The Third Figure

Benny Profane

The human yo-yo of the eastern seaboard — the third figure of the Idle Pantheon.

Revealed · No. III of XII

III. of XII

Benny Profane, the third figure of the Idle Pantheon

His standing in the five measures

Idleness 9

Works only when broke, quits by attrition, and treats employment as weather: something that happens to him and then stops. The subway nights are the purest idleness in the file.

Wisdom 3

The lowest score the Pantheon will award all year, and he would be proud of it, if pride required less effort. He ends his own novel testifying that he has learned nothing, and we take him at his word, with a strange respect.

Wanderlust 7

Perpetual motion, zero destinations. Docked three points because wanderlust implies wanting, and wanting is the one journey he never books.

Defiance 6

He does not rebel; rebellion requires a position. But never enlisting, indefinitely, in a country built on enlistment, adds up to something: not defiance, exactly, but its lazy cousin, and the inanimate world clearly counts him as an enemy combatant.

Sociability 7

The Crew, the parties, the bars, the women who insist on loving him: a crowded life, all of it held at arm's length, because closeness is a commitment and commitments are things that happen to other people.

Benny Profane is a discharged Navy sailor adrift on the eastern seaboard of the 1950s, yo-yoing between New York and Norfolk on the principle of the toy itself, flung and reeled, flung and reeled. A self-described schlemiel and human failure, he is at permanent war with the inanimate world: things break in his hands, machines sense his approach, and objects conspire against him with a patience he has learned to respect. For wages, briefly, he hunts alligators in the storm sewers beneath New York, the discarded pets of a fashion grown pale and large in the dark, and down there, among everything thrown away by somebody, he feels almost at home.

He drifts through Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963), a novel swarming with conspiracies, codes, and quests, none of which he grasps and one of which he conspicuously declines to join, running instead with the Whole Sick Crew, artists who talk more than they make. He is the third figure of the Idle Pantheon because he is the patron saint of being acted upon: where Lichter refused the world and Haňťa rescued it, Profane simply lets it carry him, and he ends his own novel testifying, without bitterness, that he has learned nothing at all. Set down your subway token.

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