The Absinthe Agent

The motif of Florida as a befouling force continues in Thomas McGuane's 1978 novel Panama. The protagonist is Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy, a proverbial burned out and brain damaged rock star now retired to his hometown of Key West, where he is descended from six or so generations of shipwrights and ship chandlers. Chet is on (among other things) an identity quest, a search for Truth, and a campaign to rekindle romance with his estranged girlfriend from the debaucheries of the road, Catherine Clay. Perhaps not coincidentally Catherine turns up in Key West living off of coffee cans full of inherited family jewelry. She left Pomeroy in New York some time during the apex and consequent disintegration of his international stardom, a crash hastened by an incident where he quite in public vomits all over the mayor of that city.

Aah, but Chester Pomeroy is a longtime Floridian, which means, "Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death. Catherine initiated the idea that I [Chet] was a misfit. I took to the idea like a duck to water." On top of the Florida connotations, he is additionally tagged "… a depraved pervert … a national disgrace … a tribute to evil living … the most sleazed-out man in America … the original snowball in hell." The defining show of his rock career occurs when on stage he emerges (in his underwear) from the ass of a frozen elephant to fight a duel with a baseball batting practice machine.

Then there is the thing with his brain. His mnemonic capacity pulverized by years of cocaine and its cronies, Chet has extreme, short-term memory quirks. Sometimes, when he cannot recall what he's eaten for breakfast, he goes to another restaurant and eats again, often forgets that, then pops into another bistro for more. Catherine, although reluctant early in the story to have much to do with Chet, hires a private detective to follow Pomeroy around daily, then report back to him on what he's been doing. She only wants to help.

Another curious short circuit in Chester's gray matter is his contention that his father died years ago in a Boston subway fire, and that he was never a good parent anyway because he signed young Pomeroy over to Catholic nuns for early schooling. Dad, however, is a living millionaire (made his fortune in the snack food business) whose yacht is moored just off of Key West. He's there to make amends, and to see firsthand just how far over the edge his son is dangling. Until the last pages of the novel, Chet refuses to acknowledge his living father in person, or in conversation with anyone. The denial is a running source of tension between Chester Pomeroy and his friends and family.

Also bubbling up from the loose goose soup is Chet's Aunt Roxy, whom he says looks like "… a circus performer who had been shot from the cannon one too many times." Pomeroy disapproves of her relationship and impending marriage with local low-life lawyer and closet gigolo, Curtis G. Peavey, because, "His eyes were full of clocks, machinery, and numbers." Roxy owns a significant piece of oceanfront property (where the family shipbuilders once thrived) and Peavey wants it for the Holiday Inn. Roxy, however, is not some frail victim of oppressive male capitalism. She is a regular abuser of tranquilizers and booze. She "… can behave with great charm. But then, just at the wrong time, pulls up her dress and throws some thing."

Another borderline femme fatale is Catherine's friend Marcelline, Creole ex-New Orleans beauty and former teenage prostitute who now blackmails a Toronto judge to get by. After Chester, in a coke stupor, nails himself by the hand to Catherine's wooden door in a desperate ploy for attention (Please, no Christ figure speculations here, although the Catholic scars are the subject of a paper not mine somewhere else.), he witnesses, as he comes out of a recovery nap, some minor league lesbian antics between Catherine and Marcelline. However, it's just a fleeting dislocation for the women, and a few days later Chet shows up at Marcelline's door with flowers to help her get over the humiliation of a talent agent urinating in her face during a private moment usually approached by most couples in a more tender way. Pomeroy's close secondary motive is to shore up things between him and Catherine by being nice and considerate to her friend. Alas, lust gets the best of Marcelline and Chet, but she calls Catherine to ask if it's all right. Catherine says OK, yet quickly appears, but a little late, disappointed and sniffling. Everything works out, though. No harm done. But don't wait for more details or summary here and now. This is literary criticism.

Panama is a first person narrative written in dazzling poetic prose, the story ricocheting between the then and now in ways that smack at times of The Sound and the Fury and "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" going on simultaneously. Chester Pomeroy's freefalling ode rings with personal history, everyday anxieties, and idealistic to surrealistic rants largely critical of "the age." Indeed it is a tale told by an idiot, of sorts; but Chet is also a strangely insightful prodigy besieged by existential angst, accumulated confusions, and demon hormones, all perhaps chemically spawned by a half-life in the high gutter, and his natural state as a disciple of The Venereal Peninsula. His romantic circumstance is one sign of his disarray. Pomeroy may still be much in love with Catherine Clay, and she with him, oddly enough. In fact she finds their marriage certificate from a 1970 lark in Panama. Neither recalls the nuptial (So who is crazy now?), but Chester reflects, "I had been married for years but I couldn't for the life of me remember Panama, though I knew it to be very warm and green, with a certain number of coconuts and a sleepy way of life. Panama. Many hats have been manufactured there. And there's that canal!"

In another take, John Regis Young, retired Emeritus Professor from somewhere in Ohio, insists that Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy is an allegorical character in a way that renders Panama another warning as to the eternal corrupting nature of Florida. If Chet is the sunshine state incarnate, then, his story impacts in that scary, ambivalent manner already noted in many of Wallace Stevens's Florida verses. Pomeroy and his tale do possess some of the classic traits of literary allegory. As a storied Florida native, Chet is an offspring, export, and by product of the state as much as citrus, election fraud, and time share abodes. He is an extended metaphor who exceeds his humanity in many alarming directions. The allegorical character is usually involved in an elaborate quest to restore his displaced raison d'?tre; the tenor of the striving is often anxious, obsessive, and tinted with hysteria. The "hero" is in a kind of exile from his community, sometimes geographically, but always psychologically and spiritually. In addition, the protagonist of allegory lacks a quality or article of high cultural worth, which he is desperate to acquire or reclaim.

"In the case of Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy," Young writes in his 1994 study, Tourist Go Home; Chilling Stories from the Disney State, "the quest object is his good old brain, whose decomposition, thanks to a life of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, renders his heart and soul Swiss cheese. When he comes home he is an outcast, for the most part, because he behaved so badly under the celebrity spotlight. To his immediate family he is a bit of an embarrassment too. Reminiscent of so many Fisher Kings then, he has no mate, that he can remember, and no riches to speak of. In part this stems from his rank as a Floridian who accepts mildew, cockroaches (palmetto bugs) and other naturally occurring blights as rather normal."

This may not be to say, though, that Panama is so much postmodern mono-myth. Chet is certainly no archetypal hero. Forsooth, there are fair assessments: "overnight sensation," (Roxy's evaluation); "you flop you," (Catherine's words). However, Pomeroy does possess a glitzy cynicism and drive that can pass for the heroic, if not tricksterish, in our warped cultural quagmire. He exhibits a darkly whimsical grace under pressure at times as he flounders about the subtropical landscape trying to jump start his slaughtered brain cells and reconfigure his doom. Oh boy does he try.

The effort, though, is much more farcical than heroic; and therein rolls another read of Panama that plops it awfully in line with a very popular modern sub genre, romantic comedy. "Thomas McGuane's Panama," declares Sissy Marie Sanguine of Dark Forest Community College, "is a loose burlesque of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, a novel consistently misread as a tome of lost generationism, but in reality a first rate romantic comedy full of puns and other funny things." Doctor Sanguine may have something. For McGuane surely clues such a comparison in that brief interlude late in the narrative when Chet and Catherine are returning from the beach after a bizarre encounter with a hyped-up Marcelline.

"I love you so," said Catherine. "Whatever's missing in the world, I'm doing my part."

We passed down the purlieus of Duval Street, past vile restaurants addressed "Rue Duval." On the steps of St. Paul's Church, a pigeon worked its way diagonally below the feet of two elderly gentlemen, factional members of a Long Island exodus.

"We could have had such a damned good time together," I heard one say.

"Yes," replied the one in the bonnet, "isn't it pretty to think so."

"Now," said the former, "I'm heading home to put things by."

If you cannot hear those bells loud and clear, do not read another word of this. Absolutely, there are parallels to be noted between the travails of Jake Barnes/Brett Ashley and Chet/Catherine. In both books there is a cast of freaky, yet lovable, characters; an exotic sense of place, albeit sometimes devoid of purpose; lots of alteration of consciousness, by chemical means; and the specter of negated love, a theme most rampant in Hemingway stories. In the penultimate analysis, both Jake and Chet are unable to get or keep the girl because of their wounds, Jake's terribly physical, and Chet's insufferably neurological. Both books drip with unincremental repetition of bar and restaurant scenes, ironical one-liners, and (especially in SAR) pointless puns.

In a related comic convention, the name calling leveled at Chester Pomeroy by friends, family, and acquaintances is unimaginative and redundant. Nearly everyone in the book at some time calls him a depraved pervert. Chet hangs a sign on the fountain in front of his residence: DEPRAVED PERVERT WISHING WELL. From there he collects a lot of lunch money, especially after his father dumps in it a gym bag full of silver dollars. But when Catherine calls him such, he protests: "I just don't like that phrase. It's not a clever phrase. It's a dreary phrase and everybody's calling me it. I'm sick of it. You hurt with those hand-me-down phrases. They suggest indifference. Will you get in here [bed] with me?"

As the great Northrop Frye observes in his still not yet tedious masterwork Anatomy of Criticism, "Repetition overdone or not going anywhere belongs to comedy, for laughter is partly a reflex, and like other reflexes it can be conditioned by a simple pattern." To digress, this must be why so many television sitcoms of the usual dubious content (Seinfeld, Friends, Will and Grace, and worse) utilize laugh tracks to an annoying, if not preposterous and insulting, degree. It's a bit of not so subliminal trickery intended to mask or dress up the trite, tasteless, and insipid; and it works. You don't get that background audio crap with The Simpsons, except when they are satirizing such fraudulence. Think about it. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

So, does Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy realize that he is a twisted disciple of The Venereal Peninsula, perhaps gone off into the outlands to intimidate possible invaders and tourists? To warn people (through perverted escapade) to stay away, keep out, don't even think it? Is he good, evil, or something bobbing in midstream? Do we applaud, boo, or ignore him? How is the tale to be taken? Should we grimace, laugh, cry, puke, or just buy the latest Harry Potter novel and forget about it? Forget about what? Where exactly is the damn antecedent? Good answers are not acquired easily; they are not like so much grapefruit in January, when ripeness is always.

Firstly, what can be ascertained as to what Chester Pomeroy thinks about his rockin' livelihood, the fame and antics? Appropriately, the white water and whirlpools of his stream of consciousness expose a mess of slippery things:

Wondering what I am doing here makes me behave as I have, which is a matter of record. Like Ulysses S. Grant, it was an instance of a village crank being called by his Republic; I found myself in the consciousness traffic, hawking a certain ugliness on a cash-and-carry basis. It took me a little while to get the bugs out; and after that, I was lethal.

He intuits, perhaps, that he is further low testimony to the affective theory of art, while sensing a higher calling, democracy's gravity, prompting him. Like Thomas Skelton, of Ninety-Two in the Shade, Chet cannot resist or shake the fatalism that fuels him, being himself out of Florida, and thus another offspring of the ultimate Funkmeister. Pomeroy describes his inertia thus:

I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller Brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant's ass, it was widely felt I'd gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.

Chester does, however, sense that what he is is socially and spiritually wretched, if not plain heinous, but that recovery is a stray dog, altogether elusive, running around with a shiny, wet chin.

I wanted to get well. I just didn't know what that was. If there was a fear, it was that I had never known; that I had been strikingly not well from the start; that my ticket to ride, such as it was, was based on the vividness of disease; and that I was paying for everyone else.

Although cognizant of his contagion, Chet appears incapable of doing one damn thing about it. He suspects there is something partly spiritual afoot with him, that his journey is no light picaresque novel peopled with rascals, scoundrels, loose maidens, and the occasional faithful mount. But he is fundamentally clueless as to how to proceed. Superb case in point is the scene following his encounter with paparazzi, whom Chet flees from through the streets of Key West, eludes them finally, but falls hard on his head. He staggers back to his place where Catherine is waiting. She notices the bulge in his pocket.

"Give me the gun."

"It's mine."

"Give it to me."

I handed it over.

"Let me ask you something. Would you consider seeing a psychiatrist?"

"Not at all."

"Why?"

"They are disease profiteers."

"You need help."

"I'm doing fine."

"As what?"

"An angler on the sea of God's mysteries."

. . .

Then Catherine found my rosary in the margarine tub: "What the fuck is this?"

"Only at night."

"What?"

"For sleepless nights. Beads, vodka, and walking the dog."

As usual, Chet's self analysis, his cure for what assails him, is skewed, like his earlier palliation of the hedonistic drug habit: "… given the objective conditions of our lives, how can we avoid taking drugs? It's our only defense against information." Religious objects, booze, and the companionship of lower animals, as agents of therapy and clarification, are the naïve resort of one afflicted with Romanticism. Chet, at best, is only a rainy day Romantic, and life is one big dry season For him there is no way out, no rest, and no way home because he is already there. Welcome (back) to Florida.

But in the end, almost, Roxy marries Peavey. Chet decides that accepting the union and not interfering is a big first step toward his reunion with society. He even pays for the party, the Cuban orchestra, and what all. Chet and Catherine are dancing the night away when Marcelline arrives with her musician boyfriend from New Orleans, who jumped bail on a grave robbing charge. They're a little short on cash, among other things, but fear not. Seems they've dug up the bones of a certain Lieutenant Pomeroy who fought the pirates out of Key West two hundred years ago, and figure Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy will want to buy him. They show him the bag of bones, which glow in the moonlight. He declines as Catherine bolts in absolute aghast. Chet catches up with her, but this time it's merely ceremonial.

"You attract that sort of thing like a lightning rod."

"I do not!" I said desperately. I could see it coming.

"Then why why why do these things always happen to us?"

Within an hour she will be on the bus for the mainland. At the station Chet asks her where she is going.

"Thinking of going to Panama."

"Why?"

"It's the last place I saw you." She pressed her beautiful hands to her face and said, "In Panama I'm married. I have a man and he'll stand up for me through thick and thin. Everywhere else I'm in pieces."

Their end is as poignant as that of Jake and Brett, but without some mounted policeman at an intersection raising his baton so gaggles of Freudian critics may come rushing in. Pomeroy knows he will never see Catherine again. But all is not over. At midnight his father shows up, the appointed hour, just like a father. He was at the wedding. There is brief, awkward, imperfect reconciliation as Chet acknowledges the man for whom he is: "He just watched me say the word and after that either of us could go, knowing there was more to be said and time to say it. Perhaps we wished there was not so much time."

Well, there you have it. Fini. Panama is a great little novel, and Thomas McGuane is a remarkable writer too much overlooked by too many people supposedly savvy about the literary in America. As for Florida again, McGuane's is hostile toward human efforts, a place where you can come (or return) for help, inspiration, or relaxation and receive none of the above. Crouched in the sunshine state is Mother Nature's Revenge, where nuts get nuttier, the ugly uglier. Talk about your pathetic fallacy--that Romantic delusion of the first magnitude spun out of the ding-bat Pastoral tradition--Florida just stomps on you until you disappear beneath the swampy terrain or shifting dunes. It's not a place one should go, especially if your drive to be there is prompted by visions of therapy and healing.

Nevertheless, the apes keep arriving, ignoring the signs. So, this is where Tim Dorsey comes in handy. His novels seem to have given up on simply warning readers not to travel to Florida. Rather they dare you. With an in-your-face frankness that only seems hyperbolic, they show what horrors await in every square foot of grass, concrete, and sand, every drop of water. The Dorsey canon fires no blanks. It is saturation bombing that revels in collateral damage, and its target is the whole of humanity, particularly those creeps and carpetbaggers that come to infest, pollute, and derange The Venereal Peninsula. As avid reader and Lakeland flower shop owner Poinciana Parker observes of Dorsey's unsubtle principal throughout his five books, "I have seen the Absolute Avenger, and his name is Serge A. Storms."