Prepping the IV

[Robin Landseadel]

The mid-sixties satirical creation of the Stoned Detective/Hippie as  
embodied by Nick Danger is actually an alternate [call it Po-Mo if it  
makes you feel better] reading of Raymond Chandler, one that focuses  
more on the actual words on the page, as opposed to somebody elses  
words on the page or dialog from the movie versions or something  
somebody picked up in a college course. No-one ever did the Stoned  
Detective better than Raymond Chandler did in his original,  
unexpurgated, Hays-Office three sheets to the wind in Copenhagen,  
wasted beyond recognition, ripped-to-the tits originals. It was a  
target so big, so obvious, so theatrical, so inherently comic it was  
never a question of "If",Pynchon would take Raymond Chandler at his  
word and simply "Do It," come up with his own tattered casebook full  
of old time-radio sound effects.  It was only a question of "when?"

Here is an extended swath of "Farewell, My Lovely" [1940], a fine  
example of "This Private Dick wakes up in this Private [nudge, nudge,  
wink, wink] clinic, see—stoned out of his mind . . .:

	"Seems like a nice place," I said. "Nice people, nice
	atmosphere. I guess I'll have me a short nap again."

	"Better be just that," he snarled.

	He went out. The door shut. The lock clicked. The steps growled
	into nothing.

	He hadn't done the smoke any good. It still hung there in the
	middle of the room, all across the room. Like a curtain. It didn't
	dissolve, didn't float off, didn't move. There was air in the room,
	and I could feel it on my face. But the smoke couldn't feel it. It
	was a gray web woven by a thousand spiders. I wondered how
	they had got them to work together.

	Cotton flannel pajamas. The kind they have in the County
	Hospital. No front, not a stitch more than is essential. Coarse,
	rough material. The neck chafed my throat. My throat was still
	sore. I began to remember things. I reached up and felt the
	throat muscles. They were still sore. Just one Indian, pop. Okey,
	Hemingway. So you want to be a detective? Earn good money.
	Nine easy lessons. We provide badge. For fifty cents extra we
	send you a truss.

	The throat felt sore but the fingers feeling it didn't feel anything.
	They might just as well have been a bunch of bananas. I looked
	at them. They looked like fingers. No good. Mail order fingers.
	They must have come with the badge and the truss. And the
	diploma.

	It was night. The world outside the windows was a black world.
	A glass porcelain bowl hung from the middle of the ceiling on
	three brass chains. There was light in it. It had little colored
	lumps around the edge, orange and blue alternately. I stared at
	them. I was tired of the smoke. As I stared they began to open
	up like little portholes and heads popped out. Tiny heads, but
	alive, heads like the heads of small dolls, but alive. There was a
	man in a yachting cap with a Johnnie Walker nose and a fluffy
	blonde in a picture hat and a thin man with a crooked bow tie.
	He looked like a waiter in a beachtownflytrap. He opened his
	lips and sneered: "Would you like your steak rare or medium,
	sir?"

	I closed my eyes tight and winked them hard and when I
	opened them again it was just a sham porcelain bowl on three
	brass chains.

	But the smoke still hung motionless in the moving air. I took
	hold of the comer of a rough sheet and wiped the sweat off my
	face with the numb fingers the correspondence school had sent
	me after the nine easy lessons, one half in advance, Box Two
	Million Four Hundred and Sixty Eight Thousand Nine Hundred
	and Twenty Four, Cedar City, Iowa. Nuts. Completely nuts.

	I sat up on the bed and after a while I could reach the floor with
	my feet. They were bare and they had pins and needles in
	them. Notions counter on the left, madam. Extra large safety
	pins on the right. The feet began to feel the floor. I stood up. Too
	far up. I crouched over, breathing hard and held the side of the
	bed and a voice that seemed to come from under the bed said
	over and over again:

	"You've got the dt's . . . you've got the dt's . • • you've got the  
dt's."

	I started to walk, wobbling like a drunk. There was a bottle of
	whiskey on a small white enamel table between the two barred
	windows. It looked like a good shape. It looked about half full. I
	walked towards it. There are a lot of nice people in the world, in
	spite. You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins
	of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and
	discouraged and sneer at the politicians, but there are a lot of
	nice people in the world just the same. Take the guy that left
	Mae West's hips.

	I reached it and put both my half-numb hands down on it and
	hauled it up to my mouth, sweating as if I was lifting one end of
	the Golden Gate bridge.

	I took a long untidy drink. I put the bottle down again, with
	infinite care. I tried to lick underneath my chin.

	The whiskey had a funny taste.  .  .

I want to ask the P-List—or at least the part of the P-List that got  
down this far—does Thomas Pynchon read more like a passage out of "The  
Ambassadors" or "Farewell, My Lovely?" Think about analogous passages  
in Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland and Against the Day. I  
mean, like— beachtownflytrap, fer chirsakes..