Infinite Jest (115 page)

He and Lenz have become separated, he realizes. Now way southwest of Union on Comm.,
Green looks around at traffic and T-tracks and bar-patrons and T.U.L.’s huge bottle’s
low-neon flutter. He wonders whether he’s somehow blown Lenz off or whether Lenz’s
blown him off, and that’s all he wonders, that’s the total complexity the speculation
assumes, that’s his thought for the minute. It’s like the whole nut-can-and-cigar
traumas drained into some psychic sump at puberty, sank and left only an oily slick
that catches the light in distorted ways. The warbly Polynesian music’s way clearer
up here. He starts up the steep hill on Brainerd Rd., which terminates at the Enfield
line. Maybe Lenz can’t move straightforwardly south at all past a certain time. The
acclivity is not kind to asphalt-spreader’s boots. After the initial crazed-gerbil-in-brain
phase of early Withdrawal and detox, Bruce Green has now returned to his normal psychorepressed
cerebral state where he has about one fully developed thought every sixty seconds,
and then just one at a time, a thought, each materializing already fully developed
and sitting there and then melting back away like a languid liquid-crystal display.
His Ennet House counselor, the extremely tough-loving Calvin T., complains that listening
to Green is like listening to a faucet with a very slow drip. His rap is that Green
seems not serene or detached but totally shut down, disassociated, and Calvin T. tries
weekly to draw Green out by pissing him off. Green’s next full thought is the realization
that even though the hideous Hawaiian music had sounded like it was drifting up northward
from down at the Allston Spur, it’s somewhat louder now the farther west he moves
toward Enfield’s Cambridge St. dogleg and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Brainerd between
Commonwealth and Cambridge St. is a sine wave of lung-busting hills through neighborhoods
Tiny Ewell had described as Depressed Residential, unending rows of crammed-together
triple-decker houses with those tiny sad architectural differences that seem to highlight
the essential sameness, with sagging porches and psoriatic paint-jobs or aluminum
siding gone carbuncular from violent temperature-swings, yard-litter and dishes and
patchy grass and fenced pets and children’s toys lying around in discarded attitudes
and eclectic food-smells and wildly different-patterned curtains or blinds in a house’s
different windows due to these old houses are carved up inside into apartments for
like alienated B.U. students or Canadian and Concavity-displaced families or even
more alienated B.C. students, or probably it looks like the bulk of the lease-holders
are Green-and-Bonkesque younger blue-collar hard-partying types that have posters
of the Fiends In Human Shape or Choosy Mothers or Snout or the Bioavailable Five
²⁴¹
in the bathroom and black lights in the bedroom and oil-change stains in the driveway
and that throw their supper dishes into the yard and buy new dishes at Caldor instead
of washing their dishes and that still, in their twenties, ingest Substances nightly
and use
party
as a verb and put their sound-systems’ speakers in their apartments’ windows facing
out and crank the volume out of sheer high-spirit obnoxiousness because they still
have their girlfriends to pound beers with and do shotguns of dope into the mouth
of and do lines of Bing off various parts of the naked body of, and still find pounding
beers and doing bongs and lines fun and get to have fun on a nightly after-work basis,
cranking the tunes out into the neighborhood air. The street’s bare trees are densely
limbed, they’re a certain type of tree, they look like inverted brooms in the residential
dark, Green doesn’t know his tree-names. The Hawaiian music is what’s pulled him southwest,
it emerges: it’s originating from someplace in this very neighborhood somewhere around
W. Brainerd, and Green moves upriver toward what sounds like the source of the sound
with a blankly horrified fascination. Most of the yards are fenced in stainless-steel
chainlink fencing, and occasional yard-dogs whine or more commonly bark and snarl
and leap territorially at Green from behind their fences, the fences shivering from
the impact and the chainlink stuff dented outward from previous impacts from previous
passersby. The thought that he isn’t scared of dogs develops and recedes in Green’s
midbrain. His jacket creaks with every step. The temperature is steadily dropping.
The fenced front yards are the toy-and-beer-can-strewn type where the brown grass
grows in uneven tufts and the leaves haven’t been raked and are piled in wind-blown
lines of force along the base of the fence and unpruned hedges and overfull wastebaskets
and untwisted trashbags are on the sagging porch because nobody’s gotten around to
taking them down to the E.W.D. dumpster at the corner and garbage from the overfull
receptacles blows out into the yard and mixes with the leaves along the fences’ base
and some gets out into the street and is never picked up and eventually becomes part
of the composition of the street. A nonpeanut M&M box is like intaglioed into the
concrete of the sidewalk under Green, so bleached by the elements it’s turned bone-white
and is only barely identifiable as a nonpeanut M&M box, for instance. And, looking
up from identifying the M&M box’s make, Green now espies Randy Lenz. Green has happened
upon Lenz, way up here on Brainerd, now strolling briskly alone up ahead of Green,
not close but visible under a functioning streetlight about a block farther uphill
on Brainerd. There’s some disincentive to call out. The incline on this block isn’t
bad. It’s cold enough now so his breath looks the same whether he’s smoking or not.
The tall curved streetlamps here look to Green just like the weaponish part of the
Martian vessels that fired fatal rays in their conquest of the planet in an ancient
cartridge Tommy Doocy’d never tired of that he labelled the case ‘War of the Welles.’
The Hawaiian music dominates the aural landscape by this point, now, coming from someplace
up near where he sees the back of Lenz’s coat. Someone has put Polynesian-music speakers
in their window, pretty clearly. Creepy slack-key steel guitar balloons across the
dim street, booms off the sagging facades opposite, it’s Don Ho and the Sol Hoopi
Players, the grass-skirt-and-foamy-breakers sound that makes Green put his fingers
in his ears while at the same time he moves more urgently toward the Hawaiian-music
source, a pink or aqua three-decker with a second-floor dormer and red-shingled roof
with a blue and white Quenucker flag on a pole protruding from a window in the dormer
and serious JBL speakers facing outward in the two windows on either side of the flag,
with the screens off so you can see the woofers throbbing like brown bellies hulaing,
bathing the 1700 block of W. Brainerd in dreadful ukuleles and hollow-log percussives.
All the blunt fingers in his ears do is add the squeak of Green’s pulse and the underwater
sound of his respiration to the music, though. Figures in plaid-flannel or else floral
Hawaiian shirts and those flower necklaces melt in and out of lit view behind and
over the window-speakers with the oozing quality of large-group chemical fun and dancing
and social intercoursing. The lit windows make slender rectangles of light out across
the yard, which the yard is a sty. Something about Randy Lenz’s movements up ahead,
the high-kneed tiptoed skulk of a vaudeville fiend up to no good at all, keeps Green
from calling out to him even if he could have made himself heard over what to him
is a roar of blood and breath and Ho. Lenz moves through the one operative streetlight’s
cone across the sidewalk and over to the stainless chainlink of the same Quenucker
house, holding something out to a Shetland-sized dog whose leash is attached to a
fluorescent-plastic clothesliney thing by a pulley, and can slide. It’s cold and the
air is thin and keen and his fingers are icy in his ears, which ache with cold. Green
watches, rapt on levels he doesn’t know he has, drawn slowly forward, moving his head
from side to side to keep from losing Lenz in the fog of his breath, not calling out,
but transfixed. Green and Mildred Bonk and the other couple they’d shared a trailer
with T. Doocy with had gone through a phase one time where they’d crash various collegiate
parties and mix with the upper-scale collegiates, and once in one February Green found
himself at a Harvard U. dorm where they were having a like Beach-Theme Party, with
a dumptruck’s worth of sand on the common-room floor and everybody with flower necklaces
and skin bronzed with cream or UV-booth-salon visits, all the towheaded guys in floral
untucked shirts walking around with lockjawed
noblest oblige
and drinking drinks with umbrellas in them or else wearing Speedos with no shirts
and not one fucking pimple anyplace on their back and pretending to surf on a surfboard
somebody had nailed to a hump-shaped wave made of blue and white papier mâché with
a motor inside that made the fake wave sort of undulate, and all the girls in grass
skirts oozing around the room trying to hula in a shimmying way that showed their
thighs’ LipoVac scars through the shimmying grass of their skirts, and Mildred Bonk
had donned a grass skirt and bikini-top out of the pile by the keggers and even though
almost seven months pregnant had oozed and shimmied right into the mainstream of the
swing of things, but Bruce Green had felt awkward and out of place in his cheap leather
jacket and haircut he’d dyed orange with gasoline in a blackout and the EAT THE RICH
patch he’d perversely let Mildred Bonk sew onto the groin of his police-pants, and
then they’d finally got tired of the ‘Hawaii Five-0’ theme and started in with the
Don Ho and Sol Hoopi CDs, and Green had gotten so uncomfortably fascinated and repelled
and paralyzed by the Polynesian tunes that he’d set up a cabana-chair right by the
kegs and had sat there overworking the pump on the kegs and downing one plastic cup
after another of beer-foam until he got so blind drunk his sphincter had failed and
he’d not only pissed but also actually
shit
his pants, for only the second time ever, and the first public time ever, and was
mortified with complexly layered shame, and had to ease very gingerly into the nearest-by
head and remove his pants and wipe himself off like a fucking baby, having to shut
one eye to make sure which him he saw was him, and then there’d been nothing to do
with the fouled police-pants but crack the bathroom door and reach a tattooed arm
out with the pants and bury them in the living room’s sand like a housecat’s litterbox,
and then of course what was he supposed to put on if he ever wanted to leave that
head or dorm again, to get home, so he’d had to hold one eye shut and reach one arm
out again and like strain to reach the pile of grass skirts and bikini-tops and snatch
a grass skirt, and put it on, and slip out of the Hawaiian dorm out a side door without
letting anybody see him, and then ride the Red Line and C-Greenie and then a bus all
the way home in February in a cheap leather jacket and asphalt-spreader’s boots and
a grass skirt, the grass of which rode up in the most horrifying way, and he’d spent
the next three days not leaving the trailer in the Spur, in a paralyzing depression
of unknown etiology, lying on Tommy D.’s crusty-stained sofa and drinking Southern
Comfort straight out of the bottle and watching Doocy’s snakes not move once in three
days, in their tank, and Mildred had given him two days of high-volume shit for first
sulking antisocially by the keg and then screwing out and abandoning her at seven
months gone to a sandy room full of tanly anomic blondes who said catty things about
her tattoos and creepy boys who talked without moving their lower jaw and asked her
things like where she ‘summered’ and kept offering her advice on no-load funds and
inviting her upstairs to check out their Dürer prints and saying they found overweight
girls terribly compelling in their defiance of culturo-ascetic norms, and Bruce Green
lay there with a head full of Hoopi and unresolved pain and didn’t say a word or even
have a fully developed thought for three days, and had hidden the grass skirt under
the dustruffle of the couch and later savagely torn it to shreds and sprinkled the
clippings over Doocy’s hydroponic-marijuana development in the tub, for mulch. Lenz
goes in and out of Green’s focus several times within a dozen andante strides, still
out in front of the Canadian-refugee-type house that’s drawn Green on, Lenz holding
a little can of something up over one side of the fence’s gate and dribbling something
onto the gate, holding something else that suddenly engages the dog’s full attention.
For some reason Green thinks to check his watch. The pink or orange clothesline quivers
as the leash’s pulley runs along it as the dog comes up to meet Lenz inside the gate
he’s slowly opened. The huge dog seems neither friendly nor unfriendly toward Lenz,
but his attention is engaged. The leash and pulley could never hold him if he decided
Lenz was food. There’s bitter-smelling material from his ear on Green’s finger, which
he can’t help but sniff. He’s forgotten and left the other finger in his ear. He’s
now pretty close, standing in a van’s shadow just outside the pyramid of sodium light
from the streetlight, like two houses down from the source of the grisly sound, which
all of a sudden is in the silence between cuts of Ho’s early
Don Ho: From Hawaii With All My Love,
so that Green can hear baritone Canadianese party-voices through the open windows
and also the low lalations of baby-talk of some sort from Lenz, ‘Pooty ooty doggy
woggy’ and whatnot, presumably directed at the dog, who’s coming over to Lenz in a
sort of neutrally cautious but attentive way. Green has no clue what kind of dog it
is, but it’s big. Green can remember not the sight but the two very different sounds
of the footfalls of his Pop the late Mr. Green pacing the Waltham living room, the
crinkle of the paper bag around the tallboy in his hand. It’s well after 2245h. The
dog’s leash slides hissing to the end of the Day-Glo line and stops the dog a couple
paces from the inside of the gate, where Lenz is standing, inclined in the slight
forward way of somebody who’s talking baby-talk to a dog. Green can see that Lenz
has a slightly gnawed square of Don G.’s hard old meatloaf out in front of him, holding
it toward the straining dog. Lenz has the blankly intent look of a short-haired man
with a Geiger counter. The hideously compelling Ho starts again with the total abruptness
that makes CDs so creepy. Green’s got one finger in one ear, shifting around slightly
to keep Lenz’s lampshadow from blocking the view. The music balloons and booms. The
Nucks have turned it way up for ‘My Lovely Launa-Una Luau Lady,’ a song that’s always
made Green want to put his head through a window. Part of the instrumentals sounds
like a harp on acid. The hollow-log percussives are like a heart in your extremest-type
terror. Green fancies he can see windows in the houses opposite vibrate from the horrific
vibration. Green’s having way more than one thought p.m. now, the squeak of the gerbil-wheel
starting to crank deep inside. The undulating shiver is a slack-steel guitar that
fills little Brucie’s head with white sand and undulating tummies and heads that resemble
New Year’s subsidized parade balloons, huge soft shiny baggy wrinkled grinning heads
nodding and bobbing as they slowly inflate to the shape of a giant head, tilted forward,
straining at the ropes they’re pulled by. Green hasn’t watched a New Year’s parade
since the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad’s, which had been obscene. Green’s close
enough to see that the Hawaiianized Nuck house is 412 W. Brainerd. Blue-collar-type
cars and 4×4s and vans are all up and down the street packed in in a somehow partyish
attitude, as in parked in a hurry, some of them with Canadian lettering on the plates.
Fleur-de-lis stickers and slogans in Canadian on some of the windows also. An old
Montego cammed out into a slingshot dragster is parked square in front of 412 in a
sort of menacing way with two wheels up on the curb and a circle of flowers hung jauntily
over the antenna, and the ellipses of dull fade in the paintjob of the hood that show
the engine’s been bored out and the hood gets real hot, and Lenz has gotten down on
one knee and breaks off some of the meatloaf and tosses it underhand to the ground
inside the leash’s range. The dog goes over and lowers its head to the meat. The distinctive
sound of Gately’s meatloaf getting chewed plus the ghastly music’s zithery warbling
roar. Lenz now rises and his movements in the yard have a melting and wraithlike quality
in the different shades of shadow. The lit window farthest from the limp flag has
solid swarthy guys in beards and loud shirts passing back and forth snapping their
fingers under their elbows with flower-strewn females in tow. Many of the heads are
thrown back and attached to Molson bottles. Green’s jacket creaks as he tries to breathe.
The snake had leapt from the can with a sound like: