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

It would be two years and change before "Man Without a Face" broke through; Brendan recorded it in March but Wally sat on it 'til August... the driest, meanest bicentennial hung-over August in memory... a DeNiro/Morricone August of hot winds, scorpion music. It stayed number one three weeks then Brendan blew his prospects again... the topic of his follow-up "John Wilkes Booth" too sensitive, even almost two years after Squeaky and Sara Jane. That it even crawled, barely, into the top forty with virtually no airplay was proof, I think, of Brendan's talent, if not his business sense...

"Face" royalties earned Brendan respite time in three special hospitals, with heavy consultancies influencing his synapses; administrators interfacing with organs of foreign oil (prosopagnosia's comparable to the destruction of compilator memory). "Resonator" also bought him that fake colonial prison in Connecticut Eileen's moved into.

Sometimes I'd goad him about auditoriums... usually in response to whatever shit he'd sling about the corporate ghouls... soon Brendan just said fuck, book me in a football stadium! "Where you're out of range of flying bottles." Kulchur, this Lower East Side place where kids buy t-shirts silkscreened with skulls and swastikas for thirty dollars, used to have an original Rambles suit swaying in the window... $175. "Man found dead," Brendan said when I told him, "old clothes keep marching on." (Matty Gouas had finally OD'd, fallen off a South Boston toilet like the little tricycle guy on Laugh-In. Brendan used to send money every so often for food, he said, except Matty always had more visceral needs.)

"As above, so below." There are reflections, Brendan said, horizontal, as a pool of water, and vertical, as from mirrors, dividing the universe into four quadrants... only one of which may be seen at any point on time and space. "The Voudon sum of one and one is three," Brendan told me, "that of two and two, five for the naming of 'and' always adds a fifth element, your invisible center."

It was at Watson center that he'd mixed the incantory Haitian, Suelan and Polynesian drums, shading their patterns into what he called "red noise" as opposed to white or brown. Did he go to Watson, rather than Jersey, out of spite... or fear I'd try to stop what he was doing? I'd offered any service Ralph or Alice could provide for him, but he'd treated me strangely. "This music's living," he said, "bonded to carbon like fish or wolves or a human being of some intelligence. You tempt the bonds, Evie, perhaps maliciously or, worse, out of curiosity. And if I were to open 'Resonator' to your database of digital fraud and sunsets the Elementals would knock me clean over, like one of your dominoes."

Two weeks before Aeon was to open... Halloween Eve... we'd all gone down to the Village for Mexican food, and the trouble was getting Bud to shut up. He'd just been assigned to the Lucchesis and girding for yogurt war with Neil Lamont on his back, chasing Warren Beatty for endorsements... then, when that failed, Don Knotts. Brendan, on the other hand, was focused, almost Jefflike, in the bad old days when he'd work over some Zone problem for two days and three nights, then crash in the trailer for sixteen hours, while I watched Star Trek reruns alone or with Almond or Duck Schaefer, sometimes, drifting outside over the north and west. Frankenstein's owls.

"I know what you want to do," he'd pointed at me and at Bud, inferencing Neil Lamont and Jack Doll's missions to secure dead hands of memory's stopwatch for sneaker commercials. "Know this - Neil Lamont isn't getting his fingers on Man Without a Face for Stridex. I know what you are, what you represent... stealing dawn with your soft metals and black raincoat people, neuron spikes and neon bombs... it's too late! Struck you out! You want me to play Aeon, fine! Happy to oblige. Any debbils I raise up... they're on you..."

"Is he back on drugs?" was all Bud could think of after Brendan tipped his Aussie hat and split - Eileen in tow like some accessory out of a magazine... a cuff link? "Eldridge... or Beaver Cleaver?" Bud scoffed. "Did Brendan say he'd settled his legal matters?"

"If you ask me," Evan Wright huffs, "he hasn't a chance."

"Who's asking you?" I reply.