I met Melvin Dill on a Thursday. Thursdays are usually very frantic days. Lots of deadlines. I was supposed to meet him in the parking lot of the Havana Citgo station. He knew I wouldn’t be able to find his house, so this seemed like an easy way to meet.

I was sitting on the trunk of a Saturn reading Washington Monthly when a man in a white T-shirt which read: "Stop! Think! Peace in the Streets" drove up and started ambling through the parking lot of the Citgo station. He looked right at me, decided I wasn’t the guy from the paper and walked on.

I was used to this. So I put the magazine down and waited for him to walk back.

"You Mike?" he belted.

Melvin Dill was shorter than I had expected him to be. About 5 foot 2. And black -- I didn’t expect that. All I knew about Mr. Dill was that he was going to go on a motorcycle ride from here to Philadelphia to promote peace in the streets. He’s going to go with friends, acquaintances, anyone he convinces to go with him. He even tried to talk me into it. He calls himself "The Peacemaker" and even has an office-complex-looking sign in front of his house that screams in big black letters: "The Peacemaker."

From the Citgo station, I followed his Ford Probe to his mobile home in Havana. It was one of those double wides. We stood in his yard for a while on his poorly-manicured lawn gawking at this large, shabby flatbed trailer. Not the kind you live in, the kind you tow. In this case, across the county. The trailer was framed in the setting sun like some sort of Peacemaker monolith. On his trip from Tallahassee to Philadelphia, he plans on stopping intermittently to hand out hats, T-shirts and pencils to people he meets along the way. They are emblazoned with logos like "Stop! Think! Peace in the Streets!" and "The Peacemaker."

"You know how when you’re at a urinal," he tells me, "and you see that little piece of plastic at the bottom that says ‘Don’t drink and drive.’?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that’s what I want to do with the Peacemaker campaign. Get it into people’s heads ... Peace in the Streets." I didn’t tell him that those little plastic things in urinals are usually found in bars where everyone drives home drunk and therefore negate any message they read in a urinal.

"Repetition is the key," he tells me. "Repetition," he says, repeating himself.

He plans to make the round-trip journey in two weeks next year. But he’s not just going to ride from here to there. "The journey is the destination," he told me. I asked him if he had read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He hadn’t. I recommended it to him, but I don’t think he’ll read it.

Melvin Dill wants to change the world.

Watching the footage of the Jonesboro, Ark., school shootings on TV had a dramatic impact on him. What really got to him was that those kids killed a teacher. Apparently, gunplay among young punks was perfectly acceptable, but teachers were a protected class. Sure it may be logically inconsistent, but I admire his reverence for the profession.

The violence he saw on the television has affected his world view. He thinks it’s a violent place. He would know, of course -- he’s had a violent life. His drunkard of a stepfather used to beat him to a pulp on hot summer nights. Melvin hated his stepfather and his alienation from his home life led him into a motorcycle gang. This was in the ’70s, when the motorcycle gangs were the ones doing all the drive-bys.

Mr. Dill also suffers from bipolar disorder. He takes medication for it now, but back then, it just exacerbated his self-described "stone-cold Marine" mentality. He made it out of the motorcycle gang OK -- amazingly enough. He even landed himself a job as a chef in a promising restaurant. He told me he was "climbing the corporate ladder," at the restaurant, but anyone familiar with how that industry works knows that he wasn’t climbing anything. I didn’t tell him that.

While Melvin Dill was on his way up the pseudo-corporate ladder at this greasy spoon in Pennsylvania, the shit hit the fan. Something happened at that restaurant that would change the course of his life.

Mr. Dill had a cashmere coat of which he was quite fond. I guess once you renounce motorcycle leather, cashmere is as good a place as any to begin a new wardrobe. Well, it was the ’70s and self-respecting people could get away with wearing cashmere coats.

One day, he walked into the back room of this restaurant to find his boss, the manager, masturbating on his cashmere coat.

Wait, it gets better.

He was setting fire to the coat while masturbating on it.

So, of course, there was a fight. At some point, Mr. Dill reached for his gun ... shots were fired ... Melvin Dill killed his boss. Shot him in the head.

He spent most of the ’80s in prison. It was in prison that he decided to make something of himself. He must have read quite a bit because he can quote John Kennedy on poverty, Steven Hawkings on wormholes, Jesus on love. His turn inward led him into the shaky ground of psychology. He wanted answers to questions that we all ask: "Why do I act the way that I do?" "What causes me to act that way?" "How could I change my behavior?"

In fact, behavior modification became somewhat of a raison d’être for Melvin Dill. While he was in prison, a Tampa-based organization, the Life Skills Foundation, came to the prison to teach the value of what they call "possibility thinking." The Life Skills Foundation is one of those touchy-feely organizations that council welfare recipients and prison inmates. It teaches them life skills -- stuff most of us just absorbed through positive role modeling.

I called the Life Skills Foundation to get some quotes about Mr. Dill and found myself engaged in a conversation with Jim Walters, the group’s president. According to Mr. Walters, many of these people just have no life skills and worse, no professional skills.

He told me stories about people who had been through his program who just couldn’t keep a job if their life depended on it. And in many cases, it did. People who have had literally hundreds of jobs.

When he started talking to them -- probing their situation, finding out what made them tick -- he found that they didn’t have the skills that successful people have. For example, these people have no concept of "boss." Mr. Walters told me a story about one lady who had recently been hired at a grocery store. Her boss told her to sweep the floor. She didn’t think that was part of her job so she quit. He also told me another story about a client he had who once showed up to a temp job at accounting firm in shorts and a T-shirt.

Mr. Walters tells me that the people who do these kinds of things don’t do them on purpose; they just don’t know the right way to act. So he started this non-profit organization to help prison inmates and welfare recipients hold jobs and have a positive self-image. Some of the education his foundation offers is called "possibility thinking." It’s something like a self-fulfilling prophecy, but dumbed-down for mass consumption. When the Life Skills Foundation came to Mr. Dill’s prison, he was sold. He still is.

As we were standing in his front yard, gawking at this Peacemaker monolith, he drew one of those grids where you’re supposed to connect X number of dots with Y number of lines. He stared at me as if to say "I know something you don’t know." Well, I did know. I was an education major and education professors love this shit!

But I pretended like I didn’t know how to solve the puzzle. He couldn’t wait to explain to me how to do it. I could tell that he derived some sort of pleasure out of it.

That’s when he invited me into his home. You know an interview is going well when someone invites you into their home.

The first thing I noticed about Mr. Dill’s place was that there were pictures everywhere. I mean everywhere. And with these gaudy Wal- Mart frames. All over the wall. Thousands of them. There were pictures on the coffee table and on the mantle and on the kitchen counter.

He had clear plastic mats set down over high-traffic areas. This gave his living room the semblance of an interstate system. If you want to get to the couch, you’ll have to take an exit and travel through some rural areas. I took no exits because Mr. Dill took me to his "study."

Most people would call it a spare bedroom. There wasn’t much in it: a bed, a bookshelf with about 20 books, a desk and a lit stick of incense which had been set upon an ironing board. Before I could ask him about the incense, he grabbed a framed picture off the desk and handed it to me.

I soon realized that it wasn’t a picture. It was a letter that had been framed, a letter from the governor praising his peacemaker campaign. Mr. Dill was very proud of that letter. I don’t think he realizes that the governor has unpaid interns that sit around and write them. He also had a letter from the education commissioner -- also written by some flunky intern.

That’s when he told me about his pet mouse. When he was in prison, he had a white mouse that he kept as a pet. "Everybody needs something to love," he told me. I would imagine that love is not a preoccupation in prison life. The mouse’s name was Jeffery. For some reason, Mr. Dill set up a labyrinth in a shoe box and laced the trail with food. Every day, Jeffery would make his way through the maze. Then one day, Mr. Dill took out the partitions. Jeffery followed the same path he always had. Adhering to physical conditions that no longer existed.

His point was that Jeffery, like we humans, had been trained to respond to his surroundings in a particular way. A psychologist would say that Jeffery had been conditioned. I think the reason Mr. Dill found this so fascinating was because he could relate to the mouse. He had come from a violent environment and he behaved in violent ways. But in prison, removed from society, he could stand back and view the situation from a more detached position. Like watching a mouse in a labyrinth. From his omnipresent perspective, he realized that there were other choices in life he hadn’t even contemplated. Like, for example, not shooting someone in the head when they masturbate on your cashmere coat.

I asked him why he came to Florida. He leaned close to me and said "Don’t put this in the paper but," ... a slight pause ... "I stole another man’s wife," he almost screamed into my ear. Then he let out this uproarious laughter. Deafening laughter. Like some sort of bizarre alien in an episode of Star Trek from a planet with an overabundant supply of nitrous oxide.

They are still together. He calls her Honey Bun, but won’t let anyone else call her that.

"I need to leave soon," said a voice from the other room. It was Demetria Pope (no relation). She had been waiting patiently to talk to me at the kitchen table with Mrs. Dill. (I had to force myself not to call her Honey Bun, even though I wanted to, for fear of physical violence). Apparently, we had dawdled too much and were trying her patience.

Demetria Pope is the "teen coordinator" of the Peacemaker campaign. She organizes teen functions -- pool parties, pizza parties, dances -- that sort of thing. I get the impression that these events are more social events than peacemaking occasions. The contest she plans to have at her upcoming Splash Party ’98 involves determining which participant can scream the word "Peace" loud enough.

I wondered if the irony escaped her.

Would Ghandi win at that game? I wondered. It didn’t matter, though, because the winner won a "Stop! Think! Peace in the Streets!" T-shirt, and if memory serves, Ghandi wasn’t a big fan of shirts in general, much less cheap T-shirts which are mass-produced and sold in bulk.

By the time Ms. Pope was telling me about her childhood in Santa Barbara, Calif., it was nearing midnight and I still had an environmental op-ed column to write that night (deadlines), so I thought I’d better get around to asking some questions.

"Why Philadelphia?" I asked Mr. Dill. He told me he chose Philadelphia because that’s where Independence Hall is. "What’s Independence Hall?" Demetria asked.

"Tell her," Mr. Dill ordered me. By this time, he had come to the conclusion that I knew enough about the world to give his companion a reasonable explanation of Independence Hall.

"It’s where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written," I told Demetria. She looked confused. I know the look well. It’s the same look of confusion I always get whenever I mention the Constitution.

"So why Independence Hall?" I asked Mr. Dill.

"Because the Constitution guarantees that we are all equal," he told me. Perhaps he meant the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is much more of a legal and much less of an idealistic document.

"Do you know what the 14th amendment says?"

He didn’t know that I was writing a master’s thesis about Constitutional theory.

"The 14th amendment guarantees that all citizens ... "

"Just tell me what it says and stop beating around the bush," he interrupted.

"Due process of law," I said quickly. I could tell he wasn’t looking for an in-depth analysis.

"Right," he said excitedly. "Which says that no matter who you are, you get equal protection under the law."

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the 14th amendment didn’t have anything to do with Independence Hall. That it wasn’t written in Philadelphia, but in Washington D.C. 90 years later. Sometimes historical facts just get in the way, though, and it’s better to ignore them. That, by the way, is history’s most valuable lesson.

I still couldn’t figure out what equality before the law had to do with peace in the streets, but I let it slide. When I asked him why he chose May of 1999 to make his journey, it became apparent why he chose Philadelphia.

"My sister lives just outside of Philadelphia and every year there’s this kick ass parade." He had chosen Philadelphia so he could party with his sister. I guess it didn’t really matter too much what his destination was. He did tell me, after all, that the journey is the destination and I believe him. It’s not all that important to his campaign where he’s actually heading, other than for symbolic reasons. The important thing was the journey and the people he would meet along the journey and hopefully, the lives he would change with his "possibility thinking."

Melvin Dill really does want to change the world. And he’s willing to go to great lengths to do it. He’s pulled himself out of the violence he was born into and he wants to help others to do the same -- an admirable quality. When and if he ever does make this journey, I’d like to think that it’ll succeed.

I have my doubts about a few T-shirts imposing a grinding halt to street violence, but if it can convince teenagers to buy ridiculously overpriced athletic shoes, why can’t it give us peace in the streets? Melvin Dill seems to think it can.

For the sake of peace in the streets, I agree.