Soft-Boiled
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/08/03/090803crbo_books_menand
Pynchon's stoned detective.
by Louis Menand
August 3, 2009
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,"
Raymond Chandler's famous dictum states. It appeared in an essay
called "The Simple Art of Murder," published in 1944Chandler's
attempt to define what might give a little literary dignity to the
murder mystery. Chandler had aspirations for the genre, and it
annoyed him that most mystery writers seemed not to, that they turned
out unrealistic plot contraptions for an undemanding
readership"Murder on the Orient Express"-type theatricals, in which
the solution to the mystery is usually whatever is least probable.
Chandler believed that what redeemed the form, what made it art, or
potentially art, was the character of the detective, and that the
detective should be (unlike Hercule Poirot or, from another mystery
writer Chandler held in contempt, Lord Peter Wimsey) a man who goes
down mean streets. "He is the hero," Chandler wrote. "He is
everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an
unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor."
The personal honor of the private eye is the genre's most hallowed
convention. He owes nothing to anyone. He is in it only for himself;
therefore, he is selfless. In Chandler's description: "He is a
relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a
common man, or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of
character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money
dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate
revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him
as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. . . . The story is
his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no
adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure." The
detective in Chandler's books is Philip Marlowe, a character probably
created on the model of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade. (Hammett was a
mystery writer Chandler did admire. "Hammett gave murder back to the
kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a
corpse," he said.) Lew Archer is Ross Macdonald's private eye; Mike
Hammer is Mickey Spillane's. Thomas Pynchon's is named Larry (Doc) Sportello.
Sportello is the best thing in Pynchon's self-consciously laid-back
and funky new novel, "Inherent Vice" (Penguin; $27.95). The title is
a term in maritime law (a specialty of one of the minor characters).
It refers to the quality of things that makes them difficult to
insure: if you have eggs in your cargo, a normal policy will not
cover their breaking. Getting broken is in the nature of being an
egg. The novel gives the concept some low-key metaphysical
playoriginal sin is an obvious analogybut, apart from this and a
death-and-resurrection motif involving a saxophonist in a surf-rock
band, "Inherent Vice" does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest
of semi-obscure allusions. (I could be missing something, of course.
I could be missing everything.) It's a slightly spoofy take on
hardboiled crime fiction, a story in which the characters smoke dope
and watch "Gilligan's Island" instead of sitting around a night club
knocking back J&Bs. It's "The Maltese Falcon" starring Cheech and
Chong, "The Big Sleep" as told by the hippy-dippy weatherman. Whether
you think it's funny depends a little on whether you think Cheech and
Chong and the hippy-dippy weatherman are funny for more than about
two minutes. It's funnier than Chandler, anyway.
Like most detective novels, "Inherent Vice" begins with an apparently
innocuous request. Doc's old girlfriend shows up and asks him to look
into a problem involving a wealthy real-estate developer with whom
she's been having an affair. Almost as soon as Doc takes the case,
the developer turns up missing. And, as in most detective stories,
the missing person is a thread that, once pulled, unravels a complex
conspiracy of murder, greed, lust, and so forth. The missing person
or the murder victim (often they are the same person, although that's
not the case here) is, of course, just the donnée, a clothesline on
which to hang a series of implausible coincidences and, for the
private eye, misadventures high and low, with the occasional
unanticipated amorous encounter. The victim is almost never someone
we are interested in. Who cares or even remembers (as Chandler
pointed out in "The Simple Art of Murder") who killed Miles Archer,
Spade's partner, in "The Maltese Falcon"despite the fact that
Archer's murder is what sets off the whole business?
Pynchon's capacity for goofball invention is limitless. A list of
characters' names, drastically abridged, might be enough to suggest
the variety, and also the relative fineness, of the narrative
texture: Ensenada Slim, Flaco the Bad, Dr. Buddy Tubeside, Petunia
Leeway, Jason Velveeta, Scott Oof, Sledge Poteet, Leonard Jermaine
Loosemeat (a.k.a. El Drano, anagram of Leonard), Delwyn Quight, and
Trillium Fortnight. Not overly fine, in other words. Plotwise, there
are probably too many pieces of the puzzle to hold in your head, and
it's not completely clear where, or whether, every piece fits. But
that, too, is standard business procedure in the form. Despite
Chandler's demand for greater realism, his own plots could be pretty
far-fetched, and they're not always coherent, either. When Howard
Hawks was shooting the film adaptation of "The Big Sleep," he got in
touch with Chandler to ask who was supposed to have killed one of the
characters, a chauffeur. Chandler was embarrassed to say he didn't know.
Pynchon's novel is set in Los Angeles, which is by no means a
departure from hardboiled tradition. This is partly because mystery
writers have tended to be screenwriters as well (or wished that they
were), and so have lived near Hollywood, and also because movie and
television crime stories have been shot in and around L.A. for a
century, since it's cheaper not to travel. Marlowe and Archer both
work in L.A. So does Walter Mosley's detective, Easy Rawlins.
Southern California, in real life a place of few dark alleys and
little weather, is bona-fide noir territory.
The twist is the time period. The events in Pynchon's story take
place in the spring of 1970, something we can infer from frequent
references to the Manson trial and the N.B.A. finals between the
Lakers and the Knicks. And the book is loadedoverloaded, really, but
Pynchon is an inveterate encyclopedistwith pop period detail: "Dark
Shadows," "Marcus Welby, M.D.," and "Hawaii Five-O"; Blue Cheer, Tiny
Tim, and the Archies; Casey Kasem, Glen Campbell, Herb Alpert. There
are some local Southland referencesthe used-car dealer Cal
Worthingtonand a few bits of rock-and-roll esoterica ("Here Come the
Hodads," by the Marketts; "Super Market," by Fapardokly). The
proto-Internet makes an appearance: "This ARPAnet trip," one
character explains; "I swear it's like acid, a whole 'nother strange
worldtime, space, all that shit." There are a lot of drug jokes, and
there are a lot of drugs (though, strangely, little reference to the
antiwar movement: the bombing of Cambodia, mentioned in passing, took
place in the spring of 1970). Nixon has been President for a year.
The sand is running out on the counterculture.
Doc, Pynchon's private eye, is a countercultural type. He wears his
hair in an Afro. He's peace-loving and undersized. (" 'What I lack in
al-titude,' Doc explained for the million or so -th time in his
career, 'I make up for in at-titude.' ") Mainly, he's a pothead. His
thoughts are the usual private-eye thoughts, but if the private eye
was, say, Jeff Spicoli:
If he had a nickel for every time he'd heard a client start off this
way, he could be over in Hawaii now, loaded day and night, digging
the waves at Waimea, or better yet hiring somebody to dig them for him.
Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer would have eaten this guy for breakfast.
But he does walk down mean streets (or the L.A. equivalent: bikers,
drug dealers, sex-club performers, nefarious dentists) and is not
himself mean. He pines after the ex-girlfriend, flees in terror a
never-ending sequence of heavies, fences with his police counterpart
(another hardboiled conventionin this case, the cop is a
hippie-hater named Bigfoot Bjornsen), takes on cases without hope of
a fee, is nice to his mom, and shares his stash. He is a man of
honor, and a neat, counterintuitive creation.
The epigraph to "Inherent Vice""Under the paving-stones, the
beach!"was a slogan in the Paris student uprising of May '68, and
it's a reminder that Pynchon does have a stake in this period.
Biographical claims about Pynchon are notoriously uncheckable, but he
is supposed to have been living in Manhattan Beach in the late
nineteen-sixties, working on "Gravity's Rainbow," and there is a lot
of affection in these new pages for the way of lifesurf, drugs, and
rock and rollthey describe. "Inherent Vice" is a generally
lighthearted affair. Still, there are a few familiar apocalyptic
touches, and a suggestion that countercultural California is a lost
continent of freedom and play, swallowed up by the faceless forces of
coöptation and repression:
Was it possible, that at every gatheringconcert, peace rally,
love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East,
whereverthose dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the
music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to
everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?
The world is going to hell. Which is what private eyes always think.
--------
There are more quests than answers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/26/pynchon-churchwell-inherent-vice
Through a fug of dope, Thomas Pynchon takes his cast of misfits to
the end of a loose, quixotic trilogy, says Sarah Churchwell
Sarah Churchwell
26 July 2009
Inherent Vice
by Thomas Pynchon
pp384, Jonathan Cape, £18.99
In Thomas Pynchon's 1973 book, Gravity's Rainbow, a character sings a
song called "My Doper's Cadenza", which could serve as both
soundtrack and subtitle for Inherent Vice. Set in the waning days of
the era of free love, as Charles Manson brings a paranoid ending to
quixotic dreams, Pynchon's seventh novel bridges The Crying of Lot 49
(1966) and Vineland (1990), forming a loose trilogy traversed by the
same (marginal) characters and (central) concerns, not to mention a
permeating 60s dope haze. In all three novels, California represents
the final frontier of the American Dream and the last stand against
corrupt institutions, the ultimate refuge of aimless dreamers riding
waves of hope and fear. Together, the three novels trace an arc
from the mid-1960s to the Reaganite 1980s, from the birth of
counterculture to the triumph of corporate culture, as the frontier
closes for good and the long descent into betrayal and greed begins.
The book's title provides Pynchon with a new metaphor for three of
his oldest preoccupations: entropy, capitalism, and religion,
specifically Puritanism. For insurers and preservationists, "inherent
vice" describes the innate tendency of precious objects to
deteriorate and refers to the limits of insurability and
conservation; it suggests that matter (and thus, by extension,
materialism) carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.
Winston Churchill used the phrase to differentiate capitalism from
socialism: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of
blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of
miseries." And the phrase suggests original sin, which is what both
Pynchon's protagonist and I first took it to mean. If vice is
inherent, where do we locate virtue?
As usual, Pynchon prefers to approach serious questions through
frivolity and pastiche, in this case a hallucinatory spoof of Raymond
Chandler. His protagonist, Larry "Doc" Sportello, is a pot-smoking
private investigator sent by an ex-flame on the trail of a
disappeared tycoon who may or may not have had a crisis of
conscience, "after all his years of never appearing to have one", and
is now setting up a quasi-socialist commune. The plot proceeds to
meander amiably around kidnapping, murder, heroin smuggling, money
laundering, loan sharking, insanity, drug addiction and rehab,
revolution and counter-revolution, not to mention time travel, the
lost continent of Lemuria, and arrepentimiento, which a character
defines as "Spanish for 'sorry about that'". A spirit of regret and
thwarted hedonism prevails, as characters take refuge in sex, drugs
and rock'n'roll.
Along the way, Pynchon assembles a typical cast of eccentrics,
misfits and dropouts with wacky names, who live life in pursuit of
lost causes. Capitalism in Pynchon tends to take two primary forms
(it is always, however, the enemy): the military-industrial complex
and land-grabbing. His main characters try to resist both, as Pynchon
asks how a country that so mythologises hope can traffic in fear, how
it can romanticise its own land while dividing it (into "lots") and
selling it off.
Sportello may feel and behave like an outlaw, but he is uneasily
aware of his complicity with the forces of law and order. Most
mysteries begin in confusion and end in certainty; Pynchon likes to
change this trajectory, so that what begins a mystery ends as pure
chaos. (Well aware how frustrating some readers find this, Pynchon
sets up a running gag in Inherent Vice about a class action suit
brought against MGM by audiences who don't like the way its stories
end.) His piling up of incident and jokes, of comic setpieces and
hallucinatory discourses is partly pleasure for its own sake; he
loves to fool around, extravagantly indulging his own playfulness.
His penchant for embedding puzzles, games and jokes in his books is
partly why Pynchon's fans tend toward the cultish. But his games are
also whistling in the dark, dancing on the grave of betrayed dreams
and abandoned hopes.
Like many a Pynchon protagonist before him, Sportello is on a doomed
quest. Pynchon's novels are always more or less picaresque journeys;
his characters travel perpetually, but rarely arrive anywhere
meaningful. What Gravity's Rainbow calls "the terrible politics of
the Grail" means that quests in Pynchon are inevitable and also
inevitable failures. At best, they will be mock-heroic; at worst,
they will be tragic, but they will never succeed. Inherent Vice may
be Pynchon's most overtly nostalgic book, featuring a character
overcome by a longing he pretends to shrug off.
Before the story's end, Pynchon will confront character and reader
alike with disintegration, disinheritance, dislocation, dismay;
property, security, conservation and conservatism; loss, abandonment,
marginalisation, being forgotten or overlooked; the futility of
resistance; the pleasures and dangers of popular culture; free will,
belief systems, religion and ideology, paranoia and faith; order and
chaos, meaning and insignificance. Pynchon tends to spawn such lists,
in part because of the proliferating quality of his own ideas and
gags, which pinwheel out from metaphorical centres. His books appear
superficially jolly, full of jaunty tunes and parodic films ("The
Young Kissinger, with Woody Allen" remains a personal favourite),
driven by a sportive playfulness that can be frankly exhausting when
it's not exasperating.
In Pynchon's previous novel, Against the Day (2006), a character,
relaxing at an anarchist day spa, asks: "What are any of these
'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time travel?" and
Inherent Vice picks up where that question leaves off and plays games
with time. While dreaming their utopian dreams, Sportello and his
friends watch a soap opera called Dark Shadows, featuring a plotline
about parallel time, which confuses all of its viewing audience
except the dopers, who have no trouble following it.
One of the novel's villains is a loan shark who realises that what
people are buying when they purchase interest is actually more time;
the characters are buying time in more ways than one. Pynchon even
takes the idea of parallel time down to the level of individual
sentences, many of which are structured around a chiasmatic doubling
of time: "What made him unusual was, was he was black guy." Indeed,
Sportello may be a time traveller. Then again, he may not: he has a
vision at one point that he was born 3 billion years ago and has
travelled to modern America in a time machine invented by
scientist-priests, and decorated with Looney Tunes characters.
However, since he has just dropped acid when he has this dream, it
would seem possible that Sportello is not on an epic journey at all
he's just tripping.
In other words, Inherent Vice raises the question of whether
pot-smoking, to take just one example, is really a revolutionary act.
Triviality may be an act of resistance against the tyranny of the
serious or it may just be trifling. Humour may be subversive or it
may just be a smile. At his best, Pynchon casts a tragic shadow over
his characters' antics, grounding his frivolity in grief, terror,
doubt and lyrical grace. The Crying of Lot 49 contains some of the
most beautiful, elegiac writing about America since Fitzgerald, as
well as packing an intense metaphorical punch about revelation,
hierophany, meaning and connection that is far too complex to reduce
to precis. By contrast, Inherent Vice is often very funny but in the
end only gestures toward meaning, significance in semaphore.
That said, it is probably Pynchon's most readable novel. Remarkably,
it features both a sympathetic protagonist and a recognisable plot,
albeit one that is as impossible to summarise as any other Pynchon
shaggy dog tale. And although I couldn't now reconstruct who did what
to whom or why, well, no one involved in making The Big Sleep knew
who killed the chauffeur either.
Near the end of Inherent Vice, Sportello looks at the photos of a
murder scene and thinks: "It was as if whatever had happened had
reached some kind of limit. It was like finding a gateway to the past
unguarded, unforbidden because it didn't have to be. Built into the
act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something
like what Sauncho's colleagues in marine insurance liked to call
inherent vice," which Sportello is told "is what you can't avoid".
Among other things the characters in Inherent Vice are seeking is a
ship once called the Preserved, which represents a dream of escape
and safety or safekeeping; preservation resists inherent vice. But
the ship has been renamed and may have been abandoned. Thomas Pynchon
always returns to the glittering mosaic of doubt; it is what he can't avoid.
--------
Pynchon lights up
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/07/31/pynchon/index.html
The famed author is back with a tale of drugs, hippies and paranoia
-- and you don't need a decoder ring to read it
By Laura Miller
July 31, 2009
Hard-boiled detective fiction may not seem like the ideal vehicle for
the often cryptic style and subject matter of Thomas Pynchon, but his
newest novel proves otherwise. An account of the adventures of a
hippie private eye pursuing assorted nonlucrative commissions in a
Southern California beach town around 1970, "Inherent Vice" is a
sun-struck, pot-addled shaggy dog story that fuses the sulky
skepticism of Raymond Chandler with the good-natured scrappiness of
"The Big Lebowski." It's an inspired formula; the mystery plot
supplies the novel with a minimum of structure (as well as confidence
that there's some point to the enterprise) and the genre provides
ample cover for Pynchon's literary weaknesses.
Of course, to the fanboy contingent that makes up some hefty
percentage of his readership, Pynchon has no weaknesses, but those of
us who have occasionally glimpsed the emperor in his skivvies must
proceed with greater caution. There's nothing quite so dispiriting as
slogging your way through 1,085 pages of increasingly repetitive and
tedious folderol (i.e., "Against the Day") only to find that its
significance ultimately boils down to not much more than sheepish
nostalgia for the heyday of the counterculture. Not that "Inherent
Vice," which clocks in at a far more surmountable 372 pages, doesn't
have essentially the same theme as "Against the Day," but here it's
presented straightforwardly, rather than disguised as a misplaced
sympathy for anarchist bombers tricked out in mathematical
paraphernalia and hot air balloons. Also, unlike the utopian romances
and adventure stories Pynchon pastiched in "Against the Day," the
hard-boiled genre has its cynicism baked in, furnishing "Inherent
Vice" with a downbeat counterpoint to what even the author himself
seems to realize is a callow idealization of the hippie scene.
Our hero, Larry "Doc" Sportello, plies his unlikely trade behind a
door labeled "LSD Investigations" (for "Location, Surveillance,
Detection") and decorated with the image of "a giant bloodshot
eyeball," painted by speed freaks, the highly detailed capillaries of
which have been known to hypnotize potential clients into forgetting
what they came for. The office is situated in Gordita Beach (the
fictional counterpart of Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon lived during
the same period), south of Los Angeles proper and home to the usual
Pynchonian assortment of marginal types: stoners, musicians, surfers,
small-time crooks, psychics, buxom "bikini babes," nubile "stewardii"
and so on.
Doc gets a visit from an ex-girlfriend, Shasta, "laying some heavy
combination of face ingredients on him that he couldn't read at all"
and worried that her new boyfriend, a real estate developer, may be
the target of a kidnap plot by his wife and her lover. Doc
investigates, then gets knocked out cold in a massage parlor,
implicated in a murder and clued into a web of connections involving
the Black Panthers, the Aryan Brotherhood, loan sharks, L.A.'s
genteel oligarchy, the LAPD, a dodgy sanitarium, a consortium of
dentists, a surf band supposedly staffed by zombies and something
called "the Golden Fang" -- which could be a schooner, a drug cartel,
an archvillain, or maybe just those dentists, or then again, maybe
it's all four. Most of the other jobs Doc takes on during the course
of the novel -- hard-luck cases to a one -- turn out to be connected
to the Golden Fang or the developer, who has gone missing, apparently
taking Shasta with him.
Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of "Inherent Vice" is that, while
a few key elements of this baroque construction go unaccounted for, a
surprising number of plot strands are more or less neatly tied up by
the novel's end. The story isn't easy to follow, but it can be
followed -- and without the aid of the sort of
secret-decoder-ring-style analysis that often passes for literary
discernment among Pynchon devotees. Besides, the reader always
retains the option of writing off any stray fancies to pot-induced
fantasizing; one of the novel's most amiable qualities is its mellow
willingness to blur the line between the author's pet conspiracy
theories and the random mental bebop of the merely stoned.
Paranoia is also a purview of noir, a genre that shares Pynchon's
propensity for regarding arrested development as a form of valiant,
but doomed nobility. Everyone in hard-boiled fiction has already
fallen from grace before the story even begins, and in its blasted
landscape only one or two true men remain, lone knights, clinging to
the fading rags of their personal conception of chivalry. In the case
of "Inherent Vice," the holdout is both Doc and the community of
Gordita Beach, which is being dragged by Greater Los Angeles down the
long slide from the crest of a perfect wave.
Pynchon conceives of the almost-lost paradise of hippieland, embodied
by Gordita Beach, as an enormous postgraduate crash pad, where
everyone lounges around all day getting wasted and having sex until
evil is introduced in the form of a landlord demanding the rent. Such
bummers are caused by nothing more than sheer "greed," the term
Pynchon's protagonists use for capitalism, that heartless machine
bent on grinding the humanity out of us all. The machine is run by
shadowy puppet masters who say things like, "Look around. Real
estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor -- all of that's ours, it's
always been ours. And you, at the end of the day what are you? One
more unit in this swarm of transients ... We will never run out of
you people. The supply is inexhaustible."
The title of the novel refers to a legal term used by insurance
underwriters describing a defect integral to a property that will
cause it to deteriorate over time. So it is with the shriveling Eden
of Gordita Beach, where the potheads are all turning to heroin, the
formerly cool have sold their services as narcs and government
agents, and whatever slack the straight world (or "flatlanders," as
Doc calls them) once cut the hippies has been rescinded in the wake
of the Tate-LaBianca killings. The specter of Charles Manson hovers
over the novel, partly because the public really did come to view
hippies with greater apprehension after the notorious murders, but
mostly because the Manson Family represents the perversion of
hippiedom's communal vision. They were evidence of the inherent vice
in humanity itself, the seeds of violence, idolatry and the abuse of
power that no utopian plan can hope to eradicate.
The novel's other iconic touchstone is John Garfield, Doc's favorite
actor, a movie star who specialized in unpolished working-class
heroes, rebelled against the studio system and died young after being
blacklisted for his leftist politics. If Manson stands for the
corruption of the counterculture, Garfield (who rejected communist
authoritarianism as well as conservatism) represents the futility of
confronting the world's vast systems of command and control. Doc's
policy of remaining detached, helping the odd friend here and there
and slipping around the corner whenever the shit hits the fan proves
the better part of valor.
These are the "arguments" of the novel, in the archaic sense that
they summarize the author's message and beliefs and in the
contemporary sense that they are social themes for critics and other
readers to ferret out, thus demonstrating their analytic chops and
allowing everyone involved to feel very smart. But a novel is an
aesthetic artifact as well as an intellectual one, and of late
Pynchon's fiction has mostly failed as art.
"Inherent Vice" almost succumbs to the flaws that scuttled "Against
the Day;" in the middle, it certainly founders. The narrative, as is
all too typical of Pynchon's recent fiction, lumbers through a
monotonous parade of indistinguishable characters, each with a silly
name and one or perhaps two outlandish traits, as if selfhood were
something to be ladled out in stingy portions like the gruel in
"Oliver Twist." Opportunities to portray interactions of import go to
waste; in particular, Pynchon depicts women and sexuality with all
the depth and nuance of a 14-year-old who has acquired his entire
knowledge of these subjects from the dirty jokes printed on vintage
novelty cocktail napkins.
Some have contended that the cartoonishness of Pynchon's characters
is deliberate, a postmodern spit in the eye of the bourgeoisie ideal
of "rounded" fictional psychology. Perhaps, but this argument isn't
very convincing, given that Pynchon otherwise evinces conventionally
sentimental views of humanity (for example, describing a chain of
freeway drivers in a thick fog as "a temporary commune to help each
other home"). Let's face it, there's something profoundly futile
about mounting a protest against vast, complex systems that use
ordinary people like interchangeable cogs by writing novels that are
vast complex systems in which the characters amount to interchangeable cogs.
What ultimately delivers "Inherent Vice" from this futility are the
stubbornly individualistic imperatives of its borrowed genre. The
detective story must resolve around a central character -- in this
case, Doc -- and Pynchon has no choice but to make something of him.
Because his creator is fundamentally sweet (unlike, say, Philip
Marlowe's), Doc turns out all right, and in negotiating his fatally
compromised moral environment, even attains a paradoxical sort of
wisdom. "What, I should only trust good people?" he says to a friend
who questions the deal he cuts at the novel's end, a rash yet
generous act of faith. "Man, good people get bought and sold every
day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no
more or less sense. I mean, I wouldn't give odds either way." When
driving in the fog, you sometimes have to take whichever exit
presents itself, and hope against hope for the best.
.
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