The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  At the White Flag raffle-break Gately usually stands around chain-smoking with the Ennet House residents, so that he’s casually available to answer questions and empathize with complaints. He usually waits til after the meeting to do his own complaining to Ferocious Francis, with whom Gately now shares the important duty of ‘breaking down the hall,’ sweeping floors and emptying ashtrays and wiping down the long cafeteria tables, which F.F.G.’s function is limited because he’s on oxygen and his function consists mostly of standing there sucking oxygen and holding an unlit cigar while Gately breaks down the hall. Gately rather likes Ken Erdedy, who came into the House about a month ago from some cushy Belmont rehab. Erdedy’s an upscale guy, what Gately’s mother would have called a yuppie, an account executive at Viney and Veals Advertising downtown his Intake form said, and though he’s about Gately’s age he’s so softly good-looking in that soft mannequinish way Harvard and Tufts schoolboys have, and looks so smooth and groomed all the time even in jeans and a plain cotton sweater, that Gately thinks of him as much younger, totally ungrizzled, and refers to him mentally as ‘kid.’ Erdedy’s in the House mainly for ‘marijuana addiction,’ which Gately has a hard time Identifying with anybody getting in enough trouble with weed to leave his job and condo to bunk in a room full of tattooed guys who smoke in their sleep, and to work like pumping gas (Erdedy just started his nine-month humility job at the Merit station down by North Harvard St. in Allston) for 32 minimum-wage hours a week. Or to have his leg be joggling like that all the time from tensions of Withdrawal: from fucking grass? But it’s not Gately’s place to say what’s bad enough to make somebody Come In and what isn’t, not for anybody else but himself, and the shapely but big-time-troubled new girl Kate Gompert—who mostly just stays in her bed in the new women’s 5-Woman room when she isn’t at meetings, and is on a Suicidality Contract with Pat, and isn’t getting the usual pressure to get a humility job, and gets to get some sort of scrip-meds out of the meds locker every morning—Kate Gompert’s counselor Danielle S. reported at the last Staff Meeting that Kate had finally opened up and told her she’d mostly Come In for weed, too, and not the lightweight prescription tranqs she’d listed on her Intake form. Gately used to treat weed like tobacco. He wasn’t like some other narcotics addicts who smoked weed when they couldn’t get anything else; he always smoked weed and could always get something else and simply smoked weed while he did whatever else he could get. Gately doesn’t miss weed much. The shocker-type AA Miracle is he doesn’t much miss the Demerol, either, today.

  A hard November wind is spattering goopy sleet against the broad windows all around the hall. The Provident Nursing Home cafeteria is lit by a checkerboard array of oversized institutional bulbs overhead, a few of which are always low and give off fluttery strobes. The fluttering bulbs are why Pat Montesian and all the other photic-seizure-prone area AAs never go to White Flag, opting for the Freeway Group over in Brookline or the candyass Lake Street meeting up in West Newton on Sunday nights, which Pat M. bizarrely drives all the way up from her home down on the South Shore in Milton to get to, to hear people talk about their analysts and Saabs. There is no way to account for people’s taste in AA. The White Flag hall is so brightly lit up all Gately can see out any of the windows is a kind of shiny drooling black against everybody’s pale reflection.

  Miracle’s one of the Boston AA terms Erdedy and the brand-new and very shaky veiled girl resident standing over him complain they find hard to stomach, as in ‘We’re All Miracles Here’ and ‘Don’t Leave Five Minutes Before The Miracle Happens’ and ‘To Stay Sober For 24 Hours Is A Miracle.’

  Except the brand-new girl, either Joelle V. or Joelle D., who said she’d hit the occasional meeting in the past before her Bottom and had been roundly repelled, and is still pretty much cynical and repelled, she said on the way down to Provident under Gately’s direct new-resident supervision, says she finds even the word Miracle preferable to the constant AA talk about ‘the Grace of God,’ which reminds her of wherever she grew up, where she’s indicated places of worship were often aluminum trailers or fiberboard shacks and church-goers played with copperheads in the services to honor something about serpents and tongues.

  Gately’s also observed how Erdedy’s also got that Tufts-Harvard way of speaking without seeming to move his lower jaw.

  ‘It’s as if it’s its own country or something,’ Erdedy complains, legs crossed in maybe a bit of a faggy schoolboy way, looking around at the raffle-break, sitting in Gately’s generous shadow. ‘The first time I ever talked, over at the St. E’s meeting on Wednesday, somebody comes up after the Lord’s Prayer and says “Good to hear you, I could really I.D. with that bottom you were sharing about, the isolating, the can’t-and-can’t, it’s the greenest I’ve felt in months, hearing you.” And then gives me this raffle ticket with his phone number that I didn’t ask for and says I’m right where I’m supposed to be, which I have to say I found a bit patronizing.’

  The best noise Gately produces is his laugh, which booms and reassures, and a certain haunted hardness goes out of his face when he laughs. Like most huge men, Gately has kind of a high hoarse speaking voice; his larynx sounds compressed. ‘I still hate that right-where-you’re-supposed-to-be thing,’ he says, laughing. He likes that Erdedy, sitting, looks right up at him and cocks his head slightly to let Gately know he’s got his full attention. Gately doesn’t know that this is a requisite for a white-collar job where you have to show you’re attending fully to clients who are paying major sums and get to expect an overt display of full attention. Gately is still not yet a good judge of anything about upscale people except where they tend to hide their valuables.

  Boston AA, with its emphasis on the Group, is intensely social. The raffle-break goes on and on. An intoxicated street-guy with a venulated nose and missing incisors and electrician’s tape wrapped around his shoes is trying to sing ‘Volare’ up at the empty podium microphone. He is gently, cheerfully induced offstage by a Crocodile with a sandwich and an arm around the shoulders. There’s a certain pathos to the Crocodile’s kindness, his clean flannel arm around the weatherstained shoulders, which pathos Gately feels and likes being able to feel it, while he says ‘But at least the “Good to hear you” I quit minding. It’s just what they say when somebody’s got done speaking. They can’t say like “Good job” or “You spoke well,” cause it can’t be anybody’s place here to judge if anybody else did good or bad or whatnot. You know what I’m saying, Tiny, there?’

  Tiny Ewell, in a blue suit and laser chronometer and tiny shoes whose shine you could read by, is sharing a dirty aluminum ashtray with Nell Gunther, who has a glass eye which she amuses herself by usually wearing so the pupil and iris face in and the dead white and tiny manufacturer’s specifications on the back of the eye face out. Both of them are pretending to study the blond false wood of the tabletop, and Ewell makes a bit of a hostile show of not looking up or responding to Gately or entering into the conversation in any way, which is his choice and on him alone, so Gately lets it go. Wade McDade has a Walkman going, which is technically OK at the raffle-break although it’s not a real good idea. Chandler Foss is flossing his teeth and pretending to throw the used floss at Jennifer Belbin. Most of the Ennet House residents are mingling satisfactorily. The couple of residents that are black are mingling with other blacks.141 The Diehl kid and Doony Glynn are amusing themselves telling homosexuality jokes to Morris Hanley, who sits smoothing his hair with his fingertips, pretending to not even acknowledge, his left hand still bandaged. Alfonso Parias-Carbo is standing with three Allston Group guys, smiling broadly and nodding, not understanding a word anybody says. Bruce Green has gone downstairs to the men’s head and amused Gately by asking his permission first. Gately told him to go knock himself out. Green has good big arms and no gut, even after all the Substances, and Gately suspects he might have played some ball at some point. Kate Gompert is totally by herself at a nonsmoking table over by a window, ignoring her pale reflection and
making little cardboard tents out of her raffle tickets and moving them around. Clenette Henderson clutches another black girl and laughs and says ‘Girl!’ several times. Emil Minty is clutching his head. Geoff Day in his black turtleneck and blazer keeps lurking on the fringes of various groups of people pretending he’s part of the conversations. No immediate sign of Burt F. Smith or Charlotte Treat. Randy Lenz, in his cognito white mustache and sideburns, is doubtless at the pay phone in the northeast corner of the Provident lobby downstairs: Lenz spends nearly unacceptable amounts of time either on a phone or trying to get in position to use a phone. ‘Cause what I like,’ Gately says to Erdedy (Erdedy really is listening, even though there’s a compellingly cheap young woman in a brief white skirt and absurd black mesh stockings sitting with her legs nicely crossed—one-strap low-spike black Ferragamos, too—at the periphery of his vision, and the woman is with a large man, which makes her even more compelling; and also the veiled new girl’s breasts and her hips’ clefs are compelling and distracting, next to him, even in a long baggy loose blue sweater that matches the embroidered selvage around her veil), ‘What I think I like is how “It was good to hear you” ends up, like, saying two separate things together.’ Gately’s also saying this to Joelle, who it’s weird but you can tell she’s looking at you, even through the linen veil. There’s maybe half a dozen or so other veiled people in the White Flag hall tonight; a decent percentage of people in the 11-Step Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed are also in 12-Step fellowships for other issues besides hideous deformity. Most of the room’s veiled AAs are women, though there is this one male veiled U.H.I.D. guy that’s an active White Flagger, Tommy S. or F., who years ago nodded out on a stuffed acrylic couch with a bottle of Rémy and a lit Tiparillo—the guy now wears U.H.I.D. veils and a whole spectrum of silk turtlenecks and assorted hats and classy lambskin driving gloves. Gately’s had the U.H.I.D.-and-veil philosophy explained to him in passing a couple times but still doesn’t much get it, it seems like a gesture of shame and concealment, still, to him, the veil. Pat Montesian had said there’s been a few other U.H.I.D.s who’d gone through Ennet House prior to the Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland, which is when new resident Gately came wobbling in, but this Joelle van Dyne, who Gately feels he has zero handle on yet as a person or how serious she is about putting down Substances and Coming In to really get straight, this Joelle is the first veiled resident Gately’s had under him, as a Staffer. This Joelle girl, that wasn’t even on the two-month waiting list for Intake, got in overnight under some private arrangement with somebody on the House’s Board of Directors, upscale Enfield guys into charity and directing. There’d been no Intake interview with Pat at the House; the girl just showed up two days ago right after supper. She’d been up at Brigham and Women’s for five days after some sort of horrific O.D.-type situation said to have included both defib paddles and priests. She’d had real luggage and this like Chinese portable dressing-screen thing with clouds and pop-eyed dragons that even folded lengthwise took both Green and Parias-Carbo to lug upstairs. There’s been no talk of a humility job for her, and Pat’s counseling the girl personally. Pat’s got some sort of privately directed arrangement with the girl; Gately’s already seen enough private-type arrangements between certain Staffers and residents to feel like it’s maybe kind of a character defect of Ennet House. A girl from the Brookline Young People’s Group over in a cheerleader skirt and slut-stockings is ignoring all the ashtrays and putting her extra-long gasper out on the bare tabletop two rows over as she laughs like a seal at something an acne’d guy in a long camelhair car coat he hasn’t taken off and sockless leather dance-shoes Gately’s never seen at a meeting before says. And he’s got his hand on hers as she grinds the gasper out. Something like putting a cigarette out against the wood-grain plastic tabletop, which Gately can already see the ragged black burn-divot that’s formed, it’s something the rankness of which would never have struck him one way or the other, before, until Gately took on half the break-down-the-hall-and-wipe-down-the-tables job at Ferocious Francis G.’s suggestion, and now he feels sort of proprietary about the Provident’s tabletops. But it’s not like he can go over and take anybody else’s inventory and tell them how to behave. He settles for imagining the girl pinwheeling through the air toward a glass wall.

  ‘When they say it it sort of means like what you said was good for them, it helped them out somehow,’ he says, ‘but plus now also I like saying it myself because if you think about it it also means it was good to be able to hear you. To really hear.’ He’s trying subtly to alternate and look at Erdedy and Joelle both, like he’s addressing them both. It’s not something he’s good at. His head’s too big to be subtle with. ‘Because I remember for like the first sixty days or so I couldn’t hear shit. I didn’t hear nothing. I’d just sit there and Compare, I’d go to myself, like, “I never rolled a car,” “I never lost a wife,” “I never bled from the rectum.” Gene would tell me to just keep coming for a while and sooner or later I’d start to be able to both listen and hear. He said it’s hard to really hear. But he wouldn’t say what was the difference between hearing and listening, which pissed me off. But after a while I started to really hear. It turns out—and this is just for me, maybe—but it turned out hearing the speaker means like all of a sudden hearing how fucking similar the way he felt and the way I felt were, Out There, at the Bottom, before we each Came In. Instead of just sitting here resenting being here and thinking how he bled from the ass and I didn’t and how that means I’m not as bad as him yet and I can still be Out There.’

  One of the tricks to being of real service to newcomers is not to lecture or give advice but only talk about your own personal experience and what you were told and what you found out personally, and to do it in a casual but positive and encouraging way. Plus you’re supposed to try and Identify with the newcomer’s feelings as much as possible. Ferocious Francis G. says this is one of the ways guys with just a year or two sober can be most helpful: being able to sincerely ID with the newly Sick and Suffering. Ferocious Francis told Gately as they were wiping down tables that if a Crocodile with decades of sober AA time can still sincerely empathize and Identify with a whacked-out bug-eyed Disease-ridden newcomer then there’s something deeply fucked up about that Crocodile’s recovery. The Crocodiles, decades sober, live in a totally different spiritual galaxy, inside. One long-timer describes it as he has a whole new unique interior spiritual castle, now, to live in.

  Part of this new Joelle girl’s pull for Ken Erdedy isn’t just the sexual thing of her body, which he finds made way sexier by the way the overlarge blue coffee-stained sweater tries to downplay the body thing without being so hubristic as to try to hide it—sloppy sexiness pulls Erdedy in like a well-groomed moth to a lit window—but it’s also the veil, wondering what horrific contrast to the body’s allure lies swollen or askew under that veil; it gives the pull a perverse sideways slant that makes it even more distracting, and so Erdedy cocks his head a little more up at Gately and narrows his eyes to make his listening-look terribly intense. He doesn’t know that there’s an abstract distance in the look that makes it seem like he’s studying a real bitch of a 7-iron on the tenth rough or something; the look doesn’t communicate what he thinks his audience wants it to.

  The raffle-break is winding down as everybody starts to want their own ashtray. Two more big urns of coffee emerge from the kitchen door over by the literature table. Erdedy is probably the second-biggest leg-and-foot-joggler in present residence, after Geoffrey D. Joelle v. D. now says something very strange. It’s a very strange little moment, right at the end of the raffle-break, and Gately later finds it impossible to describe it in his Log entry for the P.M. shift. It is the first time he realizes that Joelle’s voice—crisp and rich and oddly empty, her accent just barely Southern and with a strange and it turns out Kentuckian lapse in the pronunciation of all apicals except s—is familiar in a faraway way that both makes it familiar and yet lets Ga
tely be sure he’s never once met her before, Out There. She inclines the plane of her blue-bordered veil briefly toward the floor’s tile (very bad tile, scab-colored, nauseous, worst thing about the big room by far), brings it back up level (unlike Erdedy she’s standing, and in flats is nearly Gately’s height), and says that she’s finding it especially hard to take when these earnest ravaged folks at the lectern say they’re ‘Here But For the Grace of God,’ except that’s not the strange thing she says, because when Gately nods hard and starts to interject about ‘It was the same for—’ and wants to launch into a fairly standard Boston AA agnostic-soothing riff about the ‘God’ in the slogan being just shorthand for a totally subjective and up-to-you ‘Higher Power’ and AA being merely spiritual instead of dogmatically religious, a sort of benign anarchy of subjective spirit, Joelle cuts off his interjection and says that but that her trouble with it is that ‘But For the Grace of God’ is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. ‘But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin’s bathroom floor,’ so that an indicative transposition like ‘I’m here But For the Grace of God’ is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it’s meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in. Gately looks at a rectangular blue-selvaged expanse of clean linen whose gentle rises barely allude to any features below, he looks at her and has no idea whether she’s serious or not, or whacked, or trying like Dr. Geoff Day to erect Denial-type fortifications with some kind of intellectualish showing-off, and he doesn’t know what to say in reply, he has absolutely nothing in his huge square head to Identify with her with or latch onto or say in encouraging reply, and for an instant the Provident cafeteria seems pin-drop silent, and his own heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost unfamiliar panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that at some point in his life he’s going to get high again and be back in the cage all over again, because for a second the blank white veil levelled at him seems a screen on which might well be projected a casual and impressive black and yellow smily-face, grinning, and he feels all the muscles in his own face loosen and descend kneeward; and the moment hangs there, distended, until the White Flag raffle coordinator for November, Glenn K., glides up to the podium mike in his scarlet velour caparison and makeup and candelabrum with candles the same color as the floor tile and uses the plastic gavel to formally end the break and bring things back to whatever passes here for order, for the raffle drawing. The Watertown guy with middle-level sober time who wins the Big Book publicly offers it to any newcomer that wants it, and Gately is pleased to see Bruce Green raise a big hand, and decides he’ll just turn it over and ask Ferocious Francis G. for feedback on subjunctives and countersexuals, and the infant leaves its playpen alone inside him, and the rivets of the long table his seat’s attached to make a brief distressed noise as he sits and settles in for the second half of the meeting, asking silently for help to be determined to try to really hear or die trying.