THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 1

I think I'll embargo fish at Delfinas hereafter... any Costazuelan fish, in fact... Cybele knows in what it swam, what media it ate! Let fish lawyers and UN shipowners' lobby-bobbies thrash things out in court, I can't afford more stomach upset. I should have demanded Bobby provide alternatives... chicken, chicken's safe, isn't it? Things that taste like a chicken, lizards...

Emil Bruns, who gave Jeff a job while Boston put him on hold after graduation... now he looked like a tough old reptile. Or maybe a predatory bird, one of Doug's condors, perhaps, talons sunk into some unfortunate rodent. Even his gray, bushy eyebrows looped upwards, like feathers. Architects are rock stars for rich folk... complete with groupies, go-fers and roadies... Emil's alpha-toadie was a speedy little fellow, a Harry Joback without Harry's warped self-esteem. Clyde scurries round Emil's office, bringing coffee, ready to pounce on any mission the architect might throw his way while Jeff runs through his first batch of printouts analyzing the stress on various parts of a Midtown skyscraper Emil's doing. I'm along for pure experience. "Yah... yah..." Emil follows Jeff's jagged little lines from box to box, a flow of memory, "but you protect so many passages, how?" Jeff looks cheated. The great architect is thinking like... a cop!

And then Emil turns towards me, saying, "... and you, with Mr. Stone we do the business especially, also Wilson Leonard. I make outline for oil apparatus... one mistake goes boomf! Fire!"

Why are Jeff and I in Bruns' office, a decade back?

Petra III's burning out, and progress on IV's faltering... Mike Korbel had quit Lentex to work for the Feds, eventually surfacing at OP, and the rest of the aging Lentex design team has had trouble making the transition to transistors... the gravity of vacuum-tube technology impossible to rise above. "Most design problems with supermains are corollary to the architecture of big office buildings," T'd explained on Liverwurst. Until Boston commits, couldn't Jeff and I look over Emil's shoulder?

"Of course. I like to have audience, yah!" said Bruns. There is an artist at the core of every businessman, even if the reverse ain't always true.

Brendan!... well, the Rambles' follow-up single ran out of gas and barely cracked the Top Forty, the album bombed... most unsold copies melted down, now you'd pay twenty bucks for a mint copy at collectors' shops. Their last gigs were high school gyms, union halls with flies still struggling on the dangling flypaper. Darnell's replacement got drafted and Brendan went back to LA's smoggy air and narcotic tars.

The rest of the Rambles, incredibly, cut one more single after Brendan quit over the label's lousy promotion job... and the suits! "They voted to stay in them, I'm fuckin' 27... people are fuckin' dying in Vietnam." I think I brought up that Matty was maybe ten years older and Brendan rather unkindly said that Matty would wear a dress to feed his arm. "I have twelve hundred dollars in the bank," Brendan told us during that short, strange interregnum with Bruns... "I'm going to Vegas for the steady work." Instrumental covers - red sales in the sunset; "Yesterday" for the avant garde. Social security for almost-weres.

"I'd never live out here," Bob Parsonage declares, once safely down from Buzzard Mountain and planted on a barstool at LAX. I've asked for a can of beer... brand immaterial... and gotten only a dirty stare and bottled Beck's. "Too many complications, too much sun." When he gets back, three of the four kids from his first marriage will be coming to Valley Stream for February break, making five in all. "Have a good time in Vegas," he waves as his plane's called. "Try not to gamble the company away."

Actually I only lost about six dollars, Egg, on airport slot machines between touchdown and boarding the Albuquerque local, stopping at Flagstaff, Gallup and Santa Fe. No movie, only dry sandwiches and Fresca - I try closing my eyes but images from Harry's night keep flashing cross my scalp like migraine jolts. So many insurance people talking completion bonds... top o' the line! Harry says, still... insurance people! If users start demanding completion bonds on new computers we'd bust within a year... IBM within six months. Old starlets from soaps, coke, promises of suitcases bursting with cash...

"Women like pain," Harry told me, but then said he was only repeating what Mitchell's ex-wife said Mitch had said to her. "Women are incapable of real violence," he'd said again and came out of the party alive... proving it, I guess. Then Vegas sprawled before me with its billboards, blowing evil kisses. I had eighteen minutes, time to change a Jackson for twenty dollar tokens... fifteen losers, one ten dollar payback. The tarmac shimmers... Vegas is deep Dixie without humidity. Away from the Strip it looks like any old Southern city... Birmingham, Memphis... that's why Brendan liked it in his down days.

I rent a big old Buick in Gallup... not that old, really, a couple of years but definitely a work horse with big, mean tires for chewing up bad roads off Highway 66, pass high desert towns where aging Kookies comb thinning hair over foreheads mottled with skin cancers and lesions. Taco gas stations, Eternal Balm Funeral Parlor and Victorious Overcoming Faith Center. Back west, racing the sun.

Into the West...