IVIV: Chapter four—a deceptively sunny and uneventful spin

[Robin Landseadel]

	ON CERTAIN DAYS, DRIVING INTO SANTA MONICA WAS
	LIKE having hallucinations without going to all the trouble of
	acquiring and then taking a particular drug, although some
	days, for sure, any drug was preferable to driving into Santa
	Monica.
	IV, page 50

	He ushers you into the black Managerial Volkswagen, and
	before you know it, you're on the freeways. Near the
	interchange of the San Diego and the Santa Monica, Zhlubb
	points to a stretch of pavement:

	"Here's where I got my first glimpse of one. Driving a VW; just
	like mine. Imagine. I couldn't believe my eyes." But it is difficult
	to keep one's whole attention centered on Manager Zhlubb.
	The Santa Monica Freeway is traditionally the scene of every
	form of automotive folly known to man. It is not white and well-
	bred like the San Diego, nor as treacherously engineered as
	the Pasadena, nor quite as ghetto-suicidal as the Harbor. No,
	one hesitates to say it, but the Santa Monica is a freeway for
	freaks, and they are all out today, making it difficult for you to
	follow the Manager's entertaining story.
	GR, page P770

Doc, rather pointedly, has a "deceptively sunny and uneventful spin up  
through the Hughes Company property-a kind of smorgasbord of potential  
U.S. combat zones, terrain specimens ranging from mountains and  
deserts to swamp and jungle and so forth, all there, according to  
local paranoia, for fine-tuning battle radar systems on-past  
Westchester and the Marina and into Venice. . ." The point being that  
the little neighborhood that Doc lives in happens to be CIA central,  
or at least a massive portion of the Military-Industrial complex  
alloted to Los Angeles and devoted specifically to the development of  
electronic and computer-based surveillance systems then being  
developed for various black-ops enterprises. This also is a fore- 
shadowing of Doc's trip to Vegas, then undergoing Hughes Corporation  
modification into something more "family-friendly" albeit still fully  
capable of driving a bank manager into bankruptcy in 24 hours or less.  
The line:  "Doc went automotively groping in this weirdness east on  
Olympic. . ." sounds like it might have ripped out of  "Fear and  
Loathing in Las Vegas."

The songs from "KQAS" seem to function as a kind of Greek Chorus. If  
you recall from Vineland, KQAS is AM 460: the police band. If Droolin'  
Floyd Womack expects his career to take off he better get his people  
to talk to management at KHJ and KRLA. KFWB's already turned to an all- 
talk, all-news station. So page 51's little musical interlude has to  
be witnessed as pure fantasy. It also indicates the blurry line that  
separates Doc's activities from the cops. In Inherent Vice the song  
about the repossess man functions like one of those whirling dissolves  
we often find in forties movies, a marker of a transition to another  
time and place. Said time and place happens to be a flashback to Doc's  
entry into the moral netherworld of skip-tracers and their ilk.