THE PIGPEN A GO GO by Peter Nolan Smith

Life is the sum of a person's experiences. Work and family dominate the sculpting of a soul. Days are defined by routine and years by the seasons and weather. En masse we are the same, but different thanks to our participation in special events liberating our souls from the shackles of perpetual monotony.

Woodstock lasted three days. The freedom shared by the young celebrants of Aquarius remains an icon of peace and love to millions of young people. I was washing dishes at a hotel outside Boston that weekend. I bought the record and watched the movie. No number of joints can transport my body to the glory of Max Yasgur's farm.

While I was never at Woodstock, I have been lucky enough to have seen the first screening of APOCALYPSE NOW at the New York's Ziegfeld Theater, dropped LSD at the Mudd Club's Acid Party, and caught the Whorelords' one-night stand as well as attended every night of CBGB's Johnny Blitz Benefit and witnessed Rahsaan Roland Kirk stunning performance for the hippies at the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival.

"I'm blind, but I know there's more than five of you motherfuckers out there," the sax player shouted into the microphone with a tenor, flute, and clarinet draped around his neck. The long-hairs cheered his bravado and he rewarded their applause with a 17-minute long version of THREE BLIND MICE. After a last blast on the sax the hippie audience leapt to their feet to give the jazz legend a standing ovation.

So I missed Woodstock and the opening of Studio 54. No human can be everywhere. however as I approached forty the drive to see and be seen gave way to the comfort of sitting in a bar with a cold beer in my hand.

The stagnation was all-powerful.

40 would become 50 and 50 would run into 60.

I was a nobody in danger of becoming even more anonymous to others and even myself.

Something had to change and in 1991 I quit my job selling diamonds on 47th Street and bought a round-the-world ticket. In Bali I dropped my birthname to become Pascha Ray, explorer of bars in the Far East. Beer and gin were my poison. I recounted tales of CBGBs to backpackers. The 20 year-olds thought of me as a legend or a liar. The truth depended on my sobriety.

By the time I turned 50, my body was exhausted by the annual circumnavigation of the globe and I marooned myself in Pattaya, the Last Babylon on Earth, with a wife and daughter.

The Go-Go bars and brothels of the infamous Thai beach resort offered lonely middle-aged men from the West a last chance at youth. A night with a girl without a name passed for love. A hang-over was more easily attained than nirvana and our motto for next morning was 'another day in paradise', yet even Adam got tired of paradise and I had had my fill of go-go girls dancing to HOTEL CALIFORNIA. My friends were content every day of the week with that fate. They were oil diggers, anti-intellectual lager louts, and an assortment of international fugitives from justice.

I preferred the Buffalo Bar on Sai 3, where I rehashed ancient adventures in slurred Thai to leggy bar girls in slinky dresses.

I always brought my Shi-Tzu.

The froggie owner and a few patrons didn't like a furry dog lying on the bar, but the girls said Champoo had a nah-lak or lovely face and none of the old geezers dared to argue with a pretty girl.

Anywhere else in the world women would have avoided the Old Geezer Lounge like an ex-husband looking to borrow money, but the bargirls of Pattaya have the uncanny skill of blinding themselves to man's pros and cons.

To them all men, Thai and farang, were the same.

Bad.

Every night my friends deserted the Buffalo Bar for the go-go bars of Walking Street. I promised to join them later. My true destination was my bed up the street, where my 'ex-wife' and I slept together with my daughter. Angie lay between us. Her mother and I never had sex. She had broken my heart with an affair with a 'cousin'.

Months became years and the rainy season of 2006 swamped Pattaya with a vengeance.

One night Champoo and I were trapped by the deluge at the Buffalo Bar. Monsoon rain drummed off the tin roof with a deafening intensity to flood the side street. My drinking companion was New. The twenty year-old shivered in her thin dress.

"We go upstairs. We get warm."

"Sorry." There was no way that I was going upstairs with New. Her price was 3000 baht. In New York City she was a bargain, since she looked like Natalie Woods. I tried to tell this to New, but she has never heard of SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS or REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, so I asked New, if she wanted to be in a movie.

"Dirty movie?" New shook her lovely head.

"Not dirty." Shooting a sex film in Thailand was almost as foolish as buying property.

"Movie called MY DOG SINGS THE BLUES. Champoo is the star."

"Champoo sing?"

"Listen." I whistled a high pitch and my puppy howled off-key, getting good laugh from New. A brand-new Toyota Corona pulled up to the entrance and a scrawny man jumped out of the passenger side with a towel over his head. He was drenched in a second.

The greeting girl called him a ngao or fool with a mocking laugh.

The man took off the towel.

The fool was none other than my old New York friend, Jamie Parker.

New got up from the stool and meandered toward the pool table. Every woman in the Buffalo Bar knew the ex-con was trouble. He sat on the vacated stool and ordered two vodka-tonics. My dog growled with bared teeth and Jamie asked, "You ever think about breeding Champoo who a pit-bull? That way you'd get a pit-zhu."

"Very funny, but,Champoo took a vow of virginity."

"Like that girl you were talking to?" The gaunt 50 year-old nodded to the pool table where New was entertaining an elderly French man.

"New."

"Nice and a nice night for it."

"Monsoon season." I hadn't seen Jamie in several months. Rumor was that he was building a go-go bar in a vacant lot off Soi Buah-Khao and that Fabo, the Belgian oil explorer, was financing the project.

"How's married life?" Jamie wiped the wet from his face. The car waited in the deluge. He wasn't staying long.

"I'm as happy as a clam."

"You want to be happier." The lithesome waitress brought the drinks. They cost 100 baht each. He paid her with a 500-baht bill.

"I'm not into drugs." Pattaya was awash with speedy Ja-bah, meth Ice, and wretched cocaine. Opium might have worked, but Pattaya was too far south from the Golden Triangle.

"Not drugs, but the Pig Pen A Go Go." A soggy flyer flashed over Champoo.

PIGPEN A GO GO OPENING 9/11 UGLY GIRLS ANYTHING GOES FREE BEER FOR NEW YORKERS

"So you're opening the bar?"

"Fabo didn't mention anything?" "Not a word." Fabo and I spent the afternoons at the Welkom Inn on Soi 3. We talked about everything, but their project.

"He said he could keep a secret and did. Not many of the losers in this town can hold their sand." Jamie glared at two football hooligans at the end of the bar. He hated English soccer fans.

"Better change your mindset. That type loves go-gos." Pattaya's countless go-go bars generated billions of baht of income for the owners, dancers, bar staff, and police on the take. The clientele was strictly farangs.

"They won't be coming to the Pigpen. I'm appealing to a niche market."

"How so?"

"I'm hiring ugly girls who will do anything for anyone. The fatter and uglier the better. A horror show to wake up the dead and we're opening on 9/11 to commemorate the five years since the day."

"How appropriate." I had been standing on my roof in the East Village after the first airplane crashed into the WTC. The second attack was a shock shared by thousands. Their collapse had been witnessed by millions around the world. It was a 'had to be there' event that I wished could be exorcised from history.

"Come early. We have a special sunset show."

"Free beer, ugly girls, and a 9/11 show. Who can resist that?"

A car horn beeped loudly and the high beams flashed into the bar.

"Looks like your driver is in a hurry." The woman's face was obscured by the water sluicing over windshield.

"Ort has to get back her 'boyfriend'. Some British bodybuilder."

"You're still with Ort?"

"More or less." Ort and Jamie were made for each other.

"Is she going to dance at the Pigpen?" The vicious go-go dancer barely into her 20s had a snake's rhythm flowing in her blood.

"Opening night only." He ran out into rain, shouting, "She'll be dancing naked under a chador. Like Bin Laden's wife. You won't want to miss that."

"I see you there." Nudity was against the law in Pattaya, unless the police received their tea money to turn an eye and they were experts at being blind.

I was home by midnight. My daughter was asleep in bed. Her mother was watching a Thai soap on TV. She offered no greeting and I wasn't expecting one. I joined my daughter in the bedroom and read Nick Hornby's FEVER PITCH. I was out cold in minutes.

The next three days passed with the sameness of the previous months.

Work, eat, kisses and hugs from my daughter, the cold shoulder from her mother, beers at the Buffalo, and sleep.

I could have repeated the routine without a break, if I hadn't noticed the Bangkok Post article mentioning the 5th Anniversary of 9//11.

Four years of two wars.

Five years of OBL on the loose.

Five years of GW Bush and the worldwide war on terror.

Thailand was twelve hours in advance of Eastern Standard Time.

It was 9/11/2006.

Five years ago the attack squads had booked into airport motels. Some of the hijackers passed the last hours in prayer. The others sought solace in go-go bars to train for their reward of 77 virgins in the afterlife. Mohammad Atta exited the Mass Pike without paying the toll. Letters were written to friends and family. I spend that evening at home. The forecast from the Weather Channel predicted cloudless skies. It was right on the money.

The hijackers probably woke at 5 on 9/11 to a black morning with stars in the sky.

Five years later I left my house for the Pigpen. My daughter was napping on the couch and my 'wife' was speaking on the phone in a low voice. Her boyfriend was probably on the other end. I said good-bye and whistled for Champoo. My puppy like getting out of the house on Moo 9.

Heavy black clouds spread across the afternoon sky.

Even a blind man could predict tonight's weather.

I drove over to Soi Buah-Khao on my scooter with Champoo in the basket. Thais called out her name. She would have been a prize-winning Shzi-chu, if the next-door neighbor's mutt hadn't torn off her left ear.

The Pigpen was located at the end of a row of derelict beer bars.

A long table was loaded with good food and a pig roasted of a spit. Balloons waved in the wind. They were a Pattaya tradition indicating free food to the Cheap Charlies on a tight budget. A dozen fat girls sat on their haunches wolfing down spicy sum tam salad. None of them had been cute since birth.

Two aluminum billboards rose from the vacant lot across the street.

Fabo and Jamie were flying radio-controlled airplane around the two billboards touting a bankrupt property deal. A few Thais watched the aerobatics. They oohed at the close passes.

I parked my bike and lifted Champoo out of the basket. She barked at the looping planes.

The two owners nodded to me and I walked over to Jamie.

"You're not really going to do this?" I directed the question at Jamie. He was completely absorbed by the flight of the replica planes. Neither looked like jet liners.

"Do what, Yankee?" Fabo's grin was besotted by mischief.

"Re-enact 9/11." I stepped forward to snatch the controls.

Fabo darted out reach.

"This is only practice, Yankee." His plane buzzed the metallic billboards with inches to spare.

"Jamie?"

"What? You wanna play FBI or CIA? They didn't stop the hijackers and GW Bush let the Bin Ladens out of the country. And five years later nothing's changed in America other than we drive bigger cars and are getting fatter." Jamie was not all there at the best of times, but off his medicine he jacked up his meanness.

A pick-up truck rolled down the dead-end street.

"Our first guests."

Jamie landed the plane and greeted the five XXXL men. They collectively weighed over 1500 pounds and were dressed like off-duty fat men from a freak show. Each of them hugged Jamie and Fabo. When I joined them, Jamie whispered, "Americans, but none of them are from New York."

"I am not either." A glop of rain splattered on my face.

The clouds had darkened from gray to black.

"Boston-born, so no free beer."

"Almost thirty years in the East Village."

"Doesn't matter. You're Red Sox fan till the day you die. But we'll overlook your birthplace for one night."

Jamie clapped his hands.

"Girls, it's Showtime."

We entered the bar. The Pigpen was decorated, as if Fabo and Jamie were trying to imitate the old peckerwood TV show HEEHAW.

More fat girls emerged from the back rooms dressed like Daisy Mae of LIL ABNER.

The white plaid shirts bursy with size 45 DDD breasts and large assses overwhelmed shredded denim hot pants.

The DJ put on the Clash's ROCK AND ROLL WORLD.

"You won't be hearing HOTEL CALIFORNIA at the Pigpen, Yankee." Fabo ordered beers.

Ten bone-ugly men in their late 60s stumbled through the door and beelined to the food table.

"The hierarchy of the balloon chasers. No one gets to free food faster than these freeloaders and they drink, as if the Taliban was enforcing Sharia law tomorrow."

"That will never happen here." I sympathized with the plight of Palestine, but as an atheist I raised my beer and loudly announced, "We shall defend our beer, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight the sober bastards on the streets, we shall fight in the bars and we shall never surrender our right to drink beer. 9/11."

The fat men and the freeloaders clinked glasses with grim determination.

We were Americans far from home.

The DJ played Chuck Berry's MAYBELLINE.

A solitary dancer shrouded in a chador took the stage. The movement within evoked the struggles of a young girl stuffed into a burlap bag by Arab white slavers. It could only be Ort.

A round of tequila and the another to Love's HEY JOE. Champoo was into her first beer.

A party of trim Thais entered the bar.

Jamie high-waied the off-duty cops and installed them at a table with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. Police on the take only drink the best. Jamie waved for me to join them.

Half-Irish I had a way with cops and spoke Thai with a Boston accent.

The captain asked about 9/11 and I told him about watching people jump from the windows of the World Trade.

"Yet Islam." The Muslim South of Thailand was under martial law. Bombs and bullets were the court of justice.

I explained about living in Yala during the 90s. The insurrection was flickering with the intensity of a match until the Prime Minister had evicted the common people from land. They were Buddhists and Muslims. The rich are egalitarian in the mistreatment of the poor.

"Fucktherich," I babbled fast on tequila.

"Fucking GW Bush." Jamie blamed the president for 9/11.

"Fucking Bin laden." A fat man shook his fist. The Al-Fuck the rich swami was Wanted Dead Or Alive # 1.

"Yet Myanmar." The Thais hated Burma. Their neighbors had burnt every Thai capitol at least three times.

We drank more.

I danced with a fat woman twice my size. Her sweat smelled of chili and burned my eyes.

The DJ played SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL. Two vans of antique golfers entered the bar. Jamie poured them tequila. They drained their glasses and banged the bar for more. Time slipped into the future like it was lubricated with KY jelly. Champoo licked my face. It was good to feel love.

A tap on my shoulder.

"It's time." Jamie had the plane in his hand. He tapped his watch. The bar was empty.

"Time for what?"

"It's time to fly. Remember 9/11."

"Five years ago." I picked up Champoo.

"Exactly five years ago." Jamie and I walked outside the bar followed by fat girls and an assortment of farangs. A hundred Thais joined the crowd. Fabo launched his plane into the night sky. Jamie's aircraft followed 20 seconds later. They were lost in the murk for several moments.

"Krung-Bin."

The model plane buzzed across the garbage-strewn lot and smashed into the billboard with a thwack. The billboard withstood the crash.

"World Trade. World Trade," I shouted with tears in my eyes.

Jamie's plane was on a steep attack approach for the South Tower. The Thai cops pulled out their guns and fired at the model. A bullet clipped its wing and the plane spiraled to the ground.

"Thailand. Thailand. Chai-yo."

The sky opened for Noah's flood and we ran into the Pigpen chanting those words. Whiskey flowed like water. Lightning and thunder split the heavens, as if time had been rent in two. No one was going anywhere.

Jamie gave the old geezers Cialis.

The girls drank tequila like Pancho Villa's relief column. Ort took the stage to the Cure's TO KILL AN ARAB.

A busload of Arabs entered the bar. Everyone froze, then the Arabs ordered drinks for everyone.

They could have cared less about the 77 virgins.

They were after fat girls, which was what Jamie offered in spades.

I don't remember when the first person got naked.

I think it was when the DJ spun KC's THAT'S THE WAY I LIKE IT.

Old guys, fat girls, and Arabs dancing to 70s disco, then Jamie had the DJ segue to the Sex Pistols.

ANARCHY IN THE UK.

The old guys were mostly British and knew every word.

It was getting ugly and I took off my glasses to prevent seeing how ugly, as I sang, "I want to be born Anarchy."

LOUIE LOUIE, STREET FIGHTING MAN and then Sinatra's MY WAY.

The Arabs cursed Osama Bin Laden for making everyone in the West hate Muslims and the farangs showed their forgiveness by calling out, "FREE PALESTINE."

It was at that moment that my phone vibrated in my shirt.

It was my 'wife'. She never called me. Something had to be wrong with my daughter and I slipped out the back of the Pigpen with Champoo under my arm.

The rain pelted down hard and I drove home through a rushing river. My 'wife lifted her head from the TV and said, "Al Qaeda?"

"Chai." I felt like telling her what my thoughts on our 'relationship', except my daughter called out from the bedroom. I went to her and laid on the bed. Big storms scared three year-olds.

It had been a fun night, but not as much as holding her in my arms

Angie wasn't frightened as long as I was with her or at least that is what I wanted to tell her before we fell asleep.

The next day I called Jamie. His phone was shut off. I drove by the Pigpen a Go-go. A police sign in Thai said it was closed until further notice.

I couldn't be happier, because a place like that should only be open one night.

To repeat last night would have been a sin.

Just like re-living Woodstock.

A DAY FAR REMOVED FROM NORMAL

That morning a jet roared above the East Village. I opened my eyes. Lots of planes and helicopters flew over Manhattan. None of them ever this low or fast or loud. Thirty seconds later my apartment windows shook with a muffled thud that sounded more a boom than a crash.
The children from the day-care center screamed in the alley. There was no quiet in them and I dressed for breakfast at the Veselka diner on 2nd Avenue.
The telephone rang in the living room.
It could only be my Thai ex-girlfriend wanting money. Pong didn’t deserve a single baht after leaving me for a young Italian tourist and I left the apartment without answering the phone.
Yesterday rains had deluged Manhattan, but today not a cloud marred the sky and the temperature was ideal for September. The trees on East 10th Street were tinged by hues of red and yellow. Autumn was less than two weeks away.
My bank account had been sapped by six months in Thailand, but I wasn’t too worried about being broke, since last week Manny, my boss, had offered my old job at the diamond exchange. Everything would work out for the best and I walked toward 1st Avenue. At the corner my downstairs neighbor, Jim, ran up to me and sputtered, “A plane crashed into the Trade Tower!”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, you can see the smoke from here!” Jim pointed to people staring downtown on the avenue.
“In World War II a bomber had slammed into the Empire State Building.”
“During a storm. Not on a day like today.”
The clear sky was so blue that New York might have been atop the highest peak of heaven.
My neighbor said, “I’m going to the roof.”
“I’ll meet you in a minute.”
We bounded up the stairs two at a time and I grabbed my binoculars from the apartment before climbing the remaining four flights in less than thirty seconds. The fire door was open and on the roof several neighbors gaped south with good reason. Flames gushed from the shattered northern World Trade Tower and an apocalyptic plume of smoke trailed east over Wall Street.
TV helicopters fluttered at a distance around the stricken building and sirens whined from all over Manhattan. All heading downtown.
Only last week I had attended to a concert at the base of the Trade Towers. The two steel sheaths defied gravity without any threat from man, beast, or an act of god. Now a two hundred foot wide gash scarred the north tower.
“I can’t believe this,” Jim said with his ear to the radio. “The announcer said it was an accident.”
A balding neighbor interjected without taking his eyes off the flames, “I live on the top floor and watched the jet plane fly right into the tower like it was on a suicide mission.”
“Someone trying to finish it off,” Jim referred to the 1993 World Trade bombing. “But it’s still standing tall.”
“Yes, it is.” I brought the binoculars to my eyes.
Millions of sheets of A4 paper floated in the wind and debris rained to the ground, then a strange object shot from a window shrouded with smoke.
It was a man in a suit.
More people plunged from other floors.
The last was on fire.
“There are people jumping!”
“Why don’t those helicopters rescue them?” A girl from the fourth floor cried into the sleeve of her pajamas.
“Because there’s too much smoke on the roof.”
Jim pointed to a growing dot in the southern sky.
“There’s another plane!”
“I can’t believe a pilot is actually flying closer to give the passengers a better look of this,” said our bald-headed neighbor.
“This isn’t a fly-by,” I replied and then an airliner struck the South Tower and an enormous fireball exploded from the other side like an erupting volcano. Jim dropped his radio and everyone on the roofs of the East Village groaned in horror.
“Oh, my God.”
The DJ confirmed a second hit.
Jim shook his head.
“This only happens in movies.
He was right, but no James Bond or Bruce Willis had stopped these planes.
I searched the sky for an F-16.
There was nothing in the air.
The city was defenseless.
“This isn’t a movie. This is the real thing.”
Over the last years we had been warned about New York’s vulnerability to terrorist attack. None of us had ever anticipated such an extreme act and my mind crunched numbers of the two towers.
50,000 people worked in the WTC. Anyone on the top floors was trapped by the fire. Friends worked in those buildings. I borrowed a cell phone and tried to contact Andrew, who lived across the street from the Twin Towers.
There was no dial tone.
The South Tower collapsed in a fury of dust and smoke. Someone screamed and I joined them and everyone else standing on the roofs of Lower Manhattan
Within an hour the North Tower also crumbled to the ground. The tragedy vanquished any worries about rent or my Thai girlfriend. This country was at war, but the victims of this first attack needed our help and I declared to Jim, “I’m going to Beth Israel to give blood.” “Wait for me. I’ll live a note for my wife.”

By the time we arrived at the hospital, the police had cordoned off the street. Doctors and nurses had assembled triage stations on the sidewalks and orderlies wheeled in-patients from the hospital to accommodate the injured from the attacks. Everyone froze fearfully, as a F-16 screeched over New York too late to prevent the attacks.
“Can we help?” I asked a guard.
“Not much you can do here.” The ambulance bays were empty and he was at a loss to do anything more than protect this location.
“We can give blood.”
“Blood bank’s over there on the third floor.” He pointed to a building on 17th Street.
Jim and I ran to the entrance and up the stairs to the blood bank. More than twenty people filled the third-floor office. None of our fellow donors had seen the second plane hit and they were appalled by Jim’s account of the buildings’ collapse, which he ended by saying, “No one on those floors lived through that inferno of Hell.”
“What kind of animals do this?” A Polish woman dabbed her tears with a Kleenex.
The list of suspects was short and everyone agreed that no American pilot could have been forced to commit such a heinous deed.
A harried nurse’s aide emerged from the hallway and handed out medical history questionnaires. I checked off being free of AIDS, Hepatitis B, drug abuse, anemia, but marked ‘Yes’ to having lived outside the USA. My last ten years had been spent in South East Asia.
Giving blood isn’t a fast procedure and the hospital staff asked for patience. Not everyone was listening and a white-haired man in his fifties fumed, “I don’t understand why they can’t give us the needles and bags, so we can take our own blood.”
With his clean clothes, shaven face, and polished shoes, he could have passed for a normal citizen, if you ignored the pint of vodka sticking out of his jacket pocket.
“When can I give some blood?” His eyes sparkled with dementia. “Give me a razor blade and I’ll drip it in a bowl.”
“That won’t be necessary.” A female doctor read his file. “Bob, you mind me taking your blood pressure?”
“Just as long as you don’t suck out all my blood.” Bob glared around the room. “The old president of Nicaragua forced everyone in the country to give blood and he sold it to the good old USA. Vampire, that’s what Somoza was!”
“Bob, that’s old history.” The doctor was used to humoring the mad of Manhattan.
“You think I’m crazy, but I saw it with my own eyes."
“You haven’t written a last name here.” The doctor brandished the form.
“They stole it away, when I was a POW in Afghanistan.”
A young Asian nurse measured his blood pressure.
“I lostmy family today. To people like you.”
“I’m sorry, Bob, but you have low blood pressure,” stated the doctor.
“Meaning what?” Bob wasn’t buying her divine pronouncement.
“Meaning you can’t give blood.”
“You don’t want my blood, because I’m an American, not like the rest of ‘them’.”
The faces in the waiting room were white, black, brown, and yellow. Most of the accents originated from overseas. Their need to help trumped their country of origin and I said, “Yo, this has been a bad day and you’re frightening people with your talk.”
“Who elected you group leader?”
Jim nudged my arm.
“Let it go, he’ll be gone soon enough.”
He was wrong.
“I’ll tell you who’s to blame for this? The mayor, fucking Ghouliani, because he made New York too safe for terrorists. You can’t tell me that they wouldn’t have come here, if people were getting shot by crackheads. Those terrorists would have taken out someplace easy like Disneyworld.”
“Bob, I need to see someone else.” A doctor motioned for him to leave the waiting room.
“I’m not going anywhere.” Bob defiantly folded his arms.
I had heard enough.
“Bob, there’s a lot of people wanting to give blood. Some of them can and some of them can’t. Right now you’re making a problem for everyone.”
Bob rose from his chair. He was three inches taller than me and poked at my chest.
I knocked away his hand.
“Don’t touch me, Frisky.” Bob glowered menacingly down a crooked nose.
I forgot where I was, why I was here, and what had happened, until the doctor separated us.
“Not here.”
“Sorry,” I apologized and Bob went to the door, saying. “You’re right. Not here, but I’ll be seeing you around, Frisky.”
The other donors sighed with relief and I did too, because I didn’t want to fight Bob. The doctor wasn’t so sure and she read my chart.
“What country were you living in?”
“Thailand.”
“Thailand is one of the countries from which we don’t accept blood.”
“I suspected as much.” AIDS ran rampant in Southeast Asia thanks to the DEA stopping the opium trade, so all the tribespeople switching to heroin and needles.
“What else can I do?”
She recommended volunteering at the Emergency Ward and motioned for another donor.
I got up to leave. Jim was being drained of blood. He hadn’t ever left the country.
“Where you going?”
“Someplace I can lend a hand.” I grabbed a donut from a table. They were for donors, however I had skipped breakfast.
Outside hundreds of expectant donors jostled in a long queue down the stairs to the ground floor and out onto the street. At the emergency entrance the doctors and nurses searched the avenue for the ambulances. Hearing none was not a good sign. Downtown needed help and I returned home to change into heavy work clothes and boots left over from a construction gig in the mid-90s. Before leaving I tried calling my friend, Andrew, again without anyone answering at his apartment a block from the World Trade Tower.
I prayed he had escaped injury and rode my bike through the Lower East Side.
The subways had been closed and tens of thousands of New Yorkers walked north on the car-less avenues. Very few of them spoke and those who were usually stopped upon turning their heads to the ghostly column of smoke masking the end of Manhattan.
Blockades had been erected on Canal Street to prevent pedestrians from proceeding any closer to the collapsed towers. Every few minutes they were opened for incoming fire trucks and ambulances. A stunned onlooker stated, “Nobody escaped alive. Supposedly they’re taking the bodies over to Jersey. More than two thousand already.”
“People got out,” a man in a business suit heavily covered with soot contradicted him. “I was on the eight-second floor in the south tower. As soon as the first plane hit, we ran down the stairs.”
“Where were you, when the second plane hit?” a young bicyclist with dreadlocks asked and people gathered around the survivor.
“Something like the twentieth floor. I heard this explosion and then the entire building shook. When I got outside stuff was hitting the ground. Glass and big pieces of concrete, then bodies. One of them almost got me. It was bad.”
He choked and the bicyclist comforted him. There would be a lot of that today. I asked the nearest policeman. “Where are they accepting volunteers?”
“Volunteers?” The young Latino officer had been dazed by the horrors of the morning. This was his precinct. He re-focused on the task at hand and said, “Go over to West Street. Supposedly they’re taking people there.”
I r=tried another futile call to Andrew. No answer. I pedaled my bike toward the Hudson, grateful that that ominous cloud from the wreckage wasn’t blowing north.
On West Street several hundred people had gathered to help. Mostly construction workers with heavy tools, but also a good number were men and women from ordinary walks of life desperate to aid the rescue effort.
“Write your names on your clothing,” a volunteer shouted from the sidewalk.
“What for?” I asked a young man in jeans.
“So they have someplace to send your body in case you die.” A bearded ironworker Magic-Markered a name and phone number on his jeans.
“Die?” The young man squinted like he hadn’t heard right.
“Over two hundred firefighters have supposedly died so far.” v=
“A lot of cops too,” a beer-bellied welder raised his eyes to the sky.
“And they’re professional rescue teams, so someone like yourself has gotta be real careful, because down there isn’t any place for someone not knowin’ what they’re doin’,” the ironworker commented for the benefit of the civilians.
Several blocks beneath Canal Street was a scene of unimaginable danger. Thousands of dead. Fire. Death and worse. No one walked away. We were New Yorkers. We had tolerated years of crime, bad subways, noise, dirt, rats, cockroaches, the disparity between the poor and the rich, and a thousand other petty annoyances, because the million other reasons to live in the city outweighed the bad. They would after today too, only an hour went by, then two.
Not a single ambulance headed uptown and the ironworker said sadly, “I’m not feelin’ good about this.”
“What?” a welder re-arranged the equipment at his feet.
“I think anyone who had a chance to be out is out.”
“That’s really negative.” The welder spat on the sidewalk.
“Not negative. If there were people livin’, then they would have us in there right now tearin’ the place apart, but____you saw the thing come down. Ain’t no way anyone lived through that. Maybe one or two, but not a couple of hundred.”
“So you saying you want to leave?”
“No, I wanna say a prayer.” The ironworker lowered his head.
Everyone joined him, because he was telling the truth.
I waited another hour, listening to heated accusations about who was to blame and how we as a nation should punish the perpetrators of this infamy. Some called for the immediate bombing of Iraq, while others condoned a-bombing Lebanon and Libya. I kept my suspicions to myself. No one wanted to hear any conspiracy theories.
I borrowed a phone and discovered that Andrew was at a friend’s apartment in Little Italy. Safe, but like many people in possession of a tale he would have preferred to have seen from someplace not so close to Ground Zero. The other volunteers were glad my friend was okay and the ironworker said, “Go, man, now’s the time to be with friends and family.”
“I don’t know.”
“Man, ain’t nothing good going to happen here. Good luck and stay safe.”
I felt like the deserter in THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, but the sight of Andrew, Alia, and my other friends at Billy O’s penthouse assuaged my dishonor. “It h-h-h-had been a near-thing,” Andrew stuttered on the balcony. “I mean my apartment is across the street. I heard an explosion and saw this paper floating in the air and I tho
ught there was a parade, then the second plane crashed and I r-r-ran for my life.”
“You’re lucky to be here.” Billy opened another bottle of wine and his eight-year old daughter sheepishly demanded of her mother, “Do I have to go to school tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so.”
Gee-Gee clapped her hands and danced out of the room.
Hers was the first laughter of the day and Andrew lit a cigarette.
“G-g-glad someone’s happy.”
We drank wine and told stories.
Billy had dined at Windows of the World with his parents, Andrew had drunk at the Greatest Bar in the World with his wife, and I had driven a motorcycle around the desolate landfill, which would become Battery Park City. The sunset on the fumes rising from the ruins and even Billy/s wife patting my hand couldn’t stop my tears.
I was drunk.
$40,000 of credit remained on my credit cards. Thailand was only a day’s flight away. Pong would be happy to see me. I didn’t inform my friends of these plans and left the penthouse for my apartment, bicycling slowly up the Bowery. People walked in the eerie silence created by the traffic ban. Some spoke and some were even laughing. I pedaled harder to get home, so I could inform my family in Boston that I was all right.
A block past CBGBs a white-haired man sat on the curb, holding an empty vodka bottle and singing GOD BLESS AMERICA off-key. It was Bob from the blood bank.
I should have ignored him, but I was mad at the cruel genius who had destroyed the future and even madder knowing that I would never personally wreak revenge, but Bob, well, Bob was right at hand and I rolled up to the curb.
“Remember me?”
“Yeah, long time no see, Frisky.” Bob jumped to his feet more skillfully than expected from a man who had drunk an entire bottle of vodka, though he slurred with a gummy tongue, “I was wondering when you would show up.”
He short-circuited any further conversation with a roundhouse right. I ducked the wild blow and Bob followed the flow of his punch to the pavement. His head clonked on the curb.
I hopped off my bike.
His eyelids fluttered like butterflies and he asked, “Where am I?”
“On the Bowery.” I reached down to upright Bob.
He pressed his hand to his forehead and blood seeped through his fingers to drip onto the asphalt.
“The Bowery, how the hell did I get here? Shit, I remember.”
He didn’t speak for a second and looked downtown. The deadly flume of smoke glowed in the night.
“Hey, I’m sorry about today. Sorry about everything. I’m a fuck-up, but I was someone once. Shit, a soldier. For this country. No bullshit, Frisky. I really was, then something went wrong in my head after I got shot in Afghanistan. I shouldn’t have been there with the Hazarah, but I was.” He lifted his hair to reveal a wicked scar.
“Damn.”
“See, I wasn’t lying, but now all I am is an ornery drunk. What’s the sense? Where’s the pay-off?”
These were questions Bob asked too often and I probably did too.
“It was a real bad day today.”
“Maybe it would be better, if there was no tomorrow. Like if I could let a car hit me.”
He struggled to gus feet and I stopped him.
“Bob, there aren’t any cars in the Village and you’re not in any condition to walk to 14th Street to get hit by one.”
“Then do the world a favor and kill me. Hell, no one would notice in all the confusion.”
“I’m not killing anyone.”
“Then I’ll go over to the bridge and jump into the river.” Bob wasn’t kidding about killing himself and I couldn’t leave him alone. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“Well, what the sense? You tell me.” His index finger aimed at the funereal specter over Lower Manhattan. “What’s the sense?”
“I’ll tell a story about why you have to go on living.”
“I hope it isn’t a long story. My attention span is on short-rations.”
“Less than a minute.”
“Okay.” He raised the empty vodka bottle like he expected it to have been miraculously filled, and then released it into the gutter. “I’m all ears.”
“A long time ago I was traveling in Mexico. This shitty bus stops in a nowhere town. I ate a potato taco. Nothing happened until back in Texas, where I got sick. Almost like I was dying. I lay in bed hallucinating and had a dream about being chased by zombies. The filthy dead trapped me in this cottage and scratched at the screen door with dirty fingers. I was scared and even more so when one of them asked, “What’s the secret of human life?”
“And what did you tell them?” Bob checked his cut, which had stopped bleeding.
“I didn’t know what to tell them, until a voice said, “If you tell us the secret of human life, we’ll let you live for another minute.” At that moment I knew the secret, but woke before I told them.”
“Thank God, you saved mankind from the dream zombies!”
“I guess I did.”
“So can you tell me the secret of human life?”
“The secret was that no matter how bad things were or what awaited me at the end of that minute, I still wanted to live.”
“Maybe you do, but not me. I don’t have a place to stay. No one to take care of me. Nothing, so even if I had known the secret, I would have told the zombies to start eating.”
Despite being the world’s leading failurologist, I believed in my eventual triumph and asked the older man, “You really think it’s hopeless?”
“If you gave me enough money for a room, maybe I could forget the despair long enough to find me some hope.” Telling my story had excluded any refusal and I handed him a twenty. Jim made a face. “Where can I stay for twenty bucks in this city?”
“I think you know.” I steadied him on his feet and glanced at the Palace Hotel.
“I guess I do.” He touched my shoulder. “You’re not such a bad guy, Frisky.”
“And neither are you.”
“Yes, I am, but that’s another story. Be safe.”
He staggered off to an SRO hotel like a sailor on land after a long sea voyage and I rode my bike to East 10th Street. While I hadn’t saved any victims of the crash, having helped someone in need felt good.
Maybe not enough to forget the day’s horror, but I wasn’t going to run away from New York.
Not today.
Not any day.
The city was my home.
Maybe not forever, but I knew its streets, its bars, its people and tomorrow was another day and if those words worked for Scarlet O’Hara, then they certainly would for New York.
This city was tough and it was tough every day of the year.

Painting by Ro Lohin
Especially after a day far from normal.

3 = Conspiracy

3 = Conspiracy

I have family in Thailand. Western Union was the easiest way to send money, but not the cheapest. $15 for $100. $22 for $200. $27 for $300. I rarely sent a larger amount, since life in Thailand is not cheap anymore. Pepsi has replaced coconut milk. KFC has conquered the chicken market and every baby wears Pampers, instead of running around bare-bottomed as in the past. I couldn’t reduce the prices in Thailand, however Moneygram offered a more economical channels from wiring money overseas.

$8.99 for anything under $1000.

$6 might not seem like much, but for $200 the savings is $13.

A bottle of wine and a sandwich.

Moneygram has a location on West 46th Street one block away from work. The girls behind the protective glass windows greeted me with a wave. They know my name. They’ve seen photos of my sons and daughters.

A large black man sells bootleg DVDs in the store.

$5 a movie.

I bought CENTURION. The copy was unwatchable and Earl refunded my money. The copyright police might consider him a criminal and me too, since I buy knock-off movie, but I’ve opted out of the movie theater experience. $10 is too much for watching a crap film surrounded by a horde of popcorn munchers.

This afternoon I nodded to Earl. He was talking with a woman shuffling through DVDs. The law defined conspiracy as an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act. CCTV covered every cubic inch of the Moneygram store. My nod was suspect. I got two Moneygram forms and wrote out the proper information with my back turned to Earl and his customer.

They weren’t talking about movie.

“Anyone who thinks that 9/11 wasn’t a government operation is a fool.” Earl spoke loudly. He was no drinker.

“That plane that hit the Pentagon was no plane. It was a missile.”

“And those people in Pennsylvania were shot down by an F-16.” The woman was white. Older. Well-dressed.

The two of them repeated the same words that the President of Iran had said at the dais of the UN General Assembly. A fat man entered the store. He was breathing heavy. Earl introduced him to the white woman as Rabbi Moishe.

“Tell him what you saw on 9/11.” Earl pointed to the rabbi who was trying to regain his breath.

“That first plane exploded before it hit the North Building. I was standing on Greenwich Street. I saw the whole thing. That plane firebombed into the North Tower.”

That wasn't the first time I heard that and the rabbi said, “I saw the second plane crash into the South Tower. It fireballed inside the building. And the police found Mohammad Atta’s passport and not one of the black boxes.”

The rabbi had his facts down pat. He had seen every conspiracy film on 9/11. None of them had appeared in the theater. Hollywood was too busy making MAFIA II and THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA. I ignored their conversation, thinking that it was better not to say anything, because the three of them sounded like a plot of crazydom. I had probably sounded just as mad anytime I recounted my thoughts on the subject, since I had my doubts about the official line on that day and the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King.

I gave $300 to the Moneygram girl and said to Earl, “The people will never hear the truth until they stop believing the lies.”

It was my parting shot.

Earl, the white woman, and the rabbi raised their fists.

We were conspirators for the truth, even if the truth belonged to the mad, because they are the first people to see through the lies.

9/11/12

There is no smoke in the noon day sky. Jets skate the flight path down the Hudson. People around New York go about their business. It's twenty-four years since 9/11 changed America by taking away our rights and giving many of us new fears.

Not me.

I'm only scared of those who fear more than they hope.

9/11

2025 and the skies are clear.

And that's a good thing.

Osama Bin Laden WHO II

Osama Bin Laden was fingered by the CIA as the mastermind of 9/11. In 2016 his name on Google had 124,000,000 results. The Al-Quada fugitive was # 1 on the FBI's Most Wanted list. He evaded capture and death for over a decade and three president. In 2011 Barack Obama greenlighted his assasssination.

"Kill the motherfuckah."

He succeeded where his predecessor failed, however teenagers around America hit the Yahoo search engine to seek out the 10-4 on the name blazing across TVs and newspapers.

The top ten searched were the following;

1. Is Osama bin Laden dead?
2. How did Osama bin Laden die?
3. Who killed Osama bin Laden?
4. How old is Osama bin Laden
5. Who is Osama bin Laden
6. Where was Osama bin Laden killed?
7. Is Osama bin Laden dead or alive?
8. How tall is Osama bin Laden?

On Yahoo 1 in 3 searches for "how did osama bin laden die" and 40% of searches for "who killed osama bin laden" were from people ages 13-20.

It came as no surprise that most teenagers had no idea who the fuck Osama Bin Laden was, because 66% of searches were for "who is osama bin laden?"

This information came as no surprise, for as HL Mencken said, "No one went broke underestimating the ignorance of the American public."

More true now than then.

Then again the corpse of Bin Ladin was buried at sea.

So he still might be alive.

Some where. Just chilling.

A DAY FAR REMOVED FROM NORMAL by Peter Nolan Smith ( on KINDLE )

9/11 took us by surprise and shock the world. Two planes striking skyscrapers in New York.

Amazing and horrifying.

I stood on my roof in the East Village and saw the people jumping. I saw the approach of the second plane and heard the collective groans from the throats of thousands watching the horror.

I will never forget that day and this small book contains the truth and lies about that day.

And the days and years that have followed 9/11

To purchase A DAY FAR REMOVE FROM NORMAL for $3.99US, please go to this url.

The landfill from the World Trade Center excavation 1978.

Made In The USA 2012

It's been eleven years since 9/11. Last night I erected my own Twin Towers. They cost $4. Made in the USA. Drank in NYC.

Osama's Brother

Back in 1984 I traveled from Paris to visit friends in London. Vonelli lived behind Harrods in a small studio where Eric Burdon of the Animals' wrote SAN FRANCISCO NIGHTS. His kindly landlady hailed from America.

Her daughter was a beauty.

Caroline Carey's boyfriend was a Saudi pilot. He bought us champagne. Crystal not Moet. His girlfriend introduced him as Salem bin Laden. He entertained us with stories about the Arab peninsula. The two were very much in love and later married in the UK.

In 1988 the heir to the Bin Laden fortune died in a freak flying accident in Texas not far from George W Bush's house in Crawford.

The crash of the Sprint ultralight aircraft occurred on my birthday. I was in New York. My alibi is strong. I can not say the same for George Bush, who sought to succeed Reagan as president. No matter what people said, his father was no wimp. He led the Contra death squads in Nicaragua.

I couldn't find any photos of Salem, but the above picture shows Osama Bin Laden at Oxford. He's the one on the right and visited the university several years after Clinton studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

See the connection.

George Bush Senior was seated with members of the Bin Laden family on 9/11.

A breakfast in Washington for the ultra-right Carlyle Group.

See the connection.

It's a small world after all.

Especially when you belong to a big family.

September 10, 2001

I well remember 9/10/2001.

It rained all day in New York.

The day before I had almost gone swimming with my Brotosh diplomat friend, Alia, at Lake Awosting, except the park ranger blocked the path to the old granite sky lake. No one was allowed in the water after Labor Day to avoid legal problems from drunken locals and tourists.

There was no one swimming at the Coney Island or the Rockaways on 9/10/01.

Rain and a lot of it.

I recall turning on the TV and seeing the weather report for the next day.

Sunny cloudless skies and that sounded lovely to me.

ps it's cloudy this 9/10/2025 there is no mention of any swimming incidents at lake Awosting.

$55 Billion All In For The Eternal War

In a 2003 White House presss meeting GW Bush's Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was questioned about the cost of the proposed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"$55 billion."

When asked how he had conjured up that number and he explained that sum was for three months.

$20 billion per month or twice as much as the federal government pays for Food Stamps, but after 9/11 this country was in the mood for revenge no matter how much or whom. There were no Afghanis or Iraqis on the planes of 9/11. Not even as passengers. Nineteen of the hijackers were Saudis. None of them pilots. The USA did not attack the Oil Kingdom and the Eternal War has cost about $20 trillion without making anywhere safer.

As much as I hated Donald Rumsfeld, I had to admire his balls for saying, "$55 Billion."

For the most part the White House press corp accepted the figure without too many questions and America has been impoverished by this rush to judgment. No universal health care, high-speed trains, free education, or even improvements in the infrastructure. The only people benefitting from this War are the rich and the dictators we support around the world like the Saudis, USSR, and Qatar. Donald Trump was in awe of the Oil Kings' wealth. Our wealth was wasted on war. Lots of wars all over the globe

One more thing the war has cost about $23 trillion so far with no end in slight.

And that is a known unknown.

What is known is that the world was ruined by this $55 billion.

And remember peace costs nothing.

And also no one I have met has answered a simple question.

Why were we attacked on 9/11?

If it was, because they hate us, then why?

They don't like hot dogs.

ps Donald Rumsfeld is dead. He knows the unknowns now.

A DAY FAR FROM NORMAL by Peter Nolan Smith

That morning a jet roared above the East Village. I opened my eyes. Lots of planes and helicopters flew over Manhattan. None of them ever this low or fast or loud. Thirty seconds later my apartment windows shook with a muffled thud that sounded more a boom than a crash.

The children from the day-care center screamed in the alley. There was no quiet in them and I dressed for breakfast at the Veselka diner on 2nd Avenue.

The telephone rang in the living room.

It could only be my Thai ex-girlfriend wanting money.

Pong didn't deserve a single baht after leaving me for a young Italian tourist and I left the apartment without answering the phone.

Yesterday rains had deluged Manhattan, but today not a cloud marred the sky and the temperature was ideal for September. The trees on East 10th Street were tinged by hues of red and yellow. Autumn was less than two weeks away.

My bank account had been sapped by six months in Thailand, but I wasn't too worried about being broke, since last week Manny, my boss, had offered my old job at the diamond exchange. Everything would work out for the best and I walked toward 1st Avenue. At the corner my downstairs neighbor, Jim, ran up to me and sputtered, "A plane crashed into the Trade Tower!"

"You’re kidding!"

"No, you can see the smoke from here!" Jim pointed to people staring downtown on the avenue.

"In World War II a bomber had slammed into the Empire State Building."

“During a storm. Not on a day like today.”

The clear sky was so blue that New York might have been atop the highest peak of heaven.

My neighbor said, "I'm going to the roof."

"I'll meet you in a minute."

We bounded up the stairs two at a time and I grabbed my binoculars from the apartment before climbing the remaining four flights in less than thirty seconds. The fire door was open and on the roof several neighbors gaped south with good reason. Flames gushed from the shattered northern World Trade Tower and an apocalyptic plume of smoke trailed east over Wall Street.

TV helicopters fluttered around the stricken building at a distance and sirens whined from all over Lower Manhattan.

Only last week I had attended to a concert at the base of the Trade Towers. The two steel sheaths defied gravity without any threat from man, beast, or an act of god. Now a two hundred foot wide gash scarred the north tower.

"I can’t believe this," Jim said with his ear to the radio. "The announcer said it was an accident." A balding neighbor interjected without taking his eyes off the flames, "I live on the top floor and watched the jet plane fly right into the tower like it was on a suicide mission."

"Someone trying to finish it off," Jim referred to the 1993 World Trade bombing. "But it's still standing tall."

"Yes, it is." I brought the binoculars to my eyes.

Millions of sheets of A4 paper floated in the wind and debris rained to the ground, then a strange object shot from a window shrouded with smoke.

It was a man in a suit.

More people followed his plunge from other floors.

The last was on fire.

"There are people jumping!"

"Why don't those helicopters rescue them?" A girl from the fourth floor cried into the sleeve of her pajamas.

"Because there's too much smoke on the roof."

Jim pointed to a growing dot in the southern sky.

"There's another plane!"

"I can't believe a pilot is actually flying closer to give the passengers a better look of this," said our bald-headed neighbor.

"This isn't a fly-by," I replied and then an airliner struck the South Tower and an enormous fireball exploded from the other side like an erupting volcano.

Jim dropped his radio and everyone on the roofs of the East Village groaned in horror.

"Oh, my God."

The DJ confirmed a second hit.

Jim shook his head.

"This only happens in movies."

He was right, but no James Bond or Bruce Willis had stopped these planes.

I searched the sky for an F-16.

There was nothing in the air.

The city was defenseless.

"This isn't a movie. This is the real thing."

Over the last years we had been warned about New York's vulnerability to terrorist attack. None of us had ever anticipated such an extreme act and my mind crunched numbers of the two towers.

50,000 people worked in the WTC. Anyone on the top floors was trapped by the fire. Friends worked in those buildings. I borrowed a cell phone and tried to contact Andrew, who lived across the street from the Twin Towers.

There was no dial tone.

Someone screamed and I joined them and everyone else standing on the roofs of Lower Manhattan, as the South Tower collapsed in a fury of dust and smoke.

Within an hour the North Tower also crumbled to the ground. The tragedy vanquished any worries about rent or my Thai girlfriend. This country was at war, but the victims of this first attack needed our help and I declared to Jim, "I'm going to Beth Israel to give blood."

"Wait for me. I'll live a note for my wife."

By the time we arrived at the hospital, the police had cordoned off the street. Doctors and nurses had assembled triage stations on the sidewalks and orderlies wheeled in-patients from the hospital to accommodate the injured from the attacks.

Everyone froze fearfully, as a F-16 screeched over New York too late to prevent the attacks.

"Can we help?" I asked a guard.

"Not much you can do here." The ambulance bays were empty and he was at a loss to do anything more than protect this location.

"We can give blood."

"Blood bank's over there on the third floor." He pointed to a building on 17th Street.

Jim and I ran to the entrance and up the stairs to the blood bank. More than twenty people filled the third-floor office. None of our fellow donors had seen the second plane hit and they were appalled by Jim's account of the buildings' collapse, which he ended by saying, "No one on those floors lived through that inferno of Hell."

"What kind of animals do this?" A Polish woman dabbed her tears with a Kleenex.

The list of suspects was small and everyone agreed that no American pilot could have been forced to commit such a heinous deed.

A harried nurse's aide emerged from the hallway and handed out medical history questionnaires. I checked off being free of AIDS, Hepatitis B, drug abuse, anemia, but marked 'Yes' to having lived outside the USA. My last ten years had been spent in South East Asia.

Giving blood isn't a fast procedure and the hospital staff asked for patience. Not everyone was listening and a white-haired man in his fifties fumed, "I don't understand why they can't give us the needles and bags, so we can take our own blood."

With his clean clothes, shaven face, and polished shoes, he could have passed for a normal citizen, if you ignored the pint of vodka sticking out of his jacket poclet.

"When can I give some blood?" His eyes sparkled with dementia. "Give me a razor blade and I'll drip it in a bowl."

"That won't be necessary." A female doctor read his file. "Bob, you mind me taking your blood pressure?"

"Just as long as you don't suck out all my blood." Bob glared around the room. "The old president of Nicaragua forced everyone in the country to give blood and he sold it to the good old USA. Vampire, that's what Somoza was!"

“Bob, that's old history." The doctor was used to humoring the mad of Manhattan.

"You think I'm crazy, but I saw it with my own eyes."

"You haven't written a last name here." The doctor brandished the form.

"They stole it away, when I was a POW in Afghanistan."

A young Asian nurse measured his blood pressure.

"I lost my family today. To people like you."

"I'm sorry, Bob, but you have low blood pressure," stated the doctor.

"Meaning what?" Bob wasn't buying her divine pronouncement.

"Meaning you can't give blood."

“You don't want my blood, because I'm an American, not like the rest of 'them'."

The faces in the waiting room were white, black, brown, and yellow. Most of the accents originated from overseas. Their need to help trumped their country of origin and I said, "Yo, this has been a bad day and you're frightening people with your talk."

"Who elected you group leader?"

Jim nudged my arm.

"Let it go, he'll be gone soon enough."

He was wrong.

"I'll tell you who's to blame for this? The mayor, fucking Ghouliani, because he made New York too safe for terrorists. You can't tell me that they wouldn't have come here, if people were getting shot by crackheads. Those terrorists would have taken out someplace easy like Disneyworld."

"Bob, I need to see someone else." A doctor motioned for him to leave the waiting room.

"I'm not going anywhere." Bob defiantly folded his arms.

I had heard enough.

"Bob, there's a lot of people wanting to give blood. Some of them can and some of them can't. Right now you're making a problem for everyone."

Bob rose from his chair. He was three inches taller than me and poked at my chest.

I knocked away his hand.

"Don't touch me, Frisky." Bob glowered menacingly down a crooked nose.

I forgot where I was, why I was here, and what had happened, until the doctor separated us.

"Not here."

"Sorry," I apologized and Bob went to the door, saying. "You're right. Not here, but I'll be seeing you around, Frisky."

The other donors sighed with relief and I did too, because I didn't want to fight Bob. The doctor wasn't so sure and she read my chart.

"What country were you living in?"

"Thailand."

"Thailand is one of the countries from which we don't accept blood."

"I suspected as much." AIDS ran rampant in Southeast Asia thanks to the DEA trying to stop the opium trade and all the tribespeople switching to heroin and needles.

"What else can I do?"

She recommended volunteering at the Emergency Ward and motioned for another donor.

I got up to leave. Jim was being drained of blood. He hadn't ever left the country.

"Where you going?"

"Someplace I can lend a hand." I grabbed a donut from a table. They were for donors, however I had skipped breakfast.

Outside hundreds of expectant donors jostled in a long queue down the stairs to the ground floor and out onto the street. At the emergency entrance the doctors and nurses searched the avenue for the ambulances. Hearing none was not a good sign.

Downtown needed help and I returned home to change into heavy work clothes and boots left over from a construction gig in the mid-90s. Before leaving I tried calling my friend, Andrew, again without anyone answering at his apartment a block from the World Trade Tower.

I prayed he had escaped injury and rode my bike through the Lower East Side.

The subways had been closed and tens of thousands of New Yorkers walked north on the car-less avenues. Very few of them spoke and those who were usually stopped upon turning their heads to the ghostly column of smoke masking the end of Manhattan.

Blockades had been erected on Canal Street to prevent pedestrians from proceeding any closer to the collapsed towers. Every few minutes they were opened for incoming fire trucks and ambulances. A stunned onlooker stated, "Nobody escaped alive. Supposedly they're taking the bodies over to Jersey. More than two thousand already."

"People got out," a man in a business suit heavily covered with soot contradicted him. "I was on the eight-second floor in the south tower. As soon as the first plane hit, we ran down the stairs."

"Where were you, when the second plane hit?" a young bicyclist with dreadlocks asked and people gathered around the survivor.

"Something like the twentieth floor. I heard this explosion and then the entire building shook. When I got outside stuff was hitting the ground. Glass and big pieces of concrete, then bodies. One of them almost got me. It was bad."

He choked and the bicyclist comforted him. There would be a lot of that today. I asked the nearest policeman. "Where are they accepting volunteers?"

"Volunteers?" The young Latino officer had been dazed by the horrors of the morning. This was his precinct. He re-focused on the task at hand and said, "Go over to West Street. Supposedly they're taking people there."

After another futile call to Andrew, I pedaled my bike toward the Hudson, grateful that that ominous cloud from the wreckage wasn't blowing north.

On West Street several hundred people had gathered to help. Mostly construction workers with heavy tools, but also a good number were men and women from ordinary walks of life desperate to aid the rescue effort.

"Write your names on your clothing," a volunteer shouted from the sidewalk.

"What for?" I asked a young man in jeans.

"So they have someplace to send your body in case you die." A bearded ironworker Magic-Markered a name and phone number on his jeans.

"Die?" The young man squinted like he hadn't heard right.

"Over two hundred firefighters have supposedly died so far."

"A lot of cops too," a beer-bellied welder raised his eyes to the sky.

"And they're professional rescue teams, so someone like yourself has gotta be real careful, because down there isn't any place for someone not knowin' what they're doin'," the ironworker commented for the benefit of the civilians.

Several blocks to the south was a scene of unimaginable danger, but no one walked away. We were New Yorkers. We had tolerated years of crime, bad subways, noise, dirt, rats, cockroaches, the disparity between the poor and the rich, and a thousand other petty annoyances, because the million other reasons to live in the city outweighed the bad. They would after today too, only an hour went by, then two.

Not a single ambulance headed uptown and the ironworker said sadly, "I'm not feelin' good about this."

"What?" a welder re-arranged the equipment at his feet.

"I think anyone who had a chance to be out is out."

"That’s really negative." The welder spat on the sidewalk.

"Not negative. If there were people livin', then they would have us in there right now tearin' the place apart, but____you saw the thing come down. Ain’t no way anyone lived through that. Maybe one or two, but not a couple of hundred."

"So you saying you want to leave?"

“No, I wanna say a prayer.” The ironworker lowered his head.

Everyone joined him, because he was telling the truth.

I waited another hour, listening to heated accusations about who was to blame and how we as a nation should punish the perpetrators of this infamy. Some called for the immediate bombing of Iraq, while others condoned a-bombing Lebanon and Libya. I kept my suspicions to myself. No one wanted to hear any conspiracy theories.

I borrowed a phone and discovered that Andrew was at a friend's apartment in Little Italy. Safe, but like many people in possession of a tale he would have preferred to have seen from someplace not so close to Ground Zero. The other volunteers were glad my friend was okay and the ironworker said, "Go, man, now's the time to be with friends and family."

"I don’t know."

"Man, ain't nothing good going to happen here. Good luck and stay safe."

I felt like the deserter in THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, but the sight of Andrew, Alia, and my other friends at Billy O’s penthouse assuaged my dishonor.

"It h-h-h-had been a near-thing," Andrew stuttered on the balcony. "I mean my apartment is across the street. I heard an explosion and saw this paper floating in the air and I thought there was a parade, then the second plane crashed and I r-r-ran for my life."

"You’re lucky to be here." Billy opened another bottle of wine and his eight-year old daughter sheepishly demanded of her mother, "Do I have to go to school tomorrow?"

"I don't think so."

Gee-Gee clapped her hands and danced out of the room.

Hers was the first laughter of the day and Andrew lit a cigarette.

"G-g-glad someone's happy."

We drank wine and told stories.

Billy had dined at Windows of the World with his parents, Andrew had drunk at the Greatest Bar in the World with his wife, and I had driven a motorcycle around the desolate landfill, which would become Battery Park City. The sunset on the fumes rising from the ruins and even Billy/s wife patting my hand couldn’t stop my tears.

I was drunk.

$40,000 of credit remained on my credit cards. Thailand was only a day's flight away. Pong would be happy to see me. I didn't inform my friends of these plans and left the penthouse for my apartment, bicycling slowly up the Bowery. People walked in the eerie silence created by the traffic ban. Some spoke and some were even laughing. I pedaled harder to get home, so I could inform my family in Boston that I was all right.

A block past CBGBs a white-haired man sat on the curb, holding an empty vodka bottle and singing GOD BLESS AMERICA off-key. It was Bob from the blood bank.

I should have ignored him, but I was mad at the cruel genius who had destroyed the future and even madder knowing that I would never personally wreak revenge, but Bob, well, Bob was right at hand and I rolled up to the curb.

"Remember me?"

"Yeah, long time no see, Frisky." Bob jumped to his feet more skillfully than expected from a man who had drunk an entire bottle of vodka, though he slurred with a gummy tongue, "I was wondering when you would show up."

He short-circuited any further conversation with a roundhouse right. I ducked the wild blow and Bob followed the flow of his punch to the pavement. His head clonked on the curb.

I hopped off my bike.

His eyelids fluttered like butterflies and he asked, "Where am I?"

"On the Bowery." I reached down to upright Bob.

He pressed his hand to his forehead and blood seeped through his fingers to drip onto the asphalt.

"The Bowery, how the hell did I get here? Shit, I remember."

He didn't speak for a second and looked downtown. The deadly flume of smoke glowed in the night.

"Hey, I'm sorry about today. Sorry about everything. I'm a fuck-up, but I was someone once. Shit, a soldier. For this country. No bullshit, Frisky. I really was, then something went wrong in my head after I got shot in Afghanistan. I shouldn't have been there with the Hazarah, but I was." He lifted his hair to reveal a wicked scar.

"Damn."

"See, I wasn't lying, but now all I am is an ornery drunk. What's the sense? Where's the pay-off?"

These were questions Bob asked too often and I probably did too.

"It was a real bad day today."

"Maybe it would be better, if there was no tomorrow. Like if I could let a car hit me."

He struggled to stand and I stopped him.

"Bob, there aren't any cars in the Village and you're not in any condition to walk to 14th Street to get hit by one."

"Then do the world a favor and kill me. Hell, no one would notice in all the confusion."

"I’m not killing anyone."

"Then I'll go over to the bridge and jump into the river." Bob wasn't kidding about killing himself and I couldn't leave him alone. "You're not going anywhere."

"Well, what the sense? You tell me." His index finger aimed at the funereal specter over Lower Manhattan. "What's the sense?"

"I'll tell a story about why you have to go on living."

"I hope it isn't a long story. My attention span is on short-rations."

"Less than a minute."

"Okay." He raised the empty vodka bottle like he expected it to have been miraculously filled, and then released it into the gutter. "I'm all ears."

"A long time ago I was traveling in Mexico. This shitty bus stops in a nowhere town. I ate a potato taco. Nothing happened until back in Texas, where I got sick. Almost like I was dying. I lay in bed hallucinating and had a dream about being chased by zombies. The filthy dead trapped me in this cottage and scratched at the screen door with dirty fingers. I was scared and even more so when one of them asked, "What's the secret of human life?"

"And what did you tell them?" Bob checked his cut, which had stopped bleeding.

"I didn't know what to tell them, until a voice said, "If you tell us the secret of human life, we'll let you live for another minute." At that moment I knew the secret, but woke before I told them."

"Thank God, you saved mankind from the dream zombies!"

"I guess I did."

"So can you tell me the secret of human life?"

"The secret was that no matter how bad things were or what awaited me at the end of that minute, I still wanted to live."

"Maybe you do, but not me. I don't have a place to stay. No one to take care of me. Nothing, so even if I had known the secret, I would have told the zombies to start eating.

Despite being the world's leading failurologist, I believed in my eventual triumph and asked the older man, "You really think it's hopeless?"

"If you gave me enough money for a room, maybe I could forget the despair long enough to find me some hope." Telling my story had excluded any refusal and I handed him a twenty. Jim made a face. "Where can I stay for twenty bucks in this city?"

"I think you know." I steadied him on his feet and glanced at the Palace Hotel.

"I guess I do." He touched my shoulder. "You're not such a bad guy, Frisky."

"And neither are you."

"Yes, I am, but that's another story. Be safe."

He staggered off to an SRO hotel like a sailor on land after a long sea voyage and I rode my bike to East 10th Street. While I hadn't saved any victims of the crash, having helped someone in need felt good.

Maybe not enough to forget the day's horror, but I wasn't going to run away from New York.

Not today.

Not any day.

The city was my home.

Maybe not forever, but I knew its streets, its bars, its people and tomorrow was another day and if those words worked for Scarlet O'Hara, then they certainly would for New York. This city was tough and it was tough every day of the year.

Especially after a day far from normal.

9/11 9 years minus 2 days

Written 9/11/2010

Last night I drank wine and smoked weed with my 18 year-old nephew. Odin and I left my apartment at midnight. I lifted my head to the sky. Two columns of light scorched the black-blue sky.

9/11 monument.

9 years later.

I still feel sadness.

Never fear.

You know where the lights lead.

DARK HUMOR

On the first anniversary of the World Trade Tower Attack I was sitting with two NYPD narcotic detectives in a bar on Avenue B. Rocco and I went back to the Milk Bar and his partner Stevie was telling us about his 9/11

“My sergeant said as we approached the north tower, “Be careful, boys, today a lot of people are going to die.” He barely finished that sentence and a body smashed in front of us and then another and another. We ran for cover. None of us were heroes that day, even though we tried.”

“Shut up, Stevie. You did your best. No one can ask for more.” Rocco drank heavily from his glass.

We each had stories of that tragic, but lost the thread as we eavesdropped on a group of firefighters toasting their fallen comrades.

“Fucking Boy Scouts.”

"Who?"

"Firemen. Everyone thinks they're heroes, while we're scum."

"You got that right, Rocco." Stevie had been partners with Rocco for eleven years. Rocco leaned over and started talking loudly about how the firefighters have looted the WTC before its collapse.

“You know there would have been no dead firemen, if someone had posted one sign on the World Trade.”

The firemen at the bar turned as one to our table.

“And what would be on that sign?” Stevie loved playing straight man for his partner.

“Nothing of value inside.” Rocco laughed and slipped a hand under his jacket, as a trio of behemoth NYFD approached us. We were friends of the owner, the firemen had their house around the corner, but this was an old fight between rivals.

“What’d you say?” The largest fireman demanded with clenched fists.

“Just that if the World Trade had nothing to steal, then none of you would have died.”

Rocco laid his Glock on the table without taking his finger off the trigger.

“You’re a fuck.” The biggest fireman waved for his comrades to ignore the insult.

"It was a joke," explained Stevie. He wasn't looking for a fight.

“It wasn’t meant to be funny.” Rocco had lost two friends in the collapse. None of us found much funny about that day.

“Now be happy campers and go back to your drinks. The next round is on me.”

“Fuck you and fuck your drinks.” The biggest fireman forced his friends back to the bar, but they drank Rocco’s round and sent us one too.

“Nice one, Rocco.” Stevie lifted his glasses. We were drinking vodka-tonics.

“To the gone, but not forgotten.”

We downed them in one go and ordered another round.

9/11 is that kind of day that was remembered forever one way or the other.

THE TRUE REWARD OF A LIE by Peter Nolan Smith

My flight from Bangkok via Taipei and Anchorage to JFK in 2008 lasted almost thirty-six hours. I wished the trip had taken even longer since I had nothing to gain in America, however we landed stateside on time ending the longest Sunday of my life. The immigration officer asked how long I had been out of the country.

"Seven years." All of it in Thailand.

"Welcome back."

He stamped my passport and I entered the USA without any idea when I might see my wife and daughter again. The 12:05AM Skytrain to Brooklyn carried few passengers, mostly airport workers coming off the late-shift. They spoke my language. This had been my city for twenty-seven years. It should have felt like home.

My friend had promised a soft landing at his Fort Greene brownstone. Andrew had told the truth. His wife was willing to accept a guest for longer than three days. His daughter was the same age as my daughter. I went to sleep dreaming of rice paddies, red dirt roads, and Angie.

Over the next week I fought off the lingering effects of international jet lag and slowly connected with friends. They bought me lunch and dinner. Several lent money. They had heard about my arrest in Thailand. I didn't say too much about my new girlfriend's pregnancy or leaving Angie's mom. I was a hard sell as it was and I needed money for my families.

I visited several galleries with my Jean-Michel Basquiat sketch, except now was not the time to sell anything. Everyone was broke.

April grew warmer with the sun and one afternoon I wandered over to the East Village. I almost rang the bell of my old apartment. Someone else lived there now and I wanted to see the change, but instead I walked down to the basketball courts of Tompkins Square Park.

No one was playing hoop.

My friend JD had said the games died several months after my departure. I stood underneath the baskets. No one in the park knew my name. The East Village belonged to skateboarders and the young Wall Street bankers and I headed down to the F train stop at 1st Avenue.

It was early evening. The sun still had another hour to set. The light glazed everyone with unearthly silver. Couples kissed on the sidewalks. Singles prowled the bars in search of a hook-up. They were young. Life had gone on without me. One person is nothing to a city of millions, especially a ghost of the past.

As I approached the subway entrance, I spotted a familiar face. Thomas was speaking on a cellphone. I decided to wait for him to turn my way, thinking maybe he wouldn't recognize me.

Thomas was a neighborhood real estate developer and I was a pseudo-intellectual seeking to stop the gentrification of the Lower East Side. Our conversations were more arguments and we almost came to blows over the sale of a 2nd Avenue variety store, whose closure he viewed as progress.

I bought my underwear there.

Afterwards a store opened selling tee-shirts for $30.

Several years later at a Christmas dinner for Ornette Coleman, we pigpiled on a TV News producer extolling the networks' sense of truth. Thomas said that all TV News was lies. I called it propaganda. We recognized that we weren't that far apart and occasionally met for drinks. I even introduced him to his girlfriend.

I was too poor for Cara's tastes.

Then and even more so now.

Thomas clicked off the cellphone and slipped the mobile into his well-tailored suit. Times were tough in the USA, but he appeared prosperous.

For a second he seemed to look through me, then his eyes lit with recognition.

"Good to see you. When did you return from Thailand?" He took off the imported sunglasses to examine me better. "You have changed. How long has it been?"

"Seven years. How's Cara?" I wondered if they were still together. Her olive-skinned beauty possessed an Iberian love of laughter.

"As lovely and difficult as ever. Up in the country right now. I bought a farmhouse on 250 acres along the Walkill River. My property was the second largest in New Paltz after a New Age commune?s pig farm. She'd love to see you."

"And me her."

"Last winter I bought a building on North Moore Street and redid the top three floors. 7200 square-feet. I'm having a house-warming this Thursday. You should come. Is your family with you?"

"No," I explained they were staying behind without mentioning about my deportation.

The story was over for the moment. I was trying to start a new chapter. I showed Thomas a few photos. He casually excused himself by tapping his platinum Pate-Philippe.

"I've got to run, but here's my card. Bring a friend if you like."

"You want me to bring anything?"

"No, just don't be late or else you'll miss the lobster."

Thomas turned just in time to avoid a collision with a beautiful brunette. They knew each other. He didn't introduce me. They walked away, speaking in whispers. After several steps she started crying and laid her head on Thomas' shoulder.

I tailed them for several blocks.

They entered the brasserie Balthazaar, where the maitre de greeted Thomas like he was the new owner. I could have been jealous of his new loft, high-paying job, house in the country, fiancee, and the tears of his mistress, except I had learned long ago the envy of other people's triumphs was best suited to those who had lost all hope of achieving their own dreams and planned on attending the housewarming with a Maine native's appetite for lobster.

That Thursday Andrew accompanied me across the river from Brooklyn. He was an architect and I thought maybe Thomas could give him work. My house warming gift of a 19th Century iron was out of place in the loft on North Moore Street.

A Clifford Still hung over the river rock fireplace. Tropical flower bouquets sprouted from the corners of the enormous living room. A liveried bartender tended a well-stocked bar, while wild salmon and thin-shell lobster overwhelmed a long table. The display of wealth was well-mannered as Cara's silver sheath whispering across the teakwood floor.

I introduced her to Andrew. She kissed me on both cheeks and fingered the diamond solitaire hanging from the platinum chain around her elegant neck. Thomas had bought the D-Flawless diamond for an engagement ring and she sensed my concern.

"Don't worry, we're still engaged and better yet I'll persuade Thomas to buy me something extra special at Christmas. But enough about diamonds, I want you to meet someone."

"A friend?" I had offended hundreds of people during my twenty-five years in New York and prayed this introduction wasn't an attempted reconciliation.

"Only time will tell."

Andrew excused himself, seeing two friends. Manhattan's upper crust was a small world.

Cara led me across the room and unexpectedly introduced the brunette from the other day.

"This is Tatiana. She works in film and I've been telling her all about you."

"Like what?" I feared the worst.

"Your diving off a cliff at Lake Minnewaska.? Tatiana?s accent bespoke good schools.

"I didn't dive, I jumped." The crystalline waters had been irresistible.

"From a hundred feet." My friends tended to exaggerate my stories and I smiled guiltily. "More like fifty feet, but it was high."

"Cara says me you're a writer." Tatiana's clothes were worth more than my earnings last year.

I spieled out my latest novel's outline, after which she arched a plucked eyebrow accusingly, "You've pitched that story before."

Before I could plead innocence, Thomas joined us.

"So you two have met."

Tatiana glared in fear Cara and Thomas expected a liaison to birth from this encounter and departed to a gaggle of admirers. Winking conspiratorially Cara left for the kitchen and Thomas asked, "What did you think of Tatiana?"

"She is a goddess, but the other day I thought she was your mistress."

"Mistress?" He sneaked a peep into the kitchen, where his fiancee overlorded the help. "Cara would kill me, if she ever caught me with another woman."

"Why was she crying?"

"She bought her loft at the top of the curve and lost nearly 20% of value with the sub-prime crash. She's fucked like a lot of people."

"Guess we all can't be as lucky as you."

"We make our own luck. Like maybe you and her?"

Tatiana stood in the gentle light of the billiard room. Her devotees were obviously rich.

"She looks like she's hunting for a millionaire.

"You underestimate what you have to offer."

"Those men drive BMWs to the Hamptons. I'm a penniless failed writer, who sells diamonds for a living." I didn't even mention Sirinthep as an obstacle. My mia noi was half a world away.

"When we first met, you didn't care anything about money!"

"That crazy poet might have lost a little of his pride." I refrained from confessing my setback in Thailand. Desperation didn't sell well in this city.

"I haven't seen any twenty-year olds dive off the cliff at Lake Minnewaska."

"I jumped."

"Dive sounds better."

"But it isn't the truth."

"People want to hear the truth as much as they want to tell it." Thomas lifted his finger, as if to signal time-out. "You think I got where I am, because I told the truth?"

I examined the luxurious loft.

"Hard work maybe?"

"Shit, hard work is overrated! Maybe that's not true, because you can't grab the ring, if you're not in position, but the business, the loft, and the country house all hinged on a lie told in the right place at the right time." Thomas eyed the distance of the nearest guest. None of them needed to hear what he had to say and I was good at keeping secrets as long as I didn't drink too much.

"Almost sounds like a deal with the Devil."

"And I would have taken his offer. Ten years ago I got into a tight spot. I owed the bank $650,000."

"Ouch!" I was losing sleep over a five-figure debt incurred in Thailand.

"My only asset was that loft on 16th Street worth maybe $450,000. I told the bank I would sell it. They agreed to this deal, because my bankruptcy got them nothing. Unfortunately the best offer was for $650,000."

"Unfortunately?" I earned barely $30,000 last year. That amount of money was a fortune in Thailand.

"$650,000 settled my debt, but left me with nothing." He grabbed two champagne glasses from a passing waiter. "I had grown comfortable with the good life, so I decided to not tell the bank about the extra $200,000."

"The lie?" We clinked glasses and sipped at the champagne. It was vintage.

"Not the important one. My beautiful plan fell apart, because the bank informed the loft board about the sale. They demanded why I was giving them $450,000, when the sale was for $650,000." His eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to remember his exact words. "I said that a sale for $450,000 would lower the value of the other lofts in the building and never be approved by the board, so I lied about the $650,000."

"And they believed you?"

"Yes, I had never lied to them before. That $200,000 bought a small property, which I flipped and soon was back in the money. I haven't told anyone this. Not even Cara."

"So why did you tell me?" Too many grand families in America had sanitized the origins of their wealth, whether it be smuggling of opium, running whiskey or insider trading for me to regard Thomas as a criminal.

"Just so you understand the true reward of lying." He shrugged and said, " Excuse me, but I have to see to my other guests."

I wandered through the crowd, listening to the schemes of rich men. They turned their shoudlers at my approach. I walked into the billiard room, where Andrew spoke with several agitated men on how to best exact revenge from the perpetrators of banking crisis. A balding man in his fifties ventured with a grim grin, "We should confiscate their yachts."

"Who? The government. They'll only waste it on propping up Wall Street," a tall man in an exquisitely black Italian suit countered with what I deemed to be the voice of reason, until he added, "Better to let everyone fend for themselves."

"We do that and we'll have anarchy within a year." A third man with a frail goatee entered the fray. They had all been watching too much business news and Andrew asked me, "Can you come up with a solution?"

"Yes, have international write-off day. All debts canceled. Nothing belongs to any other than what they hold in their hands." I had written a script about this. HEAVEN ABOVE, which had been rejected by several studios. Now might be a better time for such a tale.

"Anarchy is not a solution. Things will get better."

The tall man in the black suit tsked, as if the White House had granted him the concession for selling foreclosed houses in Florida to the Chinese.

"But not this year. Gas will hit $4 this summer. The wars will go on without surrender or victory, but in the meanwhile let's drink champagne. Morituri te salutant."

"Those who are about to die, salute you." Andrew had studied Latin too, but the rest of the men's faces betrayed they thought I was mad and I wandered away onto the terrace to stare at the few stars dotting soft black sky.

None would have been visible, if the Trade Towers were standing together.

Someone put on U2's NEW YORK and a lump choked my throat. I had been born in Boston, yet loved this city and cried like a baby, until the paean-turned-dirge was replaced by Joni Mitchell's CARRIE. Something about her high-pitched soprano dispelled my sorrow, though not as much as the sight of Tatiana in the doorway with two champagne glasses.

"I just got something caught in my eyes."

She had the decency to buy my lie.

"There's a lot of that going around and there will for quite some time." She regarded me, almost as if someone had shed a revealing light about me to which I wasn't privy. "I just hope this crisis isn't forever."

"It's not the end of the world," I told my story of giving blood with a madman on 9/11. "If the insane can recover, then so can the sane. It only takes more time."

"How long do you know Thomas?" Her eyes were steely sapphires.

"We go back."

"He thinks a lot of you." She obviously valued his opinion.

"It wasn't always that way. One time we got into an argument."

"Over a girl?"

"No, over intrinsic value."

"Intrinsic value?" She frowned with disappointment.

"This old variety store in the East Village sold every necessity. The landlord upped the rent and it was replaced by a tee-shirt shop, which Thomas considered the natural course of economic evolution. I argued that no one had taken into consideration the intrinsic value of what the store gave the neighborhood. It got a little heated and people had to hold us back."

"Over a shop selling tee-shirts?"

"Yeah." Neither the tee-shirt shop nor a Blockbusters had succeeded in the space.

"You are sure it wasn't over a woman?"

"No." My soul-kissing his ex-girlfriend had been a joke.

"Men are stupid." She sneered, as if her half of the species was the only worthy cause for a fight.

"We were never friends, until I introduced him to Cara. They were meant for each other like Adam and Eve or Romeo and Juliet. I guess that's was my intrinsic value."

"Everyone has some." Her shadowed profile belonged in a museum and I almost reached out to make sure she was flesh, but she moved to the right like a mirage vanishing from a desert road, only she stopped a pace away and said, "I can't stay here any longer. You mind escorting me to a cab. It's just a cab ride. Nothing else."

"I can deal with nothing else." Her beauty canceled out her heartlessness.

Her suitors couldn't hide their puzzlement of her departure with me. I had no intention of solving the mystery, for it was never good to question the unexpected, especially if the end result was simply a handshake.

I waved good-bye to Andrew.

I had keys and this was going nowhere.

After all I was a married man.

As the elevator door closed, Cara lovingly embraced Thomas. "I didn't suspect that they would leave together.?

"I sort of cheated."

"You tell her he was the heir to a family fortune?"

"No, I said that he had the biggest____" Thomas whispered the rest of his confession into Cara's ear. She laughed raucously and several of the guests turned their heads with knitted brows of disapproval. Cara couldn't care less about what these gringos thought. "And does he?"

"Maybe." Thomas cocked his head to the side, as if it might be the truth.

"Why would you tell such a lie?"

"Because he looked so lonely without his family and I never repaid him for making me a happy man."

"Really?" Like every woman Cara had heard too many lies to believe a single word said by any man.

"Of course, but I still don't understand why he introduced us. It wasn't like he and I were good friends."

Cara pinched his cheek. "I told him to."

"Why?" Thomas asked with all ignorance a man can possess about a woman's wiles. Cara could have hurt his feeling, but she really did love him. "Because you had big feet. Big feet, big shoes. Big shoes____?

"I get the picture." Thomas stared down at his shoes. They didn't seem big.

"Would it have mattered, if they weren't big?"

"Of course not, my love." They didn't have to say another word on the subject. Both of them were happy with the way they were and no one could blame them. After all theirs was a perfect world and that was no lie.