Authors: David Foster Wallace
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,
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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
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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.
He says that's how he used to think of it to himself: fucking up.
He didn't even make it to the bus after clocking out, he said. Two other Holmeses
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in Riveting had three vials each, which vials they had, like, brandished at him, and he'd kicked in his one vial because two-and-a-third vials v. one thin-ass Sunday-night vial was only a fucking fool way out of touch with the whole seize-the-opportunity concept could pass that shit up. In short it was the familiar insanity of money in the pocket and no defense against the urge, and the thought of his woman holding his little girl in her little knit cap and mittens standing under the big clock in cold March dusk didn't so much get pushed aside as somehow shrink to a tiny locket-size picture in the center of a part of him he and the Holmeses had set out busily to kill, with the pipe.
He says he never made the bus. They passed a bottle of rye around the old Ford Mystique one of the Holmeses profiled, and fired up, right in the car, and after he once fired up with $ in his pocket the fat woman with the little helmet with horns on it done already like fucking sang, Jim.
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The man's hands grip the sides of the podium and he rests his weight on his elbow-locked arms in a way that conveys both abjection and pluck. He invites the CAs to let's just draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the night's scene, which after the check-cashing stop got hazy with missile-exhaust anyhow; but so he finally did get home to Mattapan the next morning, Saturday morning, sick and green-yellow and on that mean post-crank slide, dying for more and willing to kill for more and yet so mortified and ashamed of having done fucked up (again) that just going up the elevator to their apartment was maybe the bravest thing he'd ever done, up to that point, he felt.
It was like 0600 in the A.M. and they weren't there. There was nobody home, and in the sort of way where the place's emptiness pulsed and breathed. An envelope was slid under the door from the B.H.A.,
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not the salmon color of an Eviction Notice but a green Last Warning re rent. And he went into the kitchen and opened up the fridge, hating himself for hoping there was a beer. In the fridge was a jar of grape jelly near-empty and a half a can of biscuit mix, and that, plus a sour empty-fridge odor, was all, Jim. A little plastic jar of labelless Food-Bank peanut butter so empty its insides had knife-scrapes on the sides and a little clotted box of salt was all there was in the whole rest of the kitchen.
But what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two, though, was he said when he saw the Pam-shiny empty biscuit pan on top of the stove and the plastic rind of the peanut butter's safety-seal wrap on top of the wastebasket's tall pile. The little locket-picture in the back of his head swelled and became a sharp-focused scene of his wife and little girl and little unborn child eating what he now could see they must have eaten, last night and this morning, while he was out ingesting their groceries and rent. This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice, standing there loose-faced in the kitchen, running his finger around a shiny pan with not one little crumb of biscuit left in it. He sat down on the kitchen tile with his scary eyes shut tight but still seeing his little girl's face. They'd ate some charity peanut butter on biscuits washed down with tapwater and a grimace.
Their apartment was six floors up in Perry Hill's Bldg. 5. The window didn't open but could be broke through with a running start.
He didn't kill himself, though, he says. He just got up and walked out. He didn't leave his wife a note. Not nothing. He went and walked the whole four clicks to Shattuck Shelter in Jamaica Plain. He felt like for sure they'd of been better off without him, he said. But he said he didn't know why but he didn't kill himself. But he didn't. He figures there was some God-involvement, sitting there on the floor. He just decided to go to Shattuck and Surrender and get straight and never ever have his little girl's grimacing face in his hung-over head ever again, James.
And Shattuck Shelter — by coincidence — that usually had a waiting list every March until it got warm, they'd just kicked out some sorry-ass specimen for defecating in the shower, and they took him, the speaker. He asked for a CA Meeting right away. And a Shattuck Staff guy called somebody Afro-American with a lot of clean recovered time, and the speaker got taken to his first CA Meeting. That was 224 days ago tonight. That night, when the colored CA Crocodile dropped him off back at the Shattuck — after he'd wept in front of other colored men at his first meeting and told men he didn't know from shit about the big clock and glass pipe and paycheck and the biscuits and his little girl's face — and after he come back to the Shattuck and got buzzed through and the buzzer sounded for supper, it turned out — by coincidence — that the Saturday-night Shattuck supper was coffee and peanut butter sandwiches. It was the end of the week and the Shelter's donated food had run out, they only had PB on cheap-ass white bread and Sunny Square instant coffee, the cheap shit that doesn't even quite dissolve all the way.
He's got your autodidactic orator's way with emotional dramatic pauses that don't seem affected. Joelle makes another line down the Styrofoam coffee cup with her fingernail and chooses consciously to believe it isn't affected, the story's emotive drama. Her eyes feel sandy from forgetting to blink. This always happens when you don't expect it, when it's a meeting you have to drag yourself to and are all but sure will suck. The speaker's face has lost its color, shape, everything distinctive. Something has taken the tight ratchet in Joelle's belly and turned it three turns to the good. It's the first time she's felt sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means facing. No matter if Don Gately takes Demerol or goes to jail or rejects her if she can't show him the face. It's the first time in a long time — tonight, 11/14—Joelle's even considered possibly showing somebody the face.
After the pause the speaker says all the other sorry motherfuckers in the Shattuck Shelter in there started in to bitching about what was this shit, peanut butter sandwiches for fucking supper. The speaker says how whatever he silently thanked for just that particular sandwich he held and chewed, washing it down with gritty Sunny Square coffee, that thing became his Higher Power. He's now seven-plus months clean. Universal Bleacher let him go, but he's got steady work at Logan, pushing a third-shift mop, and a Holmes on his crew's also in the Program — by coincidence. His pregnant wife, it turned out, had gone to a Unwed Mothers Shelter with Shantel, that night. She was still in there. D.S.S. still wouldn't let him appeal his wife's Restraining Order and see Shantel, but he got to talk to his little girl on the phone just last month. And he's now straight, from Giving Up and joining the Freeway Access Group and getting Active and taking the voluntary suggestions of the Fellowship of Cocaine Anonymous. His wife was due to have her baby around Xmas. He said he didn't know what was going to happen to him or his family. But he says he has received certain promises from his new family — the Freeway Access Group of Cocaine Anonymous — and so he had certain hope-type emotions about the future, inside. He didn't so much conclude or make obligatory reference to Gratitude or any of that usual shit as grip the lectern and shrug and say he'd started feeling just last month that the choice he made on the kitchen floor was the right choice, personally speaking.
Entertainment-wise, things take a rapid turn for the splattery once the tough girl Blood Sister seemed to have saved is found bluely dead in her novitiate's cot, her habit's interior pockets stuffed with all kinds of substances and paraphernalia and her arm a veritable forest of syringes. Tight shot of B.S., face working purply, staring down at the ex-ex-punker. Suspecting foul play instead of spiritual recidivism, Blood Sister, disregarding first the Other-Cheek pieties and then the impassioned pleas and then the direct orders of the Vice-Mother Superior — who happens now to be the tough nun who'd saved Blood Sister, way back — begins reverting to her former Toronto-mean-street pre-salvation tough-biker-chick ways: de-mufflering her Harley Hawg, hauling an age-faded stud-covered leather bike-jacket out of storage and squeezing it over her pectoral-swollen habit, unbandaging her most lurid tattoos, shaking down former altar boys for information, flipping off motorists who get in her bike's way, meeting old street-contacts in dim saloons and tossing back jiggers with even the most cirrhotic of them, beating, bludgeoning, akido-ing, disarming thugs of power tools, avenging the desalvation and demapping of her young charge, determined to prove that the girl's death was no accident or backslide, that Blood Sister had not failed with the soul she'd chosen to save to discharge her own soul's debt to the tough old Vice-Mother Superior who'd saved her, Blood Sister, so far back. Several thuggish stuntmen and countless liters of potassium thiocyanate
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later, the truth does out: the novitiate girl had been murdered by the Mother Superior, the order's top and toughest nun. This M.S. is the nun who'd saved the Vice-M.S. who'd saved Blood Sister, meaning, ironically, that the evidence Blood Sister needs to prove that her salvation-debt really was discharged is also evidence inimical to the legal interests of the tough nun to whom Blood Sister's own saviour is obligated, so Blood Sister gets increasingly tortured and ill-tempered as evidence of the Mother Superior's guilt accretes. In one scene she says fuck. In another she swings a censer like a mace and brains an old verger who's one of the Mother Superior's stooges, knocking his toothless head clean off. Then, in Act III, a veritable orgy of retribution follows the full emergence of the sordid truth: it seems that the tough old Vice-Mother Superior, viz. the nun who'd saved Blood Sister, had in fact not been saved, truly, after all — had in fact, during 20+ years of exemplary novena-saying and wafer-baking, been suffering a kind of hidden degenerative recidivist soul-rot, and had resumed, the Více-M.S., at about the time Blood Sister had donned the habit of full nunhood, had not only resumed Substance-dependence but had started actually dealing in serious weights of whatever at the time was most profitable (which after 20+ years had changed from Marseillese heroin to Colombian freebaseable-grade Bing Crosby) to support her own hidden habit, covertly operating a high-volume retail operation out of the order's Community Outreach Rescue Mission's little-used confessionals. This nun's superior, the top tough Mother Superior nun, stumbling onto the drug-operation after the now-demapped verger informed her that a suspicious number of limousines were discharging gold-chained and not very penitent-looking persons into the order's Community Outreach Rescue Mission, and disastrously unable to summon the pious humility to accept the fact that she'd failed, it seemed, at truly and forever saving the ex-dealer whose salvation the Mother Superior required to discharge the debt to the now-retired octogenarian nun who'd saved her — this Mother Superior herself is the one who murdered Blood Sister's ex-punk novitiate, to silence the girl. What emerges is that Blood Sister's addicted punk-girl's Substance-copping venue, when she was Out There pre-salvation, had been nothing other than the Vice-Mother Superior's infamous Community Outreach Rescue Mission. In other words, the nun who'd saved Blood Sister but had herself been secretly unsaved had been the tough girl's Bing-dealer, is why the tough non-Catholic girl'd been so mysteriously adept at the Confiteor. The order's Mother Superior had figured that it was only a matter of time before the girl's conversion and salvation reached the sort of spiritual pitch where her guarded silence broke and she told Blood Sister the seamy truth about the nun she (Blood Sister) thought had saved her (Blood Sister). So she (the Mother Superior) had eliminated the girl's map — ostensibly, she (the Mother Superior) told her lieutenant, the Vice-Mother Superior, to save her (the Vice-Mother Superior) from exposure and excommunication and maybe worse, if the girl weren't silenced.
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