VLVL Count Drugula, or Mucho the Munificent

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 12:11 AM
Subject: VLVL Count Drugula, or Mucho the Munificent

> It's also interesting that Zoyd, just released from gaol where he had been
> remanded on a trumped-up drug charge, after picking up Prairie from
> Sasha's immediately goes to a drug commune

That's not what's in the text: We're told nothing about grass in that
"refuge from government" (306). Zoyd has got a "beer and tobacco
headache" (307) in the morning. No talk of a drug-commune.

> and then to Mucho's place looking for
> drugs (306-9, at Mucho's he "searched all over the place for any
> evidence of a guest stash").

Wrong again, obviously he's primarily looking for a place to stay at
Mucho's. He smokes his own stash after looking for the "guest stash" in the
guest room. So if he's got his own dope why should he go to Mucho's for
getting something to smoke? The "guest stash" seems to have been a regular
thing at Mucho's before Oedipa's ex became clean.

Only thing that I see worth criticising is that he should've put Prairie to
bed *before* smoking, tobacco or dope, I assume, in her presence.

> We saw how he had dropped acid the day Prairie was born
> (285),

"(...) Zoyd, who at the last minute had dropped a quarter of a tab of acid
on the chance of glimpsing something cosmic that might tell him he wouldn't
die (...)" (285).

A quarter of a tab! What a crime! The acid won't have had the slightest
chance against all that adrenaline in his blood.

What's more important to me is that he's really interested in attending the
birth which wasn't the normal thing for a father back in those days.

> and while he's in the gaol Hector lectures him about his drug abuse
> (303).

Not exactly, he's joking:

"Yeah, some natch, chain-smokin' pot, acid on weekends, when you
gonna cut your hair?"

> Though he eventually turns out to be a reasonably responsible father,
> in these early days it wasn't looking too promising, and Sasha was quite
> right to have her reservations about him as a "'hippie psychopath'" (285).

But nevertheless she advises him to go to Vineland with her granddaughter
Prairie, and she hasn't forgotten his habits. She puts a lot of trust in
him:

"(...) 'cause lately this mass migration of freaks you spoke of, nothing
personal, from L.A. north is spilling over into Vineland, so you'd have
free baby-sitting too, dope connections, an inexhaustible guitar-player
pool." (305)

This trust seems to be justified; she'd seen him at the bust:

"(...) made sure his ex-mother-in-law noticed he was wiping in the right
direction (...)." (296)

> It's clear that Sasha and Hector have been talking

Yes, it's clear that Hector has called Sasha to get Prairie before Brock
could get the idea of taking her. Hector is presented to us as believing
in the family. Terrance has asked once why Hector is a Latino.
I guess it's for making this streak of his character more plausible.

Otto