Infinite Jest (182 page)

It occurs to Gately that right now’s just like when he was a toddler and his Mom and
her companion were both passed out or worse: no matter how frightened or scared he
might become he now again cannot get anybody to come or to hear or even
know
about it; the discredited tube to prevent vicious or inspired bleeding in his suspicious
Trachea has left him completely Alone, worse off than a toddler that could at least
bellow and yowl, rattling the bars of its playpen in terror that nobody tall was in
any shape to hear him. Plus this dreadful time of weak gray late-day light is the
time, was the time when the sad and nerdily dressed wraith appeared yesterday. Assuming
that was yesterday. Assuming it was a real wraith. But the wraith, with its chinky
Coke and theories of post-mortem speed, had been able to interface with Gately without
aid of speech or gesture or Bic, was why even out of his mind Gately had had to admit
to himself it must have been a delusion, a fever-dream. But he has to admit he’d kind
of liked it. The dialogue. The give-and-take. The way the wraith could seem to get
inside him. The way he said Gately’s best thoughts were really communiqués from the
patient and Abiding dead. Gately wonders if his organic father the ironworker is not
now maybe dead and dropping in and standing very still from time to time for a communiqué.
He felt slightly better. The room’s ceiling was not breathing. It lay flat as a stucco
sheet, rippling only slightly with the petroleum-fumes of fever and Gately’s own smell.
Then bubbling up out of nowhere again he suddenly confronts deep-focus memories of
Gene Fackelmann’s final demise and Gately and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep’s involvement in
Fackelmann’s demise.

Gately, for several months before he did his State assault-bit, was disastrously involved
with one Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, his first girl ever with a hyphen, a sort of upscale
but directionless and not very healthy and pale and incredibly passive Danvers girl
that worked in Purchasing for a hospital-supply co. in Swampscott and was pretty definitely
an alcoholic and drank bright drinks with umbrellas in Rte. 1 clubs in the late
P.M.
until she swooned and passed out with a loud clunk. That’s what she called it—‘
swooned
.’ The swooning and passing out with a loud clunk as her head hit the table was more
or less a nightly thing, and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep fell automatically in love with any
man she termed ‘chivalrous’
³⁷⁴
enough to carry her out to the parking lot and drive her home without raping her,
which rape of an unconscious head-lolling girl she termed ‘
Taking Advantage.
’ Gately got introduced to her by Fackelmann, who one time as he came up through a
sports bar called the Pourhouse’s parking lot to dialogue with a Sorkin-debtor Gately
saw Fackelmann staggering along carrying this unconscious girl to his ride, one big
hand quite a bit farther up her prom-looking taffeta gown than it really needed to
be to carry her, and Fackelmann told Gately if Don’d give this gash a ride home he’d
stay and do the collection, which Gately’s heart wasn’t in collections anymore and
he jumped at the trade, as long as Fackelmann could promise him she could hold her
various fluids in the 4×4 he was driving. So it was Fackelmann who told him, as he
put the tiny and limp but still continent body in his arms in the parking lot of the
Pourhouse, to watch his personal six, Gately, and be sure and violate her a little,
because this gash here was like one of those South Sea–culture gashes in that if Gately
took her home and she woke up nonviolated she’d be Gately’s for life. But Gately obviously
had no intention of raping an unconscious person, much less even putting his hand
up the gown of a girl that might lose her fluids any second, and this locked him into
the involvement. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep called Gately her ‘
Night-Errand
’ and fell passively in love with his refusal to Take Advantage. Gene Fackelmann,
she confided, was not the gentleman Gately was.

What helped make the involvement disastrous was that Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was always
either so leglessly drunk or so passively hungover all the time that any sort of sex
any time at all with her would have classified as Taking Advantage.

This girl was the single passivest person Gately ever met. He never once saw P.H.-J.
actually get from one spot to another under her own power. She needed somebody chivalrous
to pick her up and carry her and lay her back down 24/7/365, it seemed like. She was
a sort of sexual papoose. She spent most of her life passed out and sleeping. She
was a beautiful sleeper, kittenish and serene, never drooling. She made passivity
and unconsciousness look kind of beautiful. Fackelmann called her Death’s Poster-Child.
Even at work, at the hospital supply co., Gately imagined her horizontal, curled fetal
on something soft, with all the hot slack facial intensity of a sleeping baby. He
imagined her bosses and coworkers all tiptoeing around Purchasing whispering to each
other to not wake her up. She never once rode in the actual front seat of any vehicle
he drove her home in. But she also never threw up or pissed herself or even complained,
just smiled and yawned an infant’s little milky yawn and snuggled deeper into whatever
Gately had swaddled her in. Gately started doing that thing about yelling they’d been
robbed when he carried her into whatever stripped luxury apt. they were crewing in.
P.H.-J. wasn’t what you’d call great-looking, but she was incredibly sexy, Gately
felt, because she always managed to look like you’d just X’d her into a state of total
unmuscled swoon, lying there unconscious. Trent Kite told Fackelmann he thought Gately
was out of his fucking mind. Fax observed that Kite himself was not exactly a W. T.
Sherman with the ladies, even with coke-whores and strung-out nursing students and
dipsoid lounge-hags whose painted faces swung loose from their heads. Fackelmann claimed
to have started a Log just to keep track of Kite’s attempted pickup lines—surefire
lines like e.g. ‘You’re the second most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, the first
most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen being former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,’
and ‘If you came home with me I’m unusually confident that I could achieve an erection,’
and said that if Kite wasn’t still cherry at twenty-three and a half it was proof
of some kind of divine-type grace.

Sometimes Gately would come out of a Demerol-nod and look at pale passive Pamela lying
there sleeping beautifully and undergo a time-lapse clairvoyant thing where he could
almost visibly watch her losing her looks through her twenties and her face starting
to slide over off her skull onto the pillow she held like a stuffed toy, becoming
a lounge-hag right before his eyes. The vision aroused more compassion than horror,
which Gately never even considered might qualify him as a decent person.

Gately’s two favorite things about Pamela Hoffman-Jeep were: the way she would come
out of her stupor and hold her cheek and laugh hysterically each time Gately carried
her across the threshold of some stripped apartment and bellow that they’d been ripped
off; and the way she always wore the long white linen gloves and bare-shoulder taffeta
that made her seem like some upscale North Shore debutante who’s had like one too
many dippers of country-club punch and is just begging to be Taken Advantage of by
some low-rent guy with a tattoo—she’d make a sort of languid very-slow-motion bullwhip-gesture
with her hand in the long white glove as she lay wherever Gately had deposited her
and simper out with an upscale inflection ‘Don Honey, bring Mommy a highball’ (she
called a drink a highball), which it turned out was a deadly impression of her own
Mom, who it turned out this lady made Gately’s own Mom look like Carry Nation by comparison,
lush-wise: the only four times Gately ever met Mrs. H.-J. were all at E.R.s and sanitaria.

Gately lies there pop-eyed with guilt and anxiety in the hiss and click of resumed
sleet, in the twilit St. E.’s room, next to the glittering back-brace-and-skull-halo
thing clamped exoskeletally to the empty next bed and gleaming dully at selected welds,
Gately trying to Abide, remembering. It had been Pamela Hoffman-Jeep that finally
clued Gately in on the little ways Gene Fackelmann had been historically getting over
on Whitey Sorkin, and alerted him to the suicidal creek Fackelmann had got himself
into with a certain mistaken-bet scam that had blown up right in his map. Even Gately
had been able to tell something was the matter: for the last two weeks Fackelmann
had been squatting sweatily in a corner of the stripped living room, right outside
the little luxury bedroom Gately and Pamela were lying in, out there squatting over
his Sterno cooker and incredible twin hills of sky-blue Dilaudid and many-hued M&M’s,
not much speaking or responding or moving or even seeming to cop a nod, just sitting
there hunched and plump and glistening like some sort of cornered toad, his mustache
flailing around on his lip. Things would have had to be bad indeed for Gately ever
to try to get coherent data out of P.H.-J. Apparently the deal was that one of the
bettors that bet with Sorkin through Fackelmann was a guy Gately and Fackelmann know
only as Eighties Bill, an impeccably groomed guy that wore red suspenders under snazzy
Zegna-brand menswear and tortoiseshell specs and Docksiders, an old-fashioned corporate
take-overer and asset-plunderer, maybe fifty, with an Exchange Place office and a
souvenir FREE MILKEN bumper sticker on his Beamer—it was a night of many highballs
and much papoosing, and Gately had to keep flicking the top of P.H.-J.’s skull to
keep her conscious long enough to free-associate her way through the details—who was
on his fourth marriage to his third aerobics instructor, and who liked to bet only
on Ivy League college hoops, but who when he did so—bet—bet amounts so huge that Fackelmann
always had to get Sorkin’s pre-approval on the bet and then call Eighties Bill back,
and so on.

But so—according to Pamela Hoffman-Jeep—this Eighties Bill, who’s a Yale alum and
usually unabashedly sentimental about what Pamela H.-J. laughingly says Fackelmann
called his ‘al
mo
meter’—well, on this particular time it seems like a little impeccably groomed birdie
has whispered in Eighties Bill’s hairy ear, because this one time Eighties Bill wants
to put $125K down on Brown U. against Yale U., i.e. betting against his almometer,
only he wants (–2) points instead of the even spread Sorkin and the rest of the Boston
books are taking off the Atlantic City line for a spread. And Fackelmann has to cell-phone
down to Saugus to bounce this off Sorkin, except Sorkin’s down in the city in Enfield
at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation office getting his weekly UV-bombardment
and Cafergot refill from Dr. Robert (‘Sixties Bob’) Monroe—the septuagenarian pink-sunglasses-and-Nehru-jacket-wearing
N.C.-F.P.F. ergotic-vascular-headache-treatment specialized, a guy who in yore-days
interned at Sandoz and was one of T. Leary’s original circle of mayonnaise-jar acid-droppers
at T. Leary’s now-legendary house in West Newton MA, and is now (60s B.) an intimate
acquaintance of Kite, because Sixties Bob is an even bigger Grateful Dead fanatic
maybe even than Kite, and sometimes got together with Kite and several other Dead
devotees (most of who now had canes and O
₂
tanks) and traded historical-souvenir-type tiger’s eyes and paisley doublets and
tie-dyes and lava lamps and bandannas and plasma spheres and variegated black-light
posters of involuted geometric designs, and argued about which Dead shows and bootlegs
of Dead shows were the greatest of all time in different regards, and just basically
had a hell of a time. 60s B., an inveterate collector and haggling trader of shit,
sometimes took Kite along on little expeditions of eclectic and seedy shops for Dead-related
paraphernalia, sometimes even informally fencing stuff for Kite (and so indirectly
Gately), covering Kite with $ when Kite’s rigid need-schedule didn’t permit a more
formal and time-consuming fence, Sixties Bob then trading the merchandise around various
seedy locales for 60s-related shit nobody else’d even usually want. A couple times
Gately had to actually finger an ice cube out of a highball and slip it under the
shoulderless neckline of P.H.-J.’s prom gown to try and keep her on some kind of track.
Like most incredibly passive people, the girl had a terrible time ever separating
details from what was really important to a story, is why she rarely ever got asked
anything. But so the point is that the person that took Fackelmann’s call about Eighties
Bill’s mammoth Yale-Brown bet wasn’t in fact Sorkin but rather Sorkin’s secretary,
one Gwendine O’Shay, the howitzer-breasted old Green-Cardless former I.R.A.-moll who’d
gotten hit on the head with a truncheon by a godless Belfast Bobbie once too often
back on the Old Sod, and whose skull now was (in Fackelmann’s own terminology) soft
as puppy-shit in the rain, but who had just the seedy sort of distracted-grandmotherly
air that makes her perfect for clapping her red-knuckled old hands to her cheeks and
squealing as she claimed Mass Lottery lottery winnings whenever Whitey Sorkin and
his MA-Statehouse bagmen-cronies arrange to have a Sorkinite buy a mysteriously winning
Mass Lottery ticket from one of the countless convenience stores Sorkin & cronies
own through dummy corporations all up and down the North Shore, and who, because she
could not only give what Sorkin claimed was the only adequate cervical massage west
of the Berne Hot Alp Springs Center but also could both word-process a shocking 110
wpm and wield a shillelagh like nobody’s business—plus had been W. Sorkin’s dear late
I.R.A.-moll Mum’s Scrabble-pal back in Belfast, on the Old Sod—served as Whitey’s
chief administrative aide, manning the cellular phones when Sorkin was out or indisposed.

And so but P.H.-J.’s point, which Gately has to just about crack her scalp open flicking
out of her: Gwendine O’Shay, familiar with Eighties Bill and his Y.U. Bulldog sentimentality,
plus cranially soft as a fucking grape, O’Shay took Fackelmann’s call
wrong,
thought Fackelmann said Eighties Bill wanted 125K with (–2) points on
Yale
instead of (–2) on
Brown,
put Fackelmann on Hold and made him listen to Irish Muzak while she put in a call
to a Yale Athletic Dept. mole out of Sorkin’s Read-Protected database’s
MOLE
file and learned that the Yale U. Bulldogs’ star power forward had been diagnosed
with an extremely rare neurologic disorder called Post-Coital Vestibulitis
³⁷⁵
in which for several hours after intercourse the power forward tended to suffer such
a terrible vertiginous loss of proprioception that he literally couldn’t tell his
ass from his elbow, much less make an authoritative move to the bucket. Plus then
O’Shay’s second call, to Sorkin’s Brown U. athletic mole (a locker-room attendant
everybody thinks is deaf), reveals that several of Brown U.’s most sirenish and school-spirited
hetero coeds had been recruited, auditioned, briefed, rehearsed (i.e. ‘
debriefed,
’ giggles Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, whose giggles involve the sort of ticklish shoulder-writhing
undulations of a much younger girl getting tickled by an authority figure and pretending
not to like it), and stationed at strategic points—I–95 rest-stops, in the spare-tire
compartment at the rear of the Bulldogs’ chartered bus, in the evergreen shrubbery
outside the teams’ special entrance to the Pizzitola Athl. Center in Providence, in
concave recesses along the Pizzitola tunnels between special entrance and Visitors’
locker room, even in a specially enlarged and sensually-appointed locker next to the
power forward’s locker in the VLR, all prepared—like the Brown cheerleaders and Pep
Squad, who’ve been induced to do the game pantyless, electrolysized and splits-prone
to help lend a pyrotechnic glandular atmosphere to the power forward’s whole playing-environment—prepared
to make the penultimate sacrifice for squad, school, and influential members of the
Brown Alumni Bruins Boosters Assoc. So that Gwendine O’Shay then switches back to
Fackelmann and OKs the mammoth bet and point-spread, as like who wouldn’t, with that
kind of mole-reported fix in the works. Except of course she’s taken the wager backwards,
i.e. O’Shay thinks Eighties Bill’s now got 125K on Yale coming within two points,
while Eighties Bill—who it turns out’s cast himself as White Knight in bidding for
majority control of Providence’s Federated Funnel and Cone Corp., O.N.A.N.’s leading
manufacturer of conoid receptacles, with F.F.&C. CEO’d by a prominent Brown alumnus
so rabid a Bruins-booster he actually wears a snarling hollow bear-head to conference
games, whose ass Eighties Bill is going about kissing like nobody’s beeswax, P.H.-J.
inserts, hinting it was Eighties Bill who’d tipped the Bruins staff off about the
power forward’s Achilles’ vas deferens—E.B. quite reasonably believes he’s now got
Brown within a deuce for 125 el grande’s.