David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Simple,’ Schtitt shrugs, so that the upraised pointer seems to stab at the sky. ‘Hit,’ he suggests. ‘Move. Travel lightly. Occur. Be here. Not in bed or shower or over baconschteam, in the mind. Be here in total. Is nothing else. Learn. Try. Drink your green juice. Perform the Butterfly exercises on all eight of these courts, please, to warm down. Mr. deLint, please to bring them back down, make sure of stretching the groins. Gentlemen: hit tennis balls. Fire at your will. Use a head. You are not arms. Arm in the real tennis is like wheels of vehicles. Not engine. Legs: not either. Where is where you apply for citizenship in second world Mr. consciousness of ankle Incan-denza, our revenant?’

Hal can lean out and spit in a way that isn’t insolent. ‘Head, sir.’

‘Excuse?’

‘The human head, sir, if I got your thrust. Where I’m going to occur as a player. The game’s two heads’ one world. One world, sir.’

Schtitt sweeps the pointer in an ironic morendo arc and laughs aloud:

‘Play.’

Part of Don Gately’s live-in Staff job is that he hurtles here and there on selected Ennet House errands. He cooks the communal supper on weekdays, [188]which means he does the House’s weekly shopping, which means that at least a couple times a week he gets to take Pat Montesian’s black 1964 Ford Aventura and drive to the Purity Supreme Market. The Aventura is an antique variant of the Mustang, the sort of car you usually only see waxed and static in car shows with somebody in a bikini pointing at it. Pat’s is functional and mint-reconditioned — her shadowy husband with something like ten years sober being big into cars — with such a wicked nice multilayer paint job that its black has the bottomless quality of water at night. It has two different alarm systems and a red metal bar you’re supposed to lock across the steering wheel when you get out. The engine sounds more like a jet engine than a piston engine, plus there’s a scoop poking periscopically from the hood, and for Gately the vehicle’s so terrifically tight and sleek it’s like being strapped into a missile and launched at the site of a domestic errand. He can barely fit in the driver’s seat. The steering wheel is about the size of an old video-arcade game’s steering wheel, and the thin canted six-speed shift is encased in a red leather baglet that smells strongly of leather. The height of the car’s roof compromises Gately’s driving-posture, and his right ham like exceeds the seat and squeezes against the gearshift so that shifting pinches his hip. He does not care. Some of the profoundest spiritual feelings of his sobriety so far are for this car. He’d drive this car if the driver’s seat was just a sharp pointy spike, he told John-ette Foltz. Johnette Foltz is the other live-in Staffer, though between ultra-rabid Commitment-activity in NA and a somehow damaged NA fiance she spends a lot of time pushing around places in a wicker wheelchair, she’s around Ennet House less and less now, and there are rumblings about a possible replacement, which Gately and the heterosexual male residents pray daily will be the leggy alumna and part-time counselor Danielle Steen-bok, who’s rumored also to attend Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, which engages everyone’s imagination to the max.

It’s a mark of serious regard and questionable judgment that Director Pat M. lets Don Gately drive her priceless Aventura, even just to like the Metro Food Bank or Purity Supreme, because Gately lost his license more or less permanently back in the Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster for getting pinched on a DUI in Peabody on a license that had already been suspended for a previous DUI in Lowell. This was not the only Loss Don Gately incurred as his chemical careers moved toward their life-reversing climax. Once every couple months now, still, he has to put on his brown dress slacks and slightly irregular green sportcoat from Brighton Budget Large ‘N Tall Menswear and take the commuter rail up to selected District Court venues on the North Shore and meet with his various P.D.s and P.O.s and caseworkers and sometimes appear briefly up in front of Judges and Review Boards to review the progress of his sobriety and reparations. When he first came to Ennet House last year, Gately had Bad-Check and Forgery issues, he had a Malicious Destruction of Property issue, plus two D&Ds and a bullshit Public Urination out of Tewksbury. He had a Break-and-Enter from a silent-alarmed Peabody mansion where he and a colleague got pinched before anything could get promoted. He had a Possession With Intent from 38 50-mg. tablets of Demerol [189]in a Pez container which he’d shoved down into the crack of the Peabody Finest’s cruiser’s back seat, but which got found anyway on the routine post-transport cruiser-search all cops perform when the arrestee’s pupils are unresponsive both to light and to head-slaps.

There was, too, of course, a certain darker issue, vis-à-vis a certain upscale Brookline home whose late owner had been eulogized at terrifying length and headline-size in both the Globe and Herald. After eight months of indescribable psychic cringing, waiting for the legal footwear to drop on the Nuck-VIP issue — toward the end of his drug-use Gately’d gotten sloppy and crazy and stuck idiotically with a method of straight meter-shunting that he’d learned up at MCI-Billerica and was pretty sure now constituted a signature Gately M.O., since the older guy that’d taught it to him in the Billerica metal-shop had subsequently got out and gone to Utah and died of a morphine overdose (and like who on earth hopes to get reliable morphine in fucking Utah?) over two years ago — after eight months of cringing and nail-biting, the last couple months of the torment in Ennet House — even though the House’s D.S.A.S.-license put it legally off-limits to all constabulary without Pat Montesian’s physical presence and notarized permission — after he was down to the cuticles on all ten digits, Gately had very discreetly approached a certain Percodan-devoted court stenographer an old girlfriend had once dealt to, and had the guy make equally discreet inquiries, and found that the potential Murder-2 investigation of the botched burglary [190]had been taken over — pace the loud howls of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A. — by something federal the addled stenographer called ‘Non-Specific Services Bureau,’ whereupon the case vanished from any sort of investigative scene the stenographer could make inquiries about, though quiet rumor had it that current suspicions were being directed at certain shadowy Nucko-political bodies all the way up in Quebec, far north of the Enfield MA where Gately had been cringing his way to nightly AA meetings with his fingers in his mouth.

Most of the cases Gately had had pending his P.D. had gotten Closed Without Finding, [191]contingent on Gately’s entering long-term treatment and maintaining chemical abstinence and submitting to random urinalyses and making biweekly reparation payments out of the pathetic paychecks he earned cleaning shit and sperm under Stavros Lobokulas and now also cooking and live-in-Staffing at Ennet House. The only issue not resolved on a Blue-File deferral was the business of driving with a DUI-suspended license. In the Commonwealth of MA, this issue carries a mandatory 90-day bit, as in like the penalty’s written right into the statute; and the case’s P.D. has been up-front with Gately about it’s only a matter of the time of the wheels’ slow judicial grind before some judge Red-Files the issue and the case and Gately has to do the bit at someplace MCI-Minimum like Concord or Deer Island. Gately isn’t too hinked about 90 inside. At twenty-four he’d done 17 months at Billerica for assaulting two bouncers in a nightclub — it was more like he’d beaten the second bouncer bloody with the unconscious body of the first — and he knew quite well he could get by in a Commonwealth lockdown. He was too big to fuck or fuck with and not interested in fucking with anyone else: he did his time stand-up and gave nobody any provoking cause; and when the first couple hard guys had come after him for his canteen cigarettes he’d laughed it off with ferocious jolliness, and when they came back a second time Gately beat them half to death in the corridor behind the weight room where he could be sure plenty of other guys could hear it, and after that one incident was out of the way he could simply get by and not get fucked with. Gately now was hinked only about the prospect of getting just one or two AA meetings a week in jail — the only meetings sober inmates get are when an area Group comes in on an Institutional Commitment, which Gately’s been on — when Demerol and Talwin and good old weed are almost easier to get in jail than in the outside world. Gately cringed now only at the thought of the Sergeant at Arms, the distinguished-looking shepherd guy. Going back to ingesting Substances had become his biggest fear. Even Gately can tell this is a major psychic turn-around. He tells the newer residents right up front that AA’s somehow gotten him by the mental curlies: he’ll now go to literally Any Lengths to stay clean.