Infinite Jest (39 page)

Hal always whumps his gloves together and smiles up at her and says ‘Make trouble.’

And Avril always puts on a sort of mock-stern expression and says ‘Do not, under any
circumstances, have fun,’ which Mario still always finds clutch-your-stomach funny,
every time, week after week.

Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House is the sixth of seven exterior Units on
the grounds of an Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex that, from the height
of an ATHSCME 2100 industrial displacement fan or Enfield Tennis Academy’s hilltop,
resembles seven moons orbiting a dead planet. The hospital building itself, a VA facility
of iron-colored brick and steep slate roofs, is closed and cordoned, bright pine boards
nailed across every possible access and aperture, with really stern government signs
about trespassing. Enfield Marine was built during either WWII or Korea, when there
were ample casualties and much convalescence. About the only people who use the Enfield
Marine complex in a VA-related way now seem to be wild-eyed old Vietnam veterans in
fatigue jackets de-sleeved to make vests, or else drastically old Korea vets who are
now senile or terminally alcoholic or both.

The hospital building itself stripped of equipment and copper wire, defunct, Enfield
Marine stays solvent by maintaining several smaller buildings on the complex’s grounds—buildings
the size of like prosperous homes, which used to house VA doctors and support staff—and
leasing them to different state-related health agencies and services. Each building
has a Unit-number that increases with the Unit’s distance from the defunct hospital
and with its proximity, along a rutted cement roadlet that extends back from the hospital’s
parking lot, to a steep ravine that overlooks a particularly unpleasant part of Brighton
MA’s Commonwealth Avenue and its Green Line train tracks.

Unit #1, right by the lot in the hospital’s afternoon shadow, is leased by some agency
that seems to employ only guys who wear turtlenecks; the place counsels wild-eyed
Vietnam vets for certain very-delayed stress disorders, and dispenses various pacifying
medications. Unit #2, right next door, is a methadone clinic overseen by the same
MA Division of Substance Abuse Services that licenses Ennet House. Customers for the
services of Units #1 and #2 arrive around sunup and form long lines. The customers
for Unit #1 tend to congregate in like-minded groups of three or four and gesture
a lot and look wild-eyed and generally pissed-off in some broad geopolitical way.
The customers for the methadone clinic tend to arrive looking even angrier, as a rule,
and their early-morning eyes tend to bulge and flutter like the eyes of the choked,
but they do not congregate, rather stand or lean along #2’s long walkway’s railing,
arms crossed, alone, brooding, solo acts, stand-offish—50 or 60 people all managing
to form a line on a narrow walkway waiting for the same small building to unlock its
narrow front door and yet still managing to appear alone and stand-offish is a strange
sight, and if Don Gately had ever once seen a ballet he would, as an Ennet House resident,
from his sunup smoking station on the fire escape outside the Five-Man bedroom upstairs,
have seen the movements and postures necessary to maintain this isolation-in-union
as balletic.

The other big difference between Units #1 and #2 is that the customers of #2 leave
the building deeply changed, their eyes not only back in their heads but peaceful,
if a bit glazed, but anyway in general just way better put-together than when they
arrived, while #1’s wild-eyed patrons tend to exit #1 looking even more stressed and
historically aggrieved than when they went in.

When Don Gately was in the very early part of his Ennet House residency he almost
got discharged for teaming up with a bad-news methedrine addict from New Bedford and
sneaking out after curfew across the E.M.P.H.H. complex in the middle of the night
to attach a big sign on the narrow front door of Unit #2’s methadone clinic. The sign
said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE BY ORDER COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. The first
staffer at the methadone clinic doesn’t get there to open up until 0800h., and yet
it’s been mentioned how #2’s customers always begin to show up with twisting hands
and bulging eyes at like dawn, to wait; and Gately and the speed freak from New Bedford
had never seen anything like the psychic crises and near-riot among these semi-ex-junkies—pallid
blade-slender chain-smoking homosexuals and bearded bruiser-types in leather berets,
women with mohawks and multiple sticks of gum in, upscale trust-fund-fritterers with
shiny cars and computerized jewelry who’d arrived, as they’d been doing like hyper-conditioned
rats for years, many of them, arrived at sunup with their eyes protruding and with
Kleenexes at their noses and scratching their arms and standing on first one foot
and then the other, doing basically everything but truly congregating, wild for chemical
relief, ready to stand in the cold exhaling steam for hours for that relief, who’d
arrived with the sun and now seemed to be informed that the Commonwealth of MA was
suddenly going to withdraw the prospect of that relief, until (and this is what really
seemed to drive them right over the edge, out there in the lot) until Further Notice.
Apeshit
has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. At the sound of the first windowpane
breaking and the sight of a blown-out old whore trying to hit a leather-vested biker
with an old pre-metric GRASS GROWS BY INCHES BUT IT DIES BY FEET sign from #2’s clinic’s
pathetic front lawn, the methedrine addict began laughing so hard that she dropped
the binoculars from the Ennet House upstairs fire escape where they were watching,
at like 0630h., and the binoculars fell and hit the roof of one of the Ennet House
counselors’ cars right below in the little roadlet, with a ringing clunk, just as
he was pulling in, the counselor, his name was Calvin Thrust and he was four years
sober and a former NYC porn actor who’d gone through the House himself and now took
absolutely zero in terms of shit from any of the residents, and his pride and joy
was his customized ’Vette, and the binoculars made rather a nasty dent, and plus they
were the House Manager’s amateur-ornithology binoculars and had been borrowed out
of the back office without explicit permission, and the long fall and impact didn’t
do them a bit of good, to say the least, and Gately and the methedrine addict got
pinched and put on Full House Restriction and very nearly kicked out. The addict from
New Bedford picked up the aminating needle a couple weeks after that anyway and was
discovered by a night staffer simultaneously playing air-guitar and polishing the
lids of all the donated canned goods in the House pantry way after lights out, stark
naked and sheened with meth-sweat, and after the formality of a Urine she was given
the old administrative boot—over a quarter of incoming Ennet House residents get discharged
for a dirty Urine within their first thirty days, and it’s the same at all other Boston
halfway houses—and the girl ended up back in New Bedford, and then within like three
hours of hitting the streets got picked up by New Bedford’s Finest on an old default
warrant and sent to Framingham Women’s for a 1-to-2 bit, and got found one morning
in her bunk with a kitchen-rigged shiv protruding from her privates and another in
her neck and a thoroughly eliminated personal map, and Gately’s individual counselor
Gene M. brought Gately the news and invited him to see the methedrine addict’s demise
as a clear case of There But For the Grace of God Goeth D. W. Gately.

Unit #3, across the roadlet from #2, is unoccupied but getting reconditioned for lease;
it’s not boarded up, and the Enfield Marine maintenance guys go in there a couple
days a week with tools and power cords and make a godawful racket. Pat Montesian hasn’t
yet been able to find out what sort of group misfortune #3 will be devoted to servicing.

Unit #4, more or less equidistant from both the hospital parking lot and the steep
ravine, is a repository for Alzheimer’s patients with VA pensions. #4’s residents
wear jammies 24/7, the diapers underneath giving them a lumpy and toddlerish aspect.
The patients are frequently visible at #4’s windows, in jammies, splayed and open-mouthed,
sometimes shrieking, sometimes just mutely open-mouthed, splayed against the windows.
They give everybody at Ennet House the howling fantods. One ancient retired Air Force
nurse does nothing but scream ‘Help!’ for hours at a time from a second-story window.
Since the Ennet House residents are drilled in a Boston-AA recovery program that places
great emphasis on ‘Asking For Help,’ the retired shrieking Air Force nurse is the
object of a certain grim amusement, sometimes. Not six weeks ago, a huge stolen HELP
WANTED sign was found attached to #4’s siding right below the retired shrieking nurse’s
window, and #4’s director was less than amused, and demanded that Pat Montesian determine
and punish the Ennet House residents responsible, and Pat had delegated the investigation
to Don Gately, and though Gately had a pretty good idea who the perps were he didn’t
have the heart to really press and kick ass over something so much like what he’d
done himself, when new and cynical, and so the whole thing pretty much blew over.

Unit #5, kittycorner across the little street from Ennet House, is for catatonics
and various vegetablish, fetal-positioned mental patients subcontracted to a Commonwealth
outreach agency by overcrowded LTIs. Unit #5 is referred to, for reasons Gately’s
never been able to pinpoint, as The Shed.
⁶⁷
It is, understandably, a pretty quiet place. But in nice weather, when its more portable
inmates are carried out and placed in the front lawn to take the air, standing there
propped-up and staring, they present a tableau it took Gately some time to get used
to. A couple newer residents got discharged late in Gately’s treatment for tossing
firecrackers into the crowd of catatonics on the lawn to see if they could get them
to jump around or display affect. On warm nights, one long-limbed bespectacled lady
who seems more autistic than catatonic tends to wander out of The Shed wrapped in
a bedsheet and lay her hands on the thin shiny bark of a silver maple in #5’s lawn,
stands there touching the tree until she’s missed at bedcheck and retrieved; and since
Gately graduated treatment and took the offer of a live-in Staffer’s job at Ennet
House he sometimes wakes up in his Staff cellar bedroom down by the pay phone and
tonic machine and looks out the sooty ground-level window by his bed and watches the
catatonic touching the tree in her sheet and glasses, illuminated by Comm. Ave.’s
neon or the weird sodium light that spills down from the snooty tennis prep school
overhead on its hill, he’ll watch her standing there and feel an odd chilled empathy
he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of living-room
chintz.

Unit #6, right up against the ravine on the end of the rutted road’s east side, is
Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, three stories of whitewashed New England
brick with the brick showing in patches through the whitewash, a mansard roof that
sheds green shingles, a scabrous fire escape at each upper window and a back door
no resident is allowed to use and a front office around on the south side with huge
protruding bay windows that yield a view of ravine-weeds and the unpleasant stretch
of Commonwealth Ave. The front office is the director’s office, and its bay windows,
the House’s single attractive feature, are kept spotless by whatever residents get
Front Office Windows for their weekly Chore. The mansard’s lower slope encloses attics
on both the male and female sides of the House. The attics are accessed from trapdoors
in the ceiling of the second floor and are filled to the beams with trash bags and
trunks, the unclaimed possessions of residents who’ve up and vanished sometime during
their term. The shrubbery all around Ennet House’s first story looks explosive, ballooning
in certain unpruned parts, and there are candy-wrappers and Styrofoam cups trapped
throughout the shrubs’ green levels, and gaudy homemade curtains billow from the second
story’s female side’s bedroom windows, which are open what seems like all year round.

Unit #7 is on the west side of the street’s end, sunk in hill-shadow and teetering
right on the edge of the eroding ravine that leads down to the Avenue. #7 is in bad
shape, boarded up and unmaintained and deeply slumped at the red roof’s middle as
if shrugging its shoulders at some pointless indignity. For an Ennet House resident,
entering Unit #7 (which can easily be entered through the detachable pine board over
an old kitchen window) is cause for immediate administrative discharge, since Unit
#7 is infamous for being the place where Ennet House residents who want to secretly
relapse with Substances sneak in and absorb Substances and apply Visine and Clorets
and then try to get back across the street in time for 2330 curfew without getting
pinched.

Behind Unit #7 begins far and away the biggest hill in Enfield MA. The hillside is
fenced, off-limits, densely wooded and without sanctioned path. Because a legit route
involves walking north all the way up the rutted road through the parking lot, past
the hospital, down the steep curved driveway to Warren Street and all the way back
south down Warren to Commonwealth, almost half of all Ennet House residents negotiate
#7’s back fence and climb the hillside each morning, short-cutting their way to minimum-wage
temp jobs at like the Provident Nursing Home or Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems,
etc., over the hill up Comm., or custodial and kitchen jobs at the rich tennis school
for blond gleaming tennis kids on what used to be the hilltop. Don Gately’s been told
that the school’s maze of tennis courts lies now on what used to be the hill’s hilltop
before the Academy’s burly cigar-chomping tennis-court contractors shaved the curved
top off and rolled the new top flat, the whole long loud process sending all sorts
of damaging avalanche-type debris rolling down and all over Enfield Marine’s Unit
#7, something over which you can sure bet the Enfield Marine VA administration litigated,
years back; and but Gately doesn’t know that E.T.A.’s balding of the hill is why #7
can still stand empty and unrepaired: Enfield Tennis Academy still has to pay full
rent, every month, on what it almost buried.