Infinite Jest (114 page)

By the time they hit the Spur, their northwest tacking has wheeled broadly right to
become more truly north. Their route down here is a Mondrian of alleys narrowed to
near-defiles from all the dumpsters. Lenz goes first, blaze-trailing. Lenz gives these
sort of smoky looks to every female that passes within eyeshot. Their vector is now
mostly N/NW. They stroll through the rich smell of dryer-exhaust from the backside
of a laundromat off Dustin and Comm. The city of metro Boston MA at night. The ding
and trundle of the B and C Greenie trains heading up Comm. Ave.’s hill, west. Street-drunks
sitting with their backs to sooted walls, seeming to study their laps, even the mist
of their breath discolored. The complex hiss of bus-brakes. The jagged shadows distending
with headlights’ passage. Latin music drifting through the Spur’s Projects, twined
around some 5/4 ’shine stuff from a boombox over off Feeny Park, and in between these
a haunting plasm of Hawaiian-type music that sounds at once top-volume and far far
away. The zithery drifting Polynesian strains make Bruce Green’s face spread in a
flat mask of psychic pain he doesn’t even feel is there, and then the music’s gone.
Lenz asks Green what it’s like to work with ice all day at Leisure Time Ice and then
himself theorizes on what it must be like, he’ll bet, with your crushed ice and ice
cubes in pale-blue plastic bags with a staple for a Twistie and dry ice in wood tubs
pouring out white smoke and then your huge blocks of industrial ice packed in fragrant
sawdust, the huge blocks of man-sized ice with flaws way inside like trapped white
faces, white flames of internal cracks. Your picks and hatchets and really big tongs,
red knuckles and rimed windows and thin bitter freezer-smell with runny-nosed Poles
in plaid coats and kalpacs, your older ones with a chronic cant to one side from all
the time lugging ice.

They crunch through iridescent chunks of what Lenz I.D.s as a busted windshield. Lenz
shares feelings on how between three ex-husbands and feral attorneys and a pastry-chef
that used pastry-dependence to warp and twist her into distorting a testament toward
the chef and Lenz’s being through red-tape still in Quincy’s Y.C.A. hold and in a
weak litigational vantage, the ruptured Mrs. L.’s will had left him out in the cold
to self-fend by his urban wits while ex-husbands and patissiers lay on Riviera beach-furniture
fanning themselves with high-denomination currency, about all which Lenz says he grapples
with the Issues of on a like daily basis; leaving Green a gap to make understanding
sounds. Green’s jacket creaks as he breathes. The windshield-glass is in an alley
whose fire escapes are hung with what look like wet frozen tarps. The alley’s tight-packed
dumpsters and knobless steel doors and the dull black of total grime. The blunt snout
of a bus protrudes into the frame of the alley’s end, idling.

Dumpsters’ garbage doesn’t have just one smell, depending. The urban lume makes the
urban night only semidark, as in licoricey, a luminescence just under the skin of
the dark, and swelling. Green keeps them updated re time. Lenz has begun to refer
to Green as ‘brother.’ Lenz says he has to piss like a racehorse. He says the nice
thing about the urban city is that it’s one big commode. The way Lenz pronounces
brother
involves one
r.
Green moves up to stand in the mouth of the alley, facing out, giving Lenz a little
privacy several dumpsters behind. Green stands there in the start of the alley’s shadow,
in the bus’s warm backwash, his elbows out and hands in the jacket’s little pockets,
looking out. It’s unclear whether Green knows Lenz is under the influence of Bing.
All he feels is a moment of deep wrenching loss, of wishing getting high was still
pleasurable for him so he could get high. This feeling comes and goes all day every
day, still. Green takes a gasper from behind his ear and lights it and puts a fresh
one on-deck behind the ear. Union Square, Allston: Kiss me where it smells, she said,
so I took her to Allston, unquote. Union Square’s lights throb. Whenever somebody
stops blowing their horn somebody else starts blowing their horn. There’s three Chinese
women waiting at the light across the street from the guy with the lobsters. Each
of them’s got a shopping bag. An old VW Bug like Doony Glynn’s VW Bug idling mufflerless
outside Riley’s Roast Beef, except Doony’s Bug’s engine is exposed where the back
hood got removed to expose the Bug’s guts. It’s like impossible to ever spot a Chinese
woman on a Boston street that’s under sixty or over 1.5 m. or not carrying a shopping
bag, except never more than one bag. If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk
the sound of everybody’s different footwear’s footsteps all put together sounds like
something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient. The searing facts
of the case of Bruce Green’s natural parents’ deaths when he was a toddler are so
deeply repressed inside Green that whole strata and substrata of silence and mute
dumb animal suffering will have to be strip-mined up and dealt with a Day at a Time
in sobriety for Green even to remember how, on his fifth Xmas Eve, in Waltham MA,
his Pop had taken the hydrant-sized little Brucie Green aside and given him, to give
his beloved Mama for Xmas, a gaily Gauguin-colored can of Polynesian Mauna Loa-brand
²⁴⁰
macadamia nuts, said cylindrical can of nuts then toted upstairs by the child and
painstakingly wrapped in so much foil-sheen paper that the final wrapped present looked
like an oversized dachshund that had required first bludgeoning and then restraint
at both ends with two rolls each of Scotch tape and garish fuchsia ribbon to be subdued
and wrapped and placed under the gaily lit pine, and even then the package seemed
mushily to struggle as the substrata of paper shifted and settled.

Bruce Green’s Pop Mr. Green had at one time been one of New England’s most influential
aerobics instructors—even costarring once or twice, in the decade before digital dissemination,
on the widely rented
Buns of Steel
aerobics home-video series—and had been in high demand and very influential until,
to his horror, in his late twenties, the absolute prime of an aerobics instructor’s
working life, either one of Mr. Green’s legs began spontaneously to grow or the other
leg began spontaneously to retract, because within weeks one leg was all of a sudden
nearly six inches longer than the other—Bruce Green’s one unrepressed visual memory
of the man is of a man who progressively and perilously
leaned
as he hobbled from specialist to specialist—and he had to get outfitted with a specialized
orthopedic boot, black as a cauldron, that seemed to be 90% sole and resembled an
asphalt-spreader’s clunky boot, and weighed several pounds, and looked absurd with
Spandex leggings; and the long and short of it was that Brucie Green’s Pop was aerobically
washed up by the leg and boot, and had to career-change, and went bitterly to work
for a Waltham novelty or notions concern, something with
’N
in the name, Acme Novelties ’N Notions or some such, where Mr. Green designed sort
of sadistic practical-joke supplies, specializing in the Jolly Jolt Hand Buzzer and
Blammo Cigar product-lines, with a sideline in entomological icecubes and artificial
dandruff, etc. Demoralizing, sedentary, character-twisting work, is what an older
child would have been able to understand, peering from his nightlit doorway at an
unshaven man who clunkily paced away the wee hours on a nightly basis down in the
living room, his gait like a bosun’s in heavy seas, occasionally breaking into a tiny
tentative gluteal-thruster squat-and-kick, almost falling, muttering bitterly, carrying
a Falstaff tallboy.

Something touching about a gift that a toddler’s so awfully overwrapped makes a sickly-pale
and neurasthenic but doting Mrs. Green, Bruce’s beloved Mama, choose the mugged-dachshund-foil-sheen-cylinder
present first, of course, to open, on Xmas morning, as they sit before the crackling
fireplace in different chairs by different windows with views of Waltham sleet, with
bowls of Xmas snacks and Acme-’N-logoed mugs of cocoa and hazelnut decaf and watch
each other taking turns opening gifts. Brucie’s little face aglow in the firelight
as the unwrapping of the nuts proceeds through layer and stratum, Mrs. Green a couple
times having to use her teeth on the rinds of tape. Finally the last layer is off
and the gay-colored can in view. Mauna Loa: Mrs. Green’s favorite and most decadent
special-treat food. World’s highest-calorie food except for like pure suet. Nuts so
yummy they should be spelled S-I-N, she says. Brucie excitedly bobbing in his chair,
spilling cocoa and Gummi Bears, a loving toddler, more excited about his gift’s receipt
than what he’s going to get himself. His mother’s clasped hands before her sunken
bosom. Sighs of delight and protest. And an EZ-Open Lid, on the can.

Which the contents of the macadamia-labelled can is really a coiled cloth snake with
an ejaculatory spring. The snake sprongs out as Mrs. G. screams, a hand to her throat.
Mr. Green howls with bitterly professional practical-gag mirth and clunks over and
slaps little Bruce on the back so hard that Brucie expels a lime Gummi Bear he’d been
eating—this too a visual memory, contextless and creepy—which arcs across the living
room and lands in the fireplace’s fire with a little green
siss
of flame. The cloth snake’s arc has terminated at the imitation-crystal chandelier
overhead, where the snake gets caught and hangs with quivering spring as the chandelier
swings and tinkles and Mr. Green’s thigh-slapping laughter takes a while to run down
even as Brucie’s Mama’s hand at her delicate throat becomes claw-shaped and she claws
at her throat and gurgles and slumps over to starboard with a fatal cardiac, her cyanotic
mouth still open in surprise. For the first couple minutes Mr. Green thinks she’s
putting them on, and he keeps rating her performance on an Acme interdepartmental
1-8 Gag Scale until he finally gets pissed off and starts saying she’s drawing the
gag out too long, that she’s going to scare their little Brucie who’s sitting there
under the swinging crystal, wide-eyed and silent.

And Bruce Green uttered not another out-loud word until his last year of grade school,
living by then in Winchester with his late mother’s sister, a decent but Dustbowly-looking
Seventh-Day Adventist who never once pressed Brucie to speak, probably out of sympathy,
probably sympathizing with the searing pain the opaque-eyed child must have felt over
not only giving his Mama a lethal Xmas present but over then having to watch his widowed
asymmetrical Pop cave psycho-spiritually in after the wake, watching Mr. Green pace-and-clunk
around the living room all night every night after work and an undermicrowaved supper-for-two,
in his Frankensteinian boot, clunking around in circles, scratching slowly at his
face and arms until he looked less scourged than brambled, and in loosely associated
mutters cursing God and himself and Acme Nuts ’N Serpents or whatever, and leaving
the fatal snake up hanging from the fake-crystal fixture and the fatal Xmas tree up
in its little red metal stand until all the strings of lights went out and the strings
of popcorn got dark and hard and the stand’s bowl of water evaporated so the tree’s
needles died and fell brownly off onto the rest of the still-unopened Xmas presents
clustered below, one of which was a package of Nebraska corn-fed steaks whose cherub-motif
wrapping was beginning ominously to swell…; and then finally the even more searing
childhood pain of the public arrest and media-scandal and Sanity Hearing and Midwest
trial as it was established after the fact that the post-Xmas Mr. Green—whose one
encouraging sign of holding some tattered remnants of himself together after the funeral
had been the fact that he still went faithfully every day to work at Acme Inc.—had
gone in and packed a totally random case of the company’s outgoing Blammo Cigars with
vengefully lethal tetryl-based high explosives, and a V.F.W., three Rotarians, and
24 Shriners had been grotesquely decapitated across Southeastern Ohio before the federal
A.T.F. traced the grisly forensic fragments back to B. Green Sr.’s Blammo lab, in
Waltham; and then the extradition and horribly complex Sanity Hearing and trial and
controversial sentencing; and then the appeals and deathwatch and Lethal Injection,
Bruce Green’s aunt handing out poorly reproduced W. Miller tracts to the crowds outside
the Ohio prison as the clock ticked down to Injection, little Bruce in tow, blank-faced
and watching, the crowd of media and anti-Capital activists and Defarge-like picnickers
milling and roiling, many T-shirts for sale, and the red-faced men in sportcoats and
fezzes, oh their rage-twisted faces the same red as their fezzes as the men careened
this way and that in their little cars, formations of motorized Shriners buzzing the
gates of the O.D.C.-Maximum facility and shouting
Burn Baby Burn
or the more timely
Get Lethally Injected Baby Get Lethally Injected,
Bruce Green’s aunt with her center-parted hair visibly graying under the pillbox
hat and face obscured for three Ohio months behind the black mesh veil that fluttered
from the pillbox hat, clutching little Bruce’s head to her underwired bosom day after
day until his blank face was smooshed in on one side…. Green’s guilt, pain, fear and
self-loathing have over years of unprescribed medication been compressed to the igneous
point where he now knows only that he compulsively avoids any product or service with
’N
in its name, always checks a palm before a handshake, will go blocks out of his way
to avoid any parade involving fezzes in little cars, and has this silent, substratified
fascination/horror gestalt about all things even remotely Polynesian. It’s probably
the distant and attenuated luau-music echoing erratically back and forth through angled
blocks of Allston cement that causes Bruce Green to wander as if mesmerized out of
Union Square and all the way up Comm. Ave. into Brighton and up to like the corner
of Comm. Ave. and Brainerd Road, the home of The Unexamined Life nightclub with its
tilted flickering bottle of blue neon over the entrance, before he realizes that Lenz
is no longer beside him asking the time, that Lenz hadn’t followed him up the hill
even though Green had stood there outside the Union Square alley way longer than anybody
could have needed to take a legitimate whiz.