Edwarda Beef Vibe & The Octopus: Not A California Story

[alice wellintown]

romeo wrote,

> ask Goldman Sachs and the whole derivatives market for that matter

This is no California novel.

Even as Kit Webb is seduced by the Vibe, Fleetwood Vibe walks him out
on the small hill of his Long Island Mansion, on the Gatsby Gold
Coast:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any
lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the
Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to
melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that
flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the
new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for
Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest
of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have
held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an
aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to
face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his
capacity for wonder.

That fresh, green breast of the new world, America, Long Island here,
not far from the place of Pynchon's childhood. Fleetwood shows it to
Kit. They look out over, what Fleetwood, only after a sad and
desperate globe trotting (He follows the historical tracks of Herbert
Hoover) recognizes as Queens, the Gatsby Valley of Ashes:

About half-way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily
joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as
to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley
of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges
and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses
and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort,
of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the
powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an
invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and
immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up
an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from
your sight.

But Fleetwood, never even gave thought to Queens or the Valley of
Ashes; his mind was directed to the Island where the Money is made,
Wolfsheim's Underworld, where the World Series is fixed and where
Gatsby trades derrivatives, ripping off the Midwestern Banks and the
deposits of working class men adn women.

Fleetwood gazes aross the Valley of Ashes, Kit by his side, he sees
the filthy clouds smear his vision of the Towers, and tells his morbid
and bone chilling story of greed and of enslaved workers and poor men
and women caught in the corporate vice grip of a Bad Vibe.