THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 2, EPISODE 4

 

PIGS' EAR SOUP

 

Wayne and Margie Bowen's dog was bidirectional, two dimensionally oriented... it would poke its nose forward, following precisely into whatever space a human occupied because that, obviously, was where the food and strokes existed. If it struck a wall or something cold the son of a bitch turned nose to tail and snuffled back along the track of least resistance until impeded again.

We'd seen this happen maybe three times... back and forth... before Jeff looked up at me, Dogmap in his eyes. I, however, claim credit for first raising the valence of temperature. By turning on the small heater in the Bowen's flat the intermittent but mathematically constant currents of warm air swayed the animal from its course... certainly to crash through every domino upon the board. Ralph's hardy ritual of the first two stations of the game, which novices exclude at mortal peril...

¡

E:

IS A DOG IN THE WHITE ROOM?

¡

r:

there is a dog.

¡

E:

IS THERE WIND?

¡

r:

wind is from the north, six miles per hour and constant.

At least Wayne and Maggie Bowen kept their flat free of visible dogshit... certain Haight Street accommodations were less judgmental. Jeff responded to their invitation civilly, accepted a pipeful of shit and carefully exhaled its smoke in the dog's face.

"Now," Wayne pronounced, "the Finger of God... that's the concentrated stuff at the bottom of the bowl, where you think it's all been smoked up and it's not gone at all!" He extended pipe and cigarette lighter to me - the Finger of God wasn't half what he'd cracked it up to be but what could you expect from scrapegum rembrandts of ancient smokes?

Was Jeff trying to suffocate that poor dog? "I'm just a soul whose intentions are good," he hummed, exhaling more smoke across the dog's black nose, "O lord, please don't let me be misunderstood!" Animals misunderstand me, people misunderstand. Harry Stone's ants from the ant farm died, or maybe got out and crawled away, T. brought me little rodents from the lab, but I left them in darkness where they fought and killed each other, then T. died too. Jeff went criminally mad... Brendan died, Gunter, Canul and Carlo died. Some folks make poor custodians! But poor Paul, Egg - what his father did to him ranks nine plateaus beneath whatever level I've descended to.

Even the Big Bang can be played out on the Dogmap, for example if the Dog hits a wall without first having knocked the Dominoes over...

¡

E:

DOES THE WALL RECEDE? (If the answer is yes, ask: DOES THE WALL RECEDE INFINITELY?

I took another toke... heard tumult at the door.

It seemed there was some sort of a misunderstanding which had to do with Vlad, who'd been invited (but who'd also brought along this street kid, Dennis, who wasn't). It wasn't the quantity of food at issue, nor Dennis... a sweetly vacant, long-eyelashed Indiana elf... it was that pigs were in the middle of one of their periodic sweeps for runaways. "He's not a runaway," insisted Vlad, "he's a magician!" and Dennis, obligingly, removed a boiled egg from Maggie's ear. And, as they were coming upstairs, I heard Vlad explain Dennis was even wearing shoes again... he'd finally outgrown that psychosis that inhabits certain runaways who hit downtown's bus station, walk to the Haight, then fling their Buster Browns away and let the street slash their suburban cream toes to infected black, pus-oozing ribbons of rotten Spam.

"Let me stand next to yo' Fiyuh!" Jeff coughed and passed the pipe towards me with an enormous sneeze that pushed the dog off course... but the Fiyuh had gone out.

"Who are all these suspicious people, all taking drugs?" said Abel, attempting, in a pathetic fashion, to seem sly. Abel was a pseudo-Bolshevik asshole even Deanne disliked but Wayne and Maggie, like Jeff, had to ask how they could be critical of the people's partisan, so the mooch was permitted to lurk on the fringe of artificial community. The word, after all, means a "majority" or party of the mob... silent majority, moral majority. All's calm, all's bright.

Which brings us, perforce, Egg, to the matter of the pigs' ear soup.

Margie had boiled spaghetti against the hour when munchies arrived; the sauce came out of cans... full cans... there was a slight shortage of plates, but manageable, except that Wayne had gone down to the Fillmore and, with the spaghetti, had bought a dozen pigs' ears and thrown them into boiling water with the pasta, to rise and dip in murky fluid like wounded, enraged stingrays. Vlad, a vegetarian of conscience, put his hand over his mouth and fled the kitchen.

"Would anybody mind if I put on a Beatles' album?" Wayne inquired but, since it turned out that there wasn't a playable Beatles' album in the whole damn flat (and Margie would have no traffic with Dylan or the Stones), Wayne was compelled to balance this hot bowl of spaghetti and pigs' ears in one hand, keep a joint between two fingers of the other, toke, turn the stereo on to the FM station, pass on the joint and kick the dog aside...

"If you complete all that, we'll give you a beer," Margie promised, the way that I saw Ernesto walking towards Delfinas' patio last night, arm in arm with Neil Lamont.

Another toker, Jean Arana, old for the times, leftover beat chick, over thirty... not to be trusted!... knew a grocery on Steiner, I think, that sold beer for food stamps at a twenty percent markup. "Welfare!" Abel smirked. "Ties you into the system and then sucks the juices out, like spiders."

"Spiders?" Vlad, having only emerged from doing mumptly-stomach business in the bathroom, bore a stricken look. "What spiders?"

And he turned back, closing the door behind him again.

  

TOMORROW:

"TEAD HALL!"

Old 60's rock... Beatles, Animals, Hendrix... and plenty of literate autopsies of same may be found...

At: