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By Root 703 0

balled-up paper blowing in the street; it meant stiff, straight lines wrinkled with suspicious bulges; it meant disorder. Whatever was where it shouldn’t be, or wasn’t where you expected it to be or where it should be. Larry was the only person I knew who expected perfect order, who banked on it, who would have been happy living inside a Swiss cuckoo clock. Anything that wasn’t exactly where it should be or wasn’t precisely where you left it or didn’t follow clean right angles was a thing, a death-in-waiting. The noise of panic travels up as well as down. I’d heard his screams in the night and, once, a shot. He’d terminated—that’s the word he used—a plastic Kodak canister. The canister’d found its way between layers of T-shirts in his dresser drawer. Except that he’d stashed it there himself, then forgotten it. Getting forgetful was the same as inviting Death in the front door with a hearty “Howdy!”

“Things.” I keep an open mind.

“Call me paranoid.” Larry grinned.

“I do.”

“Call me loco?”

“Some people do.”

“Yeah? So if I’m loco how come the other guys didn’t make it past forty and I did?”

The other guys meant Larry’s band of Golden Gate campers and Haight Street panhandlers, the survivors of war who didn’t make it through peace.

He had a point. He wasn’t wacko, just hypersensitive to repression, extra-wired to surveillance, the way some people develop allergies to pollution or chemicals in the air.

Things were out there. Things were in him, too. One day, things would get him, but he at least could see them coming, he had night-vision implants and ESP and when all failed him he had the hairs on the back of his neck.

“That’s how it’s going to come, you know. A snake curled up looking just like a loop of electrical wire. Sentex inside a stray sock. A ballpoint pen someone drops on the street. A dog with an extra-wide collar. Think about that, sweetheart, they’re out there. Things are going to get you.”

He stood in the hall. I invited him in. My mother had cadged a prison-term’s worth of smokes from the Gray Nuns; I was panhandling pills and consolation from a veteran.

Larry spat out his Vietnam stories. They could have been poems. He said things like “I went into villes scouting Charlie with twenty-twenty vision / I came out scoping Satan with the hi-res clarity of hallucination.” That’s more poetry than Mr. Bullock had us read. When Larry got going, his words just popped, they belonged to me as much as they did to Loco Larry, and I didn’t know shit about wars or Vietnam except for the Flash kick-boxing Commies. His war poems made me mourn the major job Vietnam had done on boys like him, the tinkerers of vintage cars, the village idiots from movie-set towns with Art Deco fronts in the adobe valleys between the Coast Range and the Sierra foothills, the turban-and-sombrero country, the farmers from India, the laborers from Mexico, the crazy Armenians speeding on the shoulders raising dust and shouting insults at Okies like his old man selling corn and beans on the side of the road. All the stuff I’d picked up, all the things, stuck to my antennae, like pollen on a bumblebee. I didn’t know shit about his California either. But I knew it was okay to be loco. There was a Bank of Craziness out there, and all I was missing was my own ATM card. It was okay to let him invite me down to his room for the sleeping pills.

“How’re you intending to pay, doll? Piastres or C rations?”

“How about cash? Like running a tab?”

“How about cash, and considerations?” But he dipped from the waist in a courtly bow as he asked and defanged the come-on. “Yikes!” He groaned. He couldn’t straighten back up. “Arthritis.”

On the ferrying-the-Styx, crossing-the-Rubicon scale, passing behind the I MY ARSENAL sign was an 8. Inside lay loud messages of serious derangement. Larry couldn’t keep his face scab-free or his shoelaces tied and his fly zipped, but inside his bunker he’d bent the world to a primal schema of monochrome madness. Cleanliness counts when you cook on a hot plate without a kitchen, wash your dishes in the lavatory and rinse with