Infinite jest

DENVER CO, 1 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

‘I hate this!’ Orin yells out to whoever glides near. He doesn’t loop or spiral like the showboats; he sort of tacks, the gliding equivalent of snow-plowing, unspectacular and aiming to get it over ASAP and intact. The fake red wings’ nylon clatters in an updraft; ill-glued feathers keep peeling off and rising. The updraft is the oxides from Mile-High’s thousands of open mouths. Far and away the loudest stadium anyplace. He feels like a dick. The beak makes it hard to breathe and see. Two reserve ends do some kind of combined barrel-roll thing. The worst is the moment right before they make the jump off the stadium’s rim. Hands in the top rows reaching and clutching. People laughing. The Interlace cameras panning and tightening; Orin knows too well the light on the side that means Zoom. Once they’re out over the field the voices melt and merge into oxides and updraft. The left guard is soaring up instead of down. A couple beaks and a claw fall off somebody and go pinwheeling down toward the green. Orin tacks grimly back and forth. He’s among those who steadfastly refuse to whistle or squawk. Bonus or no. The stadium loudspeaker’s a steely gargle. You can never hear it clearly even on the ground.

The sad old ex-QB who now just holds on place-kicks falls in beside Orin’s slow back-and-forth about 100 meters over the 40. He’s one of the token females, his beak blunter and wings’ red nongarish.

‘Hate and loathe this with a clusterfucking passion, Clayt!’

The holder tries to make a resigned wing-gesture and is almost blown into Orin’s pinfeathers. ‘Almost down! Enjoy the ride! Yo — cleavage-check in 22G, just by the —’ and then lost in the roar as the first player touches down and sheds the red-feathered promotional apparatus. You have to scream to even be heard. At some point it starts sounding like the crowd’s roaring at its own roar, a doubling-back quality like something’ll blow. One of the Broncos in the rear end of a costume takes a header at midfield so it looks like the thing’s ass went flying off. Orin has told no Cardinal, not even the team’s counselor and visualization-therapist, about his morbid fear of heights and high-altitude descent.

‘I punt! I’m paid to punt long, high, well, and always! Making me do personal interviews on my personal side’s bad enough! But this crosses every line! Why do we stand for this! I’m an athlete! I’m not a freak-show performer! Nobody mentioned flying at the trade-table. In New Orleans it was just robes and halos and once a season a zither. But just once a season. This is fucking awful!’

‘Could be worse!’

Spiralling down toward the line of X’s and the bill-capped guys that help strip the wings off, runty potbellied volunteer front-office-connected guys who always smirk in a way you couldn’t quite level the accusation.

‘I’m paid to punt!’

‘It’s worse in Philly! … had fucking water-drops in Seattle for three seaso—’

‘Please Lord, spare the Leg,’ Orin whispers each time just before touchdown.

‘… of how you could be an Oiler! You could be a Brown.’

The organopsychedelic muscimole, an isoxazole-alkaloid derived from Amanita muscaria, a.k.a. the fly agaric mushroom — by no means, Michael Pemulis emphasizes, to be confused with phalloides or verna or certain other kill-you-dead species of North America’s Amanita genus, as the little kids sit there Indian-style on the Viewing Room floor, glassy-eyed and trying not to yawn — goes by the structural moniker 5-aminomethyl-3-isoxazolol, requires about like maybe ten to twenty oral mg. per ingestion, making it two to three times as potent as psilocybin, and frequently results in the following alterations in consciousness (not reading or referring to notes in any way): a kind of semi-sleep-like trance with visions, elation, sensations of physical lightness and increased strength, heightened sensual perceptions, synesthesia, and favorable distortions in body-image. This is supposed to be a pre-dinner ‘Big Buddy’ powwow, where the littler kids receive general big-brotherly-type support and counsel from an upperclass-man. Pemulis sometimes treats his group’s powwows like a kind of colloquium, sharing personal findings and interests. The viewer’s on Read from the room’s laptop, and the screen’s got block-capitaled METHOXYLATED BASES FOR PHENYLKYLAMINE MANIPULATION on it, and underneath some stuff that might as well be Greek to the Little Buds. Two of the kids squeeze tennis balls; two rock and bob Hasidically to stay alert; one has a hat with a pair of fake antennae made of tight-coiled spring. More or less revered by the aboriginal tribes of what’s now southern Quebec and the Great Concavity, Pemulis tells them, the fly agaric ‘shroom was both loved and hated for its powerful but not always unless carefully titrated pleasant psycho-spiritual effects. A boy probes at his own navel with great interest. Another pretends to fall over.

Some of the more marginal players start in as early as maybe twelve, I’m sorry to say, particularly ‘drines before matches and then enkephaline^[26] after, which can generate a whole vicious circle of individual neurochemis-try; but I myself, having taken certain vows early on concerning fathers and differences, didn’t even get downwind of my first bit of Bob Hope^[27] until fifteen, more like nearly sixteen, when Bridget Boone, in whose room a lot of the 16 and Unders used to congregate before lights-out, invited me to consider a couple of late-night bongs, as a kind of psychodysleptic Sominex, to help me sleep, perhaps, finally, all the way through a really unpleasant dream that had been recurring nightly and waking me up in medias for weeks and was beginning to grind me down and to cause some slight deterioration in performance and rank. Low-grade synthetic Bob or not, the bongs worked like a charm.

In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I’m in a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems. It’s hard to tell. But mainly the court’s complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It’s simply huge. And it’s public. A silent crowd resolves itself at what may be the court’s periphery, dressed in summer’s citrus colors, motionless and highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand blandly alert in their blazers and safari hats, hands folded over their slacks’ flies. High overhead, near what might be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for amplification in his tall high-chair, whispers Play. The crowd is a tableau, motionless and attentive. I twirl my stick in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure out where in all that mess of lines I’m supposed to direct service. I can make out in the stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.

The umpire whispers Please Play.

We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.