Infinite jest

6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

1610h. E.T.A. Weight Room. Freestyle circuits. The clank and click of various resistance-systems. Lyle on the towel dispenser conferring with an extremely moist Graham Rader. Schacht doing sit-ups, the board almost vertical, his face purple and forehead pulsing. Troeltsch by the squat rack blowing his nose into a towel. Coyle doing military presses with a bare bar. Carol Spodek curling, intent on the mirror. Rader nodding as Lyle bends and leans in. Hal up on the spotter-shelf in back of the incline-bench in the shadow of the monster copper beech through the west window doing single-leg toe-raises, for the ankle. Ingersoll at the shoulder-pull, steadily upping the weight against Lyle’s advice. Keith (‘The Viking’) Freer^[68] and the ster-oidic fifteen-year-old Eliot Kornspan spotting each other on massive barbell-curls next to the water cooler’s bench, taking turns bellowing encouragement. Hal keeps pausing to lean down and spit into an old NASA glass on the floor by the little shelf. E.T.A. Trainer Barry Loach walking around with a clipboard he doesn’t write anything down on, but watching people intently and nodding a lot. Axford with one shoe off in the corner, doing something to his bare foot. Michael Pemulis seated cross-legged on the cooler’s bench just off Kornspan’s left hip, doing facial isometrics, trying to eavesdrop on Lyle and Rader, wincing whenever Kornspan and Freer roar at each other.

‘Three more! Get it up there!’

‘Hoooowaaaaa.’

‘Get that shit up there man!’

‘ Gwwwhoooooowaaaaar

‘It raped your sister! It killed your fucking mother man!’

‘Huhl huhl huhl huhl gwwwww.’

‘Do it!’

Pemulis makes his face very long for a while and then very short and broad, then all sort of hollow and distended like one of Bacon’s popes.

‘Well suppose’ — Pemulis can just make out Lyle — ‘Suppose I were to give you a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we’re imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?’

Troeltsch calls over to Pemulis, ‘Do the deLínt-jerking-off face again!’ Pemulis for a second lets his mouth gape slackly and his eyes roll way up and flutters his lids, moving his fist.

‘Well I’d try every darn one,’ Rader tells Lyle.

‘Huhl. Huhl. Gwwwwwivww.’

‘Motherfucker! Fucker!’

Pemulis’s wince looks like a type of facial isometric.

‘Do Bridget having a tantrum! Do Schacht in a stall!’

Pemulis makes a shush-finger.

Lyle never whispers, but it’s just about the same. ‘Then you are willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99 % error. The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key.’

Pemulis pulls his lower lip down as far as it will go and contracts his cheek muscles. Cords stand out on Freer’s neck as he screams at Kornspan. There’s a little hanging mist of spittle and sweat. Kornspan looks like he’s about to have a stroke. There are 90 kg. on the bar, which itself is 20 kg.

‘One more you fuck. Fucking take it.’

‘Fuck me. Fuck me you fuck. Gwwwwww.’

‘Take the pain.’

Freer has one finger under the bar, barely helping. Kornspan’s red face is leaping around on his skull.

Carol Spodek’s smaller bar goes silently up and down.

Troeltsch comes over and sits down and saws at the back of his neck with the towel, looking up at Kornspan. ‘I don’t think all the curls I’ve ever done all together add up to 110,’ he said.

Kornspan’s making sounds that don’t sound like they’re coming from his throat.

‘Yes! Yiiissss!’ roars Freer. The bar crashes to the rubber floor, making Pemulis wince. Every vein on Kornspan stands out and pulses. His stomach looks pregnant. He puts his hands on his thighs and leans forward, a string of something hanging from his mouth.

‘Way to fucking take it baby,’ Freer says, going over to the box on the dispenser to get rosin for his hands, watching himself walk toward the mirror.

Pemulis starts very slowly to lean over toward Kornspan, looking around confidentially. He gets so his face is right up near the side of Kornspan’s mesomorphic head and whispers. ‘Hey. Eliot. Hey.’

Kornspan, bent over, chest heaving, rolls his head a little his way.

Pemulis whispers: ‘Pussy.’

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out that once MA’s Department of Social Services has taken a mother’s children away for any period of time, they can always take them away again, D.S.S., like at will, empowered by nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e. once deemed Unfit — no matter why or when, or what’s transpired in the meantime — there’s nothing a mother can do.

Or for instance that people addicted to a Substance who abruptly stop ingesting the Substance often suffer wicked papular acne, often for months afterward, as the accumulations of Substance slowly leave the body. The Staff will inform you that this is because the skin is actually the body’s biggest excretory organ. Or that chronic alcoholics’ hearts are — for reasons no M.D. has been able to explain — swollen to nearly twice the size of civilians’ human hearts, and they never again return to normal size. That there’s a certain type of person who carries a picture of their therapist in their wallet. That (both a relief and kind of an odd let-down) black penises tend to be the same general size as white penises, on the whole. That not all U.S. males are circumcised.

That you can cop a sort of thin jittery amphetaminic buzz if you rapidly consume three Millennial Fizzies and a whole package of Oreo cookies on an empty stomach. (Keeping it down is required, however, for the buzz, which senior residents often neglect to tell newer residents.)

That the chilling Hispanic term for whatever interior disorder drives the addict back again and again to the enslaving Substance is tecato gusano, which apparently connotes some kind of interior psychic worm that cannot be sated or killed.

That black and Hispanic people can be as big or bigger racists than white people, and then can get even more hostile and unpleasant when this realization seems to surprise you.

That it is possible, in sleep, for some roommates to secure a cigarette from their bedside pack, light it, smoke it down to the quick, and then extinguish it in their bedside ashtray — without once waking up, and without setting anything on fire. You will be informed that this skill is usually acquired in penal institutions, which will lower your inclination to complain about the practice. Or that even Flents industrial-strength expandable-foam earplugs do not solve the problem of a snoring roommate if the roommate in question is so huge and so adenoidal that the snores in question also produce subsonic vibrations that arpeggio up and down your body and make your bunk jiggle like a motel bed you’ve put a quarter in.

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and elim-inatory functions as males. That over 60 % of all persons arrested for drug-and alcohol-related offenses report being sexually abused as children, with two-thirds of the remaining 40 % reporting that they cannot remember their childhoods in sufficient detail to report one way or the other on abuse. That you can weave hypnotic Madame Psychosis-like harmonies around the minor-D scream of a cheap vacuum cleaner, humming to yourself as you vacuum, if that’s your Chore. That some people really do look like rodents. That some drug-addicted prostitutes have a harder time giving up prostitution than they have giving up drugs, with their explanation involving the two habits’ very different directions of currency-flow. That there are just as many idioms for the female sex-organ as there are for the male sex-organ.

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.

That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male sex-organ is: Unit, which is why Ennet House residents are wryly amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital’s designations of its campus’s buildings.

That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.

That AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you.^[69] That, pace macho bullshit, public male weeping is not only plenty masculine but can actually feel good (reportedly). That sharing means talking, and taking somebody’s inventory means criticizing that person, plus many additional pieces of Recoveryspeak. That an important part of halfway-house Human Immuno-Virus prevention is not leaving your razor or toothbrush in communal bathrooms. That apparently a seasoned prostitute can (reportedly) apply a condom to a customer’s Unit so deftly he doesn’t even know it’s on until he’s history, so to speak.

That a double-layered steel portable strongbox w/ tri-tumblered lock for your razor and toothbrush can be had for under $35.00U.S./$38.50 O.N.A.N. via Home-Net Hardware, and that Pat M. or the House Manager will let you use the back office’s old TP to order one if you put up a sustained enough squawk.

That over 50 % of persons with a Substance addiction suffer from some other recognized form of psychiatric disorder, too. That some male prostitutes become so accustomed to enemas that they cannot have valid bowel movements without them. That a majority of Ennet House residents have at least one tattoo. That the significance of this datum is unanalyzable. That the metro Boston street term for not having any money is: sporting lint. That what elsewhere’s known as Informing or Squealing or Narcing or Ratting or Ratting Out is on the streets of metro Boston known as ‘Eating Cheese,’ presumably spun off from the associative nexus of rat.

That nose-, tongue-, lip-, and eyelid-rings rarely require actual penetrative piercing. This is because of the wide variety of clip-on rings available. That nipple-rings do require piercing, and that clitoris- and glans-rings are not things anyone thinks you really want to know the facts about. That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused. That female chicanos are not called chicanas. That it costs $225 U.S. to get a MA driver’s license with your picture but not your name. That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer, and sitting so close to Ennet House’s old D.E.C. TP cartridge-viewer that the screen fills your whole vision and the screen’s static charge tickles your nose like a linty mitten.[70]

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal — will steal things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away — at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people. That the metro Boston street term for panhandling is: stemming, and that it is regarded by some as a craft or art; and that professional stem-artists actually have like little professional colloquia sometimes, little conventions, in parks or public-transport hubs, at night, where they get together and network and exchange feedback on trends and techniques and public relations, etc. That it is possible to abuse OTC cold-and allergy remedies in an addictive manner. That Nyquil is over 50 proof. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

That addiction is either a disease or a mental illness or a spiritual condition (as in ‘poor of spirit’) or an O.C.D.-like disorder or an affective or character disorder, and that over 75 % of the veteran Boston AAs who want to convince you that it is a disease will make you sit down and watch them write DISEASE on a piece of paper and then divide and hyphenate the word so that it becomes DIS-EASE, then will stare at you as if expecting you to undergo some kind of blinding epiphanic realization, when really (as G. Day points tirelessly out to his counselors) changing DISEASE to DIS-EASE reduces a definition and explanation down to a simple description of a feeling, and rather a whiny insipid one at that.

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis. That cats will in fact get violent diarrhea if you feed them milk, contrary to the popular image of cats and milk. That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off. That 99 % of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99 % of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100 % of the things they spend 99 % of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99 % of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. That it is possible to make rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That the metro-street term for really quite wonderful is: pisser. That everybody’s sneeze sounds different. That some people’s moms never taught them to cover up or turn away when they sneeze. That no one who has been to prison is ever the same again. That you do not have to have sex with a person to get crabs from them. That a clean room feels better to be in than a dirty room. That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That you don’t have to hit somebody even if you really really want to. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. That nobody who’s ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever. That bit is a metro Boston street term for a jail sentence, as in ‘Don G. was up in Billerica on a six-month bit.’ That it’s impossible to kill fleas by hand. That it’s possible to smoke so many cigarettes that you get little white ulcerations on your tongue. That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating.

That pretty much everybody masturbates. Rather a lot, it turns out.

That the cliche ‘I don’t know who I am’ unfortunately turns out to be more than a cliche. That it costs $330 U.S. to get a passport in a phony name. That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. That you can obtain a major credit card with a phony name for $1500 U.S., but that no one will give you a straight answer about whether this price includes a verifiable credit history and line of credit for when the cashier slides the phony card through the register’s little verification-modem with all sorts of burly security guards standing around. That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. That the term vig is street argot for the bookmaker’s commission on an illegal bet, usually 10 %, that’s either subtracted from your winnings or added to your debt. That certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers. That cockroaches can, up to a certain point, be lived with. That ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else. That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.

That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.

That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.

That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused.

That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.

That it is permissible to want.

That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.

That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

That God — unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.

That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you.

That the smell of Athlete’s Foot is sick-sweet v. the smell of podiatric Dry Rot is sick-sour.

That a person — one with the Disease/-Ease — will do things under the influence of Substances that he simply would not ever do sober, and that some consequences of these things cannot ever be erased or amended.^[71] Felonies are an example of this.

As are tattoos. Almost always gotten on impulse, tattoos are vividly, chillingly permanent. The shopworn ‘Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure’ would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos. For a while, the new resident Tiny Ewell got first keenly interested and then weirdly obsessed with people’s tattoos, and he started going around to all the residents and outside people who hung around Ennet House to help keep straight, asking to check out their tattoos and wanting to hear about the circumstances surrounding each tattoo. These little spasms of obsession — like first with the exact definition of alcoholic, and then with Morris H.’s special tollhouse cookies until the pancreatitis-flare, then with the exact kinds of corners everybody made their bed up with — these were part of the way Tiny E. temporarily lost his mind when his enslaving Substance was taken away. The tattoo thing started out with Tiny’s white-collar amazement at just how many of the folks around Ennet House seemed to have tattoos. And the tattoos seemed like potent symbols of not only whatever they were pictures of but also of the chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.

Because the whole thing about tattoos is that they’re permanent, of course, irrevocable once gotten — which of course the irrevocability of a tattoo is what jacks up the adrenaline of the intoxicated decision to sit down in the chair and actually get it (the tattoo) — but the chilling thing about the intoxication is that it seems to make you consider only the adrenaline of the moment itself, not (in any depth) the irrevocability that produces the adrenaline. It’s like the intoxication keeps your tattoo-type-class person from being able to project his imagination past the adrenaline of the impulse and even consider the permanent consequences that are producing the buzz of excitement.

Tiny Ewell’ll put this same abstract but not very profound idea in a whole number of varied ways, over and over, obsessively almost, and still fail to get any of the tattooed residents interested, although Bruce Green will listen politely, and the clinically depressed Kate Gompert usually won’t have the juice to get up and walk away when Tiny starts in, which makes Ewell seek her out vis-à-vis tattoos, though she hasn’t got a tattoo.

But they don’t have any problem with showing Tiny their tatts, the residents with tatts don’t, unless they’re female and the thing is in some sort of area where there’s a Boundary Issue.

As Tiny Ewell comes to see it, people with tattoos fall under two broad headings. First there are the younger scrofulous boneheaded black-T-shirt-and-spiked-bracelet types who do not have the sense to regret the impulsive permanency of their tatts, and will show them off to you with the same fake-quiet pride with which someone more of Ewell’s own social stratum would show off their collection of Dynastic crockery or fine Sauvignon. Then there are the more numerous (and older) second types, who’ll show you their tattoos with the sort of stoic regret (albeit tinged with a bit of self-conscious pride about the stoicism) that a Purple-Hearted veteran displays toward his old wounds’ scars. Resident Wade McDade has complex nests of blue and red serpents running down the insides of both his arms, and is required to wear long_:sleeved shirts every day to his menial job at Store 24, even though the store’s heat always loses its mind in the early A.M. and it’s always wicked motherfucking hot in there, because the store’s Pakistani manager believes his customers will not wish to purchase Marlboro Lights and Mass. Gig-abucks lottery tickets from someone with vascular-colored snakes writhing all over his arms.^[72] McDade also has a flaming skull on his left shoul-derblade. Doony Glynn has the faint remains of a black dotted line tattooed all the way around his neck at about Adam’s-apple height, with instruction-manual-like directions for the removal of his head and maintenance of the disengaged head tattooed on his scalp, from the days of his Skinhead youth, which now the tattooed directions take patience and a comb and three of April Cortelyu’s barrettes for Tiny even to see.

Actually, a couple weeks into the obsession Ewell broadens his dermo-taxonomy to include a third category, Bikers, of whom there are presently none in Ennet House but plenty around the area’s AA meetings, in beards and leather vests and apparently having to meet some kind of weight-requirement of at least 200 kilos. Bikers is the metro Boston street term for them, though they seem to refer to themselves usually as Scooter-Puppies, a term which (Ewell finds out the hard way) non-Bikers are not invited to use. These guys are veritable one-man tattoo festivals, but when they show them to you they’re disconcerting because they’ll bare their tatts with the complete absence of affect of somebody just showing you like a limb or a thumb, not quite sure why you want to see or even what it is you’re looking at.

A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody’s general descriptions, a Biker.

W/r/t the Stoic-Regret group within Ennet House, it emerges that the male tattoos with women’s names on them tend, in their irrevocability, to be especially disastrous and regretful, given the extremely provisional nature of most addicts’ relationships. Bruce Green will have MILDRED BONK on his jilted right triceps forever. Likewise the DORIS in red-dripping Gothic script just below the left breast of Emil Minty, who yes apparently did love once. Minty also has a palsied and amateur swastika with the caption FUCK NIGERS on a left biceps he is heartily encouraged to keep covered, as a resident. Chandler Foss has an undulating banner with a redly inscribed MARY on one forearm, said banner now mangled and necrotic because Foss, dumped and badly coked out one night, tried to nullify the romantic connotations of the tatt by inscribing BLESSED VIRGIN above the MARY with a razor blade and a red Bic, with predictably ghastly results. Real tattoo artists (Ewell gets this on authority after a White Flag Group meeting from a Biker whose triceps’ tattoo of a huge disembodied female breast being painfully squeezed by a disembodied hand which is itself tattooed with a disembodied breast and hand communicates real tattoo-credibility, as far as Tiny’s concerned) real tatt-artists are always highly trained professionals.

What’s sad about the gorgeous violet arrow-pierced heart with PAMELA incised in a circle around it on Randy Lenz’s right hip is that Lenz has no memory either of the tattoo-impulse and — procedure or of anybody named Pamela. Charlotte Treat has a small green dragon on her calf and another tattoo on a breast she’s set a Boundary about letting Tiny see. Hester Thrale has an amazingly detailed blue and green tattoo of the planet Earth on her stomach, its poles abutting pubis and breasts, an equatorial view of which cost Tiny Ewell two weeks of doing Hester’s weekly Chore. Overall searing-regret honors probably go to Jennifer Belbin, who has four uncoverable black teardrops descending from the corner of one eye, from one night of mescaline and adrenalized grief, so that from more than two meters away she always looks like she has flies on her, Randy Lenz points out. The new black girl Didi N. has on the plane of her upper abdomen a tattered screaming skull (off the same stencil as McDade’s, but w/o the flames) that’s creepy because it’s just a tattered white outline: Black people’s tattoos are rare, and for reasons Ewell regards as fairly obvious they tend to be just white outlines.

Ennet House alumnus and volunteer counselor Calvin Thrust is quietly rumored to have on the shaft of his formerly professional porn-cartridge-performer’s Unit a tattoo that displays the magiscule initials CT when the Unit is flaccid and the full name CALVIN THRUST when hyperemic. Tiny Ewell has soberly elected to let this go unsubstantiated. Alumna and v.c. Danielle Steenbok once got the bright idea of having eyeliner-colored tattoos put around both eyes so she’d never again have to apply eyeliner, not banking on the inevitable fade that over time’s turned the tattoos a kind of nauseous dark-green she now has to constantly apply eyeliner to cover up. Current female live-in Staffer Johnette Foltz has undergone two of the six painful procedures required to have the snarling orange-and-blue tiger removed from her left forearm and so now has a snarling tiger minus a head and one front leg, with the ablated parts looking like someone determined has been at her forearm with steel wool. Ewell decides this is what gives profundity to the tattoo-impulse’s profound irrevocability: Having a tatt removed means just exchanging one kind of disfigurement for another. There are Tingly and Diehl’s identical palmate-cannabis-leaf-on-inner-wrist tattoos, though Tingly and Diehl are from opposite shores and never crossed paths before entering the House.

Nell Gunther refuses to discuss tattoos with Tiny Ewell in any way or form.

For a while, Tiny Ewell considers live-in Staffer Don Gately’s homemade jailhouse tattoos too primitive to even bother asking about.

He’d made a true pest of himself, though, Ewell did, when at the height of the obsession this one synthetic-narc-addicted kid came in who refused to be called anything but his street name, Skull, and lasted only like four days, but who’d been a walking exhibition of high-regret ink — both arms tattooed with spiderwebs at the elbows, on his fishy-white chest a naked lady with the same kind of overlush measurements Ewell remembered from the pinball machines of his Watertown childhood. On Skull’s back a half-m.-long skeleton in a black robe and cowl playing the violin in the wind on a crag with THE DEAD in maroon on a vertical gonfalonish banner unfurling below; on one biceps either an icepick or a mucronate dagger, and down both forearms a kind of St. Vitus’s dance of leather-winged dragons with the words — on both forearms — HOW DO YOU LIK YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOW MR DETH.’? the typos of which, Tiny felt, only served to heighten Skull’s whole general tatt-gestalt’s intended effect, which Tiny presumed was primarily to repel.

In fact Tiny E.’s whole displacement of obsession from bunks’ hospital corners to people’s tattoos was probably courtesy of this kid Skull, who on his second night in the newer male residents’ Five-Man Room had shed his electrified muscle-shirt and was showing off his tattoos in a boneheaded regretless first-category fashion to Ken Erdedy while R. Lenz did headstands against the closet door in his jockstrap and Ewell and Geoffrey D. had their wallets’ credit cards spread out on EwelPs drum-tight bunk and were trying to settle a kind of admittedly childish argument about who had the more prestigious credit cards — Skull flexing his pectorals to make the overdeveloped woman on his chest writhe, reading his forearms to Erdedy, etc. — and Geoffrey Day had looked up from his AmEx (Gold, to EwelFs Platinum) and shaken his moist pale head at Ewell and asked rhetorically what had ever happened to good old traditional U.S. tattoos like MOM or an anchor, which for some reason touched off a small obsessive explosion in EwelPs detox-frazzled psyche.

Probably the most poignant items in Ewell’s survey are the much-faded tattoos of old Boston AA guys who’ve been sober in the Fellowship for decades, the crocodilic elder statesmen of the White Flag and Allston Groups and the St. Columbkill Sunday Night Group and Ewell’s chosen Home Group, Wednesday night’s Better Late Than Never Group (Nonsmoking) at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital just two blocks down from the House. There is something queerly poignant about a deeply faded tattoo, a poignancy something along the lines of coming upon the tiny and poignantly unfashionable clothes of a child long-since grown up in an attic trunk somewhere (the clothes, not the grown child, Ewell confirmed for G. Day). See, e.g., White Flag’s cantankerous old Francis (‘Ferocious Francis’) Gehaney’s right forearm’s tatt of a martini glass with a naked lady sitting in the glass with her legs kicking up over the broad flaring rim, with an old-style Rita Hayworth-era bangs-intensive hairstyle. Faded to a kind of underwater blue, its incidental black lines gone soot-green and the red of the lips/nails/ SUBIKBAY’62USN4-07 not lightened to pink but more like decayed to the dusty red of fire through much smoke. All these old sober Boston blue-collar men’s irrevocable tattoos fading almost observably under the low-budget fluorescence of church basements and hospital auditoria — Ewell watched and charted and cross-referenced them, moved. Any number of good old U.S.N. anchors, and in Irish Boston sooty green shamrocks, and several little frozen tableaux of little khaki figures in G.I. helmets plunging bayonets into the stomachs of hideous urine-yellow bucktoothed Oriental caricatures, and screaming eagles with their claws faded blunt, and SEMPER FI, all autolyzed to the point where the tattoos look like they’re just under the surface of a murky-type pond.

A tall silent hard-looking old black-haired BLTN-Group veteran has the terse and hateful single word PUSSY in what’s faded to pond-scum green down one liver-spotted forearm; but yet the fellow transcends even stoic regret by dressing and carrying himself as if the word simply wasn’t there, or was so irrevocably there there was no point even thinking about it: there’s a deep and tremendously compelling dignity about the old man’s demeanor w/r/t the PUSSY on his arm, and Ewell actually considers approaching this fellow re the issue of sponsorship, if and when he feels it’s appropriate to get an AA sponsor, if he decides it’s germane in his case.

Near the conclusion of this two-month obsession, Tiny Ewell approaches Don Gately on the subject of whether the jailhouse tattoo should maybe comprise a whole separate phylum of tattoo. Ewell’s personal feeling is that jailhouse tattoos aren’t poignant so much as grotesque, that they seem like they weren’t a matter of impulsive decoration or self-presentation so much as simple self-mutilation arising out of boredom and general disregard for one’s own body and the aesthetics of decoration. Don Gately’s developed the habit of staring coolly at Ewell until the little attorney shuts up, though this is partly to disguise the fact that Gately usually can’t follow what Ewell’s saying and is unsure whether this is because he’s not smart or educated enough to understand Ewell or because Ewell is simply out of his fucking mind.

Don Gately tells Ewell how your basic-type jailhouse tatt is homemade with sewing needles from the jailhouse canteen and some blue ink from the cartridge of a fountain pen promoted from the breast pocket of an unalert Public Defender, is why the jailhouse genre is always the same night-sky blue. The needle is dipped in the ink and jabbed as deep into the tattooee as it can be jabbed without making him recoil and fucking up your aim. Just a plain ultraminimal blue square like Gately’s got on his right wrist takes half a day and hundreds of individual jabs. How come the lines are never quite straight and the color’s never quite all the way solid is it’s impossible to get all the individualized punctures down to the same uniform deepness in the, like, twitching flesh. This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done by sadistic children on rainy afternoons. Gately has a blue square on his right wrist and a sloppy cross on the inside of his mammoth left forearm. He’d done the square himself, and a cellmate had done the cross in return for Gately doing a cross on the cellmate. Oral narcotics render the process both less painful and less tedious. The sewing needle is sterilized in grain alcohol, which Gately explains that the alcohol is got by taking mess-hall fruit and mashing it up and adding water and secreting the whole mess in a Ziploc just inside the flush-hole thing of the cell’s toilet, to, like, foment. The sterilizing results of this can be consumed, as well. Bonded liquor and cocaine are the only things hard to get inside of M.D.C. penal institutions, because the expense of them gets everybody all excited and it’s only a matter of time before somebody goes and eats cheese. The inexpensive C–IV oral narcotic Talwin can be traded for cigarettes, however, which can in turn be got at the canteen or won at cribbage and dominoes (M.D.C. regs prohibit straight-out cards) or got in mass quantities off smaller inmates in return for protection from the romantic advances of larger inmates. Gately is right-handed and his arms are roughly the size of Tiny EwelPs legs. His wrist’s jailhouse square is canted and has sloppy extra blobs at three of the corners. Your average jailhouse tatt can’t be removed even with laser surgery because it’s incised so deep in. Gately is polite about Tiny Ewell’s inquiries but not expansive, i.e. Tiny has to ask very specific questions about whatever he wishes to know and then gets a short specific answer from Gately to just that question. Then Gately stares at him, a habit Ewell tends to complain about at some length up in the Five-Man Room. His interest in tattoos seems to be regarded by Gately not as invasive but as the temporary obsession of a still-quivering Substanceless psyche that in a couple weeks will have forgot all about tattoos, an attitude Ewell finds condescending in the extremus. Gately’s attitude toward his own primitive tattoos is a second-category attitude, with most of the stoicism and acceptance of his tatt-regret sincere, if only because these irrevocable emblems of jail are minor Rung Bells compared to some of the fucked-up and really irrevocable impulsive mistakes Gately’d made as an active drug addict and burglar, not to mention their consequences, the mistakes’, which Gately’s trying to accept he’ll be paying off for a real long time.

Michael Pemulis has this habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other before he says anything. It’s impossible to tell whether this is unaffected or whether Pemulis is emulating some film-noir-type character. It’s worse when he’s put away a couple ‘drines. He and Trevor Axford and Hal Incandenza are in Pemulis’s room, with Pemulis’s roommates Schacht and Troeltsch down at lunch, so they’re alone, Pemulis and Axford and Hal, stroking their chins, looking down at Michael Pemulis’s yachting cap on his bed. Lying inside the overturned hat are a bunch of fair-sized but bland-looking tablets of the allegedly incredibly potent DMZ.

Pemulis looks all around behind them in the empty room. ‘This, Incster, Axhandle, is the incredibly potent DMZ. The Great White Shark of organo-synthesized hallucinogens. ‘The gargantuan feral infant of—’

Hal says ‘We get the picture.’

‘The Yale U. of the Ivy League of Acid,’ says Axford.

‘Your ultimate psychosensual distorter,’ Pemulis sums up.

‘Think you mean psychosensory, unless I don’t know the whole story here.’

Axford gives Hal a narrow look. Interrupting Pemulis means having to watch him do the head-thing all over again each time.

‘Hard to find, gentlemen. As in very hard to find. Last lots came off the line in the early 70s. These tablets here are artifacts. Certain amount of decay in potency probably inevitable. Used in certain shady CIA-era military experiments.’

Axford nods down at the hat. ‘Mind-control?’

‘More like getting the enemy to think their guns are hydrangea, the enemy’s a blood-relative, that sort of thing. Who knows. The accounts I’ve been reading have been incoherent, gistless. Experiments conducted. Things got out of hand. Let’s just say things got out of control. Potency judged too incredible to proceed. Subjects locked away in institutions and written off as casualties of peace. Formula shredded. Research team scattered, reassigned. Vague but I’ve got to tell you pretty sobering rumors.’

‘These are from the early 70s?’ Axhandle says.

‘See the little trademark on each one, with the guy in bell-bottoms and long sideburns?’

‘Is that what that is?’

‘Unprecedentedly potent, this stuff. The Swiss inventor they say was originally recommending LSD-25 as what to take to come down off the stuff.’ Pemulis takes one of the tablets and puts it in his palm and pokes at it with a callused finger. ‘What we’re looking at. We’re looking here at either a serious sudden injection of cash —’

Axford makes a shocked noise. ‘You’d actually try to peddle the incredibly potent DMZ around this sorry place?’

Pemulis’s snort sounds like the letter K. ‘Get a large economy-size clue, Axhandle. Nobody here’d have any clue what they’d even be dealing with. Not to mention be willing to pay what they’re worth. Why, there are pharmaceutical museums, left-wing think tanks, New York designer-drug consortiums I’m sure’d be dying to dissect these. Decoct like. Toss into the spectrometer and see what’s what.’

‘That we could get bids from, you’re saying,’ Axford says. Hal squeezes a ball, silently looking at the hat.

Pemulis turns the tablet over. ‘Or certain very progressive and hip-type nursing homes I know guys that know of. Or down at Back Bay at that yogurt place with that picture of those historical guys Inc was saying at breakfast was up on the wall.’

‘Ram Das. William Burroughs.’

‘Or just down in Harvard Square at Au Bon Pain where all those 70s-era guys in old wool ponchos play chess against those little clocks they keep hitting.’

Axford’s pretending to punch Hal’s arm in excitement.

Pemulis says ‘Or of course I’m thinking I could just go the sheer-entertainment route and toss them in the Gatorade barrels at the meet with Port Washington Tuesday, or down at the WhataBurger — watch everybody run around clutching their heads or whatever. I’d be way into watching Wayne play with distorted senses.’

Hal puts one foot up on Pemulis’s little frustum-shaped bedside stool and leans farther in. ‘Would it be prying to ask how you finally managed to get hold of these?’

‘It wouldn’t be prying at all,’ Pemulis says, removing from the yachting cap’s lining every piece of contraband he’s got and spreading it out on the bed, sort of the way older people will array all their valuables in quiet moments. He has a small quantity of personal-consumption Lamb’s Breath cannabis (bought back from Hal out of a 20-g. he’d sold Hal) in a dusty baggie, a little Saran-Wrapped cardboard rectangle with four black stars spaced evenly across it, the odd ‘drine, and it looks like a baker’s dozen of the incredibly potent DMZ, Sweet Tart-sized tablets of no particular color with a tiny mod hipster in each center wishing the viewer peace. ‘We don’t even know how many hits this is,’ he muses quietly. There’s sun on the wall with the hanging viewer and poster of the paranoid king and an enormous hand-drawn Sierpinski gasket. In one of the three big mullioned west windows — the Academy is nothing if not well-fenestrated — there’s an oval flaw that’s casting a bubble of ale-colored autumn sunlight from the window’s left side to elongate onto Pemulis’s tightly made bed,^[73] and he moves everything his hat’s got into the brighter bubble, going down on one knee to study a tablet between his forceps (Pemulis owns stuff like philatelic forceps, a loupe, a pharmaceutical scale, a postal scale, a personal-size Bun-sen burner) with the calm precision of a jeweler. ‘The literature’s mute on the titration. Do you take one tablet?’ He looks up on one side and then back around on the other at the boys’ faces leaning in above. ‘Is like half a tab a regulation hit?’

‘Two or even three tablets, maybe?’ Hal says, knowing he sounds greedy but unable to help himself.

‘The accessible data’s vague,’ Pemulis says, his profile contorted around the loupe in his socket. ‘The literature on muscimole-lysergic blends is spotty and vague and hard to read except to say how massively powerful the supposed yields are.’

Hal looks at the top of Pemulis’s head. ‘Did you hit a medical library?’

‘I got on MED.COM off Lateral Alice’s WATS line and went back and forth and up and down through MED.COM. Plenty on lysergícs, plenty on methoxy-class hybrids. Vague and almost gossip-columny shit on fitviavi-compounds. To get anything you got to cross-key Ergotics with the phrase muscimole or muscimolated. Only a couple things ring the bell when you key in DMZ. Then they’re all potent this, sinister that. Nothing with any specifics. And jumbly polysyllables out the ass. Whole thing gave me a migraine. ‘

‘Yes but did you actually hop in the truck and actually go to a real med-library?’ Hal’s his mother Avril’s child when it comes to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc. Axford now really does punch him once in the shoulder, albeit the right one. Pemulis is scratching absently at the little hair-hurricane at the center of his hair. It’s close to!43Oh., and the flawed bubble of light on the bed is getting to be the slightly sad color of early winter P.M. There are still no sounds from the West Courts outside, but there’s high song of much volume through the wall’s water-pipes — a lot of the guys who are drilled past caring in the A.M. don’t get it up to shower until after lunch, then sit through P.M. classes with wet hair and different clothes than their A.M. classes.

Pemulis rises to stand between them and looks around the empty three-bedded room again, with neat stacks of three players’ clothes and bright gear on shelves and three wicker laundry hampers bulging slightly. There is the rich scent of athletic laundry, but other than that the room looks almost professionally clean. Pemulis and Schacht’s room makes Hal and Mario’s room look like an insane asylum, Hal thinks. Axford drew one of only two single upperclass rooms in last spring’s lottery, the other having gone to the Vaught twins, who get counted as one entry in Room Draw.

Pemulis still has his cheek screwed up to keep the loupe in as he looks around. ‘One monograph had this toss-off about DMZ where the guy invites you to envision acid that has itself dropped acid.’ ‘Holy crow.’

‘One article out of fucking Moment of all sources talks about how this one Army convict at Leavenworth got allegedly injected with some massive unspecified dose of early DMZ as part of some Army experiment in Christ only knows what and about how this convict’s family sued over how the guy reportedly lost his mind.’ He directs the loupe dramatically at first Hal and then Axford. ‘I mean literally lost his mind, like the massive dose picked his mind up and carried it off somewhere and put it down someplace and forgot where.’

‘I think we get the picture, Mike.’

‘Allegedly Moment says how the guy’s found later in his Army cell, in some impossible lotus position, singing show tunes in a scary deadly-accurate Ethel-Merman-impression voice.’

Axford says maybe Pemulis stumbled on a possible explanation for poor old Lyle and his lotus position down in the weight room, gesturing with the bad right hand in the direction of Comm.-Ad.

Again Pemulis with the thing with the head. The slackening of a cheek lets the loupe fall out and bounce off the drum-tight bed, and Pemulis gets it to rebound into his palm without even looking. ‘I think we can err on the side of not dickying the Gatorade barrels, anyway. This soldier’s story’s moral was proceed with caution, big time. The guy’s mind’s still allegedly AWOL. An old soldier, now, still belting out Broadway medleys in some secretive institution someplace. Blood-relatives try to sue on the guy’s behalf, Army apparently came up with enough arguments to give the jury reasonable doubt about if the guy can even be said to legally exist enough to bring suit, anymore, since the dose misplaced his mind.’

Axford feels absently at his elbow. ‘So you’re saying let’s proceed with care why don’t we.’

Hal kneels to prod one of the tablets up against the dusty baggie’s side. His finger looks dark in the elongated bubble of light. Tm thinking these look like two tablets are possibly a hit. A kind of Motrinish look to them.’

‘Visual guesswork isn’t going to do it. This is not Bob Hope, Inc.’

‘We could even designate it “Ethel,” for on the phone,’ Axford suggests.

Pemulis watches Hal arranging the tablets into the same general cardioid-shape as E.T.A. itself. ‘What I’m saying. This is not a fools-rush-in-type substance, Inc. This show-tune soldier like left the planet.’

‘Well, so long as he waves every so often.’

‘The sense I got is the only thing he waves at is his food.’

‘But that was from a massive early dose,’ Axford says.

Hal’s arrangement of the tablets on the red-and-gray counterpane is almost Zen in its precision. ‘These are from the 70s?’

After intricate third-party negotiations, Michael Pemulis finally landed 650 mg. of the vaunted and elusive compound DMZ or ‘Madame Psychosis’ from a small-arms-draped duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents who now undertook small and probably kind of pathetic outdated insurgency-projects from behind the front-operation of a cut-rate mirror, blown-glass, practical joke ‘n gag, trendy postcard, and low-demand old film-cartridge emporium called Antitoi Entertainment, just up Prospect St. from Inman Square in Cambridge’s decayed Portugo/Brazilian district. Because Pemulis always conducts business solo and speaks no French, the whole transaction with the Nuck in charge had to be negotiated in dumbshow, and since this lumberjackish Antitoi Nuckwad tended to look from side to side before he communicated even more than Pemulis looked all around himself, with his dim-looking partner standing there cradling a broom and also scanning for eavesdroppers in the closed shop the whole time, the whole negotiated deal had resembled a kind of group psychomotor seizure, with different bits of whipping and waggling heads reflected in dislocated sections and at jagged angles in more mirrors and pebbled blown-glass vases than Pemulis had ever seen crammed into anywhere. A very low-rent TP indeed had a hardcore-porn cartridge going at five times the normal speed so it looked like crazed rodents and may have turned Pemulis’s sexual glands off for all time, he feels. God alone knew where these clowns had acquired thirteen incredibly potent 50-mg. artifacts of the B.S. 1970s. But the good news is they were Canadians, and like fucking Nucksters about almost anything they had no idea what what they were in possession of was worth, as it slowly emerged. Pemulis, w/ aid of 150 mg. of time-release Tenuate Dospan, almost danced a little post-transaction jig on his way up the steps of the otiose Cambridge bus, feeling the way W. Penn in his Quaker Oats hat in like the 16th century must have felt trading a few trinkets to babe-in-the-woods Natives for New Jersey, he imagines, doffing the nautical cap to two nuns in the aisle.

Over the course of the next academic day — the incredibly potent stash now wrapped tight in Saran and stashed deep in the toe of an old sneaker that sits atop the aluminum strut between two panels in subdorm B’s drop ceiling, Pemulis’s time-tested entrepot — over the course of the next day or so the matter’s hashed out and it’s decided that while there’s no real reason to involve Boone or Stice or Struck or Troeltsch, it’s really Pemulis and Axford and Hal’s right — duty, almost, to the spirits of inquiry and good trade practice — to sample the potentially incredibly potent DMZ in predeter-minedly safe amounts before unleashing it on Boone or Troeltsch or any unwitting civilians. Axford having been allowed in on the front end, the question of Hal’s defraying the opportunity-cost of his part in the experiment is tactfully broached and turns out to be no problem. Pemulis’s mark-up isn’t anything beyond accepted norms, and there’s always room in Hal’s budget for spirited inquiry. Hal’s one condition is that somebody tech-literate actually take the truck down to B.U. or M.I.T.’s medical library and physically verify that the compound is both organic and nonaddictive, which Pemulis says a physical hands-on library assault is already down in his day-planner in pen, anyway. After P.M. drills on Thursday, as Hal Incandenza and Pemulis with camera-mounted Mario Incandenza in tow stand with their hands in the chainlink mesh of one of the Show Courts’ fencing and watch Teddy Schacht play a private exhibition against a Syrian Satellite-pro who’s at E.T.A. for two paid weeks of corrective instruction on a service-motion that’s eroding his rotator cuff — the guy wears thick glasses with a black athletic band around his head and plays with an upright square-jawed liquid precision and is dispatching Ted Schacht handily, which Schacht is taking with his customary sanguine good temper, giving his stolid all, learning what he can, one of very few genuinely stocky players at E.T.A. and one of the even fewer ranked junior players around without an apparent ego, wholly noninsecure since he blew out his knee on a contre-pied in the pre-Thanksgiving exhibition three years back, which is odd, now still in and at it for just the fun — and more or less doomed, therefore, to a purgatorial existence in 128–256 Alphabetville — as Pemulis and Hal stand there sweaty in full red-and-gray E.T.A. sweats on a raw 11/5 P.M., the sweat in their hair starting to accrete and freeze, Mario’s head bowed under the weight of the head-mount rig and his hideously arachnodactylìc fingers whitening as the fence takes his forward weight, Hal’s posture subtly but warmly inclined ever so slightly toward his tiny older brother, who resembles him the way creatures of the same Order but not the same Family might resemble one another — as they stand watching and hashing matters out, Hal and Pemulis, there’s the thud and sprong of an E.W.D. transnational catapult off way below to their left and then the high keen sound of a waste-displacement projectile the clouds are too low to let them see the flight of — though a weirdly yellow sheep-shaped cloud is visible somewhere up off past Acton, connecting the horizon’s seam to some kind of coming storm-front held off by the ATHSCME fans along the Lowell-Methuen stretch of border, northwest. Pemulis finally nixes the notion of performing the spirited controlled experiment here in Enfield, where Axford has to be at the A squad’s dawn drills every morning at 0500, and also Hal, unless he’s slept over at HmH the night before, with HmH just not being a good DMZ-dropping venue at all. Pemulis, scanning up and down the length of the fence and winking at Mario, posits that a solid 36 hours of demand-free time will be advisable for any interaction with the incredibly potent you-know-whatski. That also lets out the inter-academy thing with Port Washington tomorrow, for which Charles Tavis has chartered two buses, because so many E.T.A. players are getting to go and do battle in this one — Port Washington Academy is gargantuan, the Xerox Inc. of North American tennis academies, with over 300 students and 64 courts, half of which they’ll have already put under warm inflatable TesTar cover as of like Halloween, P.W.’s staff being less into the value of elemental suffering than Schtitt & Co. — so many that Tavis will almost surely go ahead and bus them all back up from Long Island just as soon as the post-competition dance is over, rather than shell out for all those motel rooms without corporate support. This E.T.A.-P.W. meet and buffet and dance are a private, inter-academy tradition, an epic rivalry almost a decade old. Plus Pemulis says he’ll need a couple weeks of quality med-library-stacks-tossing time to do the more exacting titration and side-effects research Hal agrees the soldier’s sobering story seems to dictate. So, they conclude, the window of opportunity looks to be 11/20-21 — the weekend right after the big End-of-Fiscal-Year fundraising exhibition with the E.T.A. A & B squads in singles against (this year) Quebec’s notoriously hapless Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup squads,^[74] invited down under very quiet low-profile political conditions via the good expatriate offices of Avril Incan-denza to get vivisected by Wayne and Hal et al for the philanthropic amusement of E.T.A. patrons and alums, then to dance the P.M. away at a catered supper and Alumni Ball — the weekend right before Thanksgiving week and the WhataBurger Invitational in sunny AZ, because this year in addition to Friday 11/20 they also get Saturday 11/21 off, as in from both class and practice, because C.T. and Schtitt have arranged a special one-match doubles exhibition for the Saturday A.M. following the big meet, one between two female coaches of the Québecois Wightmans and E.T.A.’s infamous Vaught twins, Caryn and Sharyn Vaught, seventeen, O.N.A.N.’s top-ranked junior women’s doubles team, unbeaten in three years, an unbeatable duo, uncanny in their cooperation on the court, moving as One at all times, playing not just as if but in fact because they shared a brain, or at least the psychomotor lobes of one, the twins Siamese, fused at the left and right temple, banned from Singles by O.N.A.N. regs, the broad-shadow-casting Vaughts, flinty-eyed tire-executive’s daughters out of Akron, using her/their four legs to cover chilling amounts of court, plus to sweep the Charleston competition at every post-exhibition formal ball for the last five years running. Tavis’ll be on Wayne to play some sort of exhibitory thing, too, though asking Wayne to publicly smear a second Québecer in two days might be a bit much. And but everyone who’s anyone’ll be down at the Lung, watching the Vaughts vivisect some adult-ranked Nucks, plus maybe Wayne,^[75] then the E.T.A.s will get Saturday to rest and recharge before starting both the pre-WhataBurger training week and the bell-lap of prep for 12/12’s Boards, meaning late Friday night-Sunday A.M. will give Pemulis, Hal, and Axford (and maybe Struck if Pemulis needs to let Struck in, for help with library-tossing) enough time to psychospiritually rally from whatever meninges-withering hangover the incredibly potent DMZ might involve … and Axford in the sauna predicted it would be a witherer indeed, since even just LSD alone he observed left you the next day not just sick or down but utterly empty, a shell, void inside, like your soul was a wrung-out sponge. Hal wasn’t sure he concurred. An alcohol hangover was definitely no frolic in the psychic glade, all thirsty and sick and your eyes bulging and receding with your pulse, but after a night of involved hallucinogens Hal said the dawn seemed to confer on his psyche a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence.^[76] Halation, Axford observed.

Pemulis appears to have left out of his calculations the fact that he’ll get that Saturday P.M. off classes only if he makes the travelling list for the Tucson-WhataBurger the following week, and that unlike Hal and Axford he’s not a lock: Pemulis’s U.S.T.A. rank, excepting his halcyon thirteenth year in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, has never gotten higher than 128, and the WhataBurger draws kids from all over O.N.A.N. and even Europe; the draw will have to be weak indeed for him to get even one of the 64 Qualifying-Round invitations. Axford’s on the fringes of the top 50, but he got to go last year at seventeen, so he’s almost got to get to go. And Hal is looking at getting a Third or maybe Fourth Seed in 18’s Singles; he’s definitely going, barring some sort of cataclysmic ankle-relapse against either Port Wash, or Quebec. Axford postulates that Pemulis isn’t miscalculating so much as simply showing a slitty-eyed confidence, which as far as his match-play outlook is concerned would be unusual and rather a fine thing — prorector Aubrey deLint says (publicly) that seeing M. Pemulis in practice v. seeing M. Pemulis in a real match that means anything is like getting to know some girl through e-mail as like e-mail-keyboard-type penpals and really falling for her and then finally meeting her in person and finding out she’s got like just one enormous tit in the exact middle of her chest or something like that.[77]

Mario will get to come along if Avril can convince C.T. to bring him along to get WhataBurger footage for this year’s E.T.A. promotional Xmas-giveaway-to-private-and-incorporated-patrons cartridge.

Schacht and the glossy Syrian are laughing together about something up at the net-post, where they’ve walked to gather gear and various spare rotator-cuff- and knee-appliances after the Syrian kind of cornily jumped the net and pumped Schacht’s hand, breath and sweat-steam rising up off and moving off through the fence’s mesh toward the manicured western hills as Mario’s laugh rings out at some broad mock-supplicant’s gesture Schacht’s just now made.