Hey, for you conspiracy theorists out there…don’t forget that Mary E. Surratt, one of the Lincoln conspirators, was a Roman Catholic too.

So am I. Exhausted, that is. For over a year I’ve wanted nothing more than to work again at something where I don’t to be on my feet all day or travel an extreme distance up to New York. Jobs in Philly, as you know or perhaps don’t, are as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth. Whatever it is I’m selling, nobody’s buying or even getting free samples of the wares.

Since 2008 I haven’t been able to convince anyone to take much interest in me. I was under the magical spell of some illnesses, including Type II diabetes and neuropathic feet, that caused agony when I tried to walk.

So I went more and more broke. And now I’ve arrived. It’s called everything but holding out a tin cup at the 30th Street train station. It’s not a destination I looked forward to, anymore than I look forward to my own death. I’m still only 67, and I’m a bit too young to anticipate check-out time yet. My hotel room key still opens the door, at least for now. So I keep banging away at the door, hoping that Unemployment will extend the payments (need I say I do not trust Obama or Congress, regardless of the fine noises), or that I can hook up with some source of income to offset the Social Security that I get after my ex-wife takes half as her court-ordered due and proper.

As much as I hate having to walk, I hate idleness even  more. I hate endless days of watching television movies, regardless of how good they are. I wish I could find something to do that does not involve volunteering, which I’m even sure I could so because New Jersey wants proof that I was documented looking for remunerative work.

As tired as I am I have an autonomic nervous system that will not let me quit on myself. My life is worth more than that.

Smith himself created and survived two broken marriages. He was no saint. He was a alcoholic who also used amphetamines to stay awake through printing sessions that could last up to three days. He was a womanizer. In spite of it all, his eye and artistry did not fail him. For years I wanted to be Gene Smith minus the booze and pills. I never got there. I drank too much but had long before renounced my taste for “dry goods.” I also lost my eye. I know perfectly well that getting sober made me a worse photographer, but admitting my sickness and knowing I could never become the reincarnation of Eugene Smith gad a kit to do with getting me a bit more level-headed than I’d been before.

At the 1985 Smith retrospective the the Philadelphia Museum, people stopped in front of the Minamat photographs, wept, and gasped. I was one of them.

Personally speaking…In the autumn of 1963 I was a Junior at Hunter College in the NYC City University system. I was enrolled in an Esthetics course that I did not begin to get. It met from 1 to 2 PM. At 1:55 PM the door flew and some guy came into the room. He was wearing a lab coat. He lean over to the professor and whispered something that made the professor go pale. Someone said :Kennedy’s been shot down in Dallas! The guy I was sitting with said “Oh my God, I hope a Jew didn’t do it.” Funny how ethnicity always wins out….

We walked out into the sunshine like a pack of zombies and found companions on the steps of Student Hall and in the cafeteria. People were crying if they weren’t already numb. Someone I knew quit the student production because he refused to rehearse. The director told us we can’t do anyone any good sitting out there. She was right. What can you do to revive a dead man? But he quit anyway.

Then one of my fellow writers for the college newspaper took the D train all the way downtown and assembled the paper for Monday distribution. It was joyless and somber work but it had to be done and we had to do it.

And on Sunday my best friend and I went for a walk and someone came out of a bar and said that Lee Oswald had been killed. We had the same reaction: “Oh my God, now we’ll never know what really happened in Dallas.” We still don’t.

The marchers point their fingers at the great investment banks that pay their officers insanely high salaries and even more insane bonuses.

Without a history lesson from me, go to Wikipedia and look up “Pilgrimage of Grace,” an appalling episode during the English Reformation of Henry VIII that amounted to a popular uprising against the privileges of the nobility and the Church. Let’s say it didn’t end well for the people protesting. It’s stomach-turning to read about but it’s a valuable lesson about telling truth to power.

As far as the protests, I’m perhaps a bit too old to appreciate zombie masks and make-up, but I can understand signs protesting confiscatory student loans, the tax structure, and the salaries those people on the 38th floor pay themselves. I can appreciate joblessness because I’ve been out of my occupation since May 2008 and there is no door left to pry open.

I’m on a job board where there is a repeated question (I paraphrase): “Briefly describe how you would change the economy more quickly without a revolution.”

The answer is really simple: You can’t. This is not Revolution No. 9, it’s overthrow. I prefer it without force and violence, but I can’t stop it either. Nor would I wish to.  This country has fucked over students, seniors, working Americans who have lost their stake in our democracy. I’m not seeking a Communist state or Cuba (except for the cigars), just a recognition that whatever we’ve been doing, it isn’t working anymore, and when it works it’s work for fewer and fewer people.

I’ve begun hunting for yet another place to live. It’s dangerous here, to both my physical and emotional health. I can’t afford it: especially not since I lost any source of steady income. So I’m back to being in the hunt again. But this time I feel like the fox running from a pack of hounds. They’re not barking up the wrong tree, they’re barking at me and it’s not at all pleasant for them to have my scene.

I know I can’t afford to live around here anymore. and I don’t want to go back to New Jersey, which is even worse. No one can afford to help me. My Unemployment’s going to run out eventually and all I get from Social Security after the garnishment from The She Wolf is about $650 a month.

I don’t even like Pennsylvania. I want to go back to Upstate New York, where the prices are a bit better. IF I can find a place for me and for my cat, from I will not allow myself to be parted. That is too much to ask of anyone.

So what then do I do? Reconcile myself to a host of physical ailments and just take them? Probably. I have weaons with which to fight back. I can’t fight Social Security OR Ciy Hall.

I have paid a million times over for my sins but they never seem to be remitted, and there is no end to the payback. “When will it suffice?” Yeats asked, and like him, I don’t have an answer.

This morning, I heard this thrashing around outside the kitchen Tolstoy tore through the room leaving a jet trail behind him. He looked as though he was about to take off from McGuire Air Force Base. Why?

He had a supermarket plastic bag over his head. No, he was not in danger. He would not suffocate. He just didn’t like it very much. So he kept running around trying lose the damn thing. It stopped being funny and got a bit scary. I was afraid the cat might hurt himself. So I bent over to him and he slid out out of the market bag. Then he want and hid under the bed for an hour. All I saw of him was his tail flapping around. He was clearly scared out of his gourd.

After an hour of this, he came out and walked around the house, ate, the resumed his cat-life. It was amazingly funny until I realized this was my cat, and he was probably scared shitless. Poor doofus kitty….

Congratulations. You’re so wrong I can smell the decayed fecal matter clear from Pennsylvania.

Troy Davis didn’t die for my sins or for yours. He died perhaps for his own. The question is: did he actually kill the off-duty cop in the parking lot? We may never know that because Davis insisted he was not the shooter and even seven of the nine jurors recanted their original testimony and said “No, it wasn’t him.” Letters came in from people with nothing to prove and nothing in common except a faith in a supreme being, however that being is worshiped. Nothing helped. Last night Troy Davis was strapped to a gurney in the Georgia State Prison and an undisclosed dosage of Nembutal was pumped into his veins.

I’ve seen cats and a dog put down, and the vet always used phenobarbital–also a relatively simple chemical that stuns the central nervous system and kills the victim in seconds.

When did a human being become a cat or dog? I’ve seen cats die. I’ve seen a dog die. I’ve even seen a human being die. Except for the human, they went with dignity, easily and gratefully, because they were suffering and I believe they were truly outside their suffering bodies. Did they believe in God or some higher power? Does it matter? We as their human guardians and protectors claim to believe in such things. I happen to believe in such things because I’d like to believe I’m some flavor of Christian.

What about the people who put down Troy Davis like a piece of festering rubbish last night? What happens to the executioners who injected the chemicals? How do they carry home their knowledge to their wives and children? “How was work today, dad?” “Oh, nothing special. I helped kill a man.”

I don’t know if Davis was guilty. We’ll never know. I don’t know if the bastards who dragged James Byrd down a back road while he was chained to their pickup truck were truly guilty or were just racist scum. The two things are not necessarily the same. I don’t know if the piece of shit who shot a shop worker in the face was a victim of society as she became his victim. I don’t know if pretend Catholics like Sean Hannity know what the hell they’re talking about. Probably not.

How many more have to die to protect this republic from its citizens, good or bad? The worst among us need our prayers even more than the best. Catherine of Siena used to accompany condemned men to the scaffold and pray for them. That may be one of her several claims to sainthood: that nobody was so low that they were undeserving of redemption.

And I don’t want anyone killed in the name of Justice anymore. Not in my name. Or yours.

I hope my kids will forgive me but they play a part in this narrative, especially if gets fed to OpenSalon and Facebook. I don’t know how to turn off the feeds.

Anyway, in September 2001 I was working in lower Manhattan, about 1/2 mile north of the Trade Center. I was a grossly overpaid technical writer employed on a contract for a project that ostensibly could have gone on for years. As for the buildings themselves, they were just there: slabs of steel, glass, and marble with subway stations and a shopping mall under the structures. They weren’t an architectural marvel or an eyesore: they were just a big multi-building complex that nobody thought much about after the first few years. The high-speed elevators were awesome, and the view was to die for. But that was about it.

I got up as usual, at 5:15 on the morning of September 11, and took a 5:46 AM train from Long Branch, NJ to Hoboken. Same as always. Then I switched to the PATH train and rode it to the first stop, Christopher Street. The train would proceed north to West 33rd Street. I walked down Greenwich Street toward my job on Washington Street. I arrived a minute late at about 8:47 AM. Nobody can account for train schedules in New York or New Jersey, but nobody was taking attendance.

It was, as I recall it, one of the most beautiful mornings I could remember: there was a touch of a new autumn in the air. I went to my desk, booted my PC, and someone said “Someone just flew a plane into the North Tower of the Trade Center.” My immediate assumption–and I’m sure it was shared by others–was that some jerk was drunk or had too much coke in his system and had caused a terrible accident. A tragedy for someone but on a limited scale.

I should have known when I could not get to the CNN or Yahoo websites that this going to be a bit larger than a localized disaster.

Twenty minutes later the same man said “Oh shit. Someone flew a 767 into the South Tower. It’s on fire.” You don’t fly a Cessna into one building and a large Boeing passenger jet into the other. That’s when the enormity began to come home. Something horrible was happening and I didn’t know what it was.

Then I went outside.

What I did not see? I did not see anyone jumping out of windows. I did not see any collisions. I did not see the buildings cave in.

What did I see? I saw fire. A Biblical pillar of it. I saw smoke pouring upward looking as though an atomic bomb had gone off on Vesey Street. It was terrifying and I could not stop looking at it. It was a bit like watching a car accident or someone burning at the stake.

I talked to one of my colleagues. We tried to laugh. “I guess we’ll be doing disaster recover procedures forever.”  We headed back upstairs.

I called the older of my two sons. He was at Emerson College in Boston, working on an MA in broadcast journalism. “What do you think?” I asked him.

“About what?”

“Do you have the TV on?” I asked.

When he said no I told him to go switch it on.  A few seconds later he was back and was almost incoherent with anger.

“Welcome to World War III” I said. Well, I spoke too soon but it did not feel that way at the time. I assured him I was okay–I had absolutely no idea whether that was true–and found an email from  his brother, who was an undergraduate at Goucher in Towson, MD. “Dad, I just put on the TV.  Are you OK? What the fuck is going on?”

I got an outside dial tone on the first try–a miracle in itself–and there he was.

“I’m okay,” I said, having no idea whether was was true. “Just tell your mother not to try to collect on the insurance yet. I doubt I’m gonna get off the Island today. The Army or someone has sealed off all the train tunnels and harbor exits. I have no place to sleep except a church or public shelter. I’ll be okay.”

My insides were churning with rage. Truthfully I wanted to kill every Muslim who ever lived. I assume that by now Al Qaeda had taken credit for what it had done to us.

I told my young son “Good luck.”

He replied “Daddy, I love you.”

I told him I loved (and love) him.

I hung up and broke down. We are not an emotionally demonstrative family but that did it for me. Ben had given me a gift: He erased hatred from me and replaced it with love for him and his brother. He got me through the rest of the day. Whether or not I got home was of less moment than the fact I had reestablished an emotional connection to my kids, who both had been wounded by their parents’ divorce.

I went outside again. The cell phone services to Jersey were hosed. No signal, no nothing. The buildings were still afire. At about 12:45 the fire department told everyone to vacate the premises and walk north. Not south, not west into the river, not east. Just due north.

I still had no clue about how I would get home or if I would at all. Everything faded into insignificance. I just had to walk my way north up Hudson Street to Penn Station to see what would happen. The task was small and easy.

When I made it to 31st Street I found the Capuchin Franciscan church. A monk took one look at me and said “You’ve seen something.”

And I told the priest what I’d seen. I told him I did not know why I could or would believe in a God who would do what I saw that morning. He said it was not God, it was sick men who need our prayers as we need the prayers of one another. I went into the rest of the Mass but did not receive the Sacrament.

And then I crossed the street to Penn Station just as the gates were open. That indeed felt like a miracle. All phone calls were free that day, so I phoned the woman I was living with and said “I’m in the train, I’m on the way home!” It took a bit longer than we expected. As in almost an hour more. But at Long Branch–my stop–a man stood up and embraced the woman who met him at the train. “I’m alive!” he exclaimed. He was acknowledging a gift. I had to do the same. I was alive.

I would have several days to go through fear-filled nights, through nightmares and memories of what I called mobiles of Hell sweeping out of the skies. But I remember most of all taking our dog for a walk. It was dark and the dog needed to go out. Then I realized how quiet it was. There was no air traffic. We lived at the confluence of LaGuardia, Newark, and Kennedy airports but there was no sound…except for the jet trail from one lone fighter-bomber in a steep climb away from McGuire Air Force Base, headed somewhat East.

ZERO PLUS, 9/11/01

What I did not do:

Drink.  Eat.
Not even cry.

What I did:

Stagger like a drunk
stagger still
toward the words I can gnaw
fit in my mouth

become the homeless culture-mutt who is
Armenian     Jewish     Polish     Irish
Greek    Palestinian     Anabaptist     Ba’hai
Vietnamese     Chinese     Japanese     Afghan
yes     even that
gnawed alive by war

Welcome home.

2

What I did:

walked north on Washington Street,
Lot’s wife looking backward
at the column of smoke.

Hudson Street passed the White Horse
where Dylan Thomas fell off a barstool
8th Avenue street for which
God can make no excuse except
a planning accident    the rubber broke

It is today Poe’s Haunted Palace
laughing people in and out of Ray’s Pizza
jammed bars and restaurants
but not subways
but no smiles
but quiet     but frantic

What I did:

talked to a friar
who saw through my skin
transparent

What I did not do:

tell the truth to him
about the ways of God
justified to man

fuck them
I saw people die

3

What I did not do:

Curse Him
lose trust
get drunk
give up
talk on a cell phone
use a payphone
fuck a stranger
die
want to die
pity myself
pity even the dead

What I did:

pray for sleep
pray for home
pray to accept

What I did:

find a train
curse it for being too slow
hear a man say “I’m alive”
know that I am

Wonder why

What I did not do:

Stop wondering.

What I did:

Start weeping.

What I did not do:

Stop.

KTW/10-30-01