A salad of despair......

[Mark Kohut]

Robin notes and comments after: 
Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how
    could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro,
    Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the
    most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of
    themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be
    like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to
    look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a
    shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho
    himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket
    booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers,
    or only of dust and when the cars were swept out you had to
    look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way
    of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he
    supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and
    kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost:
    clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 [cents], trading
    stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts,
    tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the
    phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already
    were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside
    of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie,
    a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just
    for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of
    despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust,
    body wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look.
    CoL 49, 4/5 PC ed.

Robin: 
Pynchon rarely uses a concept just once. The idea of a "lot" crying first enters in this scene. Later, Mucho speaks of the nightmare of the used car lot's "N.A.D.A." 

I want to focus on the almost overwhelming poignance---"the tears of things":Virgil--- of this paragraph. It reminds me of Miss Lonely Hearts despair at the sadness in the letters he receives in West's novel of that name. It is Pynchon's vision of the lost, the unsaved, Yes?     Is it related to, the revelation of "what had remained [for Oedipa] yet had somehow, before this, stayed away"? 

Notice the next line: "if it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career".....Are you reminded
of who, Flange in Low-lands?