Naked Came the Stranger (9 page)

Jonah gave up his bone and fled into the crowd. Turnbull,
discovering that it was rubber, threw it at the last of the
retreating Wails. Finally, hemmed in by superior forces, Turnbull was
overpowered and carted off. The remainder of the service was
canceled. And, though the Temple did not press charges against its
rabbi, he disappeared forever from King's Neck.

It was rumored in later years that he had changed his name to
Brodsky and had found employment as a beadle in a deteriorating
Orthodox synagogue in East New York, where he remained, penitent,
recluse, who flagellated himself ritualistically. But that was only a
rumor, of course.

Billy: Yes, Gilly, with Thanksgiving gone, can
Christmas be far behind?

Gilly: And don't forget Chanukah. Equal time, you know. Anyway,
that comes first, doesn't it?

Billy: I think so. By the way, Gilly, I think we should express
our regret at what happened to Rabbi Joshua Turnbull, who was on the
show with us not long ago. I'm sure everybody read about his
unfortunate breakdown.

Gilly: Yes, the papers certainly had a picnic with it. Billy:
The man must have been under fantastic pressure.

Gilly: You can't imagine how sorry I felt. That good, saintly
man. It just proves what a strain religious leaders are under today.
It's the world we live in.

Billy: Right. I'll tell you, Rabbi Turnbull was especially
interested in reaching young people, and that could have done
it.

Gilly: I'm not sure I follow you, dear.

Billy: Well, these kids today, they don't care about anything.
They don't identify with anything.

Gilly: Wait a minute, dear. Certainly today's young people show
a great deal of alienation, but I think you're being extreme. I'm
sure youth has its important values.

Billy: Yeah, marijuana and LSD. Look, how about the kids you
see walking around the Village?

Gilly: Those are hippies. Or they want you to think they are.
And anyway, 1 don't think they're representative of all young
people.

Billy: Maybe not, but there are an awful lot of them. Listen,
you even see them in the suburbs nowadays. Gilly: That's true. But
even then, you can't always judge a book by its cover.

Billy: Well, all I can say is that some of them, the ones with
super-long hair and sandals, have some pretty unappealing
covers.

Gilly: Perhaps, but I can remember what it was like when I was
in college. We weren't all angels.

Billy: You were, dear. I'm sure you've always been an
angel.

Gilly: Well, it's nice of you to think so.

Billy: Seriously, sweetheart, some of these kids today are
frightening. Take sexual promiscuity, for instance.

Gilly: Yes, I know what you mean. But I think you're
generalizing.

Billy: I'm not so sure.

Gilly: 1 still think most young people are terribly
stimulating.

Raina Franhop slipped the amphetamine tablet into
Cat's water bowl with the sincere hope that it would compensate for
his waning sex life. (Domestic animals, of course, were not permitted
to run free in the unincorporated village of King's Neck and, on his
last excursion into the great outdoors, Cat had attempted to mount a
gray squirrel, only to be severely rebuffed.) The drug took effect
immediately. Unfortunately, Cat overreacted. He sped from one end of
the living room to the other, banging his head noisily against the
wallboard to mark the end of each lap. Arthur Franhop could not help
hut notice that Cat was caught up in an orgasm of ecstasy.

"Barbaric!" he screamed.

"Hypocrite!" she screamed back.

Raina realized that Arthur's concern was over the loss of the
pill, not for the well-being of her beloved Cat. And, all too true,
it was becoming harder and harder to score safely. But they still had
the twenty pounds of Acapulco Gold they had smuggled out of Mexico in
whimsically painted Christmas balls, and Arthur had no right to blow
his cool over one lousy goofball.

What really upset Raina was being called barbaric. She did not
like, and she did not need, to he reminded of it. Often she felt that
she was just about to slip over the edge of humanity into an abyss of
pure violence. During a recent LSD session she had been transformed
into a banzai-shouting, teeth-baring maniac; she still wasn't sure
she had returned safely from that particular trip.

Eventually Cat slowed down and collapsed. By that time, Arthur and
Raina were lying nude on the Mexican serape reading the
East
Village Other
and some lesser publications.

"Here's one," Arthur said. "Pretty groovy. 'Housewife, 42,
interested in chains. Formal practical nurse, has knowledge of
piercing. Willing to oblige women in particular.' Interesting."

"Yes, but her address is Kenosha, Wisconsin." Raina said, reading
over his shoulder. "You don't have the bread to bring her all the way
out here."

Raina never neglected an opportunity to mention Arthur's relative
poverty. Her father had paid twenty-eight thousand dollars for the
split-level home on the outskirts of King's Neck – quite likely
with the hope that a material possession, especially one in the world
capital of material possessions, would give them some sense of
responsibility. Possibly even push them into formal marriage. (Though
they shared Arthur's last name, the marriage ceremony had never been
performed by a lawfully appointed official – it was sanctified
by a bearded nineteen-year-old Zen-reader during a monthly meeting of
the Los Angeles chapter of the League for Sexual Freedom.) At any
rate, Raina liked to keep reminding Arthur that, even if she wasn't
indispensable to him, her father's money was.

Arthur ignored it. He had a great ability to hear only the things
that really interested him.

"Okay, here's something even better," he said. " 'Father and
mother, both 32, with son, 12, and daughter 8.' It goes on to say
they raise muskrats but they're very interested in leather,
especially boots."

"Leather, for God's sake," she said. "Don't you think that's a
little passé? And look at the address. Taos, New Mexico. How
would you figure on getting there?"

"Hey, do you think they're Indians?"

Arthur brightened for a moment. His experience up to this point
had been strictly with Negroes and whites. He wanted some Orientals
to round out the picture, but Indians – Jesus, they'd be
something else. He stared at Raina. That long, straight black hair. A
little snarled, maybe, and most Indian women kept their hair in
tight, neat braids. But it was passable. Hell, more than passable. It
would do. And those dangling silver earrings. They had turned her ear
lobes black, but even that gave it a touch of authenticity. Not too
many bathtubs around those little Indian villages. Yeah, she'd do.
For the moment, anyway.

"
Querida
," he said, grabbing her left ankle brutally.

"Say something dirty in Uxmex."

"Fantasy-break time again?" She stared back at him balefully.

The question turned Arthur off. He liked spontaneity – in
fact, when he had first met Raina a year earlier, that had been her
most attractive and endearing quality. When he wanted to play
Unicorn, she had obligingly curled into the shape of a horn. When he
had wanted her in the chapel, she had sweetly stretched herself into
the form of a crucifix and – no questions asked –
accepted his love-making in Latin.

(
"Vidi, vici, veni" –
he had been inspired by the
sight –

"I saw, I conquered, I came.")

But now it was a totally different story. Raina moved away from
Arthur and eased her thighs into the Lotus position. She was let
down, bruised to the depths of her superego. Perhaps Yoga could help
her. It was better than pot or LSD, especially Tim Leary's much
touted LSD trip without LSD (you sat barefoot in a quiet setting
contemplating a tin can and fruit seed). Tim Leary, what a sellout.
It was all right, of course, for producing visions, but she didn't
want visions now. She wanted calm, higher understanding.

What upset her was not the fact of rejection. That would pass. The
thing that bothered her was that they had played Indian before.
Arthur was
repeating
a fantasy. Jesus H., if things were going
to get boring, that was it. Boredom was Raina's major fear in life;
it was the one evil to be avoided at any cost.

She waited there, in the Lotus position, waited for inspiration to
overtake her. Arthur tried to pull the serape from beneath her and
wrap it around his neck, possibly in imitation of a lei. ("Welcome to
Hawaii," he said.) Unamused, thoroughly unamused now, Raina stood up,
the serape still wrapped around her, and walked out of the room with
dignity.

Arthur didn't give her a second thought. He rarely concerned
himself with thinking about other people. His own moods were so much
more fascinating. He began thumbing through the magazine again. And
just as he hit upon another intriguing item – "Husband and
wife, 21 and 19, both like hairy men – no women need apply"
– the doorbell rang, and Arthur got up, still nude, to answer
it.

It was Dexter, a huge Negro who had been Arthur's buddy in the
army. (Arthur had allowed himself to be drafted a year after flunking
out of Brandeis. So many of his friends had burned and urinated on
their draft cards, feigned catalepsy, encouraged hideous rashes,
learned to lisp and so forth that the only cool, the only truly cool,
thing left to do was to go into the army, and so Arthur had allowed
himself to be drafted. His friends had congratulated him on his
imaginative stand, and Arthur was not unhappy about it himself.
Actually he had enjoyed the army. Being an MP directing traffic on a
Nike base in Maryland was a whole new bit. And even when he was
discovered chewing morning glory seed on duty – his clearance
had been lifted – he found that being a typist in personnel was
just this side of wiggy. He had spent most of the time drawing
obscene portraits of the thyroid-eyed WAC who sat opposite him and
telling her such wild stories that, by the end of his stint, her mind
was completely but permanently blown and she was reduced to mopping
floors in Headquarters Battalion's psychiatric ward.)

Fond memories aside, here was Dexter. Good old Dexter. A tall,
silent Black who communicated only in two-word sentences. "She fly,"
he would frequently say, meaning "She's good." Or he might say "She
bad" – also meaning "She's good." "Woofing" (putting down) and
"jammed up" (crazy) and "rapping" (playing up to) were some of his
other judgments.

He seemed more excited than Arthur had ever seen him. Arthur
looked at him with a tender smile spread across his pale bony face.
He liked Dexter, truly liked him. Dexter never got mad, never asked
questions, never thought about anything. He just grooved along from
one day to the next, so cool he was almost dead. Arthur liked him so
much, in fact, that if he ever got up the nerve to have a homosexual
fling, Dexter would be his man. (Though he was loath to admit it,
Arthur had never been able to make it with a man. He felt ashamed of
the idiosyncrasy but could do nothing to conquer it.)

"Man." Dexter was staring at him, glassy-eyed as usual.

"I have just had me one real-life experience."

"Yeah?"

"There am I, buzzin' through this supermarket you got here,
lookin' to cop a salami, somethin'. [Dexter knew that if he wanted
something to eat, he'd have to bring his own provender. Brown rice
and nuts filled the refrigerator, and that was not Dexter's idea of
soul food.] All of a sudden what do I see but this chick who is the
most fly chick I have seen in my life
ever.
This one I say,
this one, baby, is a trip and a half, only she is crying there.

"So right away I ease myself up to her and say why is she cryin'.
She is sayin' a friend of hers has checked out. So then I tell her
I'm from SNAC. And she says, very cool, 'a breakfast cereal
representative?' And I say I mean SNCC, you know, baby, civil rights,
you know, integration and like that. And by this time she is
laughing. Hooowee and a half, baby, she is something else."

Arthur drew his buddy into the house. Never in his three-year
friendship with Dexter had he heard him communicate so long, so
enthusiastically and so coherently. However, his sense of hospitality
had not deserted him altogether.

"Wanna smoke some grass?" he said.

Dexter nodded almost imperceptibly and Arthur reached for the
Christmas hall on the mantelpiece, cracked it open and offered his
friend some marijuana. The two of them sat there for a while, smiling
at the wall, until Arthur broke the silence.

"You get her name, Dexter?"

"Gilli-Anne, brother, Gilli-Anne Blake."

The rest of the story came from Dexter in barely coherent
fragments. She was tall, blonde and slim. Her breasts were full
without being maternal. Dexter had, of course, propositioned her. She
claimed to understand the meaning but the phrasing troubled her. At
any event, she had turned him down, but charmingly. Dexter took no
offense. Living in New York as he did, his sexual experience had been
rather severely limited to one type of girl – fleshy, Jewish,
painfully liberal and painfully frustrated. It even pained Dexter to
think of the last one, a flabby-thighed, snaggie-toothed young lady
named Minna who had clutched him to her pendulous bosom and offered
him corned beef sandwiches and sympathy after he had done his best to
devastate her. He had sensed that her basic goal in life was to feed,
mother and talk him to death, and he wasn't having any of it. This
Gilli-Anne was much more his type.

Arthur assembled the fragments, and came up with a reasonably
accurate reflection of Dexter's meaning. He allowed that he had seen
the woman in question, had spoken to her three times, once at a party
and twice on the street. And that it was too bad it didn't work out
so that Dexter could ball her because that would be something
else.