VL-IV (15) Tubaldetox, pages 334/339

[Robin Landseadel]

	. . .there was a full-size movie crew up here, based out of
	Vineland but apt to show up just about anyplace, prominent
	among whom, and already generating notable Thanatoid
	distress, was this clearly insane Mexican DEA guy, not only
	dropping but also picking up, dribbling, and scoring three-
	pointers with the name of Frenesi Gates.

Hector's back and we move sideways and backwards into Hollywood's  
maelstrom, always a sign of upcoming jollification in Pynchonland. One  
element of this crazed tubal fantasy, along with several karmic  
turnings for Hector, is a weird little flash into the future of  
television, along with a Pynchon/Philip K. Dick meditation on prison  
life:

	. . .dishonest Tubaldetox attendants who would produce from
	beneath their browns tiny illicit LCD units smuggled from the
	outside . . .

Of course, little DVD handheld players are on your deep discount rack  
over at Target.

This bit of passage work, where a DEA agent—after busting loose from  
the, by now overthrown, Tubaldeto facility—works out a contract with  
Hollywood insiders—Dragnet anybody?—points out the law enforcement  
ties to the propaganda machine. It also allows for some of Pynchon's  
loosest riffs:

	Despite his personal savagery, which no one at the 'Tox chose
	to acknowledge, let alone touch, Hector in these show-biz
	matters registered as fatally innocent, just a guy from the wrong
	side of the box office, offering Ernie and Sid and their friends a
	million cues he wasn't even aware of, terms used wrong,
	references uncaught, details of haircut or necktie that
	condemned him irrevocably to viewer, that is, brain-defective,
	status.

What Sid Liftoff & the Triggerman don't realize, is that they are in  
the middle of a sting operation:

	The deal was that Sid Liftoff in his vintage T-Bird had been
	stopped one recent night on Sunset out west of Doheny, where
	the cops lurk up the canyon roads waiting to swoop down on
	targets selected from all the promising machinery exceeding
	the posted limits below, only to be found, aha! with a lizard-skin
	etui stuffed with nasal goods under the seat on the passenger
	side, which to this day he swore had been planted there,
	probably by an agent of one of his ex-wives.

He works off his sentence by the "community service" of enabling  
Hector's wacky TV bi-op of Frenesi, just as smitten by our little  
Carmen as Brock.

Somehow fortune's wheels turn—if only a moment—towards Hector's fantasy:

	For according to a rumor sweeping the film community, a
	federal grand jury was convening to inquire into drug abuse in
	the picture Business. A sudden monster surge of toilet flushing
	threatened water pressure in the city mains, and a great bloom
	of cold air spread over Hollywood as others ran to open their
	refrigerator doors more or less all at once, producing this
	gigantic fog bank in which traffic feared even to creep and
	pedestrians went walking into the sides of various buildings.
	Hector assumed parallels were being drawn to back in '51,
	when HUAC came to town, and the years of blacklist and the
	long games of spiritual Monopoly that had followed. Did he give
	a shit? Communists then, dopers now, tomorrow, who knew,
	maybe the faggots, so what, it was all the same beef, wasn't it?
	Anybody looking like a normal American but living a secret life
	was always good for a pop if times got slow—easy and cost-
	effective, that was simple Law Enforcement 101.