Infinite jest - David Wallace

There was, too, of course, a certain darker issue, vis-à-vis a certain upscale Brookline home whose late owner had been eulogized at terrifying length and headline-size in both the Globe and Herald. After eight months of indescribable psychic cringing, waiting for the legal footwear to drop on the Nuck-VIP issue — toward the end of his drug-use Gately’d gotten sloppy and crazy and stuck idiotically with a method of straight meter-shunting that he’d learned up at MCI-Billerica and was pretty sure now constituted a signature Gately M.O., since the older guy that’d taught it to him in the Billerica metal-shop had subsequently got out and gone to Utah and died of a morphine overdose (and like who on earth hopes to get reliable morphine in fucking Utah?) over two years ago — after eight months of cringing and nail-biting, the last couple months of the torment in Ennet House — even though the House’s D.S.A.S.-license put it legally off-limits to all constabulary without Pat Montesian’s physical presence and notarized permission — after he was down to the cuticles on all ten digits, Gately had very discreetly approached a certain Percodan-devoted court stenographer an old girlfriend had once dealt to, and had the guy make equally discreet inquiries, and found that the potential Murder-2 investigation of the botched burglary[190] had been taken over — pace the loud howls of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A. — by something federal the addled stenographer called ‘Non-Specific Services Bureau,’ whereupon the case vanished from any sort of investigative scene the stenographer could make inquiries about, though quiet rumor had it that current suspicions were being directed at certain shadowy Nucko-political bodies all the way up in Quebec, far north of the Enfield MA where Gately had been cringing his way to nightly AA meetings with his fingers in his mouth.

Most of the cases Gately had had pending his P.D. had gotten Closed Without Finding,[191] contingent on Gately’s entering long-term treatment and maintaining chemical abstinence and submitting to random urinalyses and making biweekly reparation payments out of the pathetic paychecks he earned cleaning shit and sperm under Stavros Lobokulas and now also cooking and live-in-Staffing at Ennet House. The only issue not resolved on a Blue-File deferral was the business of driving with a DUI-suspended license. In the Commonwealth of MA, this issue carries a mandatory 90-day bit, as in like the penalty’s written right into the statute; and the case’s P.D. has been up-front with Gately about it’s only a matter of the time of the wheels’ slow judicial grind before some judge Red-Files the issue and the case and Gately has to do the bit at someplace MCI-Minimum like Concord or Deer Island. Gately isn’t too hinked about 90 inside. At twenty-four he’d done 17 months at Billerica for assaulting two bouncers in a nightclub — it was more like he’d beaten the second bouncer bloody with the unconscious body of the first — and he knew quite well he could get by in a Commonwealth lockdown. He was too big to fuck or fuck with and not interested in fucking with anyone else: he did his time stand-up and gave nobody any provoking cause; and when the first couple hard guys had come after him for his canteen cigarettes he’d laughed it off with ferocious jolliness, and when they came back a second time Gately beat them half to death in the corridor behind the weight room where he could be sure plenty of other guys could hear it, and after that one incident was out of the way he could simply get by and not get fucked with. Gately now was hinked only about the prospect of getting just one or two AA meetings a week in jail — the only meetings sober inmates get are when an area Group comes in on an Institutional Commitment, which Gately’s been on — when Demerol and Talwin and good old weed are almost easier to get in jail than in the outside world. Gately cringed now only at the thought of the Sergeant at Arms, the distinguished-looking shepherd guy. Going back to ingesting Substances had become his biggest fear. Even Gately can tell this is a major psychic turn-around. He tells the newer residents right up front that AA’s somehow gotten him by the mental curlies: he’ll now go to literally Any Lengths to stay clean.

He’ll tell them right out that he’d first come to Ennet House only to keep out of jail, and hadn’t had much interest or hope about actually staying clean for any length of time; and he’d been up-front with Pat Montesian about this during his application interview. The grim honesty about his disinterest and hopelessness was one reason Pat even let such a clearly bad-news specimen into the House on nothing but a lukewarm referral from a P.O. up at the 5th District office in Peabody. Pat told Gately that grim honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek. Desperation helped also, she said. Gately scratched at her dog’s stomach and said he wasn’t sure if he was desperate about anything except wanting to somehow stop getting in trouble for things he usually afterward couldn’t even remember he did them. The dog trembled and shuddered and its eyes rolled up as Gately, who hadn’t been told about Pat’s thing about wanting her dogs petted, rubbed its scabby stomach. Pat had said like well that was enough, that desire for the shitstorm to end.[192] Gately said her dog sure did like having its stomach rubbed, and Pat explained that the dog was epileptic, and said that just a desire to stop blacking out was more than enough to start with. She pulled some Commonwealth Substance-Abuse study in a black plastic binder off a long black plastic bookshelf filled with black plastic binders. It turned out Pat Montesian liked the color black a lot. She was dressed — really kind of overdressed, for a halfway house — in black leather pants and a black shirt of silk or something silky. Outside the bay window a Green Line train was laboring up the first Enfield hill in the late-summer rain. The downhill view from the bay window over Pat’s black lacquer or enamelísh desk was like the only spectacular thing about Ennet House, which was otherwise a wicked awful dump. Pat made a sound against the binder with a Svelte nail-extension and said that in this state study right here, conducted in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, over 60 % of the inmates serving Life sentences in hellish MCI-Walpole and not disputing that they’d done what they’d done to get in there nevertheless had no memory of having done it, whatever got them in there. For Life. None. Gately had to have her run it by him a couple times before he isolated her point. They’d been in blackouts. Pat said a blackout was where you continued to function — sometimes disastrously — but weren’t aware later of what you did. It’s like your mind wasn’t in possession of your body, and it was usually brought on by alcohol but could also be brought on by chronic use of other Substances, synthetic narcotics among them. Gately said he couldn’t recall ever having a real blackout, and Pat M. got it but didn’t laugh. The dog was heaving and quivering with its legs spronged out to all points of the compass and kind of spasming, and Gately didn’t know whether to quit rubbing on it. To be honest he didn’t know what epilepsy was but suspected Pat was not referring to the woman’s leg-shaver thing his totally alcoholic past girlfriend Pamela Hoffman-Jeep used to scream in the bathroom when she used. Everything mental for Gately was kind of befogged and prone to misprision for well into his first year clean.

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 fullblown 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 En-net 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 4x4 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 spies, 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 cliches, 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]