THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 5, EPISODE 6

White students massed in the bookstore because, as I have said, the occupation had wholly factionalized. Omar, the Franklin Panthers and maintenance workers held Mather Hall (Dika, mistaking me for Puerto Rican, wanted me to stay though Jeff, imperialist knave of white dragons, would have to go). While Barry and Bert Edwards argued furiously, the stupidest third of the honkie contingent trekked off in the direction of FIT's gymnasium... where ROTC drills were held... Mitch led the rest towards the book depot, Franklin's "company sto'", which merchandised textbooks at twenty percent over New York prices, sad FIT junk and bound collections of Professors' musings sold as required reading to supplement academic salaries. From the pig point of view, the RSU tactics were diabolical... kids screaming, voting on sidewalks, rushing to occupy one building, then another... the National Guard Captain, in a report Ralph recently provided me access to, called it "a classic instance of Marxist-Leninist duplicity enforced by Maoist terror and confusion".

The clerical staff of the book depot... most of whom were members of the same union as the cooks and the janitors... were quickly and efficiently expelled, some with a few bruises and bloody noses at the hands of the vanguard.

Only when darkness clattered down was it realized that the hundred or so world citizens were, themselves, stranded behind police lines without food except for the gum and candy at the counter and contents of one Coke machine. There was a telephone, however, an item of contention between Mitchell, Barry and some Yips who'd split off from the old guard vanguard after failing in their attempt to smuggle in a few stink bombs (which, Mitchell had adroitly pointed out, could only be used against themselves).

Barry had gained physical possession of the phone, learning that the Governor, baffled by the chaos at FIT, was ordering his troops and the local cops to wait us out, which they did throughout the rest of Thursday night, all Friday and into the weekend.

During the afternoon a dozen weightlifters and rowers (FIT was too poor and studious to support a football team) forcibly evicted twice that number of lefties from the gymnasium and Mitch gave two television and five radio interviews over the phone. Angry at his phone-hogging, the Yips trashed all the bookstore's toilets, provoking some wounded heroes returned from Chicago to trash the Yips by pelting them with yellow and black Cliff Notes.

The Yips were outnumbered, but had the advantage of being cornered in the math section... they retaliated, not with Cliff Notes, but with heavy textbooks of algorithms, syllogisms and deviant calculus. Mitchell's droids formed a bunker of European and Mideast History around the telephone, using smaller, lighter literature as tactical weapons... Trollope, Chekhov and Camus.

Like most in-betweeners, Jeff and I were bored... and hungry!... pissed at Mitchell's self-coronation, pissed because there was no longer anywhere to piss, juiced on no sleep and butterscotch balls. Slowly, and then in escalating tides, a riot of books burst out, aimed for a while at personal targets, then indiscriminately. Jeff begin reading the titles of his weapons before launching... "Niebuhr, bitter old eunuch... the Naked Ape, a prime ate literature... how do you define units of mystery?"

"Herrigel?" I asked as something flew past my ear... Eliade...

"Zen and the art of Anarchery?" I threw it over the lip of an anthill of last year's remaindered Godfathers... returning process with parochialism, Chardin for Wittgenstein, Jaspers with Santayana (whom dirty Bertie Russell called the "perfection of rottenness"); vowel with voweler (A. A. Milne for E. O. Wilson), finally an anthology of Poe... slim, but heavy with engravings... against blizzards of Leibniz and Voltaire...

"Oh wow!" a hippie glancing out the window said. "Look at all of the pigs!"

The noise of thudding books and scudding feet and screams had turned almost all of the local cops and half the Guard away from Mather Hall. They'd formed a semicircle round the bookstore... it was an old two story building with the main room on top and offices beneath... dark offices, branched off twisty little corridors; the only reason, I guess, why the place hadn't been rushed. With all the fluorescent lights burning behind thin, light purple drapes, the shadowclash of books and partisans must have seemed a Balinese renderment of the storming of the Bastille.

A blond guy with his stringy beard twisted into braids like a pirate drew open the drapes, opened the window, and I saw a copy of "Being and Nothingness" quiver in his hand. "Eat Sartre, pigs," he whelped and, though I swore he'd never hit anything, he scored a strike on a cop holding a flashlight who put his arms up over his head and sagged to one knee.

Civil strife forgotten, the occupiers pushed for window space and broke glass, hurling "Native Son", "Slaughterhouse Five" and thick IEEE texts at the pigs. I even saw Barry and the blond Yip side by side... the latter raising a Papal biography, Barry arcing a volume of Joseph Campbell into the pork.

Mitchell remained by the phone, taking and receiving calls.

I saw the boss pig and Captain of the Guard slink round with their radios, and then the Captain took his bullhorn up and said: "Gas is to be employed, and this facility will be cleared out by any and all means in ten minutes. Put your weapons down and walk single file out of the north exit with your hands on your heads. Anyone making a suspicious gesture is subject to being shot."

I saw the pigs breaking their semicircle and forming a double line... a gauntlet from the north exit to parking lot... twenty-some cops and fifty-something Guardsmen, rubbing their aching necks and shinbones, fondling their batons. I sort of figured that they weren't there to wish us happy birthday.

"They're going to arrest us!" wailed some pisshearted soul hiding in a cave of psychology textbooks.

Mitchell had stepped away from the phone, motioning Barry and a few of his most trusted flunkies towards the cash registers for a quick conference.

Jeff picked up the receiver, felt in his pockets for money, then dialed 911.

"Officer?" he said. "I'm Professor Cooper. I am being held hostage in Randleigh Hall at Franklin... I'm not allowed to say where. I'll hold, but hurry..." he smiled. "Captain! God... we're being held at gunpoint, all of us, by ten black men with guns. Big, black men! Yes, there are two women here, one maid, one secretary..." He made a waving motion towards me...

"Police?" I said. "Help!" I heard a voice ask who I was and I said "Mildred! I work for Doctor... Pepper. They have guns! Big, black guns!"

"Now listen," Jeff said with evident irritation, tapping the side of his head to denote the intellect of the Captain. "I am going to read a prepared statement, otherwise I'll be shot. I quote... you are to bring a limousine to the south door of Randleigh Hall, a Cadillac. No... they don't say whether Lincolns will do, they want a Cadillac... what?... three Cadillacs. Just let me finish. Please! It's to be driven to the airport... Newark... and a plane is to be waiting to take all the black men and hostages to Algeria. What? Well if it has to be refueled..." he put his palm over the receiver and mouthed two words, "make noise" and I began to moan and mumble, hoping I wouldn't attract the attention of some idiot at the window.

"OK," Jeff says, "they can refuel in Cuba, if they have to. Warn the State Department not to shoot us down. And money. A million dollars, cash, in a suitcase. Small bills... no, I can't, I have to read this list. I can't tell you that, they'd shoot me. Right! And one more thing, food. Yes. Two sixteen-piece tubs fried chicken, sixteen cheeseburgers with fries and ketchup in those little plastic packets. How should I know, Captain, I don't eat food like that, I'm a Professor! Cooper, yes... and beer, a case of Colt .45, two bottles of Tiger Rose wine and two bottles of Old Crow. Some tampons and cigarettes... Camels, unfiltered, and Kools, Newports... and a box of ice cream... of course, chocolate, and..."

"Hey man," some kid shouted from the window, "something's up! Pigs running all around, there's all these pigs with radios..."

"And... oh... they want me to tell you to have the airport be sure I Am Curious is the airplane movie. Blue or yellow... I don't know... I'm a scholar, I'm not interested in pornography, I'm only repeating what I've been told...

I edge away from the telephone to see what's happening... the cops and Guards are all hopping round like Federales in Malcolm Lowry suits, ants in their pants...

"... no that's not possible. I'm being ordered to hang up now. Calls to Randleigh Hall won't be answered and... please... one hostage will be shot every time the phone rings. Captain, don't do anything to further antagonize those ma... these men. Somebody will call you in eight minutes. Yes, I can remember your number... yes, no, I can't, goodbye..."

He put the receiver down. "Hey... like... the pigs are splitting," came another call from the window.

"As are we," Jeff told me and I followed him downstairs and out the dark, unguarded south exit. "Mildred," he shakes his head, "you are a voodoo child, Evie!" There was a thin drizzle, and a sweetness in the air I've only tasted a few times... such as last February after Oz switched his vote and put me on the Lentex Board. Sweet the thumburger of victory, fleet the cuckolder of Bumburger's graves... another day snatched from the pretty lady who leads Dennis DeFranco's losers out through plywood gates...

How still the sea becomes, yet I still sense a presence... something ominous under Polaris or waiting, beneath the waves...