Zoyd/Merle compare & contrast

[Johnny Marr]

I like it, pretty convincing

On Monday, November 11, 2024, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Both singly raising a daughter, in Merle’s case it’s certain Bert Snidell
> was the biological father whereas for Zoyd there’s some uncertainty about
> Brock Vond’s role
>
>
> Zoyd and Frenesi did formally get married whereas Erlys and Merle never did
>
> Both daughters reconnect with their mothers after a long time of longing
>
> Merle remained itinerant much more so than Zoyd, who evolved a home around
> a trailer.
>
> Zoyd faced persecution and intimidation and eked out a living from music,
> welfare, and odd jobs;
>
> Merle also did odd jobs but was much more involved in his own career,
> developing skills
>
> Both Merle and Zoyd had a wide circle of acquaintances and friends
>
>
> Zoyd was more fraught:
>
> “Frenesi, do you think that love can save anybody? You do, don’t you?” At
> the time he hadn’t learned yet what a stupid question it was. She gazed up
> at him from just under the brim of the hat. He thought, At least try to
> remember this, try to keep it someplace secure, just her face now in this
> light, OK, her eyes quiet like this, her mouth poised to open. . . . Mean
> or not, he hadn’t cried about it for a long time. The years had kept
> rolling, like the surf he used to ride, high, calm, wild, windless. But
> increasingly the day, the necessary day, presenting its demands, had
> claimed him, till there was only one small bitter amusement he refused to
> let go of. Now and then, when moon, tides, and planetary magnetism were all
> in tune, he went venturing out, straight up through the third eye in his
> forehead, into an extraordinary system of transport whereby he could go
> gliding right to wherever she was, and incompletely unseen, sensed just
> enough to be troublesome, he then would haunt her, for as long as he could,
> enjoying every squeezed-out minute. A vice, for sure, and one he had
> confessed only to a handful of people, including, it may have turned out
> unwisely, their daughter, Prairie, this very morning. “Oh,” sitting over a
> breakfast of Cap’n Crunch and Diet Pepsi, “you mean you dreamed—” Zoyd
> shook his head. “I was awake. But out of my body.” She gave him a look that
> he didn’t, so early in the day, attend to the full risk of, telling him she
> trusted him not to be running some cruel put-on. They’d been known not to
> share a sense of humor on many topics, her mom in particular. “You go there
> and—what? You perch somewhere and look, you keep flying around, how’s it
> work?”
>
> “It’s like Mr. Sulu laying in coordinates, only different,” Zoyd explained.
> “Knowin’ exactly where you want to go.” He nodded, and she felt some
> unaccustomed bloom of tenderness for this scroungy, usually slow-witted
> fringe element she’d been assigned, on this planet, for a father. What
> mattered at the moment was that he knew how to visit Frenesi out in the
> night, and that could only mean he must feel a need for her as intense as
> Prairie’s own. “Where’s it you go, then? Where is she?” “Keep tryin’ to
> find out. Try to read signs, locate landmarks, anything that’ll give a
> clue, but—well the signs are there on street corners and store windows—but
> I can’t read them.” “It’s some other language?” “Nope, it’s in English, but
> there’s something between it and my brain that won’t let it through.”
> Prairie made a sound like a game-show buzzer. “I’m sorry Mr.
> Wheeler. . . .” Let down and suspicious, she drifted away again. “Say hi to
> ’em up on Phantom Creek, OK?”
>
>
>
> While Merle accepted Erlys leaving him for Zombini with some equanimity -
>
> [after Erlys left] “Merle waited in East Fullmoon as long as he could,
> waited for mail, a telegram, a rider, a carrier pigeon circling in from the
> winter skies, and in the meantime learned how straightforward it would all
> be, taking care of this baby here, long as he didn’t fret about the time or
> any need he might’ve thought he had to get on with some larger plan—with
> Erlys gone, anything like that was out the window and down the turnpike
> anyway—and that long as he just kept breathing smoothly in and out, just
> staying within the contours of the chore of the moment, life with young
> Dahlia would provide precious little occasion for complaint, bitter or
> otherwise.”
> --
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>