VL & the Work of mourning

[Don Corathers]

Tim:

> Zoyd in general just seems to have a skewed sense of work, no?  He
mentions
> the need for money for groceries, yet his primary source of income is a
> once-a-year media stunt.  As you say, his notion of helping Isaiah
Two-Four
> get "into business" is a one-time-only gig.
>
> For Zoyd, "work" doesn't seem to mean "employment" (and all that comes
with
> it, including salary, benefits, etc.)  "Work" for Zoyd merely seems to
> equate an activity with receiving monetary compensation.

Zoyd operates outside the mainstream economy, but I don't think that
necessarily means he has a skewed sense of work. He's actually quite
industrious--even, with perhaps some irony, entrepreneurial. There's no
Rotary Club for the kind of entrepreneur Zoyd is, but he hustles just as
hard as those guys.

I'm not sure you can say that the disability check is his main source of
income. (We actually have no idea how much the monthly payment is, but it's
probably pretty small.)

We do know that in 1984 he's a gypsy roofer, a landscaper, a crawdad broker,
and (revealed much later) a mule for the Holytail growers association. He's
a single parent, too, another kind of serious work, and he and Prairie live
in a home he essentially built from scratch over the years.

We also see him, some years earlier, as a working musician. And when we
eventually get the story of his move to Vineland with Prairie, we're given
this sketch that shows how hard Zoyd is willing to work to provide for his
kid:

"By that time Zoyd had found a piece of land with a drilled well up off
Vegetable Road, bought a trailer from a couple headed back to L.A., and was
starting to put together a full day's work, piece by piece. Out in the
perpetual rains on that coast back then, with a borrowed ladder and rolls of
aluminum foil, he cruised middle-class neighborhoods for clogged or leaking
gutters, doing quick fixes on the spot, then coming back between storms to
make the jobs more permanent. He sold vanloads of plastic raincoats from
Taiwan along with car wax and pirated Osmonds tapes at weekend swap meets at
the Bigfoot Drive-In, spent Februaries along with everybody else he knew
going in hip waders in the Humboldt daffodil fields... and then, when the
cable television companies showed up in the county, got into skirmishes that
included exchanges of gunfire between gangs of rival cable riggers..."

By 1984, Zoyd is operating a number of cash-based businesses that depend
largely on word-of-mouth referrals and a network of friendships. When Isiaih
2:4 presents his whacked-out but MBA-grade business plan to Zoyd, his
suggestion of the Wayvone wedding for the Barftones is a way of introducing
the young man to the sector of the economy that has sustained him over the
years. That the band doesn't quite fit the gig is part of the deal, kind of
like those jury-rigged aluminum foil gutter patches.

Not sure what it means to say that work "for Zoyd merely seems to equate an
activity with receiving monetary compensation." This is different from you
and me? Don't we all basically trade labor for money?

Don Corathers