THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 2, EPISODE 6

Jean applauded Wayne's successful completion of his multitasking operations but Wayne forgot the beer supposed to be his reward, knocking the gummed up pipe against a table, gnawing at half a frozen Milky Way, and squealing "Margie!... can't you do anything better than this?"

"Than this?" Jeff asked, picking up one of the boiled pigs' ears with both hands like pizza and beginning to chew around the hard gristle... a kid gnawing on a white cookie. Vlad two-stepped back into the crapper.

"So," Abel sneers, "you're a scientist?"

"In a manner of speaking," Jeff admits behind his porcelain-hued porcine biscuit. "Baby burner, war doctor, spreader of plagues, that's me!"

"I wasn't altogether critical," Abel tried to insinuate and, do you know Egg, I believe this influenced Jeff, at least subconsciously, or more likely it reinforced the pre-existing influence. "Being a scientist means an atheistic predisposition, one of the signal steps towards scientific Socialism."

"Actually," Jeff said, still munching his cookie, "I do biology for pay because it's popular, but my majors are nuclear and celestial physics... the very big and very small. And the more you look at neutrino masses through radio wave data and red shifts... that's a way of measuring how far off things are by the color of their radiation... well, the Book of Genesis is as near to what most radio-astronomers figure out to have happened as it gets. There are more atheists in Nam than in observatories except, of course, for Genesis also saying the universe is six thousand years old whereas data holds it nearer six billion or so..."

"There..." Jeff said, "Evie comes from a family of Bible thumping fanatics. And why was it, said Harry Stone, that God would go to such trouble?"

"To lay snares for the unbelieving and unrighteous," I'd replied. "And to amuse himself."

"Your God sounds rather like other people's devils," Abel queried, "... if, of course, there was a devil incarnate rather than just embodied in capitalist systems."

"No... it's rather the other way. Look, socialism says that everyone is equal, all the same..."

"That's right," Abel beamed. "Exactly so!"

"So that when socialism is achieved there would be no more change, I mean real socialism, not what passes for it in Russia, even China," I say. "No more change, no births and no death... only continuity. The vision Harry Stone had... organisms advancing, or devolving if you will, towards inorganic quietude. Machine response... no... repose! The Garden of Eden before the Big Bang, except crawling with metal ants."

"Evie and her people have a sort of explanation of God as this troublemaker," Jeff said. "Everything regular and peaceful until he gets bored, drops an apple bomb into the garden... through a tree, doesn't it go, down there? Like the types of memory Petras use, which search and compare but never disturb data, sort of like the Prime Directive as against the other... the Godly, or Godelian if you will... that hand which, moving, alters whatever He doesn't like."

"If you haven't already figured it out," I say, "Jeff's convinced God's a masculine conceit."

"Well if there is a God, of course! I wasn't saying that Harry Stone was wrong about time proceeding in straight lines that can be divided, if not seen, only that he was a fanatic."

"Well," Wayne spoke up, "at State I'm taking Eastern philosophy and all that linear time and religion lead to is... like... even Americans like Alan Watts and Arthur C. Clarke think people have two souls... yin and yang... and..."

"Watts and Clarke are British, or used to be. Cambridge Brits," Jeff added scornfully.

"If Harry were about... not that I'd necessarily go along," I say, "he'd have said that if you'd untied the package by admitting second souls, it can be set to right by including the Holy Ghost."

"Well I need personal regeneration if I want to hear more of this," Wayne said, refilling his pipe. So, leaving Democritus and Aristotle aside, we watched news on television: Governor Reagan promising that doubling tuition would drive all the poor and black and radical students into Vietnam or jail and put an end to campus unrest while his pet, President Kerr of Berkeley, predicted "the tone of the future will be set by Peace Corps types, not radicals and beatniks." Jeff threw an ice cube at the screen. Then we were told about, but not allowed to see, a New York cellist arrested for celling in the nude.

The rest of the news was criminals, more police and the war, which received a bouquet of one-fingered salutes. Vlad rambled in from off the street; he'd to gone liberate himself from pigs' ear fear or buy beer, which he'd forgotten, too, during some vomiting-induced out-of-body experience. "There might be, like, persons from beyond who take any shape they want, living in the Park?" he'd suggested. "Some might even have forgotten their origins! So, like, since the Haight is the most spiritually advanced place in the world, that's where the saucers would arrive?"

The Zone was full of people not too much brighter than Vlad in certain respects... even the term RALF was used, alternately, for Roswell Alien Life Forms since the '47 crash (and an ongoing rumor, spread by paranoid pests, is that the Kramdens contain components scavenged off junk saucers). I can think of a number of ways to bait Jeff about this, but I'd rather leave them to General Johnny.

"They wouldn't find a place to park," Wayne had scoffed.

"Defense has opened three hundred concentration camps to intern dissenters," Abel replied. "Aliens wouldn't get their green asses fifty yards from their spaceship before the pigs took them down."

"Not if the people rose up to defend them. Or if they went someplace empty, like Big Sur..."

"Where the flowers are the only vandals," Jean reminded us.

"Anyway," Vlad continued, "astronauts believe in flying saucers. They were in Germany! You know... they all take acid at the Pentagon!"

"So did Cary Grant," Abel said. "Socialism... not drugs, not movies, not the Beatles... will put an end to this rotten system," he sneered, removing his glasses to wipe them... sly old mole as he was.

"Bullshit!" Jean replied. "Russia's full of pigs, it isn't anything like in the twenties, just the way it's not anything here like the way it used to be in North Beach ten years ago. People did all the dope they wanted and most cops didn't even know what it smelled like. Too many people ruined things, and too much heat. That stupid narc who busted us forgot to fill out his warrants right or I'd have been sent up for ten years." She snuffed out her cigarette, gone. "Even so, I had to sell my Beetle to pay lawyers to get me out from under the wiggity fingler authorities."

"The fingy winglers?" asked Margie.

"Yeah, those wiggers!" In the silence that followed there was a squeal of brakes from below. It could have meant any of a number of things, mostly unpleasant. "I sure hope that wasn't cops," Jean said.

"Who sold the Beatles?" Dennis started...

"Things are getting heavy," Jeff admitted. "Ever since Graham kicked the dealers out of the Fillmore it's like Berkeley around here."

"Graham's king of pigs," Abel declared. "Always screaming, busting people, ripping the people off..."

"Hey, I think cops are outside..." Jean repeated.

"There aren't any cops," Jeff tried to talk her down. "See if you studied quanta, like, you'd understand that there might be tendencies of a natural force directed by cultural and political currents, like winds that you told me about, Evie, in South America which seem, at times, to take the form of, well... a cop? But sometimes, also..."

Which was when the doorbell rang.

"They're here!" Wayne said. "Nobody panic, I have a procedure rehearsed! Margie, open the windows, the rest of you gather up any loose roaches..." he pondered the plateful of half-gnawed pigs' ears... "they'll lose valuable pig-time figuring out that! You... hide in the bedroom closet, not you, him!" Abel sat back down and runaway Dennis allowed himself to be wedged into a crack between shelves by Jean and Vlad. Wayne held the bag of dope in one hand, a little box of address cards in the other and stopped, confused... burn the cards, file away the dope? The dog began whining, so many footsteps obstructing its simple trail. "Take this!" Wayne said, thrusting the dope towards me.

"The toilet!" Jeff was inspired. It was a stinking mess... pigs' ears must really have ruined Vlad's digestion or perhaps he'd caught one of those parasites worming their way through Haight crash pads. "There's something Christian about this," Jeff said, shaking dope into the bowl and flushing... beatific smile souring when the toilet rumbled; dope, vomit and dirty water backwashing, cresting porcelain, spattering our shoes...

"I'll keep trying," Jeff promised. "Go out and stall them. Use violence if you must..." Things get narrower, different being a parent, even a stepfather "and we've got the New Wave to worry about," Jeff told me in Arizona. "Skin any kid of mine that ever went New Wave, beat the crap out of them, choke them with those skinny ties. Can't be dirty when Max's harvest comes!"

Margie had started downstairs to check out the midnight knockers. "Who's there?" I heard her say through the door.

"Gas company. Got reports of a leak."

"We don't... anybody have gas?" she called up towards Wayne who was tearing up the address cards, one by one for all the good that would do... throwing them down the airshaft.

"Electric. Watch out for tricks..."

"We don't have gas," she said through the chained door and I heard the man ask something else, an address Margie said was on the other side of the Panhandle. After perhaps thirty seconds she opened the door just a little wider.

Nothing!

"I guess it really was a gas man," she called up.