I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN-“The Cutter” (1983).

I’ve never been a huge Echo & The Bunnymen fan, but I do like their greatest hits.  This is one of them, and it’s a song I’ve liked from pretty much the minute I heard it.  Ian McCullough has a Jim Morrison vibe in his vocals, and there are interesting Eastern melodies and pieces thrown into the song (like in the intro).  These give it an unconventional feel, even though the main melody is pretty straightforward.

I have no idea what the song is about–I sing along without really thinking about it.  And the “spare us the cutter” chorus, complete with screechy guitar chord is pretty dynamic.  As is the loud drum change during the “drop in the ocean” part.

By the end of the song the drums seem to sound bigger, and the fills really propel the song to the end.  It’s a fine song by a band that I’m not sure I need to hear more of.

[READ: August 25, 2014] Pale Summer Week 7 (§46-§47)

After the pile of small chapters that last week gave us, this week offers just two.  One is a very lengthy discussion between two characters.  The other is another piece of the Toni Ware puzzle.  I enjoy the way the first of these sections balances the medical, the emotional and the supernatural.  And it makes me laugh that Drinion’s supernatural bit is never addressed directly in any way–it just is–as assuredly as Rand’s psychological problems just are.  But I do find it interesting that more people have talked about Rand’s problems than Drinion’s (even though his is as fascinating as he himself is dull).

§46

This is a very long section, a section I remembered very vividly from the first reading.  This is one of those very long sections that doesn’t advance the plot but is mesmerizing in its details and weirdness.  And I have to say that reading it this time, I was completely caught up in the way the narrative was structured.  It builds and wanes and builds some more and it keeps getting more and more intense.  I felt like I was in that bar, the room dark and absorbing, totally eavesdropping on this quiet moment.  And then suddenly when the story comes to a rather unceremonious end a few paragraphs before the end, it was like the lights went on and I was snapped out of the bar–the story had sucked me in that much.  And that’s why I love DFW’s writing.

This section is set during Happy Hour at Meibeyer’s. Meibeyer’s s just one of the bars that the examiners go to.  And their happy hour lasts exactly sixty minutes and drink specials are indexed to the cost of gasoline.  Different examiners go to different bars, but many come here.  And we see a number of them: Steve and Tiny Geach are often here, as are heterosexual singles like Robby van Noght and Gerry Moeller.  Harriet Candelaria come but leaves whenever Beth Rath brings Meredith Rand.  There’s also Chris Acquistispace, Russel Nugent (whose sister does the Exorcist impression in §32) Dave Witkiewicz, Joe Biron-Maint, Nancy Johnson, Chahla (‘The Iranian Crisis’) Neti-Neti, Howard Shearwater, Frank Brown, Frank Friedwald, and Frank DeChellis.  Also Dale Gatstine, who sometimes brings a date and Keith Sabusawa who often brings Shane (‘Mr.X’ ) Drinion.  Chris Fogle and Herb Dritz come about half the time but Chris Ten Ecyk and ‘Second Knuckle’ Bob McKenize come like clockwork.  R.L. Keck and Thomas Bondurant usually come.  Toni Ware and Beth Rath nearly always stop by.  I loved seeing so many familiar names in this introductory part.

Then we get into a lengthy description of Meredith Rand.  She usually comes only if her husband is working or occupied.  She gets a ride home from Beth Rath unless her husband is coming to pick her up (which he does often).  She is wrist-bitingly attractive and has the effect on men as to make them pretty much useless when it come to talking to her.  The men become very self-conscious around her (examples are very funny and affect Meredith differently).  While the women react either by shrinking in her presence (like Enid Welch and Rachel Robbie Towne) or with aggressive sighs and departures (like Harriet Candelaria).

Only Shane Drinion seems unaffected by her.  He seems to be possibly the dullest human being currently alive.  He sits quietly and self-contained, hand around his drink, observing without comment . He is expressionless except to respond to a joke (not told to him) by smiling briefly.  But his expressionlessness is not catatonic, he watches the speaker very carefully, giving his complete attention.  He seems to be easy or good to talk to “which is an attribute for which there is no good single word in English” (449). Bob McKenize and Chuck Ten Eyck have given him the name ‘Mr. X’ short for Mr. Excitement.

With that setup, we see that Meredith Rand and Mr. X are alone at a table together.  Their initial small talk shows how forced and literal Mr. X is, and it’s very funny as he can’t decide if he likes or dislikes his work, it’s just what he does.  She says that he interests her.  Drinion’s reply: “It’s a compliment that you find me of interest.”  She talks about how he doesn’t seem to come off as intimidated by her, unlike some of the others.  He agrees.  He feels some what asexual, and is not embarrassed by this.  She asks if he knows why Bob McKenzie is called “Second Knuckle,” he admits he does not.   There follows an interesting conversation with someone who is very literal, not afraid to say exactly what he thinks (and yes I have thought of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, but Drinion doesn’t have the ego).  She asks him several questions that have fairly obvious follow-up implications, but he answers minimally–she’s unsure whether he doesn’t say more because he assumes she knows the answers or because he is so literal that he only answers exactly what she asks him.

Interestingly Meredith Rand outranks Drinion.  She is a GS-10 (the only GS-10 I can remember seeing) and he is a GS-9, despite that fact that he is “several orders of magnitude more effective than Rand as an examiner” (458).  But utility examiners have a hard time getting promoted, primarily because they get transferred so much they don’t make an impression on anyone.

Rand’s reputation is that she is pretty but a serious bore, “just won’t shut up if you get her started” (489). One of the examiners’ complaints is that she “goes off on these long stories but at some point loses the thread and it’s nearly impossible not to drift off or zone out when you can’t understand what the hell she’s getting at anymore” (495).  [This of course seems to be the case, although I found it pretty engaging].  She talks about being pretty—how it is a form of power because people are in awe of you, but the power is limited because it requires other people to tell you that you are pretty—it’s kind of a trap, especially when you begin to think that people only like you because you are pretty.  She reveals that she was always aware of her prettiness, and that she was one of the foxes at her Catholic high school.  There is a footnote (with an asterisk rather than a number, which is unusual) that talks about how pretty Rand was even when talking about this subject.  This makes me wonder who the narrator is meant to be.

Then she begins her “sad story” about how she met her husband.  She says that he has cardiomyopathy, and that he had it when she first met him (when she was 17).  The sad story lasts for the bulk of this section (some 40 pages).  I’m not going to detail it because for the most part it is one long story about how she met her husband, but I’ll put in the highlights.

She was at Zeller, a mental health center, for three and a half weeks because she was a cutter. “It felt good. It was creepy and I knew it couldn’t be good if I was so secret and creepy about it” (471).

She learned (with help from her future husband) that it wasn’t important to know why she did it, it was just important to stop. She says she hated the doctors there because they were all more interested in the case than in you…in solving the problem, rather than helping the person.

At some point as the story grows more intense, Drinion begins to float off of his chair.   This is the supernatural aspect of the story that is told so matter of factly.  She thinks that maybe he is sitting up straighter, but he is definitely floating.  And he doesn’t realize it because it only happens when he is completely focused on something:

One night someone comes into the office and sees Drinion floating upside down over his desk with his eyes glued to a complex return, Drinion himself unaware of the levitating thing by definition, since it is only when his attention is completely on something else that the levitation happens (485).

She finally gets to her husband to be, Ed Rand.  He wasn’t handsome at all (the other girls called him the corpse), and he was very skinny, his keys seemed to weigh more than him. He worked on the floor dressed in a white staff coat and as sweater.  Although he was more like a security guard, he picked certain people and made it a point to talk to them, and he was hard to resist. He started talking to her in the pink room (Baker-Miller pink because pink was determined to be soothing).  He would talk to her about herself.  Drinion asks if that made her mad, but she says that everything he said was right—he said stuff about her that nobody else knew.

Drinion assumes that this is why she fell for the man, because he comforted her.  Rand is offended that it’s the “oldest story in the book.”   They talked a lot–he had to make rounds from time to time but his cardiomyopathy made it hard for him to get around. So she would often be left by herself for a while.  Eventually people started noticing how much time they were spending together and he got in a bit of trouble. But she really started to trust him, to care for him. Except when his solution was that she needed simply to grow up. That she was immature.  He said that that is everyone’s core problem.  She was pissed by that answer.

And then he went into the hospital for his heart and she feared she’d never see him again.  During he end of the story she builds up this into a major moment of panic: “I felt like in reality he was just what he was saying was impossible and childish, he was exactly the other person he was saying I’d never really find. I felt like he loved me” (507).  And as Drinion asks if they were able to see each other after she was let out, the air totally comes crashing out of the story.

And I imagine Drinion crashing to his chair, when he says “But you’ve spent time describing the conflict between confessing love and your real motives and how upset and uncomfortable you were at the prospect of not seeing him again.”  And she replies: “I was seventeen, fro Christ’s sake I was a drama queen.  They take me home.  I look in the phone book, and he’s right thee in the phone book. His apartment building was like ten minutes from my house.” (509).

 

There’s an observation that people get institutionalized because they are fragile when they are put in the system and they eventually become crazy from being there so long.  And I feel like DFW really empathized with people like this.

 

 

§47

As with last week, this week ends with Toni Ware.  She stands at a pay phone in a convenience store lot.  Bondurant called stores like this ramp tumors.

She likes to come in under the radar.  She has six bricks with postage paid cards from different marketers attached to them (ha).  She is able to speak in several different, convincing voices, creating a  false image every time she speaks.   She was placing a phone order for copper tubing (three at the base would do for any tree–[is she spoiling loggers?]).  Toni has twice helped to investigate this particular store called QWIK ‘N’ EZ [I have the idea that DFW picked this name because he hated the misspellings]. They did a phenomenal cash business and have been tagged by the local DIF function every year.  But they were always clean.

At home Toni had two phone lines and a mobile phone and two office patch codes.

In the store, Toni affects the counter girl’s accent and cadence–“The assumption that everyone else is like you.  The disease of consumer capitalism.  The complacent solipsism” (514).

Toni paid and left.  Then she went around to the back of the store and proceeded to dig into her nostril with a Kleenex and removed some bloody snot which she places it on her coat (she was only doing this to pass the time while her hardware order was being assembled, by the way).  She walks into the back storeroom, pale and crying.  She tells the manager that this disgusting thing (and it was “a mucal clot of clock-stopping horror” (515)) on the coat that she had “saved for months to get-a coat she could be proud to take her babies to church in” (516) was placed there by the cashier.  But she’d always gotten good value at the KWIK ‘n’ EZ and she hated to report that the cashier had done this to her–that she had reached into her nose and wiped this thing on her coat for no reason.  But how could she not say something?

And while the manager goes to the front to confront the cashier, Toni peels off heading to a mailbox.

§ § § § § § § § § § § §

This Toni Ware story is much funnier than the previous one.  But I wrote “What?!” in the margin by this crazy bit of subterfuge.  It seems like it is targeted at the store because they keep passing inspection, but it ultimately just seems like she does it because she is, as the coworkers said last week, “do not mess with this girl; this girl is damaged goods.”  And of course the Meredith Rand story is a little crazy too.  People have said that DFW had trouble writing female characters, which I don’t entirely agree with.  I’m more inclined to think of this as something of an old boys unenlightened network, where coworkers (and narrators) are incapable of seeing their female coworkers as anything but crazy.  Of course, that doesn’t explain Toni Ware, as she is cleared messed up.  Both of these women are compelling though (for very different reasons) and it’s yet another reason I’m bummed this story wasn’t finished because I want to know a lot more about Toni in the present, and I want to know a bit more about Meredith at home.

We come very rapidly to the end of the book now (and I feel like it is just starting to kick into high gear.  I know that DFW is partial to ending his books in unexpected ways, but I can’t help but feel he was planning to write a lot more about some of these characters.