David Wallace - Infinite jest

The entertainment’s uptake is that a tough biker-chick-type girl from the mean streets of Toronto is found O.D.’d, beaten up, molested, and robbed of her leather jacket outside the portcullis of a downtown convent and is rescued, nursed, befriended, spiritually guided, and converted — ‘saved’ is the weak entendre made much of in the first act’s dialogue — by a tough-looking older nun who it turns out, she reveals (the tough older nun), had herself been hauled up out of a life of Harleys, narcotics-dealing and — addiction by an even tougher even older nun, a nun who had herself been saved by a tough ex-biker nun, and so on. The latest saved biker-chick becomes a tough and street-smart nun in the same urban order, and is known on the mean streets as Blood Sister, and wimple or not still rides her Hawg from parish to parish and still knows akido and is not to be fucked with, is the word on the streets.

The motivational crux here being that almost this whole order of nuns is staffed by nuns who’d been saved from Toronto’s mean, dead-end streets by other older tougher saved nuns. So, endless novenas later, Blood Sister eventually feels this transitive spiritual urge to go out and find a troubled adolescent female of her own, to ‘save’ and bring into the order, thereby discharging her soul’s debt to the old tough nun who’d saved her. Through processes obscure (a Toronto troubled-but-savable-adolescent-girl-directory of some sort? Bridget Boone cuts wise), Blood Sister eventually takes on a burn-scarred, deeply troubled adolescent punker-type Toronto girl who is sullen and, yes, reasonably tough, but is also vulnerable and emotionally tormented (the girl’s pink shiny burn-scarred face tends to writhe in misery whenever she thinks Blood Sister’s not looking) by the terrible depredations she’s endured as a result of her rapacious and unshakable addiction to crank cocaine, the kind you have to convert and cook up yourself, and with ether, which is highly combustible, and which people used before somebody found out baking soda and temperature-flux would do the same thing, which dates the film’s B.S. time-period even more clearly than the tough tortured punk girl’s violet stelliform coiffure.[290]

But so Blood Sister eventually gets the girl clean, by nurturing her through Withdrawal in a locked sacristy; and the girl becomes less sullen by degrees that almost have audible clicks to them — the girl stops trying to dicky the lock of the sacramental-wine cabinet, stops farting on purpose during matins and vespers, stops going up to the Trappists who hang around the convent and asking them for the time and other sly little things to try to make them slip up and speak aloud, etc. A couple times the girl’s face writhes in emotional torment and vulnerability even when Blood Sister’s looking. The girl gets a severe and somewhat lesbianic haircut, and her roots establish themselves as softly brown. Blood Sister, revealing biceps like nobody’s business, beats the girl at arm-wrestling; they both laugh; they compare tattoos: this marks the start of a brutally drawn-out Getting-to-Know-and-Trust-You montage, a genre-convention, this montage involving Harley-rides at such speeds that the girl has to keep her hand on Blood Sister’s head to keep B.S.’s wimple from flying off, and long conversational walks filmed at wide-angle, and protracted and basically unwinnable games of charades with the Trappists, plus some quick scenes of Blood Sister finding the girl’s Marlboros and dildo-facsimile lighter in the wastebasket, of the girl doing chores unsullenly under B.S.’s grudgingly approving eye, of candle-lit scripture-study sessions with the girl’s finger under each word she reads, of the girl carefully snipping the last bits of split violet ends from her soft brown hair, of the more senior tough nuns punching Blood Sister’s shoulder approvingly as the girl’s eyes start to get that impending-conversion gleam in them, then, finally, of Blood Sister and the girl habit-shopping, the girl’s burned lantern jaw and hairless Promethean brow frozen in a sunlit montage-climax shot under a novitiate wimple’s gull-wings — all accompanied by — no kidding — ‘Getting to Know You,’ which Hal imagines the Stork justified to himself as subversively saccharine. This all takes about half an hour. Bridget Boone, of the Indianapolis archdiocese, begins to declaim briefly on Blood Sister: One Tough Nun’s ironic anti-Catholic subthesis — that the deformed addicted girl’s ‘salvation’ here seemed simply the exchange of one will-obliterating ‘habit’ for another, substituting one sort of outlandish head-decoration for another — and gets pinched by Jennie Bash and shushed by just about everyone in the room but Hal, who could pass for asleep except for the brief lists to port over the wastebasket, to spit, and in fact is experiencing some of the radical loss of concentration that attends THC-Withdrawal and is thinking about another, even more familiar J. O. Incandenza cartridge even while he watches this one with the other E.T.A.s. This other attention-object is the late Himself’s so-called ‘inversion’ of the corporate-politics genre, Low-Temperature Civics, an executive-suite soap opera filled with power plays, position-jockeyings, timid adulteries, martinis, and malignantly pretty female executives in elegant tight-fitting dress-for-successwear who eat their paunched and muddled male counterparts for political lunch. Hal knows that L-TC wasn’t an inversion or lampoon at all, but derived right from the dark B.S. ‘8os period when Himself had changed careers from government service to private entreprenurism, when a sudden infusion of patent-receipts left him feeling post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored, and Himself took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and watch broadcast-television tycoon-operas like Lorimar’s Dynasty et al. in a remote spa off Canada’s Northwest coast, where he supposedly met and bonded with Lyle, now of the E.T.A. weight room.

What’s intriguing but unknown to everyone in V.R. 6 is the way Boone’s take on Himself’s take on the substitution-of-one-crutch-for-another interpretation of substituting Catholic devotion for chemical dependence is very close to the way many not-yet-desperate-enough newcomers to Boston AA see Boston AA as just an exchange of slavish dependence on the bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and banal shibboleths and robotic piety, an ‘Attitude of Platitude,’ and use this idea that it’s still slavish dependence as an excuse to stop trying Boston AA, and to go back to the original slavish Substance-dependence, until that dependence has finally beaten them into such a double-bound desperation that they finally come back in with their faces hanging off their skulls and beg to be told just what platitudes to shout, and how high to adjust their vacant grins.

Some Substance-dependent persons, though, have already been so broken by the time they first Come In that they don’t care about stuff like substitution or banality, they’ll give their left nut to trade their original dependence in for robotic platitudes and pep-rally cheer. They’re the ones with the gun to their head, the ones who stick and Hang. It remains to be determined whether Joelle van Dyne, whose first appearance in a James O. Incan-denza project occurred in this very Low-Temperature Civics, is one of these people who’ve come into AA/NA shattered enough to stick, but she’s starting to I.D. more and more with the Commitment speakers she hears who did come in shattered enough to know it’s get straight or die. A click and a half straight downhill from E.T.A., Joelle is hitting the Reality Is For People That Can’t Handle Drugs Group, a meeting of the NA-splinter Cocaine Anonymous, [291]mostly because the meeting’s in the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital Grand Rounds Auditorium, just a couple floors down from where Don Gately, whom she just got done visiting and mopping the massive unconscious forehead of, is lying in the Trauma Wing in a truly bad way. CA meetings have a long preamble and endless little Xeroxed formalities they read aloud at the start, is one reason Joelle avoids CA, but the opening stuff is done by the time she gets down and comes in and gets some burnt urn-bottom coffee and finds an available seat. The only empty seats are in the meeting’s back row — ‘Denial Aisle,’ the back rows are usually called — and Joelle is surrounded by catexic newcomers crossing and uncrossing their legs every few seconds and sniffing compulsively and looking like they’re wearing everything they own. Plus there’s the row of standing men — there’s a certain hard-faced type of male in Boston fellowships who refuses ever to sit for meetings — standing behind the back row, legs set wide and arms crossed and talking to each other out the sides of their mouths, and she can tell the standing men are looking at her bare knees over her shoulder, making little comments about the knees and the veil. She thinks with fearful sentiment [292]of Don Gately, a tube down his throat, torn by fever and guilt and shoulder-pain, offered Demerol by well-meaning but clueless M.D.s, in and out of delirium, torn, convinced that certain men with hats wished him ill, looking at his room’s semi-private ceiling like it would eat him if he dropped his guard. The big blackboard up on the stage says the Reality Is For People That Can’t Handle Drugs Group welcomes tonight’s Commitment speakers, the Freeway Access Group from Mattapan, which is deep in the colored part of Boston where Cocaine Anonymous tends to be most heavily concentrated. The speaker just starting in at the podium when Joelle sits down is a tall yellowish colored man with a weightlifter’s build and frightening eyes, sloe and a kind of tannin-brown. He’s been in CA seven months, he says. He eschews the normal CA drugologue’s macho war-stories and gets right to his Bottom, his jumping-off place. Joelle can tell he’s trying to tell the truth and not just posturing and performing the way so many CAs seem like they do. His story’s full of colored idioms and those annoying little colored hand-motions and gestures, but to Joelle it doesn’t seem like she cares that much anymore. She can Identify. The truth has a kind of irresistible unconscious attraction at meetings, no matter what the color or fellowship. Even Denial Aisle and the standing men are absorbed by the colored man’s story. The colored man says his thing is he’d had a wife and a little baby daughter at home in Mattapan’s Perry Hill Projects, and another baby on the way. He’d managed to hang on to his menial riveter’s-assistant job at Universal Bleacher right up the street from here in Enfield because his addiction to crank cocaine wasn’t everyday; he smoked on your binge-type basis, mostly weekends. Hellacious, psychopathic, bank-account-emptying binges, though. Like getting strapped to a Raytheon missile and you don’t stop till that missile stops, Jim. He says his wife had got temp work cleaning houses, but when she worked they had to put their little girl in a day-care that just about ate her day’s pay. So his paycheck was like their total float, and his weekend binges with the glass pipe caused them no end of Financial Insecurity, which he mispronounces. Which brings him to his last binge, the Bottom, which, predictably, occurred on a payday. This check just had to go for groceries and rent. They were two months back, and there was not jack-shit in the house in the way of to eat. At a smoke-break at Universal Bleacher he’d made sure and bought just one single vial, for just a tensky, for a Sunday-night treat after a weekend of abstinence and groceries and quality time with his pregnant wife and little daughter. The wife and little daughter were to meet him after work right off the bus stop at Brighton Best Savings, right under the big clock, to ‘help’ him deposit the paycheck right then and there. He’d let his wife stipulate the meeting at the bank because he knew in a self-disgusted way even then that there was this hazard of paycheck-type incidents from binges he’d pulled in the past, and their Financial Insecurity was now whatever word’s past the word deep shit, and he knew goddamn well he could not afford to fuck up this time.