David Wallace - Infinite jest

Some Substance-dependent persons, though, have already been so broken by the time they first Come In that they don’t care about stuff like substitution or banality, they’ll give their left nut to trade their original dependence in for robotic platitudes and pep-rally cheer. They’re the ones with the gun to their head, the ones who stick and Hang. It remains to be determined whether Joelle van Dyne, whose first appearance in a James O. Incan-denza project occurred in this very Low-Temperature Civics, is one of these people who’ve come into AA/NA shattered enough to stick, but she’s starting to I.D. more and more with the Commitment speakers she hears who did come in shattered enough to know it’s get straight or die. A click and a half straight downhill from E.T.A., Joelle is hitting the Reality Is For People That Can’t Handle Drugs Group, a meeting of the NA-splinter Cocaine Anonymous, [291]mostly because the meeting’s in the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital Grand Rounds Auditorium, just a couple floors down from where Don Gately, whom she just got done visiting and mopping the massive unconscious forehead of, is lying in the Trauma Wing in a truly bad way. CA meetings have a long preamble and endless little Xeroxed formalities they read aloud at the start, is one reason Joelle avoids CA, but the opening stuff is done by the time she gets down and comes in and gets some burnt urn-bottom coffee and finds an available seat. The only empty seats are in the meeting’s back row — ‘Denial Aisle,’ the back rows are usually called — and Joelle is surrounded by catexic newcomers crossing and uncrossing their legs every few seconds and sniffing compulsively and looking like they’re wearing everything they own. Plus there’s the row of standing men — there’s a certain hard-faced type of male in Boston fellowships who refuses ever to sit for meetings — standing behind the back row, legs set wide and arms crossed and talking to each other out the sides of their mouths, and she can tell the standing men are looking at her bare knees over her shoulder, making little comments about the knees and the veil. She thinks with fearful sentiment [292]of Don Gately, a tube down his throat, torn by fever and guilt and shoulder-pain, offered Demerol by well-meaning but clueless M.D.s, in and out of delirium, torn, convinced that certain men with hats wished him ill, looking at his room’s semi-private ceiling like it would eat him if he dropped his guard. The big blackboard up on the stage says the Reality Is For People That Can’t Handle Drugs Group welcomes tonight’s Commitment speakers, the Freeway Access Group from Mattapan, which is deep in the colored part of Boston where Cocaine Anonymous tends to be most heavily concentrated. The speaker just starting in at the podium when Joelle sits down is a tall yellowish colored man with a weightlifter’s build and frightening eyes, sloe and a kind of tannin-brown. He’s been in CA seven months, he says. He eschews the normal CA drugologue’s macho war-stories and gets right to his Bottom, his jumping-off place. Joelle can tell he’s trying to tell the truth and not just posturing and performing the way so many CAs seem like they do. His story’s full of colored idioms and those annoying little colored hand-motions and gestures, but to Joelle it doesn’t seem like she cares that much anymore. She can Identify. The truth has a kind of irresistible unconscious attraction at meetings, no matter what the color or fellowship. Even Denial Aisle and the standing men are absorbed by the colored man’s story. The colored man says his thing is he’d had a wife and a little baby daughter at home in Mattapan’s Perry Hill Projects, and another baby on the way. He’d managed to hang on to his menial riveter’s-assistant job at Universal Bleacher right up the street from here in Enfield because his addiction to crank cocaine wasn’t everyday; he smoked on your binge-type basis, mostly weekends. Hellacious, psychopathic, bank-account-emptying binges, though. Like getting strapped to a Raytheon missile and you don’t stop till that missile stops, Jim. He says his wife had got temp work cleaning houses, but when she worked they had to put their little girl in a day-care that just about ate her day’s pay. So his paycheck was like their total float, and his weekend binges with the glass pipe caused them no end of Financial Insecurity, which he mispronounces. Which brings him to his last binge, the Bottom, which, predictably, occurred on a payday. This check just had to go for groceries and rent. They were two months back, and there was not jack-shit in the house in the way of to eat. At a smoke-break at Universal Bleacher he’d made sure and bought just one single vial, for just a tensky, for a Sunday-night treat after a weekend of abstinence and groceries and quality time with his pregnant wife and little daughter. The wife and little daughter were to meet him after work right off the bus stop at Brighton Best Savings, right under the big clock, to ‘help’ him deposit the paycheck right then and there. He’d let his wife stipulate the meeting at the bank because he knew in a self-disgusted way even then that there was this hazard of paycheck-type incidents from binges he’d pulled in the past, and their Financial Insecurity was now whatever word’s past the word deep shit, and he knew goddamn well he could not afford to fuck up this time.

He says that’s how he used to think of it to himself: fucking up.

He didn’t even make it to the bus after clocking out, he said. Two other Holmeses [293]in Riveting had three vials each, which vials they had, like, brandished at him, and he’d kicked in his one vial because two-and-a-third vials v. one thin-ass Sunday-night vial was only a fucking fool way out of touch with the whole seize-the-opportunity concept could pass that shit up. In short it was the familiar insanity of money in the pocket and no defense against the urge, and the thought of his woman holding his little girl in her little knit cap and mittens standing under the big clock in cold March dusk didn’t so much get pushed aside as somehow shrink to a tiny locket-size picture in the center of a part of him he and the Holmeses had set out busily to kill, with the pipe.

He says he never made the bus. They passed a bottle of rye around the old Ford Mystique one of the Holmeses profiled, and fired up, right in the car, and after he once fired up with $ in his pocket the fat woman with the little helmet with horns on it done already like fucking sang, Jim.[294]

The man’s hands grip the sides of the podium and he rests his weight on his elbow-locked arms in a way that conveys both abjection and pluck. He invites the CAs to let’s just draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the night’s scene, which after the check-cashing stop got hazy with missile-exhaust anyhow; but so he finally did get home to Mattapan the next morning, Saturday morning, sick and green-yellow and on that mean post-crank slide, dying for more and willing to kill for more and yet so mortified and ashamed of having done fucked up (again) that just going up the elevator to their apartment was maybe the bravest thing he’d ever done, up to that point, he felt.

It was like 0600 in the A.M. and they weren’t there. There was nobody home, and in the sort of way where the place’s emptiness pulsed and breathed. An envelope was slid under the door from the B.H.A., [295]not the salmon color of an Eviction Notice but a green Last Warning re rent. And he went into the kitchen and opened up the fridge, hating himself for hoping there was a beer. In the fridge was a jar of grape jelly near-empty and a half a can of biscuit mix, and that, plus a sour empty-fridge odor, was all, Jim. A little plastic jar of labelless Food-Bank peanut butter so empty its insides had knife-scrapes on the sides and a little clotted box of salt was all there was in the whole rest of the kitchen.