Infinite Jest (31 page)

Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn't hurt every minute.

This is the whirlpool, a friend.

Here is how to set up the electric ball machine at dawn on the days Himself is away living up to what will be his final talent.

Here is how to tie a bow tie. Here is how to sit through small openings of your father's first art films, surrounded by surly foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you're sure you have misheard them. Pretend you're engaged by the jagged angles and multiple exposures without pretending you have the slightest idea what's going on. Assume your brother's expression.

Here is how to sweat.

Here is how to hand a trophy to Lateral Alice Moore to put in the E.T.A. lobby's glass case under its system of spotlights and small signs.

What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher.

Here is how to pack carbohydrates into your tissues for a four-singles two-doubles match day in a Florida June.

Please learn to sleep with perpetual sunburn.

Expect some rough dreams. They come with the territory. Try to accept them. Let them teach you.

Keep a flashlight by your bed. It helps with the dreams.

Please make no extramural friends. Discourage advances from outside the circuit. Turn down dates.

If you do exactly the rehabilitative exercises They assign you, no matter how silly and tedious, the ankle will mend more quickly.

This type of stretch helps prevent the groin-pull.

Treat your knees and elbow with all reasonable care: you will have them with you for a long time.

Here is how to turn down an extramural date so you won't be asked again. Say something like I'm terribly sorry I can't come out to see 8 1/2 revived on a wall-size Cambridge Celluloid Festival viewer on Friday, Kim-berly, or Daphne, but you see if I jump rope for two hours then jog backwards through Newton till I puke They'll let me watch match-cartridges and then my mother will read aloud to me from the O.E.D. until 2200 lights-out, and c.; so you can be sure that henceforth Daphne/Kimberly/Jennifer will take her adolescent-mating-dance-type-ritual-socialization business somewhere else. Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive. Be constantly focused and on alert: feral talent is its own set of expectations and can abandon you at any one of the detours of so-called normal American life at any time, so be on guard.

Here is how to schnell.

Here is how to go through your normal adolescent growth spurt and have every limb in your body ache like a migraine because selected groups of muscles have been worked until thick and intensile and they resist as the sudden growth of bone tries to stretch them, and they ache all the time. There is medication for this condition.

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one.

It is easier than you think.

Here is how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way Himself read scholars' reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how: never tell anyone where you are.

This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

This can be tricky.

Here is how to get free sticks and strings and clothes and gear from Dunlop, Inc. as long as you let them spraypaint the distinctive Dunlop logo on your sticks' strings and sew logos on your shoulder and the left pocket of your shorts and use a Dunlop gear-bag, and you become a walking lunging sweating advertisement for Dunlop, Inc.; this is all as long as you keep justifying your seed and preserving your rank; the Dunlop, Inc. New New England Regional Athletic Rep will address you as 'Our gray swan'; he wears designer slacks and choking cologne and about twice a year wants to help you dress and has to be slapped like a gnat.

Be a Student of the Game. Like most cliches of sport, this is profound. You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. Peers who fizzle or blow up or fall down, run away, disappear from the monthly rankings, drop off the circuit. E.T.A. peers waiting for deLint to knock quietly at their door and ask to chat. Opponents. It's all educational. How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary.

See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.

This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always.

On this issue there is no counsel; you must make your best guess. For myself, I do not expect ever really to know.

But in the interval, if it is an interval: here is Motrin for your joints, Noxzema for your burn, Lemon Pledge if you prefer nausea to burn, Con-tracol for your back, benzoin for your hands, Epsom salts and anti-inflammatories for your ankle, and extracurriculars for your folks, who just wanted to make sure you didn't miss anything they got.

SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS OF THE RESIDENT-INTERFACE-DROP-

IN-HOURS OF MS. PATRICIA MONTESIAN, M.A., C.S.A.C.,
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EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL

RECOVERY HOUSE (SIC), ENFIELD MA, 1300-1500H., WEDNESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT

UNDERGARMENT

'But there's this way he drums his fingers on the table. Not even like really drumming. More like in-way between drumming and like this scratching, picking, the way you see somebody picking at dead skin. And without any kind of rhythm, see, constant and never-stopping but with no kind of rhythm you could grab onto and follow and stand. Totally like whacked, insane. Like the kind of sounds you can imagine a girl hears in her head right before she kills her whole family because somebody took the last bit of peanut butter or something. You know what I'm saying? The sound of a fucking mind coming apart. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he wouldn't quit with the drumming at supper I sort of poked him with my fork. Sort of. I could see how maybe somebody could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to get the fork out, though. Let me just say I'm ready to make amends at like anytime. For my part in it. I'm owning my part in it is what I'm saying. Can I ask am I going to get Restricted for this? Cause I have this Overnight tomorrow that Gene he approved already in the Overnight Log. If you want to look. But I'm not trying to get out of owning my part of the, like, occurrence. If my Higher Power who I choose to call God works through you saying I've got some kind of a punishment due, I won't try to get out of a punishment. If I've got one due. I just wanted to ask. Did I mention I'm grateful to be here?’

'I'm not denying anything. I'm simply asking you to define "alcoholic." How can you ask me to attribute to myself a given term if you refuse to define the term's meaning? I've been a reasonably successful personal-injury attorney for sixteen years, and except for that one ridiculous so-called seizure at the Bar Association dinner this spring and that clot of a judge banning me from his courtroom — and let me just say that I can support my contention that the man masturbates under his robe behind the bench with detailed corroboration from both colleagues and Circuit Court laundry personnel — with the exception of less than a handful of incidents I've held my liquor and my head as high as many a taller advocate. Believe you me. How old are you, young lady? I am not in denial so to speak about anything empirical and objective. Am I having pancreas problems? Yes. Do I have trouble recalling certain intervals in the Kemp and Limbaugh administrations? No contest. Is there a spot of domestic turbulence surrounding my intake? Why yes there is. Did I experience yes some formication in detox? I did. I have no problem forthrightly admitting things I can grasp. Forwicate, with an m, yes. But what is this you demand I admit? Is it denial to delay signature until the vocabulary of the contract is clear to all parties so bound? Yes, yes, you don't follow what I mean here, good! And you're reluctant to proceed without clarification. I rest. I cannot deny what I don't understand. This is my position.’

'So I'm sitting there waiting for my meatloaf to cool and suddenly there's a simply sphincter-loosening shriek and here's Nell in the air with a steak-fork, positively aloft, leaping across the table, in flight, horizontal, I mean Pat the girl's body is literally parallel to the surface of the table, hurling herself at me, with this upraised fork, shrieking something about the sound of peanut butter. I mean my God. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of my hand and the tabletop both. To give you an idea. Of the savagery. Don't even ask me about the pain. Let's don't even get into that, I assure you. They offered me Percocet
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at the emergency room, is all I'll say about the levels of pain involved. I told them I was in recovery and powerless over narcotics of any sort. Please don't even ask me how moved they were at my courage if you don't want me to get weepy. This whole experience has me right on the edge of a complete hysterical fit. So but yes, guilty, I may very well have been tapping on the table. Excuse me for occupying space. And then she ever so magnaminously says she'll apologize if I will. Well come again I said? Come again? I mean my God. I'm sitting there attached to the table by tines. I know bashing, Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most fascist. I respectfully ask that she be kicked out of here on her enormous rear-end. Let her go back to whatever fork-wielding district she came from, with her Hefty bag full of gauche clothes. Honestly. I know part of this process is learning to live in a community. The give and take, to let go of personality issues, turn them over. Et cetera. But is it not also supposed to be and here I quote the handbook a safe and nurturing environment? I have seldom felt less nurtured than I did impaled on that table I have to say. The pathetic harassments of Minty and McDade are bad enough. I can get bashed back at the Fenway. I did not come here to get bashed on some pretense of table-tapping. I'm dangerously close to saying either that . . . that specimen goes or I do.’

'I'm awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.’

'I want understanding I have no denial I am drug addict. Me, I know that I am addicted since the period of before Miami. I am no trouble to stand up in the meetings and say I am Alfonso, I am drug addict, powerless. I am knowing powerlessness since the period of Castro. But I cannot stop even since I know. This I have fear. I fear I do not stop when I admit I am Alfonso, powerless. How does to admit I am powerless make me stop what the thing is I am powerless to stop? My head it is crazy from this fearing of no power. I am now hope for power, Mrs. Pat. I want to advice. Is hope of power the bad way for Alfonso as drug addict?’

'Sorry to barge, there, P.M. Division called again about the thing with the vermin. The word was ultimatum that they said.’

'Sorry if I'm bothering you about something that isn't a straightforward treatment interface thing. I'm up there trying to do my Chore. I've got the men's upstairs bathroom. There's something .. . Pat there's something in the toilet up there. That won't flush. The thing. It won't go away. It keeps reappearing. Flush after flush. I'm only here for instructions. Possibly also protective equipment. I couldn't even describe the thing in the toilet. All I can say is if it was produced by anything human then I have to say I'm really worried. Don't even ask me to describe it. If you want to go up and have a look, I'm a 100% confident it's still there. It's made it real clear it's not going anywhere.’

'Alls I know is I put a Hunt's Pudding Cup in the resident fridge like I'm supposed to at 1300 and da-da-da and at 1430 I come down all primed for pudding that I paid for myself and it's not there and McDade comes on all concerned and offers to help me look for it and da-da, except if you look I look and here's the son of a whore got this big thing of pudding on his chin.’

'Yeah but except so how can I answer just yes or no to do I want to stop the coke? Do I think I want to absolutely I think I want to. I don't have a septum no more. My septum's been like fucking dissolved by coke. See? You see anything like a septum when I lift up like that? I've absolutely with my whole heart thought I wanted to stop and so forth. Ever since with the septum. So but so since I've been wanting to stop this whole time, why couldn't I stop? See what I'm saying? Isn't it all about wanting to and so on? And so forth? How can living here and going to meetings and all do anything except make me want to stop? But I think I already want to stop. How come I'd even be here if I didn't want to stop? Isn't being here proof I want to stop? But then so how come I can't stop, if I want to stop, is the thing.’

'This kid had a harelip. Where it goes like, you know, thith. But his went way up. Further up. He sold bad speed but good pot. He said he'd cover our part of the rent if we kept his snakes supplied with mice. We were smoking up all our cash so what's to do. They ate mice. We had to go into pet stores and pretend to be real heavily into mice. Snakes. He kept snakes. Doocy. They smelled bad. He never cleaned the tanks. His lip covered his nose. The harelip. My guess he couldn't smell what they smelled like. Or something would have got done. He had a thing for Mildred. My girlfriend. I don't know. She probably has a problem too. I don't know. He had a thing for her. He'd keep saying shit like, with all these t-h's, he'd go Tho you want to fuck me, Mildred, or what? We don't hath t'eat each other or nothin. He'd say shit like this with me right there, dropping mice into these tanks, holding my breath. The mice had to be alive. All in this godawful voice like somebody's holding their nose and can't say 5. He didn't wash his hair for two years. We had like an in-joke on how long he wouldn't wash his hair and we'd make X's on the calendar every week. We had a lot of these in-type jokes, to help us stand it. We were wasted I'd say 90% of the time. Nine-0.