Misc. Pynchon learns from Keith Richards' LIFE, not literally meant.

[Mark Kohut]

Born late 1943, Keith sez "our street took a near hit from a doodlebug, but we 
weren't
there." His mother said it bounced along the curbstones and killed everyone on 
either
side of their house. A brick or two landed on his cot. "That was evidence Hitler
was on my tail."

'The dentist was an ex-army bloke. My teeth got ruined by it. I developed a fear 
of
going to the dentist with, by the mid-70s, visible consequences."....They had 
those very
rickety machines in thos days, belt-drive drills, electric-chair straps to hold 
you down...
Gas is expensive so you'd just get a whiff. They got more for an extraction than 
for a
filling. So everything came out. ....so, with the smallest whiff of gas, you'd 
wake up
halfway through an extraction........It was the only time I saw the devil...."

English Candy Drill
At infant school, 'what they fed you was awful. "Gypsy Tart". "It was pie with 
some
muck burned into it, marmalade or caramel. I just refused it."

Dartford, where Keith grew up, had heavy fog days most of the winter. "if you've 
got 

two or three miles to walk to get back home [from school], it was the dogs that 
led you.
Suddenly old Dodger would show up with a patch on his eye, and you could 
basically
guide your way home by that. When fog was so thick you couldn't see a thing, old 
Dodger
would take you up and hand you over to some Labrador. Animals were in the 
street, something that's
disappeared."..I would have got lost and died........

Keith has a concept of the street which is akin, perhaps, to P's of V.'s time.