She slammed the brass knocker down on the big oaken door with a solid crack and then waited for somebody to answer. Carole and me, Miles. Her standing in the fourth floor hallway of the apartment house in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco at night and me on the stairway, one step below her.
One would like to suggest that this novel is a period piece; a slice of a life that is no longer remotely recognizable. Alas, such is not the case. Originally published in 1970, this opening portrait of a man and a woman attempting to score drugs in an appropriately mysterious setting in which the atmosphere suggests an ever-present awareness that violence can suddenly intrude upon the peace could just as easily be translated and updated to modern day. It is only as the narrative progresses that the novel is revealed to be taking place in an era otherwise as remote from modern day as a story taking place during the Great Depression.
She turned on me then with drooping eyes as if pleading with me not to ruin the groovy ball we had been having for the last twenty-four hours, non-stop, but I insisted, saying “I’m going to split. Are you coming with me?”
And there you go. It does not take long at all before the potential of this novel to take place in a contemporary setting to reveal itself as being firmly grounded in the era of hippies, the Beatles and Vietnam. The key clue being, of course, that most descriptive of terms from the time period: “groovy.” It is strange, isn’t it, how some terms and jargon and patois can survive over the course of the long term while others become stuck in their age like a mosquito stuck in amber. Reading the novel ultimately becomes the literary equivalent of paleontology. It is a groovy experience trekking along with the cool hipster Miles through the world of psychedelia and drug addiction before splitting to head back to the world of memes and Elon Musk.
“You’ve never been on the lam before, baby. I have. I tried to score some grass down in West Oakland one time when most college kids didn’t smoke it, and you had to go down into the underworld to get it. The narcos saw me and chased me up the wrong side of Adeline Street for two blocks, but didn’t catch up until Had thrown the grass out the window, and I thought I got away with it. But that was the beginning of a long five year run from them up and down California and even down to Mexico City, where they still didn’t let up , and tried to set me up every way they could, and finally got to my family through my brother-in-law, and finally even to my wife, until there wasn’t a person in the whole world who didn’t try to help them bust me.”
In case it was not clear by this point, this passage should reveal that what is being read is an example of pulp fiction. When Tarantino titled his movie after this literary form, this is exactly the kind of dialogue which it was referencing. From the “baby” to the “narcos” to the long outburst of that last sentence which symbolically reflects the drug-fueled psyche of the narrator, this is pure pulp fiction at its most elemental and definitive.
