THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 5

In the sharp days, from about a year after "Face" to a year before "Resonator", Brendan couldn't sell out a chicken coop on either coast, but milked the middle of the country for two blowziating albums of corporate arena-rock and three tours of forty minute sets. Dry ice, pyro... everything but high heels and facepaint. "Oh," Melanie declared last year, "... you mean the Lite Beer guy?" I had to rather patiently explain that, while most old timers were selling off their names for anything short of nuclear or semiautomatic weapons, Brendan never had, and never did allow a line of his music, even the crap, to be exploited by the Neil Lamonts of this world... the Rambles' catalog was different, already sold, gone, and so he hadn't scored a dime from the brewery or those Japanese carmakers who upgraded "It's a Happenin'" for one of their four-wheel-drives. "Doesn't matter," she says... from adolescent instinct rather than any coherent line of march, "he's still a pig!"

A pig! I never did understand the linkage of police with swinishness, when not only Salamanca but most of the world's underworlds associate their police and soldiers with dogs. "If it weren't for pigs," Bud declares, "there wouldn't be any footballs!" Yesterday, two of Ernie's goons took it to that retarded fellow with the Chinese eyes who sells his little windup plastic toys on a blanket near the entrance to the reeking beach; stomped and ground his little cartoon figures into shards of gears and plastic while the chubby vendor laughed along uproariously... such mirth of experience stemming from times when Arcilla's perros broke his fingers too.

Ernie lights a cigarillo, pointing. "Filth is what we're trying to eradicate. Filth... el tercero mundo... is what the norteamericanos despise here, while sucking our sun and oil for their boilers and Barracudas into cheap boats that fall apart because they can do no better than hire a drunk to steer them..."

We are joined, bone to bone, by crime, Ernie and I. It began twelve years ago when the Catholics set up a Japanese sedan in Plaza Armando Ortega y Rojas... a novelty at the time... to be raffled off to finance their incense and velvet Santa Semana debauch. Nuns in gray and white habits hustled tickets beneath old trees that exploded at sundown when their bats took flight.

"It does not seem so much of a thing," Nestor said of the little car, "but, for four pesos, how may one argue with the price?" I rather thought that the raffle car would crumple the first time it bumped one of the capital's proud old Pontiacs or Packards, let alone one of those oil burning trucks or buses... but it was new, foreign and shiny... I heard jokes that something large with wings would swoop down from the sky and carry it away to decorate a nest.

Almost a week into our stay Manny has become not only our principal supplier of dope but our guide, and Jeff's nervous. "Aren't there any pyramids to climb?" he pleads for, I believe, the hundredth time and the answer is the same... no, this isn't Mexico or even Honduras... we'd made one day trip to Xul where I hide my face in scarves, and Jeff sneers all the way through the desultory presentation by one of Carlo's many successors.

Today, however, Jeff has had an inspiration... dad's old radio bud Tom Varney... "they raise and capture monkeys for zoos and research. If one has influenza..." Manny agrees, "...they will let you enter during daytime, feed and touch los monos... and if you are lucky to be there when orders come in from Boston or Atlanta, you may even be allowed to watch a head chopped off and packed in... what is that stuff, Evily? So they are defrosted, still blinking, moving mouths to scream although, of course, no sound exits. It is like fog?"

"Dry ice," I say. "Carbon dioxide."

"So! And on the way out, or back, the bus passes the old silver mine!

"Call me a ding dong daddy," Jeff smirks, washing down two more little blue pills called "dormidinas" with cheap, Chilean wine. "How did you survive without being bored to death in this country?" he asks and Manny's face is as stony and motionless as the stelae in the Museum. Even Brendan's embarrassed, he picks up his guitar and strums the same four chords... close to "For Your Love" but not quite... with which he's been driving us mad for three days.

Brendan hadn't brought a guitar, he came down fully expecting one to fall into his lap and so it had... from a dispirited American whose family stopped sending money orders. He sold the guitar for bus fare to Mexico... a hundred pesos, or about twelve dollars. Brendan fully expected to leave the instrument behind, broken or maybe sold to some other romantic, he ripped hell out of those strings but always the same four chords, quietly building up a reputation as one of the crazier, dangerous gringos in a city already besieged by them.

Americans, Canadians and Europeans... cheap Belgians and French haggling over limes and tomatoes in markets, Germans with well-thumbed paperbacks of Castaneda surviving off handouts and dope sales to richer brethren, sleeping in filthy posadas when they had pesos, in alleys when they didn't. Salamanca was looser under Senior and his creatures... I heard many times that the sight of down-and-out First Worlders crashing in plazas much amused the old man. Perros would occasionally bring one in, find out he had relatives with money in Montreal or Hamburg or an American suburb... which of the chicks truly believed in free love. Poorly paid, perros took gratuities where they existed.

Instead of going off to pet monkeys and watch their heads whacked off, Brendan adopted three lost souls and snuck them into Miel for showers and a crash, and was too tired or stoned to prevent one California boy from breaking out and running naked through the halls and down into the lobby screaming "Be gay! Be gay!"

A diplomat (by process of elimination), I had to settle things with Nestor who was pretty pissed... two tourist couples had complained to their embassies and the government kept track of what went on in the hotels. I pulled it off... sort of... now Wally thinks I'm a better negotiator than Lou Baggott, all but melting my ear he takes my hand tonight and whispers: "I've been appointed your toastmaster."

"Well who's responsible for that?" I ask and Wally winks.

"The friends and friends of friends." He motions to Ernie to prompt the waitstaff and the head of all armies and police waves a manicured, Rolexed hand and Bobby's people begin to bang metal devices... pots, pans and implements... to capture the attention of the throng.

Wally's flattery borders on obscenity... yes, they all want to know how I did it. They think they know how I did but they don't know step one... I don't wear gloves as a fashion statement, but to hide the bloodstains. I've locked the romantics away in museums... under shelves of Uay monkey pots and the bat-skating god. Dusty rooms of creepy silicon pottery. Lentex is like a silver coated peso... in Costazul, Mexico, any poor country... relatively worthless but big and heavy, presenting a facade of importance. Like Jeff, who thinks his kids will be better off grown up stupid, "... you know how my mind's a Hawaiian motel for data, and look what it's brought me..."

What happened at Casa Miel, back then, was just this... I'd gone to Nestor and said we're leaving tomorrow for a few days, going to check out some monkeys. I'd pay him to hold the rooms for us, naturally the crashers go... no Brendan, no hippies. The tourist complainers see justice done and go back to Miami, and if Nestor can rent out our rooms for a night or two, who's to know?

"Make it a week," Nestor says. "That couple from Indiana were greatly offended. They say such things would not be allowed in their country, and they are right... to the extent of their knowing their own country. That means no more of the blonde man with ukelele..."

"It's a guitar, well, a sort of junior guitar," I protest but Nestor doesn't care... Brendan's creepy chords have spooked his guests worse, almost, than naked hippies. The insult appears deliberate, like Jason and Melanie running off to the Village midnights to see the Rocky Horror again; what bugs Julian is that they've already seen it what... twenty times? thirty?

"Enjoy your stay with the monkeys," says Nestor. "Maybe your two American friends can learn some manners from them."