THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 12, EPISODE 2

Carlo was drafted in September, sent to Fort Dix which, he wrote, wasn't bad... they gave weekend passes for the Harlem riots... but then shipped him South to prepare for death by first serving his season in Hell. The blacks considered him a honkie and kicked his ass, rednecks called him nigger, kicked his ass too, and Sergeant O'Bedient (Carlo's term - I never learned the man's real name) ran him round like one of B. F. Skinner's rats... offered the friendly suggestion that, in Germany, he'd probably enjoy all the hospitality of Lee Harvey Oswald, escorted through that Dallas basement. Or one of the stray cats Ernie tosses to his pit bulls to keep them in shape between fights. Cancinas set his first set of dogs free as a fig to Arcilla - even Jose Yglesias washed his hands of the dictatorship... there's a longer term target he has in mind: the moral ills of Juventud.

"Some complain that when poor people and nations gain a little influence," Vasquez excuses Junior, "didn't America enjoy its own epoch of youth. I think your people today would have driven Paine and Franklin out of service, certainly, Jefferson and Hamilton probably." Rufe gets selective about Scripture these days, a lot of Job, the Song of Solomon and, of course a lot of the New Testament (certain passages excepted like James 4:4... friendship with the world being enmity to God). Whispers to President Zamora about Jesus booting up the moneychangers from the Temple (which probably starts Junior wondering what happened to all the spilt denaria).

Agents and cherubim scurrying up TeleNacional scenery like Lon Chaney in the toyshop, all of Brendan's paper angels afire.

As a point of fact, Suelan prefer their dominoes en doble... by twelves... I see new Asian variants of Dogs and Dominoes utilize Forty Questions, a refinement that vastly complicates the game, driving most arcade kids away as effectively as Beethoven and brussels sprouts. Yes, Egg, the Dogmap's genesis was that icon of Amurkan banality... a daytime game show.

Here's what happened:

On Tuesday, November 9^th, the Chinese admission to the UN was debated and obituary writers admitted that Dorothy Kilgallen, who so despised Mrs. Khrushchev's clothes, might have been murdered for intemperate remarkings. One of New York's great power failures was still fresh bait but, on the West Coast, there was a lull in the grocery I worked at so a few girls were volunteered to be sent home (without pay). Libby Knoop, another cashier, asked if I could go with her to watch her youngest while she tested to be on this game show we watched at lunch... sometimes when our shifts discoincided I'd watch her kids for eighty cents an hour.

The show "Twenty Questions?" knocked off DuMont's old van de Venter standby, which, itself, ripped off the "Court of Current Issues" from the dawn of TV ancientity in 1948. Trademark vigilance wasn't so keen in those days... and since TQ went out over LA's fuzziest UHF station, and was syndicated to equally bottom-feeding independents, all stood quiet on the legal front. Panelists wended towards a current event by way of reductive questioning... Libby listened to news and read the Times religiously; husband Fred, who installed air conditioning, told me "I read True Detective, kiddo, I know what goes on in this world."

So there's this mob of prospective contestants, mostly women between forty and sixty since a rumor has flown... Princess Meg would show at an adjacent studio. That tanked, why not audition for the quiz show down the lot?... therefore competition! Lots of it.

So we wait with four year old Jenny in a beige room of True Detectives, astrology rags and movie tabloids hiding greedy eyes... a few ambitious holders of Daily Variety, intellectuals with Readers' Digests, or paperbacks... "Conscience of a Conservative" and "You Are All Sanpaku!" predominating. I also remember a paperback, not the title but the author... Abner La Salle. On the back cover, the future grandmaster, already a pop guru with frightening hair, cased the roomful of game-show applicants with a positively Athanasian stare.

Abner would crash my life a couple of years later. He's nearly bald now... but with eyes no less icily mesmerizing (even if his vein of pop-psych plunder's plumbed), now he's working foundation mines of Roman nodes beneath nomadic roads, has grown a Neronic moustache, so to still look the part.

A totally Phil Diamond and Geneva crowd there, Egg, spinning with stars, chakras and artificial pearls except that this was 1965... hence no Negroes.

There was only a sprinkling of men... one I remember being a retired policeman, still in uniform... hence lots of primping and squinting took place in pocket mirrors. Groups of twenty were taken away every quarter hour... finally Libby, Jenny and I turned our tickets in and were escorted down a hall by a young woman from the studio. "No husbands allowed," she giggled, all sisters under Rhea's pelt. "Most big winners have been housewives," the flack encourages us. "They have time on their hands to keep up."

Libby elbows me. "Do you think they'll ask about the war?"

I'd gotten a call, collect, from Carlo... he thought he'd be celebrating Christmas in Vietnam without having been given leave. "The PX has bodybuilding and fuck books but no Playboy, the CO says literature makes subversive inspiration, pictures only wholesome perspiration." Carlo also said he'd been assured that when he got to Asia, killing Vietnamese "would be better than sex".

"I have to clean the goddamn rifle every day. Up and down, up and down like pulling on my prick... I live to clean the rifle and fire it, then clean it some more."

I go to community college twice a week for physics and composition... "life and order exist because people exist here to observe them," Professors say. "There may be parallel decoherant universes full of worlds with mountains, trees and animals, but, since they are not perceived by intelligent agencies, they are immaterial."

Community's full of wits and halfwits, mostly hiding from the draft. One of these raises a hand and, without recognition, asks... "is that like the universe of F-Troop?"