Five years ago I was dirty and sweaty on the Queensborough Bridge.

On September 11th, I was a punk kid who needed to be in New York City because I'd seen some movies and TV shows that made the city seem impossibly complex, light years from the sleepy little towns I'd in which I'd been raised. It was a day that will live on in platitudes and speeches and creepy collector's plates, but I remember it as a scar, a loss, a heartbreak... and the beginning of the end of my youth.

I rode a bike very, very close to the Shit that day. On my way down I purchased a disposable camera from a Pakistani man who sold knick-knacks to tourists. That afternoon I brought the camera to a one-hour photomat and had them printed. I biked to a friend's dorm and scanned them, then sent them off into the ether, more evidence to convict... not the best or the worst quality, but more evidence. More to see.

That night I talked about what I saw on my father's TV station. Later on, I biked over two bridges back to my dorm on Roosevelt Island. I was dirty, my lungs hurt, and I had lost six pounds in seven hours.

In the evening we sat and watched the TV, to find out more, to put together the evidence and make theories and wait, and anticipate, and dread. We had a phenomenal view of the Empire State Building. When the TV said there'd been a credible bomb threat there, I watched it through the glass, glancing back and forth, not wanting to miss the destruction of the silly hopes and wasted ambitions of all my life.

The Rest of the Story: William Todd

THE REST OF THE STORY: William Todd

"That picture... it haunts me. The violent eyes, the dark, sweaty skin, that rough, tangly beard. You think to yourself: that man right there's got some troubles. That's not what I ever wanted to put forward."

At 62, William Todd has led a tough life. He is one of the hundreds of thousands displaced in Biloxi, Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Todd lives in FEMA trailer lot 117C, three miles from where his family's home once stood. A day before the storm approached, on August 28th, 2005, Todd loaded his three children and his wife Gladys into a neighbor's minivan and drove north, to Memphis. When he returned to his home two weeks later, everything was gone.

"My employer... he'd come back to town before I did and tried to warn me and my wife, but there's no preparing for it. Everything we had, everything I'd worked on in the last ten years, it was gone."

Todd says he's back to square one, but it's not the first time. Twelve years ago, he was homeless, a recovering crack cocaine addict trying to survive on the streets of Biloxi while staying off the pipe. He doesn't like to talk much about what led him to drugs, except that chronic unemployment created a vicious cycle that was hard to break. A great deal of William's time was spent at the Gaston Hewes Recreation Center (also since destroyed by Katrina). The Hewes center housed the Feed My Sheep soup kitchen, and it's where he came to eat, take a nap, and play some checkers.

"When you're homeless, it's the only place you can go to find people who'll talk to you."

That's where Todd met Matt Kenlon, a freelance photographer living in Biloxi. Matt had recently come back from Hannibal, Missouri, where he worked for the Quincy Herald-Whig in covering the Mississippi River flooding of 1993. There he says he saw utter and complete devastation.

"It put me in touch with people whose lives were forever altered and ruined," Kenlon says, "and there, was, I guess, a connection with those people. I felt like I had to tell the stories of those less fortunate."

When he returned to Biloxi, Kenlon began spending his time on the streets. "It's not especially the safest thing to do, and not really the most profitable, but it was something I wanted to devote some time to." Matt met William Todd in November of 1994 at Feed My Sheep.

"Matt asked me if he could take my picture," William recalls. "I said 'sure, but let's go to Winn-Dixie first.' He took me over and I got some fruit and vegetables."

Kenlon shot William's pictures behind the Hewes center, against a plain slate wall. "Most of them were unremarkable. One shot, though, stood out. The anger and hurt in his eyes. I sold that picture a month later."

The photo was published in a coffee table book produced by McLaren Press in 1996 called "America's Refuse: Homeless in the Heartland." Matt was able to bring William a copy at his very own apartment. Todd had been clean and sober for more than two years, and had managed to hold down a job delivering newspapers for over a year. He'd restarted his life at 52.

That should have been the end of William Todd's story. Five years later, everything changed.

"When I went to the market, people started looking at me funny." By then he'd married Gladys Parker and adopted her three sons, Julius, Tyrone and Bo. Julius was sixteen in 2001 and when the family bought a computer, he began spending most of his time online.

"I was hanging out in chatrooms, message boards, things like SomethingAwful.com or Fark.com, and then, all of a sudden, I see my stepdad's face." Julius took it rough. "Someone was using it as a joke, I guess. I was afraid to say something, I didn't know what it meant or why it was."

Someone had scanned the picture of Todd from America's Refuse and placed it online as a sort of punchline. Julius wasn't the first Biloxi native to notice. The picture was forwarded to inboxes across town. Todd was, by then, a supervisor at the local newspaper. At his next employee review, the picture surfaced. He didn't know what to say. He was let go. William was jobless for six months after that.

Things are different now. William works for a contractor that's rebuilding several buildings in Biloxi-- including the Hewes Center. Todd still doesn't know what to say about the picture.

"It makes me sick... when I see it. I see someone who might be capable of such things, I see someone I don't recognize. Who's not redeemable. You know, I see a rapist, I really do. And that scares me."

William's identity? You know him better as the YOU GONNA GET RAPED guy.

And that's... the REST of the STORY!

Hey Jerky!

I've been rethinking my once concrete stance on being called Johnny. See, I haven't regularly been called Johnny since I was four years old. It's unbecoming and reeks of immaturity, and I knew it at the time. I was a five year old boy who wanted (and still desires, by the way) to be taken seriously, regardless of how many times I soil my bedclothes.

SAMPLE DIALOGUE: No, Father, Johnny would not like to watch the Smurfs. John wishes to watch the McNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. And let's have some silence now, please.

And then he would let me win at chess. Anyway, several years ago there was, I should admit, a brief lighthearted period (about two or three weeks) in an overall cavernously bad relationship where I was called Johnny. This, of course, was unacceptable because I couldn't take the usage seriously, not when the person calling me Johnny regularly spoke of slitting my thoat while I slept.

Ah, young love.

I'm not sure why I've recently turned a corner on Johnny usage. There are a handful of people at work who are called Johnny-- a bartender, a nightclub performer (my good friend John LaMere), even the famed Jim Long is often called "Jimmy" (Johnny's first cousin, of course) by folks at work.

There are famous Johnnys, of course. Drug addled actors, drug addled musicians... and, of course, there's Johnny Storm.

I'm lucky, in that way, that Johnny is a generally accepted and, ahem, cool derivation from my name. Other than people named Billy, Jimmy and Charlie, most people don't have it that easy.

UNACCEPTABLE SOCIAL DERIVATIONS WITH THE "Y" OR "IE" SUFFIX

Matty
Paulie (unless this is Philadelphia or northern New Jersey)
Marky
Richie
Margie (the root is also unacceptable)
Jackie
Jamie (sorry, that shit sucks)
Davy
Tommy (unless you're a member of the Mouseketeers and you still own your mouse-ears)
Georgie
Sammy
Huey
Dewey
Louie
Suey (I made that one up, but I'll bet it's out there)

What does that last suffix add? What does it change? Why is it human nature to infantilize (or, more like, first grade-icize) ourselves. It's a diminuative reduction of one's self, if you ask me.

That said, when you've got a name like John Smith, there's not much inflating of one's self ego that can be accomplished with simply a name.

My late Uncle Bobby was not a Robert. He was born Bobby Dwayne Smith in 1937. It says "Bobby" on both his birth and death certificate. My grandfather, the first John W. Smith, who I've never met, clearly hated names.