Infinite Jest (186 page)

80
Orin Incandenza knew that Joelle van Dyne and Dr. James O. Incandenza weren't lovers; Mrs. Avril Incandenza did not know that they weren't lovers, although by the time of Joelle's acquaintance with him Jim wasn't in a position to be lovers with anybody, neurologically speaking, though it's not clear to Joelle whether Avril even knew this, since Jim and Avril hadn't been intimate with each other, i.e. conjugally, for quite some time, though Jim hadn't known the precise reason why Avril was so sanguine about their not being intimate until the incident with the Volvo, where apparently Avril had been with someone (Orin would not say who or whether he knew who) in the Volvo and had idly — and disastrously, whether w/ unconscious intent or not — and presumably post-coitally idly written the person's first name in the steam of the steamed-up car window, which name had disappeared with the steam but had reappeared the next time the window had steamed up, which had been when James had been driving to this very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal Tm-so-terribly-sorry' monologue-scene of the last thing he'd done, and then never shown her, and had ordered the cartridge's burial in the brass casket w/ him in the same testament in which he'd willed Joelle an absurd (and addiction-enabling) annuity, which Avril'd never have lowered herself to the level of contesting, but which could hardly be expected not to have solidified the appearance that they'd been lovers, Joelle and Jim.

81
'Theory and Praxis in Peckinpah's Use of Red,' Classic Cartridge Studies vol. IX, nos. 2 & 3, YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(s).

82
Maybe in like psychic opposition to their Moms's compulsive cleaning thing, both Orin when he was at E.T.A. and now Hal are horrific slobs. In Hal's case this is facilitated by the fact that the third floor of Subdorm C's prorector is the incredibly lax and laid-back Corbett Thorp, who may stutter and go in for half-baked motivational experiments on the younger players but never comes around with a white glove and clipboard. Mario makes his bed without fail, but you have to keep in mind that it's not like he's got all that much else to do. Hal's fitted sheet and sheet are Bean-James River flannels in matching green and black Night Watch plaid, and for a comforter he uses a green fiberfill winter-camp sleeping bag that's of unknown origin and price because he got it for Xmas and it had all the tags removed.

83
Boston Police Department.

84
Available on ROM via InterLace @deltad3.COM or in (remaindered) paperback from Delta/Delacorte division of Bantam-Doubleday-Dell-Little,-Brown, itself a division of Bell Atlantic/TCI.

85
= no academy affiliation.

86
The O.N.A.N.T.A. junior tour allows court-side oxygen ever since an unfortunate embolism in Raleigh NC, Y.W.Q.M.D.

87
Q.v. Note 24 supra.

88
Since claiming rampant and mysterious breakage and then one time having the Dun-lop rep passing through Allston on his way out of Boston from E.T.A. see not one but three kids on three separate corners hawking shiny new Dunlop sticks in what amounted, Dunlop charged, almost to Conspiracy to Defraud, in YY2OO7MRCVMETIUFI/ ITPSFH,O,OM(s).

89
The fact that it's not at all clear day-to-day what this it and caring mean, or how you can be expected both to care passionately and not care at all, that huge amounts of internal psychic energy get expended on trying to come to some acceptable understanding of all this stuff, particularly from 16 to like 18, is not accidental or a weakness in E.T.A. pedagogy, in Schacht's opinion, though a sizable contingent of E.T.A.s view Schtitt as bats and essentially a figurehead and choose to steer more by head prorector deLint's clipboard and reductive statistics, which at least afford you a firm idea of where you stand, comparatively, at all times.

90
E.g.:

SELECTED SNIPPET FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE HOURS OF D. W. GATELY, LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE'S AA MTNG UP to ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

'I fear I simply have to deny the insinuation that it's disloyal or ungrateful to find oneself troubled by certain quite glaring inconsistencies in this master quote unquote Program you all seem to expect us simply to open up and blindly swallow whole and then walk around glazed with our arms right out straight in front of us parroting, reciting.' 'Geoff— Geoffrey, man, I don't think anybody's trying to insinuate anything over on you, brother. I know I ain't trying to.’

No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility for insinuating anything aloud.’

'Maybe when I look patient I'm really trying to be patient with myself, for not finishing school and etcetera and having a hard time keeping up with you.’

This AA tactic of masking condescension behind humility....’

'I guess I'm just sorry for you you're feeling frustrated with the Program today. I know there's lots of days I'm frustrated with it. So I don't know what to say helpful to you except what they said to me, to just hang in there.’

'One Day at a One Day at a One Day.’

'Brother, that's just all I know to tell you that's worked for me. I know for me it don't matter if there's days I fucking hate it. I just have to do it. And it don't help me or anybody else if I go around negativing on newcomers and trying to take out my issues on trying to fuck them up with God-puzzles.’

'Mr. Gately Sir, I found myself sitting tonight in yet another Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting the central Message of which was the importance of going to still more Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings. This infuriating carrot-and-donkey aspect of trudging to Meetings only to be told to trudge to still more Meetings.’

'I hear you.’

'As if, I mean, what's supposedly going to be communicated at these future meetings I'm exhorted to trudge to that cannot simply be communicated now, at this meeting, instead of the glazed recitation of exhortations to attend these vague future revelatory meetings?’

'I'm doing my best to stay with you here Day man.’

'And tonight I'm just settling in in yet another uneven-legged chair, cultivating that glazed passive spectatorial state of mind that is clearly what they're trying to inspire in the ephebe, settling in next to a positively redolent Emil M. and trying to hold my poor addled Denial-ridden mind open with all available main, listening to this ravaged-looking Yalie in yellow slacks detail episodes of tremens whose gruesomeness interdicted any possible Identification —’

'I'm remembering I heard Pat tell you that thinking people who are walking ahead of you are following you is a pretty bad kind of D.T.s, brother.’

'And I informed her that there's a well-known surveillance tactic known as the Box-surveillance, which involves certain members of the surveillance team establishing themselves in front of the subject.’

'Except I don't ever remember you explaining why a sociology teacher weaving his way from his fourth bar to his fifth bar is important enough for four guys from some you-never-mentioned-what kind of conspiracy to be pulling this real complex surveillance thing.’

'...’

'Except I was interrupting your point you were sharing, I know, and I'm sorry.’

'Your basic decency is why you're whom I bring my thoughts to, Don. You know that.’

'That makes me feel good Day man.’

'I mean to whom else might I speak? The girl who takes her eye out and fondles it? Poor Ewell with his obsessive tattoo charts? Lenz^

'It makes me feel good you think I'm decent to talk to. That's supposed to be why I'm here. I sure needed to talk, at the start. Can you remember where you were headed before I broke i—interrupted?’

'Something this broken Ivy Leaguer said, some AA sally. He said that only one newcomer in a million actually trudges into an Alcoholics Anonymous Closed Meeting and in fact doesn't belong there.’

'Meaning doesn't turn out to have the Disease you mean.’

'Yes. And that he said that quote if You — looking right at yours truly, seemingly, with that wearily amused patient expression you all must practice in front of the mirror — he said that only one newcomer in a million doesn't belong here, and if quote You think You're that one-in-a-million, You definitely belong here. And everyone howled with mirth, stomped their feet and blew coffee through their noses and wiped their eyes with the backs of their hands and elbowed each other. Howled with mirth.’

'But you were, like, unsmiling at it.’

'And everyone labels as Denial or ingratitude what's actually horror, Don. The horror of acknowledging that you do apparently have some sort of problem with mild sedatives and fine Chianti, and wanting with all sincerity to give every fair chance to a treatment-modality which millions swear up and down has helped them with their own problem.’

'You're talking about AA.’

'To want very much to believe in it, and to try, and then to your horror find the Program riddled with these obvious and idiotic fallacies and reductia ad absurdum which —’

Tm going to need to ask you to try and say that again in words I can follow, Geoffrey, if you want me to be right there alongside with you. And I'm sorry if that seems descending.’

'Don, I am sincere when I say I'm frightened when I find that there are things about this allegedly miraculous Program's doctrine that simply do not follow. That do not cohere. That do not make anything resembling rational sense.’

'I'm with you on that one now, brother.’

'Tonight's example of the one-in-a-million, say. Don, let me ask you, Don. In all earnest. Why shouldn't every human being in the world be in AA?’

'Now I'm not with you anymore again, Geoffrey.’

'Don, why doesn't every featherless biped on earth qualify for AA? By AA's reasoning, why isn't everyone everywhere an alcoholic?’

'Well Geoffrey man it's a totally private decision to admit the Disease, nobody can go tell another man he's —’

'But indulge me for a moment. By AA's own professed logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why then you're by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone who can admit his problem.’

'Don't look at me like that. Show me the flaw in my reasoning. I beg you. Show me why not everyone should be in AA, given the way AA regards those who don't believe they belong there.’

'And now you don't know what to say. There's no cockle-warming cliche that applies.' 'The slogan I've heard that might work here is the slogan Analysis-Paralysis' 'Oh lovely. Oh very nice. By all means don't think about the validity of what they're claiming your life hinges on. Oh do not ask what is it. Do not ask not whether it's not insane. Simply open wide for the spoon.’

'For me, the slogan means there's no set way to argue intellectual-type stuff about the Program. Surrender To Win, Give It Away To Keep It. God As You Understand Him. You can't think about it like an intellectual thing. Trust me because I been there, man. You can analyze it til you're breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best you can.’

'AA's response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the inadvisability of all such questions.’

'I ain't AA Day man. No one like individual can respond for AA.’

'Am I out of line in seeing something totalitarian about it? Something dare I say un-American? To interdict a fundamental doctrinal question by invoking a doctrine against questioning? Wasn't this the very horror the Madisonians were horrified of in 1791? Amendments I and IX? My Grievance is disallowed because my Petition for Redress is a priori interdicted by the inadvisability of all Petitioning?’

'I'm about to get fucking lapped here I'm so not-following. You honestly don't see what's a little whacked-out about what you're saying about Denial?’

'I'm thinking your failure to engage me on the question itself means either I'm right, and AA's whole Belonging-versus-Denial matrix is constructed on logical sand, in which case horror, or else it means you're stupefied with condescending pity for me for some reason I fail to grasp, doubtless because of Denial, in which case the look on your face right now is the same weary patience that makes me want to scream in meetings.’

'So scream. They can't kick you out.’

'How comforting.’

'This is a thing I do know. They can't kick you out.’

91
Pillow-biter's a North Shore term, one Gately grew up with, and it and the f-term are the only terms for male homosexuals he knows, still.

92
Diane Prins, Perth Amboy NJ.

93
An anxiety-fest captured nicely by the banner-shaped posters deLint used to have D. Harde put up each fall over the senior-locker sections of both locker rooms that had WINNERS NEVER HAVE TO QUIT until some of the other prorectors went to Schtitt and got him to make deLint take them down.

94
It's surely been spelled out already that prorectors teach one marginal class per term and serve as on-court assistants to Schtitt's Lebensgefährtin Aubrey deLint, and that their existence at E.T.A. is marginal and low-prestige and their spiritual state on the low continuum between embittered and accepting, and for many of the more neurasthenic E.T.A. students the prorectors are kind of repellent the way hideously old people are repellent, reminding the students of the kind of low-prestige purgatorial fate that awaits the marginal and low-ranked jr. player; and while a couple of the prorectors are feared, none of them is all that much respected, and they're avoided, and stick together with one another and keep to themselves and seem on the whole sad, with that grad-schoolish sense of arrested adolescence and reality-avoidance about them.