Infinite Jest (32 page)

Michael Pemulis is nobody’s fool, and he fears the dealer’s Brutus, the potential
eater of cheese, the rat, the wiretap, the pubescent-looking Finest sent to make him
look foolish. So when somebody calls his room’s phone, even on video, and wants to
buy some sort of substance, they have to right off the bat utter the words ‘Please
commit a crime,’ and Michael Pemulis will reply ‘Gracious me and mine, a crime you
say?’ and the customer has to insist, right over the phone, and say he’ll pay Michael
Pemulis money to commit a crime, or like that he’ll harm Michael Pemulis in some way
if he refuses to commit a crime, and Michael Pemulis will in a clear and I.D.able
voice make an appointment to see the caller in person to ‘plead for my honor and personal
safety,’ so that if anybody eats cheese later or the phone’s frequency is covertly
accessed, somehow, Pemulis will have been entrapped.
⁵⁵

Secreting a small Visine bottle of urine in an armpit in line also brings it up to
plausible temperature. At the entrance to the male stall-area, the ephebic-looking
O.N.A.N.T.A. toxicologist rarely even looks up from his clipboard, but the square-faced
nurse can be a problem over on the female side, because every so often she’ll want
the stall door open during production. With Jim Struck handling published-source plagiarism
and compressed iteration and Xerography, Pemulis also offers, at reasonable cost,
a small
vade mecum
ish pamphlet detailing several methods for dealing with this contingency.

Jim not that way Jim. That’s no way to treat a garage door, bending stiffly down at
the waist and yanking at the handle so the door jerks up and out jerky and hard and
you crack your shins and my ruined knees, son. Let’s see you bend at the healthy knees.
Let’s see you hook a soft hand lightly over the handle feeling its subtle grain and
pull just as exactly gently as will make it come to you. Experiment, Jim. See just
how much force you need to start the door easy, let it roll up out open on its hidden
greasy rollers and pulleys in the ceiling’s set of spiderwebbed beams. Think of all
garage doors as the well-oiled open-out door of a broiler with hot meat in, heat roiling
out, hot. Needless and dangerous ever to yank, pull, shove, thrust. Your mother is
a shover and a thruster, son. She treats bodies outside herself without respect or
due care. She’s never learned that treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way
is also treating them and your own body in the most efficient way. It’s Marlon Brando’s
fault, Jim. Your mother back in California before you were born, before she became
a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit
part in a Marlon Brando movie. Her big moment. Had to stand there in saddle shoes
and bobby sox and ponytail and put her hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes
roared by. A major thespian moment, believe you me. She was in love from afar with
this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who? Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type
actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations’ relations with their own bodies
and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No? Well it was because of Brando
you were opening that garage door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and
passed on. Passed down. You’ll know Brando when you watch him, and you’ll have learned
to fear him.
Brando,
Jim, Jesus, B-r-a-n-d-o. Brando the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type,
leaning back on his chair’s rear legs, coming crooked through doorways, slouching
against everything in sight, trying to
dominate
objects, showing no artful respect or care, yanking things toward him like a moody
child and using them up and tossing them crudely aside so they miss the wastebasket
and just lie there, ill-used. With the over-clumsy impetuous movements and postures
of a moody infant. Your mother is of that new generation that moves against life’s
grain, across its warp and baffles. She may have loved Marlon Brando, Jim, but she
didn’t understand him, is what’s ruined her for everyday arts like broilers and garage
doors and even low-level public-park knock-around tennis. Ever see your mother with
a broiler door? It’s carnage, Jim, it’s to cringe to see it, and the poor dumb thing
thinks it’s tribute to this slouching slob-type she loved as he roared by. Jim, she
never intuited the gentle and cunning economy behind this man’s quote harsh sloppy
unstudied approach to objects. The way he’d oh so clearly practiced a chair’s back-leg
tilt over and over. The way he studied objects with a welder’s eye for those strongest
centered seams which when pressured by the swinishest slouch still support. She never…
never sees that Marlon Brando felt himself as body so keenly he’d
no need
for manner. She never sees that in his quote careless way he actually really touched
whatever he touched as if it were part of him. Of his own body. The world he only
seemed to manhandle was for him sentient, feeling. And no one… and she never understood
that. Sour sodding grapes indeed. You can’t envy someone who can be that way. Respect,
maybe. Maybe
wistful
respect, at the very outside. She never saw that Brando was playing the equivalent
of high-level quality tennis across sound stages all over both coasts, Jim, is what
he was really doing. Jim, he moved like a careless fingerling, one big muscle, muscularly
naïve, but always, notice, a fingerling at the center of a clear current. That kind
of animal grace. The bastard wasted
no
motion, is what made it art, this brutish no-care. His was a tennis player’s dictum:
touch things with consideration and they will be yours; you will own them; they will
move or stay still or move for you; they will lie back and part their legs and yield
up their innermost seams to you. Teach you all their tricks. He knew what the Beats
know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole
head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you. I know you don’t
understand. Yet. I know that goggle-eyed stare. I know what it means all too well,
son. It’s no matter. You will. Jim, I know what I know.

I’m predicting it right here, young sir Jim. You are going to be a great tennis player.
I was near-great. You will be truly great. You will be the real thing. I know I haven’t
taught you to play yet, I know this is your first time, Jim, Jesus, relax, I know.
It doesn’t affect my predictive sense. You will overshadow and obliterate me. Today
you are starting, and within a very few years I know all too well you will be able
to beat me out there, and on the day you first beat me I may well weep. It’ll be out
of a sort of selfless pride, an obliterated father’s terrible joy. I feel it, Jim,
even here, standing on hot gravel and looking: in your eyes I see the appreciation
of angle, a prescience re spin, the way you already adjust your overlarge and apparently
clumsy child’s body in the chair so it’s at the line of best force against dish, spoon,
lens-grinding appliance, a big book’s stiff bend. You do it unconsciously. You have
no idea. But I watch, very closely. Don’t ever think I don’t, son.

You will be poetry in motion, Jim, size and posture and all. Don’t let the posture-problem
fool you about your true potential out there. Take it from me, for a change. The trick
will be transcending that overlarge head, son. Learning to move just the way you already
sit still. Living in your body.

This is the communal garage, son. And this is our door in the garage. I know you know.
I know you’ve looked at it before, many times. Now… now
see
it, Jim. See it as body. The dull-colored handle, the clockwise latch, the bits of
bug trapped when the paint was wet and now still protruding. The cracks from this
merciless sunlight out here. Original color anyone’s guess, boyo. The concave inlaid
squares, how many, bevelled at how many levels at the borders, that pass for decoration.
Count the squares, maybe… let’s see you treat this door like a lady, son. Twisting
the latch clockwise with one hand that’s right and…. I guess you’ll have to pull harder,
Jim. Maybe even harder than that. Let me…
that’s
the way she wants doing, Jim. Have a look. Jim, this is where we keep this 1956 Mercury
Montclair you know so well. This Montclair weighs 3,900 pounds, give or take. It has
eight cylinders and a canted windshield and aerodynamic fins, Jim, and has a maximum
flat-out road-speed of 95 m.p.h. per. I described the shade of the paint job of this
Montclair to the dealer when I first saw it as bit-lip red. Jim, it’s a machine. It
will do what it’s made for and do it perfectly, but only when stimulated by someone
who’s made it his business to know its tricks and seams, as a body. The stimulator
of this car must know the car, Jim, feel it, be inside much more than just the… the
compartment. It’s an object, Jim, a body, but don’t let it fool you, sitting here,
mute. It will
respond.
If given its due. With artful care. It’s a body and will respond with a well-oiled
purr once I get some decent oil in her and all Mercuryish at up to 95 big ones per
for just that driver who treats its body like his own, who
feels
the big steel body he’s inside, who quietly and unnoticed feels the nubbly plastic
of the grip of the shift up next to the wheel when he shifts just as he feels the
skin and flesh, the muscle and sinew and bone wrapped in gray spiderwebs of nerves
in the blood-fed hand just as he feels the plastic and metal and flange and teeth,
the pistons and rubber and rods of the amber-fueled Montclair, when he shifts. The
bodily red of a well-bit lip, parping along at a silky 80-plus per. Jim, a toast to
our knowledge of bodies. To high-level tennis on the road of life. Ah. Oh.

Son, you’re ten, and this is hard news for somebody ten, even if you’re almost five-eleven,
a possible pituitary freak. Son, you’re a body, son. That quick little scientific-prodigy’s
mind she’s so proud of and won’t quit twittering about: son, it’s just neural spasms,
those thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head is still
just body, Jim. Commit this to memory. Head is body. Jim, brace yourself against my
shoulders here for this hard news, at ten: you’re a machine a body an object, Jim,
no less than this rutilant Montclair, this coil of hose here or that rake there for
the front yard’s gravel or sweet Jesus this nasty fat spider flexing in its web over
there up next to the rake-handle, see it? See it?
Latrodectus mactans,
Jim. Widow. Grab this racquet and move gracefully and feelingly over there and kill
that widow for me, young sir Jim. Go on. Make it say ‘K.’ Take no names. There’s a
lad. Here’s to a spiderless section of communal garage. Ah. Bodies bodies everywhere.
A tennis ball is the ultimate body, kid. We’re coming to the crux of what I have to
try to impart to you before we get out there and start actuating this fearsome potential
of yours. Jim, a tennis ball is the ultimate body. Perfectly round. Even distribution
of mass. But empty inside, utterly, a vacuum. Susceptible to whim, spin, to force—used
well or poorly. It will reflect your own character. Characterless itself. Pure potential.
Have a look at a ball. Get a ball from the cheap green plastic laundry basket of old
used balls I keep there by the propane torches and use to practice the occasional
serve, Jimbo. Attaboy. Now look at the ball. Heft it. Feel the weight. Here, I’ll…
tear the ball… open. Whew. See? Nothing in there but evacuated air that smells like
a kind of rubber hell. Empty. Pure potential. Notice I tore it open along the seam.
It’s a body. You’ll learn to treat it with consideration, son, some might say a kind
of love, and it will open for you, do your bidding, be at your beck and soft lover’s
call. The thing truly great players with hale bodies who overshadow all others have
is a way with the ball that’s called, and keep in mind the garage door and broiler,
touch.
Touch the ball. Now that’s… that’s the touch of a player right there. And as with
the ball so with that big thin slumped overtall body, sir Jimbo. I’m predicting it
right now. I see the way you’ll apply the lessons of today to yourself as a physical
body. No more carrying your head at the level of your chest under round slumped shoulders.
No more tripping up. No more overshot reaches, shattered plates, tilted lampshades,
slumped shoulders and caved-in chest, the simplest objects twisting and resistant
in your big thin hands, boy. Imagine what it feels like to be this ball, Jim. Total
physicality. No revving head. Complete presence. Absolute potential, sitting there
potentially absolute in your big pale slender girlish hand so young its thumb’s unwrinkled
at the joint. My thumb’s wrinkled at the joint, Jim, some might say gnarled. Have
a look at this thumb right here. But I still treat it as my own. I give it its due.
You want a drink of this, son? I think you’re ready for a drink of this. No? Nein?
Today, Lesson One out there, you become, for better or worse, Jim, a man. A player.
A body in commerce with bodies. A helmsman at your own vessel’s tiller. A machine
in the ghost, to quote a phrase. Ah. A ten-year-old freakishly tall bow-tied and thick-spectacled
citizen of the…. I drink this, sometimes, when I’m not actively working, to help me
accept the same painful things it’s now time for me to tell you, son. Jim. Are you
ready? I’m telling you this now because you have to know what I’m about to tell you
if you’re going to be the more than near-great top-level tennis player I know you’re
going to be eventually very soon. Brace yourself. Son, get ready. It’s glo… gloriously
painful. Have just maybe a taste, here. This flask is silver. Treat it with due care.
Feel its shape. The near-soft feel of the warm silver and the calfskin sheath that
covers only half its flat rounded silver length. An object that rewards a considered
touch. Feel the slippery heat? That’s the oil from my fingers. My oil, Jim, from my
body. Not my hand, son, feel the flask. Heft it. Get to know it. It’s an object. A
vessel. It’s a two-pint flask full of amber liquid. Actually more like half full,
it seems. So it seems. This flask has been treated with due care. It’s never been
dropped or jostled or crammed. It’s never had an errant drop, not drop
one,
spilled out of it. I treat it as if it can feel. I give it its due, as a body. Unscrew
the cap. Hold the calfskin sheath in your right hand and use your good left hand to
feel the cap’s shape and ease it around on the threads. Son… son, you’ll have to put
that what is that that
Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices Second Edition
down, son. Looks heavy anyway. A tendon-strainer. Fuck up your pronator teres and
surrounding tendons before you even start. You’re going to have to put down the book,
for once, young Sir Jimbo, you never try to handle two objects at the same time without
just aeons of diligent practice and care, a Brando-like dis… and well
no
you don’t just drop the book, son, you don’t just just don’t
drop
the big old
Guide to Indices
on the dusty garage floor so it raises a square bloom of dust and gets our nice white
athletic socks all gray before we even hit the court, boy,
Jesus
I just took five minutes explaining how the key to being even a potential player
is to treat the things with just exactly the… here lemme have this… that books aren’t
just
dropped
with a crash like bottles in the trashcan they’re
placed,
guided, with senses on Full, feeling the edges, the pressure on the little floor
of both hands’ fingers as you bend at the knees with the book, the slight gassy shove
as the air on the dusty floor… as the floor’s air gets displaced in a soft square
that raises no dust. Like soooo. Not like
so.
Got me? Got it? Well now don’t be that way. Son, don’t be that way, now. Don’t get
all oversensitive on me, son, when all I’m trying to do is help you. Son, Jim, I
hate
this when you do this. Your chin just disappears into that bow-tie when your big
old overhung lower lip quivers like that. You look chinless, son, and big-lipped.
And that cape of mucus that’s coming down on your upper lip, the way it shines, don’t,
just don’t, it’s revolting, son, you don’t want to revolt people, you have to learn
to control this sort of oversensitivity to hard truths, this sort of thing, take and
exert some goddamn
control
is the whole point of what I’m taking this whole entire morning off rehearsal with
not one but two vitally urgent auditions looming down my neck so I can show you, planning
to let you move the seat back and touch the shift and maybe even… maybe even drive
the Montclair, God knows your feet’ll reach, right Jimbo? Jim, hey, why not drive
the Montclair? Why not you drive us over, starting today, pull up by the courts where
today you’ll—here, look, see how I unscrew it? the cap? with the soft very outermost
tips of my gnarled fingers which I wish they were steadier but I’m exerting control
to control my anger at that chin and lip and the cape of snot and the way your eyes
slant and goggle like some sort of mongoloid child’s when you’re threatening to cry
but just the very tips of the fingers, here, the most sensitive parts, the parts bathed
in warm oil, the whorled pads, I feel them singing with nerves and blood I let them
extend… further than the warm silver hip-flask’s cap’s very top down its broadening
cone where to where the threads around the upraised little circular mouth lie hidden
while with the other warm singing hand I gently grip the leather holster so I can
feel the way the whole flask feels as I guide… guide the cap around on its silver
threads, hear that? stop that and listen, hear that? the sound of threads moving through
well-machined grooves, with great care, a smooth barbershop spiral, my whole hand
right through the pads of my fingertips less… less unscrewing, here, than guiding,
persuading, reminding the silver cap’s body what it’s built to do, machined to do,
the silver cap knows, Jim, I know, you know, we’ve been through this before, leave
the book
alone,
boy, it’s not going anywhere, so the silver cap leaves the flask’s mouth’s warm grooved
lips with just a snick, hear that? that faintest snick? not a rasp or a grinding sound
or harsh, not a harsh brutal Brando-esque rasp of attempted domination but a snick
a… nuance, there, ah, oh, like the once you’ve heard it never mistakable
ponk
of a true-hit ball, Jim, well pick it
up
then if you’re afraid of a little dust, Jim, pick the book
up
if it’s going to make you all goggle-eyed and chinless honestly Jesus why do I try
I try and try just wanted to introduce you to the broiler’s garage and let you drive,
maybe, feeling the Montclair’s body, taking my time to let you pull up to the courts
with the Montclair’s shift in a neutral glide and the eight cylinders thrumming and
snicking like a healthy heart and the wheels all perfectly flush with the curb and
bring out my good old trusty laundry… laundry basket of balls and racquets and towels
and flask and my
son,
my flesh of my flesh, white slumped flesh of my flesh who wanted to embark on what
I predict right now will be a tennis career that’ll put his busted-up used-up old
Dad back square in his little place, who wanted to maybe for once be a real boy and
learn how to play and have fun and frolic and play around in the unrelieved sunshine
this city’s so fuck-all famous for, to enjoy it while he can because did your mother
tell you we’re moving? That we’re moving back to California finally this spring? We’re
moving, son, I’m harking one last attempted time to that celluloid siren’s call, I’m
giving it the one last total shot a man’s obligation to his last waning talent deserves,
Jim, we’re headed for the big time again at last for the first time since she announced
she was having you, Jim, hitting the road, celluloid-bound, so say adios to that school
and that fluttery little moth of a physics teacher and those slumped chinless slide-rule-wielding
friends of no now wait I didn’t mean it I meant I wanted to tell you
now,
ahead of time, your mother and I, to give you plenty of notice so you could
adjust
this time because oh you made it so unmisinterpretably
clear
how this last move to this trailer park upset you so, didn’t you, to a mobile home
with chemical toilet and bolts to hold it in place and widow-webs everyplace you look
and grit settling on everything like dust out here instead of the Club’s staff quarters
I got us removed from or the house it was clearly my fault we couldn’t afford anymore.
It was my fault. I mean who else’s fault would it be? Am I right? That we moved your
big soft body with allegedly not enough notice and that east-side school you cried
over and that Negro research resource librarian there with the hair out to here that…
that lady with the upturned nose on tiptoe all the time I have to tell you she seemed
so consummate east-side Tucsonian all self-consciously not of this earth’s grit urging
us to quote nurture your optical knack with physics with her nose upturned so you
could see up in there and on her toes like something skilled overhead had sunk a hook
between her big splayed fingerling’s nostrils and were reeling skyward up toward the
aether little by little I’ll bet those heelless pumps are off the floor altogether
by now son what do you say son what do you think… no, go on, cry, don’t inhibit yourself,
I won’t say a word, except it’s getting to me less all the time when you do it, I’ll
just warn you, I think you’re overworking the tears and the… it’s getting less effec…
effective with me each time you use it though we know we both know don’t we just between
you and me we know it’ll always work on your mother, won’t it, never fail, she’ll
every time take and bend your big head down to her shoulder so it looks obscene, if
you could see it, pat-patting on your back like she’s burping some sort of slumping
oversized obscene bow-tied infant with a book straining his pronator teres, crying,
will you do this when you’re grown? Will there be episodes like this when you’re a
man at your own tiller? A citizen of a world that won’t go pat-pat-there-there? Will
your face crumple and bulge like this when you’re six-and-a-half grotesque feet tall,
six-six-plus like your grandfather may he rot in hell’s rubber vacuum when he finally
kicks on the tenth tee and with your flat face and no chin just like him on that poor
dumb patient woman’s fragile wet snotty long-suffering shoulder did I tell you what
he did? Did I tell you what he did? I was your age Jim here take the flask no give
it here, oh. Oh. I was thirteen, and I’d started to play well, seriously, I was twelve
or thirteen and playing for years already and he’d never been to watch, he’d never
come once to where I was playing, to watch, or even changed his big flat expression
even once when I brought home a trophy I won trophies or a notice in the paper TUCSON
NATIVE QUALIFIES FOR NATIONAL JR CH’SHIPS he never acknowledged I even existed as
I was, not as I do you, Jim, not as I take care to bend over backwards way,
way
out of my way to let you know I
see
you recognize you am aware of you as a body care about what might go on behind that
big flat face bent over a homemade prism. He plays golf. Your grandfather. Your grandpappy.
Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the contempt? Billiards on a big table,
Jim. A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod. A quote unquote sport.
Anal rage and checkered berets. This is almost empty. This is just about it, son.
What say we rain-check this. What say I put the last of this out of its amber misery
and we go in and tell her you’re not feeling up to snuff enough again and we’re rain-checking
your first introduction to the Game till this weekend and we’ll head over this weekend
and do two straight days both days and give you a really extensive intensive intro
to a by all appearances limitless future. Intensive gentleness and bodily care equals
great tennis, Jim. We’ll go both days and let you plunge right in and get wet all
over. It’s only five dollars. The court fee. For one lousy hour. Each day. Five dollars
each day. Don’t give it a thought. Ten total dollars for an intensive weekend when
we live in a glorified trailer and have to share a garage with two DeSotos and what
looks like a Model A on blocks and my Montclair can’t afford the kind of oil she deserves.
Don’t look like that. What’s money or my rehearsals for the celluloid auditions we’re
moving 700 miles for, auditions that may well comprise your old man’s last shot at
a life with any meaning at all, compared to my