Page 164
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Michael keeps riding in the expensive Cadillac while talking with O'Dandy about misery, compensation money, unconsciousness, the limp survivor of the pole crash, and the two other deaths still trailing behind that road to West Virginia.
The contradiction is the point here: luxury, injury money, and roadside death are all sharing the same moving interior. The page closes with the crash no longer as a boast or anecdote but as a stubborn fact that money cannot smooth over.
O'Dandy turns musical taste into a class diagnosis: the narrator can like symphony 'because you can afford to' and 'don't have to explain,' cannot like jazz because 'other people' know it, and likes rock and roll only because it is already 'a part of your memory, and everybody elses.' His materialism collapses sentiment into appetite - 'Feeling is in the memory... If you want to dance on your own / star, then get laid and make some money' - and Murphy seconds it ('I'd go for a good piece of ass') against the narrator's repeated 'Misery is my preference.' The luxury car prompts O'Dandy's own crash story - a man drove him 'into a steel pole going ninety,' so he sued, just 'like you sued me' - and the page closes on the death toll of that 'road to West Virginia,' the survivors and dead alike still 'jaff offs.'