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“But…I was born in a hospital, right? And so were you and so was my mom, right?” “That’s right, little Wiggles. It’s too late for us, we is already sucked into the system. Stamped, registered, monitored. It’s got us by our little vestigial tails. That’s why Kama isn’t going to a hospital.” Then, smiling at a secret joke, he said, “Well, that’s one reason, anyway.” “I don’t have a tail and neither do you,” I said. “Just a figure of speech, honey.” As we hit the top of the ridge, the road was speckled with leafy shadows of the trees that made a kind of dizzying strobe effect as we drove along. I liked Kama. She had welcoming eyes of a strange green I hadn’t seen before, a sad smile, and big features hewn like someone had stopped working on them before they were quite done. She was maybe twenty years old, Martin’s girlfriend. Martin (which everyone pronounced Mar-teen) rode around on his big Harley and only took off his black leather vest with its Angel patch if we were at the beach. He mainly struck me as being very tall. Most people treated him with cautious respect, except for my dad and Sam, who treated him like a friend. “I’ve been around a couple of home births, and it’s pretty far out. There’s some yelling, some pushing, and plop! Out comes a baby!” My dad paused for a moment. “Mainly, I think Martin doesn’t like any place where they ask a lot of questions. His buddy is kind of like that, too. “Buddy?” “Guy named Bear,” my dad said. “Another Angel. Nice guy. Not sure if they’ll have any other Angels along.” This whole expedition was starting to sound like one of those math problems with too many sentences and names where you weren’t even sure what the question was. This much I knew: ‘The System’ was like the machine in Modern Times, where Charlie Chaplin gets caught in the gears and there’s nothing he can do about it. My dad thought that my school back in Milwaukee, everything else about my non-summer, non-California life, all cops, and politics, the army, straight people including my step-father and probably my mom too, all businesses, hospitals, and even money, were all gears in The System. Seen this way, if you were having a non-System baby, the first step would be to avoid hospitals. It was perfectly reasonable. “Hey, Ted, how you doin’, man?” said the first Angel on the porch. Both of them dressed like Martin, completely in black. The burly guy who spoke to us had reddish blond hair, a long mustache and sideburns, and might have been scary looking if he hadn’t been smiling. The other guy 13