Infinite Jest (79 page)

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 O5OOh. 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-Davís 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 dick-ied 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 a 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.
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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.

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

all secs except sec. mex. & sec. can. [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.

sec. def.: So then how was the big game, Mr. President?

gentle: Ouster, 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.?

sec. int.: 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.]

sec. transp.: Always been partial to the General Tsu's Chicken, if we're —

rodney tine, chief, united states office of unspecified services: President Gentle's asked us all here this morning to put our collective expertise together on an issue about which we in Unspecified Services believe he's been hit with a truly seminal set of creative insights.

gentle: Gentlemen, we're both pleased and concerned to report that our seminal experiment in the Territorial Reconfiguration of O.N.A.N.
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has been a thoroughgoing logistical coup. More or less. Delaware's looking a bit crowded, and one or two curvy-horned animals apparently got by the tactical squads, and there's rather less overall good sportsmanship in downstate New New York than we'd like to see, but overall I think 'thoroughgoing coup' would not be out of line as a term to describe this sort of success.

tine: Now it's time to think about how to pay for it.

all secs.: [Stiff turns to look at each other, tie- and mustache-straightenings, gulping sounds.]

gentle: Rod informs me Marty's got the preliminary figures on gross costs, while Chef's boys have provided us with some projections on gross revenue-losses from the Reconfiguration of taxable territories and households and businesses and that there.

sec. transp. & sec. treas.: [Pass around thick bound folders, each emblazoned with the yawning red skull that emblazons all bad-news memos in the Gentle administration. Folders opened and scanned by all secs. Sounds of jaws hitting the tabletop. A couple mustaches fall off altogether. One sec. heard to ask whether there's even a name for a figure with this many zeroes. gentle's portabubble on-screen is hit right over his plastic-wrapped corsage by a half-chewed Raisinette, to half-hearted audience cheers. Another cross-dressed Motown puppet is throwing a tiny string noose over a beam at the back of the velvet-lined Cabinet Room.]

gentle: Boys. Men. Before anybody needs oxygen here [holding a placa-tive hand up against the bubble's glass], let Rod here explain that despite a quantitative downer-type quality to these figures, all we merely have here is just what Rod might call an exaggerated example of a quadrennial problem any administration with vision is going to have to face eventually anyway. By the way, the unfamiliar but welcome face on my left here is Mr. P. Tom Veals, of Veals Associates Advertising, Boston, USA, N.A.