Infinite Jest (70 page)

So say anything you want, Gately invites them. Go to the Beginner Meeting at 1930h.
and raise your shaky mitt and tell the unlacquered truth. Free-associate. Run with
it. Gately this morning, just after required
A.M.
meditation, Gately was telling the tatt-obsessed little new lawyer guy Ewell, with
the hypertensive flush and little white beard, telling him how he, Gately, had perked
up considerably at 30 days clean when he found he could raise his big mitt in Beginner
Meetings and say publicly just how much he hates this limp AA drivel about gratitude
and humility and miracles and how he hates it and thinks it’s horseshit and hates
the AAs and how they all seem like limp smug moronic self-satisfied shit-eating pricks
with their lobotomized smiles and goopy sentiment and how he wishes them all violent
technicolor harm in the worst way, new Gately sitting there spraying vitriol, wet-lipped
and red-eared,
trying
to get kicked out, purposely
trying
to outrage the AAs into giving him the boot so he could quick-march back to Ennet
House and tell crippled Pat Montesian and his counselor Gene M. how he’d been given
the boot at AA, how they’d pleaded for honest sharing of innermost feelings and OK
he’d honestly shared his deepest feelings on the matter of
them
and the grinning hypocrites had shaken their fists and told him to screw… and but
so in the meetings the poison would leap and spurt from him, and how but he found
out all that these veteran White Flaggers would do as a Group when he like vocally
wished them harm was nod furiously in empathetic Identification and shout with maddening
cheer ‘Keep Coming!’ and one or two Flaggers with medium amounts of sober time would
come up to him after the meeting and say how it was so good to hear him share and
holy
mackerel
could they ever Identify with the deeply honest feelings he’d shared and how he’d
done them the service of giving them the gift of a real ‘Remember-When’-type experience
because they could now remember feeling just exactly the same way as Gately, when
they first Came In, only they confess not then having the spine to honestly share
it with the Group, and so in a bizarre improbable twist they’d have Gately ending
up standing there feeling like some sort of AA hero, a prodigy of vitriolic spine,
both frustrated and elated, and before they bid him orevwar and told him to come back
they’d make sure to give him their phone numbers on the back of their little raffle
tickets, phone numbers Gately wouldn’t dream of actually calling up (to say
what,
for chrissakes?) but which he found he rather liked having in his wallet, to just
carry around, just in case of who knew what; and then plus maybe one of these old
Enfield-native White Flag guys with geologic amounts of sober time in AA and a twisted
ruined old body and clear bright-white eyes would hobble sideways like a crab slowly
up to Gately after a meeting in which he’d spewed vitriol and reach way up to clap
him on his big sweaty shoulder and say in their fremitic smoker’s croak that Well
you at least seem like a ballsy little bastard, all full of piss and vinegar and whatnot,
and that just maybe you’ll be OK, Don G., just maybe, just Keep Coming, and, if you’d
care for a spot of advice from somebody who likely spilled more booze in his day than
you’ve even consumed in yours, you might try to just simply sit down at meetings and
relax and take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth and shut the fuck
up and just listen, for the first time perhaps in your life really
listen,
and maybe you’ll end up OK; and they don’t offer their phone numbers, not the really
old guys, Gately knows he’d have to eat his pride raw and actually
request
the numbers of the old ruined grim calm longtimers in White Flag, ‘The Crocodiles’
the less senior White Flaggers call them, because the old twisted guys all tend to
sit clustered together with hideous turd-like cigars in one corner of the Provident
cafeteria under a 16 X 20 framed glossy of crocodiles or alligators sunning themselves
on some verdant riverbank somewhere, with the maybe-joke legend OLD-TIMERS CORNER
somebody had magisculed across the bottom of the photo, and these old guys cluster
together under it, rotating their green cigars in their misshapen fingers and discussing
completely mysterious long-sober matters out of the sides of their mouths. Gately
sort of fears these old AA guys with their varicose noses and flannel shirts and white
crew cuts and brown teeth and coolly amused looks of appraisal, feels like a kind
of low-rank tribal knucklehead in the presence of stone-faced chieftains who rule
by some unspoken shamanistic fiat,
¹³⁷
and so of course he hates them, the Crocodiles, for making him feel like he fears
them, but oddly he also ends up looking forward a little to sitting in the same big
nursing-home cafeteria with them and facing the same direction they face, every Sunday,
and a little later finds he even enjoys riding at 30 kph tops in their perfectly maintained
25-year-old sedans when he starts going along on White Flag Commitments to other Boston
AA Groups. He eventually heeds a terse suggestion and starts going out and telling
his grisly personal story publicly from the podium with other members of White Flag,
the Group he gave in and finally officially joined. This is what you do if you’re
new and have what’s called The Gift of Desperation and are willing to go to any excruciating
lengths to stay straight, you officially join a Group and put your name and sobriety-date
down on the Group secretary’s official roster, and you make it your business to start
to get to know other members of the Group on a personal basis, and you carry their
numbers talismanically in your wallet; and, most important, you get Active With Your
Group, which here in Gately’s Boston AA
Active
means not just sweeping the footprinty floor after the Lord’s Prayer and making coffee
and emptying ashtrays of gasper-butts and ghastly spit-wet cigar ends but also showing
up regularly at specified
P.M.
times at the White Flag Group’s regular haunt, the Elit (the final
e
’s neon’s ballast’s out) Diner next to Steve’s Donuts in Enfield Center, showing up
and pounding down tooth-loosening amounts of coffee and then getting in well-maintained
Crocodilian sedans whose suspensions’ springs Gately’s mass makes sag and getting
driven, wall-eyed with caffeine and cigar fumes and general public-speaking angst,
to like Lowell’s Joy of Living Group or Charlestown’s Plug In The Jug Group or Bridgewater
State Detox or Concord Honor Farm with these guys, and except for one or two other
pale wall-eyed newcomers with The Gift of utter Desperation it’s mostly Crocodiles
with geologic sober time in these cars, it’s mostly the guys that’ve stayed sober
in White Flag for decades who still go on every single booked Commitment, they go
every time, dependable as death, even when the Celtics are on Spontaneous-Dis they
hit the old Commitment trail, they remain rabidly Active With Their Group; and the
Crocodiles in the car invite Gately to see the coincidence of long-term contented
sobriety and rabidly tireless AA Activity as not a coincidence at all. The backs of
their necks are complexly creased. The Crocodiles up front look into the rearview
mirror and narrow their baggy bright-white eyes at Gately in the sagging backseat
with the other new guys, and the Crocodiles say they can’t even begin to say how many
new guys they’ve seen Come In and then get sucked back Out There, Come In to AA for
a while and Hang In and put together a little sober time and have things start to
get better, head-wise and life-quality-wise, and after a while the new guys get cocky,
they decide they’ve gotten
‘Well,’
and they get really busy at the new job sobriety’s allowed them to get, or maybe
they buy season Celtics tickets, or they rediscover pussy and start chasing pussy
(these withered gnarled toothless totally post-sexual old fuckers actually say
pussy
), but one way or another these poor cocky clueless new bastards start gradually drifting
away from rabid Activity In The Group, and then away from their Group itself, and
then little by little gradually drift away from any AA meetings at all, and then,
without the protection of meetings or a Group, in time—oh there’s always plenty of
time, the Disease is fiendishly patient—how in time they forget what it was like,
the ones that’ve cockily drifted, they forget who and what they are, they forget about
the Disease, until like one day they’re at like maybe a Celtics-Sixers game, and the
good old Fleet/First Interstate Center’s hot, and they think what could just one cold
foamer hurt, after all this sober time, now that they’ve gotten ‘
Well.
’ Just one cold one. What could it hurt. And after that one it’s like they’d never
stopped, if they’ve got the Disease. And how in a month or six months or a year they
have to Come
Back
In, back to the Boston AA halls and their old Group, tottering, D.T.ing, with their
faces hanging down around their knees all over again, or maybe it’s five or ten years
before they can get it up to get back In, beaten to shit again, or else their system
isn’t ready for the recurred abuse again after some sober time and they die Out There—the
Crocodiles are always talking in hushed, ’Nam-like tones about
Out There
—or else, worse, maybe they kill somebody in a blackout and spend the rest of their
lives in MCI-Walpole drinking raisin jack fermented in the seatless toilet and trying
to recall what they did to get in there, Out There; or else, worst of all, these cocky
new guys drift back Out There and have nothing sufficiently horrible to Finish them
happen at all, just go back to drinking 24/7/365, to not-living, behind bars, undead,
back in the Disease’s cage all over again. The Crocodiles talk about how they can’t
count the number of guys that’ve Come In for a while and drifted away and gone back
Out There and died, or not gotten to die. They even point some of these guys out—gaunt
gray spectral men reeling on sidewalks with all that they own in a trashbag—as the
White Flaggers drive slowly by in their well-maintained cars. Old emphysemic Francis
G. in particular likes to slow his LeSabre down at a corner in front of some jack-legged
loose-faced homeless fuck who’d once been in AA and drifted cockily out and roll down
his window and yell ‘Live it up!’

Of course—the Crocodiles dig at each other with their knobby elbows and guffaw and
wheeze—they say when they tell Gately to either Hang In AA and get rabidly Active
or else die in slime of course it’s only a
suggestion.
They howl and choke and slap their knees at this. It’s your classic in-type joke.
There are, by ratified tradition, no ‘musts’ in Boston AA. No doctrine or dogma or
rules. They can’t kick you out. You don’t have to do what they say. Do exactly as
you please—if you still trust what seems to please you. The Crocodiles roar and wheeze
and pound on the dash and bob in the front seat in abject AA mirth.

Boston AA’s take on itself is that it’s a benign anarchy, that any order to the thing
is a function of Miracle. No regs, no musts, only love and support and the occasional
humble suggestion born of shared experience. A non-authoritarian, dogma-free movement.
Normally a gifted cynic, with a keen bullshit-antenna, Gately needed over a year to
pinpoint the ways in which he feels like Boston AA really is actually sub-rosa dogmatic.
You’re not supposed to pick up any sort of altering Substance, of course; that goes
without saying; but the Fellowship’s official line is that if you do slip or drift
or fuck up or forget and go Out There for a night and absorb a Substance and get all
your Disease’s triggers pulled again they want you to know they not only invite but
urge you to come on back to meetings as quickly as possible. They’re pretty sincere
about this, since a lot of new people slip and slide a bit, total-abstinence-wise,
in the beginning. Nobody’s supposed to judge you or snub you for slipping. Everybody’s
here to help. Everybody knows that the returning slippee has punished himself enough
just being Out There, and that it takes incredible desperation and humility to eat
your pride and wobble back In and put the Substance down again after you’ve fucked
up the first time and the Substance is calling to you all over again. There’s the
sort of sincere compassion about fucking up that empathy makes possible, although
some of the AAs will nod smugly when they find out the slippee didn’t take some of
the basic suggestions. Even newcomers who can’t even start to quit yet and show up
with suspicious flask-sized bulges in their coat pockets and list progressively to
starboard as the meeting progresses are urged to keep coming, Hang In, stay, as long
as they’re not too disruptive. Inebriates are discouraged from driving themselves
home after the Lord’s Prayer, but nobody’s going to wrestle your keys away. Boston
AA stresses the utter autonomy of the individual member. Please say and do whatever
you wish. Of course there are about a dozen basic suggestions,
¹³⁸
and of course people who cockily decide they don’t wish to abide by the basic suggestions
are constantly going back Out There and then wobbling back in with their faces around
their knees and confessing from the podium that they didn’t take the suggestions and
have paid full price for their willful arrogance and have learned the hard way and
but now they’re back, by God, and this time they’re going to follow the suggestions
to the bloody
letter
just see if they don’t. Gately’s sponsor Francis (‘Ferocious Francis’) G., the Crocodile
that Gately finally got up the juice to ask to be his sponsor, compares the totally
optional basic suggestions in Boston AA to, say for instance if you’re going to jump
out of an airplane, they ‘suggest’ you wear a parachute. But of course you do what
you want. Then he starts laughing until he’s coughing so bad he has to sit down.

The bitch of the thing is you have to
want
to. If you don’t
want
to do as you’re told—I mean as it’s suggested you do—it means that your own personal
will is still in control, and Eugenio Martinez over at Ennet House never tires of
pointing out that your personal will is the web your Disease sits and spins in, still.
The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched
years ago. It’s now shot through with the spidered fibrosis of your Disease. His own
experience’s term for the Disease is:
The Spider.
¹³⁹
You have to Starve The Spider: you have to surrender your will. This is why most
people will Come In and Hang In only after their own entangled will has just about
killed them. You have to want to surrender your will to people who know how to Starve
The Spider. You have to want to take the suggestions, want to abide by the traditions
of anonymity, humility, surrender to the Group conscience. If you don’t obey, nobody
will kick you out. They won’t have to. You’ll end up kicking
yourself
out, if you steer by your own sick will. This is maybe why just about everybody in
the White Flag Group tries so hard to be so disgustingly humble, kind, helpful, tactful,
cheerful, nonjudgmental, tidy, energetic, sanguine, modest, generous, fair, orderly,
patient, tolerant, attentive, truthful. It isn’t like the Group makes them do it.
It’s more like that the only people who end up able to hang for serious time in AA
are the ones who willingly try to be these things. This is why, to the cynical newcomer
or fresh Ennet House resident, serious AAs look like these weird combinations of Gandhi
and Mr. Rogers with tattoos and enlarged livers and no teeth who used to beat wives
and diddle daughters and now rhapsodize about their bowel movements. It’s all optional;
do it or die.