THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 4

We'd all gone down to Costazul together... Jeff, myself and Brendan... each swinging buckets of private failure. The sixties finally expired with Boston still on hold, Emil gone to New Hampshire to nurse his depression. The only doorknockings on Second Avenue came from Clyde White or Selective Service agents, Jeff thunk... Brendan, vagabonding south to seek solace from distant family, slunk back thin-lipped, strung out, broke.

"Nothing left but to go underground," Jeff decided (since wrapping FIT, Barry Freiberg's baleful influence was a presence I seldom saw but deeply suspected) "...Cuba!"

I remarked we'd be as far from the grasp of Nixon in Costazul... anyway it would be easier to get Cuban visas from Salamanca than New York. This had some authenticity of truth and, when Brendan's Tandem royalty check for three hundred something cleared, we jetted south against the tourist flow and found rooms at Casa Miel... three dollars a night for Brendan, four for Jeff and I.

April 3rd, our first full day liberated from the Amerikkkan pigsty (as opposed to Suelan kennel!), Jeff and Brendan slept until almost noon, drowned their strangeness in Piramide Cerveza and Cafe Nit then, against my recommendation, shambled off into the sun to look for dope. Senator Fulbright fulminated against the Cambodian coup by Lon Nol, Tricky Nixon's popeyed, palindromal puppet and, as T. informed me after, the commission on Universal Price Codes, on that date, selected zebra runes over their nearest competitor. A bullseye design - technically sweet, but which would have presented a gnawing public relations problem.

Lord Kin dragged the afternoon along like a dead rat tied to a stick. Nestor, the day manager (who'd save the money he made dealing weed, reptiles and relics to buy Casa when its faint-hearted owners fled Arcillismo), showed me the passports of some Illinoisians who claimed to have been ripped off and were awaiting the kindness of strangers, or relatives, at the other end of larga distancia.

"Either someone wires money or I sell the passports... male Americans go for seventy five dollars... one hundred sixty pesos. The woman... see, she looks quite like you, does Miss Mallorca... less, may we say one twenty? That is not so high a price for the privilege of becoming someone else, is it?"

"Depends on who you were," I say, go upstairs and wait for the dos compadres to return. "Mission accomplished!" Jeff gloats, both their thumbs jiggling upwards as if massaging Nixon's rectum. The rooms at Casa Miel are high and narrow, coffins tipped on end and, while Brendan rolled the first joint, Jeff rolled up a towel, wetted it and barricaded the crack under the door. I open one of the thin, monastic windows and we fired up.

Brendan used to roll his joints loose and sloppy... Jeff's are tight, anal. "Harlem joints," Brendan scoffs, he says the best stuff in Arkansas and Alabam comes from Wallace people and bikers... the Sons, the Klan. Of course, on the mountain, I didn't even see one Harlem joint... Jeff said parole allowed him his Buglers, alcohol, valium and certain prescription downs to calm his nerves, that's fine with him because the Now's gone to down time for everyone... except maybe Iran.

"And don't you have to get back to work?" he sneers, just as Carol says I can sleep in the next trailer down, through the blowtorched-out door, backed up to the fireplace, which will be warm (they have a templeful of comforters and blankets!).

"Presidents' Day," I reply.

"Kids!" Carol calls, and leads them away.

Monday morning I shuffle out from under piles of blankets, face puffy from honest cold, from Route 666 and vulture dreams; Carol spooning gobs of gluey oatmeal out of a black pot. Flagstaff and Grand Junction radio stations wrestling, oozing staticky glops of Cat Stevens, Streisand, Denver, Chicago, Captain and Tennille, I'd rather face the cold outside... I took the second mug with me for Jeff's grand tour... more junk autos, sheds and trailers for resalable auto parts and computer guts.

"Mostly I'm known as Studebaker guy, but I'll patch up anything that fits the egos in LA or Vegas. Let's go to breakfast."

"Thought you'd had yours," I say.

"Oatmeal's not breakfast. I'll drive." And he points out a monstrous old GM cab I'd mistaken for junk. "Nothing stops Judy here... snow, rockslides... got a six car trailer over there with a toolbox, my towbars... two big mothers I use to haul dead computers out of California and Texas, hell of a lot of really toxic shit in Texas."

The engine turns over, radio's turned to Albuquerque, clear as glass. "You don't worry about the effects of that stuff on your kids? Or the neighbors?"

Jeff smiles... I see that he's lost another tooth, this on the lower right. "No procreation without mutation," he raps, the white Muhammed Ali. "And what neighbors?" he smirks... "nothing downwind but Indians and you know what government thinks about them! Ought to pay me a bounty... twenty five cents for poisoned Apaches, fifty for Zuni scalps. Just doing God's work..."

And he smiles again. "Ain't we all?"

Judy takes a nasty bounce, shocks shot, but we're so high above the desert, it's like God up there, makes you want to lay a foot down over the throat of the rest of the world, just because you can.

"Don't go much east of Texas, just that one trip to the folks I wrote you about. You'd think Detroit good for parts but iron's rotten... all that salt Yankees throw over their roads..."

Yanquis? I'd had to snap my fingers - once! twice! before he floats back from weedland in that tipped-up coffin room at Casa Miel... one of those Nestor markets as Old Colonial, now, he used to get hundred twenty for... dollars! a night! before the KM busted open. (I think he'd take four bucks now, if someone offered it, and consider himself lucky!)

Jeff grinds the gears, forcing balky old Judy onto 666, the glove compartment falls open... no dope. For want of something to talk about I comment that Carol seems nice... but...

"We had to. Some users are sensitive about anything that's connected with the military. Besides, you don't seem numb..."

"I've made an accommodation with the dark," Jeff says. "These days I see it as my friend."