Gilligan's Wake: A Novel Read online

  Additional Acclaim for Gilligan’s Wake

  “There can’t be many books with energy, depth, and sheer verbal agility enough to set James Joyce spinning in his grave, but here is one, a tour de force of a novel which expresses the American century from World War II on, both as an hilarious and biting satire and as a dark, delirious, psychedelic dream. ‘Genius’ is not a word to sling around carelessly, but Tom Carson must have had one sitting near him when he wrote Gilligan’s Wake”

  —Madison Smartt Bell, author of Master of the Crossroads

  “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale that will snap your synapses like Jiffy Pop on a bonfire…. [Gilligan’s Wake] is a wacked-out ride through history and pop culture.”

  —Phil Kloer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Dazzling and witty … Wild inventiveness and terrific wordplay, reminiscent sometimes of S.J. Perelman, sometimes of Peter De Vries. By making language the star, Carson transforms his boob-tube conceit into a captivating romp through our popular culture and Cold War history.”

  —Roger K. Miller, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Carson’s prose often has the energy of a song by his beloved Ramones…. A loopy, exuberant novel-type prose event.”

  —David Kelly, The New York Times Book Review

  “A heck of a lot of fun.”

  —Fortune

  “If there were an America’s Cup Final for fevered, often brilliant writing, he’d be in it, and probably disqualified for ramming David Foster Wallace’s dinghy, for scuttling Thomas Pynchon s trimaran, for pooping on Robert Coover’s poop deck…. It’s not all jokes, wordplay, and mad flights, though. Carson has given his characters full lives; more accurately, full inner lives.”

  —Martin Zimmerman, San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Carson, Esquire magazine’s TV critic, is to television what Pauline Kael was to film: a consistently intelligent voice brought to bear on a medium in sore need of astute criticism. Logically enough, his first novel has an audacious TV-based premise; in seven separate stories, characters describe their experiences—as scientist, naval officer, actress, student, beatnik, and rich husband and wife—in postwar America. The twist is that there’s something oddly familiar about these seven.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred)

  “The title … barely hints at the conceptual audacity of this seriously comic debut novel. Carson here combines outsized literary ambitions with a voracious appetite for cross-cultural references, concocting a Pynchon-meets-sitcom parable of the American Dream.”

  —Book Magazine

  “What other book could court comparison with Gravity’s Rainbow and Finnegans Wake and still survive? And how, by the way, does it survive? By force of imaginative invention, verbal excitement, and delirious wit. Gilligan’s Wake, offering a brilliant, tragic reading of twentieth-century American history, is as ambitious and provocative a novel as I’ve read in a long, long time.”

  —David Shields, author of Enough About You and Remote

  “This novel bends seventy-five years or so of political and television history into a enormous Technicolor pastiche, as thick with satire as it is with pop-culture references…. Carson’s style suggests David Foster Wallace after watching seventy-two hours of nonstop sitcom reruns; his verbal antics make for an intellectually stimulating read.”

  —Booklist

  “Dark, hilarious, and inventively weird.”

  —Liza Featherstone, Newsday

  “[Carson’s] onto something hilarious and a little bit frightening with his Wake.”

  —Dan Deluca, The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Not so much a nostalgic journey on the high seas of TV as a Viking berserker raid on the last American century … At its best, Carson’s brand of ail-American madness has the bravado and ingenuity of [Pynchon’s] The Crying of Lot 49 and V.”

  —-Jason Anderson, Toronto Globe & Mail

  ”A great jazz riff on twentieth-century popular culture … as goofy as the premise may seem, Gilligan’s Wake is a pretty brilliant eulogy.”

  —Kathy Kerr, Edmonton Journal

  “There is, in the parlance of literary criticism, a shitload of stuff in this crazy, inventive book…. Gilligan’s Wake gives us the twentieth century as a fever dream raging in the skull of a hidden narrator, the mad, history-obsessed Gil Egan, … pages of wordplay and mind games, illusions and allusions, high comedy and low humor, and enough references to choke Mr Ed.

  —Scott Dickensheets, Las Vegas Weekly

  “Wildly original and thoroughly enjoyable.”

  —Nancy Pearl, NPR/KUOW Seattle

  “This young man is a brilliant writer.”

  —Sherwood Schwartz, creator of Gilligan’s Island, in TV Guide

  “Only a novelist of Tom Carson’s sweeping intelligence and punk but not pitiless iconoclasm could have written this epic; audacious and original, subversive and often very funny, and spectacularly played out in the interzone between American glory and madness.”

  —Steve Erickson, author of The Sea Came in at Midnight

  Gilligan’s Wake

  Tom Carson

  Picador New York

  For my mother and Arion

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  GILLIGAN’S WAKE. Copyright © 2003 by Tom Carson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. 10010.

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited.

  www.picadorusa.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carson, Tom.

  Gilligan’s wake : a novel / Tom Carson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-29123-X (he)

  ISBN 0-312-31114-1 (pbk)

  1. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.A775 G45 2002

  813'.54—dc21

  2002029256

  First Picador Paperback Edition: February 2004

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  I. This Tiny Ship

  II. The Skipper’s Tale

  III. Alger and Dean and My Son and I and Whatnot

  IV. Sail Away

  V. Hello Nurse

  VI. Professor X

  VII. Yesterday Never Knows

  I

  This Tiny Ship

  SKIPPERTOO AND GET ME HOME, I MEAN IF YOU REALLY WANT TO hear about it. They took away my facial hair and gave me a small hat. Please to ignore dead bird around neck, hokay? We were seven, like the Mercury astronauts. But all that came after I’d done my time in the booby hatch.

  Eisenhower on the rebop, waving yo-ho to a U-2 and a boo-hoo to Batista. So hipped am I on clinching my Houdini exit from the old burg, where the specimen before you wore a sweatshirt laundered only by my tears, that I don’t even feed the mailbox a snack for my best high-school buddy after Dobie skywrites me an epistle exhaling how gassed he is the New Frontier is here. When the thousand days start clicking off, I’m hanging on by my goatee in North Beach. The coffeehouses are losing steam, the topless bars aren’t so much as a gleam in Carol Doda’s plastic surgeon’s scalpel. On the sidewalk outside City Lights, with avid periwinkle peepers but a poor Christmas salting his ever waggable chin, even Ferlinghetti’s looking like he doesn’t know where his next trochee’s coming from. Hello, hi, “Can you believe this fog?” he says, clutching my a
rm, which what with Fisherman’s Wharf north by northwest and the Rice-A-Roni streetcar going dingding practically in our ears makes me think, wow, he’s never had a dull moment.

  Then he put on some lip about the big “Ask not” recital that got beamed our way this San Fran A.M. out of snowy—doubly snowy, in the transmission-flaked ghost dance our coast’s early risers blinked at—Washington, DeeCee. “And so the Harvard sonovabitch asks Robert Frost to write him an inaugural poem, for Christ and Buddha’s sake,” Larry sniffed, huffing himself up to his full height just as some middle-aged square doing a walk-by in a mackintosh gave us a look like he hadn’t known our kind was still roosting in the nabe. “Pass that torch, Jack! They’ll never learn. That monosyllabic, meter-crazy Vermont retard—he ever stops by my woods with miles to go before he croaks, I’ll take two forks and stab him in the ass with them! Why wasn’t it Bill Carlos Bills? Hell, what about me? I’d have been there like a shot off a shovel.” We know you would, Ferl, I said, and made to split. Larry always reminded me of a St. Bernard who’d gotten bombed on his own brandy cask. A dog on a long MacLeish, Corso used to say.

  But me, I’m toking on a modest hope that things are looking up. Even if Rexroth did call it déjà lu, in a slam that accused me of counterfeiting bongos and beret to pull a fast one on easy readers““If I’m any judge,” which he was in all but robe and gavel, “this kid knows North Beach like the back of Allen Ginsberg’s hand"—my little book Wake Me When It’s Over Daddy-O: Proems 1957—i960 has sold a couple of copies, and my girl, who got hers for free, looks good in a leotard. And even better out of one, even if I can’t quit missing Thalia Menninger, who never knew what she meant to me. For our bread, Suze is girl-ing the java urn at a place called the Vertigo-Go. Then, just three months into Camelot, JFK banana-peels us with the Bay of Pigs.

  Bam, ogle me on the move with a few other scraggly cats and chicks down Columbus Avenue to Montgomery Street and Union Square, lipping “Hands off Castro!” and shoving our “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets at a sluice of snap-brims all doing the lunch-hour hurry-hurry. Ferlinghetti’s rounded up whoever isn’t on a reading tour or in Tangiers with Burroughs to show some angry beard. Soon a red light holds us up and we accordion, which is when the tagalonging crewcut we were hoping was plainclothes says he’s with the Chronicle. That’s all Ferl needs:

  “When governments write bad poetry, poets have to govern. And this,” he says, puffing himself up to his full heat, “is a bad poem, in my professional opinion. You remember what Shelley said,” and if you’re fast you see the crewcut’s brain go “Winters?” but Larry is tearing along: “I mean I don’t know where Allen and Gregory are on this, we each go our own way, but to me the ‘free’ in free verse has always been a verb, you see. The way Fidel did Havana, I want to free verse. Free verse!” he hollers, jerking his head up at the rest of us. “Free verse!” And my Suze, who’s in black from her Feiffer-feet to the witch hat on her middle-parted hair and looks like she’s just guessed where all the flowers went, is nudging in and saying, “Larry, it’s turned green, like really green, green like my eyes, we gotta go.”

  Across from a scary-looking mausoleum just short of Union Square, some burlies are hoisting a sign that makes me wonder if I’m on peyote. It’s a clock with twelve hands all holding coffee cups, and underneath it says, “There’s Always Time For Some More Maxwell House!” I mean, sometimes I think the straights know things we don’t, out in the crazy heart of America. The whole bit’s gone a little haywire, we aren’t moving, now I see that Ferlinghetti’s in a face-off with a couple of wharf rats up from the Embarcadero who think our gang is what’s wrong with this picture, and that’s why they’ve just knocked FaFaFaFair Playayayay ffor CubaCubaCuba in a long scoop down the gutter. The fat one with the hair like shaving cream is tearing off his cap and lipping away at Larry like a one-man what’s-up-doc cartoon, and the shrimp in the sneaks and red sweater next to him has hard and frightened eyes for me, why me? I know I don’t know him from Adam.

  Then someone hollers “Watch yourself, Maynard!,” in the same brain-blink that my inner radar pings a toppling world of uh-oh up above. When I look the coffee clock’s come loose, did it jump or was it pushed?, and is avalanching toward me from the sky. I try to protect myself with my “Leave Fidel Alone!” sign, but it’s too late, because time has grown a thousand feathers that I have to try to name. The clouds keel like old sails in a washing machine, hey pops which way to Alcatraz?, and Suze’s face is skidding at me from all directions under her witch’s hat, her mouth making the big O, as Larry jumps back like a circus lion in a movie running backwards and I think Corso never liked me. Off in a corner of this scene, which I couldn’t sort out with a colander, a lanky detective was hauling a drenched blonde out of the big blue drink next to the Golden Gate.

  While a ship with nowhere to get to sailed calmly on.

  I came to in a Jasper Johns, not representational like you would know of, what but undeniably sturdy. Big on white, a use of pigment so tactile it made your eyeballs feel like workingmen’s thumbs, and shapes of sheriff’s badges in rows and uninhabited aisles in an as yet unrecognizable pattern. This is either prison or a dream, I thought; not noticing the false dichotomy. After a minute or a week, part of the painting opened up, and a nice Negro lady Jasper had hidden back of it said, “With us again at last! It’s about time. You must be starving. I’ll just go fetch Dr. Troop.”

  Dr. Troop? I knew no Dr. Troop. Nor can I peg the cat who soon comes nimbly ambling in as if the air behind his heels is still begging for more autographs, a square but clearly some sort of glamor boy in his particular square world. Grown-up baby blues and teeth I groove on, better tended than the Taj Mahal I wonder if I’ll ever get to see unless I build my own, out in the yard where the doghouse used to be.

  Troop sits down on a bit of here that Jasper’s just decided is a chair, and as he hikes a pack of Larks from his breast pocket I dig the monogram—“KFT“—on the blue shirt underneath his lab coat. Just like the ad, he holds out the pack to me: “Sure you don’t smoke?” he asks, when I shake my head. “I suck ’em down like popcorn on fire myself, couldn’t have made it through med school otherwise. Hopkins was rough stuff, believe me,” just like he’d flown a Douglas SBD Dauntless torpedo bomber over Midway or something. “So’s everything since been. My patients had just better pray the Surgeon General’s boys don’t turn up anything too scary, because I’m not about to give these babies up.”

  He Zippos one and blows some smoke that kills the painting, now it’s just a room I’m in. Then he gives me another gander at the Taj. “Anyway, hello,” he says, and calls me by a name I’ve never heard before.

  “Whoever that is, it’s not me,” I told him. “I’m Krebs—Maynard G. Krebs.”

  Troop looked a little disappointed, but not surprised. Making his cigarette act as glad to be near him as if it was a bird and he was St. Francis of Sinatra, he gave a glance at the window he’d brought in with him, which gazed back admiringly. The next bit seemed to be up to your correspondent.

  “Well,” I said, my own earlier check of points south of my goatee not having turned up anything out of whack, “I guess the first question is, what kind of doctor are you?”

  “The best.” Troop flashed me a quick Taj. “I’m your psychiatrist. You’re in the Mayo Clinic.”

  “Yeah, well—hold the Mayo for me, will you, Doc?” I joked weekly, I mean weakly. Troop’s face told me he was slightly tired of having to pretend that he found that one wry, that he thought it cut the mustard, that he greeted it with relish. He thought it was a bunch of baloney. Then again, someone must have had some lettuce to install me in this pad, and Thalia Menninger was a tomato.

  “Man, am I hungry,” I said. “I sure could use a crab sandwich on sourdough bread from Fisherman’s Wharf right now. But what am I doing here?”

  “Returning appetite is a good sign,” Troop said. “You’ve had a breakdown, damn near as bad as they come, and I wrote the book
on those. It’s on sale in the gift shop, if you feel like chipping in for my retirement fund. The big words aren’t too hard. Your mother practically had to Scotch-tape you together to pack you in the car over here.”

  Mother? I thought. I, Maynard Krebs, had no mother. And certainly no father, as even Troop didn’t dispute. As he took a drag, his cigarette’s glow briefly reddened his retinas, like two tiny stop signs. But I was feeling woozy, and Troop was stubbing out a bird:

  “Well!” he said, smacking his knees and calling me by the wrong name again, he must be a busy man. “Just wanted to say howdy-doo, give you a peek at who’s been taking care of you since Old Man Sky fell down and conked you on the head, and welcome you back to our program. I’ll have Julia bring you up some lunch. No can do on the crustacean, I’m afraid, but I’m sure she’s got something in the kitchen almost as good.”

  “Hey, Doc?” I said.

  He was about to step out of the painting. But he turned all the way around—with his whole body, not just his head. Some trick, I thought; the feet must go like so, then so.

  “Just how far are we from North Beach?” I said. “I’d like to ask some cats I know to come dig this white flag.”

  Troop hesitated, which was nice of him, considering. “I’m honestly sorry,” he said, “because they say it’s a helluva town. But you might as well know that you’ve never been in San Francisco. Oh, maybe with your folks, on home leave when you were a kid; your mom didn’t mention anything like that, but we didn’t have time to go over everything. Much less under it! But we’re in Rochester, Minnesota, and that’s where you’ve always lived.”