"Yeah, I've walked around Paris with the pants on. I get some strange looks. Yesterday I was going to my publisher's office with them on and got into the elevator. There was just me and this woman in the elevator. She walked in and pressed the button for her floor, you know, and then the door closed. Then she took a look at my pants. And then she took another sly look. Man, as soon as she caught sight of those pants she pressed the button and got off at the very next floor!"

Marion returned and the conversation drifted to other subjects. Cleaver talked only briefly about his efforts to return to the United States. He said he has a request for a full pardon, exonerating him from skipping bail and leaving the country, before California's Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. Asked why he wants to return to America, he answered, "Well, don't you want to go back?" Someone asked where he would settle, and Cleaver answered that he hadn't even given it thought, that he just wants the freedom to return but doubts he'd settle here.

But Cleaver obviously didn't want to talk about returning to the States. He was more willing to describe his life in Algeria. He said the period was most difficult when Dr. Timothy Leary visited him.

"Man, Leary was a real problem. I didn't want the man to come, you know, cause he was such a problem, but he showed up at my pad anyway. It was kind of funny--when Leary announced that he was going to Algeria, the Algerian government got very excited. They didn't know anything abouth him except that he was a big Harvard professor coming to live in their country. So they were really proud, and played it up big on the television news. They were going to have a big reception committee meet him at the plane and a press conference and a dinner in his honor. Whew, that was too much. I called up the government and told them just who this guy Leary is and what he had done, with LSD and everything, and they cancelled their plans pretty quick."

'Have you ever taken LSD, Eldridge?" Bruce asked.

"Yeah, twice. Once in San Quentin and once in Algeria. I didn't like it though. I didn't like the feeling of not being in control of myself."

"What was Leary like?"

"Leary is completely crazy. His mind is really fizzled away. He can talk pretty coherently, but what he chooses to talk about is really crazy. Man, Leary was a big problem. Because wherever he'd go, there would be kids following him, kids who he had turned on to LSD. They were coming back to their guru, convinced that he could get their head back together again and no one else could.

"When he was staying with me, there'd be all the kids coming over who were completely gone in the brain, you know? This one kid came over who was really not there, you know? And he had travelled thousands of miles just to see Leary. Man, I don't know how he even got it together to board the plane. Anyway, Leary didn't want to have anything to do with him. So I made Leary sit down in a room with just me and the kid, to face up to it. But it just didn't work out. Leary couldn't face up to his responsibility for this guy's life."

* * *

Bruce and his father didn't see too much of Cleaver after he left that night in August, although they ran into his wife once and were startled to see her face covered by a big butterfly-wing bandage. "I bet Cleaver hit her," Bruce said later. That made Cleaver an even more confusing figure: rapist, convict, talented author, a man seeking to return to the country he denounced, a man promoting a pair of pants to give a new revelation to our sexuality.

As for his pants, Cleaver is still looking for a manufacturer. He doesn't know when they'll be on the market. "Already I've got a few names for them, though--the Whip, the Snake, or in France, the Mauvais Garcon."

"Or how about Meat Cleavers?" someone suggested.

"Yeah, sure," he said. "There are plenty of names."

Eldridge Cleaver sips wine in a Paris apartment and talks about the new pants he's designed: "What's wrong with getting an erection and letting people know about it?"