Photo by James Leggate

The campus of SUNY New Paltz is no stranger to nature. Located in the Shawangunk Mountain region and next to the Wallkill River, New Paltz is swarming with squirrels, deer, fish, bears and geese. In fact, SUNY New Paltz has its own pond that runs straight through the heart of campus housing. The Gunk, as the students call it, is home to over six species of ducks and geese.

Students and faculty appreciate the beauty of the pond and consider the geese that nest there a special part of the campus atmosphere. Other students can’t stand their noisiness, their aggressive nature, and the poop they leave behind. While student opinions remain split, administrative officials, like Brian Pine, director of facilities operations and maintenance, investigate the health threats that the geese pose and weigh options for their removal from campus.

Click here to listen to “Geese Get the Boot”

Reported and produced by Kim Plummer and Emily Atkin

]]> http://www2.newpaltz.edu/little-rebellion/?feed=rss2&p=2611 0 http://www2.newpaltz.edu/little-rebellion/?p=2594 http://www2.newpaltz.edu/little-rebellion/?p=2594#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:50:35 +0000 Pierce Lydon http://www2.newpaltz.edu/little-rebellion/?p=2594

Photo courtesy of Dr. Steven Leibo

You expel 20.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. You’re not the only one. So does every other person in the United States. That’s approximately 6,218,772,000 tons. That number, in part, explains why the United States is responsible for 30.3% of the global contribution to global warming.

On Oct. 19, the SUNY New Paltz Environmental Task Force brought Dr. Steven Leibo to campus to speak about climate change. He provided a continuation and updated look at Al Gore’s award-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Leibo was trained by Gore and a team of scientists for this project. He is a professor of international politics at The Sage Colleges and a commentator on WAMC’s “International Affairs.”

Through the use of a slide show, Leibo showed the inevitable effects of our current environmental habits. Glacial earthquakes have increased fourfold since 1993 and for every meter of sea level increase approximately 100 million people will be displaced.

Leibo was raised in the Maldives, a small island nation in the Indian Ocean. The Maldives is slowly seeing its homes sink due to the rising sea levels, resultant of global warming. If our current levels of energy consumption do not yield, some scientists say the Maldives will be completely underwater by 2010.

One of the biggest challenges in trying to affect climate change and fight this invisible monster is getting people involved.

“It is a challenge so new, so different from anything we have faced in the past. It is not a subject people seem capable of easily grasping,” said Leibo. “But also the very real fact that unlike most of the world, the people of the United States were subjected to a very well organized, very well financed professional campaign to confuse us and thus avoid having to do anything about this.”

The talk was old hat for those already familiar with the crisis facing our planet, but it was meant to inform and hopefully open the eyes of some global warming naysayers.

“Global warming deniers will never be satisfied because their claims are politically motivated and not scientifically based. Any serious scientist with expertise in this area recognizes that climate change is real and that its impacts could be devastating to human society and to ecosystems,” said Obach. “The denial machine is funded by corporate powers that have an interest to delaying or preventing action on climate change because some of those measures may threaten their profitability.”

But what is the solution to these overwhelming environmental problems? Leibo says, “Repower America.” Better standards of energy efficiency plus renewable energy sources and a unified national grid will equal 100 percent clean electricity.

“Given the upcoming Copehhagen talks and the legislation in the U.S. Congress being developed right now, [citizens can] make sure that they inform their representatives that this is critical,” said Leibo.

SUNY New Paltz professor and head of the Environmental Task Force, Brian Obach expressed a similar opinion.

“…There are also groups like NYPIRG (New York Public Interest Research Group) and Students for Sustainable Agriculture who are also working on different dimensions of this issue. The main thing is that people need to be involved and politically engaged,” said Obach. “Problems of this scale can only be addressed through policy and legislation. Students can join these groups and write letters and lobby and demonstrate and call their representatives and demand policy changes.”

The Honorable Al Gore, Nobel Laureate and best-selling author, gives the keynote address at Greenbuild, the U.S. Green Building Council’s annual conference and trade show in Phoenix in mid-November. Gore engaged the audience of nearly 20,000 at Chase Field with updated climate change data from his new book, Our Choice; A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, peppered with humorous anecdotes and one-liners. Because buildings account for nearly 38 percent of the country’s carbon emissions, and this was, after all, a sustainable building conference, Gore was perhaps preaching to the choir. Nevertheless, his message was clear: each of us has a responsibility to make better choices in our lives, he said.

]]> http://www2.newpaltz.edu/little-rebellion/?feed=rss2&p=2594 0 http://www2.newpaltz.edu/little-rebellion/?p=2589 http://www2.newpaltz.edu/little-rebellion/?p=2589#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:40:53 +0000 Liz Cross http://www2.newpaltz.edu/little-rebellion/?p=2589

"Fuel" director Josh Tickell

Oil.

This is the substance we as a nation are addicted to. We’ve even started a war over it. Josh Tickell does an amazing job at illustrating this in his documentary “Fuel.”

The documentary has won various film awards but most notably, one at the Sundance Film Festival for the Best Documentary Audience Award in 2008.

The introduction was genius.

Tickell drove to different fast food restaurants trying to collect their used vegetable oils. It was an automatic question-raiser – Why was he asking for used vegetable oil? To fuel his biodiesel powered “Veggie Van.” It was a great attention grabber and then he moved to the actual point of the documentary.

The documentary does a lot of things. It promotes the use of biodiesel fuels and electric cars. Furthermore, it goes into the consequences we’re going to face once we run out of oil. More importantly, it explains how this will affect the environment. The documentary doesn’t do this like a classic, boring science movie, but has emotional elements that captivate the audience and force you to form a connection to Tickell.

From there we see the story of Tickell and why he cares so much about the environment and gasoline issues. In order to gain said connection with Tickell as the narrator, it was necessary to hear part of his life in the documentary. He left Australia as a child to move to New Orleans where his mother’s family was originally from.

He came back to a place where there was no land for him and his brother to play on and they lived down the street from oil producing companies. As we find out quickly, New Orleans is one of the largest oil producers in the country. These companies were affecting not only the environment but the area in which they resided has been given the nickname “Cancer Alley” because of all the biological effects the plants have had on the people living in the area. His own mother has had nine miscarriages.

This led to Tickell’s eventual road trip in 1997 with his “Veggie Van,” and he began filming “Fuel.”

Tickell has quite a few monologues in the beginning to share his personal story, which some would view as boring, but because the camera did not just focus on him speaking it was easy to keep the audience’s attention. The camera panned to different animations and photos regarding all the topics he spoke about. They ranged anywhere from pictures of his childhood and college years to video clips of media footage. One could argue that this would be even more distracting and would take away from what Tickell was actually saying, but it only added to the tone and depth of the film.

The film seemed to run a little long. It’s only logged at a little under two hours but toward the end it felt like it was going onto three instead. Some of the more repetitive cinematography could’ve been cut to stop wandering minds and it still would’ve had the same dizzying effects on viewers. It gave a real sense of urgency for the actions that we need to take, such as changing over to biodiesel fueled vehicles (or the Algaeus, a car they developed that’s the first electric hybrid that’s powered by algae fuel!), carpooling, taking public transportation, and anything we can do to help the environment.

With stars and starlets such as Woody Harrelson and Julia Roberts to aid his campaign against gasoline, Tickell definitely has a one up on the competition to get the attention of the country and what it’s in for in coming years.

Tickell and crew plan to do college tours around the country and are making a suitable green curriculum for students. They will feature a free 35 minute clip of “Fuel,” as a classroom aid.

Click to watch the trailer for Fuel.

Death Row by Aimee Craze

Executioners struggled unsuccessfully to find a vein to lethally inject Romell Broom.

The team was so inadequate when it came to lethally injecting Broom that they needed to take a “break” after two hours of failed efforts, said Broom’s attorney Adele Shank.

If it sounds cruel and unusual, that’s because it’s torture.

Broom’s lawyers say that his first execution attempt was cruel and unusual punishment. They say executing him now would result in losing evidence for a broader lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Ohio’s lethal injection procedure.

The 8th Amendment defends against cruel and unusual punishment, but it’s a broad term that’s subjective. This subjectivity was acknowledged in Furman v. Georgia, when Justice Brennan introduced a four-part test for defining cruel and unusual punishment.

One, punishment is cruel and unusual when it degrades human dignity by its severity.

It’s true that capital punishment has evolved since crucifixion, impalement and boiling to death.

But, let’s be serious. The idea itself is hypocritical.

The evolution of capital punishment?

There’s no evolution to be had. It’s primal and inhumane. It’s an assault on humanity—to decide which prisoners live on in jail and which ones die by whichever prescribed method seems to tip-toe around the label “cruel and unusual.”

How did lethal injection do it anyway?

Those best qualified to carry out a lethal injection are medical professionals, but to execute is in direct conflict with ethical values. When speaking with The New York Times, Dr. Jonathan I. Groner, a professor of medicine at Ohio State University, termed it the Hipprocratic paradox.

Responsibility for lethal injections falls on the shoulders of execution teams. These teams receive training in injecting and IV use but still might not be prepared for obese prisoners or prisoners whose veins have been destroyed by drug use. Their inadequacy tortures prisoners, like Romell Broom, for up to two hours: waiting to be killed.

More bothersome than staff quality, is that components of the lethal injection cocktail are considered inhumane when euthanizing animals.

According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, paralyzing agents like pancuronium bromide, used in lethal injections, are inhumane because of their potential for masking pain. Yet in Tennessee and Texas where pancuronium bromide is banned for use on animals, it is still used to lethally inject prisoners.

Two, a punishment is cruel and unusual when inflicted in an arbitrary fashion.

While death penalty sentencing isn’t wholly arbitrary, there’s enough arbitrary factors contributing to sentencing that it has become a problem.

The Death Penalty Information Center, reported that in states that reviewed the relationship between race and capital punishment, that 96 percent of the states show a pattern of discrimination based on the race of defendants, victims or both.

Statistics have proven too frequently that sentencing standards fail to guide jurors proficiently in decisions of capital punishment. Jurors fall back on prejudice notions, conscious or not, to determine which criminals are the worst and which victims are most deserving of sympathy.

Three, a punishment is cruel and unusual if clearly and totally rejected throughout society.

If there ever were such a thing as humanity in the evolution of the death penalty, I guess we’ve done it.

We have evolved from people who took part in executions as if it were sport. And have transformed to be a culture that would prefer to watch those we deem perpetrators die silently paralyzed in what appears to be a pleasantly comatose state.

That doesn’t make much sense.

The only evolutionary step left for the death penalty is abolition.

And the rest of our global community has taken that step.

According to Amnesty International, more than two-thirds of the countries in the world, 137 nations, have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice. This includes nations like France, Canada and Great Britain, to name a few.

Capital punishment is all but totally rejected throughout society.

Four, punishment is cruel and unusual if it’s patently unnecessary.

As if those points weren’t enough, there are more cost effective options that promote a sense of humanity and community, rather than promoting division and discrimination.

Capital punishment is expensive.

In July 2008, California’s Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice said that their current justice system cost $137 million per year, but it would cost only $11.5 million for a system without the death penalty.

According to the commission, there are additional hearings and appeals to ensure that each inmate is entitled to a fair trial. In California, death row inmates cost the state $90,000 per inmate each year. In 2008, they had a death row population of 670 inmates, costing the state $63.3 million each year.

Another study from the Death Penalty Information Center found that death penalty cases cost an average of $10 million or more annually than life sentences.

Couldn’t that money be better spent on crime prevention or mental health treatment? Or education? Or rehabilitation?

Couldn’t it be spent better on anything other than the botched execution of Romell Broom?

Sure, you can’t apply Justice Brennan’s concepts absolutely to capital punishment. But you can certainly use it as a Litmus test, and that’s telling enough.

It’s cruel and unusual or it’s not. There’s no half-way or in between on this issue.

Do we really want to be a society where we sentence people to punishment that’s ¾ cruel and unusual?

by James Leggate

It’s a peaceful Sunday afternoon on the quad. Hungover students are beginning to slowly wake. Suddenly, the calm is interrupted by shouts and running feet as the two groups of medieval fantasy adventurers begin a fight over territory.

Within a few minutes, the conflict is over. The dead stand back up and they prepare for the next round.

Sound unusual? Well, it is. It’s called “live action role-playing,” or LARP, and it’s a new club started by third-year student Lauren Coluccio and second-year student Claire Lines. They use homemade imitation weapons called “boffers” built from PVC pipe, foam and lots of duct tape. Some of the LARPers have their own costumes and weapons, but others show up in civilian clothes and borrow their arms from the club.

According to Coluccio, who is dressed in a cape and elf ears, students on campus have had varied responses to the group.

“Usually people just stare at us and are like, ‘what are they doing?’ But sometimes people just get in there,” Coluccio said, noting one specific incident in which a student dressed as a Jedi from “Star Wars” approached her mid-battle and hit her with a plastic lightsaber.

LARPing has been gaining popularity recently after being exposed to the public in the 2008 movie “Role Models,” which depicts large-scale LARP battles.

The SUNY New Paltz LARP club, however, only boasts about eight regular members. Coluccio says the club would ideally like to be able to hold a larger event.

One of the problems the club faces is the high costs associated with LARPing. Lines referenced a Web site which sells professionally-made boffers which range from $60 and higher.

“They look really great but they cost more than we can afford,” she said.

However, Coluccio and Lines have recently figured out the costs of creating their boffers and are making them available to purchase to other local LARPers. The cheapest option is a dagger for $5. A six-foot William Wallace-style claymore with engraving would cost $19.50.

Coluccio says she has big plans for the club. After applying for approval from the Student Association next semester, she hopes to get funding for a trip to participate in a larger LARP in New Jersey.

Lines, however, is less enthusiastic.

“Do I really want to go on a road trip with the LARPers for three hours? I’m not sure.”

by Sarah Calandra Fine

Eileen Sackman has been setting fires forever.

At midnight on Friday, Oct. 23, the small shack containing the wood firing kiln on the campus of SUNY New Paltz was covered in a blue tarp as rain poured down on the six students watching their work transform within the intense 2,350 degree heat.

The ancient craft of wood firing, or anagama, has been performed in Asian cultures since the fifth century.

In today’s high-tech world, the primitive art form of wood firing allows current ceramics students to employ an ancient technology right on their own campus. These students at SUNY New Paltz have an intimate connection to the kiln.

Twenty-nine-year-old Eileen Sackman sat by the glowing kiln with her fellow potters blasting “Oh You Pretty Things” by David Bowie. Chunks of thick melted green and brown ash molded to the clay. Sections of red and orange were created on the surface when the blistering flames whipped around the pots.

“I have been a pyromaniac my entire life,” Sackman said.

Sackman has been attending school for the past eight years to master the world of ceramics. Currently, she is getting her master’s degree in ceramics from SUNY New Paltz.

“I used to be really introverted and anti-social and ceramics completely changed my life,” Sackman said. “It made me able to talk to people about something I felt passionate about.”

She was first introduced to wood firing while she was getting her undergraduate degree at Nassau Community College.

“A professor I met at Nassau, Bill Shalalies, became one of my closest friends,” Sackman said. “He built his own wood firing kiln and he would only invite specific people to fire with him.”

Shalalies immersed Sackman in the experience of wood firing. Each time she would do another wood fire with Shalalies, she would be given more responsibility.

“He was the only one ever allowed to do anything during a firing, and then one day he comes out of the kiln and hands me the knee pads and says go in and do the next section,” Sackman said. “I was shitting myself because it was so intense.”

The process of wood firing is entirely natural. The two materials needed, clay and trees, come from the same earth and contain the same elements. When the fire in the kiln reaches 2,350 degrees Fahrenheit, the wood ash transforms into glass that becomes a glaze for the clay.

“The colors and effects are all natural,” Sackman said. “How do you not get blown away by something like that? It makes you think that scientifically we are all connected.”

The process of loading a wood fire kiln is an art form unto itself.

“Loading a kiln is like a puzzle,” Sackman said. “You have to think about what will happen during the firing. You can literally create designs by how you stack the work in the kiln.”

The wood fire kiln on the New Paltz campus is located behind the South Classroom Building. Six years ago, a former ceramics student helped to build the kiln, donating approximately $1,500 of his own money. The kiln has been used ever since by ceramics students on campus.

Throughout the process of a wood firing, someone has to be watching the kiln 24 hours a day.

Sackman is so fascinated with the process that when she begins a wood fire on campus, she barely sleeps for the entire three days it takes to complete the process.

“I was there the whole time, dude there is no way I can do something else, I couldn’t even sleep,” Sackman said. “If a wood firing is happening I am there.”

For many ceramics students, it is a priceless experience to be able to follow their work from the point of creation, through the entire transformation of firing.

For fourth-year student, Dave Stieglitz, this was the first year he was able to participate in the firing.

Stieglitz remembers one of his most prized memories of the wood firing.

“There was one point where we opened the little door to the kiln and we noticed that the fire was literally breathing. We left the door open just to watch,” Stieglitz said. “Leaving the door open on the kiln isn’t good for the firing but we did it anyway because it was just so beautiful.”

Third-year ceramics major, Kelly O’Sullivan, had no work in the wood fire but still took on some over night shifts at the kiln, from midnight to 6 a.m.

“I love the process so much that even if I don’t put any work in the wood fire, I still go and stay all night,” O’Sullivan said. “Just to watch.”

Sackman sat there in her Hendrix T-shirt, with one dreadlock hanging in front of her face and a tattoo of flames crawling up her ankle while she pondered her future.

“All I want to be able to do is make ceramics every day and have enough money to live. That’s all I want to do,” Sackman said.

photo credit: iboy_daniel

Oh, God.

Did I really just do that? Did I really just hand in a job application at McDonald’s?

For a moment I picture myself hopping over that counter and strangling anyone in my way to get that piece of paper back.

I reach for the door, but then stop. I can’t leave this place without that stupid piece of paper. I take cautious steps toward the cashier.

“Did you need help with anything else?” she asks politely.

I want to say, “Yes. Yes, I do. I really need that application back. See, it’s all just a big joke, ha ha ha.” But instead I find myself saying, “Yeah, actually, can I get medium fries please?”

This happened two weeks ago, too. I walked inside determined to get an application. As I approached the counter, confident in my application-asking abilities, I blurted out, “So, um, can you do me a favor? Sorry. I’m really nervous…can I…can I have . . . a number 10, please?” I enter with the intentions of leaving with an application and end up leaving with a 10-piece Chicken McNuggets and a Coke.

As I munched on my “made with white meat” nuggets, I wondered how I could have gotten so frazzled. This is just a journalism assignment. This is my contribution to the world of literary journalism. This should have been a piece of cake.

Move over, Stephen Crane. This is a new type of experiment in misery.

*******

Out of all the ideas that might come to mind for a journalism assignment, how did I wrap my head around working at McDonalds? First off, I don’t do uniforms. Long ago I decided that no uniform would be in my future. I also hate working with food. I feel like I’m going to be the one who gives half the country food poisoning. Paranoid? Definitely. Feasible? Absolutely.

Most importantly, I swore to myself that I would never work in fast food. I would have to kill myself if I had to ask someone I knew,“Would you like fries with that?”

*******

The night I finally picked up my application, I spent what felt like hours just staring at it. I finally picked up a pen.

Before that pen hit the paper, I thought about the possibility of making it all up. But then I remembered the “legal” obligation of telling the truth – the requirement to sign your name at the bottom and swear you didn’t forge an identity. As much fun as it might sound to create a new persona, I suddenly imagined myself somehow jailed for lying on a McDonald’s application. Coming out of my daydream, I found myself writing my real name.

Availability. Hmmm, well, my weekends can be kissed goodbye. That’s a great college story to tell: my friends are all out drinking every weekend, and I’m stuck in a uniform asking people if they want fries with that.

Employment history. This is the part where I get cocky. I think about how this is a downgrade from even my previous crappy part-time jobs. Barnes & Noble, Head Cashier, counting deposits worth a couple thousand dollars. Is that not enough for you? Two years of tutoring, executive board positions that make a kick-ass resume. Is that enough for you? Am I qualified enough to serve Big Macs yet?

Oh, boy. Education. Did you know they ask for your grade point average? Can you not be too stupid to work at McDonald’s? What will that do to my ego if they can’t hire me because my GPA isn’t up to their standards? Maybe I should stop filling this out. I don’t think I could take this type of rejection.

Oh, no. Race. I hate filling this part out. I never know what to put. Sure, I’m a white female, but I’m also one-eighth Mexican. There isn’t a box for people who are one-eighth Mexican. I’m either Latino or I’m not. I feel like I’m lying if I put I’m Latino, so I move away from that box in my effort to keep telling the truth about myself.

*******

Hunter S. Thompson was on a constant search for the American Dream. With this assignment, I went on a hunt for it myself. I knew from the moment I committed to this idea, things wouldn’t work out how I imagined.

I haven’t heard back from McDonald’s yet. I’m getting worried. Maybe I didn’t take this seriously enough. I’m beginning to feel like I’ve lost sight of my initial goal. To write a story about working a minimum wage job. About how terrible it feels to do unskilled work. And how easy it is to overlook the people who do it. I’ve been in their place, but at a corporate bookstore, chit-chatting about books while wearing the enforced business casual attire. On the outside, it looks so much better, like I’m on the track to the good life. On the inside, it’s the same. Swap the button down shirt and pressed pants for a hat and apron, a book for a Big Mac.

*******

This whole assignment was a piece of cake until my first attempt at getting an application. I walked into McDonalds ready to try something new, a real journalism assignment. My confidence escaped me when I saw my boss behind the counter, taking orders. I tried to run out of there without her seeing me, but of course she noticed me.

“Hey, I never knew you worked here,” I say, not knowing what else to say.

“Yea I got the job here once I left the TV Station,” she says. “What can I get for you today?”

When I didn’t think things could get any worse, the words, “Are you guys hiring?” or anything similar, wouldn’t form in my mouth. I just stood there, staring at her for what seemed like hours.

Finally I quickly lied and told her I just wanted to interview some McDonald’s workers for a piece I’m working on, I almost set up a fake interview time with her before I lied, said I had to run, and made a break for the door.

Not only did I leave without an application, but I left feeling like I had done something horribly wrong. That awkward exchange of words made me realize I didn’t want to be in her shoes. I didn’t want people in my classes to talk about me as that girl who works in a McDonald’s. I was embarrassed for my friend, for my former boss. I can’t deal with that type of embarrassment on a daily basis.

*******

Let me be honest for a least a minute here. We can all sit back and pretend like we don’t judge people because of where they live or where they work, but we’d just be lying.

I went to find the American Dream and I found the antithesis of it. True, there is nothing inherently wrong with working at McDonald’s; I can guarantee that almost every employee there currently has more money in their bank accounts than I do. Yet, I still walk into a McDonald’s and think I’m better than the people working behind the counter, that I deserve more than a hat and apron.

My attempt at an epiphany has backfired on me. All I’ve found out from this little experiment is that I’m an asshole, and guess what, you probably are one, too. But that’s OK. We’re trained to be assholes.

We are trained to believe that we are special, we can do anything if we put our mind to it. This is great in theory, until you start believing that you are more special than someone else. It isn’t that you look down upon McDonald’s employees, it is just that you work harder than they do, therefore you deserve more. Employment isn’t just about getting a steady paycheck and being able to support yourself, it is about how many figures your paycheck is. Life isn’t about knowing that everyone else is special, it is about making yourself believe you are more special than anyone else. Oh, the ambiguity of the American Dream.

Confused? Alright, let me just lay it out there for everyone. The American Dream never existed; it is a load of shit. It is just a way for parents and teachers to make kids feel special – that if you dream it, you can do it. Well, congratulations, you’ve been fed bullshit all your lives.

The American Dream isn’t anything else but a ploy to make you think you’re better than someone else. While you live in your pretty house with your white picket fence, picking up McDonald’s for your 2.5 children because you’re too busy being successful, you’re judging your server. Trying to figure out their back story, figuring out what made them so lazy that they ended up here instead of living the good life. Blame it on drugs.

Think about that when you’re chowing down on your Chicken McNuggets. Doesn’t taste so good, does it?

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Suswar

Anthony Chanza sits in his apartment on Greene Avenue in Ridgewood, on a February afternoon. His parents and brother are out. He has class in four hours at CUNY Baruch.

His apartment is a one-floor walkup. The vestibule has yellowing walls. His family is the only tenant and their landlord lives downstairs.

Anthony is playing some post-apocalyptic war game at full volume. Three long boxes of comic books sit under his desk. He hears the front door open downstairs and thinks nothing of it. The landlord frequently has “visitors.”

CRASH!

Anthony shuts everything off and freezes. He listens. He cracks the door to his apartment and peeks down the stairs. He could really use Spiderman today.

More crashes.

He goes back inside, picks up the phone and calls 911. He reports a fight. All the while, he fears for his own life.

He looks out the front window for the cops. Nothing.

A few minutes later, an unidentifiable man leaves through the landlord’s window and walks off into the neighborhood.

The police arrive.

Anthony goes down the stairs. Blood is splattered in the vestibule.

The police get into the landlord’s apartment. The landlord is bleeding out on the floor. He dies before the paramedics arrive. A bloody shovel is at his side.

The police bring Anthony outside. He has no shoes on. His family gets home. His parents are scared. He is too.

The circus rolls in. Clowns with tape recorders and video cameras swarm the area.

“What happened? Whodunnit? Why?”

They will call it a “tenant-landlord dispute” on the 6 o’clock news.

The phone rings off the hook for the next week.

“What happened? Whodunnit? Why?”

Anthony is sick. The blood is still in the vestibule. Now it’s turning black.

Over the next two weeks, Anthony only leaves his house to withdraw from school or go to work.

He gives his two weeks’ notice. He gets fired anyway.

**********

I ask Anthony to go out one night. There’s a punk show in Brooklyn. We end up outside, not watching the bands, just talking. It’s been three weeks since the killing.

“I’m just glad that I was there. That my mom didn’t come home to that, you know?” He’s all nerves. It’s too bad he doesn’t smoke. This would be a perfect time for it. “Just wish there was something that I could’ve done.”

“You can’t beat yourself up for it. You didn’t know if that guy was a professional killer or anything.”

“Dude, he used a shovel.”

“Yeah, but you never know. Maybe he’s an expert with a shovel.” I sat on the back bumper of a van. “I mean you said he was a bad guy. Gambling debts? Hookers? Maybe he just got what was coming.”

“Does anyone deserve to die though?

“No. But better him than you. You did everything you could. You called the police. They got there too late. But you did your civil duty.”

“I guess. I just wish I could have done something.”

******

His family finds a new apartment around the block. This time their landlord is not an elderly Italian man.

He is Pete Traina, a trained martial artist who has been bestowed the honorary title of “Shihan,” or master instructor. His building is surrounded by a wrought iron fence on one side. Behind the fence, wizards and dragons guard the property. A sign exclaims, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!” He’s been in Bruce Lee movies.

I stop by the apartment on my way home from Brooklyn. Anthony comes down to let me in. He turns the lock, the bolts sliding begrudgingly into the door.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

I follow him to his new place. The hallway is lit by one light bulb and before the stairs there is a huge padlock on one of the doors.

“Don’t worry about that.” Anthony caught me staring at it. “It’s just the door to the deli next to us.”

We walk all the way up to the top of the stairs. The landing is covered in potted ferns. He unlocks the door. His mom is on the computer. We are all in the kitchen. She turns toward us.

“Oh, hi Pierce. How are you?” I don’t have a chance to answer. “Anthony, did you shut the light off downstairs?”

“Ah. No, I forgot. Gimme a sec. My room is the last one. You can wait in there.” He runs downstairs.

The apartment is almost one continuous room. After the kitchen/computer room, there is a makeshift living room followed by Anthony’s parents’ bedroom. Anthony’s room is last. It is by far the biggest room but he shares it with his little brother. It’s the only room besides the bathroom that has a door. Their beds are mattresses on the floor. This place is not big enough for four people.

Anthony comes back upstairs. His mom lectures him. I wait and turn on the TV.

“Is the light being on such a big deal?” I ask as he walks in.

“Yeah kind of. Our new landlord has a lot of rules. We’re not allowed to have overnight guests and we have to be careful about leaving lights on and doors unlocked.”

He slouches in his desk chair. The same three long boxes of comics are under the desk. Video games and clothes are scattered around the floor. He perks up a bit.

“Did I tell you that I got a job?”

“Nope. What is it?”

“I’m working at a fire security company. Taking phone calls and stuff. I guess it’ll be pretty easy. 9 to 5, Monday through Friday.”

“That’s killer, man. Gives you something to do since you don’t have school anymore.” I’m a little underwhelmed. A fire security company? He’s 20 years old. This is a guy I planned on taking over the world with. That’s what best friends are for. You know, do it all, see the world, hang out on beaches with pretty girls while getting rich off the comic book we wrote that is getting made into a movie. You know, no worries. But right now? A fire security company? “When are you going back to school?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You have to, man. What else are you going to do?”

“Right now, I’m gonna play some games. Wanna play?” He offers me a controller. He’s a little ticked off.

“Sure.” I take it.

“I just don’t want to go back to school if I don’t know what I want to do. It’s a waste of time.”

Yeah, that’s why he works a dead end job.

In a few months, we’ll probably have the same conversation.

The game flickers on. “Street Fighter.” One of the characters could be his landlord.

I give up.