Infinite jest - David Wallace

Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House is the sixth of seven exterior Units on the grounds of an Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex that, from the height of an ATHSCME 2100 industrial displacement fan or Enfield Tennis Academy’s hilltop, resembles seven moons orbiting a dead planet. The hospital building itself, a VA facility of iron-colored brick and steep slate roofs, is closed and cordoned, bright pine boards nailed across every possible access and aperture, with really stern government signs about trespassing. Enfield Marine was built during either WWII or Korea, when there were ample casualties and much convalescence. About the only people who use the Enfield Marine complex in a VA-related way now seem to be wild-eyed old Vietnam veterans in fatigue jackets de-sleeved to make vests, or else drastically old Korea vets who are now senile or terminally alcoholic or both.

The hospital building itself stripped of equipment and copper wire, defunct, Enfield Marine stays solvent by maintaining several smaller buildings on the complex’s grounds — buildings the size of like prosperous homes, which used to house VA doctors and support staff — and leasing them to different state-related health agencies and services. Each building has a Unit-number that increases with the Unit’s distance from the defunct hospital and with its proximity, along a rutted cement roadlet that extends back from the hospital’s parking lot, to a steep ravine that overlooks a particularly unpleasant part of Brighton MA’s Commonwealth Avenue and its Green Line train tracks.

Unit #l, right by the lot in the hospital’s afternoon shadow, is leased by some agency that seems to employ only guys who wear turtlenecks; the place counsels wild-eyed Vietnam vets for certain very-delayed stress disorders, and dispenses various pacifying medications. Unit#2, right next door, is a methadone clinic overseen by the same MA Division of Substance Abuse Services that licenses Ennet House. Customers for the services of Units #1 and #2 arrive around sunup and form long lines. The customers for Unit #l tend to congregate in like-minded groups of three or four and gesture a lot and look wild-eyed and generally pissed-off in some broad geopolitical way. The customers for the methadone clinic tend to arrive looking even angrier, as a rule, and their early-morning eyes tend to bulge and flutter like the eyes of the choked, but they do not congregate, rather stand or lean along #2’s long walkway’s railing, arms crossed, alone, brooding, solo acts, standoffish — 50 or 60 people all managing to form a line on a narrow walkway waiting for the same small building to unlock its narrow front door and yet still managing to appear alone and stand-offish is a strange sight, and if Don Gately had ever once seen a ballet he would, as an Ennet House resident, from his sunup smoking station on the fire escape outside the Five-Man bedroom upstairs, have seen the movements and postures necessary to maintain this isolation-in-union as balletic.

The other big difference between Units#1 and #2 is that the customers of #2 leave the building deeply changed, their eyes not only back in their heads but peaceful, if a bit glazed, but anyway in general just way better put-together than when they arrived, while #l’s wild-eyed patrons tend to exit #l looking even more stressed and historically aggrieved than when they went in.

When Don Gately was in the very early part of his Ennet House residency he almost got discharged for teaming up with a bad-news methedrine addict from New Bedford and sneaking out after curfew across the E.M.P.H.H. complex in the middle of the night to attach a big sign on the narrow front door of Unit #2’s methadone clinic. The sign said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE BY ORDER COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. The first staffer at the methadone clinic doesn’t get there to open up until O8OOh., and yet it’s been mentioned how #2’s customers always begin to show up with twisting hands and bulging eyes at like dawn, to wait; and Gately and the speed freak from New Bedford had never seen anything like the psychic crises and near-riot among these semi-ex-junkies — pallid blade-slender chain-smoking homosexuals and bearded bruiser-types in leather berets, women with mohawks and multiple sticks of gum in, upscale trust-fund-fritterers with shiny cars and computerized jewelry who’d arrived, as they’d been doing like hyper-conditioned rats for years, many of them, arrived at sunup with their eyes protruding and with Kleenexes at their noses and scratching their arms and standing on first one foot and then the other, doing basically everything but truly congregating, wild for chemical relief, ready to stand in the cold exhaling steam for hours for that relief, who’d arrived with the sun and now seemed to be informed that the Commonwealth of MA was suddenly going to withdraw the prospect of that relief, until (and this is what really seemed to drive them right over the edge, out there in the lot) until Further Notice. Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. At the sound of the first windowpane breaking and the sight of a blown-out old whore trying to hit a leather-vested biker with an old pre-metric GRASS GROWS BY INCHES BUT IT DIES BY FEET sign from #2’s clinic’s pathetic front lawn, the methedrine addict began laughing so hard that she dropped the binoculars from the Ennet House upstairs fire escape where they were watching, at like 0630h., and the binoculars fell and hit the roof of one of the Ennet House counselors’ cars right below in the little roadlet, with a ringing clunk, just as he was pulling in, the counselor, his name was Calvin Thrust and he was four years sober and a former NYC porn actor who’d gone through the House himself and now took absolutely zero in terms of shit from any of the residents, and his pride and joy was his customized ‘Vette, and the binoculars made rather a nasty dent, and plus they were the House Manager’s amateur-ornithology binoculars and had been borrowed out of the back office without explicit permission, and the long fall and impact didn’t do them a bit of good, to say the least, and Gately and the methedrine addict got pinched and put on Full House Restriction and very nearly kicked out. The addict from New Bedford picked up the aminating needle a couple weeks after that anyway and was discovered by a night staffer simultaneously playing air-guitar and polishing the lids of all the donated canned goods in the House pantry way after lights out, stark naked and sheened with meth-sweat, and after the formality of a Urine she was given the old administrative boot — over a quarter of incoming Ennet House residents get discharged for a dirty Urine within their first thirty days, and it’s the same at all other Boston halfway houses — and the girl ended up back in New Bedford, and then within like three hours of hitting the streets got picked up by New Bedford’s Finest on an old default warrant and sent to Framingham Women’s for a 1-to-2 bit, and got found one morning in her bunk with a kitchen-rigged shiv protruding from her privates and another in her neck and a thoroughly eliminated personal map, and Gately’s individual counselor Gene M. brought Gately the news and invited him to see the methedrine addict’s demise as a clear case of There But For the Grace of God Goeth D. W. Gately.

Unit #3, across the roadlet from #2, is unoccupied but getting reconditioned for lease; it’s not boarded up, and the Enfield Marine maintenance guys go in there a couple days a week with tools and power cords and make a godawful racket. Pat Montesian hasn’t yet been able to find out what sort of group misfortune +3 will be devoted to servicing.

Unit #4, more or less equidistant from both the hospital parking lot and the steep ravine, is a repository for Alzheimer’s patients with VA pensions. #4’s residents wear jammies 24/7, the diapers underneath giving them a lumpy and toddlerish aspect. The patients are frequently visible at #4’s windows, in jammies, splayed and open-mouthed, sometimes shrieking, sometimes just mutely open-mouthed, splayed against the windows. They give everybody at Ennet House the howling fantods. One ancient retired Air Force nurse does nothing but scream ‘Help!’ for hours at a time from a second-story window. Since the Ennet House residents are drilled in a Boston-AA recovery program that places great emphasis on ‘Asking For Help,’ the retired shrieking Air Force nurse is the object of a certain grim amusement, sometimes. Not six weeks ago, a huge stolen HELP WANTED sign was found attached to #4’s siding right below the retired shrieking nurse’s window, and #4’s director was less than amused, and demanded that Pat Montesian determine and punish the Ennet House residents responsible, and Pat had delegated the investigation to Don Gately, and though Gately had a pretty good idea who the perps were he didn’t have the heart to really press and kick ass over something so much like what he’d done himself, when new and cynical, and so the whole thing pretty much blew over.

Unit #5, kittycorner across the little street from Ennet House, is for cata-tonics and various vegetablish, fetal-positioned mental patients subcontracted to a Commonwealth outreach agency by overcrowded LTIs. Unit #5 is referred to, for reasons Gately’s never been able to pinpoint, as The Shed.[67] It is, understandably, a pretty quiet place. But in nice weather, when its more portable inmates are carried out and placed in the front lawn to take the air, standing there propped-up and staring, they present a tableau it took Gately some time to get used to. A couple newer residents got discharged late in Gately’s treatment for tossing firecrackers into the crowd of catatonics on the lawn to see if they could get them to jump around or display affect. On warm nights, one long-limbed bespectacled lady who seems more autistic than catatonic tends to wander out of The Shed wrapped in a bedsheet and lay her hands on the thin shiny bark of a silver maple in #5’s lawn, stands there touching the tree until she’s missed at bedcheck and retrieved; and since Gately graduated treatment and took the offer of a live-in Staffer’s job at Ennet House he sometimes wakes up in his Staff cellar bedroom down by the pay phone and tonic machine and looks out the sooty ground-level window by his bed and watches the catatonic touching the tree in her sheet and glasses, illuminated by Comm. Ave.’s neon or the weird sodium light that spills down from the snooty tennis prep school overhead on its hill, he’ll watch her standing there and feel an odd chilled empathy he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of living-room chintz.

Unit #6, right up against the ravine on the end of the rutted road’s east side, is Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, three stories of whitewashed New England brick with the brick showing in patches through the whitewash, a mansard roof that sheds green shingles, a scabrous fire escape at each upper window and a back door no resident is allowed to use and a front office around on the south side with huge protruding bay windows that yield a view of ravine-weeds and the unpleasant stretch of Commonwealth Ave. The front office is the director’s office, and its bay windows, the House’s single attractive feature, are kept spotless by whatever residents get Front Office Windows for their weekly Chore. The mansard’s lower slope encloses attics on both the male and female sides of the House. The attics are accessed from trapdoors in the ceiling of the second floor and are filled to the beams with trash bags and trunks, the unclaimed possessions of residents who’ve up and vanished sometime during their term. The shrubbery all around Ennet House’s first story looks explosive, ballooning in certain unpruned parts, and there are candy-wrappers and Styrofoam cups trapped throughout the shrubs’ green levels, and gaudy homemade curtains billow from the second story’s female side’s bedroom windows, which are open what seems like all year round.

Unit #7 is on the west side of the street’s end, sunk in hill-shadow and teetering right on the edge of the eroding ravine that leads down to the Avenue. #7 is in bad shape, boarded up and unmaintained and deeply slumped at the red roof’s middle as if shrugging its shoulders at some pointless indignity. For an Ennet House resident, entering Unit #7 (which can easily be entered through the detachable pine board over an old kitchen window) is cause for immediate administrative discharge, since Unit #7 is infamous for being the place where Ennet House residents who want to secretly relapse with Substances sneak in and absorb Substances and apply Visine and Clorets and then try to get back across the street in time for 2330 curfew without getting pinched.

Behind Unit #7 begins far and away the biggest hill in Enfield MA. The hillside is fenced, off-limits, densely wooded and without sanctioned path. Because a legit route involves walking north all the way up the rutted road through the parking lot, past the hospital, down the steep curved driveway to Warren Street and all the way back south down Warren to Commonwealth, almost half of all Ennet House residents negotiate #7’s back fence and climb the hillside each morning, short-cutting their way to minimum-wage temp jobs at like the Provident Nursing Home or Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems, etc., over the hill up Comm., or custodial and kitchen jobs at the rich tennis school for blond gleaming tennis kids on what used to be the hilltop. Don Gately’s been told that the school’s maze of tennis courts lies now on what used to be the hill’s hilltop before the Academy’s burly cigar-chomping tennis-court contractors shaved the curved top off and rolled the new top flat, the whole long loud process sending all sorts of damaging avalanche-type debris rolling down and all over Enfield Marine’s Unit #7, something over which you can sure bet the Enfield Marine VA administration litigated, years back; and but Gately doesn’t know that E.T.A.’s balding of the hill is why #7 can still stand empty and unrepaired: Enfield Tennis Academy still has to pay full rent, every month, on what it almost buried.

6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

1610h. E.T.A. Weight Room. Freestyle circuits. The clank and click of various resistance-systems. Lyle on the towel dispenser conferring with an extremely moist Graham Rader. Schacht doing sit-ups, the board almost vertical, his face purple and forehead pulsing. Troeltsch by the squat rack blowing his nose into a towel. Coyle doing military presses with a bare bar. Carol Spodek curling, intent on the mirror. Rader nodding as Lyle bends and leans in. Hal up on the spotter-shelf in back of the incline-bench in the shadow of the monster copper beech through the west window doing single-leg toe-raises, for the ankle. Ingersoll at the shoulder-pull, steadily upping the weight against Lyle’s advice. Keith (‘The Viking’) Freer[68] and the ster-oidic fifteen-year-old Eliot Kornspan spotting each other on massive barbell-curls next to the water cooler’s bench, taking turns bellowing encouragement. Hal keeps pausing to lean down and spit into an old NASA glass on the floor by the little shelf. E.T.A. Trainer Barry Loach walking around with a clipboard he doesn’t write anything down on, but watching people intently and nodding a lot. Axford with one shoe off in the corner, doing something to his bare foot. Michael Pemulis seated cross-legged on the cooler’s bench just off Kornspan’s left hip, doing facial isometrics, trying to eavesdrop on Lyle and Rader, wincing whenever Kornspan and Freer roar at each other.