David Wallace - Infinite jest

He was always kind of a boys’ boy. He had a jolly ferocity about him that scared girls. And he had no idea how to deal with girls except to try and impress them by letting them watch somebody do something to his head. He was never what you’d call a ladies’ man. At parties he was always at the center of the crowd that drank instead of dancing.

It was surprising, maybe, given Gately’s size and domestic situation, that he wasn’t a bully. He wasn’t kindly or heroic or a defender of the weak; it’s not like he stepped kindly in to protect wienies and misfits from the preda-tions of those kids that were bullies. He just had no interest in brutalizing the weak. It’s still not clear to him if this was to his credit or not. Things might have been different if the M.P. had ever knocked Gately around instead of focusing all his attention on the progressively weaker Mrs. G.

He smoked his first duBois at age nine, a hard little needle-thin joint bought off jr.-high niggers and smoked with three other grade-school football players in a vacant summer cottage one had the key to, watching broadcast-televised niggers run amok in a flaming L.A. CA after some Finest got home-movied crewing on a nigger in the worst way. Then his first real drunk a few months later, after he and the players’d hooked up with an Orkin man that liked to get kids all blunt on screwdrivers and that wore brownshirts and jackboots in his off-hours and lectured them about Zog and The Turner Diaries while they’d drink the OJ and vodka he’d bought them and look at him blandly and roll their eyes at each other. Soon none of the football players Gately hung with were interested in much of anything except trying to get high and holding air-guitar and pissing contests and talking theoretically about Xing big-haired North Shore girls, and trying to think up things to break over Gately’s head. They all had like domestic situations too. Gately was the only one of them truly dedicated to football, and that was probably just because he’d been told over and over that he had real talent and limitless futures. He was classified Attention-Deficit and Special-Ed, from grade school on, with particular Deficits in ‘Language Arts,’ but that was at least partly because Mrs. G. could barely read and Gately wasn’t interested in making her feel worse. And but there was no Deficit in his attention to ball, or to cold foamers or screwdrivers or high-resin desBois, or especially to applied pharmacology, not once he’d done his first Quaalude [362]at age thirteen.

Just as Gately’s whole recall of his screwdriver-and-sinsemilla beginnings tends to telescope into one memory of pissing orange juice into the Atlantic (he and the blunt cruel Beverly players and bullies he partied with drinking whole quarts of throat-warming OJ at a shot and standing ankle-deep in grit on a North Shore shore, facing east and sending long arcs of legal-pad-yellow piss into onrushing breakers that came in and creamed around their feet, the foam warm and yellow-shot with their piss — like spitting into the wind — Gately at the podium had started saying it turns out he was pissing on himself right from the start, with alcohol), in just the same way, the whole couple years before he discovered oral narcotics, the whole period 13–15 when he was a devotee of Quaaludes and Hefenreffer-brand beer collapses and gathers itself under what he still recalls as ‘The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks.’ Quaaludes and Hefenreffer also marked Gately’s entree into a whole new rather more sinister and less athletic social set at B.M.S., one member of which was Trent Kite, [363]a dyed-in-wool laptop-carrying wienie, chinless and with a nose like a tapir, and pretty much the last fanatical Grateful Dead fan under age forty on the U.S. East Coast, whose place of honor in the sinister Beverly Middle School drug-set was due entirely to his gift for transforming the kitchen of any vacationing parents’ house into a rudimentary pharmaceutical laboratory, using like BBQ-sauce bottles as Erlenmeyer Flasks and microwave ovens to cyclize OH and carbon into three-ring compounds, synthesizing methylenedioxy psychedelics [364]from nutmeg and sassafras oil, ether from charcoal-starter, designer meth from Tryptophan and L-Histidine, sometimes using only a gas-top range and parental Farberware, able even to decoct usable concentrations of tetra-hydrofruan from PVC Pipe Cleaner — which at that time best of British luck ordering tetrahydrofruan from any chemical company in the 48 con tigs/6 provinces without getting paid an immediate visit by D.E.A. guys in three-piece suits and reflecting shades — and then using the tetrahydrofruan and ethanol and any protein-binding catalyst to turn plain old Sominex into something just one H 3C molecule away from good old biphasic metha-qualone, a.k.a. the intrepid Quaalude. Kite had called his Quaalude-isotopes ‘QuoVadis,’ and they were a great favorite for 13-15-year-old Bimmy G. and the slouched sharp-haired sinister set he dropped Ludes and QuoVadises with, washing them down with Hefenreffers, resulting in a kind of mnemonic brown-out where the entire two-year interval — the same interval during which the ex-M.P. found somebody else, a Newburyport divorcee who apparently put up a more sporting fight than Mrs. G., and decamped in his sticker-covered Ford with his seaman’s bag and pea-coat — the whole period’s become in Gately’s sober memory just the vague era of The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks. Quaaludes and 16-oz. Hefenreffers awakened Gately and his new droogs to the usually-dormant-but-apparently-ever-lurking ill will of innocent-seeming public sidewalks everywhere. You didn’t have to be brainy Trent Kite to figure out the equation (Quaaludes) + (not even that many beers) = getting whapped by the nearest sidewalk — as in you’re walking innocently along down a sidewalk and out of nowhere the sidewalk comes rushing up to meet you: WHAP. Happened time after fucking time. It made the whole crew resent having to walk anywhere on QuoVadises because of not having driver’s licenses yet, which gives you some idea of the sum-total I.Q. brought to bear on the problem of the Attacks. A tiny permanent cast in his left eye and what looks like a chin-dimple are Gately’s legacy from the period before moving up to Percocets, which one advantage of the move deeper into oral narcs was that Percocets + Hefenreffers didn’t allow you even enough upright mobility to make you vulnerable Co sidewalks’ ever-lurking ill will.

It was amazing that none of this stuff seemed much to hurt Gately’s performance playing ball, but then he was as devoted to football as he was to oral CNS-depressants. At least for a while. He had disciplined personal rules back then. He absorbed Substances only at night, after practice. Not so much as a fractional foamer between 0900h. and 1800h. during the seasons of practice and play, and he settled for just a single duBois on Thursday evenings before actual games. During football season he ruled himself with an iron hand until the sun set, then threw himself on the mercy of sidewalks and the somnolent hum. He used class to catch up on REM-sleep. By freshman year he was starting on the Beverly-Salem H.S. Minutemen Varsity and was on academic probation. Most of the sinister set he’d hung with were expelled for truancy or trafficking or worse by sophomore year. Gately kept hanging in and on til seventeen.

But Quaaludes and QuoVadis and Percocets are lethal in terms of homework, especially washed down with Hefenreffer, and extra-especially if you’re academically ambivalent and A.D.D.-classified and already using every particle of your self-discipline protecting football from the Substances. And — unhappily — high school is totally unlike higher education in terms of major-sport coaches’ influence over instructors, athletes-and-grades-wise. Kite got Gately through math and Special Ed. science, and the French teacher was getting her strabysmic eyeballs fucked out by the Minutemen’s tanned lounge-lizard of an Offensive Coordinator on the behalf of Gately and a semi-retarded tight end. But English just fucking killed him, Gately. All four of the English teachers the Athletic Dept. tried Gately on had this sieg-heil idea that it was somehow cruel to pass a kid that couldn’t do the work. And the Athletic Dept. pointing out to them that Gately had an especially challenging domestic situation and that flunking Gately and rendering him ineligible for ball would eliminate his one reason even to stay on in school — these were to no, like, aveil. English was his sink-or-swim situation, what he then termed his ‘Water Lou.’ Term papers he could more or less swing; the football coach had wienies on retainer. But the in-class themes and tests killed Gately, who simply didn’t have enough will left over after sunset to choose like the crushingly dull Ethan From over QuoVadis and Hefenreffer. Plus by this time three different schools’ authorities had him convinced he was basically dumb, anyway. But mostly it was the Substances. This one particular B.-S.H.S.-Athletic-Dept.-hired wienie of an English tutor spent a sophomore-year March’s worth of evenings in Gately’s company, and by Easter the kid weighed 95 pounds and had a nose-ring and hand-tremors and was placed by his frantic, functional parents in a juvenile-intervention rehab, where the wienie’s whole first week of Withdrawal was spent in a corner reciting Howl in high-volume Chaucerian English. Gately flunked Sophomore Comp. in May and lost the fall’s eligibility and withdrew from school for a year to preserve his junior season. And but then, without the only other thing he’d been devoted to, the psychic emergency-brake was off, and Gately’s sixteenth year is still mostly a gray blank, except for his mother’s new red chintz TV-watching couch, and also the acquaintance of an accommodating Rite-Aid pharmacist’s assistant with disfiguring eczema and serious gambling debts. Plus memories of terrible rear-ocular itching and of a basic diet of convenience-store crud, plus the vegetables from his mother’s vodka glass, while she slept. When he finally returned for his sophomore year of class and junior year of ball at seventeen and 284 lbs., Gately was enervated, flabby, apparently narcoleptic, and on a need-schedule so inflexible that he needed 15 mg. of good old oxycodone hydro-chloride out of his pocket’s Tylenol bottle every three hours to keep the shakes off. He was like a huge confused kitten out on the field — the coach made him go in for P.E.T. Scans, fearing M.S. or Lou Gehrig’s — and even the Classic Comics version of Ethan From was now beyond his abilities; and good old Kite was gone by that last September of Unsubsidized Time, admitted early on a full ride in Comp. Science by Salem State U., meaning Gately was now on his own in remedial math and chem. On offense, Gately lost his starting spot in the third game to a big clear-eyed freshman the coach said showed nearly limitless potential. Then Mrs. Gately suffered her cirrhotic hemorrhage and cerebral-blood thing in late October, just before the midterms Gately was getting ready to fail. Bored-eyed guys in white cotton blew blue bubbles and loaded her in the back of a leisurely sirenless ambulance and took her first to the hospital and then to a Medicaid L.T.I. [365]out across the Yirrell Beach span in Pt. Shirley. The backs of Gately’s eyes were too itchy for him to even be able to stand out on the red pocked stoop’s steps and see to wave adios. The first gasper he ever smoked was that day, a 100 out of a half-finished pack of his mother’s generics, that she left. He didn’t even ever go back to B.-S.H.S. to clean out his lockers. He never played organized ball again.