This section introduces the paraphilia of love for an inanimate object-hoplophilia, love for guns and mechanophilia, love for cars or machines. Hungover, Profane witnesses Pig revving his motorcycle engine in the alley, which reminds him of Rachel Owlglass flashback to the summer of ’54. Pig decides to host a USS Scaffold reunion aboard the Susanna Squaducci back in Newport News on New Year's Eve.Ī flashback section.

The Sailor’s Grave is closed up they reunite with Pig and Dewey at a different bar, Chester’s Hillbilly Haven. Paola holds him, this time around the chest: “His mental eye withdrew, watching their still life as a stranger might” (14). Profane’s loneliness, his aversion to barren country. He and Paola leave, take the ferry back to Norfolk. Teflon attempts to photograph Profane and Paola going at it-Benny having a “no” means “yes” attitude-and Profane does “what was expected of him,” make a fight of it. He quips to himself: “I have a dependent now” (13). Benny and Paola have a relationship that is, with a few exceptions, more custodial than courtly. His nickname, Benny, sounds like the Italian bene, good but Benny isn’t the quickest draw, and, while he seems capable of a kind of compassion, his default state is lustful. Paola wants Profane to be good to her, but he doesn’t know what that means. And we’ll see it again at the close of the section. We’ve seen voyeurism of a sort already, the onlooker, the bystander: “In times of crisis preferred to sit in as voyeur” (9). He likes to photograph his guests in their post-connubial stupor. Pig, Dewey, Paola, and Profane spend a week crashing in Newport News at the apartment of Morris Teflon. A riot breaks out, the cops show up, Profane and co. She's instituted a ritual she calls Suck Hour whereby the patrons are allowed to gorge themselves at the taps, decorated as breasts. There is a brief burrowing episode to provide the backstory for Ploy, a pugnacious little man who had his teeth forcibly removed by the Navy and his gums fitted with metal plates which he then filed into sinister jaws (this is a year before Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me). There he runs into Pig Bodine, Dewey Gland, and Paola. Recently out of the navy, yo-yoing up and down the East coast (presently Norfolk, Virginia) he goes to a bar, The Sailor’s Grave. Benny is later described as 'amoebalike,' 'soft and fat,' with 'eyes small like a pig's and set too far apart' (31). Page numbers refer to the Harper Perennial edition. Chapter One is broken into five (V) sections.

V. by Thomas Pynchon