Bleeding Edge is the book that inspired this project. According to my (very work in progress) list, it mentions 32 different specific drinks, crushing V.’s paltry 17. Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew in V. are way drunker than Bleeding Edge’s Maxine Tarnow, but they’re always just drinking “beer” or “wine.” Bleeding Edge gets nice and specific. Mamajuana? Fernet-Branca? A King Kong, a Soju Wallbanger? Irresistible.

Something a little tamer for now: a tequila sunrise. These don’t show up in the physical New York of Bleeding Edge, but in “Deep Archer” the mysterious open-source Deep Web virtual reality dimension and refuge from the commercial ravages of the “surface web,” the place that “will always take you in, keep you safe.” It’s in Maxine’s first visit to Deep Archer that the digital tequila sunrises appears:

The detail of the 3-D countryside barrelling past the windows on both sides is surely on a much finer scale than it has to be, no loss of resolution no matter how closely she tries to focus in. Train hostesses out of Lucas and Justin’s beach-babe fantasies keep coming by with carts full of junk food, drinks with Pacific subtexts like Tequila Sunrises and mai tais, dope of varying degrees of illegality…

Perhaps like Pynchon himself, I’ve lived in a relatively tropical city on the Pacific and then moved to a totally untropical unPacific one. I understand the allure of the tropical. And I can certainly verify that you can taste those “Pacific subtexts” in a tequila sunrise. It’s a dreary Sunday here, but this has injected a bit of palm tree and white sand into my afternoon.