VLVL characters (ya sleazy ol' Nip grease-job ya)

[Terrance]

At YME rib joint we meet Ortho Bob Dulang, late-teenage looking fellow,
former grunt who on earth time would be 28 (it's 1978-79 so
Bob is close to DL's age), shorter than Takeshi, hitchhiker and
Thanatoid Personality ( Death-like Personality). 

Bob likes food and beer, but food and drink are not a priority for the
Thanatoids who persist in bleak poorly furnished module homes. 
Thanatoids are stolid, their existence austere. They are practicing a
form of inverse purgatorial abnegation because
they have been dispossessed (again, Cuckoo's Nest, Native American
Reservations, American Public Housing Projects etc.).  

Like some non-Thanatoids  in Vineland County, Thanatoids watch a lot of
Tube
(part of every waking hour), while they wait for the data necessary to
pursue their needs and aims among the still-living. They don't live, but
persist on the skimpiest of hopes of evening the score, getting revenge. 

Thanatoids are stolid and austere, they limit their emotions to only
those helpful in setting right whatever has been  keeping them from
advancing further into the condition of death. Most common by far, is
resentment. Constrained, by history and by the rules of imbalance and
restoration, Thanatoids feel little else beyond their needs for revenge.
Like Dante's shades, or Dickens' Joseph Marley, they wear their scars,
their lost
limbs, their dysfunctional sex organs, around their necks for all the
world to see. 


Takeshi is part Thantoid, although he is trying to move in the opposite
direction, back to life.  The cure, atonement by DL. Bob sees this plan
as Guilt (not Love)  against Death. 

Bob was damaged in Vietnam, he has a long list of the sins that were
committed against him and  a get even-agenda. Death, perhaps
superstitiously, is not on the list. Bob can't get relief from any of
the regular channels so he comes to Takeshi to clean up his toxic past,
his waste-pit of time, his time lost forever. 

Takeshi, crazy, grandiose, delusion, addicted to drugs and drink, former
kamikaze pilot and insurance man, is on the run. He sets up shop in
Thanatoid Village and starts taking testimony, cleaning up bad memory.
Does he know what he's doing? Is his heart in the right place?