Chapter 21

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

Page numbers refer to editions with 369 pages, where the story begins on page 1. Not sure if there are other editions with variant pagination. Please let us know otherwise.

Page 364

. . . the Lakers would lose Game 7 of the finals to the Knicks
Friday, May 8, 1970. The final score was Knicks 113, Lakers 99. This means that the novel ends on Pynchon's 33rd birthday, a nice way to underscore the semi-autobiographical nature of Inherent Vice. Furthermore, this situates the ending of the novel just four days after the Kent State Massacre on May 4, 1970 - yet another way of telling us that the beach is being paved over and that the sixties have come to an end.

Page 365

Ones and zeros
Binary code, the language of computers. Also mentioned in Vineland (pp. 90 and 115) and in Crying of Lot 49.

Page 366

Tubular, dude
A nice pun. "Tubular," in surfer slang, means something like "awesome" or "cool." It refers to the tubes or curls of the waves. But in the context here with Doc and Sparky, the tubes in question are vacuum tubes, which were used on computers (and radios and TVs and speakers) before transistors.

Pizza Man
Pizza Man--He Delivers - since 1964

Page 367

Doc got on the Santa Monica Freeway
Doc Sportello isn't the only character taking a drive rather than turning in tonight. On May 8, 1970, Richard Nixon went public in a news conference about the war spreading to Cambodia. That night, at 4 A.M., the President called Manolo Sanchez, his valet, and asked him if he had ever seen the Lincoln Memorial at night.
So, off went the (possibly a little unhinged) President, his valet, and a too-small Secret Service contingent. Nixon had an impromptu "rap session" with 8 protesters at the Memorial. As 8 turned to 30 and then 50 protesters, the Secret Service became "petrified".
After about an hour, President Nixon took his valet on a tour of the Capitol. You can read about it (and get the text of Nixon's press conference)

here in the italics at the bottom of the page.

Nixon's presence in this scene is even stronger if you consider Doc's drive to be a wormhole into the conclusion of Gravity's Rainbow. In IV, Doc got on the Santa Monica Freeway, and about the time he was making the transition to the San Diego southbound. In GR, Richard M. Zhlubb (according to Steven Weisenburger in A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, Richard Nixon "circa 1970") takes a reporter on a drive on the freeways. Near the interchange of the San Diego and the Santa Monica (GR p. 755).
That makes two Nixons, one real and one fictional, out for a drive with Doc.

Pages 368/369

Gordita Beach Exit
On the last two pages of Inherent Vice, Doc Sportello is on the Santa Monica freeway which then merges onto the San Diego, heading south:

Doc figured if he missed the Gordita Beach exit he'd take the first one whose sign he could read and work his way back on surface streets. He knew that at Rosecrans the freeway began to dogleg east, and at some point, Hawthorne Boulevard or Artesia, he'd lose the fog.

This series of street names and off-ramps points to Manhattan Beach where Pynchon wrote much of Gravity's Rainbow while living in a tiny beach apartment in the north end of the city around between 1967-1971. The Manhattan Beach Boulevard exit to Doc house would Rosecrans . The Artesia exit is after Hawthorne. Google Maps; Much more about Pynchon in Manhattan Beach...

Though Doc Sportello shares some qualities with Zoyd Wheeler of Vineland, contrast Doc's reaction to driving in fog with Zoyd's, when Zoyd and other members of the "Corvairs" "surfadelic" band "play motorhead valley roulette," speeding into patches of ground fog hoping that "the white passage held no other vehicles, no curves, no construction, only smooth, level, empty roadway to an indefinite distance--a motorhead variation on a surfer's dream" (37).

For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.
The endings of Pynchon's novels have justifiably become famous, and these final paragraphs about driving through the fog, capped by this heart-breaking sentence-fragment, will be no exception.