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DeLint said ‘I was given to understand you can either finish out the term for credit or you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of pockets on a stick like a bandanna to some other O.N.A.N.T.A. institution and see if they’ll take a senior without any kind of positive reference, which the sense I get is the administration says fat chance on any kind of reference.’

Tex Watson said something about urine.

Pemulis recrossed his leg. DeLint looked at Nwangi:

‘I believe the kid is speechless.’

‘I believe he has nothing to say.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘And something about you’re invited to shout whatever you threatened the administration to shout about from the highest hill you can find, which pretty soon won’t be this one.’

Nwangi got out through laughter: ‘And that the administrative office doorknobs have been rubberized and grounded, the administrative files all recryptographilated, everyone’s room’s mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, Mrs. Inc said to tell you.’

The little deck-of-cards riffle of the wings of the Shit Fairy, which he privately envisions as a kind of violet incubus with the Da’s saggy frown. Pemulis scratched very coolly next to his ear. ‘And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?’

DeLint told Pemulis he just fucking slayed him while Watson looked from face to face and Nwangi rocked and wheezed and slapped at his knee, and Pemulis, close-mouthed and breathing with terrible ease, found their good humor almost infectious.

[333] Put out by the Mass Division of S.A.S., listing meetings of all but the very most lunatic-fringe-type 12-Step Programs in city, sub-, and exurbs, all up and down both Shores, the Cape, and Nantucket.

[334] Hal’s Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob H., which started as a wry dark mental joke and now within a week has become the way Hal characterizes abstinence to himself, which any Boston AA would tell him isn’t a very promising way to think about it at all, in terms of self-pity.

[335] Except of course for a certain hardwired type of pornography- and onanistic sex-addict, which has given rise to a couple exceptionally icky Step-based fellowships.

[336] (according to his sudoriferous and and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain)

[337] Latin blunder for self-defense’s se defendendo is sic, either a befogged muddling of a professional legal term, or a post-Freudian slip, or (least likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet — namely V.i. 9.

[339] International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

[342] Or possibly Babel.

[343] Boston AA slogan meaning trying to quit addictive Substance-use without working any kind of Recovery Program.

[344] E.T.S.V Advanced Placement Standardized Subject Tests, which Hal Incandenza’s signed up to take in English and (Parisian) French.

a. Educational Testing Service Inc., Princeton NJ.

[345] The College of Basic Studies Bldg. on Commonwealth and Granby, approx. 3 clicks east-southeast of E.T.A.