* - This is the first part of what should probably, for the sake of meeting copyright technicalities, be considered a book review.
She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter's dreamscape... A vision in a sundress and silly shoes. Mildred L. Bonk.
And the other point is I started to fall even before I started to hear him reply, standing there: Yes, But He'll Never Be Great...It was a religious moment. I learned what it means to be a body, Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking, son, as I fell kneeling and slid toward the stretched net, myself seen by me, frame by frame, torn open...It's a pivotal, it's a seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same moment, Jim.
'And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void/And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep/And We said:/Look at that fucker Dance.'
...the party music's now some horrible collection of mollified rock classics with all soft rock's grim dental associations...
'As we'd later reconstructed the scene, he'd used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the over door, then when he'd gotten his head in he'd carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil.'
'Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.'
'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor.'
The real football reason, in all its inevitable real-reason banality, was that, over the course of weeks of dawns of watching the autosprinklers and the Pep Squad practices, Orin had developed a horrible schoolboy-grade crush, complete with dilated pupils and weak knees, for a certain big-haired sophomore baton-twirler he watched twirl and strut from a distance through the diffracted spectrum of the plumed sprinklers, all the way across the field's dewy turf, a twirler who'd attended a few of the All-Athletic-Team mixers Orin and his strabismic B.U. doubles partner had gone to, and who danced the same way she twirled and invoked mass Pep, which is to say in a way that seemed to turn everything solid in Orin's body watery and distant and oddly refracted...The schoolboy epithet they'd made up to refer to Orin's twirler was the P.G.O.A.T., for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time...this was the kind of hideously attractive girl you just knew in advance did not associate with normal collegiate human males, and clearly attended B.U.-Athletic social functions out of a sort of bland scientific interest...When she danced, at dances, it was with other cheerleaders and twirlers and Pep Squad Terrierettes, because no male had the grit or spit to ask her...The big hair was red-gold and the skin peachy-tinged pale and arms freckled and zygomatics indescribable and her eyes an extra-natural HD green.
How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting? Because every one of the seminal little mini-epiphanies you have in early AA is always polyesterishly banal...
She's finding it especially hard to take when these earnest ravaged folks at the lectern say they're 'Here But For the Grace of God," ... but that her trouble with it is that 'But For the Grace of God' is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. 'But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin's bathroom floor,' so that an indicative transposition like 'I'm here But For the Grace of God' is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it's meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the thought that the Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in.
Storrow 500: Local argot for Storrow Drive, which runs along the Charles from the Back Bay out to Alewife, with multiple lanes and Escherian signs and On- and Off-ramps within car-lengths of each other and no speed limit and sudden forks and the overall driving experience so forehead-drenching it's in the metro Police Union's contract they don't have to go anywhere near it.
...looking due southeast up Prospect, Lucien can see the variegated glints of passing low-chassis headlights off a whole long single-file column of polished metal wheels stolidly turning, being turned by swarthy hands in fingerless wheelchair-gloves. 'Squeak.' 'Squeak.' ... Wheelchair Assassins ... Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, A.F.R.s, the ones who come always in the twilight, implacably squeaking, and cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, feel no pity or remorse, or fear (except a rumored fear of steep hills), and now they're all in here all over the shoproom like faceless rates, the devil's own hamsters ... Lucien bursts almost falling through the curtains, bug-eyed and corded and webbed in thread ... only to horrifically see the shop's rear service door standing agape in a gritty breeze and Bertraund ... sitting, squinting piratically straight ahead, with a railroad spike in his eye.
'Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned, I'm standing here prompted to fucking muse out loud,' my father said.
Two homemade pom-poms of shredded paper and what looked like the amputated handles of wooden tennis rackets were on the seminar table, which was otherwise bare. John Wayne wore a football helmet and light shoulder pads and a Russell athletic supporter and socks and shoes and nothing else. He was down in the classic three-point stance of U.S. football. Inc's incredibly tall and well-preserved mother Dr. Avril Incandenza wore a little green-and-white cheerleader's outfit and had one of deLint's big brass whistles hanging around her neck. She was blowing on the whistle, which appeared to be minus the little inside pellet because no whistling sound resulted. She was about two meters from Wayne, facing him, doing near-splits on the heavy shag, one arm up and pretending to blow the whistle while Wayne produced the classic low-register growling sounds of U.S. football. Pemulis made rather a show of pushing the bumpkin-billed yachting hat back to scratch his head, blinking. Mrs. Inc was the only one looking at him.
'I probably won't even waste everybody's time asking if I'm interrupting,' Pemulis said.
The kid's still obsessed with her approval. He lives for applause from exactly two hands.
(This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hand after hand must descend to pull him back from the endless fall. For were there for him just one, one, special and only, the One would not be he or she but what was between them, the obliterating trinity of You and I into We. Orin felt that once and has never recovered, and will never again.)
... carpal neuralgia, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae. Half of all metro Bostonians now work at home via some digital link. 50% of all public education disseminated through accredited encoded pulses ... One third of those 50% of metro Bostonians who still leave home to work could work at home if they wished. And (get this) 94% of all O.N.A.N.ite paid entertainment now absorbed at home ... Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.
The kids did somewhat better during periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen door and went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice - whom both Mr. Stice and The Darkness called 'The Bride' - while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking intricate multicourse meals she'd feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself and his six siblings as 'The Brood') and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride's own.
... Struck, canted slightly in his desk-chair from the over-development of his body's right side, is also trying to carve up each of this diarrheatic G.T. Day, M.S. guy's clauses into less-long self-contained sentences that sound more earnest and pubescent, like somebody earnestly struggling toward truth instead of flecking your forehead with spittle as he ranted grandiosely ...
Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness, no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional involvement toward an audience. Like conversing with a prisoner through that plastic screen using phones ... Joelle thought them more like a very smart person conversing with himself.
Joelle'd felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady's grace and cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time felt sure in her guts' pit that the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle's pancreas and thymus and minced them and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned her way.
'You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a kid?'
'Boy do I ever.'
'Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.'
'But then how do you know they're monsters, then?'
''That's the monstrosity right there, Boo, I'm starting to think.'
'Golly Ned.'
'That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.'
One reason Pemulis was cautiously unassertive about Wayne's unauthorized presence in the room was the leaflet, which given a certain office-incident it wasn't impossible Wayne might choose to suspect seeing Pemulis's hand in the Olde-English-fonted leaflet up at various boards and inserted on the E.T.A. TP's communal e-board for 11/14 announcing a joint John Wayne/Dr. Avril Incandenza arithmetic presentation to the pre-quadrivial 14-and-Unders on how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times.
So Hal's most vivid full-color memory of the non-anti-Substance Meeting he drove fifty oversalivated clicks to by mistake will become that of his older brother's doubles partner's older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered because one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort dipped and rose as he crawled on three limbs toward Hal and the needs-meeter behind him, Bain's knees leaving twin pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up and past Hal, his face unspeakable.
My whole descent into somewhat-heavier-than-normal drinking may have been some instinctive attempt to bury third-grade feelings of despicability, submerge them in an amber sea.
'You stepped in against six armed Hawaiians, I hear. Marshall Plan. Captain Courageous. God's personal Shane ... Glenny Kubitz calls me and describes the thing blow by blowjob. Says I should see the other guys. Says about breaking a Hawaiian's nose, shoving the bits up into the brain. The old chop-and-stiff-arm he says. Big Don G.'s a Satanically tough motherfuck: this was his assessment.'
The resentment, fear and self-pity are almost narcotizing. Way beyond anything he'd felt whn the hapless Canadians punched or shot him. This was a sudden total bitter impotent Job-type rage that always sends any sober addict falling back up and inside himself, like vapor up a chimney. Diehl and McDade were backing away from him. As well they fucking might.
It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.
He was always kind of a boys' boy. He had a jolly ferocity about him that scared girls. And he had no idea how to deal with girls except to try and impress them by letting them watch somebody do something to his head. He was never what you'd call a ladies' man. At parties he was always at the center of the crowd that drank instead of dancing.
The condescension with which Prissburger insets that hemoptysis means something called 'percussive hemmorhage,' like Kathy the R.N. wasn't enough of a pro not to have to insert little technical explanations for, makes Gately sad for the guy - it's obvious the guy pathetically thinks this kind of limp condescending shit will impress her. Gately's got to admit he would have tried to impress her, too, though, if she hadn't met him by holding a kidney-shaped pan under his working anus.
The door's got a big poster of R. Limbaugh on it, from before the assassination.
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies ... And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.1
1 Alternatively: I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies ... 388. Talwin-NX - © Sanofi Winthrop U.S.a
aDoubly alternatively: I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies ... And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out. / 1. Methamphetamine hydrochloride, a.k.a. crystal meth ... 388. Talwin-NX - © Sanofi Winthrop U.S.
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