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But Quaaludes and QuoVadis and Percocets are lethal in terms of homework, especially washed down with Hefenreffer, and extra-especially if you’re academically ambivalent and A.D.D.-classified and already using every particle of your self-discipline protecting football from the Substances. And — unhappily — high school is totally unlike higher education in terms of major-sport coaches’ influence over instructors, athletes-and-grades-wise. Kite got Gately through math and Special Ed. science, and the French teacher was getting her strabysmic eyeballs fucked out by the Minutemen’s tanned lounge-lizard of an Offensive Coordinator on the behalf of Gately and a semi-retarded tight end. But English just fucking killed him, Gately. All four of the English teachers the Athletic Dept. tried Gately on had this sieg-heil idea that it was somehow cruel to pass a kid that couldn’t do the work. And the Athletic Dept. pointing out to them that Gately had an especially challenging domestic situation and that flunking Gately and rendering him ineligible for ball would eliminate his one reason even to stay on in school — these were to no, like, aveil. English was his sink-or-swim situation, what he then termed his ‘Water Lou.’ Term papers he could more or less swing; the football coach had wienies on retainer. But the in-class themes and tests killed Gately, who simply didn’t have enough will left over after sunset to choose like the crushingly dull Ethan From over QuoVadis and Hefenreffer. Plus by this time three different schools’ authorities had him convinced he was basically dumb, anyway. But mostly it was the Substances. This one particular B.-S.H.S.-Athletic-Dept.-hired wienie of an English tutor spent a sophomore-year March’s worth of evenings in Gately’s company, and by Easter the kid weighed 95 pounds and had a nose-ring and hand-tremors and was placed by his frantic, functional parents in a juvenile-intervention rehab, where the wienie’s whole first week of Withdrawal was spent in a corner reciting Howl in high-volume Chaucerian English. Gately flunked Sophomore Comp. in May and lost the fall’s eligibility and withdrew from school for a year to preserve his junior season. And but then, without the only other thing he’d been devoted to, the psychic emergency-brake was off, and Gately’s sixteenth year is still mostly a gray blank, except for his mother’s new red chintz TV-watching couch, and also the acquaintance of an accommodating Rite-Aid pharmacist’s assistant with disfiguring eczema and serious gambling debts. Plus memories of terrible rear-ocular itching and of a basic diet of convenience-store crud, plus the vegetables from his mother’s vodka glass, while she slept. When he finally returned for his sophomore year of class and junior year of ball at seventeen and 284 lbs., Gately was enervated, flabby, apparently narcoleptic, and on a need-schedule so inflexible that he needed 15 mg. of good old oxycodone hydro-chloride out of his pocket’s Tylenol bottle every three hours to keep the shakes off. He was like a huge confused kitten out on the field — the coach made him go in for P.E.T. Scans, fearing M.S. or Lou Gehrig’s — and even the Classic Comics version of Ethan From was now beyond his abilities; and good old Kite was gone by that last September of Unsubsidized Time, admitted early on a full ride in Comp. Science by Salem State U., meaning Gately was now on his own in remedial math and chem. On offense, Gately lost his starting spot in the third game to a big clear-eyed freshman the coach said showed nearly limitless potential. Then Mrs. Gately suffered her cirrhotic hemorrhage and cerebral-blood thing in late October, just before the midterms Gately was getting ready to fail. Bored-eyed guys in white cotton blew blue bubbles and loaded her in the back of a leisurely sirenless ambulance and took her first to the hospital and then to a Medicaid L.T.I.^[365] out across the Yirrell Beach span in Pt. Shirley. The backs of Gately’s eyes were too itchy for him to even be able to stand out on the red pocked stoop’s steps and see to wave adios. The first gasper he ever smoked was that day, a 100 out of a half-finished pack of his mother’s generics, that she left. He didn’t even ever go back to B.-S.H.S. to clean out his lockers. He never played organized ball again.