Ch. 5: The Acupuncturist

      

"Go to hell; see if I care," said the director of the Taiwan Lung Association. How could Johnny have known that the Taiwanese doctor understood English? The doctor had heard him say to his wife that he wanted a second opinion. This doctor wanted to cut his lung out. 

     "I am the head of the Taiwan Lung Association!" he said angrily pointing towards the door of his office. "If you need a second opinion, go, but don't come back. I'm not helping you anymore!"

     "With that attitude, I don't need your help," he shouted back as he took his jacket briskly and headed out. "

     "Do you realize what you just did?" said his wife in the taxi on the way back to their home. "You just gave up the last chance for you to get well. Go ahead; die, see if I care." Johnny knew she really didn't care as much about his health as she did about his money and her own saving face.

"They can cut your lung out, sweetheart, but they aren't touching mine!" Mr. and Mrs. Davinsky didn't talk the rest of the way home. Occasionally Johnny hacked a cough, opened the taxi window, and spit out phlegm onto the street. 

     "You're disgusting!" his wife scowled, her long upper teeth glimmering in the oncoming headlights. 

     "But it's okay for the driver to open the door at every red light and spit bloody betel-nut juice on the street. That’s okay. Right?"

     "It's not blood; it's cinnamon they put in the nut." Being correct was most important to her under any circumstance.

     After they got home, he took out a fold of paper with powder he had gotten from the dispensary of an ear, nose, and throat clinic; a doctor there with a reflector light on his forehead, twelve inch Q-Tips, and a row of humidifiers lined up in his clinic like hairdryers in beauty salons had prescribed it for him.

The virus he had caught from one of his adult English class students. Students didn't have the habit of covering their mouths when they coughed or sneezed in class. If they were on the street, they merely covered one nostril with a pointer finger and blew the snot out of the other. If there was a waste basket nearby, they blew it in there. Sometimes, they didn't have a waste basket; a handkerchief would do. Occasionally they would go to a W.C. and find a toilet or urinal to spit into. 

     One sleepless night, on his way back to bed from the bathroom, he spoke to his wife.

 "Let's go to that acupuncturist your sister was telling you about. Maybe he'll know what to do. My back is killing me."

“You mean Dr. Lam?”

“Yeah, that one.”

      He had been coughing so violently the previous two weeks that he threw his back out. Maybe they'd have to cut his spine out, too, in addition to his lung and kidney. 

     "Maybe he can help you; he's not a Western doctor, though. You said you only trusted American-trained doctors"

     "I don't, ker-choo, care if he comes from the moon. Your sister said, (hack-hack-spit) he was good, right?" Emerson had heard convincing testimonials about acupuncture. In China, women had childbirth with no sedative other than acupuncture and experienced no pain.

     The next morning, they got in a taxi and went to the Chinese Herbal Clinic of Dr. Lam Chat-Hom; no appointment necessary. The clinic was a non-descript storefront on a busy Taipei two-way road, three or four cycles haphazardly parked on the sidewalk outside the clinic entrance, unlit with soot coating metal grate over glass, a weather-damaged hand-painted sign printed on yellowing plastic mold near plant pots that were watered by rainfall alone, exposed electric wiring on the pole near a side ally, a step down and two steps up unevenly walked under the building overhang. The clinic, the front rooms of his residence, entered down a harsh florescent hallway, a dozen mismatched chairs of different sizes and shapes along both sides. One stepped over the outstretched shoeless legs of a motley crew of elderly patients occupying. He was the only foreigner. The air, smelling like vinegar with incense-smoke and medicinal plants thrown in; it was the smell of medicinal gao-liang liquor that shot up the nostrils.

     The doctor came out of one of three exam rooms wearing a white smock, grinned at the different Caucasian face of Johnny, walked past to a smudged gray-steel desk, bent low to say something to a dour middle-aged woman wearing an ancient nurse’s cape taken from a Hemingway novel and returned to the exam room. The nurse turned in her squeaky swivel-chair to a cluttered sliding glass-door cabinet, to a shelf holding curled papers wrapped in rubber-bands and removed a pumpkin-sized white ceramic bottle with darkened cracks. On it, an etching of a bald blue Chinese sage sat holding a peach in one hand and a long staff in the other. She removed the ceramic cap, poured some liquid into a little soda glass, stood and went over toward him and his wife and spoke with her in Taiwanese.

     "Drink this. It is good for you," Xiao-Jiao told her husband. The slightly bent nurse smiled, kowtowed, and went back behind her desk. He drank up. His nose wasn't stuffed any more now that his virus had left his system but his back still ached whenever he bent over. He could smell the kaoliang liquor with some herbal additives thrown into the mix, clearly. 

      Dr. Lam had made a good point about the medicinal cocktail. It warmed him to the point that he forgot he was sitting in a drafty waiting room of an herbal doctor's clinic. He had almost forgotten his bad back, too, that is until he tried to stand up to return the empty glass to the nurse. That's when it hit him; either this Dr. Lam was the real deal with the acupuncture needles or the rest of his life would be regulated to drinking tainted kaoliang and other alcoholic brews, not to mention a few Perkasets and oxymorphines. 

     On his way to the nurse’s desk, her telephone rang; the doctor would like him to enter his examination room on the left. His wife stood up, thanked the nurse profusely, and helped him the twenty or so steps down the pebbled cement-slab hall, wearing slimy artificial leather slippers, with forty-seven oriental eyes upon him; three elderly patients had one eye each to match their missing rotted feet.

     When he seated himself on the aluminum bed cushioned with fitted-linen tatami pads, another full glass of medicinal kaoliang was placed in his hand by the nurse who told his wife standing nearby to wait a moment until the doctor would be with him, but to have him take off his shirt and unbuckle his pants in the meantime. Patients, on their way to the restroom, passed his exam room and paused to stop, look in, and give the thumbs up to this foreign believer of Chinese voodoo.

     Dr. Lam entered, white doctors garb buttoned to the top, a white plastic Wyeth pen shield lining his upper left pocket. "How long have you been in pain?" he asked him in halting but understandable English.

     "Over a month now," his wife answered in Taiwanese.

     "Really," Dr. Lam replied surprised, even though, from the look of his patients in the waiting room, a month of minor pain would have been an endurable interlude for their hunched backs of chronic backaches.  He was lucky, and he knew it.

     "Cigarette?"

     "We can smoke in here?"

     "Sure"

     "Isn't it bad for you?"

     "As long as you live in Taipei you should not stop to smoke." He took out a yellow pack of Long Life cigarettes with the same picture of the large-headed sage with a peach and staff, just like on the jar of medicinal kaoliang. 

     "You mean I shouldn't stop smoking?"

     "No. You should continue," Dr. Lam said as he turned to an aluminum table to take hold of a deep jar filled with blue fluid. The acupuncture needles sat in the jar like combs used to sit in the jar of barber shops back in Brooklyn, to anesthetize the items before they swept through the next customers hair, only these antiseptic needles would soon be pierced through his skin, somewhere. 

     "There is lot of oxygen pollution in Taiwan air, no?" Dr. Lam explained add he took a drag on how cigarette and handed him an ashtray to catch his falling ash.

     "It's very bad the air," he said as he blew out smoke and tapped his cigarette ash into the tray. “The tar in the cigarette covers your lungs and prohibits pollution from attacking you."

     "You mean it acts as a shield coating my lungs?"

     "Exactly," said Dr. Lam, taking a swig of his one supply of medicinal kaoliang from a personal flask in his lower left pocket.

     "That's the first time I've heard that. I like that idea," said Johnny, a lifetime pack-a-day cigarette smoker. 

     "Show me where it hurts." He pointed to his lower back. The doctor gave a look.

     By that point, his back pain was the last thing on his mind. He was feeling the effects of his third glass of kaoliang and enjoying his cigarette. His wife excused herself and returned to the waiting room to let the boys inside have their fun. She heard laughter and loud talking coming through the doorway. Dr. Feel-good was making him feel good and he hadn't pricked one needle into him. 

     In the next fifteen minutes, twenty needles were twisted and snapped into his prostrated body: in his ear lobe, shoulder blades, neck, leg, and even the back where the pain originated. Then, the doctor rolled over a silver machine on wheels and flipped on a few switches. Next, he took twenty wire attachments from the side of the machine and, with alligator clips, clamped them to the open ends of the twenty acupuncture needles. Emerson felt no pain.

 Dr. Lam offered him another cigarette and held out a match so he could light it from his reclining position, an ashtray placed on a chair to the right of his exam table.  Through the hole in the exam table he put his head and down through it smoked his cigarette. Then it happened;

The machine was turned on. A trilling vibration shot through there needles into his body followed by pulsing ticks of electric stimulant. Trrrrrrril tick tick tick tick tick tick tick, trrrrrrrril tick tick tick tick tick tick…The doctor asked if he could feel it under his skin. He nodded into the hole in the table.

     "Stay here for thirty minutes. You will fewer better." He left a pack of cigarettes on the chair in front of him and left the room, turning off the light for shade. 

     After thirty minutes, Dr. Lam returned, put on the light, removed the alligator clamps from the needles, and told him to sit up on the exam table. He did so with a back that felt better already. It was a miracle! The doctor offered him another glass of a kaoliang and a cigarette and told him to return the following week for another treatment.

     "You will need four treatments because your back is so stiff. You should come here directly next time you have pain. I help you good."

 He followed his wife to the nurse’s desk as she paid. Another patient was called by the doctor into the exam room behind him.

It was 8:00pm by the time they got home. They'd been at the doctor's office seven hours but it was worth it. He could actually dry himself after he showered. The pain was mostly gone. Only a ghost of it prevailed reminding him of where the pain had once been.

     A few weeks after his last treatment from Dr. Lam, Johnny and his wife went to eat at a restaurant a friend had suggested to them. It happened to be a few block from Dr. Lam’s Chinese Herbal Medicine Clinic. It was in a dark night club atmosphere with Taiwanese music playing on a CD jukebox. There was a smoky bar counter with a dozen liquor bottles lined up on a shelf over a frosted black gala mirror. The food was Hakka style. The tables had cloth covers with glass over them so the waitress wouldn’t have to keep changing them when they got soiled.

As they sat and looked over the menu, they heard the intermittent sound of a hard object hitting the counter followed by a tumble of beads. Each time it happened, there was a roar from the crowd of men who gathered around the sound at the bar.

“What is that noise?” He asked craning his neck to look over at the disturbance.

“They’re drinking,” said his wife without taking her eyes off the menu. “We’re ready,” she called out to a waiter who came by with a pad and pen.

“But why are they making so much noise?” He asked again, this time standing to get a better look.

“They’re playing a game,” she said slightly disturbed that her husband was more distracted by them than by her. “They’re playing a drinking game. Now would you pay more attention to what I’m saying?”

“One second, one second. I think I see someone I know over there.”

“You know someone here?”

“Yeah. That man in the white doctor’s jacket looks familiar.” He stood up gingerly to as to not reinjure his bad back and walked slowly over to the bar. There was someone there who he recognized; he just wasn’t sure because that person seemed do out of place. It was clear now to him; Dr. Lam was sitting there on a stool, cigarette hanging from his lip, with a thick black plastic cup in one hand and a glass of whisky on the rocks in the other, surrounded by well-dressed businessmen who yelled with delight at him slamming the over-turned cup down onto the bar counter. He caught a glimpse of Johnny out of the corner of his blood-shot eyes.

“Hey Mr. Davinsky, how did you know I was here?” Dr. Lim called out as the others followed his eyes and looked over at the foreigner in their mitts.”

“You look like you’re having fun, doctor,” said Johnny ironically.

“I am, I am!” Dr. Lim said loudly through the din of the crowd and jukebox music. “Here, sit down,” he said as he stood up from his stool. “Come join us. Cigarette?”

“I’m here with my wife.”

“Oh!” He stood up to where he was pointing and walked toward Mrs. Davinsky.”

“Davinsky tai-tai. Ni hao? Ni ze-ma jr-dao wo zai ji-lee? How did you know I was here?” Xiao-Jiao didn’t know what to say. Dr. Lam wasn’t drunk but too happy.

“I’m going to have dinner now. Thanks for the invitation. Enjoy yourself,” Johnny said in a loud voice with a big smile, winking one eye, and sitting down gingerly to join his wife for dinner.

“Hao. See-you.”

As he walked back to the bar, Xiao-Jiao seemed angry as her husband shook his head in mock disbelief and took a sip of his sofa.

“You think that’s funny? Bu hao yi-se.” Embarrassing.

“Noooo. It’s crazy.”

They sat quietly and listened to the music, happy but pretending to be disturbed so his wife wouldn’t be upset by him again. He got up gingerly, holding the back of the seat for support, and went to the restroom. On his way back he noticed a smell of smoke; not cigarette smoke, but smoke from a fire.

“Do you smell something?” he said as he slowly sat down in his chair.
     “Smell something?” his wife repeated.

“Yes, I smell smoke. Don’t you?” he said nervously as he glanced around the club for the source of the odor.

“It’s prayer money. They’re burning prayer money outside for the holiday.” He knew that the Taiwanese were always throwing drab slips of construction paper they referred to as ‘money’ into round metallic containers.

“No. It’s not that smell. I know what that smell smells like; it’s not that burning smell,” he said now more alarmed and getting no sympathy from his wife.

He glanced around the club again and toward the windows on each side of the corner entrance door. He thought he might see someone lighting something outside. Then, he caught a glace of what it was; he looked up from the windows bottom to the top where a store awning outside had flames billowing from it dropping melted plastic sparks onto the sidewalk below.

“Call the fire department! There’s a fire outside!”

“What?”

“There’s a fire outside! Someone call the fire department!”

 She turned in her chair and saw what he had seen. She stood up immediately, went to the entrance, and stormed outside to the street. There she stood for a good minute or two transfixed as the awning fire exploded raining molten plastic onto the street below.

 She stormed back inside and told the cashier who was oblivious to anything until she alarmed her. Dr. Lim and his businessmen friends remained as they were before, playing games, drinking, and smoking at the bar counter. One man, perhaps two, turned around to see what the commotion was at the front of the club. No one moved out of their seats or left the club except for Johnny whose wife stood him up and took him outside.

     Five minutes later, those outside of the club could hear the quiet fire alarms on the tiny red trucks coming up the street. Dr. Lam remained inside and had a taste of his own medicine.

   Xiao-Jiao was becoming impossible to live with. Instead of taking care of the house or getting a job, she insisted on working with him in the school plans. This was good and bad. She did Mandarin-Taiwanese, interfacing and collected tuition. She took care of advertising and paid off the local police who came to inspect the school. He complained about his home always being a mess. He still loved Xiao-Jiao, at that time, but the ice was getting thin. She would hang up on his friends that called him saying that he was too busy with the bushiban.

   “Why is that black BMW stopping on the wrong side of the street?”     

      He sat at the table near the bushiban during a break and looked out through the window. Another two cars were coming from both directions and hemming the BMW in on the sidewalk. He picked up his can of soda when he noticed the driver in the black car open his window and toss a black object out.  The object landed on the ground in the din of traffic past and slid past some parked scooters coming to a rest under a cement planters placed by restaurant owner so scooters would kept clear.

      Two men in plain clothes emerged briskly from a car, one of them carrying a baseball bat. The other closed the door with his hip,  a pistol pointing downward; “A pistol for sure,” Emerson thought. Some customers in the restaurant gathered around the window looking out.

The man with the bat scampered over and pounded it on the BMW windshield. From the other car came two men. “It’s a shakedown,” he thought. The diners in the restaurant turned their heads pretending not to notice. After a few more knocks and hand gestures, the driver opened the door and was helped out, hands crossed behind his head. From the other door, a man was pushed to the ground, face down, gun removed from his pocket. The kneeling plainclothesman turned, emptied the gun, and dropped it a few feet away. 

      The danger over, staff and diners went back to their business. Johnny Emerson finished his sandwich as two men face down on the street were cuffed, stood up, and brought to a patrol car that had just arrived on the scene. He then went back to the bushiban.

He shook the incident out of his mind as he taught the evening class. At nine o’clock, he stopped for cigarettes. Was that a pistol he saw still under the flower pot, he wondered? No one around, he dropped his lighter and stooped to get it; there tit was. The gun! Turning to check if anyone was there, he snatched the gun and put it in his pants pocket, mounting his bike, he drove home.

When he arrived home, his wife was watching TV, the baby was crying, and the house was a mess. Dispensing his habit of removing and hanging his jacket, he went straight to the bathroom. This alerted his wife who stood to follow. He scrawled and shook his head as he locked the bathroom door. He stood on the toilet seat, removed the dropped ceiling tile, and put the pistol in. His wife was knocking.

“Are you okay?”

“I had to go fast.”

“Are you dirty?”

“I’ll be right out.”

“Did you dirty your pants?”

“Yes, I cleaned it up.”

“You have a banana now?”

“I’m okay.”

 She returned to the sofa. The pistol felt good; he sold his Brooklyn revolver to a pawn shop before they moved back; citizens do not own guns. He caressed the new baby. He had become a pretty good shot at the range after the burglary. He looked carefully. It was not an American model or even a Black Beauty from China. He fingered it. He checked the chamber; there were six bullets loaded! His wife entered his mind. He had never killed but there’s a first time.

Excerpt: Occupied near Wall Street

            Emerson replayed the frozen morning he faced the music at WBAI eleven years earlier; security at the heady studio on Wall Street wouldn’t let him on the talk show after the Christmas coop. With the wind whipping around the jack knife corners of the financial district, he had passed Zuccotti Park without a second glance, certainly no thought of stopping in it to take a piss behind a bush on that empty Sunday morning. If he had known that spit in a vest pocket would be the heart of resistance against the takeover, the beginning of the grandiose non-violent occupation, he would have at least stopped in to bring hot soup to the homeless there whose piss froze their cardboard beds to the pavement.

            Ten years after the Twin Towers had disintegrated like sand castles in the American mea culpa, he couldn’t even find the little shit of a park. He was looking for something much bigger, at least as big as the footprint of one of the downed towers. Maybe four-hundred thousand joyful protesters blaming the end of the free world as they knew it on the melting environment had taken one hundred fifty years for his namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, to prophesize. It was futile to do anything about it in 1840 and it was still futile. Greed has its way because might always, always makes right with gag orders.

            Look as Emerson may, he couldn’t find the war; no man could find the war. Workers of the world would unite over the ashes of cold dead remains, but in the ‘slash and burn’ mentality of the ruling class, the world wasn’t worth living in anymore.

            So Emerson followed the cooing of the pigeons that strutted near hot dog vendors and glided like silent drones over Pine Street on the backside of the Stock Exchange. The pigeons would tell him where the bread crumbs lay in the park under the nearest trees to Wall Street in Zuccotti. Emerson walked on the other side of little Pine Street slowly passed the black-clad gargantuan guards standing like upright cockroaches. “The occupation isn’t here,” he muttered to himself as the guards, armed, seemed to eye his passing, so he put his head down and kept on moving his flat feet squashing the dungaree sneakers onto steamy grates around Broadway.

            He looked left; nothing. He looked right; nothing. Then he saw three young sojourners across the valley, like mountain men in the wilderness, tattered packs ripped and tied to their backs haphazardly.  

            “Where are the Occupy Wall Street people?”

            “Over yonder,” one young bearded man responded pointing unhesitatingly across the street that he kept climbing.

            “Over there?” said Emerson incredulously for he had passed by that spot a short while ago and had seen no one but a few folk standing around talking. The police were there now indicating what terrible danger they were preventing and the business people they were protecting. “Over there?”

            “Yeah, over there,” the other tracker yelled from up the path where Emerson stood in disbelief. Emerson followed. When they reached the clearing in the petrified forest of buildings, he had to rub his eyes in disbelief. Perhaps two dozen people were there mulling around a missing piece of New York puzzle. Some looked like they had just been sleeping. There even looked like there was a soup kitchen with a staff meeting cross-legged near some hung tarps. “Gee,” Emerson thought, “I’ve seen more people congregating in Thompson Square on a Tuesday afternoon that I see here. This is the resistance?” 

Excerpt: The Christmas Day Coop at WBAI

Johnny Emerson held the address on a slip of paper in his hand as the daylight hit his climb on the steps out of the City Hall subway station. In 1998, WBAI moved to the tenth floor at 120 Wall Street in the Financial District. Emerson had an errand to do among the business canyons of Lower Manhattan. His mind was occupied, frozen in December 2000. How would he phrase what he wanted to say after he reached his destination, if only he could get into the building? He wasn’t that occupied or cold to notice the new riot resister at the City Hall driveway; how it looked like a subterranean torpedo rising to block passage as an infantryman stood guard. He may not be able to enter and fight City Hall but he had something to say to the hijackers of peoples’ radio.

      WBAI was the progressive movement’s mouthpiece in New York City. It was started in 1960 by several World War II conscientious objectors who called themselves the Pacifica Foundation. Emerson remembered listening to Radio Unnamable with Bob Fass all night long during his late teens. WBAI never let the movement down for cutting edge entertainment and grass-root, anti- corporate political open-mindedness. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez kept it relevant into the 90’s. Emerson couldn’t believe his ears in ’98 when he heard Amy interviewing a dumbfounded Bill Clinton who couldn’t avoid showed his true chameleon colors. Emerson always thought the liberal democrats ruling class had had enough posturing t and went after WBAI full throttle after that.

      When one morning before the Christmas break he woke up turned on the radio for news and didn’t hear Bernard White and Amy’s voices, he knew he was witnessing the end of a semblance of free speech on the airwaves.

A few weeks later, over the Christmas weekend, a new general manager was snuck in by the Pacifica board of director overnight and the locks were changed. The old staff was prohibited from entering the studios. There was a gag order on those the station still tolerated.

      “Do you feel like something is happening?” Emerson said to his colleagues around the cafeteria table in school that morning. “They’re shutting up WBAI.”

      “Even if they were, there are other sources for the news,” a social studies teacher retorted. Emerson knew the difference.

       “I feel like there is a coop going on in America; all the trappings of democracy and free speech are coming unraveled.” Of course, his colleagues though he was exaggerating, but Emerson had been an activist since the 60’s; he knew when there was a clampdown coming on. On Election Day in November 1999, the table was set for complete modern end to freedom. On September 11, 2001, the whole thing came tumbling down.

      On that frozen December morning, Johnny Emerson walked south on Broadway passed City Hall, passed J & R Music World. Trinity Church with its brownstone steeple loomed across the street. As taxis whizzed by, he imagined what Lower Manhattan must have looked like when it was built in 1700. They kept building it back up after it kept falling down from fires and winds. Now, after it had all but been swallowed up, chewed, and spit out into a tourist attraction, Trinity Church stood a few blocks west in the shadow of the World Trade Center, the only warm spot on that cold winter morning.

      He turned left onto Wall Street, passed the Stock Exchange, and headed towards the East River. The narrow streets were desolate. The chill whipped up the winding canyons. A few weeks later, after the reality hit, 500 people chanting “Despotism Won’t fly at WBAI” would congregate on the streets outside, but not on this Christmas weekend morning. Emerson alone walked to the entrance of 120 Wall Street. The security cameras had yet to be installed.

      “I’d like to speak to the general manager of WBAI, Utrice Leid,” he said as he stood on the other side of a formidable high-backed front desk; one receptionist came around the podium to meet him.

      “Who may I tell them is calling?” he replied, arms folded defensively over his suited chest.

      “My name is Emerson Davinsky.”

      “Are you expected?”

      “I don’t think so.”

      “One moment please.”

      Instead of calling upstairs to the studio offices, before asking that he sign the log, indicate the time of arrival, and get a sticker to plaster onto his coat, one guard stayed with him strategically positioning himself in the lobby between he and the bank of elevators, while the other contrived down the lobby to said elevators and rounded a corner presumably to take one up.

      He stood silently, patiently, and avoided making the small talk the guard initiated to feel him out. Secretly, he wished he had a howitzer with him, silencer attached, like he had seen in the spy movies. He then could have shot the guard and made a dash for the next elevator up, taken care of business, given Bernard White his job back and return WBAI to the people. It was not going to happen that way though; Emerson was too peaceful a man to own a gun and he wasn’t going to shoot anyone today.

      The security emerged from around the bank of elevators ten minutes later; perhaps he had taken the opportunity to urinate before heading back down with the response.

      Ms. Utrice Leid said she doesn’t know you. You will have to leave the premises.”

      “But I know her.”

      “Please leave now.”

      “Could you tell her I think she’s wrong for taking over the radio station and she should give it back.”

He had spoken from his heart. He felt no compulsion to stay home this Christmas morning with his family. He had schlepped down to the financial district to raise the specter of the oncoming backlash. It was what every loyal WBAI listener should do. He turned and left the building without the obligatory ‘thank you’ or ‘goodbye.’

Back on Wall Street, he didn’t have to re-button one button on his coat; only wrap the scarf around his neck tighter, like a noose. Bitter New York City winter winds ricocheted between the walls of the steel canyons. They would probably be the walls of fifty-story thick skating rinks in the coming ice age once the glaciers had melted and volcano soot returned the earth to scratch. How many times, he thought, would God have to start over until humanity wised up? Better yet, he mused, why couldn’t God make humanity wiser in the first place instead of evolving dinosaur bones into fossil fuel and assorted Tweedy birds?

On his way back to the City Hall subway station uptown, he passed a vest-pocket park that some corporation had forgotten to build a skyscraper on. Maybe they were waiting for the price of real estate to sky-rocket. For now, it was a rectangular block, not long or wide enough to play football on; not deep enough to stop home runs or wide enough to stop foul balls from smashing windows to its left and right. The man-made park, with leafless transplanted trees without enough branches for a bird to build a nest upon, sat unoccupied on this cold exposing day. A homeless man lay on a spread of cardboard folded like a pup tent over the grill of a steam duct cleverly concealed by the landscaper on a raised garden bed near a park path winding to make a summer lunch-break stroll seem longer than it actually was. Smoking in public places hadn’t been made illegal back then. He stopped to light a cigarette and glace up westward towards the World Trade Center that still cast a shadow for another nine months. No one New Yorker could imagine what was in store for them. Zuccotti Park would be a staging area for attack victims long before it was converted into a world stage for Wall Street occupation. 

Excerpt: The Anarchist Forum

Brecht Forum had an "Anarchist Forum" once a month which Emerson and Jack liked to attend. “I’ll pick you up at seven,” Emerson offered since Jack didn’t drive. To Manhattan into a strong, twelve story, brick-tall, former sweatshop building on the West side just below the Chelsea Hotel they entered the freight elevator. “I wonder if ‘Cave Man’ will be there again.”

“Probably,” Grinned Jack agreeing with the description, but knowing deeper. ‘Cave Man,’ as Emerson called him (and Jack couldn’t disagree) looked so unkempt and bent out of shape in what should have been a muscular body, wearing the same faded plaid shirt every time they saw him there, tussled medium-length hair, scraggly spotty short brown beard, black plastic-rimmed eyeglasses askew, adhesive-taped temple piece. 

When Peter Lamborn Wilson spoke, or some other anarchist genius, just as smart but less excited, ‘Cave Man’ would sit and gesticulate fits of rage without removing his ass from the folding chair, just by hunching his shoulders and flailing his elbows. He never said a word; only grunts and noises of objection. Cave Man didn’t shake his head in agreement; that social skill was too trite for him, nor did he shake his head ‘no’; another worn out gesture of bourgeois society. Part of the lecture’s appeal to Emerson was sitting within eye shot, behind Cave Man, near other nerdy, unfashionable anarchist thinkers, and activists. Cave Man’s erratic moans sometimes didn’t even correspond to what was being said by the lecturer; he had to mull over the gestalt of the delivery before erupting his volcanic mind to its true meaning. Occasionally, someone seated next to him would be shocked by Cave Man, worrying, expecting his protestations to develop into a seizure, perchance, punctuated by dangerous flights or violence, but Cave Man would never go that far; he would calm down; no one ever had to fear telling him to be seated and relax. Cave Man was beyond relaxed. He was a true adherent of Hakim Bey; poetic justice threw out the rules of society, any society, along with the baby and the bath water.  

Peter Lamborn Wilson made sense, Emerson thought, when the topic was the degeneration of activism or putrid disdain for acceptance of what was overthrowable in America. Wilson never talked about sex at these lectures. Sex was the farthest thing from Emerson’s mind as he listened to the old animated man rant in his scraggly gray hair, smudged plastic turtle-shell rim glasses, slowly pacing the floor, making observations about some point that he just made, occasionally alluding to a book he had written in which the point was erudite.

During the break, Emerson stood with everyone and stretched, went to the bathroom, or perused the slim literature table with a dozen copies of Wilson and other anarchist’s books for sale. Everyone milled around, even the one or two females present. There was some tea to be had at a water cooler in the slab naked reception area near the forum, a foyer really, not a theater at all. At the gigantic floor to ceiling windows of this turn-of-the-century row warehouse, one could smoke a cigarette, and, as anarchists, no one wouldn’t dare tell anyone to mind his or her manners or blow the smoke elsewhere, though one would blow it elsewhere because one was in the presence of two dozen anarchists and visionary thinkers.  

At the Sunday IWW meeting, Eupheus Clutch was livid, livid and embarrassed when hearing that Emerson and Covert were going to spend time and listen to Peter Lamborn Wilson at the Brecht Forum. “No, Emerson; I’m busy. Thanks for asking though. I don’t think I would want to go hear what that pedophile had to say.”

“What are you talking about?” Covert’s voice came in the breeze from the back of the room where he usually sat, inevitably perched higher than other members who were seated in a circle at the meeting. Mr. Covert, as a cat would, took to higher ground to view his kingdom and watch for enemies and prey. “He isn’t a pedophile.”

Colonial Clutch (since, to Emerson, he looked like chicken Sanders) lowered his head, scrunched his goatee, tipped his glasses, looked askew at Emerson and in mock secrecy said, “He is a pedophile, you know, a pedophile; he is Hakim Bey. He’s the editor of NAMBLA Bulletin.” Then in a loud voice without turning to face Covert: “He advocates sex with minors, he does.”

“But consensual,” Jack shot back in the walls of breeze, without moving to join the meeting wholly. “Consensual.”  

“Now how can an adult have consensual sex with a minor? I ask you, and even homosexual acts at that with children; now give me a break Mr. Covert,” said Colonial Clutch as he rolled his eyes.” One member objected to his negative mention of gayness.

Emerson turned to his fellow worker to his left, “Is what he’s saying true?” The gay supporter replied with mixed feelings, “Yes, it is true.”

“But that’s only a small part of his ideology,” said Mr. Covert secretly hearing what Emerson’s neighbor had said, as if secret chatter was worth responding to more than straight talk out in the open.

“I do believe Peter Lamborn Wilson, or Hakim Bey as he’s known, is an embarrassment to the anarchist community, and you know that Jack, don’t la.” responded Clutch, in final response. “Now can we get back to this meeting? I call the meeting to order. I truly hope y’all don’t have any further announcements,” said Clutch playing captain of the ship though a facilitator hadn’t been voted on yet, “because it is three o’clock already, fellow workers, and I have somewhere to go at 4pm.” 

“I move that Mr. Clutch be today’s facilitator since he is so good at it and has taken over the meeting already anyway,”

“I beg your pardon Mr. Covert, are you volunteering?”

“No.”

“…and when you join us and move your skinny ass off that box we will see if we have a quorum.”

The fact that Wilson was involved with NAMBLA, a pedophile advocacy organization that worked to abolish age of consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors, didn’t faze Jack Covert. Emerson had then only known Jack a short while as a colleague at Norman Thomas high school where they both taught. Ten years passed before, after a collected scrutiny of implied behavior, and witnessing interested glances , and meetings on the school stoop, an occasional unscheduled fifteen-year-old coed who looked up to him under his wing, the penny dropped; Emerson could only wonder if Jack was practicing what Hakim Bey preached.

Excerpt: A Critical Mass

“What a fucking dickhead!” Johnny Emerson knew Jack Covert had emotional issues but he always pinned him for being a real activist; maybe he had reasons to be clandestine, he always covered for him. But this was serious; Jack Covert abandoned his colleague Johnny Emerson Davinsky on the battlefield!

      As soon as he heard the frantic running chaos in the street, Jack Covert turned his bicycle around, and walked with it the other way. He would have ridden it the other way but there were too many human obstacles in the street for him to make a clean getaway.

 “I’m going,” he heard him say; just like that. There was no need for a cell phone or the text messages a newfangled Blackberry could provide. Even the communications system in the immense AT&T relay station behind them wasn’t necessary; He heard it with his two good ears; “I’m leaving,” said Jack with a slight look of fear in his squinting eyes.

They had met there on that corner near Bryant Park not even a half hour earlier, Johnny there by subway, Jack on his bicycle he’d taken over the Brooklyn Bridge to arrive. To Jack, it was a joy ride; it stopped when the danger started. Sure, Jack Covert was there as he said he would be, even on time as a Pavlov dog is to a school bell, but he was not there with him as he had thought, not really there with him. In what became clear to him over the years of their knowing each other, working in the same school, membership in the same organization, interest in the same topics, in typical Jack Covert style, Covert was there but he wasn’t together with anyone, anyone. Jack himself wouldn’t call it “being alone” because he knew that it was the way of many post-anarchist dickheads to existentially be alone even when acting together with others, never for the good of mankind, always alone. Nope. Jack was out of there, through the path of least resistance, to the least possible trouble he could encounter, and he walked away with the bicycle, just walked away, from him, his colleague, friend and comrade; just walked away when the battle on the streets was getting heated. He was disappointed to find that out about him; Jack was the closest thing  he had to a friend in the progressive movement. He watched him weave his bike casually down Avenue of the Americas and by 40^th Street, he was out of sight.

He had a decision to make. He could stand there in disbelief. He could shouted out, “Wait, I’m coming with you!” if his friendship to Jack was more important than the demonstration they’d gone there to participate in. That was not what Mr. Davinsky decided to do; he chose to continue on, to soldier on and do the legal marshaling he had agreed to do at that meeting the week before near Thompson Square Park. He felt so on his own, he felt so all alone, a character flaw Jack might call it, a childish emotion not befitting a warrior.

He took a deep breath, turned the corner of Avenue of the Americas across from Bryant Park, across from that newspaper stand with the socialist periodicals, the one he learned about the Radical Guardian, Workers World, The Daily World, The Socialist Worker; the one with no socialist periodicals for sale anymore. He walked down 42^nd Street to Times Square to the appointed time and place of the happening he was to attend and marshal; his job, to write the name of the cop that arrested any of his compatriots and find out which holding pen in which precinct they were being taken to, to write down the hat number of any cop that abused a demonstrator for legal action against him later on in court, but to keep at least one foot on the sidewalk so he wouldn't get arrested himself; those were the rules of the game “oly-oly oxen free.”

He found a way to get there around the swelling crowd of protesters and onlookers and Times Square gawkers. There, to where at 12:00 noon, before the days of ‘flash mobs,’ they were all to meet and create diversion so the volunteers could assemble the twenty foot tall wooden tripod, a tripod with a seat at the top, a seat where a brave protester would dare police to remove him from and risk him bodily harm. In the crowd, he saw The Carpenter, he saw Brad Will with his camera, he saw a few people he remembered from ABC No Rio, and he saw Adonis. All were there; Emerson was not alone.

The guerrilla theater protest went on as scheduled. The police were surprised and not ready to stop it before it happened. The plan worked. These brave souls were going to get the media attention they craved, better than acting out dramas with expressive signs for the microphone-less closed circuit TV’s on the subway platforms and streets that they’d been acting out and sharing in the early days of social media.

There the daredevil was; twenty feet above the pavement, a protest, a dare to get him down in the days when the police still had to worry about following the law and being accountable. The police were advised by their white shirt captain not to let it get any media attention; to keep it down. Then the chanting began as the police jostled toward the erection guarded by activists sworn to protect the safety of their perched comrade.

“Whose streets?”

“Our Street!”

“Whose street?!?”

“”Our Streets” Critical mass was going to guard their right to ride their bikes in the streets of Manhattan.

“Whose streets?”

“Our streets!” On went the chanting, louder and louder, a hundred protesters strong among the thousands that kept police busy all over midtown, the confusion of police jostling to get their vehicle close enough to arrest all the demonstrators creating a disturbance, and the tourists gawking and pushing to see what in blazes was going on, to abuse the one’s they could get away with abusing out of the glare of the camera in the days when smart phone cameras would have made a world of difference; now it doesn’t matter anymore.

The crowd cheered as the surreptitious tripod was guarded below, and Adonis was arrested, damn it; the police caught him off the sidewalk helping his comrade not fall down and he was arrested. Emerson kept his foot on the sidewalk. He took out his pen and wrote the cops service number onto his forearm in blue ink. He heard from another marshal that they were being taken to the Chinatown precinct, for some reason.

Other events went as planned. There was a sit-in in front of the military recruitment center where Broadway and Seventh Avenues crossed on 43^rd Street; dozens of young protesters were dragged away and put into police vans but not before the crowd felt the liberty of fighting off the guilty party of oppression, in the days when one could still fight off the guilty party of oppression without being labeled terrorists. Taking over the streets was a distinct possibility in the days before brutal force was constitutionally guaranteed and painful tactics were illegal and frowned upon by society, in the days before the society was completely under surveillance.      Back before the back-door destruction of two World Trade Center Buildings by almost friendly fire, there were still possibilities of liberty. Emerson didn’t know then what he found out soon enough. The mementos  and flyers he had burned in disgust after the police of America were militarized, he would have had more details but then, in hindsight, there was no reason to remember how liberty was lost, taken away, stolen by the government in complicity. No one would believe it. The mementos would have been the cruelest reminder. 

Excerpt: The Man Who Stole "Steal This Book"

     Johnny Emerson went to a rally at Union Square Park with some classmates. There was a Yippie there talking  named Abbie Hoffman. Abbie was Jewish like him and he had a lot to say about the war in Vietnam and American society controlled by the corporate Wall Street. The youth, he said, had to fend for itself. There was a book he’d written suggesting ways to do so. It was called Steal This Book because Abbie didn’t care if anyone paid for it. He took Abbie Hoffman’s advice. He saw a copy of the book in a box near an outreach table where Abbie stood, and he stole that book.  

   It was May 8, 1970 that he went on his first march in Manhattan. The whole Social Action Club from Central High School went. Mayor Lindsey paid for their transportation to Battery Park in a black hearse limousine. The mayor’s office even supplied the print shop where they could make flyers. What a great mayor! Business people hated him

    A metal-hinged accordion barricade twined in the street around an open manhole making a five-foot square area. Its worn bruised circular bars, one inch think and unbendable four layers. Three tubes on each of two hinged parts, bolted at 90 degree angles, one foot from the pavement soldered smoothly into vertical stands, uncapped raw metal bottoms made tight gray scratches on the pitch black surface. The manhole itself, three feet wide, left two feet of space within the enclosed cubicle where a pair of think gray fabric gloves lay atop of hefty pliers and a cardboard spool of thick black cable.

      To the side of the enclosure, perpendicular to the curb was a three foot passageway where parked cars had formally been before they were moved for the ruckus. There stood a heavy-duty yellow metallic chest on three solid rubber tire wheels, air grate vents on all four sides with knobs and red mini-lights on one of the sides closest to the open manhole. A triangular hitch extended out past the enclosure from the one-wheeled side of the power unit over and out into the street where marchers marched. One had to avoid it to make their way up Broadway without getting bruised.

      To the left of the work area lay the full breadth of Broadway, four lanes wide without cars parked at meters, thirty feet wide if you didn’t include the obstructive work area with open manhole. The legal march, originating in Battery Park a half mile down the hill at the southerly tip of Manhattan, proceeded by, the noisy procession punctuated by players banging thick dowel sticks on industrial strength white plastic containers punched with holes on either side where a rope strung around the neck of the primitive musicians. It moved on past the Consolidated Edison work site until Johnny caught it in sight out of the right corner of his eye.

      Johnny Emerson, who held the right rear end of the cardboard American flag draped coffin, moved as briskly up the Broadway as the 60,000 Americans whose death was symbolized by the box of their final resting place.

        “Ho-ho-ho Chi-Min, the N.L.F. is gonna win. Ho-ho-ho Chi Min, the N.L.F. is gonna win…” resounded and bounced off the marble facades of the business towers on either side of Broadway and seemed to echo its way up the canyon, actually clashing with previous and preceding contingents from other high schools around the five boroughs. The march shouted, the march chanted, and the earnest youth  joined had to win like Ho would win.

     He could vaguely see, from the right corner of his eye, the work area and uncovered manhole cover which lay at its side, and he knew where to avoid walking. From out of the hole, a light blue hardhat emerged, and then a forehead, black eyebrows, bulbous nose, square opened mouth, strapped under chin, and the whole body of a workman. The face had a smile on it, a middle-aged smile with stubble beard around the lips of unshaven cheeks, a missing tooth around brown abused tiles. The mouth smiled but the eyes stared. That should have been a warning. He smiled back excitedly but he shouldn’t have. Within two feet of the five foot cage, cheeks sucked in, lips puckered, the chest expanded, and a large globule of discharge shot through the air. Solid gray phlegm coagulated by whatever soot the man had breathed into his uncovered d blowhole below the street among the serpentine sewers of old New York. The gray matter flew through the air and found its mark like the dart of a cannibal’s straw into his right ear canal and dripped down the lobe like a satellite in a cavern. Some dripped down his right cheek and near his eye. Johnny, hands occupied on the coffin flinched but couldn’t remove it fast enough.

      “That’s for the sign of the American chicken, you fuckin’ fagot retard!” said the workman as Emerson continued, drenched from the ejaculation.

      “That’s taking one for the movement.”

      “What movement. Bowel movement?”

      “Yeah man; from the fat fool’s shitty gut.” 

       They called it the Hard Hat Riot. While he and another one thousand high school students were protesting the killing of four students at Kent State University a few days before, The American invasion of Cambodia, and the Vietnam War, about two hundred construction workers, brought in by bus by the New York State AFL-CIO, attacked them. Union workers from nearby projects and Con Ed workers on the street joined in the feast. He dropped the coffin he'd been holding and fled with the others with tool wielding burly men in pursuit. For two hours, He ran through the streets of lower Manhattan, from Broad Street to City Hall, trying to escape the violence. Escape he did by slipping into J&R Music World on Publishers' Row. He laid low inside, looking at the albums and listening to new releases on turntables in booths in the back rooms. More than seventy protesters were injured, but only four police and a smattering of construction workers who, people said, hurt themselves trying to beat up protesters. 

        What was George Meany, the AFL-CIO President thinking? He couldn't understand how a union man could be anti-communist since communism meant the workers' had taken over the state. Most labor leaders supported the US military involvement in Southeast Asia without realizing American was clearing a path for sweatshop workers to take union jobs away in the new America. He really thought that Con Ed worker coming out of the manhole was there to welcome the protesters, not spit on them! Peter Brennan, the President of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York was at the heart of the betrayal. He became Republican as the skilled labor unions lost their power; he wanted to save his own job so he capitulated. He had heard the please "AF of Hell" from his Grandfather when he was a student at Joe Ettor Junior High in Lawrence. He heard how the AFL-CIO of Gompers had turned their backs on the textile workers of the mills there saying they were unskilled foreign workers and didn't deserve to be in a union. The AFL-CIO hadn't changed that much in sixty years.

     The rally began at noon. While he was further up Broadway getting ready to march, unbeknownst to him and the people around him, two hundred construction workers converged on the rally at Federal Hall from four directions carrying signs that said "All the way, USA' and "America, love it or leave it." They broke through a skimpy police line and started chasing students. The police stood by and did nothing to stop them.

     Mayor Lindsay, who had helped the high school students by permitting teachers to join the rally that day, severely criticized the police for their lack of action. The police leaders later accused Lindsay of insulting their integrity by his statements, and blamed him for being unprepared for the demonstration. Brennan, on the other hand, was welcomed to 

the White House where he presented Nixon with a hard hat souvenir.