‘Which is in your words your first knowledge of untowardness with Wayne.’
‘My first is I get out there still trying to counsel the Postheimer and here on the speaker’s Wayne doing what Keith observed may have been a sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis.’
It had been uncanny. It had made Stice look like a rank amateur. Wayne had told Troeltsch to pretend he was some adolescent girl: this was adolescent Tavis asking her for a date; Pemulis shuddered; he couldn’t exactly remember all the little mannerisms, which Wayne’d clearly gotten locked down from Tavis always sitting next to him on the bus back from victories going at him nonstop, but in outline it was Chuckie Tavis coming up to some Canadian cheerleader or something and telling her he was going to be completely open with her: he had a terrible fear of rejection; he was telling her up-front now that tomorrow he was going to ask her out for a date and was begging her not openly to reject him if she didn’t want to go, to think up some plausible excuse — though of course he said he realized that what he was saying would make that excuse hard to believe, now that he’s openly asked her to make up an excuse.
‘Whereupon the whole Academy hears Mr. Troeltsch prompt Wayne into making public castigations of his various peers and instructors.’
‘I’ve got to say it did seem like Troeltsch had kind of orchestrated things somehow, sir, was my impression.’
‘Referring to Corbett Thorp as a —’ pretending to riffle through the papers so Pemulis’d have to see the 17-into-56 leaflet several times as it came up in the riffle.
‘I believe the expression was “a palsied twit,” ’ Nwangi said to deLint.
‘Yes “palsied twit.” And Francis Unwin quote “has the on-court look of a cornered rodent.” And Disney R. Leith: the quote “sort of man you always end up sitting next to at civic functions.” Ms. Richardson-Levy-o’Byrne-Chawaf as chair of some sort of committee dealing with the topic of the quote “Itty Bitty Titty.” On Coach Schtitt, quote, seeming as if he’d been “denied some kind of vitally important moisture from birth henceforward.” Our own Mr. Nwangi here being in rough quote if I’ve got it quote “the sort of fellow who’ll be in a Chinese restaurant with you and won’t even share food or trade food.” ’
‘Meaning mean-spirited.’ Nwangi threw his head back and beamed like he was blind. What was chilling was that in Wayne’s scenario Tavis does succeed, Wayne projects, in seducing the Canadian cheerleader or whatever, even when he’s totally open on the date about the fact that he’d deliberately told her he was afraid of rejection in the first place only as a strategy to make him seem to her different from other boys, more honest and open, so that the scenario was that the honesty was so exhausting she’d basically just laid back exhausted and let him X her just to shut him up. Except — chillingly — he hadn’t shut up.
‘— including some sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis carrying on a monologue during the act of sexual intercourse,’ deLint said, trying to find it in the sheaf. ‘On Bernadette Longley: “Bernadette Longley looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around.” On Mary Esther Thode: “a face like a pancake.” On the Academy’s own late Founder and husband of the Dean of Ac.-Aff.: “so full of himself he could have shit limbs.” Unquote. On his own doubles partner Hal Incandenza: “by all appearances addicted to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is fittable in the mouth.” ’
‘I’m remembering the word as insertable.’ Pemulis kicked himself, mentally. The pancake thing had been expanded to like fifteen seconds as Wayne had sketched M. E. Thode’s face as circular, burned, freckled, cratered, doughy, shiny, soggy, on and on. Plus somehow even more chilling was that Pemulis knew from Inc that Wayne’s pseudo-Tavis ‘I-live-in-fear-of-rejection’ ploy was actually in the top five or ten of the troubling ‘Strategies’ that Inc’s brother Orin the punter called up to Hal about employing to X young married women.
‘Donni Stott has we’re informed “skin like an attaché case and is a compelling advertisement for sunscreen.” I myself am, here I quote, quote “a man who would not lend his own mother a quarter for a rubber tip for her crutch.” ’
‘Is the emerging point that this is going to impact my getting to go on the WhataBurger trip?’
Nwangi crumpled and slapped his knee. His face literally looked like a very dark hatchet. Tex Watson reached down behind the console he was slumped in his chair by and brought out Pemulis’s special yachting cap and dangled it like something you want a dog to jump for. From someplace under Nwangi’s chair were brought out two pharmaceutical scales, several jeweller’s loupes, the tow truck’s supply of empty sterile Visine bottles, and plus every bottle from Troeltsch’s bedside table, which clearly Troeltsch had eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese.
Pemulis tasted the metallic taste of a seriously anxious stomach. ‘I request to see the Dean of Ac.-Aff. before any of this goes further.’
‘We have again Ms. Heath, apparently on someone’s mind very much today, now said to be the sort of person who quote “cries at card tricks.” We have a Rik Dunkel who “could not find his own bottom with both hands and a nautical compass of exacting precision.” We have a return engagement with Ms. Heath, described as “dwelling always at the edge of some vast continent of menstrual hysteria.” We have our own beloved Tex, sitting right here, described as having “a tiny liquid-filled nubbin at the top of the spine” in lieu of higher cortex function.’
‘Aubs, no kidding: something pressing I have to interface about with Mrs. Inc. Tell her it concerns U.S.-Canadian relations.’
Nwangi’s laugh was high and had the slight teakettle-wheeze to it of the laughs of large black men the world over. ‘She sends you her regards, the Dean said to tell you.’ He slapped his knee three times.
DeLint looked a little less happy because he clearly didn’t know what any of it was about and didn’t like playing coded messenger, but he still looked pretty happy: ‘Michael Mathew Pemulis, the Academy’s Dean of Academic Affairs said to tell you the administration’s too naturally concerned about the state of one of our two very finest current talents, who it’s clear he’s been unwittily dosed with an artificial stimulant prohibited by federal statute, O.N.A.N.T.A. regulations, and the Enfield Tennis Academy Honor-Code Specs on Artificial Substances, to permit itself the satisfaction of giving you the Dean’s very best regards and her wish that quote “may the road rise up to meet you whitherever your future travels lie.” ’ DeLint probed his ear. ‘I think that was it in a nutshell.’
Pemulis got very cool and brass-mask-faced. He was breathing very clearly through his nose, and the office air seemed mentholated. Everything got very cool and formal inside and glycerine-clear. ‘Aubs, before anything gets nailed in stone that we’ll all I promise you and Mrs. Inc we’ll all of us regret —’
DeLint said ‘I was given to understand you can either finish out the term for credit or you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of pockets on a stick like a bandanna to some other O.N.A.N.T.A. institution and see if they’ll take a senior without any kind of positive reference, which the sense I get is the administration says fat chance on any kind of reference.’
Tex Watson said something about urine.
Pemulis recrossed his leg. DeLint looked at Nwangi:
‘I believe the kid is speechless.’
‘I believe he has nothing to say.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘And something about you’re invited to shout whatever you threatened the administration to shout about from the highest hill you can find, which pretty soon won’t be this one.’
Nwangi got out through laughter: ‘And that the administrative office doorknobs have been rubberized and grounded, the administrative files all recryptographilated, everyone’s room’s mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, Mrs. Inc said to tell you.’
The little deck-of-cards riffle of the wings of the Shit Fairy, which he privately envisions as a kind of violet incubus with t
he Da’s saggy frown. Pemulis scratched very coolly next to his ear. ‘And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?’
DeLint told Pemulis he just fucking slayed him while Watson looked from face to face and Nwangi rocked and wheezed and slapped at his knee, and Pemulis, close-mouthed and breathing with terrible ease, found their good humor almost infectious. (back to text)
333. Put out by the Mass Division of S.A.S., listing meetings of all but the very most lunatic-fringe-type 12-Step Programs in city, sub-, and exurbs, all up and down both Shores, the Cape, and Nantucket. (back to text)
334. Hal’s Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob H., which started as a wry dark mental joke and now within a week has become the way Hal characterizes abstinence to himself, which any Boston AA would tell him isn’t a very promising way to think about it at all, in terms of self-pity. (back to text)
335. Except of course for a certain hardwired type of pornography- and onanistic sex-addict, which has given rise to a couple exceptionally icky Step-based fellowships. (back to text)
336. (according to his sudoriferous and and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain) (back to text)
337. Latin blunder for self-defense’s se defendendo is sic, either a befogged muddling of a professional legal term, or a post-Freudian slip, or (least likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet — namely V.i. 9. (back to text)
338. Ketorolac tromethamine, a non-narcotic analgesic, little more than Motrin with ambition — ®Syntex Labs. (back to text)
339. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. (back to text)
340. Doxycycline hyclate, an I.V.-antibiotic —®Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals. (back to text)
341. Oxycodone hydrochloride + acetaminophen, a Schedule C-III narcotic oral analgesic — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals. (back to text)
342. Or possibly Babel. (back to text)
343. Boston AA slogan meaning trying to quit addictive Substance-use without working any kind of Recovery Program. (back to text)
344. E.T.S.’s a Advanced Placement Standardized Subject Tests, which Hal Incandenza’s signed up to take in English and (Parisian) French. (back to text)
345. The College of Basic Studies Bldg. on Commonwealth and Granby, approx. 3 clicks east-southeast of E.T.A. (back to text)
346. Montréal International Airport-D’Orval, Cartierville Airport being now restricted to intra-Québec flights only. (back to text)
347. (Which in fact she doesn’t, but she had had perfume on the last time she wore the hulpil.) (back to text)
348. An R. Catholic church just off Brighton Center. (back to text)
349. Sic. (back to text)
350. Or a face writhing in involuntary disgust at Don G.’s own armlessness and hook, maybe. (back to text)
351. As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: ‘My Life Is Unmanageable and I’d Like to Share It With You.’ (back to text)
352. Reference to January-February Y.D.A.U., when person or persons unknown went around coating selected toothbrushes of the Boys and Girls 16’s with what was finally pinpointed as betel-nut extract, causing panic and internecine finger-pointing and resulting in serial oxidation-treatment visits to Dr. E. Zegarelli, D.D.S., by half a dozen E.T.A.s until the brush-tamperings ceased as suddenly as they’d begun; and now nine months later no one still has the slightest idea re perpetrator or point. (back to text)
353. Which runs not to Enfield-Brighton but to Roxbury and Mattapan, places where it is very bad nighttime joss indeed to be both white and incapacitated. (back to text)
354. Q.v. note a to Note 12. (back to text)
355. Anexsia — ®SmithKline Beecham Laboratories. (back to text)
356. Levo-Dromoran — ®Roche Laboratories. (back to text)
357. Numorphan, kind of a watered-down Dilaudid — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals. (back to text)
358. Perwin NX — hBoswell Medications Ltd., Canada — which accounts for the C-III, because the Canadians are notoriously insane when it comes to forecasting abuse-potential. (back to text)
359. A.k.a. Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride — ®Roche, Inc. — a low-grade Valiumish tranq. (back to text)
360. A C-III and sort of entry-level oral narcotic, the side-effects and inconsistent buzz of which often send abusers up the ladder to C-II compounds. (back to text)
361. A.k.a. hyoscyamine sulfate — ®Schwarz Pharma Kremers Urban, Inc. — an anti-spasmodic for anything from colitis to Irritable Bowel Syndrome. (back to text)
362. A.k.a. methaqualone, now manufactured outside O.N.A.N. jurisdiction under the trade name Parestol. (back to text)
363. Later one-third of the rent-and-strip-luxury-apts. crew, and even later Gately’s trusted colleague on some of his most disastrous and bottom-hastening home-invasions, including that of one G. DuPlessis, which Kite ended up regretting exponentially more than Gately did, once the A.F.R. got through with him. (back to text)
364. MDA, MDMA (‘X’), MMDA-2 (‘Love Boat’), MMDA–3a (‘Eve’), DMMDA-2 (‘Starry Night’), etc. (back to text)
365. Long-Term Institution. (back to text)
366. Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom’s turgid studies of artistic influenza — though it’s unclear how either Flood- or dead-ancestor discussions have any connection to S. Peterson’s low-budget classic The Cage, which is mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around, other than the fact that J. O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could; maybe the ‘disjunction’ or ‘disconnection’ between the screen’s film and Ph.D.’s scholastic discussion of art is part of the point. a (back to text)
367. Though they did, just as in depictions of organized crime in popular entertainment, often change the cell-phones they used, to avoid potential taps or Pen Registers — Sorkin buying new units and #s, Gately more often borrowing student R.N.s’ cellulars and then returning them after a few days. One of Gately’s biggest challenges in this career was remembering all the different fucking phone numbers and addresses of luxury-apts.-ofthe-week when he was strafed on Bam-Bams just about all the time. (back to text)
368. Cimetidine — ®SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals — 800-mg. spansules for generalized cranio-vascular woe (derived, kind of interestingly, from the same ergot rye-mold as LSD). (back to text)
369. For the two maps Sorkin had to have eliminated altogether during this period, it’s maybe worth observing that he eschewed both Towers and instead used the thuggish ex-Québecer muscleboys DesMontes and Pointgravè, who had no real loyalties or membership in any community and hired themselves out as enforcers for books and high-interest lenders all up and down both Shores. Gately did, as a coercive collector, demap one person, but it was essentially an accident — the debtor had been blond, and drinking Heinekens, and then when things got physical he’d squirted Gately in the face with Mace, and a red curtain of rage had descended over Gately’s sight, and when he’d come back to himself the debtor’s head was turned 180° around on his neck and had the little Mace can all the way up one nostril, and it was the most professionally horrified Gately had ever been up until the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T., which anyway occurred much later and when Gately was way more nonviolence-prone. (back to text)
370. Purified pork insulin in a zinc suspension — ®Lilly Pharmaceuticals. (back to text)
371. An elite private high school up near the Methuen salient. (back to text)
372. Surely skeet and vig, meaning debt and bookmaker’s automatic percentage (usually 10% subtracted from winnings or added to skeet) are not just metro Boston terms. (back to text)
373. A.k.a. Acetylcysteine-20 — ®Bristol Laboratories — a nebulizable prophylaxis against the post-traumatic buildup of abnormal, viscid, or inspissated mucus. (back to text)
374. With the hard-ch sound distinctive of North Shore pronun. of words like Chicago and c
hampagne. (back to text)
375. Known less sensitively among neuro-urology residents as ‘Dizzy Dick Disorder’ or sometimes just ‘3-D.’ (back to text)
376. Knoll Laboratories’ good old Dilaudid — $666.00/g. wholesale and $5/mg. street at Y.W.-Q.M.D. valuations. (back to text)
377. A ‘Phillips Screwdriver,’ vodka and Milk of Magnesia, which Gately finds nauseous and privately refers to as a ‘lowball.’ (back to text)
378. (As opposed to self-confronting, presumably.) (back to text)
379. See Note 144 supra. (back to text)
380. The 1.3:1-aspect-ratio rectangle scanned by electron beams in video imaging, now replaced by multi-interlace a solid-field HD digital imaging. (back to text)
381. More like B.S. 1926, according to the Still Photo Archive at NNY City’s Museum of Modern Art. Plus n.b. the print — which Hal correctly remembers Avril always loathing a — long pre-dated J.O.I.’s ever picking up a camera. (back to text)
382. Whether in singles against him or doubles alongside, when Hal is on-court with Wayne he always gets the creepy feeling that Wayne has control out there not just of his voluntary CNS but also of his heartrate and blood pressure, the diameter of his pupils, etc., which feeling is not only creepy but distracting, adding to the tension of playing with Wayne. (back to text)
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