Infinite Jest (107 page)

Demapping rats became Lenz’s way of resolving internal-type issues for the first couple
weeks of it, walking home in the verminal dark.

Don Gately, House chef and shopper, buys these huge econo-size boxes of Hefty
²²⁵
bags that get stored under the kitchen sink for whoever’s got Trash for their weekly
chore. Ennet House generates serious waste.

So after vermin started to get a little ho-hum and insignificant, Lenz starts cabbaging
a Hefty bag out from under the sink and taking it with him to meetings and walking
back home with it. He keeps a trashbag neatly folded in an inside pocket of his topcoat,
a billowing top-collared Lauren-Polo model he loves and uses a daily lint-roller on.
He also takes along a little of the House’s Food-Bank tunafish in a Zip-loc baggie
in another pocket, which your average drug addict has expertise in rolling baggies
into a cylinder so they’re secure and odor-free.

The Ennet House residents call Hefty bags ‘Irish Luggage’—even McDade—it’s a street-term.

Randy Lenz found that if he could get an urban cat up close enough with some outstretched
tuna he could pop the Hefty bag over it and scoop up from the bottom so the cat was
in the air in the bottom of the bag, and then he could tie the bag shut with the complimentary
wire twist-tie that comes with each bag. He could put the closed bag down next to
the vicinity’s northernmost wall or fence or dumpster and light a gasper and hunker
down up next to the wall to watch the wide variety of changing shapes the bag would
assume as the agitated cat got lower on air. The shapes got more and more violent
and twisted and mid-air with the passage of a minute. After it stopped assuming shapes
Lenz would dab his butt with a spitty finger to save the rest for later and get up
and untie the twist-tie and look inside the bag and go: ‘
There
.’ The ‘
There
’ turned out to be crucial for the sense of brisance and closure and resolving issues
of impotent rage and powerless fear that like accrued in Lenz all day being trapped
in the northeastern portions of a squalid halfway house all day fearing for his life,
Lenz felt.

There evolved for Lenz a certain sportsman’s hierarchy of types of cats and neighborhoods
of types of your abroad cats; and he becomes a connoisseur of cats the same way a
deep-sea sportsman knows the fish-species that fight most fiercely and excitatingly
for their marine lives. The best and most fiercely alive cats could usually claw their
way out of a Hefty bag, though, which created this conundrum where the ones most worth
watching assuming bagged shapes were the ones Lenz risked maybe not getting his issues
resolved on. Watching a spike-furred hissing cat run twisting away still half wrapped
in a plastic bag made Lenz admire the cat’s fighting spirit but still feel unresolved.

So the next stage is Lenz gives Ms. Charlotte Treat or Ms. Hester Thrale some of his
own $ when they go down to the Palace Spa or Father/Son to buy smokes or LifeSavers
and has them start to get him special Hefty SteelSak
²²⁶
trashbags, fiber-reinforced for your especially sharp or uncooperative waste needs,
described by Ken E. as ‘Irish Guccis,’ extra resilient and a businesslike gunmetal-gray
in tone. Lenz has such a panoply of strange compulsive habits that a request for SteelSaks
barely raises a brow on anybody.

And then he doubles them, the special reinforced bags, and employs industrial-growth
pipe-cleaners as twist-ties, and then now the grittiest most salutary cats make the
doubled bags assume all manners of wickedly abstract twisting shapes, even sometimes
moving the closed bags a couple dozen m. down the alley in a haphazard hopping-like
fashion, until finally the cat runs out of gas and resolves itself and Lenz’s issues
into one nightly shape.

Lenz’s interval of choice for this is the interval 2216h. to 2226h. He doesn’t consciously
know why this interval. Anchovies turn out to be even more effective than tuna. A
Program of Attraction, he recalls coolly, strolling along. His northern routes back
to the House are restricted by the priority to keep Brighton Best Savings Bank’s rooftop
digital Time and Temperature display in view as much as possible. B.B.S.B. displays
both EST and Greenwich Mean, which Lenz approves of. The liquid-crystal data sort
of melts upward into view on the screen and then disappears from the bottom up and
is replaced by new data. Mr. Doony R. Glynn said at the House’s Community Meeting
Monday once that one time in B.S. 1989
A.D.
after he’d done a reckless amount of a hallucinogen he’d refer to only as ‘The Madame’
he’d gone around for several subsequent weeks under a Boston sky that instead of a
kindly curved blue dome with your clouds and your stars and sun was a flat square
coldly Euclidian grid with black axes and a thread-fine reseau of lines creating grid-type
coordinates, the whole grid the same color as a D.E.C. HD viewer-screen when the viewer’s
off, that sort of dead deepwater gray-green, with the DOW Ticker running up one side
of the grid and the NIKEI Index running down the other, and the Time and Celsius Temp
to like serious decimal points flashing along the bottom axis of the sky’s screen,
and whenever he’d go to a real clock or get a
Herald
and check the like DOW the skygrid would turn out to have been totally accurate;
and that several unbroken weeks of this sky overhead had sent Glynn off first to his
mother’s Stoneham apartment’s fold-out couch and then into Waltham’s Metropolitan
State Hospital for a month of Haldol
²²⁷
and tapioca, to get out from under the empty-grid accurate sky, and says it makes
his ass wet to this day to even think about the grid-interval; but Lenz had thought
it sounded wicked nice, the sky as digital timepiece. And also between 2216 and 2226
the ATHSCME giant fans off up at the Sunstrand Plaza within earshot were typically
shut off for daily de-linting, and it was quiet except for the big Ssshhh of a whole
urban city’s vehicular traffic, and maybe the odd E.W.D. airborne deliverer catapulted
up off Concavityward, its little string of lights arcing northeast; and of course
also sirens, both the Eurotrochaic sirens of ambulances and the regular U.S.-sounding
sirens of the city’s very Finest, Protecting and Serving, keeping the citizenry at
bay; and the winsome thing about sirens in the urban night is that unless they’re
right up close where the lights bathe you in red-blue-red they always sound like they’re
terribly achingly far away, and receding, calling to you across an expanding gap.
Either that or they’re on your ass. No middle distance with sirens, Lenz reflects,
walking along and scanning.

Glynn hadn’t come right out and said
Euclidian,
but Lenz had gotten the picture all right. Glynn had thin hair and an invariant three-day
growth of gray stubble and diverticulitis that made him stoop somewhat over, and remaining
physique-type issues from a load of bricks falling on his head from a Workers Comp
scam gone rye that included crossed eyes that Lenz overheard the veiled girl Joe L.
tell Clenette Henderson and Didi Neaves the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in
the middle of the week and see both Sundays.

Lenz has gotten high on organic cocaine two or three, maybe half a dozen times tops,
secretly, since he came into Ennet House in the summer, just enough times to keep
him from going totally out of his fucking mind, utilizing lines from the private emergency
stash he kept in a kind of rectangular bunker razor-bladed out of three hundred or
so pages of Bill James’s gargantuan Large-Print
Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion
. Such totally occasional Substance-ingestions in a rundown sloppy-clocked House where
he’s cooped up and under terrible stress all day every day, hiding from threats from
two different legal directions, with, upstairs at all times, calling to him, a 20-gram
stash from the under-reported South End two-way attempted scam whose very bad luck
had forced him into hiding in squalor and rooming with the likes of fucking Geoffrey
D.—cocaine-ingestion this occasional and last-resort is such a marked reduction of
Use & Abuse for Lenz that it’s a bonerfied miracle and clearly constitutes as much
miraculous sobriety as total abstinence would be for another person without Lenz’s
unique sensitivities and psychological makeup and fucking intolerable daily stresses
and difficulty unwinding, and he accepts his monthly chips with a clear conscience
and a head unmuddled by doubting: he knows he’s sober. He’s smart about it: he’s never
ingested cocaine on his solo walks home from meetings, which is where the Staff’d
expect him to ingest if he was going to ingest. And never in Ennet House itself, and
only once in the forbidden #7 across the roadlet. And anybody with half a clue can
beat an E.M.I.T. urine-screen: a cup of lemon juice or vinegar down the hatch’ll turn
the lab’s reading into gibberish; a trace of powdered bleach on the fingertips and
let the stream play warmly over the fingertips on its way into the cup while you banter
with Don G. A Texas catheter’s a pain to get piss for and put on, plus the obscene
size of the thing’s receptacle for his Unit gives Lenz inadequacy-issues, and he’s
only used it twice, both times when Johnette F. took the urine and he could embarrass
her into turning away. Lenz owns a Texas Cathy from his last halfway house in Quincy,
in what Lenz recalls as the Year of the Maytag Quietmaster.

And then it turned out, when a cat aggrieved Lenz by scratching his wrist in a particularly
hostile fashion on the way into the receptacle, that doubled Hefty SteelSaks were
such quality-reinforced products they could hold something razor-clawed and frantically
in-motion and still survive a direct swung hit against a NO PARKING sign or a telephone
pole without splitting open, even when what was inside split nicely open; and so that
technique got substituted around United Nations Day, because even though it was too
quick and less meditative it allowed Randy Lenz to take a more active role in the
process, and the feeling of (temporary, nightly) issues-resolution was more definitive
when Lenz could swing a twisting ten-kilo burden hard against a pole and go: ‘
There,
’ and hear a sound. On banner nights the doubled bag would continue for a brief period
of time to undergo a subtle flux of smaller, more subtle and connoisseur-oriented
shapes, even after the melony sound of hard impact, along with further smaller sounds.

Then it was discovered that resolving them directly inside the yards and porches of
the people that owned them provided more adrenal excitation and thus more sense of
what Bill James one time called a
Catharsis
of resolving, which Lenz felt he could agree. A small can of oil in its own little
baggie, for squeaky gates. But because SteelSak trashbags—and then also tunafish mixed
with anchovies and Raid ant poison from behind the Ennet residents’ fridge—caused
too much resultant noise to allow for lighting a gasper and hunkering down to meditatively
watch, Lenz developed the habit of setting the resolution in motion and then booking
on out of the yard into the urban night, his Polo topcoat billowing, hurdling fences
and running over the hoods of cars and etc. For a period during the two-week interval
of give-them-poison-tuna-and-run Lenz had brief recourse to a small Caldor-brand squeeze-bottle
of kerosene, plus of course his lighter; but a Wednesday night on which the alight
cat ran (as alight cats will, like hell) but ran after
Lenz,
seemingly, leaping the same fences Lenz hurdled and staying on his tail and not only
making an unacceptable attention-calling racket but also illuminating Lenz to the
scopophobic view of passing homes until it finally decided to drop to the ground and
expire and smolder thereupon—Lenz considered this his only really close call, and
took an enormous and partly non-north route home, with every siren sounding up-close
and on his personal ass, and barely got in by 2330h., and ran right up to the 3-Man
room. This was the night Lenz had to have another recourse to the hollowed-out cavity
in his
Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion
after just beating curfew home, which who wouldn’t need a bit of an unwinder after
a stressful close-call-type situation with a flaming cat chasing you and screaming
in a way that made porch lights go on all up and down Sumner Blake Rd.; except but
instead of an unwinder the couple or few lines of uncut Bing proved to be on this
occasion an
un
-unwinder—which happens, sometimes, depending on one’s like spiritual condition when
ingesting it through a rolled dollar bill off the back of the john in the men’s can—and
Lenz barely made it through switching his car’s parking spot at 2350h. before the
verbal torrent started, and after lights-out had only gotten up to age eight in the
oral autobiography that followed in the 3-Man when Geoff D. threatened to go get Don
G. and have Lenz forcibly stifled, and Lenz was scared to go downstairs to find somebody
to listen and so for the rest of the night he had to lie there in the dark, mute,
with his mouth twisting and writhing—it always twisted and writhed on the times the
Bing proved to be a rev-upper instead of a rough-edge-smoother—and pretending to be
asleep, with phosphenes like leaping flaming shapes dancing behind his quivering lids,
listening to Day’s moist gurgles and Glynn’s apnea and thinking that each siren abroad
out there in the urban city was meant for him and coming closer, with Day’s illuminated
watchface in his fucking tableside drawer instead of out where anybody with some stress
and anxiety could check the time from time to time.

So after the incident with the flaming cat from hell and before Halloween Lenz had
moved on and up to the Browning X444 Serrated he even had a shoulder-holster for,
from his previous life Out There. The Browning X444 has a 25-cm. overall length, with
a burl-walnut handle with a brass butt-cap and a point Lenz’d sharpened the clip out
of when he got it and a single-edge Bowie-style blade with .1-mm. serrations that
Lenz owns a hone for and tests by dry-shaving a little patch of his tan forearm, which
he loves.