CoL49 (6) Hunting for Volkswagens

[Dave Monroe]

"She left, wondering if she should've called him something, or tried
to hit him with any of a dozen surplus, heavy, blunt objects in easy
reach.  There had been no witnesses.  Why hadn't she?
   "You're chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt.  This is
America, you live in it, you let it happen.  Let it unfurl.  She drove
savagely along the freeway, hunting for Volkswagens." (Lot 49, Ch. 6,
p. 150)


Volkswagens

Cf, ,,,

V755.28, B881.36 the black Managerial Volkswagen Improbable as a
managerial limousine, but implicated here perhaps because VW plants at
Fallersleben and Magdeburg manufactured V-Weapon parts ....
[Weisenburer, Companion, p. 315]

http://www.ugapress.org/0820328111.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=mj7sFr6b6aMC

Sick Dick & The Volkswagens

http://nowave.pair.com/no_wave/sickdick.html

http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/borbetomagus.html

Pynchon refers to a rock song, "I Want to Kiss Your Feet", a
self-abasing version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand". The artist, Sick
Dick and the Volkswagens, echoes such actual groups as the El Dorados,
the Edsels, the Cadillacs and the Jaguars (as well as an early name
the Beatles themselves were forced to use, "Long John and the Silver
Beetles"). Sick Dick and the Volkswagens is also a play on words.
Volkswagens most prominent car is the Beetle. The nickname for the
Beetle is the Love Bug. Thus making the play on words "Sick Dick and
the Love Bugs." "Sick Dick" may also echo Richard Wharfinger, author
of "that ill, ill Jacobean revenge play" known as The Courier's
Tragedy. On top of all this, the song's title also keeps up a
recurring sequence of allusions to Saint Narcissus, a third-century
bishop of Jerusalem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49#The_Beatles

I think Sick Dick & The Volkswagens is a little in joke.  In the
middle of "Been Down So Long..." Richard (Dick) Farina has his
protagonist Gnosis witness a scene where his first conquest of the
novel is tied to a Volkswagon (I think it was a microbus) and flogged
in what appears to be a sex act with her new husband.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9810&msg=31846

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=58984