Authors: David Foster Wallace
'Get your urine here!' Pemulis and Trevor Axford become quarterly urine vendors; they wear those papery oval caps ballpark-vendors wear; they spend three months collecting and stashing the urine of sub-ten-year-old players, warm pale innocent childish urine that's produced in needly little streams and the only G/M scan it couldn't pass would be like an Ovaltine scan or something; then every third month Pemulis and Axford work the agnate unsupervised line that snakes across the blue lobby shag, selling little Visine bottles of urine out of an antique vendor's tub for ballpark wieners, snagged for a song from a Fenway Park wienerman fallen on hard offseason times, a big old box of dull dimpled tin with a strap in Sox colors that goes around the back of the neck and keeps the vendor's hands free to make change.
'Urine!’
'Clinically sterile urine!’
'Piping hot!’
'Urine you'd be proud to take home and introduce to the folks!’
Trevor Axford handles cash-flow. Pemulis dispenses little conical-tipped Visine bottles of juvenile urine, bottles easily rendered discreet in underarm, sock or panty.
'Urine trouble? Urine luck!’
Quarterly sales breakdowns indicate slightly more male customers than female customers, for urine. Tomorrow morning, E.T.A. custodial workers — Kenkle and Brandt, or Dave ('Fall Down Very') Harde, the well-loved old janitor laid off from Boston College for contracting narcolepsy, or thick-ankled Irish women from the semi-tenements down the hill across Comm. Ave., or else sullen and shifty-eyed residents from Ennet House, the halfway facility at the bottom of the hill's other side in the old VA Hospital complex, hard-looking and generally sullen types who come and do nine months of menial-type work for the 32 hours a week their treatment-contract requires — will empty scores of little empty plastic Visine bottles from subdorm wastebaskets into the dumpster-nest behind the E.T.A. Employee parking lot, from which dumpsters Pemulis will then get Mario In-candenza and some of the naïver of the original ephebic urine-donators themselves to remove, sterilize, and rebox the bottles under the guise of a rousing game of Who-Can-Find,-Boil,-And-Box-The-Most-Empty-Visine-Bottles-In-A-Three-Hour-Period-Without-Any-Kind-Of-Authority-Figure-Knowing-What-You're-Up-To, a game which Mario had found thumpingly weird when Pemulis introduced him to it three years ago, but which Mario's really come to look forward to, since he's found he has a real sort of mystical intuitive knack for finding Visine bottles in the sedimentary layers of packed dumpsters, and always seems to win hands-down, and if you're poor old Mario Incandenza you take your competitive strokes where you can find them. T. Axford then stashes and recycles the bottles, and packaging overhead is nil. He and Pemulis keep the wiener-tub stashed under a discarded Yarmouth sail in the back of the used tow truck they'd chipped in on with Hal and Jim Struck and another guy who's since graduated E.T.A. and now plays for Pepperdine, and paid to have reconditioned and the rusty chain and hook that hung from the tow truck's back-tilted derrick replaced with a gleamingly new chain and thick hook — which get used really only twice a year, spring and late fall, for brief intervals of short-distance hauling during the all-weather Lung's dismantling and erection, plus occasionally pulling a paralyzed rear-wheel-drive student or employee vehicle either back onto or all the way up the E.T.A. hillside's long 70° driveway during bad snowstorms — and the whole thing derusted and painted in E.T.A.'s proud red and gray school colors, with the complex O.N.A.N. heraldic ensign — a snarling full-front eagle with a broom and can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple Leaf in the other and wearing a sombrero and appearing to have about half-eaten a swatch of star-studded cloth — rather ironically silk-screened onto the driver's-side door and the good old pre-Tavis E.T.A. traditional motto TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT. .. unironically emblazoned on the passenger door, and which they all share use of, though Pemulis and Axford get slight priority, because the truck's registration and basic-liability insurance get paid for out of quarterly urine-revenues.
Hal's older brother Mario — who by Dean of Students' fiat gets to bunk in a double with Hal in subdorm A on the third floor of Comm.-Ad. even though he's too physically challenged even to play low-level recreational tennis, but who's keenly interested in video- and film-cartridge production, and pulls his weight as part of the E.T.A. community recording assigned sections of matches and drills and processional stroke-filming sessions for later playback and analysis by Schtitt and his staff — is filming the congregated line and social interactions and vending operation of the urine-day lobby, using his strap-attached head-mounted camera and thoracic police-lock and foot-treadle, apparently getting footage for one of the short strange Himself-influenced conceptual cartridges the administration lets him occupy his time making and futzing around with down in the late founder's editing and f/x facilities off the main sub-Comm.-Ad. tunnel; and Pemulis and Axford do not object to the filming, nor do they even do that hand-to-temple face-obscuring thing when he aims the head-mounted Bolex their way, since they know nobody will end up seeing the footage except Mario himself, and that at their request he'll modulate and scramble the vendors' and customers' faces into undulating systems of flesh-colored squares, by means of his late father's reconfigururing matte-panel in the editing room, since facial scrambling will heighten whatever weird conceptual effect Mario's usually after anyway, though also because Mario's notoriously fond of undulating flesh-colored squares and will jump at any opportunity to edit them in over people's faces.
They do brisk business.
Michael Pemulis, wiry, pointy-featured, phenomenally talented at net but about two steps too slow to get up there effectively against high-level pace — so in compensation also a great offensive-lob man — is a scholarship student from right nearby in Allston MA — a grim section of tract housing and vacant lots, low-rise Greek and Irish housing projects, gravel and haphazard sewage and indifferent municipal upkeep, a lot of depressed petrochemical light industry all along the Spur, an outlying district zoned for sprawl; an old joke in Enfield-Brighton goes ' "Kiss me where it smells" she said so I took her to Allston' — where he discovered a knack playing Boys Club tennis in cut-off shorts and no shirt and a store-strung stick on scuzzy courts with blacktop that discolored your yellow balls and nets made of spare Feeny Park fencing that sent net-cord shots spronging all the way out into traffic. An Inner City Development Program tennis prodigy at ten, recruited up the hill at eleven, with parents who wanted to know how much E.T.A.'d pay up front for rights to all future possible income. Cavalier about practice but a bundle of strangled nerves in tournaments, the rap on Pemulis is that he's way lower-ranked than he could be with a little hard work, since he's not only E.T.A.'s finest Eschatonic
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marksman off the lob but Schtitt says is the one youth here now who knows truly what is it to punch the volley. Pemulis, whose pre-E.T.A. home life was apparently hackle-raising, also sells small-time drugs of distinguished potency at reasonable retail prices to a large pie-slice of the total junior-tournament-circuit market. Mario Incandenza is one of those people who wouldn't see the point of trying recreational chemicals even if he knew how to go about it. He just wouldn't get it. His smile, below the Bolex camera strapped to his large but sort of withered-looking head, is constant and broad as he films the line's serpentine movement against glass shelves full of prizes.
M. M. Pemulis, whose middle name is Mathew (sic), has the highest Stanford-Bïnet of any kid on academic probation ever at the Academy. Hal Incandenza's most valiant efforts barely get Pemulis through Mrs. I's triad of required Grammars
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and Soma R.-L.-O. Chawaf's heady Literature of Discipline, because Pemulis, who claims he sees every third word upside-down, actually just has a born tech-science wienie's congenital impatience with the referential murkiness and inelegance of verbal systems. His early tennis promise quick-peaking and it's turned out a bit dilettantish, Pemulis's real enduring gift is for math and hard science, and his scholarship is the coveted James O. Incandenza Geometrical Optics Scholarship, of which there is only one, and which each term Pemulis manages to avoid losing by just one dento-dermal layer of overall G.P.A., and which gives him sanctioned access to all the late director's lenses and equipment, some of which turn out to be useful to unrelated enterprises. Mario's the only other person sharing the optic-and-editing labs off the main tunnel, and the two have the kind of transpersonal bond that shared interests and mutual advantage can inspire: if Mario's not helping Pemulis fabricate the products of independent-optical-study work M.P. isn't really much into doing — you should see the boy with a convex lens, Avril likes to say within Mario's hearing; he's like a fish in brine — then Pemulis is giving Mario, who's a film-nut but no great tech-mind, serious help with cinemo-optical praxis, the physics of focal-length and reflective compounds — you should see Pemulis with an emulsion curve, yawning blasély under his bill-reversed yachting hat and scratching an armpit, juggling differentials like a boy born to wear a pocket-protector and high-water corduroys and electrician's tape on his hornrims' temples, asking Mario if he knows what you call three Canadians copulating on a snowmobile. Mario and his brother Hal both consider Pemulis a good friend, though friendship at E.T.A. is nonnego-tiable currency.
Hal Incandenza for a long time identified himself as a lexical prodigy who — though Avril had taken pains to let all three of her children know that her nonjudgmental love and pride depended in no way on achievement or performance or potential talent — had made his mother proud, plus a really good tennis player. Hal Incandenza is now being encouraged to identify himself as a late-blooming prodigy and possible genius at tennis who is on the verge of making every authority-figure in his world and beyond very proud indeed. He's never looked better on court or on monthly O.N.A.N.T.A. paper. He is erumpent. He has made what Schtitt termed a 'leap of exponents' at a post-pubescent age when radical, plateaux-hopping, near-J.-Wayne-and-Show-caliber improvement is extraordinarily rare in tennis. He gets his sterile urine gratis, though he could well afford to pay: Pemulis depends on him for verbal-academic support, and dislikes owing favors, even to friends.
Hal is, at seventeen, as of 10/Y.D.A.U., judged ex cathedra the fourth-best tennis player under age eighteen in the United States of America, and the sixth-best on the continent, by those athletic-organizing bodies duly charged with the task of ranking. Hal's head, closely monitored by deLint and Staff, is judged still level and focused and unswollen/-bludgeoned by the sudden eclat and rise in general expectations. When asked how he's doing with it all, Hal says Fine and thanks you for asking.
If Hal fulfills this newly emergent level of promise and makes it all the way up to the Show, Mario will be the only one of the Incandenza children not wildly successful as a professional athlete. No one who knows Mario could imagine that this fact would ever even occur to him.
Orin, Mario, and Hal's late father was revered as a genius in his original profession without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at, even he himself, at least not while he was alive, which is perhaps bona-fidely tragic but also, as far as Mario's concerned, ultimately all right, if that's the way things unfolded.
Certain people find people like Mario Incandenza irritating or even think they're outright bats, dead inside in some essential way.
Michael Pemulis's basic posture with people is that Mrs. Pemulis raised no dewy-eyed fools. He wears painter's caps on-court and sometimes a yachting cap turned around 180°, and, since he's not ranked high enough to get any free-corporate-clothing offers, plays in T-shirts with things like ALLSTON HS WOLF SPIDERS and CHOOSY MOTHERS and THE FIENDS IN HUMAN SHAPE Y.D.A.U. TOUR or like an ancient CAN YOU BELIEVE IT THE SUPREME COURT JUST DESECRATED OUR FLAG on them. His face is the sort of spiky-featured brow-dominated Feen-ian face you see all over Irish Allston and Brighton, its chin and nose sharp and skin the natal brown color of the shell of a quality nut.
Michael Pemulis is nobody's fool, and he fears the dealer's Brutus, the potential eater of cheese, the rat, the wiretap, the pubescent-looking Finest sent to make him look foolish. So when somebody calls his room's phone, even on video, and wants to buy some sort of substance, they have to right off the bat utter the words 'Please commit a crime,' and Michael Pemulis will reply 'Gracious me and mine, a crime you say?' and the customer has to insist, right over the phone, and say he'll pay Michael Pemulis money to commit a crime, or like that he'll harm Michael Pemulis in some way if he refuses to commit a crime, and Michael Pemulis will in a clear and I.D.able voice make an appointment to see the caller in person to 'plead for my honor and personal safety,' so that if anybody eats cheese later or the phone's frequency is covertly accessed, somehow, Pemulis will have been entrapped.
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Secreting a small Visine bottle of urine in an armpit in line also brings it up to plausible temperature. At the entrance to the male stall-area, the ephebic-looking O.N.A.N.T.A. toxicologist rarely even looks up from his clipboard, but the square-faced nurse can be a problem over on the female side, because every so often she'll want the stall door open during production. With Jim Struck handling published-source plagiarism and compressed iteration and Xerography, Pemulis also offers, at reasonable cost, a small vade mecumish pamphlet detailing several methods for dealing with this contingency.