Infinite Jest (31 page)

Four times per annum
, in these chemically troubled times, the Organization of North American Nations Tennis
Association’s Juniors Division sends a young toxicologist with cornsilk hair and a
smooth wide button of a nose and a blue O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer to collect urine samples
from any student at any accredited tennis academy ranked higher than #64 continentally
in his or her age-division. Competitive junior tennis is meant to be good clean fun.
It’s October in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. An impressive percentage
of the kids at E.T.A. are in their divisions’ top 64. On urine-sample day, the juniors
form two long lines that trail out of the locker rooms and up the stairs and then
run agnate and coed across the E.T.A. Comm.-Ad. Bldg. lobby with its royal-blue shag
and hardwood panelling and great glass cases of trophies and plaques. It takes about
an hour to get from the middle of the line to your sex’s locker room’s stall-area,
where either the blond young toxicologist or on the girls’ side a nurse whose severe
widow’s peak tops her square face with a sort of bisected forehead dispenses a plastic
cup with a pale-green lid and a strip of white medical tape with a name and a monthly
ranking and 10-15-Y.D.A.U. and
Enf.T.A.
neatly printed in a six-pt. font.

Probably about a fourth of the ranking players over, say, fifteen at the Enfield Tennis
Academy cannot pass a standard North American GC/MS
⁵²
urine scan. These, seventeen-year-old Michael Pemulis’s nighttime customers, now
become also, four times yearly, his daytime customers. Clean urine is ten adjusted
dollars a cc.

‘Get your urine here!’ Pemulis and Trevor Axford become quarterly urine vendors; they
wear those papery oval caps ballpark-vendors wear; they spend three months collecting
and stashing the urine of sub-ten-year-old players, warm pale innocent childish urine
that’s produced in needly little streams and the only G/M scan it couldn’t pass would
be like an Ovaltine scan or something; then every third month Pemulis and Axford work
the agnate unsupervised line that snakes across the blue lobby shag, selling little
Visine bottles of urine out of an antique vendor’s tub for ballpark wieners, snagged
for a song from a Fenway Park wienerman fallen on hard off-season times, a big old
box of dull dimpled tin with a strap in Sox colors that goes around the back of the
neck and keeps the vendor’s hands free to make change.

‘Urine!’

‘Clinically sterile urine!’

‘Piping hot!’

‘Urine you’d be proud to take home and introduce to the folks!’

Trevor Axford handles cash-flow. Pemulis dispenses little conical-tipped Visine bottles
of juvenile urine, bottles easily rendered discreet in underarm, sock or panty.

‘Urine trouble? Urine luck!’

Quarterly sales breakdowns indicate slightly more male customers than female customers,
for urine. Tomorrow morning, E.T.A. custodial workers—Kenkle and Brandt, or Dave (‘Fall
Down Very’) Harde, the well-loved old janitor laid off from Boston College for contracting
narcolepsy, or thick-ankled Irish women from the semi-tenements down the hill across
Comm. Ave., or else sullen and shifty-eyed residents from Ennet House, the halfway
facility at the bottom of the hill’s other side in the old VA Hospital complex, hard-looking
and generally sullen types who come and do nine months of menial-type work for the
32 hours a week their treatment-contract requires—will empty scores of little empty
plastic Visine bottles from subdorm wastebaskets into the dumpster-nest behind the
E.T.A. Employee parking lot, from which dumpsters Pemulis will then get Mario Incandenza
and some of the naïver of the original ephebic urine-donators themselves to remove,
sterilize, and rebox the bottles under the guise of a rousing game of Who-Can-Find,-Boil,-And-Box-The-Most-Empty-Visine-Bottles-In-A-Three-Hour-Period-Without-Any-Kind-Of-Authority-Figure-Knowing-What-You’re-Up-To,
a game which Mario had found thumpingly weird when Pemulis introduced him to it three
years ago, but which Mario’s really come to look forward to, since he’s found he has
a real sort of mystical intuitive knack for finding Visine bottles in the sedimentary
layers of packed dumpsters, and always seems to win hands-down, and if you’re poor
old Mario Incandenza you take your competitive strokes where you can find them. T.
Axford then stashes and recycles the bottles, and packaging overhead is nil. He and
Pemulis keep the wiener-tub stashed under a discarded Yarmouth sail in the back of
the used tow truck they’d chipped in on with Hal and Jim Struck and another guy who’s
since graduated E.T.A. and now plays for Pepperdine, and paid to have reconditioned
and the rusty chain and hook that hung from the tow truck’s back-tilted derrick replaced
with a gleamingly new chain and thick hook—which get used really only twice a year,
spring and late fall, for brief intervals of short-distance hauling during the all-weather
Lung’s dismantling and erection, plus occasionally pulling a paralyzed rear-wheel-drive
student or employee vehicle either back onto or all the way up the E.T.A. hillside’s
long 70° driveway during bad snowstorms—and the whole thing derusted and painted in
E.T.A.’s proud red and gray school colors, with the complex O.N.A.N. heraldic ensign—a
snarling full-front eagle with a broom and can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple
Leaf in the other and wearing a sombrero and appearing to have about half-eaten a
swatch of star-studded cloth—rather ironically silk-screened onto the driver’s-side
door and the good old pre-Tavis E.T.A. traditional motto
TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT…
unironically emblazoned on the passenger door, and which they all share use of, though
Pemulis and Axford get slight priority, because the truck’s registration and basic-liability
insurance get paid for out of quarterly urine-revenues.

Hal’s older brother Mario—who by Dean of Students’ fiat gets to bunk in a double with
Hal in subdorm A on the third floor of Comm.-Ad. even though he’s too physically challenged
even to play low-level recreational tennis, but who’s keenly interested in video-
and film-cartridge production, and pulls his weight as part of the E.T.A. community
recording assigned sections of matches and drills and processional stroke-filming
sessions for later playback and analysis by Schtitt and his staff—is filming the congregated
line and social interactions and vending operation of the urine-day lobby, using his
strap-attached head-mounted camera and thoracic police-lock and foot-treadle, apparently
getting footage for one of the short strange Himself-influenced conceptual cartridges
the administration lets him occupy his time making and futzing around with down in
the late founder’s editing and f/x facilities off the main sub-Comm.-Ad. tunnel; and
Pemulis and Axford do not object to the filming, nor do they even do that hand-to-temple
face-obscuring thing when he aims the head-mounted Bolex their way, since they know
nobody will end up seeing the footage except Mario himself, and that at their request
he’ll modulate and scramble the vendors’ and customers’ faces into undulating systems
of flesh-colored squares, by means of his late father’s reconfigururing matte-panel
in the editing room, since facial scrambling will heighten whatever weird conceptual
effect Mario’s usually after anyway, though also because Mario’s notoriously fond
of undulating flesh-colored squares and will jump at any opportunity to edit them
in over people’s faces.

They do brisk business.

Michael Pemulis, wiry, pointy-featured, phenomenally talented at net but about two
steps too slow to get up there effectively against high-level pace—so in compensation
also a great offensive-lob man—is a scholarship student from right nearby in Allston
MA—a grim section of tract housing and vacant lots, low-rise Greek and Irish housing
projects, gravel and haphazard sewage and indifferent municipal upkeep, a lot of depressed
petrochemical light industry all along the Spur, an outlying district zoned for sprawl;
an old joke in Enfield-Brighton goes ‘ “Kiss me where it smells” she said so I took
her to Allston’—where he discovered a knack playing Boys Club tennis in cut-off shorts
and no shirt and a store-strung stick on scuzzy courts with blacktop that discolored
your yellow balls and nets made of spare Feeny Park fencing that sent net-cord shots
spronging all the way out into traffic. An Inner City Development Program tennis prodigy
at ten, recruited up the hill at eleven, with parents who wanted to know how much
E.T.A.’d pay up front for rights to all future possible income. Cavalier about practice
but a bundle of strangled nerves in tournaments, the rap on Pemulis is that he’s way
lower-ranked than he could be with a little hard work, since he’s not only E.T.A.’s
finest Eschatonic
⁵³
marksman off the lob but Schtitt says is the one youth here now who knows truly what
is it to
pünch
the volley. Pemulis, whose pre-E.T.A. home life was apparently hackle-raising, also
sells small-time drugs of distinguished potency at reasonable retail prices to a large
pie-slice of the total junior-tournament-circuit market. Mario Incandenza is one of
those people who wouldn’t see the point of trying recreational chemicals even if he
knew how to go about it. He just wouldn’t get it. His smile, below the Bolex camera
strapped to his large but sort of withered-looking head, is constant and broad as
he films the line’s serpentine movement against glass shelves full of prizes.

M. M. Pemulis, whose middle name is Mathew (
sic
), has the highest Stanford-Bïnet of any kid on academic probation ever at the Academy.
Hal Incandenza’s most valiant efforts barely get Pemulis through Mrs. I’s triad of
required Grammars
⁵⁴
and Soma R.-L.-O. Chawaf’s heady Literature of Discipline, because Pemulis, who claims
he sees every third word upside-down, actually just has a born tech-science wienie’s
congenital impatience with the referential murkiness and inelegance of verbal systems.
His early tennis promise quick-peaking and it’s turned out a bit dilettantish, Pemulis’s
real enduring gift is for math and hard science, and his scholarship is the coveted
James O. Incandenza Geometrical Optics Scholarship, of which there is only one, and
which each term Pemulis manages to avoid losing by just one dento-dermal layer of
overall G.P.A., and which gives him sanctioned access to all the late director’s lenses
and equipment, some of which turn out to be useful to unrelated enterprises. Mario’s
the only other person sharing the optic-and-editing labs off the main tunnel, and
the two have the kind of transpersonal bond that shared interests and mutual advantage
can inspire: if Mario’s not helping Pemulis fabricate the products of independent-optical-study
work M.P. isn’t really much into doing—you should see the boy with a convex lens,
Avril likes to say within Mario’s hearing; he’s like a fish in brine—then Pemulis
is giving Mario, who’s a film-nut but no great tech-mind, serious help with cinemo-optical
praxis, the physics of focal-length and reflective compounds—you should see Pemulis
with an emulsion curve, yawning blasély under his bill-reversed yachting hat and scratching
an armpit, juggling differentials like a boy born to wear a pocket-protector and high-water
corduroys and electrician’s tape on his hornrims’ temples, asking Mario if he knows
what you call three Canadians copulating on a snowmobile. Mario and his brother Hal
both consider Pemulis a good friend, though friendship at E.T.A. is nonnegotiable
currency.

Hal Incandenza for a long time identified himself as a lexical prodigy who—though
Avril had taken pains to let all three of her children know that her nonjudgmental
love and pride depended in no way on achievement or performance or potential talent—had
made his mother proud, plus a really good tennis player. Hal Incandenza is now being
encouraged to identify himself as a late-blooming prodigy and possible genius at tennis
who is on the verge of making every authority-figure in his world and beyond very
proud indeed. He’s never looked better on court or on monthly O.N.A.N.T.A. paper.
He is erumpent. He has made what Schtitt termed a ‘leap of exponents’ at a post-pubescent
age when radical, plateaux-hopping, near-J.-Wayne-and-Show-caliber improvement is
extraordinarily rare in tennis. He gets his sterile urine gratis, though he could
well afford to pay: Pemulis depends on him for verbal-academic support, and dislikes
owing favors, even to friends.

Hal is, at seventeen, as of 10/Y.D.A.U., judged
ex cathedra
the fourth-best tennis player under age eighteen in the United States of America,
and the sixth-best on the continent, by those athletic-organizing bodies duly charged
with the task of ranking. Hal’s head, closely monitored by deLint and Staff, is judged
still level and focused and unswollen/-bludgeoned by the sudden éclat and rise in
general expectations. When asked how he’s doing with it all, Hal says Fine and thanks
you for asking.

If Hal fulfills this newly emergent level of promise and makes it all the way up to
the Show, Mario will be the only one of the Incandenza children not wildly successful
as a professional athlete. No one who knows Mario could imagine that this fact would
ever even occur to him.

Orin, Mario, and Hal’s late father was revered as a genius in his original profession
without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at, even he
himself, at least not while he was alive, which is perhaps bona-fidely tragic but
also, as far as Mario’s concerned, ultimately all right, if that’s the way things
unfolded.

Certain people find people like Mario Incandenza irritating or even think they’re
outright bats, dead inside in some essential way.

Michael Pemulis’s basic posture with people is that Mrs. Pemulis raised no dewy-eyed
fools. He wears painter’s caps on-court and sometimes a yachting cap turned around
180°, and, since he’s not ranked high enough to get any free-corporate-clothing offers,
plays in T-shirts with things like
ALLSTON HS WOLF SPIDERS
and
CHOOSY MOTHERS
and
THE FIENDS IN HUMAN SHAPE Y.D.A.U. TOUR
or like an ancient
CAN YOU BELIEVE IT THE SUPREME COURT JUST DESECRATED OUR FLAG
on them. His face is the sort of spiky-featured brow-dominated Feenian face you see
all over Irish Allston and Brighton, its chin and nose sharp and skin the natal brown
color of the shell of a quality nut.