THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 2, EPISODE 5

I'd told Mark I was sorry, had to go to Miami and meet my Venezuelans. "The movement ejaculated prematurely," Cobb replied. "There wasn't anything left of the left to strike when the opportunity presented, after Watergate, so things have been declining ever since. The human race... in its intellectual aspects... has adopted the death wish of states, nothing left to look forward to but oppression for the many and caviar for the few... until the war of all on all takes all. I tried to save them," he defended himself, "and a lot of good it did!"

The rest, with Wittgenstein: "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must consign to silence."

True believers... what was his old lady's name, Alyss? Abyss? And those girls on Lyon Street... Deanne? Donna? The one only a doper, the other political... she was friendly at first because she thought I was Cuban but, after I told her about Carlo, she treated me as if I'd contracted some war plague. And his death benefit didn't amount to minimum wages so, until Wally hooked me up with Cap Cauthen, I paid my share of rent calling strangers at dinnertime for Mr. Tead of Lincoln Information Systems... pretending to be interested in their opinions about war and Negroes, then using their trust to sell brooms and light bulbs. Supposedly made by crippled veterans but, as I learned, really imported from the Philippines.

Deanne, that's the one, had friends with jackets and skinny ties complaining about hippie lumpen wasting time at Be-Ins when there were warmongers to confront, incorrigibles to correct, bells and whistles to blow... little agents of Bentham's Paedotrophium, not so different from graduate science students Jeff Streich hung around with. Plastic pencil protector people throwing rustling McDonalds' bags around, Star Trek, Spam Spam Spam and Honeymooner memorizers whistling "Suwanee River" greetings, flashing Racoon signals...

Sometimes, between maids, I see their ghosts (working for Armonk, mostly) in post-midnight supermarket aisles in Wasconshire, staggering round the health food section, faces green in the reflected supermarket lighting...

"What is so funny about Ralph's social security number anyway?" I ask, though later.

"It's incongruous. Numbers are missing... if input it would cause a halt," Jeff said. "The program would crash or repeat itself or go off trajectory if default wasn't built in... taking the first two numbers of the next entry and on down, contaminating all the data. That it's never been fixed is a trap to catch people who can't stand that it hasn't been fixed... understanding's a sort of a malignant cult." Cults I could fathom. The Haight seethed with gurus - some few credentialed or Oriental, at least, most in the game for chicks, cash or the draft exemptions given Universal Lifers, among others.

By and by I begin deviating from the boring scripts provided by Lincoln Information Systems, mixing in questions about cults with the robotic issue/answer forms we had to fill out because Mr. Tead had connections, somewhere, that could sell things to people based on their opinions.

Tead was usually gone when I came in for my four-hour shifts that began at quarter to five. "Says he has to get back to Hillsborough," volunteered Nallie, the night shift supervisor, lifting an eyebrow, thumb and index finger to indicate drinks being consumed. It was a relief - Tead liked to lay one clammy palm across my shoulder while I made calls and all the girls had to line up in front of his desk to ask permission to go to the bathrooms, which were so back-to-back with phone banks you could hear urinals flushing almost constantly from eight to eight thirty when the door to door salesmen filed back in.

"The headquarters are in Springfield, Illinois... that's Lincoln's real hometown," Nallie marveled. "Every Christmas there's a party and fashion show, and men from Marketing downtown serve dessert. It's the only time you'll ever see them, so be ready to make an impression!" Nallie had three husband-scalps dangling from her belt and was out for number four... she's probably looking for six, these days, or seven.

"Did you know that the Honeymooners was the only show ever to use the Electronicam?" I tried to surprise Jeff once... Harry Stone had, after all, put money in Dumont.

"That's right!" he said. "A TV and movie camera too... analog and digital co-existing, perhaps for only that one time. Sure makes you think! And Gleason ends the series after thirty nine episodes because he thinks the excellence of the program was on such an upward spiral that it couldn't be maintained anymore. Dig! Rather than making money turning out... well, not junk certainly but a slightly inferior product, like the third season of Star Trek, he pulled the plug."

"That's what T. says about Beethoven too," I interrupt.

But there are no easy decisions now. The learning curve on Ralph and Alice is slowing if it already hasn't begun to fall back, the hippie curve proliferates. More apps mean even more errors. When old systems like the Kramdens go buggy, sentiment can be a fatal indulgence but, on the other hand, twenty seven potential replacements have failed and failed catastrophically. After the Kramden interval... which smart asses out in Stanford call perpendicular processing, it's plain... the future of mains gains only by chaining brains.

Slane's fear is that the poaching Ralph's doing from Alice and vice versa... a territorial impinging that's most serious down a swath of the tornado belt of the Midwest, equidistant from Malibu and the Dog School... will start to bleed over onto user systems. With Lentex stretched over such strange bones there will be opportunities for all, but no tomorrows for some.

Most hippies have been irrelevant, a few tragic, but more than a few have had comic aspects. Black functions from SPIFFY washing up into rent-a-car terminals in Tulsa like KM oil. Another penetration was airline reservations with the credit specs on street toilets that Diamond brought from France... known round 54th, now, as Phil's Parisian Piss Programme. Bad numbers even cause me to miss the first half hour of "Dark Victory"... Bud thinks the President should have married Bette, not Nancy Davis, and who am I to be critical?

Ouch! Quarter to two... thirty two years ago this very minute, Egg, Forrestal leaped out the window of that nuthouse in Bethesda... Sophocles and Balfour on his mind. And Dr. Ventura's knife lowering to bring Paul into Now like a beat poet, maybe one of those whom Jean Arana used to ball...