Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  But so — according to Pamela Hoffman-Jeep — this Eighties Bill, who’s a Yale alum and usually unabashedly sentimental about what Pamela H.-J. laughingly says Fackelmann called his ‘almo meter’ — well, on this particular time it seems like a little impeccably groomed birdie has whispered in Eighties Bill’s hairy ear, because this one time Eighties Bill wants to put $125K down on Brown U. against Yale U., i.e. betting against his almometer, only he wants (–2) points instead of the even spread Sorkin and the rest of the Boston books are taking off the Atlantic City line for a spread. And Fackelmann has to cell-phone down to Saugus to bounce this off Sorkin, except Sorkin’s down in the city in Enfield at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation office getting his weekly UV-bombardment and Cafergot refill from Dr. Robert (‘Sixties Bob’) Monroe — the septuagenarian pink-sunglasses-and-Nehru-jacket-wearing N.C.-F.P.F. ergotic-vascular-headache-treatment specialized, a guy who in yore-days interned at Sandoz and was one of T. Leary’s original circle of mayonnaise-jar acid-droppers at T. Leary’s now-legendary house in West Newton MA, and is now (60s B.) an intimate acquaintance of Kite, because Sixties Bob is an even bigger Grateful Dead fanatic maybe even than Kite, and sometimes got together with Kite and several other Dead devotees (most of who now had canes and O2 tanks) and traded historical-souvenir-type tiger’s eyes and paisley doublets and tie-dyes and lava lamps and bandannas and plasma spheres and variegated black-light posters of involuted geometric designs, and argued about which Dead shows and bootlegs of Dead shows were the greatest of all time in different regards, and just basically had a hell of a time. 60s B., an inveterate collector and haggling trader of shit, sometimes took Kite along on little expeditions of eclectic and seedy shops for Dead-related paraphernalia, sometimes even informally fencing stuff for Kite (and so indirectly Gately), covering Kite with $ when Kite’s rigid need-schedule didn’t permit a more formal and time-consuming fence, Sixties Bob then trading the merchandise around various seedy locales for 60s-related shit nobody else’d even usually want. A couple times Gately had to actually finger an ice cube out of a highball and slip it under the shoulderless neckline of P.H.-J.’s prom gown to try and keep her on some kind of track. Like most incredibly passive people, the girl had a terrible time ever separating details from what was really important to a story, is why she rarely ever got asked anything. But so the point is that the person that took Fackelmann’s call about Eighties Bill’s mammoth Yale-Brown bet wasn’t in fact Sorkin but rather Sorkin’s secretary, one Gwendine O’Shay, the howitzer-breasted old Green-Cardless former I.R.A.-moll who’d gotten hit on the head with a truncheon by a godless Belfast Bobbie once too often back on the Old Sod, and whose skull now was (in Fackelmann’s own terminology) soft as puppy-shit in the rain, but who had just the seedy sort of distracted-grandmotherly air that makes her perfect for clapping her red-knuckled old hands to her cheeks and squealing as she claimed Mass Lottery lottery winnings whenever Whitey Sorkin and his MA-Statehouse bagmen-cronies arrange to have a Sorkinite buy a mysteriously winning Mass Lottery ticket from one of the countless convenience stores Sorkin & cronies own through dummy corporations all up and down the North Shore, and who, because she could not only give what Sorkin claimed was the only adequate cervical massage west of the Berne Hot Alp Springs Center but also could both word-process a shocking 110 wpm and wield a shillelagh like nobody’s business — plus had been W. Sorkin’s dear late I.R.A.-moll Mum’s Scrabble-pal back in Belfast, on the Old Sod — served as Whitey’s chief administrative aide, manning the cellular phones when Sorkin was out or indisposed.

  And so but P.H.-J.’s point, which Gately has to just about crack her scalp open flicking out of her: Gwendine O’Shay, familiar with Eighties Bill and his Y.U. Bulldog sentimentality, plus cranially soft as a fucking grape, O’Shay took Fackelmann’s call wrong, thought Fackelmann said Eighties Bill wanted 125K with (–2) points on Yale instead of (–2) on Brown, put Fackelmann on Hold and made him listen to Irish Muzak while she put in a call to a Yale Athletic Dept. mole out of Sorkin’s Read-Protected database’s MOLE file and learned that the Yale U. Bulldogs’ star power forward had been diagnosed with an extremely rare neurologic disorder called Post-Coital Vestibulitis 375 in which for several hours after intercourse the power forward tended to suffer such a terrible vertiginous loss of proprioception that he literally couldn’t tell his ass from his elbow, much less make an authoritative move to the bucket. Plus then O’Shay’s second call, to Sorkin’s Brown U. athletic mole (a locker-room attendant everybody thinks is deaf), reveals that several of Brown U.’s most sirenish and school-spirited hetero coeds had been recruited, auditioned, briefed, rehearsed (i.e. ‘debriefed,’ giggles Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, whose giggles involve the sort of ticklish shoulder-writhing undulations of a much younger girl getting tickled by an authority figure and pretending not to like it), and stationed at strategic points — I–95 rest-stops, in the spare-tire compartment at the rear of the Bulldogs’ chartered bus, in the evergreen shrubbery outside the teams’ special entrance to the Pizzitola Athl. Center in Providence, in concave recesses along the Pizzitola tunnels between special entrance and Visitors’ locker room, even in a specially enlarged and sensually-appointed locker next to the power forward’s locker in the VLR, all prepared — like the Brown cheerleaders and Pep Squad, who’ve been induced to do the game pantyless, electrolysized and splits-prone to help lend a pyrotechnic glandular atmosphere to the power forward’s whole playing-environment — prepared to make the penultimate sacrifice for squad, school, and influential members of the Brown Alumni Bruins Boosters Assoc. So that Gwendine O’Shay then switches back to Fackelmann and OKs the mammoth bet and point-spread, as like who wouldn’t, with that kind of mole-reported fix in the works. Except of course she’s taken the wager backwards, i.e. O’Shay thinks Eighties Bill’s now got 125K on Yale coming within two points, while Eighties Bill — who it turns out’s cast himself as White Knight in bidding for majority control of Providence’s Federated Funnel and Cone Corp., O.N.A.N.’s leading manufacturer of conoid receptacles, with F.F.&C. CEO’d by a prominent Brown alumnus so rabid a Bruins-booster he actually wears a snarling hollow bear-head to conference games, whose ass Eighties Bill is going about kissing like nobody’s beeswax, P.H.-J. inserts, hinting it was Eighties Bill who’d tipped the Bruins staff off about the power forward’s Achilles’ vas deferens — E.B. quite reasonably believes he’s now got Brown within a deuce for 125 el grande’s.

  The wrench in the ointment that nobody in Providence has counted on is the picket-and-knuckleduster-wielding appearance of Brown University’s entire Dworkinite Female Objectification Prevention And Protest Phalanx outside the Pizzitola Athl. Center’s main gates right at game-time, two FOPPPs per motorcycle, who blow through the filigreed gates like they were so much wet Kleenex and storm the arena, plus a division of Brown’s pluckier undergraduate N.O.W.s who execute a pincer-movement down from the cheap seats up top during the first time-out, at the precise moment the Brown cheerleaders’ first pyramid-maneuver ends in a mid-air split that causes the Pizzitola’s scoreboard’s scorekeeper to reel backward against his controls and blow out both HOME’s and VISITORS’ zeroes, on the board, just as the FOPPPs’ unmuffled Hawgs come blatting malevolently down through the ground-level tunnels and out onto the playing floor; and in the ensuing melee not only are cheerleaders, Pep Squad, and comely Brown U. sirens all either laid out with picket-signs wielded like shillelaghs or thrown kicking and shrieking over the burly shoulders of militant FOPPPs and carried off on roaring Hawgs, leaving the Yale power forward’s delicate nervous system intact if overheated; but two Brown U. Bruin starters, a center and a shooting guard — both too wrung-out and dazed by a grueling week of comely-siren-auditioning and -rehearsing to have sense enough to run like hell once the melee spills out onto the Pizzitola hardwood — are felled, by a FOPPP knuckleduster and a disoriented referee with a martial-arts background, respectively; and so when the floor is finally cleared and stretchers borne off and th
e game resumes, Yale U. cleans Brown U.’s clock by upwards of 20.

  Then so Fackelmann calls up Eighties Bill and arranges to pick up the skeet, which is $137,500 with the vig, which E.B. gives him in large-denomination pre-O.N.A.N. scrip in a GO BROWN BRUINS gym-bag he’d brought to the game to sit next to the ursine-headed CEO with and now has less than no use for, but so Fackelmann receives the skeet downtown and blasts up cheesy Route 1 to Saugus to deliver the skeet and pick up his vig on the vig ($625 U.S.) right away, needing to cop Blues in what’s starting to be the worst way, etc. Plus Fackelmann’s figuring on maybe a small bonus or at least some emotional validation from Sorkin for bringing in such a mammoth and promptly-remitted wager. But, when he gets to the Rte. 1 titty bar at the rear of which Sorkin has his administrative offices behind an unmarked fire door and all wallpapered in stuff that looks like ersatz wood panelling, Gwendine O’Shay wordlessly points behind her station at Sorkin’s personal office door with a terse gesture Fackelmann doesn’t think fits with the up-beatness of the occasion at all. The door’s got a big poster of R. Limbaugh on it, from before the assassination. Sorkin’s in there working spreadsheets with his special monitor-screen-light-filtering goggles on. The goggles’ lenses on their long protruding barrels look like lobsters’ eyes on stalks. Gately and Fackelmann and Bobby C never spoke to Sorkin until spoken to, not out of henchmanish obsequity but because they could never tell what Sorkin’s cranio-facial vascular condition was or if he could tolerate sound until they verifiably heard him tolerating his own. (Sound.)

  So G. Fackelmann waits wordlessly to hand over Eighties Bill’s skeet, standing there tall and soft and palely sweating, the overall shape and color of a peeled boiled egg. When Sorkin hikes an eyebrow at the GO BRUINS bag and says the knee-slapping hilarity of the joke escapes him, Fackelmann’s mustache positively takes off all over his upper lip, and he prepares to say what he always says when he’s flummoxed, that whatever’s being said is with all due respect a goddamn lie. Sorkin saves his data and pushes his desk chair back so he can reach all the way down to the fireproof drawer. The goggles are often used in data-processing sweatshops and list for a deuce. Sorkin grunts as he hauls out a huge old Mass Lottery box for Quik-Pick cards and heaves it onto the desk, where it bulges obscenely, filled with 112.5K U.S. — there’s 112.5 fucking K in there, all in ones, 125K minus vig, what Sorkin via O’Shay believes to be Eighties Bill’s winnings, all in small bills, because Sorkin’s pissed off and can’t resist making a little like gesture. Fackelmann doesn’t say anything. His mustache goes limp as his mental machinery starts revving. Sorkin, massaging his temples, staring up at Fackelmann with his goggles like a crab in a tank, says he supposes he can’t blame Fax or O’Shay, that he’d have OK’d the bet himself, what with the neurologic tip on the Yale forward they had. Who could have foreseen thuggish Feminazis screwing up the ointment. He utters a bit of Gaelic that Fackelmann doesn’t know but assumes to be fatalistical. He peels six C-notes and an O.N.A.N.ite 25-spot off a wad the size of an artillery shell and pushes them across the metal desk at Fackelmann, his vig on the vig. He says What the fuck (Sorkin does), this Eighties Bill kid’s irrational sentimentalism for Yale will sooner or later catch up with him. Veteran books tend to be statistically philosophical and patient. Fackelmann doesn’t even bother to wonder why Sorkin refers to Eighties Bill as ‘kid’ when they’re both about the same age. But a high-watt bulb is slowly beginning to incandesce over Fackelmann’s moist head. As in the Faxter starts to conceptualize the overall concept of what must of happened. He still hasn’t said anything, Pamela Hoffman-Jeep emphasizes. Sorkin looks Fackelmann over and asks if he’s gained some asymmetrical-type weight, there. Fackelmann’s left tit does look noticeably bigger than his right, under his sport-coat, because of the legal envelope with 137 1000s and one 500 in it, the skeet from an Eighties Bill who thought he’d lost. Just like Sorkin thought E.B.’d won. The slight high whine in the room that Sorkin thinks is his Infernatron disk-drive is really the whine of Fackelmann’s high-speed mentation. His mustache roils like a cracked whip as he works his own internal mental spreadsheet. 250K in one lumpy sum represented like 375 sky-blue grams of hydromorphone hydrochloride 376 or like 37,500 10-mg. soluble tablets of the shit, available from a certain rapacious but discreet Chinatown opiate-dealer who’d only deal synthetic narcs in 100-gram weights — which all translated, assuming Kite could be persuaded to pack up his D.E.C. 2100 and move far far away with Fackelmann to help him set up a street-distribution matrix in some urban market far far away, into close to like let’s see carry the one like 1.9 million in street-value, which sum meant that Fackelmann and to a lesser jr.-partner extent Kite could have their chins on their chests for the rest of their days without ever having to strip another apt., forge another passport, break another thumb. All if Fackelmann just kept his map shut about O’Shay’s confabulation of Yale/ Brown//Brown/Yale, mumbled something about an I.V.-adulterant causing a sudden and temporary gigantism in one tit, and blasted out of there straight down Rte. 1 to this one Dr. Wo and Associates, Hung Toy’s Cold Tea Emporium, Chinatown.

  By this time Pamela Hoffman-Jeep had succumbed to the highballs and her own swaddled warmth and was irreversibly swooned, ice or fillip or no, twitching synaptically and murmuring to somebody named Monty that he was certainly no kind of gentleman in her book. But Gately could chart the rest of Fackelmann’s shit-creek’s course for himself. When approached by Fackelmann with a GO BROWN gym-bag of Dr. Wo’s finest wholesale Dilaudid and invited to decamp with him and set up a distrib-matrix for their own drug-empire far far away, Kite would have staggered back in horror at Fackelmann’s obviously not knowing that the bettor Eighties Bill was in fact none other than the son of Sixties Bob, viz. Whitey Sorkin’s personal migrainologist, who Sorkin trusted and confided in as only a massive I.V.-dose of Cafergot can make you trust and confide, and whom Sorkin would undoubtedly tell all about the guy’s own son’s huge win on Yale, and who wasn’t like Ward-and-Wally close with his son, Sixties Bob wasn’t, but naturally kept distant paternal tabs on him, and would certainly have known that E.B.’d in fact bet Brown in an attempt to cozy up to the conic CEO, and so would know that there’d been some kind of mix-up; and also that (Kite’d still be staggering back in horror as all this added up) plus, even if Sorkin somehow didn’t get told of Eighties Bill’s loss and Fackelmann’s scam from Sixties Bill, the fact was that Sorkin’s newest savagest U.S. muscle, Bobby (‘C’) C, old-fashioned smack-addict, copped regular old organic Burmese heroin from this Dr. Wo on a regular basis, and was sure to hear about 300+ grams of wholesale Dilaudid bought by a Fackelmann known to be C’s co-employee off Sorkin… and thus that Fackelmann, who when he came to Kite with the proposition was already in possession of a Brown-Booster bag full of 37,500 10-mg. Dilaudids and minus Sorkin’s 250K— plus with as Gately later knew only 22K in suicidal-scam-backfire-insurance capital — was already dead: Fackelmann was a Dead Man, Kite would have said, staggering back with horror at Fax’s idiocy; Kite’d have said he could smell Fackelmann already biodegrading from here. Dead as a fucking post, he’d have told Fackelmann, already worrying about being seen sitting there with him in whatever titty bar they were in when Fax hit Kite with the proposal. And Gately, watching P.H.-J. sleep, could not only imagine but Identify fully with how Fackelmann, on hearing Kite say he could smell him dead and why, with how Fackelmann, instead of taking his bagful of Blues and gluing on a goatee and immediately fleeing to climes that’d never even fucking heard of metro Boston’s North Shore — that the Faxter’d done what any drug addict in possession of his Substance would do when faced with fatal news and attendant terror: Facklemann’d made a fucking beeline for their luxury-stripped home and familiar safe-feeling hearth and had plopped down and immediately fired up the Sterno cooker and cooked up and tied off and shot up and nailed his chin to his chest and kept it there with staggering quantities of Dilaudid, trying to mentally blot out the reality of the fact that he was going to get demappe
d if he didn’t take some kind of decisive remedial action at once. Because, Gately realized even then, this was your drug addict’s basic way of dealing with problems, was using the good old Substance to blot out the problem. Also probably medicating his terror by stuffing himself with Peanut M&M’s, which would explain all the wrappers littering the floor of the corner he hadn’t moved from. That thus this is why Fackelmann has been squatting moist and silent in a corner of the living room right outside this very bedroom here for days; this was why the apparent contradiction of the staggering amount of Substance Fackelmann had in the gym-bag next to him together with the cornered-toad look of a man in the great fear one associates with Withdrawal. Charting and thinking, drumming his fingers absently on P.H.-J.’s unconscious skull, Gately realized he could more than empathize with Fackelmann’s flight into Dilaudid and M&M’s, but he now realizes that that was the first time it really ever dawned on him in force that a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides.