Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  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 —’

  ‘I’m 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 cliché 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 a
xiom 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.’ (back to text)

  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. (back to text)

  92. Diane Prins, Perth Amboy NJ. (back to text)

  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. (back to text)

  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 Lebensgef¨ahrtin 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. (back to text)

  95. Pink being Microsoft Inc.’s first post-Windows DOS, quickly upgraded to Pink2 when InterLace took everything 100% interactive and digital; by Y.D.A.U. it’s kind of a dinosaur, but it’s still the only DOS that’ll run a MathpakEndStat tree without having to stop and recompile every few seconds. (back to text)

  96. A kind of prorectorishly sad post in Amateur Sports Administration at tiny Throppinghamshire Provincial College in Fredericton N.B., C.T.’s undergrad alma mater. (back to text)

  97. It’s both perverse and kind of understandable that getting some sort of college scholarship (or ‘Ride’), while very few E.T.A.s (and certainly not Orin Incandenza) have any real kind of financial need, that nevertheless a scholarship is enormously important self-esteem-wise, since opting for the college-tennis route in the first place is kind of an admission of defeat and a surrender of dearly held dreams of the professional Show. (back to text)

  98. And to keep a distant but weirdly beady and obsessive eye on Mario, from whose lordotic presence in a room Tavis’d flee just as Avril was fleeing from the temptation of overlobbying Orin on B.U., such that for a few days when both Orin and Mario entered a room there’d be the sound of a tremendous collision in the hall outside as C.T. and Avril’s flights’ vectors met. (back to text)

  99. MA Dept. of Revenue. (back to text)

  100. The way a White Flagger formulates this, e.g., is that 99.9% of what goes on in one’s life is actually none of one’s business, with the .1% under one’s control consisting mostly of the option to accept or deny one’s inevitable powerlessness over the other 99.9%, which just trying to parse this out makes Don Gately’s forehead turn purple. (back to text)

  101. Some of their earliest dates were watching big-budget commercial films, and Orin had one time completely unpremeditatedly told her it was a strange feeling watching commercial films with a girl who was prettier than the women in the films, and she’d punched him hard in the arm in a way that just about drove him wild. (back to text)

  102. International Brotherhood of Pier, Wharf, and Dock Workers. (back to text)

  103. A quote ‘episode of excessive neuronal discharge manifested by motor, sensory and/or [psychic] dysfunction, with or without unconsciousness and/or convulsive [movements],’ plus eye-rolling and tongue-swallowing. (back to text)

  104. In order for O.N.A.N.T.A. academies to qualify as actual schools and not just like extended-term sports camps, all instructors and prorectors except the Head have to be listed as more like academic instructors who prorect on the side. (back to text)

  105. A Dworkinite heavy-leather organization whose membership on the U.S. East Coast was in the five figures up until the ugly Pizzitola Riots of Providence RI in Y.W.-Q.M.D. discredited the F.O.P.P.P.s, and fragmented them. (back to text)

  106. There’s a Viewing Room on each subdorm floor, and room-size TP’s w/ phone consoles and (if a kid wants) modems are standard issue, but only E.T.A. juniors and seniors get to have actual cartridge-viewers in their subdorm rooms — a two-year-old administrative concession the credit for which goes largely to Troeltsch, who made such a pest of himself with Charles Tavis over the issue that Tavis finally relented just to keep the kid from lurking in his office’s waiting room, speaking into his fist, pretending to report on ‘the flames of controversy surrounding individual rights raging here in quaint and peaceful Enfield’ — and none of these viewers (likewise the Viewing Room’s units) can have motherboard-cards for Spontaneous InterLace Disseminations or for ROM-caliber games, which broadcasts and videoish games encourage a stuporous passivity that E.T.A.’s philosophy now regards as venomous to the whole set of reasons the kids are enrolled there in the first place. (back to text)

  107. E.g. the WhataBurger Invitational will allegedly be recorded for fringe-market, order-only viewing, later this month. (back to text)

  108. Sometimes, especially in early fall and late spring, this can involve a lapse of several weeks; WETA doesn’t broadcast when most of the kids are away at some competitive thing, and Saturday classes are likewise often canceled — this is one reason why so many prorectors’ classes are relegated by Mrs. A.M.I. to Saturdays. (back to text)

  109. Apparently the Parti Q. is provincial, intra-Québecois; the Bloc’s its federal counterpart, w/ members in Parliament, and so on and so forth. (back to text)

  110.

  Q.v. here later in the same day, 11/7, as Hal Incandenza sits on the edge of his unmade bed, undressed, with the good right leg curled under him and the bad ankle soaking in a janitor-pail of dissolved Epsom salts, looking through one of Mario’s old Hush Puppy shoeboxes of letters and snapshots. Saturdays involve classes and drills and P.M. matches but no conditioning run or weight circuits. Afternoon’s odd mismatched challenge matches held on staff-squeegeed Center Courts under a steady metal sunless sky. The air still damp after lunchtime’s rain. Hal’s own odd match was truncated when C-squadder Hugh Pemberton took a ball in the eye up at net and began wandering the service box in wobbled circles. Hal skipped a quick trip down to the Pump Room and got to shower nearly solo in the main locker room. Tomorrow’s Interdependence Day communal supper at E.T.A. is a big deal and includes each person’s own specially selected hat, plus real dessert, and a post-prandial Mario-made film, and sometimes a sing-along. Hal and Pemulis, Struck and Axford and Troeltsch and Schacht and sometimes Stice have their own special private day-before-I.-Day-ritualistic-supper-out-and-trip-
to-The-Unexamined-Life blowout-gala, since Sunday is a day of total mandatory R&R. The untruncated matches are winding down out there, Hal can hear. The sun is coming out just in time to go down. The Comm.-Ad. pipes start to moan and sing with crowded showering kids. Pale net-shadows are starting to elongate acutely across the sidelines of the courts’ north sides. Mario is more or less the Incandenza family archivist ex officio. Mario has been closeted with Disney Leith all day preparing things for Sunday’s post-prandial gala and filmfest. The phone sits mute atop the answering-machine attachment on the telephone’s power unit’s console. Its antenna is retracted and it simply sits there, exuding the vague contained menace of mute phones. The phone’s ringer sort of twitters instead of ringing. The audio-only comm.-system’s power console is bolted to a receptacle on the side of Hal and Mario’s TP, and its red power light blinks at the slow liquid rate of a radio tower. The phone and answering machine are hand-me-downs from Orin’s days at E.T.A., old models of transparent plastic, so you can see everything’s quad-colored pasta of wires and chips and tin disks. The only message when Hal got in was from Orin at 1412h. Orin had said he’d just called to ask whether by any chance Hal’d ever realized that all of Emily Dickinson — as in the Belle of Amherst Emily Dickinson, the canonical agoraphobic poet — that every single one of Ms. Dickinson’s canonical poems could by sung without loss or syllabic distortion to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose (of Texas).’ ‘Because I could not stop for Death He kin dly stopped for Me,’ Orin had sung illustratively onto the recording. ‘I hope the Fa ther in the skies Will lift his litt le Girl.’ Actually more like sort of sung. There’d been professional-locker-room sounds in the background — locker doors banging, bass voices on tile and steel, personal stereos, hisses of antiperspirant and styling-spritz. The odd enclosed echo of locker rooms everywhere, junior or pro. ‘On my volca no grows the Grass A me dita tive spot,’ and so on. The fleshy pop of a professionally snapped towel on adult skin. A black man’s falsetto laughter. Orin’s recorded voice said he’d just grabbed an odd free second to inquire what Hal’s machine might make of this fact.