Infinite Jest (92 page)

Pat Montesian was both pretty and not. She was in maybe her late thirties. She’d supposedly
been this young and pretty and wealthy socialite out on the Cape until her husband
had divorced her for being a nearly full-blown alcoholic, which seemed like abandonment
and didn’t improve her subsequent drinking one jot. She’d been in and out of rehabs
and halfway places in her twenties, but then it wasn’t until she’d almost died from
a stroke during the D.T.s one
A.M.
that she’d been able to Surrender and Come In with the requisite hopeless desperation,
etc. Gately didn’t wince when he heard about Pat’s stroke because his mom hadn’t had
D.T.s or a classic stroke, but rather a cirrhotic hemorrhage that made her choke and
deprived her brain of oxygen and had irreparably vegetabilized her brain. The two
cases were totally, like, apart in his mind. Pat M. was never in any way a mother-figure
for Gately. Pat liked to smile and say, when residents pissed and moaned about their
own addictions’ Losses during the weekly House Community Meeting, she’d nod and smile
and say that for her, the stroke had been far and away the best thing that’s ever
happened to her because it enabled her to finally Surrender. She’d come to Ennet House
in an electric wheelchair at thirty-two and been unable to communicate except via
like Morse-Code blinks or something for the first six months,
¹⁹³
but had even without use of her arms demonstrated a willingness to try and eat a
rock when the founding Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name told her to, using her
torso and neck to like chop downwardly at the rock and chipping both incisors (you
can still see the caps at the corners), and had gotten sober, and remarried a different
and older South Shore like trillionaire with what sounded like psychotic kids, and
but regained an unexpected amount of function, and had been working at the House ever
since. The right side of her face was still pulled way over in this sort of rictus,
and her speech took Gately some getting used to—it sounded like she was still loaded
all the time, a kind of overenunciated slurring. The half of her face that wasn’t
rictusized was very pretty, and she had very long pretty red hair, and a sexually
credible body even though her right arm had atrophied into a kind of semi-claw
¹⁹⁴
and the right hand was strapped into this black plastic brace to keep its nail-extensioned
fingers from curling into her palm; and Pat walked with a dignified but godawful lurch,
dragging a terribly thin right leg in black leather pants behind her like something
hanging on to her that she was trying to get away from.

During his residency, she’d gone personally with Gately on most of his bigger court-dates,
driving him up to the North Shore in the killer Aventura with its Handicapped plates—she
because of the neurological right-leg thing literally had a lead foot, and drove all
the time like a maniac, and Gately had usually almost wet himself on Rte. 1—and she’d
throw all Ennet House’s substantial respect and clout behind him with Judges and Boards,
until every issue that could be resolved without finding was Blue-Filed. Gately still
couldn’t figure out why all the personal extra attention and help. It was like he’d
been Pat M.’s biggest favorite among the residents last year. She did have favorites
and nonfavorites; it was probably unavoidable. Annie Parrot and the counselors and
House Manager always had their particular favorites, too, so it all tended to work
out square.

About four months into his Ennet House residency, the agonizing desire to ingest synthetic
narcotics had been mysteriously magically removed from Don Gately, just like the House
Staff and the Crocodiles at the White Flag Group had said it would if he pounded out
the nightly meetings and stayed minimally open and willing to persistently ask some
extremely vague Higher Power to remove it. The desire. They said to get creakily down
on his mammoth knees in the
A.M.
every day and ask God As He Understood Him to remove the agonizing desire, and to
hit the old knees again at night before sack and thank this God-ish figure for the
Substanceless day just ended, if he got through it. They suggested he keep his shoes
and keys under the bed to help him remember to get on his knees. The only times Gately
had ever been on his knees before were to throw up or mate, or shunt a low-on-the-wall
alarm, or if somebody got lucky during a beef and landed one near Gately’s groin.
He didn’t have any God- or J.C.-background, and the knee-stuff seemed like the limpest
kind of dickless pap, and he felt like a true hypocrite just going through the knee-motions
that he went through faithfully every
A.M.
and
P.M.
, without fail, motivated by a desire to get loaded so horrible that he often found
himself humbly praying for his head to just finally explode already and get it over
with. Pat had said it didn’t matter at this point what he thought or believed or even
said. All that mattered was what he
did.
If he did the right things, and kept doing them for long enough, what Gately thought
and believed would magically change. Even what he said. She’d seen it happen again
and again, and to some awfully unlikely candidates for change. She said it had happened
to her. The left side of her face was very alive and kind. And Gately’s counselor,
an ex-coke and -phone-bunko guy whose left ear had been one of his Losses, had hit
Gately early on with the infamous Boston AA cake analogy. The grizzled Filipino had
met with the resident Don G. once a week, driving Gately around Brighton-Allston in
aimless circles in a customized Subaru 4×4 just like the ones Gately used to hotwire
and promote to use for burgling. Eugenio Martinez had this eccentric thing where he
maintained he could only be in touch with his own Higher Power when he was driving.
Down near E.W.D.’s barge-docks off the Allston Spur one night he invited Gately to
think of Boston AA as a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix. Gately had smacked himself
in the forehead at yet another limp oblique Gene M. analogy, which Gene had already
bludgeoned him with several insectile tropes for thinking about the Disease. The counselor
had let him vent spleen for a while, smoking as he crawled along behind land-barges
lined up to unload. He told Gately to just imagine for a second that he’s holding
a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix, which represented Boston AA. The box came with directions
on the side any eight-year-old could read. Gately said he was waiting for the mention
of some kind of damn insect inside the cake mix. Gene M. said all Gately had to do
was for fuck’s sake give himself a break and relax and for once shut up and just follow
the directions on the side of the fucking box. It didn’t matter one fuckola whether
Gately like
believed
a cake would result, or whether he
understood
the like fucking baking-chemistry of
how
a cake would result: if he just followed the motherfucking directions, and had sense
enough to get help from slightly more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the
directions up if he got confused somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed
the childish directions, a cake would result. He’d have his cake. The only thing Gately
knew about cake was that the frosting was the best part, and he personally found Eugenio
Martinez a smug and self-righteous prick—plus he’d always distrusted both Orientals
and spics, and Gene M. managed to seem like both—but he didn’t screw out of the House
or quite do anything they could Discharge him for, and he went to meetings nightly
and told the more or less truth, and he did the shoe-under-bed knee thing every
A.M./P.M.
24/7, and he took the suggestion to join a Group and get rabidly Active and clean
up ashtrays and go out speaking on Commitments. He had nothing in the way of a like
God-concept, and at that point maybe even less than nothing in terms of interest in
the whole thing; he treated prayer like setting an oven-temp according to a box’s
direction. Thinking of it as talking to the ceiling was somehow preferable to imagining
talking to Nothing. And he found it embarrassing to get down on his knees in his underwear,
and like the other guys in the room he always pretended his sneakers were like way
under the bed and he had to stay down there a while to find them and get them out,
when he prayed, but he did it, and beseeched the ceiling and thanked the ceiling,
and after maybe five months Gately was riding the Greenie at 0430 to go clean human
turds out of the Shattuck shower and all of a sudden realized that quite a few days
had gone by since he’d even thought about Demerol or Talwin or even weed. Not just
merely getting through those last few days—Substances hadn’t even
occurred
to him. I.e. the Desire and Compulsion had been Removed. More weeks went by, a blur
of Commitments and meetings and gasper-smoke and clichés, and he still didn’t feel
anything like his old need to get high. He was, in a way, Free. It was the first time
he’d been out of this kind of mental cage since he was maybe ten. He couldn’t believe
it. He wasn’t Grateful so much as kind of suspicious about it, the Removal. How could
some kind of Higher Power he didn’t even believe in magically let him out of the cage
when Gately had been a total hypocrite in even asking something he didn’t believe
in to let him out of a cage he had like zero hope of ever being let out of? When he
could only get himself on his knees for the prayers in the first place by pretending
to look for his shoes? He couldn’t for the goddamn
life
of him understand how this thing worked, this thing that was working. It drove him
bats. At about seven months, at the little Sunday Beginners’ Mtg., he actually cracked
one of the Provident’s fake-wood tabletops beating his big square head against it.
¹⁹⁵

White Flagger (‘Ferocious’) Francis Gehaney, one of the most ancient and gnarled of
the Crocodiles, had a white crew cut and skallycap and suspenders over the flannel
shirt that encased his gut, and an enormous cucumber-shaped red schnoz you could actually
see whole arteries in the skin of, and brown stumpy teeth and emphysema and a portable
little oxygen-tank thing whose blue tube was held under the schnoz with white tape,
and the very clear bright eye-whites that went along with the extremely low resting
pulse-rate of a guy with geologic amounts of sober AA time. Ferocious Francis G.,
whose mouth was never without a toothpick and who had on his right forearm a faded
martini-glass-and-naked-lady tattoo of Korean-War-vintage, who’d gotten sober under
the Nixon administration and who communicated in the obscene but antiquated epigrams
the Crocs all used
¹⁹⁶
—F.F. had taken Gately out for eye-rattling amounts of coffee, after the incident
with the table and the head. He’d listened with the slight boredom of detached Identification
to Gately’s complaint that there was no way something he didn’t understand enough
to even start to believe in was seriously going to be interested in helping save his
ass, even if He/She/It did in some sense exist. Gately still doesn’t quite know why
it helped, but somehow it helped when Ferocious Francis suggested that maybe anything
minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn’t going to be major-league
enough to save Gately’s addled ass from the well-dressed Sergeant at Arms, now, was
it?

That was months ago. Gately usually no longer much cares whether he understands or
not. He does the knee-and-ceiling thing twice a day, and cleans shit, and listens
to dreams, and stays Active, and tells the truth to the Ennet House residents, and
tries to help a couple of them if they approach him wanting help. And when Ferocious
Francis G. and the White Flaggers presented him, on the September Sunday that marked
his first year sober, with a faultlessly baked and heavily frosted one-candle cake,
Don Gately had cried in front of nonrelatives for the first time in his life. He now
denies that he actually did cry, saying something about candle-fumes in his eye. But
he did.

Gately is an unlikely choice for Ennet House chef, having fed for most of the last
twelve years on sub-shop subs and corporate snack foods consumed amid some sort of
motion. He is 188 cm. and 128 kg. and had never once eaten broccoli or a pear until
last year. Chef-wise, he offers up an exceptionless routine of: boiled hot dogs; dense
damp meat loaf with little pieces of American cheese and half a box of cornflakes
on top, for texture; Cream of Chicken soup over spirochete-shaped noodles; ominously
dark, leathery Shake ’N Bake chicken legs; queasily underdone hamburgs; and hamburg-sauce
spaghetti whose pasta he boils for almost an hour.
¹⁹⁷
None but the most street-hardened Ennet residents would ever hazard an open crack
about the food, which appears nightly at the long dinner table still in the broad
steaming pans it was cooked in, with Gately’s big face hovering lunarly above it,
flushed and beaded under the floppy chef’s hat Annie Parrot had given him as a dark
joke he hadn’t got, his eyes full of anxiety and hopes for everyone’s full enjoyment,
basically looking like a nervous bride serving her first conjugal dish, except this
bride’s hands are the same size as the House’s dinner plates and have jailhouse tatts
on them, and this bride seems to need no oven-mitts as he sets down massive pans on
the towels that have to be laid down to keep the plastic tabletop from searing. Any
sort of culinary comments are always extremely oblique. Randy Lenz up at the northeast
corner likes to raise his can of tonic and say that Don’s food is the kind of food
that helps you really appreciate whatever you’re drinking along with it. Geoffrey
Day talks about what a refreshing change it is to leave a dinner table not feeling
bloated. Wade McDade, a young hard-core flask-alkie from Ashland KY, and Doony Glynn,
who’s still woozy and infirm from some horrendous Workers Comp. scam gone awry last
year, and is constantly sickly and who’s probably going to get Discharged soon for
losing his menial job at Brighton Fence & Wire and not even pretending to look for
another one—the two have this bit they do on spaghetti night where McDade comes into
the living room right before chow and goes ‘Some of that extra-fine spay-ghetti tonight,
Doonster,’ and Doony Glynn goes ‘Ooo, will it be all lovely and soft?’ and McDade
goes ‘Leave your teeth at home, boy’ in the voice of a Kentucky sheriff, leading Glynn
to the table by the hand as if Glynn were a damaged child. They take care to do the
bit while Gately’s still in the kitchen tossing salad and worrying about course-presentation.
Though Tiny Ewell never fails to thank Gately for the meal, and April Cortelyu is
lavish in her praises, and Burt F. Smith always rolls his eyes with pleasure and makes
yummy-noises whenever he can get a fork to his mouth.