Infinite Jest (72 page)

Boston AA, with its emphasis on the Group, is intensely social. The raffle-break goes
on and on. An intoxicated street-guy with a venulated nose and missing incisors and
electrician’s tape wrapped around his shoes is trying to sing ‘Volare’ up at the empty
podium microphone. He is gently, cheerfully induced offstage by a Crocodile with a
sandwich and an arm around the shoulders. There’s a certain pathos to the Crocodile’s
kindness, his clean flannel arm around the weatherstained shoulders, which pathos
Gately feels and likes being able to feel it, while he says ‘But at least the “Good
to hear you” I quit minding. It’s just what they say when somebody’s got done speaking.
They can’t say like “Good job” or “You spoke well,” cause it can’t be anybody’s place
here to judge if anybody else did good or bad or whatnot. You know what I’m saying,
Tiny, there?’

Tiny Ewell, in a blue suit and laser chronometer and tiny shoes whose shine you could
read by, is sharing a dirty aluminum ashtray with Nell Gunther, who has a glass eye
which she amuses herself by usually wearing so the pupil and iris face in and the
dead white and tiny manufacturer’s specifications on the back of the eye face out.
Both of them are pretending to study the blond false wood of the tabletop, and Ewell
makes a bit of a hostile show of not looking up or responding to Gately or entering
into the conversation in any way, which is his choice and on him alone, so Gately
lets it go. Wade McDade has a Walkman going, which is technically OK at the raffle-break
although it’s not a real good idea. Chandler Foss is flossing his teeth and pretending
to throw the used floss at Jennifer Belbin. Most of the Ennet House residents are
mingling satisfactorily. The couple of residents that are black are mingling with
other blacks.
¹⁴¹
The Diehl kid and Doony Glynn are amusing themselves telling homosexuality jokes
to Morris Hanley, who sits smoothing his hair with his fingertips, pretending to not
even acknowledge, his left hand still bandaged. Alfonso Parias-Carbo is standing with
three Allston Group guys, smiling broadly and nodding, not understanding a word anybody
says. Bruce Green has gone downstairs to the men’s head and amused Gately by asking
his permission first. Gately told him to go knock himself out. Green has good big
arms and no gut, even after all the Substances, and Gately suspects he might have
played some ball at some point. Kate Gompert is totally by herself at a nonsmoking
table over by a window, ignoring her pale reflection and making little cardboard tents
out of her raffle tickets and moving them around. Clenette Henderson clutches another
black girl and laughs and says ‘Girl!’ several times. Emil Minty is clutching his
head. Geoff Day in his black turtleneck and blazer keeps lurking on the fringes of
various groups of people pretending he’s part of the conversations. No immediate sign
of Burt F. Smith or Charlotte Treat. Randy Lenz, in his cognito white mustache and
sideburns, is doubtless at the pay phone in the northeast corner of the Provident
lobby downstairs: Lenz spends nearly unacceptable amounts of time either on a phone
or trying to get in position to use a phone. ‘Cause what I like,’ Gately says to Erdedy
(Erdedy really is listening, even though there’s a compellingly cheap young woman
in a brief white skirt and absurd black mesh stockings sitting with her legs nicely
crossed—one-strap low-spike black Ferragamos, too—at the periphery of his vision,
and the woman is with a large man, which makes her even more compelling; and also
the veiled new girl’s breasts and her hips’ clefs are compelling and distracting,
next to him, even in a long baggy loose blue sweater that matches the embroidered
selvage around her veil), ‘What I think I like is how “It was good to hear you” ends
up, like, saying two separate things together.’ Gately’s also saying this to Joelle,
who it’s weird but you can tell she’s looking at you, even through the linen veil.
There’s maybe half a dozen or so other veiled people in the White Flag hall tonight;
a decent percentage of people in the 11-Step Union of the Hideously and Improbably
Deformed are also in 12-Step fellowships for other issues besides hideous deformity.
Most of the room’s veiled AAs are women, though there is this one male veiled U.H.I.D.
guy that’s an active White Flagger, Tommy S. or F., who years ago nodded out on a
stuffed acrylic couch with a bottle of Rémy and a lit Tiparillo—the guy now wears
U.H.I.D. veils and a whole spectrum of silk turtlenecks and assorted hats and classy
lambskin driving gloves. Gately’s had the U.H.I.D.-and-veil philosophy explained to
him in passing a couple times but still doesn’t much get it, it seems like a gesture
of shame and concealment, still, to him, the veil. Pat Montesian had said there’s
been a few other U.H.I.D.s who’d gone through Ennet House prior to the Year of Dairy
Products From the American Heartland, which is when new resident Gately came wobbling
in, but this Joelle van Dyne, who Gately feels he has zero handle on yet as a person
or how serious she is about putting down Substances and Coming In to really get straight,
this Joelle is the first veiled resident Gately’s had under him, as a Staffer. This
Joelle girl, that wasn’t even on the two-month waiting list for Intake, got in overnight
under some private arrangement with somebody on the House’s Board of Directors, upscale
Enfield guys into charity and directing. There’d been no Intake interview with Pat
at the House; the girl just showed up two days ago right after supper. She’d been
up at Brigham and Women’s for five days after some sort of horrific O.D.-type situation
said to have included both defib paddles and priests. She’d had real luggage and this
like Chinese portable dressing-screen thing with clouds and pop-eyed dragons that
even folded lengthwise took both Green and Parias-Carbo to lug upstairs. There’s been
no talk of a humility job for her, and Pat’s counseling the girl personally. Pat’s
got some sort of privately directed arrangement with the girl; Gately’s already seen
enough private-type arrangements between certain Staffers and residents to feel like
it’s maybe kind of a character defect of Ennet House. A girl from the Brookline Young
People’s Group over in a cheerleader skirt and slut-stockings is ignoring all the
ashtrays and putting her extra-long gasper out on the bare tabletop two rows over
as she laughs like a seal at something an acne’d guy in a long camelhair car coat
he hasn’t taken off and sockless leather dance-shoes Gately’s never seen at a meeting
before says. And he’s got his hand on hers as she grinds the gasper out. Something
like putting a cigarette out against the wood-grain plastic tabletop, which Gately
can already see the ragged black burn-divot that’s formed, it’s something the rankness
of which would never have struck him one way or the other, before, until Gately took
on half the break-down-the-hall-and-wipe-down-the-tables job at Ferocious Francis
G.’s suggestion, and now he feels sort of proprietary about the Provident’s tabletops.
But it’s not like he can go over and take anybody else’s inventory and tell them how
to behave. He settles for imagining the girl pinwheeling through the air toward a
glass wall.

‘When they say it it sort of means like what you said was good for them, it helped
them out somehow,’ he says, ‘but plus now also I like saying it myself because if
you think about it it also means it was good to be
able
to hear you. To really hear.’ He’s trying subtly to alternate and look at Erdedy
and Joelle both, like he’s addressing them both. It’s not something he’s good at.
His head’s too big to be subtle with. ‘Because I remember for like the first sixty
days or so I couldn’t hear shit. I didn’t hear nothing. I’d just sit there and Compare,
I’d go to myself, like, “I never rolled a car,” “I never lost a wife,” “I never bled
from the rectum.” Gene would tell me to just keep coming for a while and sooner or
later I’d start to be able to both listen and hear. He said it’s hard to really hear.
But he wouldn’t say what was the difference between hearing and listening, which pissed
me off. But after a while I started to really
hear
. It turns out—and this is just for me, maybe—but it turned out
hearing
the speaker means like all of a sudden hearing how fucking similar the way he felt
and the way I felt were, Out There, at the Bottom, before we each Came In. Instead
of just sitting here resenting being here and thinking how he bled from the ass and
I didn’t and how that means I’m not as bad as him yet and I can still be Out There.’

One of the tricks to being of real service to newcomers is not to lecture or give
advice but only talk about your own personal experience and what you were told and
what you found out personally, and to do it in a casual but positive and encouraging
way. Plus you’re supposed to try and Identify with the newcomer’s feelings as much
as possible. Ferocious Francis G. says this is one of the ways guys with just a year
or two sober can be most helpful: being able to sincerely ID with the newly Sick and
Suffering. Ferocious Francis told Gately as they were wiping down tables that if a
Crocodile with decades of sober AA time can still sincerely empathize and Identify
with a whacked-out bug-eyed Disease-ridden newcomer then there’s something deeply
fucked up about that Crocodile’s recovery. The Crocodiles, decades sober, live in
a totally different spiritual galaxy, inside. One long-timer describes it as he has
a whole new unique interior spiritual castle, now, to live in.

Part of this new Joelle girl’s pull for Ken Erdedy isn’t just the sexual thing of
her body, which he finds made way sexier by the way the overlarge blue coffee-stained
sweater tries to downplay the body thing without being so hubristic as to try to hide
it—sloppy sexiness pulls Erdedy in like a well-groomed moth to a lit window—but it’s
also the veil, wondering what horrific contrast to the body’s allure lies swollen
or askew under that veil; it gives the pull a perverse sideways slant that makes it
even more distracting, and so Erdedy cocks his head a little more up at Gately and
narrows his eyes to make his listening-look terribly intense. He doesn’t know that
there’s an abstract distance in the look that makes it seem like he’s studying a real
bitch of a 7-iron on the tenth rough or something; the look doesn’t communicate what
he thinks his audience wants it to.

The raffle-break is winding down as everybody starts to want their own ashtray. Two
more big urns of coffee emerge from the kitchen door over by the literature table.
Erdedy is probably the second-biggest leg-and-foot-joggler in present residence, after
Geoffrey D. Joelle v. D. now says something very strange. It’s a very strange little
moment, right at the end of the raffle-break, and Gately later finds it impossible
to describe it in his Log entry for the
P.M.
shift. It is the first time he realizes that Joelle’s voice—crisp and rich and oddly
empty, her accent just barely Southern and with a strange and it turns out Kentuckian
lapse in the pronunciation of all apicals except
s
—is familiar in a faraway way that both makes it familiar and yet lets Gately be sure
he’s never once met her before, Out There. She inclines the plane of her blue-bordered
veil briefly toward the floor’s tile (very bad tile, scab-colored, nauseous, worst
thing about the big room by far), brings it back up level (unlike Erdedy she’s standing,
and in flats is nearly Gately’s height), and says that she’s finding it especially
hard to take when these earnest ravaged folks at the lectern say they’re ‘Here But
For the Grace of God,’ except that’s not the strange thing she says, because when
Gately nods hard and starts to interject about ‘It was the same for—’ and wants to
launch into a fairly standard Boston AA agnostic-soothing riff about the ‘God’ in
the slogan being just shorthand for a totally subjective and up-to-you ‘Higher Power’
and AA being merely spiritual instead of dogmatically religious, a sort of benign
anarchy of subjective spirit, Joelle cuts off his interjection and says that but that
her
trouble with it is that ‘But For the Grace of God’ is a subjunctive, a counterfactual,
she says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g.
‘But For the Grace of God I
would
have died on Molly Notkin’s bathroom floor,’ so that an indicative transposition
like ‘I’m here But For the Grace of God’ is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless
of whether she
hears
it or not it’s meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks
can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange
at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is
the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in. Gately looks at a rectangular
blue-selvaged expanse of clean linen whose gentle rises barely allude to any features
below, he looks at her and has no idea whether she’s serious or not, or whacked, or
trying like Dr. Geoff Day to erect Denial-type fortifications with some kind of intellectualish
showing-off, and he doesn’t know what to say in reply, he has absolutely nothing in
his huge square head to Identify with her with or latch onto or say in encouraging
reply, and for an instant the Provident cafeteria seems pin-drop silent, and his own
heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy
wave of an old and almost unfamiliar panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that
at some point in his life he’s going to get high again and be back in the cage all
over again, because for a second the blank white veil levelled at him seems a screen
on which might well be projected a casual and impressive black and yellow smily-face,
grinning, and he feels all the muscles in his own face loosen and descend kneeward;
and the moment hangs there, distended, until the White Flag raffle coordinator for
November, Glenn K., glides up to the podium mike in his scarlet velour caparison and
makeup and candelabrum with candles the same color as the floor tile and uses the
plastic gavel to formally end the break and bring things back to whatever passes here
for order, for the raffle drawing. The Watertown guy with middle-level sober time
who wins the Big Book publicly offers it to any newcomer that wants it, and Gately
is pleased to see Bruce Green raise a big hand, and decides he’ll just turn it over
and ask Ferocious Francis G. for feedback on subjunctives and countersexuals, and
the infant leaves its playpen alone inside him, and the rivets of the long table his
seat’s attached to make a brief distressed noise as he sits and settles in for the
second half of the meeting, asking silently for help to be determined to try to really
hear or die trying.