Infinite Jest (94 page)

It’s a weird-weather evening, both thundering and spitting snow. Gately had finally
become able to distinguish genuine thunder from the Enfield sounds of ATHSCME fans
and E.W.D. catapults, this after nine months of wearing a Goodwill rain-slicker every
morning on the 0430 Green Line.

One of the possible weak spots in Gately’s AA recovery-program of rigorous personal
honesty is that once he’s jammed himself into a black-as-water Aventura and watched
the spoiler throb as he turns over the carnivorous engine, etc., he often finds himself
taking a little bit less of a direct route to a given Ennet-errand-site than he probably
could. If he had to come right down to the heart of the issue he likes to cruise around
town in Pat’s car. He’s able to minimize the suspicious time any particular bit of
extra cruising adds to his errands by basically driving like a lunatic: ignoring lights,
cutting people off, scoffing at One-Ways, veering wildly in and out, making pedestrians
drop things and lunge curbward, leaning on a horn that sounds more like an air-raid
siren. You’d think this would be judicially insane, in terms of not having a license
and facing a no-license jail-bit anyway, but the fact is that this sort of on-the-way-to-the-E.R.-with-a-passenger-in-labor
driving doesn’t usually raise so much as an eyebrow among Boston’s Finest, since they
have more than enough other stuff to attend to, in these troubled times, and since
everybody else in metro Boston drives exactly the same sociopathic way, including
the Finest themselves, so that the only real risk Gately’s running is to his own sense
of rigorous personal honesty. One cliché he’s found especially serviceable w/r/t the
Aventura issue is that Recovery is about Progress Not Perfection. He likes to make
a stately left onto Commonwealth and wait to get out of view of the House’s bay window
and then produce what he imagines is a Rebel Yell and open her up down the serpentine
tree-lined boulevard of the Ave. as it slithers through bleak parts of Brighton and
Allston and past Boston U. and toward the big triangular CITGO neon sign and the Back
Bay. He passes The Unexamined Life club, where he no longer goes, at 1800h. already
throbbing with voices and bass under its ceaseless neon bottle, and then the great
gray numbered towers of the Brighton Projects, where he definitely no longer goes.
Scenery starts to blur and distend at 70 kph. Comm. Ave. splits Enfield-Brighton-Allston
from the downscale north edge of Brookline on the right. He passes the meat-colored
facades of anonymous Brookline tenements, Father & Son Market, a dumpster-nest, Burger
Kings, Blanchard’s Liquors, an InterLace outlet, a land-barge alongside another dumpster-nest,
corner bars and clubs—Play It Again Sam’s, Harper’s Ferry, Bunratty’s, Rathskeller,
Father’s First I and II—a CVS, two InterLace outlets right next to each other, the
ELLIS THE RIM MAN sign, the Marty’s Liquors that they rebuilt like ants the week after
it burned down. He passes the hideous Riley’s Roast Beef where the Allston Group gathers
to pound coffee before Commitments. The giant distant CITGO sign’s like a triangular
star to steer by. He’s doing 75 k down a straightaway, keeping abreast of an Inbound
Green Line train ramming downhill on the slightly raised track that splits Comm.’s
lanes into two and two. He likes to match a Green train at 75 k all the way down Commonwealth’s
integral ς and see how close he can cut beating it across the tracks at the Brighton
Ave. split. It’s a vestige. He’d admit it’s like a dark vestige of his old low-self-esteem
suicidal-thrill behaviors. He doesn’t have a license, it’s not his car, it’s a priceless
art-object car, it’s his boss’s car, who he owes his life to and sort of maybe loves,
he’s on a vegetable-run for shattered husks of newcomers just out of detox whose eyes
are rolling around in their heads. Has anybody mentioned Gately’s head is square?
It’s almost perfectly square, massive and boxy and mysticetously blunt: the head of
somebody who looks like he likes to lower his head and charge. He used to let people
open and close elevator doors on his head, break things across his head. The ‘
Indestructible
’ in his childhood cognomen referred to the head. His left ear looks a bit like a
prizefighter’s left ear. The head’s nearly flat on top, so that his hair, long in
back but with short Prince Valiant bangs in front, looks sort of like a carpet remnant
someone’s tossed on the head and let slide slightly back but stay.
²⁰⁰
Nobody that lives in these guano-spotted old brown buildings along Comm. with bars
on the low floors’ windows
²⁰¹
ever goes inside, it seems like. Even in thunder and little asterisks of snow, all
kinds of olive Spanish and puke-white Irish are on every corner, bullshitting and
trying to look like they’re just out there waiting for something important and drinking
out of tallboys wrapped tight in brown bags. A strange nod to discretion, the bags,
wrapped so tight the outline of the cans can’t be missed. A Shore boy, Gately’d never
used a paper bag around streetcorner cans: it’s like a city thing. The Aventura can
do 80 kph in third gear. The engine never strains or whines, just eventually starts
to sound hostile, is how you to know to hurt your hip and shift. The Aventura’s instrument
panel looks more like the instrument panel of military aircraft. Something’s always
blinking and Indicating; one of the blinking lights is supposed to tell you when to
shift; Pat has told him to ignore the panel. He loves to make the driver’s-side window
go down and rest his left elbow on the jamb like a cabbie.

He’s caught behind a bus whose big square ass is in both lanes and he can’t get around
it in time to beat the train across the split, though, and the train crosses in front
of the bus with a blast of its farty-sounding horn and what Gately sees as a kind
of swagger to its jiggle on the street-level track. He can see people bouncing around
inside the train, holding on to straps and bars. Below the split on Comm. it’s Boston
U., Kenmore and Fenway, Berklee School of Music. The CITGO sign’s still off in the
distance ahead. You have to go a shocking long way to actually get to the big sign,
which everybody says is hollow and you can get up inside there and stick your head
out in a pulsing neon sea but nobody’s ever personally been up in there.

Arm out like a hack’s arm, Gately blasts through B.U. country. As in backpack and
personal-stereo and designer-fatigues country. Soft-faced boys with backpacks and
high hard hair and seamless foreheads. Totally lineless untroubled foreheads like
cream cheese or ironed sheets. All the storefronts here are for clothes or TP cartridges
or posters. Gately’s had lines in his big forehead since he was about twelve. It’s
here he especially likes making people throw their packages in the air and dive for
the curb. B.U. girls who look like they’ve eaten nothing but dairy products their
whole lives. Girls who do step-aerobics. Girls with good combed long clean hair. Nonaddicted
girls. The weird
hopelessness
at the heart of lust. Gately hasn’t had sex in almost two years. At the end of the
Demerol he physically couldn’t. Then in Boston AA they tell you not to, not in your
first year clean, if you want to be sure to Hang In. But they like omit to tell you
that after that year’s gone by you’re going to have forgotten how to even talk to
a girl except about Surrender and Denial and what it used to be like Out There in
the cage. Gately’s never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody’s hand except
to say the Our Father in a big circle. He’s gone back to having wet dreams at age
twenty-nine.

Gately’s found he can get away with smoking in the Aventura if he opens the passenger
window too and makes sure no ashes go anywhere. The cross-wind through the open car
is brutal. He smokes menthols. He’d switched to menthols at four months clean because
he couldn’t stand them and the only people he knew that smoked them were Niggers and
he’d figured that if menthols were the only gaspers he let himself smoke he’d be more
likely to quit. And now he can’t stand anything but menthols, which Calvin T. says
are even worse for you because they got little bits of asbestosy shit in the filter
and whatnot. But Gately had been living in the little male live-in Staffer’s room
down in the basement by the audio pay phone and tonic machines for like two months
before it turned out the Health guy came and inspected and said all the big pipes
up at the room’s ceiling were insulated in ancient asbestos that was coming apart
and asbestosizing the room, and Gately had to move all his shit and the furniture
out into the open basement and guys in white suits with oxygen tanks went in and stripped
everything off the pipes and went over the room with what smells like it was a flamethrower.
Then hauled the decayed asbestos down to E.W.D. in a welded drum with a skull on it.
So Gately figures menthol gaspers are probably the least of his lung-worries at this
point.

You can get on the Storrow 500
²⁰²
off Comm. Ave. below Kenmore via this long twiny overpass-shadowed road that cuts
across the Fens. Basically the Storrow 500 is an urban express route that runs along
the bright-blue Chuck all the way along Cambridge’s spine. The Charles is vivid even
under gloomy thundering skies. Gately has decided to buy the newcomers’ omelette stuff
at Bread & Circus in Inman Square, Cambridge. It will explain delay, and will be a
subtle nonverbal stab at unique dietary requests in general. Bread & Circus is a socially
hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of Cambridge Green Party granola-crunchers,
and everything’s like microbiotic and fertilized only with organic genuine llama-shit,
etc. The Aventura’s low driver’s seat and huge windshield afford your thinking man
maybe a little more view of the sky than he’d like. The sky is low and gray and loose
and seems to hang. There’s something
baggy
about the sky. It’s impossible to tell whether snow is still actually falling or
whether just a little snow that’s already fallen is blowing around. To get to Inman
Square you veer over three lines to get off the Storrow 500 on Prospect St.’s Ramp
of Death and slalom between the sinkholes and go right, north, and take Prospect through
Central Square and all the way north through heavy ethnicity up almost into Somerville.

Inman Square, too, is someplace Gately rarely goes anymore, because it’s in Cambridge’s
Little Lisbon, heavily Portuguese, which means also Brazilians in the antiquated bellbottoms
and flare-collared leisure suits they’ve never let go of, and where there are disco-ized
Brazilians can cocaine and narcotics ever be far away. The district’s Brazilians are
another solid rationale for driving at excessive rates of speed, for Gately. Plus
Gately’s solidly pro-American, and north of Central Square’s clot and snarl Prospect
St.’s a copless straight shot through eerily alien lands: billboards in Spanish, plaster
madonnas in fenced front yards, intricately latticed grape arbors looking seized and
clutched at, now, by networks of finger-thick bare woody vines; ads for lottery tickets
in what isn’t quite Spanish, all the houses gray, more bright plastic madonnas in
nunnish getups on peeling front porches, stores and bodegas and low-suspension cars
triple-parked, an all-out full-cast crèche-type scene hung from a second-floor balcony,
clotheslines hanging between houses, gray houses in rows squished right up next to
each other in long rows with tiny toy-strewn yards, and tall, the houses, like being
squished in from either side distends them. A couple Canadian and Nuck-owned stores
mashed in here and there, between the propinquous Spanish three-deckers, looking subjugated
and exiled and etc. The street shitty with litter and holes. Indifferent drainage.
Big-assed girls stuffed like stuffed sausage into cigarette jeans in always trios
in the twilight with that weird blond-brown hair Portuguese girls dye their hair to.
A store in good old English advertising Chickens Fresh Killed Daily. Ryle’s Jazz Club’s
upscale pub-type bar, guys in tweed caps and briar pipes in mouths at angles taking
all day on a pint of warm stout. Gately’s always thought dark beer tasted like cork.
An intriguing single-decker medical-looking bldg. with a sort of tympanum over the
smoked-glass door with an ad that says COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF CONFIDENTIAL RECORDS
that Gately’s always wanted to poke the old head in and have a look at what on earth
they might be up to in there. Little Portuguese markets with food in there you can’t
even tell what species it’s from. Once at a Portuguese take-out at Inman Square’s
east end a coke-whore tried to get Gately to eat something that had tentacles. He
had a sub instead. Gately now simply blows through Inman, heading for B&C over on
the upscale northwest side nearer to Harvard, every light suddenly green and kind,
the Aventura’s ten-cylinder backwash raising an odd little tornado of discarded ad-leaflets
and glassine bags and corporate-snack bags and a syringe’s husk and filterless gasper-butts
and general crud and a flattened Millennial Fizzy cup, like from a stand, which whirls
in his exhaust, the tornado of waste does, moving behind him as the last pearly curve
of the sun through baggy clouds is eaten by the countless Sancta Something and then
whitewashed WASP church roofs’ finials farther west, nearer Harvard, at 60 k but sustained
in its whirl by the strong west breeze as the last of the sun goes and a blue-black
shadow quietly fills the canyon of Prospect, whose streetlights don’t work for the
same municipal reasons the street is in such crummy repair; and one piece of the debris
Gately’s raised and set spinning behind him, a thick flattened M.F. cup, caught by
a sudden gust as it falls, twirling, is caught at some aerodyne’s angle and blown
spinning all the way to the storefront of one ‘Antitoi Entertainent’
²⁰³
on the street’s east side, and hits, its waxed bottom making a clunk, hits the glass
pane in the locked front shop door with a sound for all the world like the rap of
a knuckle, so that in a minute a burly bearded thoroughly Canadian figure in one of
those Canadianly inevitable checked-flannel shirts appears out of the dim light in
the shop’s back room and wipes its mouth on first one sleeve then the other and opens
up the front door with a loud hinge-squeak and looks around a bit, viz. for who knocked,
looking not overly pleased at being interrupted at what his sleeves betray as a foreign
supper, and also, below that harried expression, looking edgy and emotionally pale,
which might explain the X of small-arms ammo-belts across his checked chest and the
rather absurdly large .44 revolver tucked and straining in the waistband of his jeans.
Lucien Antitoi’s equally burly partner and brother Bertraund—currently still back
there in the little back room where they sleep on cots with serious weaponry underneath
and listen to CQBC radio and scheme and smoke killer U.S.A. hydroponic dope and cut
and mount glass and sew flags and cook over sterno in L.L. Bean upscale survivalist
cookware, he’s back there eating Habitant
soupe aux pois
and bread with Bread & Circus molasses and some sort of oblong blue-veined patties
of a meat your thinking American wouldn’t even want to try to identify—Bertraund’s
forever laughing in Québecois and telling Lucien he looks forward with humorous anticipation
to the day Lucien forgets to check the big Colt’s safety before he jams it into the
waistband of his pants and goes lumbering around the shop in his hobnail boots making
every reflective and blown-glass item in the place tinkle and clink. The unautomatic
revolver, it is a souvenir of affiliation. Once or twice doing work of affiliation
with the Separatist/Anti-O.N.A.N. F.L.Q., they are for the most part a not very terrifying
insurgent cell, the Antitois, more or less loners, self-contained, a monomitotic cell,
eccentric and borderline-incompetent, protected gently by their late regional patron
M. Guillaume DuPlessis of the Gaspé Peninsula, spurned by F.L.Q. after DuPlessis’s
assassination and also ridiculed by the more malignant anti-O.N.A.N. cells. Betraund
Antitoi is in charge, the brains of the outfit, pretty much by default, since Lucien
Antitoi is one of the very few natives of
Notre Rai Pays
ever who cannot understand French, just never caught on, and so has very limited
veto-powers, even when it comes to such harebrained Bertraund-schemes as hanging a
sword-stemmed fleur-de-lis flag from the nose of a U.S.A. Civic War hero’s Boylston
St. statue when it would simply be cut down by bored O.N.A.N.ite
chiens-courants
gendarmes the next morning, or taping bricks to the return-postage-paid solicitation
cards of
Sans-Christe
Gentle’s C.U.S.P. party, or fashioning Astroturf doormats with a likeness of
Sans-Christe
Gentle on them and distributing them gratis to home-supply outlets throughout their
insurgency-grid—puerile and on the whole rather sad little gestures that M. DuPlessis
would have interdicted with a merry laugh and a friendly hand on Bertraund’s bowling
ball of a shoulder. But M. DuPlessis had been martyred, an assassination only O.N.A.N.
would be stupid enough to believe Command would be stupid enough to believe was merely
an unfortunate burglary-and-mucus mishap. And Bertraund Antitoi, after DuPlessis’s
death and F.L.Q.’s rejection left to his own conceptual devices for the first time
since their all-terrain vehicle was packed with quality Van Buskirk of Montreal exotic
reflective glasswares and glass-blowing hardware and broom and ordnance and survivalist
cookware and hip postcards and black-lather gag soap and cheesy old low-demand InterLace
3rd-Grid cartridges and hand-buzzers and fraudulent but seductive X-ray spectacles
and they were sent through the remains of Provincial Autoroute 55/ U.S.A. 91 in protective
garb they’d shed and buried just south of the Convexity’s Bellow’s Falls VT O.N.A.N.ite
checkpoint, sent as a kind of primitive two-celled organism to establish a respectable
front and abet more malignant cells and to insurge and terrorize in small sad anti-experialist
ways, now Bertraund has shown a previously DuPlessis-restrained flair for stupid wastes
of time, including this branching out into harmful pharmaceuticals as an attack on
the fiber of New New England’s youth—as if the U.S.A. youth were not already more
than fiberless enough, in Lucien’s mute opinion. Bertraund had actually been credulous
enough with a wrinkled long-haired person of advanced years in a paisley Nehru jacket
also of great age and a puzzling cap with a skeleton playing at the violin emblazoned
upon it, on the front, wearing also the most stupid-appearing small round wire spectacles
with salmon-colored lenses, and also continually forming the letter of V with fingers
of his hand and directing this letter of V at Bertraund and Lucien—Bertraund felt
the gesture was a subtle affirmation of solidarity with patriotic Struggle everywhere
and stood for
Victoire,
but Lucien suspected a U.S.A. obscenity laughingly flashed at persons who would not
comprehend its insult, just as one of Lucien’s sadistic
école-spéciale
tutors back in Ste.-Anne-des-Monts had spent weeks in Second Form teaching Lucien
to say ‘
Va chier, putain!
’ which he (the tutor) claimed meant ‘Look Maman I can speak French and thus finally
express my love and devotion to you’—Bertraund had been starry-eyed enough to agree
to barter the person an antique blue lava-lamp and a lavender-tinged apothecary’s
mirror for eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges the long-haired old person
had claimed in a jumble of West-Swiss-accented French were 650 mg. of a trop-formidable
harmful pharmaceutical no longer available and guaranteed to make one’s most hair-raising
psychedelic experience look like a day on the massage-tables of a Basel hot-springs
resort, throwing in as well a kitchen-can waste bag filled with crusty old mossy boot-and-leg
Read-Only cartridges, sans any labels, that appeared to have been stored in a person’s
rear yard and then run through a gaseous dryer of clothes, as if Lucien did not have
already more than plenty of crusty old cartridges which Bertraund removed from InterLace
dumpsters or was cheated in barters for and brought back to the shop for Lucien’s
job to view and label and organize the cartridges for storing and were never bought
except the occasional cartridge in Portuguese, or pornographical. And the aged person
had flopped off in his cap and sandals with a lamp and an apothecary’s mirror to which
Lucien had been personally much attached, particularly to the lavender mirror, flashing
this covert obscenity of V and with smiles urging the brothers to write their name
and address on the palm of their hands with the drenching-sweat-proof ink before they
dropped any of the so-called ‘
tu-sais-quoi,
’ if they were going to be the persons who ingested these lozenges.