Authors: David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest (207 page)
DeLint said 'I was given to understand you can either finish out the term for credit or you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of pockets on a stick like a bandanna to some other O.N.A.N.T.A. institution and see if they'll take a senior without any kind of positive reference, which the sense I get is the administration says fat chance on any kind of reference.’
Tex Watson said something about urine.
Pemulis recrossed his leg. DeLint looked at Nwangi:
'I believe the kid is speechless.’
'I believe he has nothing to say.’
'I don't believe it.’
'And something about you're invited to shout whatever you threatened the administration to shout about from the highest hill you can find, which pretty soon won't be this one.’
Nwangi got out through laughter: 'And that the administrative office doorknobs have been rubberized and grounded, the administrative files all recryptographilated, everyone's room's mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, Mrs. Inc said to tell you.’
The little deck-of-cards riffle of the wings of the Shit Fairy, which he privately envisions as a kind of violet incubus with the Da's saggy frown. Pemulis scratched very coolly next to his ear. 'And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?’
DeLint told Pemulis he just fucking slayed him while Watson looked from face to face and Nwangi rocked and wheezed and slapped at his knee, and Pemulis, close-mouthed and breathing with terrible ease, found their good humor almost infectious.
333
Put out by the Mass Division of S.A.S., listing meetings of all but the very most lunatic-fringe-type 12-Step Programs in city, sub-, and exurbs, all up and down both Shores, the Cape, and Nantucket.
334
Hal's Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob H., which started as a wry dark mental joke and now within a week has become the way Hal characterizes abstinence to himself, which any Boston AA would tell him isn't a very promising way to think about it at all, in terms of self-pity.
335
Except of course for a certain hardwired type of pornography- and onanistic sex-addict, which has given rise to a couple exceptionally icky Step-based fellowships.
336
(according to his sudoriferous and and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain)
337
Latin blunder for self-defense's se defendendo is sic, either a befogged muddling of a professional legal term, or a post-Freudian slip, or (least likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet — namely V.i. 9.
338
Ketorolac tromethamine, a non-narcotic analgesic, little more than Motrin with ambition — ®Syntex Labs.
339
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
340
Doxycycline hyclate, an I.V.-antibiotic — ®Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals.
341
Oxycodone hydrochloride + acetaminophen, a Schedule C-III narcotic oral analgesic — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.
342
Or possibly Babel.
343
Boston AA slogan meaning trying to quit addictive Substance-use without working any kind of Recovery Program.
344
E.T.S.V Advanced Placement Standardized Subject Tests, which Hal Incandenza's signed up to take in English and (Parisian) French.
a. Educational Testing Service Inc., Princeton NJ.
345
The College of Basic Studies Bldg. on Commonwealth and Granby, approx. 3 clicks east-southeast of E.T.A.
346
Montreal International Airport-D'Orval, Cartierville Airport being now restricted to intra-Québec flights only.
347
(Which in fact she doesn't, but she had had perfume on the last time she wore the hulpil.)
348
An R. Catholic church just off Brighton Center.
349
Sic.
350
Or a face writhing in involuntary disgust at Don G.'s own armlessness and hook, maybe.
351
As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: 'My Life Is Unmanageable and I'd Like to Share It With You.’
352
Reference to January-February Y.D.A.U., when person or persons unknown went around coating selected toothbrushes of the Boys and Girls 16's with what was finally pinpointed as betel-nut extract, causing panic and internecine finger-pointing and resulting in serial oxidation-treatment visits to Dr. E. Zegarelli, D.D.S., by half a dozen E.T.A.s until the brush-tamperings ceased as suddenly as they'd begun; and now nine months later no one still has the slightest idea re perpetrator or point.
353
Which runs not to Enfield-Brighton but to Roxbury and Mattapan, places where it is very bad nighttime joss indeed to be both white and incapacitated.
354
Q.v. note a to Note 12.
355
Anexsia — ®SmithKline Beecham Laboratories.
356
Levo-Dromoran— ®Roche Laboratories.
357
Numorphan, kind of a watered-down Dilaudid — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.
358
Perwin NX — ® Bos well Medications Ltd., Canada — which accounts for the C-III, because the Canadians are notoriously insane when it comes to forecasting abuse-potential.
359
A.k.a. Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride — ®Roche, Inc. — a low-grade Valiumish tranq.
360
A C-III and sort of entry-level oral narcotic, the side-effects and inconsistent buzz of which often send abusers up the ladder to C-II compounds.
361
A.k.a. hyoscyamine sulfate — ®Schwarz Pharma Kremers Urban, Inc. — an anti-spasmodic for anything from colitis to Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
362
A.k.a. methaqualone, now manufactured outside O.N.A.N. jurisdiction under the trade name Parestol.
363
Later one-third of the rent-and-strip-luxury-apts. crew, and even later Gately's trusted colleague on some of his most disastrous and bottom-hastening home-invasions, including that of one G. DuPlessis, which Kite ended up regretting exponentially more than Gately did, once the A.F.R. got through with him.
364
MDA, MDMA ('X'), MMDA-2 ('Love Boat'), MMDA-
3
a ('Eve'), DMMDA-2
('Starry Night'), etc.
365
Long-Term Institution.
366
Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom's turgid studies of artistic influenza — though it's unclear how either Flood- or dead-ancestor discussions have any connection to S. Peterson's low-budget classic The Cage, which is mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around, other than the fact that J. O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could; maybe the 'disjunction' or 'disconnection' between the screen's film and Ph.D.'s scholastic discussion of art is part of the point.
3
a. (Which of course assumes there's a point.)
367
Though they did, just as in depictions of organized crime in popular entertainment, often change the cell-phones they used, to avoid potential taps or Pen Registers — Sorkin buying new units and #s, Gately more often borrowing student R.N.s' cellulars and then returning them after a few days. One of Gately's biggest challenges in this career was remembering all the different fucking phone numbers and addresses of luxury-apts.-of-the-week when he was strafed on Barn-Bams just about all the time.
368
Cimetidine — ®SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals — 8oo-mg. spansules for generalized cranio-vascular woe (derived, kind of interestingly, from the same ergot rye-mold as LSD).
369
For the two maps Sorkin had to have eliminated altogether during this period, it's maybe worth observing that he eschewed both Towers and instead used the thuggish ex-Québecer muscleboys DesMontes and Pointgravè, who had no real loyalties or membership in any community and hired themselves out as enforcers for books and high-interest lenders all up and down both Shores. Gately did, as a coercive collector, demap one person, but it was essentially an accident — the debtor had been blond, and drinking Heinekens, and then when things got physical he'd squirted Gately in the face with Mace, and a red curtain of rage had descended over Gately's sight, and when he'd come back to himself the debtor's head was turned 180° around on his neck and had the little Mace can all the way up one nostril, and it was the most professionally horrified Gately had ever been up until the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T., which anyway occurred much later and when Gately was way more nonviolence-prone.
370
Purified pork insulin in a zinc suspension — ®Lilly Pharmaceuticals.
371
An elite private high school up near the Methuen salient.
372
Surely skeet and vig, meaning debt and bookmaker's automatic percentage (usually 10% subtracted from winnings or added to skeet) are not just metro Boston terms.
373
A.k.a. Acetylcysteine-zo — ®Bristol Laboratories — a nebulizable prophylaxis against the post-traumatic buildup of abnormal, viscid, or inspissated mucus.
374
With the hard-ch sound distinctive of North Shore pronun. of words like Chicago and champagne.
375
Known less sensitively among neuro-urology residents as 'Dizzy Dick Disorder' or sometimes just '3-D.’
376
Knoll Laboratories' good old Dilaudid — $666.00/g. wholesale and $5/mg. street at Y.W.-Q.M.D. valuations.
377
A 'Phillips Screwdriver,' vodka and Milk of Magnesia, which Gately finds nauseous and privately refers to as a 'lowball.’
378
(As opposed to self-confronting, presumably.)
379
See Note 144 supra.
380
The 1.3:1-aspect-ratio rectangle scanned by electron beams in video imaging, now replaced by multi-interlace
3
solid-field HD digital imaging.
a. Why Noreen Lace-Forché's seminal corporation's name was a kind of wry pun: 2:1 interlace was pre-HD television's term for breaking the picture frame into two 262.5-line fields for standard 525-line raster-scanning. ... A very in-type joke designed to appeal to the same Big Four that Noreen L.-F. was then wooing.
381
More like B.S. 1926, according to the Still Photo Archive at NNY City's Museum of Modern Art. Plus n.b. the print — which Hal correctly remembers Avril always loathing
a
— long pre-dated J.O.I.'s ever picking up a camera.
a. Hence the relative queerness of its still being up on the HmH living room wall four years after Incandenza's felo de se — it's not like anybody asked her to keep the thing up.
382
Whether in singles against him or doubles alongside, when Hal is on-court with Wayne he always gets the creepy feeling that Wayne has control out there not just of his voluntary CNS but also of his heartrate and blood pressure, the diameter of his pupils, etc., which feeling is not only creepy but distracting, adding to the tension of playing with Wayne.
383
Winter Park FL facility for enmeshment-, codependency-, and compulsivity-related Issues.
384
A.k.a. Lorazepam — ®Wyeth-Aherst Labs — a venerable anti-anxiety tranq, of which 25 mg./day is enough to anxiolytize a good-sized Clydesdale.
385
Probably meaning Doryx, Parke-Davis's doxycycline hyclate, the Cruise missile of gram-negative antibiotics.
386
Nalaxone hydrochloride, the Exocet missile of narcotic antagonists — ®DuPont Pharm. — 2 ml./2Oml.-saline pre-filled syringes.
387
Metro Boston's third-hardest thing to street-cop after raw Vietnamese opium and the incredibly potent DMZ, Sunshine is pentazocine hydrochloride and mefenamic acid
3
— ®Sanofi Winthrop, Canada, Inc. — w/ trade-name Talwin-PX — Day-Glo-yellow serum, 7ml./20ml.-saline pre-filled syringes.
a. A non-narc analgesic marketed in the U.S. as Ponstel — ®Parke-Davis — mostly (oddly enough) for dysmenorrhea, sort of like nuclear-grade Mydol.
388
Talwin-NX — ®Sanofi Winthrop U.S.
The End
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