notes from ??/??/1978, 10/5/79, 10/23/??? characters ---------- Tyrone Slothrop = Typhoon Slapstick Pirate Prentiss = Pilot Pontius Roger Mexico = Wilco Canada Mucker-Maffick = Teetotaler Magic-Muffin Pointsman = Pissant Teddy Bloat = Teddy Boar Katje = Destiny Blicero = Canefield Mondaugen = Ablefield Pokler = Piglet Enzian = TNT der Springer = Gringo del Gato Schwarzcommando = S## Patrol Schwarzgerat = S## Gizmo = S###amacallit Tchitcherine = ??? Mottos for Manic-Depressives ---------------------------- 1. You get strapped in; somebody else pushes the buttons. 2. You may never write an equation for the function, but but you can determine at any point if its slope is positive or negative. 3. The ecstasy of the highs in inversely proportional to the bearability of the lows. 4. If you're sampling the wrong variables, it doesn't matter what the values are. outline -------
"Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down? That's not my department says Werner von Braun."A shrieking comes around the tracks. Of course it is far too late to turn back now. One may offer resistance, cry to the heavens (or the ride operators) for release, but it is all only melodrama. Icing on the cake. The meat in the pie, however, is total surrender. Surrender to the cascading lights, the clackety-clack of the wheels, the adrenaline pulse pounding in your temples and the battery acid turning in your stomach. Surrender to the brutality, the emotionless certainty of the next turn...— Tom Lehrer
Pilot has been receiving other people's psychic pollution again. He picks it up on his weather radio as he flies low over the northern coasts of Monterey Bay, buzzing the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk to study the Sunday crowds and traffic flow patterns. Interesting, the bottlenecks of hot cars, immobilized by four way stops and left turn lanes. A limiting factor to the gushing river of disposable income funneling into Canefield's cashier booths, overflowing from the valleys of boredom on the other side of The Hill. Sometime Pilot has dreamed of the expedient, dynamite on Highway 17. Keep the dollars in Santa Carla County, at Marionette's Great America, where they belong. Not flung insanely into Canefield's money milker; his ### outfit with its cigarette butts and Rococo rooflines splattered with pigeon shit. But Pilot follow his orders: observe and note, nothing more. Marionette's will be ruthless, no mistake about that, but only in its overall plan. The creatures feeding this machine must be well-behaved, like Walt's human zombies in the Orange Counties of California and Florida. Yes, thinks Pilot. The model of effectiveness. The All American look, in double knits and nametags, led by the master zombie, with the ghost at the top. The spirit of the Patron Saint, hovering like St. Elmo's Fire six inches (or so) above the top spire — a lightning rod, no less, against tropical storms — of Cinderella's Castle.
One other detail Pilot notes: the particular arrangement this Sunday afternoon of nautical flags flying from the main Casino's five flagpoles. A code no doubt. They must have spies everywhere, or so thinks Slapstick as he climbs the five flights of stairs to his cubicle in the TIT building. Marionette's has leased the fifth floor of this San Jose office building, short on office space it seems, for the army of experts it has pitted against Canefield's men. And their own private elevator, programmed to stop only to stop at floors "5" and "L." But Slapstick doesn't like the elevators, they make him nauseous.
"Hello Typhoon," says a voice, as Slapstick emerges from the stairwell door. He jumps with surprise, and feels the butterflies rising again in his poor, beleaguered esophagus. But a deep breath breath and he's alright again, it's only Dodger Canadian, the electronics engineer, leaning against the water cooler and grinning.
"Incapacitated again?" asks Dodger.
"No, not really," says Slapstick, wiping beads of perspiration from his flabby jowls. "Just not taking any chances."
"Oh, well if you were," Dodger pauses to fish a small paper cylinder out of his pocket, "Id offer you this."
"What is it?" asks Slapstick, taking the bait.
"A capacitor."
As he makes his way down the fluorescent corridor to his office door, Slapstick still hears Dodger's peals of laughter, until they are muffled by the soundproof door he closes behind himself.
Elsewhere in the building Pissant, the behavioral psychologist, is listening to a CB radio with scrambler, over earphone, and taking notes on a yellow legal pad: "blue over white" he says as he jots, "white over green, blue over red, uh huh..." He doesn't hear Dodger Canadian come in. "Good, good, that's very reinforcing. Over."
While Pissant is talking, Dodger takes the pencil from behind his ear and scrawls on the legal pad, "Typhoon took the stairs today."
"Ten-four, we gone," barks Pissant, and snaps off the transceiver. He sees Canadian's scrawl and looks up, shaking his head. "It's your ass on the line, you know."
"I know." Dodger is grinning. "I tell you, Doc, the new fail-safe system is fool-proof!"
Pissant turns his gaze to the green-tinted window looking out across the Santa Clara Valley. Through the smog, to the northwest, he can barely make out the graceless spiral of the double loop-the-loop — the Great American Institution — the penultimate roller coaster. Five derailings in two years, thinks Pissant. Not so good at all. And the Big Dipper in Santa Cruz hasn't jumped its tracks once in fifty-four years. "I might find it easier to believe you," he sighs, "if you didn't have that shit-eating grin."
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"Canfield's on the walk!" The muffled shout is stage-whispered from
ride operator to ride operator. Spines snap to attention; feet
are planted squarely on the pavement. Cashiers phone warnings to
the next booths down the boardwalk. A burly black youth in blue unitog
hurries back to Autorama, his fifteen minute break long over, and
brings with him news. Canefield stalks the walk. When the engineer
on the Cave Train is told, he sounds the standard warning — three
short whistles and one long — so that all may know from the Log Flume
to the Arctic Flyer.
The old man chuckles. Of course he knows the signal, too. He knows they know he's coming. And he sees the ripples of rigidity that proceeds before him as he puts one brown shoe in front of the other, lazily glancing from side to side at the gaily painted concessions and faded canvas fog curtains, knowing that his eyes are invisible behind the almost black lensed jeweler's glasses he never removes. Canefield's head, white haired and age spotted, is held aloft proudly as he shuffles along the gummy, grey pavement, surveying his domain. He remembers when the walk was once of board, sea-sprayed and sun bleached, a splintery wonderland long ago cemented over.
But a few boards remain, even now in 1978, when an entire amusement complex like Marionette's can be assembled practically overnight from prestressed steel-reinforced concrete and injected molded plastic; even now a few boards from the original 1907 boardwalk remain visible, where the Trabant once stood, next to the paint-chipped steel foundation of the Ferris Wheel, where Wolfgang Leader sits in a yellow hard hat waiting for the two and a half minute timer to stop as his ride slowly revolves like some great, rusted Hindu prayer wheel, each rivet standing for a mantra in the great cycle of death and rebirth. He, too, wears the standard blue unitog, embellished with a red-and-yellow racing stripe and personalized nametag: "Santa Cruz Boardwalk" it says in red-on-white, and below, in white-on-red, "WOLFGANG."
Not far from "the wheel," as the operators insist on calling it, a blue and white wooden sign hangs on a pillar, directing one down the alleyway between Pokerino and the building which once sheltered the old salt water "plunge" (long ago filled with cement on account of irreparable cracks and turned into an indoor miniature golf course) ... down this alley to the operations office, where even now the fate of "the wheel" hangs in the balance, awaiting Canefield's return.
"What more can they do to us?" Ablefield wants to know. Here sits the right hand man, pounding his right hand on the formica desktop of the company conference room. "First it was the inter-county travel tax, then the stink about the nuclear power plant in Davenport — they're still pushing to make us close the Log Flume because it crosses the Southern Pacific right-of-way — and then there was that goddamn cloud seeding! Thank heaven that backfired on 'em..."
Canefield Junior, the crew-cutted All-American boss' son, part owner since Dad gave him stock as a wedding present and heir to the sixty-three year old Beachside Company, looks worried. And he should be. It has happened before, in in 1912 the original builders of this seaside playland got taken to the cleaners, big. It was in the the wake of that washup that the old man stepped; now, perhaps seventy million dollars in paper profits later, he, too, is taking a fall. Canefield Jr. has never had to be ruthless before (if we are permitted to discount the petty indignities to fifteen-year-old dime toss employees) and he worries that it may be too late to learn. While Ablefield mutters to himself, nervously tugging his suspenders and cursing the juggernaut of progress that has pitted them all against a multi-national behemoth, Canefiled Jr. is doodling on a scratch pad with a gnawed-on yellow number two pencil. He draws a hasty self-portrait: eyes, nose, ears, crewcut, square jaw, loosened necktie and unbuttoned shirt collar... and then draws a circle, square in front of his likeness, blacks it in, leaving a smaller circle of white in which to carefully inscribe a numeral eight.
"Scratch that," says Pissant impatiently.
"People are going to have to make themselves predictable or the machines will get angry and kill them."— Gregory Bateson
- Harley ??? - We Await Restlessly Pynchon's Sequel (W.A.R.P.S.) - Pissant Understands Secret Habits (P.U.S.H.) - Pissant Understands Lustful Longings (P.U.L.L.) - Every Xray Invites Tumors (E.X.I.T.)
"They don't keep this room so tidy as the other one."— Alice upon entering the Looking Glass
- "rosebud" Canefield's last words - pink carnation / "ping" carnies shun / "p" incarnation (there is no p...)- - ### ### dipper crew, #########, Ping OR Larry Tzu - ticket number 00000 fallacy Labor Day - Glitter Trippy - kid w/ pet rock - teddy bear: Clodney - flashback ala "Day for Nite" - "A Pynchon Thyme..."
"Huh?"— Gerald Ford
- flashback to 00000 Canefield/Glycerine (Night Rho) - Katydid - railroad curve approximated by f(x) = x^3 - derail f (???) collision with nuke train - log flume hold "come on!" Wed Mar 26 16:55:36 PDT 2025