Infinite jest

0450H., 11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT FRONT OFFICE, ENNET HOUSE D.A.R.H., ENFIELD MA

‘Didn’t know whether to shit or shout Dixie after it went off. And the look on his face.’

‘One of the times for me was I’m in some bar in Lowell with some guys I’m crewing around with and we were there with some other guys, just fucking Lowell knuckleheads, your young drunks that are just getting to be your young working-type drunks that stop off after work for just a couple and don’t make it home til closing. Just putting away boilermakers and playing darts and this and that. And this one guy on the crew starts making moves on this one guy’s girl, this real ordinary-looking guy’s in there with his girl and one of our guys starts saying this and that to her, trying to pick her up, and her date got pissed off, you know, who can blame him, and there was words exchanged and so on and so forth, and we was all there with this first guy, in our like group, he was the one talking the shit to this guy’s girl but he was our boy, we’re all in the crew, so we all crew up on this girl’s date and push him around somewhat, you know how it is, say he’s talking shit to our boy, he gets a little bit of a beating, dope-slaps, nothing like extreme or blood, and we kick his ass around a little bit and toss him out of this bar and get this girl to drink boilermakers with us and the one guy that was making the moves on her in the first place gets her to start playing strip-darts, like taking off bits of clothes for points in darts, which the keep isn’t too like thrilled but these boys are his customers, it’s like family. We’re all real drunk and playing strip-darts.’

T get the picture. Sounds like a real nice picture.’

‘Except when I got a little smarter later I learned you never in a neighborhood bar fu— you don’t ever mess with a local guy with a girl and make him look small in front of the girl and then stay there where it happened if he leaves, because it’s this kind of guy always comes back.’

‘You learned to leave.’

‘Because this guy like a half-hour later on he comes back packing. Packing means there’s a Item involved, now, see.’

‘Item?’

‘A gun. This wasn’t a big one, I’m remembering a.25 somewhat, in that range, but in he comes and comes straight over to the dart game and the girl that’s down to her slip and pulls it out and without saying nothing up and comes right over and shoots our boy, that’d taken his girl and made him look small, shoots him right in the head, right in the back of the head.’

‘Boy was crazy as a shithouse rat.’

‘Well Joelle he’d got made small in front of his girl, and we stayed, and he came back and plugged him in the back of the head.’

‘And killed him dead.’

‘Not right away he didn’t die. The negativest part for me is what we do. All us guys with the guy that was shot. We are all very fucked up by this point in time. I remember it not seeming real. The keep’s busy calling the Finest, the guy drops the Item and the keep grabbed him and covered him with the bar piece and called the Finest and kept the guy back behind the bar, I think mostly now to keep us from eliminating his map right there, out of payback. We’re all blotto-zombie drunk by this juncture. The girl, there was blood all down the side of her slip. And here our boy’s shot in the head, the guy’d shot him right through the back of the head from the side, and blood’s all over. You always maybe think of individuals bleeding in this one way, like steady. But your serious bleeding comes with the pulse, if you didn’t know. It like shoots out and dies down and shoots out.’

‘Don’t have to tell me.’

‘Well I don’t know you, Joelle, am I right? I don’t know what you seen or know.’

‘I saw an old boy cut his hand off with a chainsaw cutting back brush back of the Cumberland when I was fishing with my Daddy. Like to have bled to death right there. My Daddy had to use his belt. Before he got it tied off the blood came like that, with the pulse. My Daddy got him to the hospital in his car, like to saved his life. He’d had some training. He could save lives like that.’

‘I tell you, what still gets me is we was so drunk we didn’t even somehow take it seriously, because everything seemed like a movie when I got real drunk. I still wish we’d thought to take him to the hospital right away. We could of piled him in. He wasn’t dead yet even though he didn’t look good. We didn’t even lay him down, we got this idea, one of the guys started walking him around. We all walked him around in circles like some kind of O.D., thought if we could keep him walking til the wagon came he’d be OK. By the end we was dragging him, I think then he was dead. Blood all over everybody. The gun wasn’t more than an old.25. People was yelling at us to pile him in and take him to the hospital, but we’d got this walking-him-around idea into our heads, to hold him up and walk him in circles, the girl’s screaming and trying to put her stockings on and we’re yelling to the guy that’d shot him how we were going to off with his map and so on and so forth, till the keep called an ambulance and they came and he was dead as a stick.’

‘Gately that’s really bad.’

‘Why are you even up, don’t have to work.’

‘I like it when it snows real early like this. This is the best window. But you learned a lesson.’

‘His name was Chuck or Chick. The one that got shot that time.’

‘Did you hear that McDade person at supper? You know how some folks have one of their legs shorter than the other?’

‘I don’t listen to those guys’ crap.’

‘It was down at the far end of the table at supper. He was telling Ken and me how he had a counselor when he was in Juvenile in Jamaica Plain, he had this counselor he said she had this condition where each leg was shorter than the other.’

‘I don’t think I follow you, Joelle.’

‘Each of the woman’s legs was shorter than the other.’

‘How can a leg that’s shorter than the other leg have the other leg shorter than it?’

‘He was having us on. He said the point was an AA point, that it defied sense and explaining and you just had to accept it on faith. That creepy Randy guy with the white wig was backing him up with a very straight face. McDade said she walked like a metronome. He was making fun of us, but I still thought it was funny.’

‘Maybe tell me about this veil of yours, then, Joelle, if we’re talking about defied sense.’

‘Waaaay out to one side. Then waaaay out to the other side.’

‘Really. Let’s really interface if you’re in here. How come with the veil?’

‘Bridal thing.’

‘…’

‘Aspiring Muslim.’

‘I didn’t mean to pry in. You can just tell me if you don’t want to talk about the veil.’

‘I’m also in another fellowship, with almost four years in.’

‘U.H.I.D.’

‘It’s the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed. The veil is a sort of fellowship caparison.’

‘What’s it compared to?’

‘We all wear one. Almost all of us, with some time in.’

‘But if you don’t mind, how come you’re in it? U.H.I.D.? How’re you supposed to be deformed? It’s nothing that sticks way out, if I can say it. Are you, like, missing something?’

‘There’s a brief ceremony. It’s a bit like giving out chips over at the Better Late Than Never meeting, for Varying Lengths. The new U.H.I.D.s stand and receive the veil and don the veil and stand there and recite that the veil they’ve donned is a Type and a Symbol, and that they are choosing freely to be bound to wear it always — a day at a time — both in light and darkness, both in solitude and before others’ gaze, and as with strangers so with familiar friends, even Daddies. That no mortal eye will see it withdrawn. That they hereby declare openly that they wish to hide from all sight. Unquote.’

‘…’

‘I’ve also got a membership card that spells out everything you could ever want to know, and more.’

‘Except I’ve asked Pat and Tommy S. and still the thing I don’t get is why join a fellowship just to hide? I can see if somebody is like — you know, hideously — and they’ve been hiding away in the dark all their life, and they want to Come In and join a fellowship where everybody’s equal and everybody can Identify because they all spent their whole life hiding also, and you join a fellowship so you can step out of the dark and into the group and get support and finally show yourself minus eyes or with three ti— arms or whatever and be accepted by people that know just what it’s like, and like in AA they say they’ll love you till you can like love yourself and accept yourself, so you don’t care what people see or think anymore, and you can finally step out of the cage and quit hiding.’

That’s AA?’

‘Kind of, a little bit, I think.’

‘Well Mr. Gately what people don’t get about being hideously or improbably deformed is that the urge to hide is offset by a gigantic sense of shame about your urge to hide. You’re at a graduate wine-tasting party and improbably deformed and you’re the object of stares that the people try to conceal because they’re ashamed of wanting to stare, and you want nothing more than to hide from the covert stares, to erase your difference, to crawl under the tablecloth or put your face under your arm, or you pray for a power failure and for this kind of utter liberating equalizing darkness to descend so you can be reduced to nothing but a voice among other voices, invisible, equal, no different, hidden.’

‘Is this like this thing they talked about about people hating their faces on videophones?’

‘But Don you’re still a human being, you still want to live, you crave connection and society, you know intellectually that you’re no less worthy of connection and society than anyone else simply because of how you appear, you know that hiding yourself away out of fear of gazes is really giving in to a shame that is not required and that will keep you from the kind of life you deserve as much as the next girl, you know that you can’t help how you look but that you are supposed to be able to help how much you care about how you look. You’re supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over how much you want to hide, and you’re so desperate to feel some kind of control that you settle for the appearance of control.’

‘Your voice gets different when you talk about this shit.’

‘What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others. You stick your hideous face right in there into the wine-tasting crowd’s visual meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts and put out your hand and are extra gregarious and outgoing and exert yourself to appear totally unaware of the facial struggles of people who are trying not to wince or stare or give away the fact that they can see that you’re hideously, improbably deformed. You feign acceptance of your deformity. You take your desire to hide and conceal it under a mask of acceptance.’

‘Use less words.’

‘In other words you hide your hiding. And you do this out of shame, Don: you’re ashamed of the fact that you want to hide from sight. You’re ashamed of your uncontrolled craving for shadow. U.H.I.D.’s First Step is admission of powerlessness over the need to hide. U.H.I.D. allows members to be open about their essential need for concealment. In other words we don the veil. We don the veil and wear the veil proudly and stand very straight and walk briskly wherever we wish, veiled and hidden, and but now completely up-front and unashamed about the fact that how we appear to others affects us deeply, about the fact that we want to be shielded from all sight. U.H.I.D. supports us in our decision to hide openly.’

‘You seem like you drift in and out of different ways of talking. Sometimes it’s like you don’t want me to follow.’

‘Well I’ve got a brand-new life, just out of the wrapper, which you all say’ll take some time to fit.’

‘So they teach you how to accept your nonacceptance, the Union, you’re saying.’

‘You followed very well. You didn’t need fewer words at all. If you don’t mind my saying so, my sense is that you think you’re not bright but you’re not.’

‘Not bright?’

‘I put that poorly. You’re not not bright. As in you’re incorrect in thinking you have nothing upstairs.’

‘It’s a self-esteem issue, then, you’re seeing in me after like three days here, then. I feel low esteem about how I think I’m not bright enough for some people.’

‘Which is fine, U.H.I.D. would say, to illustrate the U.H.I.D. take versus an apparently more AA take. U.H.I.D.’d say it’s fine to feel inadequate and ashamed because you’re not as bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if you begin to be ashamed of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact that you feel mentally inadequate, and so go around making jokes about your own dullness and acting as if it didn’t bother you at all, pretending you didn’t care whether others perceived you as unbright or not.’

‘This makes the front of my head hurt, trying to follow this.’

‘Well you’ve been up all night.’

‘Then now I have to go to my other fucking job.’

‘You’re way brighter than you think, Don G., although I doubt anything anyone else says can get in there into the gnawed ragged place where you’re afraid you’re slow and dull.’

‘And what makes you think I think I’m not bright, unless it’s you’re saying it’s obvious to anybody I’m not bright?’

‘I didn’t mean to pry. Just tell me if you don’t want to speak to someone you barely know about it.’

‘Now you’re being sarcastic on what I said before.’

‘…’

‘I got kicked off of football my tenth-grade year for flunking English.’ ‘You played American football?’

‘I was good til I got kicked off. They gave me a tutor and I still flunked.’ ‘I used to twirl a baton at halftimes. I went to a special camp six summers running.’

‘…’

‘But a lot of the forms of self-hatred there is no veil for. U.H.I.D.’s taught a lot of us to be grateful that there’s at least a veil for our form.’ ‘So the veil’s a way to not hide it.’ ‘To hide openly, is more like it.’

‘I’m already seeing it’s very different from the drug-recovery agenda, the AA and NA program.’

‘Can I ask how you’re deformed?’

‘The best is when the sun’s coming up right through the snow and everything looks so white.’

‘…’

‘I almost forgot why I came on in, that that Kate girl said Ken E. like to get killed by some son of a bitch last night at that Waltham NA thing and they want somebody to tell Johnette not to make them go back again if they don’t want.’

‘One is Kate and Ken can talk for themselves with Johnette and I don’t need to pry in and you sure don’t need to pry in and rescue nobody else. Two is you’re all of a sudden talking different again, and when you were talking about the veil you didn’t sound like you to me. And three is don’t think I can’t see you’re coming out sideways all over the place about when I asked can I ask what deformity you’re not hiding the fact that you’re hiding under that thing. The Staff part of me wants to say if you don’t want to answer it just say so, but don’t try and go around the side and think you can distract me into forgetting I asked it.’

‘The U.H.I.D. in me would say you’re trapped in shame about the shame, in response, and that the shame-circle keeps you from really being present for your Staff job, Don. You’re more bugged by the possibility that I’m treating you as unbright and distractable than you are about a resident’s inability to come right out and openly exercise her right to refuse to answer an incredibly private and drug-unrelated question.’

‘And now she’s back to talking like a fucking English teacher again. But ignore that. That’s not the point. Look at how you’re trying to get our dialogue all distracted up in shame and me again instead of saying Yes or No to me asking Will you tell me what you’re missing behind that veil.’

‘Oh you’re good at hiding Mr. G. you’re good. The minute we start to poke at any inadequacies you’re ashamed of, see, you drop behind your own protective mask of House Staff and start probing areas that you now know I can’t bring myself to be open about — since you got me to tell you all about U.H.I.D.’s philosophy of hiding — so that your own sense of inadequacy gets either buried or used as a backlight to illuminate my own inability to be open and straightforward. The best defense is a good offense isn’t it Mr. Football Player.’

‘Aspirin-time, now, with all the words. You win. Go watch the snow come down someplace else.’

‘The thing is, Mr. Staff, I’ve already just completely opened up about my shame and my inability to be open and straightforward about this. You’re exposing something I’ve already held up to view. It’s your shame about being ashamed of what you’re afraid might be seen as a lack of brightness that’s getting to stay buried under this dead horse of my deformity that you’re trying to whip.’

‘And then meantime you still didn’t say a straight-on Yes or No to Can I ask what’s up behind there, are you cross-eyed or have a like beard, or do you have like really bad skin under there even though your skin everyplace that isn’t hidden looks —’

‘Looks what? My unhidden skin is what?’

‘See, this is you keep trying to sidetrack instead of just saying No to Can I ask. Just say No. Try it. It’s OK. Nothing bad’ll happen. Just try it straight out.’

‘Perfect. You were going to say every visible expanse of my skin is just drop-dead creamy perfect.’

‘Jesus, why am I even here? Why don’t you just interface with yourself if you think you know all my issues and shames and everything I’m going to say? Why not take the suggestion to say No? Why come in here? Did I come to you, to talk? Was I just sitting in here trying to keep awake and do the Log and getting ready to go mop shit with a shoe-freak and did or didn’t you waltz on in and sit down and come to me?’

‘Don, I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I’m the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.’

‘Now with the sarcasm.’

‘I am so beautiful I am deformed.’

‘Now with the nonrespectful acting-out of treating me like I’m stupid for trying to get her to walk through her fear to give a straight-out No, which she isn’t willing.’

‘I am deformed with beauty.’

‘You want to see my professional Staff face here’s my Staff face. I nod and smile, I treat you like somebody I have to humor by nodding and smiling, and behind the face I’m going with my finger around and around my temple like What a fucking yutz, like Where’s the net.’

‘Believe what you want. I’m powerless over what you believe, I know.’

‘See the professional Staffer writing in the Meds Log: “Six extra-strong-kind aspirin for Staff after sarcasm and sideways refusal to walk through fears and sarcastic acting out by newcomer who thinks she knows everybody else’s issues.’

‘What position did you play?’

‘… that the Staffer wonders how come she’s even here in treatment then, if she knows so much.’

It is starting to get quietly around Ennet House that Randy Lenz has found his own dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerless-ness issues that beset the drug addict in his first few months of abstinence.

The nightly AA or NA meetings get out at 2l3Oh. or 22OOh., and curfew isn’t until 2330, and every Ennet resident mostly carpools back to the House with whatever residents have cars, or some of them go out in cars for massive doses of ice cream and coffee.

Lenz is one of the ones with a car, a heavily modified old Duster, white with what look like 12-gauge blasts of rust over the wheelwells, with oversized rear tires and an engine so bored-out for heavy-breathing speed it’s a small miracle he still has a license.

Lenz sets loafer one outside Ennet House only after sunset, and then only in his white toupee and mustache and billowing tall-collared topcoat, and goes only to the required nightly meetings; and the thing is that he’ll never drive his own car to the meetings. He always thumbs along with somebody else and adds to the crowd in their car. And then he always has to sit in the northernmost seat in the car, for some reason, using a compass and napkin to plot out what the night’s major direction of travel’ll be and then figuring out what seat he’ll have to be in to stay maximally north. Both Gately and Johnette Foltz have had to make a nightly routine of telling the other residents that Lenz is teaching them valuable patience and tolerance.

But then after the meeting lets out, Lenz never thumbs back with anybody. He always walks back to the House after meetings. He says it’s that he needs the air, what with being shut up in the crowded House all day and avoiding doors and windows, hiding from both sides of the Justice System.

And then one Wednesday after the Brookline Young People’s AA up Beacon by Chestnut Hill it takes him right up to 2329 to get home, almost two hours, even though it’s like a half-hour walk and even Burt Smith did it in September in under an hour; and Lenz gets back just at curfew and without saying a word to anybody books right up to his and Glynn’s and Day’s room, Polo topcoat flapping and powdered wig shedding powder, and sweating, and making an unacceptable classy-shoed racket running up the men’s side’s carpetless stairs, which Gately didn’t have time to go up and address because of having to deal with Bruce Green and Amy J. separately both missing curfew.

Lenz abroad in the urban night, solo, on almost a nightly basis, sometimes carrying a book.

Residents who seem to make it a point to go off alone a lot are red-flagged at Thursday’s All-Staff Meeting in Pat’s office as clear relapse-risks. But they’ve pulled spot-urines on Lenz five times, and the three times the lab didn’t fuck up the E.M.I.T. test Lenz’s urine’s come back clean. Gately’s basically decided to just let Lenz be. Some newcomers’ Higher Power is like Nature, the sky, the stars, the cold-penny tang of the autumn air, who knows.

So Lenz abroad in the night, unaccompanied and disguised, apparently strolling. He’s mastered the streets’ cockeyed grid around Enfield-Brighton-Allston. South Cambridge and East Newton and North Brookline and the hideous Spur. He takes side-streets home from meetings, mostly. Low-rent dumpster-strewn residential streets and Projects’ driveways that become alleys, gritty passages behind stores and dumpsters and warehouses and loading docks and Empire Waste Displacement’s mongo hangars, etc. His loafers have a wicked shine and make an elegant dancerly click as he walks along with his hands in his pockets and open coat flared wide, scanning. He scans for several nights before he even becomes aware of why or what he might be scanning for.^[224] He moves nightly through urban-animal territory. Liberated housecats and hard-core strays ooze in and out of shadows, rustle in dumpsters, fuck and fight with hellish noises all around him as he walks, senses very sharp in the downscale night. You got your rats, your mice, your stray dogs with tongues hanging and countable ribs. Maybe the odd feral hamster and/or raccoon. Everything slinky and furtive after sunset. Also non-stray dogs that clank their chains or bay or lunge, when he goes by yards with dogs. He prefers to move north but will move east or west on the streets’ good sides. His shoes’ fine click precedes him by several hundred meters on cement of varying texture.

Sometimes near drainage pipes he sees serious rats, or sometimes near cat-free dumpsters. The first conscious thing he did was a rat that this one time he came on some rats in a wide W-E alley by the loading dock out behind the Svelte Nail Co. just east of Watertown on N. Harvard St. What night was that. It’d been coming back from East Watertown, which meant More Will Be Revealed NA with Glynn and Diehl instead of St. E.’s Better Late Than Never AA with the rest of the House’s herd, so a Monday. So on a Monday he’d been strolling through this one alley, his steps echoing trebled back off the cement sides of the docks and the north left wall he hugged, scanning without knowing what he was scanning for. Up ahead there was the Stegosaurus-shape of a Svelte Co. dumpster as versus your lower slimmer E.W.D.-type dumpster. There were dry skulky sounds issuing from the dumpster’s shadow. He hadn’t consciously picked anything up. The alley’s surface was coming apart and Lenz barely broke his dancerly stride picking a kilo-sized chunk of tar-shot concrete. It was rats. Two big rats were going at a half-eaten wiener in a mustardy paper tray from a Lunchwagon in a recess between the north wall and the dumpster’s barge-hitch. Their hideous pink tails were poking out into the alley’s dim light. They didn’t move as Randy Lenz came up behind them on the toes of his loafers. Their tails were meaty and bald and like twitched back and forth, twitching in and out of the dim yellow light. The big flat-top chunk came down on most of one rat and a bit of the other rat. There’d been godawful twittering squeaks, but the major hit on the one rat also made a very solid and significant noise, some aural combination of a tomato thrown at a wall and a pocketwatch getting clocked with a hammer. Material came out of the rat’s anus. The rat lay on its side in a very bad medical way, its tail twitching and anus material and there were little beads of blood on its whiskers that looked black, the beads, in the sodium security-lights along the Svelte Nail Co. roof. Its side heaved; its back legs were moving like it was running, but this rat wasn’t going anywhere. The other rat had vanished under the dumpster, dragging its rear region. There were more chunks of dismantled street lying all over. When Lenz brought another down on the head of the rat he consciously discovered what he liked to say at the moment of issue-resolution was: ‘There.’

Demapping rats became Lenz’s way of resolving internal-type issues for the first couple weeks of it, walking home in the verminal dark.

Don Gately, House chef and shopper, buys these huge econo-size boxes of Hefty^[225] bags that get stored under the kitchen sink for whoever’s got Trash for their weekly chore. Ennet House generates serious waste.

So after vermin started to get a little ho-hum and insignificant, Lenz starts cabbaging a Hefty bag out from under the sink and taking it with him to meetings and walking back home with it. He keeps a trashbag neatly folded in an inside pocket of his topcoat, a billowing top-collared Lauren-Polo model he loves and uses a daily lint-roller on. He also takes along a little of the House’s Food-Bank tunafish in a Zip-loc baggie in another pocket, which your average drug addict has expertise in rolling baggies into a cylinder so they’re secure and odor-free.

The Ennet House residents call Hefty bags ‘Irish Luggage’ — even McDade — it’s a street-term.

Randy Lenz found that if he could get an urban cat up close enough with some outstretched tuna he could pop the Hefty bag over it and scoop up from the bottom so the cat was in the air in the bottom of the bag, and then he could tie the bag shut with the complimentary wire twist-tie that comes with each bag. He could put the closed bag down next to the vicinity’s northernmost wall or fence or dumpster and light a gasper and hunker down up next to the wall to watch the wide variety of changing shapes the bag would assume as the agitated cat got lower on air. The shapes got more and more violent and twisted and mid-air with the passage of a minute. After it stopped assuming shapes Lenz would dab his butt with a spitty finger to save the rest for later and get up and untie the twist-tie and look inside the bag and go: ‘There.’ The ‘There’ turned out to be crucial for the sense of brisance and closure and resolving issues of impotent rage and powerless fear that like accrued in Lenz all day being trapped in the northeastern portions of a squalid halfway house all day fearing for his life, Lenz felt.

There evolved for Lenz a certain sportsman’s hierarchy of types of cats and neighborhoods of types of your abroad cats; and he becomes a connoisseur of cats the same way a deep-sea sportsman knows the fish-species that fight most fiercely and excitatingly for their marine lives. The best and most fiercely alive cats could usually claw their way out of a Hefty bag, though, which created this conundrum where the ones most worth watching assuming bagged shapes were the ones Lenz risked maybe not getting his issues resolved on. Watching a spike-furred hissing cat run twisting away still half wrapped in a plastic bag made Lenz admire the cat’s fighting spirit but still feel unresolved.

So the next stage is Lenz gives Ms. Charlotte Treat or Ms. Hester Thrale some of his own $ when they go down to the Palace Spa or Father/Son to buy smokes or LifeSavers and has them start to get him special Hefty Steel-Sak^[226] trashbags, fiber-reinforced for your especially sharp or uncooperative waste needs, described by Ken E. as ‘Irish Guccis,’ extra resilient and a businesslike gunmetal-gray in tone. Lenz has such a panoply of strange compulsive habits that a request for SteelSaks barely raises a brow on anybody.

And then he doubles them, the special reinforced bags, and employs industrial-growth pipe-cleaners as twist-ties, and then now the grittiest most salutary cats make the doubled bags assume all manners of wickedly abstract twisting shapes, even sometimes moving the closed bags a couple dozen m. down the alley in a haphazard hopping-like fashion, until finally the cat runs out of gas and resolves itself and Lenz’s issues into one nightly shape.

Lenz’s interval of choice for this is the interval 22l6h. to 2226h. He doesn’t consciously know why this interval. Anchovies turn out to be even more effective than tuna. A Program of Attraction, he recalls coolly, strolling along. His northern routes back to the House are restricted by the priority to keep Brighton Best Savings Bank’s rooftop digital Time and Temperature display in view as much as possible. B.B.S.B. displays both EST and Greenwich Mean, which Lenz approves of. The liquid-crystal data sort of melts upward into view on the screen and then disappears from the bottom up and is replaced by new data. Mr. Doony R. Glynn said at the House’s Community Meeting Monday once that one time in B.S. 1989 A.D. after he’d done a reckless amount of a hallucinogen he’d refer to only as ‘The Madame’ he’d gone around for several subsequent weeks under a Boston sky that instead of a kindly curved blue dome with your clouds and your stars and sun was a flat square coldly Euclidian grid with black axes and a thread-fine reseau of lines creating grid-type coordinates, the whole grid the same color as a D.E.C. HD viewer-screen when the viewer’s off, that sort of dead deepwater gray-green, with the DOW Ticker running up one side of the grid and the NIKEI Index running down the other, and the Time and Celsius Temp to like serious decimal points flashing along the bottom axis of the sky’s screen, and whenever he’d go to a real clock or get a Herald and check the like DOW the skygrid would turn out to have been totally accurate; and that several unbroken weeks of this sky overhead had sent Glynn off first to his mother’s Stoneham apartment’s fold-out couch and then into Waltham’s Metropolitan State Hospital for a month of Haldol^[227] and tapioca, to get out from under the empty-grid accurate sky, and says it makes his ass wet to this day to even think about the grid-interval; but Lenz had thought it sounded wicked nice, the sky as digital timepiece. And also between 2216 and 2226 the ATHSCME giant fans off up at the Sunstrand Plaza within earshot were typically shut off for daily de-linting, and it was quiet except for the big Ssshhh of a whole urban city’s vehicular traffic, and maybe the odd E.W.D. airborne deliverer catapulted up off Concavityward, its little string of lights arcing northeast; and of course also sirens, both the Eurotrochaic sirens of ambulances and the regular U.S.-sounding sirens of the city’s very Finest, Protecting and Serving, keeping the citizenry at bay; and the winsome thing about sirens in the urban night is that unless they’re right up close where the lights bathe you in red-blue-red they always sound like they’re terribly achingly far away, and receding, calling to you across an expanding gap. Either that or they’re on your ass. No middle distance with sirens, Lenz reflects, walking along and scanning.

Glynn hadn’t come right out and said Euclidian, but Lenz had gotten the picture all right. Glynn had thin hair and an invariant three-day growth of gray stubble and diverticulitis that made him stoop somewhat over, and remaining physique-type issues from a load of bricks falling on his head from a Workers Comp scam gone rye that included crossed eyes that Lenz overheard the veiled girl Joe L. tell Clenette Henderson and Didi Neaves the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays.

Lenz has gotten high on organic cocaine two or three, maybe half a dozen times tops, secretly, since he came into Ennet House in the summer, just enough times to keep him from going totally out of his fucking mind, utilizing lines from the private emergency stash he kept in a kind of rectangular bunker razor-bladed out of three hundred or so pages of Bill James’s gargantuan Large-Print Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. Such totally occasional Substance-ingestions in a rundown sloppy-clocked House where he’s cooped up and under terrible stress all day every day, hiding from threats from two different legal directions, with, upstairs at all times, calling to him, a 20-gram stash from the under-reported South End two-way attempted scam whose very bad luck had forced him into hiding in squalor and rooming with the likes of fucking Geoffrey D. — cocaine-ingestion this occasional and last-resort is such a marked reduction of Use & Abuse for Lenz that it’s a bonerfied miracle and clearly constitutes as much miraculous sobriety as total abstinence would be for another person without Lenz’s unique sensitivities and psychological makeup and fucking intolerable daily stresses and difficulty unwinding, and he accepts his monthly chips with a clear conscience and a head unmuddled by doubting: he knows he’s sober. He’s smart about it: he’s never ingested cocaine on his solo walks home from meetings, which is where the Staff’d expect him to ingest if he was going to ingest. And never in Ennet House itself, and only once in the forbidden #7 across the roadlet. And anybody with half a clue can beat an E.M.I.T. urine-screen: a cup of lemon juice or vinegar down the hatch’ll turn the lab’s reading into gibberish; a trace of powdered bleach on the fingertips and let the stream play warmly over the fingertips on its way into the cup while you banter with Don G. A Texas catheter’s a pain to get piss for and put on, plus the obscene size of the thing’s receptacle for his Unit gives Lenz inadequacy-issues, and he’s only used it twice, both times when Johnette F. took the urine and he could embarrass her into turning away. Lenz owns a Texas Cathy from his last halfway house in Quincy, in what Lenz recalls as the Year of the Maytag Quietmaster.

And then it turned out, when a cat aggrieved Lenz by scratching his wrist in a particularly hostile fashion on the way into the receptacle, that doubled Hefty SteelSaks were such quality-reinforced products they could hold something razor-clawed and frantically in-motion and still survive a direct swung hit against a NO PARKING sign or a telephone pole without splitting open, even when what was inside split nicely open; and so that technique got substituted around United Nations Day, because even though it was too quick and less meditative it allowed Randy Lenz to take a more active role in the process, and the feeling of (temporary, nightly) issues-resolution was more definitive when Lenz could swing a twisting ten-kilo burden hard against a pole and go: ‘There,’ and hear a sound. On banner nights the doubled bag would continue for a brief period of time to undergo a subtle flux of smaller, more subtle and connoisseur-oriented shapes, even after the melony sound of hard impact, along with further smaller sounds.

Then it was discovered that resolving them directly inside the yards and porches of the people that owned them provided more adrenal excitation and thus more sense of what Bill James one time called a Catharsis of resolving, which Lenz felt he could agree. A small can of oil in its own little baggie, for squeaky gates. But because SteelSak trashbags — and then also tunafish mixed with anchovies and Raid ant poison from behind the Ennet residents’ fridge — caused too much resultant noise to allow for lighting a gasper and hunkering down to meditatively watch, Lenz developed the habit of setting the resolution in motion and then booking on out of the yard into the urban night, his Polo topcoat billowing, hurdling fences and running over the hoods of cars and etc. For a period during the two-week interval of give-them-poison-tuna-and-run Lenz had brief recourse to a small Caldor-brand squeeze-bottle of kerosene, plus of course his lighter; but a Wednesday night on which the alight cat ran (as alight cats will, like hell) but ran after Lenz, seemingly, leaping the same fences Lenz hurdled and staying on his tail and not only making an unacceptable attention-calling racket but also illuminating Lenz to the scopophobic view of passing homes until it finally decided to drop to the ground and expire and smolder thereupon — Lenz considered this his only really close call, and took an enormous and partly non-north route home, with every siren sounding up-close and on his personal ass, and barely got in by 2330h., and ran right up to the 3-Man room. This was the night Lenz had to have another recourse to the hollowed-out cavity in his Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion after just beating curfew home, which who wouldn’t need a bit of an unwinder after a stressful close-call-type situation with a flaming cat chasing you and screaming in a way that made porch lights go on all up and down Sumner Blake Rd.; except but instead of an unwinder the couple or few lines of uncut Bing proved to be on this occasion an un~unwinder — which happens, sometimes, depending on one’s like spiritual condition when ingesting it through a rolled dollar bill off the back of the John in the men’s can — and Lenz barely made it through switching his car’s parking spot at 235Oh. before the verbal torrent started, and after lights-out had only gotten up to age eight in the oral autobiography that followed in the 3-Man when Geoff D. threatened to go get Don G. and have Lenz forcibly stifled, and Lenz was scared to go downstairs to find somebody to listen and so for the rest of the night he had to lie there in the dark, mute, with his mouth twisting and writhing — it always twisted and writhed on the times the Bing proved to be a rev-upper instead of a rough-edge-smoother — and pretending to be asleep, with phosphenes like leaping flaming shapes dancing behind his quivering lids, listening to Day’s moist gurgles and Glynn’s apnea and thinking that each siren abroad out there in the urban city was meant for him and coming closer, with Day’s illuminated watchface in his fucking tableside drawer instead of out where anybody with some stress and anxiety could check the time from time to time.

So after the incident with the flaming cat from hell and before Halloween Lenz had moved on and up to the Browning X444 Serrated he even had a shoulder-holster for, from his previous life Out There. The Browning X444 has a 25-cm. overall length, with a burl-walnut handle with a brass butt-cap and a point Lenz’d sharpened the clip out of when he got it and a single-edge Bowie-style blade with.1-mm. serrations that Lenz owns a hone for and tests by dry-shaving a little patch of his tan forearm, which he loves.

The Browning X444, combined with blocks of Don Gately’s highly portable cornflake-garnish meatloaf, were for canines, which your urban canines tended to be nonferal and could be found within the confinement of their pet-owners’ fenced yards on a regularer basis than the urban-cat species, and who are less suspicious of food and, though more of a personal-injury risk to approach, do not scratch the hand that feeds them.

For when the dense square of meatloaf is taken out and unwrapped from the Zip-loc and proffered from the edgelet of yard out past the fence by the sidewalk, the dog at issue invariably stops with the barking and/or lunging and its nose flares and it becomes totally uncynical and friendly and comes to the end of its chain or the fence Lenz stands behind and makes interested noises and if Lenz holds the meat-item just up out of reach the dog if its rope or chain will permit it it’ll go up on the hind legs and sort of play the fence with its front paws, jumping eagerly, as Lenz dangles the meat.

Day had had some Recovery-Issue paperback he was reading that Lenz had a look at one P.M. in their room when Day was downstairs with Ewell and Erdedy telling each other their windbagathon stories, lying on Day’s mattress with his shoes on and trying to fart into the mattress as much as possible: some line in the book had arrested Lenz’s attention: something about the more basically Powerless an individual feels, the more the likelihood for the propensity for violent acting-out — and Lenz found the observation to be sound.

The only serious challenge to using the Browning X444 is that Lenz has to make sure to get around behind the dog before he cuts the dog’s throat, because the bleeding is far-reaching in its intensity, and Lenz is now on his second R. Lauren topcoat and third pair of dark wool slacks.

Then once near Halloween in an alley behind Blanchard’s Liquors off Allston’s Union Square Lenz comes across a street drunk in a chewed-looking old topcoat in the deserted alley taking a public leak against the side of a dumpster, and Lenz envisualizes the old guy both cut and on fire and dancing jaggedly around hitting at himself while Lenz goes ‘There/ but that’s as close as Lenz comes to that kind of level of resolution; and it’s maybe to his credit that he’s a little off his psychic feed for a few days after that close call, and inactive with pets circa 22l6h.

Lenz has nothing much against his newer fellow resident Bruce Green, and when one Sunday night after the White Flag Green asks can he walk along with Lenz on the walk back after the Our Father Lenz says Whatever and lets Green walk with him, and is inactive during this night’s 2216 interval as well. Except after a couple nights of Green strolling home along with him, first from the White Flag and then from St. Columbkill’s on Tuesday and a double 1900–2200 shot of St. E.’s Sharing and Caring NA and then BYP on Wed., Green following him around like a terrier from mtg. to mtg. and then home, it begins to like emerge on Lenz that Bruce G. is starting to treat this walking-through-the-urban-P.M.-with-Randy-Lenz thing as like a regular fucking thing, and Lenz starts to Jones about it, the unresolved Powerless Rage issues that the thing is now he’s gotten so he’s used to resolving them on a more or less nightly basis, so that being unable to be freely alone to be active with the Browning X444 or even a SteelSak during the 2216-2226h. interval causes this pressure to build up like almost a Withdrawal-grade pressure. But on the other side of the hand, walking with Green has its positive aspects as well. Like that Green doesn’t complain about lengthy detours to keep a mainly north/northeastern orientation to the walks when possible. And Lenz enjoys a sympathetic and listening ear to have around; he has numerous aspects and experiences to mull over and issues to organize and mull, and (like many people hardwired for organic stimulants) talking is sort of Lenz’s way of thinking. And but most of the ears of the other residents at Ennet House are not only unsympathetic but are attached to great gaping flapping oral mouths which keep horning into the conversation with the mouths’ own opinions and issues and aspects — most of the residents are the worst listeners Lenz has ever seen. Bruce Green, on the hand’s positive side, hardly says anything. Bruce Green is quiet the way certain stand-up type guys you want to have there with you beside you if a beef starts going down are quiet, like self-contained. Yet Green is not so quiet and unresponding that it’s like with some silent people where you start to wonder if he’s listening with a sympathizing ear or if he’s really drifting around in his own self-oriented thoughts and not even listening to Lenz, etc., treating Lenz like a radio you can tune in or out. Lenz has a keen antenna for people like this and their stock is low on his personal exchange. Bruce Green inserts low affirmatives and ‘No shit’s and ‘Fucking-A’s, etc., at just the right places to communicate his attentions to Lenz. Which Lenz admires.

So it’s not like Lenz just wants to blow Green off and tell him to go peddle his papers and let him the fuck alone after Meetings so he can solo. It would have to be handled in a more diplomatic fashion. Plus Lenz finds himself nervous at the prospect of offending Green. It’s not like he’s scared of Green in terms of physically. And it’s not like he’s concerned Green would be the Ewell- or Day-type you have to stressfully worry about maybe going and ratting out on Lenz’s place of whereabouts to the Finest and everything like that. Green has a strong air of non-rat about him which Lenz admires. So it’s not like he’s frightened to blow Green off; it’s more like very tense and tightly wound.

Plus it agitates Lenz that he has the feeling that it really wouldn’t be any big deal to Green that much one way or the other, and that Lenz feels like he’s spending all this stress tensely worrying about his side of something that Green would barely think about for more than a couple seconds, and it enrages Lenz that he can know in his head that the tense worry about how to diplomatize Green into leaving him alone is unnecessary and a waste of time and tension and yet still not be able to stop worrying about it, which all only increases the sense of Powerlessness that Lenz is impotent to resolve with his Browning and meatloaf as long as Green continues to walk home with him.

And the schizoid cats with clotted fur that lurk around Ennet House cringing and neurotic and afraid of their own shadow are too risky, for the female residents are always formulating attachments to them. And Pat M.’s Golden Retrievers would be tattlemount to legal suicide. On a Saturday c. 222lh., Lenz found a miniature bird that had fallen out of some nest and was sitting bald and pencil-necked on the lawn of Unit #3 flapping ineffectually, and went in with Green and ducked Green and went back outside to #3’s lawn and put the thing in a pocket and went in and put it down the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink of the kitchen, but still felt largely impotent and unresolved.

Except for Pat Montesian’s bay-windowed front office and the House Manager’s phone-booth-sized back office and the two live-in Staff bedrooms down in the basement, none of the doors inside Ennet House have locks, for predictable reasons.