Less than an hour after the bomb went off, the Feds began a literal witch hunt. In the very first place they searched was a telephone that I called rather often, and called from often enough. Even the barest of competence (not to mention supervisor oversight) dictates that the investigators in a case like this run a call detail recorder analysis on that phone, to find out who had been talking to it. The Book says that they then have to check out the dossiers of at least some of the names that come up. Which dossiers to give the greatest scrutiny depends on the number and kind of flags on each dossier. The next step is to do call detail recorder analyses of the phones of everyone whose name comes up with flagged dossiers. Special attention is paid to the number of recurring links with other dossiers and phones on the list and on the standard watch lists. This method yields more lists and more links. They get munched and crunched, and sorted and filed. Eventually, graphs are plotted. One graph isolates the guy with the longest wind. Several of us vie for the title. Take me, for example. My dossier dates back at least to 1967. It has more flags than Carter has pills. Some are my own fault. Some are mistakes. Some are flat out lies. Some of the phone links are more interesting than others. One phone to which my dossier is linked is of particular interest, even to laypersons. It certainly perked the interest of any professional using a computer to investigate the Bari bombing. This is it's tale, the tale of Shannon's phone.

The phone itself was a princess. It lived with the empties on the floor next to her bed. The night stand was too full of toys to make room for any tool. First things first. It should have been a wall phone. It would have been much better off. By the time of the Bari bombing, it's cord had been tripped over so many times that you had to hold the RJ-11 plug on the phone end of the cord in with your thumb while you talked, or else it would slip out and cut you off. This made for some interesting misunderstandings. Eventually, I got tired of replacing the cord. Capitalist engineering sucks dead rats. Curse them. Curse their minions. They could design a connector latch that wouldn't break when you tripped over the cord, but then they couldn't sell you a string of replacements, now could they? Curse them all. May they wither and dwindle. Eventually, I slapped some duct tape on it and it held just fine. That duct tape sure is versatile stuff, strong too. When properly applied, it has an aesthetic quality to it that appeals to people like me. I know for a fact that I'm not the only one. I'll get back to the duct tape later on. It's fascinating stuff.

For years I've had this on-again/off-again relationship with this poet who calls herself "Shannon." It was her phone. It was her floor. Mostly, it was her feet that tripped on the cord. She also trips on the empties. Her carpet is subject to serious floor surf. Shannon has a well turned ankle. Her legs reach clear to the ground. She likes to sing this particular Cole Porter song a cappella. She never forgets the words. She cries in her drink when Sinatra's on the juke box. She also turned me on to Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. I love 'em all. There's no accounting for taste. I even like poets, some more than others.

There's no money in poetry, even Shannon's. Her books bring in pin money, at best. So Shannon hired on as a stripper. Before that she was a teenage street whore, a refugee from Kansas. She had run away, and not without reason. No one else but a john would hire a minor without any papers. So there she was. I've been there, I can relate. If your papers are not in order, America's no place to look for a job. If you have any doubts about this, just give it a try. Better still, burn your wallet, dress poor, and go for a stroll through any rich neighborhood. See for yourself how far you get without papers in the so-called land of the "free." For that matter, go try cashing a check, the one you need to cash in order to eat, for example. In America, paper comes first, people come second. Paper sleeps in a palace, people sleep in the street. Some people work in the street, too. More people work on the sidewalk. Where ever you work, it's for almighty paper. Paper, paper, everywhere and not a bite to eat. Paper prices. Paper rules. Paper über alles. Some paper is even worth more than human skin, even yours. But when properly applied, skin has an aesthetic quality to it, that to my eye, paper lacks. When it's their own skin in question, paper looks to most people like it would make a better target. You generally want to make a big hole, even in a paper target, but it's the size of the group that decides the day. Tight groups are better. The tighter your group, the longer you're gonna survive.

Whoring is a job like any other, and deserves no less respect. It's an ancient and honorable trade. If you don't think it's work, just give it a try. Hard work or easy, it's all done for pay. If you're doing it because you're getting paid, it's work, whatever it is. Work is work is work. Some work pays better than others, that's all. Whoring pays well, if it's done right. There are a million ways to do it. Some ways are better than others. It pays best when employed in conjunction with other scams. Then it can pay very well, indeed.

It doesn't matter whether you work with your mouth, your back, or your hands, your labor is a commodity because everything is a commodity, here in the vast paper prison that you and your compulsive submission to authority have built around us all. As long as labor is a commodity, time is a commodity. Time is life, thus life itself is a commodity. Even yours has a price. The price of life varies. A crack fiend in Oakland once contracted to burn an old granny alive for $50 worth of crack. Fifty dollars worth of crack is a piece about the size of a snot-booger that grew up down-wind of a steel mill, only white. It's big enough to make you tingle, but not big enough to make you twitch. Granny had been trying to chase his connection off her corner with a broom. She had made quite a nuisance of herself. She was alienating the customers. The connection couldn't be bothered to kill her himself. Maybe he didn't trust his nine to take care of business. I wouldn't either. Bullets don't kill people – holes kill people. You want a big hole, that way it's quick. You do want it to be quick. Nine just isn't big enough. Burned alive is relatively slow, even when it is quick. The crack fiend blew it. Why am I not surprised? She escaped the fire. It made front page news. Volunteers rebuilt her home. In another version of the story, it was four hundred dollars worth of crack. Either way, life around here is cheap, very cheap.

As long as anything is a commodity, everything is a commodity. This disastrous interlude in humanity's long and glorious epoch shall pass, though certainly not until we will it. In the mean time, everything is a commodity. Get used to it. Be it time, life, food, buildings, sex or protection, a commodity is a commodity is a commodity. Commodity fetishism is the heart and core of the American experience. Everything has its price, even you. Near as I can tell, most of you sell yourselves pretty damn cheap, compared to what you say you think you're worth. Imagine what this tells me about you.

Whoring can also be seen as running a small business, not unlike running any other, except of course for the role of certain police. It all depends how you look at it. Analyses vary. Either way, it's only illegal so the cops can get in on the money, and do they ever. Some have made history at it. The very first white pimp in America to ever pimp a Chinese whore, worked as a San Francisco Vigilance Committee cop on the side, back in the 1850s. His official duty was "brothel inspector." His name doesn't matter; hers was Ah Toy. In another version, he wasn't her pimp; he merely "managed" her protection. That would make her his "client." In another version, they were "just good friends," drawn together by their (at the time) relatively esoteric hobby, miscegenation. In an era when men controlled most Chinese houses of prostitution, and most Chinese whores were essentially chattel, Ah Toy was famous for her independence. Court records show her to have been a successful litigant an numerous occasions. I don't know what happened between them. I wasn't there. This is just the kind of stuff people like that lie about anyway. It's not like they had much choice in the matter. You'd lie too. There's no point trying to catch 'em in the act, either. While you're busy trying, they'll just slip a different lie past you, somewhere where you weren't looking. They're on to that trick. It's old. This stuff goes back, wa-a-a-y back. There's an old rhyme that goes:

"The miners came in '49, the whores in '51. And that's the genealogy of the native son."

At eighteen Shannon became legally old enough to work on the books. She immediately quit strutting her stuff on the stroll and started stripping at a club called the Market Street Cinema. She worked her way up. She was working at the Mitchell Brothers' O'Farrell Theater when I met her. Mitchell Brothers' is generally considered the best strip club in town, some say in the country. I don't know about that; I've never been in a strip club. I can't see the point. That's no reason you shouldn't go. If you should remember to take along cash, I hear you'll have a much better time. Shannon immediately started making good money at stripping, not as good as a street whore makes, but better than a poet. When poetry pays as well as whoring, society will be on the mend.

Stripping is a hell of a lot safer than flat backing out on that funky old stroll. A gurl could get murdered out there. Or worse. Stripping also takes up a whole lot less of your time than being a housewife. Better still, and unlike the housewife, a stripper don't have to fuck. It's all whoring, they tell me, however it's done. Some sell sizzle, some sell steak. The housewife also does dishes. Shannon doesn't do dishes, ever. Windows, yes; dishes, no. And not just any windows, either. Shannon is not domestic. Shannon is feral. She eats in restaurants, good restaurants, restaurants where the people at the other tables look down their noses but can't throw her out because it's not their place, and besides, the management loves her. So does the staff. She's a regular, and she knows how to tip. Regulars get treated well. That's why they're regulars. Regulars tip. That's why they get treated so well. There are some things in life that staff and management do agree on whole heartedly. No one ever spits in a regular's soup.

I got a tip for you people out there: You always get what you paid for. Sometimes you get what you think you paid for. That's different.

I got another tip for you: Call it what it is. You don't have to fuck to call it a trick. The best tricks are totally dry. The absolute best-paying trick, in terms of cost effectiveness, safety, mark-up, and ease (if you're one of the ones with the knack) is a talk trick. A good mouth can talk you off in four minutes flat, and do it without even breaking a sweat, feet up and drink in hand, often while stifling a yawn. Not all mouths have this knack. Shannon's mouth is an exceptional mouth, as working mouths go. Most working mouths work hard for their money. Getting out of work takes skill and talent (and of course, that burning desire that fuels Shannon's life). You gotta start with potential. Then you gotta learn. Start with the language. Don't sweat the technique. People ask me sometimes, how I learned how to talk English. I learned a whole lot of it watching that Shannon do phone sex out of her apartment on Geary Street. I watched with my feet up, drink in hand. Sometimes I had my boots off. I never yawned once. Hey, y'gotta pass the time somehow. As far as education goes, it beat living hell outta college. For one thing, college wont let you drink with your feet up in class, let alone dress like that. For another, they teach an gawd-awful lot of hearsay and lies. You don't have to pay tuition to hear hearsay and lies. You can hear 'em for free, any old time you want. They're wandering out in the street even now, blatting and mewling and casting about. Scratch 'em behind the ear a little, and tell 'em they're good. They're sure as damn hell to follow you home. Save the tuition, spend it on fun. It's what you actually know that counts. Sometimes, it's who. Sometimes, it's how. Sometimes the best way to know someone for sure is to know them in the biblical sense. Other times, all you have to do is listen to 'em talk.

Shannon's stint as a part time phone whore overlapped the period of the Bari case investigation. No matter how many ears got involved, the topic never came up once. This made the interlude no less amusing. Some interludes in this life are more amusing than others. This one ranked. English is a great language, no matter what people say. Never mind the spelling, the computer can fix that later (Harumph – Editor). But watch what you say on the phone. You wouldn't want to be misconstrued, now would you?

Shannon says the damnedest things, and right off the top of her head, too. When I was there, she'd also dress up and act out the parts with her toys. If the guys only knew. Privacy is but an attractive illusion. So are some other phone fantasies. I have no idea what Shannon did when I wasn't there. Neither did most people. For all the guy(s) on the other end knew for certain, she was picking her nose. Shannon's nose is very attractive. It turns up a little, in a perky sort of way. It certainly has attracted a lot of attention over the years. It's some people's favorite part. The nose knows what the ears want to hear. The mouth says what ever it's told to say. The nose knows what it wants to hear, too. That's why it tells the mouth to say what it says, and, on occasion, to do what it does. Therein hangs a tale or few. Some people will say anything for a buck. Her nose sure can turn up a buck. I think she must have hunted truffles in a prior life. I can't understand how she ever got bored with phone whoring. She had a solid corner on an esoteric market niche. She was having so much fun. Talk is her favorite position by far, and money is mighty arousing. Talk is cheap only to those who don't pay. Other folks pay through the nose. Shannon knows all about paying through the nose. Her mouth can pay the bill as well as her booty, better sometimes. And so, her tale's for sale. And such tales she tells, too. Of course, any tale for sale can be seen as a sort of a trick, even this one. Actual sex needn't be part of the formula. It's not the sex that makes a trick be a trick – it's the money. I know for a fact that some of you are getting off right now, just hearing about this stuff secondhand. Ok. Sure. Go for it. This one's on me. If you want any more, we can negotiate. You know how to negotiate, don't you? I know how you could learn.

In her copious free time Shannon parties a lot. She also goes about doing good deeds, spreading joy, giving alms and advice. That's when she's not causing trouble. Shannon is a trouble maker, par excellence. Any time you're short on trouble, just tank her up, and point her in the right direction. She'll do the rest on her own. Have no doubts about that. She knows just what to say. Except when she's lying, she calls things what they are. That's exactly what trouble likes to hear most. Trouble hates the euphemism. Trouble has discerning tastes. Trouble hates the middle ground. Trouble loves extremes. Trouble comes when it's called, too. Trouble is really good about that. You just have to know the how to call it, that's all. It's easy to learn. Hint: observe others. What trouble don't do so well is to heel. Lie down, roll over and stay, trouble never heard of. Therein lies a tale or few, too, as well as a sure and certain cure for boredom. Boredom hasn't a chance against trouble. It has to turn tail, if not more. "Yo, trouble, come and get it!" is exactly what you don't want to be misconstrued as once having said on the phone, at least not if you can stand being bored. Bored is what you want to be, right? Of course you do. Consider all the alternatives. The same goes for print. Trouble can read between the lines, too. You ain't the only one. You don't have to go looking for trouble, if trouble's what you want. Trouble comes looking for you. Trouble loves company. Trouble has a lot of friends. Some are very attractive.