Infinite Jest (58 page)

What happened was that by the third week of his freshman year Orin was attempting
an extremely unlikely defection from college tennis to college football. The reason
he gave his parents—Avril made it clear that the very last thing she wanted was to
have any of her children feel they had to justify or explain to her any sort of abruptly
or even bizarrely sudden major decision they might happen to make, and it’s not clear
that The Mad Stork had even nailed down the fact that Orin was still in metro-Boston
at B.U. in the first place, but Orin still felt the move demanded some kind of explanation—was
that fall tennis practice had started and he’d discovered that he was an empty withered
psychic husk, competitively, burned out. Orin had been playing, eating, sleeping,
and excreting competitive tennis since his racquet was bigger than he was. He said
he realized he had at eighteen become exactly as fine a tennis player as he was ever
destined to be. The prospect of further improvement, a crucial carrot that Schtitt
and the E.T.A. staff were expert at dangling, had disappeared at a fourth-rate tennis
program whose coach had a poster of Bill Tilden in his office and offered critique
on the level of Bend Your Knees and Watch The Ball. This was all actually true, the
burn-out part, and totally swallowable as far as the from-tennis-part went, but Orin
had a harder time explaining the decision’s-to-football component, partly because
he had only the vaguest understanding of U.S. football’s rules, tactics, and nonmetric
venue; he had in fact never once even touched a real pebbled-leather football before
and, like most serious tennis players, had always found the misshapen ball’s schizoid
bounces disorienting and upsetting to look at. In fact the decision had very little
to do with football at all, or with the reason Orin ended up starting to give before
Avril all but demanded that he stop feeling in any way pressured or compelled to do
anything more than ask for their utter and unqualified support of whatever actions
he felt his personal happiness required, which is what she did when he started a slightly
lyrical thing about the crash of pads and Sisboomba of Pep Squad and ambience of male
bonding and smell of dewy turf at Nickerson Field at dawn when he showed up to watch
the sprinklers come on and turn the lemon-wedge of risen sun into plumed rainbows
of refraction. The refracting-sprinklers part was actually true, and that he liked
it; the rest had been fiction.

The real football reason, in all its inevitable real-reason banality, was that, over
the course of weeks of dawns of watching the autosprinklers and the Pep Squad (which
really did practice at dawn) practices, Orin had developed a horrible schoolboy-grade
crush, complete with dilated pupils and weak knees, for a certain big-haired sophomore
baton-twirler he watched twirl and strut from a distance through the diffracted spectrum
of the plumed sprinklers, all the way across the field’s dewy turf, a twirler who’d
attended a few of the All-Athletic-Team mixers Orin and his strabismic B.U. doubles
partner had gone to, and who danced the same way she twirled and invoked mass Pep,
which is to say in a way that seemed to turn everything solid in Orin’s body watery
and distant and oddly refracted.

Orin Incandenza, who like many children of raging alcoholics and OCD-sufferers had
internal addictive-sexuality issues, had already drawn idle little sideways 8’s on
the postcoital flanks of a dozen B.U. coeds. But this was different. He’d been smitten
before, but not decapitated. He lay on his bed in the autumn
P.M.
s during the tennis coach’s required nap-time, squeezing a tennis ball and talking
for hours about this twirling sprinkler-obscured sophomore while his doubles partner
lay way on the other side of the huge bed looking simultaneously at Orin and at the
N.E. leaves changing color in the trees outside the window. The schoolboy epithet
they’d made up to refer to Orin’s twirler was the P.G.O.A.T., for the Prettiest Girl
Of All Time. It wasn’t the entire attraction, but she really was almost grotesquely
lovely. She made the Moms look like the sort of piece of fruit you think you want
to take out of the bin and but then once you’re right there over the bin you put back
because from close up you can see a much fresher and less preserved-seeming piece
of fruit elsewhere in the bin. The twirler was so pretty that not even the senior
B.U. football Terriers could summon the saliva to speak to her at Athletic mixers.
In fact she was almost universally shunned. The twirler induced in heterosexual males
what U.H.I.D. later told her was termed the Actaeon Complex, which is a kind of deep
phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty. About all Orin’s doubles partner—who as a strabismic
was something of an expert on female unattainability—felt he could do was warn O.
that this was the kind of hideously attractive girl you just knew in advance did not
associate with normal collegiate human males, and clearly attended B.U.-Athletic social
functions only out of a sort of bland scientific interest while she waited for the
cleft-chinned ascapartic male-model-looking wildly-successful-in-business adult male
she doubtless was involved with to telephone her from the back seat of his green stretch
Infiniti, etc. No major-sport player had ever even orbited in close enough to hear
the elisions and apical lapses of a mid-Southern accent in her oddly flat but resonant
voice that sounded like someone enunciating very carefully inside a soundproof enclosure.
When she danced, at dances, it was with other cheerleaders and twirlers and Pep Squad
Terrierettes, because no male had the grit or spit to ask her. Orin himself couldn’t
get closer than four meters at parties, because he suddenly couldn’t figure out where
to put the stresses in the Charles-Tavis-unwittingly-inspired ‘Describe-the-sort-of-man-you-find-attractive-and-I’ll-affect-the-demeanor-of-that-sort-of-man’
strategic opening that had worked so well on other B.U. Subjects. It took three hearings
for him to figure out that her name wasn’t Joel. The big hair was red-gold and the
skin peachy-tinged pale and arms freckled and zygomatics indescribable and her eyes
an extra-natural HD green. He wouldn’t learn till later that the almost pungently
clean line-dried-laundry scent that hung about her was a special low-pH dandelion
attar decocted special by her chemist Daddy in Shiny Prize KY.

Boston University’s tennis team, needless to say, had neither cheerleaders nor baton-twirling
Pep Squads, which were reserved for major and large-crowd sports. This is pretty understandable.

The tennis coach took Orin’s decision hard, and Orin had had to hand him a Kleenex
and stand there for several minutes under the poster of an avuncular Big Bill Tilden
standing there in WWII-era long white pants and ruffling a ballboy’s hair, Orin watching
the Kleenex soggify and get holes blown through it while he tried to articulate just
what he meant by
burned out
and
withered husk
and
carrot
. The coach had kept asking if this meant Orin’s mother wouldn’t be coming down to
watch practice anymore.

Orin’s now former doubles partner, a strabismic and faggy-sweatered but basically
decent guy who also happened to be heir to the Nickerson Farms Meat Facsmile fortune,
had his cleft-chinned and solidly B.U.-connected Dad make ‘a couple quick calls’ from
the back seat of his forest-green Lexus. B.U.’s Head Football Coach, the Boss Terrier,
an exiled Oklahoman who really did wear a gray crewneck sweatshirt with a whistle
on a string, was intrigued by the size of the left forearm and hand extended (impolitely
but intriguingly) during introductions—this was Orin’s tennis arm, roughly churn-sized;
the other, whose dimensions were human, was hidden under a sportcoat draped strategically
over the aspiring walk-on’s right shoulder.

But you can’t play U.S. football with a draped sportcoat. And Orin’s only real speed
was in tiny three-meter lateral bursts. And then it turned out that the idea of actually
making direct physical contact with an opponent was so deeply ingrained as alien and
horrific that Orin’s tryouts, even at reserve positions, were too pathetic to describe.
He was called a
dragass
and then a
mollygag
and then a
bona fried pussy.
He was finally told that he seemed to have some kind of empty swinging sack where
his balls ought to be and that if he wanted to keep his scholarship he might ought
to stick to minor-type sports where what you hit didn’t up and hit you back. The Coach
finally actually grabbed Orin’s facemask and pointed to the mouth of the field’s southern
tunnel. Orin walked south off the field solo and disconsolate, helmet under his little
right arm, with not even a wistful glance back at the Pep Squad’s P.G.O.A.T. practicing
baton-aloft splits in a heart-rendingly distant way beneath the Visitors’ northern
goalposts.

What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny’s kisses and
its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over
the really meaningful events in his life:
¹⁰⁰
i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer
it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with
some sort of
Psst
that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something
important you’ve tried to engineer. The destiny-grade event that happened to Orin
Incandenza at this point was that just as he was passing glumly under the Home goalposts
and entering the shadow of the south exit-tunnel’s adit a loud and ominously orthopedic
cracking sound, plus then shrieking, issued from somewhere on the field behind him.
What had happened was that B.U.’s best defensive tackle—a 180-kilo future pro who
had no teeth and liked to color—practicing Special Teams punt-rushes, not only blocked
B.U.’s varsity punter’s kick but committed a serious mental error and kept coming
and crashed into the little padless guy while the punter’s cleated foot was still
up over his head, falling on him in a beefy heap and snapping everything from femur
to tarsus in the punter’s leg with a dreadful high-caliber snap. Two Pep majorettes
and a waterboy fainted from the sound of the punter’s screams alone. The blocked punt’s
ball caromed hard off the defensive tackle’s helmet and bounced crazily and rolled
untended all the way back to the shadow of the south tunnel, where Orin had turned
to watch the punter writhe and the lineman rise with a finger in his mouth and a guilty
expression. The Defensive Line Coach disconnected his headset and dashed out and began
blowing his whistle at the lineman at extremely close range, over and over, as the
huge tackle started to cry and hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand.
Since nobody else was close, Orin picked up the blocked punt’s ball, which the Head
Coach was gesturing impatiently for from his position at the midfield bench. Orin
held the football (which he’d not been very good at it during tryouts, holding onto
it), feeling its weird oval weight, and looked way upfield at the stretcher-bearers
and punter and assistants and Coach. It was too far to try to throw, and there was
just no way Orin was making another solo walk up the sideline and then back off the
field again under the distant green gaze of the twirler who owned his CNS.

Orin, before that seminal moment, had never tried to kick any sort of ball before
in his whole life, was the unengineered and kind of vulnerable revelation that ended
up moving Joelle van Dyne way more than status or hang-time.

And but as of that moment, as whistles fell from lips and people pointed, and under
that same green and sprinkler-hazed gaze Orin found for himself, within competitive
U.S. football, a new niche and carrot. A Show-type career he could never have dreamed
of trying to engineer. Within days he was punting 60 yards without a rush, practicing
solo on an outside field with the Special Teams Assistant, a dreamy Gauloise-smoking
man who invoked ideas of sky and flight and called Orin ‘ephebe,’ which a discreet
phone call to his youngest brother revealed not to be the insult Orin had feared it
sounded like. By the second week O. was up around 65 yards, still without a snap or
rush, his rhythm clean and faultless, his concentration on the transaction between
one foot and one leather egg almost frighteningly total. Nor, by the third week, was
he much distracted by the ten crazed pituitary giants bearing down as he took the
snap and stepped forward, the gasps and crunching and meaty splats of interpersonal
contact around him, the cooly-type shuffle of the stretcher-bearers who came and went
after the whistles blew. He’d been taken aside and the empty-scrotum crack apologized
for, and it had been explained—complete with blow-ups of Rulebook pages—that regulations
against direct physical contact with the punter were draconian, enforced by the threat
of massive yardage and loss of possession. The rifle-shot sounds of the ex-punter’s
now useless leg were one-in-a-million sounds, he was assured. The Head Coach let Orin
overhear him telling the defense that any man misfortunate enough to impact the team’s
new stellar punt-man might could just keep on walking after the play was over, all
the way to the south tunnel and the stadium exit and the nearest transportation to
some other institution of learning and ball.

It was, pretty obviously, the start of football season. Crisp air, everything half
dead, burning leaves, hot chocolate, raccoon coats and halftime-twirling and something
called the Wave. Crowds exponentially larger and more demonstrative than tennis-tournament
crowds. HOME v. SUNY–Buffalo, HOME v. Syracuse, AT Boston College, AT Rhode Island,
HOME v. the despised Minutemen of UMass–Amherst. Orin’s average reached 69 yards per
kick and was still improving, his eyes fixed on the twin inducements of a gleaming
baton and a massive developmental carrot he hadn’t felt since age fourteen. He punted
the football better and better as his motion—a dancerly combination of moves and weight-transfers
every bit as complex and precise as a kick serve—got more instinctive and he found
his ham-strings and adductors loosening through constant and high-impact competitive
punting, his left cleat finishing at 90° to the turf, knee to his nose, Rockette-kicking
in the midst of crowd-noise so rabid and entire it seemed to remove stadiums’ air,
the one huge wordless orgasmic voice rising and creating a vacuum that sucked the
ball after it into the sky, the leather egg receding as it climbed in a perfect spiral,
seeming to chase the very crowd-roar it had produced.