ST(a)G(ge)R ch 38

[Michael Bailey]

A bipartite chapter it is, and a very nice one at that.

A helpful talk with old buddy/running companion/wingman Dippy.

And a lil chat with the Moms. A new (to me) term of endearment “Carload o’ Kisses” - mental note to use that when/if appropriate (it’s really catchy, imho right up there with Jay’s “smoochie-boochies” from “Jay and Silent Bob”)

>From Ch 39 we know that he’s still got some kisses left in that carload.


So he meets up with the buddy in some place (I’ll look all this stuff up mañana) & the fellow is all decked out from top to toes & redolent of scent. So we know he’s worth a harken as well as a gander.

And then the phone call, dropping his nickel in amongst  a pile of other nickels - good old pay phone days - nickel days were before my time, although I go back as far as being of an age to’ve used one of those devices for a dime, which price for awhile was immutable & featured in song ( https://youtu.be/-RTh5t8yEqI?si=lzYtBJIsDnr9Cy8T ) and story (any # of characters who “drop a dime”)

I’d place the description of the pay phone in with that of the statue - I like it better, because it’s shorter and will be easier to copy inline, but it’s also more concrete: not something that “it is said” exists.

Okay, on rereading it’s clear that it takes place in a dream, so we’re not all the way “real in Hicks’s world”, but it’s a cognate of things which he and many others have really seen. (& hmm probably lays the groundwork for the statue, narrato-symbologically)

“Sometime in the dawn hours of the first day of a post-American life, passing from a brief moment of hopefulness into the outer fringes of whatever it is that’s coming, Hicks has been dreaming he’s someplace back on the prairie [callback to Vineland?], in an old lopsided telephone booth warped by the wind, snowed and hailed on, run into by cars and farm wagons, assaulted by hungry drifters looking for all those nickels in the box.

“Into which he drops another…”


Dippy’s wagonload of news and views apparently effected an awareness - a first step toward unwilling acceptance - that he’s not going back to Milwaukee any time soon.