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

Nan and Simon Vattig from Lauren's funeral showed at Wally's memorial, later that evening, also showing off Garnett Moore's latest shiny new Compact Disk and, since Wilson Leonard was billpaying, wrote a check to benefit the cancer charity in Lauren's memory. That joker, Will!... but since Wally was producing, I'd loaned him my Rolodex... parts of it... so there were Quad faces, oily men assigned by Tom Wendell with his big check and regrets. Mostly the crowd was advertising and other soft arts, promotion... just a few second-tier musicians sipping Russian vodka, wishing they would be elsewhere. Murder in their hearts whenever Mitchell dances past. Nobody, except maybe one of Herman Kahn's madmen, believes that selling Tandem means he's out of the business.

The other guest of honor was Brassín... accent on the last syllable, thank you... a twit with money, now, and under siege by little journals carping on his selling out by doing Garnett's cover (tiny and blotchy on the CD, nothing like the great artwork decorating albums by Hendrix or the Dead, even the Rambles)! Consequently he'd announce retirement after the Vattigs' check cleared and stood frowning, Romantic now, and like a poet who'd found gallflies in his cognac. "They think to art one must be povertism!" he said, "they want we die to starving and then raise reputation and career investment." He drank more and pouted. "Bahstards!"

"Why?" I ask myself... which is what, coincidentally, Jeff asked the only time I brought up going to Chicago. "Those stockyards aren't from Jack Frost or Sandburg, it's where big shoulders guys herd animals too stupid to understand what's going down and slaughter them." This in Franklin, now; we're sitting by the railroad switchyards in an old Pontiac tank he'd bought after the red truck finally coughed its last cough... smoking hash, speaking of Poincare and the circulatory system, while ungreased trainwheels threw up gasping waves of progressive jazz.

"Will you be seeing Jeff?" asks Wally. I'd already told him I was going to the Coast and he suggested I look in on Harry, meaning Joback was in some kind of trouble again. I'd said I'd be his spy but not his executioner.

"I don't know," I'd said, honestly at the time. "Jeff has his own life, a wife, kids... from what I understand, he isn't poor from all those cars and the computer dump and whatever he's dealing on the side..."

Garnett Moore waves at me, his beautiful wife rattles jewels. Life isn't fair and destined to get worse. The dirty people walking all over New York streets won't have Omni, never would have been plugged into Quad. Poverty is freedom, of a sort... priests may sneer, "anything goes now" but what, that is not dead, doesn't "go"? To go is to live... and let the money weep amniotic tears... nothing novel nor new under Filmer's sun. Not the Kramdens, not Max! My baby takes the morning train... he writes copy for curds unsold... then takes the train back home and, in the morning, does it all agin'!