"This uni-sex stuff--I was talking to some people in the clothes business about fashion and they told me that the areas of the body that are getting the most attention now aren't the breasts or crotch or reproductive areas. All these designers are concentrating on the bottom, you know? They're all accentuating your "boo-boo," you know? They're not concentrating on those areas that really differentiate a man and a woman. This is what I'm trying to get away from."

That Cleaver is serious about the marketing of his pants seems clear. He has been awarded an international patent on the design and its many variations, and he fully expects not only to sell them around the world, but to have them on the covers of Vogue an Harper's Bazaar. He even speculated that every man in the United States will feel so compelled to buy the pants that the economic recession here will end overnight.

The Cleaver who is proposing this salvation for capitalist society--could he be the same who wrote, in the 1969 introduction to Jerry Rubin's Do It!, "I can unite with Jerry around hatred of pig judges, around hatred of capitalism, around the total desire to smash what is now the social order of the United States of Amerika"?

And where do these pants fit in with the old image of Cleaver, rapist? In Soul on Ice, he wrote, "I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto--in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day--and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically....Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling on the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women...."

After dinner Cleaver modelled his pants. He disappeared into an adjoining room and emerged with a pair of blue jeans on, his protusion hanging down, looking less than revolutionary.

He looked down at his pants abstractly, proudly, and said inconsequentially, "I made these pair myself. The tip used to hold a little jewel, a fake ruby, but it fell off."

"Will you make pairs with falsies on them? To make it look longer?" Bruce asked.

"Sure," Cleaver laughed. "I can make any design, any dimensions. Custom-tailored, too."

Everyone stood around and looked at Cleaver's groin. There was something very funny about it all, and half a suspicion that it was all a joke.

A buzzer rang in the hallway, signalling for someone to let in Mr. Caball's daughter Marion, who is 25 and conservative.

"Maybe I'd better slip into the other pair," Cleaver said almost apologetically.

"Aw, come on Eldridge," someone said. "Why can't you wear them now? I mean, if you're going to break down the barriers you've got to start somewhere." It seemed that Cleaver himself had been embarrassed by the pants. He was about to make some excuse when Marion walked in.

"Uh, Eldridge, this is my daughter Marion." Mr. Caball said ironically. "Marion this is Eldridge Cleaver."

"Hi pleased to meet you," Marion said. She had peripherally noticed the aberration in Cleaver's pants without seeming to do so. There was a chill in her voice as these men surrounded her in a circle, mocking her slightly, and this big black man, the self-confessed white-girl rapist "on principle," with his penis slouching down between his legs, shook her hand. From that moment she was not fond of Eldridge Cleaver.

As Marion retreated into the kitchen to get her own dinner, Cleaver changed trousers and when he reappeared, described the reactions his pants had caused.