David Wallace - Infinite jest

[240] ® The Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., Hilo HI — ‘A LOW SODIUM FOOD.’

[241] Popular corporate-hard-rock bands, though it shows where Bruce Green’s psychic decline really started that, except for TBA 5, these bands were all truly big two or three years past, and are now slightly passe, with Choosy Mothers having split up entirely by now to explore individual creative directions.

[242] This is one reason why he consents to be hung way out into space from Schtitt’s transom for filming all-court play, held only by some prorector with a firm grip on the back of his lock’s vest, which the players looking up at Mario’s forward ski-jump posture off the crow’s nest find incredibly terrifying and audacious and ballsy, and Avril won’t even leave HmH during all-court filmings.

[243] This though Avril’s never come right out and articulated her worry about his P.M. safety to Mario, not wanting to seem as though she’s making a special issue of his deficits and vulnerability or to seem inconsistent when she lets Hal go off nightly wherever he likes or just basically in any way to inhibit Mario’s sense of autonomy and freedom by causing him to worry about her worrying — which he does, rather a lot, worry about Avril’s worrying about him. If that makes sense.

[244] Mario, like his maternal uncle Charles Tavis, has a dislike of fluorescent lighting.

[245] ‘Is that supposed to mean something? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing. Literally nothing.’

[246] A depressing new Sober Club in Somerville’s Davis Square where AAs and NAs — mostly new and young — get heartbreakingly dolled up and dance stiffly and tremble with sober sexual anxiety and they stand around with Cokes and M.F.s telling each other how great it is to be in an intensely social venue with all your self-conscious inhibitions unmedicated and screaming in your head. The smiles alone in these places are excruciating to see.

[247] A Restriction means just no Overnight that week and an extra Chore; a House Restriction means you have to be back an hour after work and nightly meetings; Full House is no leaving the House except for work and meetings, and 15 minutes to get back, and no even leaving to buy smokes or a paper, or even to go out in the lawn for oxygen, and one violation means a Discharge: F.H.R. is Ennet’s version of the Hole, and it’s dreaded.

[248] Ennet House takes its urines over to the methadone clinic, which has all manner of clients who have to submit weekly urines to courts and programs, and the clinic lets Ennet put its urines gratis in the weekly batch the clinic sends out to an E.M.I.T.-mill clinic all the way out in Natick, and in return every once in a while Pat gets a call from the trollish little social worker who runs #2 about some client down there who’s decided he wants off the methadone, as well, and Pat will shoot the client way up on the Interview list and give him an interview and usually let the client in — Calvin T. and Danielle S. had both originally gotten into Ennet House this way, i.e. via #2.

[249] It’s maybe significant that Don Gately never once failed to clean up any vomit or incontinence his mother’d just drunkenly left there or passed out in, no matter how pissed off or disgusted he was or how sick he himself was: not once.

[250] (who owns a Lincoln, Henderson does, origins unknown and suspicious)

[251] This is all for Insurance Reasons, the Staff sheet on which Gately doesn’t understand all the language of, and fears.

[252] It’s against House rules to smoke upstairs in the bedrooms — more Insurance Reasons — and a week’s Restriction is supposed to be mandatory, and Pat’s personally a fanatic about the rule, but Gately, much as he fears the grim boilerplate on the Insurance Sheet, always pretends he doesn’t see anything when he sees somebody smoking up here, since when he was a resident he actually used to sometimes smoke in his sleep he was so tense, and every once in a while will wake up and find that he has again, i.e. lit a gasper and apparently smoked it and put it out all in his sleep, down in bed in his Staff oubliette in the basement.

[253] (the items from the House’s donated-clothes baskets that fit Gately being few and far)

[254] Gately’s made it an iron point never again ever to run, once he got straight.

[255] NNE street argot for any kind of handgun.

[256] (Erdedy’s hands still up, w/ keys)

[257] (NNE Region, trying hard not to irritate Tine Sr. by fidgeting)

[258] (Desert-SW Region, understated in a massive peasant skirt and sensible flats)

[259] These, ® a number of fine companies, are like enormous versions of the little windshield-washer implements at service stations — an industrial mop-handle w/ a canted rubber blade at the end, used for spreading puddle-water out so it dries faster, at some academies replaced with the EZ-DRI hinged-roller-of-dense-sponge-at-the-end court-dryer, which E.T.A. eschews because of how fast the rolling sponge at the end mildews and smells bad.

[260] Mrs. Incandenza always grades everything in blue ink.

[261] A phenomenon not unknown, viz. menial employees and shift-workers mining E.T.A.’s collected waste for cast-off value, and permitted by the administration and Mr. Harde, or rather just not actively discouraged, since ‘One man’s trash …’ and so on, with the only requirement being a certain visual discretion when carrying off E.T.A.’s offal, simply because the whole thing’s kind of embarrassing for everybody.

[262] I.e. the Women’s Tennis Association, the distaff equivalent of the A.T.P.

[263] Sic, presumably for Betamax (®Sony).

[264] Sic, but it’s pretty obvious what Marathe means here.

[265] Reinforced Aluminum Spectation Unit.

[266] The occasional upscale parent could be seen exiting Comm.-Ad. and crossing behind the West Courts’ south fence to the asphalt lot and what were unmistakably parental autos, all remarkable for their textbook tire-pressure and bristles of cellular antennae and the absence of any little dust-smiles on their rear or side windows. Charles Tavis had spent the morning interfacing with parents of those E.T.A. kids injured in I.-Day’s Es-chaton free-for-all. Lateral Alice Moore, for a treat, had been listening to Tavis and parents on her headphones, while typing, instead of her collection of aerobic favorites. Struck and Pemulis had cruised by before lunch and blarneyed her into putting the exchanges on her intercom’s speaker for a couple minutes. You should hear C.T. enclosed with parents sometime. It was only some of the parents — Todd Possalthwaite’s dad was on honeymoon in the Azores, and Otis P. Lord’s mother had some inner-ear thing and the Lords couldn’t fly. But Pemulis and Struck concurred that everyone with any kind of administration in his blood should hear E.T.A.’s Headmaster with parents and a placative mission, a master charmer past all social gauge, a Houdini with the manacles of fact, the interfaces like fluidless seductions — Pemulis said the man’s missed a genuine calling in sales — everyone practically wanting to smoke a cigarette afterward, the parents leave weeping, pumping Tavis’s hands — one parent per hand — practically begging him to accept both their thanks and their apologies for daring to even possibly think, even for a moment. Then, supporting each other, making their way over Lateral Alice’s third rail and past the beaming extremely polite lads by her desk and out through the pressurized glass lobby doors and down off the white-pillared neo-Georgian porch and past courts and bleachers and into their well-maintained autos and out the portcullis and very slowly down the hill’s brick drive before they even recall they’d forgotten to pop in on their injured kid, sign his cast, feel his forehead, say Hey.