Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Some white detective you never met before, and you didn’t trust me? Wow, now I am pissed off.”

  “You need to tell him,” Clancy pointed out to Tariq.

  “But—” Doc went to supervise the coffeemaker. “Wait a minute man, didn’t you say you had to take some oath of silence about that?”

  “That don’t count,” Tariq said. “I thought it did once, but Puck and them other Nazis took a oath too, to watch each other’s back no matter what, and look how much good it did Glen. Am I uh spoze to respect that shit? I’m off the hook now. They don’t like it, they can see how far they get with it.”

  “Okay. So what was it Glen owed you, exactly?”

  “First you got to take a oath.”

  “What? You just said that was bullshit.”

  “Yeah, but you a honky. You got to sign off in blood, Blood, that you won’t ever tell nobody.”

  “Blood?”

  “Clancy did.”

  “I’m in the middle of my period, darlin,” she pointed out.

  “So . . . could I borrow some of yours?” Doc wondered.

  “Hey, fuck this,” Tariq heading for the door.

  “Emotional, ain’t he?” Doc going over to the file cabinet and retrieving his emergency stash. Like, if this wasn’t an emergency . . .

  Around the second or possibly third joint, everybody began to relax. Tariq got into the business he and Glen had done together while inside.

  It was complicated. The original beef was between two Chicano factions, Nuestra Familia, who were based out of Northern California, and the Sureños, who were from down south here. At that moment among the prison population, there had been active a snitch known as El Huevoncito, who had brought grief to many inmates, black and white as well as Chicano. Everybody hated this little rat, everybody knew he’d have to be dealt with, but for reasons of gang history, which grew very tangled especially when you were smoking weed, none of the Chicano population north or south could conveniently do the deed, so they finally subbed it out to the Aryan Brothers, who just then also happened to have an opening for a new member and were trying to recruit Glen Charlock for the slot. Part of the initiation being that you had to kill somebody. Sometimes giving them a cut on the face was enough, but then that meant they’d eventually have to come after you looking for payback, so it was better, Tariq explained, to just kill they ass and get it over with.

  Glen wanted to be in the Brotherhood but didn’t want to kill anybody. He knew he would fuck up somehow and get caught, because somehow he always did, and if he wasn’t killed on the spot by associates of El Huevoncito, he’d either get a trip upstate to the San Quentin Green Room or be kept in the joint forever, when all he really wanted, sometimes desperately, was to be outside. On the other hand, the Brothers were being really pains in the ass about it. So Glen went looking for a way to sub-subcontract the hit, take credit for it among the Brothers, but escape retaliation from anybody else.

  Tariq enjoyed a reputation as a shank artist who never got caught, but approaching him took almost more caution than Glen knew how to use. Black and white did not routinely mix, nor were they encouraged to. “Sounds like fun,” Tariq admitted, “but it’ll cost a lot. ’Less I’m mistaken, more than you got or be likely to have.”

  True as far as it went, except that Glen had some unusual connections on the outside, though he’d been careful not to share this information unless he had to. Now it looked like he had to.

  “How would you be wanting payment? in cash? Dope? Pussy?” Tariq just stared back. “Help me out. Watermelons?”

  Tariq thought about taking offense, shrugged, and made a minimal gesture with his trigger finger, to indicate firearms.

  “What do you know. My friends just happen to specialize in that area. What kind of weight we be talking about?”

  “Oh, enough for somewhere between a platoon of niggers and a company.”

  Glen looked around for eavesdroppers. “You don’t mean for in here, man?”

  “Shit no, I’m bad, not stupid. But we all got friends outside, and mine, that’s what they could use right now.”

  “How soon?”

  “How soon you want them ’woods suckin all on you dick in gratitude?”

  A blur, a shadow, passed, and neither Tariq nor Glen was sure what they saw, but they knew who it was. “Some rat runnin for his hole,” Glen said.

  “Means we been walkin and talkin too long. Better from here on we keep it short.”

  By and by, El Huevoncito, rest his soul, was found mysteriously deceased after an early-morning shake-and-bake on Tariq’s block, which gave Tariq a perfect alibi and never got traced to him. Glen, with his time also accounted for, was likewise in the clear, though he made a point of asking for brotherly assistance in disposing of a mess-hall shank he’d first put some of his own blood on. He was accepted into the Aryan Brotherhood and shortly after Tariq’s release found himself also on the outside, with a job offer from Mickey Wolfmann.

  As it turned out, because of the logistics, Tariq’s people, Warriors Against the Man Black Armed Militia (WAMBAM) had had to wait awhile for Glen to set up the small-arms part of the deal and by now were growing fretful.

  “Which is about the time I come to see you,” Tariq said.

  “I can dig why you didn’t want to get too specific,” Doc said. “Maybe I should’ve took that oath.”

  “I understand you been gettin some shit from the local FBI, Brother Karenga’s bed buddies.”

  “Yeah but I couldn’t tell them much ’cause I didn’t know all this. Now I guess I’ll have to start worryin about the Red Squad and the P-DIDdies, too.”

  “How’s that?”

  “See technically, it’s black armed rebellion, ain’t it, gets us into heavy Charles Manson fantasy material, and there’s idiots enough in the LAPD who take ol’ Charlie seriously when he starts in screamin about all that.”

  “Yeah over at the WAMBAM office too, I been seein these T-shirts and shit? Like Manson’s mug shots with Afros airbrushed onto them, that’s real popular.”

  “How about Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme?”

  “Yeah, ain’t she some righteous-ass bitch.”

  “No I meant, like Squeaky T-shirts, where she has a Afro?”

  “Oh . . . not that I know of. You want me look around for one?”

  “Actually maybe Leslie van Houten, too, what do you think?”

  “Fellas,” muttered Clancy.

  “Right,” Doc said, “then . . . I guess what I really need to know from you is who these ‘friends’ of Glen’s were, that were arranging this arms deal.”

  “Some bunch of honky dentists out on lower Sunset. Worked out of some weird-ass building look like a big tooth?”

  “Uh-huh,” Doc trying not to betray the hollowness of soul that hit him now. “Well. Maybe I can think of one or two places to look.”

  Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically. If Glen all along had had “friends” in the Golden Fang, what was he even doing in the pen? Was he taking the fall for somebody else, some higher-level figure in the Fang organization? Had they put him in there as a deliberate plant, the Fang’s man on the inside, as if they had a master scheme to station their agents in all areas of public life? And how deeply implicated did that make the Fang in Glen’s murder? Was Glen another Rudy Blatnoyd, had he touched some acupressure point forever uncharted on the mysterious body of the Golden Fang so uncomfortably he had to be dealt with?

  And would this be multiple choice?

  By now it was dark and they were all hungry, and somehow they ended up at the Plastic Nickel on Sepulveda. Inside, the walls were decorated with silvery plastic reproductions of the heads side of a U.S. five-cent coin, each about the size of a giant pizza. An artificial hedge about two feet high, very g
reen and also of plastic, separated the rows of booths. Crews of unknown hedge-assembly specialists had carefully fitted together thousands of small modular leafy twig imitations plug- and jackwise in nearly infinite complexity to produce this strangely entertaining shrubbery. Over time all manner of small articles got lost down inside of it, including roach clips and roaches and hash pipes, loose change, car keys, earrings, contact lenses, tiny glassine packets of coke and heroin and so forth. Life below, say, one gram. Customers had been known to spend hours while their coffee got cold, carefully going through the hedge inch by inch, especially when on speed. Now and then, late at night, they would be interrupted by one of the plastic images up on the wall, as Thomas Jefferson turned from left profile to full face, unfastened the ribbon that held his hair back, shook everything out into a full-color redheaded freak halo, and spoke to selected dopers, usually quoting from the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, which had actually been of great help with many legal defenses focusing on search-and-seizure issues in particular. Tonight he waited till Clancy and Tariq had both headed back to the toilets, turned quickly to Doc, and said, “So! the Golden Fang not only traffick in Enslavement, they peddle the implements of Liberation as well.”

  “Hey . . . but as a founding father, don’t you get freaked out a little with this black apocalypse talk?”

  “The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” replied Jefferson. “It is its natural Manure.”

  “Yeah, and what about when the patriots and tyrants turn out to be the same people?” said Doc, “like, we’ve got this president now . . .”

  “As long as they bleed,” explained Jefferson, “is the thing. Meantime, what are you going to do with the information you’ve just acquired from Mr. Khalil?”

  “Let’s see, what are the choices? Go to the FBI and rat out Tariq and WAMBAM. Sic the feds onto the Golden Fang, after giving Tariq enough warning to keep his own ass clear. Tell Bigfoot Bjornsen everything and let him present it to the PDID or whoever, and let them deal with it. What am I leaving out?”

  “Do you begin to detect a common thread here, Lawrence?”

  “I can’t trust any of those people?”

  “Remember too that Glen’s weapons deal never went through. So you don’t really have to tell anybody anything. What you do have to do, however, is—” He fell abruptly silent and turned back into his ponytailed profile.

  “Talking to yourself again,” said Clancy. “You need to find true love, Doc.”

  Actually, he thought, I’ll settle for finding my way through this. His fingers, with a mind of their own, began to creep toward the plastic hedge. Maybe if he searched through it long enough, late enough into the night, he’d find something that might help—some tiny forgotten scrap of his life he didn’t even know was missing, something that would make all the difference now. He said, “I’m happy for you, Clancy, but what happened to that two at a time?”

  She gestured with her head back at Tariq, on his way to rejoin them. “Doc, this guy is at least two at a time.”

  SEVENTEEN

  BACK AT HIS PLACE, DOC FOUND SCOTT AND DENIS IN THE kitchen investigating the icebox, having just climbed in the alley window after Denis, a bit earlier, down at his own place, had fallen asleep as he often did with a lit joint in his mouth, only this time the joint, instead of dropping onto his chest and burning him and waking him up at least partway, had rolled someplace else among the bedsheets, where soon it began to smolder. After a while Denis woke, got up, and wandered into the bathroom, thought he would take a shower, sort of got into doing that. At some point the bed burst into flame, burning eventually up through the ceiling, directly above which was his neighbor Chico’s water bed, luckily for Chico without him on it, which being plastic melted from the heat, releasing nearly a ton of water through the hole that had by now burned in the ceiling, putting out the fire in Denis’s bedroom while turning the floor into a sort of wading pool. Denis came drifting back from the bathroom, and not able right away to account for what he found, plus getting the fire department, who had now arrived, confused with the police, went running down the alley to Scott Oof’s beach place, where he tried to describe what he thought had happened, basically deliberate sabotage by the Boards, who had never stopped plotting against him.

  Doc found a White Owl cigar most of whose contents he had tweezed out and replaced with Humboldt sinsemilla, lit up, inhaled, and started passing it around.

  “I don’t see how it could be the Boards, man, really,” exhaled Scott.

  “Hey, I saw them,” Denis insisted, “just the other day, lurking in the alley.”

  “That was only the bass player and drummer,” Scott said, “we were hanging out. There’s going to be a free concert at Will Rogers Park, they’re calling it a Surfadelic Freak-In? and the Boards want Beer to open for them?”

  “Groovy,” said Doc, “congratulations.”

  “Yeah,” added Denis, “except they’re totally evil, of course.”

  “Well, maybe the label they’re signed with,” Scott admitted, “but . . .”

  “Even Doc thinks they’re zombies.”

  “That’s probably true,” Doc said, “but you can’t always blame zombies for their condition, ain’t like there’s guidance counselors going around, ‘Hey, kid, you ever consider career opportunities with the undead—’”

  “Mine told me I should go into real estate,” said Scott, “like my mom.”

  “Your mom’s not a zombie,” Denis pointed out.

  “Yeah, but you should see some of her co-brokers. . . .”

  “Just so’s you examine her regularly for bites,” Doc advised, “which is how it gets transmitted.”

  “Anybody understand why they call it ‘real’ estate?” wondered Denis, who was now rolling a joint.

  “Hey Doc,” Scott remembered, “I saw that Coy again, that used to play with the Boards, who was supposed to be dead only later he wasn’t?”

  Doc was just barely not too loaded to ask, “Where?”

  “In Hermosa, standing in line outside the Lighthouse?”

  Sending Doc off down the Toilet of Memory to when he and Shasta were first dating, evenings hanging out in front of the Lighthouse Café, neither of them able to afford the prices, listening to the jazz from inside and eating hot dogs from the renowned Juicy James stand around the corner, whose sign featured a giant hot dog with a face, arms and legs, cowboy hat and getup, firing a pair of six-guns and to all appearances enjoying itself. On Sundays there was always a jam session. Studio musicians showed up in rides they had bought with their first big paychecks, to be redeemed in years to follow from impound lots, winched out of mudslides, preserved from the depredations of divorce lawyers, all replacement parts kept authentic for resales that would never happen, fantasies of the eras when the longings began, Morgans from the showroom up in Westwood with hoods held down by leather straps, Cobra 289s and ’62 Bonnevilles and that supernatural DeSoto in which James Stewart, gone round the bend of love, tails Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958).

  Up at Ojai, Doc and Coy had parted under strange circumstances, with Coy doing an abrupt fade into the evening, half angry, half desperate, after Doc’s sort of half promise that he’d look for some way for Coy to cut loose of the countersubversives who were running him. Except for the quick once-over Bigfoot let him have at Coy’s LAPD file, Doc hadn’t made much progress with this, and he may have been feeling guilty, because technically he was supposed to be working for Hope, too.

  So he thought he’d take a stroll down to Pier Avenue. The palm trees along the Strand cast shadows through the fog with its usual chemical smell, the Juicy James sign glowed cheerfully smudged at some uncertain distance, and there in front of the Lighthouse, sure enough, was Coy, among a ragged line of hipsters nodding to the music, Bud Shank today and so
me rhythm section.

  Doc waited for a break between sets and said howdy, expecting another Invisible Man number, but right now Coy had the look of a sailor on liberty, willing to live inside the moment till he had to be back in some condition of servitude.

  “I got to take the day off.” He checked the light over the ocean. “But it looks like maybe I’m about to be AWOL.”

  “You need a ride back up to Topanga? Long as I don’t have to come in with you, that is.”

  “Oh, that all got fixed. Now everything’s cool.”

  “‘Drac’s a part of the band’?”

  “Seriously. It was the chicks. None of them could handle it anymore, so they all got together and kicked in and hired an exorcist. Some Buddhist priest from the Temple downtown. He came up one day and did his thing, and now the Boards and the house are all officially dezombified. They gave him a maintenance contract to run regular psychic perimeter checks.”

  “Did any of the band, like, suddenly recognize you?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. It don’t matter as much as it used to.”

  The fog had thickened by the time they reached the car. Doc and Coy got in, and Doc put the wipers on for a couple of cycles, and they headed up Pier Avenue.

  “Chisel one of your smokes?” Coy said. Doc reached him the pack off the dashboard and pushed in the lighter and took a left on Pacific Coast Highway. “Hey, what’s this button here?”

  “Uh, maybe not, that’s the—” They were submerged in the bone-shaking reverberations of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive.” Doc found the volume knob. “—the Vibrasonic. Takes up half the trunk, but it’s there when you need it.”

  Going under the runway at the airport, they lost the music for a minute and Doc said, “So the Boards really aren’t so evil anymore?”

  “Maybe confused now and then. You know a band that isn’t?”

  “You back playin with them now?”

  “Workin on it.” Doc knew there was more coming. “See, I always needed to think somebody gave a shit. When the call came from Vigilant California, it was like, somebody’s been watching all the time, somebody who wants me, sees something in me I never guessed was there. . . .”