Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon Read Free Book Online Page A

Small airplanes went purring overhead. In the kitchen hung a creeping fig in a plastic pot, vegetable stock simmered on the stove, hummingbirds out on the patio poised vibrating in the air with their beaks up inside the bougainvillea and honeysuckle blossoms.
    Doc, who had a chronic problem telling one California blonde from another, found an almost 100-percent classic specimen—hair, tan, ath letic grace, everything but the world-famous insincere smile, owing to a set of store-bought choppers which, though technically “ false, ” invited those she now and then did smile at to consider what real and unamus-ing history mightVe put them there.
    Noticing Docs stare, “ Heroin, ” she pretended to explain. “ Sucks the calcium out of your system like a vampire, use it any length of time and your teeth go all to hell. Flower child to wasted derelict, zap, like magic. And that ’ s the good part. Keep it up long enough ... Well. ”
    She got up and started pacing. She was not a weeper, but she was a pacer, which Doc appreciated, it kept the information coming, there was a beat to it. A few months back, according to Hope, her husband, Coy Harlingen, had OD ’ d on heroin. As well as he could with a doper ’s memory, Doc recalled the name, and even some story in the papers. Coy had played with the Boards, a surf band who ’ d been together since the early sixties, now considered pioneers of electric surf music and more recently working in a subgenre they liked to call “ surfadelic, ” which fea tured dissonant guitar tunings, peculiar modalities such as post-Dick Dale hijaz kar, incomprehensibly screamed references to the sport, and the radical sound effects surf music has always been known for, vocal noises as well as feedback from guitars and wind instruments. Rolling Stone commented, “ The Boards ’ new album will make Jimi Hendrix want to listen to surf music again. ”
    Coy ’ s own contribution to what the Boards ’ producers had modestly termed their “ Makaha of Sound ” had been to hum through the reed of a tenor or sometimes alto sax a harmony part alongside whatever melody he was playing, as if the instrument was some giant kazoo, this then being enhanced by Barcus-Berry pickups and amplifiers. His influences, according to rock critics who ’ d noticed, included Earl Bostic, Stan Getz, and legendary New Orleans studio tenor Lee Allen. “ Inside the surf-sax category, ” Hope shrugged, “ Coy passed for a towering figure, because he actually improvised once in a while, instead of the way second and even third choruses usually get repeated note for note? ”
    Doc nodded uncomfortably. “ Don ’ t get me wrong, I love surf music, I ’ m from it’s native land, I still have all these old beat-up singles, the Chantays, the Trashmen, the Halibuts, but you ’ re right, some of the worst blues work ever recorded will be showing up on the karmic rap sheets of surf-sax players. ”
    “ It was never his work that I was in love with. ” She said it so matter-of-factly that Doc risked a quick scan for eyeball shine, but this one was not about to start in with the faucets of widowhood, or not yet. Meantime she was running through some history. “ Coy and I should ’ ve met cute, with cuteness everywhere back then and all of it up for sale, but actually we met squalid, down at Oscar ’ s in San Ysidro— ”
    “ Oh boy. ” Doc once or twice had been in—and through the mercy of God, out of—the notorious Oscar ’ s, right across the border from Tijuana, where the toilets were seething round the clock with junkies new and old who ’ d just scored in Mexico, put the product inside rubber balloons and swallowed them, then crossed back into the U.S. to vomit them back up again.
    “ I had just gone running into this one toilet stall without checking first, had my finger already down my th roat, and there Coy sat, gringo digestion, about to take a gigantic shit. We both let go at about the same time,