Infinite Jest (111 page)

Since the E.M.P.H.H. Units' catatonics and enfeebled people rarely own registered vehicles, it's generally pretty easy to find places along the little road to switch to, but it's a constant sore point between Pat Montesian and the E.M.P.H.H. Board of Regents that Ennet House residents don't get to park overnight in the big off-street lot by the condemned hospital building — the lot's spaces are reserved for all the different Units' professional staff starting at 0600h., and E.M. Security got sick of staffs' complaints about drug addicts' poorly maintained autos still sitting there taking up their spots in the A.M. — and that Security won't consider changing the little E.M. streetlet's nightly side-switch to 2300h., before Ennet Houses's D.S.A.S.-required curfew; E.M.'s Board claims it's a municipal ordinance that they can't be expected to mess with just to accommodate one tenant, while Pat's memos keep pointing out that the Enfield Marine Hospital complex is state- not city-owned, and that Ennet House residents are the only tenants who face the nightly car-moving problem, since just about everyone else is catatonic or enfeebled. And so on.

But so every P.M. at like 2359 Gately has to lock up the lockers and Pat's cabinets and desk drawers and the door to the front office and put the phone console's answering machine on and personally escort all residents who own cars out post-curfew outside into the little nameless streetlet, and for somebody with Gately's real limited managerial skills the headaches involved are daunting: he has to herd the vehicular residents together just inside the locked front door; he has to threaten the residents he's herded together into staying together by the door while he clomps upstairs to get the one or two drivers who always forget and fall asleep before 0000 — and this straggler-collecting is a particular pain in the ass if the straggler's a female, because he has to unlock and press the Male Coming Up button by the kitchen, and the 'buzzer' sounds more like a klaxon, and wakes the edgiest female residents up with an ugly surge of adrenaline, and Gately as he clomps up the stairs gets roundly bitched out by all the mud-masked heads sticking out into the female hall, and he by regulation can't go into the sleeper's bedroom but has to pound on the door and keep shouting out his gender and get one of the straggler's roommates to wake her up and get her dressed and to the bedroom door; so he has to retrieve the stragglers and chew them out and threaten them with both a Restriction and a possible tow while herding them quick-walking down the staircase to join the main car-owner herd as quickly as possible before the main herd can like disperse. They'll always disperse if he takes too long getting stragglers; they'll get distracted or hungry or need an ashtray or just get impatient and start looking at the whole car-moving-after-curfew thing as an imposition on their time. Their early-recovery Denial makes it impossible for them to imagine their own car getting towed instead of, say, somebody else's car. It's the same Denial Gately can see at work in the younger B.U. or -C. students when he's driving Pat's Aventura to the Food Bank or Purity Supreme when they'll fucking walk right out in the street against the light in front of the car, whose brakes are fortunately in top shape. Gately's snapped to the fact that people of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they're immortal: college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they're exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else. They'll piss and moan your ear off if somebody else fucks with the rules, but they don't deep down see themselves subject to them, the same rules. And they're constitutionally unable to learn from anybody else's experience: if some jaywalking B.U. student does get splattered on Comm. or some House resident does get his car towed at 0005, your other student's or addict's response to this will be to ponder just what imponderable difference makes it possible for that other guy to get splattered or towed and not him, the ponderer. They never doubt the difference — they just ponder it. It's like a kind of idolatry of uniqueness. It's unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for a Staffer to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like upset the idolatry. Eugenio M. and Annie Parrot always recommend letting everybody get towed at least once, early on in their residency, to help make believers out of them in terms of laws and rules; but Gately for some reason on his night-shifts can't do it, cannot fucking stand to have one of his people get towed as long as there's something he can do to prevent it, and then plus if they do get towed there's the nail-chewing hassle of arranging their transport to the South End's municipal lot the next day, fielding calls from bosses and supplying verification of residents' carlessness in terms of getting to work without letting the boss know that the earless employee is a resident of a halfway house, which is totally sacred private residents' private information to give out or not — Gately breaks a full-body sweat just thinking about the managerial headaches involved in a fucking tow, so he'll spend time herding and regathering and chewing the absentminded asses of residents who Gene M. says have such calloused asses still it's a waste of Gately's time and spirit: you have to let them learn for themselves.
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Gately alerts Thrale and Foss and Erdedy and Henderson,
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and Morris Hanley, and drags the new kid Tingley out of the linen closet, and Nell Gunther — who's fucking sacked out slack-mouthed on the couch, in violation — and lets them all get coats and herds them together by the locked front door. Yolanda W. says she left personal items in Clenette's car and can she come. Lenz owns a car but doesn't answer Gately's yell up the stairs. Gately tells the herd to stay put and that if anybody leaves the herd he's going to take a personal interest in their discomfort. Gately clomps up the stairs and into the 3-Man room, plotting different fun ways to wake Lenz up without bruises that'd show. Lenz is not asleep but is wearing personal-stereo headphones, plus a jock strap, doing handstand-pushups up against the wall by Geoffrey Day's rack, his bottom only inches from Day's pillow and farting in rhythm to the pushups' downstrokes, as Day lies there in pajamas and Lone Ranger sleep mask, hands folded over his heaving chest, lips moving soundlessly. Gately's maybe a little rough about grabbing Lenz's calf and lifting him off his hands and using his other big hand on Lenz's hip to twirl him around upright like a drill-team's rifle, but Lenz's cry is of over-ebullient greeting, not pain, but it sends both Day and Gavin Diehl bolt-upright in their racks, and then they curse as Lenz hits the floor. Lenz starts saying he'd let time completely get away from him and didn't know what time it was. Gately can hear the herd down by the front door at the bottom of the stairs stamping and chuffing and getting ready to maybe disperse.

Up this close, Gately doesn't even need his Staffer's eerie seventh sense to sense that Lenz is clearly wired on either 'drines or Bing. That Lenz has been visited by the Sergeant at Arms. Lenz's right eyeball is wobbling around in its socket and his mouth writhing in that way and he has that Nietzschean supercharged aura of a wired individual, and all the time he's throwing on slacks and topcoat and incognitoizing wig and getting almost pitched headfirst down the stairs by Gately he's telling this insane breathless whopper about his finger once getting cut off and then spontaneously regentrifying itself back on, and his mouth is writhing in that fish-on-a-gaff way distinctive of a sustained L-Dopa surge, and Gately wants to pull an immediate urine, immediate, but meanwhile the cars' herd's edges are just starting to widen in that way that precedes distraction and dispersal, and they're angry not at Lenz for straggling but at Gately for even bothering with him, and Lenz pantomimes the akido Serene But Deadly Crane stance at Ken Erdedy, and it's 0004h. and Gately can see tow trucks aprowl way down on Comm. Ave., coming this way, and he jangles his keys and unlocks all three curfew-locks on the front door and gets everybody out in the scrotum-tightening November cold and out down the walk to the line of their cars in the little street and stands there on the porch watching in just orange shirtsleeves, making sure Lenz doesn't bolt before he can pull a spot-urine and extract an admission and Discharge him officially, feeling a twinge of conscience at so looking forward to giving Lenz the administrative shoe, and Lenz jabbers nonstop to whoever's closest all the way to his Duster, and everybody goes to their car, and the backwash around Gately from the open House door is hot and people in the living room provide loud feedback on the draft from the open door, the sky overhead immense and dimensional and the night so clear you can see stars hanging in a kind of lacteal goo, and out on the streetlet a couple car doors are squeaking and slamming and some people are conversing and delaying just to make Staff have to stand there in shirtsleeves on the cold porch, a small nightly sideways ball-busting rebellious gesture, when Gately's eye falls on Doony R. Glynn's specialty-disembowelled old dusty-black VW Bug parked with the other cars on the now-illicit street-side, its rear-mount engine's guts on full glittered display under the little street's lights, and Glynn's upstairs in bed tonight legitimately prostrate with diverticulitis, which for insurance reasons means Gately has to go back in and ask some resident with a driver's license to come move Glynn's VW across the street, which is humiliating because it means admitting publicly to these specimens that he, Gately, doesn't have a valid license, and the sudden heat of the living room confuses his goose-pimples, and nobody in the living room will admit to have a driver's license, and it turns out the only licensed resident who's still vertical and downstairs is Bruce Green, who's in the kitchen expressionlessly stirring a huge amount of sugar into a cup of coffee with his bare blunt finger, and Gately finds himself having to ask for managerial assistance from a kid he likes and has just bitched out and extracted urine from, which Green minimizes the humiliation of the whole thing by volunteering to help the second he hears the words Glynn and fucking car, and goes to the living room closet to get out his cheap leather jacket and fingerless gloves, and but Gately now has to leave the residents outside still unsupervised for a second to go clomping upstairs and verify that it's kosher with Glynn for Bruce Green to move his car.
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The 2-Man seniorest males' bedroom has a bunch of old AA bumper-stickers on it and a calligraphic poster saying EVERYTHING I'VE EVER LET GO OF HAS CLAW MARKS ON IT, and the answer to Gately's knock is a moan, and Glynn's little naked-lady bedside lamp he brought in with him is on, he's in his rack curled on his side clutching his abdomen like a kicked man. McDade is illicitly sitting on Foss's rack reading one of Foss's motorcycle magazines and drinking Glynn's Millennial Fizzy with stereo headphones on, and he hurriedly puts out his cigarette when Gately enters and closes the little drawer in the bedside table where Foss keeps his ashtray just like everybody else.
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The street outside sounds like Daytona — a drug addict is like physically unable to start a car without gunning the engine. Gately looks quickly out the west window over Glynn's rack to verify that all the unsupervised headlights going down the little street are Uing and coming back the right way to repark. Gately's forehead is wet and he feels the start of a greasy headache, from managerial stress. Glynn's crossed eyes are glassy and feverish and he's softly singing the lyrics to a Choosy Mothers song to a tune that isn't the song's tune.

'Doon,' Gately whispers.

One of the cars is coming back down the street a little fast for Gately's taste. Anything involving residents that happens on the grounds after curfew is his responsibility, the House Manager's made clear.

'Doon.’

It's the bottom eye, grotesquely, that rolls up at Gately. 'Don.’

'Doon.’

'Don Doon the witch is dead.’

'Doon, I need to let Green move your car.’

'Vehicle's black, Don.’

'Brucie Green needs your keys so's we can switch your car over, brother, it's midnight.’

'My Black Bug. My baby. The Roachmobile. The Doonulater's wheels. His mobility. His exposed baby. His slice of the American Pie. Simonize my baby when I'm gone, Don Doon.’

'Keys, Doony.’

'Take them. Take it. Want you to have it. One true friend. Brought me Ritz crackers and a Fizz. Treat it like a roachlady. Shiny, black, hard, mobile. Needs Premium and a weekly wax.’

'Doon. You got to show me where's the keys, brother.’

'And the bowel. Gotta weekly shine the pipes in the bowel. Exposed to view. With a soft cloth. The mobile roach. The bowelmobile.’

The heat coming off Glynn is face-tightening.

'You feel like you got a fever, Doon?' At one point elements of Staff thought Glynn might be playing sick to get out of looking for a job after losing his menial job at Brighton Fence & Wire. All Gately knows about diverticulitis is that Pat said it's intestinal and alcoholics can get it in recovery from impurities in bottom-shelf blends that the body's trying to expel. Glynn's had physical complaints all through his residency, but nothing like this here. His face is gray and waxy with pain and there's a yellowish crust on his lips. Glynn's got a real severe adtorsion, and the bottom eye is rolled up at Gately with a terrible delirious glitter, the top eye rolling around like a cow's eye. Gately still cannot bring himself to feel another man's forehead. He settles for punching Glynn very lightly on the shoulder.

'You think we need to take you over to St. E.'s to get your intestine looked at, Doon, do you think?’