IVIV: Partners

[Mark Kohut]

>From the doper's grin here, from earlier and thru later, doc is smarter
than he gives off.  Another nail in the unreliable, all is irony, characterization of Doc, imho.   

--- On Sat, 9/12/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: IVIV: Partners
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Saturday, September 12, 2009, 1:04 PM
> Doc and Luz have eyes for each
> other:
> 
>     Luz was gazing over his shoulder into
> Mickey's bedroom. "He
>     always used to take me in the shower to
> fuck," she reminisced. "I
>     never got a chance to do anything on
> that groovy bed in there."
> 
>     "Seems easy enough to arrange," Doc said
> smoothly, "maybe-" At
>     which point, wouldn't you know, came a
> horrible low-fidelity
>     screech from an intercom speaker out in
> the hall. " Luz! ¿Dónde     estás, mi
> hijita?"
> 
> ¿Dónde estás mi hijita? = Where are you, my child?
> 
>     "Shit," murmured Luz. ''Another time,
> perhaps."
> 
>     At the door Doc gave her one of the fake
> MICRO cards, which had
>      his real office number on it.
> She slipped it in the back pocket of
>     her jeans.
> 
>     "You're not really a shrink, are you?"
> 
>     "Y-maybe not. But I do have a couch?"
> 
>     "Psicodtlico, `ese!" Flashing those
> famous teeth.
> 
> Psicodtlico 'ese  trans: Psychedelic, dude!
> 
>  [rimshot! ]
> 
> Wonder how TRP's teeth are doing these days.
> 
> As Doc gets into his car his old nemesis Bigfoot arrives,
> this time with another cop, one Doc doesn't recall.
> 
>      . . .this other cop could in
> no way have been Bigfoot's partner,
>     though he might be a close relative-they
> both had the same
>     smooth and evil look . . .
> 
> Interesting line here, something some of you children may
> not have experienced:—"Doc deployed his most feckless
> doper's grin"—recalls the ole hippie cover of acting
> stupider than they really were, thus inciting the
> quadrilaterals to spill their guts, the aforementioned
> straights usually working from the assumption that the
> Hippie wasn't listening anyway. Worked for a while but
> nothing that easy lasts for long.
> 
> What the doper's paranoia brings to Doc here is now
> recalling that Bigfoot used to have a partner, and even
> though Doc pretty much considers the cops to be there to
> protect and defend "The Man", aka "Them", Doc  still
> thinks they have a pretty cool code of honor within their
> own ranks. If there is an Inherent Vice creeping into the
> tale here it is how that code broke down during the Nixon
> repression.
> 
>     This bond between partners was nearly
> the only thing Doc had
>     ever found to admire about the LAPD. For
> all the Department's
>     long sorrowful history of corruption and
> abuse of power, here was
>     at least something they had not sold but
> kept for themselves,
>     forged in the dangerous life-and-death
> uncertainties of one
>     working day after another—something
> real that had to be
>     respected. No faking it, no question of
> buying it with favors,
>     money, promotions-the entire range of
> capitalist inducement
>     couldn't get you five seconds of
> attention to your back when it
>     really counted, you had to go out there
> and earn it by putting your
>     pitiful ass on the line, again and
> again. Without knowing any
>     details of the history Bigfoot and his
> late partner had been
>     through together, Doc would still bet
> the contents of his stash for
>     the next year that Bigfoot if,
> improbably, asked to generate a list of
>     people he loved, would have put this guy
> up near the top.
> 
> We finish the scene with Doc talking to himself, something
> the kindly Doc seems to be doing a lot of these days.
>