Before Alexander Graham Bell

The term telephone was adopted into the vocabulary of many languages. It is derived from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, "far" and φωνή, phōnē, "voice", together meaning "distant voice" according to Wikipedia. Prior 10 March 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell called out over his invention, the liquid transmitter, to his assistant, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.", all dialogues between humans had been conducted within ear shot or shout.

Nowadays telephones permit same-time conversations across the globe. In Asia in the 1990s calling back to the States required placing orders at the local GPO through an overseas operator. Messages were delayed seconds. Interference and electronic feedback were accepted flaws in the system was normal.

Come the second decade of the 21st Century and in one day I speak with my wives in Thailand, my brother Mawee in Loitokitok, Kenya, old friends in Paris, London, and Rome as well as all parts of the Americas and Hawaii. At least until last Thursday when I stepped on my cellphone.

Crunch.

A drop on tile had previously spidered the screen.

My cellphone resisted all attempts to restore service.

For all purposes it was dead, although the flashlight worked fine.

TMobile offered the option of buying another phone and still have to pay for the damaged device. I tried to connect with old burners. No success and on Friday I opted to order another from my server's insurance company and the agent warned that delivery was scheduled for Monday or Tuesday at the latest.

Four to five days without calls, social media, or texting.

An eternity in the Age of Instant Gratification.

Wikipedia claimed that in 2002, only 10% of the world's population used mobile phones and by 2005 that percentage had risen to 46%. By the end of 2009, there were a total of nearly 6 billion mobile and fixed-line telephone subscribers worldwide. On July 28, 2023 I was not one of them. I existed outside the Matrix and I felt good. Actually I felt better than good. I felt free. My seconds, minutes, and hours were my own. This was my first time without a cellphone since the late 90s in Bangkok. I could still write emails and messages on my iPad, but that was it, almost as if Alexander Graham Bell had never said those words to Mr. Watson in 1876. Everyone else in the world were trapped in the present ticking second by second into a digital future by the Cell Towers of Babble.

Free at last. Free at last.

Allergy to Silence

2012

Last month I staying in bannok about sixty kilometers from Chai-nat. Every morning I was woken by the village loudspeakers. The announcer read off farming information to the locals. I couldn't understand a word that he was saying. Finally someone pulled the plug and the world was serenaded by a chorus of birdsong for several minutes, until a Loso fan decided to play KAO MOTORSAI with the volume knob locked on 11.

Anyone who has lived in Thailand will notice almost that the Thais are allergic to silence. The blare of TVs drown out quiet in every corner of the land. Loud music assaults the ears from every possible stereo device and they don’t seem bothered by two TVs competing with a boombox in the same room. Any time I mention the cacophony, the Thais stare at me as if I’m anti-sanuk or anti-fun.

Maybe I’m getting old, but years ago in New York I would have a day of silence on Sunday. No talking. No conversing with anyone. Only reading and later break the fast with THE SIMPSONS.

I even went so far as to unplug the telephone, although not many people called on Sunday, due to my friends suffering from life-threatening hang-overs. It was so peaceful.

Thais love noise. The louder the better, although the world’s noisiest people have to be the Taiwanese. I never heard anyone talk so loudly, almost as if shouting is the only way to get another taiwanese to understand you.

Back in the early 70s my family invited a Spanish student to live with us, while my younger brother stayed at his house in Madrid. My father had a little French, but not Spanish, so he shouted at the young man, whose grasp of the English language was rudimentary. He thought that my father was always angry with him and on several occasions I heard him crying in his room after my father yelled a simple request like 'are you hungry' or 'why do you call soccer 'football'.

I said to my father that the young student mistook the loudness for anger.

"Well, that's plain stupid." And my father went to the Spanish boy's room to upbraid him for this misunderstanding.

Muted sobs.

Some health authorities see no danger to the public from the incessant noise bombarding the Thais, however one irate Thai complained to this next-door neighbors, who thought they had the right to make as much noise as they wanted in the privacy of their own home. He shot the 8 of them dead.

Now that’s a health hazard.

What’s the hand of one hand clapping?

A click of the fingers.

Cool like beatnik.

Yes, I really am that old.

X Marks The Spot - Twitter Name Change

Last week Elon Musk completed his transformation of Twitter by changing the name of the once-dominant social media app to simply X, although a highly designed X. X.com had been a domain for a financial transfer app, which the genius had sold, then in 2017 re-purchased from Meta, which owns his rival Facebook.

The NY Times reported “X” is a term for what Mr. Musk has described as an “everything app” that could combine social media, instant messaging and payment services, akin to the popular Chinese app WeChat.

A comment from CRL on THE NY TIMES

July 24 I thought this guy was supposed to be some kind of genius!

I am flabbergasted….

1. First he pays probably 3x the value of what Twitter was worth. 2. He removes at least 1/2 of company talent creating real holes on service and support. 3. He scares advertisers by allowing the return of throlls and villains (He himself becomes a political throll!) 4. Limits the number of messages heavy users can send per day. 5. And finally, he KILLS THE BRAND by changing the logo

One should question why Forbes keeps putting him at the top of his list!

A young friend of mine called Musk a genius. I beg to differ. His Space X company has been launching hundreds of satellites into low orbit threatening to block out the stars so the masses will be further empowered to decommunicate from other humans.

I hope the LA punk band sues him for copyright infringement.

At least he had the smarts to not name Twitter XXX.

VOW OF SILENCE by Peter Nolan Smith

Almost everyone in the world has a phone. Cellular service can connect New York with Antarctica or Greenland. I can call my son Fenway's mom and Mam will pick up in Thailand. Every minute millions of cellular calls and SMS messages crisscross the globe searching billions of destinations. We are so close, yet so far away from each other.

Back in the last decade AP and I moved a set of headboards from the 3rd Floor to the penthouse landing. They were heavy and luckily neither of us hurt our backs.

"Thanks," my landlord/friend/architect said, walking down to the 2nd floor.

"No worries." I ascended the stairs to my apartment.

Those three syllables ended my verbal communications for Saturday. I walked over to my apartment on Myrtle Avenue and put on CITY OF THE NIGHT.

Three beers sang a lullaby. I was in bed by 9. I pulled John Rechy's CITY OF THE NIGHT from my night table. Within two-hundred words sleep wrapped my body in bliss.

The next morning morning I rose slowly from my slumber. Rain splashed against my window. I checked my watch.

7:30am. Sunday morning. Another drop into dreams. Thirty minutes later church belles rang in Brooklyn. I pulled the cover over my shoulder and read more of John Rechy's novel about gay hustlers. Ten minutes later the book fell on my chest and I napped for another half-hour.

I awoke to a heavy rain bucketing from ominous clouds crawling across a charcoal gray sky. I pitied churchgoers and checked my cellphone.

No one had called me.

Not my wife in Thailand.

Not my family in Boston.

Not my friends around the world or a Chinese scam caller.

I got out of bed and looked out the window. Not a soul was visible in the alleys behind the brownstone. The dark sky was devoid of airplanes. I could be the Last Man on Earth, but I am not Mada, Adam’s dead end. Hungry I cooked myself breakfast. Two slices of toast and milky tea with one sugar. I sat by the window and eyeed the windows across the backyard alley. There was no sign of life from the neighbors.

Five million people lived in this borough, but none were visible today and I wondered if zombies had risen from the dead and eaten the entire population of Brooklyn, but there are no zombies, because I would have heard the screams of their zictims.

In truth families were having brunch at the restaurants in Fort Greene. Kids were on playdates with their friends. Lovers laid late in bed. None of them were thinking about me and I ran a hot bath and put on some Graham Parsons.

After a good twenty-minute soak I chose to resign my day to a monastic vow of silence, because if I didn't leave my top-floor apartment, I could spend the entire day without speaking.

This was a tradition dating back to my old apartment on East 10th Street.

During the earlyn 80s I regularly isolated myself from the rest of the world. Sunday mornings were spent in bed with a book. A late breakfast was followed by a long afternoon bath with my evenings devoted to finishing the book and drinking a bottle of wine or two.

Once or twice during these Sundays I checked the phone for a dial tone. I was somewhat disappointed to discover that buzz, because it meant that no one thought to call me on a Sunday and I returned the favor, as if we had a pact.

This vow of silence lasted, until I started dating Ms. Carolina. The former beauty queen liked talking and I couldn't blame her. She lived in a redneck community below the Mason-Dixon Line. Every Sunday Ms. Carolina was obliged to attend extraordinary long church services and her Baptist congregation was very advanced for North Carolina. They believed that blacks possessed a soul. One Saturday called late at night.

"Sometimes I need to speak to someone sane." Despite a birth in the Adirondacks her accent was pure Tarheel.

"I'm not really sane." I warned her about my Sunday tradition.

"You don't speak to anyone on Sunday. Why the silence?"

"Seneca said, “As often as I have been amongst men, I have returned less a man."

"Which means?"

"That I don't like speaking on Sundays.”"

"Don't worry. I respect your beliefs." The blonde southerner was a true gentlewoman. "But what about if you just pick up the phone and listen to me? That's not really breaking your vow of silence."

"Let me reflect on this." One Trappist sect was very strict on silence, but my rest of my life style was a complete rejection of the Cistercian dictates and I told Ms. Carolina, "As long as the phone calls don't last longer than twenty minutes, I'll pick up the phone and listen."

"Thank you." Her gratitude was sincere and I said, "You know I love you in my own way."

"I can't ask for anything more."

The next day my phone rang at 11:15. I was soaking in my bathtub in the kitchen. My apartment was very East Village. I picked up the phone, knowing that it was Ms. Carolina.

She recounted the visiting preacher's ranting sermon. I thought I could talk, but this woman was a champ and she complained, "This Bible0-Thumper believes that all homosexuals are damned to Hell. I told him after the service that I knew that he went to some Richmond bars where men were dancing with men and gave him a check for $25. It's going to fix the roof."

Forty minutes later she said, "Good luck with your vow of silence."

Luck had nothing to do with that Sunday's silence.

I had merely listened to a woman on a phone.

Words had never left my lips and I forgot the conversation watching BONANZA on TV.

Two weeks passed and Ms. Carolina drove north to visit me in the East Village.

Saturday night we dined at a good restaurant in Soho. I drank more than I should, but I was a sucker for a good Saturday night drunk.

Sunday morning I woke up before Ms. Carolina. Light filtered through the shades. My eyeballs scrapped my sandpaper sockets. My guest lay on her side facing me. She liked to watch me sleep before she fell asleep. I picked up a book, Peter Freuchen's BOOK OF THE ESKIMOS, and read to escape the nails pounded into my skull.

A little before 11 Ms. Carolina opened her eyes and said, "Sometimes I think you're dead when you're reading. You barely breathe."

The blonde heiress accepted my shrug as an answer. We had one week a month together. She deserved more, but I could only give what I had to give.

"You know the Trappist monks never really practiced a 'vow of silence'."

This was news to me. My mother loved the quietude of their monastery outside of Boston.

"St. Benedict, their founder, had three tenets; stability, fidelity to monastic life, and obedience. Benedict preferred the monks to exist in silence, because speech was disruptive to contemplation." Ms. Carolina was as good as a nun and only wicked with the lights out.

Like my Irish mother I have the gift of gab, although dampened by my Yankee father's preference for silence. The Maine native had held his piece for years under the blitzkrieg of my mother's monologues, but today Ms. Carolina wanted to hear my voice and I surrendered to her need.

"I've been to the Trappists monasteries in Belgium. They made good beer. Actually not good, excellent. Did I ever tell you why I began my vow of silence?"

"No." Ms. Carolina was a repository of my vocal history. She had heard many of my stories on our road trips through Guatemala, Peru, and the Far West. Listening was one of her better traits.

"Back in 1979 the phone in my 10th Street apartment was shut off."

"Let me guess. Non-payment."

"Yes. I had racked up a $700 bill tracking down the whereabouts of my blonde girlfriend from Buffalo. My broken heart remained broken all that time. My service was cut for months. I never could get together the money to pay the bill. There wasn't much of a reason for me to go out on Sunday and I stashed the phone under the sofa. One Sunday I was watching a BONANZA re-run and a telephone rang. I thought to myself, "That's funny, I didn't think they had phones on the Ponderosa."

"And they didn't." Ms. Carolina laughed at the image. She was my best audience.

"No, it was the phone. I reached under the sofa and brushed off six-months of dust, but didn't pick up the receiver. The phone rang for a minute and then stopped. I picked up the phone. There was a dial tone. I tried a number. My parents. I hadn't spoke to them in ages. It worked and not only that I could call anywhere in the world."

"Strange."

"Even stranger was that the phone would ring every Sunday at the same time."

"During BONANZA?"

"Correct." I liked the chemistry between Little Joe and Hoss.

"Did you ever pick it up to find out who was calling?"

"No. The phone stayed in service for two month, then went dead again. After that I never spoke on Sundays. At least until I met you."

"All that remains is a vow of silence." still quiet on Sundays.”

"I try my best." I nodded and led Ms. Carolina by the hand into my bedroom. There was no need for words in the darkness, as our bodies spoke without words.

That Sunday was over twenty-five years ago. Ms. Carolina has been dead for over ten of them. If she called today from the Beyond, I would answer. It would make her feel good in the Afterlife. This rainy Sunday rain splashed against the windows on Myrtle Avenue. I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator.

The suds poured into my mug with a pleasant glut glug glug.

I raised my glass to Ms. Carolina.

She had been a good friend and tomorrow was Monday.

A day to call my wife Mam and speak with my son on the phone. Fenway will tell me to come home soon.

"I will."

Until then my vow of silence rules this Sunday, but before the Day of Rest is over I will watch some Bonanza. Hoss has to be speaking somewhere in the Here-Before on an eternity cellphone and I promise I will answer the phone from anyone in the after-life.

The Tower Of Blather

2013

I speak several languages with varying degrees of expertise.

All of them with a Boston accent.

Linguists estimate that there are over 6700 languages spoken on the planet Earth with English acting as the prime lingua franca or most popular bridge language at present.

Unfortunately silence is not a language.

This morning at the Academy Dinner I listened to a young man converse with his friend about how easy women were if you pretended to be a filmmaker or photographer.

I knew the speaker.

Ray lectured his friend's about his failure as a lady's man.

"No one wants to hear the truth. You tell them you know Spike Lee and their eyes light up thinking they going to Hollywood and the fastest route to stardom is your bedroom. I know you ain't likes that, but you can't argue with success."

Ray ranted on and on.

Everyone in the diner heard him.

He didn't care and neither does anyone else talking on the phone.

Most of what they have to say is meaningless, which is why most people text messages.

So no one can eavesdrop on the inanity of their words.

Billions and billions of words spoken each day to unite mankind by the creation of a Tower of Blather.

As the King James version of the Bible puts it: "And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."

The Lord hated the language of Blather and said, "Let's go down and confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech, so the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Blather; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Telecommunications draw us close.

I can speak with my children in Thailand.

But most of what people say is meaningless.

Then again it has always been so.

ONE RPM by Peter Nolan Smith

PUBLISHED IN ELK 2006

February's blizzards buried New York City with two-foot drifts and people conversed about Global Warming as a distant threat in comparison to Iraq. America was gearing up to war and nothing could stop the process, because the President was acting like a pit bull too stubborn to spit out the bone stuck in his throat. After all Saddam had tried to kill his father.

When the Director of Homeland Security announced an unspecific Orange Alert, Manhattanites hermitically sealed their apartments with duct tape and plastic sheets against toxic attack. Two elderly people died of asphyxiation, but even worse the March to War was killing business in the Diamond District and It was hardly worth going to work, except my girlfriend in Thailand was awaiting my winter arrival, so I mummified myself in my warmest clothes to catch the 9:11am 9th Street Bus.

The sun was brilliant in a cloudless sky and the air temperature hovered above 10 without taking into consideration the wind. The time was 9:08 and a blue-and-white bus was traversing 1st Avenue ahead of schedule. The light was against me and I remained on the curb, since HBV or 'hit by vehicle' caused the most visits to the Bellevue Hospital emergency ward any season of the year.

On the opposite corner an old woman impatiently pushed her load into the street. The holes in her tennis shoes showed bare toes and I dug for a dollar in my pocket. The city was tough on the elderly, especially since she wasn't the only one in a hurry.

A mammoth SUV with Jersey plates revved its engine on 10th Street and the truck clumsily accelerated left with the old lady in its path. The collision seemed unavoidable and I could only shout. "Watch out."

My warning paralyzed the old lady, but a lanky man in a long overcoat snagged her out of the luxurized truck's path, although its chrome bumper crashed into the shopping cart, cascading scores of bottles into the gutter. After the SUV lumbered to a halt, a middle-aged man in a NY Giants sweatshirt waddled to the woman. "Are you okay?"

"My things." The old lady stared at her crushed cart.

"All right?"

The man in the overcoat helped the old woman to her feet, daubing the lady's bloodied knees with a pristine handkerchief.

"You damn near killed her."

"Hey, she stepped into the street."? The paunchy driver looked over his shoulder to the pasty blonde poking her head out the side window. A few spectators gathered on the sidewalk and I stopped too, for the upscale clothing couldn't disguise Jamie Parker.

The driver reached for his wallet and a hundred-dollar bill quickly fluttered in his hand. "I'm glad no one is hurt. Can I pay you for the damages?"

"Damages?" Money was unimportant to Jamie. He was after trouble. "How much you wanna to pay for ruining her day with your big-ass SUV?"

"Hey, it was an accident and no one was hurt." The driver hadn't expected a tirade from a Good Samaritan. "Why don't you calm down?"

"Calm down?" Parker was rat-tough from his years as a guest of the State. "You blew that light and almost killed her."

Cops cruised the avenue. Their writing up a report meant an increase in the driver's insurance rates. He held out two hundred dollar bills. "The cart isn't worth twenty bucks."

"So you're bargaining with the old lady's life."

"We can call it quits, Sonny. I've fallen worse in my bathtub." The old lady snatched the money with the swiftness of a cobra attacking its careless trainer and skedaddled down the avenue. The driver eyed Jamie. "Happy now?"

"Happy? Happy you drive that pig? Happy, 40,000,000 of those gas-guzzlers suck the oil from the Earth and spew billions of tons of smog into the air to breathe?" Jamie was on a roll. "The terrorists topple the Twin Towers and how does America respond? Build oil junkie cars to fund the Al-Qaeda through the Saudis, so you fatsos can feel thinner in your SUVs."

"Yeah, that's right." His harangue was echoed by assenting shouts, for while the landlords might have renovated the East Village for young professionals, the neighborhood contained enough weirdo radicals to stage a hair-trigger riot.

The driver recognized the building anger and jumped inside his SUV. His vehicle veered into the oncoming traffic, thunking into a speeding Ford Navigator. Both cars stopped and the drivers inspected the damage. It was in the thousands of dollars.

Jamie hooted with triumph and I grabbed his arm.

His eyes widened in anger, then a smile. "Hey, man."

"I liked his hero act, but the rabble-rouser was a bit much for more than five minutes.

Traffic had snarled into a knot. Other motorists rubbernecked the accident. The SUV driver pointed at Jamie and pulled out his mobile phone. His finger hit three buttons. 911. The police wouldn't interpret Jamie's saving a woman's life as a carte blanche for abusing the public. "Jamie, it's time to go."

"I had my heart set on a croissant from SOMETHING SWEET." He gazed to the corner bakery and pushed his gloved hand through greasy hair. Even lacking two front teeth Jamie was handsome, but nothing good lasted long on him. His cashmere coat had a tiny tear in the arm and his crocodile loafers were stained with salt.

"You can come back later." I tugged at his sleeve.

Jamie understood my unspoken urgency and we strode along a 10th Street clogged with irate drivers. He spat at a parked Land-Rover. "Their fuel addiction doesn't piss me off so much as their tough guy acts. I mean the only bump an Expedition runs over is their fat kid's tricycle in the driveway."

"A little angry this morning?"

"I haven't abandoned the revolution."

"The revolution?" This wasn't 1776 or 1789 or 1845 or 1917 or even 1968. The Republicans ran the country and most Americans' vision of change is dictated by a TV remote control.

"How many Communists took over Russia? 10,000. And Castro landed in Cuba with many followers? 17. How many voters in Dade County swung the vote to GW Bush? 217?"

"Che went into Bolivia with forty-five men and was buried a fat old failure." The images of the SLA's flameout, the Ruby Ridge's shooting, and the Days of Rage in Seattle were dealt as losing hands by my memory's blackjack dealer.

"I heard a rumor he hung up his AK047 to become a farmer."

"The CIA says different. Che exists only on t-shirts and posters." I wished otherwise for JFK, Malcolm X, and Marc Bolan. "Besides you're looking a little prosperous better off than when we were swimming in the East River three years ago."

"I was never too down on my luck that I sold out." He tossed his head with a laugh at a forgotten punchline. "After leaving you, I met this punk girl. Mousy blonde hair, skinny, almost cute. You know the type. Their parents won't let them use their stash or fuck the football team or they're catching a beating in school, so they runaway to the East Village and live in filthy squats."

"Not many burnt-out buildings left in the Lower East Side now."

"Yeah, they live on the street off the kindness of suckers." These ragged sons and daughters of the suburbs cadged cigarettes and quarters on St. Mark's Place. Their sneering rejection of materialism earned the ridicule of veteran East Villagers, who labeled them 'children of the dust'.

I didn't give them a penny, but admitted, "I prefer them to the junior exec bar-crawlers shouting on their cell phones."

"And the old junkies, right?"

"Let's not get carried away." The neighborhood was better off without Hakim, for thieving junkies had overrun the East Village in the 1970s. His murder had never hit the papers, but his death had cleared the way for the gentrification of lawless blocks beyond Avenue A.

“Anyway this punk called herself Bakunin. Always carried his anarchist essays around. She was eighteen and disenfranchised from her mother, an uptown heiress. Bakunin called me the street messiah, since I taught her friends where to find free food, how to stuff newspapers under their clothes to stay warm or to sleep with their shoes under their heads to prevent anyone stealing them. I didn't tell them all the tricks, after all I have to protect the real bums from the amateurs."

"Sounds you were sticking around, because you were soft on this Bakunin?" The clock on St. Mark's Church bonged out the half-hour and I walked faster across 2nd Avenue. My boss hated my chronic tardiness and my excuses even more.

"Naw, she didn't wash and smelled like she had been dug from the grave." His nose scrunching in distaste was amusing, considering Jamie had historically been not too particular about his own personal hygiene. "But you're right. You do get tired of being alone and I liked these kids. They didn't watch TV or eat potato chips or listen to boy band music."

"Or fake punk bands?" I looked both ways, crossing 4th Avenue.

"Plus they believe in something. A revolution." Jamie followed me into the subway station. "Can you keep a secret?"

"Not if I've had three beers in me."

Jamie must have thought I was kidding.

"The main problem with a revolution is that they usually come about when everyone is real angry, which means bloodshed, however non-violence worked for Gandhi in India or Martin Luther King in the Sixties. Perhaps not as fast as violence, but it is the other path."

THE JETSONS had promised a world of automation. I had dreamed of eternal youth and driving beautiful blondes along the beaches in streamlined cars. It was hard living the lie. "A revolution in this country is impossible."

"We had one in 1776 and one in the Sixties."

"One win, one loss. The Mets aren't playing .500 ball this year. Where you going?"

"47th Street." I swiped my multi-pass at the turnstile.

"You working in the Diamond District?"

"No one else would have me." My job on 47th Street consisted of extolling the beauty of diamonds to glowing brides-to-be and inanely explaining financial shortcuts to men unwilling to blow two month's wages on an artificially inflated commodity.

"I'll come with you." Jamie leapt the barrier and darted into the car a second before the doors shut. "Old habits die hard."

The other passengers' disapproval disappeared as soon as the train left the station and Jamie respected their apathy, but whispering, "The President has us in the purgatory of an Endless War. The environment is a mess. Our food has produced two generations of fat people and TV has sedated the masses more completely than any religion or drug. 9/11 should have disturbed their complacent slumber, except the 'people' are toasty in their cocoons of consumerism."

The train's steel wheels shrieked on the curve into the Union Square Station. Not one passenger covered their ears and I asked, "You have a better offer?"

"This present is beyond help. Tomorrow is another story. Where we want to be ten years from now? Twenty? People's aspirations are simplified to purchases of the same items in different colors and sizes. A change has to happen. A change for the better."

The train slowed to a stop. The people exiting ignored us. We had become invisible, even when Jamie"s fist thumped his chest. "I remember your old movement."

"I had hoped everyone had forgotten the National Resurgence Party." The last meeting in the cellar of a Polish church had been in 1979. A month later I had broken up with my hillbilly girlfriend and became persona non persona in the East Village.

"Who can forget Nuke the Whales. or proposing a war against France to stop their theft of Jerry Lewis?" Jamie had been the treasurer and my hillbilly girlfriend the minister of disinformation. Another twenty people comprised the NRP. We wore brown shirts and black ties. Our critics declared us closet fascists. Our salute came from a gladiator movie. "They were punk jokes."

"Most people have no sense of humor."

"We've strayed far from the pursuit of happiness." No one from the nation's two killjoy camps dared laugh about fat-inducing corn, Osama Bin Laden, terrorism, or freedom.

"What better moment than now to take advantage of the chaos."

My political activity consisted of voting at each election, writing insane letters to the President, and attending non-violent demonstrations."I'm too old for revolution."

"Stop saying you're old." Jamie's eyes sifted through the straphangers for any eavesdroppers and he dismissed our fellow travelers as mere wage-slaves. "Those squatters constantly blather about overthrowing the government, especially Bakunin's boyfriend, Clash. I counseled against anything rash."

In the 70s Jamie had aided the Underground, committed acts of felony, and robbed dealers without ever backing down from anyone in or out of authority. "The voice of reason doesn't suit you."

"I know, but one of them might have gotten hurt and Bakunin actually admired my pacifism. We spent a lot of time walking around Lower Manhattan. It was almost like being a teenager again. She discussed going back home and I said she could return to her mother's duplex as easily as Dorothy returned to Kansas. I was shocked to hear she had never seen THE WIZARD OF OZ."

"Probably hasn't heard Judy Garland sing SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW."

Today's teenagers didn't know what they were missing from those old black-and-white movies and no one was telling them either, because Time/Warner didn't want kids seeing SULLIVANS TRAVELS, THE WAGES OF SIN, or SOME LIKE IT HOT. "Funny, how the parents don't tell them about it."

"They're too busy trying to attain an impossible lifestyle. Bakunin's not knowing about the Tin Man or Wicked Witch was wrong and right then I saw a billboard for a Cadillac SUV. A big fat-ass car for stupid fucking people. That's all these kids see. Something to consume. I had to destroy it. Hit the corporations in their pocket, only it was too far away for a Molotov cocktail."

"So the rage passed?" It was twenty to 10 and we were only at 28th Street. Like Jamie the train seemed not to obey any schedule.

"No, Bakunin told me how Clash practiced for an FBI shoot-out with a paintball gun. While he was drinking beer at Sophie's I liberated it and headed back to the Caddy SUV billboard. Bakunin tagged along as a lookout. I splattered the ad with three hits. Red for revolution and I wasn't done either. I took out a Tommy Hilfiger billboard and another for Pringle Potato Chips."

"Cars, fashion, and fast food." Each was an enemy of the people.

"Bakunin nailed a model selling perfume in the breasts. She hugged me and I kissed her. Bakunin told me her real name was Billie and she wanted a bath. We went for a schvitz at the Russian Steam Bath. She cleaned up good and we took a room in the St. Mark's Hotel, where we made love and talked about saving the world from consumerism."

"By paintbombing SUV ads?" It seemed a little lightweight.

"No, I had small ideas to take advantage of her clan. We made fake parking tickets and pasted a warning to SUV drivers that they were violating the Earth under their windshield wipers."

"What the drivers do?"

"Just stuffed them in their pockets or threw them on the street without reading a single word. They didn't care about the planet."

"So?"

"We needed a more radical course of action and I bought a couple of cans of paint."

"For another attack on the billboards?"

"I had Bakunin's squatter friends paint all the parking meters in the Lower East Side. The meter maids were blocked from seeing, if they were in violation. We obliterated the parking signs in Wall Street and Chinatown. Several squatters covered the City Courts with FREE NEW YORK without ever saying from what."

"The Staten Island Ferry is the only thing free in New York."

"Nothing wrong with dreams."

The train pulled into Grand Central and I exited from the train with Jamie in tow.

The paint squad planned on tagging every meter and sign in the city. Way too ambitious and bound to get someone on Rikers Island. I called off the painting campaign and organized them into gangs gathering the circulars stuck on the doorsteps. We returned them to the super markets and chain stores and then blockaded a luxury condo with those phony newspaper dispensers of the corners."

"Sounds Mickey Mouse to me." None of these incidents had hit the newspapers, then again the newspapers didn't report on events, which might upset the status quo.

"You're right. I had to devise a feat which the media couldn't ignore or blame on teenage vandals." Jamie was a menace to society and himself, but no terrorist, yet I had to say, "Sounds like the end to non-violence to me."

The two policemen armed with shotguns guarded Grand Central. Despite 9/11 people weren't avoiding populated or famous locations. As we mounted the escalator for the old Pan-Am Building, Jamie glanced at the starry ceiling. "Bakunin's boyfriend suggested robbing banks with a toy gun like that actor from ZABRISKI POINT."

"Michael something." The handsome actor had attempted to rob a bank high on acid and the police had shot his friend dead. His defense was insanity. The State of Massachusetts had ignored his plea of insanity and given him 25 to Life. "He died in Walpole Prison. Weights fell on him."

"Clash was jealous of my telling the squatters there's no such dog as a little violence and he suspected Bakunin and I were having an affair."

"He wasn't wrong."

"He was when he chained her to a wall. I wanted to kill him, but Bakunin told me to chill. Things would work out. Fucking kids."

"Shouldn't we be hanging out with people our own age?"

"Most of my old friends are dead plus you're only as old as you feel."

Two businessmen passed us and he whispered, "Riding the Staten Island Ferry I got an idea."

"Kidnap the Statue of Liberty?"

"Close. I decided to invade Governor's Island."

"Invade?" I asked loudly enough for two Hassidim to flinch.

"The Coast Guard abandoned the island ten years ago and the Federal government has been trying to give it to the city ever since. Clinton offered the island to Giuliani for a measly dollar. The mayor considered its upkeep was too expensive and there was talk about his cutting a deal with the real estate developers. 400 acres of free land for the taking and I proposed to the squatters we liberate the island and declare it Babylon."

"Babylon?" Pattaya in Thailand satisfied my vision of Babylon.

"Not everyone wants to be a saint and an anything-goes-land would be the perfect outlet to do drugs, sex, murder, total anarchy. No laws, no police and, if I ran a bordello, I'd earn more money than God. Babylon Island five minutes from New York. They'd be traffic jams south to the Delaware Bridge and north to New Haven."

"How about liberating Governors' Island to establish a sex paradise sit with your squatters?" Cities in the Sixties had experimented with Combat Zones only to discover their citizens' demand for Sin outpaced their expectations.

"Hey, they dig free love." We exited the terminal into the city's icy claws and Jamie pulled up his collar. "The girls weren't above hustling Hassidic men on Delancey Street. One even stripped at the BabyDoll Lounge. They thought it sounded like fun and we assembled at the Hudson River Boathouse to appropriate some kayaks. The squatters had the banners to declare the island's liberation. Before I cut the chain locking the boathouse, something made me turn around and I saw these young kids' faces. They would obey my every command and I flashed on Hitler at the Munich Beer Hall Putsch."

We turned onto 46th Street and I bought a large tea from a street vendor's cart. The cup was warm in my gloved hands. I had felt the same way with the National Resurgence Party. "People are willing to do anything anyone tells them, if they think it's a good idea."

"Or have nothing to live for and I know all about true meaninglessness, except these kids were too young to throw away their futures." After Jamie ordered a large coffee, we proceeded across 5th Avenue with the 'walk' light. He ripped off a sliver of plastic and sipped the coffee. "Clash resented my backing out and tried to force Bakunin into a kayak, but I wasn't letting him ruin her life and pushed him into the river. He couldn't swim and I had to rescue him. He started crying and I told the rest of them to find another messiah and took Bakunin home."

"So you betrayed the revolution?" The corner shops on 47th Street were already open and their jewelry glittered in the morning light.

"I told Bakunin that the revolution was a one-man show."

"Something tells me that's not the end of the story."

"Her mother was so grateful that she hired me as chauffeur/go-fer."

"You're Tony Danza in WHO'S THE BOSS?" I joked, nearing Manny's store.

"Much more classy." Jamie frowned with the disapproval. "MY MAN GODFREY, the forgotten man becoming the servant to the rich."

"Your patroness as beautiful as Carole Lombard?" I tried to recall if she had starred opposite William Powell.

"More a dissolute Veronica Lake." Jamie threw his coffee cup into the trash.

Manny was in the window tapping at his Rolex. Another minute or two wouldn't cost me my job. "So all's well that ends well?"

"I guess so." Jamie wasn't free to tell me about his life as a man-of-all-trades on the Upper East Side.

"You see any of the other squatters?"

"No, autumn drove them to the suburbs or college." Jamie studied the diamonds in the window, a thief pondering his old trade. "A few die-hards are lingering in Tompkins Square Park like bears who had forgotten the location of their hibernating caves. Clash, he's hanging out with a fat girl. They seem happy, although he walks the other way, if he sees me."

"What about Bakunin?" I signaled to Manny a few more minutes.

"She went off to college." Jamie raised his collar. "We have the weekends."

"And the mother?"

"It's a job," he said with little conviction and I asked, "What car you drive?

"A Bentley. Nice ride and it isn't a SUV." The sun flashed against a skyscraper in the Rockefeller Complex and he put on imported sunglasses. Manny regarded him as a potential buyer and pointed at a ring. "Your boss seems a little eager to make a sale."

"So am I." I could use the money and we shook hands. "You take care."

"Hey, what other choice I have?" He released his grip and strode toward the Plaza Arcade.

I worried about him finding some meaning to his life, but I should have been more worried about myself, for a voice called his name. He turned to greet the old lady. They embraced and the old lady's wig fell off. The thin girl was young and blonde. I recognized Bakunin from Jamie's brief description. They turned to me and waved good-bye. I pulled up my coat collar and looked to the sky. The clouds to the west promised more snow, though not enough for snow tomorrow.

Manny rapped on the window. No one else had showed up yet. Not his son. Not my co-workers. I was almost early. Entering the exchange Manny shook his head. "When are you ever going to come on time?"

"Manny, I'm never going to change." It wasn't the answer he wanted to hear, but nothing in the world was changing soon, because nothing happens overnight except to those who weren't expecting the change in the first place, then again one day I might be surprised and Jamie Parker and I were counting on that day. Hopefully others were too and until that moment living right is my only course of action, for even at one revolution per minute positive actions add up. You only have to do the math, even if it means taking off your shoes to count your toes.

Solzhenitsyn RIP

Written 2008

Solzhenitsyn’s A DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH introduced the Soviet gulag to the world. Stalin had been dead 7 years. if Koba had been alive, neither the book nor the author would exist today. Luckily Beria killed his stricken boss and the great writer was exiled to Vermont with his 2nd wife and her 11 year-old son, Dmitri Turin.

I never met Solzhenitsyn.

His stepson, Dmitri Turin, was my friend.

I wrote about him in A HERO FOR THE OPEN ROAD.

Seeing Solzhenitsyn’s obit in the NY Times brought back memories of Dmitri and his black bike.

He was our man for our times.

photo thanks to http://johnbarons.com/dmitri.html.m

COME ALL YE FAITHFUL by Peter Nolan Smith

Written Mar 26, 2016 at 11:35

Pattaya is a city not well known for monogamy. Promises of fidelity last until you leave the room, because this city on Thailand's Eastern Seaboard has temptations by the thousands and those temptations rarely say no.

Bar girls, rent boys, ka-toeys, booze, and drugs added up to damnation according to Reverend Joe Stannis of the Holy Revival Church located down the street from my old soi. He preached in a black suit to passing motorists.

A megaphone in hand.

"You are all going to hell." Only in English.

The Thais thought he was crazy, because attached to his concrete chapel was a sign pointing the way to the nearest 'Love Motel'.

The Angel Inn.

The rooms rent by the hour or day for Heaven on Earth testifying to Pattaya's motto.

"Good men go to heaven. Bad men go to Pattaya."?

This quip was borrowed from Mae West's epithet. "Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go anywhere they want."

Nevertheless this doesn't mean everyone in Pattaya is all sinners, because even Sodom had one good man and my friend Richard has never cheated on his wife in Pattaya.

Several years back we were sitting at the Buffalo Bar.

Beers before us.

The DJ was playing HOTEL CALIFORNIA. The Englishman's girlfriend was at his side. Despite working the bars for ten years Lee's undying beauty was a miracle and Richard explained his faithfulness.

"I'm too lazy to be unfaithful and it's not in my nature."?

Richard was a London contractor working 10-12 hour days, so his lassitude only pertains to matters of the heart.

Thankfully he doesn't know that his Thai wife sleeps with another man. His friends never tell Richard, because the Englishman feels good about himself for being good.

After Richard and Lee left my friend Nick said, "No one is faithful in this town, unless it's to their football team."

Nick was a Tottenham Spurs fan. His girlfriend worked as a service girl at the Buffalo Bar. Fen was too pretty for words and too pretty for just one man. The lanky Brit explained, "Fen has a boyfriend. He pays for her schooling. She only sees me when he leaves down. She considers herself 'faithful' to both of us. Fen never asks me for money, so I'm the only man in Pattaya getting free sex."

"Nothing is free in Pattaya." Everything had a price, even if it was marked 'free'.

Two nights later Richard asked Nick at the Buffalo, "Is Fen your mia noi?"

"No, she not mia noi. She geek." Richard's girlfriend answered for Nick and waved for another gin-tonic.

"What's the difference?" Richard's question was directed at his girlfriend. The seeds of suspicion were worming into his trust. Lee stammered for a second, but Nick saved her from having to tell the truth.

"A mia noi you take care of along with having a mia leung or first wife. A geek is someone you have sex with and care about, but only a little. You see her when you see her and it's no big deal." Nick obviously had been educated in the difference.

"But your girlfriend doesn't think she's your geek?"

"No, Fen is what she is."

"So you never say the love word?"

"No." Nick shook his head. "It's a sex thing."

"So she's a geek?" Richard couldn't fathom why people sleeping together for purely sex.

"No, not geek. Not mia noi. Not friend." Richard's girlfriend was exasperated by the his husband's density, but he only wanted to know where Nick's girl stood in the scheme of things.

"I like her, but I'm not in love. I'm not faithful to her either. Not like you and Lee."

I got up and left to avoid any examination of my situation.

Jamie Parker was sitting at the other end of the bar.

When I told my friend about the discussion, the New Yorker smiled slyly and said, "This is not a town for the pure of heart. Some women here regard their husbands as faithful if they don't bring anyone home or are seen with another women by their friends. Other women think you're cheating if you look at another woman or think of one. Men will believe any story by these bar girls to grant them immunity from a life of sleeping with complete strangers. I call it the Eliza Doolittle syndrome. I can rescue her from this life of sin. Ha, but it's not the farang boyfriend most men have to worry about. It's the Thai ex-. They never die, even if the girl says his husband was killed in a motorcycle accident."

"I've heard that story twice."

"Bet every man in Pattaya has heard it at least once." Jamie had little use for stories. His girlfriend had been working on Soi 6 three years. Ort liked being a bad girl and so did Jamie. "Everyone has been unfaithful in either thought or deed and I don't know what's worse. Thinking about it and doing it."

"Doing it."

"Yeah, but at the end of your life are you going to be sorry about not doing it or doing it?"

"There were twins at the old Blackout a Go-go. I should have taken them home, except I was been faithful to my previous girlfriend. She left me for an Italian."

"Regrets I have a few but then again too few to mention."

?"Sinatra the Philosopher."

"Do-be-do-be-do," Jamie crooned off-key and several bar girls stared his way, as if he was a dog with his paw stuck in a door. "Are you thinking about going home with someone from here??"

"No way." I lived two minutes from the Buffalo. Mam was my steady. We had been seeing each other for over a year.

"Are you still faithful to her?"

Yes. Maybe she gave me a love potion."

"Maybe she did, because there's something wrong with being faithful in Pattaya. You're not scared, are you?"

"Of what?"

"Of Mam cutting off your penis and feeding it to the ducks." Castration was a favorite punishment Thai women inflict on philandering males. So much so that Thai doctors had become the world's premier saviors of amputated penises. Accordingly Thai women cast the severed member to the duck pen, since quackers, unlike pigs, eat anything. Even cock.

"Better to keep your sins in thoughts." Jamie advised, for Ort was equally vicious as Mam when it came to his roaming eye.

"Deeds we can save for the after-life."

"Or secrets we never tell anyone else. Is it a sin if no one knows?"

In this town everyone knows sooner or later. Mam also knows that once I've had two drinks all I really want is a couple more drinks and I went home to surf through the ennuidom of international TV. Mam was playing cards with her friends. She wasn't answering her phone. The night was still young, but I shut off the TV and went to sleep with dreams of becoming a saint.

At least in deed.

Thought was another story, because anyone in Pattaya is going to hell.

At least according to Reverend Joe Stannis of the Holy Revival Church and a baptist knows Sin when he sees it and so do I.

The Curse Of Gentrification

Building by building a city dies for the sake of greed.

People care.

But not enough.

And when it's gone.

It will be gone forever.

Or at least until Hakkim the Junkie comes back from the dead.

WHY I MISS JUNKIES by Peter Nolan Smith

Most New Yorkers depend on air-conditioning during the summer heat waves, however AC always felt to me, as if a dirty old man from the Arctic was breathing down my neck and that dirty old man wasn't Santa Claus.

Truthfully after so many years in Southeast Asia I liked the heat and any temperature under 92 was survivable with the aid of a strong metal fan and a couple of cold beers. Above 92 Fahrenheit required multiple baths in my kitchen tub and the drinking countless liters of water, however as July 1999 stretched into its second week of body-sapping heat I surrendered to the weather.

I needed cold.

Renting a car for a drive north was not an option, since the oppressive mugginess smothered the Eastern Seaboard from Cape Hatteras to Eastport. My bank account held enough money for a small 6000 BTU AC. The nearest appliance store was on 14th Street and I staggered out of my apartment onto the breathless sidewalk of East 10th Street.

Santa John exited from the Russian Baths. The white-haired junkie walked toward me, as if his feet had no bones.

He was not a friend. No junkie is anyone's friend, however my Uncle Carmine let Crazy John sleep in his basement. The scrawny addict was due his inheritance soon and he had promised to reward Carmine for his charity. Personally I thought the ne'er-do-well was full of shit. Most rich people are when it comes time to pay their debts. Especially rich junkies.

"John, you weren't schvitzhing today?" I loved the baths, but not in the summer.

"Why not? It's so hot inside the steam room that outside on the street is like winter." Santa John's blood ran cold as a snake. "You should try it."

"No way." I was scared of an internal heat implosion. "But I need to get cool."

"Why don't you go swimming in the East River?" His eyeballs were narcotic pools the color of mercury.

"The East River?"

"Yes."

"You have to be joking."

"Not at all." John was as serious as an OD.

"Only the Dead End kids swam in the East River and that was in the movies."

"You're right, but a peninsula of construction rubble sticks out from East 20th Street."

"I see where you mean." That spit of sand covered an abandoned sewer outlet a block south of the gas station underneath the FDR Drive."

"That's it and I've seen people swimming there. Not me, so I can't vouch for the quality of the water, but billions of gallons of seawater flush the river twice a day. My friends tell me it's okay for swimming."

His only friends were the heroin addicts haunting the blocks between Avenues A and D.

"I'm not sold."

"It's closer than the Hamptons. Give it a try and let me know. I might join you one day."

Santa John sauntered off toward the East 4th Street shooting galleries. Heroin ran like ice in a junkie's vein. Sweat ran down my face. The sidewalk radiated heat. I reflected on Crazy John's suggestion.

The East River had served as a sewer for centuries, but the East River was closer than the Rockaways. I returned to my apartment and changed into shorts and reef-walkers. The purchase of an AC was postponed, until I checked out Crazy John's information. Hitting the street again with a towel over my shoulder I headed toward the river.

No one shot hoops on the asphalt frying pan of Tompkins Square Park. Old men in tank tops listlessly played dominos under the wilting trees of East 13th Street, while a pack of children scampered through the feeble spray from an open fire hydrant. I resisted its temptation and slogged past the Con Ed power station. The river wasn't far now.

An elevated section of the FDR Drive shaded a cluster of improvised shelters. The derelict inhabitants lay on cardboard boxes, as if they were exhausted from praying for winter. Come January they wouldn't be so happy about having their dreams coming true. I strolled across the road.

The broad East River separated Manhattan from Brooklyn. A tour boat steamed upstream and two jet skis skated through its foaming wake. The air was scented by the evening's incoming tide and I hurried to the sand spit projecting into the green water from 20th Street.

Several old-timers basked on lawn chairs and sea gulls perched on the waterlogged stumps of a forgotten pier. The lap of waves dampened the rush-hour traffic on the FDR Drive and I climbed over a railing to set foot on the algae-slick sewer outlet. The water emanated a chill and I tested the temperature with my foot. It was cold and I cautiously inched into the river, because anything could be stuck in the sandy bottom.

Seconds later the river swallowed me and I thought the East River was mine, then a man's head popped from the river and he wiped the wet from his eyes.

The swimmer smiled with a broken grin.

"C'mon in, the water's great."

He wasn't a stranger.

"Jamie?"

"The way you say that makes me think you thought I was dead."

Jamie stood up like he was tottering on an unsteady perch.

"I heard a few things. Prison was one of them. OD was another."

"I'm too crazy to die, but I heard you died too." His beard was a grizzled gray, but he was unmistakably alive. "Somethin' about a bike crash in Burma."

"It was more a near-death experience than the real thing." A bent left wrist was a reminder of that head-on accident and I hung my shirt along with my towel on a stump.

"Hey, those are the worst kind." Jamie was as wiry as a meth addict's pit bull. "Are you going to swim or what?"

"Is it really okay?" A flotilla of plastic bottles bobbed past him.

"It ain't the Riviera, but it's better than Coney Island with a million people pissin' in it and I haven't broken out in a rash."

"It does feel good." I waded into the river and goose bumps popped on my flesh.

"If the water looks clean and smells clean, then there's a good chance it won't kill you." Jamie swam on his back. "Don't be a chicken."

Those words spurred my diving underneath the water and I rose from the shallows refreshed by the cool plunge. The few of the sunbathers ignored us.

"So what you think?" asked Jamie and I replied, "It's almost as good as Jones Beach."

"Hey, why shouldn't it be? This water comes from the same ocean. Just don't swallow any of it?" Jamie breathed in the river and glided on his back for the current to tug him away from the shore. He broke free of the river's grasp with a frantic flurry of flailing arms and kicking feet. Reaching me, Jamie said, "Damn, it's dangerous. Excitin' too."

"I have to admit it's nice swimming in the city." I had always avoided the public pools.

"They're forbid us from doing it." His tone made no bones about who 'they' were. "A friend of mine dove off the helicopter port. The authorities decided he was a suicide. The fire department and police tried to rescue him. He kept on doin' the Australian Crawl. Hah. Even the police divers were scared to enter the river, but it's not too bad once you're used to it."

Pedestrians stood by the embankment and gaped at us. It might be another ten years before normal people chanced swimming in the river. They walked away shaking their heads.

"Where you been lately?"

"The Bellevue doctors diagnosed me as manic-depressive and I wasn't in any condition to argue with their assessment. They sent me to a hospital near Binghamton, where I discovered that the State was hiding hundreds of madmen and women in these old nut houses. Most of them not really crazy. Only homeless."

"What do you mean?" I was suspicious of conspiracy theories from such a dubious source.

"You ever wonder where those Squeegee men went? No, cause you were too happy with them off the streets."

Very few New Yorkers missed the hordes of beggars, although their near-extinction posed a very sinister mystery.

"I figured the Mayor had hired a death squad from Columbia to kill them."

"He's too cheap to pay more than the price of a bus ticket."

Up on the promenade an old man shouted from a bike.

Jamie waved and returned to the beach.

"Friend of yours?"

"I met Dynamite upstate. He was once was a fighter, but too many punches left him a little brain-dead."

Jamie picked up a torn tee-shirt.

"You want me to meet him?"

"Dynamite's a little touchy around strangers." Jamie motioned for me to stay in the water. "He should be gettin' help, but they emptied the hospitals, cause our mayor's thinkin' of runnin' for president and he can't piss off those upstate hicks, so you'll be seein' lots more of my friends."

"I'll keep my eyes out for them."

"See you when I see you."

Jamie climbed the embankment to the old man.

I saluted him with a raised fist and exited from the river. The sun dried my skin in seconds and I sniffed at my arm. My skin smelled clean, but I reckoned that a quick bath was in order after this adventure.

Back at my flat I scrubbed my flesh raw.

That evening the weather broke and the temperature dropped into the 70s.

The next day I told several friends about my swim. Their faces warped between disgust and disbelief. I fought off a grin, since I hadn't witnessed such boldfaced distaste since the grammar school nuns had condemned my wearing a leather jacket to Mass.

I swam a few of more times in the East River without running into Jamie.

As the summer rounded the homestretch into September and his prediction bore fruit.

Legions of homeless people begged quarters and harangued passers-by with demented litanies. Most East Villagers ignored them in the hopes they would disappear with the change of the season.

After Labor Day NYU opened for the fall semester and one afternoon I stood on 3rd Avenue in awe of the passing parade of young students. The pudgy collegians strolled heads-down to their cellphones. I considered their craving for online contact an addiction yet happiness beamed from their clean faces infecting the East Village with a suburban blandness.

The traffic light turned green and the insensate students disregarded the 'don't walk' signal, which I might have obeyed forever, if Jamie's gravelly voice hadn't hijacked me back to the present.

"Nothin' stays the same."

"No one said they do." I turned to face Jamie.

He was wearing a sweat-stained rumpled suit and yellowing bruises discolored his face. His hand deftly covered his mouth and slipped on a cap to fill the gap in his grin.

"Remember the way it used to be." He pointed up 3rd Avenue.

"This was a fucked up neighborhood back then."

You got that right. Junkie prostitutes worked out of decrepit vans in the parking lots and Johnny Thunder used to pawn his guitar at the hock shops. Shit, the director of TAXI DRIVER filmed Jodie Foster at that SRO hotel on 13th Street. I even saw William Burroughs shuffle down the sidewalk skin in a gray suit on his way to Eldridge Street.

His fond nostalgia for the 1970s was scary, since the bad from those times was so much more memorable than the good.

"Burroughs is living out in Kansas. Some university town." I headed to Stuyvesant Street. Jamie followed me, speaking with a belligerence better saved for the start of an argument.

"Yeah, he's gone and we got these kids in return. I hate them. They wear bicycle helmets and condoms for sex. They stare at us like we don't belong here, but it's them that don't belong," Jamie snarled at two teenage punks.

"They're kids. You were young once too.

"But never young like this and I'd love to run a gang of thieves, pickpockets, conmen, and grifters. I rip these spoiled brats off for every last penny and send them back crying to their fat-ass parents."

"Only one problem. They don't carry money. Only credit cards and cell phones."

"Useless fucks."

"A little angry this afternoon, Jamie?"

"Damn right, I'm angry." His eyes twitched without focus. "I just finished a weekend bid in jail."

"For what?"

"This film crew was tearing branches off a tree blockin' their fuckin' shot. I told them to stop and they ignored me. I punche

d out the producer and the pigs arrested me for tryin' to save a tree."

"That's very green of you." I liked saving the planet, though not enough to go to jail.

"I didn't give a rat's ass about the tree, but I hate film people believin' the shit they film is truer than life."

"Did you make bail?"

"No, the producer dropped the charges, but then I get out and find out they hospitalize Dynamite for observation, because he was rantin' about a fight he might have lost twenty years ago and if that's a crime, they'd throw all the assholes talkin' on cellphones in the looney bin too. I wish I had a hockey stick to slapshot them off their ears. I mean who are they talkin' to anyway? Their stupid friends?"

Jamie seized my arm. His fingers bit into my bicep and I pried them loose. It wasn't easy.

"You gotta calm down."

"Don't tell me to calm down." Jamie spun on his heels, as if a sudden spurt of vertigo might shift the time twenty years into the past.

"Suit yourself and don't calm down."

"Calm, not calm." Jamie staggered to the fence around a weedy garden. "You gotta remember why this ain't how it was."

"Why?" I was stumped by his question.

"Because Hakkim's gone."

"Hakkim?"

"You don't remember Hakkim?"

"How could I forget?"

"And the night they shot him?"

"We were at the Horseshoe Bar on Avenue B."

"Good, you haven't forgotten. Sorry, I lost it, but I get a little crazy, if my blood sugar gets low. They still have egg creams at the Gem Spa?"

"Same as ever." The Asian owners had bought the recipe from the old Jews.

A family of Pakistani might have taken over the newsstand, but they honored the ancient recipe of chocolate syrup and seltzer water.

"I drink one of those and I'll be good. You have money?"

"Yes, but if you go crazy and you're on your own." I walked him to the corner of St. Mark's.

"Hey, I've been sober ten years. I'm just havin' an egg cream. The evaporation of his rage had left him a fragile shell. "But can you do me a favor?"

"What?" I hoped that he wasn't contemplating robbing the Gem Spa.

"For once it'd be nice for someone to wait around, instead of runnin' away." He almost sounded like an orphan. "Can you do me that solid?"

"Yes, but hurry."

I couldn't refuse this small boon and waved him inside, while I examined the street to recall what remained of the East Village from twenty years ago.

In truth very little.

Back then East Village resembled ancient Rome a week after the Goths had sacked the city. Apartment buildings had been left to ruin or torched for insurance by indebted landlords.

The Ninth Precinct had unofficially declared the streets east of 1st Avenue a 'no-go' zone, but my West Virginia girlfriend had fallen in love with the rundown neighborhood and she wasn't the only one. The East Village was the center of the universe for punks, musicians, artists, runaways, B-grade models, painters, dancers, actors, and sculptors recolonizing the burnt-out blocks between 1st and D Avenues.

Alice and I made our move on an unbearably hot July 1st, which was terrible day to move, especially since the taxi driver emphatically refused to continue past 1st Avenue.

"It's only a little bit down the block," Alice pleaded with an Appalachian accent. Speaking in tongues was one of young actress' gifts.

"I don't care if it was five feet. I'm not going another inch." The driver pulled over to the curb.

"Thanks a lot." We unloaded our bags onto the sidewalk and I tipped him a dollar.

"You said a good tip, when you got into the cab."

"It is a good tip for not taking us where we wanted to go." I slammed the door and the taxi driver cursed me in Greek before racing uptown.

"Thanks for not losing your temper." Alice smiled her gratitude.

"I didn't want to start off on the wrong foot." I looked down the block

Near-naked children played in the spray from a hydrant and their parents lounged on the steps.

"Guess we're home." She beamed and lifted a box.

"No, home is upstairs." I tried to manage with the other four. One toppled onto the sidewalk.

"Mister, you need help?" Two scrawny kids ran up to us.

"$1 each to carry a box to our new apartment." I pointed to the third stoop on the south side of the street.

"Can we trust them?" whispered Alice. Her eyes were two different colors; green with tints of red. The latter was the color of fire.

"We let them help and no one will think we're stuck-up white people trying to evict them from their neighborhood?"

I handed them each a dollar and the kids joked about us being Mr. And Mrs. Opie, then fell silent at the door to our new address.

A pockmarked junkie sprawled before the door and the taller kid said, "That's George."

"Is he dead?" asked Alice.

"No, he ain't dead, just fucked up," said the shorter of the two.

"Let me see, if I can wake him."

I called his name several times and then climbed the stairs to lightly nudge the comatose junkie with my foot. As he slumped from the doorway, an enraged voice shouted, "Who the fuck are you to kick George?"

"Oh shit."

The two kids dropped the boxes and bolted toward 1st Avenue. The kids in the spray of the fire hydrant scurried to their parents. A bare-chested black man wearing jean too tight for his muscular build approached us with yellowed eyes bellowing with fury.

My girlfriend stepped behind me.

"I ask you before. You kick George?

"I didn't kick him."

"You callin' me a liar, you white piece of shit?" the junkie snarled from the sidewalk.

"I'm sorry." I couldn't look in his maddog yellow eyes.

"Too late for sorrys. You're fucked." The veins on his neck pulsed with thick throbs of blood and he put a foot on the steps. "I'm gonna to kick your ass."

Countless scraps with Southie gangs had taught me the value of not fighting fair and I threw the boxes at his chest. Their weight knocked him off balance and his body slammed onto the sidewalk. The crack of his skull on the pavement echoed off the opposite building. A trickle of blood seeped from under his head.

The street grew very quiet. The people had seen this show before. Their eyes read 'bad ending'.

George rose from his slumber and stared at his friend and then me.

"What you done to Hakkim? You fucked yourself good. Hakkim gonna come for you and your little girlfriend. Take your clothes, TV, jewelry and fuck her scrawny ass."

Anyone stupid enough to threaten you deserved a beating and I kicked him in the head. My girlfriend stopped me and said, "We better leave before the police come."

"They ain't no police coming here." I opened the door and carried the boxes to our third-floor flat.

That night I lay awake on the futon waiting for Hakkim's revenge.

A little past 3AM Alice said, Nothing is going to happen tonight."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing bad." She slipped across the futon into the arms.

The next morning we awoke to birds singing in the alley and made love on a dusty futon. The two of us shared a bath in the kitchen tub. She washed me and I shampooed her hair with the sun streaming through the willows in the alley.

Later I went to buy groceries and the domino players across the street greeted me with a wave.

On my way back Hakkim appeared sporting a stained head bandage. George had a black eye and a swollen cheek. Their eyes followed me, but neither man tried to attack me that night or any other, however their unexpected leniency didn't curtail their reign of terror against the neighborhood.

Two models, Valda and Mary Beth, moved into an apartment across the street. They heeded my warnings about Hakkim and installed theft-proof grills on the windows.

For several weeks they were spared the unwelcome wagon treatment, but only because Hakkim had been busy elsewhere.

One evening they returned home to discover Hakkim had chopped through the walls to steal their money and defecate on their beds. They moved out the next morning.

A musician friend devised the unusual strategy of leaving his door unlocked.

"I have nothing worth stealing." Kurt upped this security measure by throwing his trash onto a growing garbage heap in the corner.

"That's all I have and, if anyone wants it, they can have it."

A lack of cleanliness was meaningless to a criminal so far removed from godliness as Hakkim and one day I spotted him in a jacket, which Kurt had buried under a pile of Chinese take-out boxes.

Observing my horror, Hakkim warned ominously, "I been waitin' for you. Waitin' real patient for a piece of your girlfriend too."

A friend gave me a gun. I stashed it in the closet. I felt safe, but I had to tell my girlfriend the news.

Alice shook her head and thrust the Village Voice in my chest. The weekly was opened to the APARTMENT FOR RENT section and she didn't mince words.

"Find us an apartment quick. I don't care where as long as it's not East 10th Street."

I called the landlord of a one-bedroom in Gramercy Park.

It was available and my girlfriend said, "Go over and sign the lease."

"Right away." I left the apartment and walked to hail a taxi on 1st Avenue.

Loud shouts rang from the corner.

Hakkim and another junkie were arguing about the split of swag from their robberies of apartments.

"You gonna throw down on me? You a punk bitch same as the rest of 'em. I own you all."

He was threatening his partner in crime, but I snatched a wooden stick out of the trash. Hakkim saw me coming and scrambled between two tightly parked cars, as I swung at his head. He ducked the blow and stumbled into the avenue to be struck by a Daily News truck.

Its fender sent Hakkim flying fifty feet in the air.

When he landed on the other side of the street, a bone audibly snapped and his body tumbled to rest.

I expected the other junkie to blame me for causing this terrible accident, instead he rifled through Hakkim's pockets and cried out with joy upon discovering several glassine packets of dope, then fled east shouting, "Hakkim is dead."

Long-time residents emerged their apartments and stood over the fallen thief.

Everyone was getting in their kicks.

Only the arrival of a cop car prevented a murder and the crowd begged the police to leave the scene.

The officers apologized, "Sorry, we have a job to serve and protect. For him as much as you."

People swore at the cops, as an ambulance carted him off to Bellevue, but no one was afraid to pray aloud for their tormentor's death and that evening people walked on the block with newly purchased TVs, radios, and the stereos, that they wouldn't buy as long as Hakkim controlled the streets.

"You still want to leave?" I asked Alice. The sun was setting in an orange sky. Children laughed beside an ice cream truck. She tucked her arm around my waist.

"If he's gone, then we're still home. You want vanilla or chocolate?"

"Both."

Within a day of Hakkim's accident flowers sprouted in the beaten ground underneath the trees. Supers swept the sidewalks and music filled the street. This miracle's lasting forever was too much to ask from a place so beyond the pale of civilization as East Village.

Two weeks later I sat on the stoop with my upstairs neighbor and his face went white.

"What's wrong?"

"Look."

"No way."

Hakkim hobbled down the sidewalk on crutches. His admirers toasted his resurrection by ripping the flowers out of a recently planted garden.

"Hey, you motherfuckers." Hakkim waved a clump of roots over his head. "Get ready for a Christmas in the Springtime, cuz I been hearin' you bought a lot of shit for me."

Everyone shirked his gaze and I shook my head.

When I broke the news to my girlfriend, she cried.

"It's not fair." Alice believed that Hakkim was coming for her.

I said nothing to Alice and left the apartment.I went to Uncle Carmine on the Far East Lower East Side. I asked the Sicilian plumber for a throw-away 38.

"You sure about this? You refused the last time I offered." A scarred hand reached into his desk and he slid a five-shot revolver to me. I held the steel pistol in my hand. It had a nice weight.

"Times changed."

"Hakkim?"

I nodded, because his guess was on the money.

Only a few words of advice. You see him wait until he's alone. Walk up behind him, bang him in the head, and plug that scumbag in the chest. Junkies like Hakkim don't die easy. Finally drop that gun in the sewer and don't run, walk away slow. Got it."

Another nod and I left without another exchanged ors.

We had said enough. away slow. Don'

Out on East 11th Street I carefully tucked the .38 behind my back. It had no safety. The gun was hardly the most accurate weapon in the world, but if I could get within ten feet of Hakkim, he was a dead man.

Hakkim wasn't at Brownie's or the East Village Artist's Club on 9th or at any of the shooting galleries on 4th.

I ran into Jamie Parker at the Horseshoe Bar on Avenue B.

"Have you seen Hakkim?"

He pointed to a group of passing Puerto Ricans.

"They're hunting down Hakkim. He ripped off their bruja. This fucked with their juju, so have a drink and let them do Hakkim for you."

"No, I have___"

"You don't have to do nothing. Sit down and wait." He pulled me onto a stool.

I drank a few beers, but kept on imagining Hakkim on the ground before me. The gun was in my hand. My finger was on the trigger. Jamie sensed the rising tide of vengeance and ordered me a shot of whiskey. I pushed away the shot glass.

"I need air."

"Don't go far."

"I'm not going anywhere."

The night was still and the streetlights were black. Someone had knocked them out. Running feet slapped against the pavement. It was George. No one was catching the little junkie.

"Who was that?" Jamie exited from the bar.

"Fucking George. Hakkim can't be far behind." My hand slipped inside my jacket to the revolver.

"Help me. Please help me." Hakkim wobbled along the street on his crutches with five young men behind him. "They gonna kill me. Call 911."

"No one's callin' the police." A gang of Puerto Ricans mocked him.

"Help me. Help me."

Scores of people were on the street and many more watched from the windows.

I started to cross the street to kick him off his feet.

"This doesn't concern you." Jamie restrained me from joining the fray.

"It does."

"Not anymore." Jamie wouldn't release my arm and I watched, while Hakkim swung a crutch at barrio toughs. Six more kids ran up carrying pipes. There was no escape for the terror of the East Village.

"Help me for God's sake," Hakkim screamed with his head to heaven.

"Anyone want to save Hakkim's ass?" a teenager in a black satin shirt mercilessly asked the onlookers.

The people in the windows shut them. Those on the streets walked away. The courts might accuse us of being accessories to murder, but that night we were the judge and jury giving the junkie a death sentence. None of us would lose any sleep about our verdict.

I returned to our apartment.

"What happened?" Alice was sitting on the futon. She was wearing a white cotton shift. Everything about her said West Virginia.

"Hakkim's gone." I stashed the revolver in the closet. Alice knew for her own good to never look through my things.

"Gone?" The question bristled with hope.

"For good." I lay down next to her and pretended that I was Lil Abner, as I explained what I had seen on Avenue B. "I had nothing to do with it."

"I know." Her reward was sweet.

That night was a long time ago and I turned my head in time to catch Jamie coming out of the Gem Spa.

He finished the egg cream with one long suck.

"Damn, that was as good as it ever was."

"I'm glad to hear it?" I stepped aside for a quartet of gym scholars dressed in new leather. They bumped into me as if to demonstrate the toughness they had learned from TV Wrestling.

"Watch who you bump into." Jamie's eyes shone with danger and they hurried off like rats with their tails on fire. He tossed the empty egg cream into the overflowing trash bin. "Stick pussy wannabes."

"Jamie, I didn't need your help."

"I didn't say you did, just my way of sayin' thanks for not walkin' away, while I was in the store."

"Jamie, good seeing you. I got to be someplace. You be careful."

"That's good coming from you. I remember you hunting Hakkim that night. What you think would have happened, if you had shot him."

"He'd still be dead. You take care."

"That might be asking too much from people like us, but I'll try. You too?" Reacting to my facial expression, he added, "Don't worry, you ain't seen the last of me yet and I ain't seen the last of you either."

To prove his statement, Jamie strolled across the avenue, daring the traffic to hit him. A cement truck lurched to a screeching halt and he yelled, "See, I'm invulnerable?"

Reaching the other side of the avenue, Jamie stopped to speak with a fat coed on the sidewalk. He must have told her a funny line, because she laughed with a hand covering her mouth. They vanished into the crowd of college students. Jamie was lucky with girls, although it was the kind of luck that few people wanted anymore.

In the following weeks I expected to see Jamie again, except he had slipped into the cracks of the East Village.

He might be living with the fat coed.

More likely he had lost his temper and the police had thrown him in jail.

If not, I hoped that he had left town and whenever I stopped at the church on East 14th Street, I lit a candle for Jamie.

Maybe he'll return, once the neighborhood reverted to its old wickedness.

Maybe not.

That East Village only existed once and in some ways I do miss junkies. They never say 'Oh My God' and kept a city honest and no city can achieve the future without its past.

Especially without Hakkim.

Lazurus II and the East River.

The East River Spit in Winter

Lori on my birthday.

Hellah Swelter

A horrid heatwave has scorched the Eastern Seaboard for the past four days.

New York thermometers have read in the upper 90s.

This evening I descended into the subway.

The temperature rose 10 degrees Fahrenheit on each level.

The train platform had to be in the 100s.

I hurried into the air-conditioned train.

A cool 75.

respite from the madness of Hellah Swelter, however the weatherists have predicted a repeat for tomorrow.

Hot.

But not as hot as LA.

Q: How hot is it in Southern California? A:

So hot every fat guy sweating in the city smells like Bacon!

104 And That's All

JULY 23 2016

Thursday the temperature in New York City hit the high 90s. The humidity soaked my shirt within a few minutes of exposure to the outside weather. I drank three large bottles of Perrier, ate a quarter of a watermelon, and downed about 5 iced beers in a vain attempt to keep up with my projectile sweating. It was almost as if my pores were spitting out fluid. Once home I took about five showers and remained cloistered in my air-conditioned apartment.

I survived the night.

Friday the weathermen were predicting heat in excess of 100. The record for New York City was 105. The hottest temperature for the NY State was recorded in Troy on July 22, 1926. The thermometer hit 108.

By midday the radio was calling Friday the hottest day in recent history.

104.

For me the heat wasn't as bad as the previous day. My friends said my brain was heat-addled. They weren't far from the truth.

The heat wave continued over the weekend, although this evening I'm feeling a slight abatement from the sweltering heat.

I even went out to shoot hoops at the park on DeKalb.

My friends once more accused me of suffering from heat madness, but this recent spike in the temperature is nothing to comparison to the grasp of the heat dome over Oklahoma and Kansas. A month of unrelenting 90+ temperature, but even that streak pales in regards to the longest heat wave in modern history.

5 months of 100+ Marble Bar, Australia during the winter of 1924.

America's worst heat wave occurred in the Dust Bowl of 1936.

101+ for over 100 days in Yuma, Arizona.

Back then hot was hot. There was no AC. Ice melted faster than butter on the red-hot frying pan.

104 was hot for New York City.

People complained so much that their wind blew away the heat.

Hot air versus hot air.

New Yorkers are # 1.

It's certainly not Kansas.

A BAR OF INFAMY by Peter Nolan Smith

Written 2007

Some bars' names evoke grandeur; Harry's in Venice, The Oak Bar in the Plaza, Raffles Long Bar in Singapore.

Other bars elicit yawns from real drinkers; TGIF, Hooters, Harry Beans.

Yet a few are notoriously renowned for their sleaze and mayhem, where most people's fun ended where the fun of those those frequenting these haunts begins.

Such dubious dens of inequity as Ave B’s Save the Robots, Miami's Ace of Space, Phnom Penh's Sophie's and the late Grace Hotel in Bangkok faced a rival in Pattaya.

The JP Bar off Walking Street and this beer bar doesn't gather steam until the other bars shut their beer coolers and the discos closed their doors. By some miracle of light-refraction sunlight refuses to pierce the corners of this bar, where drunken farangs drink with beautiful dok-thongs and more beautiful ka-toeys well past dawn.

JP's is a bar to avoid and be seen avoiding, except for when holiday-makers refuse to call it quits and head to JP Bar for a coup de gracelessness with drugs and drink and the dregs of society. I'm not condemning their behavior. Every city should boast of a dive that hardcore miscreants can frequent rather than roam the streets endangering the public.

I even know people who go the JB Bar.

Me, never.

My holidays in Thailand are spent with the lovely Mam and our son Fenway. We're in bed with Mam long before the guns are firing into space off Walking Street. I'm almost a good boy, although if I were 20-30 years old and single, I'd be at JP's every morning.

Probably once a week in my 40s.

At 58 I drive by it on my way to buy the Bangkok Post on Pattaya Klang.

Several of my friends have taken my place on the dawn patrol.

I'm proud of their dedication to the wicked ways of life.

They deserve medals.

Joey from New Hampshire hangs out at JP Bar in a ketamine hole. He drags home beastoids who inevitably rip off his cellphone and remaining cash.

Mark from OZ likes to drink and suck down whiskey until the warning lights on his kidneys flash 'failure imminent'. A ladyboy once dosed him a knock-out drink. His friends saved the Aussie from a fleecing on the beach.

The ever-lovely JP Bar.

Girls on ja-bah, lady boys on Viagra, boy band karaoke gigolos, and 40-50 year-old men pretending to be 30 present an eclectic scene best suited to those not willing to question the sins of the previous night, because this kind of fun has its own special costs as my friend, Klaus, found out the other night.

Klaus was an ex-armed robber from Germany. The biker knew his way around bad places and told vicious stories of being a teenage bank robber and his nine years in prison.

"They kill people in German jails. They are not a hotel."

The Bader-Meinhof Gang can attest to that testimony from the grave.

Klaus was usually a happy-go-lucky guy. His preference was for fat dark-skinned girls. Plenty of that type can be found on Soi 6, Pattaya's short time Strasse. I've rarely seen him in go-gos.

Klaus was a married man.

10 years to the same woman, but that week his wife deserted him after he said she was drinking too much.

Left with no address or phone.

Gone with the wind.

Freed of this entrapment, Klaus told me over the phone. "I can do what I want when I want and don't have to tell anyone anything."

"Sounds good. You wan to join me?"

"Love too, but I am a prisoner to my son's sleeping hours."

My liberties were measured in minutes, not hours, and Fenway's mom said, "You want join him. I leave you. You can be free too."

I didn't want freedom and I vowed not to go out at night.

Not easy for someone who spend most of his life in bars and discos and restaurants, but my loving son was tons of fun, plus I don't mind drinking at home, especially since most of the bars are packed with British lager louts looking for a drunken brawl about a football team.

The next morning I drove to Pattaya Klang via Walking Street. The pedestrian way had re-opened to motor traffic and bars were hauling out their empties from a busy Saturday night. Not everyone was Thai, since I spotted Klaus staggering in the road. I stopped my bike and pulled him to the sidewalk.

"Was ist los?"

"Bad Story." His eyes were pinned like he had shot China White.

My old habits rose like smoke from a napalm explosion.

"You have anything?"

"No, it's not like that." He leaned heavily against a shop window and several passing locals laughed at Klaus. They loved seeing farangs in trouble. "I was at the JP Bar."

"Yeah." I could hear the music from the bar.

"Last night I went home with a girl and had a drink. I don't remember anything else, but when I woke, my money, 100,000 baht, and computer are gone. First my wife leaves me and now this."

He wasn't teary, but angry at himself.

Obviously the girl had dosed him with a sleeping powder.

An old trick taught to the young girls at JP Bar by the veteran ka-toeys. Mark from Oz said most of these slut-thieves wake at 5am to prey on unsuspecting partygoers. The money goes to fueling bizarre sex parties with Ja-bah and Viagra. I didn't tell this to Klaus.

"So what do you want to do?" I hoped he wasn't going back to the bar to seek revenge. Ka-toeys and drugged Thai girls were much tougher than they look and Klaus was in no condition to take a senseless beating from a crow-voiced shim.

"Can you take me home?"

"Warum nichts?" I could get my newspaper later.

His house wasn't far and I put him to bed after he sent his son to school with the maid.

He was lucky that he hadn't been given a bigger dose.

When I arrived back to our Jomtien apartment I told Mam about Klaus' loss.

She shook her head.

"Why he not go to a hotel?"

It was a good question and I said, "Klaus probably wanted to rid the house of his wife's ghost."

His mission had been accomplished, but for the rest of you be warned of JP bar.

Sometimes it's best to end your fun before someone else's can begin or else Sunday morning could be spent coming down harder than a Kris Kristofferson suggests in SUNDAY MORNING COMING DOWN.

"Well I woke up Sunday morning, With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt."

And I know that feeling all too well.

UPDATE

Klaus' one-night stand also clipped his bankbook and drained his account for another 140,000 baht.

Greedy, because she transferred the money to her own account. The police were immediately interested and said, "We will get the money for you. No problem. And we find her, you get one hour to do what you want. We get 30%."

The girl has yet to show her face again in Pattaya, but she will, since bad girls have one place to go and it's rarely up.

UPDATE

I'm back in New York. Mam and Fenway were in Jomtien.

Klaus called the other day with good news. The police had tracked down the thief to Surin. They recovered his passport, computer, camera, telephone and 100,000 of the 140,000 stolen from his ATM. The rest was used for expenses by the diligent police. They even brought Klaus to the Chonburi prison to gloat over his one-night stand.

"Was she sexy?"

"She was okay, but no one is sexy in jail."

Having spent 9 years in German prison, Klaus knew how sexy gray walls can make a person.

Not at all.