At the end of a busy teaching day at Curtis, Tom got a notice from the main office to call Mary, Amon’s girlfriend in Mariners Harbor. She had just arrived home from her teaching job at St. Mary’s to find him lying on a couch in his Victorian boardinghouse. He was badly bruised and battered, with some missing teeth, as a result of a beating administered by several thugs.
Rushing over to the refurbished Victorian house in his old gray Pontiac, Tom wondered about Amon’s recent propensity to get into fisticuffs. Instead of turning the other cheek, the charismatic young man was prone to behave recklessly, rather than prudently, to achieve worthwhile goals. The goodwill built up in recent years from positive press reports was being squandered by his rash behavior. In addition, his faith healing, keen sensitivity, prophetic ability, and prodigious energy were waning. Indeed, Amon appeared to have aged noticeably in the past several months.
Entering the small, dingy bedroom, Tom saw Mary tending to Amon, who was shifting restlessly on a narrow cot under some torn, faded blankets.
“How are you doing?” Tom inquired, taking in the run-down state of the Victorian boardinghouse.
“I’ve been better. I’m afraid I bit off more than I could chew today,” the young man replied in a slurred manner.
“You look like they worked you over pretty good.”
“Well, you should see what my attackers look like. It ain’t pretty.” Gone were the rudiments of his western accent. Amon now spoke in the fast, clipped New York vernacular.
“Amon gave as much as he got. But he was outnumbered three to one,” Mary asserted grimly.
She went on to explain that Amon had rescued a young girl from prostitution in Port Richmond. As expected, her pimp took offense and paid him a “friendly visit” with two allies, for the purpose of teaching Amon a lesson.
“Amon, why didn’t you call the police about that situation? It’s their job to handle things like prostitution and drug dealing,” Tom replied.
“That’s exactly what I told him myself. This isn’t the Wild West, where you can be a lone-wolf vigilante, rescuing the damsel in distress,” Mary said in an exasperated tone.
“There’s so much bullshit going on in the world. Sometimes you just have to take a stand and let the chips fall where they may.”
“There are injustices in the world you just have to accept. We can’t right the wrongs of the world in one day. Progress is incremental,” Tom asserted.
“That doesn’t sound like you, the son of a Marxist,” Amon retorted.
“My mom is an armchair Marxist. Her greatest joys are working as bookkeeper for the Royal Canadian Bank, reading the Staten Island Advocate, going to Great Books, and attending off-Broadway shows in the city.”
“The point is I’m running out of time, and I must do what I can before my time is over,” Amon declared.
“He keeps talking that way about dying, which upsets me so much,” Mary whispered to Tom.
“What are you talking about? You’re a young man with your whole life ahead of you,” Tom said, in spite of his fears that his friend was in danger. It seemed that America had a way of knocking off its mavericks—social and political.
As they left Amon’s room, Mary indicated that the city was getting ready to seize Amon’s tugboat as part of their renewal project on the Kill Van Kull waterfront. “They’ve already cleared the old ships and rusty hulks from the harbor. Notices to vacate have been placed on the tugboat, and the utility wires, which Amon himself put up, have been torn down.”
On the following Saturday, Tom helped Mary cart their furniture, clothes, books, old newspapers, and other possessions to the Victorian boardinghouse on Simonson Avenue. He recalled his first meeting with Amon when he was connecting the electricity wires from the tugboat to the utility pole—a dangerous job in which Amon had received an electric shock, throwing him to the soft, rotted wharf below without injury.
Tom was in awe of the strapping young man, whose concern for the poor and the downtrodden was Christlike. With the city’s help, Amon eventually converted the ramshackle twelve-room Victorian house into a much-needed shelter for down-and-out alcoholics, ex–drug addicts, the homeless, and other lost souls of Staten Island’s North Shore. His gifts of faith healing, surreal sensitivity to events of the past, heroic efforts in saving others in danger, plus his exceptional kindness and generosity earned him the pseudonym of Mariners Harbor Messiah—given by the local newspapers. But recently, the tide of public opinion had turned against Amon, with even the Staten Island Advocate publishing an article critical of the “so-called Messiah with his half-cocked vigilante actions and his run-down boardinghouse filled with ne’er-do-wells, misfits, drunks, drug addicts, and jailbirds.”