In Which We Change Our Mind About Him

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To Each His Own Mafia

by LEON DISCHE BECKER

If S — my high school’s most prolific bully — ever reads this, I'll have to content myself with a life in hiding. Luckily he isn’t a man of letters, and though he tries to phone me every once in a while he isn’t particularly interested in what I have to say. He is more interested in how I can stand living the way I do: drudging along, trying to write. S considers every man that doesn’t at least attempt to live like Genghis Khan a pitiable incrimentalist that should consider himself lucky that he lives at a time in which faggotry isn’t punishable by death. But once in a while he finds a use for us ineffectuals. That's the context in which we first became acquainted.

It was mid-August, 2001, my first day at the new school — my first lunch break, to be precise. I was meandering across the schoolyard, pretending to receive calls and texts on my mobile, when I saw him pointing at me from the smoker's corner, surrounded by his apparatchiks. Who is this little asshole? he yelped, breaking out in siren laughter. He judged me from thirty yards. I knew better than to respond; I'd heard much about S from my friends at the school. 

A frightening presence, by all accounts: 15 years old (if his documents were to be trusted), 200 pounds, countless priors — a school bully well on his way to becoming a federal issue. And he looked the part. Sitting across from me in chemistry class that afternoon, fidgeting with his phone, eating and sleeping, he seemed at once impulsive and world-weary. His face was a registry of punishments. I found it hard to believe that we were the same age. I had hardly hit puberty — S looked like a veteran of several Balkan wars. At the time I viewed this maturity as an expression of his lifestyle.

His father had recently come to taxable income, chiefly through the undeclared transport of industrial amounts of wood from Tajikistan, and moved his family from the autonomous housing projects of Wedding into a neo-classical mansion in leafy Zehlendorf —  a house commissioned and long inhabited by Alfred von Tirpitz, Grand Admiral of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial Navy. They customized it to their liking. Its graying exterior received a new Ivory coat, its antique shutters were splashed in Azure, the crescent moon of Turkey hung from a mast affixed below the balcony. Their neighbors, most of them elderly, welcomed the new household in keeping with local customs: sidewalk evasions, hurried disregard, anonymous complaints to state authorities regarding noise/(potential) building violations. S’s family, usually referenced as Family G. in investigative news pieces about their exploits, were in the process of cleaning up their corporation. Their son was a more difficult matter.

The first conversation I had with him came two weeks or so after my enrollment and concerned Angela, a vivacious girl in the grade below us. S had decided, on a whim, apparently, that she would make a good fit for him, and tapped me to speed up the pursuit —  a pragmatic choice, given that I was going out with her. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

His car pulled up nearby the Kebab stand, around the corner from our school, just as I reached the front of its waiting line.

Sauce? Salad? the proprietor addressed me.

One with garlic & spicy sauce, as many tomatoes as possible. No onions.

No onions? Lucky girl.

S arrived next to me and ordered: Lütfen, sadece et.

Sadece et mi? the proprietor responded. 

As I said! S huffed. The man shrugged and went to work, producing a doner kebab with no salad at all, a heap of lamb slivers in a pouch of flatbread. S paid for us both and we sat down to eat in his car. You are Leon, right? he said, in between mouthfuls. You are from Charlottenburg, aren’t you? Once we’d agreed on the basic aspects of my biography, he got to Angela.

He started by praising my audacity. Me, going for such a girl — he could appreciate that. He regretted that fate had pitted us against each other. The most troubling thing about this monologue, at the time, was that he seemed completely sincere.

But why Angela? Simple, he said. She’s a good girl. I like good girls. He said he meant the kind of girls that do their homework, don’t smoke weed, don’t wear Buffalo shoes; the kind that didn’t let some dirt-Arabs gangbang them. There are not many of these in Germany, he observed. But there are some: German girls with very boring parents — you know, who wear thin-rimmed glasses and no make-up; some Turkish girls, but that’s dangerous; also, Jews. Angela fell into the latter category.

The problem with this foible was that most good girls were afraid of S. (He didn’t much appreciate the girls he did get: more than enough, let me tell you; but always some Pollacks who hate their parents. I like that kind of thing sometimes, but I can’t take them anywhere!) But Angela had spoken to him — the day before, when he sat nearby her on the bus. At the end of the ride, he suggested coffee. She turned him down, but in a manner he deemed encouraging. He’d concluded that I was the small thing keeping them apart. It was only honorable to tell me this, he said, adding that he wanted me to stay away from Angela for as long as it took him to try his luck.

He couldn’t expect me to do that.

I can. Watch me.

But why would I comply?

Because you’re afraid, he said. Aren’t you?

I told him that I was not afraid, though he shouldn’t take that to mean that I didn’t respect him.

Excellent, he said, grinning now. He suggested we continue our conversation elsewhere. One doesn’t just sit in a car, staring at the street. I told him that I had to go home.

That’s fine, he said. You’re from Charlottenburg. I’m heading in that direction.

As he started the engine, I remembered that he was the same age as me and couldn’t possibly have a driver’s license. Contrary to my expectations he drove superbly, albeit not to Charlottenburg.  

We pulled over nearby the dreary Pankstrasse, in Wedding. Come, he said, and we climbed out.

My parents are expecting me, I said. I’ll take the train home; it’s no problem.

He said that he just wanted to show me his place, have a mocca. He went on to make the reasonable argument that he was actually saving me time by driving me.

But I thought you lived in Zehlendorf.

Still have a flat here.

We shuffled through a passageway into a good square mile of courtyard — a metropolis of parking lots, garbage collection sites and playgrounds, encircled by ashy tenements.

He turned to me and I noticed that he looked a bit nauseous: You aren’t really planning on seeing Angela any longer, are you? I told him that I liked her a lot, and apologized. He nodded and we trotted on; he tended to a phone call. We arrived at a bright-red entrance and were received there by a wiry middle-aged gentleman, in a crisply ironed jogging suit, wearing a nervous, exhausted look between his wooly hat and beard. S introduced us: Leon, this is Neighbor. Neighbor, this is Leon. Neighbor glanced down at me, squinted as if I didn’t quite fit his existing categories. Leon is making me very sad, Neighbor. S paused and smiled fondly at his friend, who felt compelled to respond so he shook his head at me in condemnation.

Tell me Neighbor, would you kill this boy me for me?

The man stared at S to detect serious intent, turned back to me, shrugged and then nodded confidently. I thought of dashing but then considered that such a move would provoke a change of pace on their part, might make them do something thoughtless. S asked for my phone, and though I don’t remember handing it to him he managed to remove her number. Meanwhile Neighbor ran inside to collect our moccas.

Over the following week, S conducted an intensive recruitment campaign, wooing Angela by call and text message, though she ceased to respond after his initial offer (security of various kinds). I saw him stage a final attempt in person, by the school bus stop. She dodged his gaze. He described a romantic scenario involving the both of them and mountains of caviar…sand imported from Namibia. She giggled at this. He looked around at us, sweaty, red-eyed, and, with a jolt, drew something from his pocket with which he walloped her in the face face. She shrieked, he stomped away; she bent down and picked it up, sobbing, gulping, then howling more: a wad of small bills.

Thankfully none of this spoiled my relationship with S. He hounded me until he dropped out of our school, a few months before graduation.

II

Eleven years later, a few weeks ago, S once again found a use for me. He started messaging me on Facebook every few hours and sending me chats whenever my icon popped up. Apparently he’d been deported to Turkey.

Always disappear when I send you a chat

you cheap jew. 

Somehow he got his hands on my phone number. The moment I heard the heavy breathing I knew it was him. I expected abuse, but instead heard a plea for assistance. 

S wailed about the bad luck that had shadowed him since we’d last seen each other — the cases, the jails, the extradition process. He swore that though he’d been a violent person at times, he’d never sold drugs. I interjected that I’d witnessed him throwing pillowcases of stuff around his flat. He snickered fondly: I never liked them. I never took them myself. 

He started to mumble as he reached the tragic crux of his story. The woman that had stuck with him through his five-year sentence, who he’d married upon release, had now left him and moved to New York City, where I lived. He could not travel because of his crimes and needed my help getting her back. I was, after all, his friend.

We’re not.

He’d considered this and responded confidently: you are wrong. 

I reminded him that:

1. look at this little asshole! were the first words he’d ever said to me.
2. he’d called me Jew more often than Leon.
3. Angela refused to talk to me after his intervention.
4. he’d asked his friend to kill me.
5. he’d beaten up several friends of mine, often kicked me as a greeting.

He responded that:

1. he calls everybody asshole; that, in his vernacular, it’s a term of endearment.
2. he admires our keen business sense and always has.
3. where he was from it was customary to stand up for one’s women.
4. I was gullible for believing that the threat was sincere.
5. he’d never beaten me up.

All this was true; but stopping short of hospitalizing me wasn’t my sole criterion for friendship. I remembered him primarily as a source of annoyance and hounding.

That’s ungrateful, he said.

He reminded me that he’d annoyed and hounded everyone, that roughness was part of his public persona but that he’d always been very nice to me outside of school, away from our classmates. I responded that I’d found him particularly annoying in those instances.

He mentioned the clubs he’d taken me and my friends to, the standout suits that he’d lent us. I had forgotten about these establishments. I had repressed Metropolis, that blue smoky room where cake-faced eastern European girls tore at each other over their shiny boyfriends. I remembered Superlights, that pseudo-1960s-USA-diner-bar with the small dance floor in the back and the coke den upstairs, a place that gave the awful impression that it wouldn’t require much reshuffling to convert into a functioning brothel. Sometimes we were joined by his friends: scruffy men with wide stances, fake tans and short hair gelled into pyramid constellations. They hung on his every word and bore the brunt of his invective. 

What was school like after I left?

He had gone into hiding after stabbing his way out of a brawl and injuring a high-ranking member of a large Allevite family. I had rejoiced at the time, something I was ashamed about now.

He described our last meeting in detail. It too had slipped my mind — a summer night in Schöneberg, between my freshman and sophomore college semesters. I walked into a subterranean slot machine hall, the kind of seedy, smoky, neon establishment that hasn’t been remodeled or aired out since the early 1980s, with my old friend Ilan, another of his victims. He was sitting by a slot machine, with a woman next to him, solemnly chucking in coins while she smoked and stoically observed the results.

I tapped him on the back. He didn’t recognize me at first, but then let off a small squeal and gave me the customary three pecks on the cheek. This was a very different S, sluggish and devoid of the frantic energy that had so long been his signature. "I’m going away. For a long, long time,” he said to me and I could tell he was afraid. He told me that he’d killed someone. 

To prevent an uncomfortable silence, he called over his female companion from the slot machine. “This is my wife, Serda,” he said, looking at her with grandfatherly pride. She acknowledged their nuptuals with a sober nod and shook my hand as if it was the ultimate inconvenience. 

I tried to rouse his spirits by framing prison as an opportunity to get his life in order. He shook his head at me with a painful smile, “I am never going to change, Leon.” In that moment I felt ashamed for despising him. After hushing Ilan away, he told me about his conviction, reconstructing the turn of events that lead to him speeding his car into a crowd of armed men. I had no choice, he said. You have no idea what sons of whores these guys are! They had ambushed him in an attempt to abscond with his merchandise.

The trial was a farce (the two parties had already settled in a private court overseen by local elders). No witnesses appeared. The prosecutor complained about the victim’s family. The evidence he presented was purely biological. He could only speculate why two Turkish residents of Berlin had encountered eight Lebanese residents of Berlin at 4 a.m. in an obscure town near the Polish border. Going by the public record, it was a random occurrence.

S chucked another coin into the slot machine.

What did you get?

Manslaughter: 8 years.

I promised him not to tell my friends and - for fear of being found out - I never did. I wasn’t the only one he’d told: the news made the rounds. Eventually I forgot where I’d heard it first.

S coughed into the phone. He took a long sip of something, coughed a couple more times, and cleared his throat:

You forgot about that night, didn’t you? I remember that kind of thing because I never ever did drugs. You smoked too much weed back then. You probably still do. 

You moved to America to remake yourself. I spoke to Ahmed, Ilan and them on the phone. Mesut even came to visit me here in Antalya. They all say that you never call.

He lit a cigarette. You and I were friends all right. You said that the last time we spoke, the night before I went into prison. You said: goodbye, my friend.

That was the kind of thing I said to everyone back then; such was my pretension after one year of college. But that wasn’t his fault. I’d treated him like an idiot. But he was smart. I told him I’d changed my mind about him.

You thought I was dumb? He huffed into the phone. How dumb were you to think that?

I agreed; I chuckled. He was right. I’d been childish.

But that’s how you are, he spat. I have seen enough of you to know. You all think you’re the smartest, but let me tell you something. Some of you are very clever. More than anyone maybe! But those of you who aren’t are really fucking dumb. And you my friend are fucking dumb. You couldn’t do anything for yourself back then! 

He steadied his breath for a moment and then laughed instructively.

I have to get back to work, I said.

He apologized, a first between us, and asked me whether I could, perhaps, please, deliver flowers to his wife next week while she visited a certain theatre. I suspected that he was trying to get around a restraining order, so I found him a delivery service. He thanked me and observed with some measure of contentment that I was still completely without honor.

Leon Dische Becker is a writer living in Brooklyn.

"You Need To Work Your Heart Out" - Tom Vek (mp3)

"Aroused" - Tom Vek (mp3)

In Which We Contemplate Hierarchies In The Mid 90s

Popular Fantasies

by LEON DISCHE BECKER

One of the primary benefits of growing up a full-time — though, at times, rebellious — apparatchik of my sister, was that she tried to steer me clear of all the atrocious music on offer in 1990s Germany. Eurodance formations, boybands, girlbands — those were not acceptable choices in our household cassette player. I am grateful for that.

Unfortunately, though, those songs were omnipresent at the time, and not liking them didn’t mean one could block them out. When MTV first showed up on our TV in 1995, I watched every video that came on and studied it closely (I was addicted to watching television). One issue that preoccupied me greatly was the hierarchical structure of boy and girl-bands. Some members sang a part of every song, others only sometimes. The camera seemed to discriminate between them also, showing some faces and torsos more frequently than others. Who was making these unjust decisions?

Why, for instance, was Michael McCary restricted to doing the “bum bum bum” and spoken apology bits in Boyz II Men songs? Surely he was as capable a whiner as the other three members of the group. Why did only one of the four singles released off CrazySexyCool feature a verse by quirky midget Left Eye? T-Boz sang "Creep" all by herself, and only left the bridges of "Red Light Special" and "Diggin' on You" to her foxy, Native American bandmate Chili. Who forced the one fat member of 'N Sync to carry his burden in his name? Was Mel B considered scary because of her ethnicity?

My younger self, of course, had no idea that he would one day grow up into hack writer with the resources necessary to demystify these oblique organizations. I recently figured out why TLC’s hierarchy was reshuffled around the turn of the millennium, and Chilli and T-Boz henceforth shared front-woman duties. Their management preferred Chilli’s dating choices. She had dated up (Usher, who allegedly cheated on her), while T-Boz had married down (The Westside Connection’s Mack 10, who allegedly beat her). Apparently Left Eye’s decision to burn her boyfriend’s house down didn’t affect her standing in the group.

I’d always sensed a strange tension between the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, two similar variations on a format. Turns out they were managed by the same pervo. Lou Pearlman, so his name, urged the bands to compete with each other. He even organized basketball games between them (hence the five members). And yet 'N Sync were intended for a slightly different, a slightly higher, market than BSB. They were constructed to suggest artistic integrity — the ugly members, the many acapella performances — they were sold as the boy band that could actually sing. In other words, while both 'N Sync and BSB were both compiled to appeal to pre-teen girls, 'N Sync’s image was aimed at slightly smarter ones. But BSB were tougher. Hence the backstreet.

In Germany of the mid-90s, such arranged bands were referred to as "acts." Unlike most English words misappropriated for colloquial German use, that term was instructive. But the implication failed to register with their pious fans. They ran away from home to attend their idols’ playback concerts. They waved homemade signs, wept through their make-up, hyperventilated, and threw their undergarments at poor Lance Bass. At home, they memorized lyrics they didn’t understand. And that is where the farce turned tragic. With songs like "Wannabe" and "Everybody", acts like the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys significantly degraded the ESL-capabilities of their overseas fans. To many Germans of a certain generation, the words "crazy" and "blue" denote lovesickness and not much else.

Leon Dische Becker is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. He last wrote in these pages about Hurricane Irene.

"Waterfalls (Darp remix)" - TLC (mp3)

"Waterfalls (Onp remix)" - TLC (mp3)

"Waterfalls (album instrumental)" - TLC (mp3)

In Which We Try To Discern What Condition Our Condition Is In

Not Ungrateful

by LEON DISCHE BECKER

"She won't make it," Ahmed Abdullah, an elderly bodega cashier, told me. "No way. They never do." He made Hurricane Irene sound like a clueless Southern lounge singer with Broadway aspirations.

An early drinker entered the store, contorted and hungover. He looked worried: "Why are there so many people outside?"

Abdullah peered down at him: "Don't you watch the news, man? The mayor says a hurricane is going to hit New York City tonight."

"Oh, that shit," the customer said. "I heard about that shit. Don't believe it. They just want people to buy stuff."

"I know!" Abdullah said.

"Or maybe they want to install some secret shit in the tunnel to monitor people."

The mayor was on television telling people to "get out"; the New York Post's cover page bolstered his argument with a close-up of Irene "Zeroing in on New York City!" Very few of the people still in town on Saturday seemed to believe the dire predictions. (Next time, one assumes, even less people will evacuate voluntarily.) Instead many felt entitled to make predictions of their own. The most popular and safe answer: "it's not gonna be as bad as they say it is." A Bangladeshi cabdriver told me that the predicted wind speeds were "a joke" compared to the ones which with he was acquainted from monsoon season at home. Overnight it seemed like almost everyone had acquired a rudimentary knowledge of hurricanes.

There was a lively public discussion on the streets between strangers — small talk about the weather. With the storm approaching, even the most disparate residents had something in common — a condition. The notion of a hurricane hitting the city sounded implausible to most everyone I spoke to, like that much nature couldn't logically establish itself in the big city, like our civilization was too dense for Irene's winds to penetrate. New York confers a claim to toughness. Bloomberg may have insulted that self-perception with his nannyish evacuation advice: "Staying behind is dangerous."

"They shouldn't tell us to evacuate our homes," Albert Consero, a plumber, told me. "Who's gonna clean all that up?" The Daily News captured a classic New York riposte from a family in Coney Island (a grade A flood-zone) doing exactly the opposite of what they were being told: "We'll come out here anyway - we're New Yorkers," crowed Nelson Rolon, 50, of the Bronx, who brought his girlfriend, Tanya Rios, 30, and their daughter, Suehaley, 9, to the beach. "We're like the mailman; no matter what, we're out here."

By Saturday afternoon most evacuees had fled, leaving only those who couldn't afford to flee, those who didn't know the storm was coming, those who wanted to witness the storm and storm skeptics, on the streets of South Williamsburg. As shops neared closing time, the neighborhood went on a final crazed shopping spree. By then the air was humid and smelled of damp pennies, and the sky looked grey and swampy (everything seems ominous when a catastrophic storm is looming). Inside Food Bazaar, an extensive supermarket at the intersection of Broadway and Manhattan Ave, locals stocked up for what appeared to be a nuclear holocaust. The check-out lines reached around the store. Full shopping carts produced miniature traffic jams. Outside, people dashed to buy flashlights, dashed home pushing shopping carts the size of dumpsters.

Then the first rain fell and the streets emptied. I put on my ridiculous rain suit, baggie and black and shapeless, and walked around to research a story on the hurricane (this story).

At 11 p.m., South Williamsburg's streets were largely deserted, except for troupes of ironic twenty-somethings in between hurricane-themed parties, gypsy cabs out to charge hurricane-induced prices, and a segment of the local homeless population, standing in the lights of the few open delis. I spoke to Harold, a Williamsburg native who'd lost his fed-ex job a decade ago for drinking during work hours and since resided outdoors.

"I haven't seen these streets this empty in twenty years, even during the snowstorm last year," he said. I asked him what emptied the streets twenty years ago. "Back then it was always like this," he said. "You'd only see drug dealers and hookers here. Before the white kids moved in. You could get everything."

I asked him if he preferred it now. He snickered at the question. "I'll be honest with you: I liked it more then. It's nicer for girls here today. But for me: much better then. Now you can't even stand anywhere around here anymore without somebody trying to sell you something expensive. Back then you did what you wanted. And you could live here. I had a loft, a big one, right here. 400 dollars!" He looked down the street and smirked. "It's as dark as then, tonight."

Manhattan's squares and shopping miles, empty and dim, were being battered with rain when I arrived shortly after. Here the few remaining pedestrians moved faster than in Brooklyn. In Chinatown, I saw the personnel of a dumpling spot dart out of its doors, wearing makeshift rain suits composed of garbage bags; on the LES I witnessed a man holding his chihuahua to his chest, under his umbrella, and begging him to pee. Nearby, in Washington Square park, a squadron of aspiring hipsters rolled around singing — predictably — "It's Raining Men" in their gym clothes.

One of the drunker exemplars, Josephine Baker, 22, complained about the storm's laxity. "Irene's been a bit of a disappointment, so far, I'm not gonna lie. I hope it gets better." She'd come outside for the 12 foot waves she'd heard about on television, equipped with an ironic but very real boogie board. Her boyfriend wore armbands. They all rallied for whiskey shots, toasted with a chorus of boos — aimed, presumably, at the gods.

But they wouldn't be tempted. Walking around at 3 a.m. I couldn't help but feel like this amounted to little more than "shitty weather, category 3." The buildings appeared as unimpressed with the storms as its residents. Professionally this was a bit irksome, since I'd walked over to the city to cover the hurricane, to chase ambulances as it were (only to the scene, of course). As a mere resident of the city, however, I was pleased to have nothing to cover. Lower Manhattan was a museum, stocked with life-sized models of its parts. A night tour. No coruscated lights to distract from the buildings. Nothing to consume. Just the city: civilization without its usual discontents.

When the downpour became tedious, I sat under some scaffolding and read over my damp notes. An old range rover pulled up and a man climbed out, and ducked under my scaffold. Like me, he was shrouded in a black bi-laminate suit, but he was significantly taller and thinner. He looked down at me and patted his pockets: "Do you have a lighter?"

His name was Andy. He turned out to be 29, a native of Ireland, a gym instructor, and nine-year resident of Far Rockaway. Asked to evacuate, he'd packed all his clothes in his Range Rover, and driven over to Manhattan to survey the flood situation.

"If a disaster goes down in my city, I want to see it," he said, in between hits of a joint. "It is, after all, a big fucking event." He said he planned to check possible flood points all over the city, until the bridges shut. "Maybe I can get a good overview of the situation, and help the police — with intelligence, like."

We drove uptown, ploughing through puddles. Andy started to freak me out a bit when he launched into a monologue about his desire to be on television. Times Square looked to be operating on screensaver. The police pulled us over.

"You shouldn't be on the road," the officer said.

"I'm a trained driver," Andy protested. "And I think I can help you."

"You can help me by staying the fuck off the road," the heavyset mustache responded, with a sense of routine.

Andy and I returned to our previous scaffolding. There he grew increasingly resentful of the system — "ungrateful prack!" — and burned his hands while trying to heat a can of baked beans with my lighter. The wind howled ever so often but it was only a tease. Andy climbed into his car every few minutes to listen to the news updates on 1010 WINS ("a brilliant station!"). By 6:30 he had lost hope. "This thing is never coming, right?" he said, apparently pleading for positive reinforcement. It was the most personal question he'd ask me that night, and I chose to reassure him. Everything could still go haywire. "I hope so," he said. "I need some excitement!" But it wasn't to come, and I'm glad I wasn't with Andy when he realized this.

I gave up on Irene at 9 a.m. that morning, near Union Square. Bowing to keep rain off my face, I stumbled into a squad of giddy police officers in front of a 24 hour donut store. The sky was drizzling. "Is this it?" I asked a bearded ginger policeman. "Yeah. That was it, kiddo. Soak it up." His colleagues chuckled. A female officer approached me, to offer me a more official line: "they're saying there could still be some strong winds coming up."

Soon the streets of Chelsea were visited by couples with dogs, registering the severed branches, the strewn trash, as if they were a bit embarrassed for Irene, all talk, no bite. As the day progressed, more skeptics sneaked out of their houses, going on short survey walks. By the evening the conversation shifted from Irene's underwhelming performance to the mayor's overreaction. Several interviewees of mine used the term crying wolf, as if it all had been a hoax. If you live in the New York bubble, Irene might as well have been: she made a whole lot of noise down south, but hardly registered on the city's discerning radars.

Leon Dische Becker is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. This is his first appearance in these pages.

Photographs by the author.

"The Man In Me" - David Bazan (mp3)

"The Man In Me" - The Clash (mp3)

"The Man In Me" - Bob Dylan (mp3)