Infinite Jest (139 page)

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. Incandenza 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 shoulderpain,
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 god
damn
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.

But what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two, though, was
he said when he saw the Pam-shiny empty biscuit pan on top of the stove and the plastic
rind of the peanut butter’s safety-seal wrap on top of the wastebasket’s tall pile.
The little locket-picture in the back of his head swelled and became a sharp-focused
scene of his wife and little girl and little unborn child eating what he now could
see they must have eaten, last night and this morning, while he was out ingesting
their groceries and rent. This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice,
standing there loose-faced in the kitchen, running his finger around a shiny pan with
not one little crumb of biscuit left in it. He sat down on the kitchen tile with his
scary eyes shut tight but still seeing his little girl’s face. They’d ate some charity
peanut butter on biscuits washed down with tapwater and a grimace.

Their apartment was six floors up in Perry Hill’s Bldg. 5. The window didn’t open
but could be broke through with a running start.

He didn’t kill himself, though, he says. He just got up and walked out. He didn’t
leave his wife a note. Not nothing. He went and walked the whole four clicks to Shattuck
Shelter in Jamaica Plain. He felt like for sure they’d of been better off without
him, he said. But he said he didn’t know why but he didn’t kill himself. But he didn’t.
He figures there was some God-involvement, sitting there on the floor. He just decided
to go to Shattuck and Surrender and get straight and never ever have his little girl’s
grimacing face in his hungover head ever again, James.

And Shattuck Shelter—by coincidence—that usually had a waiting list every March until
it got warm, they’d just kicked out some sorry-ass specimen for defecating in the
shower, and they took him, the speaker. He asked for a CA Meeting right away. And
a Shattuck Staff guy called somebody Afro-American with a lot of clean recovered time,
and the speaker got taken to his first CA Meeting. That was 224 days ago tonight.
That night, when the colored CA Crocodile dropped him off back at the Shattuck—after
he’d wept in front of other colored men at his first meeting and told men he didn’t
know from shit about the big clock and glass pipe and paycheck and the biscuits and
his little girl’s face—and after he come back to the Shattuck and got buzzed through
and the buzzer sounded for supper, it turned out—by coincidence—that the Saturday-night
Shattuck supper was coffee and peanut butter sandwiches. It was the end of the week
and the Shelter’s donated food had run out, they only had PB on cheap-ass white bread
and Sunny Square instant coffee, the cheap shit that doesn’t even quite dissolve all
the way.

He’s got your autodidactic orator’s way with emotional dramatic pauses that don’t
seem affected. Joelle makes another line down the Styrofoam coffee cup with her fingernail
and chooses consciously to believe it isn’t affected, the story’s emotive drama. Her
eyes feel sandy from forgetting to blink. This always happens when you don’t expect
it, when it’s a meeting you have to drag yourself to and are all but sure will suck.
The speaker’s face has lost its color, shape, everything distinctive. Something has
taken the tight ratchet in Joelle’s belly and turned it three turns to the good. It’s
the first time she’s felt sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means
facing. No matter if Don Gately takes Demerol or goes to jail or rejects her if she
can’t show him the face. It’s the first time in a long time—tonight, 11/14—Joelle’s
even considered possibly showing somebody the face.

After the pause the speaker says all the other sorry motherfuckers in the Shattuck
Shelter in there started in to bitching about what was this shit, peanut butter sandwiches
for fucking supper. The speaker says how whatever he silently thanked for just that
particular sandwich he held and chewed, washing it down with gritty Sunny Square coffee,
that thing became his Higher Power. He’s now seven-plus months clean. Universal Bleacher
let him go, but he’s got steady work at Logan, pushing a third-shift mop, and a Holmes
on his crew’s also in the Program—by coincidence. His pregnant wife, it turned out,
had gone to a Unwed Mothers Shelter with Shantel, that night. She was still in there.
D.S.S. still wouldn’t let him appeal his wife’s Restraining Order and see Shantel,
but he got to talk to his little girl on the phone just last month. And he’s now straight,
from Giving Up and joining the Freeway Access Group and getting Active and taking
the voluntary suggestions of the Fellowship of Cocaine Anonymous. His wife was due
to have her baby around Xmas. He said he didn’t know what was going to happen to him
or his family. But he says he has received certain promises from his new family—the
Freeway Access Group of Cocaine Anonymous—and so he had certain hope-type emotions
about the future, inside. He didn’t so much conclude or make obligatory reference
to Gratitude or any of that usual shit as grip the lectern and shrug and say he’d
started feeling just last month that the choice he made on the kitchen floor was the
right choice, personally speaking.

Entertainment-wise, things take a rapid turn for the splattery once the tough girl
Blood Sister seemed to have saved is found bluely dead in her novitiate’s cot, her
habit’s interior pockets stuffed with all kinds of substances and paraphernalia and
her arm a veritable forest of syringes. Tight shot of B.S., face working purply, staring
down at the ex-ex-punker. Suspecting foul play instead of spiritual recidivism, Blood
Sister, disregarding first the Other-Cheek pieties and then the impassioned pleas
and then the direct orders of the Vice-Mother Superior—who happens now to be the tough
nun who’d saved Blood Sister, way back—begins reverting to her former Toronto-mean-street
pre-salvation tough-biker-chick ways: demufflering her Harley Hawg, hauling an age-faded
stud-covered leather bike-jacket out of storage and squeezing it over her pectoral-swollen
habit, unbandaging her most lurid tattoos, shaking down former altar boys for information,
flipping off motorists who get in her bike’s way, meeting old street-contacts in dim
saloons and tossing back jiggers with even the most cirrhotic of them, beating, bludgeoning,
akido-ing, disarming thugs of power tools, avenging the desalvation and demapping
of her young charge, determined to prove that the girl’s death was no accident or
backslide, that Blood Sister had not failed with the soul she’d chosen to save to
discharge her own soul’s debt to the tough old Vice-Mother Superior who’d saved her,
Blood Sister, so far back. Several thuggish stuntmen and countless liters of potassium
thiocyanate
²⁹⁶
later, the truth does out: the novitiate girl had been murdered by the Mother Superior,
the order’s top and toughest nun. This M.S. is the nun who’d saved the Vice-M.S. who’d
saved Blood Sister, meaning, ironically, that the evidence Blood Sister needs to prove
that her salvation-debt really was discharged is also evidence inimical to the legal
interests of the tough nun to whom Blood Sister’s own saviour is obligated, so Blood
Sister gets increasingly tortured and ill-tempered as evidence of the Mother Superior’s
guilt accretes. In one scene she says
fuck
. In another she swings a censer like a mace and brains an old verger who’s one of
the Mother Superior’s stooges, knocking his toothless head clean off. Then, in Act
III, a veritable orgy of retribution follows the full emergence of the sordid truth:
it seems that the tough old Vice-Mother Superior, viz. the nun who’d saved Blood Sister,
had in fact
not
been saved, truly, after all—had in fact, during 20+ years of exemplary novena-saying
and wafer-baking, been suffering a kind of hidden degenerative recidivist soul-rot,
and had resumed, the Vice-M.S., at about the time Blood Sister had donned the habit
of full nunhood, had not only resumed Substance-dependence but had started actually
dealing in serious weights of whatever at the time was most profitable (which after
20+ years had changed from Marseillese heroin to Colombian freebaseable-grade Bing
Crosby) to support her own hidden habit, covertly operating a high-volume retail operation
out of the order’s Community Outreach Rescue Mission’s little-used confessionals.
This nun’s superior, the top tough Mother Superior nun, stumbling onto the drug-operation
after the now-demapped verger informed her that a suspicious number of limousines
were discharging gold-chained and not very penitent-looking persons into the order’s
Community Outreach Rescue Mission, and disastrously unable to summon the pious humility
to accept the fact that she’d failed, it seemed, at truly and forever saving the ex-dealer
whose salvation the Mother Superior required to discharge the debt to the now-retired
octogenarian nun who’d saved
her
—this Mother Superior herself is the one who murdered Blood Sister’s ex-punk novitiate,
to silence the girl. What emerges is that Blood Sister’s addicted punk-girl’s Substance-copping
venue, when she was Out There pre-salvation, had been nothing other than the Vice-Mother
Superior’s infamous Community Outreach Rescue Mission. In other words, the nun who’d
saved Blood Sister but had herself been secretly unsaved had been the tough girl’s
Bing-dealer, is why the tough non-Catholic girl’d been so mysteriously adept at the
Confiteor. The order’s Mother Superior had figured that it was only a matter of time
before the girl’s conversion and salvation reached the sort of spiritual pitch where
her guarded silence broke and she told Blood Sister the seamy truth about the nun
she (Blood Sister) thought had saved her (Blood Sister). So she (the Mother Superior)
had eliminated the girl’s map—ostensibly, she (the Mother Superior) told her lieutenant,
the Vice-Mother Superior, to save her (the Vice-Mother Superior) from exposure and
excommunication and maybe worse, if the girl weren’t silenced.
²⁹⁷