VV(11): The Sewer Job

[Terrance]

Mark Wright AIA wrote:
> 
> Howdy
> 
> --- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> (snip)This is why Benny has
> > money from the sewer job, but he didn't get paid.
> 
> I've missed something.  Why do you think the Alligator Patrol didn't
> get paid?  Why else would they participate?  They may have been
> off-the-books somehow, but they were paid *something*.  This happens
> today: there are places up near Greenwich CT where undocumented
> immigrants congregate each morning and are picked up illegally as
> day-laborers on a cash basis to do the lousy jobs none of "us" wants to
> do.  They are "volunteers".  They get paid.  They remain crushingly
> poor, invisible, and human.
> 
> Mark


Right, caused quite a stir out on Long Island too, where
unemployment is next to nothin, so...and many of these men
are skilled, but for the language, and making a contribution
as new Americans have for over 200 years...but anyway...back
to page one where we could say that there are two East Main
Streets. One is the East Main that Benny returns to and the
other is "old East Main." The singer sings about old East
Main. Now of course that kinda like singing about "my old
school" or "my old Kentucky home" or "my old main squeeze,"
but suppose that the "old East Main" is as real and as
present as "East Main."
Wouldn't that old man be singing that street right into
Benny's world? The old man also says that "every night is
"Christmas eve on old East Main." Now again, that's kinda
like saying everyday is Saturday Night in that land where
Pinnocchio goes on his way to becoming a "real boy" after
playing the Jack, or every day is Sunday at Carvel ice cream
shop or every day is the 4th of July when my babies feelin
fine or everyday is, well you get the idea, but suppose that
every night is Christmas Eve on old East Main, well that
might explain a lot of strange things going on in this
novel, not the least of which might be why Eve or Mary is V.
In any event, on page two we learn that all the streets that
Profane has traversed, working as a road crew laborer and
Yo-yoing about have "fused into a single abstracted Street
(P's caps). Now this Street as we know is one of the major
leitmotifs (or whatever lit crit term you prefer here) of
the novel--the Street we must walk, the 2oth Century and so
forth. So we know it's Christmas Eve 1955 and we have a 54
Packard Patrician on the street to confirm that it is indeed
1955. That single abstracted Street will, "come the full
moon," give Benny nightmares. This might be where the two
streets or the V comes together. On East Main there are
drunks and crazies, suicides, sick green ugly faces (reminds
one of Pynchon's "TSI" and note that in our current chapter
P recycles the dog Pierre from "TSI") and Sps. Now this is
gonna get real long and tangential, sorry, but I'm just on a
break here for lunch and have been a good boy of late,
working real hard and all caught up, for a day at least, but
here we go, Benny has this sympathy, this empathy, this
thing for the year he was born, for the Great Depression and
the outcasts (How that P does use his details so cleverly,
remember that Benny wears Fina's father's suit, a Depression
suit and so on). Now in the current chapter we have that
"Grapes of Wrath family that didn't go West but East and
they (P, like Melville loves that "All that might be?" 
"Should be?"  "Is but we don't know?" Might there have been
a fork in the road sort of thing, the Optative Mood? the
preterite compounded by the subjunctive) "might have stepped
through time's hanging arras (another P favorite, tapestries
and the man behind the curtain) directly out of the Great
Depression; journeyed to this city in an old Plymouth pickup
from their land of dust (what a handful of dust here Mr.
Eliot, well it's been a while but I can't help but think
that P is alluding to that great American novel and or the
film. Anyway, as Dave Monroe noted, April 15th is the
biggest day of the year in the States, if only because it's
one of the few days on the calendar we all recognize--Tax
day. So now, back to Benny's Alligator gig.....gotta go
sorry, but I will do it I swear, if you want to take a look
at Bung's accounting and the calendars there....