THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 3, EPISODE 4

Most of what Ab LaSalle proclaims is crap, but one of his few right-on statements (certainly borrowed!) is that we all love our jailers, be they other people, ideas or the street.

Human beings form a substrata of creatures who breed in captivity. Lions in zoos, whales in aquaria, so many brightly plumaged birds in aviaries... these regard captivity with such horror or disdain that, if offspring somehow manifest, they are forthrightly devoured. Pigs in their pens, awaiting transport to Chicago, monkeys bled for serum in the Suelan monte, rats in cages, women in their nations... such have not yet evolved such a sense of shame, or dignity. We raise up tiny armies of teratosaura from the dragons' teeth and litigate over embers until collapsing like so many treadmill mice, like joggers in their masks during chemical holocausts.

So the street still owned me to the end of summer; after Brendan's ride I'd return to the same old grimy boulevards, trodden by Haight burnouts on their way to lines where the Recipients of the world stand, waiting for their charity. Around that time someone executed Superspade, the street's weed dealer... I was smoking the last of his numbers, waiting for water in a pan to boil for coffee, picking out the paint flakes that dropped off the ceiling as hot moisture rose; dried paint that fell like snowflakes in the shape of bear traps falling, ever falling to poison the coffee of unvigilance.

Suddenly I hear a doorslam, voices... Billy Wowa blows into the kitchen like dried leaves, hoisting a ridiculous but costly phony snakeskin overcoat over his head like Satan's October wings. "Lookit this, Evie, it was just over this chair by the door of the bar, nobody saw it walk out... nobody, man! Think somebody would pay fifty bucks?" and he whirled the coat round like a bullfighter's cape. "Sure they would! Easy!"

"Sure, cut your stupid throat, and ours too," Remington followed, fuming like a volcano. "That's Garcia's... if you were around this spring, not back in fuckin' Brooklyn, you'd have seen him on the street. He had a little vacation, courtesy of Uncle Sam, but the witness sort of disappeared, so they had to cut him loose. Only a tourist would rip off Garcia without first planting a bullet in his head... Evie, this fuckin' tourist's trying to get us killed!"

I looked down, focusing on what I could do which was spoon out little flecks of lead from the pan. "You're negative," Billy kept whining, "East Coast negative! Somebody'll buy it. How about Jeff? He's usually in Berkeley, he could wear it over there and Garcia would never find him. Thirty dollars!"

It was hot in that kitchen... Lorraine, a particularly sweet but stupid Dana-crasher had followed the trendy back-to-nature meme of the month that real women bake bread, cadging some yeast from old Mrs. Varsi on the first floor for listening to an hour's worth of her complaints about the post office. Mixed it with welfare butter, flour she'd found on the street with about a thousand burnt matches inside, shoved everything into a pan and turned the oven up high as it would go. I thought they'd outlawed germ warfare at the United Nations, but there was bread and lead... heat, now a stolen overcoat. I'd seen Garcia in his snakeskins months back, chatting up teenyboppers like a Greek Colonel in shades, conning runaways... rapping, rapping about showbiz connections, acting gigs, easy money. Some of his victims came back to the street with habits, bruises and diseases, others had just disappeared.

By the time coffee was ready and lead-free, Remington had just about convinced Billy to leave the overcoat on the bus stop bench outside the bar... keeping, of course, the three dollars and change in its pocket... but Lurleen walked in and right away insisted she knew somebody who'd buy it. "If Farm doesn't, I am going to cut you a second asshole," Remington swore, but Billy had already stuffed the coat into a paper bag and, since the coffee had to cool, the four of us walked up a few blocks past the love burger shack to our putative customer.

Farm got his name after the farm he always claimed he'd buy with money from the killer score around the corner and now, with Superspade dead and other dealers dropping by the wayside, I figured he'd get his wish, in verity or metaphor. Of course he wasn't home, out hustling farm money, so we hung out at his pad listening to Country Joe, watching Gomer Pyle with the sound off. I'd copped a few times there early in June but everyone was different now, there'd been a mass evacuation over the last month... old souls replaced by a chemically unstable concoction of the criminal, addicted and disturbed. One kid, about fifteen, had been so badly beaten by pigs he was incapable of completing sentences... squatting in a corner muttering Creation Research talk; another spooky chick, punk ten years prematurely, all in black, fake silver jewelry and magic marker tattoos... all she talked about was how the pigs in doorways doing the Hide and Show were Jews, all wearing their Jewish Star o'David badges...

As a night worth the remembering, Egg, this ranked down around the seventh negative plateau, among certain Robinstett family gatherings. Another thing Abner saying, that I remember... "collectivity of guilt provides license to escape individual responsibility. We all killed the Jews, so Germany is off the hook. We all killed Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King... we did!... with milk and cookies, twilight competitions and with our lovelessness, our conservation of mass miseries, when we ought to be saying Yes! to life. Can anyone imagine the Vietnam War being fought in the nude?" the Grandmaster queries his suburban herds as the hawking of books and cassettes transpires, quietly, at the back of the evening's hall.

Bud flicks the television on, after Lauren's funeral and Wally's creepy party. Manuel had driven us lickety-spit back, when we'd split in time to catch the news... Bud thought someone Bro John knew would be appointed Undersecretary of cabbages or something... there was nothing except quick and dirty noodle ads in artificial sauce, and with an artificial Albert Einstein in a dull, hazy mashed potato heaven. "Pretty crummy," Bud admitted, "but it must have been cheap. Dead celebrities... you don't have to pay royalties!

"So," he adds, rolling over the sheets to pin my arms against the pillow like the hero of a gladiator movie... and with fresh, minty aftershave too!... "when is Quad really going to put us all out of our misery?"

"Never," I say, there's always room for advertising. "Quad only provides more carriers. Others will supply content... Casablanca, Meet the Press, Animal House, Gomer Pyle... sure Pay-TV takes the commercials out, first, but they'll creep back in. More channels mean more hockey," I add.

"And classic NCAA football?" Bud perks up.

"Sure!"

"I wuv you!" he moans, dusting my breasts with his hair, which is agreeably soft (and there is plenty of it... Jeff's, I fear, is beginning to thin). But also something unpleasant on the tube...

"Shit!" I cry and inadvertently knee Bud's groin as I struggle for a better look. "Brendan used to know that guy..."

"Who?" Bud says through gritted teeth.

"Bloomfield. He was in that band with horns; not Chicago, the older one, and this other group that played blues? Brendan toured with him... Florida, I think. He OD'd."

Some non-entity walked in without knocking, looked us over, including the bathtub lawyer, helpless as a kitten now. "Farm's in jail," he said through his smelly beard, after awhile... Gomer Pyle goes Surprise! Surprise!

"Really?" Instead of provoking him to leave, this had the opposite effect on Remington, on whom the urge had settled to unspool his prison stories. "Know why all the streets of San Francisco are named after prisons... Folsom, Leavenworth... I think there's an Alcatraz somewhere south of here... Lurleen, help me..." Somebody passed around stale popcorn but not a bite would I eat, nor drop I would drink in Goblinland. But, since it was late, I did accept a shot of speed.

"Jews, you know," said the premature punkette, "pigs handing out poison purple pills, looks like acid but it isn't." The failed lawyer cursed, kicking his bathtub, it was really time to split!

"Her old man would know what to do if he were here," says Remington. He and Jeff have this strange dynamic; despite the thing with the truck, Jeff still reflects ytz... he likes to talk about atom and hydrogen bombs 'round the flat, how to design them and position triggers. That four leaf clover, with Satan's little elf inside like Ralph up on Blue Mountain, Russian wedding cakes... I think Remington thinks Jeff has bombs of his own hidden somewhere, maybe under our bed. Since Brendan seems at least wary around Remington... he knows a fuck-up with nothing left to lose when he sees one... Jeff's freaking out of Remington has caused Brendan to have a little more respect for him. Not much... just some.

Remington's probably back in the joint, or dead now... neither Jeff nor Brendan (while he lived) ever thought much of Bud, as if Bud gave a fuck about the opinions of lowlifes either. "I'm sorry..." he says after rubbing the pain out of his balls, "I didn't mean anything." Of course he did and I've decided no... embargo on forgiving, until he has gone all wistful like the kid who never grew up.

"You were serious about Quad? Hockey channels?"

So sue me... but how can I stay angry at someone who still sends away for stuff from the back pages of Spiderman and Green Lantern? (Brendan's influence spreads like flu germs.) In response to Remington's prison yarns of shanks and shivs, Jeff talks dirt about mathematicians like Frege, who cited 'a man who puts on a coat over his cloak... wrapping up thoughts in double negatives does not affect its truth value.' "You know what Bertrand Russell and Einstein did to Frege?"

"Cut him?" Remington guesses. "No... blew him up! With hydrogen?"

"They drove him mad with logic or, rather, the logic of their illogical physics," Jeff replied and Remington nods; the Godfather, after all put a cut-off horse head to bed. And when the men in white coats were taking Frege away, Russell said, "... like the Pythagoreans, when confronted with the incommensurable, he took refuge in geometry."