Gravity's Endzone Fan Mail from Pynchon

[pynchonoid]

May 31, 2003


Gravity's Endzone

Fan Mail from Pynchon

by ADAM ENGEL

I'm bad. Bad to the bone-marrow. B-b-b-bad.

Nevertheless - and how's this for "Un-American" sour
grapes? - THE MAN is so deep inside my head I can't
even croak-out without melodrama, without conjuring up
some fantasy scene outta one of HIS TV shows. True, I
haven't watched television regularly since I was about
fifteen, but those first fifteen are formative years.
While Europeans my age were learning languages and
culture, there I was - and I sure wasn't alone -

watching "Three's Company" and "Happy Days," so now I
can't even check out with dignity. My head's full of
sentimental romantic fascist crap. It's an insult to
humanity, a fart in the face of life itself. Enough to
drive a man mad. For instance, I'm thinking

(we-ell maybe not exactly)

wild west shoot'em-up war movie, I'm the hero saves
the day, sleeps with all three Andrews Sisters, rolls
mean old Mr. Potter off a cliff, smiles and waves for
the camera for viewers of the FUTURE (uh...that's
probably you)...

but possibly

me and those women from that "Friends" show up all
night talking about life and love and sex and death
and whatever minor plot twists they typically cram
into a twenty-minute episode and I won't have sex with
any of them we'll decide we're too vulnerable or some
shit like that and it would ruin our friendship or god
knows what perversities they indulge in - really, I've
seen snatches (heh, heh) of that sit-glum while
passing in and out of television blue-lit rooms: their
spiel is sicker than de Sade's, who at least wrote
about HUMAN stuff

or

I hit the game-winning HOME RUN match set love (or
whatever they do in tennis) forty yard serpentine rush
to the end zone TOUCHDOWN

but really more like

(Zee Plane! Zee Plane!)

Thomas Pynchon reads Counter Punch. Why not? If he's
gonna read anything, it'd be CP, eh? So Pynchon writes
to me:

"Really dig your stuff. Keep cool, but care.

Best,

Tommy Boy"

And for a moment I believe it. It's like when some guy
offered the Beatles $50 million to reunite for one
concert tour or something like that when I was
fourteen, or when I went to visit Keats' house on my
first and only trip to England. Only, the Beatles
didn't get back together, and Keats' house was "closed
for renovation we regret any inconvenience," and
that's the way it goes. Then again, there was that one
Sunday in the early 70's when Charles M. Schultz
accidentally put a real phone number in one of Lucy's
cartoon bubbles and millions of readers flooded the
lines - "Hello, is Lucy there, what about Linus?" -
and the flesh-and-blood people who actually
"possessed" that seven digit code had their phones
ring-ringing off the walls all day, and when they
answered there was a nano-second pause on the other
end, a pause of, I don't know, hope maybe? That maybe,
maybe, this could be, like, real? But nothing in
America is real, is it? Yeah, yeah, I know: Death and
Taxes. Fuck 'em both.

So I get this email from <Kenosha.Kid at blicero.gov> and
after I get over that cocaine rush of hope and
excitement I fall deep into cocaine blues. Dark moon
reality cold-clocks me upside the head.

I write back,

"Whoever you are, thanks for the lift. But, as Nancy
said, "Say No to Drugs." Too old - really - to deal
with this kind of game. I'm sure the real TP would
appreciate the humor."

Then he writes back,

"No, really, really. I AM Thomas Pynchon."

And since I happen to know a guy who not only knows
TP's wife, but worked on some kind of digital literacy
program where TP's kid went to grade school, I write
back,

"If you're Tom Pynchon, ask your wife, or your son,
who Kevin Kanarek is."

And he write back and tells me. Not only that, he
invites me to lunch.

"A-and bring Kevin along too, if you want," he adds.

The fantasy progresses to me and Tom becoming pals. He
encourages me to work on a book and gets me an advance
and I go into remission just long enough to write the
book, and Pynchon and Don Delillo and Ishmael Reed and
Robert Coover write rave reviews, and it sells, and I
have some money to leave behind for my wife and dog
and a legacy for the readers of "The Imperator," the
Jericho Senior High School year book, 1983 (why do I
still want to impress those people?).

Yeah, well. Back on earth...

I actually was a celebrity a couple of weeks ago, when
I went to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in
Bethesda, Maryland, just outside D.C. Not only had I
actually lived to the ripe old age of 38 (so far) with
Diamond-Blackfan Anemia, but in 1966 or so, the infant
Adam Engel was actually one of the first to receive
and respond to the Prednisone treatment by THE Dr.
Diamond himself. Needless to say, the NIH wants me to
undergo some of their test treatments (they call them
"Protocols") with nasty drugs - For FREE! - so if one
of them does the trick the government can give it away
to some drug company which will charge me two billion
dollars to use the "treatment" if I'm still alive two
years from now. Just call me Slothrop. And don't call
the NIH at all.

But why this need for the game-winning home-run? The
Super bowl-winning touchdown and spike in the End
Zone, all cameras upon me? I thought I would have
grown out of it by now. No, that's a lie. I thought I
would have done something of, for lack of a better
word, VALUE, by now, and that thing, a book or
something, would have allowed me to grow beyond the
tired sports metaphor and die in peace.

But Americans never die in peace. Most of them, at any
rate. They're too burdened with all the shit they were
told they were supposed to do but never did and
probably never could. They're too guilty, too ashamed
to die.

Like in that book, "A Fan's Notes," by Frederick
Exeley. Guy can't live his life cause he's not Frank
Gifford. Never gonna make that game-winning touch down
for the New York Giants his father so adored. No spike
and dance in the End Zone. Just booze, cigarettes,
anxiety, depression, roast beef, meaningless labor,
death. Like Daddy.

So it was Daddy's fault all along! Then again, who's
Daddy, usually, but another incarnation of THE MAN? A
mannequin with tapes in his head. DVDs, now.
Microchips. Daddy gone digital.

Terrible, but true: most people you meet, particularly
in a "professional" capacity, are recorders, digitized
to interface in real time, albeit somewhat limited by
the unfortunate sloppiness of wet-ware. Meat-puppets
fronting for THE MAN. Here's a fun experiment: watch a
night of TV News, if you can stand it, then go around
asking people, particularly "professionals" in suits,
official-looking coats, arm-bands, uniforms, funny
hats etc., what they think "about stuff." You'll get
minor variations on what you heard and saw the night
before. Maybe a harsh opinion or two added courtesy
the NY POST or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or
whoever. Like that kid's game, "Telephone."

After all, it was THE MAN, or his white-coated
representatives, who condemned me to death. Tell you
the truth, I don't feel THAT bad. They tried the same
thing with Pynchon's Tyrone Slothrop, but he escaped,
sort of. Why not me? Is it not my right as a "free
American citizen" to skeedaddle when the Reaper (or
THE MAN) comes a knock, knock, knockin on my door? Not
by the hair of my chinny chin chin, I say. Go away.
Piss off. Die, Death, and yer little MAN too.

Okay. It's settled, then. "I'll die on my own time,"
as my friend, Paul, said to THE MAN's white-coated
toadies when given a similar prognosis almost a decade
ago.

Now, it's one thing to cheat Death, but THE MAN is a
bit more wily and cruel. How to escape the corny,
mawkish scenes THE MAN put in my head, the
sentimentality and illusions? Don't think they're
harmless fun, those corny greeting cards and cliches.
Out of such cerebral dysentery patriots, Liberals and
talk-show hosts are made. False feeling. The soap
operas and sticky sweet flash-backs (often of
experiences you've never actually had) the MAN and his
Media slather all over your brain like Aunt
Jemima's-plastic pancake syrup. Looka dat nice smiling
auntie Jemima (a bit updated: thinner, especially the
nose and lips; capped teeth; cleaner kerchief; lighter
hue) jest so happy to be cooking home style
Frankenfood for THE MAN, pouring his sticky brown
maple-flavored lab-fresh chemo-spunk all over your
frozen waffles.

That's the real sickness anyway...all the rest is just
biology.

Adam Engel can be reached at
bartleby.samsa at verizon.net. But Death be not SPAM. He
has your IP number, Death, so don't try any of those
cute aliases like light at tunnel.org or
gotcha at butterfly.net It's "Block Sender," all the way,
dig? Anything You send gets the bum's rush straight to
Engel's "Delete" file. 


<http://www.counterpunch.org/engel05312003.html>

=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.org/>

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