BE groupread 2021-2 Chapter 1 second pass, part 2

[Michael Bailey]

8) Maxine runs Tail ‘Em and Nail ‘Em, a small fraud-investigating agency
with an office in a building that’d been built as a bank.

Her commute - on foot. How nice is that?

The old bank building “temple of finance” sort of conjures Ishmael Reed’s
conflation of banks with temples in Mumbo Jumbo. But I think that “temple
of finance” is also a legit high-flown phrase that would have been used in
a “puff piece” by a city desk reporter back in the 20s without irony; and
by reformers with irony.


102 word sentence concerning the previous tenants:

“Opened as a temple of finance shortly before the Crash of 1929, in a blind
delirium not unlike the recent dotcom bubble, it’s been configured
 and reconfigured over the years since into a drywall palimpsest
accommodating wayward
            schoolkids, hash-pipe dreamers, talent agents, chiropractors,
illegal piecework mills,
            mini-warehouses for who knows what varieties of contraband, and
these days, on Maxine’s floor, a dating service called Yenta Expresso, the
In ’n’ Out Travel Agency, the fragrant
suite of acupuncturist and herb specialist Dr. Ying, and down the hall at
the very end the Vacancy, formerly Packages Unlimited, seldom visited even
when it was occupied.”

The wayward school kids & hash-pipe dreamers presumably use unoccupied
offices, what with the high turnover. The rest are sort of fringey, making
the place close to a Temporary Autonomous Zone, and placing Maxine within
their ranks at least by proximity.




9) She goes there and overhears Daytona, her secretary, on a personal call.

“Morning,” Maxine chirps in a descending third, sharping the second note
maybe a little.

The sharpness of the note being admonitory, apparently. I’ve tried this out
and it conveys nothing to me, but I’m willing to accept it does between
Maxine and Daytona.

Daytona damps things down, indicating respect, but the fact she feels
confident enough to add brief commentary tags Maxine as a sympathetic
employer.



10) Starts her work day with phone messages.
Grease-stained Rolodexes - where “every lowlife in town” finds her phone
number.
Fringier and fringier - apparently she’s not catering to the carriage trade.


11) Calls back Trevor, a whistleblower.
Trevor sez his employer is trying to steal the baking parameters for Krispy
Kreme donuts.
These were ubiquitous in 2001!
Anybody lucky enough to attend company meetings of any kind (halcyon days)
ate them; fortunate were those with company credit cards tasked to purchase
and bring them!

Trevor lapses into paranoia, allowing Pynchon to riff on cops and pastry.

It’s not quite clear to me: he’s the whistleblower, his employers are
stealing the data? But why does he worry about a police sting? A sting is
what he’s invoking by calling Maxine, isn’t he?

Trevor may not be right in the head.

12) Reminisces about a recurring fraudster, Uncle Dizzy.

He’s a character like Crazy Eddie, even wears a Crazy Eddie t-shirt. This
bit of info probably means a lot more to a New Yorker. But the image of
Uncle Dizzy’s ads with him spinning on a turntable resonates with many
enthusiastic TV pitchpersons - nicely followed in the next paragraph with a
reference to “Dizzy’s charm, at least a just-off-the-turntable naïveté that
Maxine can’t quite believe is fake.”

13) Remembers her last field visit to one of his stores.

Geez, she’s giving him advice on how not to be quite so obvious with his
fraud. What kind of auditor is she anyway?
A-and there’s another team of auditors out there counting empty boxes, whom
she startles by lifting them effortlessly. So they are the b-team and she
gets the calls to bail him out?
Or is she auditing him on someone else’s behalf? Does she have a law
enforcement or at least some kind of regulatory hookup?

14) Daytona, the secretary, buzzes her to announce a visitor: Reg.

Portentous.