Jeff, thanks for the offer, but I got it figured out. I was running through a sample that was incomplete and my lack of experience with lisp made me miss it (what I took as a reserve word was actually a call to a function that was missing in the sample).
The thing that drove me nuts was that I have spent good 3 hours on something that I should have spotted from the get go (can I blame it on lack of sleep?), although it would have been more apparent if it was documented better.....
Ok... and one more thing: counting parenthesis sucks!