Entropy 1

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A Beat tale:



Summary:



Meatball Mulligan has been engaged in a marathon lease-breaking party at his 
apartment in Washington, DC in early February of 1957.   His guests are a 
colorful bunch, including Sandor Rojas, an “ex-Hungarian Freedom fighter,” 
and the avant-garde Duke di Angelis quartet comprised of Duke, Vincent, 
Krinkles and Paco who sit around stoned, listening to Musssorgsky on the 
hi-fi and watching the ashes from the joint they are sharing bounce around on 
the speaker cone.

 

Meanwhile, in the apartment above, a middle-aged man named Callisto living in 
a hermetically sealed hothouse resembling a painting by Rousseau with a young 
woman named Aubade, a Vietnamese exotic who perceives all sensory input as 
sound, is awakened by the blaring stereo downstairs.   Callisto has been 
gently holding a dying bird to his chest, trying to save it with the warmth 
of his body.  The apartment is “a tiny enclave of regularity in the city’s 
chaos.”  



Meatball Mulligan awakens at the same time as his neighbor, apparently for 
the same reason:  the clashing finale of Mussorgsky’s The Heroes’ Gate at 
Kiev from Pictures at an Exhibition.  He is appalled by his hangover and the 
mess in his apartment.   The music is changed to a recording of 
alto-saxophonist Earl Bostic.  A woman who has been asleep in the bathroom 
sink is awakened by Mulligan and seeks a hangover cure fully clothed in the 
shower. 



Callisto is dictating his theories to Aubade:  “you can’t win, things are 
going to get worse before they get better.”  Callisto has a theory on the 
nature of Thermodynamics and its theoretical extension beyond the limits of 
physics into the realms of society and culture as well:  just as all closed 
systems lose energy overtime until a “heat-death” occurs wherein motion 
ceases, culture has a tendency to lose differentiation and slide toward what 
Callisto terms “the Condition of the More Probable.”  Entropy, then, which 
Callisto defines as “the measure of disorganization for a closed system,” is 
valuable in that it is “an adequate metaphor to apply to certain phenomena in 
[the] world,” such as the consumerist trend away from difference and toward 
sameness.   For the past three days the thermometer outside has remained at 
37° F. 



Saul, a neighbor of Mulligan’s, comes in through the window of the lower 
apartment after an argument with his wife concerning communication theory and 
the tendency for noise to “screw up your signal,” making for 
“disorganization in the circuit.”  The party degenerates during the course 
of the story into a chaotic mess:  more guests arrive with more booze, 
drunken sailors barge in mistaking the place for a brothel. 



Callisto muses on his youthful life as an expatriate in Europe.



The Duke di Angelis Quartet performs “Love for Sale” without instruments.  
It appears the Navy may get lucky with the Catholic girls from Georgetown.   
Meatball takes action, and he succeeds in minimizing the chaos of the party 
through the establishment of a temporary order.



The story ends with the death of the bird.  Aubade, finally comprehending 
Callisto’s thoughts, punches out the windows of their apartment (a 
self-contained ecosystem) and sits with Callisto to await “the moment of 
equilibrium … when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and 
inside.” 



The tale is like a happening.  It is also a historical document of sorts, a 
tale of a world now sadly gone forever, a simpler world with only nuclear 
oblivion to worry about.



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