The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  The Antichrist’s eyes lit up. “May I please have the lymph node?” The Breather handed him the phone. Lenore, not sure if she should stay around to explain where Rick Vigorous was, stood awkwardly, hefting her suitcase, hurting for a shower. Heat lay curled up on the sofa, apparently alseep. The Breather quietly went over and removed the red eye of the burning nubbin of the joint from between Heat’s fingers. Cat lay crumpled against the wall under the window, his shirt in his mouth.

  “Nervous Roy Keller,” the Antichrist said into the phone. “Is it possible that I have not yet seen you this year? Are you spending all your time in the library again? In spite of what we talked about last spring?”

  Nervous Roy Keller said something.

  “Nervous, Nervous Roy,” laughed LaVache. “OK. I sense that a certain limb and I can do something for you. Right. You’re what? You’re taking Hegel? With Professor Huffman? I thought that got canceled for lack. He turned it into a tutorial? Just you and Huffman, and Hegel? That’s going to be death and destruction, you huge guy you. Well I’m sure sorry, is all. Uh-huh. Obliteration of Nature by Spirit? That’s the first assignment? What’s he going to do for an encore I wonder.” The Antichrist looked up at the Breather from the phone. “Breather, you want to be a good Sancho and go get me my Phenomenology of Spirit?”

  The Breather went up the little set of stairs from the social room into the bedroom/bathroom area. On the television, marred only by a few vertical flutters, Marilyn Munster was bringing a date home, and the date saw her father, Herman, and ran away and climbed a telephone pole in sped-up motion, which Herman and Lily interpreted as a reflection on Marilyn’s seductive charms, and the audience laughed. The Breather reappeared and handed the Antichrist the book.

  “Obliteration N by S, let’s see,” LaVache said, thumbing through. He stopped. “Bingo. Let’s see.... OK, look, N.R., why don’t you come by the room right before dinner, and we’ll talk Sublation Through Concepts. OK? Right. The leg will of course be positively growling with hunger by that time. Verstehen Sie? Right. See you then, then.”

  The Antichrist hung up the phone and put it on the floor. “A tutorial on Hegel with Huffman,” he said to the Breather. “The leg likes that.”

  The Breather grinned and manipulated his eyebrows at Lenore.

  “Rick’s taking ... walk around ... alumnus ... intense emotions washing... ,” Lenore was muttering.

  The Antichrist looked at her. “Why aren’t you in the shower this very moment?” he asked. “Take until four, and ‘The Munsters’ will be over, and my catharsis will be effected, and away we’ll go, leaving Heat to his homework.”

  “Right,” said Lenore. She undid the straps of a suitcase and dug through Rick’s underwear and got her washcloth and toothbrush, and headed for the stairs.

  “Need any help, don’t hesitate to call,” said the Breather.

  “Thanks,” Lenore said. She shivered.

  “Guess I might as well have a Quaalude, too, A.C., since there’s going to be no one left to play with,” the Breather said to LaVache.

  Lenore unhooked the wire hanger bent and fastened to keep the bathroom door open and closed the door against the noise of the television and low voices and the sliding of the drawer.

  /h/

  I’m not exactly sure how I arrived at the Flange, at three o‘clock, and I really have no idea when the Flange became a gay bar, although I do know it was sometime after 1968, during which year a group of marginal Psi Phi fraternity brothers—including myself—would come every Wednesday to hoist a few and play pool and try, in our tweed jackets and white socks and Weejun loafers, to blend in with the public-university- and townie-crowd. A crowd that I can say with all confidence was at this point not the least bit gay.

  But the bead curtain at the inner room clicketed and in I came, feeling warm from my walking and with a sneezy, burning afterdust of dry leaves in my nose. The place was relatively empty on this Monday, apart from some couples dancing and a group sitting at one end of the bar watching an episode of “The Bob Newhart Show,” a program I’d always enjoyed. The place did not scream gay bar, as so many gay bars seem to, not of course that I’ve personally been to many. In any event, here the choice and placement of posters and mirrors, the planty, velvety decor, the male bartender with orange mascara, the dancer-gender situation, told me all I needed to know. I didn’t care. My plans were simple. I wanted a Canadian Club with distilled water, then I would go initial-hunting in the restroom. I was sure I had left myself here. I sat on a stool, away from the television crowd, feeling a bit childish. Barstools make me feel a bit childish, because my feet do not quite reach the supports; they dangle, and sometimes swing, and my thighs plump out from the weight of the dangling and swinging legs, and my feet sometimes go to sleep.

  I slipped unconsciously into my bar mode. I looked at people. The people at the actual bar were easy, because of the huge mirror we were all looking into. The mirror revealed that the young bartender’s hair became a mohawk in back. I was given the Canadian Club and immediately tasted tapwater, to which I am acutely sensitive.

  The man nearest me, a few stools away, even farther than I from the “Bob Newhart” audience, was the best-looking man in the room. He had a strong face, a chin I admired wistfully over my whiskey, his high features stronger for the fact that he was engagingly in need of a shave. Hair a kind of deep, dark blond, cut short and almost brushed up. The muscles of his jaw worked as he chewed peanuts. He drank beer; he had a small brown forest of bottles around him. The eyes were bright green, but bright and still soft, somehow, plant-green as opposed to emerald-green, so that he still looked like a human being, and not a product of technology, as so many green-eyed people in my opinion do. Look like products of technology. His chin, his generous chin was cleft. Enough about chins. I’m certain this person felt the stares of all the men in the room, but he didn’t seem to notice, simply sat hunched on his stool, legs reaching the supports and then some, in designer jeans and sportcoat and dress shirt opened at the neck, eating nuts and drinking beer at an impressive rate. I somehow smelled Amherst College.

  The only Approach I had the misfortune to witness personally came from a big, sleek, blue-eyed man in a rugby shirt and white cotton pants. How he slid in between the man and myself, then slid the upper part of his body down the bar toward the man, hiding him a bit, so that I had to make exclusive use of the angle of the mirror above the glitter of the bar’s arsenal of bottles to watch. I shivered. I shivered only because the Approach looked so troublingly familiar. I had seen it at every single one of the singles bars, heterosexual singles bars I’d attended during the first desolate Lenoreless year after my hegira to Cleveland. It was indeed an Approach.

  “Hi there,” said the Approacher to the man, in the mirror. “Do you come here often?”

  I shivered.

  “Nope,” said the man, popping a handful of nuts in his mouth. His eye caught mine in the mirror.

  “No, I didn’t think so,” said the Approacher, gauging the man’s bicep under his sportcoat. “I come here fairly regularly, and I certainly would have noticed you, but I haven’t noticed you here before.” He played with his daiquiri glass.

  The man looked the Approacher in the eye through the mirror, considering something. His green eyes grew liddy, sleepy, amused. “I think you’re probably barking up the wrong tree, here, guy,” he said to the Approacher. “I’m here as a rememberer, not a patron.”

  The Approacher looked down at the man’s hands, around his beer glass, on the bar. “A rememberer?”

  “Yup,” said the man. “I used to go to school around here. A few years ago.” A nut, into his mouth. “I used to come to this bar, a lot, before it changed.”

  “Oh?” The Approacher cupped his chin in his hand, looked at the side of the man’s chewing face. “The Flange changed? I never heard about any change.”

  “Sure enough.” The man looked levelly at the Approacher through the mirror. “Now, I’m sorry to say,
it looks to be a place for faggots.” He said this slowly and distinctly. I looked down at my drink and my handkerchief. When I looked up the Approacher was gone, back at the television, and the man was placidly ordering what appeared to be his tenth beer, patiently repeating the order until the bartender could no longer pretend to ignore him.

  Careful to make it in no way resemble an Approach, I came over to the man and sat on the stool beside him, my feet dangling.

  “Look, I’m not a homosexual either,” I found myself saying, though thank God quietly. “In fact I too am here as a ... rememberer and not a patron. But I think if one comes to a place like this, for whatever reason, it behooves one not to be overtly rude to the people for whom coming here is ... entirely appropriate.” My ice snapped suddenly in my drink.

  The man looked at me in the mirror, chewing. We waited while his mouth cleared of peanuts. “I got nothing against homosexuals,” he said. “They can go around being homosexuals amongst themselves all they want, far as I’m concerned. It’s just when it’s my own personal ass that they start sniffin’ after and checkin’ out, I find my tolerance level really plummets, for some reason.” He took some beer. “As for coming into this place, I was coming into this place when these old boys were all out kneeling in alleys in the rain.” He gestured slightly through the mirror at the Approacher and his friends. “This is more my place than theirs. I used to spend hours here, when it was a real bar. I used to talk to the whores here. They were real nice. I got educated here. My house used to come down here, en-fucking-masse, on Wednesday nights.”

  “Wednesdays?” I asked. Wednesdays. “House as in ... fraternity house?”

  His green eyes were on mine in the mirror. I thought I could see something, in those eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

  “Not ... Amherst College fraternity house.”

  “Yeah, I went to Amherst,” he said.

  “Not ... Psi Phi fraternity at Amherst,” I said.

  He swiveled on his stool to face me. “Yeah.” I felt the jealous stares of the “Bob Newhart” crowd.

  “My Lord,” I said. “Myself as well. Psi Phi. Class of ‘69.”

  The man grinned widely. “ ‘83 here,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed; he held out his hand, each finger pointing in a different direction. Testing me, I knew. After only the briefest hesitation, I joined him in the Psi Phi handshake. I had not done it in so, so long. My throat ached a little bit. I found my arm tingling. “Quaaaango!” we yelled in unison at the end, and grabbed each other’s wrists, and tapped elbows. I felt eyes.

  “Sheeit.”

  “Heavens.”

  I held out my hand in the conventional way. “I am Richard Vigorous of Cleveland, Ohio.”

  The man took it. “Andrew Sealander Lang,” he said, “of Nugget Bluff, which is to say really Dallas, Texas, and lately of Scarsdale, New York.”

  “Scarsdale, Andrew?” I said. “I lived in Scarsdale, myself, for a good while. Mostly in the seventies.”

  “But you moved,” Andrew Lang said, smiling. “I can understand, completely and entirely. Yes.”

  What am I to say, retrospectively, here? Perhaps that I felt myself in the presence of a kinsman. Not simply a fraternity brother: I had been a completely marginal Psi Phi, and had actually moved out of the place in some haste in the middle of my sophomore year, when the House upperclassmen cut our stairs off halfway and fashioned a crude diving board and cut open the House’s living-room floor and filled the basement with beer and called the entire creation a swimming pool, into which it was dictated that all sophomores were to be required to dive and then drink themselves to safety. I was marginal. And I sensed in Lang a really hard-core Psi Phi: he had had at least ten beers, was entering into negotiations for the eleventh, and didn’t seem the slightest bit tipsy; nor, even more important, had he been to the restroom once since I arrived. This was collegiate manhood as I had come to know it.

  No, but still I felt affinities, elective or otherwise. I sensed somehow in Lang another inside outsider, another lonely alumnus here at an alumniless time. Surrounded by insiders, now: children, swaggering and belonging, with their complicated eyes. Lang’s eyes, eyes the color of plants, were not complicated. I looked at them in the mirror. They were like my eyes. They were the eyes of a man gone back to the house where he grew up, to watch new children play in his yard, a new Rawlings Everbounce pass through a new basketball hoop over his garage, a new dog diddle on his mother’s rhododendrons. Sad, sad. Perhaps it was only the whiskey, and the beer, but I sensed sadness in Lang. His bar was my college. They were the same. And we simply no longer belonged, now.

  “Why are you in town?” I asked Lang. “Is ‘83 having some function?”

  “Naw,” said the Texan. “ ‘83 never has functions. I just felt like I had to ... to get the heck out of Scarsdale. Just get out for a while. Plus I really like it up here in the fall. ’Course it’s not really fall yet. Too goddamned hot.”

  “Still, though.”

  “Right. Exactly. Now but I bet you didn’t come all the way out here from Ohio just to get out, though, right?”

  “No, you’re right.” I shook my head. I asked the now explicitly hostile bartender for another drink. The bartender glared at Lang. Lang ignored him. “No,” I said, “my fiancée is here visiting her brother, ‘93, and I just came along on a bit of a lark. I hadn’t even been back before.”

  Lang stared into the mirror. “Naw, I haven’t been back much either. ‘Course I only been out a few years. And I’ve come back for a couple Homecomings. Those kick ass.”

  “I remember they were fun.”

  “You bet.”

  “Are you married, in Scarsdale?” I asked. I must here confess that I asked the question for an admittedly immature and selfish reason. I instinctively and involuntarily regard all other men as potential threats to my relationship with Lenore. One more married man was one fewer member of the great threat-set.

  “Yeah, I’m married.” Lang looked at his reflection in the mirror.

  I giggled sympathetically.

  “Is the wife up with you?” I asked.

  “No she is not,” said Lang. He paused to belch. “The wife ... ,” he looked at his watch, “... the wife is at this second indubitably out in the back yard, on the lawn chair, with a martini and a Cosmopolitan, reinforcin’ the old tan.”

  “I see,” I said.

  Lang looked at me. “I really don’t know why the hell I came up here, to tell the truth. I just ... felt like I needed to come home, somehow.” He drummed his knuckle on the bar.

  “Yes, yes.” I almost clutched at his arm. “I understand completely. Trying to come back inside ...”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. What do you do, Andrew? May I call you Andrew?”

  “Sure you can, Dick,” he said. He turned back toward me, and there was peanut-smell. His eyes went dull. “Right now I’m in accounting. My wife’s Daddy’s an accountant and all, and so I do some work for him. I mostly fuck off, though. I’m gonna quit. I think I in effect quit today, by not showing up.” He gulped beer and wiped his lip, looking faraway. “When I got out of school, I worked overseas for a while, for my Daddy. My Daddy owns this company, in Texas, and I worked for them overseas, for a couple years. That was the balls.”

  “But then you got married.”

  “Yup.” Peanuts. “You married, Dick? That’s right, you said you’re engaged. ”

  “I ... I am engaged. To a wonderful, wonderful girl.” He was married, after all. “I was married before. I got divorced.”

  “And engaged again now. Whooee. A glutton for punishment, Dick.”

  “Please call me Rick,” I said. “My friends call me Rick. And an entirely different situation, this time, fortunately.” I felt a bit uncomfortable. Lenore and I were, after all, not explicitly engaged, although it was only a matter of waiting for the combination of the right moment and sufficient saliva.

  “Well good for you. What�
��s the lucky little lady’s name?”

  “Ms. Lenore Beadsman, of East Corinth, which is to say Cleveland, Ohio,” I said.

  Lang speculatively sucked the salt off a peanut. He looked in the mirror and removed something from his lip. “Beadsman. Beadsman.” He looked at me. “Hmmm. She didn’t go to school around here, did she? Or more exactly Mount Holyoke?”

  “No, no,” I said, excited, feeling connection potential—‘83, after all. “But her sister did. Ms. Clarice Beadsman. Now Mrs. Alvin Spaniard, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.”

  “Well I will be goddamned,” said Lang. “Clarice Beadsman was one of my wife’s roommates, one year. My sophomore year. I knew her. Christ in a camper, that seems like just too goddamned long ago. My wife and her didn’t get along too good.”

  “But they knew each other. Really. Really.” I squirmed with excitement and a full bladder. No possible way I was going to the men’s room before Lang, though. “What is your wife’s name, pray, so I can tell it to Lenore and she to Clarice?”

  “My wife’s maiden name was Miss Melinda Metalman,” said Andrew Lang to the mirror.

  The earth tipped on its axis. The spit was vacuumed from my mouth and disappeared out the back of my head. Melinda Metalman. Mindy Metalman, perhaps the most erotic girl I have ever seen in person. Rex Metalman’s daughter, who had done things around a lawn sprinkler no thirteen-year-old should be able to do. Sweat leapt to my brow.

  “Mindy Metalman?” I croaked.

  Lang turned again. “Yeah.” His eyes were old, dull.

  I looked at my whiskey. “You don’t perhaps know whether her father might by any chance live on ... Vine Street, in Scarsdale,” I said.

  Lang grinned to himself. “Yeah, you’re from Scarsdale, that’s right. Well, yup. 14 Vine Street. Except he don’t anymore, ‘cause he gave the house to me and Mindy last year. He lives in an apartment now. One supposedly without a lawn. Having a lawn fucked with old Rex’s mind. But except now he’s starting a lawn at his building, he says. Just a real tiny one. Hardly a lawn at all, he says. Who the hell knows.” Lang looked at the mirror. “I live at 14 Vine now, more or less.”