[lit-ideas] Re: OLD JOKES
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:11:23 -0500
I still can't read this without grinning like mad. How about you?
Sorry, John, I didn't even grin. Now it's my turn to test you. This
passage is very near the end of Pynchon's "Vineland". It's one of the
funniest things I've read in 30 years -- but, of course, you may need to
have read the previous 370 pages to find humor in it:
"...But she was already on her way, on into the trees till she reached a
piece of the woods that she'd never seen, a small clearing inside a grove of
Sitka spruce and alder, where she spread her bag and, enjoying the solitude,
must've drifted off to sleep. The beat of helicopter blades directly
overhead woke her. As she stared, down out of it, hooked by harness and
cable to the mother ship above, came Brock Vond,who looked just like he had
on film. For about a week Brock, whom his colleagues were calling "Death
From Slightly Above," had been out traveling in a tight formation of three
dead-black Huey slicks, up and down the terrain of Vineland nap-of-
the-earth style, liable to pop up suddenly over a peaceful ridgeline or come
screaming down the road after an innocent motorist, inside one meter of the
exhaust pipe, Brock, in flak jacket and Vietnam boots, posing in the gun
door with a flamethrower on his hip, as steep with bright flares of autumn
yellow, went wheeling by just below, as the rotor blades tore ragged the
tall columns of fog that rose from the valleys.
"But at the moment here, Brock was linked by remote control to the motor of
the Huey's hoist, able to lower himself to within centimeters of the girl's
terrified body, where she could stare into the dim face, backlit by the
helicopter lights. The original plan, as he'd recapped for Roscoe, who'd
frankly had more recaps on this than Mark C. Bloome, had been to go in,
cross-plot the subject, come down vertical, grab her, and winch back up and
out -- "the Key is rapture. Into the sky, and the world knows her no more."
Roscoe in his time had done a heckuva lot worse than abduct kids. He
imagined himself grown oversize, beastlike, scuffling along beside a more
human-faced Brock Vond. "Her tits, Master --"
"Nice firm adolescent tits, Roscoe, tits like juicy apples."
She lay paralyzed in her childhood sleeping bag with the duck decoys on the
lining and saw that even in the shadows his skin glowed unusually white.
For a second it seemed he might hold her in some serpent hypnosis. But she
came fully awake and yelled in his face, "Get the fuck out of here!"
"Hello, Prairie. You know who I am, don't you?"
She pretended to find something in the bag. "This is a buck knife. If you
don't --- "
"But Prairie, I'm your father. Not Wheeler -- me. Your real Dad."
Nothing that hadn't occurred to her before -- still, for half a second, she
began to go hollow, before remembering who she was. "But you can't be my
father, Mr. Vond," She objected, "my blood is type A. Yours is Preparation
H."
By the time Brock figured out the complex insult, he was also feeling mixed
signals through the cable that held him. Suddenly, some white male far away
must have wakened from a dream, and just like that, the clambake was over.
The message had just been relayed by radio from field headquarters down at
the Vineland airport. Reagan had officially ended the "exercise" known as
REX 84, and what had lain silent, undocumented, forever deniable, embedded
inside. The convoys were to pack up and return to their motor pools, the
mobile prosecution teams to disband, all the TDY's in the task forces to
return to their regular commands, including Brock, his authorizations
withdrawn, now being winched back up, protesting all the way, bearing and
brake pads loudly shrieking, trying to use his remote but overidden by
Roscoe at the main controls."
Like I say, you might need to have read the preceding story. But I find
Pynchon one of today's funniest writers. But I don't think people think of
his as funny -- people are weird.
Mike Geary
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