THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 1, EPISODE 2

Of two gates that admit information and exhale decisions in the entity that was Jeff Streich the first - that no action's so trivial or inconsequential that it must not, however, be followed through to resolution - may have derived from Gandhi. More probably it's genetic... evidence for the defense: Jeff's father, Bill, persisting in his own UFO researches in Ohio despite the derision of neighbors and bewilderment of former Air Force colleagues.

The second gate's guardian is Burroughs... William, not Edgar Rice of Tarzan fame... grounded in his junkie's query: "Who am I to be critical?" After Texas, "ytz" entered into this equation... the Uay principle of consumable vitality reflected, somewhat, in South Pacific cannibalism and, to a lesser extent, in Jeff's beloved Norman Mailer essay "The White Negro". From Berkeley to the monkey ranch in Costazul, Jeff had lived life as a dream but, thereafter, the silky, suburban calculus of Crewcuts would darken, harkening back to rasping, grasping life and death rattles of the Chords even as it advanced, in time, towards Texas, to the Zone and ratpile.

Our meeting then, Egg... he'd been my biology T.A. while working on his doctorate. No more, no less. A hired ratstabber whose dream to be a rocket scientist, maybe even astronaut, was dissolving in the aqua regia of Vietnam. His hair was only slightly long in those days... face softer, though... he'd transferred from hard science to biology because, with Vietnam well under way, biology was stepping stone to the healing professions - physics and mathematics to the killing fields.

Sentimentality, in those days, ceased at genetic borders. Rats tortured, tested for pain tolerance thresholds and poisoned with flashing lights. Today, the few liberal humanitarians remaining after November hate people, Vietnamese not excluded, and love rats... Melanie, for example, would rather see microbes tested on Republicans. Today it's medical doctors under fire; at Berkeley and Franklin, back then, it was the physicists' time to have car tires slashed and offices spraypainted "Baby Burners!" and... as ever... mathematicians propping up both disciplines like the unseen Alien Hand (which, Dr. Ventura says, tugs strings of the so-called Free Will nesting in the brain's Korbinian Colonia 24).

"A mathematician doesn't look like anything!" complained Walter, the dilettante in Musil's "Man Without Qualities", "which means he will always look so generally intelligent that there is no single definite thing behind it at all."

These were dog-years for intellectual rigour - Jeff buried his behind the wheel of a ten year old Chevy pickup, red as Gus Hall. A few weeks into summer term he suggested that, rather then play tag with War Tax roadblocks and the pigs they drew, we might drive up north, away from the city. I replied that I was seeing someone; he said, "oh yeah, that musician?" Then sucked it in "how about you and what's 'is name, me and my old lady... plenty of room in back for a guitar." And what's so counterrevolutionary, anyway, 'bout trying to have an escape from tear gas city?

Except Brendan was in one of his intense, pissed off moods that stood out even above his usual pissed-offedness when Jeff explained that his chick had this rash, so it would only be us three... Larry, Curly, Moe. Silent he remained on the gearbox - imposed between Jeff and I as we crossed over the two bridges, vibes boiling off fog wreathing the dead tan hills ringing San Francisco Bay and brown shit lump of Alcatraz like toxic steam...

Jeff taps his fingers on the steering wheel almost to Santa Rosa, then jerks the truck off of the freeway... west... until the air grows cold and wet. Suburbs disappeared, farmhouses further apart, more sheep than people out here and he points... "there's a place, down that road, abandoned, cops hardly ever come 'round. Only ten minutes walk from the road to a swimming hole... wanna set up there or keep going towards the coast?"

The Pacific's pretty to look at, but too cold for swimming, this far north... I'd just as well stop here and Jeff pushes the truck into a little scrum of brushes so that we'll be hidden from casual visits by the law. Brendan leans on a tree, smoking, while Jeff tosses junk from the pickup bed... "shit!" he says, "forgot whiskey." I say not to mind, we've brought dope but Jeff can't deal with that... lonesome rat cowboys freeze out here without their firewater.

Brendan removes his smoke, looks at, decides to make his move. "Evie and I'll get some, Doc," he suggests, "seeing as you got all these... fixins... to fix up." Jeff was a Boy Scout come prepared... all Brendan and I brought was a ratty sleeping bag, half a baguette of sourdough and dope. Not even his guitar... his visual reaction when I'd relayed Jeff's suggestion, stinking of Kumbaya! round a crackling fire, made pure Gila Monster round the corners of his eyes.

Jeff compounded the insult by asking if Brendan could drive stick but, since he hadn't sipped from the well of ytz yet, it came off pitifully and Brendan just took Jeff's keys and his last Andy Jackson. "Road goes maybe eight or nine miles to the coast... there's a grocery in town." California grocers are allowed to sell liquor, a quantum improvement over the Bible-besotted East. "And, like, if you want a soft drink for your trouble... hey, it's on me."

Brendan kicked at the fender as if to remove nonexistent dirt clinging to his sole, a gesture I've copied, several times, after running into Flagler. Saying not a word until the ocean's within view, he sort of smiles then and says "You know? I do feel like a drink, but there's no way we're going back to rat boy, understand? Have a mind to see the world, now I've a truck to do it in too! You coming, or do I set you down in that parking lot?"

Well nothing's changed there... Eileen, crawling out of her shell a few weeks after Brendan's essentially pagan accident, begins obsessing on recreating Aeon with insurance money as an "enclaves of decades"... rooms out of the 20s and 30s, the 50s and 60s and not even all of them from the twentieth century. One of the airplane books she's read was a biography of Mesmer, which so-called father of hypnotism gathered crowned and feathered heads of Europe into what he called "Crisis Rooms", locked the door and let Electricity ride. To my admittedly sophomoric understanding, accounts of what was done there read rather like insertions of someone's John Henry into a wall socket (that ever-sinister fixture at 328 Chauncey?) with the chorus clasping hands in a sort of group chain of auto-electrocution. But after the Shah's exile, chipmasters and walnut scions flocked to Aeon to bare themselves in orgies of twisting and twitterings, so who am I... Jeff would say... to be critical?