Dance with a Stranger

My brother came last night to say goodbye. I am 24. He is 20. I don't worry about the Army, because I have a wife and a son, 14 months old.He doesn't worry about the Army, because he has a record: one auto theft, one forgery, one insanely bungled safe heist. Two out of three, felonies. One year parole, six years' probation. He's not supposed to leave New Jersey, but when he's downtown, illegally, he drops by to talk. He rings my bell and wakes me up.

Last night--this morning--he came at three; tan, pink-tinted sunglasses, Mexican beads, Dylanish tresses, two weeks' growth of downy hair along his cheeks. He threw some pillows down in the big room (he likes to sit on the floor) and filled an enormous Sherlock Holmes pipe.

"I wanted to smoke with you once before I go, Leo," he said. "I'm disappearing."

He lit the pipe and dragged. I asked him where he was disappearing to and what he planned to do disappeared, but he smiled and raised his hand, telling me I'd have to wait until he finished toking. He passed me the pipe. Ordinarily, I never smoke.

"West," he said on the exhale, and then he breathed deeply in and out a few times, nodding serenely. "Catch fish. See flowers. Do my thing."

I emptied out my lungs and asked who was subsidizing him. We whispered, so as not to wake Michael, my heir. Our place is a loft, really. One big room, my film workshop, with Michael's crib in the corner, and then a little bedroom, for me and Jessica.

"Who's subsidizing me now?" Allen; asked rhetorically, reaching for the pipe. "People. Women. They give you what they have. You don't need much." He reached into the pocket of his coat (he never takes his coat off in the house) and drew out a thick roll of bills. "I sold everything. Even my bike," he said, and dragged.

I graduated from Chicago three years ago; my wife went to Antioch. Now she's in the Movement for $25 a week. I'm a Movement hanger-on, you might say. Making a Movement movie: very low status. We get a little money from her parents, which is why I'm sensitive about subsidies, and four nights a week I drive a cab. Allen didn't get through high schools till he'd passed 19; four different ones, plus one yeshiva. He cut a lot and became a delinquent. He's not into delinquency anymore, though.

"Peruse Thoreau?" he said, finishing another toke. "Cat gave everything away except this ashtray on his desk. Cleaned out his pad. Hold it. I think it may have been a paperweight. Anyway, he'd sit there and contemplate it, until it started to freak him. Then he chucked it out the window." Allen made a noise that can only be described as a blissful groan. He evidently admired Thoreau. Actually, he admires me, too. I'm a borderline case: cubed but with roundable edges; engagé but uncertain. I have no special thing for Haight-Ashbury, but I'm not nuts about cops, either. Allen and I can relate.

Allen said, "I'm Thoreau, but with a wad. Geoffrey wanted to count it. All he had time for. I went up there for a fond farewell, but he was snowing a little miniskirt." Geoffrey is my other brother. As a matter of fact, he doesn't worry about the Army, either. Too old. He came of drinking-drafting age smack between Korea and Vietnam; he still thinks Russia is the enemy. He's not exactly a middle-aged swinger, but since his divorce, he's been dating a number of youthful models and hanging out at Malkan's and Elaine's. Even though he's in advertising, he has some immortal longings (he likes to talk about "really making it") and he lends me money two or three times a year. Probably he lends Allen even more often. Once, after the auto theft, when Allen was afraid to call our parents, Geoff put up a fairly immense bail bond. "We only talked about ten minutes. I told him he'd probably never see me again, but the was intent on his erotic games. He asked me how long I thought my bread would hold out and I told him twenty or eighty years, depending on how much I gave away. It might not be so long, though. I gave away about three hundred on my way downtown. That roll is like a stone in my pocket; like a big-ass paperweight bringing me down."

He stood up and started weaving about, smiling wildly. At first, I thought he might be looking for the toilet in the middle of the room, but then he stumbled--it was quite graceful for a stumble, really--into our tiny kitchen and emerged some 45 seconds later with a large flowered serving dish. He began by tapping the pipe ashes out onto the dish, but in the middle of the task, he seemed to forget its functional purpose and was simply rapping out a loud Hare Krishna rhythm.

Then Michael started whimpering. For an instant, Allen looked on the verge of an apology. Instead, he spread his arms straight out--I wasn't sure whether in imitation of crucified Jesus or an overaffectionate Yiddish relative--and beamed, "Well, he had to say bye-bye to Uncle Allen!"

When you wake Michael after midnight, you can kiss away your morning's sleep. He's a crier, my son. A kvetcher. Fourteen months old; I must raise him wrong. Too lenient. I lifted him from the crib, seesawing paternally from the hips, and started for the kitchen to hunt up a bottle. Allen waylaid us. He rose up slowly from a crouch--puffing out his cheeks, bugging out his eyes--grabbed several fingersful of Michael's tummy flesh in a luxuriant pinch and drawled "Kinnna-a-hhhorrr-a-a-a" in a fervent basso profundo. Zero Mostel escaping genie-style from a Coke bottle. Michael sputtered, as though a pillow had been stuffed into his open mouth. It was weird. He's named after my father, even though Jews aren't supposed to do that. Actually, my father is Mikhail, but everyone calls him Mike.

"You're emitting orgone stases and he's tuning them in," Allen said matter-of-factly. He's no Reichian--he doesn't believe half the crap he says, I don't think. He just believes things not altogether unlike what he says. In any case, he and Michael were reaching out for each other like long-separated lovers in a grade-B movie. I'm easily embarrassed by these filial rejections. I relinquished my son, who instantly wrapped his miniature arms around Allen's neck. Allen carried him over to the corner. The two of them faced the wall and Michael quieted down some more.

"The first was just some cold water in the face," Allen stage-whispered, his back to me. "A zetz from the Zen master. Now we contemplate the void. You ought to set him in front of a blank wall once in a while. Cleanse out that sensory overload. He's just a little kid." Then Allen started humming in his ear. He started humming tzmiris, the endless melodic chant that finishes a Hebrew Sabbath meal, bending and straightening at the knees and rocking forward at the waist, like an orthodox Hasid. Michael cooed gently along, stroking Allen's woolly hair on the downbeat. I moved closer to hear the lyrics, over and over.

"Remember the star that went overthe manger?

It means simply this: You can dancewith a stranger."

My brother likes to mix up his religions.

• • •

Allen had somehow flicked the golden switch that turns my son off; Michael didn't utter another cheerless sound for the rest of the night. "Babies love me," Allen said. "They have radar."

"What's the secret?"

"I'm the secret. I'm a baby." Michael cuddled against his chest, burying mouth in available beard.

"Maybe I should stop shaving," I said.

Allen wrinkled his nose and shook his head, as though I'd proposed betting a bundle on a lame horse. I could see thick beads of Michael's spittle in his chin hairs. My son the kvetch. When he's happy, he drools. "Don't mean a thing if you ain't got the moves. You, you're still all strung out. Bad karma. We pick that up. Let me lay it on you. It's not just like this with kids. I know thirty houses from here to the Coast, I can walk in this minute, they'll feed me and bed me and spread money on me and I'm doing them a favor. I walk in the room and girls who never set eyes on me throw their arms around me. We connect. I've got the answer. They know who I am."

I was about to ask who runs these establishments, but before I could, Allen answered. "Kids! Babies! Some very rich; share. Communal head bending." I must have looked startled at his anticipating my question, because Allen burst out laughing and Michael, who was now fiddling with the bead necklace, laughed, too. "That's been happening lately," he said reverently. "Since I flew back from Yelapa. For a month and a half I dropped three caps a day, or shot speed. I got some kind of X ray. In this sad country I'm a criminal and a bum, but in the Himalayas, I'd be a god."

"You're crazy," I said.

"I know," Allen said, absolutely earnest. "Isn't it ecstatic?"

Squatting Yogi style, he dragged deeply on the pipe, his inhale sounding like last waters running quickest out of the bathtub, and rolled his eyes upward in mischievous supplication. He began to grin while he held his breath, as though by some incredible stroke of luck he'd sucked in all the sweet fumes and none of the foul. He gestured to me with a finger that he had something to say, as soon as his toke was completed, something momentous, in case, perhaps, I was thinking of running off to the bathroom. Then he exhaled in a proud, smiling explosion. I saw him do the same exhalation a dozen years ago at camp, after a full minute under water.

"Insanity isn't a condition, you see, Leo," he gasped, still out of breath. "It's a word that describes a condition. Now, I've got a condition, that's true." He seemed to be wrestling with an enormously difficult concept, and that made him happy. Michael was staring into his eyes, three inches away, mesmerized. Allen's eyebrows furrowed in concentration. For an instant, I thought he might be making fun of seriousness. "But if we agree that I'm crazy, we're just choosing to apply that word to my condition." He lifted his head and flashed me a smile of grateful comprehension. "So going crazy is a matter of choice. An affectation, Leo. Inconclusive." I thought that he started to hum at this point, but it may have been only a silent pause. "It would be like growing a goatee or learning karate, sort of--but it would suggest an opinion on more things. It might even suggest an opinion on everything. Not a solution, Leo. Just an immediate kind of answer to questions--it gets embarrassing answering 'I don't know' all the time. But being crazy is a really adequate response, if you're still reading me: 'How're they hanging?' 'What is it with kids today?' 'Do you like MacBird? I just say, 'I'm crazy.' "

I nodded stupidly. An instant before, I noticed that the pipe had gone out. I must have been fairly smashed, because I was trying to figure out how I might gracefully relight it without detracting from Allen's philosophizing.

"But do you think people will see insanity as a ... failure of humor?" Allen asked, a bit apprehensively. At last, I reached over to his side and grabbed the pipe. Dragging deeply, I relit it. He'd launched into this new thought with considerable excitement. "I mean, like, Harvey Creep asks you, 'How does Allen feel about the war in Vietnam?' and you say, 'Haven't you heard? Old Allen's gone mad.' And Harvey says, 'Oh, poor kid. He took himself so seriously.' "

"I go all tingly inside to hear you grappling with the southeast-Asian question. In your own way," Jessica said from the bedroom doorway. "Without you in my demonstration I could do, New Youth." She often puts on the dialect when she's awakened. She likes to feel the harried mother. She walked across into the kitchen, her white-cotton nightgown brushing the floor, and put a pot of water on the stove. "How are you, Allen?" she called in. "May I ask what chemical pacifier you've slipped my son?" Michael was rocking, wide-eyed but (continued on page 301)Dance with a Stranger(continued from page 210) dreamily, in the semicircle of Allen's folded legs.

"Beautiful. Oh, baby. I'm beautiful, and so are you, and so is your baby, if you give him half a chance."

"I'm not beautiful. You goddamned beautiful people! Leo, has he given some drug to mein Kind?"

I said I didn't think so. Michael, for some reason, had accelerated his rocking and begun giggling.

"He has. He obviously has. Allen, I'll have you incarcerated. I swear. This is worse than statutory rape. You'll get a refresher course in police brutality for this. Turning on minors has gone too far. You've made my son a mutant--the first of the teeny-weeny-boppers. I'll expose you in True Confessions, you perverted junkie, 'My brother-in-law blew my baby's mind.' "

Allen was convulsed with laughter. They really like each other terrifically. In the kitchen. Jessica sloshed boiling water into some cups on a tray. "STP? Coffee?"

"I don't do coffee," Allen said, suddenly quiet again. "I'm doing grains now." He'd been on a macrobiotic diet for a few months.

"How's about a little brown rice and poppy petals' on sisal to go?" Jessica asked, bringing in the tray with two cups. "You know why you're not insane? Because this state recognizes only two legitimate symptoms of insanity. A, loss of appetite; B, nausea. You're just a punk acidhead. You couldn't get into a zoo any faster than you could get into Princeton."

"Gaining admittance to a mental institution would be primarily a matter of show," Allen said, his voice ringing with professorial pomposity. Jessica reached over and took off his pink-tinted sunglasses. She tried them on.

"La vie en rose," she simpered. "A little cube'll do ya." They liked to play witli each other this way.

"Authoritative corroboration, however, would be quite possible without gaining actual admittance," Allen went on. "For example, I present myself at Bellevue." He stood up, still holding Michael and, turning first one way and then the other, had a little dialog with himself in different voices.

"'I wish to be admitted as a lunatic.'

"'On what grounds, fella?'

"'I'm crazy.'

"'Whaddaya mean, you're crazy?

What makes you think so? You eat OK? You nauseous----' "

"Nauseated," interrupted Jessica.

"Uneducated cat. 'I understand myself to be insane through extensive introspection.'

"'You got symptoms or what?'

"'I should think my own conviction of insanity would be sufficient.' After we rap a little more of this riff, I am refused admittance to the asylum."

Jessica applauded this verification of her diagnosis. She was, of course, joined by Michael, a big clapper, who was more or less slung over Allen's shoulder.

"But sanity has not yet won out on the official score card. For a second doctor, having peripherally observed this interview, approaches the very Kildare who has turned me from the inn.

"'What was that all about?'

"'Oh, nothing, just some crazy guy.' "

Allen plopped down again into his lotus position on the floor, set Michael cowboy style on his shoulders, refilled the pipe, toked and passed it to Jessica. "This is very nice dope," he said. "Zoom you into the stratosphere." All of a sudden, he seemed to notice the pink-tinted sunglasses that Jessica still had on. "Highly gassy shades. Like to get mea pair."

At first we thought he was joking. "They're yours," Jessica said, a bit confused. Allen looked, for an instant, altogether lost. Then he brightened. "They're mine. Certainly they're mine." I noticed then that Allen was sweating unreasonably.

"Why don't you take off your coat, stay for a little soup?" Jessica asked gently. Allen stood up and maneuvered his jacket out from under Michael's legs. His shirt was torn off at both sleeves and his bare arms were covered with crisscrossed scabs, like a wide ski trail seen from a distance. Jessica gasped, then quickly exaggerated her gasp into a mock gasp.

"You didn't hear on my accident? 'Bout two months back?" Allen asked, beaming like a matron about to exhibit her surgical scar. "'S why they call me zolar tahn--bird in space! First I'm peeling around this corner at seventy on my Harley and next I'm just flying through the air at sixty. I look up and my bike is flying through the air, too, maybe a yard above me. Petrified! Yisgadahl vih Yiskadash. Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind! I must fly forty feet before I hit the ground, twenty scared out of my tubes--and the next twenty: digging it. I suddenly realize I can't be hurt, you know what I mean? I'm untouchable. I got Gardol. My own in visible protective shield! So it's just a dynamite trip. And, like, I'm still going thirty-five when I hit the highway shoulder, fantastic, barreling over the gravel and through some grass and into the woods, tumbling, hittingon every conceivable part of my bod, plowing over bushes and trees--I cut a path like a cannonball--until I stop. And, cousin, I just stand up. Nothing broken. My clothes are ripped to shreds, I'm covered with blood, but I'm loose. And I walk back to my bike, embedded in the dirt 'bout ten yards back, and my bike isn't hurt. They couldn't hurt my bike! So I sit me down on this rock and light up a joint and pass out. And when I wake up, it's dark and headlights----

"Then the telephone started ringing and Allen jumped as though his nerves were wired up to the Bell System. "I'm not here to the narcos. I'm not here to any fuzz, in fact, including my probation officer, or to any blood relatives or any blood friends...."

Puffing grass like a smokestack, Jessica went into the bedroom to answer, and after a few seconds, we heard her say, "He's not here. We haven't seen him for weeks."

"Flipped out!" Allen whispered. He'd been kidding. Jessica came back into the big room, still dragging fiendishly on the pipe. She can't get high without making fun of herself. Actually, she doesn't approve.

"It's the motivational researcher." she said, nodding me toward the phone. That's what she my brother Geoffrey. They don't get along too well. He thinks she's a Maoist. I went into the bedroom, going through a lot of color changes. It was pretty powerful stuff.

• • •

"Leo. I hope to hell I didn't wake you," Geoffrey said. His voice was gurgling. "Did I wake you or anything?"

I told him we'd been up with the baby. My voice was gurgling, too.

Geoffrey laughed. "You treat my nephew right, hear?"

I asked him whether he realized it was 4:25 in the morning.

"Yeah. Listen. I never would've buzzed you. Leo--it's just that I've been up till now writing this report: I've got to make a major campaign presentation tomorrow and--he hasn't been around, huh?"

"Who's that?"

"The J.D)." Geoffrey said. "Baby Face Nelson." He always refers to Allen with the names of infamous desperadoes. He does it to be funny. I said that we hadn't heard from him and didn't feel like getting into another hassle.

"You'll hear. sweetheart: you're choiceless in that regard. All in the mishpucha. Now. I don't think he's running from the cops, don't get worried, he'll just be coming over to say goodbye, because he's got this idea he's going to vanish forever into the jungle or some place. Believe me. I wish to hell I could have sat him down for a good talk when he was here tonight--you know. Dutch uncle--but I've been tied in knots over this report, and I could see right off we were getting nowhere fast. He called me an aborigine! I mean, I've practically supported that kid----"

"He called you a what?"

"An aborigine. A spiritual aborigine, no less. You're still wandering in the caves with a bone in your nose,' he says to me. Which is pretty typical, when I've practically supported him for about...."

It was not so much boredom or rudeness as a simple intoxicee's desire for stereo channels that caused me intermittently to hold the phone at arm's length as Geoffrey lectured on, so that his voice became barely prelingual, like an insect's buzzing drone, and the conversation of my wife and brother, in the next room, swung into the acoustical foreground. I remember reasoning idiotically that if I could catch 60 percent of both conversations. I'd take in a total of 120 percent, putting my high to better advantage. I have a thing about commitment.

On the home front, inevitably. Jessica passed out of her psychedelic-banter phase and into her earnest-radical phase--such was the historic pattern of her intercourse with Allen--and I could hear her exhorting him to straighten out his head (by which she meant purging his blood stream of noxious chemicals) and turn his attention to What Is Important in the World. What is important, to Jessica, is the deep sickness of America, the vulgarity and corruption of her leaders, the evil of her international adventures, the psychic poverty of her middle class, the more palpable privations of her bereft.

There were pauses, of course, but Allen's responses were indistinct, or at least I couldn't make them out: once I thought I heard him tell her she was "on a dynamite trip." But then I was preoccupied with my telephone responsibility, too. From time to time, I grunted acquiescence into the receiver. Geoffrey was outlining for me precisely what advice I must give to our brother when he showed up: he wanted to leave nothing to my own imagination, believing that, as far as Allen was concerned, I possessed enormous sway and pitifully unsound judgment. Through my other car. I heard names, in Jessica's voice--Schwerner and Chancy and Goodman. Jimmy Lee Jackson, Mrs. Liuzzo. Medgar Evers, Reverend Reed. Meredith, the President. Oswald. Malcolm: Oswald on television in from of 30.000.000 people. Whitman from the Texas tower, the beauty-parlor boy who made his victims lie on the floor in the shape of a star before he finished them with his sawed-off shotgun--and alter her catalog of public slaughter, I heard the names of cities: Natchez. New Orleans, Cleveland. Harlem. Detroit; a list of towns she thought might burn all next summer, until police move in with submachine guns, wiping out riots as they start....

"You know he offered me LSD once." Geoffrey asked, "and marijuana twice? It's like the fox who had his tail chopped off! Because where can he be in ten years but in the gutter? I gave him an article--authoritative!--on drug dangers. OK. some may not be addictive right there, but they set you up for the hard stuff. Would he read it? He laughed and he kissed me! Because I work. I earn my own living. I appreciate a few personal comforts--that means I don't know anything. I can't have a soul. And all he has to do. Leo, forget about the heroin, is get picked up once, I don't care how good a lawyer we hire...."

Jessica was talking about Mississippi in the summer of 1964, more quietly now. so I heard only snatches of her sermon. It was the summer before we were married, though, and I'd spent two nightmarish weeks with her in voter registration, so I had my own associations. They were just more distant, more dreamy to me. My wife would have been the sort to stick with the Party after everyone got out, after the Stalin purges, after the Nazi-Soviet Peace Pact of 1939. God. she has stuck with Moses and Foreman, then Carmichael. now Brown through a hundred humiliations and rejections, long after other Movement friends have pulled out, disenchanted, to sow their indignant passions in more receptive fields. Sometimes her black power, or her Lynd power, or her Ho power sound to me like a strange mutation of Antioch power. But her certainty never fails to set some chord vibrating within me, nor does Allen's certainty, for that matter, nor even Geoffrey's, until I begin to resonate chromatically inside, like a great hollow casket. I make no music of my own, then, but become a vacant echo chamber in which the moral authorities of my life reverberate in exponential, ear-rending dissonance.

"Work is life." came Geoffrey's voice. "Even Marx said that. Life is struggle. He can't be a hack-off delinquent sniffing airplane glue forever. Not in jail. Irresponsibility is shit."

Probably Allen doesn't disagree with Jessica's apocalyptic vision of America. Probably I don't. Geoffrey; Geoffrey who grew up listening to the radio, riding the Third Avenue EI to a show at the Roxy, dancing cheek to cheek--he would have no prescience of the country's slow, sick fall: but perhaps even Geoffrey sensed some vague doom on the periphery of his corporate consciousness.

I was very high. I was having "insights." We were all working, then: Jessica, ineffectually, to combat her vision; I. mindlessly, to record it; Allen, recklessly, to transcend it: Geoffrey, stoically, to deny it. But I am our only bystander, our sidewalk superintendent; pathetic, solutionless. Jessica has her good light, her noble, futile righteousness. And my brothers have their own intense diversions, their respective pursuits of oblivion: the older, through triumph on a sorry battlefield: the younger, through salori in the forest. I watch, and criticize.

"Why are you so chicken to trip out?" I heard myself ask in an absurdly playful voice. Geoffrey was patient; he ignored me. "Why do you think I'm on the phone here with you at practically five o'clock? I'm not in the crusader-rabbit business, racial or otherwise. We work nine to five in my line, eight good hours while the sun shines, and the answer is, frankly. I'm concerned. I'm deeply concerned; and if you'd stop for a minute worrying about humanity and Negroes in the streets and give a second's thought to your own family, you'd see that that boy is just winding up to throw his life away like it was a greasy resin bag he picked up from behind the mound. Around comes the big right arm and in comes the pitch and Allen's whole market value is going, going, gone. Into the left-field bleachers. And that's what will be on your head, as the cliché goes, because you know damn well that I can't talk to him, and Mike can't talk to him, and Mother won't even look at him after the A & P business, and you are the only one who can have a five-minute conversation with that kid and not start losing your hair. But let me tell you something, Leo, you are playing behind the left fielder. Your bowels may be in a real uproar because some peasant gets naped or a boogie takes a couple knocks from a cop----"

I asked Geoffrey what it was that Allen had told him that wrought him up so.

"Oh, yeah, right," Geoffrey said. "Right right right. I'm telling him go back to school, get that degree, what's the point of saying goodbye to me for? And he asks me if I'm happy. This is the way he changes the subject, Leo. This isn't it yet or anything, it's just an example of how his mind works. You know what will happen if he gets caught with narcotics, Leo? You want to read about it in the papers?"

I was dizzy. I could hear Jessica giggling in the next room and I knew she had passed out of her earnest-radical phase, into her giddy-turned-on phase, also traditional.

" ... So I had to explain to him I was talking about his future, because without that diploma today, you're a dead man, Leo. you know it as well as I do. And he asks me am I happy. Well, very patiently--I talk to him like he was a baby; otherwise, you can't get through--I explain to him that one is not simply 'happy' like that, but you lay the groundwork, you lay the foundation, and so on. And the trouble with his happiness is it has no foundation, of course, he's just floating on air and the first good breeze----"

"Are you happy or aren't you?" I asked.

"Happy, shmappy, pappy, whappy, what's the matter with you?" Geoffrey answered. "I've got a stinking job, right? You said so yourself. I figure out what makes morons buy breakfast gook, right? I have insomnia very bad, right? But. I have a gorgeous apartment--you've been up here, haven't you?--and twenty one grand per annum: three years, it will be twenty-seven, but don't spread that around. I would be one of the richest bachelors in the city if it weren't for the alimony, practically. OK, I'm not a creative person like you. The point is, Leo, if you want to talk happiness. I'm in a position to get happy--find the right girl, be able to support her, kids--and Allen is in a position to get nothing but a swift kick in the ass from society, and that is exactly----

"What was it he said when you told him you weren't happy?" I asked. In the next room, Michael squealed with glee.

"Oh, yeah. Get this," Geoffrey said, whispering for emphasis. "'Suppose,' he says to me, 'suppose I disappear into the woods and grow hair all over my body. And suppose in thirty years we meet again some old rainy day'--these are his exact words, Leo--'and suppose I still feel ecstasy and you still feel the way you feel. What would you do then?' "

I asked, "What would you do?"

"So ask me if I stopped beating my wife, I'll tell you I'm divorced!" Geoffrey yelled. "The question is preposterous and if you'd engage brain--For crying out loud, Leo, it's sick. It's a sick question without foothold in the world of reality, because in three years the way he's going, not thirty years, three, he's going to be right in the ash can with every junkie, with every pervert...." I held the phone away from my ear. Geoffrey was hollering. Geoffrey, what are you hollering? You'll wake up the whole castle....

Mostly out of restlessness, I pushed the bedroom door open just a crack, with my foot. Allen's hand was inside the buttons of Jessica's nightgown, on her breast. He was kissing her on the mouth, soft and long. When he finished, he toked languidly on the pipe, handed it to her and kissed Michael the same way.

" ... 'If you had any sense,' he says to me, 'if you had any courage, you'd give away what you had and follow me!' Are you getting this, Leo? Does it fit in? With that hair? With that pussycat beard? I have to spell it out for you?"

I didn't answer.

"Why play dummy?" Geoffrey said. "He wants me to give away my belongings and follow him? Be his disciple?"

I was still silent. Then Geoffrey's voice became suddenly tired and fraternal. "Listen, I know it's late, buddy. I didn't mean to get all hot under the sweat shirt. You know. I would've had a good talk with the kid myself, if I hadn't of had this damn report to blindfold for the firing squad tomorrow."

"Sure."

"Ah. I'm probably blowing up a tempest in a demitasse, anyway. Odds on he won't even show tonight." Geoffrey laughed, for no reason. "So. listen, let's have lunch, why don't we? Sometime this week? Expense account?" Then he hung up and I returned to the big room.

"Qu'est-ce qu'il veul, votre cher frére?" Jessica asked me. She was lying on her back. Anyone could have told she'd been smoking. She gets zonked on one joint. Michael was sitting on Allen's lap, quiet and grinning. They were all way ahead of me.

"He said we ought to have lunch."

"Lunch. That's too beautiful. That's where they love," Allen wheezed, laughing so hard he made no noise. He was really stoned. "The lunch bag."

"What's so funny?" I asked. "You don't do lunch?" Jessica was laughing, too.

Allen just rocked back and forth convulsively. "Maybe you'd like to share your little joke with the rest of the class," I said. Michael was clapping his hands so fast the beats ran together.

"Yeah, we know that sound. We know that sound. Do one hand for us," Allen moaned through his laughter.

"Where are you at?" I asked, feeling uncomfortable with the argot. Jessica was swaying her torso from the waist in languid circles. Everybody was acting crazy.

"Where are you at?" I asked again.

"I'm in the happy village."

"Where?"

"The Happy Village!"

I said I didn't know where that was.

Allen bolted upright, his eyes flashing, and brushed the hair from his face. "It's where things are done for you to make you feel good. I love you," he said. "Both of you. Now dig it. There's this village: beautiful, verdant, recreational facilities, free love, civil liberties, everything, man. What you do there is ball, explore caves, discover little animals, yoga, puppet shows, dancing, always dancing--I mean, like, all you do is play. And the food has nothing to do with hunger, just with taste. And you're all kids. Freaking freely. Big ones, skinny ones, old, young. But all kids. This is called the Happy Village. That's where I am. Now, the world is two scenes. Outside the village is practically everyone alive pulling on this rope--in rags. BO, some of them getting trampled, like a giant gang of Volga boatmen, get it? It's like a huge tug of war, except the other side is hooked onto the sun or something--the center of the universe! And these guys are holding the planet up in orbit. They're being whirled around this center and having a bitch of a time, but they know that if they let go, then the world goes hurtling off into space and there's no more gravity. So that's the big gig in the world, pulling on this rope. I mean, like, it's the only gig. So all the time, these guys are always beckoning to the kids on the border pastures of the village, dig? Come on, this cat says, what do you think you're doing gamboling on the green when if we don't get some help here pretty fast the whole world is gonna fly off into space? So a lot of the kids, when they go in for the evening hootenanny or whatever, start thinking to themselves, what am I doing just playing all the time instead of becoming a Volga boatman or something? They start thinking a man has to be a man. So most of them sooner or later say goodbye to the village and pack up their trinkets in an old kit bag and they cross the border and get on the rope line. Pulling. In fact, that's how everybody got tugging on there in the first place. Once everybody lived in the village. Almost everybody. But a few guys, here's the gritty, a few kids, I mean, stay in the village. To play. Then after a while, they die. The guys on the line die, too. Everybody dies. But the village cats, they go happy into that good night, man, all tan and----"

"Lunch. Trés important. Business, long-lost buddyroos. Brothers. Díner--rien." Jessica interrupted, as though time had been standing still for her since I'd got off the phone.

"Megaton grass," commented Allen, nodding.

I decided I'd better get her to bed. I lifted under her armpits and half dragged her toward the bedroom, both of us moving backward. I wasn't any too steady myself, but I felt like a husband. "SNCC kids." she was mumbling. "SNCC kids and your pot. And your pot and your porno. Blowin' weed and makin' it with Black Belt dinges. Fliptripping, mind-stripping, boo-lipping, end-gypping, burning, burning...." We were all laughing, even Michael.

When I got her into the bedroom, she stood up by herself, as though the change of air had brought her down. She put her arms around my neck. "Can you save him, Leo?" she whispered. "He's so lovely and so bollixed."

"You're eight miles up," I said.

"I'm straight. Don't let him drop out. He can help us take over. There's so much to be done. You're right, I'm a little high."

She closed her eyes standing up and flopped onto the bed. I went back into the big room, where Allen was fishing in place with Michael in his arms. Allen was humming Mr. Tambourine Man in Michael's ear and Michael was gently slapping Allen's face off rhythm. I started to tell Allen not to get him keyed up or he'd never fall back asleep, when Allen said, "Don't get him all keyed up; he'll never fall back asleep," and dissolved again in noiseless laughter. Perhaps I only imagined that his laughter was very close to tears and that somehow they were for me.

"Let's just dance for a minute," he said. "The Allen Memorial Tea Dance."

I told him I didn't feel like dancing.

"Couldn't we at least hold hands?" he asked. "You're my own brother."

I carried Michael over to his crib and laid him in it. I was sure he'd cry, but he faked me out. "Say night-night to Uncle Allen," Allen called, very softly, from across the room. "Remember the star that went over the manger."

• • •

Light was starting to come in through our imitation-bamboo curtains. Allen suggested we smoke some more, but I said enough was enough. I'm usually good for a line like that. Allen said he guessed he ought to say goodbye to our father and then see about picking up some plane tickets before he gave away the rest of his money. He hadn't exactly decided where he was going; probably Mexico by way of San Francisco. Mike takesthe bus in from White Meadow Lake very early in the morning (he meets truck deliveries before rush-hour traffic starts) and Allen said he might as well hop a subway up to the warehouse and wait for him there. I said I might as well walk him over to Astor Place, and we went out. He was carrying about a kilo of grass in a brown-paper bag, just swinging it by his side as we walked. It was barely daylight and you could still see the moon. Allen said it was a lozenge in the throat of God. We approached a cop on the corner of Second Avenue and St. Marks Place. I was very nervous. Alien waved the bag of grass at him and grinned.

"Hang loose," he said to me.

"Listen," I said, after we had passed the cop. "I hate to come on with a big brother act, but shouldn't you exercise a little more caution, with your record and everything? You're not pushing any stuff, are you?"

"No. Of course not. No pushing." He laughed. "Maybe a little dealing.... "

"What's the difference?"

"Well, it's a question of attitude, mostly. I mean. I just share what I score and some cais remunerate." He stopped smiling. "I know it's ridiculous. Leo. Three quarters of the time I don't even realize I'm dealing. It's ridiculous."

"What would you do if you were picked up?"

"They'd never take me alive," he answered without emotion. He was completely serious. He spent a few weeks in jail, when he was still stealing, and had some bad experiences.

"That doesn't scare you, though?"

"I don't think about it anymore." He put his arm around my shoulder and we walked like that for a ways. "You don't remember how I was, Leo. I was frightened all the time. I woke up trembling. I'd lie in bed for hours, afraid to get up. School, busts, girls, accidents. I don't know what. I think that's why I got myself in trouble--just so the disaster would happen and I wouldn't have to keep waiting for it. My whole life seemed so fragile; so dear and so fragile. Like I was standing on a precipice before the little furnace of my energy and any mountain wind could snuff it out. I'd say grateful prayers when I crossed a street without getting hit by a car. I would have thought the Buddha was out to get me; I would have pulled a shiv on him. I invented paranoia. Especially with people.

"I was so long. Leo--so long afraid people were out to hurt me, that I was slippery, and putting you on, all of you, and acting like I didn't care. But even then, feeling so damn hated, nothing seemed too actual, read me? I was pretty tentative, while the real physical world glided by, like a dream I wasn't enjoying. Always wishing, wishing, wishing I were back somewhere, back somewhere I'd been and gamboled on some green, but couldn't remember. You see I was busy shielding myself. Leo, to keep from being hurt. Until on my third trip--I'm still not sure exactly how it happened. We were sitting, four, in this cabin, duskish, and had built a fire in the middle of the floor; and as it got colder, we drew nearer the fire, nearer until it seemed we were planets in orbit round the sun, the sun's gravity drawing us to a center. A fiery destruction. Oh. it was so graceful flowing centerward like that into the heat, no effort or plan. Then all of a sudden Mario, this guy. wrenching himself like steel tearing out of a magnet, screaming backward toward a plate window and through it. suddenly so happy in delirium--to have broken out of the orbit. I guess--we had to drag him off the shattered glass where he was dancing. But before I helped drag him off, Leo. I had to dance a minute with him there, do you see what I mean? Both our bare-feet blood mixing just a little on the floor? I'd never even met him before, but he was sending me this engraved invitation from the Lord--I, Wisdom, danced before the Lord.' Jesus. Dancing is the flip side of fear. Then we dragged him off the glass. Or maybe they dragged us both off the glass.... What difference does it make? My head exploded.

"I realized that no one, no one, no one was wanting to hurt me. Because no one gave a shit about me, Leo. Do you see how beautiful that was? Like God in a golden jewelly chariot, that the universe didn't give a shit about me. That I was safe. Like a ton of up-tight bricks lifted off my shoulders. Understanding life, baby, life didn't care at all who was living her. That I was nothing. Who wants to hurt nothing? No thing.... Sale 10 dance."

We walked the last two blocks to Astor Place without saying anything. It was very early. I can't remember passing anybody, except a bum curled up in a doorway. The New York Times wrapped around his body. We stood together on the square above the subway entrance for a minute and then Allen started down the steps.

"When will I see you again?" I called.

"Maybe never. Maybe when you've become the Occidental Kurosawa, and Jessica has won her revolution, yet Geoffrey is still chairman of the board. And Mike has been reborn into the shoulder of a gazelle, and I return. Maher Baba Allen, with much hair and many followers in the Way of the Tao." He laughed and ran back up the stairs and kissed me on the mouth.

"What of Michael?" I asked.

"Of Michael we cannot say. Michael will be the New Youth. He will be the New Youthquake."

I grabbed his sleeve as he started down the steps again. A subway rumbled into the station, shaking the ground. "Please just quit dealing, will you. Allen?"

He salaamed and ran down to catch the train. Then I went home and took off all my clothes and got into bed next to Jessica. I ran my hand over her skin and thought how amazing it was that my wife lived inside. It must have been a little after six in the morning.

• • •

It was not yet nine when Jessica woke me. As is my wont after turning on. I'd been having geometric light-show dreams. They advertise pot as a no hangover substance, but it's a lie.

"Mike's on the phone," she said. I hadn't heard the ringing. I suppose I'd seen it. though. "I told him you'd been up for ages, but he's awfully vehement. Was I horrible last night?"

"You were funny at the end. You were really funny."

"He subverts me. His gentle talk and his wicked weed. Why doesn't he dump the flower-children crap and do something with his life?"

I pulled myself up in bed and reached for the phone. Jessica still had her hand clasped over the receiver. "I wanted to tell you that I kissed him."

"OK."

"We were all kissing each other, actually. Him and me and Michael. I mean."

"Sounds nice."

"The police beat up Jimmy McKew last night." she said, pinching her lip. "A girl called from the storefront. They claimed he bit a cop. We've got to see about bail and a doctor." Jimmy was an old Negro who liked to help around the project. We had a vest-pocket playground in the summer and Jimmy I'ked to mind it, or distribute leaflets. He was retired. Jessica dropped the phone on the bed and ran out the door.

I was sure my father would want to know what took me so long, but instead, he started right in.

"Tell me what to do."

"Would you mind a lot talking later this afternoon, Mike? I didn't get to sleep till about two and a half hours ago and----"

"Eight o'clock in the morning he floats in like a zombi to say goodbye forever. Not even a message for his mother. Tell me what I should do, I'll do it."

"You just have no idea how tired I am. Why don't we have a late lunch or something? I don't have to be on the project until three, but I have to pick up some film at Willoughby's, anyway, so----"

"Leo, he's not even supposed to leave the state of New Jersey! I should just wish him good luck and goort zelangeh yoor?"

After a bit of bargaining, we compromised on breakfast. Compromise was my father's word. It meant that I dress myself immediately and come uptown to talk. His concession was a five-block walk east, 10 the Automat on 31st and Broadway. When I arrived, Mike was already finishing an early lunch--it looked like chopped steak (I remembered him warning me about Horn & Hardart hamburger steak; "... all the leftover garbage they throw into it, and pork. Take my word, it's worth the extra pennies for die chopped....")--and was preparing to move on to a lemonmeringue pie and tea. Mike's in the buy ing-in-lots-at-auctions-or-bankruptcy-sales-and-trading-"merchandise" -under-the-counter-to-retailers business. He's become quite wealthy at it--he and my mother go to Europe or Israel every summer, and he's probably planted a hundred forests of Palestinian saplings--but he still tells everyone he's "in the junk business" and he never eats anywhere but the Automat. He says he likes the food. I got a cup of coffee from the machine and sat down next to him.

Mike said, "No protein?" Then we sat silent for a few minutes while he sipped his pale-yellow tea and picked at his pie. He was composing his thoughts, though perhaps they weren't so much thoughts as the mental equivalent of moaning. He loves us all so deeply and so helplessly.

"How's Jessica? How's the baby?"

"Fine." He'll refer to Michael only as "the baby." He didn't want me to name my son after him. After a while, he began. "Every two minutes with him it's 'love'! Is that a laugh? Does he know the meaning of the word love? Does he understand the mitzvah? How can he live with such hatred boiling in his kishkes? He hates school. He hates New Jersey. He hates his country. He hates the United States. He thinks the President should be impeached. Does he know he hates me and wants to kill me?"

Mike had had a little analysis a few years back. It was the thing then. I said I thought Allen had seemed more tender, more at peace than he'd seemed in a long time but maybe I wasn't too in touch with the situation. A fat man, on his way out, bumped into the back of my chair and excused himself. My father was fidgeting.

"At peace with what? You know, for a while, I thought he was really straightening out. I thought he would get a job. I must have rocks instead of brains. I said to him this morning, any amount of money to go to college; any college he wants, I don't care how much. You know, if I could go to college, this minute, I'd pick up everything and go? Everything. So I offered him to come into my business, a growing concern, for two hundred dollars a week; he wouldn't need college. He laughed. More than I made in a season when I was his age. It's all a joke to him. He thinks a person doesn't need money to live."

I said that Allen seemed to be getting along financially.

"Let him go," Mike said. "He's dead to me. I wouldn't offer him a nickel."

I suggested that Allen was struggling to find himself and immediately felt like an idiot. I was grateful when my father let the comment pass. Perhaps he didn't hear me. There was nothing happening behind his eyes.

"How about you, Leo?" he said, shifting gears. "I need someone smart in the business. All I got there is goyishe kups. I need a manager."

We'd been through this before. I shook my head and repressed an impulse to squeeze his arm, which was lying limply on the table just a few inches away.

"You want to make movies?" he demanded. "Go to Hollywood!"

I nodded stupidly. Then Mike softened again.

"Anything you tell me to do, Leo. You understand the complexities. Anything in my power. How can I lose him? He has many good qualities." I thought my father was about to cry. "I get down on my knees to you, Leo. Only we can save him. Who else?"

I told him I didn't know that there was anything we could do, I didn't know what was right, but that we must just hope for everything to work out. I didn't feel too honest saying that; things practically never work out.

Almost imperceptibly, Mike pulled himself together. He withdrew a folded piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it slowly, smoothing out the center crease--he has a certain dramatic flair--and handed it across the table to me with just a little flourish of satisfied regret. It was about a third of a printed page with ripped edges. A sloppy red Magic Marker circle was drawn around several sentences.

"Read it," Mike said. "You analyze for me."

For an odd instant, I couldn't quite place the passage; then, of course, I could. "A boy," I said, "watching his little sister going around on a carrousel. That's all." An echo from another age; a book I'd given Allen for Hanukkah, almost a decade ago. He'd never mentioned it. I hadn't even known he'd read it.

"He tore it out of a book! Does he own books? Be a critic for me. This is his message to his father, his farewell message, he couldn't take the trouble to write. Read it out loud, it was so apropos to tear out of a library book."

I read the part Allen had circled: " 'All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd fall off the goddamn horse, but I didn't say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off. they fall off. but it's bad if you say anything to them.' "

"So?" my father said.

"I just think he means not to worry about him. That he loves you and doesn't want you to worry."

"He wants me to abdicate? I abdicate!" Mike said, with false resignation. Then he reached his hand over the table, brushing the remains of his meringue, and grabbed hold of my wrist. "I know there are things in you guys--forces--I don't understand. Listen, you don't even understand them all yourself, Leo, none of you."

Mike was just warming up, but I spoke, anyway. "I was wrong. It doesn't mean he doesn't want you to worry."

He looked mildly startled at my interruption--the way I remembered him looking when a conductor woke him on the commuter train. "Excuse me a second," he said. "I have to take a glass of water." While Mike was gone, I tore up the half-squeezed lemon that lay on his saucer and put the seeds in my mouth. Then I realized that a woman sitting alone at the next table was staring at me. I stared back at her; you might say I glowered. I don't know why. First she smiled, then she stopped smiling, then she got up and walked away, then she returned to her table--very briskly, without glancing over toward me--snatched up her purse and left. Then my father came back with his water.

"I was thirsty," he said.

"You can worry," I said. "He just wants you to shut up."

Mike shook his head in a kind of dumb, defeated belief.

"No, Allen didn't say that. I'm interpreting, Mike. I mean, he's saying, 'Look, Pop, I'm trying to reach out for what I want'--see, that's the gold ring--'and you think Teaching's bad for me and want me to be careful. But you've got to let me find out for myself, even if I get hurt trying....' " I broke off, suddenly weary with my own earnestness. Mike thought I was done.

"Let him," he said. "I'm stopping him? Let him break his neck. Gold ring."

A Negro waitress in a white uniform began clearing our dishes off the table. She piled them onto a metal serving cart and wiped off the table, using her hand to catch the crumbs. As she moved off, Mike leaned sadly across the table and spoke to me in a low voice.

''When I was his age, it was the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt was the President----"

"And when Geoffrey was his age, Eisenhower was the President!" I interrupted, almost shouting. "And when Jessica and I were his age, Kennedy was the President! And now Allen is his own age and Lyndon Johnson is the President! And it's all different now, don't you see? It's different every time!"

"Leo, I wasn't even going to tell you this, you shouldn't worry. He comes up to my place this morning--he couldn't take a shave--it's my place of business, Leo--he couldn't take a haircut--and while I'm pleading, this colored fella I got working for me comes in, a moving man Allen never saw before. And suddenly, from the blue, blue sky, Allen has one arm around his waist and grabbing the other hand, the schvartze, humming tzmiris--tzmiris!--and trying to make like jitterbugging with him. jitterbugging!"He looked imploringly into my eyes, as though I must surely see how hopeless it was to expect that such a boy might someday make his way in the world.

We sat silent for a few moments, my father poking with his fork at the remains of his meringue. Finally, he inhaled sharply. "It's like you're strangers," he said. We both stood up.

Mike went through the revolving door ahead of me and ran out to the curb to hail a passing taxi. As I reached ahead to open the door, a wino, about his own age, stepped in front of him and mumbled a request for a handout. My father shook his head and, as he brushed by into the cab, trembled. I wasn't sure for whom he trembled--for Allen or for himself--but as he slammed his door, I had a sudden urge to invite him to step out again into the sunlight: to ask him if he cared to join me and the wino in a little dance. I repressed it, of course. Socked and sleepy as I was, I knew that all three of us had left the Happy Village too long ago for dancing and that even now our hands were slipping on the rope that holds the world in orbit.