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

The departure of the white students from Mather Hall wholly discombobulated the police, whom the Governor ordered back into postures of watchful waiting over one more weekend of burning monks. The devil distracted, Jeff inveigled me into a "what's next?" meeting, Saturday night, at the Hoboken townhouse of a sympathetic Professor of Classical Studies. Dr. Arrol had a student bride and three month old infant screamingly indifferent to mass struggle... the more world politics, viable and visible futures and people's heroics, the more Che and Abbie and Ho Ho, Ho Chi Minh!... the more little Eldridge cried.

And Mitch Kazelka was a no-show. After leaving Omar and the blacks to face what he'd later admit he'd expected would be a massacre, Mitch hopped a train to Trenton to huddle with the Governor. Exploring options. Mark Cobb went the other way, New York, in search of money and publicity... between them, Barry Freiberg was left to draw up a charter for a Revolutionary Students' Union. But every time Barry opened his mouth, Eldridge began to wail.

As the pirate Ann Bonney is reputed to have told a colleague on the gallows... not Peter Beard... "if you had fought like men you would not now be hanged like dogs."

So Eldridge howled again, as desperately... although not as freely... as Jeff bellows across his mountain, years later, to his canyons and his rats.

"If you can't shut that kid up," a toilet-busting bravo declared, "maybe somebody ought to shut his face up for him..."

"I wish Mitch were here," wished a long-faced, long-haired girl. "He'd know what to do."

The less violently inclined revolutionaries tried to amuse Eldridge into silence with funny faces, Marxist rhymes, snatches of the Age of Aquarius, Sweet Georgia Brown... strained as the cast of Up With People.

"I don't think Eldridge appreciates pizza," I say, pushing an offering away from the baby's mouth. Arrol's a liberal and his wife's an idiot... I foresaw a childhood of indulgence but, thereafter, a rough life for little E. ahead in that Big E, I'm told, has gone over to the Moonies. Bang Zoom! Ought to check up on them, when I get back. "Any thoughts?" I'd said. "Jeff?"

"What would Harry Stone do? Well, we can't hit him with a hammer, but maybe we could try boring him to sleep," and he'd reached for this Bible I know he's had an eye on for some time. Not a Scofield, a Jehovah's Witness tract but, when in Jersey... there were, of course, plenty of books in the apartment, even a copy of "Understanding Media" on the radiator under a paper cup of pizza-parlor Coke and icecubes, rendering it a passable example of a medium both hot and cold.

Jeff opened to Ezekiel at random and began to read...

"And I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I shall put inside you, and I will take away the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

"And my spirit I shall put inside you, and I will act so that in my regulations you will walk, and my judicial decisions you will keep and actually carry out."

"Wraah!" little Eldridge screamed, his pudgy fingers waving, face screwed up into a frown of demonic torment.

"Well I guess the Bible doesn't turn him on," Jeff shrugged. "Maybe the law..." and he riffled through an anthology of British jurisprudence. "OK kid what did Faraday, inventor of electricity, so the English say... they never apparently heard of Franklin and his kites... anyway, confronted by Disraeli, no... Gladstone!... who asked what use electricity would have... do you know what Faraday answered?"

Eldridge snuffled, snuckered, thumb rising against gravity and perhaps other weak, quarkish impulses, towards his lips... drool trickling from the corner of his mouth.

"Mr. Faraday declared, "Sir... I do not object to skepticism but mark... some day you sons of bitches will tax it. Alright, he didn't call all lawyers sons of bitches, but..."

"Erroll, he's sleeping," Ms. Professor said. Jeff put the lawbook down.

Eldridge Arrol snored evenly, soaring in dreamlands of warm milk, electric blankets, bright, noisy objects, taxes and warm, dry diapers.

While Amurka burns and Soviet General Reznichtzeko pens an article favoring preventive war in the military journal Red Star, Medieval Don... a Warp Seven Flight Commander in the embryonic Star Trek hackers' hierarchy!... has seen Jeff leap from Warp Five to Warp Twelve in four months, and he's intimidated. "Who owns," he falters, "the apparatus of control? Science or government? Arthur C. Clarke or Nixon?"... Don confuses science with science fiction, a common FIT misperception.

Coincidentally, both Don and Jeff have secured tickets to an address by Dr. Drohm, who will be flying in from La Jolla Friday to fulfill his quarterly obligation... the brainiologist and pop culture spook is on the guest faculty of fifteen or maybe twenty institutions from Marseilles to Malaysia. Drohm has labs with slaves and monkeys (lazy sheepskin-studded flunkies!) he is Moloch... to be flattered and propitiated. In his fake castle in La Jolla is a basement lab where monkey heads in Petri dishes stream out brain signals to silicon organs of experience and of reception. Signals captured and translated to code. Expensive Wolf-fattened Suelan monkeys...

"Monkeys stink," Jeff tells me a year later, hoisting his backpack for the six-kilo stomp towards towards San Gregorio where, twice a day, buses might stop, if flagged... buses back to the Salamanca of Graham Greene and Hemingway sipping chocolate in the lobby of Casa Miel, wrestling in song and love. To Brendan, writing down songs on the back of bullfighting and wrestling noticias in his American bed.

"Do you think decapitated monkeys can still recognize symbols that they've been conditioned with to associate with food or pain when they were whole?" I ask Drohm two years ago at an old mob dive in Brooklyn Heights Bud adores - faded rose wallpaper, spiders, wiseguys. "Stars and bars... hammer and sickle, crosses, swastikas..."

Dr. Drohm sips thick wine - he'd rather be fishing for marlin with General Johnny than serving as unpaid consultant on the Kramdens to Max problem. He stares out past New York towards a distant armpit of the future. "I think the brain... a brain cut off from sensory input, would be more likely to recognize patterns imprinted upon the right side... the East Coast side if I may be forgiven partisanship," he'd smiled at Bud (and that was not a pleasant smile, not at all!). "A brain decapitated in such manner as are mine... which, by the way, simulate certain notorious wound instances, the Kennedy brothers, for example... their traumas contaminated different sectors... retain some COBOL-like capabilities, I would think, as opposed, let us say, to BASIC or FORTRAN."

"No pain, Mrs. Stone," says Drohm, "no gain..."

After the white students consensed to occupy the bookstore, some kid with a shortwave radio had risen to say "The Germans are burning their dogs alive with napalm to express their solidarity with Vietnam!" and wild cheering redounds through the trampled piles of Edith Hamilton, Poincare and Levi-Strauss. Things used to keep falling off the old table in Gallatin as I typed up Jeff's dissertation... a paper bag, some keys, a towel. I type, he frowns before the television which speaks in the voice of Bing Crosby's son, Gary, as a hippie forger on Dragnet... now come hours of Mickey Rooney as a singing exterminator on Dean Martin's darkness. Dark darknesses, roving through darkness... gaunt hours when Carneval madmen in shabby, tattered sequins drag their wooden crosses through Salamancan streets. Crumpled fotonovelas and sports journals with brown, dysenteric stains... so many vital forces escaping through gaping assholes. Now the skies, salt, black beans, a chocolate rabbit up the sleeve...

There is a clatter of pyrates' bones in Salamanca's park... a viejo al Templo has put down the 5-6. A knave of hearts, inverted, the south facade of the Pyrate's Temple is constructed from Gloria down towards Earth. Tess winces and says: "in the war, when I was very, very little..." and he holds his hand between his knee and thigh, "my mother moved us to city, Stalingrad, because Germans overran our village. When the soldiers defending us cast dominoes, simple Russian set, not Chinese dobles, they call the double six bone Hitler..." and he points to the double twelves completing the viejos' Eastern wall and keystoning the skyhooked structure South. "He was most frightening of all!"