Infinite Jest (42 page)

Ennet House alumnus and volunteer counselor Calvin Thrust is quietly rumored to have
on the shaft of his formerly professional porn-cartridge-performer’s Unit a tattoo
that displays the magiscule initials
CT
when the Unit is flaccid and the full name
CALVIN THRUST
when hyperemic. Tiny Ewell has soberly elected to let this go unsubstantiated. Alumna
and v.c. Danielle Steenbok once got the bright idea of having eyeliner-colored tattoos
put around both eyes so she’d never again have to apply eyeliner, not banking on the
inevitable fade that over time’s turned the tattoos a kind of nauseous dark-green
she now has to constantly apply eyeliner to cover up. Current female live-in Staffer
Johnette Foltz has undergone two of the six painful procedures required to have the
snarling orange-and-blue tiger removed from her left forearm and so now has a snarling
tiger minus a head and one front leg, with the ablated parts looking like someone
determined has been at her forearm with steel wool. Ewell decides this is what gives
profundity to the tattoo-impulse’s profound irrevocability: Having a tatt removed
means just exchanging one kind of disfigurement for another. There are Tingly and
Diehl’s identical palmate-cannabis-leaf-on-inner-wrist tattoos, though Tingly and
Diehl are from opposite shores and never crossed paths before entering the House.

Nell Gunther refuses to discuss tattoos with Tiny Ewell in any way or form.

For a while, Tiny Ewell considers live-in Staffer Don Gately’s homemade jailhouse
tattoos too primitive to even bother asking about.

He’d made a true pest of himself, though, Ewell did, when at the height of the obsession
this one synthetic-narc-addicted kid came in who refused to be called anything but
his street name, Skull, and lasted only like four days, but who’d been a walking exhibition
of high-regret ink—both arms tattooed with spiderwebs at the elbows, on his fishy-white
chest a naked lady with the same kind of overlush measurements Ewell remembered from
the pinball machines of his Watertown childhood. On Skull’s back a half-m.-long skeleton
in a black robe and cowl playing the violin in the wind on a crag with
THE DEAD
in maroon on a vertical gonfalonish banner unfurling below; on one biceps either
an icepick or a mucronate dagger, and down both forearms a kind of St. Vitus’s dance
of leather-winged dragons with the words—on both forearms—
HOW DO YOU LIK YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOW MR DETH!?,
the typos of which, Tiny felt, only served to heighten Skull’s whole general tatt-gestalt’s
intended effect, which Tiny presumed was primarily to repel.

In fact Tiny E.’s whole displacement of obsession from bunks’ hospital corners to
people’s tattoos was probably courtesy of this kid Skull, who on his second night
in the newer male residents’ Five-Man Room had shed his electrified muscle-shirt and
was showing off his tattoos in a boneheaded regretless first-category fashion to Ken
Erdedy while R. Lenz did headstands against the closet door in his jockstrap and Ewell
and Geoffrey D. had their wallets’ credit cards spread out on Ewell’s drum-tight bunk
and were trying to settle a kind of admittedly childish argument about who had the
more prestigious credit cards—Skull flexing his pectorals to make the overdeveloped
woman on his chest writhe, reading his forearms to Erdedy, etc.—and Geoffrey Day had
looked up from his AmEx (Gold, to Ewell’s Platinum) and shaken his moist pale head
at Ewell and asked rhetorically what had ever happened to good old traditional U.S.
tattoos like
MOM
or an anchor, which for some reason touched off a small obsessive explosion in Ewell’s
detox-frazzled psyche.

Probably the most poignant items in Ewell’s survey are the much-faded tattoos of old
Boston AA guys who’ve been sober in the Fellowship for decades, the crocodilic elder
statesmen of the White Flag and Allston Groups and the St. Columbkill Sunday Night
Group and Ewell’s chosen Home Group, Wednesday night’s Better Late Than Never Group
(Non-smoking) at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital just two blocks down from the House. There
is something queerly poignant about a deeply faded tattoo, a poignancy something along
the lines of coming upon the tiny and poignantly unfashionable clothes of a child
long-since grown up in an attic trunk somewhere (the clothes, not the grown child,
Ewell confirmed for G. Day). See, e.g., White Flag’s cantankerous old Francis (‘Ferocious
Francis’) Gehaney’s right forearm’s tatt of a martini glass with a naked lady sitting
in the glass with her legs kicking up over the broad flaring rim, with an old-style
Rita Hayworth–era bangs-intensive hairstyle. Faded to a kind of underwater blue, its
incidental black lines gone soot-green and the red of the lips/nails/
SUBIKBAY’62USN4-07
not lightened to pink but more like decayed to the dusty red of fire through much
smoke. All these old sober Boston blue-collar men’s irrevocable tattoos fading almost
observably under the low-budget fluorescence of church basements and hospital auditoria—Ewell
watched and charted and cross-referenced them, moved. Any number of good old U.S.N.
anchors, and in Irish Boston sooty green shamrocks, and several little frozen tableaux
of little khaki figures in G.I. helmets plunging bayonets into the stomachs of hideous
urine-yellow bucktoothed Oriental caricatures, and screaming eagles with their claws
faded blunt, and
SEMPER FI,
all autolyzed to the point where the tattoos look like they’re just under the surface
of a murky-type pond.

A tall silent hard-looking old black-haired BLTN-Group veteran has the terse and hateful
single word
PUSSY
in what’s faded to pond-scum green down one liver-spotted forearm; but yet the fellow
transcends even stoic regret by dressing and carrying himself as if the word simply
wasn’t there, or was so irrevocably there there was no point even thinking about it:
there’s a deep and tremendously compelling dignity about the old man’s demeanor w/r/t
the
PUSSY
on his arm, and Ewell actually considers approaching this fellow re the issue of
sponsorship, if and when he feels it’s appropriate to get an AA sponsor, if he decides
it’s germane in his case.

Near the conclusion of this two-month obsession, Tiny Ewell approaches Don Gately
on the subject of whether the jailhouse tattoo should maybe comprise a whole separate
phylum of tattoo. Ewell’s personal feeling is that jailhouse tattoos aren’t poignant
so much as grotesque, that they seem like they weren’t a matter of impulsive decoration
or self-presentation so much as simple self-mutilation arising out of boredom and
general disregard for one’s own body and the aesthetics of decoration. Don Gately’s
developed the habit of staring coolly at Ewell until the little attorney shuts up,
though this is partly to disguise the fact that Gately usually can’t follow what Ewell’s
saying and is unsure whether this is because he’s not smart or educated enough to
understand Ewell or because Ewell is simply out of his fucking mind.

Don Gately tells Ewell how your basic-type jailhouse tatt is homemade with sewing
needles from the jailhouse canteen and some blue ink from the cartridge of a fountain
pen promoted from the breast pocket of an unalert Public Defender, is why the jailhouse
genre is always the same night-sky blue. The needle is dipped in the ink and jabbed
as deep into the tattooee as it can be jabbed without making him recoil and fucking
up your aim. Just a plain ultraminimal blue square like Gately’s got on his right
wrist takes half a day and hundreds of individual jabs. How come the lines are never
quite straight and the color’s never quite all the way solid is it’s impossible to
get all the individualized punctures down to the same uniform deepness in the, like,
twitching flesh. This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done by sadistic
children on rainy afternoons. Gately has a blue square on his right wrist and a sloppy
cross on the inside of his mammoth left forearm. He’d done the square himself, and
a cellmate had done the cross in return for Gately doing a cross on the cellmate.
Oral narcotics render the process both less painful and less tedious. The sewing needle
is sterilized in grain alcohol, which Gately explains that the alcohol is got by taking
mess-hall fruit and mashing it up and adding water and secreting the whole mess in
a Ziploc just inside the flush-hole thing of the cell’s toilet, to, like, foment.
The sterilizing results of this can be consumed, as well. Bonded liquor and cocaine
are the only things hard to get inside of M.D.C. penal institutions, because the expense
of them gets everybody all excited and it’s only a matter of time before somebody
goes and eats cheese. The inexpensive C-IV oral narcotic Talwin can be traded for
cigarettes, however, which can in turn be got at the canteen or won at cribbage and
dominoes (M.D.C. regs prohibit straight-out cards) or got in mass quantities off smaller
inmates in return for protection from the romantic advances of larger inmates. Gately
is right-handed and his arms are roughly the size of Tiny Ewell’s legs. His wrist’s
jailhouse square is canted and has sloppy extra blobs at three of the corners. Your
average jailhouse tatt can’t be removed even with laser surgery because it’s incised
so deep in. Gately is polite about Tiny Ewell’s inquiries but not expansive, i.e.
Tiny has to ask very specific questions about whatever he wishes to know and then
gets a short specific answer from Gately to just that question. Then Gately stares
at him, a habit Ewell tends to complain about at some length up in the Five-Man Room.
His interest in tattoos seems to be regarded by Gately not as invasive but as the
temporary obsession of a still-quivering Substanceless psyche that in a couple weeks
will have forgot all about tattoos, an attitude Ewell finds condescending in the extremus.
Gately’s attitude toward his own primitive tattoos is a second-category attitude,
with most of the stoicism and acceptance of his tatt-regret sincere, if only because
these irrevocable emblems of jail are minor Rung Bells compared to some of the fucked-up
and
really
irrevocable impulsive mistakes Gately’d made as an active drug addict and burglar,
not to mention their consequences, the mistakes’, which Gately’s trying to accept
he’ll be paying off for a real long time.

Michael Pemulis has this habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other
before he says anything. It’s impossible to tell whether this is unaffected or whether
Pemulis is emulating some film-noir-type character. It’s worse when he’s put away
a couple ’drines. He and Trevor Axford and Hal Incandenza are in Pemulis’s room, with
Pemulis’s roommates Schacht and Troeltsch down at lunch, so they’re alone, Pemulis
and Axford and Hal, stroking their chins, looking down at Michael Pemulis’s yachting
cap on his bed. Lying inside the overturned hat are a bunch of fair-sized but bland-looking
tablets of the allegedly incredibly potent DMZ.

Pemulis looks all around behind them in the empty room. ‘This, Incster, Axhandle,
is the incredibly potent DMZ. The Great White Shark of organo-synthesized hallucinogens.
‘The gargantuan feral infant of—’

Hal says ‘We get the picture.’

‘The Yale U. of the Ivy League of Acid,’ says Axford.

‘Your ultimate psychosensual distorter,’ Pemulis sums up.

‘Think you mean psycho
sensory,
unless I don’t know the whole story here.’

Axford gives Hal a narrow look. Interrupting Pemulis means having to watch him do
the head-thing all over again each time.

‘Hard to find, gentlemen. As in very hard to find. Last lots came off the line in
the early 70s. These tablets here are artifacts. Certain amount of decay in potency
probably inevitable. Used in certain shady CIA-era military experiments.’

Axford nods down at the hat. ‘Mind-control?’

‘More like getting the enemy to think their guns are hydrangea, the enemy’s a blood-relative,
that sort of thing. Who knows. The accounts I’ve been reading have been incoherent,
gistless. Experiments conducted. Things got out of hand. Let’s just say things got
out of control. Potency judged too incredible to proceed. Subjects locked away in
institutions and written off as casualties of peace. Formula shredded. Research team
scattered, reassigned. Vague but I’ve got to tell you pretty sobering rumors.’

‘These are from the early 70s?’ Axhandle says.

‘See the little trademark on each one, with the guy in bell-bottoms and long sideburns?’

‘Is that what that is?’

‘Unprecedentedly potent, this stuff. The Swiss inventor they say was originally recommending
LSD-25 as what to take to come
down
off the stuff.’ Pemulis takes one of the tablets and puts it in his palm and pokes
at it with a callused finger. ‘What we’re looking at. We’re looking here at either
a serious sudden injection of cash—’

Axford makes a shocked noise. ‘You’d actually try to peddle the incredibly potent
DMZ around this sorry place?’

Pemulis’s snort sounds like the letter K. ‘Get a large economy-size clue, Axhandle.
Nobody here’d have any clue what they’d even be dealing with. Not to mention be willing
to pay what they’re worth. Why, there are pharmaceutical museums, left-wing think
tanks, New York designer-drug consortiums I’m sure’d be dying to dissect these. Decoct
like. Toss into the spectrometer and see what’s what.’

‘That we could get bids from, you’re saying,’ Axford says. Hal squeezes a ball, silently
looking at the hat.

Pemulis turns the tablet over. ‘Or certain very progressive and hip-type nursing homes
I know guys that know of. Or down at Back Bay at that yogurt place with that picture
of those historical guys Inc was saying at breakfast was up on the wall.’

‘Ram Das. William Burroughs.’

‘Or just down in Harvard Square at Au Bon Pain where all those 70s-era guys in old
wool ponchos play chess against those little clocks they keep hitting.’

Axford’s pretending to punch Hal’s arm in excitement.