Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

  “What’s this?” Leo said. “You’re laughing at us.”

  “No. No . . . I’m laughing ’cause I like to use that same name.”

  “Huh. You must get that from me.”

  Later, though, around three A.M., four, one of those desolate hours, Doc had forgotten his feelings of relief and only remembered how scared he’d been. Why had he automatically assumed there was something out there that could find his parents so easily and put them in danger? Mostly in these cases, the answer was, “You’re being paranoid.” But in the business, paranoia was a tool of the trade, it pointed you in directions you might not have seen to go. There were messages from beyond, if not madness, at least a shitload of unkind motivation. And where did that mean this Chinese voice in the middle of the night—whenever that might be at the Skyhook Lodge—was telling him to look?

  NEXT MORNING, waiting for the coffee to percolate, Doc happened to glance out the window and saw Sauncho Smilax down in his classic beach-town ride, a maroon 289 Mustang with a black vinyl interior and a low, slow throb to its exhaust, trying not to block up the alley. “Saunch! come on up, have some coffee.”

  Sauncho took the stairs two at a time and stood panting in the doorway, holding a briefcase. “Didn’t know if you were up.”

  “Me neither. What’s happening?”

  Sauncho had been out all day and night with a posse of federales aboard a garishly overequipped vessel belonging to the Justice Department, visiting a site previously identified as the spot where the Golden Fang was supposed to have left some kind of lagan. Divers went down to have a look and, as the light shifted over the ocean, presently were bringing up one connex after another full of shrink-wrapped bundles of U.S. currency, maybe the same ones Cookie and Joaquin, on behalf of Blondie-san, might still be out after. Except that upon opening the containers, imagine how surprised everybody was to find that, instead of the usual dignitaries, Washington, Lincoln, Franklin and whoever, all of these bills, no matter which denomination, seemed to have Nixon’s face on them. For an instant a federal joint task force paused to wonder if they might not after all, the whole boatload of them, be jointly hallucinating. Nixon was staring wildly at something just out of sight past the edge of the cartouche, almost cringing out of its way, his eyes strangely unfocused, as if he had himself been abusing some novel Asian psychedelic.

  According to intelligence contacts of Sauncho’s, it had been common CIA practice for a while to put Nixon’s face on phony North Vietnamese bills, as part of a scheme to destabilize the enemy currency by airdropping millions of these fakes during routine bombing raids over the north. But Nixonizing U.S. currency this way was not as easily explained, nor sometimes even appreciated.

  “What is this? The CIA’s done it again, this shit is worthless.”

  “You don’t want it? I’ll take it.”

  “What are you gonna do with it?”

  “Spend a bundle of it before anybody begins to notice.”

  Some thought it was a plot by Chinese Communist pranksters to mess with the U.S. dollar. The engraving work was too exquisite not to have some Fiendish Oriental Provenance. According to others it might have been circulating as scrip for a while now throughout Southeast Asia, and even somehow be negotiable Stateside.

  “And let’s not forget its value on the collectors’ market.”

  “Bit too weird for me I’m afraid.”

  “And dig,” said Sauncho later to Doc—“the law says that before you can get your picture on U.S. currency, you have to be dead. So in any universe where this stuff is legal tender, Nixon would have to be dead, right? So what I think it is, is it’s sympathetic magic by somebody who wants to see Nixon among the departed.”

  “That sure narrows it down, Saunch. Can I have some of this?”

  “Hey, take whatever. Go on a shopping spree. See these shoes I’ve got on? Remember those white loafers that Dr. No wears in Dr. No, 1962? Yes dig it! same identical ones! Bought ’em on Hollywood Boulevard with one of these Nixon twenties—nobody examined it, nothing, it’s amazing. Hey! my soap’s almost on, do you, uh, mind?” He headed for the tube without delay.

  Sauncho was a devoted viewer of the daytime drama The Way to His Heart. This week—as he updated Doc during lulls—Heather has just confided to Iris her suspicions about the meat loaf, including Julian’s role in switching the contents of the Tabasco bottle. Iris isn’t too surprised, of course, having for the duration of her own marriage to Julian taken turns in the kitchen, so that there remain between these bickering exes literally hundreds of culinary scores yet to be settled. Meanwhile, Vicki and Stephen are still discussing who still owes who five dollars from a pizza delivery weeks ago, in which the dog, Eugene, somehow figures as a key element.

  Doc was in the toilet pissing during a commercial break when he heard Sauncho screaming at the television set. He got back to find his attorney just withdrawing his nose from the screen.

  “Everything cool?”

  “Ahh . . .” collapsing on the couch, “Charlie the fucking Tuna, man.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, so desperate to show he’s got good taste, except he’s also dyslexic so he gets ‘good taste’ mixed up with ‘taste good,’ but it’s worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won’t be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it. . . .”

  “Saunch, wow, that’s . . .”

  “It’s been on my mind. And another thing. Why is there Chicken of the Sea, but no Tuna of the Farm?”

  “Um . . .” Doc actually beginning to think about this.

  “And don’t forget,” Sauncho went on to remind him darkly, “that Charles Manson and the Vietcong are also named Charlie.”

  When the show was over, Sauncho said, “So you, how you doing, Doc, going to be arrested again or anything?”

  “With Bigfoot on my tail now, I could be calling you any minute.”

  “Oh. I almost forgot. The Golden Fang? Seems there was an ocean marine insurance policy taken out on her just before she singled up all lines, covering this one voyage only, the one your ex–old lady’s supposed to be on, and the beneficiary is listed as Golden Fang Enterprises of Beverly Hills.”

  “If the boat sinks, they collect a lot of money?”

  “Exactly.”

  Uh huh. What if it was a deliberate insurance hustle? Maybe Shasta could still get ashore in time, onto some island where maybe even now she’d be pulling small perfect fish out of the lagoon and cooking them with mangoes and hot peppers and shredded coconut. Maybe she was sleeping out on the beach and looking at stars nobody here under the smoglit L.A. sky even knew existed. Maybe she was learning to sail island to island on an outrigger canoe, to read the currents and the winds, and how to sense magnetic fields like a bird. Maybe the Golden Fang had sailed on to its fate, gathering those who hadn’t found their way to shore deeper into whatever complications of evil, indifference, abuse, despair they needed to become even more themselves. Whoever they were. Maybe Shasta had escaped all that. Maybe she was safe.

  THAT EVENING OVER at Penny’s place, Doc fell asleep on her couch in front of the day’s sports highlights, and when he woke, sometime well after dark, a face, which turned out to be Nixon’s, was on the tube going, “There are always the whiners and complainers who’ll say, this is fascism. Well, fellow Americans, if it’s Fascism for Freedom? I . . . can . . . dig it!” Tumultuous applause from a huge room full of supporters, some of them holding banners with the same phrase professionally
lettered on them. Doc sat up, blinking, groping around in the tubelight for his stash, finding half a joint and lighting up.

  What struck him was that Nixon right now had the exact freaked-out expression on his face that he did on the fake twenty-dollar bills Doc had gotten from Sauncho. He took one out of his wallet now and consulted it, just to be sure. Yep. The two Nixons looked just like photos of each other!

  “Let’s see,” Doc inhaled and considered. This same Nixonface here, live on the screen, had somehow already been put into circulation, months ago, on millions, maybe billions, in false currency. . . . How could this be? Unless . . . sure, time travel of course . . . some CIA engraver, in some top-security workshop far away, was busy right now copying this image off of his own screen and then would later somehow go slip his copy into a covert special mailbox, which would have to be located close to a power-company substation so they could bootleg the power they needed, raising everybody else’s rates, to send information time-traveling back into the past, in fact there might even be time-warp insurance you could buy in case these messages went astray among the unknown energy surges out there in the vastness of Time. . . .

  “I knew I smelled something in here. Lucky for you I don’t go in to work tomorrow,” Penny, squinting and barelegged in one of Doc’s Pearls Before Swine T-shirts.

  “This joint woke you up? Sorry, Pen, here—” offering what was by now more a friendly gesture than a real roach.

  “No, all that screaming did. What are you watching, sounds like yet another Hitler documentary.”

  “Nixon. I think it’s happening live right now, someplace in L.A.”

  “Could be the Century Plaza.” Which was presently confirmed by the newsfolks covering the event—Nixon had indeed dropped in, as if on a whim, at the palatial Westside hotel to address a rally of GOP activists who called themselves Vigilant California. In cutaways to individuals in the audience, some seemed a little out of control, like you’d expect to find at gatherings like this, but others were less demonstrative and, to Doc at least, scarier. Strategically posted among the crowd, wearing identical suits and ties you’d have to call on the unhip side, none of them seemed to be paying much attention to Nixon himself.

  “I don’t think they’re Secret Service,” Penny sliding over next to Doc on the sofa. “Not cute enough, to begin with. More likely private sector.”

  “They’re waiting for something—ha! look, here we go.” As if linked by ESP, the robot operatives had pivoted as one and begun to converge on a member of the audience, longhaired, wild-eyed, dressed in matching psychedelic Nehru shirt and bell-bottoms, who was now screaming, “Hey, Nixon! Hey, Tricky Dick! Fuck you! And you know what, hey, fuck Spiro, too! Fuck everybody in the First Fuckin Family! Fuck the dog, hey! Anybody know the dog’s name? whatever—fuck the dog, too! Fuck all of you!” And began to laugh insanely as he was seized and dragged away through the crowd, many of them glaring, snarling and foaming at the mouth in disapproval. “Better get him to a hippie drug clinic,” suggested Nixon humorously.

  “Giving revolutionary youth a bad name,” it seemed to Doc, who was rolling another joint.

  “Not to mention raising some First Amendment issues,” Penny leaning up close to the screen. “Strange, though . . .”

  “Really? Looks like typical Republicans to me.”

  “No, I mean—there, there’s the close-up. That’s no hippie, look at him. It’s Chucky!”

  Or to put it another way, Doc now became aware with a jolt, it was also Coy Harlingen. It took him maybe half a lungful of pot smoke to decide against sharing this with Penny. “Friend of yours,” he inquired disingenuously.

  “Everybody knows him—when he’s not hanging out at the Hall of Justice, he’s at the Glass House.”

  “A snitch?”

  “‘Informant,’ please. He works mostly for the Red Squad and the P-DIDdies.”

  “Who?”

  “Public Disorder Intelligence Division? Never heard of them, eh?”

  “And . . . why’s he yelling at Nixon like that again?”

  “Jeez, Doc, at this rate they’re going to pull your paranoia card. Even a PI can’t be that naïve.”

  “Well, his outfit maybe is a little overcoordinated, but that don’t mean there’s any setup.”

  She sighed didactically. “But now that he’s been all over the TV? he has instant and wide credibility. The police can infiltrate him into any group they want.”

  “You guys been watchin that Mod Squad again. Gives you all these cold-ass ideas. Hey! Did I tell you Bigfoot offered me a job the other day?”

  “Astute of Bigfoot as always. He must have detected in your character some special gift for . . . betrayal?”

  “Come on, Penny, she was sixteen, she was dealing, I was only trying to steer her away from a life of crime, how long are you gonna—”

  “Goodness, I don’t know why you always get so defensive about it, Doc. There’s no reason to feel guilty. Is there?”

  “Great, just what I want to do—discuss guilt with a deputy DA.”

  “—was identified,” the TV set announced, while Penny reached to turn up the volume, “as Rick Doppel, an unemployed student dropout from UCLA.”

  “I don’t think so,” Penny muttered. “It’s that Chucky.”

  And dang, Doc added silently, if it ain’t a resurrected tenor sax player, too.

  NINE

  DECIDING ON A PROFESSIONAL LOOK, DOC PULLED HIS HAIR BACK in a tight ponytail, securing it with a leather clip he only remembered later Shasta had given him, and put a black vintage fedora on top of that, then slung a tape machine over his shoulder. In the mirror he looked plausible enough. He was headed up to Topanga that afternoon to visit the Boards, pretending to be a music reporter for an underground fan magazine called Stone Turntable. Denis was along posing as his photographer, wearing a T-shirt with the familiar detail from Michelangelo’s fresco The Creation of Adam, in which God is extending his hand to Adam’s and they’re just about to touch—except in this version God is passing a lit joint.

  All the way up to Topanga, the radio cranked out a Super Surfin’ Marathon, all commercial-free—which seemed peculiar until Doc realized that nobody who would sit through this music-teacher’s nightmare of doubled-up blues lines, moronic one-chord “tunes,” and desperate vocal effects could possibly belong to any consumer demographic known to the ad business. From this display of white-eccentric binge behavior only once in a while, mercifully, would there be a departure—“Pipeline” and “Surfin’ Bird,” by the Trashmen, and “Bamboo,” by Johnny and the Hurricanes, singles by Eddie and the Showmen, the Bel Airs, the Hollywood Saxons, and the Olympics, souvenirs out of a childhood Doc had never much felt he wanted to escape from.

  “When are they gonna play ‘Tequila’?” Denis kept wondering, till just as they were pulling up the drive of the Boards’ rented mansion, on it came, the Spanish modality and flamencoid roll strokes of the surfer’s sworn enemy, the Lowrider. “Tequila!” screamed Denis as they slid into the last parking space.

  The house had once belonged to half of a much-loved hillbilly act of the forties, and currently the Boards were renting the place from a bass player–turned–record-company executive, which trend watchers took as further evidence of the end of Hollywood, if not the world, as they had known it.

  Like girls at Hawaiian airports, a couple of house groupies named Bodhi and Zinnia came forward with leis, or actually love beads, and put them around Doc’s and Denis’s necks, then led them off on a tour of the place, looking at which, a less tolerant person might think right away, Wow, this is what happens when people make too much money in too short a time. But Doc figured it depended on your idea of excess. Over the years business had obliged him to visit a stately L.A. home or two, and he soon noticed how little sense of what was hip the very well fixed were able to ex
hibit, and that, roughly proportional to wealth accumulated, the condition only grew worse. The Boards had so far managed to escape serious impairment, though Doc had his doubts about the coffee tables made from antique Hawaiian surfboards, until he saw that all you had to do was unscrew the legs to get back to a ridable plank. Thanks to ingenious porte cochere arrangements, many of the closets here were not just walk-in but drive-thru, full of costumes from past and future worlds, many obtained in Culver City at the MGM studio’s historic sell-off of assets a few months back. Catered meals for twenty or thirty got trucked up here every day from Jurgensen’s in Beverly Hills. There was a dope-smoking room with a huge 3-D reproduction in fiberglass of Hokusai’s famous Great Wave off Kanagawa, arching wall to ceiling to opposite wall, creating a foam-shadowed hideaway beneath the eternally suspended monster, though now and then this would tend to freak a visitor into declining his hit whenever a joint came around, which was fine with the Boards, who were still at an arrested stage from back in their surf-punk days when every crumb of dope counted, and as greedy on the subject as ever.

  Outside, on a terrace with a view across the canyon, longhaired short-skirted cuties drifted around in the sunlight tending the marijuana plants or wheeling huge trays of things to eat, drink, and smoke. Dogs came and went, some reasonably calm, others obsessive-compulsive, bringing you back the otherwise ordinary rock you had been throwing, farther and farther away each time, for the last half hour (“It’s his trip, man”), and now and then one fallen afoul of that breed of human that finds amusement in feeding a dog LSD and watching what happens.

  Doc was reminded for the uncountableth time that for every band like this one there were a hundred or a thousand others like his cousin’s band Beer, doomed to scuffle in obscurity, energized by a faith in the imperishability of rock ’n’ roll, running on dope and nerve, brother- and sisterhood, and good spirits. The Boards, though keeping their voicing—the traditional two guitars, bass and drums, plus a horn section—had changed personnel so often that only meticulous music historians had any kind of a handle on who was or had been who anymore. Which didn’t matter because by now the band had evolved into pretty much a brand name, years and changes away from the tough little grommets, all related by blood or marriage, who used to stomp as a cadre barefoot into Cantor’s Delicatessen on Fairfax and spend all night eating bagels, hanging out, and trying not to trigger any rock-star bodyguards into some kind of episode. When at length the once hippie-friendly eatery, growing concerned about possible lawsuits and insurance costs, started putting up signs saying Shoes Required, the Boards all went down to a tattoo parlor in Long Beach and got sandal straps tattooed on their feet and ankles, which fooled the managerial level for a while, and by then the band had moved on anyway to fancier places farther west. But there were a couple of years when you could always tell who the original members of the band were by those ink sandals.