Infinite Jest (207 page)

163.
NoCoat Inc. ended up occupying the #346 spot vacated by Hoechst’s CBS, Hal noted
with surprisingly little irony.

164.
Granted that this stuff is all grossly simplified in Hal’s ephebic account; Lace-Forché
and Veals are in fact transcendent geniuses of a particularly complex right-time-and-place
sort, and their appeals to an American ideology committed to the
appearance of freedom
almost unanalyzably compelling.

165.
Granted,
pace
critics, this was partly to forestall A.C.D.C.’s appellate-court claims that InterLace
was basically hopping up and down on the B.S. 1890 Sherman Act with spike heels.

166.
‘Reduced Instruct-Set Computers,’ descendents of the IBM/Apple ‘Power PCs,’ with
mainframe-caliber response-time and .25 terabytes of DRAM and numerous expansion-slots
for various killer apps.

167.
A couple of Incandenza’s more accessible early documentaries were bought by InterLace
on a distribution-factored contingency basis, but except for a flat PBS-ish one on
the lay principles of DT-annulation they never brought Meniscus/Latrodectus more than
a fraction of the interest on the interest from Himself’s rearview-mirror fortune.
InterLace ended up optioning rights to only a couple of his higherbrow productions
for its ‘Howls from the Margin’ low-volume-expectation product-line during Himself’s
lifetime; the bulk of his stuff didn’t make any ILT menus until after his untimely
death.

168.
It didn’t do J. Gentle F.C.’s original grass-roots-intensive campaign a whole lot
of good around ultra-liberal Enfield that one of his earliest sign-carrying faithful
had been E.T.A.’s own Gerhardt Schtitt, who politically listed so far to starboard
that even people without watches looked at their watches and referred vaguely to just-recalled
appointments whenever Schtitt’s eyes got a certain particular navy-blue cast and he
uttered any one of such terms as
America, decadence, State,
or
Law;
but Mario I. was pretty much the only one clued in to the fact that Schtitt’s attraction
to Gentle had more to do with Schtitt’s take on tennis than anything else: the Coach
was swept away with the athleto-Wagnerian implications of Gentle’s proposals for waste,
this business of sending from yourself what you hope will not return.

169.
Triaminotetralin, a synthesized hallucinogen whose high transdermal bioavailability
makes it a popular ingredient in the ‘Happy Patches’ so prevalent in the American
West and Southwest of Subsidized Time—
Pharmochemical Quarterly
17, 18 (Spring, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) provides a detailed account of the
synthesis and transdermal physiochemistry of aminotetralins in general.

170.
Québecois French: ‘working up steam.’

171.
‘Homestyle. Ready to Serve.’

172.
‘Pursuit of happiness.’

173.
Q.v. Note 304
sub
.

174.
‘Absolutely no bonking,’ presumably.

175.
The both-hands-full logistics of which are hard to envision, but realism wasn’t really
the point of the image for the bitter Brigade boys.

176.
It’s also where Mario’s most derivative of Himself, whose own
ONANtiad
was more centrally concerned with doomed high-office claymation romance than with
political comment, though the love thing in Incandenza Sr.’s film had concerned not
Tine and a Québecois fatale but an alleged doomed and unconsummated affair between
President J. Gentle and the equally hygiene-and-germ-obsessed wife of Canada’s ‘Minister
of Environment and Resource-Development Enterprises,’ the affair presented as doomed
and unconsummated because the Minister hires a malevolent young Canadian
Candida albicans
specialist to induce in his wife a severe and more or less permanent yeast infection,
driving both wife and Gentle to ardent-desire-v.-hygienic-neurosis breakdowns during
which the wife throws herself across the tracks in front of a Québecois bullet-train
and Gentle decides to exact his revenge on a macrocartographic scale. The
ONANtiad
was not Himself’s strongest effort by a long shot, and pretty much everybody around
E.T.A. agrees that Mario’s own Reconfiguration-explanation-parody is funnier and more
accessible than Himself’s, if also a bit heavier-handed.

177.
The officially spun term for making Canada take U.S. terrain and letting us dump
pretty much everything we don’t want onto it is
Territorial Reconfiguration. Great Concavity
and
Grand Convexité
are more like U.S./Canadian street argot that got adopted and genericized by the
media.

178.
A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes
change this to goes something like: ‘Don’t worry about getting in touch with your
feelings, they’ll get in touch with you.’

179.
Presumably North Shore AA meetings, but Gately never recollects hearing the word
AA;
all he remembers from the time is just ‘Meetings’ and a Diagnosis he’d construed
as chivalric.

180.
But Avril had gotten former M.I.T. #1 Men’s Singles Corbett Thorp to drive Mario
down to V.F. Rickey’s cerebral Student Union thing, where Thorp used his old student
I.D. (thumb over expiration date) to get them past the Security lady at the Rectus
Bulbi and down to the YYY studio’s freezing pink basement, where the only person who
didn’t talk like an angry cartoon character, a severely carbuncular man at the engineer’s
board, would by way of comment point only at a tripartite onionskin screen that stood
folded beneath a handless wall-clock, possibly signifying that no hiatus could be
all that long if the absent party hadn’t taken her trusty screen. Mario hadn’t had
any idea M.P.’d used a screen, on-air. That’s when he’d gotten agitated.

181.
Corbett Thorp’s sobriquet among the less kind kids is ‘Th-th-th-th.’

182.
Known also sometimes as ‘Pukers.’

183.
The dull-metal Kenkle & Brandt kind, not the white plastic industrial-solvent buckets
associated with Eschaton and yesterday’s debacle.

184.
Moving fast in one direction and having the ball hit someplace behind you and having
to try to stop and reverse direction very quickly is known also as a ‘wrong-foot’
or ‘
contre-pied,
’ and it results in a fair number of injuries to junior knees and ankles; ironically
enough it’s Hal, since the explosion, who’s known as the real E.T.A. master of placement
and opponent-yanking-around and the old
contre-pied
. Also a quick insertion that Dennis van der Meer, father of Side-to-Sides, was a
Dutch immigrant low-level pro who became a major pro coach and tennis-education-theory
guru, on the same level with like a Harry Hopman or Vic Braden.

185.
Stice’s legendarily dysfunctional parents are in Kansas, but he’s got two vaguely
lesbianic maiden aunts or great-aunts or something up in Chelsea who keep bringing
him foods the staff won’t let him eat.

186.
Serious juniors never pick up tennis balls with their hands. Males tend to bend down
and dribble the balls up with the face of their stick; there are various little substyles
of this. Females and some younger males less into bending stand and trap the ball
between their shoe and racquet and bring their foot up in a quick little twitch, the
stick bringing the ball up with it. Males who do this trap the ball against the inside
of the shoe, while females trap the ball against the outside of the shoe, which looks
a bit more feminine. Reverse-snobbism at E.T.A. has never reached the point of people
bending way down and picking balls up manually, which, like wearing a visor, is regarded
as the true sign of the novice or hack.

187.
N.b.: Europeans and Australians refer to overheads as ‘overhands,’ while South Africans
sometimes also call them ‘pointers.’

188.
The budget doesn’t allow for communal suppers on weekends, and the weekly menu has
below SATR and SUND the word
forage,
which with a certain percentage of this fall’s residents ends up being literal.

189.
Expanding where appropriate on Note 12: Demerol is meperidine hydrochloride, a Schedule
C-II synthetic narcotic, available from Sanofi Winthrop Laboratories in banana-flavored
syrup; 25, 50, 75, and 100 mg./ml. cartridge-needle units; and (most popular w/ D.W.G.)
the 50 and 100 mg. tablets known up on the Shore as Pebbles and Bam-Bam, respectively.
(D&D of course means Drunk and Disorderly, and P.D. and P.O. respectively mean Public
Defender and Probation Officer or ‘Probie,’ by the way.)

190.
If somebody dies during the commission of a felony, even from so much as a defective
pacemaker or a lightning bolt, the felon’s facing Murder-2 and unbargainable time,
at least in MA, a ghastly statutory provision as far as most active drug addicts are
concerned, since even though they’re not violence-oriented, efficiency and safety-consciousness
are not exactly hallmarks of addiction-motivated crimes, which tend to be impulsive
and fuzzily thought out at best.

191.
Also known as a case being ‘Blue-Filed,’ meaning put in a kind of judicial limbo
for a specified period, and reopenable (‘Red-Filed’) at any time P.O.s and Boards
decide the defendant isn’t making ‘satisfactory progress.’

192.
She didn’t literally say
shitstorm
.

193.
Gately didn’t get any of this from Pat Montesian; it’s mostly like Ennet House mythology,
with some hard facts from Gene M. and Calvin Thrust, both of whom think Pat M. just
about hung the moon.

194.
A totally different thing than Volkmann’s contracture (cf. Note 115).

195.
Which he had to make a fucking Financial Amend to have fixed, which luckily semi-Crocodile
Sven R. was a refinisher and voluntarily fixed the crack with some weird fake-wood-resin,
so Gately only had to pay for the tube of fake-wood-resin instead of a whole new institutional
table.

196.
E.g. ‘Kid, sobriety’s like a hard-on: the minute you get it, you want to fuck with
it’; they’d rattle this kind of stuff off; they had a million of them.

197.
(Never yet having checked the side of a box of pasta for possible directions.)

198.
Project MK-Ultra, U.S.-C.I.A. inception 4/3/B.S.53: ‘The central activity of the
MK-Ultra program was conducting and funding brainwashing experimentation with dangerous
drugs and other techniques [
sic
] performed on persons who were not volunteers by C.I.A. Technical Service Division
employees, agents, and contractors.’—Civil Action #80-3163,
Orlikow et al. v. United States of America,
B.S. 1980.

199.
Alprazolam, Upjohn Inc.’s big hat-throw into the benzodiazepine ring, only Schedule
C-IV but wickedly dependence-producing, w/ severe unpleasant abrupt-withdrawal penalties.

200.
Ennet House near-alumnus Chandler Foss’s analysis, which you can bet was developed
outside Gately’s earshot.

201.
Another vestige: Gately still always automatically notices bars and mesh, the foil
and little magnetic contacts of residential alarms, plunger-buttons on the inside
of hinges, etc.

202.
Local argot for Storrow Drive, which runs along the Charles from the Back Bay out
to Alewife, with multiple lanes and Escherian signs and On- and Off-ramps within car-lengths
of each other and no speed limit and sudden forks and the overall driving experience
so forehead-drenching it’s in the metro Police Union’s contract they don’t have to
go anywhere near it.

203.
Whether English misspelling or Québecois solecism,
sic
.

204.
Jolly-Jolt
^®
hand-buzzers, Whoopi-Daisy
^®
(celebrity-endorsed) cushions, Blammo
^®
cigars, Oh, Waiter
^®
plastic-ice-cubes-w/-fly, I See London!
^®
X-ray specs, etc. usually just trucked over, along w/ the Saprogenic Greetings
^®
treacly greeting and postcards, from the Waltham facilities of Acmé Inc., a.k.a.
‘The Acmé Family of Gags ’N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and
Wacky Disguises,’ at a substantial and politically motivated discount, seeing that
the company’s owned by the Québec-sympathetic shadowy Albertan mogul who’d been such
a force in the anti-broadcast A.C.D.C., and who over a decade back had exploited the
then-U.S.-owned then-Acme’s severe PR and cash-flow problems right after the serial
Blammo Cigar tragedies to move in and hostile t/o the firm for about 30% of its real
worth.

205.
Unknown to the hapless Antitois, this doesn’t mean they’re necessarily blank. Copy-Capable
cartridges, a.k.a. Masters, require a 585-r.p.m.-drive viewer or TP to run, and on
a conventional 450-drive decline to give off so much as static, appearing rather empty
and blank. Q.v. here Note 301
sub
.

206.
Being out of the sociolinguistic loop, L.A. has no way of knowing that ‘To hear the
squeak’ is itself the very darkest of contemporary Canada’s euphemisms for sudden
and violent de-mapping.

207.
L.A. having a pretty good intuition that the lone communicable ‘
va chier, putain!
’ wouldn’t be a good idea in this context.

208.
From Ch. 16, ‘The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems,’ in
The Chill of Inspiration: Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle
Lithiumized Annular Fusion,
ed. Prof. Dr. Günther Sperber, Institut für Neutronenphysik und Reaktortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum
Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously expensive hardcover only, ©
Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY.

209.
E.g.: Ted Schacht adjusting his wristbands and sash. Carol Spodek stretching for
a volley at net, her whole body distended, face grim and full of cords. An old one
of Marlon Bain at the follow-through of a big forehand, a corona of sweat shimmering
around him, his bigger arm crossed across his throat. Ortho Stice doing a handstand.
Yardguard gliding down through a low backhand. Wayne this summer sliding on Rome’s
fine clay, a red cloud hiding everything below the knees. Pemulis and Stice standing
cross-armed against desert light and a fence. Shaw without his silly wispy pseudo-Newcombe
mustache. The photos have been looked at so often they’re pale. Hal at the height
of his toss, knees more bent than he’d like. Wayne holding up a silver plate. The
European-contingent males three summers past all lined up outside a square van with
its steering wheel on the wrong side, somebody with either two or three fingers held
up over Axford’s head. Schtitt addressing kids you can only see the backs of. Todd
Possalthwaite shaking a small black kid’s hand at net. Troeltsch pretending to interview
Felicity Zweig. The Vaught twins sharing a foot-long frank at a stand at the Bronx’s
U.S. Jr. Open. Todd Possalthwaite at the net with a P.W.T.A. kid. Every muscle in
Amy Wingo’s front leg ridged as she gets a little ahead of herself on a backhand.
On and on. They’re not in a straight line; they’re more like chaotically placed. Heath
Pearson, former tow-truck shareholder, now at Pepperdine, facing away from the camera,
under Lung-light, running. The Palmer Academy courts looking cheesy in the heat. A
lot of the photos are stills from Mario. Peter Beak falling nastily after a stretch-volley,
both feet off what looks like Longwood’s synthetic grass. The photos surrounded by
locationless clouds and sky. Freer in the bleachers at Brisbane in thongs and a tank-top,
giving the camera a peace-sign. The Lung in mid-assembly with Pearson and Penn and
Vandervoort and Mackey and the rest of that year’s seniors out in the pavilion’s webbed
chairs, feet up in the cold, kibbitzing Hal and Schacht and the other kids lugging
parts. One of Mrs. Clarke’s cooks in a hairnet mixing something with an arm-sized
pestle in a bowl she has to tilt to hold. None of Mario or Orin. A battalion of kids
in sweats doing sprints up the hill in deep snow, two or three well behind and ominously
bent over. Some lighter-blue rectangles where pictures have been taken down and not
yet replaced. A shirtless Freer playing microtennis with Lori Clow. A close-up of
bespectacled Gretchen Holt staring in disbelief at a linesman’s call. Wayne and a
Manitoban in T-shirts with leaves on them, hands over their hearts, facing north.
Kent Blott with a horrified boomerang mouth and his nose a protrusion in the supporter
fit over his ears and nose and Traub and Lord collapsing around him in either hilarity
or horror. Hal and Wayne at the net in doubles, both leaning way over left like the
whole court’s tilted.