Infinite Jest (86 page)

The inmates at the Shattuck suffer from every kind of physical and psychological and
addictive and spiritual difficulty you could ever think of, specializing in ones that
are repulsive. There are colostomy bags and projectile vomiting and cirrhotic discharges
and missing limbs and misshapen heads and incontinence and Kaposi’s Sarcoma and suppurating
sores and all different levels of enfeeblement and impulse-control-deficit and damage.
Schizophrenia is like the norm. Guys in D.T.s treat the heaters like TVs and leave
broad spatter-paintings of coffee over the walls of the barrackses. There are industrial
buckets for
A.M.
puking that they seem to treat like golfers treat the pin on like a golf course,
aiming in its vague direction from a distance. There’s one sort of blocked off and
more hidden corner, over near the bank of little lockers for valuables, that’s always
got sperm moving slowly down the walls. And way too much sperm for just one or two
guys, either. The whole place smells like death no matter what the fuck you do. Gately
gets to the shelter at 0459.9h. and just shuts his head off as if his head has a kind
of control switch. He screens input with a fucking vengeance the whole time. The barrackses’s
cots reek of urine and have insect-activity observable. The state employees who supervise
the shelter at night are dead-eyed and watch soft-core tapes behind the desk and are
all around Gately’s size and build, and he’s been approached to maybe work there himself,
nights, supervising, more than once, and has said Thanks Anyway, and always screws
right out of there at 0801h. and rides the Greenie back up the hill with his Gratitude-battery
totally recharged.

Janitoring the Shattuck for Stavros Lobokulas was the menial job Gately had landed
with only three days to go on his month’s deadline to find some honest job, as a resident,
and he’s kept it ever since.

The males in the Shattuck are supposed to be up and out by 0500h. regardless of weather
or D.T.s, to let Gately and Stavros L. clean. But some never screw out of there on
time—and these’re always the worst guys, the ones you don’t want anyplace near you,
these ones that won’t leave. They’ll clump behind Gately and watch him jet feces off
the shower-tiling, treating it like a sport and yelling encouragement and advice.
They’ll cringe and ass-kiss when the supervisor heaves himself on by to tell them
to get out and then when he leaves not get out. A couple have those little shaved
patches on their arms. They’ll lie in the cots and hallucinate and thrash and scream
in the cots and knock army blankets off onto the floors Gately’s trying to mop. They’ll
skulk back over to the little dark spermy corner the minute Gately’s got done scrubbing
the night’s sperm off and has backed away and started again to inhale.

Maybe the worst is that there’s almost always one or two guys in the Shattuck who
Gately knows personally, from his days of addiction and B&E, from before he got to
the no-choice point and surrendered his will to staying straight at any cost. These
guys are always 25–30 and look 45–60 and are a better ad for sobriety at any cost
than any ad agency could come up with. Gately’ll slip them a finski or a pack of Kools
and maybe sometimes try and talk a little AA to them, if they seem like maybe they’re
ready to give up. With everybody else in the Shattuck Gately adopts this expression
where he lets them know he’s ignoring them totally as long as they keep their distance,
but it’s a look that says
Street
and
Jail
and not to fuck with him. If they get in his way, Gately will stare hard at a point
just behind their heads until they move off. The protective face-mask helps.

Stavros Lobokulas’s great ambition—which he goes on about regularly to Gately when
they’re cleaning the same barracks—Stavros’s dream is to utilize his unique combination
of entrepreneurial drives and janitorial savvy and flairs for creative billing and
finding desperate recovering halfway-house guys who’ll scrub shit for next to nothing,
to pile up enough $ to open a women’s shoe store in some mobilely upward part of Boston
where the women are healthy and upscale and have good feet and can afford to take
care of their feet. Gately spends a lot of the time around Stavros nodding and not
saying really much of anything. Because what is there to really say about ambitious
career-dreams involving feet? But Gately’ll be paying court-scheduled restitution
well into his thirties if he stays straight, and needs the work. Foot-thing or no
foot-thing. Stavros has allegedly been clean for eight years, but Gately has his private
doubts about the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved. E.g. like Stavros gets
easily aggravated at the Shattuck guys that can’t get up and out like they’re supposed
to and clear out, and almost daily he’ll make a production of throwing down his mop
in the middle of the floor and throwing his head back to scream: “Why don’t you sorry
motherfucks just
go home?
” which so far for over thirteen months he hasn’t quit finding hilarious, his own
witticism, Stavros.

But the whole Clipperton saga highlights the way there are certain very talented jr.
players who just cannot keep the lip stiff and fires stoked if they ever finally do
achieve a top ranking or win some important event. Next to Clipperton, the most historically
ghastly instance of this syndrome involved a kid from Fresno, in Central CA, also
an unaffiliated kid (his dad, an architect or draftsman or something, functioned as
his coach; his dad had played for UC-Davis or -Irvine or one of those; all the E.T.A.
staff really emphasize is that again here was a kid w/o academy-support and -perspective),
who, after upsetting two top seeds and winning the Pacific Coast Hardcourt Boys 18’s
and getting toasted wildly at the post-tourney ceremony and ball and carried off on
the shoulders of his dad and Fresno teammates, came home late that night and drank
a big glass of Nestlé’s Quik laced with the sodium cyanide his Dad kept around for
ink for drafting, drinks cyanitic Quik in his family’s home’s redecorated kitchen,
and keels over dead, blue-faced and still with a ghastly mouthful of lethal Quik,
and apparently his dad hears the thump of the kid keeling over and rushes into the
kitchen in his bathrobe and leather slippers and tries to give the kid mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation, and but gets the odd bit of NaCN-laced Quik in his own mouth, from
the kid, and also keels over and turns bright blue, and dies, and then the mom rushes
in in a mud-mask and fluffy slippers and sees them both lying there bright blue and
stiffening, and she tries giving the architect dad mouth-to-mouth and is of course
in short order also lying there keeled over and blue, wherever she’s not mud-colored,
from the mask, and but anyway dead as a rivet. And since the family has six more various-aged
kids who as the night wears on come in from dates or patter down the stairs in little
pajamas with adorable little pajama-feet attached to them, drawn by the noise of all
the cumulative keeling over, plus I should mention the odd agonized gurgle-sound,
and but since all six kids had gone through a four-hour Rotary-sponsored CPR course
at Fresno’s YMCA, by the end of the night the whole family’s lying there blue-hued
and stiff as posts, with incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around
their rictus-grimaced mouths; and in sum this whole instance of unprepared-goal-attaintment-trauma
is unbelievably gruesome and sad, and it’s one historical reason why all accredited
tennis academies have to have a Ph.D.-level counselor on full-time staff, to screen
student athletes for their possibly lethal reactions to ever actually reaching the
level they’ve been pointed at for years. E.T.A.’s staff counselor is the bird-of-prey-faced
Dr. Dolores Rusk, M.S., Ph.D., and she’s regarded by the kids as whatever’s just slightly
worse than useless. You go in there with an Issue and all she’ll do is make a cage
of her hands and look abstractly over the cage at you and take the last dependent
clause of whatever you say and repeat it back to you with an interrogative lilt—‘Possible
homosexual attraction to your doubles partner?’ ‘Whole sense of yourself as a purposive
male athlete messed with?’ ‘Uncontrolled boner during semis at Cleveland?’ ‘Drives
you bats when people just parrot you instead of responding?’ ‘Having trouble keeping
from twisting my twittery head off like a game-hen’s?’—all with an expression she
probably thinks looks blandly deep but which really looks exactly the way a girl’s
face looks when she’s dancing with you but would really rather be dancing with just
about anyone else in the room. Only the very newest E.T.A. players ever go to Rusk,
and then not for long, and she spends her massive blocks of free time in her Comm.-Ad.
office doing involved acrostics and working on some sort of pop-psych manuscript the
first four pages of which Axford and Shaw dickied her lock and had a look at and counted
29 appearances of the prefix
self-
. Lyle, a dewimpled Carmelite who works the kitchen day-shift, occasionally Mario
Incandenza, and many times Avril herself take up most of the psychic slack, for practical
purposes, among E.T.A.s in the know.

It’s possible that the only jr. tennis players who can win their way to the top and
stay there without going bats are the ones who are already bats, or else who seem
to be just grim machines à la John Wayne. Wayne’s sitting low on his spine in the
dining hall with the other Canadian kids, watching the screen and squeezing a ball
without any readable expression. Hal’s eyes are fevered and rolling around in his
head. And actually by this time a lot of the eyes in the I.-Day audience have lost
a bit of that festive sparkle. Though there’s a certain chortle-momentum left over
from the film’s self-felonious Gentle/Clipperton comparisons, the Rodney-Tine-Luria-P.-love-rumor-and-Tine-as-Benedict-Arnold
thing seems brow-clutchingly slow and digressive.
¹⁷⁶
Plus there’s some retroactive puzzlement, because the advent of Subsidized Time is
historically known to have been a revenue-response to the heady costs of the U.S.’s
Reconfigurative giveaway, which means it must have come after formal Interdependence,
and indeed in the film it does come after, but then the chronology of some of the
end makes it seem like Tine sold Johnny Gentle on his whole Sino-temporal-endorsement
revenue scheme sometime in Orin Incandenza’s first major-sport year at Boston U.,
which ended in the Year of the Whopper, pretty obviously a Subsidized year. By this
time the E.T.A.s are eating more slowly, playing in that idle post-prandial way with
the orts on their plates, and people’s hats are making some people’s heads itch, and
plus everybody’s sugar-crashing a bit; and one of the really small E.T.A. kids crawling
around with a bottle of adhesive under the tables has whacked his head on the sharp
edge of an institutional chair and is in Avril I.’s lap crying with a desolate late-day
hysteria that makes everybody feel jagged.

GENTLE AT LARGE!—Superheader; TOURS NEW ‘NEW-NEW’ ENGLAND BORDER AMID TIGHT SECURITY—Header;
WHACKS CHAMPAGNE BOTTLES AGAINST MASSIVE LUCITE WALLS SOUTH OF WHAT USED TO BE SYRACUSE,
CONCORD NH, SALEM MA.—10-point Subheader;

GENTLE MORE OR LESS AT LARGE: WATCHES FROM OXYGENATED PORTABUBBLE AS CLEMSON DOWNS
BOSTON U IN LAS VEGAS’S FORSYTHIA BOWL—Header from That Guy Who’s Now Reduced to Laying
out Headlines for the Rantoul IL
Eagle;

CRANIALLY CHALLENGED, ACROMEGALIC INFANTS LOST IN EXPERIALIST SHUFFLE?—Editorial Header
in Ithaca NY’s
Daily Odyssean;

GENTLE CABINET TO DRAFT BUDGET OVERHAUL IN LIGHT OF WALL STREET ANGST OVER COSTS OF
‘TERRITORIAL RECONFIGURATION’—Header; ADMINISTRATION HEADS PUT TOGETHER ON MISSILE
INVERSION EXPENDITURES, RELOCATION COSTS, LOSS OF REVENUE FROM BETTER PART OF FOUR
STATES—Subheader.

G
ENTLE
[substantially muffled by both Fukoama microfiltration mask and oxygenated Lucite
portabubble]: Boys.

A
LL
S
ECS
E
XCEPT
S
EC.
M
EX.
& S
EC.
C
AN.
[the Cabinet’s Motown-girl puppets, decked out for climactic camp, are all in wicked
three-piecers with slicked-back-straight hair and enormous robber-baron steer-horn
mustaches, which mustaches could be straighter but are on the whole pretty impressive
mustaches, for female puppets]: Chief.

S
EC.
D
EF.
: So then how was the big game, Mr. President?

G
ENTLE
: Ollster, boys: seminal, visionary. An outstanding experience. I now say things like
outstanding
instead of
boss
. But also seminal. Ollie, men, I saw something outstandingly visional and seminary
yesterday. I do not refer to the football game. I normally don’t much get into football.
All that grunting. Mud everywhere. Not my scene ordinarily. The most diverting single
thing of the game was one of the two teams’ punters. This one slim cat with an outsized
leg and slightly less outsized arm. Never saw punts I could hear before.
Whoom
.
Blam
. I ate an entire wiener stem to stern while one punt was in the air. People stood
around conferring and making a racket and going to the restroom and coming back and
eating concessions, all while this one cat’s punts were still in the air. What was
that cat’s name again, R.T.?

S
EC.
I
NT.
: May I respectfully ask whether this is to be a lunch meeting, Mr. President? Is
that why these Chinese-calendar-zodiac-Year-of-the-Tiger-and-like-Rat Szechuan-restaurant
paper placemats are at all our places next to our water-pitchers? Are we going to
get to tuck into some Chinese takeout, Chief?

[Mario’s aural background becomes something with a brisk cornet, and there’s some
glove-muffled finger-snapping from J.G.F.C., who’s lapsed into a visionary reverie.]

S
EC.
T
RANSP.
: Always been partial to the General Tsu’s Chicken, if we’re—