Infinite Jest (55 page)

At some point in here Day’s saying ‘So bring on the lobotomist, bring him on I say!’

Except Gately’s own counselor when he was a resident here, Eugenio Martinez, one of
the volunteer alumni counselors, a one-eared former boiler-room bunko man and now
a cellular-phone retailer who’d hooked up with the House under the original founder
Guy That Didn’t Even Use His First Name, and had about ten years clean, Gene M. did—Eugenio’d
lovingly confronted Gately early on about his special burglar’s selective attention
and about how it could be dangerous because how can you be sure it’s you doing the
screening and not The Spider. Gene called the Disease The Spider and talked about
Feeding The Spider versus Starving The Spider and so on and so forth. Eugenio M. had
called Gately into the House Manager’s back office and said what if Don’s screening
input turned out to be Feeding The Old Spider and what about an experimental unscreening
of input for a while. Gately had said he’d do his best to try and’d come back out
and tried to watch a Spont-Dissem of the Celtics while two resident pillow-biters
from the Fenway were having this involved conversation about some third fag having
to go in and get the skeleton of some kind of fucking rodent removed from inside their
butthole.
⁹¹
The unscreening experiment had lasted half an hour. This was right before Gately
got his 90-day chip and wasn’t exactly wrapped real tight or real tolerant, still.
Ennet House this year is nothing like the freakshow it was when Gately went through.

Gately has been completely Substance-free for 421 days today.

Ms. Charlotte Treat, with a carefully made-up, ruined face, is watching the viewer’s
stripe-shot cartridge while she needlepoints something. Conversation between her and
Geoffrey D. has mercifully petered out. Day is scanning the room for somebody else
to engage and piss off so he can prove to himself he doesn’t fit in here and stay
separated off isolated inside himself and maybe get them so pissed off there’s a beef
and he gets bounced out, Day, and it won’t be his fault. You can almost hear his Disease
chewing away inside his head, feeding. Emil Minty, Randy Lenz, and Bruce Green are
also in the room, sprawled in spring-shot chairs, lighting one gasper off the end
of the last, their postures the don’t-fuck-with-me slouch of the streets that here
makes their bodies’ texture somehow hard to distinguish from that of the chairs. Nell
Gunther is sitting at the long table in the doorless dining room that opens out right
off the old D.E.C. fold-out TP’s pine stand, whitening under her nails with a manicure
pencil amid the remains of something she’s eaten that involved serious syrup. Burt
F. Smith is also in there, way down by himself at the table’s far end, trying to saw
at a waffle with a knife and fork attached to the stumps of his wrists with Velcro
bands. A long-time-ago former DMV Driver’s License Examiner, Burt F. Smith is forty-five
and looks seventy, has almost all-white hair that’s waxy and yellow from close-order
smoke, and finally got into Ennet House last month after nine months stuck in the
Cambridge City Shelter. Burt F. Smith’s story is he’s making his like fiftieth-odd
stab at sobriety in AA. Once devoutly R.C., Burt F.S. has potentially lethal trouble
with Faith In A Loving God ever since the R.C. Church apparently granted his wife
an annulment in like B.S. ’99 after fifteen years of marriage. Then for several years
a rooming-house drunk, which on Gately’s view is about like one step up from a homeless-person-type
drunk. Burt F.S. got mugged and beaten half to death in Cambridge on Xmas Eve of last
year, and left there to like freeze there, in an alley, in a storm, and ended up losing
his hands and feet. Doony Glynn’s been observed telling Burt F.S. things like that
there’s some new guy coming into the Disabled Room off Pat’s office with Burt F.S.
who’s without not only hands and feet but arms and legs and even a head and who communicates
by farting in Morris Code. This sally earned Glynn three days Full-House Restriction
and a week’s extra Chore for what Johnette Foltz described in the Log as ‘XSive Cruetly.’
There is a vague intestinal moaning in Gately’s right side. Watching Burt F. Smith
smoke a Benson & Hedges by holding it between his stumps with his elbows out like
a guy with pruning shears is an adventure in fucking pathos as far as Gately’s concerned.
And Geoffrey Day cracks wise about There But for Grace. And forget about what it’s
like trying to watch Burt F. Smith try and light a match.

Gately, who’s been on live-in Staff here four months now, believes Charlotte Treat’s
devotion to needlepoint is suspect. All those needles. In and out of all that thin
sterile-white cotton stretched drum-tight in its round frame. The needle makes a kind
of thud and squeak when it goes in the cloth. It’s not much like the soundless pop
and slide of a real cook-and-shoot. But still. She takes such great care.

Gately wonders what color he’d call the ceiling if forced to call it a color. It’s
not white and it’s not gray. The brown-yellow tones are from high-tar gaspers; a pall
hangs up near the ceiling even this early in the new sober day. Some of the drunks
and tranq-jockeys stay up most of the night, joggling their feet and chain-smoking,
even though there’s no cartridges or music allowed after 0000h. He has that odd House
Staffer’s knack, Gately, already, after four months, of seeing everything in both
living and dining rooms without really looking. Emil Minty, a hard-core smack-addict
punk here for reasons nobody can quite yet pin down, is in an old mustard-colored
easy chair with his combat boots up on one of the standing ashtrays, which is tilting
not quite enough for Gately to tell him to watch out, please. Minty’s orange mohawk
and the shaved skull around it are starting to grow out brown, which is just not a
pleasant sight in the morning at all. The other ashtray on the floor by his chair
is full of the ragged little new moons of bitten nails, which has got to mean that
the Hester T. that he’d ordered to bed at 0230 was right back down here in the chair
going at her nails again the second Gately left to mop shit at the Shelter. When he’s
up all night Gately’s stomach gets all tight and acidy, from either all the coffee
maybe or just staying up. Minty’s been on the streets since he was like sixteen, Gately
can tell: he’s got that sooty complexion homeless guys get where the soot has insinuated
itself into the dermal layer and thickened, making Minty look somehow upholstered.
And the big-armed driver for Leisure Time Ice, the quiet kid, Green, a garbage-head
all-Substance-type kid, maybe twenty-one, face very slightly smunched in on one side,
wears sleeveless khaki shirts and had lived in a trailer in that apocalyptic Enfield
trailer park out near the Allston Spur; Gately likes Green because he seems to have
got sense enough to keep his map shut when he’s got nothing important to say, which
is basically all the time. The tattoo on the kid’s right tricep is a spear-pierced
heart over the hideous name
MILDRED BONK,
who Bruce G. told him was a ray of living light and a dead ringer for the late lead
singer of The Fiends in Human Shape and his dead heart’s one love ever, and who took
their daughter and left him this summer for some guy that told her he ranched fucking
longhorn cows east of Atlantic City NJ. He’s got, even by Ennet House standards, major-league
sleep trouble, Green, and he and Gately play cribbage sometimes in the wee dead hours,
a game Gately picked up in jail. Burt F.S. is now hunched in a meaty coughing fit,
his elbows out and his forehead purple. No sign of Hester Thrale, nailbiter and something
Pat calls Borderline. Gately can see everything without moving or moving his head
or either eye. Also in here is Randy Lenz, who Lenz is a small-time organic-coke dealer
who wears sportcoats rolled up over his parlor-tanned forearms and is always checking
his pulse on the inside of his wrists. It’s come out that Lenz is of keen interest
to both sides of the law because this past May he’d apparently all of a sudden lost
all control and holed up all of a sudden in a Charlestown motel and free-based most
of a whole 100 grams he’d been fronted by a suspiciously trusting Brazilian in what
Lenz didn’t know was supposed to have been a D.E.A. sting operation in the South End.
Having screwed both sides in what Gately secretly views as a delicious fuck-up, Randy
Lenz has, since May, been the most wanted he’s probably ever been. He is seedily handsome
in the way of pimps and low-level coke dealers, muscular in the MP-ish way that certain
guys’ muscles look muscular but can’t really lift anything, with complexly gelled
hair and the little birdlike head-movements of the deeply vain. One forearm’s hair
has a little hairless patch, which Gately knows well spells knife-owner, and if there’s
one thing Gately’s never been able to stomach it’s a knife-owner, little swaggery
guys that always queer a square beef and come up off the ground with a knife where
you have to get cut to take it away from them. Lenz is teaching Gately reserved politeness
to people you pretty much want to beat up on sight. It’s pretty obvious to everybody
except Pat Montesian—whose odd gullibility in the presence of human sludge, though,
Gately needs to try to remember had been one of the reasons why he himself had got
into Ennet House, originally—obvious that Lenz is here mostly just to hide out: he
rarely leaves the House except under compulsion, avoids windows, and travels to the
nightly required AA/NA meetings in a disguise that makes him look like Cesar Romero
after a terrible accident; and then he always wants to walk back to the House solo
afterward, which is not encouraged. Lenz is seated low in the northeasternmost corner
of an old fake-velour love seat he’s jammed in the northeasternmost corner of the
living room. Randy Lenz has a strange compulsive need to be north of everything, and
possibly even northeast of everything, and Gately has no clue what it’s about but
observes Lenz’s position routinely for his own interest and files. Lenz’s leg, like
Ken Erdedy’s leg, never stops joggling; Day claims it joggles even worse in sleep.
Another gurgle and abdominal chug for Don G., lying there. Charlotte Treat has violently
red hair. As in hair the color of like a red crayon. The reason she doesn’t have to
work an outside menial job is she’s got some strain of the Virus or like H.I.V. Former
prostitute, reformed. Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get
so prim? It’s like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out. Charlotte
T. has a cut-rate whore’s hard half-pretty face, her eyes lassoed with shadow around
all four lids. Her also with a case of the dermal-layer sooty complexion. The riveting
thing about Treat is how her cheeks are deeply pitted in these deep trenches that
she packs with foundation and tries to cover over with blush, which along with the
hair gives her the look of a mean clown. The ghastly wounds in her cheeks look for
all the world like somebody got at her with a woodburning kit at some point in her
career path. Gately would rather not know.

Don Gately is almost twenty-nine and sober and just huge. Lying there gurgling and
inert with a fluttery-eyed smile. One shoulder blade and buttock pooch out over the
side of a sofa that sags like a hammock. Gately looks less built than poured, the
smooth immovability of an Easter Island statue. It would be nice if intimidating size
wasn’t one of the major factors in a male alumni getting offered the male live-in
Staff job here, but there you go. Don G. has a massive square head made squarer-looking
by the Prince Valiantish haircut he tries to maintain himself in the mirror, to save
$: room and board aside—plus the opportunity for Service—he makes very little as an
Ennet House Staffer, and is paying off restitution schedules in three different district
courts. He has the fluttery white-eyed smile now of someone who’s holding himself
just over the level of doze. Pat Montesian is due in at 0900 and Don G. can’t go to
bed until she arrives because the House Manager has driven Jennifer Belbin to a court
appearance downtown and he’s the only Staffer here. Foltz, the female live-in Staffer,
is at a Narcotics Anonymous convention in Hartford for the long Interdependence Day
weekend. Gately personally is not hot on NA: so many relapses and un-humble returns,
so many war stories told with nondisguised bullshit pride, so little emphasis on Service
or serious Message; all these people in leather and metal, preening. Rooms full of
Randy Lenzes, all hugging each other, pretending they don’t miss the Substance. Rampant
newcomer-fucking. There’s a difference between abstinence v. recovery, Gately knows.
Except of course who’s Gately to judge what works for who. He just knows what seems
like it works for him today: AA’s tough Enfield-Brighton love, the White Flag Group,
old guys with suspendered bellies and white crew cuts and geologic amounts of sober
time, the Crocodiles, that’ll take your big square head off if they sense you’re getting
complacent or chasing tail or forgetting that your life still hangs in the balance
every fucking day. White Flag newcomers so crazed and sick they can’t sit and have
to pace at the meeting’s rear, like Gately when he first came. Retired old kindergarten
teachers in polyresin slacks and a pince-nez who bake cookies for the weekly meeting
and relate from behind the podium how they used to blow bartenders at closing for
just two more fingers in a paper cup to take home against the morning’s needled light.
Gately, albeit an oral narcotics man from way back, has committed himself to AA. He
drank his fair share, too, he figures, after all.

Exec. Director Pat M. is due in at 0900 and has application interviews with three
people, 2F and 1M, who better be showing up soon, and Gately will answer the door
when they don’t know enough to just come in and will say Welcome and get them a cup
of coffee if he judges them able to hold it. He’ll get them aside and tip them off
to be sure to pet Pat M.’s dogs during the interview. They’ll be sprawled all over
the front office, sides heaving, writhing and biting at themselves. He’ll tell them
it’s a proved fact that if Pat’s dogs like you, you’re in. Pat M. has directed Gately
to tell appliers this, and then if the appliers do actually pet the dogs—two hideous
white golden retrievers with suppurating scabs and skin afflictions, plus one has
Grand Mall epilepsy—it’ll betray a level of desperate willingness that Pat says is
just about all she goes by, deciding.