Infinite Jest (88 page)

And the same fucking thing happens again. The tough chain-smoking TSBYSCD Group all
stands and applauds and the men give two-finger whistles, and people come up at the
raffle-break to pump his big hand and even sometimes try and hug on him.

It seems like every time he forgets himself and publicizes how he’s fucking up in
sobriety Boston AAs fall all over themselves to tell him how good it was to hear him
and to for God’s sake Keep Coming, for them if not for himself, whatever the fuck
that means.

The Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink Group seems to be over 50% bikers and biker-chicks,
meaning your standard leather vests and 10-cm. boot heels, belt-buckles with little
spade-shaped knives that come out of a slot in the side, tattoos that are more like
murals, serious tits in cotton halters, big beards, Harleywear, wooden matches in
mouth-corners and so forth. After the Our Father, as Gately and the other White Flag
speakers are clustered smoking outside the door to the church basement, the sound
of high-cc. hawgs being kick-started is enough to rattle your fillings. Gately can’t
even start to guess what it would be like to be a sober and drug-free biker. It’s
like what would be the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their
leather and like playing a lot of really precise pool.

This one sober biker that can’t be much older than Gately and is nearly Gately’s size—though
with a really small head and a tapered jaw that makes him look kind of like a handsome
mantis—as they’re massed around the door he brings a car-length chopper up alongside
Gately. Says it was good to hear him. Shakes his hand in the complex way of Niggers
and Harleyheads. He introduces his name as Robert F., though on the lapel of his leather
vest it says BOB DEATH. A biker-chick’s got her arms around his waist from behind,
as is SOP. He tells Gately it was good to hear somebody new share from the heart about
his struggles with the God component. It’s weird to hear a biker use the Boston AA
word
share,
much less
component
or
heart
.

The other White Flaggers have stopped talking and are watching the two men sort of
just awkwardly stand there, the biker embraced from behind and straddling his throbbing
hawg. The guy’s got on leather spats and a leather vest with no shirt, and Gately
notices the guy’s got a jailhouse tatt of AA’s weird little insignia of a triangle
inside a circle on one big shoulder.

Robert F./Bob Death asks Gately if by any chance he’s heard the one about the fish.
Glenn K. in his fucking robe overhears, and of course he’s got to put his own oar
in, and breaks in and asks them all if they’ve heard the one What did the blind man
say as he passed by the Quincy Market fish-stall, and without waiting says He goes
‘Evening, Ladies.’ A couple male White Flaggers fall about, and Tamara N. slaps at
the back of Glenn K.’s head’s pointy hood, but without real heat, as in like what
are you going to do with this sick fuck.

Bob Death smiles coolly (South Shore bikers are required to be extremely cool in everything
they do) and manipulates a wooden match with his lip and says No, not that fish-one.
He has to assume a kind of bar-shout to clear the noise of his idling hawg. He leans
in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This wise
old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the
water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each
other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away. The young biker leans back
and smiles at Gately and gives an affable shrug and blatts away, a halter top’s tits
mashed against his back.

Gately’s forehead was wrinkled in emotional pain all the way up Rte. 3 home. They
were in the back of Ferocious Francis’s old car. Glenn K. was trying to ask what was
the difference between a bottle of 15-year-old Hennessey and a human female vagina.
Crocodile Dicky N. up riding shotgun told Glenn to try to fucking remember there was
ladies present. Ferocious Francis kept moving the toothpick around in his mouth and
looking at Gately in the rearview. Gately wanted to both cry and hit somebody. Glenn’s
cheap pseudo-demonic robes had the faint rank oily smell of a dish towel. There was
no smoking in the car: Ferocious Francis had a little oxygen tank he had to carry
around and a little thin pale-blue plastic-like tube thing that lay under his nose
and was taped there and sent oxygen up his nose. All he’d ever say about the tank
and the tube is that they were not his personal will but that he’d submitted to advice
and now here he was, still sucking air and staying rabidly Active.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you’re new and out of your
skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it’ll
all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention
that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or
in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from
Compulsion. There’s serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time.
Then now that you’re clean and don’t even much want Substances and feeling like you
want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain, these Boston AAs start in
on telling you you’re right where you’re supposed to be and telling you to remember
the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain
now has a purpose. At least this pain means you’re going somewhere, they say, instead
of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain.

They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you’ve
been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you’ll begin to start to ‘Get In
Touch’ with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You’ll start to
feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic.
‘Getting In Touch With Your Feelings’ is another quilted-sampler-type cliché that
ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out.
¹⁷⁸
It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of
the real truth it covers.

Near the end of his Ennet residency, at like eight months clean and more or less free
of any chemical compulsion, going to the Shattuck every
A.M.
and working the Steps and getting Active and pounding out meetings like a madman,
Don Gately suddenly started to remember things he would just as soon not have. Remembered.
Actually
remembered
’s probably not the best word. It was more like he started to almost reexperience
things that he’d barely even been there to experience, in terms of emotionally, in
the first place. A lot of it was undramatic little shit, but still somehow painful.
E.g. like when he was maybe eleven, pretending to watch TV with his mother and pretending
to listen to her
P.M.
nightly monologue, a litany of complaint and regret whose consonants got mushier
and mushier. To the extent it’s Gately’s place to diagnose anybody else as an alcoholic,
his mom was pretty definitely an alcoholic. She drank Stolichnaya vodka in front of
the TV. They weren’t cable-ready, for reasons of $. She drank little thin glasses
with cut-up bits of carrot and pepper that she’d drop into the vodka. Her maiden name
was Gately. Don’s like organic father had been an Estonian immigrant, a wrought-iron
worker, which is like sort of a welder with ambition. He’d broken Gately’s mother’s
jaw and left Boston when Gately was in his mother’s stomach. Gately had no brothers
or sisters. His mother was subsequently involved with a live-in lover, a former Navy
M.P. who used to beat her up on a regular schedule, hitting her in the vicinities
between groin and breast so that nothing showed. A skill he’d picked up as a brig
guard and Shore Patrol. At about 8–10 Heinekens he used to all of a sudden throw his
Reader’s Digest
against the wall and get her down and beat her with measured blows, she’d go down
on the floor of the apartment and he’d hit her in the hidden vicinity, timing the
blows between her arms’ little waves—Gately remembered she tried to ward off the blows
with a fluttered downward motion of her arms and hands, as if she were beating out
flames. Gately still hasn’t ever quite gotten over to look at her in State Care in
the Long-Term-Care Medicaid place. The M.P.’s tongue was in the corner of his mouth
and his little-eyed face wore a look of great concentration, as if he were taking
something delicate apart or putting it together. He’d be on one knee knelt over her
with his look of sober problem-solving, timing his shots, the blows abrupt and darting,
her writhing and trying to kind of shoo them away. The darting blows. Out of the psychic
blue, very detailed memories of these fights surfaced one afternoon as he was getting
ready to mow the Ennet House lawn for Pat in May Y.D.A.U., when Enfield Marine P.H.H.
withheld maintenance services in reprisal for late utilities. After the little Salem
decayed beach-cottage with Herman the Ceiling That Breathed, the little like tract
house by Mrs. Waite’s tract house in Beverly’s good dining room chairs had fluted
legs and Gately had scratched
Donad
and
Donold
in each leg with a pin, low down. Higher up on the legs, the scratches became correctly
spelled. It’s like a lot of memories of his youth sank without bubbles when he quit
school and then later only in sobriety bubbled back up to where he could Get In Touch
with them. His mother used to call the M.P. a
bastuhd
and sometimes go
oof
when he landed one in the vicinity. She drank vodka with vegetables suspended in
it, a habit she’d picked up from the missing Estonian, whose first name, Gately read
on a torn and then fuckeduppedly Scotch-taped paper out of her jewelry box after his
mother’s cirrhotic hemorrhage, was Bulat. The Medicaid Long-Term place was way the
fuck out the Yirrell Beach bridge in Point Shirley across the water from the Airport.
The former M.P. delivered cheese and then later worked in a chowder factory and kept
weights in the Beverly house’s garage and drank Heineken beer, and logged each beer
he drank carefully in a little spiral notebook he used to monitor his intake of alcohol.

His mom’s special couch for TV was nubbly red chintz, and when she shifted from seated
upright to lying on her side with her arm between her head and the little protective
doily on the couch’s armrest and the glass held tilting on the little space her breasts
left at the cushion’s edge, it was a sign she was going under. Gately at like ten
or eleven used to pretend to listen and watch TV on the floor but really be dividing
his attention between how close his Mom was to unconsciousness and how much Stolichnaya
was left in the bottle. She would only drink Stolichnaya, which she called her Comrade
in Arms and said Nothing but the Comrade would do. After she went under for the evening
and he’d carefully taken the tilted glass out of her hand, Don’d take the bottle and
mix the first couple vodkas with Diet Coke and drink a couple of those until it lost
its fire, then drink it straight. This was like a routine. Then he’d put the near-empty
bottle back next to her glass with its vegetables darkening in the undrunk vodka,
and she’d wake up on the couch in the morning with no idea she hadn’t drank the whole
thing. Gately was careful to always leave her enough for a wake-up swallow. But this
gesture of leaving some, Gately’s now realized, wasn’t just filial kindness on his
part: if she didn’t have the wake-up swallow she wouldn’t get off the red couch all
day, and then there would be no new bottle that night.

This was at age ten or eleven, as he now recalls. Most of the furniture was wrapped
in plastic. The carpet was burnt-orange shag that the landlord kept saying he was
going to take up and go to wood floors. The M.P. worked nights or else most nights
went out, and then she’d take the plastic off the couch.

Why the couch had little protective doilies on the arms when it usually had a plastic
cover on it Gately cannot recall or explain.

For a while in Beverly they had Nimitz the kitty.

This all came burpling greasily up into memory in the space of two or three weeks
in May, and now more stuff steadily like dribbles up, for Gately to Touch.

Sober, she’d called him Bimmy or Bim because that’s what she heard his little friends
call him. She didn’t know the neighborhood cognomen came from an acronym for ‘Big
Indestructible Moron.’ His head had been huge, as a child. Out of all proportion,
though with nothing especially Estonian about it, that he could see. He’d been very
sensitive about it, the head, but never told her not to call him Bim. When she was
drunk and conscious she called him her Doshka or Dochka or like that. Sometimes, well
in the bag himself, when he turned off the uncabled set and covered her with the afghan,
easing the mostly empty Stoly bottle back onto the little
TV Guide
table by the bowl of darkening chopped peppers, his unconscious Mom would groan and
titter and call him her Doshka and good sir knight and last and only love, and ask
him not to hit her anymore.

In June he Got In Touch with memories that their front steps in Beverly were a pocked
cement painted red even in the pocks. Their mailbox was part of a whole tract-housing
complex’s honeycomb of mailboxes on a like small pole, brushed-steel and gray with
a postal eagle on it. You needed a little key to get your mail out, and for a long
time he thought the sign on it said ‘
US
MAIL,’ as in
us
instead of
U.S.
His mom’s hair had been dry blond-white with dark roots that never lengthened or
went away. No one tells you when they tell you you have cirrhosis that eventually
you’ll all of a sudden start choking on your own blood. This is called a
cirrhotic hemorrhage
. Your liver won’t process any more of your blood and it quote
shunts
the blood and it goes up your throat in a high-pressure jet, is what they told him,
is why he’d first thought the M.P.’d come back and cut his Mom or stabbed her, when
he first came in, after football, his last season, at age seventeen. She’d been Diagnosed
for years. She’d go to Meetings
¹⁷⁹
for a few weeks, then drink on the couch, silent, telling him if the phone rang she
wasn’t home. After a few weeks of this she’d spend a whole day weeping, beating at
herself as if on fire. Then she’d go back to Meetings for a while. Eventually her
face began to swell and make her eyes piggy and her big breasts pointed at the floor
and she turned the deep yellow of quality squash. This was all part of the Diagnosis.
At first Gately just couldn’t go out to the Long-Term place, couldn’t see her out
there. Couldn’t deal. Then after some time passed he couldn’t go because he couldn’t
face her and try and explain why he hadn’t come before now. Ten-plus years have gone
like that. Gately hadn’t probably consciously thought of her once for three years,
before getting straight.