Down and Out Near the Happiest Place on Earth : CHEZ CHANCE, <i> By Jay Gummerman (Pantheon Books: $21; 224 pp.)</i>

In this subtly warped tale of Disneyland-adjacent drug peddling and real-estate swindling, Jay Gummerman not only presents the most appetizing analysis of the horrors of Disney-fication since Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s “How to Read Donald Duck,� but offers substantial allegorical evidence that, despite their annoying tendency to thrash one’s brain to oblivion, hallucinogens are ultimately less damaging to society’s consciousness than their chemical-free counterpart, the Wonderful World of Disney.

Caustic and compassionate, rendered with the thoughtful pacing of Raymond Carver, the stubborn humanity of Mark Twain and the intricate circuitry of Kurt Vonnegut, “Chez Chance� is a unique flailing of ownership and self-preservation against community and communication.

After a crippling accident, grumpy young Frank Eastman leaves Los Angeles to be with his family in St. Louis, only to be orphaned a month later by a late-night falling fuselage. Frank “knew from that day forward his life would be dominated by rabid kittens and stray tires bounding toward him at high speed.� Unable to communicate with the rest of his family--sister Margaret--Frank returns to the West, hoping to make some sort of sense of things before the next kitten or tire arrives.

We run into him at LAX, lounging in his wheelchair, denigrating the indigenous “enabled� citizens (good legs, bad brains) and musing over the omnipresence of rats in the palm trees. Across from the luggage-maiming carousel, he meets fellow traveler Violet Moonier, yabbering away on a pay phone. Violet grew up in Disneyland--�well, not in Disneyland�--and that’s where she’s headed now. Frank says--why shouldn’t he?--Disneyland’s his destination, too. Soon Violet’s big brother, the ever-scowling Chance Slimp, arrives in a bright red Mercedes, stuffs them in and speeds greedily down the 405, dodging traffic as if he’s playing Tetris.

Chance speaks only the language of real estate, at crucial intervals meticulously reminding people of their first names: “Where you from, Frank?� “Is that right, Frank?�

A brazen hater of people with disabilities, the gluttonous Chance is in fact “the most enabled person [Frank’s] ever seen�; but at least he’s honest.

Honest like Hitler:

Frank, he says, is his “monkey. It’s my unconscionable tax outlay that subsidizes your pathetic existence. You don’t even have [an] organ, for chrissakes. I don’t have to be nice to you.�

And so he isn’t. Chance dumps Frank like a bran muffin onto the festering outskirts of the Happiest Place on Earth. With an immense suitcase balanced across the arms of his wheelchair, Frank rolls with great difficulty to the nearest lodging, the Tradewinds, a ramshackle boomtown motel, its pool dirt-packed and planted with cactuses.

Here in the Tradewinds’ courtyard, Gummerman gets Frank to mingle with the neighbors, a menagerie of popular Orange County wasteland characters: white-trash teenagers, schizophrenic French-fry-stealing burglars and one kindly young hooker.

The immense ovoid one, Beatrice “the egg woman,� sells drugs out of the room next door. Her life is sitting on a box all day, spouting non sequiturs until a customer arrives to buy a does of “tickets.� (An “E-ticket,� for example is LSD; “straight outta the . . . ‘60s,� Beatrice brags.) Customers come and go, an onslaught of babbling dudes, chemical workaholics so inured to each other’s incoherencies they’ve forgotten that these sounds they make can be used to create meaning. They’re crippled by jargon, just like their real-estate workaholic counterparts uptown, just like Chance at home watching television in the Anaheim Hills: If your language is the only one you hear, how would you know whether or not you’re making sense?

After a few days, Frank appears to be conspicuously not buying drugs, so egg woman Beatrice arranges for a briefing with “the emperor,� young Jarvis Tayama.

Lord of these Anaheim streets, supplier of tickets at wholesale prices to the public, maker of occasional sense and constant money, Jarvis is livid, lucid and sociopathic--the perfect businessman. Gummerman sentences Frank to drive all over town in a pickup truck with Jarvis to absorb the emperor’s deep nasty secrets from within a luxuriously upholstered, air-conditioned world. Like Chance, Jarvis is an aficionado of sales talk (he says Frank a lot) and, like Chance, he also threatens to turn Frank over to “the elements.�

The elements, in this case, take the form of Jarvis’ franchises--a highly trained staff of blithering druggies and petty thieves. “If you’re not a part of the system,� Tayama coos, “you’re a free agent, Frank. Free agents don’t belong here--they don’t belong anywhere--and when you don’t belong in a place, bad things will tend to happen to you.�

Faced with an enticing assortment of impending bad things, Frank does the only thing he can do: acid. Acid for lack of a Big Mac, acid for lack of a Lexus. Only by a display of public support for the local merchants’ association--whether it’s scoring an E-ticket from an egg woman or a briefcase from Office Depot--can an American be spared the wrath of true independence.

So, yes, Frank buys and does acid (as any good citizen would), giving his creator the chance to let loose some fantastic synesthetic amalgamations with a disturbing ease reminiscent of Thelonious Monk playing a lullaby. Here, especially, Gummerman’s pollination of the subversive with the sublime makes for a wonderful read, indeed. Frank comes back down, of course, and that’s where Violet picks him up. Unfortunately, there’s always a Chance.