THE PLACE IS AT THE EDGE. An hour after showtime, it is packed with more bodies and the mirror behind the bar is steamed with human heat. The little black box is itself pumping when the lead guitarist breaks his Sex Pistols cover and chants with his bass player, DESTROY-DESTROY-DESTROY and he disappears behind the drummer, who keeps a steady, low roll. The singer emerges from the other side of the drums wearing an Iranian flag shirt and American flag pants. There are 50 safety pins mending the rips in his shirt. They do a song called "Take Me Hostage," and at the end, at the height of a feedback, the bass player sets the singer's shirt on fire. The bass player takes the pillow out of the bass drum and wallops it against the singer's chest. "Aggggh, it hurts," the singer sings, and closes out the set.

A heavy metal band takes the stage--full of steel studs and volume and muscle--and people start to file out of the club. Girls and boys follow the man with the Iranian shirt into the bathroom, and wait at the door.

"We're 666," the heavy metal singer announces, "and this if our first gig. Every gig's our first gig (he tries to stare down the crowd)... and we got a song for YOU." Half the crowd is waiting at the bathroom door, the other half splits for the city streets at night.

THE STREETS OF BOSTON are lined with kids out for Friday night fun. They wear neat clothes. They are clean and white. They drink beer and shout "Kill the Ayatollah" at an Iranian student who is crossing the street in front of a pickup truck. The drivers smile and sneer at once.

"BOMB THEM. Killllll THEM," they say. The student shouts at them in Italian as he mounts the curb. The drivers are disappointed. They throw a bottle at the student, who is dark and has something burning in his eyes.

"Yuh, yuh...Duce! Il Duce!" the student scoffs at them and hurries away down Commonwealth Ave. He hails a cab immediately and climbs in. They head in the other direction, fast. I'll walk.

A bridge connects Boston and Cambridge. They call it the Harvard Bridge. The bridge is calibrated in marks of orange paint, saying: 75 Smoots...100 Smoots...150 Smoots...200 Smoots...360 Smoots and one ear all the way to the MIT campus with its swelling Greek temples and plate-glass buildings. The buildings have no names; they are numbered.

Two FUI (Phi Gamma Delta) men are making their way to #169 and savoring the legend of the bridge. "I think we should get Khomeini and measure the bridge in Ayatollahs," he laughed.

"No. We can just get an Iranian."

He said he went to a lecture Chomsky was sponsoring for the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran. They had an Iranian poet to read his poetry--Reza Berahini... and a mob of Iranian students delayed the lecture for hours. There was a bomb threat. The Americans were scared. The Iranians said Berahini was a CIA agent. Yet he was an anti-Shah poet--he spent years in jail. So finally, Chomsky let one of the students speak at the podium, and the student waxes hot-faced and apologizes to the crowd for the disturbance. He says he is sorry for what he has to say, and he reads a poem by Berahini which has the words "shit" and "fuck" in it. He says he's sorry to say such words to the crowd, and says that Beranhini's use of those words proves he is a CIA agent trying to discredit the people's movement in Iran by using dirty language. That was two years ago.

"I don't see any way out of it but to bomb the hell out of them. This thing really pisses me off. Who knows what they're doing to those hostages, and they're already doomed to die. It's time we just did something." Bomb them, they agreed.

"We can have a party when it's over, hey." They step off the bridge to cross the street.

The Legend of the Bridge: Many years ago, in the 1960s, a Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity party turned into an argument over developing new systems of measurement. So they kidnapped one of their pledges--Mr. Smoot--and tied him to two-by-fours. They took him to the Harvard Bridge and measured the bridge in Smoots.

THE ROAD LEADS PAST MIT, past Central Square where the hookers and the cabs and the police all compete to take people home with them. All the way down the road, lined with happy and vicious people celebrating the end of a work week, making parodies of threats, laughing the serious. All the way to Holyoke Center, where a group of American students is staging a show.

They seat six students, bound and gagged, in the middle of the plaza. There is an executioner wearing a black veil. He totes a padded wiffle-ball bat. The MC speaks into a homemade PA to the motley gathering of workers, bums and passers-by.