THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 5, EPISODE 4

"Here is a problem," Ernie Cancinas allowed round sunset, last night, "Mitch Kazelka and Fanny Scarlatta have asked that this writer... whom you told me to keep away... be admitted." He coughed... "this Flagler person is supposed to be a surprise guest, a joke, Mr. Kazelka puts it."

Something vile and hairy to jump from my cake? Mitchell's sense of humor's as subhuman as his lack of integrity; fortunately Jeff had had something he wanted, so the ransacking of Mather Hall files proceeded swimmingly... a Mutually Assured Destruction of dirt. Jeff had rounded up a half dozen of the least stoned-looking Subcommitoids to rifle the contents of file cabinets. "We're looking for data. Financial data... who's paying whom... contracts, look at names on the bottom, research specs, passwords. Especially passwords!"

My own area of interest are FIT's Lentex correspondence files, compiled into neat little histories; roasty-toasty little nuggets of crime... what Dean Martin prefaces as "a conceptual frieze of middle things".

Mitch had promised a half an hour but it's more like a full hour before one of his flunkies comes barreling down the hall, pulling people out of meetings. The Dean had finally screwed up balls enough to ask that we leave in return for promises of fair trials, to which Mark Cobb had replied "Everything that allows a triumph of the revolution is morality," cribbing from Nechaev, not a bad source, all considered... "and everything that stands in its way is immoral!"

"Pielcock thinks we could create a computer that acquired original intentionality," Jeff discriminated, "but it would be impossible to make one that had it."

"A baby doesn't have intentionality," I say, and an Egg... sorry... has even less. "It has potential to become intentional, but this potentiality may be impotentiated by attentional malfunction..."

"Go ahead, see what's happening," Jeff pushed me into the hall. "I'm on the track of something interesting. Whistle if it looks like pigs are about to charge... Swannee River!

I go back to Dean Martin's office and the Dean's spokesperson asks me if I am in charge. People are running round, screaming slogans... this bald white guy asking "Are you in charge? Who's in charge?" until Mitch settled that issue by scribbling twelve abbreviated demands on brown washroom paper and thrusting them into the hands of the Dean's flunkey, who crumples the paper and throws it down as if it were a smoke bomb. I never found the name out of that little creep but, in one second, he'd made a star of Kazelka... everything that's happened since; Tandem, politics, all derived from the prestige Mitch got going face to face with the little turd.

That's the one! He's guilty!

All the cameras switched towards Mitch, away from Cobb, rendering him a footnote 'til the day of his arrest. "The Dean's position is that student demands are illegitimate because students cannot have legitimate demands!" Baldy retaliated, then he split. Even Omar couldn't have slit his throat any better than the guy had done so he had to slap Mitchell on the shoulder with a "right on!", although I knew he truly, deeply hated Kazelka.

Finally Jeff shows up at the back of the auditorium, carrying only his smile and his old briefcase he'd rescued out of a dumpster... "Property of Earl Jones Sausage Company", motioning me out to the hall to have a look out the window at the pigs. "Lined up like buzzards!" Every spring since at least the Civil War, a winged army of ugly, smelly vultures flies into a town twenty miles down the Interstate from Bill and Helen's place to mate and quarrel over roadkill. That was Jeff's karma... Capistrano gets swallows, Campobello, FDR... Ohio gets the buzzards.

"Think they'll pull a People's Park?"

"Not if Dean Martin's been honest with the Governor." Jeff shook out one of those unfiltered Camels he was smoking in those days. "They've been assholes, but purposeful assholes, you're not dealing with English students here. Science majors get pissed they can grind up an awful lot of real estate."

Omar finally lost it with the toilet trashers, his moving for expulsion of all the white idiots brought Bert Pilp's response that honkies were perfectly capable of expelling themselves, a motion someone seconded by firing a shot into the ceiling, causing Bert to drop his Budweiser can. It rolled across the auditorium, bleeding beer and summoning up such war loas as haunt New Jersey.

Jeff motioned me to the window again... Dean Martin slithering through pork... nobody guarding the back door, so we slipped out that way. I caught a final glimpse of Bert being clobbered with a chair and nobody... black or white... raising a hand in his defense. Then we were off into the night... safe as a white cow in Bombay, safe as a pig in Palestine.