Spam and turkey tails have turned Micronesians into Macronesians. A

case study of how fatty Western plenty is taking a disastrous toll on people

in developing countries

In Kosrae, an island in Micronesia, new arrivals are a curiosity, and it seemed that

half the island had come to greet me and Steven Auerbach, a Manhattan-based

medical epidemiologist and an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service who had

worked in Micronesia in the early 1990s, when we visited last year. Dazed from

our 8,000-mile journey, we groped our way down the pockmarked coastal road,

driving past groves of trees bent nearly double under loads of bananas, papayas, and

breadfruit. We were on our way to a funeral feast.

We arrived to find the feast in full swing. Young men in lawn chairs played cards, while

toddlers squatted, transfixed, around a television screen blaring taped cartoons.

Hovering women filled plates and wiped faces. Perhaps a hundred people were there,

and the dead man's wife looked bored. The deceased, buried four weeks earlier in a

nearby crypt, seemed almost beside the point.

Kosraeans die young (the man in the crypt was fifty-six), but not for reasons

commonly associated with the developing world. There is no famine here, and with the

notable exception of upper-respiratory infections, little evidence of the diseases that

cut life short in, for example, sub-Saharan Africa. The big killer in Kosrae&emdash;what some

epidemiologists call New World syndrome&emdash;is a constellation of maladies brought on

not by microbes or parasites but by the assault of rapid Westernization on traditional

cultures. Diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure&emdash;scourges of affluence that

long ago eclipsed infectious diseases as killers in the West&emdash;have only recently

appeared here.

We sat with the dead man's brother-in-law, who told us that he expects to die soon too.

His sister's husband died of heart disease; he himself will likely die of diabetes. "But I

am fifty-seven, an old man, so this is of no matter," he said. He worried more about the

young people. Nodding toward the cardplayers nearby, he said that it was not

uncommon for them to gather to mourn a man or woman of thirty.

Kosrae was at one time a mighty kingdom, with Lelu its capital. Today Lelu is still the

state's largest and most densely populated village, a jumble of tin-roofed huts

connected to Kosrae proper by a causeway. We went to Lelu to see the ruins of the

ancient city, built 600 years ago of immense basalt "logs." Exhausted by the heat, we

ducked into a nearby general store to get a cold drink. Inside we found row after row of

canned goods: Spam and corned beef and Vienna sausages in fancy tins. There were

cake and muffin mixes from the United States, ramen-noodle soup from the

Philippines, flats of soda and Budweiser beer, shelves of candy bars and potato chips.

An entire freezer was reserved for turkey tails&emdash;a fatty, gristly hunk of the bird which

is generally regarded as inedible in the United States. The freezer was empty. Turkey

tails are so popular, we were told, that the month's shipment was long gone.

In the handful of other grocery stores scattered around the island we found plenty of

salty, sweet, and fatty imports&emdash;but no fresh bananas, papayas, breadfruit, coconut, or

mangoes. Apart from a fish shack or two and a few forlorn stands hawking bags of the

island's famous&emdash;and costly&emdash;green tangerines, there was nowhere to buy local

produce on the island. We were told that most Kosraeans once grew fruits and

vegetables on family plots, and pulled tuna and reef fish from the sea. But the majority

of modern Kosraeans don't have time or energy to farm or fish&emdash;they are too busy with

their office jobs.

Kosrae is the smallest of four island states that make up the Federated States of

Micronesia (FSM), the largest and most populous political entity to emerge from the

Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which placed the islands under U.S.

administration after World War II. In 1986 Micronesia implemented a Compact of Free

Association with the United States, which dissolved its trust status. In order to sustain

a security partnership, the United States is still the FSM's chief benefactor, supplying

the bulk of its revenue&emdash;about $100 million&emdash;in aid each year. The bureaucracy

required to manage and distribute this windfall continues to be Kosrae's single largest

employer. Few if any of its jobs demand the skill or physical effort required by the

traditional work of fishing and farming. Physical exertion has been further discouraged

by expansion of the coastal road and the steady importation of cars, some bought with

the help of government money. To walk in Kosrae is to announce that one is too poor

to ride, and Kosraeans offer a lift to every casual stroller.

This newfound convenience comes at a high price, as a visit to Kosrae's state hospital

revealed. A low-slung concrete structure with greasy windows and no air-conditioning,

it is poorly equipped to handle anything but basic health needs. Patients with serious

problems are airlifted to Guam or the Philippines. The hospital director, a former Vice

President of Micronesia, confessed to us that he and his wife travel abroad for even

routine checkups.

The hospital's inpatient ward has perhaps two dozen beds, and nineteen were occupied

on the morning we visited. Thirteen people were there for complications of diet-related

diabetes and two for heart conditions. Paul Skilling, a Kosraean family doctor, lamented

that cases of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease are as common as coconuts on

his island. Another doctor half joked that even health-care professionals are at risk.

"Look at me," he said, pointing to his paunch. "I am myself obese. My body-mass

index is thirty-two. How long before I have these diseases?"

The doctor was indeed obese, but his body-mass index was only slightly higher than

average for a Kosraean adult. In 1993-1994 the Micronesian Department of Health,

with funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, screened almost all the adults

on the island and found that nearly 85 percent of those aged forty-five to sixty-four

were obese. Non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, heart disease, and hypertension

are closely linked to obesity, so it is perhaps not surprising that more than a quarter of

Kosraeans in this age group were also diabetic, and more than a third suffered from high

blood pressure. (Non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, or NIDDM, the kind that

afflicts Micronesia, is also known as Type II or adult-onset diabetes; "diabetes" here

refers to this type.) Vita Skilling, the island's chief of preventive health services, told us

that efforts to reverse this trend have been disappointing. "Here you buy imported

food in the store to show that you have money," she said. "Even if you don't have

much money, you can buy turkey tails."

In Kosrae 90 percent of adult surgical admissions are linked to diabetes, and of these

many are for amputations necessitated by vascular breakdown. There are more cases of

renal failure than the hospital can handle, and cardiovascular disease is pervasive. And

in Kosrae ill health hits early&emdash;frequently men and women have a first heart attack in

their late twenties.

ew World syndrome has taken hold throughout much of the South Pacific.

The problem in Kosrae pales by comparison with that in the Republic of

Nauru, a tiny, crowded island known as the Kuwait of the South Pacific.

Nauru's citizens grew rich from the mining of phosphate deposits, which long

ago eclipsed fishing as the state's major revenue source and are now nearly

depleted. This rocky island's few patches of arable land were laid waste years ago by

mining, so Nauruans subsist almost entirely on imports. Prosperity has brought them

Japanese televisions, German luxury sedans, and Australian filet mignon. It has also

brought them what Auerbach calls "the worst of 1950s American cuisine"&emdash;processed

foods with plenty of fat, salt, sugar, and refined starches. As a result Nauruans have

among the highest rates of obesity and diabetes on the planet, and a life expectancy of

only fifty-five. In contrast, the region's poorest nation&emdash;Kiribati, thirty-three islands

that straddle the Equator, with little money for imported food or anything else&emdash;has in

its rural regions the lowest rates of noncommunicable disease in the South Pacific.

Scientists have studied the health status of native peoples in the South Pacific for

decades, and have noted the explosion of diet-related disease in Nauru and Micronesia,

among other islands. But the CDC-supported effort seven years ago was the first to

offer systematic health screening of adults in the islands of the FSM. Auerbach was in

charge of that screening. He told me that it had made possible the early identification

and treatment of health problems, and had helped to alert the islanders to the perils and

prevention of noncommunicable illnesses. Among the small victories were an

early-morning walking program for adult women and the Micronesian One Diet Fits All

Today campaign, through which Kosraeans are encouraged to avoid imported food in

favor of locally grown fruits, vegetables, tubers, and fish. Vita Skilling said that

although MODFAT had helped some patients to reduce their blood pressure and

dependence on diabetes medication, she did not know whether the program had had a

wide impact. She invited us to attend a party for a group of women who had recently

"graduated" from the MODFAT program. We arrived in time for lunch and were

offered fresh fish, breadfruit, fried chicken, orange soda, candy, and apple pie. Most of

the graduates were hugely obese. Apparently the "healthy diet" message had gotten

muddled. The walking program, although enthusiastically endorsed by the clinicians I

spoke to, was in May still suspended "for the Christmas holiday."

PART II

Paul Zimmet, an Australian physician and researcher who specializes in the

study of noncommunicable diseases, wrote in 1996 that "the

[non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus] global epidemic is just the tip of a

massive social problem now facing developing countries." Zimmet implicated

the "coca-colonization" that has devastated local customs and economies and

led to ill health. Rates of obesity and diabetes have skyrocketed around the globe, but

particularly among traditional peoples in transition&emdash;Polynesians, Native Americans,

and aboriginal Australians; Asian Indian emigrants to Fiji, South Africa, and Britain;

and Chinese emigrants to Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

Although the rapid introduction of processed foods and other conveniences is certainly

the proximate force behind this trend, scientists are also looking at genetic components.

Jeffrey Friedman, a professor and the head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at

the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Rockefeller University, in New York, is

investigating why some Kosraeans manage to escape the hazards of coca-colonization

while others succumb. To Friedman and his team, the interesting question is not why

so many sedentary, office-bound, Spam-loving Kosraeans are obese but why not all of

them are.

Kosraeans, like all natives of Micronesia, trace their ancestry back 2,000 years to a

handful of Indo-Malayan mariners. Driven by fear, religious persecution, greed, or

foolhardiness, this small band settled the Pacific. Those who landed on Kosrae

developed a feudal society that went largely unnoticed by the West until 1824, when a

French research vessel, the Coquille, dropped anchor nearby. Rene Primevere Lesson,

the ship's doctor, described Kosraeans as "advanced people of a high civilization, to

judge from the vestiges of customs, tradition such as the authority of the chiefs, classes

of society, and the remnants of the arts which they still practice." The women, he

wrote, had "black eyes full of fire and a mouth full of superb teeth … but a tendency to

become fat." He also observed that considering the island's bounty, its population of

about 3,000 was surprisingly small. (Easter Island, in Polynesia, was then supporting a

population of at least 7,000 with roughly the same land mass and a less hospitable

climate.) Studies later supported local lore that a much larger population had been

diminished by starvation after typhoons devastated the island's food supply. The

population continued to dwindle throughout the nineteenth century, as Kosrae became

an increasingly popular base for pirates and New England whalers, who brought with

them tobacco and whisky&emdash;and infectious diseases. By 1910 only 300 Kosraeans had

survived the Western imports of smallpox, measles, influenza, and sexually transmitted

diseases.

James Neel, a geneticist at the Un iversity of Michigan Medical School who died last

year, hypothesized in a 1962 article on diabetes that under conditions of scarcity

natural selection weeds out people unable to store food efficiently in their bodies, and

that a "thrifty genotype" encourages the conversion of calories into body fat. He

suggested that this mechanism was necessary for survival during periods of extreme

stress and famine that would otherwise ravage a population. Most populations are

assumed to have some variation on this genotype, but it is likely that peoples whose

evolution was punctuated by a number of particularly harrowing events developed the

most-effective versions. In Kosrae, where weather and disease wiped out 90 percent of

the population, this effect must have been profound. The very genes presumed to have

protected islanders from their history are now believed to be predisposing them to

life-threatening illnesses.

In 1994 Friedman and his team at Rockefeller cloned what is perhaps the ultimate

thrifty gene&emdash;the obese gene, which in its normal form carries the chemical code for

leptin. A hormone discovered by Friedman, leptin plays a critical role in the brain,

regulating appetite and fat storage, among other things. Leptin is an extremely potent

hormone. People who carry the abnormal form of the obese gene don't have the genetic

makeup to produce leptin; they eat uncontrollably and are morbidly obese. Although

very few people have this defect, all of us have variations along the leptin and perhaps

other brain pathways that influence our eating habits and efficiency at turning calories

into body fat. Friedman's group examined blood samples taken from 2,286 adult

Kosraeans in the course of Auerbach's islandwide screening. Preliminary findings

suggest that European genes inherited from New England whalers and other visitors

protect Kosraeans to some degree against obesity and diabetes: the more "European" an

islander, it appears, the less likely he or she is to be obese or diabetic. Zimmet says this

finding is consistent with earlier findings linking Asian genes with those of populations

from Native Americans to New Guinea highlanders. Scientists speculate that certain

aspects of the Asian genotype, evolved in part to withstand long periods of scarcity,

predispose hundreds of millions if not billions of people to obesity and diabetes.

Writing in Nature in 1992, Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at the UCLA

Medical School, suggested that the populations of Western industrial nations had

already to some extent weeded out the thrifty genotype, keeping diabetes and obesity

below the levels now common in Micronesia. "Before modern medicine made [diabetes]

more manageable," he wrote, "genetically susceptible Europeans would have been

gradually eliminated, bringing [diabetes] to its present [relatively] low frequency."

Diamond and others have suggested that some human populations, notably those that

evolved in regions of Europe, may have developed a relative resistance to certain

noncommunicable diseases just as they did to some infectious diseases&emdash;through

natural selection over centuries of relatively sustained plenty. Given the burgeoning

rates of obesity and diabetes in the United States and other industrialized nations, this

seems surprising, until one considers that rates among the most susceptible

peoples&emdash;Pacific Islanders such as Native Hawaiians, Samoans, and Nauruans&emdash;are

higher still. Indeed, all measures indicate that the greatest impact of obesity-related

disorders will continue to be in newly industrialized and developing nations in Asia,

Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans which

historically had an unstable food supply.

he World Health Organization recently described overeating as the "fastest

growing form of malnourishment" in the world. For the first time in history the

number of people worldwide who are both overweight and malnourished,

estimated at 1.1 billion, equals the number who are underweight and

malnourished. Obesity rates in China have quadrupled in the past decade, and

obesity in the urban middle class in India is epidemic. In Colombia 41 percent of adults

are overweight. The global spread of diet-linked disease presents one of the greatest

medical challenges of the twenty-first century.

But when I spoke with agricultural and business leaders in Micronesia, it was clear that

a concerted government effort to fight noncommunicable disease was not likely on

these islands. I heard repeatedly that health was a matter of willpower and individual

effort, and that government could do nothing to curb the public taste for imports. The

fact that many state legislators in Micronesia are also food importers was never

mentioned&emdash;nor were the particulars of auto importation in a tiny country already

overrun with cars.

Father Francis Hezel, a Jesuit priest from Buffalo, New York, who has spent more

than three decades teaching and writing in Micronesia, said that even people in power

are reluctant to speak out. "You can enter any clinic and smell the decaying limbs,

rotted by diabetes," he told me. "But many people here are beholden to the

government. They don't want to rock the boat." In Micronesia&emdash;as in much of the

world, particularly the developing world&emdash;it is more profitable for authorities to

encourage overconsumption than to discourage it. The Worldwatch Institute reported

last year that approximately four of the five McDonald's restaurants that opened every

day in 1997 were outside the United States. In its 1998 annual report the Coca-Cola

Company described Africa as "a land of opportunity."

Obesity, diabetes, and other manifestations of New World syndrome can, like

infectious diseases, be contained. In Singapore the nationwide Trim and Fit Scheme,

which began in 1992, has cut childhood obesity by up to 50 percent. And in Hawaii,

Terry Shintani and colleagues at the Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center have

shown long-term health benefits from a program emphasizing a return to traditional

local foods.

We spotted a glimmer of progress in Micronesia, though not in the Western-style

wellness programs. One of our hosts, a hospital administrator, told us that he neither

farmed nor fished but did enjoy playing basketball, and that he would sometimes jog

rather than drive to the high school gym to play. As a result of this regimen he had lost

a significant amount of weight, and avoided some of the health problems suffered by

his more sedentary compatriots. Basketball, he said, was catching on quickly in Kosrae,

as was baseball. "Imports made us sick," he said. "Now maybe imports will help us get

well."

However nice the thought, increasing amounts of junk food are being shipped into

Kosrae from the West, food importers say, and the island is about to import television

programming. Kosraeans will be able to come home, open a few cans of Spam, switch

on the tube, and kick back for the evening. It is then that they will truly be able to

SINSIDE PASSAGE

Six-twenty A.M. and the sun rises over a dark place. Across the Hudson River from Sing Sing prison, on the opposite bank, the hills turn pink; I spot the treeless gap in the ridgeline where, another officer has told me, inmates quarried marble for the first cellblock. Nobody could believe it back in 1826: a work crew of convicts, camping on the riverbank, actually induced to build their own prison. They had been sent down from Auburn, New York State's famous second prison, to construct Sing Sing, its third. How would that feel, building your own prison?

 The shell of that 1826 cellblock still stands, on the other side of the high wall I park against; the prison has continued to grow all around it. In 1984, the roof burned down. At the time, the prison was using the building as a shop to manufacture plastic garbage bags, but as late as 1943, it still housed inmates. Sometimes now when inmates complain about their six-by-nine cells, I tell them how it used to be: two men sharing a three-and-a-half-by-seven-foot cell, one of them probably with TB, no central heating or plumbing, open sewer channels inside, little light. They look unimpressed.

 I park next to my friend Aragon, of the Bronx, who always puts The Club on his steering wheel; I see it through his tinted glass. This interests me, because, with a heavily armed wall tower just a few yards away, this has got to be one of the safest places to leave your car in Westchester County. Nobody's going to steal it here. But Aragon is a little lock-crazy: He has screwed a tiny hasp onto his plastic lunch box and hangs a combination lock there, because of the sodas he's lost to pilfering officers, he says. Between the Bronx and prison, a person could grow a bit lock-obsessed.

 There's no one else around. Most people park in the lots up the hill, nearer the big locker room in the Administration Building. But it's almost impossible for a new officer to get a locker in there, so I park down here by the river and the lower locker room. The light is dim. Gravel crunches under my boots as I head into the abandoned heating plant.

 This six-story brick structure is one of those piles of slag that give Sing Sing its particular feel. Massive, tan, and almost windowless, it looks like a hangar for a short, fat rocket. The whole thing is sealed off, except for a repair garage around the corner and a part of the first floor containing men's and women's locker rooms and rest rooms.

 The men's locker room-I've never seen the women's-is itself nearly abandoned; though it's stuffed with a hodgepodge of some two hundred lockers of inmate manufacture, fewer than twenty are actively used. The rest have locks on them, some very ancient indeed, belonging to officers who quit or transferred or died or who knows what. Nobody keeps track. An old wall phone hangs upside down by its wires on the left as you enter, the receiver dangling by its curly cord, a symbol of Sing Sing's chronically broken phone system.

 Cobwebs, in here, find a way onto your boots. For a few weeks following my arrival, on Aragon's advice I checked the room for lockers that might have opened up. None ever did. All those unused lockers needlessly tied up. This might not be a problem for the officers who drive to work from the north, but down south in the Bronx (I live there, too) you don't want to advertise that you're a correction officer: Too many people around you have been in prison. Officers tend not to stick the big badge decals they pass out at the Academy on their car windows (because they like their windows), and most, like me, don't want to walk the street wearing a uniform. It's just awkward. A locker lets you leave your uniform at work.

 My second month, I found one old lock that was so flimsy I could almost twist it off with my hands, but not quite. I brought in a small tire iron and it came off easily. Inside were plastic cups, magazine pictures of women in bikinis, and newspapers from 1983. I've since heard of a locker coming available in the Administration Building, but I'm not pursuing it. I've come to prefer it down here. The feel of neglect is somehow truer to the spirit of Sing Sing.

 It's barely fifteen minutes till lineup. I throw on my gray polyester uniform, making sure I've got all the things I need on my belt: radio holder, latex-glove packet, two key-ring clips, baton ring. I put pen and pad, inmate rulebook, and blue union diary in my breast pockets, slide my baton through the ring, lock the padlock, and slam the locker door. I walk past a pile of old office desks and, by necessity, into the men's room. It smells like an outhouse. I sit down, for the second time this morning. Every morning is like this, and it is for the other new guys, too: Your stomach lets you know, just before the shift starts, what it thinks of this job.

 A decrepit footbridge takes me over the tracks of the Metro North railroad-Sing Sing may be the only prison anywhere with a commuter railroad running through it-and other officers start to appear. My climb continues, up a wooden staircase that's been built atop a crumbling concrete one.

 Here is the Administration Building parking lot, and the main entrance to the prison. Parked in the middle is the "roach coach," purveyor of coffee and rolls. To the right is the entrance to the Visit Room, not yet open. To the left, officers are lined up, waiting to deposit their handguns at the outside window of the Arsenal. For reasons lost to time, New York State correction officers are allowed to own and carry concealed weapons, and most seem to enjoy doing so. However, they can't bring the guns inside with them (nobody is allowed to carry inside)-and few of us have any doubt that prison is the safer for it. I take the last steps to the main gate and flash the badge and I.D. card I carry in a special wallet that I picked up at the Academy. The officer takes a cursory peek inside my lunch bag-the contraband check. I punch my time card and proceed to the morning's worst moment, getting my assignment.

 The desk of Sergeant Ed Holmes is the focal point of the lineup room. It's on a raised platform, in front of a window. From up there, Holmes can see everybody In the room and most of those ascending the front steps. His eyes are constantly scanning, never settling on any person or object for more than an instant, moving from an officer to the printout in front of him and back again. The printout tells him what jobs he'll need to fill-who's on his day off, who's got vacation, who's out sick, who's on suspension. He checks off old-timers as he sees them-they've chosen their jobs and know where they're going. It's the new guys, like me, who are at his mercy.

 Holmes is one of the tough black officers who have been here forever, a big man who seems to enjoy his distance from the rank and file. Several of his fellow white-shirts spoke to us during orientation, mostly about how the institution runs. Holmes was different. He came only to warn: Don't fuck with me, he said, glancing at the back wall of the room. I'm gonna give you your job assignment, and if you complain, I'll give you a worse one tomorrow. I have no patience. I'm not nice. Don't fuck with me. A few days later, a longtime officer advised me never to show Holmes I was scared-of him or anything else. "Holmes feeds on weakness," she said.

 And now the line has moved and I'm next, a small, new officer before the mighty sergeant. I place my time card in front of him and he initials all the cards, to prevent us from punching in for friends-and then he is uncharacteristically silent: Holmes hasn't decided what to do with me. Or maybe he's not thinking of me at all; maybe his mind has wandered to his car or his electric bill or the movie he watched on TV last night. He riffles through his printout. Usually I'm sent to A-block or B-block. These are massive human warehouses, two of the largest prison housing units in the world, containing over a thousand inmates between them. I live for the exceptions: an easy day in the wall tower, the barbershop, or the hospital. That's the root of my dread-the hope for something else.

 "Two fifty-four B-block," says Holmes finally, glancing to my left. Holmes could tell us the job instead of just the number, but if it's in the blocks, he won't. He wants to leave us guessing, as if we're still at the Academy. I turn and walk back among the eightyodd officers milling around the crowded room, looking for someone who might know what job 254 is. I ask Miller; he shrugs. I ask Eaves; he thinks it's an escort job. That would be good. Escort officers spend a while in the mess hall and then get to leave the block for chunks of the day, taking groups of inmates to other buildings in the prison. Eaves has written down all the jobs in his union diary but hasn't yet found the number when a different sergeant shouts: "On the lineup!" As we assemble in rows, I pray it's true that it's an escort job and not a gallery job. Gallery officers run the galleries, the floors on which inmates live. Galleries are understaffed, and the officers on them, surrounded by inmates all day, are put at risk and run ragged. It's an awful job. I often get it.

 We form into six or seven files, facing the white-shirts, most of whom are sergeants. As we're called to attention, it's interesting to watch the heavy ones try to squeeze between our narrow rows as they make a cursory check for violations of uniform-missing collar brass, whiskers, an earring inadvertently left in. Then a lieutenant, often the watch commander, speaks, telling us what has gone on in the prison since we left the day before. Today it's Lieutenant Goewey.

"Okay, it's been pretty quiet. They had one guy cut in the leg, in the tunnel from A-block yard. No weapon, no perp, the usual. Then we found three shanks buried in the dirt there in B-block yard, two of 'em. meta4 that we found with metal detectors. You think they're just sitting around out there, but these crooks are always conniving." In other words: one inmate stabbed, assailant unknown, knife not found; three homemade knives found; no officers hurt. A fairly typical day. Then a new sergeant steps forward: "Remember, there's no double clothing allowed during rec, for the obvious reasons. Inmates with two shirts on or two sets of pants should be sent back to their cells and not allowed in the yard or gym." Double clothing is understood to be both a defense against getting "stuck" and a way of quickly changing your appearance if you stick someone else.

 Often we'll hear a moral message at lineup, too: a warning that we're not stepping up to the inmates enough or a caution that we need to watch one another's backs better and know the names of the people we're working with or a reminder that our job is "to get out of here in one piece at three Pm. "-as if that needed saying. No such message today. There's the schedule of driver's-ed courses, for anyone interested, and a reminder of next week's blood drive, and the announcements are over.

"Officers, a-ten-shun!" yells a sergeant. Everyone is quiet. "Posts!" And we're off, not exactly at a run, through the long, rough corridors and up the hill to begin the day.

Sing Sing sprawls over fifty-five acres, most of it rocky hillside.It's flat down where I parked, near the river -the old cellblock andthe railroad tracks. The former Death House, site of the electricchair that killed 614 inmates between, 1891 and 1963, is down there too. (It's now a vocational-training building.) And so is Tappan, the medium-security unit of Sing Sing, with some S50 inmates housed in three 1970s-vintage shoe box-shaped buildings.

But most of Sing Sing is on the hill, and from the lineup room, we climb there. Getting to B-block is the longest walk; it's the remotest part of the "max" jail. There are a couple of ways to go; both involve a lot of stairs. Officers sip from coffee cups and grip lunch bags as we make the slow march up to work. We are black and white and Latino, male and female. Members of the skeleton night crew pass us in the hall and wave wanly; most have that gray night-shift look. They trade normal diurnal rhythms for the perk of having very little inmate contact-at night, all the inmates are locked in their cells. If I didn't have a family, I might put in for night duty.

The corridors and stairways are old, often in disrepair. When it rains, we skirt puddles from leaking roofs. When it's cold, we have reason to remember that these passages are unheated. The tunnels snake around Sing Sing, joining the various buildings, and at the beginning and end of each-sometimes even in the middle-there is a locked gate. Most of the officers posted to these gates have big, thick keys, but at one gate the guard pushes buttons instead, as they do in modern prisons. By the time I pass through the heavy front door of B-block, there are ten locked gates between me and freedom.

A-block and B-block are the most impressive buildings in Sing Sing, and in a totally negative sense. A large cathedral will inspire awe; a large cellblock, in my experience, will mainly horrify.

The size of the buildings catches the first-time visitor by surprise, and that's largely because there's no preamble. Instead of approaching them from a wide staircase or through an arched gate, you pass from an enclosed corridor through a pair of solid-metal doors, neither one much bigger than your front door at home. And enter into a stupefying vastness. A-block, probably the largest freestanding cellblock in the world, is 588 feet long, twelve feet shy of the length of two football fields. It houses some 684 inmates, more than the entire population of many prisons. You can hear theman encompassing, overwhelming cacophony of radios, of heavy gates slamming, of shouts and whistles and running footstepsbut, oddly, at first you can't see a single incarcerated soul. All you see are the bars that form the narrow fronts of their cells, extending four stories up and so far into the distance on the left and right that they melt into an illusion of solidity. And when you start walking down the gallery, eighty-eight cells long, and begin to make eye contact with inmates, one after another after another, some glaring, some dozing, some sitting bored on the toilet, a sense grows of the human dimensions of this colony. Ahead of you may be a half-dozen small mirrors held through the bars by dark arms; these retract as you draw even, and you and the inmate get a brief but direct look at each other.

A-block and B-block are aligned with each other, end to end, and span the top of Sing Sing; between them sits the mess-hall building. Both were completed in 1929, and they're very similar in structure, except B-block is twenty cells shorter (sixty-eight), and one story taller (five). Though few civilians have seen anything like them, there is nothing architecturally innovative about the design. It plainly derives from the 1826 cellblock, based on Auburn's ,4new" north wing, which was the prototype for most American cell-house construction: tiny cells back to back on five tiers, with a stairway at either end and one at the center of the very long range.

From the ground floor, which in both buildings is known as the flats, you can look up and see how each structure is made up of two almost separate components. One is the all-metal interior, containing the inmates; it's painted gray and looks as though it could have been welded in a shipyard. The other is comprised of the exterior walls and roof, a brick-and-concrete shell that fits over the cells like a dish over a stick of butter. One does not touch the other: Should an inmate somehow escape from his cell, he's still trapped inside the building. A series of tall, barred windows runs down either side of the shell. They would let in twice as much light if they were washed. As it is, they let pass a diffuse, smog-colored glow, which crosses about fifteen feet of open space on each side before it reaches the metal, which it does not warm. There is a flat, leaky roof, which does not touch the top of the metal cellblock but leaves a gap of maybe ten feet. If the whole structure were radically shrunk, the uninitiated might perceive a vaguely agricultural purpose; the cages might be thought to contain chickens, or mink.

The blocks are loud because they are hard. There is nothing inside them to absorb sound except the inmates' thin mattresses and their bodies. Every other surface is of metal or concrete or brick.

 A crowd of officers is milling around a cell near the front gate of B-block when I get there; this cell is the office of the officer in charge, or OIC. Rooms for staff were not included in B-block's plan, so a few cells near the front gate have been converted for that purpose. Next to the OICs office, an identical, tiny cell houses the sergeants; two of them are squeezed in there. Next to that is the coat room, which contains a barely functioning microwave oven and a refrigerator that won't stay closed. There's an office for paperwork and filling out forms, and one for a toilet-the only staff toilet on these five floors.

 For many years, the day-shift OIC has been Hattie "Mama" Cradle, a fifty-something woman five feet tall and just about as big around. She's got a clipboard in her hand and horn-rimmed reading specs on a chain around her neck. Officers give her their names and job numbers; she tells them where they're posted. I hang back a little, but then there's no more stalling: "Conover, two fifty-four," I say. She gets the spelling off the tag on my shirt, then, already poised to jot down the next name, says, "R-and-W"

My heart sinks. It's as bad as it could be. I am the first officer on the second-floor galleries, known by the letters R and W I've worked there a few times before, including my very first horrifying--day of on-the-job training, when I accompanied a novice officer, or "newjack," who barely knew what he was doing. Today I'm that newjack, going it alone.

I crowd into Cradle's office and look for my keys-four separate rings of the big, heavy "bit" keys, which work cell doors, with center-gate, end-gate, and fire-alarm keys thrown on for good measure. I attach these to my belt, and feel the weight. My heart is pounding, but there's nothing for it. I find a fresh battery for the floor's portable communications radio and grab a sheaf of forms that I have to fill out during my shift. Last is the list of "keeplocks." I copy mine from Cradle's bulletin board, noting that there are two new ones in the past twenty-four hours. Keeplocks are inmates on disciplinary restriction. In the old days there were few such inmates, and often they would be sent to solitary confinement, known as the Special Housing Unit or the Box. But now their numbers overwhelm the Box, so they stay put, mixed in with the general population-except they can't come out of their cells. One of our main responsibilities as gallery officers is to keep the keeplocks locked up. Because we're always in a hurry and often don't know the inmates, this is harder than it sounds. It's easy to unlock the wrong door.

 I pass through two more gates on my way upstairs and relieve the night officer on R-and-W Since the galleries are all locked down at night, mainly her job is to check, every hour or so, that every inmate is still breathing. It's not a bad job, and if an inmate does die, it's no problem-unless he's found with rigor mortis. In that case, she will lose her job, because of the cold, hard proof that she wasn't really checking. The night officer hands me the radio and some other keys. Does she know what the new keeplocks are in for? I ask.

 "I don't know, I don't care, they're not my friends, and I don't like them," she says with a suddenness and finality that I find kind of funny. She hands me the radio, which I attach to my belt. She's left some wrappers and tissues around the desktop, but I don't mention it; she looks tired. I envy her as she puts on her coat: She's going home and doesn't have to deal with the inmates any longer. "The cells are all deadlocked," she adds before leaving, which means that not only is the huge bar, or "brake," in place which locks them all at once but the cells are locked individually. Inmates are not at large at night, swarming around you on their way to chow, arguing with you when it's time to "lock in," calling you names, stressing you out. Pandora's box is closed. My first job of the day, with breakfast less than an hour away, will be to openit.

A-BLOCK

 Many times during those first months I was assigned to A-block. The mammoth cellblock required more officers to run it than any other building-around thirty-five during the day shift-but the senior officers there seemed particularly unfriendly to new officers, offering little encouragement and lots of criticism. The best way to fend off their comments, I decided, would be to try and enforce the rules as strictly as I could.

But, assigned to one of the vast eighty-eight-cell galleries for the first time, I found it hard to know where to begin. With the sheets hanging from the bars like curtains? The clothes drying on the handrails? The music blaring from several cells? I decided to start with the annoyance closest at hand: an inmate's illegal radio antenna.

Inmates were allowed to have music. Each cell had two jacks in the wall for the headphones its occupant was issued upon arrival. Through one jack was transmitted a Spanish-language radio station; through the other, a rhythm-and-blues station, except during sporting events, when the games were transmitted instead. Inmates could have their own radios, too, but the big steel cellblock made reception very difficult. Telescoping antennas were forbidden, because they might be turned into "zip guns." By inserting a bullet into the base of an extended antenna and then quickly compressing it, an inmate could fire the inaccurate but still potentially deadly gun. The approved wire dipole antennas were supposed to be placed within a two-by-four-foot area on the wall-where, apparently, they did no good at all.

To improve their chances of tuning in to a good station, inmates draped wires over their bars and across the gallery floor. Some even tied objects to the end of a bare strand of copper wire and flung it toward the outside wall, hoping that it would snag on a window and that they would win the reception jackpot. (When you looked up from the flats on a sunny day, you could sometimes

See 10 or 20 thin wires spanning the space between the gallery and the exterior wall, like the glimmering work of giant spiders.)

Antennas strewn across the gallery floor could cause someone to trip, and if they seemed likely to do so, I'd have the inmates pull them in. But the inmate in question on my first day as a regular officer in A-block-a short, white-haired man in his sixties-had gotten his off the floor by threading wire through a cardboard tube, the kind you find inside wrapping paper. One end of the tube was wedged between his bars at stomach level, and the other protruded halfway into the narrow gallery space between cell bars and fence, like a miniature bazooka.

 "You're gonna have to take this down," I advised him the first time I brushed against it.

 "Why's that?"

 "Because it's in my space."

 "But I can't hear if it's in my cell."

 "Sorry. Try stringing it up higher on your bars."

 "Sorry? You ain't sorry. Why say you sorry if you ain't sorry? And where'd you get to be an authority on antennas? They teach you that in the Academy?"

 "Look, you know the rule. No antenna at all outside the cell. I could just take it if I wanted. I'm not taking it. I'm just telling you to bring it in."

 "You didn't tell that guy down there to bring his in, did you? The white guy?"

 I looked in the direction he indicated. There were no other antennas in tubes, and I said so.

 "You're just picking on the black man, aren't you? Well, have a good time at your Klan meeting tonight," he spat out. "Have a pleasant afternoon. You've ruined mine."

 All this over an antenna. Or, rather, all brought into focus by an antenna. In person, unlike in the outside world, power and authority were at stake in nearly every transaction.

The high stakes behind petty conflict became clear for me on the night during my first month when Colton and I were assigned to work M-Rec, one of the kinds of recreation that Sing Sing relied upon heavily in order to give the prisoners something to do. After dinner, instead of the gym or the yard, inmates could gather at the gray-metal picnic-style tables bolted to the floor along M-gallery, on the flats, to play cards or chess or dominoes, or watch the television sets mounted high on the walls.

"The rule is that they can't be leaning against the bars Of the cells, the regular officer said to us, "and the cell gates are supposed to be closed." You could tell from his "supposed" that this rule was not strictly enforced. Still, Colton, a lieutenant's son, seemed strangely zealous. I think he couldn't stand the laxity around us. As we walked along the dimly lit gallery, he challenged one inmate after another. I decided that to keep his respect, I had better do the same. At varying volumes, they objected. "What is this, newjack rec P " asked one older man in a kufi who was sitting right outside his own open cell. I gestured toward the door. He told me that he was always allowed to leave the cell door open during M-Rec. Well, not tonight, I said. He yelled and screamed. I closed the gate. He walked right up to me, stood less than a foot from my face, and, radiating fury, said, "You're going to learn, CO, that some things they taught you in the Academy can get you killed."

I would hear inmates utter these exact words several times more in the upcoming months at Sing Sing, a threat disguised as advice.

(The phrasing had the advantage of ambiguity, and thus could steer the speaker clear of rule 102.10: "Inmates shall not ' under any circumstances, make any threat.") But I hadn't heard those words spoken to me before, and that, in combination with the man's standing so close, set my heart racing. I tried staring back at him as hard as he was staring at me, and didn't move until he had stepped back first.

Some of the conflict we saw, of course, wasn't only a fixed feature of prison life; it had roots in Sing Sing's frequent changes of officers. New officers, as we'd already learned, irritated inmates in much the same way that substitute teachers irritate schoolchildren. To try to lessen these effects, the chart office would often "pencil in". a resource officer to the post of a senior officer who was sick or on vacation. That way, there wouldn't be a differ ent one every day.

One day in A-block, however, I was assigned to run the gallery temporarily assigned to one of my classmates, Michaels, whom I knew to be particularly lax. It was Michaels's day off, which made me the substitute for a substitute. I knew before I even arrived that things would be chaotic.

My first problem came at count time, 11 A.M. Inmates generally began to return to their cells from programs and rec at around 10:40 or 10:45 A.m. The officers would encourage them to move promptly to their cells. By 11, anyone not in his cell and ready to be counted was technically guilty of delaying the count and could be issued a misbehavior report. Few galleries, therefore, had inmates at large after 11 A.M.

But on this day, Michaels's gallery had a dozen still out. Michaels had grown up in Brooklyn and, more than most officers from the city, considered the inmates to be basically decent guys, his "homies." He wanted them to like him. Once penciled in to this post, he had quickly learned all their names. I had helped him at count time once before, and when I complained about two inmates who were slow to lock in, Michaels replied that they were good guys. Though I had seen sergeants chew him out for looseness, he had told me privately that the sergeants could "suck my dick in Macy's window" for all he cared.

I liked Michaels for acknowledging the inmates' humanity. He had told me how much he hated A-block's usual OIC, a big, pugnacious slob I'll call Rufino, who told jokes such as "How do you know when an inmate is lying? When you see him open his mouth." But I didn't appreciate Michaels's legacy of chaos that morning.

A group of three or four senior officers strolled by, to my relief-I was sure they'd been sent to help me usher in the stragglers. But they had no such plan. A couple of them glanced disapprovingly at their watches and then at me. They didn't have to help, so they weren't going to. Thanks, guys, I muttered to myself.

About an hour later, a couple of keeplocks returned from disciplinary hearings. The block's keeplock officer, instead of borrowing my keys and ushering the inmates to their cells, called, "They're back," when he came through the gate and then disappeared. One of the keeplocks returned to his cell without trouble, but the second had other plans. It was Tuesday, he told me, and Michaels always let him take a shower on Tuesdays.

 "Keeplock showers are Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays," I said. "And Michaels isn't here today."

 "C'mon, CO, don't play tough. I'll be out in a second."

 "No," I said. He acted as though he hadn't heard, grabbed a towel from his cell, and strode quickly down the gallery to the shower stall. I wasn't overly concerned: I always kept the showers locked, just in case something like this came up, and felt confident that once I reminded him he would miss keeplock rec today if he didn't go back, he'd turn around. Then I remembered. On this gallery, the lock mechanism was missing from the shower cell door. The shower was always open. Sing Sing. The inmate was agood foot taller than me and well muscled. I yelled through thebars into the shower that he'd lost his rec. He said, "Fuck rec." I put the incident into the logbook, then wrote up a Misbehavior Report and had his copy waiting in the cell when he got back. He shrugged it off.

"I don't give a fuck, CO," he explained. "I got thirty years to life, right? And I got two years' keeplock. Plus today, I got another three months. When they see this lame-ass ticket, they're gonna tell you to shove it up your ass."

The frustration was, he was probably right. Of all the inmates on a gallery, keeplocks were the hardest to deal with. There were no carrots left to tempt them with, and few sticks-especially for the long-termers. And now it was time for keeplock rec. I tried to match faces with cells as they headed out to the yard on that hot June day-it could help me when it came time to lock them back in. I was in the middle of letting them out when the keeplock officer reappeared. He gestured in the direction I was walking

"Forty-three cell?" he said. "Hawkins? No rec today.',

 "No rec for forty-three? Why's that?"

 "He doesn't get it today," he said, and disappeared.

 I knew there could be several reasons for the inmate not receiving rec. He might have committed an infraction within the past twenty-four hours. Or he might have a deprivation order'pending against him; in cases of outrageous misbehavior, a keeplock who was a "threat to security" could have his rec taken away for a day by a sergeant. Or-what I worried about in this situation-he might have pissed off the officer but not had a deprivation order pending. In that case, another officer was asking me to burn the keeplock's rec as an act of solidarity. I hoped it wasn't the last possibility and went on down the gallery, passing up forty-three cell.

The inmate called out to me shortly after I went by.

"Hey, CO! Aren't you going to open my cell?" I ignored him until I was on my way back. He stood up from his bed as I approached.

 "Open my cell, CO! I'm going outside."

 "Not today," I said.

 "What? Why not today?"

"No rec today."

 "Why not?"

 "That's what they told me."

 I didn't answer him, but I immediately felt I'd done something wrong. I returned to the office and tried to get the keeplock officer on the phone. I was going to insist on knowing his reason. What was up with this guy? The phone rang and rang. I called the office of the OIC and asked for him. He was outside now; couldn't be reached, Rufino said. But Rufino was always unhelpful. I called the yard. He'd had to go somewhere, wasn't there now. Shit, I thought.

 Meanwhile, three keeplocks on their way out to the yard stopped separately to advise me that "forty-three cell needs to come out, CO." I looked down the gallery. He was waving his arm madly through the bars, trying to get my attention. I walked down to talk to him.

 "You're not letting me out?"

 I shook my head.

 "Who said so?" He was angry now.

 "I don't know his name," I lied.

 "Well, what did he look like?" I declined to help out. "Then what's your name? I'm writing up a grievance." I told him my name. When I passed by the cell again an hour later, he had a pagelong letter written out.

Instead of the classic newjack mistake of enforcing a rule that nobody really cared about, I had just enforced a rule that wasn't a rule, for my "brother in gray." I knew that many police admired that kind of thing. But it made me feel crummy. And with the grievance coming, I was going to have to answer for it.

I thought about how the senior officers hadn't helped me during the count, how the keeplock officer hadn't helped me when the two inmates came back, and how the same keeplock officer hadn't explained to me the deal with forty-three, even when I asked. More than once at the Academy, I'd heard the abbreviation CYA-cover your ass. I knew how to do it, though I also knew there could be consequences. In the logbook, I made note of the time and wrote, "No rec for K/L Hawkins, per CO X"-the keeplock officer. And then I waited.

 The chicken came home to roost about a month later. I knew it when I arrived at work and approached the time clock. Officer X, instead of ignoring me as usual, gave me a cold, hard stare. His partner, Officer Y, stopped me and asked if I was Conover. Yes, I said, , and he gave me the same stare and walked away. It was because inmate Hawkins in cell 43 had slugged Officer Y the day before (as I'd since learned) that Officer X had wanted to send him a message that day.

A sergeant who was unaware of all of this approached me with a copy of the inmate's grievance letter in the mess hall at lunchtime that same day. "Do you remember this incident?" he asked. I said yes. "You'll just need to respond with a To/From," he said, using department slang for a memo. "Do you remember why you didn't let him out? Probably forgot, right?"

 "Well, no, the keeplock officer told me not to."

 The sergeant wrinkled his brow. "Well, probably best just to say you forgot," he said cheerily, and turned away.

 "Sarge," I said. "It's in the logbook. I wrote in the logbook that he told me."

 "You're kidding," he said. "Why'd you do that?"

 I shrugged. "I was new."

 "I'll get back to you," he said.

 I wrote the memo the sergeant had asked for, told the truth, and felt conflicted. Days went by. Another sergeant called me in and told to me to see a lieutenant in the Administration Building. My memo was on the lieutenant's desk, and he was poring over it. "So you say you logged this part about Officer X, right?" he asked. I nodded, expecting to receive a stern, quiet lecture on how not to fuck my fellow officer. But the lieutenant just nodded, cogitated a bit, and then picked up the phone.

I heard him greet a sergeant in A-block. "So Officer X remembers saying that to Conover now, is that right? And he's going to write a new To/From? And you'll take care of the deprivation order? Okay, fine." And hung up.

He passed my memo to me over the desk. "Just write this up again, but leave out the name of Officer X," he told me.

"And then we're set?"

 "All taken care of.5~

 I was relieved. Officer X was off the hook, which meant that maybe he wouldn't hate me more than he already did. Apparently, a deprivation order would be backdated to cover his ass. And I had learned an important lesson: If you were going to survive in jail, the goody-goody stuff had to go. Any day in there, I might find myself in a situation where I'd need Officer X to watch my back, to pry a homicidal inmate off of me, at his peril. The logic of the gray wall of silence was instantly clear, as clear as the glare of hate that Officer X had sent my way when he heard what I'd done.

The single most interesting word, when it came to the bending and ignoring of rules, was contraband. To judge by the long list of what constituted contraband, its meaning was clear. In practice, however, contraband was anything but.

The first strange thing about contraband was that its most obvious forms-weapons, drugs, and alcohol--could all be found fairly readily inside prison. Some of the drugs probably slipped in through the Visit Room, but most, it seemed, were helped into prison by officers who were paid off. The Department had a special unit, the Inspector General's Office, which followed up on snitches' tips and tried to catch officers in the act; the union rep had even warned us about the "IG" at the Academy. A couple of times a year, I would come to find, a Sing Sing officer was hauled off in handcuffs by the state police.

But even in its lesser forms, contraband had many interesting subtleties. As officers, we were not allowed to bring through the front gate glass containers, chewing gum, pocket knives with blades longer than two inches, newspapers, magazines, beepers, cell phones, or, obviously, our own pistols or other weapons. A glass container, such as a bottle of juice, might be salvaged from the trash by an inmate and turned into shards for weapons. The chewing gum could be stuffed into a lock hole to jam the mechanism. The beepers, newspapers, and magazines were distractions-we weren't supposed to be occupied with any of that while on the job. Nor could we make or receive phone calls, for the same reason. Apart from inmates smoking in their cells, smoking was generally forbidden indoors.

And yet plenty of officers smoked indoors. Many chewed gum. The trash cans of wall towers were stuffed with newspapers and magazines.

A much longer list of contraband items applied to inmates. As at Coxsackie, they couldn't possess clothing in any of the colors reserved for officers: gray, black, blue, and orange. They couldn't possess cash, cassette players with a record function, toiletries containing alcohol, sneakers worth more than fifty dollars, or more than fourteen newspapers. The list was very long-so long, in fact, that the authors of Standards of Inmate Behavior found it easier to ,define what was permitted than what wasn't. Contraband was imply "any article that is not authorized by the Superintendent or [his] designee."

You looked for contraband during pat-frisks of inmates and during random cell searches. One day in A-block, I found my first example: an electric heating element, maybe eight inches wide, such as you'd find on the surface of a kitchen range. Wires were connected to the ends of the coil, and a plug was connected to the wires. The inmate, I knew, could plug it into the outlet in his cell, place a pan on it, and do some home cooking. I supposed it was contraband because of the ease with which it could start a fire, trip the cell's circuit breaker, burn the inmate, or burn someone the inmate didn't like. And it must have been stolen from a stove somewhere inside the prison.

I was proud of my discovery and asked a senior officer on the gallery how to dispose of it and what infraction number to place on the Misbehavior Report.

 "Where'd you find this?" he asked.

 "Cell K-twelve, in a box behind the locker," I said.

 "K-twelve-yeah, he's a cooker," the officer said. "Cooks every night. Can't stand mess-hall food. I don't blame him."

 "Yeah? So what's the rule number?"

 The other officer said he didn't know, so I made some phone calls, figured it out, and did the paperwork during lunch. While I was at it, an inmate porter stopped by and pleaded on behalf of the cooker. "He's a good guy, CO. He needs it." A few minutes later, to my amazement, a mess-hall officer called.

 "You the guy who found that heating element?"

 "Yeah. Why?"

 "What are you going to do with it?"

 "Turn it in."

 "Oh really?"

 "Yeah. Why?"

 There was a long pause. "Oh, nothing." He hung up.

 I finished my Misbehavior Report and stepped out of the office to let inmates back into their cells from chow. When I returned to the office, the coil, which I had placed on the desk, was gone.

 "Where'd it go?" I asked the senior officer. "Did you move it?"

 "What-oh, that heating thing?" he said offhandedly. "I gave it back to him."

 "Gave it back? Why'd you do that? I just wrote up a report."

 "Look, he's a good guy. Never gives any trouble. I think he's vegetarian. He really can't eat that stuff they serve down there. Why don't you go talk to him?" He made for the door.

 I stared at him skeptically. He shrugged and was gone.

 Unsure exactly why I did so, I went to talk to the inmate. He did seem like a nice guy, and thanked me profusely for not turning him in. Oh what the hell, I thought.

Not long afterward, I found another heating coil during a cell search in B-block. This time my sergeant, Murphy, saw it in my hands and insisted I turn it in. The paperwork that Murphy told me to fill out was even more elaborate than what I had imagined. Specifically, he said, I'd need to make an entry in the B-block cellsearch logbook; to write a contraband receipt for the inmate, with copy stapled to a misbehavior report, to be signed by a supervisor in the Watch Commander's Office, where I would submit all the paperwork and get the key to the contraband locker in the hospital basement, where I would also sign the logbook. Oh, and on the way to the Watch Commander's Office, I should stop and pick up an evidence bag from the disciplinary office, in which to place the burner.

It was the end of my day. I knew that many officers, rather than plow through all this when their shift was over, would just drop the contraband in a trash can by the front gate and be done with it. Sergeant Murphy would never follow up. But some contrarian impulse drove me on. I finally made it to the Watch Commander's Office and waited twenty minutes for my turn with the lieutenant. He looked at the heating element, then at my paperwork.

"Do you think this is a good use of the Adjustment Committee's time?" he asked.

I shrugged and said I supposed it was. My sergeant must have thought so when he told me to write all this up, I added. The lieutenant blathered on about major versus minor offenses, the need to make judgments, and so on, apparently expecting me to say, "Oh, I get it!" and withdraw from his office. But it had been a lot of work. I had stayed late. I was pissed off about this and other things. I didn't move.

After 23 years of duping drug dealers, Jack Kelly prepares to hang up his cloak

Aboard the Coast Guard vessel Monomoy, Sept. 22, 1990

The seas are running 14 to 16 feet as the ship heads out of Woods Hole with seven overnight guests - four Drug Enforcement Administration agents, two US Customs agents and a Gloucester cop. John L. (Jack) Kelly, the DEA agent in charge of the voyage, was an infantryman in Vietnam's Mekong Delta in the late '60s. He was part of the infamous Phoenix program set up to eliminate Viet Cong leaders. That was dangerous, but this trip is truly crazy, he is thinking, no place for a Dorchester boy. "Everyone is getting sick to the stomach," he would remember later.

Kelly has nobody to blame but himself. He has been running this investigation since January 1990, when he got a call from a Gloucester sailor: Some guys wanted a boat to pick up marijuana and maybe cocaine in Colombia and run it back to the States. Since then, he has developed two informants, supervised electronic surveillance and has been able to monitor the drug ring's every move. For the next four nights and days, the lawmen will be sick, in danger of drowning and close to failure, but the result will become another piece of Jack Kelly's legacy, part of why he has become a legend among New England law enforcement officers, and why they all say they're going to miss him, because after 23 years of hunting down and tricking the bad guys, Kelly is getting ready to retire in a few months when he's 50.

DEA New England headquarters, downtown Boston, 1994

An agent wanders into Jack Kelly's cluttered office to tell him how a case is going. He is the second agent in 20 minutes to do this. Kelly is their mentor and that of assistant US attorneys, state and local cops and FBI agents. In law enforcement, where agencies are too often known more for protecting their turf and budgets than for cooperating, Jack Kelly shared everything he could.

When describing Kelly, Jonathan Chiel, chief of the criminal division of the US Attorney's Office in Boston, uses the Yiddish word for stand-up guy. "He's a mensch. He always took an interest in the young assistants. He took time to tell stories, to teach. Generations of prosecutors point to him as one of the best they ever worked with. He's a beloved guy here."

Drug Enforcement Administration work is not a movie full of car chases and running gun battles. "It's like war," says Kelly, a former first lieutenant. "There are months of boredom and tedium punctuated by unbelievable fear and violence. We worked that boat case, for example, for six months prior, so I liken it to months of march and patrol and search and one day, an hour of violence when everything goes crazy."

George Festa, special agent in charge of the New England Office, says, "It takes a unique individual to do undercover work for a long period of time. It takes an awful lot of patience, a great amount of courage, and you must be very intelligent. Jack has all that."

Kelly sits behind his desk and listens to the younger agent. He is not crazy about desk work. After 23 years of undercover, he has been assigned to handle the media. But he speaks proudly of how the DEA still pulls him out frobehind that desk because he is one of the best "buy-and-bust" agents in the business. When the agent leaves, Kelly folds his hands over a slight paunch. He is always battling his weight, and he loves his cigars. The first thing he does when he hits the golf course, a friend says, is light up a cigar. But he has given up drinking. And he remains sharp.

"That's important to me," he says after the agent leaves, "what you pass on to some of the guys. They're in their prime now, and they'll pass it along to younger ones."

But what worries his admirers is this: As good and caring a teacher as Jack Kelly has been, can he transfer the legend?

"The DEA has good, experienced agents," says Assistant US Attorney Bill Sinnott, "but there was something special that Jack brought to a case. I really don't see an heir apparent. I'm not saying there aren't great agents, or that there are agents who won't make super cases, but I don't know if they'll have as much fun at their work as Jack did. Jack's got an intuitive sense of how bad guys think."

Kelly can ingratiate himself with anyone. He doesn't swagger into any meeting place. He doesn't play macho man.What the drug dealer sees and hears is a guy who has something to sell or money that he wishes to spend, a guy who wants to do business for the long term, a guy who's somewhat nervous about this business and keeps asking you if you know what you are doing. And the point of it all is to get it on tape, crucial to the prosecution. But the agent must be fast on his or her feet.

Once, Kelly was posing as a dope dealer, pulling a reverse sting, in which the DEA pretends to be selling, rather than buying, the drugs. When the critical moment came, the buyer asked Kelly, "I'm a little short. Can you take a check?"

Kelly yelled, "A check? What do I look like, Kmart?"

He got cash. He knew most dope dealers don't take checks. Had he said OK, the buyer might have had secondthoughts, and the deal might have died.

Another time, Kelly was posing as somebody who had come into possession of a chemical used in the manufacture of methamphetamine and was dealing with a hard guy over a pupu platter of Chinese food. At one point, Kelly said, "I might be fat, and my mother dresses me funny, but I'm not stupid." Slowly, inexorably, Kelly, at once self denigrating and street-wise, managed to squeeze from his dinner partner every sort of admission that any prosecutor would want.

Assistant US Attorney Mike Kendall says the suspect pleaded guilty, took a sentence of 30 years, no parole, and told his lawyer that he did not want any jury to hear the tape because it was so embarrassing.

Kendall recalls, "Jack would say, 'Are you guys big enough to do this kind of a deal?' And all these idiots would talk about how big they were, how much experience they had. They say a good jazz musician can play without music, can play from his heart, and that's what Jack can do."

When Jack Kelly was just starting out as a DEA agent in New York City in 1971, his supervisor told him, "Work on your surveillance. You look like an Irish cop." A few months later, he told Kelly, "You're OK. You're the only guy who can look me in the eye and lie."

The lying comes with the undercover role. When the agent gets on the stand, Kelly argues, he had better be truthful.Credibility is a dear commodity; if you lose it, you lose more than a case or two; you become useless to the agency and to the prosecution.

By being what he is, he has trapped dealers among ghetto gangbangers, bikers, wiseguys, Cuban Marielitos. Through it all, he seems to be a nervous guy whose endless chatter puts others at ease, managing to elicit from them what they sell, where they get it or how they make it and for how long they've been plying their illegal trade.

"I'm a good undercover agent," Kelly says. "It's part of my upbringing. And I understand that drugs are a business.My demeanor reflects that. A monkey can go get dope. You've got to identify who the guy buys the drugs from, who his source is.

"A lot of times, the main guy will walk into the room and say nothing to you. I met one guy, for two kilos of coke, and the other guy turns the TV set on and says, 'I'm just here for the ride.' If that other guy doesn't say anything, he walks. We have nothing on him. So I say, 'Hey, what's the story here? Am I gonna be meeting different people every time?' And he says, 'No, me or him.' Good. We've got him."

At such times, Kelly, wired for sound or videotaped by a hidden camera, utters a certain phrase or makes apredetermined motion, the signal for other DEA agents to come crashing in and make the collar.

But other times, nothing goes according to script. And that's precisely what was happening that stormy night at sea.

Somewhere in the Atlantic, Sept. 22, 1990

The Monomoy is to make contact with the Vigorous, an ocean-going Coast Guard cutter that is to find and then track a broken-down fishing boat, the Miss Reba O, on its way from Colombia to Gloucester with a stash of 19,000 pounds of grass with a street value of about $ 36 million.

The DEA tracked the boat from Gloucester, to Puerto Rico, to an island off the coast of Venezuela and to Colombia,where the stash was loaded onboard and a Colombian joined the American crew.

Kelly doesn't want to hit the boat at sea. He wants the suspects to unload their goods and begin distributing so he can nab the whole organization. But that's going to be a problem that will test his talents.

About 5 a.m., when a Coast Guardsman awakens Kelly, it's raining, and the sea is still in turmoil. The horizon seems to be moving up and down, and every once in a while, Kelly sees the Vigorous popping up and down. A Boston whaler has approached the Monomoy to take on the seven seasick agents and bring them to the larger ship.

The agents must get into survival suits. Kelly, middle-aged and a bit portly, is carrying a pistol, rifle and radio and struggles into the skin-tight suit. "This is gonna keep me buoyant?" he asks a crew member. "I'm gonna sink like a stone. And what's this little whistle for?"

The crewman says, "If you fall in the water, blow the whistle, and we'll be able to find you."

Kelly says, "My question is - can you blow a whistle 40 feet underwater?"

When the whaler arrives, Kelly is told to simply jump from the Coast Guard ship onto the boat.

"Jump? I'm a 45-year-old fat guy with 100 pounds of gear, and you want me to time it?"

Kelly leaps and lands in a heap in the boat, which takes the men to the Vigorous.

The lawmen spend the next two stormy days trying to find Miss Reba O. Not to worry, Kelly is told, the aircraft can find the boat. The information comes in, and the cutter intercepts a boat. And it's the wrong one. It has become crucial to board the drug boat. That was not the original plan, but while monitoring the dealers' radio calls, the DEA learns that they're low on fuel and may refuel off the coast of Long Island. Now the DEA worries that some drugs might be removed during refueling. Kelly and crew must intercept the boat, take it over, pretend - if necessary - that they've refueled from a passing ship and bring it into safe haven.

But now they've got the wrong boat. Kelly has a fallback position. The Gloucester boat captain, the informant, was given special radio codes in case he had to contact Kelly. So, Kelly, using "a $ 24 radio on a $ 23 million ship and with jet planes all over the place," contacts the captain of the elusive boat and, "I say, basically, 'Hi, this is Jack. Where are you?' " He gets the coordinates.

"I had vessels, planes, ground forces, and they're all saying the boat is going south," Kelly later recalls. "It's just me and the cooperating witness, and he tells me where it is."

The captain goes with Kelly's advice. The Coast Guard finds and boards the boat - at sea, the Coast Guardsmen do the initial boarding and arresting. They collar three suspects - Robert Young, Daniel Casey and Carlos Alberto Restrepo -and leave the captain/informant on board. Kelly and the lawmen must get into the whaler, then jump up on Miss RebaO's cargo netting. Kelly almost falls into the ocean.

Waves have knocked out the electrical system. The Coast Guard manages to get the engine working, but there is no electricity. For three days, the lawmen subsist on soggy ham and bologna sandwiches and water. It is too dark to e.

Forget Gloucester and head for Portland. It's more secure. It also means another eight to 10 hours on the boat from hell.

As the boat captain navigates toward Portland, a second informant - this one on land - is asked by two suspects,Michael Cody and Thomas Walsh, to arrange to unload the marijuana. They have no idea that their companions are no longer in charge of the boat, no idea that they and their colleagues are blabbing their way into being arrested. On land, the second informant hears from Walsh that one Charles Pappas has heavy-duty money to buy the marijuana.Pappas agrees to pay $ 100,000 up front for 5,000 pounds of marijuana with the promise of another $ 200,000 to be delivered later.

After Pappas, accompanied by a driver, Arthur Cunningham, makes the deal near a Woburn hotel, the two are arrested.A short time later, Walsh and the two guys who masterminded the deal, Cody and Michael Gunther Spieth - all under surveillance - are collared outside a downtown Boston restaurant.

"Jack recruited the captain as an informant," says Assistant US Attorney Bill Sinnott, "and also got a land-based oordinator for the distribution to work for him. We had them coming and going. We had the informant at sea, and he was recording all the conversations. We must have had 100 tapes on these guys."

Boston, 1995

Jack Kelly still lives in Dorchester, not far from where he grew up, one of five sons born to a phone company employee and a housewife. His mother also lives in Dorchester and occasionally reminds her bachelor son, "For every old sock, there's an old shoe." In other words, when is he going to get married already and settle down?

Kelly, his friends say, has his share of female admirers. But for a long time, especially earlier in his career, he would be on the road, going wherever the deals had to be made. "You can be Clark Gable," he says, "but women are not going to put up with that, being gone for three months at a time."

They do put up with his persona. He wanders the halls of DEA's Boston headquarters, at times with an unlit cigar in his mouth, his blue eyes sparkling, his mouth in full gear. "Hello, girls," he says to three DEA employees.

"Girls!" they exclaim as one. "Women," one yells. "Ladies," another shouts after him. They are not insulted."Because," explains Sydney Hanlon, presiding justice of the Dorchester District Court and a Kelly fan ever since he befriended her in 1983 when she joined the Drug Unit of the US Attorney's Office, "there's no anger in it, no malice in it."

State Sen. Paul White, a Dorchester Democrat who went to St. Mark's Grammar School with Jack Kelly, remembers, "He was really diligent, serious about whatever he did, but he was funny then too. He'll kid around about everything,but he's serious and proud about what he's done with his life."

Once, Kelly worked under a cloud. An assistant US attorney, David Twomey, falsely accused him of leaking information on a narcotics case to the suspect. It turned out that Twomey was the culprit and went to the slammer. But Kelly was hurt that DEA superiors had taken him off the case and had not supported him. Despite that wound, Jack Kelly remains a true believer. He has heard all the arguments about legalizing drugs, and he dismisses them as naive. He acknowledges that the DEA's job is akin to that of holding one's finger in the dike, but he contends that plugging that hole has saved lives. After close to a quarter-century of pursuing bad guys, he says the effort is worth the chase.

"They'd sell cancer if they thought they could make money at it," he says. "That's why they're in it. They're not in it to help mankind."

Doyle's: Everybody	Alan Lupo
Knows the Name	Boston globe

The Burke brothers tap into city's changing spirit

Dick McDonough, Jamaica Plain resident and literary agent, was on the phone with a New York editor who was planning to meet him in Boston. Where did she wish to have lunch?

"Doyle's," she said. "Please."

Not the Ritz. Not Anthony's Pier Four. Doyle's in Jamaica Plain, described by one of its regulars, Danny McLean, as a place that serves "a nice meal. Everything on the menu is under $ 10. We're not gourmet people. The price is right.

That's all."

Doyle's Cafe was once a joint not unfamiliar to combinations of jabs and hooks. It is now neutral territory, a meeting place for whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians; for pols of every stripe; for straights and gays; for local elbow-benders at the bar and policy wonks in the no-smoking room; for law-enforcement types and those they have put away for a spell; for doers and dreamers. But more than all that, it is the reflection of three Boston boys. Jerry, Eddie and Billy Burke are third-generation Irish-Americans who grew up in the neighborhood and understood and responded to how it and the city were changing. Their story is in large part the story of how Boston has changed in the last half-century from an insular town consumed by a history of Yankee-Irish conflict to a more cosmopolitan city, still beset by the tensions of race and class, but coming to terms with the new world.

As Marie Turley, a transplanted New Yorker and one of the brothers' friends and customers, says, "Their story is about family. It's about tradition. It's about some universal things."

On one wall of Doyle's Cafe is a framed copy of a dead newspaper's account of a dead politician, James Michael Curley. It is the Nov. 14, 1958, Boston American, reporting on 50,000 mourning at Curley's bier. From across the room comes the rapid-fire Spanish of some customers. Doyle's bridges the old and new Boston.

"Doyle's is to Cambridge and New York City what Cheers was to Cleveland," says McDonough. "It's a hip place."

And unlike Cheers, this saloon is real. You can't find it on the TV. You have to go to the corner of Washington and Williams streets.

On the outside is a patchwork of saloon architecture, some of it of fairly recent vintage and some of it from 1882. Inside are the Burke brothers, each with a specialty, who manage to work together without killing one another and who often wonder out loud how they came to such good fortune.

Technically, Eddie, 51, who lives in the Burke family home on Myrtle Street in Jamaica Plain, is the owner and the nighttime host; Jerry, 53, of Canton, is the food manager and host during the day; and Billy, 46, of Quincy, is the drinks manager and chief bartender. The saloon business being what it is, each brother has done all the jobs, but each gives the others room to maneuver. Brothers who don't do that don't remain brothers. Businessmen who don't do that end up in court. Saloonkeepers who don't do that begin drinking up the profits.

"When my mother was dying," Jerry says, "she called us to her bed and said, 'It's nice to see how all you kids get along together. But I'll tell you now, if I hear of any of you fighting, I'll come back out of my grave and haunt you.' Well, that said it, pure and simple. We don't have any strife here."

Richie Harris, a neighborhood leader and a longtime pal of the Burkes, says, "If they were all alike, it'd be awful. You wouldn't be able to get a drink in there. They'd all be fighting. But they all do their jobs well."

Eddie, his brothers and others say, is the brains behind the place. He is at once garrulous and reticent, depending on how much he feels like revealing. From the time he was a kid, Jerry says, Eddie had a mind for "the arithmetic" of business.

"Eddie's smart," says Harris. "He keeps his mouth shut and takes everything in and then makes a decision. He'll tell you as much as he wants you to know."

Jerry, who majored in history in college, is a political junkie who has carefully culled and posted on the saloon walls photos and news stories of Boston's and Ireland's political legends. To the undying amusement of his brothers, Jerry will take a lunch break by hiking through the Forest Hills Cemetery, where he has become a self-appointed tour guide on pols, writers and assorted characters of ages past.

Billy comes off as the tough guy, the one on whose shoulders all the gritty details of bartending must fall. But he is the same guy who took the time and trouble to talk a bereaved customer through the red tape of how one tidies up the affairs of a late parent. And his grin belies the image.

The joint has become a success beyond the brothers' dreams. One recent night, US Sen. John Kerry and his aides were in one booth with some community activists, as local pols came by to pay respect. Earlier, Eddie Jesser, a confidant of Mayor Menino, was chewing the fat with his close friend, former state Sen. Joe Timilty. In another corner, state Sen.Paul White, a Dorchester Democrat, had just come in with a bevy of political pals after having knocked on doors and rung bells for his reelection effort.

A few feet from them were a handful of off-duty Boston Police Patrolmen's Association members, taking a night to themselves and even belting out a number, thereby confirming a general feeling in the bar that a singing cop might be more frightening to a criminal than one with a drawn service revolver.

As local pols trooped by, Kerry, eating fried fish, looked up, grinned and said, "This is not a political bar or anything like that, is it?"

It is at least that. Doyle's has grown from a typical corner joint to an institution, from a place with five employees when Eddie bought it in 1971 to one with 80.

"When I started this," says Eddie between puffs of a thin Jamaican cigar, "I didn't expect that John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Ray Flynn, Tom Menino would be coming in. Flynn once brought Clinton in here for Sunday brunch."

He leans back in a chair next to a window looking out on Washington Street - the shadows of the elevated T tracks now a memory - and to a park used by Boston English High School, takes another puff and laughs, "Saloonkeeper to the world!" and then pauses and grunts, "My father sold peanuts, for Chrissakes."

Peanuts, pols and pachyderms

By the time City Councilor James Michael Curley was running for Congress in 1910, the Boston Irish were well past the worst of the challenges they had experienced: first, in making it across the ocean; later, in surviving tenements, cholera and crime; and, finally, in gaining a foothold in both the public and private sectors.

William J. Burke, formerly of the village of Clooneen, was married four years to the former Margaret Hawkins, of Norwood, and was becoming a person to be reckoned with in Jamaica Plain. He had taken over the faltering Division 40 of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, had increased its membership by 500 percent and put it in the black.

In Curley, who would later serve as mayor four times and governor once, he saw a man on the move, and in 1910 he ran a smoker for him. Curley would remember. Burke ran a bar at Washington and Rossmore streets. With Prohibition, the bar closed, and Burke opened a "candy store," which never seemed to feature much candy. It was a front for wholesale booze, which Burke supplied to, among others, F. J. Doyle, who had taken over the joint at the corner of Washington and Williams. In time, the Doyle family would remember.

After a few years of Prohibition, Burke knew he needed something more reliable. He bid for the refectory and concessions at the Franklin Park Zoo. He was not favored until Mayor Curley stepped in. After William died in 1939, his son John took over the operation; John's three sons and two daughters would later come to help him. In all, the Burke family would run the concessions for a half-century.

"My old man," recalls Jerry, the oldest of the three brothers, "it would take him two days at Christmas time to bring presents to all the inspectors, the city councilors, the cops. They were bastards in those days. He said to me once, 'Gerard, I have two back pockets, one for my money, and one for my pride.' You had to eat a lot of crow back then."

Eddie, the middle brother, looks around his saloon and says, "That's why I ended up here. When we had the zoo, my old man had to pay heed to the MDC police, the Boston police, the state reps, city councilors, because it was a contract. My poor old man, sitting there, trying to make a buck, with five kids, a dog, a cat, his brother-in-law. I said, 'Someday, I'll have my own little joint.' "

Upward mobility

John Burke, the "smart and aggressive" captain of Jamaica Plain High School's district champion football team of 1934-35, fell in love with Mary Callahan, whose dad, Eddie (Smiler) Callahan, was the pro at the Franklin Park Golf Course. Her uncle, Timothy, was a well-connected lawyer, tight with Curley and both John I. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald,former mayor and maternal grandfather of the Kennedy clan, and Joe Kennedy. John and Mary inherited William Burke's home on Myrtle Street next door to where a future mayor, John Collins and his wife, Mary, would live. There they raised three sons and two daughters, Helen and Frances. College was an option, but work at the concession stands was a required rite of passage.

"I was getting close to 14," Jerry remembers. "It was a bitterly cold Sunday. My father and I were driving through the intersection of Green and Washington, and out of the blue, he says to me, 'If you sold me something for 35 cents, and I gave you a dollar, how much change would I get back?'

"I said, 'What are you asking me that for?'

" 'Because you are going to help open up the lion house stand today.'

"We were closed for the season. The stand had three shutters, and we opened it for one day, maybe to make a hundred bucks with some hot chocolate and some souvenirs. That was my first day at work. I learned a lot working there."

Jerry Burke learned well. Unlike his brothers, he got a college degree and then a law degree, but the lessons that stuck were those he picked up at the concession stands and when he ran unsuccessfully in 1966 for state representative.

"Jerry can charm any customer who comes in," says Paul Reid, a writer and state employee and an addict to Doyle's Reuben sandwiches. "He zeroes right in on your interest whether he knows you or not. He'll find some anecdote on baseball, Boston history, church history. Jerry will laugh at anything, but he'll never crack a joke at anyone's expense."

Billy beer

Down in the cellar of Doyle's, Billy Burke is flushing out the lines that run from the barrels of beer up through the ceiling and into the bar itself. The room is a jungle of intravenous-like wires, something between an intensive care unit and Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. Every second Wednesday, Billy cleans out 26 lines, one for cider, the rest for beer.

Billy is the youngest brother. John and Mary Burke raised three big boys, each with a handshake that can crush a normal person's fingers, but Billy is the most trim and the most athletic. As a senior at Jamaica Plain High School in 1967, he was captain of the hockey team, which lost every game but one. This he recalls with a smile, this grin that creeps across his face, often in expectation of a good story. At first glance he seems to be a dour guy, but he is as facile with self-deprecation as his brothers.

"I think I went to college," he says one day.

He thinks he went?

"Yeah, six weeks at Northeastern. Economics was a required course. Iictly a neighborhood joint then, drawing mostly daytime business from the MBTA yards and the Boston Gas Co.

"They were rough," Harris recalls. "They'd get a couple of pops in them, and watch out. I seen these half-dozen guys in a booth, and they're yabba do, yabba do, and I says, 'These guys are gonna get in a fight.'

"Sure enough, one big guy belted a little guy, who slid under the table. I jump the bar and try to break it up, but it's like walking into a buzzsaw, because they're all friends, and I'm the outsider.

"Now, I didn't know much about Billy Burke. But before I went at it, there's Billy right there, and we're shoulder to shoulder. We got 'em by the front door, and I got a couple of them, and he's got a couple of them, and they're swinging at us. I look up and all I see is a big fist heading my way, and I figure I've had it. All of a sudden, another big fist comes out from behind me and hits the guy. My brother Al had just come in.

"So now we're having a donnybrook out on the street, three of us against six of them." Richie Harris pauses and smirks. "We licked 'em."

Changing neighborhood

When William Burke needed a favor, Jim Curley remembered him. When his grandson, Eddie, was looking to make his own way, F. J. Doyle and his nephew Billy remembered the Burkes.

Eddie Burke had always wanted to run a bar. And he was always thinking, always trying to figure the angles. "When he was working for our old man, he would come up with new ways of doing things," says Jerry. "He bought a horse, and we gave pony rides in front of the refectory. He made a mobile concession stand that we took to events with coffee, pastry, tonic and hot dogs."

Eddie had gone in with partners to buy the Stag, a well-worn neighborhood joint on Washington Street, close to Egleston Square. The Stag was still attracting the guys who had grown up around there, the guys who liked a shot and a beer, but Eddie didn't see a future in it, and he wanted his own place.

One day in 1971, he dropped into Doyle's for a beer. F. J. Doyle, 90, and his nephew Billy, 69, were running the place - essentially one room with a bar and a small kitchen, all attached to a small store.

"What are you doing, Eddie?" Billy Doyle asked.

"Nothin'," Eddie answered.

"Why don't you buy this bar?" Billy asked.

And so a second-generation Doyle and third-generation Burke began negotiating. The continuum of Boston Irish history was at work, but it was slowly eroding. Jamaica Plain, long a melting pot of white ethnics, was changing in both race and class.

Blacks and Latinos were moving into the affordable apartments; baby boomers who couldn't afford Cambridge or Beacon Hill were buying up the more expensive properties. Slowly, the clientele at Doyle's was reflecting the neighborhood, mirroring the changes sweeping the city itself.

When it was a working-stiff bar, one special meal a day - meatloaf, corned beef and cabbage, fish on Fridays - was fine.

"But people who were coming in wanted more than a choice of one meal a day," says Eddie.

So, Eddie expanded. He began planning what would become two additional rooms, learned about whole wheat pizza and shark meat and, in one of the more traumatic decisions a saloonkeeper can make, he got rid of the Budweiser.

"It was one of the smartest things we ever did," Jerry says now. "It attracts a bad element. Once in a while, I'll see one of the guys who used to hang around here, and I'll say, 'Hey, I haven't seen you in a while,' and he'll say, 'You stopped the Budweiser,' and I'll say to myself, 'Thank Jesus.' "

So the troublemakers were slowly leaving for other watering holes, and the boomers, attracted by a neighborhood bar that actually welcomed them, were coming in to join the regulars. But something was missing.

Eddie had Billy behind the bar, but he had to fulfill family destiny. He needed Jerry, who was then working in the Flynn administration. Eddie had contributed to Ray Flynn, and when Flynn asked if he could do anything for him, Eddie saw his chance. "Get rid of my brother," he said. "I want him down here."

Flynn complied, and Jerry turned the first building addition into the Irish room and the second addition into the Boston politics room.

Ray Flynn had liked Doyle's when he was a city councilor and liked it even more when he became mayor. Once he began showing up, his wannabes, loyalists, precinct workers, bureaucrats and bootlickers followed.

When Flynn showed up one night with former Mayor Kevin White, and they posed with future Mayor Menino, the Burkes thought they had died and gone to heaven. For $ 9.95, one can buy from them what they call "30 Years of Boston's History. Doyle's Famous Mayors Photo. Ready to frame and story enclosed."

In business, as in politics, perception is a large part of reality, and both the perception and the reality of Doyle's hangs on its cultural intercourse of sculptors, artists, writers, pols, bureaucrats, wiseguys, cops and others. Word gets around.

The New York Times does a piece. National Geographic includes the bar in a Boston story.

"It's been an incredible crossroads," says Carol Leary, a longtime Jamaica Plain activist. "It's like a Greek forum. You can get political debate and find out who can do the plumbing in your house."

Paul Reid began hitting Doyle's about six years ago. He made a big impression when he told the Burkes that their chocolate cake was pretty good, but that his wife, Donna, made a better one. Now, she makes them, he delivers them and Doyle's serves them.

What impressed Reid was the time he met a federal agent there and at the next table was a Southie wiseguy who had just been released after serving time for running guns to the Irish Republican Army.

"The agent patted him on the back and said, 'I hope you're behaving yourself,' and the guy said he had just come out and the first place he wanted to go was Doyle's. Two years later, there's this big armored car heist, and the same agent arrested the same guy, and I think one of the first things the guy said was, 'Well, I'm not going to be seeing you at Doyle's soon.' "

Payback

"We're always kidding around," says Richie Harris, "but the Burke brothers never forgot where they came from. You see somebody who needs help, and you give him a hand."

the Burkes give back to the neighborhood that succored their family. Eddie, the businessman, says it's an investment - you give the young people a leg up, and it pays off down the line.

When Sister Jeanne Gribaudo, of the Sisters of St. Joseph and director of the Jamaica Plain CYO, needed money to fund sports and activities for kids who do not regularly frequent summer camps, she was told to see the Burke brothers.

"I asked Eddie if he could give me a break on pizza. He said he'd give me all the free pizza I'd want any time. He even printed certificates entitling the kids to pizza. I bring the kids, and it's 10 pizza sometimes. On a bad month," she says, laughing, "Eddie can go through 40 pizzas."

Eddie and Gil Sullivan, who runs an industrial packaging outfit across the street, also came up with the money to sponsor one baseball and three softball teams and eight basketball squads.

"Our junior girls, God love them," says Sister Jeanne, "they haven't won a game. They don't even go seven innings sometimes, maybe five. They have lost by 35 runs. It's worse than anything you could imagine. When they catch a ball and get an out, they dance on the field, scream and yell. Someone once said, 'They don't win a game, but they look good in their uniforms.' When kids are in a uniform, they feel special.

"The brothers always say, 'It's gonna work,' no matter what it is. There are moments where I can lose it altogether. But no matter what problems the kids are having, the Burkes say, 'Whatever you need, it's gonna work.' "

Sister Jeanne, talking about three brothers who own a saloon, is crying.

HEADLINE: The barrel of a gun : 'She's comin' on, boys,' radioed Capt. Billy Tyne off the Nova Scotia coast.Soon after, the Andrea Gail and its crew of six disappeared

BYLINE: Sebastian Junger

It was the storm of the century, boasting waves more than 100 feet high -- a tempest created by so rare a combination of fact that meteorologists deemed it ''the perfect storm.'' When it struck in October 1991, there was virtually no warning.

There's a certain amount of denial in swordfishing. The boats claw through a lot of bad weather, and the crews generally just batten down the hatches, turn on the VCR and put their faith in the tensile strength of steel. Still,

every man on a sword boat knows there are waves out there that can crack them open like a coconut. Oceanographers have calculated that the maximum theoretical height for wind- driven waves is 198 feet; a wave that size could put down a lot of oil tankers, not to mention a 72-foot sword boat. Once you're in the denial business, though, it's hard to know when to stop. Captains routinely overload their boats, ignore storm warnings,stow their life rafts in the wheelhouse and disarm their emergency radio beacons. But the farther you work from shore, the less smug you can afford to be. Any weekend boater knows the Coast Guard will pluck him out of whatever idiocy he gets himself into, but sword boats don't have that option. They're working 600 to 800 kilometres from shore, way beyond helicopter range. So Billy Tyne, captain of the Andrea Gail -- like any bluewater fisherman -- has a tremendous respect for the big wet fist. When Billy, who fishes out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, receives the weather chart off the fax machine, he undoubtedly tells the crew that there's something very heavy on the way. There are specific things you can do to survive a storm at sea and whether the crew does them, and how well they do them, depends on how jaded they all are. Billy has fished his whole life. Maybe he thinks nothing can sink him; or maybe the sea is every nightmare he's ever had.

A good, worried crew starts by dogging down every hatch, porthole and watertight door on the boat. That keeps breaking waves from busting things open and flooding the hold. They check the hatches on the lazarette, where the steering mechanism is housed, and make sure they're secure. They check the pump filters and fish out any debris floating in the bilgewater.

They clear everything off the deck -- fishing gear, gaff pikes, oil slickers, boots -- and put them down the fishhole. They remove the scupper plates so the boat can clear her decks. They tighten the anchor fastenings. They double-lash the fuel and water barrels on the whaleback. They shut off the gas cocks on the propane stove. They lash down anything in the engine room that might break loose and cause damage. They press down the fuel tanks so that some are empty and others are as full as possible. That reduces something called free surface effect -- liquid sloshing around in tanks, changing the centre of gravity.

Some boats pay one crew member a bit extra to oversee the engine, but the Andrea Gail doesn't have such a position; Billy takes care of it himself. He climbs down the engine room companionway and runs through the checklist: engine oil, hydraulics, batteries, fuel lines, air intakes, injectors.

He makes sure the fire and high-water alarms are on and the bilge pumps are working. He tests the backup generator. He hands out seasick pills. He fixes his position on the chart and calculates how the weather will affect his drift. He reckons their course in his head in case a wave takes out their electronics.

He checks the emergency lighting. He checks the survival suits. He checks the photos of his daughters. And then, he settles down to wait. Another weather fax comes in:

HURRICANE GRACE MOVING WILL TURN NE AND ACCELERATE. DEVELOPING DANGEROUS STORM MOVING E 35 KTS WILL TURN SE AND SLOW BY 12 HOURS. FORECAST WINDS 50 TO 65KTS AND SEAS 22 TO 32 FEET WITHIN 400 NM SEMICIRCLE.

It reads like an inventory of things fishermen don't want to hear. An accompanying chart shows Hurricane Grace as a huge swill around Bermuda, and the developing storm as a tightly jammed set of barometric lines just north of Sable Island. Billy can either waste several days trying to get out of the way, or he can stay on-course for home. The fact that he has a hold full of fish, and not enough ice, must figure into his decision.

''He did what 90 per cent of us would've done -- he battened down the hatches and hung on,'' says Tommy Barrie, captain of the Allison, another boat in the Andrea Gail's swordfish fleet. ''He'd been gone well over amonth. He probably just said, 'Screw it, we've had enough of this shit,' and kept heading home.''

The first sign of the storm comes late on Oct. 26, when satellite images reveal a slight bend in the leading edge of the cold front over western Indiana. The bend is a pocket of low barometric pressure -- a short-wave trough -- imbedded in the wall of the cold front at around 6,000 metres. It's the embryo of a storm. The trough moves east at 60 kilometres an hour, strengthening as it goes. It follows the Canadian border to Montreal, cuts east across northern Maine, crosses the Bay of Fundy and traverses Nova Scotia throughout the early hours of Oct. 28. By dawn an all- out gale is raging north of Sable Island. The barometric pressure is dropping more than a millibar an hour, and the Sable Island storm is sliding away fast to the southeast with 65-knot winds and 30-foot seas. It's a tightly packed low that Billy Tyne, 300 kilometres away, can't even feel yet.

The Canadian government maintains a data buoy 100 kilometres east of Sable Island, at 43.8 north and 57.4 west, just short of Billy's position. It is simply known as buoy #44139; there are eight others like it between Boston and the Grand Banks. They relay oceanographic information back to shore on an hourly basis.

Throughout the day of Oct. 28, buoy 44139 records almost no activity whatsoever -- dingy-sailing weather on the high seas. At two o'clock the needle jumps, though: suddenly the seas are 13 feet and the winds are gusting to 15 knots. That in itself is nothing, but Billy must know he has just seen the first stirrings of the storm. The wind calms down again and the seas gradually subside, but a few hours later another weather report creaks out of the radiofax:

WARNING. HURRICANE GRACE MOVING E 5 KTS MAXIMUM WINDS 65 KTS GUSTING TO 80 NEAR CENTRE. FORECAST DANGEROUS STORM WINDS 50 TO 75 KTS AND SEAS 25 TO 35 FT.

Billy's at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into the mouth of meteorological hell. For the next hour the sea is calm, horribly so. The only sign of what's coming is the wind direction; it shifts restlessly from quadrant to quadrant all afternoon. At four o'clock it's out of the southeast. An hour after that it's out of the south-southwest.

An hour after that it's backed around to due north. It stays that way for the next hour, and then right around seven o'clock it starts creeping into the northeast. And then it hits.

It's a sheer change; the Andrea Gail enters the Sable Island storm the way one might step into a room. The wind is instantly 40 knots and parting through the rigging with an unnerving scream.

Fishermen say they can gauge how fast the wind is -- and how worried they should be -- by the sound it makes against the wire stays and outrigger cables. A scream means the wind is around Force 9 on the Beaufort Scale, 40 or 50 knots. Force 10 is a shriek. Force 11 is a moan. Over Force 11 is something fishermen don't want to hear.

By eight o'clock, the barometric pressure has dropped to 996 millibars and shows no sign of levelling off. That means the storm is continuing to strengthen and create an even greater vacuum at its centre. Nature, as everyone knows, abhors a vacuum, and will try to fill it as fast as possible. The waves catch up with the wind speed around 8 p.m. and begin increasing exponentially; they double in size every hour.

After nine o'clock, every graph line from data buoy 44139 starts climbing almost vertically. Maximum wave heights peak at almost 46 feet and, drop briefly and then nearly double to 69 feet. The wind climbs to 50 knots by 9 p.m. and gradually keeps increasing until it peaks at 58 knots. The waves are so large that they block the anemometer, and gusts are probably reaching 90 knots. That's 167 kilometres an hour -- Gale Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The cables are moaning.

Billy picks up the microphone on his single sideband and issues one last message to the fleet: She's comin' on boys, and she's comin' on strong. The position he'd given Linda Greenlaw on the Hannah Boden -- 44 north, 56.4 west -- is a departure from his original heading.

It appears to be more the heading of a man bound for Halifax or maybe even Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island, than Gloucester, Massachusetts. Louisbourg is only 400 kilometres to the northeast, a 24-hour drive with the seas at their stern. Maybe Billy, having looked down the barrel of the gun, has decided to dodge north.

Whatever the reason, Billy changes course sometime before 6 p.m. and neglects to tell the rest of the fleet. They all assume he's headed straight for Gloucester. Albert Johnston on the Mary T, Tommy Barrie on the Allison, and Linda Greenlaw on the Hannah Boden all hear Billy Tyne's six o'clock bulletin on the weather. Only Linda is worried -- ''Those boys sounded scared and we were scared for them,'' she says. The rest of the fleet is more nonchalant. ''We live in this stuff for years and years, '' says Barrie. ''You have to look at the charts, listen to the weather. Talk to the other boats, and make a decision on your own. You can't just go out there and wait for nice weather.'' On the Andrea Gail, Billy probably takes the helm while the rest of the crew go below and try to forget about it. Some guys get stoned, which keeps them calm, and some sleep, or try to. Others just lie on their bunks and think about their families, or their girlfriends, or how much they wish this wasn't happening.

''I picture it like this,'' says fisherman Charlie Reed, trying to imagine the last evening aboard the Andrea Gail.

''The guys are down below readin' books, and every now and then the boat takes a big sea on the side. They run up to the wheelhouse and ask, 'Hey, what's goin' on, Cap?' and Billy says something like, 'Well, we're gettin' there, boys, we're gettin' there.' If Billy's goin' downsea it has to be an awful frightening ride. Sometimes you come off the top of one of those waves and it just kinda leaves out from under you. The boat just drops. It's better to take the seas head on -- at least that way you can see what's comin' at you. That's about all you can do.''

Of the men on the boat, Bugsy, Murph and Billy have the most time at sea -- 34 years, all told, much of it together. At home, Billy has a photo of the three of them at sea with a gigantic swordfish. He has hip boots on, rolled downto his shins, and he's sitting on a hatchcover pulling open the fish's mouth with a steel hook. He's staring straight into the camera. Bugsy's just behind Billy, head cocked to one side, looking as gaunt and ethereal as Christ on the Shroud of Turin. Murph's in back, squinting into the sea glare and noticeably huge even beneath a bulky pair of Farmer-John waders.

A few weeks before signing onto the Andrea Gail, Murph had stopped by his parents' house in Bradenton, Florida, for a somewhat unsettling goodbye. His mother reminded him that he needed to keep up on his life insurance policy -- which included burial coverage -- and he just shrugged.

''Mom, I wish you'd quit worryin' about burying me,'' he said. ''I'm going to die at sea.''

His mother was taken aback, but they talked a bit longer, and at one point he asked whether she still had his high school trophies.

''Of course I do,'' she said.

''Well, make sure you keep them for my son,'' he said, and kissed her goodbye.

By 10 o'clock, average windspeed is 40 knots out of the north-northeast, spiking to twice that and generating a huge sea. Every time a large sea rises to her stern, the Andrea Gail slews to one side and Billy must fight the wheel to keep from broaching. Broaching is when the boat turns broadside to the seas and rolls over. Fully loadedsteel boats don't recover from broachings; they downflood and sink.

If Billy's still running with the weather, he's taking seas almost continually over his stern and running a real risk of having a hatchcover or watertight door tear loose. And to make matters worse, the waves have an exceptionally short period; instead of coming every 15 seconds or so, the waves now come every eight or nine. According to buoy 44139, maximum wave heights for Oct. 28 coincide with exceptionally low periods right around 10 o'clock.

It's a combination that a boat the size of the Andrea Gail couldn't take for long. Certainly by 10 -- if not earlier, but no later than 10 -- Billy Tyne must have decided to bring his boat around into the seas. If there's a manoeuvre that raises the hairs on the back of a captain's neck, it's coming around in large seas. The boat is broadside to the waves -- ''beam-to'' -- for half a minute or so, which is easily long enough to get rolled over. Even aircraft carriers are at risk when they're beam-to in a big sea. If Billy attempts to come around that late in the storm he'd make sure the decks were cleared and give her full power on the way around.

The Andrea Gail would list way over and Billy would peer out of the windows to see what was bearing down on them. With luck, he'd pick a lull between the waves and they'd round up into the weather without any problem.

It's a significant moment; it means they've stopped steaming home and are simply trying to survive. In a sense Billy's no longer at the helm, the conditions are, and all he can do is react.

If danger can be seen in terms of a narrowing range of choices, Billy Tyne's choices have just racheted down a notch. A week ago he could have headed in early. A day ago he could have run north like Johnston. An hour ago he could have radioed to see if there were any other vessels around.

There are distinct drawbacks to heading into the weather, though. The windows are exposed to breaking seas, the boat uses more fuel, and the bow tends to catch the wind and drag the boat to leeward. The Andrea Gail has a high bow that would force Billy to oversteer simply to stay on course.

One can imagine Billy standing at the helm and gripping the wheel with the force and stance one might use to carry a cinder block. It would be a confused sea, mountains of water converging, diverging, piling up on themselves from every direction. A boat's motion can be thought of as the instantaneous integration of every force acting upon it in a given moment, and the motion of a boat in a storm is so chaotic as to be almost without pattern.

The next High Seas report comes in at 11 p.m., and Tommy Barrie mulls it over while waiting for Billy to call.

Barrie waits 20, 30 minutes, but Billy never calls. That's not as bad as it sounds -- we're all big boys out there, as Barrie says, and can take care of ourselves. Maybe Billy's got his hands full, or maybe he went below to take a nap, or maybe he simply forgot. Finally, around midnight, Barrie tries to raise Billy himself. He can't get through,though, which is more serious. It means the Andrea Gail has sunk, has lost her antennas, or there's such pandemonium on board that no one can get to the radio. Barrie guesses the fragile antennas have come loose. Losing the antennas would seriously affect the Andrea Gail: it would mean they had lost their GPS, radio, weatherfax and loran. And a wave that had taken out their antennas may well have also stripped them of their radar, running lights and floodlight. Not only would Billy not know where he was, he wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone or detect other boats in the area; he'd basically be back in the 19th century.

Around midnight a curious thing happens: the Sable Island storm eases up a bit. The winds drop a few knots and maximum wave heights fall about 10 feet. Their periods lengthen as well, meaning there are fewer breaking waves; instead of crashing through walls of water, the Andrea Gail rises up the face of each wave and plunges down itsbackside. Forty-foot waves have an angled face of 65 to 75 feet, which is nearly the length of the boat. On exceptionally big waves, the Andrea Gail has her stern in the trough and her bow still climbing toward the crest.

The lull, such as it is, lasts until 1 a.m.; within a couple of hours the waves are back up to 70 feet. A 70-foot wave has an angled face of well over 110 feet. The sea state has reached levels that no one on the boat, and few people on Earth, have ever seen.

''The storm resulted in large- scale destruction of offshore shipping and coastal installations from Nova Scotia to Florida,'' wrote Bob Raguso of Weathernews, New York. ''It was called an extreme nor'easter by U.S. scientists and ranked as one of the five most intense storms, from 1899-1991. It had the highest significant wave heights arrived at either by measurement or calculation. Some scientists termed it the 100-year storm.''

The Andrea Gail is at the epicentre of this storm and almost on top of the Sable Island shoals. It's very likely she lost her antennas, or Billy would have radioed Tommy that things looked bad. The most likely scenario is that Billy manages to get through the 10 o'clock spike in weather conditions but takes a real beating -- the windows are out, the electronics are dead, and the crew is terrified.

For the first time they are completely, irrevocably on their own.

Excerpted from The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger. Copyright 1997 by Sebastian Junger. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Inhuman architecture, bad food, boredom death by fun and games

Life in a high-rise dorm is a depraved, dangerous party

By PAUL KEEGAN (Esquire)

IN THE MID-SIXTIES,small cities were created across America where young people could immerse themselves in higher learning in order to come of age, fully prepared for the adult world.

In one such city, in a tower named for President John F. Kennedy, the weekend rituals begin on Friday afternoon. The television teeters atop a small refrigerator stocked with cans of beer, and the clatter of Wheel of Fortune is drowned out by the angry guitars of Jane's Addiction. Citizens are discussing last weekend, when one of their number was so drunk and disturbed over a girl that he started karate-chopping a door and attempted to throw a table through a window. The constables showed up and handed out alcohol violations, which still pisses everybody off, just thinking about it.

Half of this tiny room is crowded with a bunk bed and two desks; the living-room half is carpeted with beer cans, pens, potato chip bags, a newspaper, cigarette butts, a roll of duct tape, two trash cans overflowing with beer cans, and The Portable Voltaire.

Sang Oh, who lives here, walks in and heads for a mattress in the comer. He's in jeans, high-tops, a gold chain around his neck, his hair shaved on the sides and rising into a stylish flattop. Sang has become fully acclimated to American life since his family moved from Korea to the Boston suburb of Newton, eleven years ago.

A swimsuit model taped to his wall is falling to her knees, arms out for balance, hair flying, breasts heaving. There's a memorial collage of Johrn Lennon, 1940-1980, and posters of the Beatles and Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet. The pinup belongs to Sang; the music posters, The New York Times, and the books on the floor belong to Sang's roommate, Val, an economics major who says he wants to be either an actor or a talk-show host. But when they are in their bunk beds late at night, Sang will say, "So what do you want to do?"

"I don't know," Val answers. "What do you want to do?"

Sang usually tells people he wants to be a lawyer, but in the honest of the dark, he'll say, "I don't know."

Val's as loquacious as Sang is taciturn. He talks so fast that his friends have difficulty following his rants about the historic brutalities of the Catholic church or about racist students. Val couldn't believe it when he heard a kid on campus refer to Bill Cosby as a niggcr.

Enter two girls, one sexy in tight jeans and halter, the other wholesome in an argyle sweater. Wholesome walks up to one of the guys and pulls the tab off his beer can.

"You know what this is?" she asks him. "A fuck tab."

The boy looks puzzled.

You're at a party, right?" she explains. "You give it to somebody and that means you want to fuck them."

"Okay," he says, taking the tab and placing it in her hand. "I want to fuck you."

"Dork," she sighs. "No, you don't say it. You just give it to them."She stalks over to the mattress and she stalks over to the mattress and sits on Sang's lap. Relationships between boys and girls who live on the same floor tend to be more sibling than sexual. The girls know they can call Sang late atnight from the library and he'll walk them home. After a few beers,the boys will get huggy with the girls, but that's about as far as it goes.

After all, nothing could be worse for a boy who got drunk at a keg party and went hogging than to run into the girl the following day. It'll be bad enough having to face her in the dining commons. Living on the same floor? Nightmare! Except if it's serious. But how often does that happen?

The truly wild stories the boys like to tell are from last year, when most of them lived on the all-male sixteenth floor. Keg parties were popular that semester, in clear violation of university rules. A student resident assistant can lose his free room and board if a violation of such magnitude occurs while he's around. But neither does he want his peers to think he's a weenie. So if an RA sees his boys hefting a keg down the hall, he'll simply ask, "Does this mean I have to go to the library?

When Sang moved into the Kennedy Tower, his roommate was a high school buddy named Joel. Sang and Joel were part of a clique at Newton North High School known for their pranks. Kid stuff compared to what they got away with in college, which had lots of beer and girls and no parents or curfew.

Sang would look forward to the morning discussions of the previous night's misadventures. He'd know instantly whether Joel made it home by looking up from the lower berth of their bunk bed for that familiar lump in the mattress.

Sang remembers the first keg party he went to. "Joel got to the keg first. He always did." Then they lost him in the crowd. "We were always losing Joel." So they left without him. Sang remembers catching a last glimpse of his buddy, fighting the crowds at the keg, laughing and pouring himself a beer.

When Sand and Joel entered the University of Massachusetts Amherst as freshmen, they were just two Of 5,400 students packed into a giant dormitory complex. The John F. Kennedy Tower is one of five twenty-two-story high-rises; surrounded by cleven,low-rises, the towers look like a housing project dropped into the middle of the western Massachusetts countryside.

Like most state universities, UMass realized in the late Fifties that a tsunami of baby-boomercollege students was headed its way. If the school wanted to keep the local talent at home, it had to.grow huge in a hurry. President John W. Lederle transformed UMass from a tiny cow college of 6,495 students in ig6o, when he took over, into a metropolis of more than 21,000 by 1970.

But somehow, amid the excitement of trying to build UMass into "one of the top ten public universities in America," as Lederle put it, they forgot about the students. There was no money, left for the complex of smallish residential colleges' originally envisioned. So UMass bought a thirty-five- acre parcel of land on which to house and feed 5,400 kids. An emerging Boston architect named Hugh Stubbins, who would later become one of the nation's most prominent architects, building the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, was hired to design it.

It's hard to imagine what his firm's historians were thinking when they titled the chapter on his work from that period "Academic Restraint and Prescience." There was nothing restrained about the 205-fOOt towers into which nearly three thousand students were jammed, and nothing prescient about believing that students would behave themselves in there. Adults at UMass always seemed surprised when anything unpleasant happened in the Southwest Residential Area. Students knew better. They've always called it the ZOO.

Soon after moving into Southwest in 1966, students began to trash the place. Stubbins had ordered furniture "of many cheerful colors" for the lounges and designed two balconies in the towers where he imagined students sunning themselves and sipping soft drinks. Instead, the kids did drugs, guzzled beer, threw the pretty furniture out the windows, and vandalized the elevators. Some suicidal kids used the balconies as jumping-off spots. Emmett Glynn, one of the aRchitects on the project, says American youth just hasn't been the same since John Kennedy was shot. The Zoo's most famous incident came in 1986, just after the Red Sox lost the World Series to the Mets. A crowd of more than a thousand students started chanting "Red Sox! Mets Suck!" The campus cops were overpowered as fights broke out and a black student was beaten unconscious by whites.

Today, most big state universities have a Place like the Zoo, soaring stone monuments to America's dream of universal public higher education. The incidents that have taken place in these student ghettos for a quarter-century--rape, racial violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, dangerous pranks, vandalism, suicides-have only recently begun to be talked about. Colleges have tried for decades to suppress the truth about crime in dorm life. But that will change by 1993, when a new law will require colleges to publish annual security reports, including the numbers of violent crimes.

Studies show campus crime is nearly always student against student. Incredibly, the crime rate at the UMass Zoo is nearly identical to that of the high-rise housing projects they resemble. The Polo Grounds Tower in New York City, which has 5,5oo residents jammed into four towers, did have more murders than the Zoo (2 to o), robberies 68 to o), assaults (98 to 24), and disorderly conducts (47 to 12) during 1990, the last year for which comparative statistics are available. But the Southwest Residential Area, with 5,400 People spread over fiv( high-rises and eleven low-rises, had more larcenies (135 to 54), burglaries (103 to 20), car thefts (25 to 7), and DWI arrests (io to I). Th( two finished in nearly a dead heat in sexual offenses, includini rape/sexual assault (Zoo 6, Polo Grounds 8), arson ~ to 2), drug offenses (16 to 18), and weapons charges (6 to 5). UMass spends nearly twice as much on security per resident, $200 to $120.

The Polo Grounds and Southwest towers also share a passion for a bizarre sport played in high-rise buildings. Ghetto kids call iI elevator action. Suburban teenagers in the Zoo call it elevator surfing. UMass housing director Joe Zannini remembers kids boasting about getting their "elevator wings" when he was a residence di rector at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the early Seventies Lederle emembers hearing about it in the late Sixties, Paul LawlOR UMass's director of elevator maintenance, says he's received evidence of kids riding on top of elevators at least once a week since hE started back in 1966, when the towers opened. "It's been like a war, he says wearily. "They attack, we counterattack." Once, Lawor found a chair tied like a gondola to the underside of a tower car.

In New York City housing projects, thirty people were injured and two killed from riding on top of elevators last year. The problem has become so widespread that the New York City Housing Authority has produced a chilling, nineteen-minute educational video called Children Are Too Young to Die.

UMass has considered borrowing the grisly film and piping it into TV sets in campus dorm rooms. Students in the Southwest towers should have no problem identifying with the nine-year-olds depicted in the program-restless kids stuck in high-rise towers, largely ignored,with no backyard to play in, left to create their own increasingly dangerous coming-of-age rituals.

TOWER WINDOWS FLASH with beer signs and strobe lights, and the air is pulsing with rap music. Cars whip through the parking lot and boys jump out carrying duffel bags lumpy with beer cans. Kids roam the quadrangle in packs. At midnight, a small mob staggering back from a party yells up at one of the towers, "You fucking suck!" to which upper-floor residents reply, "Fuck You!" The exchange drags on until the cops show up.

A campus police car speeds across the courtyard at 2:30, trying to catch a nude boy hiding behind a tower, laughing, stepping into his underwear. A chubby, middle-aged campus cop runs after him and the streaker tucks his clothes under his arm like a football and scampers away, his lean, muscular body easily outpacing the constable. The boy slips in a puddle, still laughing, dashing away just before the cop grabs his arm. Another boy wearing only shorts and a baseball cap was not so lucky. He's getting handcuffed.

Here also is a date rape in the making, a typical horny, drunk, violent boy and a girl too ashamed to ask for help. The barrel-chested guy skips down a sidewalk alongside the girl, whispering to her. She is clearly mad about something, refusing to slow down or speak. The girl takes a shortcut between two dorms, and once they're in a secluded area, the boy grabs her from behind, still whispering. She listens for a moment, then shouts, "Let me go!" and breaks free.

When two campus cops become suspicious and start following them, the boy puts his arm around her affectionately, until the cops give up. Then she tries to escape, and he grabs her again from behind. They repeat this dance several times. Students of both sexes stroll by without saying a word. Finally, she breaks free and almost reaches her low-rise dorm, just as two girls emerge. Helpfully, they hold the door open as the boy and the girl silently disappear inside.

At about 3:00, a boy looks out from a dark second-floor room and yells at a passerby, for no reason, "Motherfucker!-When the man keeps walking, the boy shouts, "Hey you, motherfucker! Hey motherfucker!"

AT 6: o o p. m. Sang, Val, and the guys walk next door to the dining commons. They bolt their machine-cut slices of turkey, glutinous beige gravy, stuffing, and pumpkin pie and are out in twenty minutes.

The guy with the fake ID makes a run to the liquor store. They drink until about 9.3o, when Sang Val, two other boys, and three girls squeeze into somebody's car. They pull into a parking lot where about fifteen kids are waiting for a friend, who is next to some bushes, throwing up. Val is disgusted with his technique. "He's doing it all wrong. You don't throw up right where everybody can see you," he says. "I should write a book on how to throw up."

The group eventually arrives at a big white house in Amherst rented by somebody named Murph. They buy plastic cups for three dollars apiece from a guy in the hallway, then head for the kitchen, where the keg is. It's a relaxed, quiet party, but less than an hour later, Sang is outside, pacing, furious. At the keg, an immense, drunk boy-giant called him a "fucking gook."

This isn't the first racial slur Sang's heard since he went to college. Sang says his friends usually get madder about these things than he does. But this time he's pissed. "I should go deck him," he keeps saying. Val dances around, swinging at the air, and says, "Hey Sang, why don't you give him some of that kung-fu shit?

Now the mood's ruined and nobody feels like sticking around. Even though it's only about

11:30, they head back to Kennedy, where they can sit around smoking, watching TV, and listening to the Smiths: I want to live and I want to loved want to catch something I might be ashamed of. At about 1:oo, they all head for a tiny house, where a guy at the door is asking three dollars for admission. Sang and Val push through the packed living room and into the kitchen, but getting near the keg is out of the question. Sang pulls out some cold ones he brought for just such emergencies and hands them to friends. Most of the crowd is chanting along to a Beastie Boys song: "Ali Baba and the forty thieves!" The floor is wet and the stench of beer is choking. Soon the crowd is so dense it's impossible to move.

By 2:00, the Stories are singing Baby, you're a fool to Cry ... and everybody is pretty well fucked-up. Standing in a narrow hallway, Val starts talking to a short, slim girl with teased hair who's having trouble standing. They brush up against one another, hands touching, then holding. It looks a sure thing, but then she walks away.

Val is bewildered. He says he offered to take her home and she said yes, but first she had to tell her roommate. "Then she turns around and starts talking to some other guy!" he says. It's getting kind of late, so the gang gets back in the car and returns to the dorm.

At 3:00, Val gets undressed for bed. "Life's a big bowl of shit, sexually," he says. "The rest of it's fine." He drifts off to sleep.

But where's Sang?

Joel pulled one of these roommate-disappearing stunts the previous March on the sixteenth floor. It was exactly this time of the morning, somewhere between 3:oo and 4:00. Sang had already gone to bed. Your roommate could be anywhere at this hour ... maybe he's partying in somebody's room ... or maybe he's off getting lucky...

Sang remembers Joel being especially pumped up that night. The hometown boys had driven out from Newton for a weekend of partying. It was great to see those guys again. just when you're sure those high school days are gone forever, they'll show up at your door and it all comes back.

They arrived at about 7:00 P.m., picked up Sang on the sixteenth floor of Kennedy, and met Joel at an off-campus keg party.

Joel was an honors student, but be could drink anybody under the table. At off-campus parties, he leaned to do "kegstands," standing on his head atop the keg while someone pours beer from the hose into your mouth.

At 9:45, the boys went to a sub shop, then returned to the party until the keg ran dry at about 12:30. As they were walking toward their car, they noticed a party at another apartment in the same complex. They went inside and drank more. At about 3:00, the boys staggered off to Sang and Joel's room on the sixteenth floor of the Kennedy Tower. When his friends from Newton began fighting over pillows and floor space, Sang decided to go to bed. That's when Joel said something like, You wimps, it's too early to go to bed. Let's do something wild, for old times' sake.

They'd heard Joel rave about riding on top of the elevators before. He supposedly learned the technique from some guys on the twenty-second floor: You wait until the elevator is between floors, then pry open the inside doors with your hands, which makes the car stop. Then you take a broom and reach up until it touches a latch, drawing open the outside doors as easily as you might pull back a window curtain. You crawl out-the lobby floor is now chest high-climb on top of the elevator, and close the doors behind you.

It's pitch black in there, silent except for the low hiss of the moving cars. You hold onto the cluster of metal hoist cables affixed to the top of the car. There's also a bare light bulb you can turn on. The car moves at a crawl compared to those big-city 'vators that really fly at one thousand feet per minute. Some kids like to smoke a bone as they climb slowly into the blackness.

Looking through a slit at your feet, you can see kids walking into the elevator after a night of partying. There's also a tiny red switch that shuts the car on and off. It's fun to stop the car with people inside and listen to them yelling. You can get off the elevator and stand on the horizontal crossbeams that run between shafts and watch the car dropping down the tunnel. If you're feeling wild, you can jump from the crossbeam onto the elevator car while it's moving. If you're totally insane, you can try to leap from one moving car to another and hope you don't get tangled up in the curtain of cables. You realize you're carrying on an American rite of passage when you notice the ancient cave markings flashing by: JERRY G. '69 . . . STEVE'69 ...BALLS ... JFK 22 RULES THE TOWERS ... I WANT HER SO BAD ... DO ME ...

No elevator surfing tonight, said two of the boys from Newton. Joel walked over to his buddy Sang, who was in bed. No way, man. "Oh, come on, you baby," Joel said. Sang was not even tempted. Dave was Joel's last hope. They'd raced across a dangerous bridge together in high school, hadn't they?

Joel had consumed the equivalent of a case of beer, but his friends didn't consider him any drunker than usual. Joel and Dave walked into the sixteenth-floor elevator.

Few places on earth feel as dangerous as standing on the greasy top of an elevator car. Walls slide by on two sides, inches away. An empty shaft beckons. And down the fourth wall slides the black guillotine of the counterweight.

That's the first way you imagine yourself dying, looking up and seeing the counterweight dropping from the murky darkness toward you. An optical illusion caused by the narrowness of the shaft makes it appear to be coming straight for your head. Only at the last moment does it glide past you, not more than four feet away.

You could also be killed by falling into the empty shaft. But that would be pleasant compared to the truly nasty way to go: snagging your sleeve or shoelace or sneaker in the matrix of wheels, pulleys, cables, and hooks that surround you. Or becoming caught in the small cracks and gaps that open and close like a vise as the car moves. You could be pulled off-balance, or spun around and tumble, getting snagged further, held in place just long enough for this machine to slowly tear your body apart at a leisurely 250 feet per minute.

Oddly, fear dissipates quickly, replaced by a childlike awe at the elevator's sheer immensity and power. As you're being hoisted two hundred feet into the darkness, the silence broken only by a gentle shhhhhhhhhh, you suddenly feel pathetically small and helpless, utterly alone. And so you surrender, safe and snug, floating through black space. Perhaps that's what Joel loved most about the elevator shaft. Not only was he a prankster and risk-taker, but a poet:

There is a place, where no wind blows

The calm of earth abound

There grows a thinking, floating rose

Which I have often found...

Sang woke up to pounding on his door.

He ignored it for a long time. Finally, Steve dragged himself off the floor and opened the door. Some guy named Dave was downstairs, a kid said. Dave was yelling something about Joel.

Steve and Sang ran downstairs to the fourteenth-floor lobby and found Dave pounding the walls with his fists. "I can't find Joel," he said. He had already looked on top of both elevators. So Steve climbed onto the elevators, too, and rode them until they were side by side. No sign. There was blood on top of one of the cars.

Somebody called the cops, and they started looking, too. Then Sang heard a police walkie-talkie say they found something in the pit. Sang rushed down the stairs, but he was stopped by a cop who said, "There's nothing you can do."

Nobody except Dave knows exactly what happened inside the shaft during the early morning hours of March ii, 199o. He broke numerous appointments with the authorities to tell his story. They finally gave up-no charges were being pressed and nobody blamed him. Their only clue is a barely legible statement the boy wrote in the police station that night, which reads, in part:

" . . . Joel got on the beem in the middle of the elavater and watched me go up and down and I told Joel to get off and he did.. . but he slipped and fell between the elavater and the elavater door ... and I grabed his hand, but it was to late he was getting forced Down and he fell. . . '

Today, inside the John F. Kennedy elevator shaft, there is a dark green divider beam smeared, from the seventh floor to the third, with the blood of Joel Mangion. His body struck a horizontal metal beam in the pit, pushing it down by two feet. When they found Joel, his eyes and mouth were open in horror, his body severed in half

SANG CRIED the next day at the sound of Mr. Mangion's voice on the phone. "Don't blame your-self, there's nothing you could have done," Joel's father told him.

For years, Paul Lawler couldn't get anybody to show up for meetings to talk about elevator surfing. But forty people showed up in the sixteenth-floor lounge that night to discuss Joel's death with the dorm's resident director, a priest and psychologist. That night, a friend drove Sang home to Newton.

For a long-time, Sang couldn't really believe that Joel was dead. At the open-casket funeral, it hit him. He took one look at Joel's face and tried to run outside, but Mr. Mangion stopped him. "So I went to the casket and prayed," Sang says. "It didn't look like Joel. But I talked to him like he was there and told him I'd miss him."

Sang stayed home for two weeks. Finally, he drove back to Amherst and rode the elevator up to the sixteenth floor. He felt sick, so he went to bed early. He woke up the next morning and instinctively looked up. There was no lump in the mattress.

Unable to bring himself to drink, Sang missed most of the parties. When he did go, he'd stand in a corner by himself. Sang's grades plummeted as he wandered through the semester, wondering who he was, why it happened, what the goddamn point of life was, anyway., He'd open a book but be unable to concentrate, torturing himself. Why didn't I stop him?

There were eulogies in the student newspaper, and a memorial event was held in Kennedy. But the university seemed like a big, cold, impersonal place when Sang read Dennis Madson, vice-chancellor of student affairs, telling the student newspaper, "This just shows that bad judgments are made when people have too much to drink. People are smart enough to know that climbing on an elevator is a dumb, stupid thing to do."

Why was everybody being so insensitive, looking for blame and scapegoats? "Nobody came out and said it was a tragedy," Sang says, still bitter. "They just wanted to make an example'out of what happened, which was rude. it seemed like they didn't care."

In all, it was a rough semester for UMass. Tuition went up and some kids couldn't afford to come back. Police were unable to come up with any clues in the case of a twenty-year-old Chi Omega sorority girl, who was brutally murdered that December in her car parked at a nearby mall. After Joel's death, a sophomore apparently hanged himself

Then one night, something happened to Sang It was Sunday, and he'd been left alone in his room. He was in utter despair, wanting to quit school and succumb to the meaninglessness of life. "I wanted to call my father and go home," be says. "I decided I couldn't take it anymore."

Sang revealed his plans to his resident assistant, Who gave him a pad of paper and said, "Write down how you feel. It's worked for me plenty of times."

Sang sat down and wrote a onc-page letter to himself. "Why did it have to be Joel?" he wrote, "It's not fair. So many other people deserve to die. If there's a god, why would he do that to such a bright kid? Why?" In the end, that was his biggest question: WHY?

Sang folded the note, shoved it into his desk drawer, and went to bed. That night, he was visited by a force as mysterious and powerful as that wicked evilness that invaded his dreams on March 11, 199o, the last day of his childhood.

When Sang woke up, the world was different. "The next day was the best one I ever had," be says. Sang sat in class taking notes without falling asleep, read his economics chapters, saw his friends, and didn't even think about what happened.

Sang's greatest source of strength, remarkably, was the dead boy's father. "I remembered what Mr. Mangion said, that life goes on," he says. "That really helped.

"I said, 'Would Joel want me to sit around feeling sorry about what happened2'No way. If I was dead, I wouldn't want Joel to just sit around. I'd want him to go on."

Sang doesn't describe himself as religious, but he'd lie in bed and say out loud, into the darkness, "If you're up there, God, take care of him. I'll see you up there, Joel."

He made up the midterms he'd missed and pulled his grades up to passing. He even went to a couple of keg parties and had fun. Sang still gets depressed about what happened to Joel sometimes, especially when he's drunk. But that's not often. Joel's part of another life that seems long ago.

TODAY, WHEN SANG walks through the lobby of the John F. Kennedy Tower and out the front door, he never looks up at the photograph of his friend standing on a rock, clouds full and rippling behind him on a sunny day, squinting off into the distance, forever a boy.

As for the other five thousand kids who live in the Zoo, and those in student ghettos across the country, their future was presaged in a tiny news item in the UMass student newspaper. Four days after Joel Mangion's body was found, a student told police that something odd happened as she boarded the elevator on the nineteenth floor of the John F. Kennedy Tower:

"She heard someone knocking on the roof."

by Tom Wolfe

from The Right Stuff

Within five minutes, or ten minutes, no more than that, three of the others had called her on the telephone to ask her if, she had heard that something had happened out there.

"Jane, this is Alice. Listen, I just got a call from Betty, and she said she heard something's happened out there. Have you heard anything?" That was the way they phrased it, call after call. She picked up the telephone and began relaying this same message to some of the others.

"Connie, this is Jane Conrad. Alice just called me, and she says something's happened.. .

Something was part of the official Wife Lingo for tiptoeing blindfolded around the subject. Being barely twenty-one years old and new around here, Jane Conrad knew very little about this particular subject, since nobody ever talked about it. But the day was young! And what a setting she had for her imminent enlightenment! And what a picture she herself presented! Jane was tall and slender and had rich brown hair and high cheekbones and wide brown eyes. She looked a little like the actress jean Simmons. Her father was a rancher in southwestern Texas. She had gone East to college, to Bryn Mawr, and had met her husband, Pete, at a debutante's party at the Gulf Mill Club in Philadelphia, when he was a senior at Princeton. Pete was a short, wiry, blond boy who joked around a lot. At any moment his face was likely to break into a wild grin revealing the gap between his front teeth. The Hickory Kid sort, he was; a Hickory Kid on the deb circuit, however. He had an air of energy, self-confidence, ambition, joie de vivre. Jane and Pete were married two days after he graduated from Princeton. And today, here in Florida, in Jacksonville, in the peaceful year 1955, the sun shines through the pines outside', and the very air takes on the sparkle of the ocean. The ocean and a great mica-white beach are less than a mile away. Anyone driving by will see Jane's little house gleaming like a dream house in the pines. It is a brick house, but Jane and Pete painted the bricks white, so that it gleams in the sun against a great green screen of pine trees with a thousand little places where the sun peeks through. They painted the shutters black, which makes the white walls look even more brilliant. The house has only eleven hundred square feet of floor space, but Jane and Pete designed it themselves and that more than makes up for the size. A friend of theirs was the builder and gave them every possible break, so that it cost only eleven thousand dollars. Outside, the sun shines, and inside, the fever rises by the minute as five, ten, fifteen, and, finally, nearly all twenty of the wives join the circuit, trying to find out what has happened, which, in fact, means: to whose husband.

After thirty minutes on such a circuit--this is not an unusual morning around here--a wife begins to feel that the telephone is no longer located on a table or on the kitchen wall. It is exploding in her solar plexus. Yet it would be far worse right now to hear the front doorbell. The protocol is strict on that point, although written down nowhere. No woman is supposed to deliver the final news, and certainly not on the telephone. The matter mustn't be bungled!--that's the idea. No, a man should bring the news when the time comes, a man with some official or moral authority, a clergyman or a comrade of the newly deceased. Furthermore, he should bring the bad news in person. He should turn up at the front door and ring the bell and be standing there like a pillar of coolness and competence, bearing the bad news on ice, like a fish. Therefore, all the telephone calls from the wives were the frantic and portentous beating of the wings of the death angels, as it were. When the final news came, there would be a ring at the front door--a wife in this situation finds herself staring at the front door as if she no longer owns it or controls it--and outside the door would be a man ... come to inform her that unfortunately something has happened out there, and her husband's body now lies incinerated in the swamps or the pines or the palmetto grass, "burned beyond recognition," which anyone who had been around an air base for very long (fortunately Jane had not) realized was quite an artful euphemism to describe a human body that now looked like an enormous fowl that has burned up in a stove, burned a blackish brown all over, greasy and blistered, fried, in a word, with not only the entire face and all the hair and the ears burned off, not to mention A the clothing, but also the hands andfeet, with what remains of the arms and legs bent at the knees and elbows and burned into absolutely rigid angles,burned a greasy blackish brown like the bursting body itself, so that this husband, father, officer, gentleman, this ornamentum of some mother's eye, His Majesty the Baby of just twenty-odd years back, has been reduced to a charred hulk with wings and shanks sticking out of it.

MY own husband--how could this be what they were talking about? Jane had heard the young men, Pete among them, talk about other young men who had "bought it" or "augered in" or "crunched," but it had never been anyone they knew, no one in the squadron. And in any event, the way they talked about it, with such breezy, slangy terminology, was the same way they talked about sports. It was as if they were saying, "He was thrown out stealing second base." And that was all! Not one word, not in print, not in conversation--not in this amputated language!--about an incinerated corpse from which a young man' s spirit has vanished in an instant, from which all smiles, gestures, moods, worries, laughter, wiles, shrugs, tenderness, and loving looks--you, my love!--have disappeared like a sigh, while the terror consumes a cottage in the woods, and a young woman, sizzling with the fever, awaits her confirmation as the new widow of the day.

The next series of calls greatly increased the possibility that it was Pete to whom something had happened. There were only twenty men in the squadron, and soon nine or ten had been accounted for ... by the fluttering reports of the death angels. Knowing that the word was out that an accident had occurred, husbands who could get to a telephone were calling home to say it didn't happen to me. This news, of course, was immediately fed to the fever. Jane's telephone would ring once more, and one of the wives would be saying:

"Nancy just got a call from Jack. He's at the squadron and he says something's happened, but he doesn't know what. He said he saw Frank D-take off about ten minutes ago with Greg in back, so they're all right. What have you heard?"

BUT Jane has heard nothing except that other husbands, and not hers, are safe and accounted for. And thus, on a sunny day in Florida, outside of the Jacksonville Naval Air Station, in a little white cottage, a veritable dream house, another beautiful young woman was about to be apprised of the quid pro quo of her husband's line of work, of the trade-off, as one might say, the subparagraphs of a contract written in no visible form. just as surely as if she had

the entire roster in front of her, Jane now realized that only two men in the squadron were unaccounted for. One was a pilot named Bud Jennings; the other was Pete. She picked up the telephone and did something that was much frowned on in a time of emergency. She called the squadron office. The duty officer answered.

"I want to speak to Lieutenant Conrad," said Jane. "This is: Mrs. Conrad."

"I'm sorry," the duty officer said-and then his voice cracked.

I'm sorry . - . I . . . " He couldn't find the words! He was about to cry! "I'm-that's-I mean ... he can't come to the phone!"

He can't come to the phone!

"It's very important!" said Jane.

"I'm sorry-it's impossible " The duty officer could hardly get the words out because he was so busy gulping back sobs. Sobs! "He can't come to the phone."

"Why not? Where is he?"

"I'm sorry-" More sighs, wheezes, snuffling gasps. "I can't tell you that. 1-have to hang up now!"

And the duty officer's voice disappeared in a great surf of emotion and he hung up.

The duty officer! The very sound of her voice was more than he could take!

The world froze, congealed, in that moment. Jane could no longer calculate the interval before the front doorbell would ring and some competent long-faced figure would appear, some Friend of Widows and Orphans, who would inform her, officially, that Pete was dead.

Even out in the middle of the swamp, in this rot-bog of pine trunks, scum slicks, dead dodder vines, and mosquito eggs, even out in this great overripe sump, the smell of "burned beyond recognition" obliterated everything else. When airplane fuel exploded, it created a heat so intense that everything but the hardest metals not only burned- everything of rubber, plastic, celluloid, wood, leather, cloth, flesh, gristle, calcium, horn, hair, blood, and protoplasm-it not only burned, it gave up the ghost in the form of every stricken putrid gas known to chemistry. One could smell the horror. It came in through the nostrils and burned the rhinal cavities raw and penetrated the liver and permeated the bowels like a black gas until there was nothing in the universe, inside out, except the stench or of the char. As the helicopter came down between the pine trees and settled onto the bogs, the smell hit Pete Conrad even before the hatch was completely open, and they were not even close enough to see the wreckage yet. The rest of the way Conrad and the crewmen had to travel on foot. After a few steps the water was up to their knees, and then it was up to their armpits, and they kept wading through the water and the scum and the vines and the pine trunks, but it was nothing compared to the smell. Conrad, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant junior grade, happened to be on duty as squadron safety officer that day and was supposed to make the onsite investigation of the crash. The fact was, however, that this squadron was the first duty assignment of his career, and he had never been at a crash site before and had never smelled any such revolting stench or seen anything like what awaited him.

When Conrad finally reached the plane, which was an SNJ, he found the fuselage burned and blistered and dug into the swamp with one wing sheared off and the cockpit canopy smashed. In the front seat was all that was left of his friend Bud Jennings. Bud Jennings, an amiable fellow, a promising young fighter pilot, was now a horrible roasted hulk-with no head. His head was completely gone, apparently torn off the spinal column like a pineapple off a stalk, except that it was nowhere to be found.

Conrad stood there soaking wet in the swamp bog, wondering what the hell to do. It was a struggle to move twenty feet in this freaking muck. Every time he looked up, he was looking into a delirium of limbs, vines, dappled shadows, and a chopped-up white light that came through the treetops-the ubiquitous screen of trees with a thousand little places where the sun peeked through. Nevertheless, he started wading back out into the muck and the scum, and the others followed. He kept looking up. Gradually he could make it out. Up in the treetops there was a pattern of broken limbs where the SNJ had come crashing through. It was like a tunnel through the treetops. Conrad and the others began splashing through the swamp, following the strange path ninety or a hundred feet above them. It took a sharp turn. That must have been where the wing broke off. The trail veered to one side and started downward. They kept looking up and wading throu2h the muck. Then they stopped. There was a great green sap wound up there in the middle of a tree trunk. It was odd. Near the huge gash was ... tree disease ... some sort of brownish lumpy sac up in the branches, such as you see in trees infested by bagworms, and there were yellowish curds on the branches around it, as if the disease had caused the sap to ooze out and fester and congeal except that it couldn't be sap because it was streaked with blood. In the next instant, Conrad didn't have to say a word. Each man could see it all. The lumpy sac was the cloth liner of a flight helmet, with the earphones attached to it. The curds were Bud Jennings's brains. The tree trunk had smashed through the cockpit canopy of the SNJ and knocked Bud Jennings's head to pieces like a melon.

In keeping with the protocol, the squadron commander was not going to release Bud Jennings's name until his widow, Loretta, had been located and a competent male death messenger had been dispatched to tell her. But Loretta Jennings was not at home and could not be found. Hence, a delay-and more than enough time for the other wives, the death angels, to burn with panic over the telephone lines. All the pilots were accounted for except the two who were in the woods, Bud Jennings and Pete Conrad. One chance in two, acey-deucy, one finger-two finger, and this was not an unusual day around here.

Loretta Jennings had been out at a shopping center. When she returned home, a certain figure was waiting outside, a man, a solemn Friend of Widows and Orphans, and it was Loretta Jennings who lost the game of odd and even, acey-deucy, and it was Loretta whose child (she was pregnant with a second) would have no father. It was this young woman who went through all the final horrors that Jane Conrad had imagined-assumed!-would be hers to endure forever. Yet this grim stroke of fortune brought Jane little relief.

On the day of Bud Jennings's funeral, Pete went into the back of the closet and brought out his bridge coat, per regulations. This was the most stylish item in the Navy officer's wardrobe. Pete had never had occasion to wear his before. It was a double-breasted coat made of navy-blue melton cloth and came down almost to the ankles. It must have weighed ten pounds. It had a double row of gold buttons down the front and loops for shoulder boards, big beautiful belly-cut collar and lapels, deep turnbacks on the sleeves, a tailored waist, and a center vent in back that ran from the waistline to the bottom of the coat. Never would Pete, or for that matter many other American males in the mid-twentieth century, have an article of clothing quite so impressive and aristocratic as that bridge coat. At the funeral the nineteen little Indians who were left-Navy boys!-1ined up manfully in their bridge coats. They looked so young. Their pink, lineless faces with their absolutely clear, lean jawlines popped up bravely, correctly, out of the enormous bellycut collars of the bridge coats. They sang an old Navy hymn, which slipped into a strange and lugubrious minor key here and there, and included a stanza added especially for aviators. It ended with: 440 hear us when we lift our prayer for those in peril in the air."

Three months later another member of the squadron crashed and was burned beyond recognition and Pete hauled out the bridge coat again and Jane saw eighteen little Indians bravely going through the motions at the funeral. Not long after that, Pete was transferred from Jacksonville to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. Pete and Jane had barely settled in there when they got word that another member of the Jacksonville squadron, a close friend of theirs, someone they had over to dinner many times, had died trying to take off from the deck of a carrier in a routine practice session a few miles out in the Atlantic. The catapult that propelled aircraft off the deck lost pressure, and his ship just dribbled off the end of the deck, with its engine roaring vainly, and fell sixty feet into the ocean and sank like a brick, and he vanished, just like that.

Pete had been transferred to Patuxent River, which was known in Navy vernacular as Pax River, to enter the Navy's new test-pilot school. This was considered a major step up in the career of a young Navy aviator. Now that the Korean War was over and there was no combat flying, all the hot young pilots aimed for flight test. In the military they always said "flight test" and not "test flying." Jet aircraft had been in use for barely ten years at the time, and the Navy was testing new jet fighters continually. Pax River was the Navy's prime test center.

Jane liked the house they bought at Pax River. She didn't like it as much as the little house in Jacksonville, but then she and Pete hadn't designed this one. They lived in a community called North Town Creek, six miles from the base. North Town Creek, like the base, was on a scrub-pine peninsula that stuck out into Chesapeake Bay. They were tucked in amid the pine trees. (Once more!) All around were rhododendron bushes. Pete's classwork and his flying duties were very demanding. Everyone in his flight test class, Group 20, talked about how difficult it was-and obviously loved it, because in Navy flying this was the big league. The young men in Group 20 and their wives were Pete's and Jane's entire social world. They associated with no one else. They constantly invited each other to dinner during the week; there was a Group party at someone's house practically every weekend; and they would go off on outings to fish or water-ski in Chesapeake Bay. In a way they could not have associated with anyone else, at least not easily, because the boys could talk only about one thing: their flying. One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was "pushing the outside of the envelope." The "envelope" was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft's performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so 'on. "Pushing the outside," probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test. At first "pushing the outside of the envelope" was not a particularly terrifying phrase to hear. It sounded once more as if the boys were just talking about sports.

Then one sunny day a member of the Group, one of the happy lads they always had dinner with and drank with and went water-skiing with, was coming in for a landing at the base in an A3J fighter plane. He came in too low before lowering his flaps, and the ship stalled out, and he crashed and was burned beyond recognition. And they brought out the bridge coats and sang about those in peril in the air and put the bridge coats away, and the Indians who were left talked about the accident after dinner one night. They shook their heads and said it was a damned shame, but he should have known better than to wait so long before lowering the flaps.

Barely a week had gone by before another member of the Group was coming in for a landing in the same type of aircraft, the A3J, trying to make a ninety-degree landing, which involves a sharp turn, and something went wrong with the controls, and he ended up with one rear stabilizer wing up and the other one down, and his ship rolled in like a corkscrew from 800 feet up and crashed, and he was burned beyond recognition. And the bridge coats came out and they sang about those in peril in the air and then they put the bridge coats away and after dinner one night they mentioned that the departed had been a good man but was inexperienced, and when the malfunction in the controls put him in that bad comer, he didn't know how to get out of it.

Every wife wanted to cry out: "Well, my God! The machine broke! What makes any of you think you would have come out of it any better!" Yet intuitively Jane and the rest of them knew it wasn't right even to suggest that. Pete never indicated for a moment that he thought any such thing could possibly happen to him. It seemed not only wrong but dangerous to challenge a young pilot's confidence by posing the question. And that, too, was part of the unofficial protocol for the Officer's Wife. From now on every time Pete was late coming in from the flight line, she would worry. She began to wonder if-no! assume!-he had found his way into one of those comers they all talked about so spiritedly, one of those little dead ends that so enlivened conversation around here.

Not long after that, another good friend of theirs went up in an F-4, the Navy's newest and hottest fighterpl4ne, known as the Phantom. He reached twenty thousand feet and then nosed over and dove straight into Chesapeake Bay. It turned out that a hose connection was missing in his oxygen system and he had suffered hypoxia and passed out at the high altitude. And the bridge coats came out and they lifted a prayer about those in peril in the air and the bridge coats were put away and the little Indians were incredulous. How could anybody fail to check his hose connections? And how could anybody be in such poor condition as to pass out that quickly from hypoxia?

A couple of days later Jane was standing at the window of her house in North Town Creek. She saw some smoke rise above the pines from over in the direction of the flight line. just that, a column of smoke; no explosion or sirens or any other sound. She went to another room, so as not to have to think about it but there was no explanation for the smoke. She went back to the window. In the yard of a house across the street she saw a group of people ... standing there and looking at her house, as if trying to decide what. to do. Jane looked away--but she couldn't keep from looking out again. She caught a glimpse of a certain figure coming up the walkway toward her front door. She knew exactly who it was. She had had nightmares like this. And yet this was no dream. She was wide awake and alert. Never more alert in her entire life! Frozen, completely defeated by the sight, she simply waited for the bell to ring. She waited, but there was not a sound. Finally she could stand it no more. In real life, unlike her dream life, Jane was both too self-possessed and too polite to scream through the door: "Go away!" So she opened it. There was no one there, no one at all. There was- no group of people on the lawn across the way and no one to be seen for a hundred yards in any direction along the lawns and leafy rhododendron roads of North Town Creek.

Then began a cycle in which she had both the nightmares and the hallucinations, continually. Anything could touch off an hallucination that stopped before she could answer it, the sound of a siren, even the sound of trucks starting up (crash trucks!). Then she would glance out the window, and a certain figure would be coming up the walk, and she would wait for the bell. The only difference between the dreams and the hallucinations was that the scene of the dreams was always the little white house in Jacksonville. In both cases, the feeling that this time it has happened was quite real.

The star pilot in the class behind Pete's, a young man who was the main rival of their good friend Al Bean, went up in a fighter to do some power-dive tests. One of the most demanding disciplines in flight test was to accustom yourself to making precise readings from thc control panel in the same moment that you were pushing the outside of the envelope. This young man put his ship into the test dive and was still reading out the figures, with diligence and precision and great discipline, when he augured straight into the oyster flats and was burned beyond recognition. And the bridge coats came out and they sang about those in peril in the air and the bridge coats were put away, and the little Indians remarked that the departed was a swell guy and a brilliant student of flying; a little too much of a student, in fact; he hadn't bothered to look out the window at the real world soon enough. Beano-A] Bean--wasn't quite so brilliant; on the other hand, he was still here.

Like many other wives in Group 20 Jane wanted to talk about the whole situation, the incredible series of fatal accidents, with her husband and the other members of the Group, to find out how they were taking it. But somehow the unwritten protocol forbade discussions of this subject, which was the fear of death. Nor could Jane or any of the rest of them talk, really have a talk, with anyone around the base. You could talk to another wife about being worried. But what good did it do? Who wasn't worried? You were likely to get a look that said: "Why dwell on it?" Jane might have gottten away with divulging the matter of the nightmares. But hallucinations? There was no room in Navy life for any such anomalous tendency as that.

By now that bad string had reached ten in all, and almost all of the dead had been close friends of Pete and Jane, young men who had been in their house many times, young men who had sat across from Jane and chattered like the rest of them about the grand adventure of military flying. And the survivors still sat around as before-with the same inexplicable exhilaration! Jane kept watching Pete for some sign that his spirit was cracking, but she saw none. He talked a mile a minute, kidded and joked, laughed with his Hickory Kid cackle. He always had. He still enjoyed the company of members of the group like Wally Schirra and Jim Lovell. Many young pilots were taciturn and cut loose with the strange fervor of this business only in the air. But Pete and Wally and Jim were not reticent; not in any situation. They loved to kid around. Pete called Jim Lovell "Shaky," because it was the last thing a pilot would want to be called. Wally Schirra was outgoing to the point of hearty; he loved practical jokes and dreadful puns, and so on. The three of them--even in the midst of this bad string!--would love to get on a subject such as accident-prone Mitch Johnson. Accident-prone Mitch Johnson, it seemed, was a Navy Pilot whose life was in the hands of two angels, one of them bad and the other one good. The bad angel would put him into accidents that would have annihilated any ordinary pilot, and the good angel would bring him out of them without a scratch. just the other day--this was the sort of story Jane would hear them tell--Mitch Johnson was coming in to land on a carrier. But he came in short, missed the flight deck, and crashed into the fantail, below the deck. There was a tremendous explosion, and the rear half of the plane fell into the water in flames. Everyone on the flight deck said, "Poor Johnson. The good angel was off duty." They were still debating how to remove the debris and his mortal remains when a phone rang on the bridge. A somewhat dopey voice said, "This is Johnson. Say, listen, I'm down here in the supply hold and the hatch is locked and I can't find the lights and I can't see a goddamned thing and I tripped over a cable and I think I hurt my leg." The officer on the bridge slammed the phone down, then vowed to find out what morbid sonofabitch could pull a phone prank at a time like this. Then the phone rang again, and the man with the dopey voice managed to establish the fact that he was, indeed, Mitch Johnson. The good angel had not left his side. When he smashed into the fantail, he hit some empty ammunition drums, and they cushioned the impact, leaving him groggy but not seriously hurt. The fuselage had blown to pieces; so he just stepped out onto the fantail and opened a hatch that led into the supply hold. It was pitch black in there, and there were cables all across the floor, holding down spare aircraft engines. Accident-prone Mitch Johnson kept tripping over these cables until he found a telephone. Sure enough, the one injury he had was a bruised shin from tripping over a cable. The man was accident-prone! Pete and Wally and Jim absolutely cracked up over stories like this. It was amazing. Great sports yarns! Nothing more than that.

A few days later Jane was out shopping at the Pax River commissary on Saunders Road, near the main gate to the base. She heard the sirens go off at the field, and then she heard the engines of the crash trucks start up. This time Jane was determined to keep calm. Every instinct made her want to rush home, but she forced herself to stay in the commissary and continue shopping. For thirty minutes she went through the motions of completing her shopping list. Then she drove home to North Town Creek. As she reached the house, she saw a figure going up the sidewalk. It was a man. Even from the back there was no question as to who he was. He had on a black suit, and there was a white band around his neck. It was her minister, from the Episcopal Church. She stared, and this vision did not come and go. The figure kept on walking up the front walk. She was not asleep now, and she was not inside her house glancing out the front window. She was outside in her car in front of her house. She was not dreaming, and she was not hallucinating, and the figure kept walking up toward her front door.

The commotion at the field was over one of the most extraordinary things that even veteran pilots had ever seen at Pax River. And they had all seen it, because practically the entire flight line had gathered out on the field for it, as if it had been an air show.

Conrad's friend Ted Whelan had taken a fighter up, and on takeoff there had been a structural failure that caused a hydraulic leak. A red warning light showed up on Whelan's panel, and he had a talk with the ground. It was obvious that the leak would cripple the controls before he could get the ship back down to the field for a landing. He would have to bail out; the only question was where and when, and so they had a talk about that. They decided that he should jump at 8,000 feet at such-and-such a speed, directly over the field. The plane would crash into the Chesapeake Bay, and he would float down to the field. just as coolly as anyone could have asked for it, Ted Whelan lined the ship up to come across the field at 8,ioo feet precisely and he punched out, ejected.

Down on the field they all had their faces turned up to the sky.

They saw Whelan pop out of the cockpit. With his Martin-Baker seat-parachute rig strapped on, he looked like a little black geometric lump a mile and a half up in the blue. They watched him ashe started dropping. Everyone waited for the parachute to open. They waited a few more seconds, and then they waited some more. The little shape was getting bigger and bigger and picking up tremendous speed. Then there came an unspeakable instant at which everyone on the field who knew anything about parachute jumps knew what was going to happen. Yet even for them it was an unearthly feeling, for no one had ever seen any such thing happen so close up, from start to finish, from what amounted to a grandstand seat. Now the shape was going so fast and coming so close it began to play tricks on the eyes. It seemed to stretch out. It became much bigger and hurtled toward them at a terrific speed, until they couldn't make out its actual outlines at all. Finally there was just a streaking black blur before their eyes, followed by what seemed like an explosion. Except that it was not an explosion; it was the tremendous crack of Ted Whelan, his helmet, his pressure suit, and his seat-parachute rig smashing into the center of the runway, precisely on target, right in front of the crowd; an absolute bull's-eye. Ted Whelan had no doubt been alive until the instant of impact. He had had about thirty seconds to watch the Pax River base and the peninsula and Baltimore County and continental America and the entire comprehensible world rise up to smash him. When they lifted his body up off the concrete, it was like a sack of fertilizer.

Pete took out the bridge coat again and he and Jane and all the little Indians went to the funeral for Ted Whelan. That it hadn't been Pete was not solace enough for Jane. That the preacher had not, in fact, come to her front door as the Solemn Friend of Widows and Orphans, but merely for a church call ... had not brought peace and relief. That Pete still didn't show the slightest indication of thinking that any unkind fate awaited him no longer lent her even a moment's courage. The next dream and the next hallucination, and the next and next, merely seemed more real. For now she knew. She now knew the subject and the essence of this enterprise, even though not a word of it had passed anybody's lips. She even knew why Pete--the Princeton boy she met at a deb party at the Gulf Mill Club!--would never quit, never withdraw from this grim business, unless in a coffin. And God knew, and she knew, there was a coffin waiting for each little Indian.

Seven years later, when a reporter and a photographer from Life magazine actually stood near her in her living room and watched her face, while outside, on the lawn, a crowd of television crewmen and newspaper reporters waited for a word, an indication, anything--perhaps a glimpse through a part in a curtain!-waited for some sign of what she felt--when one and all asked with their ravenous eyes and, occasionally, in so many words: "How do you feel?" and "Are you scared?'--America wants to know!--it made Jane want to laugh, but in fact she couldn't even manage a smile.

"Why ask now?" she wanted to say. But they wouldn't have had the faintest notion of what she was talking about.

	Sons of the Draft Riot

Sons of the Draft Riot

Characters

Bob Di Grazia&emdash;police Commisionr

Joe Jordan Black police Commander

Bob Kiley&emdash;key aide to mayor Kevin White

Weddington, Ira jackson, Eddie King&emdash;mayor's aides

ROAR&emdash;the anti-busine

Coalition

Paul Parks Black City official

The Mullins&emdash;organized crime gang

The sun at 6:30 am is bright red, rising slowly in a blue

sky with just bits and pieces of cloud. In the east, the horizon is red and blue, as it sometimes is early in the summer and spring mornings, and it is clear. The temperature is expected to be in th 70s. It is a perfect day for a parade.

At City Hall, Rich Kelliher is already in the bunker with the rumor control and information people. Most of them are pale. Some catch a little sun on the weekends, but most people are pale. The air circulation in the bunker is not bad early in the morning. By midmorning it is not so good.

Ira Jackson comes into the mayor's office by 7 a.m. He and Mike Feeney are putting on their ties and Ira is smiling. "Mikey, today's D day, Mikey. Feeney, yet another Irish fatalist in a city that specializes in them, does not roar with laughter. Ira has brought two sets of old binoculars, including one of World War II vintage. One is for his crew, and another is for Kiley's Crew, as they travel the highways and byways of shit and strife. "so we can stay outta gunshot distance," Ira says.

This mornings' all-time favorite, award-winning rumor is that black guys are renting U-hauls to load up with Molotov cocktails.

Bob Kiley arrives and reports that law officers were active and that the FBI had talked to gang leaders and urged peace. Kiley slides into the car parked behind City Hall. Weddleton is already behind the wheel. Weddleton stops the car on Broadway in Southie, and they pick up Eddie

King and drive to Bayside Mall. Bayside mall near Columbia Point is the transfer point for buses. Black kids pick up buses here and are taken to Southie. Their numbers fluctuate each day, depending on the previous day's disturbances. The mall is a boarded-up shopping center that died for want of business and no lack of vandalism and shoplifting. Lately, the mall has come to life with motorcycle police, cruisers, foot patrolmen, some TPF, community workers, black kids, some white kids, a lot of buses, and, flying overhead, a state police chopper containing Paul Russell, deputy superintendent.

DiGrazia hears the chopper and looks up and yells, "Hello, Paul. Howareya?" Radios crackle with messages. Kids get shifted around to buses. Some of them decide to split altogether. Others go off to a canteen truck. This is what the struggle has come to, the struggle begun with those black Bostonians of the 1840's who insisted separate schools would only perpetuate the myth of racial inferiority. It has taken 130 years, and it has come to motorcycle cops, scared busdrivers, parents hovering over their kids, a helicopter banking overhead, and men standing on an asphalt pavement that sits between a threatened and threatening black and Puerto Rican community and a threatened and threatening white Catholic community. The Yankees, the oneswho brought the slaves and who fought on both sides of the issue of freedom and equality, the ones who enticed the immigrants and then spat on them, are nowhere to be seen this day. They have left the spoils, if indeed there are any, to their inheritors, their tormented, parochial, and frightened inheritors.

"All South Boston High on these buses," a cop yells. "All South

Boston High." Most of the black kids seem cool. One girl, being es-corted by her mother and another two adults, seems to have been crying. They make sure she gets on the bus. Southie High may not look like much, but there's apparently something there that these blacks see as worthwhile, something they didn't have before. There is a story going around that on the first day of busing, one black looked out the window at the old high school and said, "Sheeeeaaat, take me to Weston," a suburb. But there will also be a story of a black kid showing up at the mall and being told by black adults to go back, that it's too dangerous, and the kid says, "is there any teachin' going on there today?" and when told there is, he says, "Well, I'm going."

An old car with. Ohio license plates pulls up. There will be other

nondescript cars with out-of-state plates, and, like this one, they will

contain two Irish plainclothesmen, two very Boston-Irish-looking

plainclothesmen. What the Boston cops lack in subtlety, they will make up in effort,

Now, the procession of buses, cruisers, cars, an d motorcycles begins.

They turn out of the mall and take a right onto the boulevard.

The sun has changed from red to blinding yellow. Three MDC horsemen ride on the beach, the men on horseback framed against the bright sun for a moment, so that to stare at them, one sees not distinct men, but forms as on a desert. They ride the sand to the high school annex at L Street, near the scene of the first rock throwing that Thursday afternoon. Across Columbus Park, a motorcycle cop, a yellow bus, and another cycle cop are on their way to the Gavin School. Eddie King takes out one pair of Ira's binoculars and peers at the housing projects to the right of the park, where a group of youths are forming. Projects are perfect places for urban warfare, with their alleys and fire escapes, their broken doors and windows and their look-alike buildings. "Probably about twenty-five of them," King figures.

"They got anything in their hands?" Kiley asks.

"I 'm trying to make that out now. The cops are right there."

The helicopter flies over the project, checking rooftops. DiGrazia's car goes by the spot where Weddleton has parked, and one of diGrazia's aides waves four fingers. "Four buses," Weddleton says. Four buses are supposed to be coming. Heavy morning commuter traffic is moving along the boulevard, as if this were just another workday morning. At 8:21, the buses and their motorcycle escorts are seen. No rocks. Weddleton follows the last one, as they go down the boulevard and turn up the hill to the high school, and Kiley is on the phone, giving a running commentary.

"We've got door-to-door cops on the access route, all holding their

helmets. Overhead the chopper slices the air with its rotary blades.

The sound will persist all day, but for a fuel stop. The area near the

high school is packed with cops wearing helmets and TPF in blue

fatigues. A lot of the TPF are young men, many with long hair and

handlebar moustaches. There are a handful of black cops and one

woman, and the word on the street is the woman cop knows judo.Four cops sit high in their saddles and face in the direction of Broadway. The buses unload about 200 black kids, and the occupants of Weddleton's car are happy with the numbers. "If we could curb these assholes,

maybe we've turned the corner."

Weddleton continues to tour Southie, past the signs that say, "Welcome Niggers" and "Duck, you Suckers" . . . "Klan Country"…

"This is Southie Country…Mayor Black…….. Mayor White is a Fag …Boneheads" . . . Eddie King spots a guy on one corner, opening his tavern. The taverns were supposed to be closed. Over and over again last night, Eddie King warned the mayor, close the taverns, and the mayor had told the police to do so. But now, as they tour

around, they see one after another opening up for business, and each time, Kiley phones in a report and finally, he hears from the bunker that the bars were ordered closed from 7 A.M. to 9 A.M. only. The bureaucracy doesn't always function the way it should. "What good did it do to close them down from seven to nine?" Kiley asks angrily. When they make their next turn near the high school, Kiley tells Charlie Barry. "Somehow we've fouled up on the joints." Barry takes his command walkie-talkie and orders the police to close them down.

As the car moves up and down Southie's streets, Kiley is on the phone with a running commentary, and Eddie King feeds him details

with a street sense that one does not acquire from political science textbooks. "We're getting, a lotta dirty looks," Eddie says at one point. "Right now, the lines are drawn, and we're the enemy.... Hey, that place opening up at Andrew Square. A bad crowd hangs around there.

That should have been one of the first places they closed."

Tough whites are gathering along Broadway, which would be the route of march. "They're gonna march," Eddie says, "I don't care what you say. They're gonna march."

On the phone, Kiley reports, "That's a bad scene. Those bars being open doesn't help anything."

For a couple of minutes, they pull up behind the M Street Park, an open space the size of two large city blocks, which would be the staging area for the parade. The other crew of operatives pulls up too. Ira Jackson comes over with his binoculars and reports, "A lotta people are pulling up in cars, taking a look around and driving off."

But Broadway is active. Men, women, and children are milling about. Some kids are tacking a protest poster on a car. Soon, a disorganized mass, including some young kids and some women wearing hockey helmets and smiling, is moving down Broadway. "Here we go, Southie. Here we go," they chant. Once, it was for high school games,

and now it has become the chant of protest, and ROAR chants, " Here we go, Boston. Here we go." But it will forever be Southie's chant, and as they chant it now, these ladies in hockey helmets and kids and some tough guys, the press follows them with their cameras.

The car is driving toward and through the marchers. Weddleton is nervous. He drives slowly, knowing that the slightest accident could cause a riot. The car could be mobbed. King mutters over and over, "Oh, shit. Oh, shit." The crowd is not threatening. They act as if it is just a lark, but some members of that crowd would welcome trouble. Kiley, on the phone to Kelliher, says, "They've dispersed them. A raggly, scraggly group is headed to Dorchester Heights. It's not an unruly crowd yet. More larkish."

From the high school, the cycles speed down G Street, toward Broadway. A little kid stands near the gutter with his own walkietalkie. "Nothing going on yet," he reports to an unseen friend, presumably carrying his own walkie-talkie. Ahhhh, mechanical America. Kiley shakes his head in disbelief. The police radios crackle, "Information says seventy-five youths are on their way to the high school."

Two buses roll up with TPF troops with helmets and blue fatigues and boots. The motorcycles line up. "Put your helmets on," orders a TPF officer. "Okay, line up right here."

"I think we're gonna have it," Kiley says.

The crowd from Broadway, mostly youths, is moving up G Street toward the school. Some elements are coming up other radial roads leading to the high school. Cops stand in line and block G Street. Cycles and horses break the large groups into smaller ones, as the young demonstrators break through. The cops are getting strung out to a thin line, trying to block all the radial streets at once, but suddenly, from the top of a rise in the woods behind the school, four more TPF cops appear. Two of them, one black and one white, wearing leather jackets, each holds a German shepherd. Each dog barks viciously. The cops stand there, outlined against the sky in their black leather jackets, each holding a leash, against which strains a barking dog, and the crowd across the street disappears. "They're supposed to keep those fucking dogs out of sight," Kiley says, but later he'll happily tell people about the integrated dog patrol and how it made a difference between a noisy demonstration and a full-fledged battle.

The first assault wave has been turned back. It was not a particularly vicious group. The teenagers seemed to enjoy seeing who couldslip by the cops. They did not appear to be carrying weapons.

Back in front of the high school, diGrazia looks down the hill.

"There's another crowd." The TPF moves down to break it up. Barry

approaches Joe Jordan and tells him, "Joe, there are fifty men in two

platoons on the other side of the park."

"Now?" Jordan asks.

"Yeah," Barry says, "when you need them."

A platoon of TPF moves down G Street toward Broadway in single

file. "Hey, good luck, fellas," a cop yells. Six mounted police also move

off at a trot.

Gary Hayes, a civilian aide to diGrazia and a friend of Kiley's, says,

"We'll have to keep the horses and cycles after 'em all day till we wear

them down."

"Well, why aren't they putting some in the wagon?" Kiley asks.

"Right now, it's a lark for them. They're not paying any price. We're

just doing the same old thing, and we'll have the same conversation

tonight."

Kiley and diGrazia stare down the street. The cops move down, and

the crowd moves back. Back and forth, all over Southie, the game will

go on all day. Kiley laughs and says, "We could drop leaflets."

"Candy and nylons," suggests diGrazia. "Give up, and we'll escort

you out of town."

The messages are spit into the bunker, one after another.

10 a.m. - Arrest at G and 5th St., second arrest today.

10 a.m. - Group breaking up at high school and heading toward H

St.

10 a.m. - There is a group of approximately 65 people in front of

the South Boston Courthouse.

10 a.m. -Arrest at I and East Broadway ... booked for disorderly.

10 a.m. -Group heading up Broadway to M St. Park -about 50 youths coming down I St. About ioo people at M St. Park. roo more heading down E. Broadway toward M St. Park. Rumored regrouping at M St. at ir:oo a.m.

10:10 a.m. - 200 people in M St. Park. "Mullens" people are within this group.

10:15 a.m. - 300 at M St. Park - crowd is being dispersed by police.

10:20 a.m. -Large group of approximately 150-200 people is congregating in front of St. Brigid's Church at Broadway and M St.

Also at 10 A.M., Weddleton is back driving on Broadway, as King and Kiley try to get a feel for what's going on. They have kept their windows closed when the crowds have been close to the car. Now, the windows are open. The day is warm. As they drive slowly down Broadway, Kiley hears one woman yell to another, "It's a waste of time. It's a waste of time up there."

"Right, lady,,' he mumbles. "Go do your ironing." He gets back on the phone. "We're gonna take the pipe here unless we can get the

the phone. If those places aren't down by two or three this afternoon, it's gonna be bad.

At N Street, Kiley gets out of the car and climbs up the steps of a

nearby house. He watches as the TPF move the crowd back toward St.

Brigid's Church. "Let's go Southie ! Lets go," they are yelling.

"Let's go!" Horses clop-a-clop on the street . The TPF infantryworks closely with the cavalry. People are pushed back in one sector, and, almost like a balloon filled with water, the pressure seems to force the crowd back out in another sector. "What happens to equal rights?" yells a woman from her doorstep. "Don't we have any? And without waiting for anyone to answer, she vows, "Well, we'll get it."

"Sieg Heil," the whites of Southie shout at the white policemen.

"Heil, Hitlerl" they shout.

And now there is violence. Men scuffle on the street. The TPF jumps one man and tries to get him into a paddy wagon. Paddy Wagon. To many Irish, it is a racist term- But today, history is replayed.

The cops are throwing their own people into the wagon, and as they struggle with one man, another beefy one tries to rescue him - a big guy in a T-shirt. Gary Hayes says, "It's a Mullens.

Perhaps. Who knows? Who cares anymore? Mullens or no Mullens, cops and men are fighting in the street. They wrestle one big guy to the ground. Four or five of them are holding him down. Another TPF cop holds by his hair the guy who tries to help the other.

"Leave him alone! Leave him alone!' The people are yelling from

the sidewalks, from the steps, from the windows. Some kid spits on Kiley and a companion who stand on the sidewalk and watch. Back in

the car, Weddleton and King are nervous, in, because demonstrators are all over the car. They yell for Kiley to get back in the car and when he's ready, he does. Weddleton drives away, past a young woman who gives

the car the finger and quickly shoves her hand back into her pocket. As

the car moves slowly back to the high school, past small knots of youths, its occupants hear one little kid say to his friends, "I don't know if they can make the noon news, but it'll be on the six o'clock

and the eleven o'clock."

Kiley turns around, his eyes wide with some astonishment.

"Do you believe that?" Kevin White may have been right about people

performing for the tubes.

In front of the high school, a cruiser pulls up and out jumps Jordan, wearing his sunglasses and a uniform with perfect creases. He's one of those types whose pants never lose the crease. "We'll be playing tag all day long with these kids."

11:34 a.m. Group at Andrew Square heading for MBTA station.

The Globe reporters also carry walkie-talkies, and the voice of a police reporter is heard on one. "They're here at Andrew Square. They tore up some phones and did some damage, but the cycles swept them out."

The police radio is also busy. "Motorcycle units to Gavin School. Motorcycle units to Gavin."

11:42 a.m. All available units being sent to Gavin School. Crowd from Andrew Square is heading in that direction.

Three women have approached Kiley as he stands in front of the high school. They strike up a conversation. Their neighborhood radar tells them he's somebody they should talk to. So, they talk. They nag him. "Would you bus your children to Roxbury?" He says, "If I had any, 1 would." Kiley gets peeved. He doesn't want to be nagged. "My wife and children were killed six weeks ago." They stop. They are uncomfortable and shocked, but they are also relentless, and, so they so they press on - "We've had Negro kids here, and they were not harmed.... Two hundred murders in Roxbury - eighty-seven-year-old woman killed for two dollars ... and Atkins calls this a violent area ... we don't mind Negro kids here, but we don't want to send our kids out. . . ."

Nearer to the school, a young mother wanders around with her two little kids. The kids hang back, and she tells them, "Go ahead. Look at the school. See what the niggers are doin'. Go ahead. You're not afraid of black people, are you? Shout 'White power.' The two kids shout, 'White powerl White powerl"' and they collapse into giggles.

The crowd near the high school has slowly but perceptibly increased. Mayor White's insistence that any group larger than three near a school be broken up seems to have again gone by the boards. Someone mentions the crowd to Kiley, who, in turn, asks diGrazia about it, who seems surprised they're there. Cadegan is not crazy about forcibly moving the people away. "Gee," he says, "we stirred up a hornet's nest when we tried to move the women the other day." Jordan walks in and orders his men to clear the area. Most leave quickly.

Some who don't want to are cajoled to do so by Cadegan, who gets them. 1aughing and joking and moving.

Early in the afternoon, word comes to the front line that a policeman named Frank Creamer, forty-seven, suffered a heart attack during one of the assaults on Broadway. Three weeks later, he will die.

From the front lines to the bunker, Kiley sends a message too. "Jordan thinks it's gonna be tough getting outta this today. There are kids with pockets stuffed full of rocks." Jordan is right.

The Boston police are pulled thin. There are reports of disturbances elsewhere, and some of the reports are false. Joe Egan, manager of the Dorchester Little City Hall, reports of "rumored diversionary action in other areas of the city to draw police away from South Boston."

12:40 p.m. Rumor circulating at Hyde Park High School that the buses in Bradlee's parking lot at American Legion Highway will be vandalized&emdash;rocks, bottles, Molotov cocktails).

1:05 p.m. Approximately 15 non-students gathered outside Roslin-dale High.

1:35 p.m. Running total of arrests: 17, all in South Boston

At the high school, as dismissal time approaches, there are two distinct sounds- the chopper above and the horns of a motorcade in the distance. "Column of threes" a TPF officer commands, and they go marching down G Street again. Some aides and teachers come out of the high school but no students yet, because the buses have not shown. They will be late, because crowds have gathered at the Old Colony Housing Project on the boulevard, and police are worried about rocks and missiles. They come late, but they will pick up the students and leave in peace. The action is elsewhere.

"A group up there with bricks on the roof," a radio reports from the housing project.

"Firecrackers going off all over the place here," another says over the airwaves.

A Globe reporter talks into his radio, "Every once in a while, a rock is heaved. Some good-sized rocks too."

A community worker gets a message from Freedom House in Roxbury. Some black parents are calling there, worried that their kids aren't home yet from school in Southie.

"A lotta people here," Eddie King says, when the car reaches the boulevard. "Too many people."

Kiley is on the phone. "They haven't done much of a job getting the area cleared out." The other crew pulls up, and Ira Jackson says, "We've been following this gang with the white hats all day. They're bad news guys from Lower Broadway. The detectives just frisked a bunch of them, and they left." The young men wearing white caps, the kind the seafarers sometimes wear, will be seen throughout the afternoon and in days to come. The hat becomes a badge of resistance, like the chant and the ROAR songs, and soon, the different-color berets each neighborhood contingent of ROAR will wear.

As the high school buses leave, 20 minutes late, Weddleton worries, "They let them go too easy. They're planning something." They learn where the catch is. The buses scheduled to pick up the younger black kids at the Gavin Middle School have not yet. left Bayside Mall, because of the white crowds massed at the project and near the boulevard and along the route to the Gavin. In the crowd, the white caps reappear. An American flag hangs from the third floor of one project building. A hastily made cardboard sign, held by a protestor, says, "Remember Wegler," a reference to a young white woman torched to death in Roxbury. A family gathered on a grassy strip in front of the project chants, "Yay. Honk if you're with us. Are you with us? Hah? Honk for Southie."

Honk for Southie. Pray for us, Father, for we have sinned. And pray

for others of us, for we have not sinned. In the mayor's administration,

one of the top-level aides speaks one day over a beer in a place across

the street from City Hall. He is given to moments of Philosophy and

fatalism, though time has not allowed such maudlin luxuries as of late.

Boston, he says, is America one century ago. The whites are in the city

partly because some wish to be and partly because others must be, and

both kinds are in Southie. Now, the national press is gushing over the

white ethnics of Southie. How quaint, these Irish folk. "Nobody' " he

complains, "is really getting into the other part of Southie, what it's

like to be in an Irish family where the father is a boozer, where --'s

father [he names another city employee] was killed by a gang of kids

because he was shitfaced. The guys drinking at the Rabbit Inn at age

twenty-five, but what about the forty-five-year-old drinking there? My

own father was an alcoholic. Somebody should really get into that

whole thing. What does it mean to work for the city? It means you got

a fuckin' red nose at age forty-three and dead at fifty-two of a heart

attack before you even got that pension you dreamed about all your

life, and you don't even get to see it. The similarities with blacks are

amazing -rural migrants, coming from an oppressive political

situa-tion which gave them excuses for failure, and both of them have weak family structures -the classic Irish father being drunk, the weak

fa-ther who becomes an alcoholic and doesn't Provide. I can go on forever

in terms of my Irish friends in this city and talk about their fathers

who had the potential yet never made it."

So, honk for Southie.

Near the Gavin School, there are police all over the lot, and priests who will ride the buses if the buses ever come. On the police radio, a voice from somewhere intrudes "'Fen-three to Operations. Check on

Mercer Street. A group with white caps on. "Now the sounds of the MDC

chopper are overhead here. Everyone waits:the TPF and the regular police and the MDC police all wait for orders.

The priests and the kids wait for the buses.

A priest, waiting in front of the school looks at a young kid smoking

and says " You're too young to smoke." On the sidewalk, neighborhood residents joke with uniformed sergeants they know, old neighborhood boys. Okay, Kojak," one says to a beefy sergeant and they laugh

together.

Finally, an hour and ten minutes after school closed, six buses arrive at the Gavin. Kiley has learned that the crises is not over yet, for these are the same buses used in picking up up white children attending the King School in Roxbury. The action of the crowds in Southie have effectively created trauma for both black parents and white parents, each worried about their kids in strange and sometimes hostile neighborhoods.

Knots of people remain. One man shouts "Heil Hitler," but that chant against the cops, Garrity and all the forces that now control Southie is not taken up."Hey, Michael," a kid yells, "stay here. There might be trouble

Great expectations. There is no trouble now. and priests load the kids onto buses, and the buses work their way down broadway back to Bayside. Broadway looks like a parade scene. Cops line the street. Mounted Cops roam the avenue. Traffic cops wave the buses through, and scores of people stand on each block, including, again, the young men in the white caps. They stand and stare. And what is it that they have come to look at? A bunch of junior high school kids in Yellow buses.

It is close to 4 P.M. when the buses get back to Bayside Mall, so the kids can transfer to other buses and it seems as if the

Long day is over. Jordan has taken his helmet off and wipes his brow with one arm.- ."if we're gonna do this again tomorrow," he says, we better go to bed now." But Kiley tells diGrazia their troubles may not be over. That white students still await buses at the King. DiGrazia's expressive face turns from the joy of having brought kids here safely to pain. Kiley says,

"-you make an accommodation here and before you know it,you have a problem somewhere else. Everyone's getting awfully tired."

Weddleton now drives behind the buses on their way to Roxbury. The motorcade moves down Columbia Road in that portion of Dorchester that borders Southie

From the schoolyard of St. Margaret's Parochial School, some kids throw stones. They miss the buses, but they hit Weddleton's car and one zips through an open window and clips Kiley behind the right ear. On the side of the school is inscribed, "For God and Country."

As the bus bends at Uphams Corner, a focal point for white, black, and Puerto Rican, young white men come out of the bars to stare at the procession and give the finger. A postal worker flicks his hand under his throat, a fine Italian gesture. The motorcade moves up Columbia Road, which changes from white to black, and toward Blue Hill Avenue. It is the evening before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Once, on such a night, there were masses of people here, hundreds of men, women, and youngsters walking to any of a dozen synagogues strung out along the shtetl from Roxbury to Mattapan. Now, but for some blacks here and there, the area is deserted. There are no shofars echoing in the late afternoon, no families preparing for the holiest days. But for some pockets here and there, the urban Jew is gone. Slowly, his little stores are boarded up or burned down or converted into something else. His schools become public school annexes or Baptist churches. Only the veterans' memorials on the comers stand out strangely in the black neighborhood, each of them a stiff metal rod Kaddish for the Jews of the city. There is, otherwise, no more trace of them here than there is of the shtetls that once lived in Poland, in Moldavia, in the Pale of Settlement.

Now, in Roxbury, there is the King School, which is not about to win a House Beautiful Award, but it has been cleaned up, and the

mood outside is strikingly different from what Kiley has just left in Southie. It is calm. There are no crowds, no black toughs hanging on the corners in the style of Southie, waiting to hurt or to get hurt. Only community workers and YAC workers and a handful of cops are outside. "Hey," one yells to the arrivals in Weddleton's car, "you don't happen to have a bulkie roll on you, do, you?" They are tired and hungry, but they have waited here, these black adults, to make sure no harm comes to those white kids. The white kids pour out of school the way kids all over America come out, happy to be out. They are more than 60 minutes late. A very tall black eighth-grader with an afro guides them on the buses and lectures them to keep their windows closed. Paul Parks is ecstatic. He talks of how well it has gone, of how earlier in the day, "some dude appears on the hill and lifts a rock and five of the community workers look up at him, and he just puts it down."

The buses pull out with their white charges. Around the corner from the school is the first large group of black teenagers. They are running hard and sweating. They are playing basketball. Most don't bother to look at the buses. Black community workers are stationed at strategic corners. The Multi-Service Center's Sav-More Security Patrol has a car about to follow the buses. Leroy Chase, the department's highest ranking black officer, is out on the street, directing traffic himself, so the buses all get by in one group.

Back in Southie, the police still stand at the curbstones and wear their riot gear. The information center reports 22 were arrested today, all but 3 in Southie, that 9 persons, including 3 Police officers, have been injured, all of them in Southie.

At City Hall, the mayor has visited his troops in the bunker and has told them, "I am convinced we made the correct move in banning the march. The police have done an excellent job of combining good judgment with strict enforcement. I think today is a critical day, and so far it has gone well."

At night, he meets again at the Parkman House with black leade:s, with the veterans like Ruth Batson, who began making noises about unequal education in Boston in the 1950's, and Ken Guscott of the NAACP, Otto Snowden and Paul Parks, with Pat Jones and Percy Wilson. The blacks are still hoping that something beyond police power can work in Southie, that some social or political pressures by other whites or by some agencies can be brought to bear.

The Parkman House lights burn on long after the end of dusk in nineteenth-century comfort and security. The windows look out on the Common, peaceful in the early fall evening. The Yankee gentlemen of Beacon Hill strolled here at their leisure. Martin Lomasney liked to take a daily walk here. It has been for all sorts of people a place to unwind, to relax. The mayor and Larry Quealy had looked at it, and the mayor said, "You think the president of France is waiting for the last word on busing, and you get out there and hear singing and nobody cares. They're going about their own business." The Common reminds Kevin White that very little of the world shares his worries, his priorities, his problems, his pretensions. The bells of the Park Street Church tone the time, and when the auto traffic is light, it is timeless time. Perhaps the city can endure, as long as young people sing and dance on its Common ground and grown men sit across from the ground and talk late into the night of peace and how to attain it.

Whether peace is attained depends on whether the violence is contained in Southie. It becomes clear in the days and weeks to come that containment has failed. The pus must be let out of the long-festering sore, before anything will mend. The violence, it seems, must run its course.

Death of an Innocent

How Christopher McCandless lost his way in the wilds

By Jon Krakauer

James Gallien had driven five miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the hitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering in the gray Alaskan dawn. A rifle protruded from the young man's pack, but he looked friendly enough; a hitchhiker with a Remington semiautomatic isn't the sort of thing that gives motorists pause in the 49th state.

Gallien steered his four-by-four onto the shoulder and told him to climb in.

The hitchhiker introduced himself as Alex. "Alex?" Gallien responded, fishing for a last name.

"Just Alex," the young man replied, pointedly rejecting the bait. He explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge of Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and "live off the land for a few months." Alex's backpack appeared to weigh only 25 or 30 pounds, which struck Gallien, an accomplished outdoorsman, as an improbably light load for a three-month sojourn in the backcountry, especially so early in the spring. Immediately Gallien began to wonder if he'd picked up one of those crackpots from the Lower 48 who come north to live out their ill-considered Jack London fantasies. Alaska has long been a magnet for unbalanced souls, often outfitted with little more than innocence and desire, who hope to find their footing in the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier. The bush, however, is a harsh place and cares nothing for hope or longing. More than a few such dreamers have met predictably unpleasant ends.

As they got to talking during the three-hour drive, though, Alex didn't strike Gallien as your typical misfit. He was congenial, seemed well educated, and peppered Gallien with sensible\ questions about "what kind of small game lived in the country, what kind of berries he could eat, that kind of thing."

Still, Gallien was concerned: Alex's gear seemed excessively slight for the rugged conditions of the interior bush, which in April still lay buried under the winter snowpack. He admitted that the only food in his pack was a ten-pound bag of rice. He had no compass; the only navigational aid in his possession was a tattered road map he'd scrounged at a gas station, and when they arrived where Alex asked to be dropped off, he left the map in Gallien's truck, along with his watch, his comb, and all his money, which amounted to 85 cents. "I don't want

to know what time it is," Alex declared cheerfully. "I don't want to know what day it is, or where I am. None of that matters."

During the drive south toward the mountains, Gallien had tried repeatedly to dissuade Alex from his plan, to no avail. He even offered to drive Alex all the way to Anchorage so he could at least buy the kid some decent gear. "No, thanks anyway," Alex replied. "I'll be fine with what I've got." When Gallien asked whether his parents or some friend knew what he was up to--anyone who could sound the alarm if he got into trouble and was overdue--Alex answered calmly that, no, nobody knew of his plans, that in fact he hadn't spoken to his family in nearly three years. "I'm absolutely positive," he assured Gallien, "I won't run into anything I can't deal with on my own."

"There was just no talking the guy out of it," Gallien recalls. "He was determined. He couldn't wait to head out there and get started." So Gallien drove Alex to the head of the Stampede Trail, an old mining track that begins ten miles west of the town of Healy, convinced him to accept a tuna melt and a pair of rubber boots to keep his feet dry, and wished him good luck.

Alex pulled a camera from his backpack and asked Gallien to snap a picture of him. Then, smiling broadly, he disappeared down the snow-covered trail. The date was Tuesday, April 28, 1992.

More than four months passed before Gallien heard anything more of the hitchhiker. His real name turned out to be Christopher J. McCandless. He was the product of a happy family from an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C. And although he wasn't burdened with a surfeit of common sense and possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not readily mesh with the realities of modern life, he was no psychopath. McCandless was in fact an honors graduate of Emory University, an accomplished athlete, and a veteran of several solo excursions into wild, inhospitable terrain.

An extremely intense young man, McCandless had been captivated by the writing of Leo

Tolstoy. He particularly admired the fact that the great novelist had forsaken a life of wealth and privilege to wander among the destitute. For several years he had been emulating the count's asceticism and moral rigor to a degree that astonished and occasionally alarmed those who knew him well. When he took leave of James Gallien, McCandless entertained no illusions that he was trekking into Club Med; peril, adversity, and Tolstoyan renunciation were what he was seeking. And that is precisely what he found on the Stampede Trail, in spades.

For most of 16 weeks McCandless more than held his own. Indeed, were it not for one or two innocent and seemingly insignificant blunders he would have walked out of the Alaskan woods in July or August as anonymously as he walked into them in April. Instead, the name of Chris McCandless has become the stuff of tabloid headlines, and his bewildered family is left clutching the shards of a fierce and painful love.

On the northern margin of the Alaska Range, just before the hulking escarpments of Denal and its satellites surrender to the low Kantishna plain, a series of lesser ridges known as the Outer Ranges sprawls across the flats like a rumpled blanket on an unmade bed. Between the flinty crests of the two outermost Outer Ranges runs an east-west trough, maybe five miles across, carpeted in a boggy amalgam of muskeg, alder thickets, and scrawny spruce.

Meandering through this tangled, rolling bottomland is the Stampede Trail, the route Chris McCandless followed into the wilderness.

Twenty or so miles due west of Healy, not far from the boundary of Denali National Park, a derelict bus--a blue and white, 1940s-vintage International from the Fairbanks City Transit System--rusts incongruously in the fireweed beside the Stampede Trail. Many winters ago the bus was fitted with bedding and a crude barrel stove, then skidded into the bush by enterprising hunters to serve as a backcountry shelter. These days it isn't unusual for nine or ten months to pass without the bus seeing a human visitor, but on September 6, 1992, six people in three separate parties happened to visit it on the same afternoon, including Ken Thompson, Gordon Samel, and Ferdie Swanson, moose hunters who drove in on all-terrain vehicles.

When they arrived at the bus, says Thompson, they found "a guy and a girl from Anchorage standing 50 feet away, looking kinda spooked. A real bad smell was coming from inside the bus, and there was this weird note tacked by the door." The note, written in neat block letters on a page torn from a novel by Gogol, read: "S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening.

Thank you, Chris McCandless. August?"

The Anchorage couple had been too upset by the implications of the note to examine the

bus's interior, so Thompson and Samel steeled themselves to take a look. A peek through a window revealed a .22-caliber rifle, a box of shells, some books and clothing, a backpack, and, on a makeshift bunk in the rear of the vehicle, a blue sleeping bag that appeared to have something or someone inside it.

"It was hard to be absolutely sure," says Samel. "I stood on a stump, reached through a back window, and gave the bag a shake. There was definitely something in it, but whatever it was didn't weigh much. It wasn't until I walked around to the other side and saw a head sticking out that I knew for certain what it was." Chris McCandless had been dead for some two and a half weeks.

The Alaska State Troopers were contacted, and the next morning a police helicopterevacuated the decomposed body, a camera with five rolls of exposed film, and a diary--written across the last two pages of a field guide to edible plants--that recorded theyoung man's final weeks in 113 terse, haunting entries. An autopsy revealed no internal injuries or broken bones. Starvation was suggested as the most probable cause of death.

McCandless's signature had been penned at the bottom of the S.O.S. note, and the photos, when developed, included many self-portraits. But because he had been carrying no identification, the police knew almost nothing about who he was or where he was from.

Carthage, South Dakota, population 274, is a sleepy little cluster of clapboard houses,weathered brick storefronts, and shaded yards that rises humbly from the immensity of the northern plains, adrift in time. It has one grocery, one bank, a single gas station, a lone bar--the Cabaret, where Wayne Westerberg, a hyperkinetic man with thick shoulders and a rakish black moustache talks of the enigmatic young man he knew as Alex. "These are what Alex used to drink," saysWesterberg with a smile, hoisting his glass. "He used to sit right there at the end of the bar and tell us these amazing stories of his travels. He could talk for hours."

Westerberg owns a grain elevator in town but spends every summer running a custom combine crew that follows the harvest from Texas north to Montana. In September 1990 he'd been in Montana cutting barley when, on the highway east of Cut Bank, he'd given a ride to a hungry-looking hitchhiker, a friendly young man who said his name was Alex McCandless.

They hit it off immediately, and before they went their separate ways Westerberg told Alex to look him up in Carthage if he ever needed a job. "About two weeks later," says Westerberg, "he thumbed into town, moved into my house, and went to work at the elevator. He was the hardest worker I've ever seen. And totally honest--what you'd call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for himself.

"You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent," Westerberg continues. "In fact, I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing."

McCandless didn't stay in Carthage long--by the end of October he was on the roadagain--but he dropped Westerberg a postcard every month or two in the course of his travels. He also had all his mail forwarded to Westerberg's house and told everybody he met thereafter that he was from South Dakota.

In truth McCandless had been raised in the comfortable, upper-middle-class environs ofAnnandale, Virginia. His father, Walt, was an aerospace engineer who ran a small but very prosperous consulting firm with Chris's mother, Billie. There were eight children in the extended family: Chris; a younger sister, Carine, with whom Chris was extremely close; and six older half-siblings from Walt's first marriage.

McCandless had graduated in June 1990 from Emory University in Atlanta, where hedistinguished himself as a history/anthropology major and was offered but declinedmembership in Phi Beta Kappa, insisting that titles and honors were of no importance. His education had been paid for by a college fund established by his parents; there was some $20,000 in this account at the time of his graduation, money his parents thought he intended to use for law school. Instead, he donated the entire sum to the Oxford Famine Relief Fund.

Then, without notifying any friends or family members, he loaded all his belongings into a decrepit yellow Datsun and headed west without itinerary, relieved to shed a life of abstraction and security, a life he felt was removed from the heat and throb of the real world. Chris McCandless intended to invent a new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience.

In July 1990, on a 120-degree afternoon near Lake Mead, his car broke down and heabandoned it in the Arizona desert. McCandless was exhilarated, so much so that he decided to bury most of his worldly possessions in the parched earth of Detrital Wash and then--in a gesture that would have done Tolstoy proud--burned his last remaining cash, about $160 in small bills. We know this because he documented the conflagration, and most of the events that followed, in a journal/snapshot album he would later give to Westerberg. Although the tone of the journal occasionally veers toward melodrama, the available evidence indicates that McCandless did not misrepresent the facts; telling the truth was a credo he took very seriously.

McCandless tramped around the West for the next two months, spellbound by the scale and power of the landscape, thrilled by minor brushes with the law, savoring the intermittent company of other vagabonds he met along the way. He hopped trains, hitched rides, and walked the trails of the Sierra Nevada before crossing paths with Westerberg in Montana.

In November he sent Westerberg a postcard from Phoenix, urging him to read War and Peace ("It has things in it that I think you will understand, things that escape most people") and complaining that thanks to the money Westerberg had paid him, tramping had become too easy. "My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal," he wrote. "I've decided that I'm going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up. One day I'll get back to you, Wayne, and repay some of your kindness."

Immediately after writing that card, McCandless bought a secondhand aluminum canoe near the head of Lake Havasu and decided to paddle it down the Colorado River all the way to the Gulf of California. En route he sneaked into Mexico by shooting the spillway of a small dam and got lost repeatedly. But he made it to the gulf, where he struggled to control the canoe in a violent squall far from shore and, exhausted, decided to head north again.

On January 16, 1991, McCandless left the stubby metal boat on a hummock of dune grass southeast of Golfo de Santa Clara and started walking north up the deserted beach. He had not seen or talked to another soul in 36 days. For that entire period he had subsisted on nothing but five pounds of rice and what he could pull from the sea, an experience that would later convince him he could survive on similarly meager rations when he went to live in the Alaskan bush. Back at the border two days later, he was caught trying to slip into the UnitedStates without ID and spent a night in custody before concocting a story that got him across.

McCandless spent most of the next year in the Southwest, but the last entry in the journal he left with Westerberg is dated May 10, 1991, and so the record of his travels in this period is sketchy. He slummed his way through San Diego, El Paso, and Houston. To avoid being rolled and robbed by the unsavory characters who ruled the streets and freeway overpasses where he slept, he learned to bury what money he had before entering a city, then recover it on the way out of town. Snapshots in the album document visits to Bryce and Zion, the Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree, Palm Springs. For several weeks he lived with "bums, tramps, and winos" on the streets of Las Vegas.

When 1991 drew to a close McCandless was in Bullhead City, Arizona, where for three months he lived in a tent and flipped burgers at McDonald's. A letter from this period reveals that "a girl Tracy" had a crush on him. In a note to Westerberg he admitted that he liked Bullhead City and "might finally settle down and abandon my tramping life, for good. I'll see what happens when spring comes around, because that's when I tend to get really itchy feet."

Itchy feet prevailed. He soon called Westerberg and said that he wanted to work in the grain elevator for a while, just long enough to put together a little grubstake. He needed money to buy some new gear, he said, because he was going to Alaska.

When McCandless arrived back in Carthage on a bitter February morning in 1992, he'dalready decided that he would depart for Alaska on April 15. He wanted to be in Fairbanks by the end of April in order to have as much time as possible in the North before heading back to South Dakota to help out with the autumn harvest. By mid-April Westerberg was shorthanded and very busy, so he asked McCandless to postpone his departure date and work a week or two longer. But, Westerberg says, "Once Alex made up his mind about something there was no changing it. I even offered to buy him a plane ticket to Fairbanks, which would have let him work an extra ten days and still get to Alaska by the end of April.

But he said, 'No, I want to hitch north. Flying would be cheating. It would wreck the whole trip.'"

McCandless left Carthage on April 15. In early May Westerberg received a postcard of a polar bear, postmarked April 27. "Greetings from Fairbanks!" it read.

This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne. Arrived here 2 days ago. It was very difficult to catch rides in the Yukon Territory. But I finally got here. Please return all mail I receive to the sender.

It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and youdon't ever hear from me again, I want you to know your a great man. I now walk into the wild.

McCandless's last postcard to Westerberg fueled widespread speculation, after his adventure did prove fatal, that he'd intended suicide from the start, that when he walked into the bush alone he had no intention of ever walking out again. But I for one am not so sure.

In 1977, when I was 23--a year younger than McCandless at the time of his death--I hitched a ride to Alaska on a fishing boat and set off alone into the backcountry to attempt an ascent of a malevolent stone digit called the Devils Thumb, a towering prong of vertical rock and avalanching ice, ignoring pleas from friends, family, and utter strangers to come to my senses. Simply reaching the foot of the mountain entailed traveling 30 miles up a badly crevassed, storm-wracked glacier that hadn't seen a human footprint in many years. By choice I had no radio, no way of summoning help, no safety net of any kind. I had several harrowing shaves, but eventually I reached the summit of the Thumb.

When I decided to go to Alaska that April, I was an angst-ridden youth who read too much Nietzsche, mistook passion for insight, and functioned according to an obscure gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end it changed almost nothing, of course. I came to appreciate, however, that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.

As a young man, I was unlike Chris McCandless in many important respects--most notably Ilacked his intellect and his altruistic leanings--but I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.

The fact that I survived my Alaskan adventure and McCandless did not survive his was largely a matter of chance; had I died on the Stikine Icecap in 1977 people would have been quick to say of me, as they now say of him, that I had a death wish. Fifteen years after the event, I now recognize that I suffered from hubris, perhaps, and a monstrous innocence, certainly, but I wasn't suicidal.

At the time, death was a concept I understood only in the abstract. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts. I was stirred by the mystery of death; I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The view into that swirling black vortex terrified me, but I caught sight of something elemental in that shadowy glimpse, some forbidden, fascinating riddle.

That's a very different thing from wanting to die.

Westerberg heard nothing else from McCandless for the remainder of the spring and summer. Then, last September 13, he was rolling down an empty ribbon of South Dakota blacktop, leading his harvest crew home to Carthage after wrapping up a four-month cutting season in northern Montana, when the VHF barked to life. "Wayne!" an anxious voice crackled over the radio from one of the crew's other trucks. "Quick--turn on your AM and listen to Paul Harvey. He's talking about some kid who starved to death up in Alaska. The police don't know who he is. Sounds a whole lot like Alex."

As soon as he got to Carthage, a dispirited Westerberg called the Alaska State Troopers and said that he thought he knew the identity of the hiker. McCandless had never told Westerberg anything about his family, including where they lived, but Westerberg unearthed a W-4 form bearing McCandless's Social Security number, which led the police to an address in Virginia. A few days after the Paul Harvey broadcast, an Alaskan police sergeant made a phone call to the distant suburbs of the nation's capital, confirming the worst fears of Walt and Billie McCandless and raining a flood of confusion and grief down upon their world.

Walt McCandless, 56, dressed in gray sweatpants and a rayon jacket bearing the logo of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is a stocky, bearded man with longish salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from a high forehead. Seven weeks after his youngest son's body turned up in Alaska wrapped in a blue sleeping bag that Billie had sewn for Chris from a kit, he studies a sailboat scudding beneath the window of his waterfront townhouse. "How is it," he wonders aloud as could cause his parents so much pain?"

Four large pieces of posterboard covered with dozens of photos documenting the whole brief span of Chris's life stand on the dining room table. Moving deliberately around the display, Billie points out Chris as a toddler astride a hobbyhorse, Chris as a rapt eight-year-old in a yellow slicker on his first backpacking trip, Chris at his high school commencement. "Thehardest part," says Walt, pausing over a shot of his son clowning around on a family vacation,"is simply not having him around any more. I spent a lot of time with Chris, perhaps more than with any of my other kids. I really liked his company, even though he frustrated us so often."

It is impossible to know what murky convergence of chromosomal matter, parent-childdynamics, and alignment of the cosmos was responsible, but Chris McCandless came into the world with unusual gifts and a will not easily deflected from its trajectory. As early as third grade, a bemused teacher was moved to pull Chris's parents aside and inform them that their son "marched to a different drummer." At the age of ten, he entered his first running competition, a 10k road race, and finished 69th, beating more than 1,000 adults. By high school he was effortlessly bringing home A's (punctuated by a single F, the result of butting heads with a particularly rigid physics teacher) and had developed into one of the top distance runners in the region.

As captain of his high school cross-country team he concocted novel, grueling trainingregimens that his teammates still remember well. "Chris invented this workout he called Road Warriors," explains Gordy Cucullu, a close friend from those days. "He would lead us on long,killer runs, as far and as fast as we could go, down strange roads, through the woods, whatever. The whole idea was to lose our bearings, to push ourselves into unknown territory.

Then we'd run at a slightly slower pace until we found a road we recognized, and race home again at full speed. In a certain sense, that's how Chris lived his entire life."

McCandless viewed running as an intensely spiritual exercise akin to meditation. "Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us," recalls Eric Hathaway, another friend on the team. "He'd tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best. He believed doing well was all mental, a simple matter of harnessing whatever energy was available. As impressionable high school kids, we were blown away by that kind of talk."

McCandless's musings on good and evil were more than a training technique; he took life's inequities to heart. "Chris didn't understand how people could possibly be allowed to go hungry, especially in this country," says Billie McCandless, a small woman with large,expressive eyes--the same eyes Chris is said to have had. "He would rave about that kind o f thing for hours."

For months he spoke seriously of traveling to South Africa and joining the struggle to end apartheid. On weekends, when his high school pals were attending keggers and trying to sneak into Georgetown bars, McCandless would wander the seedier quarters of Washington, chatting with pimps and hookers and homeless people, buying them meals, earnestly suggesting ways they might improve their lives. Once, he actually picked up a homeless man from downtown D.C., brought him to the leafy streets of Annandale, and secretly set him up in the Airstream trailer that his parents kept parked in the driveway. Walt and Billie never even knew they were hosting a vagrant.

McCandless's personality was puzzling in its complexity. He was intensely private but could be convivial and gregarious in the extreme. And despite his overdeveloped social conscience, he was no tight-lipped, perpetually grim do-gooder who frowned on fun. To the contrary, he enjoyed tipping a glass now and then and was an incorrigible ham who would seize any excuse to regale friends and strangers with spirited renditions of Tony Bennett tunes. In college he directed and starred in a witty video parody of Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's vault. And he was a natural salesman: Throughout his youth McCandless launched a series of entrepreneurial schemes (a photocopying service, among others), some of which brought in impressive amounts of cash.

Upon graduating from high school, he took the earnings he'd socked away, bought a used Datsun B210, and promptly embarked on the first of his extemporaneous transcontinental odysseys. For half the summer he complied with his parents' insistence that he phone every three days, but he didn't check in at all the last couple of weeks and returned just two days before he was due at college, sporting torn clothes, a scruffy beard, and tangled hair and packing a machete and a .30-06 rifle, which he insisted on taking with him to school.

With each new adventure, Walt and Billie grew increasingly anxious about the risks Chris was taking. Before his senior year at Emory he returned from a summer on the road looking gaunt and weak, having shed 30 pounds from his already lean frame; he'd gotten lost in the Mojave Desert, it turned out, and had nearly succumbed to dehydration. Walt and Billie urged their son to exercise more caution in the future and pleaded with him to keep them better informed of his whereabouts; Chris responded by telling them even less about his escapades and checking in less frequently when he was on the road. "He thought we were idiots for worrying about him," Billie says. "He took pride in his ability to go without food for extended periods, and he had complete confidence that he could get himself out of any jam."

"He was good at almost everything he ever tried," says Walt, "which made him supremely overconfident. If you attempted to talk him out of something, he wouldn't argue. He'd just nod politely and then do exactly what he wanted."

McCandless could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well,characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption, qualities that seemed to intensify throughout his college years. "I saw Chris at a party after his freshman year at Emory," remembers Eric Hathaway, "and it was obvious that he had changed. He seemed very introverted, almost cold. Social life at Emory revolved around fraternities and sororities, something Chris wanted no part of. And when everybody started going Greek, he kind of pulled back from his old friends and got more heavily into himself."

When Walt and Billie went to Atlanta in the spring of 1990 for Chris's college graduation, he told them that he was planning another summerlong trip and that he'd drive up to visit them in Annandale before hitting the road. But he never showed. Shortly thereafter he donated the $20,000 in his bank account to Oxfam, loaded up his car, and disappeared. From then on he scrupulously avoided contacting either his parents or Carine, the sister for whom he purportedly cared immensely.

"We were all worried when we didn't hear from him," says Carine, "and I think my parents' worry was mixed with hurt and anger. But I didn't really feel hurt. I knew that he was happy and doing what he wanted to do. I understood that it was important for him to see how independent he could be. And he knew that if he wrote or called me, Mom and Dad would find out where he was, fly out there, and try to bring him home."

In September--by which time Chris had long since abandoned the yellow Datsun in the desert and burned his money--Walt and Billie grew worried enough to hire a private investigator. "We worked pretty hard to trace him," says Walt. "We eventually picked up his trail on the northern California coast, where he'd gotten a ticket for hitchhiking, but we lost track of him for good right after that, probably about the time he met Wayne Westerberg." Walt and Billie would hear nothing more about Chris's whereabouts until their son's body turned up in Alaska two years later.

After Chris had been identified, Carine and their oldest half-brother, Sam, flew to Fairbanks to bring home his ashes and those few possessions--the rifle, a fishing rod, a Swiss Army knife, the book in which he'd kept his journal, and not much else--that had been recovered with the body, including the photographs he'd taken in Alaska. Sifting through this pictorial record of Chris's final days, it is all Billie can do to force herself to examine the fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow.

"I just don't understand why he had to take those kinds of chances," Billie protests through her tears. "I just don't understand it at all."

When news of McCandless's fate came to light, most Alaskans were quick to dismiss him as a nut case. According to the conventional wisdom he was simply one more dreamy, half-cocked greenhorn who went into the bush expecting to find answers to all his problems and instead found nothing but mosquitoes and a lonely death.

Dozens of marginal characters have gone into the Alaskan backcountry over the years, never to reappear. A few have lodged firmly in the state's collective memory. There is, for example, the sad tale of John Mallon Waterman, a visionary climber much celebrated for making one of the most astonishing first ascents in the history of North American mountaineering--an extremely dangerous 145-day solo climb of Mount Hunter's Southeast Spur. Upon completing this epic deed in 1979, though, he found that instead of putting his demons to rest, success merely agitated them.

In the years that followed, Waterman's mind unraveled. He took to prancing around Fairbanks in a black cape and announced he was running for president under the banner of the Feed the Starving Party, the main priority of which was to ensure that nobody on the planet died of hunger. To publicize his campaign he laid plans to make a solo ascent of Denali, in winter, with a minimum of food.

After his first attempt on the mountain was aborted prematurely, Waterman committedhimself to the Anchorage Psychiatric Institute but checked out after two weeks, convinced that there was a conspiracy afoot to put him away permanently. Then, in the winter of 1981, he launched another solo attempt on Denali. He was last placed on the upper Ruth Glacier, heading unroped through the middle of a deadly crevasse field en route to the mountain's difficult East Buttress, carrying neither sleeping bag nor tent. He was never seen after that, but a note was later found atop some of his gear in a nearby shelter. It read, "3-13-81 My last kiss 1:42 PM."

Perhaps inevitably, parallels have been drawn between John Waterman and Chris McCandless Comparisons have also been made between McCandless and Carl McCunn, a likable, absentminded Texan who in 1981 paid a bush pilot to drop him at a lake deep in the Brooks Range to photograph wildlife. He flew in with 500 rolls of film and 1,400 pounds of provisions but forgot to arrange for the pilot to pick him up again. Nobody realized he was missing until state troopers came across his body a year later, lying beside a 100-page diary that documented his demise. Rather than starve, McCunn had reclined in his tent and shot himself in the head.

There are similarities among Waterman, McCunn, and McCandless, most notably a certain dreaminess and a paucity of common sense. But unlike Waterman, McCandless was not mentally unbalanced. And unlike McCunn, he didn't go into the bush assuming that someone would magically appear to bring him out again before he came to grief.

McCandless doesn't really conform to the common bush-casualty stereotype: He wasn't a kook, he wasn't an outcast, and although he was rash and incautious to the point of foolhardiness, he was hardly incompetent or he would never have lasted 113 days. If one is searching for predecessors cut from the same exotic cloth, if one hopes to understand the personal tragedy of Chris McCandless by placing it in some larger context, one would do well to look at another northern land, in a different century altogether.

Off the southeastern coast of Iceland sits a low barrier island called Papos. Treeless androcky, perpetually knocked by gales howling off the North Atlantic, the island takes its name from its first settlers, now long gone, the Irish monks known as papar. They arrived as early as the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., having sailed and rowed from the western coast of Ireland. Setting out in small open boats called curraghs, made from cowhide stretched over light wicker frames, they crossed one of the most treacherous stretches of ocean in the world without knowing what they'd find on the other side.

The papar risked their lives--and lost them in untold droves--but not in the pursuit of wealth or personal glory or to claim new lands in the name of a despot. As the great Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen points out, they undertook their remarkable voyages "chiefly from the wish to find lonely places, where these anchorites might dwell in peace, undisturbed by the turmoil and temptations of the world." When the first handful of Norwegians showed up on the shores of Iceland in the ninth century, the papar decided the country had become too crowded, even though it was still all but uninhabited. They climbed back into into their curraghs and rowed off toward Greenland. They were drawn west across the storm-wracked ocean, past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than hunger of the spirit, a queer, pure yearning that burned in their souls.

Reading of the these monks, one is struck by their courage, their reckless innocence, and the intensity of their desire. And one can't help thinking of Chris McCandless.

On April 25, 1992, ten days after leaving South Dakota, McCandless rode his thumb into Fairbanks. After perusing the classified ads, he bought a used Remington Nylon 66--a semiautomatic .22-caliber rifle with a 4x20 scope and a plastic stock that was favored by Alaskan trappers for its light weight and reliability.

When James Gallien dropped McCandless off at the head of the Stampede Trail on April 28the temperature was in the low thirties--it would drop into the low teens at night--and a foot of crusty spring snow covered the ground. As he trudged expectantly down the trail in a fake-fur parka, the heaviest item in McCandless's half-full backpack was his library: nine or ten paperbacks ranging from Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man to Thoreau's Walden and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illyich. One of these volumes, Tanaina Plantlore, by Priscilla Russel Kari, was a scholarly, exhaustively researched field guide to edible plants in the region; it was in the back of this book that McCandless began keeping an abbreviated record of his journey.

From his journal we know that on April 29 McCandless fell through the ice--perhaps crossing the frozen surface of the Teklanika River, perhaps in the maze of broad, shallow beaver ponds that lie just beyond its western bank--although there is no indication that he suffered any injury. A day later he got his first glimpse of Denali's gleaming white ramparts, and a day after that, about 20 miles down the trail from where he started, he stumbled upon the bus and decided to make it his base camp.

He was elated to be there. Inside the bus, on a sheet of weathered plywood spanning abroken window, McCandless scrawled an exultant declaration of independence:

Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North.

No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

Alexander Supertramp

May 1992

But reality quickly intruded. McCandless had difficulty killing game, and the daily journal entries during his first week at the bus include "weakness," "snowed in," and "disaster." He saw but did not shoot a grizzly on May 2, shot at but missed some ducks on May 4, and finally killed and ate a spruce grouse on May 5. But he didn't kill any more game until May 9, when he bagged a single small squirrel, by which point he'd written "4th day famine" in the journal.

Soon thereafter McCandless's fortunes took a sharp turn for the better. By mid-May thesnowpack was melting down to bare ground, exposing the previous season's rose hips and lingonberries, preserved beneath the frost, which he gathered and ate. He also became much more successful at hunting and for the next six weeks feasted regularly on squirrel, spruce grouse, duck, goose, and porcupine. On May 22 he lost a crown from a tooth, but it didn't seem to dampen his spirits much, because the following day he scrambled up the nameless 3,000-foot butte that rose directly north of the bus, giving him a view of the whole icy sweep of the Alaska Range and mile after mile of stunning, completely uninhabited country. His journal entry for the day is characteristically terse but unmistakably joyous: "CLIMB MOUNTAIN!"

Although McCandless was enough of a realist to know that hunting was an unavoidable component of living off the land, he had always been ambivalent about killing animals. That ambivalence turned to regret on June 9, when he shot and killed a large caribou, which he mistakenly identified as a moose in his journal. For six days he toiled to preserve the meat, believing that it was morally indefensible to waste any part of an animal that has been killed for food. He butchered the carcass under a thick cloud of flies and mosquitoes, boiled the internal organs into a stew, and then laboriously dug a cave in the rocky earth in which he tried to preserve, by smoking, the huge amount of meat that he was unable to eat immediately. Despite his efforts, on June 14 his journal records, "Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective. Don't know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life."

Although he recriminated himself severely for this waste of a life he had taken, a day later McCandless appeared to regain some perspective--his journal notes, "henceforth will learn to accept my errors, however great they be"--and the period of contentment that began in mid-May resumed and continued until early July. Then, in the midst of this idyll, came the first of two pivotal setbacks.

Satisfied, apparently, with what he had accomplished during his two months of solitaryexistence, McCandless decided to return to civilization. It was time to bring his "final and greatest adventure" to a close and get himself back to the world of men and women, where he could chug a beer, discuss philosophy, enthrall strangers with tales of what he'd done. He seemed to have turned the corner on his need to assert his autonomy from his parents. He seemed ready, perhaps, to go home. On a parchmentlike strip of birch bark he drew up a list of tasks to do before he departed: "patch jeans, shave!, organize pack." Then, on July 3--the day after a journal entry that reads, "Family happiness"--he shouldered his backpack, departed the bus, and began the 30-mile walk to the highway.

Two days later, halfway to the road, he arrived in heavy rain on the west bank of theTeklanika River, a major stream spawned by distant glaciers on the crest of the Alaska Range. Sixty-seven days earlier it had been frozen over, and he had simply strolled across it. Now, however, swollen with rain and melting snow, the Teklanika was running big, cold, and fast.

If he could reach the far shore, the rest of the hike to the highway would be trivial, but to get there he would have to negotiate a 75-foot channel of chest-deep water that churned with the power of a freight train. In his journal McCandless wrote, "Rained in. River look impossible. Lonely, scared." Concluding that he would drown if he attempted to cross, he turned around and walked back toward the bus, back into the fickle heart of the bush.

McCandless got back to the bus on July 8. It's impossible to know what was going through his mind at that point, believing that his escape had been cut off, for his journal betrays nothing. Actually, he wasn't cut off at all: A quarter-mile downstream from where he had tried to cross, the Teklanika rushes through a narrow gorge spanned by a hand-operated tram--a metal basket suspended from pulleys on a steel cable. If he had known about it, crossing the Teklanika to safety would have been little more than a casual task. Also, six miles due south of the bus, an easy day's walk up the main fork of the Sushana, the National Park Service maintains a cabin stocked with food, bedding, and first-aid supplies for the use of backcountry rangers on their winter patrols. This cabin is plainly marked on most topographic maps of the area, but McCandless, lacking such a map, had no way of knowing about it. His friends point out, of course, that had he carried a map and known the cabin was so close, his muleheaded obsession with self-reliance would have kept him from staying anywhere near the bus; rather, he would have headed even deeper into the bush.

So he went back to the bus, which was a sensible course of action: It was the height ofsummer, the country was fecund with plant and animal life, and his food supply was stilladequate. He probably surmised that if he could just bide his time until August, the Teklanika would subside enough to be forded.

For the rest of July McCandless fell back into his routine of hunting and gathering. His snapshots and journal entries indicate that over those three weeks he killed 35 squirrels, four spruce grouse, five jays and woodpeckers, and two frogs, which he supplemented with wild potatoes, wild rhubarb, various berries, and mushrooms. Despite this apparent munificence, the meat he'd been killing was very lean, and he was consuming fewer calories than he was burning. After three months on a marginal diet, McCandless had run up a sizable caloric deficit. He was balanced on a precarious, razor-thin edge. And then, on July 30, he made the mistake that pulled him down.

His journal entry for that date reads, "Extremely weak. Fault of pot[ato] seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great Jeopardy." McCandless had been digging and eating the root of the wild potato--Hedysarum alpinum, a common area wildflower also known as Eskimo potato, which Kari's book told him was widely eaten by native Alaskans--for more than a month without ill effect. On July 14 he apparently started eating the pealike seedpods of the plant as well, again without ill effect. There is, however, a closely related plant--wild sweet pea, Hedysarum mackenzii--that is very difficult to distinguish from wild potato, grows beside it, and is poisonous. In all likelihood McCandless mistakenly ate some seeds from the wild sweet pea and became gravely ill.

Laid low by the poisonous seeds, he was too weak to hunt effectively and thus slid toward starvation. Things began to spin out of control with terrible speed. "DAY 100! MADE IT!" he noted jubilantly on August 5, proud of achieving such a significant milestone, "but in weakest condition of life. Death looms as serious threat. Too weak to walk out."

Over the next week or so the only game he bagged was five squirrels and a spruce grouse. Many Alaskans have wondered why, at this point, he didn't start a forest fire as a distress signal; small planes fly over the area every few days, they say, and the Park Service would surely have dispatched a crew to control the conflagration. "Chris would never intentionally burn down a forest, not even to save his life," answers Carine McCandless. "Anybody who would suggest otherwise doesn't understand the first thing about my brother."

Starvation is not a pleasant way to die. In advanced stages, as the body begins to consume itself, the victim suffers muscle pain, heart disturbances, loss of hair, shortness of breath. Convulsions and hallucinations are not uncommon. Some who have been brought back from the far edge of starvation, though, report that near the end their suffering was replaced by a sublime euphoria, a sense of calm accompanied by transcendent mental clarity. Perhaps, it would be nice to think, McCandless enjoyed a similar rapture.

From August 13 through 18 his journal records nothing beyond a tally of the days. At some point during this week, he tore the final page from Louis L'Amour's memoir, Education of a Wandering Man. On one side were some lines that L'Amour had quoted from Robinson Jeffers's poem "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours":

Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made

Something more equal to the centuries

Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.

On the other side of the page, which was blank, McCandless penned a brief adios: "I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!"

Then he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had made for him and slipped intounconsciousness. He probably died on August 18, 113 days after he'd walked into the wild, 19 days before six hunters and hikers would happen across the bus and discover his body inside.

One of his last acts was to take a photograph of himself, standing near the bus under thehigh Alaskan sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. He is smiling in the photo, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.

HEADLINE: Prison Is a Member of Their Family  BYLINE:  By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc;  Adrian Nicole LeBlanc has written for The Times Magazine about female gangs and other topics. This article is adapted from "Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx," to be published next month by Scribner.

BODY:

 Since Nina was born, Lolli has been dressing her for prison. Nina wore new baby clothes for visits to her 16-year-old father, Toney, in a juvenile detention facility not too far from their Bronx neighborhood. As Nina grew, Lolli dressed her daughter for the rarer afternoons in faraway New York State maximum-security visiting rooms. The gaps between visits gave Lolli time to save and shop for the brand-new outfits on layaway. In the inner city, being "dressed" has always been important: it means you are provided for, a part of bigger things. Sloppiness and stains were physical evidence of failure, of poverty winning its battle against you. The night before visits, Lolli would spend hours doing Nina's hair in her father's favorite style --Shirley Temple curls.

 Nina groaned and grimaced. Lolli tugged and yanked. Nina winced whenever Lolli cleaned her ears (Toney sometimes checked). In prison, as on the street, a well-dressed family enhanced Toney's stature. Interactions were public, and appearances mattered.

 On a cold morning early last month, Nina, who is now 12, stood on her stoop, dressed, waiting to visit her father. She was glad about going to see him, eager to go anywhere, to get away from her boring block in an upstate New York town and the chaos of her house. She has been an upstate girl for more than seven years, but like her mom, she still rocks a city style. Nina's thick, dyed blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she flashed a new pair of silver-and-pink Nikes. She was wearing a dark blue velvet sweatsuit Lolli bought for the day. The sweatsuit came from a corner store, whose Bronx-born proprietor imports the New York City ghetto style upstate. As long as Nina could remember, the prison system held uncles and cousins and grandfathers and always her father. Nina, like Toney and Lolli, was raised in the inner city; for all three, prison

 further demarcated the already insular social geography. Along with the baby showers of teenagers, they attended prisoners' going-away and coming-home parties. Drug dealing and arrests were common on the afternoons Nina spent playing on the sidewalk as she and her parents hung out with their friends. People would be hauled away, while others would unexpectedly reappear, angrier or subdued. Corrections officers escorted one handcuffed cousin to Nina's great-grandmother's funeral; her favorite uncle had to beunshackled in order to approach his dying grandmother's hospital bedside. The prison system was part of the texture of family life.

 Since 1974, the year Toney was born, the incarceration rate for young men in America has quadrupled. In his Bronx neighborhood, as in the poorest communities around the country, prison is now a well-established rite of passage. A 2000 study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that about half of the nation's inmates are parents of children under 18. The study also found that almost 1.5 million children had a parent in prison, an increase of more than 500,000 children since 1991.

  Many inmates lose touch with their families -- more than half of all fathers in state prison report having no personal visits with their children. But the family that maintains a significant connection must arrange and rearrange their relationships -- their lives -- around prison. The fact that so many young minority men spend time in jail is "felt acutely at the street level, and influences dating patterns, parenting patterns, the way people do or don't connect to work, the norms of social interactions," says Jeremy Travis of the Urban

 Institute. These abstractions are the reality for Nina and Lolli and Toney, with whom I have spent countless hours hanging out and shuttling back and forth to prison during the last 10 years. (To gain such access to their lives, I agreed to use only their street nicknames when writing about them.) For them, as for many poor American families, prison and the street are where family life unfolds.

   1988-1990: Toney and Lolli Fall in Love

 Love is a place to go in the ghetto. Like thousands of inner-city teenagers, Toney and Lolli met on the street. It was 1988, and drugs had rendered their precarious home situations untenable. Home meant cramped places where too many people and never enough money erupted in too much fighting and sadness and partying. In their Puerto Rican neighborhoods on the eastern and western ends of Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, drug dealing was a mainstay of the local economy.

  Lolli wasn't a church girl, and she wasn't much of a schoolgirl either. But she wasn't truly hardened, and she had family. She liked action, although she preferred to watch from the periphery. Boys called her Lollipop because she liked to tuck lollipops in the topknot of her ponytail; her teachers called her Motor Mouth because she talked a lot. After school, she liked watching the boys fooling around in front of a nearby bodega: boys talking to other boys, boys eating Cheez Doodles, boys idly bouncing basketballs, boys on bicycles.

 Toney called attention to himself just by appearing. He sported a red leather jacket with a collar trimmed in what looked like real rabbit fur. His clothes were pressed and clean. He squinted as if he had just sucked on a lime and had a hop in his sexy walk. He was 14 and looked like a boy headed somewhere.

 What Lolli didn't know at the time was what Toney was running from. His mother's life was spiraling out of control, and her longtime boyfriend, a workingman who had given structure to Toney's turbulent household, had recently moved out. Toney usually retreated to his homeboys -- Four-Man Posse, as they called  themselves, or F.M.P. As Toney remembers it, within no time he went from playing tag to hiding drugs in his pocket to carrying guns. F.M.P. had an M-1 rifle, a .45 and a shotgun. They hunted for victims on the subway and did a daylight robbery at a sporting goods store.

  Toney caught Lolli's attention immediately. "Damn," Lolli remembers saying to her best friend the day she saw him. "That guy looks good."

 At first, Toney later recalled, he'd noticed Lolli the way he noticed all kinds of girls. She was pretty, "real short and thick." He wanted to have sex with her.Having sex with girls was for Toney a daily goal, one he met fairly regularly. "Different girls gave me an opportunity to experience different things," Toney said. But Toney found himself actually liking Lolli, and they started speaking every day. They talked and talked and then they kissed and kissed. When they began to make love, Lolli was silly and happy, not scared and sad like other girls he'd been with. Some neighborhood girls moved like somnambulists through the haze of their depressing streets, but Lolli was playful, ready to try anything. Toney said, "She had this vitality."

 Toney was a player, and even love wasn't going to stop a boy's philandering, but Lolli was the girl he came back to, his "wife." Toney also spent less time robbing and mugging once he had Lolli. It was common knowledge in the neighborhood that a girl could save a boy from the dangers of the street, but Toney wasn't looking to be saved, and Lolli wasn't looking to rescue him. She liked the adventure and wasn't thinking further than that. She started cutting school.

 By the fall of 1989, Lolli was pregnant. She was hopeful: both she and Toney said they believed the relationship would go on much as it had, and that they would get help from their moms. Lolli's mother, who had her first child at 14, was less worried about the pregnancy -- lots of girls had bellies -- than about the extra hardship Toney's hoodlum lifestyle guaranteed. She had cousins and siblings who'd been in and out of prison.

 Her own longtime partner, who was addicted to heroin, managed to stay out of jail, but even with him at home, raising children was a struggle.

 Within weeks, Lolli's mother's fears were realized: Toney was arrested. His crew was involved in a shootout. Toney took the blame -- he knew he'd get less time as a juvenile; his best friend, Pee Wee, also took the rap as a gesture of solidarity.

  In 1990, Toney was sentenced to two-to-six years for attempted murder and shipped to Harlem Valley, the juvenile detention center in Wingdale, N.Y., 50 miles north of the Bronx. By this time, Lolli had quit school.

 She was now not only a pregnant 15-year-old, but a jailbird's "wife."

    1990-1991: With Bars Between Them

  Toney didn't know it, but Harlem Valley would have the best conditions that he would experience during his prison years. In the early 90's, juveniles were still treated like older children who might turn things around. In addition to offering Toney a chance to get his G.E.D., the institution encouraged connection with his family.

 He had easy access to a phone. He could shoot his own rolls of film with a camera that the staff let the teenagers use. He mailed Lolli pictures of himself sitting in his cinder-block room on his Ninja Turtle sheets.

 Toney ate the home-cooked food that his mother brought for visits, which she made often, because Metro-North trains ran from New York City to Wingdale.

 Toney's mother hoped that jail would teach her son the lessons she had not been able to. Prison wasn't safe, but it was safer than the street, though you had to establish that you could take care of yourself. Early on, two bigger boys beat Toney, and while he was getting stitches, they stole a pair of his sneakers. In a move that would establish his reputation in the system, Toney did them one better: he waited a week for one of the boys to wear the sneakers, jumped him and took the sneakers right off his feet.

 For Lolli, prison made the relationship hard instead of fun. Face to face in the visiting room with full hours stretched out before them, Lolli and Toney had to figure out new ways to communicate. The unborn baby became their strongest link. Toney hated the idea of being an absent father, like his own father, who moved out when Toney was 2 and was in and out of prison. "For the next four years I'm going to have to handle it,"

 Toney wrote to Lolli. "But anyway at least I have something that's mine and will never stop loving me. My kid."

  In April 1990, a healthy, full-term baby girl arrived. Lolli mailed Toney his own baby book. They charted their daughter's progress. Toney wanted Lolli to document with photographs each day he was missing. He stopped asking Lolli questions about herself and wanted to hear only about the baby: does she still have that rash? That bump on her chest? Was Lolli changing her diapers enough? The more controlling Toney became, the more Lolli avoided him. She let Toney's mother take Nina to see Toney on weekends instead. Toney fed her and changed her diaper. When the baby cried, he said, "I ain't letting go till you get used to me." He badgered his mother to keep a close eye on Nina, and promised to take care of her when he got out.

  Lolli's mother also helped with the baby. Lolli welcomed the break. It was summer. Her friends were hanging out and going for midnight swims at Roberto Clemente State Park. She missed having sex with Toney. One night, she and an ex-boyfriend got together. Within three months of Nina's birth, Lolli was pregnant again.

  Toney was devastated -- and furious. He didn't want Lolli to turn out like his mother or his oldest sister, having babies by different fathers. Lolli loved Toney, but she could not go through with an abortion. Toney still called regularly to check on Nina -- Lolli would hold the receiver to Nina's mouth to capture sounds -- but Toney's inquiries quickly turned into diatribes. He promised to make Lolli's life miserable once he got out.

   1991-1993: Back to the Neighborhood

  In October 1991, after completing the minimum two years of his sentence, Toney arrived back home in the Bronx. He stripped at the threshold of his mother's apartment door. His prison clothes formed a puddle at his feet. Prison clothes were believed to bring a house bad luck, and his mother's house had already had enough: Toney's oldest sister, who had contributed to the household, had recently been arrested on a drug charge,leaving behind three little girls.

 A condition of Toney's parole was that he either get a job or return to school. He attended Bronx Community College, thinking it would be easier to skip. The B.C.C. campus was on the west side, close to Lolli's mother. Toney and Lolli soon started sleeping together again. Lolli would leave her new baby girl, Che Che, with her mother, and wait with Nina for Toney after class. Watching the students, Lolli wished she had never dropped out of school. Toney shared whatever he was learning -- math, new words. Lolli liked math the best. Within a couple of months, though, Toney stopped attending college. His mother's latest boyfriend was arrested; she was getting high, and someone needed to pay the bills. Toney took a job overseeing crack sales and tried to keep his mother in check.

 Toney still loved Lolli, but wanted to punish her for becoming pregnant by someone else. He brought other girls into his bedroom at his mother's house. Lolli waited out his company. Sometimes, she and Nina slept on the couch. Even after one girl moved in at his mother's, he regularly saw Lolli; he would pass by her mother's apartment at bedtime to tuck in Nina. Lolli accepted his divided attention as punishment for having another boy's baby. But Nina, who was 2, wasn't having it. She fought on behalf of both of them. Sometimes Toney would drive Nina around in his car. If he offered a girl a ride, Nina refused to relinquish the passenger seat.

 "My chair!" she'd say, or, "Mommy's chair!" and the girl would have to sit in back.

  The repetitiveness of drug dealing quickly bored Toney, and he started robbing again with F.M.P. He was hardheaded and 17, bursting with angry energy. He understood that his actions had consequences, but in his world, theconsequences seemed less determined by action or intention than by the luck of the draw. That Christmas, after robbing a drug dealer, he came home with $25,000, intoxicated with the ease of the job. He paid his mother's overdue rent, stocked the shelves with food and bought presents for his nieces. He outfittedhimself and his live-in girlfriend with sneakers and jewelry and coats. He always made sure Nina had everything she needed, and with his new money, he bought her a black leather shearling. He even bought things for Lolli's other daughter, Che Che, a gesture that Lolli interpreted hopefully.

  But Toney was stopped one night and charged with driving without a license; he spent the summer of 1992 on Rikers Island for violating parole. By the time he got out that fall, his mother had been evicted. Toney quickly found a new girlfriend. One night she had a party, and everything was upended again.

  Toney's friend Pee Wee became deadly when he partied, and on this night, after drinking, he got into an argument with a group of boys at a White Castle. Toney arrived and tried to calm Pee Wee in the parking lot, but couldn't. He then accompanied him inside. The trouble exploded instantly. Guns blasting, Toney and Pee Wee backed out the glass front doors.

  Pee Wee had a habit of stepping in front of Toney whenever they got into shootouts; he was shorter, and Toney fired over his head. Toney had repeatedly warned Pee Wee about this habit, but it was also a testament to the trust between them. But this time, Toney tripped. He doesn't remember pulling the trigger, but he remembers his friend going down, his chin lifting toward the sky as the bullet tore through the back of his head.

 Toney, anguished, spent those first hours after the shooting at his girlfriend's, muttering incoherently and threatening to kill himself. For the next several months, he lived on the lam, staying with her and with other girls. When he thought it was safe, he met with Lolli and saw Nina. These stolen moments between other girlfriends were the closest Toney and Lolli ever came to conventional family life. In January 1993, the police picked up Toney. He pleaded guilty to one count of manslaughter.

 Around the same time, Lolli's mother suffered a nervous breakdown. By the time the authorities transferred Toney upstate, Lolli and her two young daughters were living in a homeless shelter. And Lolli was pregnant by Toney again.

    1993: Toney Hedges His Bets

 By the fall of 1993, Toney was 19, an inmate at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, N.Y., facing 9 to 18 years. Most of Coxsackie's inmates were young, so there were lots of stabbings and cuttings and robberies. Some inmates called it Gladiator School. Toney promptly immersed himself in the mix -- conning and fighting, the prison version of inner-city streets. In the yard, he ran into his old friend Ace from the F.M.P.crew. They hung out and spoke of all the girls they'd known, or wished they'd known, and wondered which girls would answer the letters they floated into the world -- inmates called them kites.

  "The whole thing is about getting women to write to pass the time," Toney said then. If you were a boy with a long sentence, letters reminded you of what was out there, what else was possible -- which was why some lifers preferred no letters at all. Toney cast a wide net. For starters his correspondents included Lolli and the girl he had been with right after he killed Pee Wee -- he had gotten her pregnant, and she had just had a baby.

 He wrote another girl named Ily, whom he knew from childhood. He wrote other girls in care of friends, because he remembered only their nicknames, buildings or blocks. He recalled telling Ace, "We shoulda kept their addresses if this was the kind of life we was gonna lead."

 Toney feared that no girl would stick by him. He didn't doubt Lolli's love as much as her ability to remain faithful to him.

  Lolli herself was overwhelmed, with two toddlers and her and Toney's new baby, Tati. Her life was a string of appointments -- recertification for welfare, screenings for public housing, the sign-ins to collect vouchers for the federal food supplement program, W.I.C. If she wasn't dressing the girls for an appointment, on the way to an appointment or on the bus ride home from one, Lolli was sitting in bleak rooms crowded with women and children in the long yawn of waiting to be seen.

  Toney went through periods of writing Lolli every day -- love letters, angry letters, letters brimming with baby instructions and fathering commands. He was constantly after her to bring the children to the prison, so that Nina wouldn't forget him and so that Tati, the baby, would get to know him. He also wanted Lolli to make arrangements to bring the daughter he'd had with his girlfriend, who had dropped out of contact. But getting upstate was much harder than hopping the train to Harlem Valley; the shuttle bus cost $60, which had to be saved in advance. Often, after using her welfare check to buy her daughters what they needed, Lolli had to make $5 stretch for the last two weeks of the month. Sometimes she borrowed fare from a loan shark, but with the 100 percent interest, the loans left her weeks behind.

  When Toney wasn't writing Lolli, the possibility of conjugal visits preoccupied his restless mind. His adult designation made him potentially eligible for the Family Reunion Program, known inside prison as "trailers" -- for the trailers on the compound where an inmate could spend a few days every three to six months with his family in relative privacy. (Although some researchers believe that strong family ties may lower recidivism rates, New York is one of only a handful of states to allow trailers.) But to qualify, wives had to be legal wives If Toney wanted sex, he had to marry; and trailers required a girl with resources -- money for the traveling and the three days of food, persistence to assemble all the necessary documentation and fill out the required paperwork and stamina to withstand the duration of her husband's prison sentence, or "bid."

 Toney needed a pretty-enough stand-up girl who did her job -- brought his children regularly to visit, gave him sex, sent him monthly food packages and put money in his commissary account. He hoped for a girl who would understand him and also check up on his mother, but he wasn't expecting that. Lolli was disorganized and easily distracted, and she was always letting him down. He considered Ily, his childhood friend. Each weekend Lolli failed to visit increased Ily's appeal. Ily wasn't enamored of the hoodlum lifestyle. She used to warn Toney to tuck in his gold chains whenever she passed him on their old Bronx streets. Prison life was familiar to Ily -- so many of her relatives had been in prison that her mother had inherited nine children. Like Lolli, Ily wanted to get out of the neighborhood, and although she was also a single mother on welfare, her family situation gave her a chance. She had only one child, and her ex-husband and mother helped out.

 Lolli couldn't fix the past, but she did her best at mothering. She didn't visit Toney much, but she bought Father's Day cakes, read his letters aloud and decorated her space in the shelter with his prison Polaroids.

 She kissed his image at night before she tucked the girls in bed. Whenever she could afford to, Lolli took pictures of Nina and Tati and mailed them to Toney. Nina, who was now 3, posed gangsta style, like the Polaroids of her father and his F.M.P. friends -- hands on bent knees, with a menacing look, or standing, arms folded across her chest, her expression intently grim. Lolli worried about Nina's toughness, because she was already getting into altercations with her classmates at preschool; her favorite TV show was "COPS." But Lolli encouraged it -- she wanted to keep alive Nina's connection to her father.

   1994: In the Hole

  By early 1994, visiting Toney had gone from being difficult to almost impossible. The authorities had moved him four hours farther north to a prison called Southport -- nearly seven hours from the city, an unwelcome relocation that he'd earned for injuring a guard during a riot in the Coxsackie yard. Southport was an isolation-unit facility in Pine City, N.Y., where inmates were sent if the isolation units of their own prisons weren't punishment enough. Toney could still receive visits, but otherwise he faced endless days of 23-hour lockdown in a single-man cell, or box. He was desperately lonely. He started suffering anxiety attacks. The endless hours with nothing to do gave him the chance to think about the way he had lived his life. To his surprise, he missed playing with Nina more than he missed hanging out with his friends. He spent most of his time writing letters to Lolli and to Ily. Ily's mobility placed Lolli's passivity in a harsher light. But he begged Lolli to visit and to bring the girls.

  One cold night that winter, Lolli, Nina and baby Tati boarded a bus at Columbus Circle, one of several private buses that haul families and friends of prisoners upstate. Without them, the visits would have been impossible; few neighborhood people had cars. Passengers often recognized one another -- from other routes, from the long hours spent together waiting in prison processing or from the neighborhood. Some of the women became friends.

 On the bus, veteran visitors had equipped themselves with rolls of quarters and crisp dollars for the vending machines, clear plastic bags for locker keys and change. Some brought along pretty outfits, whose perfection they preserved in dry-cleaning bags. The cost of the trip used up most of Lolli's money. Toney's mother's new boyfriend sent along $20 to deposit in Toney's commissary account, and Lolli had budgeted an additional $20 for the vending machines so that Toney and the girls could eat.

  About half an hour from the prison, the bus pulled into a truck stop. The women gathered themselves and crowded into the cramped bathroom. They didn't want to dress in the prison bathroom -- that would take precious minutes of their visits. They tucked and scrutinized and tightened, sharing compliments and lipstick and complaints in the toasty bathroom air.

  In a stall, Lolli slipped into a conservative outfit one of Toney's sisters had lent her -- a beige turtleneck and matching skirt, topped by an embroidered vest. Her own style was sporty, but she wanted Toney to see that she had matured. She wore sheer stockings beneath the slitted skirt, so she could show Toney a new tattoo of his name that she'd gotten. Inside the visiting room, Lolli followed Nina, who searched for her father among the inmates in an interior cage in the center of the dreary room. As they headed to their seat assignment,Toney shuffled toward them, despondent, chin down, shackled in leg irons and handcuffs attached to a chain around his waist. Nina looked terrified. "Come out!" she said desperately. "Over here."

  "Can't you see I'm chained up?" he said, lifting his wrists slightly. "I can't move."

  "Take them off," she demanded. "Take them off! Take them off!"

 "I can't."

  "Play patty-cake!" Nina pleaded.

 "Nina," Lolli chided.

  Suddenly Nina brightened. It was as if she grasped that her father couldn't tolerate the view of himself that her panic reflected. "Wanna hear a song?" Nina asked. Toney squinted, as if he had suddenly recognized her voice from far away. Then she sang. Her father was smitten by her performance until she said, "That's Che Che's daddy's song," referring to the father of her half-sister, and puncturing the moment. Toney looked away stonily.

 Toney often smarted at reminders of Lolli's infidelity, but solitary confinement magnified his need for a reliable family. At other prisons, Lolli and Toney could bridge their troubles by hugging and kissing, but the cage between them at Southport made what was always hard more difficult. Lolli busied herself with Tati. Toney didn't tease Lolli affectionately the way he used to, or compliment her dressy outfit. He said nothing about the special Weeboks Tati wore. Nina provided distraction by exploring the visiting room, collecting compliments. Lolli didn't dare say anything; she didn't want to ruin what little time they had together with their kids.

 Around noon, Toney reached through the slot and held what he could of Lolli's hand. Touch did what only touch could do. Lolli's words poured out. She told him about a new girl at the homeless shelter who was sharing her prison expertise. The girl had had a prison wedding. She had told Lolli about all the right things to bring for trailers -- satin sheets, and cream and strawberries.

  Toney waited for her to finish, then said tenderly, "Sex ain't everything." The box had forced him to do some thinking. If they were going to marry, they needed more than a physical connection. They needed to communicate in ways that didn't require privacy. At best, they'd have trailers three or four times a year, and fewer if Toney didn't improve his disciplinary record. Lolli bit her lip. His new hopes came across as a reprimand: "I want it to be you love me and I love you. Where happiness comes in is when I'm making you happy and you do things to make me happy." Neither of them was clear on what those things could be.

 All around them, couples were whispering. Some were laughing, others were scolding increasingly restless kids. Next to them, a young black man placed his head down near the slot so an older white woman could braid his hair through the wire that separated them.

  "I'm starting to think about going back to that cell, and it's got me real depressed," Toney said with an hour of the visit left. The pending goodbye wedged between them as the remaining minutes dwindled. A guard called time. Chairs scraped the linoleum. The men tried to stretch. Children's hands clasped the grating like small claws, and men and women tried to kiss through the mesh.

 "You better come next week, or I'll punch you in the face," Toney said miserably. "You got my hopes up."

 Shortly afterward, Toney wrote and told Lolli to limit the girls' visits. He didn't want them to see him caged that way. He later admitted that not being able to play with Nina and hold the baby during the visit hurt more than not seeing his children at all.

    1994-1996: New Relationships

  If reason played a part in Lolli and Toney's relationship, its role kept changing. They broke up, and got back together, then broke up again and reunited, for reasons both of them eventually lost track of. Toney threatened and cajoled her to bring the children, but Lolli was chronically broke. Meanwhile, Toney tested Ily's level of devotion. When he left Southport and was moved farther north, to Clinton, he invited her up: "I was the farthest I could be. If she can troop here, then I'm cool." Toney still corresponded with Lolli, and on the envelope of one of his conciliatory letters to her was a reminder that suggested he knew, even if Lolli didn't, the inevitable outcome of the growing distance between them: "Use your mind to control all your body parts."

 But it was too late. Lolli had already cheated. An old flame with whom she had been corresponding while he was in prison had been released and had paid her a visit. She was pregnant. Shortly after Toney heard the news, he proposed to Ily. They married in February 1995. He was fond of Ily, but, he said: "I wasn't focusing on what a relationship should be -- I was focusing on what I could get out of a relationship." But even the limited connection motivated him to behave. "I didn't want to get in trouble no more because I wanted to keep getting trailers," Toney said. "My main concern was sex."

 Lolli's main concern was how to survive. Her newest baby was premature and remained in intensive care for several months. Meanwhile, Lolli had been placed in her own apartment, but dealers ruled the decrepit building, and her kitchen was infested with rats. Her mother's apartment was no better: a dealer was using one of the bedrooms as a stash house, and with all the traffic, Lolli worried for the safety of her daughters. Lolli decided to move upstate, outside of Albany, with a friend who promised to help with the children. The friendwas caring for three of Toney's nieces (Toney's sister having been sentenced to 10 years in prison). When Lolli learned of Toney's marriage, she impulsively asked a boy she knew, Capone, to move away with her. She wasn't in love, but she didn't want to be alone. She cared for Capone, and he was good to her daughters. And he wasn't a player. Nina, who was nearly 5, reserved judgment, but within weeks, Che Che and Tati called him Papi, and he treated the newest baby like his own.

  Despite their ties to other people, Toney and Lolli kept in touch. Sometimes they grew nostalgic and spent hours on the phone. In one call, Toney and Lolli fantasized that on his release date, he'd take Nina and Tati somewhere far away -- maybe Florida -- where they could be a family just once, before Toney returned to his legal wife. Lolli pretended more generosity toward Ily than she felt: "Who knows? You could fall in love with your wife."Lolli still loved him absolutely, but felt foolish telling him -- not so much because he'd married, but because she'd let him down again.

    1996-1997: Problem Child

  For the next few years, Toney and Lolli had erratic contact as their lives ran along parallel tracks, each trying to scrape by financially and make their new relationships work. Nina was the glue that held them together. She was very bright, but she was starting to have disciplinary problems at school and was difficult at home. Lolli tried to control her, but she didn't know how to hold the line. If Capone got involved, Nina yelled, "You ain't my father!"

  Lolli would write Toney for advice. Sometimes she was desperate: "I need help with your daughter so bad."

 But what could Toney do from prison? He spent more time with Ily's son, Jay, than with his own child. He asked Lolli to bring Nina to visit, but the prison was too far and money too tight. Toney wrote to Nina, but she was still too young to write back. Nina did, however, dedicate songs to him that she liked to sing with the radio, and she took seriously her job of teaching Tati that Toney, not Capone, was her dad. Nina quizzed her sister with photographs. But too many nights, Nina stomped to bed, screaming, "I want my father," raging until, exhausted, she fell asleep.

  At one point when things were especially hard, Lolli wrote Toney about her urge to move back to the city. But Toney thought she would be resigning herself to a lifestyle she'd tried to escape. He wrote back: "I really don't want my daughters growing up in the Bronx. . . . I don't want my daughters to come out like you or me."

 One night, when Nina was 6, she asked her mother if she would write a letter to her father. A few weeks before, Lolli had bailed Capone out of jail after a minor charge. Nina had been preoccupied by what had happened. She dictated as Lolli scribbled:

 Dear Daddy,

 How you doing? Fine I hope. As for myself I'm confused about something. Mommy's boyfriend got locked up, and she bailed him out. I want to know why she didn't bail you out. . . . I don't understand. Mom tried to explain to me. I want to hear what you have to say now. Daddy I'm telling Tati every day that you love her. Daddy write back once you get my letter. I love you.

Love,

Nina and Tati

 Lolli didn't know where to begin the explanation. She dreaded Nina's reaching an age where she would ask serious questions. Lolli had never explained to Nina why her father was locked up, or why her sisters had different fathers.

    1997-1998: Forced Reflection

 While Nina was getting into trouble at home, Toney descended into the self-destruction of the prison mix. He had long ago decided not to join a gang for protection, but his independence meant he had to prove he was capable of doing anything. He fought often and had many enemies. He spent part of 1997 in the box for carrying a shank. In a panic, he wrote his oldest sister, who was also in prison, about his greatest fear: "The only time I feel at ease is when I'm with Nina. Tati and my other daughter are lost to me. They don't treat me like their father. . . . Nina is all I have left. And she's slowly slipping away. . . . Once she's gone . . . I will lose myself."

 In 1998, he almost did. After not seeing his daughters for more than a year, Toney arranged for Ily to bring Nina and Tati along with Ily's son during their next trailer visit. The trailer happened to coincide with Nina's 8th birthday. For weeks, it was all she spoke about. But at the last minute, the trailer was canceled -- there had been a fight at the prison, and Toney had been slashed. In the mix, such trouble was inevitable. He was thrown into protective custody, with 29 stitches across his back. Nina was crushed. And Toney was once again shipped back to solitary confinement at Southport.

 In the hole again, without distractions, Toney felt the pain that he'd caused his family outside. In addition to having to cancel his trailer with his daughters, he was looking at one to three more years added to his term for possessing the shank. Serving time for killing his best friend was justice; hurting his wife and children was unbearable.

 The trailers forced fidelity to a single woman and exposed him to a more conventional notion of family.

 Temporarily losing the trailers made him acutely aware of what he needed. Not just the sex, but something he'd never had in his own home: three days of living in peace. "The first time I've ever been truly able to be part of a family has been at those trailers," he said.

  Prison had been the perfect place for shutting down, and when Lolli became pregnant with another boy's baby all those years back while Toney was in juvenile detention, he'd sworn never to make himself vulnerable again. He'd been conning Ily all along -- not thinking about what he could offer her but scheming to make sure that she didn't stop taking care of him. Ily, on the other hand, had stood by him, throughout all his prison troubles, with a faith that he could barely imagine for himself.

 "She gave me her life," he said later, still stunned at the enormity of it. He wanted to be the family man he was on those weekends. To be there for his children he had to plan for a future. For that, he needed hope. And there was no way to hope without being vulnerable.

   1999-2001: Out of the Mix

  By the spring of 1999, after turning 25, Toney had finally stepped out of the mix and kept to himself. Toney said, "I was either gonna end up killed or murdering someone, and I thought about how that would make my daughter feel, to come to my funeral for that."

 He volunteered as a speaker for teenagers from juvenile hall. Toney told them about his own days in juvenile, wanting to be a gangster, being locked up. The interactions inspired him, but he remained troubled at the paradox. He was a better father to others' kids than he was to his own.

 He stopped writing to other girls and told Lolli their relationship was truly over. It hurt Lolli, but her feelings for Capone had been growing, and eventually she said that she was happy for Toney. They'd failed each other, but still had their kids.

 By early 2000, Lolli was dealing with her fifth child, a son with Capone. And Ily was pregnant with Toney's baby. Toney had wanted to wait to be sure that his marriage would hold before having another child. He also wanted to focus on the children he already had. But Ily thought a baby would prove Toney's commitment to a positive future, and Toney felt he was in no position to resist.

 In July 2000, Toney's security status was reduced, and he was sent to a medium-security prison, Woodbourne, the calmest of all the prisons he'd been in. Most of the inmates at the prison, which was in Woodbourne, N.Y., were in their late 30's and older. Toney was used to prisons where stabbings happened daily; at Woodbourne, months passed between incidents. His relative freedom was exciting. Toney's enthusiasm for the tiny, substantial pleasures was contagious. He beamed like a child.

 Two years ago, he signed up for an inmate-run college program. Higher education for New York State inmates was a rarity. Of the 30 men who signed up, only half stayed on. Toney was one of them. The inmates were tough professors. He loved school.

 But Nina weighed heavily on his mind. Lolli's letters showered Toney with worries about Nina, who was expressing interest in boys and edging closer to the street. At home, Nina, who was now 10, inherited more responsibility. Lolli was working hard hours at a factory, and Capone, who was unemployed, was supposed to watch the children. But Lolli would often arrive home after her shift and find Nina taking care of the kids andCapone hanging out with his friends on the street. At school, Nina would fall asleep in class or be disruptive and resist authority -- she refused to open her book or salute the flag and pounded the computer keys. Her exasperated teacher often sent her off to the nurse's office or to the guidance counselor, where Nina inevitably napped.

  By the spring of 2001, after many suspensions, Nina was expelled from fifth grade and placed on probation. Until the academic year ended, a home tutor visited Nina an hour a day. The rest of the time she spent watching TV and watching her siblings, yearning for something interesting to do. After Nina's suspension, Lolli mailed Toney a copy of the thick packet of Nina's school records. In his cell, he pored over the many pages and said sadly, "It's like reading a book about myself."

 Toney was taking parenting and psychology classes, and the more he learned, the more he hungered for news about Nina that was positive. In his letters to her, he made a point to acknowledge her strengths instead of just reprimanding her for her weaknesses. He hated the long gaps between the visits with Nina and Tati. "I don't think it's fair, you know. But I'm not saying it's Lolli's fault. I gotta understand that she got all them

 kids, and she's going through her own problems, and sometimes I say, You know, I ain't got it that bad." The absence of Lolli and the kids was underscored by the growing connection he had with Ily, her son, Jay, and their new baby, Elexis, whom he saw nearly every weekend. He was a better father now. When Nina was Elexis' age, Toney said, "I was more curious about what was happening in New York City, what girls was over there,

 what's going on in the street." Now he spent hours playing with Elexis in the walled-in children's room.

 Last January, Toney graduated near the top of his class. Lolli was proud. She always knew he was intelligent -- just like his daughters -- and she admitted her admiration for the steadfastness of his wife. "I got to give it to her, sticking by him all this time," Lolli said. Lolli was experiencing her own evolution. She had held several full-time jobs, and had recently found one in which she thrived. She did "disaster restoration," chemically cleaning up after fires, floods and bloody crimes. Though the days were long -- she sometimes worked a 16-hour shift -- the pay was poor and the job was dangerous, she liked helping people. And she was considered one of the best workers in the region.

 Now that Lolli was a working woman, being a prison wife was a lifestyle she could no longer even imagine. But she and Toney worried that its lore beckoned to Nina. Toney blamed Lolli for burdening herself and Nina with too many children. But mostly he blamed himself. He'd been in prison for most of Nina's life. Nina was 12, and all they'd really had together were the rare, timed phone calls, and rarer visits.

   2002: Nina Visits

 Last month, I took Nina to see her father. Woodbourne -- a 90-minute drive from her front stoop -- was the 10th prison Nina had visited of the 12 that had housed her father over the past 13 years. Lolli rarely sees Toney anymore, but he speaks to his daughters periodically. Lolli is happy to pay for Toney's calls when she can: the fathers of her two other daughters have been out of prison for years, but they rarely call in. In the Woodbourne visiting room, Nina bought her father his favorite snacks from the vending machines -- inmates cannot handle money -- walked over to their assigned table and sat down. Toney came over and stood above her, radiant and wanting.

 "C'mon!" he said, pulling Nina up from her chair to hug him. She reluctantly stood, grinning shyly into his broad chest. He reached across the table, grabbed her pale cheeks and pinched.

"Stoppit!" she yelled, burying her delight.

 "How's your new school?" he asked excitedly.

 "They trying to give me a disability," she continued, the current of connectiontugging her toward her trouble. The disability referred to a school meeting she faced in a few weeks time, the purpose of which she didn't understand. It involved assessing whether or not Nina should be placed in special ed. "They didn't tell me what for -"

  "They are probably going to say you are psychologically unstable, and have an attitude that they can't control

 -" "Tell me what they mean," Nina asked, frustrated by the verbiage.

 "I am," Toney said, "psychobabble -"

 "Just stop please with them big words -"

  Toney paused, and tried again. "They're saying you're crazy."

 Wounded, Nina replied, "But I'm not."

 Toney looked hurt. "I'm not saying you are."

 Toney explained how the same things had happened to him before he dropped out of junior high. "I want you to learn from my mistakes. I don't want you to walk in these footsteps. If I was home, I would take you on a crash course on the streets. I'd show you for real what the streets are."

 "I know what the streets are like," she said.

 Toney nodded. "That's what I'm worried about."

 These days their infrequent visits often went this way: Toney lecturing, determined to cram in life's larger lessons in their limited time, while Nina demanded to know why she couldn't have a boyfriend or get aneyebrow ring. Toney saw through the surface to the dangers Nina couldn't see -- a street culture that pooled around their lives and whose currents were made stronger by the absence of other, more positive things. Toney tried humor. He tried facts -- rape, early pregnancy, drugs. He tried to explain that both he and Lolli had grown up too fast, that there was life beyond the street. But, he later admitted, he didn't really know what that life was. It was a world he himself was trying to reach.

 Nina had some inkling of that larger world. After being on a waiting list for two years, she had been assigned a Big Sister mentor. Each week they spent time together outside Nina's neighborhood. They have gone apple-picking and have carved pumpkins, things Nina had never done before. The match is not unlike Toney's marriage to Ily, a vital relationship, but one that exists in a vacuum.

 Toney knew that Nina's future rested on what he had learned the hard way -- how to create some sanctuary within yourself. For him it was a precarious balance -- holding out hope for a normal life while still needing to cope in the prison world. Nina faced a similar challenge: how to find a future she couldn't know, while navigating the minefield of adolescent street life.

 Toney, now 28, is scheduled to appear before the parole board in May. He has four children and has never held a legitimate job. But he is better off than most inmates like him: he managed to acquire some higher education, and he has a home life waiting for him.

  As she did on every visit, Nina begged her father to give her his gold chain, a cross he has had from the beginning of his bid. As he always did, he told her he didn't want her to have something from prison. "Kind of like superstition," he said. Nina wanted to make the bad time good. "If I have that, it's like I have him, because that was him those years," she said.

 Toney knew that their shared past was lost. He could look forward only to the future and hope that Nina would be a part of it. She will soon be the same age that he was when he met Lolli. "Everything at the tip of your fingers," Toney said, "and at the same time slipping away."

	Big Shot   Patricia Thomas

WHISTLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD

Paul Luciw was alone in his lab at Chiron Corporation in Emeryville, California, on an August evening in 1984. Rush-hour traffic on the nearby Nimitz Freeway had fallen to a dull rumble, the technicians had gone home, and Paul relished the chance to work without interruptions. Then the call came from Kathy Steimer, his closest colleague at the company. "Paul, I've got a problem, ' she said. "The ultracentrifuge has stopped.'

He could picture exactly where she was, all alone in a spooky P3 containment facility-a place where dangerous microbes could be handled in an isolated, specially ventilated room. This lab, a part of the Navy Biosciences Laboratory (NBL), was less than two miles from Chiron. All summer, Paul and Kathy had been loading the huge, heavy ultracentrifuge with samples of virus that doctors had isolated from AIDS patients in San Francisco. Like other teams of scientists in the United States and France, they were racing to unravel the genetic code of the virus and figure out how this tiny killer is organized. Scientists put a premium on this information because it could open the door to diagnostic tests, treatments, or even a vaccine.

When Kathy called, Paul's first thought was that the ultracentrifuge had thumped and bumped itself off balance like an overloaded washing machine, wreaking havoc with its contents whirling at up to 20,000 revolutions per minute. If this had happened, whoever lifted the lid would find a jumble of metal racks and broken glassware coated with deadly viral goo.

Fortunately, Kathy reassured him, the situation wasn't as serious as that. The ultracentrifuge had simply ground to a halt while she was running a large preparation of virus. What troubled her was the prospect of filing an incident report-required any time something goes awry in a lab-with the central NBL office. Kathy and Paul had been cleared to work in the lab only because a navy researcher, who happened to be an old friend of Chiron's CEO, had lent surplus lab space to the company three months earlier. This made it possible for the fledgling biotech to work on the AIDS virus; at this point, the company hadn't finished building a place where dangerous organisms could be safely handled. As guests of a military facility, working on a virus that terrified most people, the Chiron scientists had kept their heads down.

As soon as Kathy finished talking to Paul, who agreed they had to reveal what microbe was in the broken centrifuge, she called the duty officer for the Bicisciences Lab. He immediately notified the commanding officer of the Oakland Naval Depot, where the laboratory was located, to report that there had been an accident with the AIDS virus on the base. The irate commander demanded to see Kathy in his office that very night-not in the morning, but ASAP.

If the base commander was so bent out of shape, what would happen to the viral cultures that she had spent all summer cajoling into lush growth? For all she knew, a hazardous-waste disposal team was already hurtling in her direction, with instructions to confiscate the precious flasks. In a second quick phone consult, Kathy and Paul agreed that it made no sense to wait and see. Within minutes Paul was on his bike, pedaling furiously from Chiron's headquarters in Emeryville, a down-at-the heels industrial suburb of Oakland, to the navy base. Paul was a short man, only a few inches over five feet tall, but fit in the way of one who shuns cars and walks or bikes wherever he goes.

Once at the Naval Depot, Paul showed his security pass to the armed guards at the gates and pedaled on to the P3 building, a forlorn structure near the base's edge. In the entry chamber, he stripped off his jeans and T 611111 and tossed them into it locker, pulling oil a cotton scrub suit, gown, mask, booties, and latex gloves.

As soon as Paul stepped in to the ill -Iit hallway, lined with derelict freezers and obsolete lab equipment, he began to sweat. His reaction was the same every time he saw the labels on the closed doors of individual labs. 1114, hallway wits a rogues' gallery of pestilence: plague, anthrax, slow viruses that eat the brain. God knows what scourges had been handled in this old building and by whom. The only room in use, however - where he and Kathy had labored fourteen hours a day, six or seven days a week, since May. All that time and they had never seen another person in the corridor.

Kathy had removed the contents of the ultracentrifuge and had lined up the T-150 flasks on the bench. Each contained about one cup of cloudy vital Litton, and she was tightening the tops and wrapping them in tape. Wof king swiftly, the two identically dressed scientists put each flask into a plastic bag, sealed it, then bagged it again. Finally, they loaded the flasks into some of the thick Styrofoam shipping boxes that accumulate in biology labs like coat hangers in a closet. These they sealed with broad strips of shipping tape. The goal was to move the cultures to the small level-3 room that Chiron bad completed only a few weeks earlier. Clearly, they'd have to transport the boxes of virus in Kathy's car, but leaving through the front gate would be too risky: It was now late in the evening, the guards would surely suspect these civilians of stealing government property. A stealthier departure would be better.

Soon Kathy traded her sterile garb for street clothes, retrieved her car from a nearby lot, and signed out at the guardhouse. A couple of quick turns its put her on a service road that hugged the outside of the navy's tail , chain link fence topped with concertina wire. She rolled slowly through the bright pools of the tall security lights, finally dousing the headlights and stopping in a dark patch only twenty yards from the back door of the 1.0, holding. She slipped out of the car, taking care not to slam the door.

Paul had been watching, and within seconds he emerged from the lab, looking nervously for the armed sentries who patrolled the base at night. He listened for the crunch of' tires but heard only the low whiz of light traffic on the freeway. The air wits brackish with the smell of the nearby . mudflats of San Francisco Bay. With it box tucked under each arm, he hurried back and forth from the door to the fence until all the shipping containers were out.

Kathy and Paul each took a few steps back from the fence. She was the taller of the two by half a foot, a rangy, flaxen-haired California girl. He was smaller and darker, and his spectacles glinted in the darkness. They exchanged furtive whispers and a signal nod before Paul gently lofted the first box, like a square and fragile beach ball, over the fence to Kathy's waiting arms. One by one, she received them. Less than an hour later, all Kathy's precious flasks filled with the AIDS virus were safe on the Chiron campus.

She returned to the Oakland Navy Depot alone to meet with the base commander. He was not a scientist, so Kathy explained calmly and carefully that although a machine had malfunctioned, no deadly organisms had been spilled and nothing had been contaminated. She also explained that she and Paul had been authorized to use the containment facility by the navy scientist in charge of it. The commander did not care what had happened or how it came to be. Only the future interested him. The AIDS virus, he told Kathy, was not the kind of problem he was going to have on his base.

In 1981, the same year that doctors in Los Angeles and San Francisco began reporting puzzling and rapidly fatal illnesses among young gay men, the fledgling Chiron Corporation made history by inventing a new kind of vaccine against hepatitis B. Some cases of this viral infection were chronic, untreatable, and ultimately fatal. And like AIDS, it was commonplace among homosexual men and posed a threat to transfusion recipients and health-care workers who handled human blood.

Chiron's founders, William Rutter and Edward Penhoet, were academic biochemists at the University of California campuses in San Francisco and Berkeley, respectively. Both were experts on hepatitis B and other viruses that prey on people. More important, they were charter members of a small club of genetic engineers. They practiced recombinant DNA technology, which basically meant snipping genetic material out of one organism. insetting it into it different organism, and tricking the host into expressing it: churning out the protein specified by the newly transferred DNA. This enabled them to make a large amount of whatever protein they chose, which might hold promise as a preventive vaccine, a treatment, or a laboratory tool.

On Easter Sunday of 1981, Rutter and Penhoet wrote out a wish list of products that their new company might make using recombinant DNA technology. Their goal was not only to solve some real biological mysteries but also to use genetic engineering to improve human health. At the top of their list were vaccines to prevent hepatitis B, herpes, and influenza, as well as tests that could be used to check blood samples for two types of hepatitis-B and the mysterious, newer kind known as "non-A, non-B" (since shown to be several distinct viruses, including hepatitis Q.

Rutter's lab at UC-San Francisco had already studied the hepatitis B virus in great detail. At the time Chiron was founded, the East Coast pharmaceutical giant Merck was actively seeking a replacement for its current hepatitis B vaccine, which used a protein derived from the blood of hepatitis B carriers. Making vaccine this way was not only expensive, but the process was also vulnerable to contamination with other blood-borne viruses-including the scary new pathogen responsible for AIDS. Merck wanted a new kind of vaccine that would cost less to make, could be manufactured in a laboratory, and would be free of contamination. This was a tall order, however, and the best ideas for such a product were being nurtured in young biotech companies or in academic labs. Merck invested in several groups racing for the same goal, and one of them was Chiron.

Chiron's main rivals were hotshot researchers at Genentech, the San Francisco Bay Area's preeminent biotechnology company, and a group of Rutter's former collaborators at the University of Washington in Seattle. But it was Chiron's Pablo Valenzuela who got there first. He figured out how to use recombinant DNA technology to make the hepatitis B vaccine of Merck's dreams.

From hepatitis B virus, Valenzuela removed DNA that coded for a protein on the outside of the virus called HBsAg, short for "hepatitis B surface antigen. "Then he inserted the DNA into yeast cells, which are cheap and easy to grow, and voila! The yeast cells cranked out I4BsAg that looked like the protein Merck had been laboriously isolating Iron blood. This genetically engineered version could be made safely, without any blood or virus involved. By Christmas, tiny Chiron had outdistanced its competitors and licensed this process to Merck. This precedent-setting vaccine, approved for sale by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1986, does an excellent job of preventing hepatitis B and is used around the world.

All vaccines accomplish the same thing: Like a self-defense instructor impersonating a mugger, the vaccine teaches the immune system what to do in an emergency. When a real thug appears, the lesson is recalled and a swift immune response immediately overpowers the attacker. Most traditional vaccines consist of disease-producing organisms that have been altered or killed; the Sabin polio vaccine is made from live attenuated (weakened) virus, for example, whereas the Salk formulation consists of killed organisms. Sometimes nature supplies a vaccine: Credit for eradicating smallpox goes to vaccine, a pox virus that originally infected cows but in humans evokes a protective immune response to smallpox without causing any harm. Today, recombinant DNA technology offers a wondrous alternative, a wholly new generation of vaccines that are safer and cheaper to make than old-fashioned ones.

The first step toward building a genetically engineered vaccine is to identify an antigen that is always part of the attacking virus. Antigens are simply molecules, usually proteins, that the immune system recognizes as a threat and takes steps to eliminate. Finding the right antigen, as it turns out, can be an enormous challenge.

Pablo Valerizuela's hepatitis B vaccine was a cosmic home run for Chiron. Suddenly, anything seemed possible. In order to keep the company's streak going, Bill Rutter and Ed Penhoet drew up lists of scientists they wanted to hire, and most said yes when they were asked. "We were looking for people with a high energy level, dedicated to their work, and who want to make a difference," Penhoet recalls. In 1981 the scientists who joined Chiron and other biotech start-ups were turning their backs on stodgy academic tradition and offending many of their mentors.

During the late 1970s, the world of biology was split over the legitimacy of patenting discoveries made in the course of tax-supported research. Old-guard academic scientists saw university-based research as a gentleman's game and looked down their noses at scientists who went into trade by joining a biotechnology company. Today, when professors at elite universities and medical schools race to patent discoveries as soon as they are made, this snobbishness seems as outmoded as the idea that all telephones must have cords. But this attitude was entirely real in ig8i. "So we put people on our list that we thought we could actually recruit, and they were all young people,' Penhoet recalls.=

Virologist Paul Luciw (pronounced "loo-shoo") was thirty-three when he joined Chiron in July 1982. He had just completed postdoctoral training in a UCSF lab whose leaders would win the Nobel Prize seven years later. Rutter, Penhoet, and Valenzuela were a tremendous lure for Paul. Not only were they respected as top-notch scientists, but "they were adventurous, broad in their thinking, yet able to define goals and get things done,' he says.

Hiring Paul was a smart move for Chiron because he was an expert on retroviruses-bizarre little organisms that were just beginning to seem relevant to human health. Although doctors weren't worried about retroviruses in the pre-AIDS era, veterinarians were all too familiar with the damage these unusual organisms caused. Feline leukemia virus, known as few caused many thousands of fatal cancers in domestic cats. There would be a lucrative market for a vaccine against FeLV, and this was Paul's first project at Chiron. He explored two possible approaches at once. One was a classic vaccine strategy, in which protection would come from Immunization with a weakened version of FeLV itself. The other, and far more exciting, idea would be to mimic the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine-splicing FeLV genes into yeast cells, so that these cells turn into vaccine factories.

Kathy Steimer had just turned thirty-four when she decided to write to Pablo Valenzuela and ask for a job at Chiron. She and Martin Wilson, a young neuroscience professor she had been dating during the previous year, drafted the letter beside a swimming pool in Davis, California. They had been introduced the previous Christmas by a mutual friend and had 1~ke become inseparable. Their lives had begun quite differently, with &thy growing up as the daughter of a firefighter in Los Angeles, and Marti~ in a cultured British household where he was immersed in classical Nsic. Both families valued education, however, and each produced a scientist absorbed in the challenges, frustrations, and satisfactions of laboratory research. In addition to falling in love, Kathy and Martin gave each 't4er tremendous professional support. So it was natural for Martin to help her write a job-hunting letter to Chiron.

Like Paul, Kathy was a skilled retrovirologist. Earlier, she had left a biotech company because she was impatient with managerial incompetence, then moved to an immunology postdoc at Stanford, where she grew tired of being patronized by mate physicians who were sure they 're smarter than any woman with a Ph.D. At this point in her career, Kathy wanted to be respected for who she was and what she knew. During her first biotech job, she'd worked next door to Chiron and had seen Rutter, Penhoet, and Valenzuela in action. Observation told her that they 1~~re the kind of people she wanted as colleagues.

The feeling was mutual, and Chiron needed a scientist with exactly Kathy's strengths. An earlier postdoctoral stint at a famous Harvard lab 'Specializing in growth factors-natural substances that signal cells to grow or divide-had made her an artist when it came to growing temperamental cells. At Stanford, which had not been a happy experience on ~ personal level, Kathy had worked on the cutting edge of immunology. 1~ Chiron's view, she was exquisitely prepared to create new assays for 1~termining how the human immune system responds to experimental vaccines.

Kathy started at Chiron in September 1983. She promptly devised several methods for detecting viruses that proved useful for research purposes, had less success with a crotchety system for automating certain lab tests, and figured out how to synthesize interleukin-2, usually called IL-2, ~1 cell growth factor that was fun to tinker with in the laboratory but didn't appear to have any immediate medical value.

Two months after Kathy started work at Chiron, a thirty-one-year-old '1101CCUlar biologist named Nancy Haigwood came to the company from 411other, Iess-successful biotech in Maryland. At this point there were biotech start-ups on every corner, but in Nancy's mind, Chiron and Genentech were the only two destined for success. A military brat, Nancy Strew up on overseas bases where cholera, yellow fever, and the like were commonplace. These early experiences sparked her interest in biology, and in human disease in particular. She joined a biotech company immediately after her postdoc at Johns Hopkins, feeling that the private sector was the place to be if you wanted to develop products that helped people.

On that first job, Nancy met and married a protein chemist who also joined Chiron when she did. Nancy was ambitious, and, in her own words, "I wanted to work in a really high-powered place because I thought it would be fun.' She brought important skills to the company. She was expert at site-directed mutagenesis, a technique for introducing deliberate mutations into genes. Another major interest was splicing genes into animal cells, so that they could be turned into protein factories. Although Chiron made its successful hepatitis B vaccine in yeast, some scientists believed that future vaccines should be made in mammalian cells that more closely resemble human cells.

The first generation of molecular biologists thought there was no disease they couldn't conquer, and their dreams were paid for by investors besotted with biotechnology. Dozens of other bright young scientists cast their lot with Chiron in the early ig8os, and they were backed by executives and investors brave enough to risk the time, money, and space needed to tackle major medical puzzles. But it was mainly the brains and determination of Paul, Kathy, and Nancy that enabled the company to create one of the first experimental vaccines for AIDS.

The New York Times wrote in November 1983 that AIDS cases had been identified in thirty-three countries and on every inhabited continent. By Christmas that year, epidemiologists at UC-San Francisco estimated that one of every three gay men in the city was already infected with the virus that causes AIDS. San Francisco was hit early and hard by the new epidemic, and although cases had been identified among hemophiliacs, transfusion recipients, IV drug users, and a few prostitutes, most People saw it mainly as a gay disease. AIDS was an ugly way to die. The virus decimated the immune system, leaving the patient vulnerable to opportunistic infections by microbes that aren't normally a problem for healthy people. AIDS patients were disfigured by the purple lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma, wasted by intractable diarrhea, and suffocated by a vicious pneumonia. Microbes swarmed into every orifice; mouths turned mossy with yeast infections and bowels were lacerated by bacteria. Some patients went mad with dementia as malignant lesions swelled in their brains. Doctors prescribed anti-microbiological drugs for opportunistic infections, but this was like trying to halt a locomotive with bare hands.

Rutter and Penhoet and their scientists knew about all this. Part of Chiron's business strategy was to maintain close working relationships with UC-San Francisco and UC-Berkeley, where they still had strong ties. The human catastrophe of AIDS was all too evident at UCSF and its crosstown teaching hospital, San Francisco General, which was on the front line of the epidemic. Many of the previously healthy young men who were dying of AIDS were the same people who had earlier been infected with hepatitis B. And this, after all, was the disease that had already made Chiron famous.

Although it would be romantic to think that scientists throw themselves at a new infectious scourge because it vexes their curiosity or stirs pity and terror in their hearts, that isn't how it works. In fact, researchers tackle problems that they believe they are equipped to solve. Rutter and Penhoet figured that they had at least some of the tools needed to study whatever virus might be causing AIDS. At the very least, Chiron might come up with a blood test that could confirm the diagnosis in patients or screen donated blood for signs of virus. The company already had a test for detecting hepatitis B in donor blood, and if it also had a similar one for AIDS, it could package the two and sell the product to blood banks. More important, detailed knowledge of the hepatitis B virus was what enabled Chiron to make the world's first genetically engineered vaccine. If Chiron put its best scientists to work on the AIDS virus, who could say? Back-to-back homers are not unheard of.

In 1983, the French researcher Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute each reported that he had isolated retroviruses from patients sick with AIDS. Montagnier called his virus LAV, for lymphadenopathy-associated virus. Doctors had noticed that many of their gay male patients suffered lymphadenopathy-chronically swollen lymph nodes-before they developed symptoms of AIDS; Montagnier isolated his virus from some of these patients' lymphoid tissue. Gallo dubbed his virus HTLV-IIL because he believed it was the third in a family. By of what he called "human T-cell leukemia viruses. "

Hard on their heels was UCSF virologist Jay Levy, who had also isolated a retrovirus from AIDS patients in San Francisco. He called his ARV, for *AIDS-associated retrovirus." Were these three viruses the same, or were three different viruses on the loose? No one knew. Nor was it clear whether any of them actually caused AIDS, or whether they were among the many pathogens that overwhelmed patients left defenseless by immune-system collapse. These were tough questions that Levy needed collaborators to answer. Not only that, but if the answers were going to make a difference, he needed ties to a company that could convert new -findings into clinically useful products. In April 1984, Levy began sending Chiron samples of virus that he had collected from AIDS patients.

In addition to the impeccable UCSF pedigrees of Chiron's top guns, this small biotech had three bona fide retrovirologists among its several dozen employees-Dino Dina, head of the vaccine division, Paul Luciw, and Kathy Steimer. Their expertise was crucial because retroviruses are not like other living things, even other viruses.

Most life forms store their genetic code as DNA. When a plant or animal cell divides, this DNA is transcribed into RNA, which in turn tells parts of the cell how to make proteins. These proteins enable living organisms to go about their business. if the human body were a large hotel, proteins would be its bricks and mortar, its plumbing system and telephone wiring, the furnace in the basement, and the stove in the kitchen-even the housekeeping staff that keeps order and hauls out the trash.

The DNA packaged into the nucleus of every cell is the master plan for building and running the hotel. Different types of cells follow different parts of that plan, communicated to them in the form of RNA, and like subcontractors, they follow their specific set of instructions. Some build walls; some install communication systems; others move raw materials from one place to another. Each separate part of these jobs is a protein.

The DNA-makes-RNA-makes-protein pattern also holds true for most viruses. What sets viruses apart from other organisms, however, is that they can't manufacture proteins on their own. So, in order to accomplish this, their DNA must invade another creature's cells and commandeer its subcontractors to churn out more virus. Retroviruses have an even stranger way of perpetuating themselves. Because retroviruses use RNA as their genetic blueprint instead of DNA, they require an extra step not needed by other viruses: A retrovirus uses an enzyme called reverse transcripts to translate its RNA into DNA. That DNA slips into the genetic code of the infected cell, where it is turned into RNA instructions that direct the cell to make proteins the virus needs to reproduce.

The first hint that retroviruses might be medically important came in the early 1970s, when one of these contrarian viruses was discovered to cause cancer in chickens. Links to leukemia in cats, cows, and other animals soon followed. While it made sense to suspect that retroviruses might also cause cancer in humans, this connection was so difficult to uncover that tired, increasingly cynical researchers called them "human rumor viruses." The jokes were silenced in ig8o, when Gallo demonstrated that a retrovirus could cause human T-cell leukemia. Soon afterward, he linked a related virus to hairy cell leukemia. Gallo called these retroviruses HTLV-I and HTLV-11.

Young retrovirologists like Kathy and Paul grew up with these discoveries and couldn't wait to get their hands on the AIDS virus. The leukemias caused by HTLV-I and -II claimed a few hundred lives each year. The human toll of AIDS was already far greater: In 198o it had been unknown, but by 1984, there were more than 200,000 infections in the United States and more than 1 million worldwide. Fears about personal risk took a backseat to their overwhelming sense that this was the biggest challenge of their careers. The stakes were high for Kathy and Paul, and unlike Gallo and other established scientists, Who now Spent most of their time at desks, these passionate young researchers were willing to spend long hours at the lab bench.

Which is exactly what Chiron wanted them to do. Bill Rutter, in particular, felt that it was important for Chiron to analyze the virus and generate data that could be patented-paving the way to diagnostic tests and vaccines that Chiron would own. Down the road, when detailed knowledge of the virus had been transformed into marketable products, Rutter wanted his company to be collecting royalties, not paying them to someone else.

Although Chiron had skilled virologists, it didn't have a safe place to work with anything as lethal as the AIDS virus. Fortunately, the company was able to borrow an unused navy P3 lab, which had the isolation barriWit and special ventilation needed to contain dangerous pathogens. The Chiron team brought in some new equipment and supplies, turning the lab into command central for the AIDS project. They set to work on pies of the virus that Jay Levy called ARV, collected from patients in Francisco and driven across the Bay Bridge in sealed containers.

By May, Kathy and Paul had made an important scientific decision of r own. They decided to study patient samples from a second source, medical pathology department at the University of California-Davis, ninety minutes away near Sacramento. Although Levy was certain his virus was indeed the cause of AIDS, Kathy and Paul had been taught to assume nothing. If they studied the virus only in the same group of patients where it had originally been found, they would know only that cured in those patients. More patient samples, obtained from an independent source in a different locale, would be essential if they were S to make judgments about the true importance of ARV. The more s it turned up, the more likely it was to be the true cause of the disease.

Paul's most important job was to clone the virus's entire genetic code to determine the exact sequence of the chemical "letters" that make up the code. Outside of science fiction, most people had never heard of cloning until Dolly the sheep made her debut in 1996. Actually the term a longer history and broader meaning than the recent interest in copying farm animals. In Molecular biology, "clones" are genetically identical copies of a gene, cell, or organism. Cloning a viral genonle--meaning its mire genetic code-involves cutting the genome into pieces and inserting those pieces into a biological system that churns out millions of identical copies. A virus that has been isolated from blood can't be patented; now that has been cloned and sequenced can be. That's why Paul's work as so important to Chiron. Kathy's project was also crucial, because her ask was to invent a test that could be used to screen human blood for antibodies to the AIDS virus. The government had already announced that an antibody test was its top priority for fighting the epidemic, and Chiron expected this to be its first AIDS-related commercial product.

The AIDS virus is the ultimate example of a creature that bites the hand that feeds it. It penetrates T4 lymphocytes, certain white blood cells that are essential for a healthy immune system. Once the virus is inside, it hijacks the T4 cell's machinery to make more of itself. By doing so, the AIDS virus damages and eventually destroys its host. Sometimes a T4 cell is killed when millions of virions (baby viruses) explode its membrane like the skin of an overripe tomato. Other T4 cells expire less dramatically, when their own metabolic machinery is choked to a halt by wads of viral genetic material and proteins.

Not only did the AIDS virus's relentless destruction of T4 cells kill patients, but it was also a major headache for every scientist who tried to grow it. Whether the setting was Paris, the National Cancer Institute, or Chiron's improvised lab on the navy base, cultures died as the virus gobbled up all the cells in a closed test tube or flask. There was immense pressure to grow great quantities of virus as fast as possible, and the biologists held their secrets as closely as wine makers.

Unlike the experiments that many people remember doing in high school or college, where success hinges on little more than the ability to follow directions, Kathy and Paul had no lab manual to follow. Swaddled in sterile garb from head to toe, they worked alone in the navy isolation facility. Paul's cultures were in T-75 flasks, each holding about one-half' cup of material; Kathy worked in T-15( flasks twice that size.

They moved slowly, carefully, like dancers, not wanting to break or spill anything (it, even to breathe the air that was released when they pulled the stopper out of a flask. "Kathy and I trusted each other," Paul would later say "if there had been more people in the lab, there would have been the element of mistrust, of wondering whether others were being as careful as you are. That adds a lot of tension.' Neither Kathy nor Paul was willing expose Chiron lab technicians to such a dangerous microbe. In 1984, it clear that the AIDS virus could be transmitted by blood, but virologists didn't know whether it might also be spread by aerosols-tiny infected particles that could be breathed into the lungs. Not only that, but could the scientists tell technicians what to do when they were improvising every move?

Kathy and Paul fed the cultures with biologic broths that they hoped would nourish the T cells and keep the virus growing. They added dribs drabs of this and that: chemicals called growth factors, which stimucells, and chemicals called cytokines, which cells use to communicate among themselves. They used different T cell lines-some they'd purchased from a biological supply company, some they'd gotten from Jay For more than a month, they couldn't get a culture established no matter what they did. When they talked, it was about what to try next. Finally, in early June, all their conscientious tinkering paid off. The virus grew happily in a T cell line that had come from Levy.

Now Kathy and Paul were excited and spent more time in the lab than Martin Wilson, who later became Kathy's husband, remembers that a typical Saturday night date during this period involved going with to the eerily deserted navy containment facility, suiting up in 61 and watching Kathy pour supernatant, the liquid from the flasks, containers that she spun in the centrifuge. "It scared the shit out of I always thought, give me one little bit of aerosol here, and who knows what can happen?" Martin said.

On the small television in the corner of the navy lab, the games of the Twenty-third Olympiad played out as Kathy and Paul cultivated increase quantities of the AIDS virus and began experimenting with it. Most of time they were intensely busy. But sometimes they were forced to wait lie the centrifuge spun or the electrophoresis gels worked their magic. these small boxes of translucent gelatin, droplets of liquid were lined like sprinters in the starting blocks. Drawn from one end of the box to other by the invisible pull of it tiny electrical current, the distance traveled by each sample told the researchers exactly what it was. These little races were slow and painstaking and had to be run again and again to make sure the results were right. Each time they looked up to see Carl Lewis winning yet another gold medal, it was a reminder that sports was gloriously simple compared to science. Or at least faster.

The pressure to make progress against AIDS was intense in 1984. Rutter and Penhoet could stand in their offices on the third floor Of 456o Horton Street in Emeryville and see San Francisco's skyline across the Bay. The disease was rampaging through the city's gay community, and there was a huge brouhaha about shutting down the bathhouses where men went for anonymous sex. In Atlanta, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced that most of the nation's hemophiliacs were already infected with the virus and that the number of cases related to blood transfusions had quadrupled in four months. There was widespread panic about AIDS in donated blood, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was ready to pump money into tests that blood banks could use to protect the "general population"-an unsubtle way of saying heterosexuals who didn't inject drugs.

Although Kathy and Paul had worked incredibly hard to grow the virus, when they returned to Chiron headquarters the pace was so intense that their time at the navy P3 facility seemed tranquil by comparison. The ultracentrifuge accident ended their stay in the deserted Naval Biosciences Laboratory, and now they were buffeted by noise and distractions on all sides. Chiron was housed in an old research building that had been used by Shell Oil, then abandoned in Emeryville's industrial flatlands until Chiron had dusted it off and reopened it in 1982. On one side of the long third-floor corridor were Chiron's executive and administrative offices; on the other side was a row of large open laboratories, facing not the Bay but the Berkeley Hills.

There was no air conditioning or heating in the labs, and on hot days, when the tall windows were open to catch a breeze, the air was heavy with the stench of a nearby plant where cattle were rendered into hides, fertilizer, and the like. Grit and pollution from the busy freeway feeding the Bay Bridge settled oil the lab benches and had to be constantly wiped away. The Ph.D.-level scientists and their lab technicians, many of who d were fresh Out of college, wore jeans and listened to the radio while they worked. What set the techs apart was that they worked only eight hours a day.

Paul lived in a large condominium complex on the edge of San Fran14nscosBay, a short walk or bike ride from Chiron. He didn't have a phone condo because he was rarely there. Paul usually started work around l0:00 or 11:00 A.m. and left around 2:00 the following morning. Kathy and Paul shared a small office next to the lab, and sometimes she would come in at her usual starting time, around 9:00 A.M., and find him #Weep on the office floor.

Nancy Haigwood's lab was just down the hall, and although she wasn't working on the AIDS project yet, like all Chiron scientists she was constantly in overdrive. "We worked all the time. It was rare to take a whole weekend off We worked really hard because the company's survival depended on us and we were really into what we were doing." Most of the scientists were young and few had children, so there was nothing to stop them from working a full day, taking a break for dinner at one of the ,neighborhood dives, then going back to the lab until l0:00 PM. The influx of biotech companies had not yet changed this run-down industrial area, d during Chiron's early years, it wasn't unusual to see empty wine bottles or used syringes in the gutters.

In September 1984, Pablo Valenzuela promoted Kathy from staff to senior scientist. One of her great strengths was her excellent grasp of immunology, a discipline essential for development of a vaccine to defend against AIDS. Stripped down to its basics, immunology is the study of how the body determines whether something is "self," therefore harmless, or "non-self " and potentially dangerous. The basic ability to identify something as foreign is the first step toward a protectiveresponse against threats as minor as a splinter or as potentially lethal as the AIDS virus.

Paul cloned Levy's virus and determined its full sequence in September. This was a landmark accomplishment, and Chiron filed for a patent on the genetic sequence of the virus and the general arrangement of its genes. Having staked this claim, Chiron wanted to move fast on products. Kathy was whipsawed from one task to the next, trying to do everything at once, sometimes collaborating with Paul and sometimes working only with her five technicians. Chiron identified two genes that coded for parts of the envelope glycoprotein-a protrusion on the surface of the AIDS virus and on infected cells. Glycoproteins were important antigens in experimental vaccines against feline leukemia virus, influenza in mice, and of course the successful hepatitis B vaccine being used in humans.

Confronted with the AIDS virus, the body's first response would probably be to make antibodies against this knobby glycoprotem. If blood bank technicians could detect these antibodies in donated blood, they would know which units to throw out. Certain parts of the envelope protein elicited stronger immune responses than others, and Kathy performed a series of experiments to pinpoint the most reactive parts. She picked away at genetic sequences to figure out which peptides, or small Proteins, kicked antibody production into high gear.

As important as this work was to the company's future, there were other demands on Kathy's time as well. She was working with Paul, Jay Levy, and Dino Dina on the journal article reporting the cloning of the virus. There was a mad dash to get it into print before their competitors did, and on September 22, 1984, they finally shipped it off to Nature, a famous scientific journal edited in London. But there was no time to relax. The Chiron team worked on inserting the glycoprotein genes into yeast, so that the yeast would make viral proteins when it reproduced.

Protein production is difficult to measure in cultures of yeast cells, and Kathy's group worked nonstop to accomplish this. During this intensely demanding period, Martin Wilson saw a side of Kathy Steimer that she kept well hidden at work. By that time they were renting a house together in Benicia, a bucolic waterfront village on the Carquinez Strait, which joins the Sacramento River and San Francisco Bay. Benicia was a geographic compromise for this two-career couple, located halfway between Chiron's Emeryville headquarters and the campus of UC-Davis, where Martin worked.

Kathy struggled with long bouts of depression, during which getting herself off to work was a major exercise in emotional weight lifting. And longer her workdays, the more sleep-deprived she became, and the less able to sleep. And when this happened she drove herself onward with unnatural, manic energy until finally Martin would force her to go y with him for a few days, usually to a favorite spot in Baja California. tographs from these trips show a handsome couple, his short hair y with seawater and hers wild and blond, tanned arms hugging each other against backdrops obliterated by sun. In Baja, Kathy stepped off treadmill.

In April 1984, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler told a Washington press conference that a vaccinate against AIDS would be ready for testing in two years. A former republican congresswoman from Massachusetts, Heckler had no science expertise and on this occasion was suffering with a rotten cold. Minutes re stepping on stage, Heckler asked Bob Gallo, whom she was just to hail as the discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS, what to say if anyone asked about a preventive vaccine. Gallo pulled a number out of air. Although this sadly wrong prediction has been attributed both to Heckler's ignorance and Gallo's legendary arrogance, it may simply have reflected the optimism that ruled early in the biotech era.

Researchers in government laboratories, biotech companies, and universities were bursting with ideas about how to make an AIDS vaccine. Salk was convinced that it would be possible to protect against S with an inactivated version of the virus-an updated version of the igm for his successful polio vaccine. Largely on the strength of his e, Salk quickly raised $20 million to start a biotech company-a that many investors would later come to regret as stock prices flucted wildly. A Harvard primate researcher and a Cambridge biotech company jumped on the live-attenuated bandwagon early, even though Most experts believed that a live vaccine for AIDS would be too risky. Other start-ups set out to create AIDS vaccines from synthetic versions of antigenic pepticles, short chains of amino acids that some predicted would safely elicit powerful immune responses. Everybody had an idea.

Chiron's big score bad been the hepatitis B vaccine-a protein subunit expressed in yeast. "Clearly the potential for using this technology to make [an HIV] vaccine seemed relatively straightforward Ed Penhoet said years later, shortly after he left Chiron to become a university dean. "This is one of those Cases where ignorance was bliss."

Kathy's mission was to find out everything she could about gP120, the envelope glycoprotein that would be-in one form or another-the anti-gen for Chiron's new vaccine. Early on, Kathy agonized that she would never figure out exactly what this antigen should look like. For months she worried that some other scientist, in some other lab, had a surefire way of making a vaccine against AIDS. Gradually, Martin recalls, she came to see that none of the other aspiring vaccine designers and entrepreneurs knew any more than she did. "Nobody knows how to make AIDS vaccines, " Kathy told Martin. "We really don't understand the basic immunology that goes with this. "

In her lab, Kathy studied the blood of AIDS patients in minute detail. By carefully analyzing their antibodies against HIV-as the AIDS virus was officially named in 1986-Kathy hoped to determine exactly which parts of the virus elicited the strongest immune response. If a vaccine was based on the most powerfully antigenic bits, perhaps it could stimulate a response strong enough to protect people who later encountered HIV in the wild.

Kathy missed being able to talk with Paul, whom she greatly respected as a scientist, as she tried to pick the right antigen. But Paul was gone. In mid-1986, when Chiron was becoming less like an academic lab and more like a business, he had left the company for a faculty position at UC-Davis. Paul wasn't really a corporate type of guy, and he had become less interested in making products and more inclined toward laboratory research on HIV and similar primate viruses. His main focus was using animal models to test HIV vaccines, and over the years, he's built a distinguished career and tnernored dozens of young researchers.

Back at Chiron, Kathy and Nancy Haigwood worked together to refine gpi2o. In the lab they chiseled off epitopes (tiny parts of the antigen) that they thought might interfere with the powerful immune response they were seeking. Because Nancy5s special expertise was in expression systems, which harness ordinary cells to make foreign proteins, her role was to make larger quantities of the gP120 pieces Kathy judged most promising.

Just how gpi2o should be made was a hotly debated issue at Chiron and elsewhere. The question was whether yeast or animal cells should be used to manufacture gP120, and a growing number of scientists were coming to believe that gP120 grown in cells from mammals would more closely resemble the knobby protrusion on HIV. But Chiron's forte was making proteins in yeast cells, so they stuck with that system.

Once a week, Kathy and Nancy scheduled a working lunch. On pleasant days they would leave Chiron and walk to one of the new cafes that were cropping up now that scruffy Emeryville was beginning to gentrify. Both were blonde and blue-eyed; Nancy was three years younger, a tad shorter, and prettier in a more conventional way. Both were being promoted up the corporate ladder in the late ig8os and had traded jeans for a softer, more corporate look. Nancy was ambitious and self-assured, and for the most part she shrugged off adversity or criticism.

Although she tried to hide it at work, Kathy was by far the more sensitive of the two. When Kathy traveled to conferences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island and other temples of the East Coast scientific establishment, she was surrounded by men who never lost sleep wondering whether they were wrong about anything. When she rose to question an experimental procedure, she was often dismissed and sometimes even attacked. Kathy told her close friend Kathryn Radke, also a retrovirologist who knew the major players, that she didn't know whether she could ever go to another AIDS conference "where all the big egos and high rollers were jockeying with each other for glory." This may have been after the meeting where a famous Duke University researcher loudly propositioned Kathy while his inebriated dinner companions egged him on.

As upsetting as these East Coast meetings were to Kathy, life was good in California. At Chiron, Kathy was beginning to bring in outside funding for At DS vaccine research. She started small, in 1987, with a $500,000 National Instiaites of' I lealth grant to work (in genetically engineered vaccines. In 1988, Kathy and Nancy were co-principal -investigators on a $3.1 million AIDS vaccine grant from the state of California; Kathy soon got an additiOnal $1.3 million from the NIH on her own. Chiron had also begun rnanu-facturing 9PI20 in mammal cells instead of yeast.

Lunching ip the California sunshine, talking about the temporary setbacks and egO battles that are inevitable in any kind of work, Nancy and Kathy never Joubted that genetic engineering would enable science to win the war against AIDS. With the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine as a Precedent, holv could they fail? "There were so many ways that we could make this vaccine, it was just a matter of who was going to get there first,' Nancy recalle cl a . decade later. Sure, there were difficulties along the way.but they were going to Prove that they could beat the virus.

Kathy's per-sonal life was also on the upswing. She and Martin had been together since 1982, and in 1987, they moved from their rental house in Benicia to a q oirky, dramatic home designed just for them. On the outside it looked like a modest frame house onto which a boxy, two-story concrete addition had been grafted; inside, the space was airy and coherent. The site commanded a spectacular view across the Carquinez Strait to the hills of lport Costa, a small town on the opposite shore. Kathy and Martin gardened with a passion, planting great rosemary hedges and frLjil trees with a special fenced enclosure for Leroy, their black standard poodle pup. Photos from that time show the two of them with a dog as Jak a, an inkblot squeezed in the middle. With the house and dog in place, the absence of the child they had been trying to conceive for years became acute. Finally, they began to investigate adoption, only to discover that agencies favored couples who were married-which they weren't.They simply hadn't felt the need to make it official. Each had been married before, in Kathy's case a graduate-school misjudgment that had lasted less than one year. Martin's first marriage had lasted longer and had a more amiable parting, but with Kathy he had not felt that a wedding was needed to cement their bond.

Now it appeared that if Kathy and Martin wanted a child, which they did ' they would have to tie the knot. So in December 1989, they went to Tijuana with Kathy's father, Harry Steimer, and his lady friend, Sandy Davis."We paid a guy $5 to make sure that the hubcaps didn't get stolen off the car, while we went into one of those places with a big sign out front saying 'Marriages and Divorces.' it seemed likeit would be much more fun than to have a big production , " Martin recalled. Afterward, the four-some went out for margaritas. Harry and Sandy took the Tijuana Trolley back to San Diego, while Kathy and Martin took a road trip through Baja.

They returned from their honeymoon to find an answering machine message from a young woman who thought they sounded like good adoptive parents for the baby she was carrying. Kathy's date book for early 199o was crammed with appointments with lawyers, doctors, social workers-all the people who become involved when an adoption is being arranged. On March 25, Kathy and Martin were at the hospital when the baby they named Acacia Lynn was born. She went home with them to Benicia the following day.

Kathy took a month off from Chiron, although now and then she went to Emeryville for a day jammed with meetings. Both she and Martin worked part-time for six months, and Casey-as the baby soon came to be called-was the center of their lives. For the first time, Kathy stayed up late with an infant instead of an experiment. Except for the addition of the baby, their overall domestic arrangements were the same as ever; Kathy handled all the financial accounts and Martin-an expert and talented chef-did all the shopping and cooking.

Meanwhile, Nancy, who had been made co-leader of the HIV vaccine project and associate director for virology in early 19go, ran the showwhile Kathy was on leave. By this point she was using mammalian cells to make GMP lots-large batches of vaccine that meet federal standards for Good Manufacturing Practices. Before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will agree to let a vaccine be tested in humans, it demands that the safety of the product has been demonstrated in animals, that the identity and purity of the product can be assured, and that the product will be stable during the course of a clinical trial.

During the summer of 19go, Nancy and other Chiron representatives met with NIH officials in Bethesda to talk about a government-supported trial for gP120. The prospects looked good, and Chiron submitted an Investigational New Drug (IND) application for its recombinant gP120 vaccine to the Food and Drug Administration. The IND described ingreat detail all the cutting-edge molecular biology, all the novel manufa turing techniques, that had gone into the making of this new vaccine. dazzling as all this high-tech wizardry was, there was still only one way prove whether it would actually protect people against AIDS: immunize volunteers and see what happened.

DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

FARUK SINANGIL WAS FEELING ragged when he and AnneMarie Duliege stepped out of the taxi that had brought them from Washington National Airport to the Hyatt Regency in downtown Bethesda. It was never easy for Faruk to sleep on a red-eye from San Francisco to Washington, in part because his legs were too long or in the confines of economy class. But this flight had been worse than usual. Faruk's efforts to take a Zen attitude, to let the white-noise roar of the engines drown out his anxieties, had been only intermittently successful. I am a scientist who works with test tubes, he kept telling himself, and not a businessman or a politician. Anne-Marie has to make a presentation, not me. And whatever happens here is not going to be about science.

It was June 17,1994, and Faruk and his colleagues at Chiron Biocine, the company's vaccine division, had good reason to be nervous about the meeting at the "NIH Hyatt"-a hotel so close to the southernmost edge 4 the National Institutes of Health that it might as well be on the campus. Kathy Steimer would ordinarily have been part of Chiron's delegation, but she had asked Faruk to go instead.

At stake was the future of gP120, the AIDS vaccine that had so far cost Chiron eight years of work and millions of dollars. Since 19go, this vaccine had been Faruk's livelihood and tile center of his life as a virologist.

He was one of a team of twenty researchers and technicians working on the gpl20 project, and none of them knew whether they Would still b, with the company next year, or even next month. So much depended what happened today.

In the Hyatt's garage, Pat Fast was glad to find a parking space 1 111,1 inching into Bethesda with all the other commuters from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. It was hot and muggy and she did not have a good feeling about how the day would unfold, As head of the vaccine program for the Division of AIDS and the person responsible for overseeing research on gp120 and other candidate vaccines, her assignment for the meeting to summarize the clinical trial results for the Chiron Biology' and Genentech products. Sensational press coverage that began ml Memorial Day weekend had made these studies wildly controversial, and today's meeting had the potential to turn into a farce or a brawl. What Pat had to do was stay neutral, Jay out the facts, and not make waves.

Inside, crowds were squeezing through the tall dark doors of the Crystal Ballroom. Three dozen members of two NIH advisory committees prowled around the tables that formed a large open square in the center of the ballroom, looking for the name card that would tell each where 1~, sit. On a large platform at the end of the room, some fifteen television crews wrestled with their cables and tripods and jostled for space with still photographers. More than fifty print reporters fiddled with

Their tape recorders and notebooks, torn between claiming a good seat and button holing government officials and committee members in the premeeting hubbub.

Faruk and Anne-Marie made their way to the front row of the spectator section, where seats were reserved for corporate representatives. They exchanged greetings with Biocine President Dino Dina, who had traveled on his own and arrived earlier. Next to him were Don Francis, Phil Berman, Tim Gregory, and some lesser-known people from Genentedi. Reporters buzzed around Don Francis, the celebrity member of tile group, while pretty much ignoring everyone else.

Out of the spotlight, Faruk and the Genentech scientists didn't have much to say to each other. The two biotechs had been rivals for years, and now they were jointly petitioning the NIH to put their vaccines into inefficacy trial together. Politics had once again made strange bedfellows. Kathy knew Phil and Tim pretty well, and if she'd been there, she probably would have made conversation with them. Faruk barely knew them, but he could tell they were lots in the best of moods. Phil's hackles had Own the instant he saw the mob of reporters and TV cameras, and all he could think was, this is a set-up. We're gonna get murdered." Tim was of the same mind.

The rest of the room was fast filling with people who develop, test, or pegulate HIM vaccines. Standing out among the middle-aged people in suits were the AIDS activists who had traveled from New York, Boston, and San Francisco, as well as from nearby Washington. Six months earlier, most of them had been only dimly aware that vaccines that might prevent AIDS were being tested in numerous small trials. Recent reports that a few volunteers had become infected, however, coupled with the suggestion that the vaccines might have been responsible, roused the activists like a three-alarm fire. Although a few radicals thought that vaccines might be genocidal attack on the gay community, cooler heads realized that the impact would be economic: NIH money spent developing a preventive vaccine was money that wouldn't be available for treatment research.

Faruk, who was both a powerful believers in vaccines and a resident of one of the world's most politically conscious cities, understood where the activists in the Crystal Ballroom were coming from. He knew that even those who weren't infected with HIV saw themselves as advocates for a community of people who were. Unless better antiviral drugs were developed, and fast, people who already had the virus were headed for certain death. If the NIH approved a gpl20 efficacy trial at the conclusion of this meeting, there was no denying that treatment research would take a hit.

Faruk was still eyeing the activists when the meeting got underway 8:30 with an official update on DAIDS activities from its director, Jack Killen. For nearly thirty minutes he droned on about routine matters such as new committee appointments, internal reorganization, and changes in grant-making procedures. The thirty-six committee members seated around the big table were mildly inattentive as they sorted through the multicolored folders stacked before them, poured water, and settled in for what promised to be a long day.

The atmosphere changed abruptly when Tony Fauci swept in a few and medical directors, and their anxieties were heading off the chat IN Stockholders and venture capitalists who had read sensational about people being infected in HIV vaccine trials were on the verge deciding that there must be easier ways to make money. If the efficacy trail was canceled today, Pat had a mental list of companies she thought would abandon HIV vaccine research.

Fauci wound up his remarks by saying that he planned to stay all (h~ "to get a firsthand flavor of the discussions." Although this seemed unremarkable to many in the room, in fact it was extraordinary coming time a man who was so impatient that his own senior staff often felt as though they were wasting his time and whose idea of a half-hour appointment was twenty-three minutes. "Thank you and good luck to all of us" was lit, closing line.

Jack Killen came back to the microphone to explain the agenda and set ground rules for the meeting. There would be six short presentations of various aspects of vaccine research, and the committee members would be able to ask a few questions after each one. Following lunch, representatives of Genentech and Chiron Biocine would briefly give their view N (-it future vaccine testing, Killen said; then forty-five minutes of public comment would be heard. Only people who put their names on an office it, before 12:00 noon would be permitted to address the committee, I Ill, one would be allotted more than five minutes. "The remainder oft lie this is open for discussion and the development of a recommendation ' Killen said. This meant that people seated at the big table could talk, but only when recognized by the chairman.

The goal of the meeting, he emphasized, was to pass a specific recommendation about the future of the gp120 vaccines. "Knowing Dr. I Liam chairmanship talents as we do, we are confident that he will get you it before the day is through," Killen said. On that note, he turned the meeting over to Ashley Haase, who was the first speaker on the agenda. It as the meeting's chairman.

On first impression, Haase looked like Clark Kent: He was a square-jawed, square-shouldered fellow with horn-rimmed glasses and it low-key manner. But the more one knew about this self-described "shy guy from Minnesota" the more obvious it became that he was an NIH insider I whose many roles included being chairman of ARAC and serving on many NIH study sections that decide which researchers will get grant money. In April, he had been asked to pinch-hit as cochairman of the Vaccine Working Group, and now he was to tell the members of ARAC, many of whom were not vaccine experts, what had gone on there.

Some participants in that earlier meeting listened to Haase's report with a growing sense of amazement, because it bore little resemblance to their own recollections. What stood out for them was that Chiron and Genentech had relaxed their guard on proprietary information and allowed the scientists to present their rawest new findings. The young vaccine developers from California had swapped ideas with Merck's Maurice Hilleman and Mary Lou Clements from Johns Hopkins, giants of the field whose vaccines had defeated infectious diseases around the world. Everyone critiqued everyone else's experiments, speculated about the ornate chess game that goes on between HIV and the human immune system, and freely debated where to go next. In the end, the VWG decided that there was nothing more to be learned from laboratory experiments and animal studies. The only way to find out whether gp120 vaccines protected against AIDS was to test them in more people. So they asked IDS staffers to go back to the office and draft plans for two possible case trials, a definitive Cadillac version and the more modest Chevye experiment.

For people who had been part of the give-and-take at the VWG meet Haase's summary was like listening to a tax lawyer read the lyrics to a song. All the words were there, nothing was inaccurate, but all the sizes were gone. On slide after slide, Haase showed two balance scales: One tilted slightly toward doing an efficacy trial with dispatch, the others tilted toward putting it off. Haase chose the image because "for every positive thing you could say, you could counter with' Well, but' "' Haase had worked and reworked these slides for the past two weeks, going over what happened at the VWG in phone conversations with Tony Fauci. The re they talked, the grayer everything looked. As a result, Haase's presentation was so scrupulously balanced, so did with caveats, that some committee members probably concluded at members of the VWG hadn't really cared much-one way or the other-about expanding the clinical trials. Sitting around the ARAC table were several people who had also served on the VWG, including Susan Zolla-Pazner, the antibody researcher from New York University. She grew increasingly impatient during Haase's account of the earlier meeting, raising her hand when he finished.

"Ashley's summary of the meeting is really excellent and very accurate, " Zolla-Pazner began. But he had not told ARAC that "at the end of the second day of meetings, we went around the table and each individual was asked to give his or her impression and opinion about what we should do. The decision was really overwhelming. It was not quite unanimous, but almost, that we should proceed with these scaled-back trials," she said, her gaze traveling slowly around the table. "I would like to get that emphasis across, that it was a nearly unanimous decision. It was stronger than what sounds like lukewarm approval."

Did the vaccine experts vote for a clinical trial because they believed gP120 would protect people against HIV, one ARAC member asked M because they wanted to gather scientific data that would be useful in the future?

"The consensus was that these probably are not the vaccines that we are going to end up using broadly ten or twenty years from now, but that these were products that were worth going ahead with, because they might be efficacious and because certainly we would learn more doing the trial," Zolla-Pazner answered.

A subset of the ARAC members were bona fide vaccine experts, and they came from two main camps. Some, like Zolla-Pazner, felt certain that an efficacy trial was the next logical step. Others were opposed to doing a trial with gpl2o and wanted to hold off until canarypox, or possibly naked DNA, was ready for testing. But the majority of the committee members weren't directly involved in vaccine research and did not come to the Hyatt with strongly held views. Neither the companies nor Tony Fauci could predict how they would vote at the end of the day.

By this point it was a little after 10:00 A.m., and Faruk noticed that although some people were paying close attention, others were not. In the life of a meeting there is a time in midmorning when some participants, no matter how compelling the topic, begin slipping out to visit the rest room or make surreptitious phone calls to the office. Faruk didn't leave his seat but flagged a bit during the next talk, which summarized animal experiments related to HIV vaccines. He wished that he had gotten more sleep on the plane.

Pat Fast was next in the lineup of speakers from the Division of AIDS, and she started her update on clinical trials with the basics: DAIDS had tested thirteen different candidates in 1,40o HIV-negative volunteers since 1988, mostly in small Phase I trials but more recently in larger studies of the gpi2o products. She told the group that the Chiron and Genentech vaccines appeared to be safe and to stimulate immune responses, although there was certainly debate about how protective those responses might be. That was the easy part of the talk, the part she had given dozens of times.

Then Pat tapped the remote control and a new slide came up HIV Infections in Vaccine Trial Participants. She could hear the rustling of note pads as the reporters in the back of the room came to attention. This was what they had come for, the media and activists, and why the members of ARAC were conducting their business in full view of TV cameras.

"There has been a lot of interest recently in the small number of volunteers who become exposed to HIV and despite having received some doses of experimental vaccines have become infected. Unfortunately, there has been a public perception that the vaccines directly infected the volunteers,' Pat said. Some of the people who had called her with this rumor during the past two weeks were probably in the room now, obscured by the glare of the lights.

"The members of this committee will certainly know that this is not possible. These vaccines are made by genetic engineering techniques. They do not and they never did include whole virus genomes or live viruses and they cannot be infectious," she said.

She aimed a laser pointer at the total shown on the slide-twelve HIV infected participants in vaccine trials sponsored by NIAID or by corporations. This was the total a few days ago, Pat said, "but we have just in the past day turned up one additional case, which is in a gP120 trial.' She went on to explain that when the infected volunteers had been interviewed, all admitted to having had contact with someone who was HIV positive, either sexually or by sharing needles.

These thirteen infections occurred among 1,450 volunteers in NIH trials and another few hundred in studies sponsored by corporations. Overall, the incidence was low less than 1 percent. One of thc newly in I"(c, I volunteers had received all the shots called for in a study of MicroGyneSys gp120 volunteers, none had gotten the planned series of four immunizations. The informed consent forms and counseling signs had always emphasized that experimental vaccines can't be viewed as protective and that people had to take precautions on their own. Now the Data and Safety Monitoring Board had decided to beef up warnings and had asked trial sites to check more frequently for signs (it infection in volunteers.

When Pat finished, hands shot up around the big table. Virologists wanted to know whether the volunteers had encountered a fierce w unusual strain of the virus. Immunologists wondered how the antibody responses of the infected few compared with vaccines that remain healthy. And once vaccine recipients were infected, did they go downhill faster than other patients? The answers aren't in yet, Pat had to say; it, work is in progress. And then Haase said that her time was up, and 11.11 headed back to her chair.

It was a point of pride for Pat that she was trusted by everyone she dealt with in the complicated world of vaccines, whether they were pinstriped executives or activists with Kool-Aid hair. Today she had told the truth and done it as dispassionately as she could. She had not been asked (o sway the vote of the committee; her task was to provide them with sonic facts.

The next presentations by DAIDS staffers laid out a detailed picture of the choices ARAC faced. By the end of the day, committee members would have to vote on one of several choices. If they wished to go forward with efficacy testing, they would have to choose between a classic of a scaled-down version of a trial in which people would be randomly assigned either to one of the gP120 vaccines or to a placebo. A classic official trial would require 9,ooo volunteers, take three and a half years, and cost $9 million to $18 million per year. The up-front costs of recruiting and screening so many volunteers would be tremendous. On the plus side, a massive study like this doesn't miss much: It would certainly pick out a vaccine that worked more than 50 percent of the time, and it could probably tell if only one person in three was protected. Best of all, it approved at this meeting, this Cadillac of clinical trials could determine the value of gp120 vaccines by the year 1998.

A scaled-down, Chevy-type trial would enroll 4,500 volunteers and last only two years. For $4.5 million to $9 million per year, it could identify a completely useless vaccine or an effective one that protected people at least 6o percent of the time. It would cost less at the beginning and recruitment would be less daunting, but if test results fell in a large gray area, it would still be necessary to take the next step, which would be the Cadillac version. This trial could not get underway until 1997 at the earliest, and results would not be available for another three and a half years. Efficacy would be known after mid-2ool.

The first people to shoot up their hands were statistically inclined committee members who asked technical questions about the two designs. This discussion of the proposed trials was as abstract as an exercise in a college statistics textbook until the focus shifted to the volunteers themselves. Uninfected gay men and IV drug users were the people most at risk and thus the ones where a vaccine's impact could best be seen, and the HIVNET sites had already identified 1,000 to 3,000 likely volunteers from these groups. Recruiting 6,ooo to 8,ooo more for a definitive efficacy trial might require 8,ooo interviews, or it might mean screening 32,000 people. That was impossible to calculate.

Not every potential volunteer is enthusiastic about an experiment that pays nothing, requires lots of clinic visits, might make them test positive for HIV, and might inject them with a worthless placebo. And as ARAC member and long-time activist Martin Delaney pointed out, volunteers would be even harder to find if the AIDS community actively opposed the trial.

The next speaker on the agenda was Derek Hotel, a full-time AIDS activist and VWG member, who expanded on Delaney's comment. There is a highly organized constituency of HIV-positive people and their friends and loved ones, and they had become expert at navigating the federal system. Many of them were suspicious of experimental vaccines, he said, and they had the public's ear. The committee needed to realize that if the efficacy trial went forward, it would be vociferously opposed. No one would speak out on the other side, because there was no organized group of uninfected people to champion the vaccine cause.

Six presentations had rushed past in two and a half-hours when I last announced that it was time to adjourn for lunch. The committee members had been bombarded with thousands of details about the vaccines and the immune responses they elicit, laboratory tests of dubious value, imperfect animal models, clinical trials that sounded costly and complicated, and community activists who thought the vaccines might be a horrible government plot. It was enough to give anyone indigestion.

The Chiron and Genentech teams fidgeted through lunch together. They were eager to get their turn at the microphone. Back in California, they had agreed that Don would open, Dino Dina would follow, and Anne-Marie Duliege would close. Phil, Faruk, and the others were specific carriers, unless they needed to supply scientific details that one of the speakers had momentarily lost.

Even people who disagree with Don's views acknowledge that he can be a charismatic speaker, although a bit too preachy for some. His purpose at this meeting was to deliver a barnburner that would rouse the committee from its post-lunch torpor. He was determined to use words and pictures to bring the human carnage of the epidemic into the Crystal Ballroom: There were 5,ooo new infections a day worldwide, and even if the epidemic magically stopped right now, it would still leave 750,00 dead Americans in its wake. Francis juxtaposed slides of the AIDS quilt laid out on the Washington Mall with images of the Vietnam Memorial, saying that it took ten years for 50,000 people to die in Vietnam, but it was taking only one year for the same number to die of AIDS in the United States. In other countries the situation was much worse, and without a vaccine the death toll would continue to climb.

The need for a vaccine was urgent, Don insisted, and even a partially protective one would slow the rate at which the virus was rampaging around the globe. Money, he suggested, should not stand in the way of doing an efficacy trial. The total cost of medical care for people with AIDS had reached $10 million per day in the United States, which made the price of even a full-scale efficacy trial appear trivial. Conducting one year of a definitive trial would cost no more than two days of treatments for Americans with AIDS.

Francis was a hard act to follow and Dino Dina knew it. So he used b is status as president of Chiron Biocine to present himself as a model of executive reserve. The companies and the NIH had agreed on what it would take for a vaccine to advance to an efficacy trial, he said, and Chiron had honored its part of that pact. Dina turned the microphone over to Aritie-Marie, the medical director for the gP120 project. Having worked on HIV vaccine trials at Genentech and Chiron, Anne-Marie had become passionate about the need for a large-scale study.

Although scientists disagreed about the technical merits of the gpi2o vaccines and although bad publicity had recently prejudiced the public against them, "scientifically and ethically we should do a definitive trial," Anne-Marie said. Not a small trial that would yield uncertain results, but a full-scale study that would settle the protectiveness question. Chiron had new ideas about improving their vaccine formulation, and she was confident that a trial approved now would be able to test state-of-the-art technology.

For hours, committee members had listened to academics and government employee's comment on the pros and cons of the gP120 vaccines. But if they had any questions for the people who actually made these products, they were out of luck. Without skipping a beat, Haase plowed ahead as soon as Anne-Marie uttered her closing words. "I am going to go now to the public comment portion, and the first person to speak will be Dr. Donald Burke," the chairman said. He held a list, prepared by ARAC's executive secretary, of people who had signed up with her that morning.

Burke, who was still in charge of WRAIR's Division of Retrovirology at this point, spoke on behalf of Thai scientists who had been testing HIV vaccines made by American companies. In his opening remarks, Tony Fauci said he had received a letter from Thai researchers. They did not want ARAC's recommendations to slow their progress toward efficacy trials in Thailand, where the epidemic was spinning out of control and where there was no money for treatments. Burke reiterated that message and urged the committee to explicitly limit its focus to the United States when it came time to actually write a recommendation.

Burke was followed by a series of gay men, emissaries from the front lines of the AIDS epidemic, who delivered the kinds of morally charged statements that make academicians squirm in their seats. An Ichabod Crane-like figure from Boston shook his finger at the committee and warned that the proposed trials would have serious enrollment problems unless their benefits, both to individuals and to society, were clearer. A Latino activist waved a letter from the New York chapter of ACT UP, which called the trials "not only premature, but extremely unethical and dangerous" An HIV-positive man painted a nightmare scenario in which people with AIDS would demonstrate in front of vaccine trial sites, protesting the shift of NIH research funds from treatment to vaccines.

These remarks struck an emotional chord in some committee members, who felt that they should support whatever people from the most hard-hit parts of society wanted them to. Farulk thought committee members might have other, more personal reasons, for voting against an efficacy trial. Under the white drape of the committee table, these people probably felt a hand groping for their pockets. Most of them got grants from NIH, and most of those grants were not for vaccine work but for basic science, treatments, or risk reduction. If a definitive efficacy trial ended up costing $8o million, which it might, some of that money was bound to come out of their research budgets. Faruk did not find this thought encouraging.

Bill Snow, a well-regarded activist who was an adviser to NIH's clinical trials, asked the committee to look at the big picture. He reminded them that in the morning, Haase had presented four possible recommendations: Stop all research on gp120, do a definitive efficacy trial, do a limited version, or hold off on efficacy testing until a second type of vaccine could be compared with gpi2o. Yet the formal presentations from DAIDS had focused on two possible efficacy trials, Snow observed, neither one of which might be ideal from a scientific or social point of view. Why must a decision be made today, he asked? An unspoken answer flashed through the brain of more than one person at the committee table: "Because Tony wants an answer, and he wants it now.'

The final public comment came from a physician-epidemiologist who had just left DAIDS for an academic post. For six years he had designed HIV vaccine trials, so no one was surprised when he spoke in favor of doing a big one. On that note, Dino Dina and Anne-Marie Duliege quietly made their way out of the ballroom. Business demanded that they catch a plane to Paris, and they now left Faruk as Chiron's sole representative in the room.

The minute that Haase called for discussion, a dozen hands went up and he scribbled down names then began working his way down the list. The result was a jumble. A statistician jumped on fine points of trial design, the next speaker mused about the benefits of safe-sex counseling for volunteers, and the next wanted an update on primate studies. People had their say without making reference to what had gone before.

In this atmosphere, highly questionable assertions went unchallenged. A famous primate researcher predicted that within six months, animal studies would reveal which laboratory results correlated with protection in humans. People who didn't know better could have seen this as a good reason for postponing an efficacy trial. Larry Corey, one of two "no" votes at the VWG, told ARAC that the prime-boost strategy might be ready for clinical testing in twelve to fourteen months, which subsequent speakers took to mean that it could enter an efficacy trial by 1996. Why go ahead with gP120, some members must have asked themselves, if exciting new discoveries are just over the horizon? But there was no time to talk about this at length.

Faruk and the other corporate representatives sat silent, because the rules of the meeting did not permit them to speak. If only they could respond to what was being said, they would help the committee get a better grip on the realities of vaccine development. Farulk did primate work, he kept up with what was happening, and he knew that no one was close to finding correlates of protection in animals. As for the prime-boost strategy, which Chiron was working on with Pasteur Wrieux Connaught, he knew it had a long way to go before an efficacy trial would make sense. A few seats away, Tim Gregory practically writhed in frustration. "Our hands were tied and we had tape over our mouths," he said.

During a short afternoon break, Clark Kent stepped into a phone booth and the Man of Steel emerged. Ashley Haase was freshly determined to get a decision before the scheduled adjournment at 5:30. "Please make your comments crisp," he said. I want to hear concrete proposals, however flawed * " But the committee members continued on a meandering course that did not flow clearly toward a decision of any kind. Some people were preoccupied with laboratory assays, some with animal studies. Others mused about doing an efficacy trial at some future time, when a type of vaccine other than gpi2o could be included. And one member proposed a trial bigger than a Phase 11 and smaller than a Phase III, which Haase facetiously dubbed a Phase 2.76.

Finally, when the clock had passed 4:oo and Haase could feel the scheduled adjournment drawing near, he lost patience and lopped off the two most dramatic choices facing the committee. Unless somebody objected, he said, shelving the products was off the table and so was the 9,ooo-person efficacy trial. No one said a word. Haase's first efforts to draft a recommendation snagged on how big an efficacy trial should be, but he steered the focus away from size and toward the issue of timing. Several members felt that an efficacy trial should be postponed until gpl2o and a second vaccine approach could be tested in tandem. There was much haggling about exactly how the recommendation should be worded, and finally a draft was projected on an overhead transparency.

"Do I hear a call to vote? A motion, please, " Haase said.

He recognized a public-health professor from Maryland, but she disappointed him by not moving the vote. Instead, she haltingly said that she did not think the committee had enough time to formulate a recommendation "I would like to suggest that what we do is develop a-some people may not like this-a subcommittee of ARAC members, the Council, the Vaccine Working Group, and really comb through this information some more and then come back."

Haase shook his head.

"You said no? You won't even put it up?"

"If you have a recommendation, a motion, we can discuss that Haase said. And he got a motion from the next person he called on, which was then amended and finkered with by other speakers. The most substantive suggestion came from Susan Zolla-Pazner, who wanted to make sure that the gp120 vaccines could be advanced to an efficacy trial on the basis of new scientific findings about them, rather than having to wait for prime boost or some other strategy to mature.

In the end, the proposed vote was a restatement of the status quo: "The Institute should continue ongoing programs and current trials of the two gp120 vaccine candidates, as well as the development of other candidates. NIAID should proceed with expanded clinical trials when other concepts and/or compelling data from current studies are available." Fewer than 700 people had been injected with gP120 so far. If the recommendation passed, they were likely to remain members of a very exclusive club.

"What I am going to do now is go around the table and we are going to record everyone's votes. Your choices are yes, no, or abstain Haase said, The room was tense and silent during the roll call, and pens moved swiftly to tally the count: twenty-three in favor of the recommendation and four abstentions. Several members moved swiftly to tack on a motion limiting the ARAC's recommendation to trials in the United States. It passed quickly, and Haase adjourned the meeting at 5:25.

As soon as it was over, Tony Fauci huddled briefly with Killen and a few others, then headed straight for the eager reporters. Ordinarily he would have gone to the industry representatives first, to shake hands and assure them of his continued goodwill and his desire to work together in the future. Instead, speaking just in time for the evening news, Fauci told reporters that he accepted the committee's recommendation and that it was now the official position of the NIAID. "Dr. Fauci denied that the recommendation was a setback to the development of an AIDS vaccine, though he said that others might view the recommendation as having a chilling effect on the drug industry," Lawrence Altman reported in the next day's New York Times. The article also quoted Fauci as saying that it would be another two or three years before any efficacy trials could be done.

The minute the meeting was adjourned, Don Francis had come out of his seat like a feral dog whose pup had been attacked, bearing down on luckless members of the committee. Later he would say, his eyes widening with amazement at the shortsightedness of others, "They had no idea that what they did was kill vaccines, '

Faruk was stunned by the realization that the world was different now, changed by a one-day meeting that ended five minutes early. This was nothing like the afterglow of the VWG meeting, only two months earlier, when the future seemed boundless and bright. Now Faruk had been nearly sleepless for two days and was demoralized and exhausted, but he wasn't off-duty yet. Dino and Anne-Marie were on a plane over the Atlantic. Only Faruk remained to deliver the bad news to Chiron headquarters.

He made his way out of the room and across the ballroom lobby, taking a left toward the bathrooms, where he recalled seeing a bank of telephones. He arrived at exactly the same moment as all the report who had just finished talking with Fauci. Less than twenty-four hours ago he had been a key member of a team with a shot at beating AIDS. Now he was a rumpled, exhausted man clutching a corporate phone card, fighting to hold his place against people who had lots of experience winning the race for a phone.

Finally Faruk got through to Corey Dekker, the vice president for Chirons clinical department, who was in her office on the edge of San Francisco Bay. He told her the outcome, read off the votes, and concluded, "We are stuck. We are not going anywhere." He could barely hear her reply over the bedlam in the hallway. Faruk hung up and headed upstairs to catch a cab to the airport. That westbound flight has remained the most depressing journey of his life.

Two levels up from the Crystal Ballroom, in the atrium of the Hyatt, committee members gathered at the cocktail lounge to unwind from a tense day under the television lights. But instead of seeing themselves on the big screen above the bar, they saw 0. J. Simpson in his white Bronco, leading a dreamy parade of patrol cars. None of them could have predicted, on that infamous night in 1994, that would get two verdicts in the courts long before gP120-Or any other AIDS vaccine-would get one in a clinical trial.

The Onassis Women	Phyllis Karas

Chapter Twelve

The End of His Dream

DESPITE ARISTO'S ONGOING affair with Maria, his marriage to Jackie might have continued had life not dealt him a devastating blow from which he could never recover. On the occasion of the fourth anniversary of that

marriage, Miltos Yiannacopoulos commented to me, "My friend is indeed an amazing man. I believe he can go on forever with both Jackie and Maria in his life. They both know what's going on with the other woman, and seem capable of living with the reality of the situation."

Miltos knew, however, as we all did, that the marriage, as it moved into its fifth year, was not one made in heaven. We could all see that it had been stronger and more loving when it had begun than it was now. Yet, it was far from over. Aristo and Jackie still spent wonderful moments together and frequently looked as if they loved each other. They enjoyed fun-filled days and evenings aboard the Christina, both in Skorpios and on cruises to exciting locales. I often saw them walking along the beach near Glyfada, arm in arm, talking earnestly to one another. There were romantic dinners in tavernas in Greece and in fine restaurants in Paris and London and Rome. Jackie did seem to be spending less time in Greece, but when she was there, she and Aristo appeared happy to be together.

But when the accident happened, when Alexander was lost forever, everything that mattered to Aristo was gone. Unlike a woman, a ship, or an airplane, Alexander, his one and only son, could not be replaced. For Alexander was his future, his reason to live. And so it was Alexander's death that shattered the world of every member of the Onassis family.

What might have happened to Jackie's and Aristo's lives had that accident never happened, no one will ever know. Perhaps they would have defied their critics and the gods and continued living together as man and wife, building a stronger marriage every year they were together. Or perhaps they would have gone their separate ways. All I do know for certain is that the plane crash that took Alexander's life in 1973 destroyed not only his father's marriage, but Mr. Onassis' life as well.

The day of that plane crash remains as firmly etched in my mind as I am certain the day of President Kennedy's assassination is imprinted in the mind of every American citizen who was alive on Friday, November 22, 1963. It was a Monday, January 22, 1973, a cool but unremarkable winter day, and Alexander and I were alone in our Olympic Airways offices. We had planned to have lunch in Athens that day at Antonopoulos, Alexander's favorite fish tavema, with two German friends to discuss business. But two hours before the lunch, one of the men called the office to report that he had a bad stomach problem and asked if we could postpone our lunch until the next day.

Alexander was in a quiet, somber mood that day. He was like that sometimes and for no apparent reason. Since his mother, Tina, had married her former brother-in-law Stavros Niarchos fourteen months earlier, Alexander had been having more blue days than usual. Even though over a year had passed, he could not accept the reality that his mother had married the husband of her sister Eugenie, eighteen months after Eugenie died a suspicious death. After Tina had divorced Sonny Blandford a year before that marriage, Alexander had been full of hope that one day his father would divorce Jackie and his parents would remarry. We had discussed such a possibility many times and each time I had tried to convince him how senseless such hopes were. He'd listen to me politely, but I knew he wasn't accepting my advice. "You need to think about your own life, Mr. Alexandros," I told him. "You must stop thinking about your parents' happiness and concentrate on your own." Again he would shake his head in agreement and politely thank me for listening to his problems, but my words never dispersed his black moods. He spoke to his mother when she called the office, but his words were cool and his face sad.

The more unhappy Alexandros became over his mother's third marriage, the more he resented his father's second marriage. During one of Jackie's recent trips to Greece, Alexander had been even nastier to her than usual. "I am counting the seconds until she goes back to New York," he told me one morning.

A few weeks later, when I heard him talking to, his father in New York just before Jackie was due to return to Athens, I knew that there would be a message for me about her travel plans. "When is Mrs. Jackie arriving?" I asked him nonchalantly when he came into my office after his phone call.

"I do not know and I do not care," he said curtly as he walked by my desk. "Let us hope she changes her mind and does not return."

"But I need to know what flight to book her on and when the car should pick her up at the airport," I told him. "Can you just tell me the day she intends to arrive?"

"I told you," he repeated even more curtly than before. "I do not know and I do not care." And he left the office. I was just about to call New York and speak to Jackie directly, which of course would be embarrassing, since she had given the information to Mr. Onassis to give to Alexander and me, when Alexander called me, informed me the date she was arriving, and hung up. The hate in his voice, even with those few words, was palpable.

The day of his accident, Jackie was again in New York with his father, but Alexander was still dark and morose. "Don't put any calls through to my office, Kiki," he told me when he informed me that our luncheon plans with the Germans had been canceled. "I don't want to talk to anybody today."

"Not even Fiona?" I asked him.

"Nobody," he repeated, and returned to his office, where he began to read some letters.

I did not say another word to him, but I knew that if Fiona called, I would put through her call immediately. A few days earlier, Alexander had informed me that in February he would be out of the country for a month. I had promised to make any necessary changes in his schedule, but had not questioned him about his plans. For I strongly suspected he would be on his honeymoon with Fiona. Artemis had spent many hours telling me what she thought was happening with Alexander and Fiona based on her own observations and the talk of the employees. She believed Fiona had become pregnant and Alexander was adamant about marrying her. It would be an act of supreme defiance to his father, but his mind was made up. As Artemis understood it, both Fiona and Alexander were serious people who had not planned to have this baby and were not anxious to become parents at that time in their lives. Yet, if the pregnancy had happened, they would handle it in their own way. That Fiona was forty concerned them the most. That she was sixteen years older than Alexander seemed to matter not at all. They loved each other regardless of their age difference, and whatever they decided about having a baby would not change that love.

One evening, however, Mrs. Artemis greeted me at the door with word that Fiona had lost the baby. Yet, she was convinced that Alexander and Fiona would still many. For the past week, it had been difficult to talk to Alexander without thinking about what Artemis said was happening between him and Fiona, but I would never break my pledge of secrecy to Artemis. My greatest fear was that, even though Artemis was loyal to her niece and nephew and had previously held many secrets about them from her brother, the vodka would overtake her mind and she would reveal her suspicions to her brother, who had no thought of such matters.

I was also worried about Artemis' revealing her suspicions to Jackie. Artemis was unhappy with the idea of her nephew's marrying Fiona. She disapproved of Fiona and, because she was a religious woman, she had been both saddened and relieved when she heard Fiona had lost the baby. After all, Fiona was forty, and Artemis felt that she was too old to have a child. Fiona had been a frequent subject discussed passionately between Artemis and Jackie, and I had heard their discussions many times. Jackie readily agreed with Artemis that Fiona would not make a proper wife for Alexander. Sometimes, when Jackie was expressing her opinion and stressing all the negative aspects of Alexander and Fiona's relationship, how Fiona was too old for Alexander and how little appreciation she had for Greece and the family, I sensed a streak of jealousy in Jackie's words. Christina, who liked and admired Fiona, was always anxious to point out to me that Fiona was wealthier, as well as more beautiful, intelligent, and independent than her stepmother. "Jackie can't help but be jealous of a real woman like Fiona," Christina told me many times.

Artemis and I had often talked about how Aristo adored strong, independent, beautiful women. Fiona certainly fit that description. Although I hated to agree with Christina in regard to any matter concerning her stepmother, I had to admit that Jackie had no desire for such a rival for attention in the Onassis family.

Fiona could make any woman jealous. If the day came when Alexander brought Fiona into his family and his father was forced to accept this woman as his daughterin-law, Jackie might well be shaken in her position as the most unique wife of a Onassis man. Perhaps Jackie also worried that if Fiona ever became the mother of Aristo's grandchildren and heirs, Jackie and her own children might suffer financially. Fiona was three years younger than Jackie, was the daughter of a British rear admiral, had achieved international fame as a model before her marriage to a baron, and was a distinct and attractive presence in any gathering. Regardless of whether Fiona became an Onassis wife or mother, I was certain Fiona von Thyssen was not the type of woman Jackie would want sitting opposite her at a dinner party in Glyfada or on the Christina.

Although Fiona and Jackie saw little of each other, one day on the Christina they were thrown together. Although Mr. Onassis forbade his son to marry Fiona, occasionally he had told him to do whatever he wanted with her, so long as it did not embarrass his family. One afternoon, Aristo invited his son and Fiona to spend the day with him and Jackie and her children on the Christina. Unfortunately, he apparently did not inform Jackie of his invitation, for when Fiona and Alexander approached the Christina on a Chris-Craft, Jackie was shocked to see them. Jackie had barely greeted Fiona and Alexander when she announced that she had to do some shopping and would be leaving for the nearby Nydri. Before Aristo had a chance to say a word, she arranged for her own ChrisCraft and disappeared for the day.

While Jackie was gone, Fiona and Alexandros spent a wonderful day swimming in the pool and ocean and playing games with John and Caroline. Strangely, that was the first day that Alexandros ever smoked in front of his father, asking permission from Aristo before he lit his cigarette. The day passed quite smoothly, and all five of them appeared happy and relaxed in one another's company. When Jackie arrived back on the Christina, loaded with packages from her shopping expedition, she was surprised to find everyone still in the pool, swimming and laughing.

One of the employees of the Christina told me thatwhen Fiona came out of the water, she and Jackie ended up sitting in the same chairs that Aristo and Maria always used when they were at the pool. "The two women barely spoke to each other," the employee told me. "The two

people in those ch airs that day acted nothing like the two who had- formerly occupied them."

Often, I had heard other employees on the Christina talk about Fiona after she and Alexandros had spent time alone on the boat. Whenever Alexandros and Fiona arrived, the staff on the Christina were delighted to have her as a guest on the boat. Her warmth and kindness had made them all adore her. "She is so beautiful," more than one of the employees had remarked to me after her visit to Skorpios. "She would be the perfect first lady of this ship and the entire island." I knew that their unspoken words were insinuating that the current first lady of the island would face stiff competition had Alexandros ever found the courage to marry Fiona.

Ironically, several months before the day of the accident, Artemis had come up with an idea which, if it could have been brought to reality, might have drastically changed the lives of all the members of the Onassis family. An unstoppable matchmaker, Artemis dreamed up the most surprising match of her life: Alexander Onassis and Caroline Kennedy. Such a match had been mentioned before, almost in a joking manner, but this time Artemis was deadly serious.

I was in Glyfada the night she mentioned her plan to Aristo and Jackie. Aristo had been complaining angrily about Fiona and was worried that his son would do something impulsive like marry her. "I do not know what else I can do to make him stop seeing her," he said. "Nothing I say makes that stupid boy realize what a terrible marriage that would be."

"Well, I have one suggestion," Artemis said, and she presented her idea. She had discussed it with me earlier, and I was not at all certain how Mrs. Jackie would react. Her reaction surprised me. She listened carefully to every word Artemis said, as her sister-in-law explained her feelings that it would be good for Caroline to marry an older man. After all, Aristo was twenty-eight years older than Jackie, and look how well their marriage was working. The difference in age between Alexander and Caroline wasn't even nine years. She was sixteen and he was twenty-four. Certainly, she was too young to marry now, but if they could be encouraged to become good friends and spend more time together, then maybe later, when she was ready to marry, they could fall in love.

"Bravo, Artemis," Aristo said, clapping his hands when his sister finished her presentation. "You have come up with a very interesting idea for us to consider. We must plant the seeds for a second marriage between an Onassis man and a Kennedy woman."

Although Jackie was not quite as enthusiastic as her husband, she did smile and said it all sounded like something to consider in the future. She agreed that Caroline and Alexander seemed to enjoy each other's company and that it would be a good idea to try and plan a few more family functions where they would have a chance to be together in Skorpios. Maybe even a family cruise for all of them on the Christina. As I watched her smile and praise Artemis for her clever idea, I could not help thinking that such a marriage, if it ever happened, would please Jackie more than a marriage between Alexander and Fiona.

Any worries Jackie might have about Fiona or her child with Alexander receiving a large portion of the Onassis fortune would be dissolved. Instead, it would be Jackie's own daughter who would inherit the millions that would inevitably go to an Onassis heir. I do not know how much Jackie was motivated by considerations of money, but Artemis and I often wondered about the reason for her strong dislike of her stepson's mistress.

Still, we all knew that Caroline was a sweet young girl, but that was all she was, and such a marriage was many years off. I knew how seriously Jackie took her role as a mother, and I understood that she would never consider anything that was not in her children's best interests. In addition, I knew how much Alexander needed to be with an older woman and I doubted that an innocent teenager like Caroline would hold the attraction for him that the experienced, worldly Fiona did. Still, it was obvious that Artemis had given both Aristo and Jackie a great deal to think about, and the match she had suggested was not totally out of the question for either the father of the future groom or the mother of the future bride. For a moment that night, I thought about how the American press had reacted to the marriage of the wife of their former First Lady to Aristotle Onassis. How on earth would they respond, perhaps ten years later, to a marriage between the daughter of the slain president and the son of Aristotle Onassis? Not with unequivocal approval, I was certain.

As I was remembering that fascinating evening in Glyfada, Fiona called the office and I forgot all about Caroline Kennedy and Alexander Onassis, and I put her call through to Alexander immediately. He picked up the phone on the first ring and began to talk to her. For over an hour, the two of them talked. During their telephone call, Koulouris, the offensive photographer, walked into my office, smiling, and holding a package of photographs. Without a word, he placed the package on my desk. I glanced at them quickly, and saw they were all pictures of Alexander and Fiona. I asked him how much he wanted and he told me a hefty sum, which I paid him immediately. As always, I just wanted him out of my office as quickly as possible.

Once Koulouris had left, I opened the package of photographs again and studied each one carefully. They were so beautiful that they almost took my breath away. They had been shot during a recent trip that Alexander and Fiona had taken to Porto-Heli, a seacoast town, which was a three-hour drive from Piraeus. The two of them looked like children, running uninhibited across the beach, swimming and playing in the ocean, kissing by the edge of the water. Alexander looked so handsome, so dark and athletic, his face filled with smiles I rarely witnessed. And Fiona was stunning and slender, looking years younger than her age of forty, her long, light brown hair blowing in the wind as the two of them raced across the beach. I wondered if she had already lost the baby when the pictures were taken or if she was still or ever really had been pregnant. I wondered if they had already decided to get married when they got to Porto-Heli or if they had just made up their minds that day. I wondered how two people could look so happy and so perfect for each other and still face such overwhelming problems from the Onassis family. And, lastly, I wondered where the photographer had been hiding when he took these glorious photographs.

When Alexander came out of his office, I was still studying the photographs. I was shocked to see that an hour had passed since Koulouris had left. "What are you looking at, Kiki?" Alexander asked me and I looked up to see his serious, unsmiling face.

I handed him the large pile of photographs, but he barely glanced at diem. "Did you pay a lot of money for these?" he asked me.

"The usual," I said as he nodded and handed them back to me.

"I'll look at these when I come back," he told me. "I'm going to the airport now."

"But you haven't eaten any lunch," I reminded him.

"I'm not hungry," he informed me, but I kept nagging him until he allowed me to order him a Coca-Cola and a plate of toast. He sat on the edge of my desk and nibbled at the toast and drank the Coke, but he was in a big hurry to go to the airport. I watched him quietly while he finished his small lunch, dressed, as always, in a dark navy suit with a fashionable silk shirt and tie. He certainly looked different than he had looked in the photographs when he had been wearing only his tiny bathing suit. I blushed, despite myself, when I remembered the stories I had heard about Alexandros' legendary sexual prowess. Fiona was, indeed, a lucky woman. I also considered, as I often had before, that Alexandros did not look that much like his father; he was even more handsome than Mr. Onassis. Several years later, when I was about to marry George Moutsatsos, Artemis, in a loving mood, had told George that I was so nice, so good, so beautiful, and so innocent. "But," she added, "Kiki is not so clever or else she would have married Alexandros." That day, in our office on Syngrou Avenue, I pushed away all of those thoughts. Alexandros was my boss, and only my boss. Most of the times when we were together, he would avert his eyes, too shy to look me directly in the face. I knew I was a capable secretary, and that he was always satisfied with and grateful for everything I did for him. Yes, we were friends, too, but we were not destined to become any more than that to each other.

I am certain that Alexandros was not thinking of me as he prepared to leave our office. His life was complicated enough. The subject of his relationship with Fiona made things uneasy between him and his father. And his marriage plans with Fiona, I knew, would only make them more so. Just the way Mr. Onassis' marriage to Jackie had complicated their lives. I had just about given up any hope that Alexander would ever learn to like, never mind love, his father's second wife.

Alexander's relationship with his father, however, had not changed very much during the four years of his father's marriage to a woman Alexander disliked. Despite the fact that both men loved each other, it had never been a perfect father-son relationship. Mr. Onassis was too busy

with his business and his personal life to show his son real affection. He could hug him or smile with pleasure when Alexander walked into a room, but in less than a minute his mood could change and he would be angry with something Alexander had done or not done.

Alexander, however, I was certain, was not thinking about his father either as he finished his small lunch. Even though he was in love with Mrs. Baroness Fiona, and she loved him very much and, they were, as I secretly knew, planning to marry, Alexander was still a sad man. The Alexander in the pictures I still held in my hand was a different man from the one in front of me. Perhaps, I thought, I had been foolish to have paid money for those pictures. Perhaps, I should have let the mean-spirited photographer sell the photographs to the newspaper and let everyone know once and for all that Alexander Onassis was in love with the Baroness Fiona von ThyssenBornemisza and was planning to marry her.

When Alexander finally got up to leave, I tried to stall him. I did not know why, but I did not want him to leave. I knew he was meeting an American pilot at the airport to train him to fly the Piaggio, but it was already after two. "Why not train him tomorrow, when you can do it earlier?" I suggested.

But he would not listen to me. "Kiki, I am leaving to the airport to fly," he told me. "And if you need something, after flying I will be at the Hilton. Otherwise, I will see you tomorrow."

After Alexander left, I opened the package of photographs again and reexamined each picture. Never had I seen my friend look so carefree, so handsome, or so happy. I could not put them down. I was surprised when I saw my tears fall onto the pictures. I had not realized, nor did I understand why, I was crying. When the phone rang a few minutes before four o'clock that afternoon, I was still looking at the photographs. It was Miltos Yiannacopoulos. "Kikitsa," he said to me in a barely recognizable voice, "we have lost Alexandros."

I was not sure what I was hearing. "What did you say?" I asked him.

"Alexandros went down with his plane," he told me. "He had a terrible accident. We don't know if he is alive or dead. "

I was certain I was dreaming. I tried to stand up from my chair, but my legs would not hold me. For a moment, I lost my senses and could not remember anything. I picked up the phone and heard that Miltos was no longer there. I tried to remember the phone number for the house in Glyfada but my fingers would not move. Finally, they dialed the number. I spoke to Panagiotis, who told me that everyone there had gotten the news a few minutes earlier. I could hear the screaming in the background. Mrs. Artemis was out of her mind.

I had barely hung up the phone when the door to my office opened and Costas Konialidis, Aristo's cousin and closest friend, walked in. "Kiki, what terrible thing has happened?" he asked me. "What destruction has come to us?" Before I could answer one word, he took me in his arms and held me and we were both sobbing against each other. For a long time, we just held each other and wept, and then we stopped because we both knew what had to be done. Without a word, we found the telephone numbers we needed and began the impossible task of informing the other members of the family what we had just learned. Together, we called Aristo and Jackie in New York, Christina in Brazil, Tina in Switzerland, and Fiona in London.

"How can I tell Aristo?" Costas cried to me as he dialed the phone number of the New York office. Aristo barely said a word to Costas Konialidis when he learned the news. It was as if he had lost the ability to speak.

I was dialing Fiona's number but I could not get through. I put the phone down for one minute when she called. "Kiki," she asked in a small voice, "is it true?"

"It is true," I answered, and she hung up the telephone.

The moment Mr. Costas Konialidis left the office to go to the airport to make arrangements to meet the family, a cameraman appeared in front of my desk and insisted that he be allowed to take a video inside Alexander's office. I told him that it was not the right time to do such a thing and, out of respect for Alexander, he must wait. But he would not listen to me and began to force his way into Alexander's office. I thought for sure I would kill this man with my bare hands, but I did not. Instead, I screamed and other men from the company came in and forcibly removed the cameraman from the building. Then I locked up Alexandros' office so that nobody else could go in.

It did not take long for everybody to know about the accident, and the telephones started to ring without any stop. I remember that for some time I had lost all my senses. I was answering the phones and talking to some of the press, but I was not really there. I did not know where I was, but the person who was in my office talking about Alexandros' accident was not me. It could not be.

All I could think about was how many times Mr. Onassis had told Alexander not to get on the airplane before it had been checked. I could hear him standing beside my desk, telling his son to make sure all the instruments had been carefully inspected. And Alexandros- had always answered him with a gentle, half-mocking smile. "Yes, Baba," he would say. "I will check everything. There is nothing for you to worry about." And Aristo would half push and half hug him and watch his son walk out of the room. This scene happened so often it was engraved into my mind. But I would never see it happen again. I would never hear those words, "Yes, Baba," again. I would never see that son walk out of my office again. This could not be happening. It had to be a dream.

But it was not a dream. And immediately after the accident I learned that the flaps of the airplane had been put in the wrong places. The left was where the right should be, and the right where the left should have been. That is why the Piaggio plane, at 3:15 that Monday afternoon, with Alexander in the right-hand seat, and the American pilot he was training, Donald McCusker, in the seat to his left, and the experienced Canadian pilot Donald McGregor, in the rear left seat, instead of going up more than one hundred feet, crashed down onto the runway. The two other pilots would both live, but Alexander would die. The doctors at Kat Hospital in Athens would keep him alive with machines until the family arrived, but there was no chance that he would survive the accident involving flaps that must not have been checked.

The next twenty-four hours were a nightmare. Alexander's handsome face had been smashed beyond recognition. Mr. Onassis and Jackie went directly to Kat Hospital, but there was so large a crowd in front of the hospital that their car could not pass through. Jackie tried to get out of the car and walk the few remaining feet to the hospital, but Aristo could not move at all. She came back into the car and sat beside him until the car finally made its way to the door of the hospital. Seconds later, Tina and Stavros Niarchos arrived at the hospital. With faces turned yellow with shock and pain, Tina kissed Aristo, and Aristo kissed Niarchos. For that moment, all their differences were forgotten and only one thing mattered: Alexandros. However, no one, I noticed, kissed Jackie, who stood beside her husband, silent, her eyes looking down.

Despina, the wife of President Papadopoulos, had been at Alexander's side before members of the family arrived, but Fiona came soon and never left. When Aristo got to the hospital, Fiona was already there. For the next twenty hours, she never left Alexandros' side. She never looked at anyone in the room, except for Alexandros, although she did answer Aristo and Tina when they spoke to her. She did not move from Alexandros' side, nor did she eat a morsel of food or take a sip of water. The nurses had given her a white robe, which made her look even taller and paler than usual. With her light brown hair streaked with blond and translucent skin, she looked almost angelic, as if she were a mirage in the midst of the hell into which we all had fallen. But if she were an angel, she was an angel without life. Her eyes, which were locked on Alexander's face, did not seem to see anyone else in the room, just her lover. She held his hand in hers, as if she believed he could feel her touch. Her lips moved in what I thought was silent prayer.

During those final hours of Alexander's life, the room was filled with the members of the family, as Artemis, Tina, Merope, Kalliroi, Christina, Jackie, and Aristo came and went, each of them crying, some aloud, some silently, their lips all moving, like Fiona's, in prayer.

In my own private world of grief, I could still see Fiona, and despite the haze in which I stood, I noted the way the family deferred to this woman they had, for the past six years, shunned. Even when Aristo came to touch his son, Fiona barely flinched. Her hand still clutching Alexander's, she assumed the position in his death scene that she had never been allowed in his life, connected to him by a bond no Onassis dared disturb. Occasionally her hand traveled to her lover's face, where his nose, which miraculously did not seem shattered, and his eyes, which never opened, remained unbandaged, or to his motionless body beneath the white sheet, but mostly it was his hand she would not release.

One of the most tragic figures in that room full of tragic figures was unquestionably Christina. Supported by her aunts, she stood beyond the bed, sobbing openly, shaking her head as if to rid herself of a hideous dream, crying out her brother's name, begging him to wake up and speak to her. Even when Christina cried out, Fiona did not flinch. I was certain she heard nothing in the room, except the sounds of the machines keeping Alexandros alive.

Jackie stood beside her husband, her face bare of cosmetics, her lips praying, her skin pale, as if at any moment she might faint. But Fiona did not look as if she might faint. Yet, strangely, although she looked as if she might die, just be blown away by the slightest wind, she also appeared so strong that it seemed to be her breath that was keeping everyone in the room, including the body beneath the sheets, alive. When I closed my eyes I could see that same body running like a young boy across the beach in Porto-Heli, and I thought my heart would break into a million pieces and I would surely die