Vineland (29 page)

Row that ya hoe,

Somehow, ya

Just ne-ver know, say it ain't so,

Thanatoid World!

 

They're ringin'

Sales at the store,

They're standin'

Guard at the door,

They're turnin'

Tricks on the floor, that 'n' much more,

Thanatoid World!

 

They've got that,

Tha-natoid stare,

They've got that,

Tha-natoid hair,

They've, got, that,—
there's

A Tha-natoid,
there's

A Tha-natoid (where?)

Right There!

 

So if you're

Desp'rate some night,

You never

Know but you might,

Just step on

In-to the light, clear out of sight,

Thanatoid World!

 

A kind of promotional jingle more than a song, and about as up-tempo as anything would get around here tonight, the 'Toids preferring minor chords and a dragged recessional pulse. Gestures in the direction of rock and roll were discouraged, though blues licks were allowed to pass. The band was a twist-era puttogether, two saxes, two guitars, piano, and rhythm. From somewhere mildew-prone and unvisited, the hotel staff had brought piles of old-time Combo-Ork arrangements of pop standards, including Thanatoid favorites like “Who's Sorry Now?,” “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues,” “Don't Get Around Much Anymore,” and the perennially requested “As Time Goes By.” Van Meter had to keep forcing himself to slow down, not to mention the drummer, whose brightness of eye, wetness of lip, and frequent visits to the men's lounge suggested a personality at best impatient, and who now and then liked to explode into these ear-assaulting self-expressive solos, hollering “All right!” and “Party Time!” Despite his enthusiasm, the beat, as the evening went on, only grew slower. It was to be an all-night rallentando. Van Meter had played reds parties, where a number of bikers and biker women got in a room, took barbiturates, and nodded out, this being, basically, the party, which compared to this gig were evenings filled with vivacity and mirth. After a while just getting through 32 bars took a whole set. The dancing, rudimentary to begin with, tended toward gig's-end stillness, as conversation grew less and less meaningful to what few outsiders had blundered in, shunpike tourists who had only a dim idea tonight of just how far from the freeways they'd come. “Chickeeta, what's with all these people?”

“See how slow they're moving, Dr. Elasmo!”

“It's Larry, remember?”

“Ups, rilly. . . .”

“Uh-oh, here comes one of them, now remember, it's not the office, OK?”

“Evening . . . folks . . . you . . . seem . . . to . . . be . . . from . . . out . . . of . . . town. . . .” It took some time to get said, and both Dr. Larry Elasmo, D.D.S., and his receptionist Chickeeta began to break in more than once, mistaking for pauses the silences between his words. Because Thanatoids relate in a different way to time, there was no compression toward the ends of sentences, so that they always ended by surprise. “Wait, I think I know you now,” continued the slow-talking Thanatoid, who turned out to be Weed Atman in his eye-catching Spandex tuxedo, “we had appointments . . . kept rescheduling . . . years ago? Down south?”

“Maybe you saw one of Doctor's commercials?” Chickeeta suggested, while the embarrassed Dr. Elasmo went “Larry! Larry!” out of the side of his mouth. These days he ran a chain of discount dental franchises called Doc Holliday's, famous for its $49.95 OK Corral Family Special, advertising in all major market areas in the West—but back when he'd crossed Weed's path he'd been a low-rent credit dentist known around San Diego for his stridently hypnotic, often incoherent radio and TV commercials. Somehow, in Weed's deathstunned memory, Dr. Elasmo's video image had swept, had pixeldanced in, to cover, mercifully, for something else, an important part of what had happened to him in those penultimate days at College of the Surf, but faces, things done to him that he could not . . . quite. . . .

It was right at the steepest part of his curve of descent into irresponsibility, or, as he defined it at the time, love, with Frenesi Gates, and he was spending a lot of hours out on the freeway, going through the empty exercise of trying to fool Jinx, who was having a relapse into anger and hiring private detectives to keep an eye on everybody. One day, as Weed was heading for a strip of motels in Anaheim, doing about seventy, palms aching and dry, pulse knocking in his throat, awash in thoughts of incredibly seeing Frenesi again, whom should he notice, first in his mirror, then slowly drawing abreast in the lane to his left, but the well-known video toothyanker himself, in a long chocolate Fleetwood, clearly on his own horny way to an illicit rendezvous—a deep glittering sideswung gaze, flipping away to check the road, then back to stare at Weed again, the two of them blasting along at dangerous speed, up and down hills, around curves, weaving among flatbeds and motorheads, Weed at first pretending not to see, then, tentatively, nodding back. But there was only that stare, chilling in its certainty that
it knew who Weed was
. Soon, in beach-town bars and country saloons, in rock and roll hideaways up canyons full of snakes and LSD laboratories, anyplace inside a hundred-mile radius that Weed and Frenesi tried to slip away for a quiet minute, there at some nearby table would be the silent, staring Dr. Larry Elasmo, or a person wearing, like a coverall and veil, his ubiquitous screen image, grainy, flickering at the edges . . . usually in the company of a tanned and lovely young blonde who might or might not have been the same one as last time.

In some way, as it developed, the lascivious tooth physician enjoyed a franchise to meddle in the lives and with the precious time of people he didn't even know—one that Weed, beached these years beside the Sea of Death, still didn't understand. Somehow the Doc had been authorized in those days to send people, Weed included, a form that required them to come to his offices at a certain time. No-show penalties were never exactly spelled out, only hinted at. The place was all the way downtown, in a setting of old brick hotels, sailors' bars, aging palm trees towering above the streetlights—a stark sprawling maze of cheap partitions inside a gutted former public, perhaps federal, building, now stained and ruinous, its classical columns airbrushed black with fine grime on their streetward halves, except for the fluting, letters across the frieze overhead long chiseled away, no longer readable, ascended toward by a broad littered flight of steps that seethed with visitors on appointments, small business deals up and down at all levels and into the great echoing cement lobby, lined with geometric statues who loomed overhead, staring down like the saints of whatever faith this building had served.

Weed could have ignored the form in the mail, but he was haunted by that first gleaming whammy on the freeway, so he showed up on time and wearing a jacket and tie, but had to wait, as it turned out all day, in the bullpen just off the lobby, on a flimsy folding chair, nothing to read but propaganda leaflets and withered newsmagazines from months gone by, afraid even to go out and look for lunch. This was to happen again and again. Dr. Elasmo always ran late, sometimes days late, but each time he insisted Weed fill out a postponement form, including “Reason (explain fully),” as if it were Weed's fault. Weed felt more and more guilty as he became an old bullpen regular, one of a throng of what should plainly have been dental cases but always proved to be something else, none of them smiling, who passed nervously both ways through the gates in the railing that stood like a bar in a courtroom, an altar rail in a church, between the public side and the office penetralia full of their mysteries. Sometimes Dr. Elasmo would be rolling a table carrying a tray of shining—why couldn't Weed ever make them out clearly, was it the low-wattage light in the place?—dental equipment of some kind? “Welcome to Dr. Larry's World of Discomfort,” he would whisper, going through the paperwork. There was a recurring message, one too deep for Weed, always about paper. “I can't accept this form. This will all have to be renegotiated. Rewritten. You'll figure it out.” It was some long, ongoing transaction, carried on, like dentistry, in a currency of pain inflicted, pain withheld, pain drugged away, pain become amnesia, how much and how often . . . sometimes Ilse, the hygienist, stood waiting by a door into a corridor, leading, he knew, to a bright high room with a tiny window at the top, impossibly far away, some blade of sky . . . she was holding something . . . something white and . . . he couldn't remember. . . .

And Weed at the close of the workday would go back down the chipped and crumbling steps, back across a borderline, invisible but felt at its crossing, between worlds. It was the only way to say it. Inside, at that well-known address he could no longer remember, was an entirely different order of things. He was being exposed to it gradually during these repeated, required visits. Each time there he returned to PR
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less sure about anything—deeply confused about Frenesi, whom he loved but didn't completely trust, because of gaps in her story, absences neither she nor anyone else in 24fps would explain. He was also being driven ever crazier by the swarm of disciples who clustered around him more thickly and frantically as days gathered and a feeling of crisis began to grow, all making the basic revolutionary mistake, boobish, cheerful, more devoted the louder he screamed at and insulted them. “Yes my guru! Anything—chicks, dope, jump off the cliff, name it!” Tempting, especially that part about the cliff—but even more seductive were the seekers of free advice. “Weed, how about picking up the gun? We know it's supposed to be wrong, but we don't know why.”

Once he would have proclaimed, “Because in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. This forces us to be humane—to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property.” But these days he was saying, “It's wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he's all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?” Between these two replies, something had happened to him. He was still preaching humane revolution, but seemed darkly exhausted, unhopeful, snapping at everybody, then apologizing. If anybody caught this change, it was much too late to make a difference. They still came trooping up the alley to Rex's place at Las Nalgas, like ducklings looking for a mother. Surf, somewhere hidden in the fog, didn't crash so much as collapse on itself, wetly over and over. Though he lived there, Rex didn't show up much at these gatherings anymore, having finalized his own plans to fly off to Paris and join whatever was left of the Vietnamese section of the Fourth International. “It'll never work,” Weed told him, “you're an Anglo, who'll trust you?”

“Anybody who can rise above racist bullshit like that, I guess.” Once deferent, these days Rex was getting bitter about his protégé, who hadn't turned out at all the way he'd hoped. Though Rex wouldn't have called it purity, he'd still expected from Weed more thought, less wallowing in the everyday. Rex himself saw the Revolution as a kind of progressive abstinence, in which you began by giving up acid and pot, then tobacco, alcohol, sweets—you kept cutting down on sleep, doing with less, you broke up with lovers, avoided sex, after a while even gave up masturbating—as the enemy's attention grew more concentrated, you gave up your privacy, freedom of movement, access to money, with the looming promise always of jail and the final forms of abstinence from any life at all free of pain.

“Kind of pessimistic?” Weed suggested.

“I don't see you giving up anything,” Rex answered, and this, to both of them, seemed a clear sign that their fates were diverging. Rex had once owned this Porsche 911, as red as a cherry in a cocktail, his favorite toy creature, his best disguise, his personal confidant, and more, in fact all that a car could be for a man, and it's fair to say Rex had made a tidy emotional as well as cash investment—indeed, he would not have flinched from the word “relationship.” He called it Bruno. He knew the location of every all-night car wash in the four counties, he'd fallen asleep on his back beneath its ventral coolness, with a plastic tool case for a pillow, and slept right through the night, and he had even, more than once, in scented petroleum dimness, had his throbbing manhood down inside one flared chrome carburetor barrel as the engine idled and with sensitive care he adjusted the pulsing vacuum to meet his own quickening rhythm, as man and machine together rose to peaks of hitherto unimaginable ecstasy. . . .

Long might the automotive idyll have gone on had the PR
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Exterior Bureau, in its search for allies in the world at large, not initiated talks with the Black Afro-American Division, who all wore shiny black Vietnam boots, black-on-black camo fatigues, and velvet-black berets with off-black wide-point stars on them ChiCom-style just to lounge around in, who showed up by invitation at the clifftop republic and got into an all-day argument with its indigenous, whom they kept referring to as children of the surfing class. They may have been the first black people ever to set foot in Trasero County, certainly the first that many of the PR
³
inhabitants had ever seen, so that a good deal of rudimentary history had to be gone over before the discussion even caught up with the present day. As this ground on, Rex grew impatient—he wanted to talk Revolution. But the brothers from BAAD seemed content just to play Trash The Xanthocroid with what, given this crowd, were some pretty easy shots.

“But we're fighting the common enemy,” Rex protested. “They'd just as soon kill us as you.”

The BAAD contingent liked that one, and laughed merrily. “The Man's gun don't have no blond option on it, just automatic, semi-automatic, and black,” replied BAAD chief of staff Elliot X.