THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 6, EPISODE 1

Breathes there Americanae who have not dreamed themselves Back In School? Awakening with sweaty loins and midnight shivers at the prospect of nocturnal interrogations?

Jeff's diversion enabled those who wanted out to out, and most of Franklin's occupying army did just that... hiding behind Negroes, Barry Freiberg reflects, now, just like Chicago conspirators sneaking downtown behind Reverend Abernathy's mules. The only casualties were the few too stoned or too stupid to find the way out; these were knocked around some and tossed in jail, knocked around more and finally charged with felonies, only to be set free with fifty dollar and seventy-five dollar fines, months (or even years) later.

The pig hankerings for proper massacre were busted near dawn when Omar and the Governor's men cut their own deal without Mitchell's interference, submitting the workers' grievances to a state negotiator who awarded the janitors and kitchen staff twelve of their fifteen cents (Omar said they'd have settled for ten). The amnesty issue fizzled despite Bert's polemic that permanent records from FIT would be employed to fill concentration camps and this may be... though, of Jack Doll's most recent download survey of "28,000 left-liberals aged 25 to 40" (culled from memberships and magazine subscriptions), more than half had family incomes over $50,000, qualifying them as marketing targets for exercise equipment and a Nebraska company that repackages old songs into the new digital technology Brendan despised so heartily. The fleeting excitement of a successful strike was overtaken by the implications of a student suicide and, across the river, Grayson Kirk pontificated that: "Our young people have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destructive!"

"Demonstrations only serve to notify authorities which people can safely be identified for correction," Professor Drohm says, knocking insurgence from his pipe. "These are those who create the semblance of disturbance, as opposed to genuine danger," he added, cloaked in smoke, croaking his smoky votives as if from a doctors' doctrinal cloakroom, cloaked by inchoate cloaking devices...

"At Choate?" I note...

"Bring back some smog," Michael told me at the airport last February when Bob Parsonage and I went out to meet Hal Cord and feed his buzzards. This trip would enable me to miss winter's one serious storm and two social obligations: Roy Cohn's birthday and the premiere of the Helmsley's Harley Hotel, at which the Mayor would say that Lee and Harry "made a buck for themselves and that is fine". That party also ended early when the buffet caught fire, recalls Peter Bach; Koch racing Governor Hugh Carey to the door for dear life... the News interviewed Banks at the scene, he had no comment.

While this was going on I was watching "Elephant Man" over Amurka and touched down at LAX... Los Angeles, under both a full moon and Santa Ana wind. We're on the down escalator towards the taxi bay when a middle aged lady starts to scream and kick at a swarthy dude in disco polyester duds, batting him with her handbag. "Uh oh," Bob says, but the escalator is drawing us into ground zero.

Dude takes a swing and the top of the woman's head seems to fly off... tanned rent-a-cops draw their revolvers...

"Down!" Bob cried and crouched as the scalp flopped in front of us and snagged on escalator teeth... a blonde wig. The lady was a he, one angry transsexual who aimed a distinctly masculine kick that drops polyester guy to his knees, howling, clutching his groin. A second sent bloodspurts from his nose and mouth as we slunk along the wall with our baggage, past pigs, bewildered would-be Galahads and towards the taxi bay.

"Don't you just love LA?" I ask from the Chateau Marmont, which smells of blood and sex, money clouds hovering in Legion's yellow sky. Cord's left a message: pick up at nine tomorrow morning. Bob plugged in his computer, tap-a-tapping and I called Ma Maison's but there's a wait, it's late... even with Wally's name dropped... LA's an early-risers' town so I call down for barbecue, get greasy fingerprints all over the phone calling Bud - it's past midnight in New York but there are voices, television shrieking, hockey, and beer cans popping.

"Don't get burned!" Bud advises. "Try to stay out of the sun...

Anyway, with Revolution over, Jeff's trying not to get burned by Pielcock whose reputation, says Medieval Don, derives less from high standards than from the wholism of misanthropy. "I've only heard of him ever giving out one A," Don sighed, shaking his head in wonder, "... and that was two years ago, to an undergraduate!"

"How did that happen?" I ask, "and to whom?" Don said that the recipient of Pielcock's largesse had gone to New York, which is where most graduates go to duck out of the war. "The queerest thing was that he didn't really care about science at all, he was some art student, architecture maybe... did cartoons for the student paper till they kicked him out for pornography. Go figure!"

I asked who might know how to find this Aberrant Contingency and Don suggests Barry Freiberg. "Conrad Crane. Wanted to do movement cartoons, pigs for the Panthers, that sort of thing, though prematurely... he was what they used to call prematurely anti-Fascist, like when they blacklisted people for fighting Franco. But some chicks... women, I mean... they started complaining last year, he was sort of underground. Phallic, you know, with guns and boobs and, like, hairy things?" I ask for an address and Barry can't help... Crane was paranoid about ID... credit cards, library cards. "He took lots of drugs," Barry added, disapprovingly...

He told me to contact Marshall Sellars, one of Omar's semi-Panthers, full of macho... "New York be too tough for that boy, something about this teachers' strike. He back in Newark," and he gives this address which Jeff drives out to and it's a hole in wall, really!... there's real holes in all the walls rats keep peeking through while Jeff makes his pitch about Pielcock.

(I've got a class I go to... bad mistake!)

Jeff says Crane's six something and about ninety seven pounds, wired on speed and pornographic movies looping through his sick mind... Jeff has to groove on his sketches before he can swing the subject round to acing Pielcock's Neural Darwinism... which is the direction that got Leonard his A.

"Hates Descartes," the cartoonist advised, "anything romantic. Show him Hobbes; Hobbes, more Hobbes and Augustine. Stuffy old British fascist eunuch!"

Our FIT colleagues scatter. The realists slide right into Defense... a few even wind up in the Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, next to Great America's amusement park. Mitch gets his speeches anthologized in Rolling Stone, which he parlays into a soft gig writing record company press releases. Others get private sector jobs... one IBM lifer went mad in Los Gatos last fall, two weeks before Halloween... Tac Squad guy gets quoted: "we heard him roaming his house, slamming walls with his shotgun. He said he was being attacked by rats and machines. He said he was killing the rats. He's obviously a very disturbed man." After a sixteen hour siege he was teargassed, then warehoused in a bughouse.

Another used his Drohm connections to find a brain-slicing sinecure in one of the Carolinas. Dr. Ventura runs into Charlie occasionally, they talk about whether it's cheaper to use grad students... especially in the humanities these days... instead of research monkeys. Charlie insists the brain's devoid of pain receptors... veins in brains drain mainly without pain. I tell Ventura to give Paul enough gas to knock out a horse,

Meanwhile, the media find their spokesman for the rapidly disintegrating RSU... a street nut, Billy the Id, so named for his fondness for guns and brown acid. By parading this specimen on TV screens through the summer break of '69, the collapse of the organization by September is secured.

"Sure was a shame," I say as we pick up our Salamanca tickets a few months later.

"Wasn't all bad." And Jeff pats his briefcase from the sausage company.