The self-styled "Viking": beauty, vanity, Pledge, and the Phoneless-Cord fortune

texture · STANDING

• When: STANDING — ongoing physical and social identity across the whole stretch we see
• What: Freer is the Academy's beauty: high hard white-blond hair (it reminds Hal of frozen surf), an extremely muscular neck and lower jaw with protrusive gonions that make his upper face look tapered and sly, eyes with a "protrusive wideness" that (per Axford) make him always look like he's getting shocked or throttled, and superb latissimal definition that looks especially good in the shirtless calfskin vest he favors after weights. The beauty is worked at: he is complexion-obsessed, a "profligate Pledge-user" whose "Nordicular skin that peels instead of tanning" is mottled from repeated applications and defoliations of Lemon Pledge, and he is constantly at the mirror — grooming his hair, checking his jaw in the side-mirrors, watching himself walk. He tries to get people to call him "The Viking," but the moniker is his own invention: nobody else uses it, and the campaign is regarded as a classic pathetic Freer-type move (the narration's "so-called 'Viking'" scare-quotes track this). Gear: Fox sticks and both Adidas and Reebok, until one of the two companies' NNE reps catches on. Background: inland Maryland, a nouveau-riche family whose Amway business hit big on his now-deceased father's Pet-Rockish novelty, "the so-called Phoneless Cord," the windfall shrewdly invested.