Infinite Jest (35 page)

Here is how to beat unseeded, wide-eyed opponents from Iowa or Rhode Island in the
early rounds of tournaments without expending much energy but also without seeming
contemptuous.

This is how to play with personal integrity in a tournament’s early rounds, when there
is no umpire. Any ball that lands on your side and is too close to call: call it fair.
Here is how to be invulnerable to gamesmanship. To keep your attention’s aperture
tight. Here is how to teach yourself, when an opponent maybe cheats on the line-calls,
to remind yourself that what goes around comes around. That a poor sport’s punishment
is always self-inflicted.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

Here is how to spray yourself down exactly once with Lemon Pledge, the ultimate sunscreen,
then discover that when you go out and sweat into it it smells like close-order skunk.

Here is how to take nonnarcotic muscle relaxants for the back spasms that come from
thousands of serves to no one.

Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn’t hurt
every minute.

This is the whirlpool, a friend.

Here is how to set up the electric ball machine at dawn on the days Himself is away
living up to what will be his final talent.

Here is how to tie a bow tie. Here is how to sit through small openings of your father’s
first art films, surrounded by surly foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so
pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you’re sure you have misheard them.
Pretend you’re engaged by the jagged angles and multiple exposures without pretending
you have the slightest idea what’s going on. Assume your brother’s expression.

Here is how to sweat.

Here is how to hand a trophy to Lateral Alice Moore to put in the E.T.A. lobby’s glass
case under its system of spotlights and small signs.

What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher.

Here is how to pack carbohydrates into your tissues for a four-singles two-doubles
match day in a Florida June.

Please learn to sleep with perpetual sunburn.

Expect some rough dreams. They come with the territory. Try to accept them. Let them
teach you.

Keep a flashlight by your bed. It helps with the dreams.

Please make no extramural friends. Discourage advances from outside the circuit. Turn
down dates.

If you do exactly the rehabilitative exercises They assign you, no matter how silly
and tedious, the ankle will mend more quickly.

This type of stretch helps prevent the groin-pull.

Treat your knees and elbow with all reasonable care: you will have them with you for
a long time.

Here is how to turn down an extramural date so you won’t be asked again. Say something
like I’m terribly sorry I can’t come out to see
8½
revived on a wall-size Cambridge Celluloid Festival viewer on Friday, Kimberly, or
Daphne, but you see if I jump rope for two hours then jog backwards through Newton
till I puke They’ll let me watch match-cartridges and then my mother will read aloud
to me from the
O.E.D.
until 2200 lights-out, and c.; so you can be sure that henceforth Daphne/Kimberly/Jennifer
will take her adolescent-mating-dance-type-ritual-socialization business somewhere
else. Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive. Be constantly
focused and on alert: feral talent is its own set of expectations and can abandon
you at any one of the detours of so-called normal American life at any time, so be
on guard.

Here is how to
schnell.

Here is how to go through your normal adolescent growth spurt and have every limb
in your body ache like a migraine because selected groups of muscles have been worked
until thick and intensile and they resist as the sudden growth of bone tries to stretch
them, and they ache all the time. There is medication for this condition.

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite
a jock: be no one.

It is easier than you think.

Here is how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the
way Himself read scholars’ reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care
and not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who
you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how: never tell
anyone where you are.

This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please
learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really
invoke.

This can be tricky.

Here is how to get free sticks and strings and clothes and gear from Dunlop, Inc.
as long as you let them spraypaint the distinctive Dunlop logo on your sticks’ strings
and sew logos on your shoulder and the left pocket of your shorts and use a Dunlop
gear-bag, and you become a walking lunging sweating advertisement for Dunlop, Inc.;
this is all as long as you keep justifying your seed and preserving your rank; the
Dunlop, Inc. New New England Regional Athletic Rep will address you as ‘Our gray swan’;
he wears designer slacks and choking cologne and about twice a year wants to help
you dress and has to be slapped like a gnat.

Be a Student of the Game. Like most clichés of sport, this is profound. You can be
shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable.
Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. Peers who fizzle
or blow up or fall down, run away, disappear from the monthly rankings, drop off the
circuit. E.T.A. peers waiting for deLint to knock quietly at their door and ask to
chat. Opponents. It’s all educational. How promising you are as a Student of the Game
is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences
can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This
is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents
are especially scary.

See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept
the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself
what you hope will not return.

This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always.

On this issue there is no counsel; you must make your best guess. For myself, I do
not expect ever really to know.

But in the interval, if it is an interval: here is Motrin for your joints, Noxzema
for your burn, Lemon Pledge if you prefer nausea to burn, Contracol for your back,
benzoin for your hands, Epsom salts and anti-inflammatories for your ankle, and extracurriculars
for your folks, who just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss anything they got.

SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS OF THE RESIDENT-INTERFACE-DROP-IN-HOURS OF MS. PATRICIA MONTESIAN,
M.A., C.S.A.C.,
⁵⁸
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE (
SIC
), ENFIELD MA, 1300–1500H., WEDNESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER—YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

‘But there’s this
way
he drums his fingers on the table. Not even like really drumming. More like in-way
between drumming and like this
scratching, picking,
the way you see somebody picking at dead skin. And without any kind of rhythm, see,
constant and never-stopping but with no kind of rhythm you could grab onto and follow
and stand. Totally like
whacked, insane.
Like the kind of sounds you can imagine a girl hears in her head right before she
kills her whole family because somebody took the last bit of peanut butter or something.
You know what I’m saying? The sound of a fucking mind coming apart. You know what
I’m saying? So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he wouldn’t quit with the drumming
at supper I sort of poked him with my fork. Sort of. I could see how maybe somebody
could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to get the fork out, though. Let
me just say I’m ready to make amends at like anytime. For my part in it. I’m
owning
my part in it is what I’m saying. Can I ask am I going to get Restricted for this?
Cause I have this Overnight tomorrow that Gene he approved already in the Overnight
Log. If you want to look. But I’m not trying to get out of owning my part of the,
like, occurrence. If my Higher Power who I choose to call God works through you saying
I’ve got some kind of a punishment due, I won’t try to get out of a punishment. If
I’ve got one due. I just wanted to ask. Did I mention I’m grateful to be here?’

‘I’m not
denying
anything. I’m simply asking you to define “alcoholic.” How can you ask me to attribute
to myself a given term if you refuse to define the term’s meaning? I’ve been a reasonably
successful personal-injury attorney for sixteen years, and except for that one ridiculous
so-called seizure at the Bar Association dinner this spring and that clot of a judge
banning me from his courtroom—and let me just say that I can support my contention
that the man masturbates under his robe behind the bench with
detailed
corroboration from both colleagues and Circuit Court laundry personnel—with the exception
of less than a handful of incidents I’ve held my liquor and my head as high as many
a taller advocate. Believe you me. How old are you, young lady? I am not
in denial
so to speak about anything empirical and objective. Am I having pancreas problems?
Yes. Do I have trouble recalling certain intervals in the Kemp and Limbaugh administrations?
No contest. Is there a spot of domestic turbulence surrounding my intake? Why yes
there is. Did I experience yes some formication in detox? I did. I have no problem
forthrightly admitting things I can grasp. For
m
icate, with an
m,
yes. But what is this you demand I admit? Is it
denial
to delay signature until the vocabulary of the contract is clear to all parties so
bound? Yes, yes, you don’t follow what I mean here, good! And you’re reluctant to
proceed without clarification. I rest. I cannot deny what I don’t understand. This
is my position.’

‘So I’m sitting there waiting for my meatloaf to cool and suddenly there’s a simply
sphincter
-loosening shriek and here’s Nell in the air with a steak-fork, positively
aloft, leaping
across the table, in
flight,
hori
zon
tal, I mean Pat the girl’s body is literally
parallel
to the surface of the table,
hurling
herself at me, with this upraised fork, shrieking something about the sound of
peanut
butter. I mean my God. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of my hand and the
tabletop both. To give you an idea. Of the
savagery.
Don’t even ask me about the pain. Let’s don’t even get into that, I assure you. They
offered
me Percocet
⁵⁹
at the emergency room, is all I’ll say about the levels of pain involved. I told
them I was in recovery and powerless over narcotics of any sort. Please don’t even
ask me how moved they were at my courage if you don’t want me to get weepy. This whole
experience has me right on the edge of a complete hysterical
fit.
So but yes, guilty, I may very well have been tapping on the table. Excuse me for
occupying space. And then she ever so
magnaminously
says she’ll apologize if I will. Well come again I said? Come
again?
I mean my God. I’m sitting there attached to the table by tines. I know bashing,
Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most fascist. I respectfully ask that she
be kicked out of here on her enormous rear-end. Let her go back to whatever fork-wielding
district she came from, with her Hefty bag full of gauche clothes. Honestly. I know
part of this process is learning to live in a community. The give and take, to let
go of personality issues, turn them over. Et cetera. But is it not also supposed to
be and here I quote the handbook a
safe
and
nurturing environment
? I have seldom felt less nurtured than I did impaled on that table I have to say.
The pathetic harassments of Minty and McDade are bad enough. I can get bashed back
at the Fenway. I did not come here to get bashed on some pretense of table-tapping.
I’m dangerously close to saying either that… that
specimen
goes or I do.’

‘I’m awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any
special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.’

‘I want understanding I have no denial I am drug addict. Me, I know that I am addicted
since the period of before Miami. I am no trouble to stand up in the meetings and
say I am Alfonso, I am drug addict, powerless. I am knowing powerlessness since the
period of Castro. But I cannot stop even since I know. This I have fear. I fear I
do not stop when I admit I am Alfonso, powerless. How does to admit I am powerless
make me stop what the thing is I am powerless to stop? My head it is crazy from this
fearing of no power. I am now hope for
power,
Mrs. Pat. I want to advice. Is hope of
power
the bad way for Alfonso as drug addict?’

‘Sorry to barge, there, P.M. Division called again about the thing with the vermin.
The word was
ultimatum
that they said.’

‘Sorry if I’m bothering you about something that isn’t a straightforward treatment
interface thing. I’m up there trying to do my Chore. I’ve got the men’s upstairs bathroom.
There’s something… Pat there’s something in the toilet up there. That won’t flush.
The thing. It won’t go away. It keeps reappearing. Flush after flush. I’m only here
for instructions. Possibly also protective equipment. I couldn’t even describe the
thing in the toilet. All I can say is if it was produced by anything human then I
have to say I’m really worried. Don’t even ask me to describe it. If you want to go
up and have a look, I’m a 100% confident it’s still there. It’s made it real clear
it’s not going anywhere.’