Infinite Jest (69 page)

If you listen for the similarities, all these speakers’ Substance-careers seem to
terminate at the same cliff’s edge. You are now Finished, as a Substance-user. It’s
the jumping-off place. You now have two choices. You can either eliminate your own
map for keeps—blades are the best, or else pills, or there’s always quietly sucking
off the exhaust pipe of your repossessable car in the bank-owned garage of your familyless
home. Something whimpery instead of banging. Better clean and quiet and (since your
whole career’s been one long futile flight from pain) painless. Though of the alcoholics
and drug addicts who compose over 70% of a given year’s suicides, some try to go out
with a last great garish Balaclavan gesture: one longtime member of the White Flag
Group is a prognathous lady named Louise B. who tried to take a map-eliminating dive
off the old Hancock Building downtown in B.S. ’81 but got caught in the gust of a
rising thermal only six flights off the roof and got blown cartwheeling back up and
in through the smoked-glass window of an arbitrage firm’s suite on the thirty-fourth
floor, ending up sprawled prone on a high-gloss conference table with only lacerations
and a compound of the collarbone and an experience of willed self-annihilation and
external intervention that has left her rabidly Christian—rabidly, as in foam—so that
she’s comparatively ignored and avoided, though her AA story, being just like everybody
else’s but more spectacular, has become metro Boston AA myth. But so when you get
to this jumping-off place at the Finish of your Substance-career you can either take
up the Luger or blade and eliminate your own personal map—this can be at age sixty,
or twenty-seven, or seventeen—or you can get out the very beginning of the Yellow
Pages or InterNet Psych-Svce File and make a blubbering 0200h. phone call and admit
to a gentle grandparentish voice that you’re in trouble, deadly serious trouble, and
the voice will try to soothe you into hanging on until a couple hours go by and two
pleasantly earnest, weirdly calm guys in conservative attire appear smiling at your
door sometime before dawn and speak quietly to you for hours and leave you not remembering
anything from what they said except the sense that they used to be eerily like you,
just where you are, utterly fucked, and but now somehow aren’t anymore, fucked like
you, at least they didn’t seem like they were, unless the whole thing’s some incredibly
involved scam, this AA thing, and so but anyway you sit there on what’s left of your
furniture in the lavender dawnlight and realize that by now you literally have no
other choices besides trying this AA thing or else eliminating your map, so you spend
the day killing every last bit of every Substance you’ve got in one last joyless bitter
farewell binge and resolve, the next day, to go ahead and swallow your pride and maybe
your common sense too and try these meetings of this ‘Program’ that at best is probably
just Unitarian happy horseshit and at worst is a cover for some glazed and canny cult-type
thing where they’ll keep you sober by making you spend twenty hours a day selling
cellophane cones of artificial flowers on the median strips of heavy-flow roads. And
what defines this cliffish nexus of exactly two total choices, this miserable road-fork
Boston AA calls your Bottom, is that at this point you feel like maybe selling flowers
on median strips might not be so bad, not compared to what you’ve got going, personally,
at this juncture. And this, at root, is what unites Boston AA: it turns out this same
resigned, miserable, brainwash-and-exploit-me-if-that’s-what-it-takes-type desperation
has been the jumping-off place for just about every AA you meet, it emerges, once
you’ve actually gotten it up to stop darting in and out of the big meetings and start
walking up with your wet hand out and trying to actually personally meet some Boston
AAs. As the one particular tough old guy or lady you’re always particularly scared
of and drawn to says, nobody ever Comes In because things were going really well and
they just wanted to round out their
P.M.
social calendar. Everybody, but
everybody
Comes In dead-eyed and puke-white and with their face hanging down around their knees
and with a well-thumbed firearm-and-ordnance mail-order catalogue kept safe and available
at home, map-wise, for when this last desperate resort of hugs and clichés turns out
to be just happy horseshit, for you. You are not unique, they’ll say: this initial
hopelessness unites every soul in this broad cold salad-bar’d hall. They are like
Hindenburg-survivors. Every meeting is a reunion, once you’ve been in for a while.

And then the palsied newcomers who totter in desperate and miserable enough to Hang
In and keep coming and start feebly to scratch beneath the unlikely insipid surface
of the thing, Don Gately’s found, then get united by a second common experience. The
shocking discovery that the thing actually does seem to work. Does keep you Substance-free.
It’s improbable and shocking. When Gately finally snapped to the fact, one day about
four months into his Ennet House residency, that quite a few days seemed to have gone
by without his playing with the usual idea of slipping over to Unit #7 and getting
loaded in some nonuremic way the courts couldn’t prove, that several days had gone
without his even
thinking
of oral narcotics or a tightly rolled duBois or a cold foamer on a hot day… when
he realized that the various Substances he didn’t used to be able to go a day without
absorbing hadn’t even like
occurred
to him in almost a week, Gately hadn’t felt so much grateful or joyful as just plain
shocked. The idea that AA might actually somehow
work
unnerved him. He suspected some sort of trap. Some new sort of trap. At this stage
he and the other Ennet residents who were still there and starting to snap to the
fact that AA might work began to sit around together late at night going batshit together
because it seemed to be impossible to figure out just
how
AA worked. It did, yes, tentatively seem maybe actually to be working, but Gately
couldn’t for the life of him figure out how just sitting on hemorrhoid-hostile folding
chairs every night looking at nose-pores and listening to clichés could work. Nobody’s
ever been able to figure AA out, is another binding commonality. And the folks with
serious time in AA are infuriating about questions starting with
How.
You ask the scary old guys How AA Works and they smile their chilly smiles and say
Just Fine. It just works, is all; end of story. The newcomers who abandon common sense
and resolve to Hang In and keep coming and then find their cages all of a sudden open,
mysteriously, after a while, share this sense of deep shock and possible trap; about
newer Boston AAs with like six months clean you can see this look of glazed suspicion
instead of beatific glee, an expression like that of bug-eyed natives confronted suddenly
with a Zippo lighter. And so this unites them, nervously, this tentative assemblage
of possible glimmers of something like hope, this grudging move toward maybe acknowledging
that this unromantic, unhip, clichéd AA thing—so unlikely and unpromising, so much
the inverse of what they’d come too much to love—might really be able to keep the
lover’s toothy maw at bay. The process is the neat reverse of what brought you down
and In here: Substances start out being so magically great, so much the interior jigsaw’s
missing piece, that at the start you just know, deep in your gut, that they’ll never
let you down; you just know it. But they do. And then this goofy slapdash anarchic
system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee
is so lame you just
know
there’s no way it could ever possibly work except for the utterest morons… and then
Gately seems to find out AA turns out to be the very loyal friend he thought he’d
had and then lost, when you Came In. And so you Hang In and stay sober and straight,
and out of sheer hand-burned-on-hot-stove terror you heed the improbable-sounding
warnings not to stop pounding out the nightly meetings even after the Substance-cravings
have left and you feel like you’ve got a grip on the thing at last and can now go
it alone, you still don’t try to go it alone, you heed the improbable warnings because
by now you have no faith in your own sense of what’s really improbable and what isn’t,
since AA seems, improbably enough, to be working, and with no faith in your own senses
you’re confused, flummoxed, and when people with AA time strongly advise you to keep
coming you nod robotically and keep coming, and you sweep floors and scrub out ashtrays
and fill stained steel urns with hideous coffee, and you keep getting ritually down
on your big knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems
a burnished shield against all who would ask aid of it—how can you pray to a ‘God’
you believe only morons believe in, still?—but the old guys say it doesn’t yet matter
what you believe or don’t believe, Just Do It they say, and like a shock-trained organism
without any kind of independent human will you do exactly like you’re told, you keep
coming and coming, nightly, and now you take pains not to get booted out of the squalid
halfway house you’d at first tried so hard to get discharged from, you Hang In and
Hang In, meeting after meeting, warm day after cold day…; and not only does the urge
to get high stay more or less away, but more general life-quality-type things—just
as improbably promised, at first, when you’d Come In—things seem to get progressively
somehow better, inside, for a while, then worse, then even better, then for a while
worse in a way that’s still somehow better, realer, you feel weirdly unblinded, which
is good, even though a lot of the things you now see about yourself and how you’ve
lived are horrible to have to see—and by this time the whole thing is so improbable
and unparsable that you’re so flummoxed you’re convinced you’re maybe brain-damaged,
still, at this point, from all the years of Substances, and you figure you’d better
Hang In in this Boston AA where older guys who seem to be less damaged—or at least
less flummoxed by their damage—will tell you in terse simple imperative clauses exactly
what to do, and where and when to do it (though never How or Why); and at this point
you’ve started to have an almost classic sort of Blind Faith in the older guys, a
Blind Faith in them born not of zealotry or even belief but just of a chilled conviction
that you have no faith whatsoever left in yourself;
¹³⁵
and now if the older guys say Jump you ask them to hold their hand at the desired
height, and now they’ve got you, and you’re free.

Another Advanced Basics Group speaker, whose first name Gately loses in the crowd’s
big Hello but whose last initial is E., an even bigger guy than John L., a green-card
Irishman in a skallycap and Sinn Fein sweatshirt, with a belly like a swinging sack
of meal and a thoroughly visible ass to back it up, is sharing his hope’s experience
by listing the gifts that have followed his decision to Come In and put the plug in
the jug and the cap on the phentermine-hydrochloride bottle
¹³⁶
and stop driving long-haul truck routes in unbroken 96-hour metal-pedalled states
of chemical psychosis. The rewards of his abstinence, he stresses, have been more
than just spiritual. Only in Boston AA can you hear a fifty-year-old immigrant wax
lyrical about his first solid bowel movement in adult life.

‘ ’d been a confarmed bowl-splatterer for yars b’yond contin’. ’d been barred from
t’facilities at o’t’ troock stops twixt hair’n Nork for yars. T’wallpaper in de loo
a t’ome hoong in t’ese carled sheets froom t’wall, ay till yo. But now woon dey… ay’ll
remaember’t’always. T’were a wake to t’day ofter ay stewed oop for me ninety-dey chip.
Ay were tray moents sobber. Ay were thar on t’throne a’t’ome, yo new. No’t’put too
fain a point’on it, ay prodooced as er uzhal and… and ay war soo amazed as to no’t’belaven’
me yairs. ’Twas a sone so wonefamiliar at t’first ay tought ay’d droped me wallet
in t’loo, do yo new. Ay tought ay’d droped me wallet in t’loo as Good is me wetness.
So doan ay bend twixt m’knays and’ad a luke in t’dim o’t’loo, and codn’t belave me’yize.
So gud paple ay do then ay drope to m’knays by t’loo an’t’ad a
rail
luke. A loaver’s luke, d’yo new. And friends t’were loavely past me pur poewers t’say.
T’were a
tard
in t’loo. A
rail tard.
T’were farm an’ teppered an’ aiver so jaintly aitched. T’luked…
conestroocted
instaid’ve sprayed. T’luked as ay fel’t’in me ’eart Good ’imsailf maint a tard t’luke.
Me friends, this tard’o’mine practically had a poolse. Ay sted doan own m’knays an
tanked me Har Par, which ay choose t’call me Har Par Good, an’ ay been tankin me Har
Par own m’knays aiver sin, marnin and natetime an in t’loo’s’well, aiver sin.’ The
man’s red-leather face radiant throughout. Gately and the other White Flaggers fall
about, laugh from the gut, a turd that practically had a pulse, an ode to a solid
dump; but the lightless eyes of certain palsied back-row newcomers widen with a very
private Identification and possible hope, hardly daring to imagine…. A certain Message
has been Carried.

Gately’s biggest asset as an Ennet House live-in Staffer—besides the size thing, which
is not to be discounted when order has to be maintained in a place where guys come
in fresh from detox still in Withdrawal with their eyes rolling like palsied cattle
and an earring in their eyelid and a tattoo that says BORN TO BE UNPLEASANT—besides
the fact that his upper arms are the size of cuts of beef you rarely see off hooks,
his big plus is he has this ability to convey his own experience about at first hating
AA to new House residents who hate AA and resent being forced to go and sit up in
nose-pore-range and listen to such limply improbable clichéd drivel night after night.
Limp AA looks, at first, and actually limp it sometimes really is, Gately tells the
new residents, and he says no way he’d expect them to believe on just his say-so that
the thing’ll work if they’re miserable and desperate enough to Hang In against common
sense for a while. But he says he’ll clue them in on a truly great thing about AA:
they can’t kick you out.
You’re In if you say you’re In. Nobody can get kicked out, not for any reason. Which
means you can say
anything
in here. Talk about solid turds all you want. The molecular integrity of shit is
small potatoes. Gately says he defies the new Ennet House residents to try and shock
the smiles off these Boston AAs’ faces. Can’t be done, he says. These folks have literally
heard it all. Enuresis. Impotence. Priapism. Onanism. Projectile-incontinence. Autocastration.
Elaborate paranoid delusions, the grandiosest megalomania, Communism, fringe-Birchism,
National-Socialist-Bundism, psychotic breaks, sodomy, bestiality, daughter-diddling,
exposures at every conceivable level of indecency. Coprophilia and -phagia. Four-year
White Flagger Glenn K.’s personally chosen Higher Power is
Satan,
for fuck’s sake. Granted, nobody in White Flag much likes Glenn K., and the thing
with the hooded cape and makeup and the candelabrum he carries around draw some mutters,
but Glenn K. is a member for exactly as long as he cares to Hang In.