Van Meter

Van Meter is Zoyd Wheeler’s old friend, former musical partner, and recurring ally in the improvised communities around Vineland. A bass player with a habit of searching for transcendent experience, he is also a practical presence in Zoyd’s unsettled life: he keeps track of him, makes room for him, and offers help when Zoyd and Prairie are displaced. His comic indignation and spiritual restlessness do not cancel one another; together they make him a portrait of countercultural aspiration surviving amid overcrowding, political pressure, and everyday need.

Identity and Life in Vineland

Van Meter had once played bass with Zoyd and shared in the disorderly adventures of their earlier lives. By the time Zoyd encounters him again in 1984, he lives in a bungalow behind the Cucumber Lounge, where he calls his crowded household a commune. Its members include current and former wives, friends of former wives, children whose parents are present or absent, and people who have arrived from elsewhere. Rather than settling into the peace Zoyd hopes might come with communal life, the residents sustain a ceaseless, high-volume series of arguments. Their disputes become so familiar and persistent that they acquire the character of ritual and even generate their own newspaper, the Blind-Side Gazette.

The setting makes Van Meter’s domestic world an alternative kind of refuge, but not a quiet one. The commune’s noisy life is audible beyond its immediate circle, while Van Meter himself carries an expression of injured righteousness that Zoyd recognizes as his emblem. His irritation is real, yet it belongs to the same comic social landscape in which the household’s conflicts are both exhausting and communal habit.

Friendship with Zoyd

The friendship between Van Meter and Zoyd is grounded less in solemn reassurance than in a shared practice of laughing at one another’s troubles. Years later, when they recall the collapse of Zoyd’s marriage to Frenesi Gates, Van Meter teases him about having been so preoccupied with Hector Zuñiga that he failed to recognize another federal agent’s involvement with Frenesi until after she had left. Zoyd accepts the jab as part of their familiar exchange. Their humor does not erase the pain behind the memory; it gives the two men a way to revisit it without pretending that either of them escaped the consequences.

Van Meter also helps Zoyd through the annual stunt that keeps Zoyd’s disability benefit in place. When Zoyd is late for his scheduled window-smashing performance at the Cucumber Lounge, Van Meter calls to tell him that television crews, police vehicles, and an ambulance are waiting. He later hurries Zoyd toward the event as the light fades and performs a mock ceremonial send-off before the cameras are ready. The performance is Zoyd’s, but Van Meter helps make its public staging possible. When Zoyd smashes through the window, the impact proves unexpectedly muted; afterward, Van Meter is among those caught up in the confused aftermath. His participation shows how their friendship accommodates both practical coordination and absurd spectacle.

The bond continues through Zoyd’s reflections on the past. At one point Zoyd believes he has finally escaped Hector’s interference and that his life with Prairie can simply continue, while Van Meter’s presence belongs to the old circle of shared stories and misunderstandings. The narrative makes clear that Zoyd’s sense of closure was mistaken: separation and survival required years of further adjustment. Van Meter’s place in the friendship is therefore not as a rescuer who resolves Zoyd’s difficulties, but as a companion who remains available within them.

Music and the Search for Transcendence

Music gives Van Meter a continuing vocation and a way to pursue experiences beyond ordinary life. He keeps playing in local groups, including a hastily assembled band at a Thanatoid gathering at the Blackstream Hotel. The booking also draws on his friendship with Zoyd, who plays keyboards, although Van Meter has not seen him for a week and does not know whether to worry. Zoyd is staying with cannabis growers at Holytail, a hard-to-reach refuge increasingly threatened by CAMP and by expanding government pressure. The missed reunion is a small but telling sign of how their shared musical life persists even as political danger disperses the people around them.

Van Meter’s musical history is embodied in an old Fender Precision bass whose tuning pegs he removed in 1976, after hearing that Jaco Pastorius had done something similar to a Jazz Bass. He filled the grooves with epoxy and drew guide lines where the pegs had been. At first, he treated the alteration as a route beyond predetermined musical scales, a way to imagine every note as available. Years later, the grandness of that epiphany has faded, though its darker outlines remain. At the Blackstream Hotel he plays the altered instrument for an audience that responds to his sliding, wavering notes, even though he admits that he does not understand the Thanatoids very well.

His musical work also involves adapting himself to other people’s expectations. At the gathering, the band plays old popular standards, blues, and nostalgic songs, while the audience favors minor keys and funeral-like marches rather than rock. The music slows as the night advances, with dancing tending toward stillness and conversation thinning out. Van Meter has to keep restraining the tempo. The scene places his musical idealism inside an occasion that values subdued remembrance over the energy he might otherwise bring; his performance becomes another effort to find connection in a room whose rhythms are not his own.

His search for transcendence extends beyond music. Van Meter has spent much of his life looking for exceptional spiritual experiences, including lucid shared dreams that the children in his household describe but that he cannot reach. He tries to follow their instructions, yet cannot even arrive at the edge of the imagined jungle. The gap between the children’s certainty and his frustrated striving sharpens the character’s comic vulnerability: experiences that others seem to enter naturally remain just beyond his grasp. Rather than make him dismiss the children, this repeated failure leaves him privately preoccupied with what they claim to have found.

Displacement and Practical Loyalty

When Zoyd is arrested, Van Meter is demoralized and decides to move north in California. He offers to tow Zoyd’s car, which is loaded with belongings, and gives him telephone numbers through which they can reconnect. Zoyd leaves with Prairie and travels toward a hidden community in the Sacramento Delta, while the larger movement of people from southern California leaves Vineland struggling to house newcomers. Van Meter’s offer is a concrete act of assistance at a moment when Zoyd’s home and familiar routines have become insecure.

The friends meet again in Eureka, but the reunion begins with mutual misrecognition. Zoyd sees Van Meter’s psychedelic-painted Dodge Dart and initially fails to recognize the person at the wheel, who looks to him like a standard-issue hippie version of himself. Van Meter, meanwhile, takes Zoyd’s confusion for anger and drives on. Zoyd follows through traffic and reaches him at a red light. The encounter turns disorientation into recognition, and Van Meter immediately tries to reassure his friend that the car is running well and has just been filled with gas.

As they travel through Vineland, Van Meter offers to bring Zoyd and Prairie into the commune where he lives beyond Intemperate Hill. The town is already crowded with people fleeing warrants and other official attention, and the bus station has become temporary sleeping space for many displaced newcomers. Before going to a bar with Van Meter, Zoyd leaves Prairie with people from the bus journey who share childcare. At the bar, Van Meter reasons that the newcomers are difficult to distinguish from one another and that this resemblance could make them nearly invisible. He also suggests that Zoyd might seek out relatives of Sasha Gates, while advising him not to forget his old friend if he finds somewhere to live. The offer is not abstract solidarity: Van Meter says that even a garage, woodshed, or shack would be enough for him and Chloe.

Later Alliances and Narrative Role

Van Meter’s networks remain useful when Zoyd begins assembling men for a plan that calls for something capable of firing rapidly. Van Meter says that the Ordine Harleyita has its headquarters in Walnut Creek and could therefore be approached without difficulty. He knows the group through his persistent search for the transcendent and is impressed by the spirituality he perceives in its members. The Order’s unusual identity joins motorcycle culture to religious language: its members have become a group of nuns for tax purposes while retaining practices that defy conventional ideas of religious purity. Van Meter’s account makes clear why he finds them compelling, but the possibility of recruiting them remains uncertain; his connection opens a route, not a guaranteed alliance.

That combination of spiritual openness and practical networking defines Van Meter’s narrative role. He is neither an uncomplicated guide nor a figure who can shield Zoyd from the forces bearing down on him. He moves among bands, communes, seekers, and unconventional groups, carrying with him a distinctive instrument and an appetite for experiences that remain elusive. Yet his most consequential gestures are grounded in ordinary friendship: alerting Zoyd to the waiting television crews, arranging transport, welcoming him and Prairie, and offering space to stay. Through Van Meter, the novel presents countercultural life not as a settled escape from political and material pressures, but as a fragile network of people whose imperfect loyalties can still make shelter possible.