Chapter 43. Brazil and Marat/Sade

While hitting all the regular haunts in Berkeley, I met a character at the Free Lunch table with a charming, thick, and hard to identify, accent. He wore a heavy wool Peruvian Poncho with slicked-back, jet-black, hair. 
The man sat on the bench at the table next to me and introduced himself, “The food is good, the company, better… aaaahhhah! Pleased to make you acquaintance, I am called Brazil.”

After an awkward moment in which he just stared at me, I realized he wanted me to reciprocate, “Oh, sorry, I’m Max, where are you from in Brazil.” I was just making conversation and wouldn’t know anything about Brazil if I’d been told. I suppose I wanted to simply hear the music of this guy’s accent more than I had any curiosity of his origins.

“I am from Valparaíso. I call myself Brazil because… well, because, that’s why.”

“Uh, Valparaíso, where’s that?” I knew some National Geographic stuff about Brazil but not much beyond Rio de Janeiro and the Amazon.

“Chile… she was a dangerous place for me… that’s why I call myself Brazil. I need papers to get back into Chile now that Allende is… well, let us say, I have a chance now. I should call myself Chile but I rather like Brazil… a Portuguese accent suites me, don’t you think? Don’t you think it sounds good?”

“Yeh, sure, it sounds different from Hispanic… it has a nice ring to it and it sounds great.  You must be an actor to pick it up.”

“Yes, I had to learn it to get this passport. My mother she… Say, I have an adventure to go on tomorrow in San Francisco. Do you want to go with me?”

“Why not?” I scratched my beard, “What kind of adventure?”

“I need to go to the Chilean Consulate and get my papers in order or I will be stuck here in this hell forever. It would cause a big scandal.”

We crashed that night under the floors in the crawlspace of an abandoned house condemned by the University. It had room underneath to squat or crawl on the way in, and it was dry, perfect for rolling out a bag, and safe enough to hide from cops or other predators for the night. There were rooms in the house one could break into, but we never did that. We wouldn’t know what to expect; who our nocturnal visitors might be; campus police, junkies or a low-life of one sort or the other looking for someone to roll for a fix. 
The next day we hitched a ride out across the Bay Bridge and caught a ride in a small Toyota, kind of a rare car in those days. The driver and shotgun were Palestinians. Immediately, upon entering the back seat of the car, Brazil and I were handed flyers with pictures of bloody corpses decrying Jewish atrocities. I had been a big fan of Israel since the Seven Day War and had never actually considered the other side of the story. Yet, I did feel something dangerous about these two as they spewed venomously about Israeli occupation of their ‘homeland’. If they were PR men for the Palestinians, all they accomplished was to scare the shit out of me, and did not sell one point in their pitch. I was relieved to be let off on Market Street, wished them ‘Luck’, and we walked down to Powell towards the Consulate.

The Chilean Consulate was an experience that went from intimidating to bizarre. There were military types at one end of the room behind a counter and civilian looking folks at the other end of the same counter. The military types and the civilian types had an air of uneasy tolerance for each other. The leftist mustachioed president, Allende, peered out from his portrait in black rimmed glasses behind where the civilians busied themselves. There was a smaller, but more ominous, picture of a mustachioed general behind where the military types stationed themselves. Knowing nothing of Chilean politics, I wondered which mustachio would prevail to become Chili's Big Brother. Brazil spent a good hour with one of the civilians talking and pulling out papers from a briefcase he’d retrieved on the way from a storage locker at the Greyhound station.  Then, after the clerk stamped the papers with some sort of official seal, he was sent over to the military end of the counter where he was told to take a seat after the officer took his stamped papers over to an unoccupied desk where they were put on a stack of other papers in the ‘In’ basket.

It was closing time before an officer picked up the papers and called out Brazil’s name, “Senor Gonzales, you will have to come back tomorrow. We are closed.”

The officer smiled and turned back to discuss the papers with another officer.

“But I have been here already for three hours!” Brazil protested.

The officer didn’t acknowledge his protest and left the room.

“Well, that’s it. I will come back tomorrow,” Brazil said under breath and stared at the door the officer went through, “But first, Max, we will make one more stop.”

I didn’t ask Brazil where he was going next. I just tagged along on up to Bush Street where we entered the lobby of a building. I noticed the call letters of a radio station behind the counter that had the look of a bank teller’s, with bullet proof glass at a counter behind which a security guard was stationed. Brazil signed-in on a ledger passed to him by the security guard who picked up a phone and talked for five minutes repeating the name, Pedro Gonzales, two or three times.

After a pause, he looked up at Brazil for the first time and ordered, “You have to leave,” and nothing more before he went back to reading a magazine.

I could see Brazil’s chest deflate as he sighed.

Brazil then started yelling something in Portuguese and then Spanish in a rapid-fire staccato… I put an arm around his shoulder when I saw the guard pick up the phone and say something in Spanish back at Brazil. Only then did Brazil give up and leave with me.

“What was that all about?”

“You don’t want to know. Something very bad is going to happen to me now.”

Brazil had that look, I supposed, of a condemned man going to the wall.

“It doesn’t have to be that way, does it?” I tried to cheer him up to no avail. We went back to the freeway entrance on lower Broadway and hitched a ride back to Berkeley. When we got back to the Rap-Center that evening Bob-O was there.

“So, what happened with the big-assed miracle?” I teased.

“Oh, there was this guy who’d died a few days before we got there, and they were having a prayer vigil for him.” Bob-O looked down at his feet as he told the story. “Yeh, they were supposed to raise the guy from the dead.”

“Really… shit those people were crazier than they looked.”

“Well, Father came back and put an end to it saying the poor stiff was already raised in the spirit,” Bob-O saying what happened, looked embarrassed.

“Did you believe it?” I goaded him.

“Sure, why not?”

“Why not?” I waved a hand in front of Bob-O’s face… “Why not?  Because it is impossible… that’s why not.”

“Jesus raised Lazarus… didn’t he?”

“Yeah, and in the last days we’re all going to come all ghoulish looking from our graves.”

“Hey, you don’t know, do you?”

Bob-O looked like his feelings were hurt so I backed off.

Brazil broke up the uncomfortable conversation, “Say, let’s go over to this fraternity house I know of. They serve some free food and sometimes they have a movie on.”

The frat house had a huge living room with a screen and a projector. We got there just in time for the movie of the night. Brazil was treated as a celebrity, or someone of great esteem, and we were offered a seat on the couch in front. The movie was Marat/Sade by Peter Brooks. I was transfixed by the whole production and I fell in love with Glenda Jackson playing Charlotte Corday in the mad house. It was a sensational display of a particle of the madness I’d witnessed in Berkeley, Altamont and Miami. I left the frat house empty. The flick had destroyed any vestige of hope I’d harbored for ‘the revolution’ in my mind. It was all being acted out on a stage in an asylum before my own eyes… as the theme song rang through my consciousness; “We want a revolution… NOW!”

Some University academic types threw a Christmas Eve party a few days later. This was an authentic party, not an occupation, at a house on Bancroft Way about a block up from the UC Berkeley Art Museum. Brazil knew some people in academia and got a hold of a couple of invitations. I’d also come into some good acid and decided to drop it before the party. Bob-O came along too but he didn’t want to have anything to do with taking acid. As we arrived at the house there was already a large crowd of people milling around outside. It looked crammed tight inside too. Someone passed me a bottle of beer, so I held on to it, more for a prop than to have a drink. I had been standing by the street on the sidewalk for a few minutes when a cruiser pulled up. The police in Berkeley had their hands full most of the time with Street People and there was no sensitivity training to be had back then. That wouldn’t come until after the next decade.

The cop demanded, “What you got in your hand, boy.”

“It’s a beer, I think.”

“You think it’s a beer?”

I hoped to find a soft spot behind that uniform, “Well, you know, it’s Christmas.”

“Pour it out.”

“Pour it out?”

“You heard me, pour it out!”

“But its Chris… okay, okay!” I poured it out in the gutter.

I tried to hand the empty bottle to the cop, but he snarled, “I don’t want that!”

“I don’t want to be busted for littering.”

“Take it down the street to a trash can and get your ass out of here.”

Brazil called out from the main door to the house, “Hey Max, come on in… the party’s waiting for you.”

Once inside, I realized that the acid I’d dropped was starting to kick in. I’d lost track of Bob-O in the crowd, but I was close by Brazil most of the time. After about a half hour I noticed a wiry-thin-faced man about five-foot four standing in a corner watching Brazil. When he caught me watching him, he suddenly disappeared. I thought nothing of it and got in a conversation with a middle aged white woman dressed in an ethnic dashiki. The dashiki reminded me of Glenda.

Dashiki said, “I see you came with Pedro. Are you his… uh. He is a great man.”

We were making idle chit-chat, and, as I assured her that Brazil and I weren’t lovers, her eyes shifted to something behind me. I turned to look and saw the same wiry-thin-faced man approaching me.

The man spoke with a feint Hispanic accent, “I know you from somewhere, si?”

“No.”

“Sure, I never forget a face.”

I objected, “I’m sure I don’t know you,” and tried to get away from the man.

There was something about him that the acid accented. I mixed into the crowd and another room thinking that I’d gotten away from the creep but there he was in front of me, coming towards me. How did he do that? my mind was racing… He would have had to somehow come all the way around the house to show up before me in this room…. all this in the same time it took me to get where I am!

He seemed pleased to see me, “Oh, I know where I saw you.”

“Man, I don’t know you.” I cut-out again through the crowd into another room where I ran into Brazil.

“Brazil, there is this creep following me around…” but, before I could finish the sentence the guy was there as though he were already a part of the conversation.

Brazil’s face went white…

The man sneered, “You were at the consulate last week, yes?”

“Are you talking to me?” I was so puzzled about this man’s ability to maneuver through the crowded party that I hadn’t given much thought to any motive behind his kinetic acuity.

“Si, I am talking to you and your friend… yes?”

Brazil grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away, “We have to get out of here, this guy is a scandal… a big bloody scandal.”

I was familiar with Brazil’s use of the word, scandal. Brazil used the word interchangeably with the words, nuisance, a bother, an embarrassment, and BIG TROUBLE.

I looked around and saw no sign of the wiry-thin-faced man. We got outside and took off in the direction of Bancroft Way as fast as we could without running. Then we saw him again ahead of us at the corner of Bowditch and Bancroft. “What the hell?” I stopped in my tracks, “How did this guy get there!”

I turned to see what Brazil was going to do but he was gone. I just stood where I was and watched as the man turned and got into a black sedan that had pulled up to the curb.

‘Brazil!” I shouted once and then thought better of it.

I looked around and tried to see where Brazil might have been able to ditch himself between the museum and... Oh, forget it., I thought. Could be the acid I dropped might have had something to do with it.

I murmured. “Is it paranoia if you really have something to fear?”

I was turning down Dana Street towards the Rap Center and Free Clinic when I saw the black sedan pass by. It had two figures in the back seat and I was sure one of them was Brazil. The car had diplomatic plates that I recognized as State Department plates from my staff driving job in the Navy. I couldn’t read them very clearly, but I recognized the design. That was the last I saw of Brazil.

I told Bob-O about the whole incident the next day. Bob-O listened then said; “He was Satan.”

“Satan?”

“Yeh, I saw him too. He was a spirit, you know. If God is real, then so is Satan.”

“I think I saw him in a sedan with diplomatic plates.”

“How else would Satan ride?”

“What would he want of Brazil?”

“Brazil… hmm… haven’t you noticed, Max? Brazil is an angel.”

“I’m glad you stopped sniffing glue, Bob-O.”