Authors: David Foster Wallace
Since the E.M.P.H.H. Units’ catatonics and enfeebled people rarely own registered
vehicles, it’s generally pretty easy to find places along the little road to switch
to, but it’s a constant sore point between Pat Montesian and the E.M.P.H.H. Board
of Regents that Ennet House residents don’t get to park overnight in the big off-street
lot by the condemned hospital building—the lot’s spaces are reserved for all the different
Units’ professional staff starting at 0600h., and E.M. Security got sick of staffs’
complaints about drug addicts’ poorly maintained autos still sitting there taking
up their spots in the
A.M.
—and that Security won’t consider changing the little E.M. streetlet’s nightly side-switch
to 2300h., before Ennet Houses’s D.S.A.S.-required curfew; E.M.’s Board claims it’s
a municipal ordinance that they can’t be expected to mess with just to accommodate
one tenant, while Pat’s memos keep pointing out that the Enfield Marine Hospital complex
is state- not city-owned, and that Ennet House residents are the only tenants who
face the nightly car-moving problem, since just about everyone else is catatonic or
enfeebled. And so on.
But so every
P.M.
at like 2359 Gately has to lock up the lockers and Pat’s cabinets and desk drawers
and the door to the front office and put the phone console’s answering machine on
and personally escort all residents who own cars out post-curfew outside into the
little nameless streetlet, and for somebody with Gately’s real limited managerial
skills the headaches involved are daunting: he has to herd the vehicular residents
together just inside the locked front door; he has to threaten the residents he’s
herded together into staying together by the door while he clomps upstairs to get
the one or two drivers who always forget and fall asleep before 0000—and this straggler-collecting
is a particular pain in the ass if the straggler’s a female, because he has to unlock
and press the Male Coming Up button by the kitchen, and the ‘buzzer’ sounds more like
a klaxon, and wakes the edgiest female residents up with an ugly surge of adrenaline,
and Gately as he clomps up the stairs gets roundly bitched out by all the mud-masked
heads sticking out into the female hall, and he by regulation can’t go into the sleeper’s
bedroom but has to pound on the door and keep shouting out his gender and get one
of the straggler’s roommates to wake her up and get her dressed and to the bedroom
door; so he has to retrieve the stragglers and chew them out and threaten them with
both a Restriction and a possible tow while herding them quick-walking down the staircase
to join the main car-owner herd as quickly as possible before the main herd can like
disperse. They’ll always disperse if he takes too long getting stragglers; they’ll
get distracted or hungry or need an ashtray or just get impatient and start looking
at the whole car-moving-after-curfew thing as an imposition on their time. Their early-recovery
Denial makes it impossible for them to imagine their own car getting towed instead
of, say, somebody else’s car. It’s the same Denial Gately can see at work in the younger
B.U. or -C. students when he’s driving Pat’s Aventura to the Food Bank or Purity Supreme
when they’ll fucking walk right out in the street against the light in front of the
car, whose brakes are fortunately in top shape. Gately’s snapped to the fact that
people of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they’re immortal:
college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they’re
exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else.
They’ll piss and moan your ear off if somebody else fucks with the rules, but they
don’t deep down see themselves subject to them, the same rules. And they’re constitutionally
unable to learn from anybody else’s experience: if some jaywalking B.U. student does
get splattered on Comm. or some House resident does get his car towed at 0005, your
other student’s or addict’s response to this will be to ponder just what imponderable
difference makes it possible for that other guy to get splattered or towed and not
him, the ponderer. They never doubt the difference—they just ponder it. It’s like
a kind of idolatry of uniqueness. It’s unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for a
Staffer to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way.
It has to happen to
them
to like upset the idolatry. Eugenio M. and Annie Parrot always recommend letting
everybody get towed at least once, early on in their residency, to help make believers
out of them in terms of laws and rules; but Gately for some reason on his night-shifts
can’t do it, cannot fucking
stand
to have one of his people get towed as long as there’s something he can do to prevent
it, and then plus if they do get towed there’s the nail-chewing hassle of arranging
their transport to the South End’s municipal lot the next day, fielding calls from
bosses and supplying verification of residents’ carlessness in terms of getting to
work without letting the boss know that the carless employee is a resident of a halfway
house, which is totally sacred private residents’ private information to give out
or not—Gately breaks a full-body sweat just thinking about the managerial headaches
involved in a fucking tow, so he’ll spend time herding and regathering and chewing
the absentminded asses of residents who Gene M. says have such calloused asses still
it’s a waste of Gately’s time and spirit: you have to let them learn for themselves.
249
Gately alerts Thrale and Foss and Erdedy and Henderson,
250
and Morris Hanley, and drags the new kid Tingley out of the linen closet, and Nell
Gunther—who’s fucking sacked out slack-mouthed on the couch, in violation—and lets
them all get coats and herds them together by the locked front door. Yolanda W. says
she left personal items in Clenette’s car and can she come. Lenz owns a car but doesn’t
answer Gately’s yell up the stairs. Gately tells the herd to stay put and that if
anybody leaves the herd he’s going to take a personal interest in their discomfort.
Gately clomps up the stairs and into the 3-Man room, plotting different fun ways to
wake Lenz up without bruises that’d show. Lenz is not asleep but is wearing personal-stereo
headphones, plus a jock strap, doing handstand-pushups up against the wall by Geoffrey
Day’s rack, his bottom only inches from Day’s pillow and farting in rhythm to the
pushups’ downstrokes, as Day lies there in pajamas and Lone Ranger sleep mask, hands
folded over his heaving chest, lips moving soundlessly. Gately’s maybe a little rough
about grabbing Lenz’s calf and lifting him off his hands and using his other big hand
on Lenz’s hip to twirl him around upright like a drill-team’s rifle, but Lenz’s cry
is of over-ebullient greeting, not pain, but it sends both Day and Gavin Diehl bolt-upright
in their racks, and then they curse as Lenz hits the floor. Lenz starts saying he’d
let time completely get away from him and didn’t know what time it was. Gately can
hear the herd down by the front door at the bottom of the stairs stamping and chuffing
and getting ready to maybe disperse.
Up this close, Gately doesn’t even need his Staffer’s eerie seventh sense to sense
that Lenz is clearly wired on either ’drines or Bing. That Lenz has been visited by
the Sergeant at Arms. Lenz’s right eyeball is wobbling around in its socket and his
mouth writhing in that way and he has that Nietzschean supercharged aura of a wired
individual, and all the time he’s throwing on slacks and topcoat and incognitoizing
wig and getting almost pitched head-first down the stairs by Gately he’s telling this
insane breathless whopper about his finger once getting cut off and then spontaneously
regentrifying itself back on, and his mouth is writhing in that fish-on-a-gaff way
distinctive of a sustained L-Dopa surge, and Gately wants to pull an immediate urine,
immediate,
but meanwhile the cars’ herd’s edges are just starting to widen in that way that
precedes distraction and dispersal, and they’re angry not at Lenz for straggling but
at Gately for even bothering with him, and Lenz pantomimes the akido Serene But Deadly
Crane stance at Ken Erdedy, and it’s 0004h. and Gately can see tow trucks aprowl way
down on Comm. Ave., coming this way, and he jangles his keys and unlocks all three
curfew-locks on the front door and gets everybody out in the scrotum-tightening November
cold and out down the walk to the line of their cars in the little street and stands
there on the porch watching in just orange shirtsleeves, making sure Lenz doesn’t
bolt before he can pull a spot-urine and extract an admission and Discharge him officially,
feeling a twinge of conscience at so looking forward to giving Lenz the administrative
shoe, and Lenz jabbers nonstop to whoever’s closest all the way to his Duster, and
everybody goes to their car, and the backwash around Gately from the open House door
is hot and people in the living room provide loud feedback on the draft from the open
door, the sky overhead immense and dimensional and the night so clear you can see
stars hanging in a kind of lacteal goo, and out on the streetlet a couple car doors
are squeaking and slamming and some people are conversing and delaying just to make
Staff have to stand there in shirtsleeves on the cold porch, a small nightly sideways
ball-busting rebellious gesture, when Gately’s eye falls on Doony R. Glynn’s specialty-disembowelled
old dusty-black VW Bug parked with the other cars on the now-illicit street-side,
its rear-mount engine’s guts on full glittered display under the little street’s lights,
and Glynn’s upstairs in bed tonight legitimately prostrate with diverticulitis, which
for insurance reasons means Gately has to go back in and ask some resident with a
driver’s license to come move Glynn’s VW across the street, which is humiliating because
it means admitting publicly to these specimens that he, Gately, doesn’t have a valid
license, and the sudden heat of the living room confuses his goose-pimples, and nobody
in the living room will admit to have a driver’s license, and it turns out the only
licensed resident who’s still vertical and downstairs is Bruce Green, who’s in the
kitchen expressionlessly stirring a huge amount of sugar into a cup of coffee with
his bare blunt finger, and Gately finds himself having to ask for managerial assistance
from a kid he likes and has just bitched out and extracted urine from, which Green
minimizes the humiliation of the whole thing by volunteering to help the second he
hears the words
Glynn
and
fucking car,
and goes to the living room closet to get out his cheap leather jacket and fingerless
gloves, and but Gately now has to leave the residents outside still unsupervised for
a second to go clomping upstairs and verify that it’s kosher with Glynn for Bruce
Green to move his car.
251
The 2-Man seniorest males’ bedroom has a bunch of old AA bumper-stickers on it and
a calligraphic poster saying EVERYTHING I’VE EVER LET GO OF HAS CLAW MARKS ON IT,
and the answer to Gately’s knock is a moan, and Glynn’s little naked-lady bedside
lamp he brought in with him is on, he’s in his rack curled on his side clutching his
abdomen like a kicked man. McDade is illicitly sitting on Foss’s rack reading one
of Foss’s motorcycle magazines and drinking Glynn’s Millennial Fizzy with stereo headphones
on, and he hurriedly puts out his cigarette when Gately enters and closes the little
drawer in the bedside table where Foss keeps his ashtray just like everybody else.
252
The street outside sounds like Daytona—a drug addict is like physically unable to
start a car without gunning the engine. Gately looks quickly out the west window over
Glynn’s rack to verify that all the unsupervised headlights going down the little
street are Uing and coming back the right way to repark. Gately’s forehead is wet
and he feels the start of a greasy headache, from managerial stress. Glynn’s crossed
eyes are glassy and feverish and he’s softly singing the lyrics to a Choosy Mothers
song to a tune that isn’t the song’s tune.
‘Doon,’ Gately whispers.
One of the cars is coming back down the street a little fast for Gately’s taste. Anything
involving residents that happens on the grounds after curfew is his responsibility,
the House Manager’s made clear.
‘Doon.’
It’s the bottom eye, grotesquely, that rolls up at Gately. ‘Don.’
‘
Doon
.’
‘Don Doon the witch is dead.’
‘Doon, I need to let Green move your car.’
‘Vehicle’s black, Don.’
‘
Brucie Green
needs your keys so’s we can switch your car over, brother, it’s midnight.’
‘My Black Bug. My baby. The Roachmobile. The Doonulater’s wheels. His mobility. His
exposed baby. His slice of the American Pie. Simonize my baby when I’m gone, Don Doon.’
‘Keys, Doony.’
‘Take them. Take it. Want you to have it. One true friend. Brought me Ritz crackers
and a Fizz. Treat it like a roachlady. Shiny, black, hard, mobile. Needs Premium and
a weekly wax.’
‘Doon. You got to show me where’s the keys, brother.’
‘And the bowel. Gotta weekly shine the pipes in the bowel. Exposed to view. With a
soft cloth. The mobile roach. The bowelmobile.’
The heat coming off Glynn is face-tightening.
‘You feel like you got a fever, Doon?’ At one point elements of Staff thought Glynn
might be playing sick to get out of looking for a job after losing his menial job
at Brighton Fence & Wire. All Gately knows about diverticulitis is that Pat said it’s
intestinal and alcoholics can get it in recovery from impurities in bottom-shelf blends
that the body’s trying to expel. Glynn’s had physical complaints all through his residency,
but nothing like this here. His face is gray and waxy with pain and there’s a yellowish
crust on his lips. Glynn’s got a real severe adtorsion, and the bottom eye is rolled
up at Gately with a terrible delirious glitter, the top eye rolling around like a
cow’s eye. Gately still cannot bring himself to feel another man’s forehead. He settles
for punching Glynn very lightly on the shoulder.