...
An hour past "Johnny Carson" I figure everybody's asleep. Time to spiral down from my attic bedroom through the three stories that'll mark my progress toward a rear basement door— Lyle's point of entry. I move slow but steady like sands through an hourglass, carefully stepping around the peak's creaking boards that are known to me from nocturnal stumbles to the fridge. Through the porch door of the only space on the second floor that's not an occupied bedroom, I see Deaver crossing the backyard in a full moon's light. Second's later I've reached the dining room on the first where he's animatedly peering in through the triptych panes above the window seat. I get a huge rush as it finally registers just what the hell I'm doing. Too late to back out now! I keep going—through the kitchen and down to the laundry room where Lyle agreed only just this afternoon he'd wait quietly by the door. That's when I hear the knocking! I can't believe it. It must've been the "no" part of "no knocking" that Deaver missed at our briefing.

As I fling the door open he yells, "Jesus, it's fucking freezing out here, man!"

I hurry Deaver inside keeping an ear out for dad to come flying down the stairs. He doesn't. Tossing a few folded blankets on the couch in what my parents often overdescribe as "the recreation room", I launch into a last warning about Mickey the Marine. I remind Lyle how it would be much more than totally uncool if he were found in the house. And that while he shouldn't be overly nervous, he should definitely try to keep it quiet.

"I'll be down early in the morning to letchyaout, okay?" I ask, hoping for a reassuring look from Lyle that says he'll stay put.

I don't get anything of the sort. What I do get are the blank stares of a hapless hippy who's been smoking up his profits ... and a sinking feeling that it won't be me but Mickey with butcher-knife-bayonet-in-hand who's gonna end up letting Lyle out.
Deaver nods off the second he's horizontal. As for me, I finally fall asleep about an hour-and-a-barbiturate later after cautiously climbing the stairsteps back to my chilly bunk in the tower.

Just how long I'd been out I've no way of knowing, but right in the middle of a really compelling REM cycle my worst fears become part of this really bad dream I'm having. My raging father (wearing a chef's hat) is trying to bounce me awake by lifting and dropping my bed by turns. Finally, he jerks the mattress off the frame and drags it out into the middle of the room. He flours me. Then rolling me off onto the cold bare floor he pounds me flat and bastes with a broad brush.

"Hey asshole, what the fucking hell is wrong with you!?"

Coming up way too fast out of my sensory deprivation tank of drug-induced somnambula I'm not only reeling from an acute attack of the black-beauty-bends but frantically groping for an answer to the question that I fully understand to be vague but definitely not rhetorical. A whiff of consciousness brings immediate envy of Lyle. Yes, I must be turning green with thoughts of the peripatetic pauper who was doubtless tossed out of the house ... or only killed ... by the same Fury whom I fully expect is preparing to deal me a fate even worse. I strain to r.s.v.p. At least an "uh, I dunno" would postpone the imminent beating. But, alas, a single downer has paralyzed my powers of speech.

"Wake up, asshole! Are you going to tell me why at goddamn three o'clock in the fuckin' morning I find a grown man sitting on the goddamn crapper in the basement of this house? Is there something seriously wrong with your goddamn mind!?", Mickey keeps asking ... and asking.



Omniscient Narrator: Like the infamous Korean torturers of "his war", Brian's old man is applying techniques for fact-finding made popular in that Asian conflict of the early 1950's. But Mickey's waking the lad up again and again with the same refrain ultimately backfires, succeeding only in hurling Brian into deeper and deeper intervals of narcotic sleep. As the rest of the children all lay nervously wide-eyed awake in their own beds ready to confess to just about anything, Dad McMahon drives himself to inevitable exhaustion. Then, finally, to his own bed.

Tomorrow, the Lyle Deaver caper will join a host of other recent barnacles on Mickey's peevish ass. This newest incident automatically rotates current stock by displacing some other "betrayal" carrying an earlier freshness date, sending the oldest grudge into the bulging permanent archive. This is how the files of high crimes and misdemeanors are built. Established just after Brian's birth,—in order to be referenced by the old man's roaming subconscious whenever intesity wanes during the floggings or punch-outs of any of the offending offspring—it's really no surprise that so much of the vault's data is labeled ASSHOLE, which is of course Mickey's nickname for his eldest son.

About a year later, when Brian finally does admit that there is definitely something "seriously wrong with (his) fucking mind", Mickey and Nancy'll take him to a priest instead of the shrink he requested, explaining that Father Schnerr has had not only extensive biblical training but at the seminary he'd minored in psychology! This'll not be the first time McMahon will utter, " This can't be my life— it's a fucking Bunuel film!"