Infinite jest

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

The Man o’ War Grille on Prospect: Matty sat in the hot clatter of the Portuguese restaurant with his hands in his lap, looking at nothing. A waiter brought his soup. The waiter had bits of either bloodstain or soup on his apron, and for no discernible reason wore a fez. Matty ate his soup without once slurping. He’d been the neat eater in the family. Matty Pemulis was a prostitute and today he was twenty-three.

The Man o’ War Grille is on Prospect Street in Cambridge and its front windows overlook the heavy foot traffic between Inman and Central Squares. As Matty waited for his soup he’d seen across the restaurant and out the front’s glass a bag-lady-type older female in several clothing-layers lift her skirts and lower herself to the pavement and move her scaggly old bowels right there in full view of passersby and diners both, then gather all her plastic shopping bags together and walk stolidly out of view. The pile of bowel movement sat there on the pavement, steaming slightly. Matty’d heard the college kids at the next table say they didn’t know whether to be totally illed or totally awed.

A big rangy kid, with a big sharp face and tight short hair and a smile and a shave-twice jaw since he was fourteen. Now balding smoothly back from a high clear forehead. A permanent smile that always seemed like he was trying not to but just couldn’t help it. His Da always formerly saying to Wipe it off.

Inman Square: Little Lisbon. The soup has bits of calamari that make the muscles in his face flex, chewing.

Now two Brazilians in bell bottoms and tall shoes along the sidewalk across the window over the diners’ heads, what might be a brewing street-fight, one walking forward and one walking backward, facing off as they move, each missing the dollop of bowel-movement on the walk, speaking high-volume street-Portuguese muffled by windows and hot clatter, but each looking around and then pointing at his own chest like: ‘You saying this shit to me?’ Then the forward man’s sudden charge carrying them both past the window’s right frame.

Matty’s Da’d come over on a boat from Louth in Lenster in 1989. Matty’d been three or four. Da’d worked on the Southie docks, coiling lengths of rope as big around as phone poles into tall cones, and had died when Matty was seventeen, of pancreatic complaints.

Matty looked up from the roll he was dipping in the soup and saw two underweight interracial girls moving across the window, one a nigger, neither even looking at the shit everyone’s stepping around; and then a few seconds behind them Poor Tony Krause, who because of the trousers and cap Matty didn’t even recognize as Poor Tony Krause until he’d looked back down and then up again: Poor Tony Krause looked godawful: sucked-out, hollow-eyed, past ill, grave-ready, his face’s skin the greenish white of extreme-depth marine life, looking less alive than undead, identifiable as poor old Poor Tony only by the boa and red leather coat and the certain way he held his hand to his throat’s hollow as he walked, that way Equus Reese always said always reminded him of black-and-white-era starlets descending curved stairs into some black-tie function, Krause never so much walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of space, a queenly hauteur now both sickening and awesome given Krause’s spectral mien, passing across the Grille’s window, his eyes either on or looking right through the two skinny girls plodding ahead of him, following them out of the window’s right-hand side.

His Da’d begun fucking Matty up the ass when Matty was ten. A fook in t’boom. Matty had complete recall of the whole thing. He’d seen sometimes where persons that had unpleasant things happen to them as children blocked the unpleasantness out in their mentality as adults and forgot it. Not so with Matty Pemulis. He remembered every inch and pimple of every single time. His father outside the little room Matt and Micky slept in, late at night, the cat’s-eye sliver of lit hallway through the crack in the door Da’d opened, the door on well-oiled hinges opening with the implacable slowness of a rising moon, Da’s shadow lengthening across the floor and then the man his very self weaving in behind it, crossing the moonlit floor in darned socks and that smell about him that later Matty’d know was malt liquor but at that age he and Mickey called something else, when they smelled it. Matty lay and pretended to sleep; he didn’t know why tonight he pretended not to know the man was there; he was afraid. Even the first time. Micky just five. All the times were the same. Da drunk. Tacking across the bedroom floor. A certain stealth. Managing somehow never to break his neck on the toy trucks and tiny cars scattered on the floor, left there that first time by accident. Sitting on the edge of the bed so his weight changed the bed’s angle. A big man smelling of tobacco and something else, his breath always audible when drunk. Sitting on the edge of the bed. Shaking Matty ‘awake’ to the point where Matty’d have to pretend to wake up. Asking if he’d been asleep, sleeping, there, was he. Tenderness, caresses that were somehow just over the line from true ethnic-Irish fatherly affection, the emotional largesse of a man without a Green Card who daily broke his back for his family’s food. Caresses that were in some vague way just over the line from that and from the emotional largesse of something else, drunk, when all the rules of mood were suspended and you never knew from minute to minute whether you were to be kissed or hit — impossible to say how or even know how they were just over those lines. But they were, the caresses. Tenderness, caresses, low soft oversweet hot bad breath, soft apologies for some flash of savagery or discipline from the day. A way of cupping the pillow-warm cheek and jaw in the hollow of the hand, the huge pinkie finger tracing the hollow between throat and jaw. Matty’d shrink away: shy are we sone scared are we? Matty’d shrink away even after he knew the shrinking fear was part of what brought it on, for Da’d get angry: who are we scared of, then? Then who are we, a sone, to be scared so of our own Da? As if the Da that broke daily his back were nothing more than a. Can’t a Da show his son some love without being taken for a. As if Matty could lie here with his food inside him under bedding he’d paid for and think his Da were no better than a. Is it a fookin you’re scared of, then. You think a Da what comes in to speak to his sone and holds him as a Da has nought on his mind but a fook? As if the sone were some forty-dollar whore off the docks? As if the Da were a. Is that what you take me for. Is that what you take me for then. Matty shrinking back into a flattening pillow the Da’d paid for, the springs of the convertible bed singing with his fear; he shook. Why then so then I’ve a mind to give you just what you’re thinking t’fear. Take me for. Matty knew early on that his being afraid fueled the thing somehow, made his Da want to. He was unable not to be afraid. He tried and tried, cursed himself for a coward and deserving, all but calling his father a. It was years before he snapped to the fact that his Da’d have fooked him in t’boom no matter what he’d done. That the event was laid out before the first slim line of doorlight broadened, and whatever Matty’d felt or betrayed made no difference. An advantage to not blocking it out is you can snap to things later, with ma-turer perspective; you can come to see no sone on the planet could in any way ask for that, regardless. At a certain later age he started lying there when his Da shook him and pretended to sleep on, even when the shakes got to where his teeth clacked together in a mouth that wore the slight smile Matty’d decided truly sleeping people’s faces always wore. The harder his father shook him, the tighter Matty’d shut his eyes and the more set the slight smile and the louder the rasps of the cartoon snores he alternated with exhaled whistles. Mickey over in the cot by the window always silent as a tomb, on his side, face to the wall and hidden. Never a word between them about anything more than the chances of being kissed v. hit. Finally Da’d grab both his shoulders and flip him over with a sound of disgust and frustration. Matty thought just the smell of the fear was maybe enough to deserve it, until (later on) he got some maturer perspective. He remembered the oval sound of the cap coming off the jar of petroleum jelly, that special stone-in-pond plop of a Vaseline cap (not Child-Proof even in an era of Child-Proof caps), hearing his Da muttering as he applied it to himself, feeling the ice-cold awful cold finger between him as his Da smeared the stuff roughly around Matty’s rosebud, his dark star.

It was only the maturer perspective of years and experience that let Matty find something to be thankful for, that the Da’d at least used a lube. The origins of the big man’s clear familiarity with the stuff and its nighttime use not even adult perspective could illuminate, let Matty snap to, still, now, at twenty-three.

One hears, say, cirrhosis and acute pancreatitis and thinks of the subject clutching his middle like an old film’s gutshot actor and slumping quietly over to eternal rest with lids shut and face composed. Matty’s Da’d died choking on aspirated blood, a veritable fountain of the darkest possible blood, Matty coated a spray-paint-russet as he held the man’s yellow wrists and Mum lumbered off down the ward in search of a crash-cart team. Particles aspirated so terribly fine, like almost atomized, so that they hung in the air like the air itself over the cribbed bed as the man expired, cat-yellow eyes wide open and face screwed into the very most godawful rictusized grin of pain, his last thoughts (if any) unknowable. Matty still toasted the man’s final memory with his first shot, whenever he indulged.[278]