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Butch did not start the riot.

I know, because when the riot began I was sitting right next to Butch, in the basement cafeteria of the Third Street Mens Shelter.

It was August and the city was miserable hot. I was just picking at my tray of food when a Chinese man stood up at the far end of our table and yelled something that sounded like, "Gung-ho!"

Another Chinese man stood up across from him. Both wore sleeveless tee shirts and striped boxer shorts and rubber sandals. They looked like brothers.

The first one pointed at the second one, his hand shaking with rage. "Two wacka dong!"

The other crossed his arms over his chest. "Ling-cod-dung!"

I heard Butch say, "Uh-oh."

We both watched as the first Chinese man swept up a bowl of green Jell-O and smeared it into the other one's face. Blinded by the Jell-O, he scrambled over the table, knocking aside trays and plates and glasses, and grappled onto the first one.

And that's when the riot began. Within seconds, every man at our table but Butch and me was fighting. Then every man at every other table in the basement cafeteria was fighting. Plates were being smashed, trays thrown, metal chairs kicked over. I crouched low, ducking all the fists and elbows and flying plates.

Now, Butch is huge. He must be six and a half feet tall and weigh over three hundred pounds all inside a skin so black it gets a purplish hue in bright sunlight. When Butch started to move, grinning and showing all his big yellow teeth as he waded forward, the brawling men just parted around him, like water around the bow of a ship. As always, I stayed close behind him, grabbing hold of his coat, that stained, beige raincoat he wore night and day, winter and summer. I must have looked like a dinghy behind a battleship.

We came up the stairs onto the main floor in time to see the Shelter's Director and three security guards sprinting out the front doors. On their heels were the half dozen college students who did kitchen work in exchange for a reference and a claim to altruism on their résumés. I thought Butch and me were going to follow them all, and run out of the Shelter, but Butch had other ideas.

He went down the hall to the Director's office. The door was wide open. We went inside, Butch closing the door behind us just as a bearded man went charging down the hall, swinging a busted-off leg of a wood chair like a club, and screaming like a gorilla.

"Hey, Butch. What's up?" I asked.

Butch was going through the drawers of the Director's desk, humming to himself, the way a maid doing housework might.

He found a telephone directory, looked up a number, then sat in the Director's chair.

"You calling the police?" I asked.

"Yes, hell-ooo!" Butch said into the phone.

As I said, he's a big man, but the biggest part of him is his voice. He's got range, from a whisper to a roar, and from a falsetto to a baritone. He can make his voice do anything. And he's got real good diction. When he speaks you can hear the letters at the start and the end of each word.

"The city desk, if you please!" He was using what I call his happy-go-lucky baritone.

As he waited on hold he tossed the phone book at me. "Do me a favor, Shadow. Look up the number for that Puerto Rican paper you're always reading. What is it, El Gundo, El Mongo?"

He winked at me. Butch called me Shadow because of the way I follow him around, and maybe also because he liked the joke of calling a white-skinned man a name used to insult black-skinned men.

"Hello?" Butch sat up straight. "There is a riot going on at the Mens Shelter on East Third Street." He made his voice stern, like he was scolding the person on the other end of the line. "Yes... East Third off the Bowery.... From inside the shelter... Listen care-full: the Union of Shelter Residents demands a meeting with the Archbishop as the only means of peacefully ending the ex-plo-sive sit-u-a-tion... Union of Shelter Residents.... Because the Church owns the Shelter, honey! That's right. And by the way, hostages have been taken. Any police interference will be dealt with. Yes, sweetheart, you heard me right. Hostages. Several."

He hung up.

"Arch-arch-archbishop?" When I'm nervous, I sometimes stutter. Butch was looking up another number in the phone book.

"H-hostages, Butch?"

He was dialing the phone when he answered me, his big voice rich with sarcasm. "Would they care if they knew it was just us bums?"

In the next ten minutes Butch called one radio stations, two television stations and one tabloid. Then I called El Mundo and repeated Butch's speech in Spanish.

When Butch thumped me on the back I decided whatever he was plotting, I would stick with him, one hundred percent.

I tried to keep close to Butch but it wasn't easy. He lumbered fast, all over the shelter, from the basement cafeteria to the third floor sleeping dormitory. Somehow he got the brawling men up from the basement. Somehow, he re-directed all of their mad energy from fighting one another, to preparing to defend the Shelter from a siege.

He had us barricade all the doors. He stationed two or more men at every window. He had two dozen men gathering stuff from the cafeteria and the different rooms of the shelter; chairs, tables, lamps, mattresses, cans full of kitchen garbage.

Butch paced behind the men at the windows and doors, like a general inspecting his fortifications. By the time three cop cars arrived, without sirens but with blue and white flashing lights bright in the early twilight, more than a dozen reporters and two television vans were already parked on the sidewalk outside the Shelter.

For ten minutes, one cop in a droopy brown suit talked through a bullhorn at us, trying to get us to come out of the Shelter.

When a huge black truck pulled up he just gave up in mid-sentence and shuffled away. Cops in black combat uniforms and bulletproof vests jumped out from the back of the black truck.

"Ninjas!" someone screamed. "Ninjas!"

The Ninja-cops knelt behind parked cars or police cars that had been pulled up onto the sidewalk. The excitement was too much for some pyromaniacs among us. They set fire to a couple mattresses remaining in the top floor dormitory. When the Ninja-cops saw the stream of putrid smoke coming from the upper windows of the brick building, they distributed gas masks among themselves.

Fire trucks arrived a few minutes later and parked in the middle of the street. Firemen milled about and watched the smoke. It got dark. I got dizzy from all the red and blue and white emergency lights rocketing around the brick walls of the buildings along the street.

As soon as it was dark the cops charged the front door of the shelter with a battering ram. Butch had been waiting. He gave the order for a counter-attack.

From a third floor window we turned the Shelter's emergency fire hoses on. As the dozen cops lunged at the barricaded door for a second time, the water hit them from above. They yelped, dropped the battering ram, danced in confusion. You would of thought we were pouring boiling led down on them. They retreated.

Butch gave the command for a full-scale retaliation. Debris of every kind was ejected from every window of the shelter. Coffee grounds and eggs, banana peels and apples, metal folding chairs and busted up canvas cots. For five minutes junk and garbage rained down on the cops and their vehicles.

The finale was when three bums launched a big television through a window. It arced through the air, flashing lights catching it, making it seem to fall in slow motion. It smashed into the windshield of a police car.

Then it was quiet. That was when I realized Butch was no longer standing next to me.

"Truce!"

It was Butch's big voice. I looked down and saw him climbing out of a ground floor window. The bright lights of a dozen cameras illuminated him as he walked, waving what seemed to be a pair of white boxer shorts on the end of a broken chair leg. He shouted, "Truce! Par-ley! Truce!"

In his beige raincoat and squinting against the harsh lights, Butch looked like some dazed businessman who had wandered into a war zone.

He ignored the cops and went straight to the press. He stood in the beams of bright white light from the cameras.

He boomed, "The Union of Shelter Residents has seized the property of the Church in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to be heard!"

Even in the Shelter, Butch’s big voice made the whole city seem quiet.

"We will be heard! We have but one demand: a meeting with the Archbishop!"

For a moment it was quiet. I remember hearing the whine of a jet high above the city and some honking horns from Second Avenue. Then Butch asked the reporters, "Any of you folks have questions?"

They interviewed Butch. He made all the evening news programs. We watched him on the one television not smashed in the riot or thrown down on the police. We listened to him on the radio, repeated every twenty-two minutes, announcing the birth of our Union, and our demand to meet with the Archbishop. With the entire city now following the riot-turned-strike on their televisions, the cops decided against another assault. They could have routed us, but it would have looked bad on television. Bad for the cops; bad for the Church.

Instead, they cut off our electricity, gas and water. They brought in trucks with huge searchlights and aimed the lights into the Shelter. The inside of the Shelter became weirdly illuminated in a bluish white light so bright we could see dusts motes swirling in the blue air.

Then the loudspeaker trucks arrived. They aimed giant speakers at the Shelter. We braced ourselves. All night they bombarded us with Christmas carols. The same eleven loud, scratchy recordings of Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mathis and Burl Ives. Over and over and over.

Still, I dozed off near dawn, but awoke within minutes, sweating from a nightmare in which I was tied to a stake under a blazing desert sun. My eyes were blinded by the sun and I was unable to cover my ears against the Mormon Tabernacle Choir surrounding me.

All morning I was hungry, thirsty, irritable and had a pounding headache. About nine o'clock, I felt a ringing in my ears. I had to think about it before I realized I could hear the soft sounds of nearby traffic punctuated by beeping horns. The Christmas carols had stopped.

Butch and me ran to the barricaded front door. We saw the police escorting a man and a woman to the main entrance of the Shelter. Butch had a narrow path opened in our barricades and we went onto the steps to meet them.

The man ignored the cameras following him. He was trim, dark, and handsome. He wore a dark blue suit and a blood red tie. His hair was black, cut short, and had a perfect brush of grey at each temple. He had a quick way of moving that reminded me of lightweight boxers.

He put his hand out. "It's good to meet you, Butch. I'm Father Xavier."

Butch shook his hand, then nodded at the blonde woman beside Father Xavier. "Who's the lady?"

"Ms. Manchester," she said. She nodded at us but kept both manicured hands on her briefcase. Her thick yellow hair was pulled tight behind her head and gathered in a gold clip. She wore large tortoise shell glasses that magnified her bright green eyes. I tried not to stare at the way her dark business suit snugged on the curve of her hips.

Father Xavier said, "Butch, the Archbishop is greatly distressed by events."

"As are we, Padre."

"Then let's talk, Butch. Let's straighten things out."

The meeting was in the basement of the Shelter, in a small room just off the laundry. We sat on metal folding chairs at a small square table with plastic padding on its top.

Father Xavier folded his neat hands on the table. Butch put his big hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. Ms. Manchester took a yellow pad of paper from her briefcase and held a fountain pen in her manicured hands. I kept my own dirty hands in my lap, under the table.

"So," Butch said to the woman, "I'll bet you're a lawyer, ain't you?"

"Yes."

"As am I," said Father Xavier.

Butch turned to the priest. "You're a priest, and a lawyer?"

The handsome priest shrugged and smiled.

"I'll be damned," Butch said.

"Let's hope not," Father Xavier said.

Butch laughed loud, real loud. He pushed back his beige raincoat from his big shoulders. "Well, well, well. I'm out numbered, Padre. If only I could retreat to some safe, far away place, like Mexico, I could forget all about wrestling with you two!"

"Have you been to Mexico?"

"Well, no," Butch beamed at the priest. "But I've always dreamed of going there, ever since I was a little kid. Mexico. I guess it's just a symbol to me, you know?"

Father Xavier was patient. He seemed interested. "How do you mean?"

Butch winked. "It's a place to hunker down and forget about all your cares. You know, siesta, mañana! It's too hot to stir up any trouble down there."

"It's hot here in the city, Butch. Yet you seem to have stirred things up some."

Butch, all six and a half feet and three hundred-plus pounds of him, tittered.

I was confused by all the talk about Mexico. It was true that Butch always loved to talk about Mexico. Once, we had gone to the big library at Fifth and Forty-Second and tried to steal some books about Mexico. But they caught us as we passed through the scanners by the exits. We had to drop the books at the guard's feet and run away. I didn't see what Mexico had to do with our Union and our strike.

"Well, Padre, as you said already, we've got work to do. I'll never get to Mexico, much as I'd love to. If I had a little money, I'd go there, even now. But I got my duty here to take care of."

Father Xavier surprised me by saying something in Spanish.

"What was that?" Butch asked, turning to me.

I translated, "Do your duty and leave the rest to heaven."

Father Xavier and Ms. Manchester were looking straight at me. Their sudden attention made me nervous. I felt they were noticing me, really noticing me, for the first time. I don't like that kind of attention. I prefer that people ignore me, not expect anything from me. I stared down at the table.

Butch and the priest talked for a half-hour. Butch tied himself up with his oratory. Ms. Manchester at first made notes, then soon stopped, and only stared blankly at Butch, listening. Father Xavier never showed anything but patience, and attentiveness.

The priest said he was here to listen, to be the ears for the Archbishop. He wanted to help us, but we first had to come out from the Shelter.

Butch would nod, take a breath, then say we wouldn't come out until the Union of Shelter Residents members were guaranteed jobs, paying jobs, working in the Church's shelters.

After repeating this for the third time he added something odd. "And uniforms, too."

"I'm sorry? Uniforms?" Father Xavier managed to ask the question without sounding shocked. Even I had been surprised by Butch's demand.

"In this society," Butch made his voice quiet and firm, "In this society, clothes made the man."

Ms. Manchester wrote something on her pad. Butch continued, gaining momentum from listening to the sound of his own voice, his favorite music. "We in the Union of Shelter Residents reject suits and ties. That's the uniform of the oppressing class. No, we identify with the mechanics, the workers, the artisans."

Father Xavier nodded. "The artisans?"

"I will be blunt, Padre. As much as I'd rather be in Mexico right now--"

I could not figure out why Butch kept bringing up his wanting to be in Mexico, but Father Xavier didn't seem confused. He nodded attentively as Butch went on.

"Mexico will have to wait. My duty is to help the men of my union gain the respect, the dignity, the place in this society that is their birthright. We demand jobs, and uniforms!"

Butch's voice had gotten loud, but the moment he stopped talking, he folded his big hands on the table and smiled pleasantly at Father Xavier.

"I shall relay your requests to the Archbishop." The priest smiled once at Butch, and once at me. "You will hear from us this evening."

When the priest and the lawyer left the Shelter, the Christmas music was turned back on.

It was nine o'clock that night when the Christmas carols stopped for the second time. Butch and I were waiting for Father Xavier at the main entrance, but the cops were escorting only Ms. Manchester.

"Where's the Padre?"

She ignored Butch's question. "Can we meet in the same room, please? I have a message for you."

Butch led the way through the Shelter, Ms. Manchester following him and me following her. Her thick yellow hair was no longer held up under the gold pin; it cascaded over her shoulders. I don't know why, but that made me even more nervous around her.

When we got to the room in the basement she turned to me. "Would you mind waiting out here a minute?" She closed the door in my face.

But then the door opened, and Butch stood there, filling up the doorway. "Miz Manchester, where I go, Shadow goes." Butch pulled me into the room.

The lawyer said nothing, not even frowning. She put her briefcase on the square table and took an envelope out of it.

The moment I saw the envelope my stomach kind of flip-flopped.

"I've been instructed to give this envelope to you."

"In-struc-ted? By who?"

She ignored him. "I don't know what it contains."

I knew she was lying.

"You are asked to open it in private," she said.

I looked at Butch. He grinned at the lawyer, and I felt a moment of hope-- but then he took the envelope and stuffed it in the pocket of his old raincoat.

I felt like a light inside me had been turned off.

I followed, dazed, as Butch escorted Ms. Manchester to the main doors. As they went through the doors the brilliant flood of the camera lights washed over them. The reporters shouted questions. I wanted to run down the steps, run into the city, run as far away as I could get. But the crowd was too thick and I felt too weak to move.

I watched Ms. Manchester going away, using her briefcase to wedge a path through the reporters. She stopped and turned when Butch's big voice boomed out.

"Quiet! Settle down! I have something to share with all of you!"

In the white-blue light flooding the steps Butch's black skin glistened. I saw him take the fat envelope out from the pocket of his coat. I pressed my back into the brick wall and forgot to breathe.

"A few minutes ago, Miz Manchester delivered this envelope to me."

Butch held the stuffed envelope in the harsh light.

"She wouldn't say who it was from."

The reporters got quiet.

"Miz Manchester claimed," Butch was biting off each word. "She-did-not-know-what-was-in-it."

It was now so quiet I could hear the motors of the video cameras whirring.

"Miz Manchester asked that I open the envelope--" He paused a beat. "In private."

Butch ripped open the envelope.

Two dozen voices went off at once.

Butch pulled a handful of money from the envelope. He waved the fist full of money in the hot, bright lights. Everyone watched the money. I was the only one who saw Butch's other hand neatly slide the torn envelope into the pocket of his coat.

Butch shouted, "Perhaps Miz Manchester can tell us the meaning of all this mon-ey in this en-vel-ope?"

Ms. Manchester pushed away from the bright lights that turned in her direction. She disappeared into the darkness.

Butch grabbed one of the television reporters, the one he'd given the most interviews to in the past two days. "You want an exclusive interview with me, or any one of the strikers-- inside the Shelter?"

The reporter swallowed his excitement. "If there are no conditions."

"Only one condition. One single humanitarian condition." Butch put all the money he had shown the world into the reporter's hands. "That condition is you send some of your people to every restaurant in the neighborhood and have them buy all the food they can carry back to these men-- these hungry men who are on strike for the simple dignity-- the simple dignity of being recognized— recognized as feeling, suffering, human beings!"

There was a cheer from inside the shelter. The reporters laughed. I fell back against the brick wall of the shelter. I was breathing like I'd been chased forty blocks by a gang of teenagers carrying a can of gasoline. I was amazed and relieved that Butch hadn't taken the bribe. But I worried about what could still be in the envelope in Butch's pocket.

Butch shaded his eyes against the camera lights. He peered out to where the battalion of cops was watching the scene. "Hey, fellas! Hey, New York's Fine-est! The Archbishop's mess-en-ger is gone now. You can turn the music back on!"

The food began arriving and the cops made no attempt to prevent the deliveries from piling up at the entrance of the Shelter. We began a bucket brigade, passing along dozens of boxes holding pizzas, Chinese take-out, platters of sushi, platters of cold cuts and cheeses, boxes filled with pie-tins of pirogi and sausages and red cabbage and trays of baklava and gallons of ice cream.

But strangely, as the food arrived and was passed into the Shelter, the men didn't celebrate. Some got a little pushy. They pulled apart the pizzas or grabbed the white boxes of fried rice and searched for corners out of the hard light where they could eat alone.

The reporter and his cameraman wandered around the weirdly lighted shelter. Their expressions were like amazed kids inside a haunted house. The old brick building was no more than a shell; with no water, no working plumbing, no gas, no electricity, and with more than two hundred sweating, stinking, hungry, sleep-deprived men. We had been bludgeoned so long by the same eleven Christmas carols and the endless glare of the search lights that we moved about like zombies.

The reporter was frustrated as he tried to get a coherent interview. The men who would talk with him refused to follow the question-answer form. They would mumble, or suddenly scream belligerently. They all had complaints; about the city, about politicians, about Jesus, about pollution. The cameraman had to keep wiping spittle from the lens.

But the reporter recovered enough to gaze seriously at the camera, and promise that he would remain in the Shelter, "filing reports as this extraordinary event unfolds".

Of course, Butch noticed the surly mood of the strikers. I could tell he was thinking, coming up with an idea, by the way he was grinning but not talking. I was still concerned about his having pocketed the envelope. I watched him from a distance, thinking I might see him taking the envelope out of his pocket when he thought no one was looking.

I'm not sure when Butch started making the speech. He just started talking, getting louder and louder, and the men began gathering around him. They began grunting approval. I pushed through the circle to the front. The television reporter stiff-armed his microphone toward Butch. The cameraman knelt, aiming the camera's light up on Butch's face. I could see drops of perspiration sliding down his purple-black skin, like raindrops on a dark window.

Someone shouted, "What about the uniforms, Butch?"

I've never understood why, but the idea of having uniforms really excited the men.

"They will never grant a re-quest for uniforms. Never. Understand? Do you understand why they will never grant a re-quest for uniforms?"

"Why, Butch?"

"Yeah, why not, Butch?"

"It wouldn't cost all that much, Butch. If the Church--"

"NO-BOD-Y!" Butch's voice was like a sonic boom.

The men, me included, actually flinched backward from the shock.

"No-body never got no-thing by re-questing it!"

The men grumbled agreement. They started getting louder, angrier.

"The rich don't honor re-quests! They honor power! You want something? You got to seize it. Seize it!"

The men roared. They looked around wildly, for something to seize, something to do, some way they could vent their rage.

"You want uniforms?" Butch yelled.

The men yelled back that they did.

"You want uniforms?"

They yelled louder.

Butch waited for a dip in the crescendo. "What does the Church fear more than anything else?"

"Us!"

"Satan!"

"The IRS!"

"No. No. No." Butch thumped his chest with each word. "I will tell you what it is that the Church fears more than anything."

My head was aching. I hung on every word.

Butch dragged over a chair and got up on it. He folded his arms over his chest. He waited for the men to jostle each other into a quiet.

Then, incredibly, Butch began taking off his clothes.

There was an electric silence in the room of agitated men. Butch pulled off his beige raincoat and rolled it in a ball. He tossed it at me. I caught it.

I held the coat and stared as he pulled off a sweat stained shirt. Then he kicked off the torn up loafers from his feet and pulled down his pants. He didn't have underwear on.

The men were buzzing, but I couldn't catch any of the words they were saying. Through all his stripping off of the clothes, the camera's bright light was straight on him. The reporter was saying, "We'll edit later! We'll edit later!"

When Butch was naked he raised his big arms for quiet. He got it. Into the quiet he said two words, "Human nakedness."

The two words somehow deepened the silence in the room.

"You want respect? You want dignity? You got to earn it! You got to be re-born! Shed the poverty! Shed the humiliation! Shed the ultimate oppression of the Church: the concept of O-rig-i-nal Sin! Be born again! Like Adam, brothers-- come into a New World-- naked!"

Butch slowly turned his body in a circle, the camera light making his black bulk glisten with a purple hue.

He held his arms over us. "Remember! Remember what it is that our enemies fear most--"

He sucked up his breath, stood absolutely still. Then he said those two words, separating each syllable and stressing them evenly:

"Hu-man na-ked-ness."

I cannot describe the madness that began. With Butch urging them on, the men in the room ripped off their own clothes, what little they were still wearing. A tall Jamaican Rasta ran around chanting, "Cloth is the ser-pent's skin! Cloth is the ser-pent's skin!"

They began ripping off one another's clothing. The reporter gaped, speechless, and backed away, but the cameraman filmed the writhing snarl of men violently shedding and shredding whatever clothing they could grab.

Word spread instantly. The men posted at the doors and windows began stripping. Everyone rushed to the windows and began tossing their dirty rags out. Then someone began setting the rags on fire before tossing them out.

The cops crouched behind their cars with their guns drawn, watching the rain of shredded, flaming clothing.

The television reporter's exclusive story from inside the Shelter ran on every morning news program.

People came to see in person the naked bums they had watched rioting on their televisions. Hundreds of people pressed into the block the cops had sealed off. We watched, amazed, when a half dozen men and women huddled down in the street suddenly pulled off their clothes. They danced in front of the cameras and proclaimed their solidarity with the Union of Shelter Residents. Then they slathered sunscreen on one another.

The scratchy recordings of Christmas carols kept grinding away. By late afternoon, each time Jingle Bell Rock came on, people in the street and men inside the Shelter, leaning from the windows or stomping in rhythm up on the roof, would belt out the lyrics, almost drowning out the loudspeakers. Butch declared the song our anthem.

He urged us to keep our nakedness in full sight of the cameras and the crowds. He had forty or so men out of the Shelter at all times. The cops all put on latex gloves, but they didn't try to arrest anyone. They seemed amused. Maybe it was a reaction from seeing the bribe the Church had tried to break the Union. Or maybe, in their blue uniforms and heavy bullet-stopping vests, they were too hot to manhandle the frolicking crowds. The cops were getting paid overtime.

It was like a street fair. We worked the crowd, talked to people, answered their questions, accepted the money and food they passed over the police barricades. We explained how we were out to shame the Church more than they had shamed us. I noticed many men and a few women slipping into our Shelter from the street. With so many naked people, it was impossible to tell the strikers from the audience.

Butch's nakedness was awesome. The massiveness around his stomach and thighs didn't shake when he strode, so much as it jolted. He stood on the steps of the Shelter, natural in his nakedness, giving interviews endlessly, hammering away at the Church's neglect, and the Archbishop's coldly calculated bribe, his disdain for our request for "honorable employment".

I followed Butch, carrying his balled up raincoat, sometimes using it to cover my genitals, when the pressure of going around naked in front of people and television cameras was too much for me. I did not dare search the pockets of his coat. I waited. I waited until ten o'clock that night. Then I confronted Butch.

We were all back in the Shelter. Many of the strikers were collapsed in fitful sleep on the floor or a few cots or broken chairs, their naked bodies dully glowing with the blue-white light the cops still flooded the building with. The Christmas carols kept grinding away. My head ached from the noise. The night was so hot and humid that no one regretted being naked.

Butch was sitting in a corner on the top floor of the Shelter, trying to keep out of the bright light.

I dropped his raincoat on the floor between us. "I s-saw you put the envelope in your p-p-pocket."

"You don't miss much, partner."

I didn't know what to say or do next.

He looked around once to make sure no one was watching, then picked up the coat. He dug the envelope out of its pocket. From inside, he removed a bunch of money and a smaller, sealed envelope.

He counted the money quickly. He whispered. "Nine hundred left!"

"What's in the s-small envelope?"

"Bus ticket." He snorted. "I was expecting a plane ticket." He sounded irritated.

"To where?" I whispered.

"Mexico."

Butch saw my dumb expression. "Father Xavier. He's no fool. A smart man. A real smart man."

I understood now what Butch's talking about Mexico to the priest was aimed at. Butch had manipulated the priest to give him the bribe.

Butch's mouth had opened to say something else-- when I flinched from the sound of smashing glass.

I covered my ears and turned to see three windows along the front of the building bursting inward.

As the glass came flying into the Shelter I saw a half dozen smoking canisters land on the floor and go spinning wildly into the men startled from their sleep.

"Tear gas!" It was the reporter who yelled. "Tear gas! Tear gas! Are you getting this, Pete? Are you getting this?" The cameraman was getting it.

When I turned around, Butch's mouth was still open. I started to stand up, but Butch reached up and pulled me down onto the floor.

"Keep down!"

He had to yell. It was excruciatingly loud. Windows shattered and naked men jumped up shrieking, knocking into one another, cutting their bare feet on shards of glass. The harsh blue-white searchlights illuminated the clawing, grappling struggle as a hundred men fought to get to the exits and down the stairs.

Butch got onto his knees and pulled on his raincoat. He crouched low and instinctively, I clutched the tail of his coat with one hand, while trying to rub the scorching tears from my eyes with the other hand.

We stayed low and rushed toward the back wall. Two gas-blinded men got in our way and Butch knocked them aside as if they were children.

We went out onto the fire escape on the back of the building. We scrambled down while most the other men were snarled in a blind fight on the stairs.

From the lowest step of the fire escape we jumped. My feet were stunned from the impact on the rough concrete. I lost hold of Butch's coat. My vision was blurry and my eyes hurt whether open or closed. I sensed Butch moving to the left and I followed him.

We came out from between two buildings. To our right we saw firemen aiming a stream of water at the strikers running out of the main entrance of the shelter, the high-pressure water knocking them right off their feet.

Someone yelled, "There's the big one! He's getting away!"

Butch started running. I heard his heavy bare feet slapping on the sidewalk. I started running, too, straining to see his beige raincoat ahead of me, ignoring how much my feet hurt.

I got three blocks away. From the sounds of heavy traffic and the rumbling subway under the sidewalk, I guessed I was racing along Houston Street. Through my tears I could see Butch a half block ahead, the sides of his raincoat flapping out like wings as he ran.

He stopped and hailed a taxi. It was dark, and maybe as Butch pulled the raincoat together to hide his nakedness he appeared to the driver to be a businessman desperate to get out of a bad part of town he'd mistakenly wandered into. I saw the taxi shoot over to the curb.

Then I felt a hand scratch across the skin of my back. I knew they were going to catch me. I dropped into a ball on the sidewalk and caused the men behind to crash over me.

I caught a glimpse of the door slamming closed and the taxi lurching back into traffic.

Then they started beating me. I covered my groin with one hand and my face with the other. As I blacked out I could still hear car horns blaring and men grunting from the exercise of stomping and kicking me.

It was Father Xavier who got me out of jail, through the courts and onto parole. He arranged for Mrs. Titus, a lady on the altar society of a church on the Lower East Side, to rent a room to me. Ironically, he gave me a job in the laundry of one of the Church's shelters, without me even asking for it.

I saved every penny from my wages. All my free time I stayed in my tiny room, crowded by the eighteen crucifixes Mrs. Titus had hung on the walls. Each week when I paid my rent, she gave me a piece of candy with a quote from scripture printed on its wrapper. I saved the wrappers, afraid she'd be offended to find them in my wastebasket.

It took a long time, but I was patient, and polite, did a good job at the laundry, and finally, Father Xavier stopped checking up on me.

Now, as I write this, I'm bouncing on a bus somewhere inside Mexico. I didn't have to buy my bus ticket. It came in the mail eight weeks ago. I've kept it on me at all times because I knew Mrs. Titus rifled through my bureau and few possessions when I was at work.

I'm wearing a money belt holding six hundred dollars, half of it in traveler's checks. I've got another hundred and forty dollars in my pocket, and a hundred-dollar bill tucked in each of my socks.

An hour ago, when the dawn sun was a red ball over the black horizon, the bus pulled over. All the men and women and children got off and urinated beside the road. I asked the driver how much longer until my stop. He said four hours.

Now the sun is high and hard yellow and turning white. It's still early morning but already hotter than August in New York.

I'm wondering, will Butch be wearing his beige raincoat?

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