Michael Vick And The Crying Of Lot 49, by Rosicky Jones

I am in the middle of a bunch of books.  I start them, fall in love, and then work interjects and I have to cultivate a basic knowledge of emerging media or of the purchasing patterns of millennials.  Once I am done faking my way through a week’s worth of meaningless meetings to satiate some corporate want, I have forgotten why I ever fell in love with A Fan’s Notes in the first place.  And just like a whore capitalizing on the detachment of a married man, The Crying of Lot 49 catches my eye and winks at me from across the room freshly piquing my literary desires.

I was in bed with Pynchon when I realized why he was such a recluse – he was a horrible cuddler and he does not reciprocate – big no-no.  I decided that I needed the touch of a woman interspersed between my literary one-night-stands.

I drove to the bar and drank alone as I surveyed the scene.  There were a group of girls sitting near me, but big groups of girls are nearly impossible to infiltrate.  Group-think takes over creating a misandrist lynch mob whose ideologies fall blood curdlingly close to the Lorena Bobbitt zone.  Then I spotted a chubby girl in the corner. Well, spotted may not be accurate; I couldn’t miss her, she ate up the majority of my sight lines as she slurped her chocolate martini.  She would not make it onto my list, but I did debate throwing her into the “maybe” column.  I’ve never been with a heifer, but Luke tells me that the abuse society inflicts on the obese manifests itself as a complete lack of sexual inhibition and shame inside the bedroom.  As Luke and I had an in intense conversation, via texts, regarding the depths a bigger girl would go to please a man in bed I spotted my victim.  Two girls walked in and sat at the bar.  One of the girls was in her pajamas because she was only there as a conduit for the other girl to find a warm body for the night.  I made eye contact with my target and when I tried to wink I choked on my gin and tonic spitting a bit up and onto my shirt.  I was very embarrassed, but I had a mission.  A couple shots and one successful wink later had us making out in the parking lot.  As people passed us on their ways home a number of guys waved goodbye at my slutty paramour.  I began to wonder how many people had already been me.  I grew apoplectic and needed to flee the scene.  My friend Pinky, sensing the tumult in my loins called me, providing me an excuse to run away.

My paranoia only grew as I gave her a fake name and a fake phone number to type into her Blackberry.

I don’t think she bought it, because she gave me an indecipherable gaze.  I also don’t think she bought it because she called me on the spot so that I would have her number, and the call went to Bennigan’s answering machine.

My uneasiness and inner turmoil mirrored that of a gay Republican; so I began singing, at the top of my lungs:

Can we pretend that airplanes
In the night sky
Are like shooting stars
I could really use a wish right now, wish right now, wish right now

until she ran away.

I called Pinky back and told him what I had done and he began waxing rhapsodic about the bad karma I was unleashing into the universe by turning down guaranteed sex, even if the tread had been burned off the tires.

“We should be trying to kill you,” he exclaimed.

I made him apologize for his hurtful outburst and we said a prayer for our friend, the one we are trying to kill.

We have a mutual friend, Michael Vick (I won’t give his real name out, so we will call him Michael Vick from now on) who is addicted to heroin.  He is also addicted to Newports and Vicodin and may have had a brief dalliance with Oxy.  He is a medical miracle, a marvel, on par with Shaquille O’Neal’s penis and Kathy Griffin’s career.  The same astonishing stories that materialized about Secretariat and its over-sized heart will proliferate about Vick and his fully-functioning, drug-ravaged insides upon his death.  I witnessed him pop 15 Vicodin in the span of five minutes.  He breaks them into small pieces, with one hand no less, to aid his body in the digestion process, and swallows them dry.  He also grinds them and snorts them, to skip the esophagus and plow right through the blood-brain barrier.

I called him to make sure he was still living before I wrote this piece, as not to disparage the death of my good friend, and after he excitedly explained how he scored “mad rah” (heroin) he held the phone out so I could listen to his girlfriend shoot up between her toes so that her self-inflicted wounds maintain their anonymity in front of her parents.  I told him that I couldn’t hear the needle, but that I was proud of him, not proud of what he was doing, but proud that he was still alive.  I fully expect him to be dead in five years, but god damn him if he doesn’t make his waning years legendarily legendary.  Between the mad rah, the half a dozen ice cream sandwiches he inhales a day, the stable relationship he somehow sustains, and the three cases of Mountain Dew he drinks, he has been able to graduate from college and cling to a job – a job that allows him to ‘rah his face off, but a job nonetheless.

Pinky took Vick to Ohio for ten days in an attempt to clean him up.  He forbade him from ingesting anything but Happy Meals and vodka.  Pinky may not be the greatest Dr. Drew impersonator, but his heart was near the right place.  They didn’t do anything but sit in a hotel room all weekend, because Pinky had never been to Ohio.  He could have taken Vick to his homeland of Canada, where he would have exhibited some Martha Stewartian hospitality, but he did not want “American trash crossing the border into the greatest country of all time” – his words, not mine.

After their return Vick stayed clean for about a week, and then he fell off the wagon back into his impression of The Profligate Son.  We then took him to Atlanta in another attempt to clean out his veins.  We even bought him a prostitute… the prostitute was not part of the cleansing process, we just wanted to see if he would sleep with her, and he did, like a champ.

Upon our return to Michigan’s desecrated grounds, Vick fell back into a heroin induced existence.  Pinky and I visited his parents and told them everything, even the prostitute story, and they didn’t believe us.  We knew that they knew; they just didn’t want to believe us.  We told them that they had to do something, cut him off, take away his car, kick him out, or force him into rehab, something, anything.  They responded by asking us if we wanted to stay for dinner, completely ignoring our protests.  We were in complete shock as we devoured helping after helping of Mrs. Vick’s slow baked organic salmon and roasted Tuscan vegetables marinated in a cauliflower purée.

Vick knew that we were going to speak to his folks and he also knew that they wouldn’t believe us.  They reeked of consumer fetishism and cultural superiority – and it was impossible for them to accept that their son, bred on societal commercialism, would develop a plebian drug addiction because that would conflict with and eventually negate their cultural superiority.  Their superficial reality allowed them to ignore the actual reality.

Once all our drug abuse behavioral treatment methods proved powerless to the ‘rah, Pinky devised a new plan – to make a mockery of Vick’s abuse.  We would egg him on, amping up the peer pressure to the maximum.  We laughed and cheered with every additional ‘rah hit he took, we threw Vicodin pills at him from across the room as he effortlessly  caught them in his mouth, and we even paid for the supersizing of his meals.  When my foster mom caught me smoking a cigarette in ninth grade she sat me down and made me eat half the pack and smoke the rest.  It worked on me, I never eat cigs and smoke them half-a-pack at a time, so we thought the same proven treatment would work on Vick.  Ever since we ate dinner with his parents we have been focused on driving Vick towards death or repulsion of drugs due to overconsumption.  Only time, or a coroner, will be able to tell if we had any effect on him.

As I lay in my bed debating whether or not to brush the bar whore’s kisses off my lips I turned to the lover I never should have abandoned – Pynchon.  I finished the book that night and I saw my friend, Vick, in every page.  He was “the middle” that went largely ignored in Pynchon’s chaotic pages.  Oedipa’s hallucinogenic journey to provide her lot in life some structure, a meaning that is fleeting for the world’s expansive middle mirrors Vick’s life so much so that I had to rub my eyes in disbelief as I read it.  The bars confining Vick are branded, examples of the same superficial commercialism that seemed to haunt Oedipa.  The disorder didn’t disappear with the final page of the book, it was magnified for me.  Magnified because the book and Vick’s trajectories were similar, differing by my definition of reality and my concept of time.  I felt like Pynchon, powerless to change the story but ignoring the temptation to stand on the sidelines.  The Crying of Lot 49 was part fantasy and part reality; part Pynchon’s creativity and part his keen observations.  Vick’s life is important to me because I can impact it, causing incremental change, and important because I need to maintain my focus, so Vick’s final act is not lost on me.  It may be a testament to Pynchon that he was able to create a book so moving, or a testament to life that it has the power to dwarf the book.