Infinite Jest (41 page)

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

That addiction is either a disease or a mental illness or a spiritual condition (as
in ‘poor of spirit’) or an O.C.D.-like disorder or an affective or character disorder,
and that over 75% of the veteran Boston AAs who want to convince you that it is a
disease will make you sit down and watch them write
DISEASE
on a piece of paper and then divide and hyphenate the word so that it becomes
DIS–EASE,
then will stare at you as if expecting you to undergo some kind of blinding epiphanic
realization, when really (as G. Day points tirelessly out to his counselors) changing
DISEASE
to
DIS–EASE
reduces a definition and explanation down to a simple description of a feeling, and
rather a whiny insipid one at that.

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have
a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston
AA term for addictive-type thinking is:
Analysis-Paralysis.
That cats will in fact get violent diarrhea if you feed them milk, contrary to the
popular image of cats and milk. That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than to
be pissed off. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that
99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for
things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think
about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining
and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are
never good.
Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the
literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists
of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. That it is possible to make
rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That the metro-street term for really
quite wonderful is:
pisser.
That everybody’s sneeze sounds different. That some people’s moms never taught them
to cover up or turn away when they sneeze. That no one who has been to prison is ever
the same again. That you do not have to have sex with a person to get crabs from them.
That a clean room feels better to be in than a dirty room. That the people to be most
frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal
courage to let yourself appear weak. That you don’t have to hit somebody even if you
really really want to. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

That nobody who’s ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to
need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight
and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has
ever
reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved;
not ever. That
bit
is a metro Boston street term for a jail sentence, as in ‘Don G. was up in Billerica
on a six-month bit.’ That it’s impossible to kill fleas by hand. That it’s possible
to smoke so many cigarettes that you get little white ulcerations on your tongue.
That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating.

That pretty much everybody masturbates.

Rather a lot, it turns out.

That the cliché ‘I don’t know who I am’ unfortunately turns out to be more than a
cliché. That it costs $330 U.S. to get a passport in a phony name. That other people
can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people
are stupid. That you can obtain a major credit card with a phony name for $1500 U.S.,
but that no one will give you a straight answer about whether this price includes
a verifiable credit history and line of credit for when the cashier slides the phony
card through the register’s little verification-modem with all sorts of burly security
guards standing around. That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering
or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. That the
term
vig
is street argot for the bookmaker’s commission on an illegal bet, usually 10%, that’s
either subtracted from your winnings or added to your debt. That certain sincerely
devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding
helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

That cockroaches can, up to a certain point, be lived with.

That ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.

That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.

That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting
the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did
or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating
buzz.

That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused.

That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex
in the first place, afterward.

That it is permissible to
want.

That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they
are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.

That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

That God—unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely
through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.

That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly
low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you.

That the smell of Athlete’s Foot is sick-sweet v. the smell of podiatric Dry Rot is
sick-sour.

That a person—one with the Disease/-Ease—will do things under the influence of Substances
that he simply would not ever do sober, and that some consequences of these things
cannot ever be erased or amended.
⁷¹
Felonies are an example of this.

As are tattoos. Almost always gotten on impulse, tattoos are vividly, chillingly permanent.
The shopworn ‘Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure’ would seem to have been almost custom-designed
for the case of tattoos. For a while, the new resident Tiny Ewell got first keenly
interested and then weirdly obsessed with people’s tattoos, and he started going around
to all the residents and outside people who hung around Ennet House to help keep straight,
asking to check out their tattoos and wanting to hear about the circumstances surrounding
each tattoo. These little spasms of obsession—like first with the exact definition
of
alcoholic,
and then with Morris H.’s special tollhouse cookies until the pancreatitis-flare,
then with the exact kinds of corners everybody made their bed up with—these were part
of the way Tiny E. temporarily lost his mind when his enslaving Substance was taken
away. The tattoo thing started out with Tiny’s white-collar amazement at just how
many of the folks around Ennet House seemed to have tattoos. And the tattoos seemed
like potent symbols of not only whatever they were pictures of but also of the chilling
irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.

Because the whole thing about tattoos is that they’re permanent, of course, irrevocable
once gotten—which of course the irrevocability of a tattoo is what jacks up the adrenaline
of the intoxicated decision to sit down in the chair and actually get it (the tattoo)—but
the chilling thing about the intoxication is that it seems to make you consider only
the adrenaline of the moment itself, not (in any depth) the irrevocability that produces
the adrenaline. It’s like the intoxication keeps your tattoo-type-class person from
being able to project his imagination past the adrenaline of the impulse and even
consider the permanent consequences that are producing the buzz of excitement.

Tiny Ewell’ll put this same abstract but not very profound idea in a whole number
of varied ways, over and over, obsessively almost, and still fail to get any of the
tattooed residents interested, although Bruce Green will listen politely, and the
clinically depressed Kate Gompert usually won’t have the juice to get up and walk
away when Tiny starts in, which makes Ewell seek her out vis-à-vis tattoos, though
she hasn’t got a tattoo.

But they don’t have any problem with showing Tiny their tatts, the residents with
tatts don’t, unless they’re female and the thing is in some sort of area where there’s
a Boundary Issue.

As Tiny Ewell comes to see it, people with tattoos fall under two broad headings.
First there are the younger scrofulous boneheaded black-T-shirt-and-spiked-bracelet
types who do not have the sense to regret the impulsive permanency of their tatts,
and will show them off to you with the same fake-quiet pride with which someone more
of Ewell’s own social stratum would show off their collection of Dynastic crockery
or fine Sauvignon. Then there are the more numerous (and older) second types, who’ll
show you their tattoos with the sort of stoic regret (albeit tinged with a bit of
self-conscious pride about the stoicism) that a Purple-Hearted veteran displays toward
his old wounds’ scars. Resident Wade McDade has complex nests of blue and red serpents
running down the insides of both his arms, and is required to wear long-sleeved shirts
every day to his menial job at Store 24, even though the store’s heat always loses
its mind in the early
A.M.
and it’s always wicked motherfucking hot in there, because the store’s Pakistani
manager believes his customers will not wish to purchase Marlboro Lights and Mass.
Gigabucks lottery tickets from someone with vascular-colored snakes writhing all over
his arms.
⁷²
McDade also has a flaming skull on his left shoulderblade. Doony Glynn has the faint
remains of a black dotted line tattooed all the way around his neck at about Adam’s-apple
height, with instruction-manual-like directions for the removal of his head and maintenance
of the disengaged head tattooed on his scalp, from the days of his Skinhead youth,
which now the tattooed directions take patience and a comb and three of April Cortelyu’s
barrettes for Tiny even to see.

Actually, a couple weeks into the obsession Ewell broadens his dermo-taxonomy to include
a third category, Bikers, of whom there are presently none in Ennet House but plenty
around the area’s AA meetings, in beards and leather vests and apparently having to
meet some kind of weight-requirement of at least 200 kilos.
Bikers
is the metro Boston street term for them, though they seem to refer to themselves
usually as Scooter-Puppies, a term which (Ewell finds out the hard way) non-Bikers
are not invited to use. These guys are veritable one-man tattoo festivals, but when
they show them to you they’re disconcerting because they’ll bare their tatts with
the complete absence of affect of somebody just showing you like a limb or a thumb,
not quite sure why you want to see or even what it is you’re looking at.

A like
N.B.
that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading
Biker
is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos
remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody’s general descriptions,
a Biker.

W/r/t the Stoic-Regret group within Ennet House, it emerges that the male tattoos
with women’s names on them tend, in their irrevocability, to be especially disastrous
and regretful, given the extremely provisional nature of most addicts’ relationships.
Bruce Green will have
MILDRED BONK
on his jilted right triceps forever. Likewise the
DORIS
in red-dripping Gothic script just below the left breast of Emil Minty, who yes apparently
did love once. Minty also has a palsied and amateur swastika with the caption
FUCK NIGERS
on a left biceps he is heartily encouraged to keep covered, as a resident. Chandler
Foss has an undulating banner with a redly inscribed
MARY
on one forearm, said banner now mangled and necrotic because Foss, dumped and badly
coked out one night, tried to nullify the romantic connotations of the tatt by inscribing
BLESSED VIRGIN
above the
MARY
with a razor blade and a red Bic, with predictably ghastly results. Real tattoo artists
(Ewell gets this on authority after a White Flag Group meeting from a Biker whose
triceps’ tattoo of a huge disembodied female breast being painfully squeezed by a
disembodied hand which is
itself
tattooed with a disembodied breast and hand communicates real tattoo-credibility,
as far as Tiny’s concerned) real tatt-artists are always highly trained professionals.

What’s sad about the gorgeous violet arrow-pierced heart with
PAMELA
incised in a circle around it on Randy Lenz’s right hip is that Lenz has no memory
either of the tattoo-impulse and -procedure or of anybody named Pamela. Charlotte
Treat has a small green dragon on her calf and another tattoo on a breast she’s set
a Boundary about letting Tiny see. Hester Thrale has an amazingly detailed blue and
green tattoo of the planet Earth on her stomach, its poles abutting pubis and breasts,
an equatorial view of which cost Tiny Ewell two weeks of doing Hester’s weekly Chore.
Overall searing-regret honors probably go to Jennifer Belbin, who has four uncoverable
black teardrops descending from the corner of one eye, from one night of mescaline
and adrenalized grief, so that from more than two meters away she always looks like
she has flies on her, Randy Lenz points out. The new black girl Didi N. has on the
plane of her upper abdomen a tattered screaming skull (off the same stencil as McDade’s,
but w/o the flames) that’s creepy because it’s just a tattered white outline: Black
people’s tattoos are rare, and for reasons Ewell regards as fairly obvious they tend
to be just white outlines.