VLVL(5) Summary

[Toby G Levy]

Chapter five provides us with a view of the last meeting between Zoyd and
Frenesi.  It also creates the device in which the focus of the novel
will shift from Zoyd-Prairie to Chastain-Fumimota.

At the end of the last chapter we stood by Zoyd as he watched the
Vomitones Van, containing Prairie head down the highway.  The first
sentence of this chapter reels Prairie back in for a moment so that we
know that Zoyd has given her a "strange Japanese business card."  The
rest of the chapter reveals the process by which Zoyd obtained the card
about ten years earlier.

Zoyd had found out that Frenesi was in Hawaii, so he gets Frenesi's
mother Sasha to take care of Prairie while Zoyd  takes the least
expensive night flight he can find to go to Hawaii and try and patch
things up with Frenesi.

Zoyd manages to rent the room right next to Frenesi in the Dark Ocean
Hotel.  They stood on adjacent balconies and talked briefly.  After a
handful of sentences Frenesi went back inside her hotel room. This was
the last Zoyd was ever to see of Frenesi.  Zoyd stayed outside for a
while longer to finish a beer and went inside to conduct the first of
his "astral night flights" in which he leaves his body to go see
Frenesi.  He believes he has floated inside her hotel room and watches
her take a shower.  Pynchon shows that we are not take Zoyd's claims of
out-of-body experience seriously, when he reveals that Frenesi packed
and checked out of the hotel as soon as he left the balcony.

Eventually Zoyd discovers from an assistant hotel manager that Frenesi
has left.  Zoyd hits a number of Honolulu bars, winding up at a place
called The Cosmic Pineapple, where a musician he knows tells him of a
job playing piano aboard a plane.  Zoyd calls a 24 hour number listed in
the Yellow Pages at 2:30 AM and is hired to play on a plane leaving at
dawn.

The plane, the only aircraft owned by Kahuna Airlines, is a gutted 747
redesigned to appear as a large Hawaiian restaurant. The keyboard
instrument that Zoyd had to play was a synthesizer that was "by no means
user-friendly."

Zoyd kept this job for a while, playing while the airship flew between
Los Angeles and Hawaii.  Kahuna was a mysterious company, with
"unpredictable scheduling," and "absent bus links to hotels that had
already lost everybody's reservations" and more oddities.

Zoyd learns for a cocktail waitress named Gretchen that unidentified
aircraft sometimes flew right next to their plane and stayed there,
sometimes for hours.

On the next flight out of Los Angeles, out over the middle of the ocean,
another plane approaches Zoyd's plane and a an access tunnel telescopes
out of the mystery plane, and militaristic types, hidden behind
"high-impact shields" board the plane and go through the crowd searching
for someone.

Suddenly a man in a blond wig approaches Zoyd  asking if he can play
banjo-ukelele along with Zoyd.  As the intruders approach Zoyd and his
accompanist, Zoyd notices that every time he plays a high b-flat, it
irritates the intruders.  So he plays it a number of times and soon the
intruders withdraw.

The ukelele player tells Zoyd that Zoyd has saved his life and offers him
his business card, which reads "Tekeshi Fumimota - Adjustments."  He
tells Zoyd that he can use that card to get help from Takeshi when he
truly needs it.

And even though the card has been transferred semi-consciously over the
years to a number of locations among Zoyd's possessions, Zoyd thinks of
it and finds it in time to pass it along to Prairie just before she takes
off with the Vomitones on their way to play at the Mafia wedding
reception.

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