THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 3, EPISODE 1

Wednesday morning, after Junior's assassination and rising (and after a short walk on Salamanca's beach with Tess and his goons... Igor, Silenskii, Priapin), I call Lou from Casa Miel; meanwhile Bud makes three calls - one of which, Ralph and Alice say, is to Brother John. Initials' work never done, and it proceeds backwards through various Operations... at Berkeley, Jeff was given lists of nice and naughty to be processed by Perfessors until one unfortunate draft-related self-immolation prompted an unwritten policy of giving out only As and Bs.

I've always suspected our present low standards of society derive from that draft-related abandonment of competence and Mitchell, well past draft age now, augurs to make it one issue in his still-coalescing campaign, part of "that values thing". History advances in disguise.

"It's impossible to live or work in academic environments," Jeff told me, somewhat before our migration to FIT, "without becoming addicted to or, at the least, influenced by conspiracies. Paranoia oozes through the skin of higher education like Bay fog. Not that I get along with all of what Dad says about the flying saucers... their human interfaces, Soltec and Jycondria, for example, are creepy and we haven't even begun to get into Jeanne Dixon's sources for how, when and where President Kennedy was shot," he qualified. "That British scientist killed with apples, who devised a list of conditions for self-governing computers... he included UFO intervention and the government removed that."

"You mean Alan Turing? T. did say Harry worked with him, questioning old Nazis."

"Strange dude," Jeff allowed. "Man after my own tastes, but for the homo trip... got most of his original ideas off of this children's radio serial during the war. So when, after the war he started messing round with chemical bases of organic information growth, the Brits sicced Darwin's evil grandson on him. Harold Stassen, too. London's the original Lodge of Bad Racoons."

"You have a theory?" I'd suggested.

"Of course. Ever since the war, England's openly sought Grand Unified Theories, GUTs of the universe... but GUT's well, not exactly a red herring, more likely a stepping-stone up to TOE..."

"The Theory of Everything. Including Klaatu, Turing's censored Objections... he got grief over ESP, too, but that stayed on the list they published... Tom Watson's five-pointed jewels and six quarks of Muster Joyce. Here is the scab of tragedy over the gangrene of Team Camelot."

I remember saying something to the effect that it was too bad; Harold Stassen seemed a useful alternative to President Johnson in 1967 which was a time... not of domestic pogroms, not yet... rather a drift. Dr. King having just enraged the President by linking civil rights to the antiwar movement, LBJ invited Senior and various other Latin shadings of dictator/democrat to Texas for barbecue and to discern whether and where he'd face the fate of Nixon, on whom "even the llamas spat" during his tour of South America.

"We only spit upon Republicans," Senior had lied.

There was no Sirhan, no Peace and Freedom, no Kazelka nor even a Clean Gene, yet, while I tried to make rent in San Francisco before Cap Cauthen... only Lincoln salesmen pawing, begging for dates; finally Edward Tead himself, drunk and desperate. The company was dying. A day finally arrived when men from Illinois arrived to close the West Coast office down... the following day Tead, wearing a hip black turtleneck and tinted glasses to the funeral, bought 7-up and vodka on the company's account. Moths circled a lightbulb during his maudlin farewell speech and then, as if exhibiting some flea-corral synchronicity principle, a fly began orbiting his head in the opposite direction. Balloons... indifferently tied, shriveled and sputtered across the floor; when Tead began throwing knives at them I slunk out.

The California Department of Employment informed me that, since Lincoln had pulled all its assets out of the state, I had no recourse in collecting the $34 in back wages owed me.

So I filed for unemployment as Frank and Mia got hitched... Dali officiating... fifty thousand locals (whom Dean Rusk called agents of the Communist Conspiracy and Richard Nixon derided as "intellectuals") gathering midst government offices to protest war. Cops waited, hungry, on the sidelines in black shades, black gloves and clubs... for two weeks after, Haight Street was their happy hunting ground. Deanne got maced in Golden Gate Park and a pig volunteered "Rub your eyes, honey." Decent people huddled deep in their burrows, Hobbits in storm drains.

Ever a skull moment in Goblinland!