THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 5, EPISODE 2

"This," Jeff acknowledged, "is a crummy neighborhood." Our first drive through Franklin, after getting married and honeymooning with T. over Labor Day.... T. had offered Jeff a thousand dollar check, Jeff said he'd tear it up, wasn't marrying for any dowry, but thank you anyway. I did register the gray old Pontiac that had languished in Rhode Island's barn four years - it started up after an oil change and minor electric work and T. paid the insurance bill.

Even the college suggested, if discreetly, that students look for housing elsewhere. Franklin was hopeless... a combat zone of neighborhoods rigidly segregated by ethnicity... the streets we now prowled festered with Cyrillic alphabets. Most FIT security lived here, bristling with tribal paranoia. You couldn't blame them... fully half of Franklin was black or Puerto Rican, smoldering in resentments. Most of the rest was abandoned... doors and windows pried off buildings, junkies clustered by liquor store-bunkers. One started towards the Pontiac as we waited at a stoplight on a frontier with no physical boundary markers... tho' a neckful of psychic ones... he waved his arms and fell, splop! into the gutter.

Gallatin, south of Franklin, was only a quarter abandoned... then. Crime vibes abounded... iron bars welded across most of the still unbroken windows gave it that good Amurkan aura of a medium-security prison, but there were a few fair streets away from the downtown hippie ghetto where Rutgers students... Mongol hordes, to the locals... came to buy drugs, raise hell in bars and catch a deserved bullet in the back now and then.

"What's the definition of an outsider in Gallatin?" this punchcard boy smirked at me while I waited for satisfaction at the registration table. "A fireman!"

Have I already said a lot of cops lived there? Somehow the landscape didn't fill me with warm feelings of safety; our fourth night as man and wife, despite having signed the lease, was spent, like the third, in a motel off the Jersey Turnpike... out Secaucus way, where pig farms still battled chemical plants for atmospheric turf. (Chemicals won, but yogurt's coming up fast, now!) "Notorious" was on the box as Jeff drew little triangles on toilet paper, little military Mao-maps of Gallatin, saying... "we got our cops, junkies here and decent citizens all firing in..." he obliterated the paper with lines, "that's us... in the middle."

I said I thought Notorious borrowed from Casablanca, far too obviously.

Franklin's always been low profile, like a lot of greasy, dying cities on the Eastern Seaboard... FIT had a little booth at Nepcon, a haunted corner. In college guides, it used to rank between third and sixth worst party school among four hundred something places, always behind the University of Chicago, until a few years back when the editors dumped FIT off completely, as not meeting even minimum standards for an academic environment. Nepcon elevators kept opening and closing, sending bone-rattling gusts of wind and drizzle spraying across the unmanned table; I'd postponed meeting Brian Palin so Bud and I could walk around the convention center, checking out booths. "This is where you went to school and didn't graduate from? Here?" The elevator rattled again, men with handcarts of bottled water emerging, and Bud drew his sweater closer round his shoulders.

Pritchard Vliet Robinstett, Virginia graduate, MBA from Wharton, two tenths of a grade point short of cum laude, truly gets off on opportunities to lord it over his wife!

Phil Diamond's holding down our end of the fort at the Lentex Pavilion with a trio of busty models (Robert Leonard's contribution)... posing with mini-modems and brochures of Ralph and Alice for half a dozen screaming suits. To his credit Phil doesn't point me out to any teenage hackers... we gravitate towards the center of the hall where IBM pulsates and pullulates, the mother spider of some ungodly sticky planet.

It's cheaply satisfying to see wunderkinder streaming past the competition on their way to Toyland... lot of Japanese, I note... storming Milton Bradley. Hell... half our new technology hits FAO Schwartz before the Pentagon, even, and, as the cost of patrolling the poor world escalates, it gets cheaper to distract the wogs than kill them. Memo to Jersey: get together with Uli to bring out a game based on Omni... fool little buggers into thinking credit overdrafts, float, fees and penalties and mailing list compilation is... fun!

Peter Bach waits at the Lentex Pavilion. I ask how the work is going and he beams... "Fine! It's fine! Fine! Fine!" he shines me on, suggesting I find some famous painter to detail the highest-end Omnicards... Dali maybe? Warhol? It's not bad... for Peter. I wonder what Gunter would have thought... he did have standards, though he tried valiantly to hide them. The more I think about it the more I find it, well... disturbing... and I start wishing I'd kept Peter down under.

Speaking of renovations let me reconstruct for you, dear Egg, some of the buildings that we saw in Gallatin. Bad enough at the time, insufferable now... imagine how they'd look when you become ready for higher education by 1999 or so! The first one we saw had had a fire... the hallway was charred, pipes still leaking. The next one's owned by this creepy toad who passes us keys under the edge of bulletproof glass; whoever last lived in this hovel had taken a hammer and gouged obscenities into the plaster... words like bursts of machine gun fire.

I considered this a reference... Santa hasn't yet abandoned this pancreas of Jersey!

The place we finally take is a big old tomb with a view of the Hudson and its garbage barges and, also, a fireplace, which makes Jeff's mind up. The resident manager's a stringy Iron Curtain throwaway who wants a fifty dollar "tip"... he doesn't even use one of those New York euphemisms like key deposit, first and last, security... Jeff jaws him down to forty. "Not ever see no niggers in this building, not ever!" Slobbo promises and winks at me, "hey, how about we party... want a shot of speed?"

"Trust me," Jeff says, "it's the fireplace. None of these slums have heat but, when it gets January-time, we can drive around, find things to burn and bring them back here." I'm looking forward to winter already. Home are the hunters.

We drag the stereo, typewriter, other stuff out of the U-Haul from Rhode Island which has languished in a ruinously expensive garage, turn it in, then hit Franklin's block of drab, cavernous second-hand stores... fighting off old black women with big ankles for furniture... couch, dresser, mattress... I've had it with sleeping bags on the dirty floor... hauled back in and atop the Pontiac with transmission-grinding lurches to find that the burglars have not only stripped the place bare but they've left a turd, moist and still steaming, on the floor.

Slobbo's amazed and outraged. "I said no nigger tenants in building but they crawl under doors like mice. I have good lock, ten dollars, other ones five. Thirty five a gun, no questions."

War merchants are crawling all over Nepcon... squawking, hawking... handing out little flags (American), flag shit paper (Iranian) and surplus yellow ribbons. Uli would be right at home... I spy Ussim al'Ibraham, working for Iraqis now, I think; he lingers by those booths with the briefest bikinis. At the other end of the hall I recognize Bert Evans, former Franklin PILP... agent of the Progressive Labor Party... barbered now, smooth and Attisized, working the G.E. booth with the nametag of a temporary employment agency stuck unevenly over the breast pocket of a five dollar Goodwill blazer. Last I heard, he substitute-taught in New York's educational gulag... people sink morally as well as economically downward with the flow.

I try to avert my head but he's seen me, so we have to pay a courtesy call... Bert's full of gossip, a notorious rat at FIT. He's heard Jeff's still a head case, wandering through the snows of Wisconsin?... Michigan... I don't correct him. Why bother? Bert's walking refutation of the cliche that suffering begats wisdom.

"Your appointment," Bud breaks in and I wave three fingers. In order to get to the phones we have to traverse the public service sector... cheap spaces for self-designated advocates, as opposed to salesmen. There's a Strategic Computer Initiative (SCI, ripping off the President's SDI), a front begging Federal aid to the computer speech rathole... there is a Friendship Booth portraying sunny views of USSR science cities. There is singing, swaying, records playing... zoot-suit, vinyl bikini'd pushers of four snarling media of the future... wide to narrow band being: satellite, terrestrial broadcast, cable and telephone. There are lawyers, mesmerized at an Arcade of fake boulders chasing trolls through Colossal Cave. A poorly constructed droid from a film company follows us to the phone bank beeping and squawking; we are near enough the Exit door to Columbus Circle to hear the political and religious fanatics outside, also that inevitable Manhattan room tone... "loose joints, loose joints"...

After two days of rage and involuntary cleaning-fluid highs, Jeff's mind has zeroed in on chemicals...

The hippy street in Franklin was less than a block long... one diner that dimwits called their "coffee shop", a headshop, one boutique peddling Marimekko miniskirts too long unsold in the City, Record Jungle, and a Black Power Store/Mosque behind thick black bars. Black Power, Flower Powder, Cold Powered All! Alleys between the stores as cheap scenery, before which the street action goes down; dealers shambly in long overcoats, yellow eyes. "You folks from Gallatin?" one says, "Gallatin?" palms a nickel bag in a handshake. "Gotta be crazy, living there!" A cop car drives by, cop takes a long look at us, spits and toodles on. Crazy to be in Gallatin. Crazy anywhere! Pigeons on the sidewalk coo... no evil gulls of Gallatin on Franklin's hippy street... pigeons who pluck lice out of each other's feathers, living on love, love, love is blue, is groovy, all around. Must be the season of the witch!