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

The Summer of Love drifted, inexorably, into its Amurkan Fall and, after, blustery winter months of many discontents. By November, both the streets and flat on Lyon were gangrenous, no matter how rewarding my new job with Cap Cauthen was, nor how interesting Jeff's classes... even workshops with those clumsy Boston helmets approximating what is being called now, I think, virtual reality. In September, Jeff's Berkeley landlord doubled his rent, so he'd trashed the place and moved across the Bay, in with me... his Berkeley TA's salary atop Cap's pittance being pimp-bracket income in the Haight. But, when Deanne marched off to Washington in November to confront the war machine, she, as a final act of defiance, signed the lease over to this junkie who slept alternately in the front room or the Park, left the front door open and spread word that we were a free squat. Scag and speed having displaced acid and weed, the population of scruffs balling on salvaged mattresses and reading comic books among broken glass and popcorn all over Deanne's and the front room began oozing into the halls. Jeff padlocked our door.

By then the radio had disappeared... letting the music go wasn't so hard being that AM stank mightily by years' end... remember "Judy in Disguise"? "Green Tambourine"? (Money feeds the music machine!) Along with silence and the crashers came their cats... at least five regulars, and more cat-crashers creeping door-to-door seeking pizza crusts... into my troubled dreams slithered accusatory howls of misery from those starved, wretched felines.

Patsy, the last sane person in Dana's room, had secured a gig on Broadway... "all you have to do is have big tits and know the dances - duck, the pony, mash potatoes, monkey and the clam." The clam? She also admitted that she'd had to ball the manager, but he was married and there were seven dancers, sometimes eight, so that didn't happen too often and, with tips, she'd clear a hundred, some weeks. Another chick in that room had been ripped off by one of the floaters who held a knife to her throat and hopped back to the shadows of the dark park with forty cents and two cans of sliced peaches... all too much for Patsy, who said she'd hidden enough money to move back to North Beach, telling me not to let anybody know where she was living. Especially Dana.

"She's real sweet and like, but she is stupid... God, she's stupid, and stupid ain't gonna handle what's coming down. This place won't make it through winter." Winter needs a better public relations agent.

That was the good half of Billy. The bad was that he was stupid, too... so stupid he made Dana look and sound like Einstein... and a sucker for crashers, the most ominous of whom was a Texas hood named Remington, fresh out of jail and gone to Californ' to start over. With him, like the plastic whistle in any Cracker Jack box, came his speed freek old lady Lurleen, half Navajo, whom he'd picked at the bus station in Gallup and seduced with shots of Desoxyn and words of trailer-park love. The unstable, barely-controlled components of fission reaction of the dirtiest sort were now assembled... hinged upon vagaries of escalation strategies defined by Herman Kahn's biographer as "expansive verses explosive".

Kahn himself once warned the Joint Chiefs: "... the upper levels of escalation are both dangerous and painful and each side wishes to avoid them," but, unfortunately, also popularized the madman theory... imitated not only behind the Iron Curtain, but in the streets, boardrooms and government halls of America and other places... "An enemy or a madman may well have more resolve than we have, particularly if he is not listening."