Bangkok Babylon. Jerry Hopkins

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      Eventually, his parents divorced, and his mom and the kids settled in Washington state where she had a sister and found a job as a secretary; welfare took up the slack. Joe's mother was a strong woman, Joe said–manipulative, larger than life; “I had my first adult conversation with her when I was fifty-three.”

      Starting in the seventh grade, Joe was shipped off to a Catholic seminary in California for six years, during which time he became the only Eagle Scout in the seminary. He was mercilessly teased, just as he was a target in the troop for being the only Catholic. He also suffered through a bout of polio that affected some minor muscles in his face and made his fingers unfit for continuing piano lessons, although he was still able to make a fist.

      After a spiritual internship in Missouri, Joe was ordained and shipped off to another seminary in Wisconsin. This is where he earned his merit badge in rebellion, challenging seminary regulations and protesting the nascent Vietnam war. His superiors got their revenge. In 1967, as the war heated up, they sent him to the country next to it, Thailand. He was not pleased. And he vowed not to stay.

      “I was an angry young man,” he recalled, “and the rest of the priests were glad to see the back of me.”

      The sermons on the military bases stopped when he completed his Thai language classes and was posted in Loei near the Laos border, where he taught himself Lao, and then, after crossing into Laos, took his faith to the hilltribes; he once told me he thought he still could say Mass in Hmong. This is when he got to know all the classic characters–and killers–of the secret Laos war.

      By war's end, Joe was back in Bangkok, where he took over the parish in the city's toughest slum, called the Slaughterhouse for the abattoir where three thousand pigs were killed every night. Most of the butchers were descended from Vietnamese Catholics who migrated to Thailand, because Buddhists were forbidden to kill and Muslims wouldn't go near pork. Fast food joints refused to deliver in this neighborhood, taxis wouldn't take you there after dark, and if you let it slip to a prospective employer that you lived there, you didn't get hired. Joe moved into a two-room shanty squat in the middle of the slum, slept on an old army cot, dressed himself out of the poor box, offered spiritual nourishment to the butchers and their families, and in 1972, started a kindergarten. This is where the accomplishments that followed began. From then on, Joe said, it was war, and the priest not only said Mass on the weekend, he became an urban guerilla.

      When he heard a ten-year-old girl whose mother was a prostitute in a brothel was going to introduce the girl to the trade, Joe negotiated a price with the brothel owner to buy the girl, then put her in a school and a foster home. When a twelve-year-old slum girl was raped and a man was apprehended, it looked as if he'd walk after paying a bribe. Joe had four hundred slum women march on the police station, telling the cops to either guarantee they'd prosecute the sonofabitch or give him to the women for one hour, and if they didn't do one or the other, he'd be back the next day with the women and media. (The man was sentenced to seven years.) When Joe learned that some gangs were planning a move on a neighborhood and he noticed that the canine population was nil, he organized a posse and “borrowed” a dozen or so animals from another slum area to stand guard.

      Perhaps he was most creative when there was a fire. They averaged about two a year, and Joe believed that it was important to rebuild immediately. A community meeting was held even as the embers cooled. The city had a program where homeowners– even if they were squatters living on land illegally–were entitled to more than $500 after a fire, and renters got about half of that. Joe said he'd advance the money needed to start construction on an adjacent piece of wasteland that very day, explaining that the longer they delayed, the harder it would be to claim the right to rebuild on or adjacent to the original slum site.

      Joe's social workers told the people that after a fire, everything material was gone, except for the few items saved on the way out of the flames, so it was important to hold on to the social structure. That meant that if these people could continue to send their children to the same schools, if they could continue to take the same bus routes to their jobs, if they could continue to shop at the same slum stores, if they could continue to see the friends and relatives with whom they'd lived–often for generations–still in place as a community, their chances of survival were increased. And the psychological damage might be diminished.

      At the meeting, they also were told that the new houses probably would be smaller than their old ones and that it would take a year, maybe two years, fighting through all the red tape before they could rebuild on their original sites. It would not be easy. At one such meeting I attended, a man said if rebuilding was illegal, maybe the police would arrest them. He was told that if anyone were arrested, everyone else in the neighborhood was to go to the police station and surrender, confessing identical guilt. Before they went, the mommies were to give the children as much to drink as possible and sticky candy to eat, so that when they got to the police station the smallest children would end up peeing on the floor and leaving their gummy handprints on policemen's trousers. The mommies were also told to have the children take their dogs, so they could pee on the floor as well.

      Committees were formed. One to deal with the police and government. Another to distribute food and clothing that was coming in from the business sector and concerned citizens. A third to organize activities for the children. One more to visit the lumber yards the next day and find the cheapest nails and wood and corrugated roofing, all at Joe's expense, repayment due when the government honored its mandated compensation.

      The fire meeting I attended was on Thursday afternoon. The lumber and so on was delivered by Friday night. Construction began right away. Daddies, mommies and children carried the boards and bags of cement. Tools were loaned by others in the slum. The nine-meter-long poles that would be used as corner posts for the new homes were too long to be carried down the twisting walkways from the highway, so the men waded across a swamp with the boards on their backs.

      All night and through the next two days and nights the slum echoed with the sounds of hammers and saws. Every slum has its “slum carpenters”–men who have worked in construction or who have built their own homes in the past–and they told the others what to do. No one slept longer than a few hours, thanks in part to someone's having laced the drinking water with amphetamines.

      The last family moved into the last house at 6:30 a.m. Monday, just as the sun came up and well before government offices came to life in an effort to keep the slum dwellers from rebuilding. The stench of the charred wood still hung in the air, along with the sweet smell of success.

      In every war there are losses as well as victories and Joe's was no different. Pigs were not slaughtered on a monthly occurrence called Monks' Day, but on one of them, which also happened to be his birthday, Joe arrived at the Slaughterhouse in his white robes, coming from some public appearance. He stopped to lead the butchers and their families, who lived in shacks built on top of the killing pens, in saying the rosary. Nearby was a small group of men who'd decided to kill some pigs anyway, for the easy profit, and they ignored Joe when he asked them to stop for the twelve minutes that the prayers took. In response, the men splashed Joe with warm blood. He was shocked. He remembered bolting and then standing still, alone, for five minutes, then joining another group of men who customarily spent their evenings drinking and gossiping. Joe told them what happened and said he was going back to America.

      Packing a small bag, he drove to the Holy Redeemer Church and, finding it locked up for the night, climbed a drainpipe in the back and went to sleep in one of the small bedrooms usually used by new or visiting priests. About three in the morning, he was awakened by a pounding on the church door. He pulled on some clothes and to his great surprise, he saw several of the Slaughterhouse men, drunk, who'd arrived in a pickup truck. “You can come home now,” one of them said. “We took care of the problem.” Joe was told that when the police arrived to arrest the men for violating Monks' Day, mysteriously they'd all had accidents and had broken arms and legs. Eleven were taken to the СКАЧАТЬ