THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 12, EPISODE 4

Incidentally, Manny also tracked down a copy of Brendan's so-called "lost album" for me that week in February, the one where he backs up Marty Crowder on four tracks... "Plainsman", sold only in the South through late night mail order. Brendan was deep into moonlight, hobbling on that bad foot from his accident and the couple hundred that the lateniters paid him... Jeff and I were Zoners by then, it must have been '72. Only one of the tracks was Brendan's original under the alias Red Banks... a maudlin sack o'shit, devoid of vevers, processed and sold for money. No Plainsman demons will ever rise from radios when stations go digital because not even Drake chains will play it.

Geneva remembers him with Mitch Kazelka at the time; Mitch waxing cosmic over his second-hand connections to these Carter people, all on drugs, asking Purdon Leaviss what it's like to be rich with so many groupies? Purdon's so fucked up he can hardly stand, but he looks down towards the tip of his boot and says "at least you learn s'not worth it to wash th' plastic glasses n' pep... paper plates..."

When television cries out to improve the culture, I reach for my half pint of Lucchesi's Strawberry Swirl.

Manny lay down thirty five dollars for that nine year old Nashville turkey, I've never even played the Brendanless Crowder sides. Maybe Eileen would get a kick out of it, but not for a major holiday or birthday - that would be cold. Not as in bad, just cold, commercial. Product.

Now as to what Melanie said... and the face...

The world's round enough so that, if you go in the wrong direction long enough, you wind up where you wanted to get in the first place. Libby hated the grocery, feared the manager who'd be over her case, win or lose... this fellow, Bumberger, was a greasy, roving little prick to whom I quote, unquote, forgot to confess my widowhood. The job itself wasn't so bad... before ringing up groceries I'd worked in this warehouse rebuilding printing equipment that had to be washed in stinging, stinking corrosive fluid which I did, for a week, then cried that my hands were cracked and bleeding so bad I'd pay for rubber gloves out of my own pocket. "Gloves!" the manager recoiled, "nobody can get to all the parts fast enough in gloves. Go back to work or clock out!"

I'd clocked out... and when suits come to Lentex, now, all preening, screaming at Cynthia because of too much or little sugar in their coffee, I picture them scrubbing metal frames and pins in acid, or probably bagging cans of corn on top of bread and eggs. Certainly our Quad and Omni partners wouldn't have a clue, except for Tom Wendell. Uli, of course, would find some way of talking himself out of anything like work, laying disagreeable tasks off on one of the lice who follow various Pahlevis round. Jeff would work twice as long, twice as hard inventing a machine to do the job and it wouldn't work.

I guess Brendan's better off dead. His first comeback was unexpected, the second totally unreal. A few more years and he'd be like Mick Jagger without lips, I think, burning my own on hot Chinese soup with fiery condiments the sweating waiter brings, watching the only two skaters on Rockefeller's ice twirl like vagrant leaves in Mao suits with sunbeams bouncing off their blades. "Hey, I just try to use my body to make people happy!" Harry used to whine (a concept bogumental fifteen years ago as now!).

"These two managed, somehow, to escape humanity," Jeff used to point at Harry and Wally Martyn, extending a hand beringed as that of Boris Karloff's Dr. Janos Rukh from Saturday morning TV.

If Harry remembers anything of 1964 it's with a little shake of that Satanic goatee and a twitter, "... weren't we all just stoned out of our skulls those days?" as if I'd forget if he'd ever put his paws on me. Wally's set him to sorting Brendan's estate... dunning four separate publishers for royalties they chose to forget to send on learning of Brendan's death, sparring with that Valhalla Foundation that got its claws into Brendan back around September, Eileen thinks.

Some wind up worth more dead than alive... look at Elvis!

So - ice and fire, pills to keep germs at bay and then I see a pale man in a thin brown suit, in loafers without socks, leaning upon the ledge across from Rocky's rink. His briefcase flies open and when papers start to spiral out I think... haven't I been round this curve before?

So many more people walking the streets since Aeon's fire, it seems, thousands of loops of soggy wetware trudging from avenue to avenue and back. Shabby backpacks, layers of dirty clothes and sleeping bags, some pushing stolen shopping carts of animated newspapers.

Where does this mob come from?

I think I have it now... what to do with that old album that's probably at the bottom of some drawer back in the office or under a pile of old IEEE journals.

I'll give it to Cynthia (Martyn, not my Cynthia) and Wally when we get back! He can bronze it... or dip it in whatever coagulant unsuccessful recordings deserve... coal slurry, tempura batter, whatever... hang it on his wall out in Cemetery City alongside the rest of his other trophy heads. Gold measures sales, not quality. King Midas was notorious for gold but, Gunter told me, his real legacy's having taken Cybele's meteorite... full of alien DNA known only to Bill Streich, the CFR (maybe) and Boy Zuse... carving it down and grinding it with so many millions of groovely little grooves, so longlasting and useful, planting it in the temple of Mount Ida in Pessinus (as opposed to Cnossus - Mount Idas being as fertile as the Idaeas they germinate) for Phrygia to trade off to Rome off a few centuries hence, for cash and the player always named later.

Brendan knew we were upgrading the Kramdens into Max, would the hardware be recycled, he wonders... if not, he suggested, upon agreeing to the Aeon New Years' gig... would I be willing to swap either Ralph's crystal cabeza or Alice's omphale core for the rest of his catalog?

"My relationship with Mitch Kazelka's over," he'd said... Mitchell had obtained a court order allowing a digital remix of "Resonator" a few days before Lennon bit his bullets. Brendan sensed loas gathering to claim their forfeit... "see that Jeff gets my fishing gear," he'd said; I'd thought that statement rather ominous in and of itself. Brendan became almost fanatical about deep sea fishing as T. before the gyre of cancer widened, but he'd just chuckled and cracked a joke about "omphallic symbols"...

More evidence for prosecution, Egg, this from one Herbert Schiller, media critic, friend of WOMP...