Infinite Jest (40 page)

1610h. E.T.A. Weight Room. Freestyle circuits. The clank and click of various resistance-systems.
Lyle on the towel dispenser conferring with an extremely moist Graham Rader. Schacht
doing sit-ups, the board almost vertical, his face purple and forehead pulsing. Troeltsch
by the squat rack blowing his nose into a towel. Coyle doing military presses with
a bare bar. Carol Spodek curling, intent on the mirror. Rader nodding as Lyle bends
and leans in. Hal up on the spotter-shelf in back of the incline-bench in the shadow
of the monster copper beech through the west window doing single-leg toe-raises, for
the ankle. Ingersoll at the shoulder-pull, steadily upping the weight against Lyle’s
advice. Keith (‘The Viking’) Freer
⁶⁸
and the steroidic fifteen-year-old Eliot Kornspan spotting each other on massive
barbell-curls next to the water cooler’s bench, taking turns bellowing encouragement.
Hal keeps pausing to lean down and spit into an old NASA glass on the floor by the
little shelf. E.T.A. Trainer Barry Loach walking around with a clipboard he doesn’t
write anything down on, but watching people intently and nodding a lot. Axford with
one shoe off in the corner, doing something to his bare foot. Michael Pemulis seated
cross-legged on the cooler’s bench just off Kornspan’s left hip, doing facial isometrics,
trying to eavesdrop on Lyle and Rader, wincing whenever Kornspan and Freer roar at
each other.

‘Three more! Get it up there!’

‘Hoooowaaaaa.’

‘Get that shit up there man!’

‘Gwwwhoooooow
aaaaa!
’

‘It raped your sister! It killed your fucking mother man!’

‘Huhl huhl huhl huhl
gwwwww
.’

‘
Do it!
’

Pemulis makes his face very long for a while and then very short and broad, then all
sort of hollow and distended like one of Bacon’s popes.

‘Well suppose’—Pemulis can just make out Lyle—‘Suppose I were to give you a key ring
with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these
keys will unlock it, this door we’re imagining opening in onto all you want to be,
as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?’

Troeltsch calls over to Pemulis, ‘Do the deLint-jerking-off face again!’ Pemulis for
a second lets his mouth gape slackly and his eyes roll way up and flutters his lids,
moving his fist.

‘Well I’d try every darn one,’ Rader tells Lyle.

‘Huhl. Huhl. Gwww
wwwww
.’

‘Motherfucker! Fucker!’

Pemulis’s wince looks like a type of facial isometric.

‘Do Bridget having a tantrum! Do Schacht in a stall!’

Pemulis makes a shush-finger.

Lyle never whispers, but it’s just about the same. ‘Then you
are
willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The
paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling
the keys. Afraid to try the first key.’

Pemulis pulls his lower lip down as far as it will go and contracts his cheek muscles.
Cords stand out on Freer’s neck as he screams at Kornspan. There’s a little hanging
mist of spittle and sweat. Kornspan looks like he’s about to have a stroke. There
are 90 kg. on the bar, which itself is 20 kg.

‘One more you
fuck.
Fucking
take
it.’

‘Fuck me.
Fuck me
you
fuck.
Gwwwwww.’

‘
Take the pain.
’

Freer has one finger under the bar, barely helping. Kornspan’s red face is leaping
around on his skull.

Carol Spodek’s smaller bar goes silently up and down.

Troeltsch comes over and sits down and saws at the back of his neck with the towel,
looking up at Kornspan. ‘I don’t think all the curls I’ve ever done all together add
up to 110,’ he said.

Kornspan’s making sounds that don’t sound like they’re coming from his throat.

‘Yes!
Yiiissss!
’ roars Freer. The bar crashes to the rubber floor, making Pemulis wince. Every vein
on Kornspan stands out and pulses. His stomach looks pregnant. He puts his hands on
his thighs and leans forward, a string of something hanging from his mouth.

‘Way to fucking take it ba
by,
’ Freer says, going over to the box on the dispenser to get rosin for his hands, watching
himself walk toward the mirror.

Pemulis starts very slowly to lean over toward Kornspan, looking around confidentially.
He gets so his face is right up near the side of Kornspan’s mesomorphic head and whispers.
‘Hey. Eliot. Hey.’

Kornspan, bent over, chest heaving, rolls his head a little his way. Pemulis whispers:
‘Pussy.’

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to
spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s
state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out
that once MA’s Department of Social Services has taken a mother’s children away for
any period of time, they can always take them away again, D.S.S., like at will, empowered
by nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e. once deemed Unfit—no matter
why or when, or what’s transpired in the meantime—there’s nothing a mother can do.

Or for instance that people addicted to a Substance who abruptly stop ingesting the
Substance often suffer wicked papular acne, often for months afterward, as the accumulations
of Substance slowly leave the body. The Staff will inform you that this is because
the skin is actually the body’s biggest excretory organ. Or that chronic alcoholics’
hearts are—for reasons no M.D. has been able to explain—swollen to nearly twice the
size of civilians’ human hearts, and they never again return to normal size. That
there’s a certain type of person who carries a picture of their therapist in their
wallet. That (both a relief and kind of an odd let-down) black penises tend to be
the same general size as white penises, on the whole. That not all U.S. males are
circumcised.

That you can cop a sort of thin jittery amphetaminic buzz if you rapidly consume three
Millennial Fizzies and a whole package of Oreo cookies on an empty stomach. (Keeping
it down is required, however, for the buzz, which senior residents often neglect to
tell newer residents.)

That the chilling Hispanic term for whatever interior disorder drives the addict back
again and again to the enslaving Substance is
tecato gusano,
which apparently connotes some kind of interior psychic worm that cannot be sated
or killed.

That black and Hispanic people can be as big or bigger racists than white people,
and then can get even more hostile and unpleasant when this realization seems to surprise
you.

That it is possible, in sleep, for some roommates to secure a cigarette from their
bedside pack, light it, smoke it down to the quick, and then extinguish it in their
bedside ashtray—without once waking up, and without setting anything on fire. You
will be informed that this skill is usually acquired in penal institutions, which
will lower your inclination to complain about the practice. Or that even Flents industrial-strength
expandable-foam earplugs do not solve the problem of a snoring roommate if the roommate
in question is so huge and so adenoidal that the snores in question also produce subsonic
vibrations that arpeggio up and down your body and make your bunk jiggle like a motel
bed you’ve put a quarter in.

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions
as males. That over 60% of all persons arrested for drug-and alcohol-related offenses
report being sexually abused as children, with two-thirds of the remaining 40% reporting
that they cannot remember their childhoods in sufficient detail to report one way
or the other on abuse. That you can weave hypnotic Madame Psychosis–like harmonies
around the minor-D scream of a cheap vacuum cleaner, humming to yourself as you vacuum,
if that’s your Chore. That some people really do look like rodents. That some drug-addicted
prostitutes have a harder time giving up prostitution than they have giving up drugs,
with their explanation involving the two habits’ very different directions of currency-flow.
That there are just as many idioms for the female sex-organ as there are for the male
sex-organ.

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently
enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life,
the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but
lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance
of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker
down for required
A.M.
and
P.M.
prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose
your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave
it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.

That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male sex-organ is:
Unit,
which is why Ennet House residents are wryly amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital’s designations
of its campus’s buildings.

That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most
nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather
early on.

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than
that.

That AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It
before He/She/It will help you.
⁶⁹
That,
pace
macho bullshit, public male weeping is not only plenty masculine but can actually
feel
good
(reportedly). That
sharing
means talking, and
taking somebody’s inventory
means criticizing that person, plus many additional pieces of Recoveryspeak. That
an important part of halfway-house Human Immuno-Virus prevention is not leaving your
razor or toothbrush in communal bathrooms. That apparently a seasoned prostitute can
(reportedly) apply a condom to a customer’s Unit so deftly he doesn’t even know it’s
on until he’s history, so to speak.

That a double-layered steel portable strongbox w/ tri-tumblered lock for your razor
and toothbrush can be had for under $35.00 U.S./$38.50 O.N.A.N. via Home-Net Hardware,
and that Pat M. or the House Manager will let you use the back office’s old TP to
order one if you put up a sustained enough squawk.

That over 50% of persons with a Substance addiction suffer from some other recognized
form of psychiatric disorder, too. That some male prostitutes become so accustomed
to enemas that they cannot have valid bowel movements without them. That a majority
of Ennet House residents have at least one tattoo. That the significance of this datum
is unanalyzable. That the metro Boston street term for not having any money is:
sporting lint.
That what elsewhere’s known as Informing or Squealing or Narcing or Ratting or Ratting
Out is on the streets of metro Boston known as ‘Eating Cheese,’ presumably spun off
from the associative nexus of
rat.

That nose-, tongue-, lip-, and eyelid-rings rarely require actual penetrative piercing.
This is because of the wide variety of clip-on rings available. That nipple-rings
do require piercing, and that clitoris- and glans-rings are not things anyone thinks
you really want to know the facts about. That sleeping can be a form of emotional
escape and can with sustained effort be abused. That female chicanos are not called
chicanas. That it costs $225 U.S. to get a MA driver’s license with your picture but
not your name. That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That
gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and
sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer,
and sitting so close to Ennet House’s old D.E.C. TP cartridge-viewer that the screen
fills your whole vision and the screen’s static charge tickles your nose like a linty
mitten.
⁷⁰

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness
is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see
everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal—will
steal things that are
yours
. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing
with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip
can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil
people never believe they are evil, but rather that
everyone else
is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That
it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds.
That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so
bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with
your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but
instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut
it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually
pass,
it will go away—at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low-IQ
people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people. That the metro Boston street
term for panhandling is:
stemming,
and that it is regarded by some as a craft or art; and that professional stem-artists
actually have like little professional colloquia sometimes, little conventions, in
parks or public-transport hubs, at night, where they get together and network and
exchange feedback on trends and techniques and public relations, etc. That it is possible
to abuse OTC cold-and allergy remedies in an addictive manner. That Nyquil is over
50 proof. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate
intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is
possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human
beings have to just sit in one place and, like,
hurt.
That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when
you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless
kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.