From: dschmidt@athena.mit.edu (Dan Schmidt)
Subject: Re: Gravity's Rainbow: MEGAZONE (Meggezone)
Organization: the act or process of organizing or of being organized
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 23:04:22 GMT

snow@netcom.com (Tim Szeliga) says:
>As part of the continuing Gravity's Rainbow thread, I ask
>"Where can I get some MEGAZONE?".
>(I think it's megazone:  while I do have Finnegans Wake and The Perfect
>Wagnerite in my office collection, GR is at home.)

I can't answer your question, but since I typed in the whole candy
episode a few years ago, I can't resist the opportunity to post it.
This should at least convince everyone that Pynchon is real funny...

                              ----

   She [Mrs. Quoad] brings out from behind its cretonne camouflage a
great bowl of candies.  "_Now_," beaming at Slothrop.  "Here: wine
jellies.  They're prewar."
   "Now I remember you -- the one with the graft at the Ministry of
Supply!" but he knows, from last time, that no gallantry can help him
now.  After that visit he wrote home to Nalline:  "The English are
kind of weird when it comes to the way things taste, Mom.  They aren't
like us.  It might be the climate.  They go for things we would never
dream of.  Sometimes it is enough to turn your stomach, boy.  The
other day I had one of these things they call 'wine jellies.'  That's
their idea of _candy_, Mom!  Figure out a way to feed some to that
Hitler 'n' I betcha the war'd be over _tomorrow_!"  Now once again he
finds himself checking out these ruddy gelatin objects, nodding, he
hopes amiably, at Mrs. Quoad.  They have the names of different wines
within on them in bas-relief.
   "Just a touch of menthol too," Mrs. Quoad popping one into her
mouth.  "Delicious."
   Slothrop finally chooses one that says Lafitte Rothschild and
stuffs it on into his kisser.  "Oh yeah.  Yeah.  Mmm.  It's great."
   "If you _really_ want something peculiar try the Bernkastler
Doktor.  Oh!  Aren't you the one who brought me those lovely American
slimy elm things, maple-tasting with a touch of sassafras --"
   "Slippery elm.  Jeepers I'm sorry, I ran out yesterday."
   Darlene comes in with a steaming pot and three cups on a tray.
"What's that?" Slothrop a little quickly, here.
   "You don't really want to know, Tyrone."
   "Quite right," after the first sip, wishing she'd used more lime
juice or something to kill the basic taste, which is ghastly-bitter.
These people are really insane.  No sugar, natch.  He reaches in the
candy bowl, comes up with a black, ribbed licorice drop.  It looks
safe.  But just as he's biting in, Darlene gives him, and it, a
peculiar look, great timing this girl, sez, "Oh, I thought we got rid
of all _those_ --" a blithe, Gilbert & Sullivan ingenue's _thewse_ --
"_years_ ago," at which point Slothrop is encountering this dribbling
liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels.
   "You've taken the last of my Marmalade Surprises!" cries Mrs.
Quoad, having now with conjuror's speed prodeuced an egg-shaped
confection of pastel green, studded all over with lavender nonpareils.
"Just for that I shan't let you hace any of these marvelous rhubarb
creams."  Into her mouth it goes, the whole thing.
   "Serves me right," Slothrop, wondering just what he means by this,
sipping herb tea to remove the taste of the mayonnaise candy -- oops
but that's a mistake, right, here's his mouth filling once again with
horrible alkaloid desolation, all the way back to the soft palate
where it digs in.  Darlene, pure Nightingale compassion, is handing
him a hard red candy, molded like a stylized raspberry... mm, which
oddly enough even tastes like a raspberry, though it can't begin to
take away the bitterness.  Impatiently, he bites into it, and in the
act knows, fucking idiot, he's been had once more, there comes pouring
out onto his tongue the most godawful crystalline concentration of
Jeez it must be pure nitric acid, "Oh mercy that's really _sour_,"
hardly able to get the words out he's so puckered up, exactly the sort
of thing Hop Harrigan used to pull to get Tank Tinker to quit playing
his ocarina, a shabby trick and twice as reprehensible coming from an
old lady who's supposed to be one of our Allies, shit he can't even
_see_ it's up his nose and whatever it is it won't dissolve, just goes
on torturing his shriveling tongue and crunches like ground glass
among his molars.  Mrs. Quoad is meantime busy savoring, bite by
dainty bite, a cherry-quinine petit four.  She beams at the young
people across the candy bowl.  Slothrop, forgetting, reaches again for
his tea.  There is no graceful way out of this now.  Darlene has
brought a couple-three more candy jars down off the shelf, and now he
goes plunging, like a journey to the center of some small, hostile,
planet, into an enourmous bonbon _chomp_ through the mantle of
chocolate to a strongly eucalyptus-flavored fondant, finally into a
core of some very tough grape gum arabic.  He fingernails a piece of
this out from between his teeth and stares at it for a while.  It is
purple in color.
   "Now you're getting the idea!" Mrs. Quoad waving at him a marbled
conglomerate of ginger root, butterscotch, and aniseed, "you see, you
also have to enjoy the way it _looks_.  Why are Americans so
impulsive?"
   "Well," mumbling, "usually we don't get any more complicated than
Hershey bars, see..."
   "Oh try _this_," hollers Darlene, clutching her throat and swaying
against him.
   "Gosh, it must really be something," doubtfully taking this
nasty-looking brownish novelty, an exact quarter-scale replica of a
Mills-type hand grenade, lever, pin and everything, one of a series of
patriotic candies put out before sugar was quite so scarce, also
including, he notices, peering into the jar, a .455 Webley cartridge
of green and pink striped taffy, a six-ton earthquake bomb of some
silver-flecked blue gelatin, and a licorice bazooka.
   "Go on then," Darlene actually taking his hand with the candy in it
and trying to shove it into his mouth.
   "Was just, you know, looking at it, the way Mrs. Quoad suggested."
   "And no fair squeezing it, Tyrone."
   Under its tamarind glaze, the Mills bomb turns out to be luscious
pepsin-flavored nougat, chock-full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and
a chewy camphor-gum center.  It is unspeakably awful.  Slothrop's head
begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes are running, his tongue's
a hopeless holocaust.  Cubeb?  He used to _smoke_ that stuff.
"Poisoned..." he is able to croak.
   "Show a little backbone," advises Mrs. Quoad.
   "Yes," Darlene through tongue-softened sheets of caramel, "don't
you know there's a war on?  Here now love, open your mouth."
   Through the tears he can't see it too well, but he can hear Mrs.
Quoad across the table going "Yum, yum, yum," and Darlene giggling.
It is enormous and soft, like a marshmallow, but somehow -- unless
something is now going seriously wrong with his brain -- it tastes
like gin.  "Wha's 'is," he inquires thickly.
   "A gin marshmallow," sez Mrs. Quoad.
   "Awww..."
   "Oh that's nothing, have one of _these_ --" his teeth, in some
perverse reflex, crunching now through a hard sour gooseberry shell
into a wet spurting unpleasantness of, he hopes it's tapioca, little
glutinous chunks of something all saturated with powdered cloves.
   "More tea?" Darlene suggests.  Slothrop is coughing violently,
having inhaled some of that clove filling.
   "Nasty cough," Mrs. Quoad offering a tin of that least believable
of English coughdrops, the Meggezone.  "Darlene, the tea is lovely, I
can feel my scurvy going away, really I can."
   The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp.
Menthol icicles immediately begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop's
mouth.  Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape
alveolar clusters in his lungs.  It hurts his teeth too much to
breathe, even through his nose, even, necktie loosened, with his nose
down inside the neck of his olive-drab T-shirt.  Benzoin vapors seep
into his brain.  His head floats in a halo of ice.