VL: the Deal

[jbor]

> Vineland, p. 304:
> [...] Right, which is where the mental disability
> arrangement came in. "Just a way for us to know where
> you are," Hector had explained, "long as you're
> picking up the checks, nobody'll bother you--but if
> you stop, even one time, the alarm goes off and we
> know you're tryin' to skip."[...]

In fact, Hector is merely the messenger here, following orders in what he
perceptively recognises is only an "estupidass marriage-counsellor errand"
(295) anyway. And, as well as ensuring that Prairie is looked after when
Zoyd is arrested (295), Hector finagles Zoyd's release from custody (302-3)
and gives Zoyd some pretty sensible advice as well (303).

The deal had actually been orchestrated by Brock to keep Frenesi away from
Prairie (294, 304-5). Frenesi, of course, is still sleeping with Brock at
this point, as she had been (literally and symbolically) for some time. Her
"steadfastly smiling" presence at the gaol when Zoyd is released (304), as
well as the fact that the chapter opens with her goading Brock into a rage
with the information that she has a child with Zoyd (294), intimates that
she is the one who has manipulated this situation. Thus, this "arrangement"
through which Zoyd and Prairie will be supported by the state is *her*
legacy to the daughter she abandoned. The chapter ends with the information
that, over the years as Zoyd and Prairie established themselves in Vineland,
the "mental disability checks ... arrived faithfully as the moon" (321).

There is a deeper sub-text in all this too, of how the counterculture
gradually succumbed, or was lured by fame and fortune, to the indignity of
becoming a comic self-parody (or worse, N.B. that the reference to Tiny Tim
and Wild Man Fischer is counterpoised by mention of Charles Manson 309) and
how it lost any of the political puissance it might once have aspired to as
a result -- how it allowed itself to become framed by the media and the
Establishment as, what Zoyd is, some crazed and impotent transvestite hippie
wielding a chainsaw, leaping through windows and scaring the kiddies.

best