Infinite Jest (178 page)

Gately’s cognomen growing up and moving through public grades had been Bim or Bimmy,
or The Bimulator, etc., from the acronymic B.I.M., ‘Big Indestructible Moron.’ This
was on Boston’s North Shore, mostly Beverly and Salem. His head had been huge, even
as a kid. By the time he hit puberty at twelve the head seemed a yard wide. A regulation
football helmet was like a beanie on him. His coaches had to order special helmets.
Gately was worth the cost. Every coach past 6th grade told him he was a lock for a
Division 1 college team if he bore down and kept his eye on the prize. Memories of
half a dozen different neckless, buzz-cut, and pre-infarcted coaches all condense
around a raspy emphasis on bearing down and predictions of a limitless future for
Don G., Bimmy G., right up until he dropped out in high school’s junior year.

Gately went both ways—fullback on offense, outside linebacker on D. He was big enough
for the line, but his speed would have been wasted there. Already carrying 230 pounds
and bench-pressing well over that, Gately clocked a 4.4 40 in 7th grade, and the legend
is that the Beverly Middle School coach ran even faster than that into the locker
room to jack off over the stopwatch. And his biggest asset was his outsized head.
Gately’s. The head was indestructible. When they needed yards, they’d shift to isolate
Gately on one defender and get him the ball and he’d lower his head and charge, eyes
on the turf. The top of his special helmet was like a train’s cowcatcher coming at
you. Defenders, pads, helmets, and cleats bounced off the head, often in different
directions. And the head was fearless. It was like it had no nerve endings or pain
receptors or whatever. Gately amused teammates by letting them open and close elevator
doors on the head. He let people break things over the head—lunchboxes, cafeteria
trays, bespectacled wienies’ violin cases, lacrosse sticks. By age thirteen he never
had to buy beers: he’d bet some kid a six he could take a shot with this or that object
to the head. His left ear is permanently kind of gnarled from elevator-door impacts,
and Gately favors a kind of long-sided Prince Valiantish bowl-cut to help cover the
misshapen ear. One cheekbone still has a dented violet cast from 10th grade when a
North Reading kid at a party bet him a twelve-pack on a shot with a sock full of nickels
and then clocked him under the eye with it instead of the skull. It took Beverly’s
whole offensive line to pull Gately off what was left of the kid. The juvenile line
on Gately was that he was totally jolly and laid-back and easygoing up to a certain
point but that if you crossed that point with him you better be able to beat a 4.4
40.

He was always kind of a boys’ boy. He had a jolly ferocity about him that scared girls.
And he had no idea how to deal with girls except to try and impress them by letting
them watch somebody do something to his head. He was never what you’d call a ladies’
man. At parties he was always at the center of the crowd that drank instead of dancing.

It was surprising, maybe, given Gately’s size and domestic situation, that he wasn’t
a bully. He wasn’t kindly or heroic or a defender of the weak; it’s not like he stepped
kindly in to protect wienies and misfits from the predations of those kids that were
bullies. He just had no interest in brutalizing the weak. It’s still not clear to
him if this was to his credit or not. Things might have been different if the M.P.
had ever knocked Gately around instead of focusing all his attention on the progressively
weaker Mrs. G.

He smoked his first duBois at age nine, a hard little needle-thin joint bought off
jr.-high niggers and smoked with three other grade-school football players in a vacant
summer cottage one had the key to, watching broadcast-televised niggers run amok in
a flaming L.A. CA after some Finest got home-movied crewing on a nigger in the worst
way. Then his first real drunk a few months later, after he and the players’d hooked
up with an Orkin man that liked to get kids all blunt on screwdrivers and that wore
brownshirts and jackboots in his off-hours and lectured them about Zog and
The Turner Diaries
while they’d drink the OJ and vodka he’d bought them and look at him blandly and
roll their eyes at each other. Soon none of the football players Gately hung with
were interested in much of anything except trying to get high and holding air-guitar
and pissing contests and talking theoretically about Xing big-haired North Shore girls,
and trying to think up things to break over Gately’s head. They all had like domestic
situations too. Gately was the only one of them truly dedicated to football, and that
was probably just because he’d been told over and over that he had real talent and
limitless futures. He was classified Attention-Deficit and Special-Ed. from grade
school on, with particular Deficits in ‘Language Arts,’ but that was at least partly
because Mrs. G. could barely read and Gately wasn’t interested in making her feel
worse. And but there was no Deficit in his attention to ball, or to cold foamers or
screwdrivers or high-resin desBois, or especially to applied pharmacology, not once
he’d done his first Quaalude
³⁶²
at age thirteen.

Just as Gately’s whole recall of his screwdriver-and-sinsemilla beginnings tends to
telescope into one memory of pissing orange juice into the Atlantic (he and the blunt
cruel Beverly players and bullies he partied with drinking whole quarts of throat-warming
OJ at a shot and standing ankle-deep in grit on a North Shore shore, facing east and
sending long arcs of legal-pad-yellow piss into onrushing breakers that came in and
creamed around their feet, the foam warm and yellow-shot with their piss—like spitting
into the wind—Gately at the podium had started saying it turns out he was pissing
on himself right from the start, with alcohol), in just the same way, the whole couple
years before he discovered oral narcotics, the whole period 13–15 when he was a devotee
of Quaaludes and Hefenreffer-brand beer collapses and gathers itself under what he
still recalls as ‘The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks.’ Quaaludes and Hefenreffer also
marked Gately’s entree into a whole new rather more sinister and less athletic social
set at B.M.S., one member of which was Trent Kite,
³⁶³
a dyed-in-wool laptop-carrying wienie, chinless and with a nose like a tapir, and
pretty much the last fanatical Grateful Dead fan under age forty on the U.S. East
Coast, whose place of honor in the sinister Beverly Middle School drug-set was due
entirely to his gift for transforming the kitchen of any vacationing parents’ house
into a rudimentary pharmaceutical laboratory, using like BBQ-sauce bottles as Erlenmeyer
Flasks and microwave ovens to cyclize OH and carbon into three-ring compounds, synthesizing
methylenedioxy psychedelics
³⁶⁴
from nutmeg and sassafras oil, ether from charcoal-starter, designer meth from Tryptophan
and L-Histidine, sometimes using only a gas-top range and parental Farberware, able
even to decoct usable concentrations of tetrahydrofruan from PVC Pipe Cleaner—which
at that time best of British luck ordering tetrahydrofruan from any chemical company
in the 48 contigs/6 provinces without getting paid an immediate visit by D.E.A. guys
in three-piece suits and reflecting shades—and then using the tetrahydrofruan and
ethanol and any protein-binding catalyst to turn plain old Sominex into something
just one H
₃
C molecule away from good old biphasic methaqualone, a.k.a. the intrepid Quaalude.
Kite had called his Quaalude-isotopes ‘QuoVadis,’ and they were a great favorite for
13–15-year-old Bimmy G. and the slouched sharp-haired sinister set he dropped Ludes
and QuoVadises with, washing them down with Hefenreffers, resulting in a kind of mnemonic
brown-out where the entire two-year interval—the same interval during which the ex-M.P.
found somebody else, a Newburyport divorcée who apparently put up a more sporting
fight than Mrs. G., and decamped in his sticker-covered Ford with his seaman’s bag
and pea-coat—the whole period’s become in Gately’s sober memory just the vague era
of The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks. Quaaludes and 16-oz. Hefenreffers awakened
Gately and his new droogs to the usually-dormant-but-apparently-ever-lurking ill will
of innocent-seeming public sidewalks everywhere. You didn’t have to be brainy Trent
Kite to figure out the equation (Quaaludes) + (not even that many beers) = getting
whapped by the nearest sidewalk—as in you’re walking innocently along down a sidewalk
and out of nowhere the sidewalk comes rushing up to meet you: WHAP. Happened time
after fucking time. It made the whole crew resent having to walk anywhere on QuoVadises
because of not having driver’s licenses yet, which gives you some idea of the sum-total
I.Q. brought to bear on the problem of the Attacks. A tiny permanent cast in his left
eye and what looks like a chin-dimple are Gately’s legacy from the period before moving
up to Percocets, which one advantage of the move deeper into oral narcs was that Percocets
+ Hefenreffers didn’t allow you even enough upright mobility to make you vulnerable
to sidewalks’ ever-lurking ill will.

It was amazing that none of this stuff seemed much to hurt Gately’s performance playing
ball, but then he was as devoted to football as he was to oral CNS-depressants. At
least for a while. He had disciplined personal rules back then. He absorbed Substances
only at night, after practice. Not so much as a fractional foamer between 0900h. and
1800h. during the seasons of practice and play, and he settled for just a single duBois
on Thursday evenings before actual games. During football season he ruled himself
with an iron hand until the sun set, then threw himself on the mercy of sidewalks
and the somnolent hum. He used class to catch up on REM-sleep. By freshman year he
was starting on the Beverly-Salem H.S. Minutemen Varsity and was on academic probation.
Most of the sinister set he’d hung with were expelled for truancy or trafficking or
worse by sophomore year. Gately kept hanging in and on til seventeen.

But Quaaludes and QuoVadis and Percocets are lethal in terms of homework, especially
washed down with Hefenreffer, and extra-especially if you’re academically ambivalent
and A.D.D.-classified and already using every particle of your self-discipline protecting
football from the Substances. And—unhappily—high school is totally unlike higher education
in terms of major-sport coaches’ influence over instructors, athletes-and-grades-wise.
Kite got Gately through math and Special Ed. science, and the French teacher was getting
her strabysmic eyeballs fucked out by the Minutemen’s tanned lounge-lizard of an Offensive
Coordinator on the behalf of Gately and a semi-retarded tight end. But English just
fucking killed him, Gately. All four of the English teachers the Athletic Dept. tried
Gately on had this
sieg-heil
idea that it was somehow cruel to pass a kid that couldn’t do the work. And the Athletic
Dept. pointing out to them that Gately had an especially challenging domestic situation
and that flunking Gately and rendering him ineligible for ball would eliminate his
one reason even to stay on in school—these were to no, like, aveil. English was his
sink-or-swim situation, what he then termed his ‘Water Lou.’ Term papers he could
more or less swing; the football coach had wienies on retainer. But the in-class themes
and tests killed Gately, who simply didn’t have enough will left over after sunset
to choose like the crushingly dull
Ethan From
over QuoVadis and Hefenreffer. Plus by this time three different schools’ authorities
had him convinced he was basically dumb, anyway. But mostly it was the Substances.
This one particular B.-S.H.S.-Athletic-Dept.-hired wienie of an English tutor spent
a sophomore-year March’s worth of evenings in Gately’s company, and by Easter the
kid weighed 95 pounds and had a nose-ring and hand-tremors and was placed by his frantic,
functional parents in a juvenile-intervention rehab, where the wienie’s whole first
week of Withdrawal was spent in a corner reciting
Howl
in high-volume Chaucerian English. Gately flunked Sophomore Comp. in May and lost
the fall’s eligibility and withdrew from school for a year to preserve his junior
season. And but then, without the only other thing he’d been devoted to, the psychic
emergency-brake was off, and Gately’s sixteenth year is still mostly a gray blank,
except for his mother’s new red chintz TV-watching couch, and also the acquaintance
of an accommodating Rite-Aid pharmacist’s assistant with disfiguring eczema and serious
gambling debts. Plus memories of terrible rear-ocular itching and of a basic diet
of convenience-store crud, plus the vegetables from his mother’s vodka glass, while
she slept. When he finally returned for his sophomore year of class and junior year
of ball at seventeen and 284 lbs., Gately was enervated, flabby, apparently narcoleptic,
and on a need-schedule so inflexible that he needed 15 mg. of good old oxycodone hydrochloride
out of his pocket’s Tylenol bottle every three hours to keep the shakes off. He was
like a huge confused kitten out on the field—the coach made him go in for P.E.T. Scans,
fearing M.S. or Lou Gehrig’s—and even the Classic Comics version of
Ethan From
was now beyond his abilities; and good old Kite was gone by that last September of
Unsubsidized Time, admitted early on a full ride in Comp. Science by Salem State U.,
meaning Gately was now on his own in remedial math and chem. On offense, Gately lost
his starting spot in the third game to a big clear-eyed freshman the coach said showed
nearly limitless potential. Then Mrs. Gately suffered her cirrhotic hemorrhage and
cerebral-blood thing in late October, just before the midterms Gately was getting
ready to fail. Bored-eyed guys in white cotton blew blue bubbles and loaded her in
the back of a leisurely sirenless ambulance and took her first to the hospital and
then to a Medicaid L.T.I.
³⁶⁵
out across the Yirrell Beach span in Pt. Shirley. The backs of Gately’s eyes were
too itchy for him to even be able to stand out on the red pocked stoop’s steps and
see to wave adios. The first gasper he ever smoked was that day, a 100 out of a half-finished
pack of his mother’s generics, that she left. He didn’t even ever go back to B.-S.H.S.
to clean out his lockers. He never played organized ball again.