Vineland by Thomas Pynchon Read Free Book Online Page B

well into second thoughts anyway, instead spent the rest of that evening, and in fact many other nights down the years to come, not to mention daylight beer breaks, freeway meditations, and toilet-seat reveries, obsessing about his wife—he never would get too comfortable with “ex-wife”—and managing to bum out everybody inside a radius even these days considered respectable.
    Zoyd’s dream album someday would be an anthology of torch songs for male vocalist, called
Not Too Mean to Cry.
He had arrived in this recurring fantasy at the point where he’d take advertising space, late at night on the Tube, with a toll-free number flashing over little five-second samples of each tune, not only to sell records but also on the chance that Frenesi, up late some 3:00 A.M. out of some warm Mr. Wonderful’s bed, would happen to pop the Tube on, maybe to chase the ghosts away, and there’d be Zoyd, at the keyboard in some outrageous full-color tux, someplace along the Vegas Strip, backed by a full house orchestra, and she’d know, as the titles scrolled by, “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” “One for My Baby,” “Since I Fell for You,” that every one of these disconsolate oldies was all about her.
    Frenesi had ridden into his life like a whole gang of outlaws. He felt like a schoolmarm. He was working gypsy construction jobs by day and playing at night with the Corvairs, never anyplace near the surf but inland, for this sun-beat farm country had always welcomed them, beer riders of the valleys having found strange affinities with surfers and their music. Besides a common interest in beer, members of both subcultures, whether up on a board or behind a 409, shared the terrors and ecstasies of the passive, taken rider, as if a car engine held encapsulated something likewise oceanic and mighty—a technowave, belonging to distant others as surf belonged to the sea, bought into by the riders strictly as-is, on the other party’s terms. Surfers rode God’s ocean, beer riders rode the momentum through the years of the auto industry’s will. That death entered into their recreation more than into the surfers’ helped shape an attitude, nonetheless, that had brought the Corvairs their share of toilet and parking-lot trauma, police interventions, sudden midnight farewells.
    The band played up and down valleys still in those days unknown except to a few real-estate visionaries, little crossroads places where one day houses’d sprawl and the rates of human affliction in all categories zoom. After work, unable to sleep, the Corvairs liked to go out and play motorhead valley roulette in the tule fogs. These white presences, full of blindness and sudden highway death, moved, as if conscious, unpredictably over the landscape. There were few satellite photos back then, so people had only the ground-level view. No clear bounded shape—all at once, there in the road, a critter in a movie, too quick to be true, there it’d be. The idea was to enter the pale wall at a speed meaningfully over the limit, to bet that the white passage held no other vehicles, no curves, no construction, only smooth, level, empty roadway to an indefinite distance—a motorhead variation on a surfer’s dream.
    Zoyd had grown up in the San Joaquin, ridden with the Bud Warriors and later the Ambassadors, gone on many an immortally lunatic “grudge run,” as Dick Dale might say, through the presuburban citrus groves and pepper fields, lost a high percentage of his classmates, blank rectangles in the yearbooks, to drunk driving or failed machinery, and would eventually return to the same sunny, often he could swear haunted, landscape to get married, one afternoon on a smooth gold green California hillside, with oak in darker patches, a freeway in the distance, dogs and children playing and running, and the sky, for many of the guests, awriggle with patterns of many colors, some