She had to switch cars again before she got to L.A., then took the bus out to a bank branch on mid-Wilshire where she had once providential stashed a packet of documents that would now give her a choice among identities, paid cash on Western Ave for a ’66 Plymouth Fury, bought a win at a place across the street, went into a certain ladies’ gas-station toilet on Olympic legendary in the dopers’ community, and emerged a different, less-noticeable person. The car radio, tuned to KWFB, was playing the Doors’ “People Are Strange (When You’re a Stranger” as she injected herself into the slow lane of the eastbound freeway and settled in, hating to let any of it go, Banning, the dinosaurs, the Palm Springs turnoff, Indio, across the Mojave, to be redeemed in colors pale but intense, unnaturally fine sands blowing in plumes across the sun, baby-blue shadows in the folds of the dunes, a pinkish sky— holding on, letting go, redeeming each night stop the less easterly places she’d been all day. coming slowly unstuck, leaving for the United States, trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror’s single tale of receding and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give.
On inertial navigation, knowing she’d know what she was looking for when she’d found it, DL didn’t stop till the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, which self first beheld around midday in a stunning onslaught of smog and traffic. By this time, she was used to the car and its unorthodox push-button shifting, having made the analysis “stick shift=penis”, and speculating that a push-button automatic might at least appear more clitorally ladylike, or, as DL might’ve put it, regressive, if there’d been anybody anymore to talk to, which of course, there wasn’t. She took a little apartment and found a job at a vacuum cleaner parts distributor’s, typing and filing.
Columbus must have promised a life that some residual self, somewhere stifling in the dark, had wanted always. “Superman could change back into Clark Kent,” she had once confided to Frenesi, “don’t underestimate it. Workin’ at the Daily Planet was the Man o’ Steel’s Hawaiian vacation, his Saturday night in town, his marijuana and opium smoke, and oh what I wouldn’t give…” An evening newspaper…anyplace back in the Midwest…she would leave work around press time, make a beeline for some walk-down lounge, near enough to the paper that she could feel vibrations from the presses through the wood of the bar. Drink rye, wipe her glasses on her tie, leave her hat on indoors, gossip in the dim light with other regulars. In the winter it would already be dark outside the windows. The polished shoes would pick up highlights as the street lamps got brighter…she wouldn’t be waiting for anybody or anything to happen, because she’d only be Clark Kent. Lois Lane might not give her the time of day anymore but that’d be OK, she’d be dating somebody from the secretarial pool. They’d go out for dinner sometimes to this cozy Neopolitan joint down by some lakefront, where the Mussels Posillipo couldn’t be beat. “So instead of being able to fly everyplace,” her friend had replied, “you’d have to climb into some car you’re still making payments on, drive on out, you, Clark Kent, to the scene of some disaster, blood, corpses, flies, teen technicians wandering around stoned, eyewitnesses in shock…Superman never has to get involved with any of that. Why should anyone want to be mortal? Better to stay an angel, angel.” DL, more generous in those days, only thought her friend had missed the point.
In Columbus, she spent dats in shopping centers, Ninja Srwno, assembling an invisibility wardrobe — murky woolens, dim pastels, flat shoes with matching purses, beige hose, white underwear, surprised how little of a chore it was — the blandest of accessories would call out to her from shop windows, the misses’ sections of discount stores were acres of abundance waiting to be pick through. She had by now grown into a relationship with the Plymouth, named her Felicia, bought her a new stereo, was washing her at least twice per workweek plus again on weekends, when she also waxed the vehicle. She swam and did t’ai chi and continued to practice the excercies she learned in Japan. She grew used to her disguised image in the mirror, the short haircut with the rodent-brown rinse, the freckles subdued under foundation, the eye makeup she’d have never work before, slowly becoming her alias, a small-town spinster pursuing a perfectly diminished life, a minor belle gone to weeds and gophers before her time.
So that when they came and kidnapped her in the Pizza Hut Parking lot and took her back to Japan, she wasn’t sure right away that being sold to white slavery would turn out to be at all beneficial as a career step.
Phew……. if you made it all the way through that quotation, props to you. I am obsessed with it, for sure. People don’t talk about our generation’s fascination with “representation” very much. When I was sitting, quietly to myself in independent reading time with my fifth grade class and I came across the words “Columbus, Ohio” in Vineland, my eyes widened. They perked up. I could list the books (if I thought about it really hard) that I’ve read which mention Columbus, Ohio, on one hand. No one talks about it. The way others conceptualize my hometown bends my mind.
Pynchon captured it perfectly, didn’t he? Columbus is an easy life, a low key floating feeling of mediocrity and pleasure. Beige clothing, simple life in the flatlands. In the middle of February, having not left this city since December, having not left this state since October, having not left the Midwest since last March, I am beginning to feel like other places are an illusion, a sweet memory but nothing more. How can I know other places exist when I am not there? When I haven’t been there in a very long time.
Thoughts on the reading I provided you..: first I think Pynchon has never actually been to Columbus. Two misconceptions are glaring. First, that he would describe a restaurant Clark Kent, DL would visit as, “lakeside”…. bruh we don’t have no fucking lakes in this cityyyy.. you are thinking of Cleveland. Columbus is the most landlocked city in the country aside from Denver, according to what someone told me recently. Second, the quality the bar had, of being dark in the winter, already. Absolutely untrue, myth, busted. Maybe my favorite thing about this city is that it’s very west in the East Coast time zone. Meaning the sun sets at 10pm in the summer. Meaning the sunset at 6:01pm today, February 8th, in the depths of winter. A later sunset than New York (5:23pm today), and later than Los Angeles (5:31pm today).
But in any case, he did capture something… maybe the tiny tiny, two page passage length corner in the 384 page book which is the American imaginary. I don’t think people outside of this city conceptualize it very much at all. More than that, Columbus is a place to disappear to. To go under the radar. A nowhere place to be nobody. A place to forget everything else that pushes and pulls you, and stand at the foot of the wave of banal existence. Become your alter ego, because no one cares who you are here.
I like the idea that Pynchon was writing about Columbus in the 80s. When my parents worked at Waterbeds n Stuff together, when my dad was 33 and my mom was 22. In high school, we watched a documentary about accents in the US, made in ’91-92, and I thought the accent for Columbus sounded like my grandparents. I don’t know how my dad ended up living here actually, how he went from being a strung out hippie in central Pennsylvania to a one hitter salesman at WB&nStuff turned husband to my mother.
In some ways, everything I write is about Columbus. I am a product of this city. My grandparents went to high school in the same school district I work in now. Living here is writing and rewriting memories on top of memories. My grandparents’ first house was a block away from the cafe I worked at as a barista. The record store I would frequent in high school, which Lizi worked at for one day for a free smoothie, was closed and a Pita-Hut I would go to with my ex in college reopened in its place. My grandmother’s uncle owns the bar my family goes to to drink a beer every time a family member dies. As a kid, I would eat at the Florentine family-style Italian diner which has since closed, in the pre-Covid heated and intense gentrification of Franklinton. If the cannibalistic real estate market hadn’t slowed down slightly in the last year, a trendy coffee shop would take its place. Instead it sits empty, neon signed burnt out and darkened as you drive eastward into the city.
I am disappearing here, into my head a little bit. I am wondering when I something will happen to me, if it will ever happen, that makes me realize being sold into white slavery would be beneficial to my career, to my ego. Maybe, that will never come. Again, is there anywhere else? What is the difference between Columbus, and any other place? I’m not sure I, personally, can see that anymore.
Good song about Columbus, how it feels to live here.