It’s January 1956; it’s Chapter One of V.; Benny Profane’s back in New York, up early yo-yoing sub-pavement between Grand Central and Times Square. He meets a group of Puerto Rican kids called Tolito, José, and Cucarachito (Klook to his friends). Their sister Josefina shows up too and shortly decides that Profane should move in with them all. Before long, he’s installed at their house uptown in the ’80s, sleeping in the bathtub—the place he’d been living before wasn’t real flash anyway. He wakes up there the next morning and finds the older brothers drinking wine:

A few hours later they all came reeling down the steps of the old brownstone, horribly drunk. Angel and Geronimo were arguing about whether it was too cold for girls to be in the park. They walked west in the middle of the street. The sky was overcast and dismal. Profane kept bumping into cars. At the corner they invaded a hot dog stand and drank pina colada to sober up. It did no good. They made it to Riverside Drive, where Geronimo collapsed.

V., p. 42.

Do hot dog stands sell piña coladas where you come from? It appears in New York City they do. Various incestuously related NYC chains from the 1930s on (“Papaya King,” “Gray’s Papaya,” “Papaya Dog,” “Papaya Heaven,” “Papaya Paradise,” “Papaya Place,” … ) seem to have specialised in pairing hot dogs with tropical juice drinks. Gray’s Papaya may be the only one surviving, but to this day they serve a $2.95 frank and a $1.95 regular pina colada. The pina colada is, however, non-alcoholic. Profane and co’s sobering up plan might have been more sensible than it at first appeared.

Being far from NYC, my pina colada comes with booze. In what I think is the first Drunk Pynchon post from an actual bar since Pynchon in Public Day 2021 (I guess I need to get out more), I have ventured to the LuWow, a Melbourne tiki bar as legendary as it is garish. Their pina colada spin goes by the name “Bikini Bottom.” It’s a thick silky sweet coconut and rum, with guava juice supplementing the typical pineapple. I felt like I had drank half a can of coconut milk, but not in a bad way.

I do feel that should I ever find myself in Nueva York again I should head by Gray’s Papaya for a taste of the non-alc coladas our fictional friends were slurping down. The remaining Gray’s location isn’t even all that far from where Angel, Geronimo, and Profane stumbled—it’s at Broadway and West 72nd street, just a few blocks south of whatever hot dog stand got invaded on our fictional January 1956 afternoon.