BEg2 Lester Traipse (Dr Wu) more Traipse / Epperdew & vanilla fantasies

[Michael Bailey]

Lester Traipse!

- he is the corpus delicti so he must be important

He very quickly advances from a sidekick of Felix to somebody whose death
Maxine feels deeply

The name Lester -
https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=lester
English: habitational name from Leicester, named in Old English from the
tribal name Ligore (itself adapted from a British river name) + Old English
ceaster ‘Roman fort or walled city’ (Latin castra ‘legionary camp’).
English (of Norman origin): habitational name from Lestre in Normandy.
English and Scottish: variant of Lister.


British tribal river name + Latin “castra”
Is it reading too much in to say it reflects the development of the
Internet from a freely flowing river to a walled encampment? Probably.

Then the surname Traipse
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/traipse

to go on foot
also  : to walk or travel about without apparent plan but with or without a
purpose

Does he traipse?

Characteristics

Scrooge McDuck necktie

Talks like Kermit the Frog (maybe this is what endears him to her
initially?)

Square-rimmed (glasses presumably)

Maxine takes to him, although - unlike the way she took to Felix in Canada
- not as a short term love interest

Into tables as a Web design tool - argues violently against CSS with
goonish looking fellow in men’s lav (Maxine crosses gender barrier to
retrieve him)

Former hwgaahwgh employee, had tete-a-tete with Gabriel Ice that still
gives him nightmares

Scared to tell Maxine the whole story

——- Dr Wu is a song within a song!

Maxine chooses to sing Dr Wu —- in all the lyric descriptions online that
I’ve seen, nobody ever comes out and says (maybe because it’s too obvious,
but I just want to point it out anyway): “Dr Wu” is the name or at least
the subject of the stupid song the people are singing - “all night long we
would sing that stupid song” (and it went like this: are you with me, Dr
Wu, etc)
/ I tend to agree with whoever laid into Steely Dan’s oeuvre, at least in
terms of occasional annoying lyrics -

But anyway Maxine choosing this song is almost a gaffe like choosing “Ship
of Fools” on a cruise ship, or “Play Us a Song Mr Piano Man” in a piano
bar.

I mean, all night long, they - right there in the Lucky 18! - are singing
songs of less than stellar import, less than crystalline thinking, more
than homeopathically inane.
———


More Traipse
- teamed up with Felix, but Felix seems to be functioning as somewhat of a
minder, intruding on Maxine’s nascent tell-me-all mind meld before she can
wring the facts out of Traipse

Maxine finds a big stream of money diverting to a Traipse account from the
Hashslingrz-hwgaahwgh fundage (itself puzzling) - obvious embezzlement!

So - and I didn’t really catch the import before - Maxine volunteered to go
talk to Traipse on Lester’s behalf, using her Israeli brother-in-law’s
employment at Hashslingrz as an in.

Why do that since she’s talked to Ice on her own before? And why does she
think he’ll listen anyway - they aren’t on good terms at all!

But before we get any action on Lester Traipse there’s the tape from Marvin
and she starts worrying about VIP Epperdew instead, herself traipsing out
to Montauk!

I get why some people get impatient with the intertwining plots…I mean, she
calls up Felix Boingeaux to ask him about Epperdew, but doesn’t talk to him
about how she thinks he might be the one who sent her the videotape!
Which is logical because he’s a known whistleblower!

“Flustrating”

And then there’s this little gem embedded in Maxine’s viewing fare, of the
young women with enchantingly spelled names like Typhphani talking about
their exceedingly vanilla love fantasies -

- which, to be honest, sound pretty nice to me.
But Maxine, veteran of the sexual revolution that she is, is shocked!
shocked! at the tameness.