"He's got a good idea, if only you'd listen, Pop."

　　"Pop this." Zoyd ate a Chee-to he'd been planning to throw. "Of course I can listen, I hope I can still do that, what kind of uptight father do you take me for, why, he might even turn out to be a fine young man despite all the evidence, look at Moon-doggie, for example, in Gidget [1959], after all……"

　　"Isaiah!" hollered the girl, "let's move it mah man, no telling how long he's even gonna be in this good of a mood," and out of another dimension, where he'd been waiting in orbit, emerged Isaiah Two Four, who today, Zoyd noticed, had his long Mohawk colored a vibrant acid green, except at the tips, where some magenta shade was airbrushed on. Now these happened to be Zoyd's two all-time favorite colors, and Prairie, who had given him enough T-shirts and ashtrays in the quaint sixties combo, knew it. Was this some weird effort to be nice?

　　Isaiah, in their greeting, wanted to slap and dap, having always somehow believed that Zoyd had seen combat in Vietnam. Some of this was bush-vet and jailyard moves Zoyd recognized, some was private choreography he couldn't keep up with, though he tried, Isaiah throughout humming Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." "Hey, so, Mr. Wheeler," Isaiah at last, "how you doing?"

　　"What's this 'Mr. Wheeler,' what happened to 'You lunch meat, 'sucker'?" this line having climaxed their last get-together, when, from a temperate discussion of musical differences, feelings had swiftly escalated into the rejection, on quite a broad scale, of most of one another's values.

　　"Well then, sir," replied the NBA-sized violence enthusiast who might or might not be fucking his daughter, "I must've meant 'lunch meat' only in terms of our joint strange fate as mortal sandwich, equally exposed to the jaws of destiny, and from that perspective what's it matter, rilly, that you don't care for the musical statements of Septic Tank or Fascist Toejam?" jiveassing so obvious that Zoyd had no choice but to thaw.

　　"By the same token, I could easily overlook as trivial your spirited advocacy of the Uzi as a means of resolving many of our social problems."

　　"That's gracious of you, sir."

　　"Eats, you guys," Prairie coming in with a gallon of guacamole and a giant-size sack of tortilla chips, Zoyd wondering if soon there ought not to appear as well, aha there it was — a cold six-pack of Dos Equis, ah right! Popping one open, beaming, he observed once again in his daughter the sly, not yet professionally developed gift of staging a hustle, something she must surely have got from him, and he felt himself begin to glow, unless it was the guacamole, in which she'd gone a little heavy tonight on the commercial salsa.

　　Zoyd's reference to the Uzi submachine gun, "Badass of the Desert," as it is known in its native Israel, had been appropriate. Isaiah's Business idea was to set up first one, eventually a chain, of violence centers, each on the scale, perhaps, of a small theme park, including automatic-weapon firing ranges, paramilitary fantasy adventures, gift shops and food courts, and video game rooms for the kids, for Isaiah envisioned a family clientele. Also part of the concept were a standardized floor plan and logo, for franchising purposes. Isaiah sat at the cable-spool table, making diagrams with tortilla chips and pitching his dreams — "Third World Thrills," a jungle obstacle course where you got to swing on ropes, fall into the water, blast away at surprise pop-up targets shaped like indigenous guerrilla elements . . . "Scum of the City," which would allow the visitor to wipe from the world images of assorted urban undesirables, including Pimps, Perverts, Dope Dealers, and Muggers, all carefully multiracial so as to offend everybody, in an environment of dark alleys, lurid neon, and piped-in saxophone music . . . and for the aggro connoisseur, "Hit List," in which you could customize a lineup of videotapes of the personalities in public life you hated most, shown one apiece on the screens of old used TV sets bought up at junkyard prices and sent past you by conveyor belt, like ducks at the carnival, so your pleasure at blowing away these jabbering, posturing likenesses would be enhanced by all the imploding picture tubes. . . .

　　Zoyd was barely ahead of the white water here, nearly taken under by the surge of demographics and earnings projections the kid was coming up with. Dazedly he realized that at some point his mouth had fallen open and remained so, he didn't know for how long. He shut it too abruptly and clipped his tongue, just as Isaiah arrived at the line, "And it won't cost you a penny."

　　"Uh-huh. How much will it cost me?"

　　Isaiah gave him the five-figure California orthodontia, plus full eye contact. Zoyd need only stand ready to cosign for a loan —

　　Zoyd allowed himself a lengthy and mirthless chuckle. "And who'll be doing the lending?" expecting some address in a distant state, obtained from a matchbook cover. Turned out to be the Bank of Vineland Itself. "You didt'n, uh, threaten 'em, nothin' like 'at?" Zoyd needling the long-shadowed youth.

　　Isaiah just shrugged and went on, "In consideration, you get all the construction and landscaping work."

　　"Wait a minute, why don't your parents cosign?"

　　"Oh. …… I guess 'cause they've always been into, you know, nonviolence?" There was something wistful in the way he said this. It wasn't just that his folks were vegetarians, they also discriminated among vegetables, excluding from their diet everything red, for example, the color of anger. Most bread, having been made by killing yeasts, was taboo. Zoyd, no shrink, nonetheless wondered if the kid wasn't doing unto Prairie what was being done unto him at Home, in terms of food craziness.