Vineland

Elvissa, Zoyd’s neighbor, borrows his car. In turn, Zoyd borrows a car from another neighbor named Trent. This borrowed car is a truck with a cedar cabin camper shell. Zoyd drives to Phantom Creek, where he will meet a pair of crawfish farmers named RC and Moonpie. Zoyd takes their crawdad catch and sells the crayfish to Vineland restaurants.

Zoyd met RC and Moonpie on the same day in the 1970s when he and Frenesi divorced. In the years that followed, he spent his days working on construction sites and his nights playing gigs with the Corvairs. He relates to the surfers of California, likening himself to them because they are both carried along by a force greater than themselves, the “terrors and ecstasies of the passive” (37). They are carried by God’s oceans, and he is carried along by the motor of his car. Just as the surfers lose friends to the ocean, Zoyd has lost friends to faulty cars and drunk driving. As he drives, his mind flits back to the past. He recalls his wedding day, as he frequently does. He tells only Prairie about these fond memories.

Zoyd meets Moonpie, who tells him that a television-obsessed man resembling Hector visited the Lost Nugget to ask about him.