Word: chet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THERE IS desperation in this compact novel, and madness too. Tom McGuane is 38 years old now--Panama lunges and spouts like Hero's engine and reads as if the author does not intend to see 40. Chester (Chet) Hunnicut Pomeroy is the scion of an old Key West shipbuilding family, but Chet has rejected all that for fleeting fame in the three-chord world of rock and roll. Or something larger than that: A Mick Jagger-like figure with an equal part of Maharaji Ji and Keith Richard's bad teeth thrown in, he somehow got elevated into...
...doesn't give a fig for the shipyard. "I don't care about the money at all. I have put that shipyard up my nose ten times over." In cocaine, of course--Chet is what Raymond Chandler used to call a cokey, and Panama's prose comes to you through the paranoid fog of a rolled Benjamin Franklin...
...keep rearranging his caps--but to join his sweetheart Catherine, a woman he may or may not be married to. Stay away, she warns: "You called me deep-dish Southern plastic in a national publication!" She is a lesbian now, she maintains, having taken up with the bisexual Marcelline. Chet considers this only vaguely through a menthol cocaine haze. Then he nails his hand to her door...
THAT IS the only mention of Panama, of Canal Zone and right-wing Southern paranoia fame, in these 175 pages, but it is the crux of the book. Chet suffers from memory loss; Catherine hires a private detective to inform him of what he did during the day so that eventually he might get it back. Maybe, then, you can go home again--but what if you can't remember home, or what it was, like? What if you can't remember when, where, or if you were married? In a minor key, this translates into not remembering...
...Pigs than McGuane. A drug bust is "too Cuban for words." Pomeroy's dog "kills a lizard; then, overcome with remorse, tips over in the palm shadows for a troubled snooze." The violence is lovingly plotted, coldly calculated, but respected. Councilman Peavey sends Nylon Pindar the thug to straighten Chet...