Infinite Jest (71 page)

So but like e.g. Gately puzzled for quite some time about why these AA meetings where
nobody kept order seemed so orderly. No interrupting, fisticuffery, no heckled invectives,
no poisonous gossip or beefs over the tray’s last Oreo. Where was the hard-ass Sergeant
at Arms who enforced these principles they guaranteed would save your ass? Pat Montesian
and Eugenio Martinez and Ferocious Francis the Crocodile wouldn’t answer Gately’s
questions about where’s the enforcement. They just all smiled coy smiles and said
to Keep Coming, an apothegm Gately found just as trite as ‘Easy Does It!’ ‘Live and
Let Live!’

How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just un- but
anti-
interesting? Because every one of the seminal little mini-epiphanies you have in
early AA is always polyesterishly banal, Gately admits to residents. He’ll tell how,
as a resident, right after that one Harvard Square industrial-grunge post-punk, this
guy whose name was Bernard but insisted on being called Plasmatron-7, right after
old Plasmatron-7 drank nine bottles of NyQuil in the men’s upstairs head and pitched
forward face-first into his instant spuds at supper and got discharged on the spot,
and got fireman-carried by Calvin Thrust right out to Comm. Ave.’s Green Line T-stop,
and Gately got moved up from the newest guys’ 5-Man room to take Plasmatron-7’s old
bunk in the less-new guys’ 3-Man room, Gately had an epiphanic AA-related nocturnal
dream he’ll be the first to admit was banally trite.
¹⁴⁰
In the dream Gately and row after row of totally average and non-unique U.S. citizens
were kneeling on their knees on polyester cushions in a crummy low-rent church basement.
The basement was your average low-rent church basement except for this dream-church’s
basement walls were of like this weird thin clean clear glass. Everybody was kneeling
on these cheap but comfortable cushions, and it was weird because nobody seemed to
have any clear idea why they were all on their knees, and there was like no tier-boss
or sergeant-at-arms-type figure around coercing them into kneeling, and yet there
was this sense of some compelling unspoken reason why they were all kneeling. It was
one of those dream things where it didn’t make sense but did. And but then some lady
over to Gately’s left got off her knees and all of a sudden stood up, just like to
stretch, and the minute she stood up she was all of a sudden yanked backward with
terrible force and sucked out through one of the clear glass walls of the basement,
and Gately had winced to get ready for the sound of serious glass, but the glass wall
didn’t shatter so much as just let the cartwheeling lady sort of melt right through,
and healed back over where she’d melted through, and she was gone. Her cushion and
then Gately notices a couple other polyester cushions in some of the rows here and
there were empty. And it was then, as he was looking around, that Gately in his dream
looked slowly up overhead at the ceiling’s exposed pipes and could now all of a sudden
see, rotating slow and silent through the basement a meter above the different-shaped
and -colored heads of the kneeling assembly, he could see a long plain hooked stick,
like the crook of a giant shepherd, like the hook that appears from stage-left and
drags bad acts out of tomato-range, moving slowly above them in French-curled circles,
almost demurely, as if quietly scanning; and when a mild-faced guy in a cardigan happened
to stand up and was hooked by the hooked stick and pulled ass-over-teakettle out through
the soundless glass membrane Gately turned his big head as far as he could without
leaving the cushion and could see, now, just outside the wall’s clean pane, trolling
with the big stick, an extraordinarily snappily dressed and authoritative figure manipulating
the giant shepherd’s crook with one hand and coolly examining the nails of his other
hand from behind a mask that was simply the plain yellow smily-face circle that accompanied
invitations to have a nice day. The figure was so impressive and trustworthy and casually
self-assured as to be both soothing and compelling. The authoritative figure radiated
good cheer and abundant charm and limitless patience. It manipulated the big stick
in the coolly purposeful way of the sort of angler who you know isn’t going to throw
back anything he catches. The slow silent stick with the hook he held was what kept
them all kneeling below the baroque little circumferences of its movement overhead.

One of Ennet House’s live-in Staffers’ rotating
P.M.
jobs is to be awake and on-call in the front office all night for Dream Duty—people
in early recovery from Substances often get hit with real horror-show dreams, or else
traumatically seductive Substance-dreams, and sometimes trite but important epiphanic
dreams, and the Staffer on Dream Duty is required to be up doing paperwork or sit-ups
or staring out the broad bay window in the front office downstairs, ready to make
coffee and listen to the residents’ dreams and offer the odd practical upbeat Boston-AA-type
insight into possible implications for the dreamer’s progress in recovery—but Gately
had no need to clomp downstairs for a Staffer’s feedback on this one, since it was
so powerfully, tritely obvious. It had come clear to Gately that Boston AA had the
planet’s most remorselessly hard-ass and efficient sergeant at arms. Gately lay there,
overhanging all four sides of his bunk, his broad square forehead beaded with revelation:
Boston AA’s Sergeant at Arms stood
outside
the orderly meeting halls, in that much-invoked Out There where exciting clubs full
of good cheer throbbed gaily below lit signs with neon bottles endlessly pouring.
AA’s patient enforcer was always and everywhere Out There: it stood casually checking
its cuticles in the astringent fluorescence of pharmacies that took forged Talwin
scrips for a hefty surcharge, in the onionlight through paper shades in the furnished
rooms of strung-out nurses who financed their own cages’ maintenance with stolen pharmaceutical
samples, in the isopropyl reek of the storefront offices of stooped old chain-smoking
MD’s whose scrip-pads were always out and who needed only to hear ‘pain’ and see cash.
In the home of a snot-strangled Canadian VIP and the office of an implacable Revere
A.D.A. whose wife has opted for dentures at thirty-five. AA’s disciplinarian looked
damn good and smelled even better and dressed to impress and his blank black-on-yellow
smile never faltered as he sincerely urged you to have a nice day. Just one more last
nice day. Just one.

And that was the first night that cynical Gately willingly took the basic suggestion
to get down on his big knees by his undersized spring-shot Ennet House bunk and Ask
For Help from something he still didn’t believe in, ask for his own sick Spider-bit
will to be taken from him and fumigated and squished.

But and plus in Boston AA there is, unfortunately, dogma, too, it turns out; and some
of it is both dated and smug. And there’s an off-putting jargon in the Fellowship,
a psychobabbly dialect that’s damn near impossible to follow at first, says Ken Erdedy,
the college-boy ad exec semi-new at Ennet House, complaining to Gately at the White
Flag meeting’s raffle-break. Boston AA meetings are unusually long, an hour and a
half instead of the national hour, but here they also have this formal break at about
45 minutes where everybody can grab a sandwich or Oreo and a sixth cup of coffee and
stand around and chat, and bond, where people can pull their sponsors aside and confide
some trite insight or emotional snafu that the sponsor can swiftly, privately validate
but also place in the larger imperative context of the primary need not to absorb
a Substance today, just today, no matter what happens. While everybody’s bonding and
interfacing in a bizarre system of catchphrases, there’s also the raffle, another
Boston idiosyncrasy: the newest of the White Flag newcomers trying to Get Active In
Group Service wobble around with rattan baskets and packs of tickets, one for a buck
and three for a fin, and the winner eventually gets announced from the podium and
everyone hisses and shouts ‘Fix!’ and laughs, and the winner wins a Big Book or an
As Bill Sees It
or a
Came To Believe,
which if he’s got some sober time in and already owns all the AA literature from
winning previous raffles he’ll stand up and publicly offer it to any newcomer who
wants it, which means any newcomer with enough humble desperation to come up to him
and ask for it and risk being given a phone number to carry around in his wallet.

At the White Flag raffle-break Gately usually stands around chain-smoking with the
Ennet House residents, so that he’s casually available to answer questions and empathize
with complaints. He usually waits til after the meeting to do his own complaining
to Ferocious Francis, with whom Gately now shares the important duty of ‘breaking
down the hall,’ sweeping floors and emptying ashtrays and wiping down the long cafeteria
tables, which F.F.G.’s function is limited because he’s on oxygen and his function
consists mostly of standing there sucking oxygen and holding an unlit cigar while
Gately breaks down the hall. Gately rather likes Ken Erdedy, who came into the House
about a month ago from some cushy Belmont rehab. Erdedy’s an upscale guy, what Gately’s
mother would have called a yuppie, an account executive at Viney and Veals Advertising
downtown his Intake form said, and though he’s about Gately’s age he’s so softly good-looking
in that soft mannequinish way Harvard and Tufts schoolboys have, and looks so smooth
and groomed all the time even in jeans and a plain cotton sweater, that Gately thinks
of him as much younger, totally un-grizzled, and refers to him mentally as ‘kid.’
Erdedy’s in the House mainly for ‘marijuana addiction,’ which Gately has a hard time
Identifying with anybody getting in enough trouble with weed to leave his job and
condo to bunk in a room full of tattooed guys who smoke in their sleep, and to work
like pumping gas (Erdedy just started his nine-month humility job at the Merit station
down by North Harvard St. in Allston) for 32 minimum-wage hours a week. Or to have
his leg be joggling like that all the time from tensions of Withdrawal: from fucking
grass? But it’s not Gately’s place to say what’s bad enough to make somebody Come
In and what isn’t, not for anybody else but himself, and the shapely but big-time-troubled
new girl Kate Gompert—who mostly just stays in her bed in the new women’s 5-Woman
room when she isn’t at meetings, and is on a Suicidality Contract with Pat, and isn’t
getting the usual pressure to get a humility job, and gets to get some sort of scrip-meds
out of the meds locker every morning—Kate Gompert’s counselor Danielle S. reported
at the last Staff Meeting that Kate had finally opened up and told her she’d mostly
Come In for weed, too, and not the lightweight prescription tranqs she’d listed on
her Intake form. Gately used to treat weed like tobacco. He wasn’t like some other
narcotics addicts who smoked weed when they couldn’t get anything else; he always
smoked weed and could always get something else and simply smoked weed while he did
whatever else he could get. Gately doesn’t miss weed much. The shocker-type AA Miracle
is he doesn’t much miss the Demerol, either, today.

A hard November wind is spattering goopy sleet against the broad windows all around
the hall. The Provident Nursing Home cafeteria is lit by a checkerboard array of oversized
institutional bulbs overhead, a few of which are always low and give off fluttery
strobes. The fluttering bulbs are why Pat Montesian and all the other photic-seizure-prone
area AAs never go to White Flag, opting for the Freeway Group over in Brookline or
the candyass Lake Street meeting up in West Newton on Sunday nights, which Pat M.
bizarrely drives all the way up from her home down on the South Shore in Milton to
get to, to hear people talk about their analysts and Saabs. There is no way to account
for people’s taste in AA. The White Flag hall is so brightly lit up all Gately can
see out any of the windows is a kind of shiny drooling black against everybody’s pale
reflection.

Miracle
’s one of the Boston AA terms Erdedy and the brand-new and very shaky veiled girl
resident standing over him complain they find hard to stomach, as in ‘We’re All Miracles
Here’ and ‘Don’t Leave Five Minutes Before The Miracle Happens’ and ‘To Stay Sober
For 24 Hours Is A Miracle.’

Except the brand-new girl, either Joelle V. or Joelle D., who said she’d hit the occasional
meeting in the past before her Bottom and had been roundly repelled, and is still
pretty much cynical and repelled, she said on the way down to Provident under Gately’s
direct new-resident supervision, says she finds even the word
Miracle
preferable to the constant AA talk about ‘the Grace of God,’ which reminds her of
wherever she grew up, where she’s indicated places of worship were often aluminum
trailers or fiberboard shacks and church-goers played with copperheads in the services
to honor something about serpents and tongues.

Gately’s also observed how Erdedy’s also got that Tufts-Harvard way of speaking without
seeming to move his lower jaw.

‘It’s as if it’s its own country or something,’ Erdedy complains, legs crossed in
maybe a bit of a faggy schoolboy way, looking around at the raffle-break, sitting
in Gately’s generous shadow. ‘The first time I ever talked, over at the St. E’s meeting
on Wednesday, somebody comes up after the Lord’s Prayer and says “Good to hear you,
I could really I.D. with that bottom you were sharing about, the isolating, the can’t-and-can’t,
it’s the greenest I’ve felt in months, hearing you.” And then gives me this raffle
ticket with his phone number that I didn’t ask for and says I’m right where I’m supposed
to be, which I have to say I found a bit patronizing.’

The best noise Gately produces is his laugh, which booms and reassures, and a certain
haunted hardness goes out of his face when he laughs. Like most huge men, Gately has
kind of a high hoarse speaking voice; his larynx sounds compressed. ‘I still hate
that right-where-you’re-supposed-to-be thing,’ he says, laughing. He likes that Erdedy,
sitting, looks right up at him and cocks his head slightly to let Gately know he’s
got his full attention. Gately doesn’t know that this is a requisite for a white-collar
job where you have to show you’re attending fully to clients who are paying major
sums and get to expect an overt display of full attention. Gately is still not yet
a good judge of anything about upscale people except where they tend to hide their
valuables.