Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 873

He hadn’t in the beginning burgled, Gately, as a full-time drug addict, though he did sometimes promote small valuables from the apartments of the strung-out nurses he X’d and copped samples from. After the bailout from school, Gately worked full-time for a time for a North Shore bookmaker, a guy that also owned several titty clubs down Rte. 1 in Saugus, Whitey Sorkin, that had sort of casually befriended him when Gately was still playing high-profile ball. His professional association with Whitey Sor-kin continued part-time even after Gately discovered his real B&E vocation, though he tended more and more toward less taxing nonviolent crime.

But from age like eighteen to twenty-three, Gately and the prenominate Gene Fackelmann — a towering, slope-shouldered, wide-hipped, prematurely potbellied, oddly priapistic, and congenitally high-strung Dilaudid addict with a walrusy mustache that seemed to have a nervous life of its own — these two served as like Whitey Sorkin’s operatives in the field, taking bets and phoning them in to Saugus, delivering winnings, and collecting debts. It was never clear to Gately why Whitey Sorkin was called Whitey, because he spent a huge amount of time under ultraviolet lamps as part of an esoteric cluster-headache-treatment regimen and so was the constant shiny color of a sort of like dark soap, with almost the same color and coin-of-the-realm classic profile as the cheery young Pakistani M.D. who’d told Gately at Our Lady of Solace Hospital in Beverly how Teddibly Soddy he was that Mrs. G.’s cirrhosis and cirrhotic stroke had left her at roughly the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout and then given him public-transportation directions to the Point Shirley L.T.I.

Eugene (‘Fax’) Fackelmann, who’d dropped out of the Lynn MA educational system at like ten, had met Whitey Sorkin through the same eczema-tic, gamble-happy pharmacist’s assistant Gately had first met Sorkin through. Gately was now no longer called Bimmy or Doshka. He was Don now, nicknameless. Sometimes Donny. Sorkin referred to Gately and Fackelmann as his Twin Towers. They were more or less Sorkin’s paid muscle. Except not in any sort of way important crime figures’ paid muscle is portrayed in popular entertainment. They didn’t stand impassively flanking Sorkin at crime-figure meetings or light his cigar or call him ‘Boss’ or anything. They weren’t his bodyguards. In fact they weren’t physically around him that much; they usually dealt with Sorkin and his Saugus office and secretary via beepers and cellular phones.[367]