So I bought a box of off-brand soda crackers. They were cheap: I figured—why not? And they were bad. So bad. I couldn't finish them. I tried them on the birds and the beasts, but no one would bite. Not even the raccoons. So there was nothing else to do: I dug for them a shallow grave, and laid their bodies down.

The good thing, about the bad crackers, is that, like Proust's madeleines, they sparked remembrances of things past. To wit: survival crackers. Placed by the government in the fallout shelters so that the Americans therein would have something to eat while they were Surviving the nuke rain falling outside. They came into my mouth when my friend D "liberated" them from the shelters around town and brought them into our house, so that when there was no money we would still have something to eat, and could thereby Survive.

They were twenty or thirty years old when I was digesting them, but seemed not to have suffered with the time; the taste was peculiar, but not unpleasant, certainly superior to these off-brand soda crackers I buried out there when not even the raccoons would eat them. The government had no doubt figured the Americans in the shelters would have to be in there Surviving for a very long time, and so designed the crackers to be more or less immortal. I believe they consisted primarily of bulgur, a word which sounds suspiciously Russian, and so shows that Rooskis were all in the Americans' government, even then.

D and his wife B were Science Men, although B was a woman, and also in the house, the one that sometimes ran on survival crackers, was K, who was a witch. This is not a descriptor, certainly not an insult, but a statement of natural fact: a witch is what she was. She liked to play with the stereotypes, and so dressed all in black, when she was wearing clothes, which was not always, or even often, and she would sometimes trail around in public a broom, and for sure she was all about witchery, wherever she would go. She did not concern herself with questions of white or dark magic, which she considered a false division, and was firm in her conviction that some people, places, and things, they actually needed, to be cursed. I could not always ride along with her on all this, but she claimed this was because "your soul is so old it's new," and therefore I didn't know what was happening.

She would get deep into the tarot, especially when in the Medicine, and, when asked, would foretell the futures of people who, once in the reading, would discover they didn't actually want to know about their future after all.

"Most people don't really want to know their future," she said. "They don't even want to look at the present. And are always rearranging the past."

She said she didn't need any tarot to know my future. "I can tell your future," she said, "just look what's in your hand." I would try that, but sometimes it was hard to see what was in there, because my hand was not fully mattering, and so I could see through it.

"That's because you're a bucket, with the handle your ascendant at thirty degrees of Pisces, which means you will never be fully here," she said. Great. That probably explains that period, some years later, when the automatic doors at the supermarkets would not open for me. Such things are built to sesame when they detect approaching matter, but apparently I was not registering as matter. So they would remain closed. My friend would have to walk in front of me, to activate the doors, so that I could get in and out of the stores. "Let's get you home," she would say on these occasions. "You are too insubstantial to be out in public."

D, he did not do any witching, but was instead a Marxist, and thus "liberating," that was very big in his life. For instance, when the North Vietnamese rode the tanks into Saigon, he wanted to go out in the streets and there have a little parade and party, in celebration of what he called "the rising of Saigon." I went with him, because I was his friend, but I knew there would be no real rising, because in the tanks the North Vietnamese were bringing the State, and where there is a State, the humans generally are unleavened.

D was concerned for me, because I was aware of Karl, and yet did not accept him as my lord and savior. D did not understand why I would not be Saved. He wished for me a blinding light, while on the road to Damascus, so that I would Know surplus value. I tried to explain to him that Marxism couldn't possibly be Real, because it is built around money, which doesn't exist, but D could not hear this heresy.

Everyone in those days always wanted to know where you were in the politics, and, when pressed, I would say I was in the anarchism (this was before the silly spraypainting, the stupid window-smashing, the craven burkaed blackblocing). Which would cause the Marxists to bite their blankets. "When are you going to grow out of this silly anarchism, and get with Marx?" Michael Perelman would ask, irritated. I found it interesting that the Marxists considered my anarchism a sort of larval state, from which someday I would emerge on the wings of Karl, when it was Karl himself who taught that communism was a larval state, which would wing into anarchism, once the state had withered away. But then, why should the Marxists, they make any more sense, than any of the other humans?

Ivan Svitak was a Marxist more generous in his assessment, but then he had actually lived in the communism. When I knew him he was in exile among the Americans, because when the tanks rolled into Prague he did not want to go to the jail, or to the boneyard; he had been making big Czech noises about humanizing the Marxism, and the tanks had come to Prague to put a stop to that. When I knew him he was best known among the Americans for his maxim that he had lived under three tyrants: Hitler, Stalin, Nixon. He told me that he had made only fleeting acquaintance of anarchists while under Hitler and Stalin, because such persons were considered by the Hitlers and Stalins to be worm food, and so they would go into the graves as soon as they were identified. He said Nixon would have liked to do that too, but there weren't really any anarchists among the Americans.

Svitak also foretold my future, based on his past, though unlike the witch, he didn't use any tarot. "You are an anarchist, a pacifist, a writer, and a libertine," he said. "You will be shot." Not so far. After Gorbachev had the no mas, Svitak returned to his native Czechoslovakia, where the new post-Soviet government was filled with people who listened to Frank Zappa, but Svitak soon began cassandraing that they were hitting wrong notes. He passed some years ago, and I suppose this is a mercy, in the sense that he did not have to experience the tragedy repeated as farce of The Hairball.

I did not live with D, B, and K on Montague Street, but otherwise it was what Dylan was talking about with that "basement down the stairs." It was very cold in that basement, and there were many mosses; also, lichens. Landlords, they will rent anything. Such persons sometimes cited by K as people who really do need to be cursed.

I'm trying to remember, through the survival madeleines, when and how I landed in that basement. I know that when I first moved to that town I squeezed into a sliver of a Victorian a couple blocks from the school, with a man from a time tunnel, who believed he was living in Peckinpah's film Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Things there went fairly well, until the power was shut off—apparently we were supposed to pay for it—which caused the refrigerator to become a Superfund site, and then a man was screaming, I think he was the landlord, and then we were out on the street. Herb went into a place called CAVE, while I moved into the administration building, which we were anyway occupying, because we didn't want the campus police to have any guns.

The college had hired as campus police chief a man who had spent 25 years in the LAPD—can't remember his name; think it was something like Berserk—and he arrived in town to enter Outrage that his men were less lethal than even Barney Fife, who was at least permitted to wear a gun, though he was only issued one bullet, which he had to keep in his pocket. Berserk's people, they had no guns at all. Berserk demanded his officers be de-Fifed, and the college cravenly acquiesced. At which point one of Berserk's Fifes promptly whipped out his new gun and shot his desk. We arose in defense of desks everywhere, and went into the administration building, and there said we would not leave, until the Fifes had been stripped of their firearms. We were about all the guns are going to go. Which, of course, they are. Everywhere. It's just a matter of waiting, for the time, to catch up.

The occupiers were mostly students, or people who had recently been students, but then dropped out, because it was more fun to occupy the administration building. But there were also some professors, like the Law Man, who went into the cases to explain how we could stay in there and be a bother, without actually getting arrested, and the man of Big Bill Shakes, who went into the plays and the philosophy and the poems, to explain how we should consider ourselves The Dispossessed. Somewhere in the occupation, I think, is where I befriended D, who was then moved to invite me into the basement down the stairs, to live there among the molds and the witches and the survival crackers, even though I was not of Karl, but was instead, to him, "the ghost of Bakunin, walking these halls."

It was after the basement, I'm pretty sure, that Annabel secured a karass of us a house out in The New World, a preposterous subdivision marooned in the nowhere east of town. All of the neighbors were from Leave It To Beaver, and did not want us there, but they could do nothing, because one among us was Mike, who was of the loincloth men, a being who would roam freely, winter and summer, clad only in a brief loincloth, accompanied by about 65 pounds of hair. Even more intimidating was Andy Walton, brother of Bill, the basketball man, who was taller than any of the houses in the subdivision, and looked to be half-Bigfoot. When our cars would not run—which was often—Andy would perform a healing ceremony that involved going out into the driveway, there in The New World, and placing atop the becalmed vehicle a small idol, to which Andy would then Om at top volume.

Andy had a big flowing Tolstoy beard that was in a constant state of singe, because he would turn the gas on in the oven, then wander off for several hours, finally cycling back to kneel before the oven and light the pilot. We rest would be sitting in the next room, and suddenly see a tremendous blue flash blinding out from the kitchen, accompanied by an impressive roar. "Andy's cooking," someone would announce. An entire shelf of the refrigerator was dedicated to Andy's cauliflower heads, and so upon opening the thing, you would for an instant think you were in a Science Man lab, where they were storing brains.

Eventually locusts came and devoured The New World, but by then Annabel had removed us to the Stone House, which was allied with the Henshaw House, and it was in these twinned abodes that we could really, as Van Morrison put it, "get down to what is really wrong." Annabel was the doyenne of the Stone House, with her familiar, the little dog Polyphemus, whose name of course became Jolly Penis. The Henshaw House was presided over by a man who sat in a chair and smoked marijuana at all times. Out back was Seth in his garden, a thing straight out of Findhorn, where he grew radishes the size of cantaloupe.

Annabel had been raised by Mae Brussell, the queen of lefty CT in that day, and so we were in at that beginning, more or less. Among the wonders that thereby passed through our hands were The Gemstone Files, the Q of its time, and for a while we thought we were among the real books, but of course it was just another mirror, in the wilderness of mirrors. In any event we did not waste a lot of time monking in such mental onanisms, but were more about sex and drugs and rocknroll, which at least had the decency of being of flesh, and in which we knew we were winning, and that we would win.

One of the Stone House inmates later became the lawyer for all the state's children. I would then sometimes wonder if he ever told the children about the time we ate the psilocybin mushrooms grown in the UC Davis lab, and then he stood transfixed, in the same spot, for four straight hours, two feet from Jerry Garcia, as Garcia pulled noodles out of the ether in his Reconstruction band. I was meanwhile back at the table, my head blissed arest in a small spill of beer, which I mistook for the ocean, and so relived the entirety of the history of life on this planet, from its birth in the seas, to the Childhoods End spiraling out to the stars. Then there was the time, after he had moved to Sacramento, where we needed to prepare for the Grateful Dead show, and, no mirror readily at hand, we instead snorted the cocaine off his wife's bible. She was not present for this ceremony, as her people were not of the Dead. I think that the children, they would find these stories, edifying.

Another inmate was the math savant the government pulled out of the high school at 16 and set to work top-secreting out on Mare Island. When he belatedly understood they were working him on bombs, he disappeared into the night, reappearing in a chair in the Stone House, chuckling softly as he read Dostoevsky in the Russian. He smoked Viceroys, which must have been as old as the survival crackers, because when he would pull one out of the pack, half the tobacco would fall out. This man was majoring in drinking mass quantities and then going down to the Denny's to sit there and grumble about the fat people. His own body knew no fat, fat would run from him at top speed, he was so skinny as to be two-dimensional: you could perceive him head-on, but turned sideways, he basically disappeared. Sometimes he would have Mare flashbacks, and then he would pull out the lighter and the Right Guard, and create a flamethrower which he would turn on the black widows creviced away between the stones of the Stone House.

Another time he went down the street and blew up the policeman's mailbox. To get into the town from the Stone House, we had to pass by the home of the Fife who had shot his desk. But this Barney got to keep his gun, even though he was a wanton desk-shooter, and later, when the administrators decided they didn't want us in their building anymore, he was one among those who arrested us, and put us in the pokey.

Sometimes, deep in the night, amid the Viceroys and the mass quantities, The Thin Man's mind would alight on Fife, and his heart would fill with Hate. Out front the Fife house, there on the rural road, was a big old mailbox, mounted on a stout pole. And so it came to pass that The Thin Man, accompanied by my brother, then still a minor, but already the quintessence of crime, once in some wee hours commandeered the future-lawyer's car, and drove down to the Fife spread, and there packed some explosives into the mailbox, and blew it up.

The next day, the future-lawyer and I, motoring into town, wondered why, where once the Fife mailbox had stood, there was now but a jagged stump. It was some time, until we would hear the miscreants' confession. The future-lawyer, he was then not pleased, that his own automobile, it had been "an instrumentality of the crime." Probably he didn't mention any of this, when they got to the Law Man part where they determine whether you are moral enough to practice the same profession as Michael Cohen and Rudy "The Wino And I Know" Giuliani.

The last I heard of The Thin Man, he was showering shards, tosspotting full-length through a closed sliding-glass door. This did not bode well for "live long and prosper," an occasional saying of his, which he would recite with the Spockian spread digits, except he could do it with his toes. This sort of thing unnerved the people at Denny's, even when they were not fat.

The landlord, the owner, of the Stone House, he lived in a tiny shed, out back the main house. He was quiet and shy and ate off a hot plate, quite an elderly gent, probably ten or twenty years younger than I am now, and he would not come into his own house, no matter how enticing our invitations. He did not care what we were doing in there; no matter what the orgy, what the mayhem, he never said a word. The future-lawyer's theory was the man was enjoying a contact high. Whatever the explanation, it is for sure that, like Van said, "we were too young to really know" just how special a situation that was. By that time I had lost track of K, or I would have cited this man as example that not all of the landlords, they need to be Cursed.

I don't know where K is these days. She might be a mathematician. She might be a carpenter's wife. I don't know what she's doing with her life. Sometimes you find out what people are doing with their lives, and then you wish you hadn't. Like, what if they are into the real estate?

Dirt-selling, that was not a big thing, here on this continent, until arrived the white people. Did you know that the white people, they boarded the Mayflower, and then set sail from Plymouth, on September 6, and so they are not even here yet? Don't come here, white people! It's not too late to stop now!

D I ran into when Jerry Brown was preparing to not win a US Senate seat. You could just feel it, that Brown was going to Lose. Which made no sense, because his opponent, Pete Wilson, was a robot. And one thing Jerry Brown has never been, is a robot. But then the Californians have a long and sorry history of voting for cretins who should really be run through the streets in tiger cages while people yell and throw rotting fruit at them. The Californians, for instance, inflicted both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan on themselves, before those men got loose to menace all the nation, and, yea, verily, the entirety of the world.

The Californians also elevated to the governorship Arnold Schwarzenegger, even as the newspapers were filling with blood-curdling stories of how out in public he would grope any woman who came within range, while at home, when he got bored, he would wander down the hall, and impregnate the maid. This of course provided permission to the Americans to shrug and pull the lever in 2016 for a man whose campaign slogan to be the president was basically I Rape Freely.

The Californians also elected governor the aforementioned Mr. Wilson, when in 1994 he stumped the state urging the voters to "please join me in hating the Mexicans." So why wouldn't the Americans, in 2016, elect as their president a man who promised to burn all the Mexicans, bazooka all the Muslims, and repeal everything the black man did, said, or even thought, when he was in there soiling the Whiter House?

But this was not 1994, or 2016, but instead 1982, when Wilson was preparing to defeat Jerry Brown, the Brown who was coming to town to go into an old folks' home, and there ask for votes, in the election he was going to lose. I was there in the old folks' home because I was in a newspaper. D was also there. And he was changed. To begin, he was no longer D. The D identity, it developed, has always been a fake; in truth, he had long been a colonel in a branch of military intelligence, his real name long and unpronounceable, packed with consonants, and very few vowels. As proof of his story, he, with trembling hands, displayed to me a paper, worn and frayed, from similar displays, many times before, sent from a governmental agency, and addressed to the long and unpronounceable name, saying it could find no records anywhere concerning the long and unpronounceable name. Because D now identified as the long and unpronounceable name, and the letter had come to him, addressed to that name, this, he maintained, was "proof," that his story was Real.

This was not the first time I had encountered such a paper, such a story, such a "proof," and it would not be the last. What I was later told was that D had transferred his Science Menning to UC Davis, and there occurred some sort of accident, in a Lab, and in this accident chemicals came into D's brain, that convinced him he was a colonel in military intelligence, with a long and unpronounceable name. He eventually understood that he was disabled, and so was attempting to collect benefits from the government, which he had long served in top-secret capacity, but the government was claiming it had never heard of him, but then that is what the government always says, to its most valued top-secret colonels in military intelligence, and we know this because that's what happens every night in the shows on the televisions.

What I couldn't understand was why D was there in the old folks' home, while we were waiting for Jerry Brown to arrive to ask for votes in the election he was going to lose. Because when you are in the politics, these days, you must needs always keep an eye out for the Taxi Driver, who might show up intent on impressing Jodie Foster. And D, who had clearly become unmoored in his mind, might he not go Taxi Driver? I couldn't understand what Mulholland was thinking. Bob Mulholland, he was running this Brown event, and yet, it soon became clear, it was also he who had brought D to the thing.

Suddenly I was struck with The Fear. Had Bob gone mad too? Did he also think he was a colonel in military intelligence? And what about me? Was I also a colonel in military intelligence? Maybe, I thought, this is where it will all come out: Brown will walk in, and then he will announce that we are all colonels in military intelligence, we are all disabled, and the government is going to do the right thing, and give us all money.

Then I changed the channel. Of course D was not a Taxi Driver. Mulholland knows Taxi Drivers, and he would never allow any, near any of his people. What D was, was hurt, a man in need. And Mulholland was helping him. He was keeping D with him, because nobody else would. Because that's what Mulholland does. Everybody knows Mulholland is all in the politics, from California to Cambodia, but fewer people know that, and most all of his life, Mulholland has also been quietly succoring people like D. Why I like him.

I would like to think that today D is again some recognizable form of D. For such a thing is possible. L, for instance, spent many years grimly disassembling cable boxes, because he was convinced they were Looking at him, from atop the television set, and Transmitting information to the Authorities. Later, when I worked at a lawyer compound, he came by one day and took me out to his car and there opened up the trunk and spread for me his detailed map of the basement of the town’s big church, where, he said, the congregants were molesting the children with the pizzas.

But I saw L just recently, and he had transitioned into Fine. He didn't mention, and neither did I, that it could be said that he was just ahead of his time: for now, these days, the televisions, and indeed all of the tubes, are indeed Looking, and Transmitting information to the Authorities, pretty much at all times; while that in the basements, the satanists are molesting the children with the pizzas, this is today an article of faith, among those whose screws are very loose, which includes most all the people of The Hairball. But then L, even in the very deepest bowels of his madness, had never been so deranged as to not see The Hairball for what he is: thanatic filth, of the first water, a creature who cannot be tolerated, not for even a nanosecond, by any sentient creature, except those whose souls have been bonesawed. Who, when he at last explodes, in a cloud of pus, cannot rely even on Morlocks, to dig for him a shallow grave, and lay his body down.

In that one picture way up above is my hand when it is not fully mattering, and so you can see through it. This I post so that you will know I am not Lying. When I tell you that in the other picture, I am holding a Starman ball. Those who have seen the true-life documentary film Starman know that when you come to this planet, but are not really from here, you arrive with some Starman balls, which you can apply to make things right, when they go really dire. I just have the one Starman ball. I have never deployed it. I guess because things have never really been that dire. I for sure take it with me, though, everywhere I go. Maybe the Starman ball is kind of like life itself. Of which my friend Jeffrey Miller, poet, long dead, once wrote:

the first one's free
you just get one

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTp40TSU8HE]