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May
29, 2003
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May
31, 2003
Gravity's Endzone
Fan Mail from
Pynchon
by ADAM ENGEL
I'm bad. Bad to the bone-marrow. B-b-b-bad.
Nevertheless - and how's this for "Un-American"
sour grapes? - THE MAN is so deep inside my head I can't even
croak-out without melodrama, without conjuring up some fantasy
scene outta one of HIS TV shows. True, I haven't watched television
regularly since I was about fifteen, but those first fifteen
are formative years. While Europeans my age were learning languages
and culture, there I was - and I sure wasn't alone -
watching "Three's Company"
and "Happy Days," so now I can't even check out with
dignity. My head's full of sentimental romantic fascist crap.
It's an insult to humanity, a fart in the face of life itself.
Enough to drive a man mad. For instance, I'm thinking
(we-ell maybe not exactly)
wild west shoot'em-up war movie, I'm
the hero saves the day, sleeps with all three Andrews Sisters,
rolls mean old Mr. Potter off a cliff, smiles and waves for the
camera for viewers of the FUTURE (uh...that's probably you)...
but possibly
me and those women from that "Friends"
show up all night talking about life and love and sex and death
and whatever minor plot twists they typically cram into a twenty-minute
episode and I won't have sex with any of them we'll decide we're
too vulnerable or some shit like that and it would ruin our friendship
or god knows what perversities they indulge in - really, I've
seen snatches (heh, heh) of that sit-glum while passing in and
out of television blue-lit rooms: their spiel is sicker than
de Sade's, who at least wrote about HUMAN stuff
or
I hit the game-winning HOME RUN match
set love (or whatever they do in tennis) forty yard serpentine
rush to the end zone TOUCHDOWN
but really more like
(Zee Plane! Zee Plane!)
Thomas Pynchon reads Counter Punch. Why
not? If he's gonna read anything, it'd be CP, eh? So Pynchon
writes to me:
"Really dig your stuff. Keep cool,
but care.
Best,
Tommy Boy"
And for a moment I believe it. It's like
when some guy offered the Beatles $50 million to reunite for
one concert tour or something like that when I was fourteen,
or when I went to visit Keats' house on my first and only trip
to England. Only, the Beatles didn't get back together, and Keats'
house was "closed for renovation we regret any inconvenience,"
and that's the way it goes. Then again, there was that one Sunday
in the early 70's when Charles M. Schultz accidentally put a
real phone number in one of Lucy's cartoon bubbles and millions
of readers flooded the lines - "Hello, is Lucy there, what
about Linus?" - and the flesh-and-blood people who actually
"possessed" that seven digit code had their phones
ring-ringing off the walls all day, and when they answered there
was a nano-second pause on the other end, a pause of, I don't
know, hope maybe? That maybe, maybe, this could be, like, real?
But nothing in America is real, is it? Yeah, yeah, I know: Death
and Taxes. Fuck 'em both.
So I get this email from <Kenosha.Kid@blicero.gov>
and after I get over that cocaine rush of hope and excitement
I fall deep into cocaine blues. Dark moon reality cold-clocks
me upside the head.
I write back,
"Whoever you are, thanks for the
lift. But, as Nancy said, "Say No to Drugs." Too old
- really - to deal with this kind of game. I'm sure the real
TP would appreciate the humor."
Then he writes back,
"No, really, really. I AM Thomas
Pynchon."
And since I happen to know a guy who
not only knows TP's wife, but worked on some kind of digital
literacy program where TP's kid went to grade school, I write
back,
"If you're Tom Pynchon, ask your
wife, or your son, who Kevin Kanarek is."
And he write back and tells me. Not only
that, he invites me to lunch.
"A-and bring Kevin along too, if
you want," he adds.
The fantasy progresses to me and Tom
becoming pals. He encourages me to work on a book and gets me
an advance and I go into remission just long enough to write
the book, and Pynchon and Don Delillo and Ishmael Reed and Robert
Coover write rave reviews, and it sells, and I have some money
to leave behind for my wife and dog and a legacy for the readers
of "The Imperator," the Jericho Senior High School
year book, 1983 (why do I still want to impress those people?).
Yeah, well. Back on earth...
I actually was a celebrity a couple of
weeks ago, when I went to the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside D.C. Not only had I actually
lived to the ripe old age of 38 (so far) with Diamond-Blackfan
Anemia, but in 1966 or so, the infant Adam Engel was actually
one of the first to receive and respond to the Prednisone treatment
by THE Dr. Diamond himself. Needless to say, the NIH wants me
to undergo some of their test treatments (they call them "Protocols")
with nasty drugs - For FREE! - so if one of them does the trick
the government can give it away to some drug company which will
charge me two billion dollars to use the "treatment"
if I'm still alive two years from now. Just call me Slothrop.
And don't call the NIH at all.
But why this need for the game-winning
home-run? The Super bowl-winning touchdown and spike in the End
Zone, all cameras upon me? I thought I would have grown out of
it by now. No, that's a lie. I thought I would have done something
of, for lack of a better word, VALUE, by now, and that thing,
a book or something, would have allowed me to grow beyond the
tired sports metaphor and die in peace.
But Americans never die in peace. Most
of them, at any rate. They're too burdened with all the shit
they were told they were supposed to do but never did and probably
never could. They're too guilty, too ashamed to die.
Like in that book, "A Fan's Notes,"
by Frederick Exeley. Guy can't live his life cause he's not Frank
Gifford. Never gonna make that game-winning touch down for the
New York Giants his father so adored. No spike and dance in the
End Zone. Just booze, cigarettes, anxiety, depression, roast
beef, meaningless labor, death. Like Daddy.
So it was Daddy's fault all along! Then
again, who's Daddy, usually, but another incarnation of THE MAN?
A mannequin with tapes in his head. DVDs, now. Microchips. Daddy
gone digital.
Terrible, but true: most people you meet,
particularly in a "professional" capacity, are recorders,
digitized to interface in real time, albeit somewhat limited
by the unfortunate sloppiness of wet-ware. Meat-puppets fronting
for THE MAN. Here's a fun experiment: watch a night of TV News,
if you can stand it, then go around asking people, particularly
"professionals" in suits, official-looking coats, arm-bands,
uniforms, funny hats etc., what they think "about stuff."
You'll get minor variations on what you heard and saw the night
before. Maybe a harsh opinion or two added courtesy the NY POST
or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or whoever. Like that kid's
game, "Telephone."
After all, it was THE MAN, or his white-coated
representatives, who condemned me to death. Tell you the truth,
I don't feel THAT bad. They tried the same thing with Pynchon's
Tyrone Slothrop, but he escaped, sort of. Why not me? Is it not
my right as a "free American citizen" to skeedaddle
when the Reaper (or THE MAN) comes a knock, knock, knockin on
my door? Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin, I say. Go away.
Piss off. Die, Death, and yer little MAN too.
Okay. It's settled, then. "I'll
die on my own time," as my friend, Paul, said to THE MAN's
white-coated toadies when given a similar prognosis almost a
decade ago.
Now, it's one thing to cheat Death, but
THE MAN is a bit more wily and cruel. How to escape the corny,
mawkish scenes THE MAN put in my head, the sentimentality and
illusions? Don't think they're harmless fun, those corny greeting
cards and cliches. Out of such cerebral dysentery patriots, Liberals
and talk-show hosts are made. False feeling. The soap operas
and sticky sweet flash-backs (often of experiences you've never
actually had) the MAN and his Media slather all over your brain
like Aunt Jemima's-plastic pancake syrup. Looka dat nice smiling
auntie Jemima (a bit updated: thinner, especially the nose and
lips; capped teeth; cleaner kerchief; lighter hue) jest so happy
to be cooking home style Frankenfood for THE MAN, pouring his
sticky brown maple-flavored lab-fresh chemo-spunk all over your
frozen waffles.
That's the real sickness anyway...all
the rest is just biology.
Adam Engel
can be reached at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net.
But Death be not SPAM. He has your IP number, Death, so don't
try any of those cute aliases like light@tunnel.org or gotcha@butterfly.net
It's "Block Sender," all the way, dig? Anything You
send gets the bum's rush straight to Engel's "Delete"
file.
Today's
Features
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Jason
Leopold
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
US Plans Overthrow of Iran Regime
Ron
Jacobs
Popular Uprising, Inc.
Michelle
Ciaccorra
Bush's Nuclear Policy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Yves Engler
The Economics of Health Care in
America: Pay More to Die Sooner
Kimberly
Blaker
Vouchers for Jesus
Harry
Browne
Stakeknife: Britain's Army Spy at
the Top of the IRA
Stew
Albert
Cops of the World
Steve Perry
Greens 04: In or Out?
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