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!