Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

  For a week or so now, the Boards’ houseguests had included Spotted Dick, a visiting British band who were getting some local airplay on those stations where the pulse was less hectic, being themselves often so laid back that people had been known to call the ambulance, mistaking the band’s idea of a General Pause for some kind of collective seizure. Today they were wearing wide-wale corduroy suits in a strangely luminous brownish gold and sporting precision geometric haircuts from Cohen’s Beauty and Barber Shop in East London, where Vidal Sassoon had once apprenticed and where every week the lads were piled onto a small bus, given their weekly cannabis allowance and brought out to sit in a row giggling over back issues of Tatler and Queen and getting scissor-cut asymmetric bobs. Last week in fact the lead vocalist had decided to change his name legally to Asymmetric Bob, after his bathroom mirror revealed to him, three hours into a mushroom experiment, that there were actually two distinct sides to his face, expressing two violently different personalities.

  “They’ve got a tube in every room!” Denis reported excitedly. “A-and these zapper units you can change the channel with and not even have to leave the couch!”

  Doc had a look. These control boxes, recently invented and found only in upscale homes, were large and crude, as if sharing design origins with Soviet sound equipment. Operating them required a forceful touch, and sometimes both hands, through which you could feel them buzzing, because they used high-frequency sound waves. This tended to drive most of the house dogs here crazy, except for Myrna, a wirehair who, being older and a little hard of hearing, was able to lie patiently through all sorts of programming, waiting for a dog-food commercial to come on, which because of some strange dog ESP she knew was due a minute before it actually showed up on the screen. When it was over, she would turn her head to any humans in the vicinity and nod emphatically. At first, people thought this meant she wanted dinner or at least a snack, but it seemed to be more of a social act, along the lines of, “Something, huh?”

  At the moment she was lying in an unlit room of uncertain size, which smelled of potsmoke and patchouli oil, watching Dark Shadows along with selected Boards and Spotted Dick personnel, plus those members of the entourage who were not elsewhere in the house running their ass off indulging band whims that required deep-frying Hostess Twinkies, ironing each other’s hair on the ironing board to maintain some muse image, and going through fan magazines with X-acto knives and cutting out all references to competing surf acts.

  This was around the point in the Collins family saga when the story line had begun to get heavily into something called “parallel time,” which was confounding the viewing audience nationwide, even those who remained with their wits about them, although many dopers found no problem at all in following it. It seemed basically to mean that the same actors were playing two different roles, but if you’d gotten absorbed enough, you tended to forget that these people were actors.

  After a while the concentration level among the viewers had Doc feeling a little restless. He realized the scope of the mental damage one push on the “off” button of a TV zapper could inflict on this roomful of obsessives. Luckily he was near the door and managed to crawl out without anybody noticing. He hadn’t seen Coy Harlingen around here yet, and figured this would be as good a time as any to go looking.

  He began to wander the great old house. The sun went down, the groupies flocked together briefly, transitioning into nighttime mode. Denis ran around like a dog chasing pigeons in the park, snapping pictures, and girls obligingly scattered, going eww . . . eww. Something like a security detail appeared now and then out on the property, making perimeter checks. From an upper window came the sound of Spotted Dick’s keyboard player Smedley, doing Hanon exercises on his Farfisa, a little Combo Compact model he had obtained on the advice of Rick Wright of Pink Floyd and which was never observed far from his person. He called it Fiona, and witnesses had reported him having long conversations with it. Earlier, Doc, pretending to interview him for Stone Turntable, asked what they talked about.

  “Oh, what you’d expect. Association football, the war in Southeast Asia, where can one score, sort of thing.”

  “And how’s, how’s Fiona enjoying it here in Southern California?”

  Smedley got glum. “Loves everything but the paranoia, man.”

  “Paranoia, really?”

  His voice dropped to a whisper. “This house—” At which point a scowling young gent, maybe one of the Boards’ roadies, maybe not, entered and leaned against a wall with his arms folded and just stayed there, listening. Smedley, his eyeballs oscillating wildly, fled the area.

  A private eye didn’t drop acid for years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops, and truth was, since crossing the doorsill of this place, Doc couldn’t help noticing what you’d call an atmosphere. Instead of a ritual handshake or even a smile, everybody he got introduced to greeted him with the same formula—“Where are you at, man?” suggesting a high level of discomfort, even fear, about anybody who couldn’t be dropped in a bag right away and labeled.

  This seemed to be happening more and more lately, out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he’d seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everybody else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. Like the operatives who’d dragged away Coy Harlingen the other night at that rally at the Century Plaza. Doc knew these people, he’d seen enough of them in the course of business. They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who’d make it happen.

  Was it possible, that at every gathering—concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?

  “Gee,” he said to himself out loud, “I dunno . . .”

  At which point he ran into Jade just coming out of one of the bathrooms. “What, you again?”

  “Drove up with Bambi—she heard that Spotted Dick were staying here, so I had to come along, try and keep her out of trouble?”

  “Into these folks, is she?”

  “Spotted Dick black-light posters on the walls, Spotted Dick sheets and pillowcases on the bed, Spotted Dick T-shirts, coffee cups, souvenir roach clips. And twenty-four hours a day, Spotted Dick albums on the stereo. Man. You know this English ukulele player named George Formby?”

  “Sure, Herman’s Hermits covered one of his.”

  “Well these guys have covered everything else. I mean I try to be cool with it. Spotted Dick are also known to be into some weird forms of recreation, and I think that’s the main attraction for Bambi.”

  “Haven’t seen her around tonight.”

  “Oh, she already split with the lead guitar, they’re on the way up to Leo Carrillo looking for some cricket game.”

  “Night cricket?”

  “Yeah, Somerset told her it was like baseball? Lights and so forth. Unless . . . oh no, do you think they were running a number on me?”

  “Well if you do need a ride back, let me know. And if anybody asks, I’m a rock ’n’ roll reporter, okay?”

  “You? Sure, I’ll tell ’em about your Pat Boone cover interview.”

  “Oh and hey—that guy I was talking to at the Club Asiatique the other night? You seen him around?”


  “He’s here someplace. Try the rehearsal rooms upstairs.”

  Sure enough, wandering the hallways, Doc heard the sound of a tenor sax practicing “Donna Lee.” He waited for a break and put his head in the room.

  “Howdy! It’s me again! Remember that chore you wanted me to do?”

  “Wait.” Coy angled his thumb at a cluster of sound equipment over in the corner that may have had more wires than necessary running in and out of it, and he shook his head. “What was the, uh, make and model you looked at again?”

  Doc went along. “You were asking about a older-type VW, flowers and bluebirds and hearts and shit all over it?”

  “That’s the one I was interested in all right. No, uhm . . .” Coy paused, improvising, “no new replacement parts, nothin like that?”

  “None I could see.”

  “Street legal, no hassles with the registration?”

  “Seemed that way.”

  “Well thanks for lookin into that, you know, I just . . . wondered, the way people do.”

  “Sure. Anytime. Any other rides you want me to check out, just let me know.”

  Coy was quiet for a while. Doc thought about reaching over and poking him. A look on his face so desperate, so longing, and way too nervous, as if somehow inside this house he had actually been forbidden to speak. Doc wanted to lay at least a quick abrazo on this guy, some reassurance, but that could be read by inquiring eyes as more emotion than anybody should invest in a used-car deal. “You have my number, right?”

  “I’ll be in touch.” Just then a driveling of dopers burst into the room, any of whom could have been assigned to spy on Coy. Doc unfocused his eyes and allowed his face to sag into a loose grin, and next time he looked, Coy was invisible, though he might’ve still been in the room.

  Back downstairs, a member of the company was going around jovially handing out joints. As people lit up and inhaled, he’d go, “Hey! Guess what’s in this grass?”

  “No idea.”

  “Come on, guess!”

  “LSD?”

  “No! it’s just grass! Hahahaha!”

  Approaching somebody else, “Hey! what do you think’s in this dope we’re smoking?”

  “I don’t know, uh . . . mescaline!”

  “No, nothin! pure grass! Hahahaha!”

  And so forth. Shredded psilocybe mushrooms? Angel dust? Speed? No, just marijuana! Hahahaha! Almost before Doc knew it, he’d gotten so stoned on the mystery weed that he flashed how it wasn’t just Coy whose vital signs were debatable—somebody had definitely been out harrowing the next world for Boards personnel, because Doc knew now, beyond all doubt, that every single one of these Boards was a zombie, undead and unclean. “Dead and clean is okay?” Denis, who had materialized from someplace, wondered.

  “A-and that Spotted Dick—they’re zombies, too, only worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “English zombies! look at them, man, American zombies are at least out front about it, tend to stagger when they try to walk anywhere, usually in third ballet position, and they go, like ‘Uunnhh . . . uunnhh,’ with that rising and falling tone, whereas English zombies are for the most part quite well spoken, they use long words and they glide everywhere, like, sometimes you don’t even see them take steps, it’s like they’re on ice skates. . . .”

  At which point Spotted Dick’s bass player, Trevor “Shiny Mac” McNutley, with a louche smile on his face and pursuing a confused young woman, entered in exactly this way, crossing smoothly from left to right.

  “You see, you see?”

  “Aaahhh!” Denis running off in panic, “I’m outta here, man!”

  Denis having failed to provide him much of an anchor in reality, Doc now proceeded to freak even further out. That dope with its extra ingredient which might not really have been there could also have had something to do with it—howsoever, Doc suddenly found himself fleeing through the corridors of the creepy old mansion with uncertain numbers of screaming flesh-eating creatures behind him. . . .

  Down in the vast kitchen, he ran pretty much head-on into Denis again, now busy looting the fridge and cabinets and filling a Safeway bag with cookies, frozen candy bars, Cheetos, and other munchies of opportunity.

  “Come on Denis, we got to split.”

  “Tell me about it man, I snapped a picture a couple minutes ago and they all went insane tryin to take away my camera, and now they’re after me, so I figured I better grab what I can—”

  “Actually, man, I think I hear them,” Doc, guiding Denis by the string of love beads around his neck, dragged him out a side exit into the grounds. “Come on.” They started running for where they’d parked the car.

  “Jeez Doc, you said free dope, maybe some chicks, you didt’n say noth’n about no zombies, man.”

  “Denis,” advised Doc, already out of breath, “just run.” Passing a sycamore tree, he was unexpectedly descended on by somebody who’d been trying to hang on to a branch. It was Jade, in a state of panic.

  “What am I, the Skipper?” Doc muttering onto his feet again, “or some shit?”

  “I really need a ride out of here,” Jade said, “please?”

  By some piece of luck, they found Doc’s car right where he’d parked it, and they piled in and went screeching out down the driveway. In the mirror Doc saw dark shapes with ghostly white incisors slithering into a 1949 Mercury woodie with a front end and split windshield that looked like the snout and pitiless eyes of a predator, which now came after them, its V-8 in a throbbing roar, gravel scattering off the driveway. At the canyon road, Doc hooked a violent left, nearly rolling them over and fishtailing once or twice before straightening out and proceeding down to Malibu on what in those days was not quite the multiple-lane suburban convenience it would later become, more you’d say of a life-threatening nightmare actually, full of blind driveways and serious hairpins, where Doc soon found himself putting to good use his refresher courses at the well-known Tex Wiener École de Pilotage, executing four-wheel drifts and more heel-and-toe double-clutching than fully foreseen by the design teams back at Chrysler Motors, while the radio played “Here Come the Hodads” by the Marketts.

  Denis, despite the 3-D jolting around he was getting, sat good-naturedly putting together a joint without hardly spilling anything, lighting and presenting it to Jade once they were all the way downhill and headed for Santa Monica.

  “Nicely rolled Denis,” Doc remarked when it came his way at last. “Don’t know if I’d’ve had the presence of mind myself.”

  “Basically just trying to keep from freaking out?”

  “Listen, Doc,” Jade said, “what is with that guy from the Club Asiatique?”

  “Coy Harlingen. You talk to him?”

  “Yes and when they found us together, it really looked like somebody meant to do me some harm. Not like I was trying to seduce him. Normally if Bambi’s around, I don’t worry when they come after me like that, but she was off at that ‘night cricket,’ so it’s a blessing you guys showed up when you did.”

  “Our pleasure,” Denis assured her.

  At some point after they were back on the Coast Highway and heading for the freeway, Doc glanced in the rearview mirror and no longer saw the headlights of the sinister woodie behind him. Like a once-troublesome pair of zits on the face of the night, they had faded away. What he couldn’t also help noticing in the mirror now was that Denis and Jade were striking up a friendship. “And what’s, like, your name?” Denis was saying.

  “Ashley,” said Jade.

  “Not Jade,” Doc said.

  “My working name. In the Fairfax High yearbook, I’m just one of, like, a thousand Ashleys?”

  “And the Chick Planet salon . . .”

  “Never considered that a career. Too fuckin wholesome. Smiling all the time, pretending it’s about
‘vibrations’ or ‘self-awareness’ or anything but,” sliding upward into an old-movie society-lady screech, “hoddible fucking!”

  “Southern California,” Denis chimed in. “No sympathy for weirdness, man, none of them darker type activities.”

  “Yeah really like where’s that at,” Jade, or Ashley, sympathized.

  “And people wonder why Charlie Manson’s the way he is.”

  “Do you eat pussy, by the way?”

  They entered the transition tunnel to the eastbound Santa Monica Freeway, where the radio, which had been playing the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” lost the signal. Doc kept singing it to himself, and when they emerged and the sound came back, he was no more than half a bar off. “Denis, don’t forget to leave me the camera, okay?” An eloquent silence. “Denis?”

  “He’s busy,” Jade murmured. Remaining so all the way to the Harbor Freeway, to the Hollywood Freeway and up over the Cahuenga Pass to Jade’s exit, in the course of which, in a very relaxed, occasionally drowsy voice, pausing every once in a while to send Denis down a word of encouragement, she filled Doc in on her early history of experimenting with shoplifting and grand theft auto. She had met up with Bambi in Dormitory 8000 at Sybil Brand Institute, where Bambi, observing Jade one evening furiously masturbating, offered to do her pussy for a pack of smokes. Menthol, if possible.