Pages 169–171

Winter, B.S. 1960 — a father's monologue · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

A dateline — 4 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment — and a short, two-stop scene. Pemulis, fresh from a transaction, rides a deliberately pointless loop of Boston buses and trains to shake any conceivable tail, then drives the communal tow truck home to E.T.A. with something packed in his hat's detachable lining. Mid-drive the narration pulls over for a two-paragraph pharmacology monograph on what he's carrying, a compound called DMZ; then the scene hands off to Hal, waiting by the phone in his room. It ends on a code phrase you already know.

Terms, in order of appearance

Mr. Howell hat (p. 169) — real reference: Thurston Howell III, the yacht-capped millionaire castaway on Gilligan's Island.
'drines (p. 169) — argot: amphetamines.
the Lung (p. 170) — E.T.A.'s inflatable all-weather dome, raised over Courts 16–32 each winter (first rigged on p. 52).
the p. 170 drug alphabet (p. 170) — mescaline, MDMA, DMT, psilocybin, etc.: all real compounds; endnote 56 sizes DMZ against them.
Sandoz (p. 170) — real Swiss pharmaceutical firm where LSD was in fact first synthesized, by accident, futzing with ergot fungi.
Watts / Leary / Millbrook (p. 170) — real people and place: pop-Zen lecturer Alan Watts; LSD evangelist Timothy Leary; Leary's actual utopian colony in Millbrook, NY — here "on what is now Canadian soil."
WYYY-109 (p. 170) — M.I.T.'s student radio station; 109 really is prime, sitting just above the real FM band's top.
Riverside Hamlet (p. 171) — real one-volume scholarly Shakespeare edition.
Tilden On Spin (p. 171) — Bill Tilden: real 1930s tennis champion, author of stroke-mechanics classics.
levirate (p. 171) — real anthropological term: a man who marries his dead brother's widow.

After you read: three things

1. The monograph is a warning label (p. 170). DMZ isn't described as another psychedelic: its effects are "temporally-cerebral and almost ontological" — it alters your felt relation to the flow of time — and its reputation is "the single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube." The chemist who accidentally made it (the same real Sandoz chemist who stumbled on LSD) retired into "serious unblinking wall-watching." Its street name, Madame Psychosis, is borrowed from an M.I.T. radio personality — the personality herself is new here, though endnote-readers have seen the name before, as the performer credited across J.O.I.'s films in the Filmography (endnote 24, called out back on p. 64). And note the aside: Millbrook, NY now sits "on what is now Canadian soil" — the pp. 92–93 rearrangement again, dropped in passing.

2. Count the casuals (p. 171). Hal waits for the call "very casually… in a very casual posture" — phone pre-positioned, props arranged, letting it ring three times "like a girl at home on Saturday night." The narrator's repeated casual is the tell: nothing about this wait is casual. Worth registering what that says about Hal and this particular substance.

3. Look at the wall over his chair. Hal sits holding the Hamlet he's promised to help Mario adapt, "partly under" a print titled Consummation of the Levirates — levirate: brother marries dead brother's widow — which is also, more or less, the plot crime of the play in his lap. The set-dressing is doing quiet work; the placing is yours.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.