Pynchon Heights
On vertigo, deliveries, and reading over the years.
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1.
Years and years ago I was watching that Harrison Ford movie Frantic with my then-girlfriend Linda when she started getting antsy; a sort of writhy restless hip action, a squeezing of hand; I thought she was maybe turned on or wanting to poop and then with a noise more angry than hurting she snapped forward at the waist and whipped her shoes off and revealed her feet had these major arthritic twists.
She started strangling them back into shape with what was clearly a practiced handling.
I paused the movie on a shot of Harrison Ford scaling a Parisian rooftop.
Linda glanced at it and then shut her eyes, turned her head, kept massaging her feet and explained that she’s not scared of heights, out in the world, but she gets wicked vertigo whenever she sees heights being dramatized in movies. She said that her vertigo manifests as sudden visceral cramps in her feet. More specifically: the base of her big toe slides underneath the other toes like a tectonic plate and then curls down Grinchy til she claws it back into place.
When she’d gotten her feet back to shape she scooted back onto the couch and I asked if she wanted to watch something else and she said, “No,” squinty, breathing through her teeth, nodding at the screen, “lemme see this guy fall.”
2.
Occasionally I’ll deliver an Uber Eats order to a luxury building. The lobby’s all marble floors and cathedral ceilings and tight leather furniture with laminated signage indicating BATHROOM NOT FOR DRIVERS and DRIVERS DO NOT SIT.
Approach the concierge and they’ll ask unsmiling where I’m headed (20th floor) and what I’m delivering (food) and who’s it for (Rachel) what service it’s from (Uber Eats). They’ll take my license and write down some info and occasionally they’ll ask me to stand against a wall so they can take a photo and log the hour. One time I was asked to empty my pockets and as I piled the breathmints and keys and two pens and wallet on the marble counter I couldn’t help think that maybe someday, if I work real hard and don’t get tattoos, I might be so protected from the Help.
Eventually they direct me to a specific high-tech elevator that has no buttons. No need! The concierge will decide where you go because, in a classic twist, you are now the thing inside a box, being delivered to the customer’s door.
3.
I ride that gaspy high-speed lift for ten seconds and when the doors open, I’m outside.
It’s an open-air walkway. Twenty stories in the sky. Apartment doors on one side and Miami (way down below) on the other. The wind is coldish up here and intimate. Flirts your hair. Tongue in your ear. Purring such classics as “Whish” and “Whoosh” and “Go ‘Head Jump”.
4.
I was reading Fall and Rise, a book about 9/11, and some of the most upsetting chapters are about the “jumpers”: people on the upper floors of the World Trade Center who decided to go out the window instead of burn.
While reading one of those chapters, I got curious. I put the book down. I went to Google and typed “9/11 jumpers” and then waited. Contended with my guilt. Then I added, “remains.”
I was wondering what a person looks like after a 100-story fall.
There were two or three images, kinda vague: a loafer with a shin jutting out, some puddled viscera in a shirt…
I put my phone down and with my thumbs still Wet from the internet I anointed my brow with shame and returned to the book and that’s where I learned why there aren’t many photos of jumpers’ remains:
Jumping from the 100th floor of the World Trade Center, on a breezy day, you were likelier to fall 50 or 75 stories down and hit your death on the roof of a neighboring high-rise.
5.
Bret Easton Ellis has been saying all year on his podcast that he re-read Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time in 40 years and it’s been one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of his life.
I read Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time two years ago and thought it was beautiful, funny, exciting but way over-my-head.
Ellis is reading his paperback from college. Even with the help of a professor and a class of readers he says, looking back, he was probably too young for it.
I was 32 but maybe that was also the case for me.
6.
Sometimes looking at true-crime stuff (I think 9/11 books straddle the fence between historical and true-crime) feels illicit. Looking at crime scene photos, hearing 911 calls. You’re seeing the remnants of the worst/final moment of someone’s life — and for what? Cuz your curious?
It’s a big industry now and plenty of people who will confirm there’s nothing wrong with it. That these stories are true and you’d just as well know them.
But even if you make peace with the ethics of it you can find your albatross this way: the images you put in your head don’t go anywhere.
And hence, when I’m flat and damp and tremply on Level 22 of a Miami Beach highrise, with paradise flayed and sunbuttered before me, it’s hard not to think of these $75 non-slip Skecher sneakers I’m wearing, and how my shins will look jutting up from them, til maybe a coroner peels them off and finds, inside, my gnarled feet, cramped with empathy, during the fall.
7.
I’m doing research for an article about Thomas Pynchon and came across his 1966 contribution to The New York Times Book Review:
In a recent letter to the editor, Romain Gary asserts that I took the name “Genghis Cohen” from a novel of his to use in a novel of mine, The Crying of Lot 49. Mr. Gary is totally in error. I took the name Genghis Cohen from the name of Genghis Khan (1162-1227), the well-known Mongol warrior and statesman.
In other words: “Chill out, Gary. There’s enough for everyone.”
8.
Norman Mailer’s assistant, in the last few years of his life, was a guy named Dwayne Raymond who went on to write a very sweet memoir about their time together. Raymond tells an anecdote: one morning he was sitting at the breakfast table and mentioned that he tried reading Mailer’s 1,000-page CIA epic, Harlot’s Ghost, but the book went over his head.
Mailer said, “You were probably too young.”
Raymond said, “I was 30.”
Mailer nodded over his grapefruit. No smile. “Like I said.”
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I visited the 9/11 museum last time I was in NYC last year. Hadn't been to the city in about 20 years.
Nothing bothered me more than the photos of eye witnesses at the entrance. Just close ups of them from old video footage and their facial reactions. The shock and terror in their faces...
It brought me to tears and affected me in a way nothing else in the museum did .
I've read GR twice (once in college, once a couple of years ago), and it was better a couple of years ago. In college I read it with the companion thing that explained a lot of the references, summarized the plot, and I think that was fine. I read it without the companion the second time (I think? I don't totally remember) and just...skipped parts I didn't like, and that worked better. I wanted to understand it too much the first time.
You're right to connect it to the death drive and all of this morbid stuff. It's a funny book that's all about how western civilization wants to kill itself. It feels much more pessimistic than his later stuff. I think Mason and Dixon is up your alley. It was recommended to me by this insanely burned out urban school teacher when I was 22. I was a baby teacher and I think we were talking about what we were reading and I mentioned I was going back to Lot 49 after reading GR in college and he just got this big smile on his face because I don't think ANY of the other teachers in our building were reading those kind of books and he asked if I'd read M&D and I said no, only GR and Lot 49, and he told me I had to read all of them and come back to him, but M&D was his favorite one. And I agree with him!
Anyway, a lot GR seems super Freudian in retrospect, especially influenced by "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and this whole idea of the death drive. A lot of this post feels death-drivey too---not a bad thing, just interesting! The idea of being disgusted and then internalizing that into this feeling of wanting to destroy yourself.