Prologue

                               Prologue
                                                                               (Updated 2-23-15)

      He once told me how he had tried to kill the president of Taiwan. I didn’t think he was serious. I was interested; I let him talk. It was good listening practice. It didn’t do much for his Mandarin, but it did wonders for my English. He always had a lot of stories to tell, often ending them by saying, “Everything I know I learned in Kindergarten.” Those were the words he wanted chiseled on his tombstone, so I requested they be written, bilingually, after they found him, silent, on that bench in the morning.

 He had said that ever since he could remember, he had been concerned with what was fair. He was hopeful that every person in the world would have the chance he had had for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If they publish this book, you won’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Everyone, he said, had to fight to be free individually, as he had done. It had saved him from the people who wanted to save him, and from those who wanted to hurt him. Good life happened when he learned everything he was supposed to learn in kindergarten, but he had to teach it to himself.

      His last name wasn’t Davinsky, by the way; it was Zukorhof. He changed it. He grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the sixties and attended school there. It had been fifty years since the Bread & Roses Strike in the city’s textile mills, but it stuck to the walls of school like eggs to a frying pan. While living there, he learned to get along with people from different cultural backgrounds. He was Jewish, and had fights to defend himself at school, at summer camp, and at his workplace.

 At work, he realized it did not matter what color he was; that if he was broken, the management would just throw him out; get another worker. That lesson was not a kindergarten lesson.

Emerson, prophetically named after the great philosopher, studied in Joe Ettor Junior High. Joe Ettor and Ralph Waldo would have been proud of him; a wise, young, union-minded man.

      His grandfather was his favorite person. Shimon Davinsky, who was a young man when he escaped the Bolsheviks in Belarus, came to America in the early twentieth century. They didn’t like Jews there, or anarchists in Russia. His ‘Pop’ was a Jewish anarchist. He took a ship in Hamburg bound for Ellis Island. When Emerson was young, Pop was his hero, the only man that would dare bring a flask of schnapps to the synagogue on Yom Kippur.

 In his junior year at Joe Ettor Junior High School, Emerson’s father left home; he just went to the bank, emptied the account and ran off with another woman from Falls River. It left penniless his mother to care for them in 1970’s depressed Lawrence, Massachusetts. All the factories had closed down years before; the union had slipped away. All they left was a museum about the "Strike for Three Loaves."

It helped him when dad left to realize he would have to work for a living the rest of his life. His mom wasn’t going to pay him; she was busy raising family on her own and keeping up a bourgeois illusion. Before he reached puberty, the cards were laid out on the table. His grandpa, who he called Pop was an anarchist; his role model.

The women in his life played decisive roles; he did what he did to be with them or to get away from them. His high school sweetheart drove him off the wrong way. His conflict with women never pushed him away from women's children. As a teacher, he met thousands of students, twenty per class, five classes a term, two terms a year, for thirty-five years. Four children all got full love and attention. He married taking the advice to be happy for the rest of his life, to choose a particular kind of wife.

      Although women and children had influenced his emotional life, his intellectual and political life had been dominated by men. His life in the progressive movement was forwarded or sabotaged by the male of the species; egotistical, insecure, and otherwise, sometime not wise at all. When the history of the world is written for aliens, the prologue of that will state how men destroyed any chance of liberation for his brothers and sisters by swinging their balls around social movements or trying to find them. As his musical hero, Phil Ochs, once wrote, "Half the world is crazy and the other half is scared." He wasn't referring to the third half that were female. As a quote for that third half, he’ shared his other musical hero, John Lennon, who wrote, "Women are the niggers of the world" and left it at that.

      Lies from people he loved had altered his mindset forever, and minds do get set, like zebras do with stripes. The first was a collective decision by his childhood friends to abandon him because he was not Christian, the predominant religion of the Lawrence he grew up. They could have tolerated him if I was a Protestant, like their brethren from the Mayflower, but a Jewish anarchist in Massachusetts was intolerable, something for witch- hunters to flush out and burn.

      Flushed out he was from a Lawrence junior high school of poor, patriotic simple-minded kids dying to visit Vietnam. He thought of wandering by the pond at Walden, a better place to contemplate the future. The only war he would wage would be against the authority to throw his life away without his permission.

He marched to that different drummer and carried the flag-draped coffin through Manhattan. He didn't write the book on civil disobedience but he stole that book from Abbie Hoffman and kept on demonstrating for his own freedom. His manager at the supermarket watched the profit margin as he learned to cover his own ass.

      College came and college went and so did his draft number. He sure was lucky but survivors’ guilt drove him down, a puppet in a theater, to Washington DC, with a critical mass, to become, to be high and be young, no sympathy for veterans or Richard Nixon on the bum. Allan Ginsburg and Tim Leary led him to Cold Mountain to met Lao-Tzu. The incense drew them closer to understand the dust and mixture in love, the alternative to rust. The Mandarin language classes, cosmic dancing, the sweetheart in Georgetown all seemed so natural a path to traverse. His moratorium on hate and capital self-aggrandizement suspended all belief in the ruling class system.

      Emerson was a leaf floating with the breeze in each event evocating intrinsic meaning, like his being one with the puppets in the back of bus to a demonstration in Washington D.C. or the painful headache he suffered all night camped out in a D.C. church, or the illegality of the freedom of kite flying on the slope of the hill in front of the Washington Monument.

      The abandoned factories in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a utility worker rising through his manhole like some urban serpent to spit on Emerson carrying a flag-draped coffin up Broadway in Lower Manhattan, the enraged mounted policeman on his injured horse trying to crush him against the side of a building; listen to understand Emerson’s life in the progressive movement, like hazards in a video game on the way to his final move; his ‘game ender.’ Public escape was impossible; only private escape was, like the man at the gate in Kafka’s “The Law.” There was no other gate because that gate was for Emerson, only!

Chapter 12: Bread & Roses on ICE

12: Bread & Roses on ICE

                                                              (Updated 2-23-15)

       After Emerson’s secret mission in Taiwan, and his convalescence from vasectomy, he threw himself into preparing his students for midterm examinations. The American labor union movement with the Industrial Workers of the World beckoned him back.

Shemp Hollander felt no surprise. He knew that if Xin-Mei could hook up with him she could hook up with anyone. He looked around the office he had carved out for himself in the abandoned tenement. There was the desk, broken drawer hanging lopsided over the stack of papers he'd piled on the floor to keep the desk up. When he picked up the phone, he remembered who he wanted to call but by the time he got to dialing, he had forgotten. He was a certain man, certain of wanting to have his notch in the world that he had hastily carved out with a kitchen knife intact. His world of broken banisters and steps that might fall through into the basement satisfied him. Shemp figured that since he wasn't living in luxury and that the tenants didn't have to pay rent regularly that he wasn't a slumlord or landlord or any lord at all. He took solace in thinking himself a common man, a friend to the new avant guard of the Lower Eastside. It was as simple as ABC and it was no Rio. 

      The smelly shoes Shemp had worn (for how long he couldn't remember) was the bottom that sandwiched his ragged body, thinning wiry hair on top up in all directions, not combed or brushed. The ragamuffins in his tenement shack loved him better for not doing so. Young dumpster divers and artsy-midnight vegans mixed their glop of homeless goop that they had accumulated to cook in Mr. Shemp Hollander’s kitchen. It passed through the wholesome meatless kitchen on his way to his office and gave a deep smell, so deep that his nostrils caused a shimmy in his stubbed lips that almost assembled a smile. He stood, looking at the virginal runaway chefs with babushkas on their unattended self-cut hair and said, "Smells good; save some for me." He would have eaten it himself, he said, if he had been around.

 But he left the ramshackle dilapidation to return across Rivington Street to his fine studio, the one with all the accouterments of basic bourgeois life: a shade on a light bulb, toilet paper, not old newspaper, on the rack near by the toilet. He could even change into a pair of comfy slippers if he wished, which he didn't. He wanted to call someone to ask if they knew where Xin-Mei had gone, taken the baby child and gone. The last accouterment of his alter-life would be an outdoors ceremony on the top a grassy knoll near a babbling stream with birds singing. If they got married, he told himself, it would be with flowers in their hair and bands of bells around their ankles. They would exchange hemp rings.  

      "Tell her I called," he said after the phone was picked up on the fifth ring and answered. The mother on the other end of the line didn't know where Xin-Mei was, either and was there something wrong? Was her daughter okay; she thought she and Shemp were getting along well. She had seen the two with the baby just a month ago. What happened? Shemp assured her that everything was alright and he just thought she might be there but shoe was probably at another friend's place. He hung up not concerned that he had made the grandmother of his common-law wife's child nervous; she isn't his mother-in-law, he told himself, because they weren't married. 

      Across the river Xin-Mei sat on the floor of the childcare room with a dozen not well dressed children horsing around and pulling out anything that didn't move. Downstairs in another dilapidated house somewhere in Bushwich, crushed between two warehouse yards, each with a troop of junkyard watchdogs, over a hundred latter day hippies squeezed through the narrow hallway where another hundred latter day hippies slouched, coughed, and smelled their sweet essence of freedom onto each others' convenience. The racquet of sound no so much enjoyed but felt with deep bass runs and someone's vocal 90% echo and 10% talked throughout the monotone raga. Out back, in the half sheltered yard, gotten to through a door barely passable in unpainted abandon as all doorways are unless painted, and down a half thought out step composed of half brick and half cement of two different colors, through three overweight young bearded vegan men who like their cigarettes self rolled and lipped, out there Adonis was starting to light a fire, a campfire he said, using a table leg and any other wood that didn't look like it was doing any good. He liked starting fires for any reason or none at all. On a sofa that the second party had removed after finding and left for this party to return to a house for the fourth coming sat four slumped fellows and a female who was one of the boys, passing a very large joint and trying not to squint awkwardly. Upstairs, right about the kitchen that abutted this junked backyard where Adonis made a barbecue "because I feel like making a fire" with nothing to barbecue of meat or vegetable matter, the smoke, brown and white with burned and steamed fuel drifted up past the wood plank foolishly placed over the barbecue pit essentially making half the small backyard and all dozen of its denizens part of the barbecue pit themselves, all smoked what they were smoking. The smoke footed up, when the firs died down thanks to pots of water splashed on the stupid idea from someone in the kitchen within tossing distance and a clear path from the sink to the window just above Adonis’ barbecue, the smoke rose and as it rose, the wind kindled the breeze, with the smoke hitchhiking, into the window where a dozen children of one to eight years old with no father or mother any more married than Mr. Hollander and Shin-Mei were. Shin-Mei sat with Mr. Covert who volunteered to be in the room with the children ("watching" the children not exactly required) since Shin-Mei was there, too, and he had shacked up with her when she showed a desire for him and left Rivington street digs. 

      He would have smelled the smoke if he was there, but he wasn't. Instead, Mr. Shemp Hollander sat in the studio preparing for another day at the place called Rio but looking more like the slums that surrounded the beaches of Brazil. He walked the block to the disaster and saw Emerson sitting on the stoop with a few of his fellow workers waiting for Mr. Hollander to arrive. It was the Sunday after the party in Bushwick and Emerson felt enough of responsibility to be at the meeting place early to meet easy arrivals and new members, to adjust the seats, and start the meeting at its scheduled time 1:00pm. It was approaching noon. "Does anyone have Mr. Hollander's number? Perhaps he's home." 

      "Why don't we just walk over; I know where he lives."

      "Okay you go; I'll wait here in case any else shows up. Hey, get me a cappuccino at the Cuban place on the corner while you're there," and Emerson stood looked left and right for any reason to stay, and walked to see if Mr. Hollander was home, or at least get a few cappuccinos.

      Mr. Hollander was met on the way to the Cuban place heading toward the tenement. "We're you looking for me? Here I am."

      "Hey, do you want a cappuccino," asked Emerson politely but Shemp had already had his coffee; he raised a paper cup he held by the bottom. Shemp said he would open the grate to fire up the kitchen with bags of ate for the others and not to worry and that's what he did, by then, another three homeless young men and women in urban attire were waiting, too. The Food Not Bombs staff was discarded corn, tomatoes, chick peas, and rice they found in the Griswold’s dumpster a few hours before the carting truck arrived. With the spices added, everyone agreed it was rather yummy.

      At IWW meetings, Emerson proposed reactions to the staging of the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden, a slap in the face to New Yorkers, Emerson thought to a city where almost four thousand lives were obliterated due to the benign neglect of the Republicans in power, not to mention the hundreds of police officers and fire fighters who perished, the men killed when ordered by the mayor and police commissioner to enter the burning first tower without adequate protection or means of communication.

      The Republican Convention to re-nominate George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for four more years was set to take place in Manhattan from August 30^th to September 2^nd and New Yorkers were warned: Stay out of midtown that week. It was declared a National Special Security Event by the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service was put in charge of coordinating the FBI and NYPD into a crescendo of police presence, a presence that hadn’t abated since the Twin Towers were leveled three years earlier. Citizens of New York, with their own security and convenience at stake, were told it was a better idea not to be on the streets essentially handing over Manhattan to conventioneers, and the police.

Seventy million dollars in hardware, software, weapons, surveillance, and human resources was paid, from federal and local tax dollars. Ten thousand police officers were given over-time pay as “Hercules Teams” in full riot gear and body armor, with submachine guns and rifles. All commuters on trains and buses passing through Midtown were scrutinized and often stopped and frisked, especially if they looked the racial profile targeted. Emerson was more determined to give the visitors a proper New York welcome, with a Bronx cheer.

Buses across intersections were parked to cordon off the area. All employees within the zone were subjected search and bomb-sniffing dogs. Protest groups, even the IWW NYC GMB was infiltrated, with dossiers compiled on it and others. Almost two thousand people were arrested and finger-printed in pre-emptive strikes against possible disturbances.

Emerson said, “They can’t get me. There is space between those bumpers in the bus barricades. I will get inside their zone, easily,” and he did.

Obstructionists and spies abounded, not to mention jealous egotists within the union; they hindered any formidable reaction. For instance, Eupheus Crutch reminded members at meetings how sabotage, the main tactic of organizing workers against the ruling class, was disavowed officially by the Wobbly brass. Emerson thought, with Crutch, the NYPD didn’t need to send another spy; they already had one embedded.

That first evening, getting off the subway at 23^rd Street and walking up past the flower wholesalers on Avenue of the Americas, Emerson easily infiltrated the line of parked police busses at Herald Square and walked along 34^th Street smilingly as bus after bus of delegates queued up to walk their way to 7^th Avenue and enter Madison Square Garden. Macy’s was awash with Texas-accented ladies and Arizona rhinestone cowboy-hated old prune-skinned gentlemen each wanting a taste of that Yankee commercial ingenuity. Emerson just had to see all the conservative clowns for himself.

“Hello, y’all, welcome to New York! Have a nice day,” he shouted gleefully, bowing, and when they smiled back, nodding receptively, he added, “And make sure you go fuck yourselves, too. That’s right. Yes, M’am; you, too,” he repeated again and again down the queue as a thousand delegates looked back at him aghast. “Remember to go fuck yourself, and have a nice day, too,” he repeated. If a man looked at him like an honorary varmint, he repeated, “That’s right y’all, remember to fuck your mama up the ass, too.” Then he repeated it down the line. He was even thinking of joining the line with a name tag he found on the street and entering Madison Square Garden himself but that would have been boring, he thought, though not impossible. Emerson couldn’t count how many people had their stay in New York tarnished by him. The police, over-confidant, didn’t bother to throw a police dog in them there woods. Emerson wished his comrades had half the balls he had; they would have been rewarded with all the upset faces he saw, without anyone needing to know. “Have a nice day. Now, get the fuck out of my city!” he repeated, but he was all alone.

One police officer, on his way out, dared to accost Emerson and body searched him. Emerson merely noted his badge number, found his precinct, knew the shift change, followed him home in his car, and learned where he lived. Later, he took revenge; he found some soft dog shit, shoveled it into a brown paper, placed it on the officers front stoop, lit it on fire, rang the doorbell, then stood away out of sight to watch the law officer splatter shit all over his clothes and front door as he stamped on the bag with his foot to put out the flames. It was cheap thrills like that which kept Emerson sane.

Emerson once told me it was always fun to type, not print, triple-x magazine subscription forms and have them addressed to the officer’s home, too. Pedophile magazine subscriptions, or a magazine itself, were the best, so long as he left a typed anonymous note alerting his chief to his dastardly deed. The police had become the enemies of the people by then.

So what if he was the only one? He knew he wasn’t. But if Jack Covert could pretend he was doing clandestine Anarchism with-mail messages to Tasmanian butterflies that would flutter their wings and start a typhoon in Asia; if he was doing that as an excuse to cover up is pedophiliac trysts, surely Emerson could do it as it was meant to be; for the good of common people.

So it was that Emerson exercised his idea for bringing lower Manhattan to a halt at the heart of the Republican Convention, just when the buggers were in recess and encouraged to see the ruins of the World Trade Center and lay a wreath.

Emerson got the idea from the Surveillance Camera Players who would use the cameras around town to put on political art shows. The group formed in 1996 by Bill Brown would find a surveillance camera in an advantageous location and use it to stage shows of enlightenment. The monitors, in public places could be watched as you would watch a TV. Without sound, the players used word bubbles to show what the characters were saying. For example, they did a show on the tenth anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down. They found a chunk of the wall being exhibited near a camera on 52^nd Street and they performed Wilhelm Reich’s “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” for those nearby to see. They announced the viewing on Indymedia.

For the convention, the players were doing a piece on the death of American democracy for a monitor outside the turnstiles at the Rector Street subway station, closest to the sight of the World Trade Center. Emerson thought he would participate the best way he knew how. He figured the police would try to disperse the crowd gathered to watch the Surveillance Players production. Emerson went underground to throw a wrench into the mix and distract the police to buy the Surveillance Players more time to perform. Emerson was going to bring the subway to a standstill.

Emerson told me the way to stop the trains was to pull the emergency brake cord hanging outside the motorman’s booth inside the subway train. The conductor would have to go through the train to find the car in which the cord was pulled and re-set it so the train could resume running. It would create a bottleneck for the trains following behind it. The RR train which ran from Herald Square near Madison square Garden passed by the now closed Cortland Street WTC Station but stopped a few short blocks north at City Hall and south at Rector Street; that’s where most of the delegates instructed to take the train would alight. Stopping the train would cause chaos possibly complicating the Republican ceremony above ground. The problem was, if Emerson pulled the red wooden knob at the end of the cord, the delegates in the car would see him pull it and he would be arrested immediately when the police arrived.

The trick went like this: Emerson got into the last car of the train at the first stop in Astoria, Queens. With the car empty awaiting its scheduled run, he took out thin transparent fishing line and tied an end around the emergency cord near the wooden knob. The line was loose and gently stuffed behind an aluminum corner guard to the subway car floor. It ran by his side as he sat in the corner seat holding the other end of the line with his shoe. He put in his earphones and turned the portable CD player on: “Volunteers of America,” Jefferson Airplane. As the train went south down Broadway, it started filling with passengers. At 34^th Street, the car became jammed with conventioneers heading to the WTC ceremony; not a space was open. When the train left the Canal Street Station, it curved west to meet Cortland Street. Emerson bent down as the train screeched through the curve as if to tie his shoe, pulled the cord, and stopped the train. The fishing line snapped and dropped off the cord. Emerson sat straight and acted naturally. Passengers nearly toppled over as the train came to a sudden halt; the air brakes locked.

Emerson knew it would take a good half hour for the conductor to reach the last car and re-set the brake. By then, the system would be backed-up in shambles, the Garden party ruined for the moment. By then, it was Buffalo Springfield on the portable CD player: “Sit down, I think I love you.” He sat back, tried to relax in the terrified delegate-packed car, and rode the music down to South Ferry, got out, and joined the Statue of Liberty in a toast before heading home. He read about the delayed ceremony the next day in the New York Times, one sentence in a long-winded commemorative story in a special pull-out section.

(WRITE ABOUT THE FUND RAISER HERE)

      On January, 20^th, 2005, at the 2005 Presidential Inauguration, two thousand anarchists participated in an inspiring display of resistance with direct action. Emerson was there with his Fellow Workers from the New York City General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World.

      The DC Anti-War Network (DAWN) had planned a rally at Malcolm X Park. When Emerson arrived speakers on stage were there damning the evils of the Bush Agenda. There had been a call for a “Militant Anti-Fascist Contingent” there so Emerson looked for the black flags of Anarchism and the red and black flags of Anarcho-Syndicalism

      Emerson felt like a member of a small community, dressed in black with their faces covered to conceal their identities and to stay warm. They all shared a common identity.

      At eleven o’clock, there was a commotion from behind him. “Fuck Nazi Sympathies” was chanted at them, a neo-fascist organization started a few years earlier which received funding from conservative organizations to show up at anti-war demonstrations to act as counter-protesters. There was a lot of anger and Emerson knew it was going to be a show-down. “The Proto-Fascist Bush Regime was having its coronation later that day,” thought Emerson. Some tried to rip the signs out of the hands of Emerson and his comrades. There was some kicking and yelling but, finally, the fascists were pushed back to a hill and forced to flee the park. The contingent slowly re-formed and prepared for the march.

      At noon on 16^th Street and “Q”, Emerson walking with the three-hundred strong contingent broke off from the main march and made their way to Logan Circle for the Anarchist march and anti-Authoritarian Bloc. It was an un-permitted march and the police followed them along on their motorcycles.

      Outmaneuvering the police several times, they made their way to Logan Circle to meet other contingents. A large Anarchist banner supported by PVC pipes was held by the brothers and sisters at the front of the now two-thousand strong contingent. They began marching out of Logan Circle. The police presence was incredible.

      “What’s the solution?”

      “PEOPLES’ REVOLUTION!”

      “What’s the reaction?”

      “DIRECT ACTION!” was chanted repeatedly, loudly. Emerson felt a great deal of pride as he marched. This was the last chance to save the nation.

      The police looked like they were going to keep Emerson and his comrades where they were and not allow them to move forward. Calls of “Keep it tight” and “Tighten up!” were heard throughout the contingent as they became concerned that if they were spread out too much, they would be easily dispersed. But someone noticed a snow-covered but easily passable parking lot to their left and they crossed. “”Why the fuck are we stopped? Go left! Go left!” Some brothers and sisters made snowballs and threw them at the police. One hit a police officer on the top of his head. He was wearing a helmet. They kept marching until, finally, they were stopped by police who blocked the entire street. There was no way for Emerson and his comrades to pass. The police began to push and shove the brothers and sisters at the front of the contingent. A count of: “One! Two! Three” was heard and on “Three!” they all rushed forward pushing back the police who had disrupted their peaceful march.

      With fear in their eyes, the police started swinging their telescopic batons and began to pepper spray Emerson and his comrades. He yelled out, “Pepper Spray! Pepper Spray!” to alert those behind him and turned his own head away to avoid being sprayed. There were some in front of Emerson who were not prepared with eye protection and were pulled from the front with shouts of “Medic” taking the place of screams. The street medics in their contingent went to their aid.

      They began to fall back as the police became more violent. One officer crouched down low, held his baton like a baseball bat and shouted “Come on!” to Emerson’s contingent. Emerson saw a fellow in his contingent, soaking wet from tear gas, getting slammed onto a car. The officers then pushed him to the ground and were just about to beat him when they managed to distract him and move away and avoid arrest. The contingent split and moved back. There were calls to stay in the street and lock arms. Emerson noticed many more inexperienced brothers ignoring the pleas and left him no choice but to flee.

      It was two o’clock on 14th and Pennsylvania. Spirits were still high. One protesters walked up to Emerson. “Hey brother, we’re going to 14^th and “H. Cell phone text messaging played an important part in spreading intelligence. Those who had signed up were quick to make collective decisions. Reports came in of more pepper spraying.

      Emerson took the opportunity to find an open convenience store to get a bite to eat, and then he read on his cell phone, “Spontaneous street party on Connecticut and “L”. He tried to find his way there. Walking down Vermont he spotted another contingent of anarchists on an unpermitted march turning onto “L” and joined them. Three hundred strong marched through Chinatown to the cheers of standers-buy and honking car horns of support.

“Union Station! Union Station! Party! Party! Party!” Not to join but to disturb Republicans there. They linked arm in arm. Two warning to9 disperse were issued. The police, seeing their defiance, began to drive into them on motorcycles. Emerson was nearly hit. One cop was hit in the leg by the motorcycle of another cop. They forced their way onto the sidewalks flashing middle fingers of defiance at the police. They were unafraid and resisted the police state, but there were not enough of them. There are never enough brave souls to resist the state.   

 They were the governor's pistoleros," Flavio Sosa, a leader of the more radical protesters, told the Monitor radio network following the shootings. "Our fight is peaceful."

Photographs published online by the Mexico City daily Reforma showed men trying to revive a shirtless man identified as the slain photographer, who had a bullet wound in the upper torso. Other photographs published in the online editions of other newspapers showed pistol-carrying masked men, identified as activists.

"He had a camera in his hand. It was obvious he was doing the work of journalism," said Al Giordano, publisher of Narco News, an alternative Internet news site focused on Mexico and Latin America, who said he had known Will for a decade. "It could have been you or me."

'One more martyr'

Brad Will, who had also worked in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America, had gone to Oaxaca in early October to cover the protests there. His last story, published by Indymedia on Oct. 17, 2006 covered the death of an activist shot earlier this month.

"One more death, one more martyr in a dirty war," Will wrote about the slain activist 11 days ago. "One more time to cry and hurt. One more time to know power and its ugly head."

"What can you say about this movement — this revolutionary movement?" he continued in the article. "You know it is building, growing, shaping — you can feel it trying desperately for a direct democracy.”

"The next time you scream at me in front of the students, I'll kick you in the face," so said Jack Covert as Emerson drove them to the IWW meeting on Rivington Street. Emerson would have stopped the car and told Jack to step out and try to do it or just step out if they hadn't been on the BQE under the Brooklyn Heights Promenade at the time. Instead, he continued on driving.

      "The students had voted which items to put up on the bulletin board and you just put up what you wanted. I didn't 'scream' at you; I merely asked what you were doing." Emerson had the feeling that, with Jack, he was dealing with a sick puppy but he didn't know how passive-aggressive and insecure he actually was. He almost felt pity for Jack in that he was educated and open-minded yet he held such heavy baggage. 

      Emerson remembered back to the other times he had interacted with Jack; when they met on the steps of the high school having cigarettes, talking shop, to the advent of the Bread & Roses Club which Emerson entertained with Mr. Blue, the student organization faculty advisor. Emerson had chalked it up to Jack's shyness, a shyness that seemed to be erased when he was in front of children. So long as it didn't mask some perversion, Emerson could deal with it. When the charter for the club was approved, Emerson took the heat and demonstrated the tenor of the club to the founding student members and Mr. Blue who sat blubber faced, arms barely folded across his broad mid-section, in the back of the room. Jack sat in the back of the room, too, out of shyness. hen Emerson thought it over, he realized that Jack sat in the back of every room that had a meeting with adults in attendance. He didn't seem to have a problem standing in front of sixteen-year-olds in his classes,

       Emerson learned, toward the end of their friendship, that John had a reputation questionable behavior with female students, too; that the students had complained to their guidance counselor that Jack seemed to flake off to asides with female students during class. Emerson just thought it was Jack's strong hands-on teaching style that was being misunderstood and gave him the benefit of the doubt; the students weren't very good judges of teaching methodology. That was until some fishy business started swimming up with Jack. One of the young ladies that Jack cozied up to was a Hungarian student of his who joined the club. Emerson realized that it was in deference to her at the bulletin board in the hallway that day that mortified Jack enough to threaten to kick Emerson in the face. 

      Before Bread & Roses Club meetings, Emerson would approach Jack to discuss what the meeting would focus on; would there be a fund-raiser or a trip to discuss or perhaps a lesson from labor history to bring out.

      "We'll just let it happen," said Jack.

      "We can't just let it happen. What if Mr. Blue or the principal walk in and ask us what we're doing?"

      "Why are you worried about that?"

      "I'm not worried about that; we just have to decide."

      "Calm down; there you go again," said Jack quietly annoyed.

      "I'm not doing 'anything again, Jack," said Emerson frustrated that his college couldn't see what seemed appropriate to him.

      "How about this, Jack; Let's alternate being faculty advisors to the club; one week you can do what you want to do with them and the next week it will be my turn." Emerson sat on the stool in the former drafting classroom as Jack paced the floor slowly in contemplation. "What do you mean?" 

      "For example, I will direct the students to form an agenda and discuss the procedure for doing so with Robert's Rules and then let the club leader practice the collective decision making with the members."

      "Just let it happen," said Jack looking up from the floor at Emerson as he paced.

      "Jack, it won't just happen unless we show the students how to do it."

      "On the alternate week, you can run the meeting and let the students do what you'd like." Emerson thought this was a good solution to the different methodologies each advisor brought to this club. Their hearts were in the same place but their minds weren't. They agreed to try it.

      At their next meeting, seven students were in attendance. Jack slinked off to the side and started talking with Marina, the Hungarian beauty. Emerson went the front of the room and called the meeting to order. The elected student leader of the month, Vadim, was asked to take over and run the students through the meeting procedure; goods and welfare, announcements, approval of agenda, the volunteering of the time-keeper and minute writer, and the meeting itself, key point, the selection of a design for the club t-shirt. The meeting went well, all forty minutes of it, and Mr. Covert sat next to Marina throughout. If not for his beard, one could have mistaken him for a club member himself. 

      A few times after that, in the hallways during passing between classes, Emerson noticed Jack in hushed conversation with Marina, even escorting her out the main entrance reserved for teachers only and chatting with her before she smiled a glance at him and left the campus to her part-time job in a supermarket. Jack never talked with Emerson about it and Emerson never asked him; Emerson believed that Jack's intentions were good. He was so different from the other deadbeat teachers at the high school. His ways could have been easily misunderstood. A few times, colleagues had warned Emerson about Jack; that they had seen something questionable on a computer history that he had just added to. The sites he visited were strange, but Emerson just though these humdrum bureaucrats were just reacting to the radical Jack was, not the predator inside.

      Emerson never caught Jack in a compromising situation with a student and neither had anyone else, but colleagues wondered about his sexuality. Everyone had an interest in sex, except for Jack. Teachers would sit in the cafeteria and talk about the newest cute teacher to join the faculty or a star on TV who was particularly attractive, gay or straight. Jack didn't seem to be interested in any of it. When Emerson had good natured conversation with female colleagues, Jack stretched the undertones to seem improperly flirtatious, especially if the female was a lesbian. Jack liked it when Emerson was brushed off, but no one could brush off Jack; he was unapproachable to anyone but the administrator who hired him and the female student he impressed. 

      The alternate week meetings that Jack facilitated were chaotic. Emerson held his tongue and acted as a minute writer when no one volunteered or a time keeper when there was something on the agenda to keep time for; usually there wasn't. Jack jumped from one topic to another and bore down on a student with a question to see if he was paying attention, a task in itself since there wasn't a focus to pay attention to. Only Jack's convoluted reasoning patterns were the agenda; the students simply enjoyed the banter and forget why they were at a club meeting. Before anyone could realize it, the bell had runs and the period was over. 

      After going on like this for a few weeks, the students started requesting Emerson to give direction to the meeting. Emerson, who had held his tongue, discussed the situation with Jack.

      "The children would like to organize a trip. I told them it was a good idea," Emerson said to Jack. "They don't understand what you wanted them to do last week. They don't understand when you talk with them about anarchism; they don't know what you mean." Jack started shuffling his feet in nervousness. "They just want to have fun. They asked me to show them some places they could take a trip to. Do you have any plans for the next meeting?"

      "What do you mean?"

      "Is there anything you want them to put on the agenda?"

      "It's up to them."

      "They want to talk about the trip."

      "So, let them."

      "Would you mind if suggested some places to go?"

      "No."

      "Do you have any suggestions?"

      "We could go do silk screening at ABC No Rio."

      "Okay bring that up. We will have to get it approved though," said Emerson. Mr. Blue wants to know where we are taking them." Emerson was as daring as Jack and liked the idea.

      When the next meeting started, John milled around as the seven students chatted and had their snacks. Emerson, looking at his watch, waited for John to call the meeting to order, but it wasn't happening. Finally, Jack stood up and said, "Alright, where can you find out about the martyrs in the Spanish Revolution?"

      "On the web," called out one student flippantly.

      "Exactly," said Jack and went on talking about George Orwell involvement in Spain before World War II and Franco and the need for workers to take charge and run the factories themselves.

      "Jack, don't we have something to do at the meeting today?" asked Emerson above the din of rowdy students. "The trip? The trip."

      Jack stared at Emerson for having the nerve to tell him what to do and break his dream of consciousness.

      "Why don't you do what you want," said Jack, put a disgusted look on his face, grabbed his bag, and walked out of the room.

      "What's wrong with Mr. Covert?" A student who had seen the move asked.

      "Oh, he had to get something upstairs." Emerson stood up and roused the club to order. There was still twenty minutes left in the period. "Didn't you want to discuss our club trip?"

      When the students chatting in the back heard the magic word "trip" they stopped talking and paid attention.

      "Let's go to Great Adventure," said one student and a few other boys started loudly agreeing with the suggestion.

      "Now what does Great Adventure have to do which what we are doing in this club?" Emerson had said that the choices had to do with sweatshops and factory workers or labor history. He reminded the students. Three or four agreed that their club trip shouldn't be to Great Adventure.

      The meeting went on with Vadim as the point person, asking students to choose from a number of places around the city that Mr. Davinsky and Mr. Covert had suggested. One student wanted to go to a foster home for children that his religious mother volunteered at. At the end of the period, it was decided, by majority 5 to 2 vote, to go to the Lower Eastside Tenement Museum.  

      Later, Emerson met Jack in the teachers' cafeteria. Jack wasn't happy as he peeled his blood orange. Emerson smiled. He was going to tell Jack about the student vote after he got his lunch tray from the counter, but when Emerson turned around with his food to sit back down, Jack was gone.

      It was the last meeting Jack attended the Bread & Roses Club. He left Emerson to explain where he was but Emerson wouldn't explain why Jack decided to leave because Emerson didn't know what to tell the students. Emerson would have to find someone else to escort the children with him on the trip. Jack still went outside to smoke cigarettes with the others, including Emerson, but it was different now. When Emerson came out, Jack went inside. 

      "Your friend is angry with you, Emerson," said Lao You-Tiao.

      "I don't know if he's my friend anymore."

      "Oh come on. It can't be that serious."

      "That's what I thought but he just walked out of the club meeting." 

      "I'll talk with him," said Mr. Lao. Mr. Lao's best friends at the school were Emerson and Jack. If they weren't talking to one another, what would he do? He would have to speak with each one separately.

Marty's pants returned to the seat below his body while Mr. Turd, Mr. Petersburg, Ms. Sweirdo, and Mr. Guadeloupe, Mr. Popovich. Peter Silecchia Mussolini

      Ms. Elmira Sweirdo’s gift to humanity was her clean conspiracies, using the union as a cover, to insure that no one was seen as union savvy as she was; she worked hard at it reading all the bulletins and newsletters from the Board of Education concerning workers. The retirees at I.C.E. were titillated by her in the audacity of her obstruction. They thrilled at the gossipy counterbalance of union personalities at Norman Thomas High School. They fancied themselves the opposition group to the mainstream and other opposition group; the middle path. To them, Emerson vs. Combs and Sweirdo were spy vs. spies a la Mad Magazine; they loved to see them get under each others’ skins. How delightful their cooperative destruction of Emerson. It didn’t matter that Emerson had joined I.C.E. for support; ultimately he was an enemy to I.C.E. leaders’ authority, too; he had to be neutralized.

      When the top-down decision-making of Harry Combs was questioned, his storm troopers, Ms. Sweirdo and a damaged-goods veteran teacher named Silecchia Mussolini, came out of the chalk bins to back him up. When collective decision making and meeting procedure of Roberts’ Rules was quoted, and seemed to the faculty to be working, it had to be sabotaged so they could keep their authority. Ms. Sweirdo had an advantage over her adversaries in the school union chapter; she was able to get the principal to loathe her for her slide insistence on rules to form over what was the best thing to do for the school, even if it meant hurting the faculty in the process.

      When Emerson found there was agreement in the faculty to form a discussion group in addition to the chapter meeting, they needed a room to meet and have their discussion. The date and time were chosen and the staff, all included, were invited. None of the members of the chapter committee decided to come; a boycott. Emerson and the others didn’t mind because they knew they would try to take over the meeting and filibuster any discussion.

      One room needed to be found. An empty music room with no class scheduled was located. The principal was informed that they were exercising their union rights, after school time, and she approved. But after the meeting, Ms. Sweirdo said she was called in to the principal’s office to be scolded for choosing a room without getting permission. Instead of saying she wasn’t involved with the meeting and letting cooler heads prevail, she sabotaged the good will that was created. She assumed responsibility for the meeting and must have irked the principal with her rude attitude so much that the committee was not allowed to ever meet in the building again. The funny thing was, and this was strange: Emerson and the other faculty never bothered to confirm from the principal that this edict of hers was true; Ms. Sweirdo could have made it all up; that’s how much residual power she had over the frail staff.

      There was another incident Emerson used to refer to, after the time he had engaged the support of I.C.E. and got the candidates for the citywide election to agree to campaign at Norman Thomas High School. The room and time were set and announced over the time clock and on the U.F.T. bulletin boards. Ms. Sweirdo, Mr. Turd, Mr. Petersburg, Mr. Guadeloupe, and Mr. Popovich joined Chapter Leader Harry Combs in intimidating the staff not to go to the meeting. Teachers are very easy to give up a fight with their “who needs this” attitude. They didn’t need the cold shoulders of the committee next time they needed a favor from the union, the union to them being an agency that helped from above and not a part of. They stayed away from meeting the other opposition group’s candidates.

      It was most revealing to Emerson how, after the miniscule turn-out at the meeting, attended only by Emerson’s closest colleagues, the hierarchy at I.C.E. made fun of Emerson for not getting the staff to turn out instead of blaming Mr. Combs and Ms. Sweirdo for intimidating them; they didn’t give Emerson their support. Emerson always thought they wanted to keep their power away from him. Emerson was boxed in by the anti-democratic obstructionists at his school as well as the leaders of the opposition group he had gone to for support. Both were against the collective decision making practiced at meetings of the IWW. The teachers didn’t want to join the union; they wanted the union to work for them. Emerson’s idea of participatory democracy scared most of the faculty, and the caucus in power and the leaders of two opposition groups weren’t going to share their power with the staffers.

      Emerson didn’t give up although it looked like he was fighting a losing battle. He continued to work outside his school to make I.C.E. a strong opposition group; they seemed more democratic than Ms. Sweirdo’s group. Emerson felt that grass root organizing was the key to improving conditions for the staff and students at New York City public schools. Like the industrial unionism of the IWW, all workers in one workplace were in one union to Emerson; all had to cooperate, parents included, to protect liberal education and workers rights. Without that grass root empowerment, regression of community parental involvement and staff work load would continue unabated, and finally collapse.

      Emerson was a visionary; look at what has happened in the years since he began to try to organize the grass roots in1999. Many schools had been closed or turned into charter schools, the probationary period a teacher waits for tenure increased to five years, the work time longer, the work load heavier, teacher evaluations based 50% on student test results, the firing of teachers without due process. It was no consolation to Emerson that he had retired by then with a good pension. He could hear the quiet tapping from the other shoe about to drop. There was no consolation at all for his colleagues and most of the teachers he knew who had stood by without supporting democratic reforms, actively or passively, they would eventually be sorry they had.

      The wretched staffers that inhabit high schools all over the capitalist world, specifically Norman Thomas High School in Midtown Manhattan, had no desire to increase their union participation or teaching methodology. There is no more a desire to help make students smarter. A teacher, such as Emerson Davinsky, who interacted with students to their hearts and minds are few. The administration knew them all too well to forgive the stubborn wickedness of their insecurity.

 Emerson only liked the cafeteria matron at school, Carol; so non-threatening. He was in the same working class as Carol who only wished to do her best at work, be friendly to the staff, and earn the respect of her gentle family at home. Carol, to the heart of every person a hug and smile, a married woman, neat and jocular, at the grand-parenting age, calm in duty and holding of tongue. Other teachers either ignored Carol or treated her as a servant, below their contempt or competition. Not so Emerson; she was like a sister to him, better to him than even his own sister. Administrators didn’t bother entering the teachers’ cafeteria. Even their lunch period had more importance to them than the staff. Carol was glad she didn’t have to serve them.

Emerson deflected every snub without a wisp of a breeze. He only caught the contemptuous corner of the eye from novices too green to hide their jealousy; they thought they had to give Emerson a hint of their contempt for him. He was as numb to their passive-aggressiveness as they were to his sensitivity.

Years later, after he was retired, his Facebook posts of his successes and happiness drew no comments and almost no “likes” from former colleagues;”he knew he was still being looked down at on from the corner of his former colleagues’ eyes; only mutual friends acknowledged respect for his doings after he had left the school, even if they themselves still suffered indignations from students, administration and union from within.

Emerson’s greatest measure of success was in not hearing a word from a former colleague who hated him, not even a comment attached to a friend’s post did he see from those jealous minds, the ones who pretended they weren’t interested in Emerson’s idealism. Their less than idealistic subterfuge could be tricked into assuming a wise-assed superiority by incorrect statements of fact to which they could chide Emerson publically not realizing that, by responding and correcting him, they had lost at their own game. The longer Emerson kept their Facebook “friendship,” the less they meant to him. It was like a staring contest; who would blink first and ‘unfriend’ the other? That was the person that had forever lost until Alzheimer’s erased the last trace of their obstruction for good for the Benny Goodman of all.

But while the colleagues worked in the same school, cliques brought the heat to the soldier and melted the walls together. Mot one union chapter leader ever visited the Bread & Roses Social Action Club or gave lip service to it. They absolutely could not allow each other down in keeping Emerson and his students out in the cold, just as the administration and greedy student affairs faculty advisor Greene had. The very goal of reaching a Sweatfree school perplexed them, or at least they pretended it perplexed them.

Years later, Emerson saw, on-line, a YouTube conference with the hash-tag: “Putting Socialism into the Classroom.” Tabled by three people, one of whom was a former faculty member at Norman Thomas High School, an enemy from the school based opposition group, it was strange for Emerson to hear her talk about the difficulties of having students feel in their guts that socialism was better for living. Yet this teacher had never visited the social action club Emerson was the faculty advisor of, not only to see how it was possible, but to see how it was being done right under her proverbial nose. He had to laugh and comment for any innocent viewers that this teacher was one sitting in a cave staring at a picture of a star when there was a real socialist star right there in her work place.

Emerson, sitting on the bench up the Han River in Taichung, said he took another deep breath of the stalk soaked air being burned from the rice paddies behind him, watched the progress of a beautiful red beetle as he swept it off his pant leg and it crossed his feet, looked at the warm green mountains to the east, the handsome joggers passing by behind him, and in his retirement, turned the page, closed the book, listened to the birds sing as they few across the sky, and headed back to his comfortable home on the sweetest bike he had ever owned. 

Chapter 13: Bring Them Up on Charges

13. Bring Them Up on Charges

                                                                               (updated 2-23-15)

Ryland Grossinger was bred in Forest Hills, NY but he was raised in Los Angeles. He was toasted when he graduated from UCLA in law but he baked too long in the Southern California sun when he tried to butter up to his boss and was fired. Rather than loaf around, he yearned to go back east and see what was cooking. He became a barista for Dante’s Coffee and found his place at the table. 

      While Ry had no trouble getting settled with the handsome allowance his well-to-do parents provided him with, he wanted to make a mark in legal world on the side of the oppressed. Being short brought His contempt for others who looked down of him. He felt he knew what it was like to be a poor, black and to have to pump a nickel wherever they forked-out salary. He was going to help the workers of the world. A working class hero was something to be. 

      He went to the IWW website and discovered there was a branch in New York City meeting on the Lower Eastside in a place called ABC No Rio. One slow Sunday afternoon, he got on the subway at Broadway-Lafayette and took the F train to Essex Street, walking over to Rivington near the Streit’s Matzo Factory. He thought he would be late, and hoped to be to make a grand entrance but the meeting, scheduled for 2pm so some members could get over their Sunday morning hangovers, hadn't started yet. Only Emerson was there to welcome Ry with Colonial Crutch from Macon, Georgia, on the throne downstairs. 

      "Is this the IWW meeting?"

      "It sure is. Are you looking for us?"

      "I thought there'd be more of you."

      "Some of them are coming late but Colonial Clutch will be right back; he's our legal expert."

      "I'm a lawyer, too; B.A. from UCLA."

      "Oh, Californian; the sunshine state,"

      "I was born in Queens; my parents moved west when I was young."

      "I didn't notice any New York accent." Just then, Eupheus Crutch's footsteps could be heard climbing the fragile stairs and walking back, entering the dilapidated room.

      "Well, what do we have here?"

      "You must be Crutch," said Ry without standing to greet him. Already Crutch was his brother in law and a sibling rivalry was brewing."

      Crutch sat down and opened his satchel removing a booklet with the IWW Constitution and another booklet called One Big Union. "Here you are; read these when you get a chance. Y'all living in New York now?"   

      "Yes, I live on East 12th near Tompkins Square Park." Ry had been living in the ground floor studio since arriving six months earlier.

      Just then, footsteps could be heard coming up the stairs, two sets of footsteps, both heavy, like the footstep of working men. Two male voices were talking loudly as they came through and slammed the open door. 

      "Oh so sorry," said Adonis, “I didn't realize there was anyone here." 

      "Oh he did that on purpose," Mack reached out a hand. Hi, you must be that fella from California. GHQ said you might be coming in. My name is Maynard, I'm a carpenter. Call me May."

      "Yeah, some carpenter. He's a fuckin' boss, I tell you," shouted Adonis as he threw his bag to the floor and roughly took a broken seat to sit on. "He still owes me two hundred bucks."

      "Now be polite, "Adonis," said May."You'll scare Ry away. Ry it is, isn't it?"

      "It's Ryland but my friends call me Ry, Ry Grossinger."

      "You know you're famous in New York."

      "Yeah, someone told me there was a Jewish bread company with my name."

      "It's okay. The Industrial Workers of the World have no racist tendencies."

      "I'm not Jewish. My parents are Jewish."

      "Well, doesn't that make you Jewish?" said Crutch. "I read somewhere that the religion follows the mother's side in your culture."

      "I'm losing my religion," said Ry angrily.

      Just then, another member slinked into the room from the second door to the back, the one that led into a little storage area and then the kitchen. 

      "Come in Jack; don't be shy," said May. "Ry, this is our fifth member present."

      "Y'all sit down now, here? We have a quorum. Let's get started we're an hour and a half late already."

      "I can't stay past 4pm; I have an important meeting with a fellow barista."

      "Barista? What, do you work in a coffee shop?"

      "Dante’s," said Ry with distain. "We are trying to start a union there."

      "That's great, Ry," exclaimed May. "How can we help?"

      "Help? You're a fucking boss is all! You can't even help your own crew," chimed in Adonis.

      Emerson saw that Ryland was looking in disbelief at this motley crew he had just joined. H e knew he was thinking the same thing Emerson thought when he joined his first IWW meeting: "This is a union?" 

      Ry Grossinger was on the way to becoming a working class star buck. His grind would be Dante’s Coffee, a franchise chain that had thousands of locations across the United States and around the world.

      Colonial Eupheus Crutch, the gentleman Wobbly who headed straight to New York City from Macon, Georgia, was the cosmonaut Bolshevik to Ry’s Astro Boy persona; he was in a catch-up race to the moon of Industrial Worker union stardom. All the underhanded insults Eupheus endured from miniscule Ryland would have made him a sympathetic cult hero down south, but there in New York, he was fair game for every yokel joke cosmopolitan sophistication could dish out. He held his head high throughout the confederate-baiting northerners’ rants. Did he not suggest the Stars and Bars were to be proud of as his state flag? So what if Clutch was? Clutch was ready to show that “tiny organizer with the big mouth” what organizing was all about. The south would rise again in New York City.

      He went looking for workers to be organized by him. The firebrand who got him moving was William Stacks, Willy the Glove. Willy, who bore a resemblance to Popeye, had that California look of sun-glassed indifference to what anyone but he had to say. He knew Ryland Grossinger’s kind; he’d dealt with them before, the bosses from the other side. Now, in his 50’s, unmarried, getting wrinkled, a drifter with a cowboy hat, Willy had more tricks than sleeves to hide. He wore a right-handed gray felt construction worker’s glove with railroad stripe wrist band like the Phantom of the Opera wore his mask; he never took it off except, maybe, to sleep.

Willy Stacks, who claimed to be Cesar Chavez’s gloved left hand in the struggle of the California grape growers United Farm Workers at Delano, was raring for a fight to bring back the glory. Colonial Crutch had his wishes fulfilled. Emerson, as the treasurer of the New York City branch had the task of raising funds depleted by the Dante Barista Union (as Ryland called his offshoot) and holding down the fort for Wobblies with other pet struggles to finance. Emerson went out with Willy and Crutch on hunches. He was Crutch’s hum-dinger; the cat’s meow. He was the only man more macho than Crutch.

      Willy the Glove had an insider’s tip that there were some workers in a processing plant in Long Island City that were pissed off about their low wages and heavy work schedule. Willy himself had worked there for a while driving a refrigerated delivery truck. The company, Farm Freshness, had a two hundred thousand square-foot warehouse with hundreds of employees, mostly immigrant workers and ex-cons that collected and boxed shopping lists of groceries for deliveries to customers. They were like a supermarket on wheels.

      “Hundreds of workers who are ready to organize; I feel it in my bones. Enough shit from their supervisors,” said Willy pointing his glove finger in the direction of the plant, three miles uptown across the East River from the IWW meeting place off Essex Street. “They’re ready to pop!” 

      “They need to meet with us somehow without letting their supervisors see,” said Crutch, the canon wheels turning. “We must let them, know we can steer them right; they can trust us.” Crutch stood, arms folded across his chest, mustache drooping down his seriously red face.

      “How many copies do you want?” questioned Emerson picking up a thread from earlier in the meeting, before Ryland and four other baristas came to make their motion and move on to their own meeting place. “You said they have how many workers?”

      “We need bilingual flyers; Spanish on one side, English on the other.”

      “Ask Ernie in Bushwich if he could do it.” Ernie Pancho was the Wobbly who worked with a Latino group from the barrio there in an organization called “Allanar El Camino,” Pave the Way.

      “Let’s get, I don’t know, two hundred printed,” said Willy, matter-of-factly.

      “That many? Okay, on thin paper. They’re going to throw them away.”

      “No. They must be top quality! Don’t let them think we’re a cheap organization.” Crutch shook his head slowly in agreement, his eyes shut under raised brows, lips enclosing down-pointed whiskers.

      “But we are cheap; we only have four hundred dollars left in the treasury,” said Emerson pleadingly.

      “We may need more,” said Willy, tapping the rim of his Mexican Stetson an inch from the left uncovered hand of the arm leaning on the radiator. “Can’t tell; the lady workers on the line have boyfriends.” Billy went on,” They need some confidence, too. We can give it to them. You know, ex-cons need a push; they’re a little shy about losing this job, one of the only places that’ll hire them.”

      In the weeks before, Willy and his de facto spokesman, Crutch, had unleashed their organizing abilities on the fine workers of Farm Freshness. They’d made a motion and had gotten three hundred dollars from the branch to reserve breakfast in a little luncheonette outside the plant; no refund. The breakfast would be “chin-wag,” as the Colonial called it, “a chinwag for the scissor-bills.” Before Crutch and Willy the Glove had set their sights on the Farm Freshness workers, he had Emerson and another Wob named Fergie visiting junk yards in Greenpoint. The barking dogs at each job site in and around painfully drab and weed wild corrugated metal fences were omens. On the dead end summer streets of industrial Greenpoint, there was no sense trying to get passed the gates, but that didn’t deter Willy the Glove or Colonial Crutch who followed close by at Willy’s new Red Wing construction-booted heels. Emerson and Fergie shied the other way. Beyond the crumpled gates backed into by trucks too many times stood two or three men in short-sleeved shirts and jeans, looking outward and scratching their heads at the four men milling around in the usually vacant street.

      Willy bravely took a chance. The other Wobblies looked as he strutted past the gate, black chained pit bulls barking madly, to speak with the workers awaiting him. No, they weren’t workers. The workers, he was told, were on their break and he’d better stay away and not bother them.

      “Yes sir, just asking,” said Willy looking skyward under his Ray-Bans, the dog pulling at its chain.

      “”They’re supervisors,” he nonchalantly said passing the other three Wobblies out of sight up the broken blazing street. “How was I to know?” said the veteran of many a California grape grower strike.

      “Let’s get out of here; this is stupid,” said Emerson, stating the obvious. “Holy shit,” chimed in Fergie. “If this wasn’t the biggest waste of time! Willy? There are no workers here to organize!”
      “I say there are!” said Willy emphatically.

      “He said there are then there most certainly are,” added Crutch confidently. “Where y’all going to now, Willy?”

      “Back to the Chinese warehouse in Bushwick.”

“Damn if I’m going there I’d rather be in bed with a bitch,” said Fergie. ”I’m heading home to Brooklyn. Where’s the ‘L’ Train?” Fergie was off and so was Emerson. They’d had enough organizing for the day. It seemed pretty disorganized to them. Who was this Willy the Glove, anyway? How did he show up at the IWW meeting and who let him in?

“Let’s go see if Ernie is at Allanar El Camino; it’s just ten minutes from here,” said Willy as he walked down the street to his battered Land Rover with Crutch and drove off dropping off Emerson and Fergie at the subway station a few blocks away.

      “They’ll need some Red Cards for sure, I do believe,” said Crutch.

      “I want to make a deal with you.”

      “He wants to make a deal with us.”

      “Bring our union up to date.” Eupheus Crutch had requested at the previous monthly meeting, and over the internet, that members rendezvous with him at Ft. Green Park, it was decided as most of the members lived in Brooklyn, on a Saturday next, one o’clock, to hear a very important proposal he had been working on for months, had even sent in to general headquarters for their approval, to no avail. He felt that the weight of a New York City General Membership endorsement would open up some eyes when it was published in the G.O.B., the General Office Bulletin for the Industrial Workers of the World.

      “I’ve been thinking, and sure working hard. Tell me how y’all feel. I’m glad y’all come here today. If Eugene comes it’s five, and we’ll have a quorum; we can vote on it and make branch policy. Thank you for listening. Cigarette Emerson? Oh yes, that’s right. You’ve quit. How’s that going, by the way? Uh-huh; didn’t mean to tempt you. What’s that; sure Fellow Worker Fergie. You are more than welcome to one. Well, well well. Lookie who’s comin up yonder hill, and only an hour late. I’m sure he has a good reason; he always does. Why Fellow Worker Portobello, you do us honor with your presence. Why sure we’ll be finished soon; I wouldn’t want to keep you from your Dante Workers meeting. I, too, have an important meeting in the City at five o’clock. I’m so glad you could attend. And, congratulations; you are the fifth member here in good standing. You are in good standing, aren’t you? Well that’s just fine and dandy.

      Without further ado, I have here in my satchel all the documentation y’all will need to make a proper informed decision. We have a chance to make history here, fellow workers, and sister worker Sadie. Fergie, Emerson, Pete. What you now have in your hands is the re-worked Wheel of Industrial Organization.  

      Compare it, if you would all be so kind, to Figure ‘B,’ Father Haggerty’s wheel. The good father, bless his Wobbly soul, besides leaving the pulpit for some more worthwhile and constructive vocation, for the welfare of all working folk, designed this well nigh about a century ago at a time when certain industries were still immature or hadn’t even been born yet. For example, there were no franchise restaurants with prepared foods back then so he classified retail workers in the food industry instead of assigning them an industrial union number of their own; he put them with butchers and greengrocers instead of listing them as sales clerks. What’s that Pete? Yes, I know y’all make cappuccino and latte, but, bear with me a moment, I shall answer all your questions in due course. That is why I.U. 640 is no longer reasonable and another number should be assigned service workers. Now look, if you will, at the new wheel I invented; a separate I.U. 660 has been created to identify all workers in the fast food industry. What’s that, Emerson? Why of course. I’ll just run my mouth a little while you find yourself a place to relieve yourself. I shall go no further until you return. Why yes, sister worker Sarah; I would love a candy.”

       Eupheus Crutch went on for another hour using all the time allotted to him. His fellow workers were tired and wanted to go.

      “I know it’s late but I call for a vote on endorsing the new wheel of Industrial Organization I put together. Now who seconds the motion?” No one raised their hand. “Now come on y’all. How about you Emerson; second the motion, won’t you?”

      “I don’t think we should be wasting our time reinventing the wheel when there are more important things to do.”

      “But I have explained the necessity there is for new industry…”

      “I have to go Crutch; another time,” said Pete as he stood up from the lawn to leave.”

      “Fellow workers: let us strike while the iron’s hot; now sit down for a moment won’t you fellow worker?”

      “Okay, I second the motion, and vote ‘no’ for changing the wheel.”

      “But we’re not voting on changing the wheel; we’re only voting for an endorsement from our branch for the acceptance by the general committee to bring it up for a union-wide vote.

      The other three Wobblies all raised their hands to vote ‘no.’

      “The vote is four to one, fellow worker Eupheus. That’s that.”

      “Well if y’all are going to vote not to endorse the proposal then I retract the proposal.”

      “You can’t do that; it’s underhanded,” said sister worker Sadie.

      “Call it what you will sister worker; I retract my proposal.”

      “Too late,” Pete said as he stood and walled a few steps down the grassy knoll. “The vote’s been taken. We do not endorse your stupid wheel. Bye?”

      “Well, I never!”

      The result of the vote for the NYC GMB rejection of Colonial Crutch’s wheel was printed in the monthly Wobbly City newsletter.

      Ah yes; The Wobbly City; Emerson had taken on the responsibility for organizing a monthly newsletter for the branch. No one requested that he do it, and no one offered to help; he just thought it was the right thing to do and he felt like volunteering to do it. He promised the general membership branch that he would send each member attending the monthly meeting a first draft of the newsletter for their approval before he printed it up and would spend no branch funds. It was an offer no one could refuse, so they voted to make Emerson the editor of the Wobbly City, a name he himself had come up with. For three years, every month, Emerson culled news stories from the branch members, sometimes tweaking minutes from meeting or pulling arms to get some copy. Usually he had to write copy himself, under three different pseudonyms.

      Sometimes it got a little dicey about what he could print. Eupheus Crutch claimed all names should be anonymous so the authorities couldn’t pin anything on anyone and cautioned Emerson to remember that sabotage was disavowed by the union so don’t print anything about it. Ry Grossinger took exception to a truthful article about his nascent Dante Barista Union because it didn’t reflect the image he wanted to have presented to the public. They almost came to blows over propaganda versus truth. Ry would write the articles about him by himself. Emerson had to edit the newsletter to let him do so, and he had the votes of the general membership, padded that week with baristas to make sure his veto held up.

      When one fellow worker threw his hat into the ring to be editor, every barista there, and the few members who weren’t baristas, agreed to let the new guy have a chance since Emerson had been doing it for three years. Tom Hood became the new editor saying he would work with Emerson on the transition. He decided it was better to use the internet technology top put the Wobbly City on-line and save paper. One issue on the internet came out. After that, Tom Hood was too busy with other more important projects to continue; and he didn’t realize how much work he would have to put into it. The newsletter languished never to see the light of day again. By the time Ry Grossinger had taken over the branch behind the curtain and nominated Emerson back as the editor of the Wobbly City, Emerson had already quit the branch.

      It was nine years later that the Labor Board said fired the Dante’s Barista should get his job back. Emerson was glad Bruno was vindicated, after all this time. He'd always been a hero to him. Bruno Ascus was not a union organizer; he was told he was one by Ryland whose dirty work he did. Emerson remembered Bruno feeling his oats after Ryland dared him to stand up to the manager. Then, after he was fired, while Ryland kept his job, Ryland used Bruno as a test law case with some connections he had. Bruno didn’t even know what NLRB stood for when Ryland filed the petition on his behalf; all Bruno did was sign the paper.

In the nine years since federal authorities decided he should get his case back, Bruno washed dishes in delicatessens, took care of elderly homebound clients for an agency, and washed floors in a rehab center. “It’s disgusting,” Emerson thought, “that after all this time, his jobs were so bad that he still wanted his Dante’s Coffee Shop job back!”

 Emerson thought of calling up Bruno. He couldn’t muster the courage. To Bruno, Ryland was a hero though he lost Bruno the best job he ever had, literally. Emerson recalls how Ryland and two other Wobbly baristas wore the IWW button at work, too, but carefully didn’t say anything to management that would be considered grounds for firing; he wasn’t ready to play that card, yet. Bruno wasn’t that discreet. 

Bruno Ascus had already moved on, married and had kids when Ryland, seeing another opportunity for union fame, brought charges on his behalf to the NLRB accusing Dante’s of unfairly abusing him for union activism. The board ruled against the coffee chain. Dante’s took its case to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals the court gave the case back to the NLRB after deciding that Bruno didn’t curse the manager in front of customers; just in front of other baristas.

Two years later, the NLRB had a new decision: Bruno’s firing was illegal no matter what because Bruno’s union activism contributed to the decision to get rid of him. The NLRB pointed out that Dante’ didn’t punish other employees for cursing—including the manager—and that a memo about Bruno’s dismissal specifically said it was because Bruno supported the IWW union.

When Emerson Davinsky started feeling the need for anti-Alzheimer’s medication, he put the pen down and stopped writing his memoirs. Through all the past e-mails and flame wars, he couldn’t put on his pants without pulling up a memory.

When he saw the news on-line about Bruno Ascus, he got that feeling again. Bruno was vindicated after nine years after he was fired from Dante’s Coffee Shop in the early days of the Ry Grossinger organizing there; Grossinger had an idea, for IWW solidarity, for workers to wear buttons during work time, even though only five of the twelve workers were in the union.

Ryland had contacted the NLRB to schedule an election. Emerson and the other Wobblies in the branch felt it showed their hand without a solid majority, it got Bruno, naive as he was, into an argument with the manager and eventually fired. Before a vote could be taken to join the union, it was postponed because they knew they would lose, since Dante management packed the location with anti-union stalwarts.

The only person who benefitted from the organizing was Ry Grossinger; the corporate news it generated made him slightly famous, enough to be invited to write a preface to an old IWW anthology, get hangers-on, and make use of his law credentials.

He never asked permission from the IWW GMB to start the union drive and, finally, depleted the GMB of funds by stuffing votes; only Dante workers went to vote. Ry never shared funds raised by the Dante baristas with the GMB or GHQ. He even started his own website and list-serve without approval. With the tide against Emerson and no support from friends like Jack Covert who quit the branch, he never brought Ry up on charges; he left the branch in disgust.

It was the first shot in a volley of union organizing that the New York City General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World tried to accomplish. All the organizing had ended before it took hold, like moving a broken chair before the glue had dried or trying to sit on the chair after it had been removed, so eager were Emerson’s fellow workers to outdo each other. Workers who lost their jobs because of the impatience of the advising organizers would eventually win some of their cases in court after guilt and pro bono defense helped them get through. Colonel Crutch even donated a sum of his own money to ease his conscience and get workers their jobs back. Emerson was long gone from the branch by the time mop-up began.

Colonial Crutch moved on as Ryland moved away with his own version of the IWW. Emerson stayed true to the General Membership Branch and tried to safeguard meetings and funds for all members, not just Ryland’s gang or the Clutch-Willy faction.

In Brooklyn Crutch and Willy were joined by Fergie and Emerson and a few others at four shops that had let them help organize unions for them. Emerson was especially helpful with his Mandarin ability by ad-libbing chants outside the Chinese run businesses. For their services, all workers in two of the shops had been fired and management demanded to see proof of legal immigrant status as a way of scaring the un-fired workers into behaving.

Emerson proudly participated in the union pushes at the shops in Bushwick. One day in particular stands out in his mind as exemplary. The day began at 5:30am in front of Great City Produce. A few workers arriving heard whistles and home-made drums. A supervisor kept the door closed an hour until the Latino manager arrived; he could speak with his own people, the Chinese bosses knew. Next, Emerson and the other Wobblies walked to the nearby Americana Market. It was there the previous year that four workers were fired for organizing. A few stayed on because they were discreet and not openly involved with the union, so the management thought.

After stopping off for breakfast, Emerson took his fellow workers in his car a few miles away to Dawn Plus Corp., formally called Rosy Supply Corp. Rosy Supply was the company that fired all its workers involved with the IWW. Wobblies from out of town in New York City at the time joined the demonstration to get the workers their back pay.

The final stop of that perfect union day was at Hung-Easy, the foodstuffs distributor that Willy the Glove and Colonial Crutch went to after one worker complained about them at Allanar El Camino. The warehouse was locked up for the holiday. Despite that, the solidarity party continued until the police came to send them away. Emerson drove his fellow workers back to the subway station and headed home fulfilled.

Willy the Glove expressed himself satisfied with the day’s events in every way. Everyone let him believe it was his party. Emerson resented him and the way the branch was strictly divided along selfish lines of heroism by Crutch and Ryland. Despite all the hard effort, almost everyone who was being helped organizing lost their jobs. Baristas usually didn’t go to Bushwich actions and Bushwich organizers weren’t welcome at barista meetings. Only Emerson and a few other Wobblies stayed on to participate in both. Emerson knew there had to be a better way. The NYC GMB was ruining more people’s lives than they helped. Only Ryland came out smelling like Bread & Roses.  

“Tell us about the time Ryland Grossinger and Tumor Israeli made the motion to get stocking hats for all the New York City Dante baristas,” the historian sent by The Labor Studies Center in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan adjusted the microphone in front of Emerson and checked the recorder on the table to make sure it was running. It was five years earlier that the Wobbly City newspaper was cited for progressive journalism and added to the university archives. Gerald Rubin came to New York to meet and interview its editor, Emerson Davinsky, who wasn’t the editor any more or even active in the New York City General Membership Branch, but it would be a good story.

      “There were enough baristas there for a quorum; five members minimum. They all voted ‘yes’ and the motion passed; that’s all. It was that simple.”

      “Did they say they would pay the branch back for them?”

      “Yes, that’s what Ry and Tumor said.”

      “Ry?” Mr. Rubin looked amused.

      “Yeah. They said they would, at the wholesale price, of course, but none of them ever did.”

      “Where did you buy the stocking hats from?”

      “GHQ; Secretary-Treasurer Lexus in Philadelphia had them made for the outreach store there. I asked her to send them up pronto because the Dante’s Workers were planning a job action at the Union Square store and wanted to have them; it would be cold out there on the picket line.”

      “It must have been upsetting,” the historian commented.

      “It wasn’t at first. I got a thrill going to the picket line with the box full of stocking hats. All the baristas greeted me like I was a hero coming to hold the fort down. Before I had a chance to collect payment they grabbed the hats from the box. Some put them on their heads, others stashed them somewhere; some took two, wore one and stashed the other. Some friends of the baristas took one, too, and I never saw them again.”

      “Did you at least get one?”

      “No, they were all gone, all twenty of them.”

“They hijacked the General Membership Branch and looted the funds,” said Emerson somewhat distraught at the regression of the branch. “Ry just smeared his own jelly over it and made it his own with Tumor and the other barista friends of his.”

      “What did the other non-affiliated members do?”

      “Well, that drunkard, Fergie, wagging his tail in excitement, went along with the schmoozing Rye Bread spread over him. He was Ryland’s peer; the same age. Not like me; I was an old fart to them. Colonial Crutch had his head up his ass with his Bushwick project. His only regret was that he couldn’t loot the GMB funds first. There was no money left in the treasury when he came to the next monthly meeting and made a motion for outreach funds.”

      “What about Jack Covert?”

      “After they wouldn’t listen to his advice at the meeting, he slinked further into the shadows of the branch. Then he wrote that e-mail on our list-serve: ‘You’re all a bunch of assholes,’ he wrote, including me too, I guess.” Emerson and Gerald laughed at the notion of the branch creep calling the others ‘assholes.’

      “No one had the time or energy to fight these schmucks and bringing them up on charges would have been a waste of time.”

      “Why.”

      “Why? Because Ry and the baristas were the only members coming to meetings; they wouldn’t have voted for the charges if there had been anyone to second the motion in the first place, which there wasn’t.”  

      “Look at them now. They have their own website, their own column in the Industrial Worker. The ‘bored from within’ and took over a void left when real Wobblies, sick with disgust, walked away,” Emerson said shaking his head.

      “I didn’t give up though,” he went on. “After a year of boycotting the branch activities and meetings, I finally took Fergie’s advice and went back.

      “Did you go back to editing the Wobbly City?”

      “No, I didn’t. Ry chose Tom Hood to be the editor and voted him in when I left the branch. The shithead wrote one hard copy edition and one half-hearted electronic edition on the internet, and then stopped doing it all together. Later another Dante barista, this sister worker named Dyin’, was given the paper but she had bigger plans; the I.W. was her goal and there she is printing out the crap Ryland and the new-fangled Wobblies approve of, the fakirs they are.”

      “They wouldn’t even vote to make me secretary when I called the ace and put in my candidacy.” Emerson took a long gulp on the water bottle he’d been holding. He’d been talking with the reporter for half an hour and his mouth was getting high as his temperature rose. “Ry Bread nominated a guy, actually a nice guy, but he had only been in the branch a few months. His qualification, according to that louse, was that he was new and should be given a chance to demonstrate and learn leadership skills, in other words, he could be Ry Grossinger’s puppet.”

      “I left the branch for good after that. Well, actually I did go back a while later on when this folksinger from France was in town wanted to do a fund-raiser for the IWW at this bar in Williamsburg. I helped organized the show, went to the bar and all to get permission, advertised it on Indymedia, and we had a pretty good turn-out. I only did it because Fergie said the funds would be GMB funds; not Dante funds. I stood at the door and asked patrons to donate a suggested five dollars and we raised over three hundred dollars. But Fergie didn’t like that I was asking people to donate funds, would you believe that?” The reporter from The Labor Studies Center in Ann Arbor shook his head in disbelief.

      “Like I was a class enemy; I wasn’t supposed to ask people to donate five dollars or whatever they could afford. Fergie treated me like shit and said he was going to tell Ryland Grossinger what I was doing like he was a principal or something. Schmuck!”

A young woman walked into the library, a friend of Gerald Rubin, and sat down at the table introducing herself to Emerson. “We’re almost done, Flo.”

“Oh that’s okay,” she said, “Take your time.”

“Wow, what time is it? I have to get ready to go anyway,” Emerson said looking at his watch. “Anyway, let me conclude: I left the branch for good after that and the new secretary, the one that Ryland nominated, would send me an e-mail from time to time asking me to reconsider coming back to the branch. He persuaded me and I told him I would, but he kept asking me and calling me on the phone like I didn’t answer. I called him back and left a message and said I was coming to the next meeting whenever that would be but he never called me back; it’s like there was a glitch in the e-mails in the computer, but I have the proof; I have the e-mails he sent me and my responses that didn’t seem to get through. Maybe someone was deleting them on purpose and he never saw them. I don’t know. He kept writing asking me why I wouldn’t respond and then said I was no longer in good standing and would not contact me again.”

Emerson, Gerald, and Flo stood and put on their winter coats and headed out into the streets of Greenwich Village. Emerson was told his account would be put into the file the labor studies department had on the IWW NYC GMB. Perhaps they were spies satisfied that, with the losers in the branch and the dishonest ego trippers they were, the F.B.I. had nothing to worry about.

 Those monthly Wobbly City newsletters Emerson edited (and mostly wrote himself with no help) are great works, he felt. He would have kept doing them if the Wobblies at the NYC GMB, spearheaded by Ryland, hadn't taken the editorship away from him and given it to Tom Hood who wrote one belated edition and lost interest. Later, after Ry Grossinger took over the branch, he had the nerve to make a motion that Emerson to resume editorship after refusing to second his nomination for chapter secretary. Emerson declined and left the branch. Emerson was glad he kept color copies of all the editions.

If everything had worked out as Emerson hoped, the IWW would again be the spirit that animated the labor movement as it was a century ago. This rag-tag organization with two thousand members in good standing* worldwide (*dues paid up to date) would have had a lecture circuit like the businessman, author and investor, Robert Kiyosaki who wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad, not for entrepreneuring weasels but for hard-working victims oppressed by that shitty top-down attitude. Ayn Rand would have become a cartoon character villain in a ‘truth and justice’ comic book about the un-American way a super hero of the working class would be, realistically, and she would suffer her dog-eat-dog ways with monster dogs eating her putrid flesh, literally. 

All Emerson ever wished for, and all his Pop ever expected him to be successful at was raising a family and being true to them, alive and after he was gone. It just wasn’t working out that way. Even in the progressive movement, there were under-achievers who tried to get over on others to prove their worth to themselves and attract dumb-ass woman holding out for anti-heroes such as themselves.