BRAIN LINT

THE DINOSAUR had been living in our suite for a week before I finally spoke to him. Our floater, a Cambridge skateboard punk--now withdrawn from Harvard to his native streets--had let the psuedo-prehistoric monster in and then disappeared home, leaving us trying desperately to ignore the spiky invader.

But after the Dinosaur stole Ted's clothes, and then asked to borrow a hundred dollars, I figured it was time to get to know him.

"So, what the hell are you doing here?" I asked, a hospitable gleam lighting up my cherubic face. The Dinosaur whirled, chains clanking softly against his leathery torso. A black leather coat--imbedded with steel plates and crusted with spikes--made up his armor; a gelled crest of blonde mohawk arced across his skull, calling to mind some genetically mutated stegosaurus. The Dinosaur.

"Huh?"

Eyeing his six foot, slamdance hardened frame, I modified my greeting. "So how come you've been living in our suite?" Swarming beer cans, skateboard parts, mangled hardcore tapes and ever-increasing mossy foliage were all part of the natural habitat the Dinosaur had erected around himself in our floater's room.

"Well, like, things are really chilly with me and my parents, but, like, they had this rule that I couldn't bring drugs into the house, and I brought 'em in--so I was out." He shrugged, his eyes rolling like greasy hardboiled eggs under his blonde spikes. I retreated quickly to my room.

AS THE WEEKS went by, and we struggled to keep our personal possessions out of his meaty grasp, the Dinosaur gradually revealed to me the sordid intricacies of the hardcore lifestyle, as practiced by punkus Cantabrigianus.

Three a.m. Saturday morning, the Dinosaur beckoned me into the smoky lair he had made his home. The T.V. flickered through the smoke, a swirling mixture of carcinogens and radioactivity that played flatteringly over my host-guest's chain scarred face.

"Yo, J.T. want a beer?" Not wanting to arouse the latent ferocity that rippled through even his most cursory gestures, I took a swallow from the saliva-spattered can he offered me.

Expecting lukewarm effervescence, my throat was searingly ambushed by a bitter rush of vodka. As phlegm and blood spewed from my esophagus, the Dinosaur guffawed at his own ingenuity. "Haaaaah, got you dude!"

We settled back on the couch in front of the tube; on the screen Ronald Reagan was bashing various ethnic minorities into submission in the jungleland classic "Tropical Zone." The movie's soundtrack, probably a valuable primer to Reagan's foreign policy, was drowned out by the thrashing feedback screaming out of the Dinosaur's tapedeck. "Man, this band really sucks," he decided, replacing it with a virtually identical tonal mash.

I paused to figure out how he could tell the difference. "You play any musical instruments?" I asked, liberally granting him some quality appreciation I lacked.

"Oh, dude, of course. Check out this song..." He launched into a semi-rap, arms folding and refolding across his chest, combat boots stamping a muddled beat. The main themes of his tune seemed to be Catholicism, jism, blood, and bondage. In one climactic verse the words "juxtaposition" "crucifix" and "pumping" followed each other in quick succession.

THE EVENING produced a number of juicy punker bon mots. Group activities: "Like, the thing to do a couple years ago was to go to somebody's house and make weapons. But don't get me wrong dude, I never killed anybody."

Guidelines for when killing is okay: "Yo man, I give cats a chance. Like, if I pet them, and they purr then everything's chilly. But I'd been taking this cat's shit all night long, and, like, once it was just in the wrong place and at the wrong time. So I nuked it."

About this time, geologically speaking, my curiosity was swallowed by a black tar-pit of nausea, and I left the Dinosaur vacantly watching Ronnie beating natives in the name of truth, justice and the charismatic way.

Like all good prehistoric beasts tend to do, the Dinosaur eventually disappeared, leaving behind only fossilized traces of his natural foodstuffs, his indigenous underwear, and his characteristic drug paraphernalia. He left behind no moral lessons, no cultural conundrums worth of opination, but only a stark example of the brutal spiral of natural selection, which fortunately left him with a brain incapable of responding to the printed word. Which means I won't get nuked.