Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  It was Ennet House’s Assistant Director Annie P. who coined the phrase that Don Gately ‘sunlights on the side.’ Five A.M.s a week, whether he’s just getting off all-night Staff duty or not, he has to be on the Inbound Green Line by 0430h. to then catch two more trains to his other job at the Shattuck Shelter For Homeless Males down in bombed-out Jamaica Plain. Gately has become, in sobriety, a janitor. He mops down broad cot-strewn floors with anti-fungal delousing solvents. Likewise the walls. He scrubs toilets. The relative cleanliness of the Shattuck’s toilets might seem surprising until you head into the shower area, with your equipment and face-mask. Half the guys in the Shattuck are always incontinent. There’s human waste in the showers on a daily fucking basis. Stavros lets him attach an industrial hose to a nozzle and spray the worst of the shit away from a distance before Gately has to go in there with his mop and brushes and solvents, and his mask.

  Cleaning the Shattuck only takes three hours, since he and his partner got the routine down tight. Gately’s partner is also the guy that owns the company that contracts with the Commonwealth for the Shattuck’s maintenance, a guy like forty or fifty, Stavros Lobokulas, a troubling guy with a long cigarette-filter and an enormous collection of women’s-shoes catalogues he keeps piled behind the seats in the cab of his 4×4.

  So at like 0800 usually they’re done and by vendor’s contract still get to bill for eight hours (Stavros L. only pays Gately for three, but it’s sub-table), and Gately heads back to Government Center to take the westbound Greenie back up Commonwealth to Ennet House to put on his black eye-patch mask thing and sleep till 1200h. and the afternoon shift. Stavros L. himself gets a couple hours off to footwear-browse (Gately very much needs to assume that’s all he does with the catalogues, is browse), then has to head over to Pine Street Inn, the biggest and foulest homeless shelter in all of Boston, where Stavros and two other broke and desperate yutzes from another of the halfway houses Stavros cruises for cheap labor will spend four hours cleaning and then bill the state for six.

  The inmates at the Shattuck suffer from every kind of physical and psychological and addictive and spiritual difficulty you could ever think of, specializing in ones that are repulsive. There are colostomy bags and projectile vomiting and cirrhotic discharges and missing limbs and misshapen heads and incontinence and Kaposi’s Sarcoma and suppurating sores and all different levels of enfeeblement and impulse-control-deficit and damage. Schizophrenia is like the norm. Guys in D.T.s treat the heaters like TVs and leave broad spatter-paintings of coffee over the walls of the barrackses. There are industrial buckets for A.M. puking that they seem to treat like golfers treat the pin on like a golf course, aiming in its vague direction from a distance. There’s one sort of blocked off and more hidden corner, over near the bank of little lockers for valuables, that’s always got sperm moving slowly down the walls. And way too much sperm for just one or two guys, either. The whole place smells like death no matter what the fuck you do. Gately gets to the shelter at 0459.9h. and just shuts his head off as if his head has a kind of control switch. He screens input with a fucking vengeance the whole time. The barrackses’s cots reek of urine and have insect-activity observable. The state employees who supervise the shelter at night are dead-eyed and watch soft-core tapes behind the desk and are all around Gately’s size and build, and he’s been approached to maybe work there himself, nights, supervising, more than once, and has said Thanks Anyway, and always screws right out of there at 0801h. and rides the Greenie back up the hill with his Gratitude-battery totally recharged.

  Janitoring the Shattuck for Stavros Lobokulas was the menial job Gately had landed with only three days to go on his month’s deadline to find some honest job, as a resident, and he’s kept it ever since.

  The males in the Shattuck are supposed to be up and out by 0500h. regardless of weather or D.T.s, to let Gately and Stavros L. clean. But some never screw out of there on time — and these’re always the worst guys, the ones you don’t want anyplace near you, these ones that won’t leave. They’ll clump behind Gately and watch him jet feces off the shower-tiling, treating it like a sport and yelling encouragement and advice. They’ll cringe and ass-kiss when the supervisor heaves himself on by to tell them to get out and then when he leaves not get out. A couple have those little shaved patches on their arms. They’ll lie in the cots and hallucinate and thrash and scream in the cots and knock army blankets off onto the floors Gately’s trying to mop. They’ll skulk back over to the little dark spermy corner the minute Gately’s got done scrubbing the night’s sperm off and has backed away and started again to inhale.

  Maybe the worst is that there’s almost always one or two guys in the Shattuck who Gately knows personally, from his days of addiction and B&E, from before he got to the no-choice point and surrendered his will to staying straight at any cost. These guys are always 25–30 and look 45–60 and are a better ad for sobriety at any cost than any ad agency could come up with. Gately’ll slip them a finski or a pack of Kools and maybe some-times try and talk a little AA to them, if they seem like maybe they’re ready to give up. With everybody else in the Shattuck Gately adopts this expression where he lets them know he’s ignoring them totally as long as they keep their distance, but it’s a look that says Street and Jail and not to fuck with him. If they get in his way, Gately will stare hard at a point just behind their heads until they move off. The protective face-mask helps.

  Stavros Lobokulas’s great ambition — which he goes on about regularly to Gately when they’re cleaning the same barracks — Stavros’s dream is to utilize his unique combination of entrepreneurial drives and janitorial savvy and flairs for creative billing and finding desperate recovering halfway-house guys who’ll scrub shit for next to nothing, to pile up enough $ to open a women’s shoe store in some mobilely upward part of Boston where the women are healthy and upscale and have good feet and can afford to take care of their feet. Gately spends a lot of the time around Stavros nodding and not saying really much of anything. Because what is there to really say about ambitious career-dreams involving feet? But Gately’ll be paying court-scheduled restitution well into his thirties if he stays straight, and needs the work. Foot-thing or no foot-thing. Stavros has allegedly been clean for eight years, but Gately has his private doubts about the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved. E.g. like Stavros gets easily aggravated at the Shattuck guys that can’t get up and out like they’re supposed to and clear out, and almost daily he’ll make a production of throwing down his mop in the middle of the floor and throwing his head back to scream: “Why don’t you sorry motherfucks just go home?” which so far for over thirteen months he hasn’t quit finding hilarious, his own witticism, Stavros.

  But the whole Clipperton saga highlights the way there are certain very talented jr. players who just cannot keep the lip stiff and fires stoked if they ever finally do achieve a top ranking or win some important event. Next to Clipperton, the most historically ghastly instance of this syndrome involved a kid from Fresno, in Central CA, also an unaffiliated kid (his dad, an architect or draftsman or something, functioned as his coach; his dad had played for UC-Davis or -Irvine or one of those; all the E.T.A. staff really emphasize is that again here was a kid w/o academy-support and -perspective), who, after upsetting two top seeds and winning the Pacific Coast Hardcourt Boys 18’s and getting toasted wildly at the post-tourney ceremony and ball and carried off on the shoulders of his dad and Fresno teammates, came home late that night and drank a big glass of Nestlé’s Quik laced with the sodium cyanide his Dad kept around for ink for drafting, drinks cyanitic Quik in his family’s home’s redecorated kitchen, and keels over dead, blue-faced and still with a ghastly mouthful of lethal Quik, and apparently his dad hears the thump of the kid keeling over and rushes into the kitchen in his bathrobe and leather slippers and tries to give the kid mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and but gets the odd bit of NaCN-laced Quik in his own mouth, from the kid, and also keels over and turns bright blue, and dies, and then t
he mom rushes in in a mud-mask and fluffy slippers and sees them both lying there bright blue and stiffening, and she tries giving the architect dad mouth-to-mouth and is of course in short order also lying there keeled over and blue, wherever she’s not mud-colored, from the mask, and but anyway dead as a rivet. And since the family has six more various-aged kids who as the night wears on come in from dates or patter down the stairs in little pajamas with adorable little pajama-feet attached to them, drawn by the noise of all the cumulative keeling over, plus I should mention the odd agonized gurgle-sound, and but since all six kids had gone through a four-hour Rotary-sponsored CPR course at Fresno’s YMCA, by the end of the night the whole family’s lying there blue-hued and stiff as posts, with incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around their rictus-grimaced mouths; and in sum this whole instance of unprepared-goal-attaintment-trauma is unbelievably gruesome and sad, and it’s one historical reason why all accredited tennis academies have to have a Ph.D.-level counselor on full-time staff, to screen student athletes for their possibly lethal reactions to ever actually reaching the level they’ve been pointed at for years. E.T.A.’s staff counselor is the bird-of-prey-faced Dr. Dolores Rusk, M.S., Ph.D., and she’s regarded by the kids as whatever’s just slightly worse than useless. You go in there with an Issue and all she’ll do is make a cage of her hands and look abstractly over the cage at you and take the last dependent clause of whatever you say and repeat it back to you with an interrogative lilt — ‘Possible homosexual attraction to your doubles partner?’ ‘Whole sense of yourself as a purposive male athlete messed with?’ ‘Uncontrolled boner during semis at Cleveland?’ ‘Drives you bats when people just parrot you instead of responding?’ ‘Having trouble keeping from twisting my twittery head off like a game-hen’s?’ — all with an expression she probably thinks looks blandly deep but which really looks exactly the way a girl’s face looks when she’s dancing with you but would really rather be dancing with just about anyone else in the room. Only the very newest E.T.A. players ever go to Rusk, and then not for long, and she spends her massive blocks of free time in her Comm.-Ad. office doing involved acrostics and working on some sort of pop-psych manuscript the first four pages of which Axford and Shaw dickied her lock and had a look at and counted 29 appearances of the prefix self-. Lyle, a dewimpled Carmelite who works the kitchen day-shift, occasionally Mario Incandenza, and many times Avril herself take up most of the psychic slack, for practical purposes, among E.T.A.s in the know.

  It’s possible that the only jr. tennis players who can win their way to the top and stay there without going bats are the ones who are already bats, or else who seem to be just grim machines à la John Wayne. Wayne’s sitting low on his spine in the dining hall with the other Canadian kids, watching the screen and squeezing a ball without any readable expression. Hal’s eyes are fevered and rolling around in his head. And actually by this time a lot of the eyes in the I.-Day audience have lost a bit of that festive sparkle. Though there’s a certain chortle-momentum left over from the film’s self-felonious Gentle/Clipperton comparisons, the Rodney-Tine-Luria-P.-love-rumor-and-Tine-as-Benedict-Arnold thing seems brow-clutchingly slow and digressive. 176 Plus there’s some retroactive puzzlement, because the advent of Subsidized Time is historically known to have been a revenue-response to the heady costs of the U.S.’s Reconfigurative giveaway, which means it must have come after formal Interdependence, and indeed in the film it does come after, but then the chronology of some of the end makes it seem like Tine sold Johnny Gentle on his whole Sino-temporal-endorsement revenue scheme sometime in Orin Incandenza’s first major-sport year at Boston U., which ended in the Year of the Whopper, pretty obviously a Subsidized year. By this time the E.T.A.s are eating more slowly, playing in that idle post-prandial way with the orts on their plates, and people’s hats are making some people’s heads itch, and plus everybody’s sugar-crashing a bit; and one of the really small E.T.A. kids crawling around with a bottle of adhesive under the tables has whacked his head on the sharp edge of an institutional chair and is in Avril I.’s lap crying with a desolate late-day hysteria that makes everybody feel jagged.

  GENTLE AT LARGE! — Superheader; TOURS NEW ‘NEW-NEW’ ENGLAND BORDER AMID TIGHT SECURITY — Header; WHACKS CHAMPAGNE BOTTLES AGAINST MASSIVE LUCITE WALLS SOUTH OF WHAT USED TO BE SYRACUSE, CONCORD NH, SALEM MA. — 10-point Subheader;

  GENTLE MORE OR LESS AT LARGE: WATCHES FROM OXYGENATED PORTABUBBLE AS CLEMSON DOWNS BOSTON U IN LAS VEGAS’S FORSYTHIA BOWL — Header from That Guy Who’s Now Reduced to Laying out Headlines for the Rantoul IL Eagle;

  CRANIALLY CHALLENGED, ACROMEGALIC INFANTS LOST IN EXPERIALIST SHUFFLE? — Editorial Header in Ithaca NY’s Daily Odyssean;

  GENTLE CABINET TO DRAFT BUDGET OVERHAUL IN LIGHT OF WALL STREET ANGST OVER COSTS OF ‘TERRITORIAL RECONFIGURATION’ — Header; ADMINISTRATION HEADS PUT TOGETHER ON MISSILE INVERSION EXPENDITURES, RELOCATION COSTS, LOSS OF REVENUE FROM BETTER PART OF FOUR STATES — Subheader.

  GENTLE [substantially muffled by both Fukoama microfiltration mask and oxygenated Lucite portabubble]: Boys.

  ALL SECS EXCEPT SEC. MEX. & SEC. CAN. [the Cabinet’s Motown-girl puppets, decked out for climactic camp, are all in wicked three-piecers with slicked-back-straight hair and enormous robber-baron steer-horn mustaches, which mustaches could be straighter but are on the whole pretty impressive mustaches, for female puppets]: Chief.

  SEC. DEF.: So then how was the big game, Mr. President?

  GENTLE: Ollster, boys: seminal, visionary. An outstanding experience. I now say things like outstanding instead of boss. But also seminal. Ollie, men, I saw something outstandingly visional and seminary yesterday. I do not refer to the football game. I normally don’t much get into football. All that grunting. Mud everywhere. Not my scene ordinarily. The most diverting single thing of the game was one of the two teams’ punters. This one slim cat with an outsized leg and slightly less outsized arm. Never saw punts I could hear before. Whoom. Blam. I ate an entire wiener stem to stern while one punt was in the air. People stood around conferring and making a racket and going to the restroom and coming back and eating concessions, all while this one cat’s punts were still in the air. What was that cat’s name again, R.T.?

  SEC. INT.: May I respectfully ask whether this is to be a lunch meeting, Mr. President? Is that why these Chinese-calendar-zodiac-Year-of-the-Tiger-and-like-Rat Szechuan-restaurant paper placemats are at all our places next to our water-pitchers? Are we going to get to tuck into some Chinese takeout, Chief?

  [Mario’s aural background becomes something with a brisk cornet, and there’s some glove-muffled finger-snapping from J.G.F.C., who’s lapsed into a visionary reverie.]

  SEC. TRANSP.: Always been partial to the General Tsu’s Chicken, if we’re —

  RODNEY TINE, CHIEF, UNITED STATES OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES: President Gentle’s asked us all here this morning to put our collective expertise together on an issue about which we in Unspecified Services believe he’s been hit with a truly seminal set of creative insights.

  GENTLE: Gentlemen, we’re both pleased and concerned to report that our seminal experiment in the Territorial Reconfiguration of O.N.A.N. 177 has been a thoroughgoing logistical coup. More or less. Delaware’s looking a bit crowded, and one or two curvy-horned animals apparently got by the tactical squads, and there’s rather less overall good sportsmanship in downstate New New York than we’d like to see, but overall I think ‘thoroughgoing coup’ would not be out of line as a term to describe this sort of success.