V2-V, Part 1

[Joseph Tracy]

Sorry About arriving late. I have been very busy and continue to be  
pretty busy in a kind of insulated cultural community, but will try  
to contribute and put out some thoughts on this chapter.

A year has passed from the opening scene and Benny is still yo-yo ing  
now on the NYC subway. He is again described as a kind of overfed  
plastic blob, a passive window shopper.

> " Still great amoebalike boy, soft and fat, hair cropped close and  
> growing in patches, eyes small like a pig's and set too far apart.  
> Road work had done nothing to improve the outward Profane, or the  
> inward one either. Though the street by claimed a big fraction of  
> Profane's age, it and he remained strangers in every way."   ..He  
> walked; walked, he thought sometimes, the aisles of a bright,  
> gigantic supermarket, his only function to want"

The image moves further toward the plasticity of animated cartoons

" He was visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves of  
horniness, whereby all women within a certain age group and figure  
envelope became immediately and impossibly desirable. He emerged from  
these spells with eyeballs still oscillating and a wish that his neck  
could rotate through the full 360 degrees."

He falls asleep once then twice. First time he is awakened and the  
tone of the writing gets jazzier and more syncopated and Profanes  
attention seems less distant, more active.

"On his eleventh or twelfth transit Profane fell asleep and dreamed.  
He was awakened close to noon by three Puerto Rican kids named  
Tolito, Jose and Kook, short for Cucarachito. They had this act,  
which was for money even though they knew that the subway on weekday  
mornings, no es bueno for dancing and bongos."

Why Puerto Ricans? I think another colonial reference. Why are they  
helping Profane, the human yo-yo , dreaming of his own dissolution?