Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 1004

[185] Stice’s legendarily dysfunctional parents are in Kansas, but he’s got two vaguely lesbianic maiden aunts or great-aunts or something up in Chelsea who keep bringing him foods the staff won’t let him eat.

[186] Serious juniors never pick up tennis balls with their hands. Males tend to bend down and dribble the balls up with the face of their stick; there are various little substyles of this. Females and some younger males less into bending stand and trap the ball between their shoe and racquet and bring their foot up in a quick little twitch, the stick bringing the ball up with it. Males who do this trap the ball against the inside of the shoe, while females trap the ball against the outside of the shoe, which looks a bit more feminine. Reverse-snobbism at E.T.A. has never reached the point of people bending way down and picking balls up manually, which, like wearing a visor, is regarded as the true sign of the novice or hack.

[187] N.b.: Europeans and Australians refer to overheads as ‘overhands,’ while South Africans sometimes also call them ‘pointers.’

[188] The budget doesn’t allow for communal suppers on weekends, and the weekly menu has below SATR and SUND the word forage, which with a certain percentage of this fall’s residents ends up being literal.

[189] Expanding where appropriate on Note 12: Demerol is meperidine hydrochloride, a Schedule C–II synthetic narcotic, available from Sanofi Winthrop Laboratories in banana-flavored syrup; 25, 50, 75, and 100 mg./ml. cartridge-needle units; and (most popular w/ D.W.G.) the 50 and 100 mg. tablets known up on the Shore as Pebbles and Barn-Bam, respectively. (DôcD of course means Drunk and Disorderly, and P.D. and P.O. respectively mean Public Defender and Probation Officer or ‘Probie,’ by the way.)

[190] If somebody dies during the commission of a felony, even from so much as a defective pacemaker or a lightning bolt, the felon’s facing Murder-2 and unbargainable time, at least in MA, a ghastly statutory provision as far as most active drug addicts are concerned, since even though they’re not violence-oriented, efficiency and safety-consciousness are not exactly hallmarks of addiction-motivated crimes, which tend to be impulsive and fuzzily thought out at best.

[191] Also known as a case being ‘Blue-Filed,’ meaning put in a kind of judicial limbo for a specified period, and reopenable (‘Red-Filed’) at any time P.O.s and Boards decide the defendant isn’t making ‘satisfactory progress.’

[192] She didn’t literally say shitstorm.

[193] Gately didn’t get any of this from Pat Montesian; it’s mostly like Ennet House mythology, with some hard facts from Gene M. and Calvin Thrust, both of whom think Pat M. just about hung the moon.

[194] A totally different thing than Volkmann’s contracture (cf. Note 115).