Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 883

Gately, for several months before he did his State assault-bit, was disastrously involved with one Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, his first girl ever with a hyphen, a sort of upscale but directionless and not very healthy and pale and incredibly passive Danvers girl that worked in Purchasing for a hospital-supply co. in Swampscott and was pretty definitely an alcoholic and drank bright drinks with umbrellas in Rte. 1 clubs in the late P.M. until she swooned and passed out with a loud clunk. That’s what she called it — ‘swooned.’ The swooning and passing out with a loud clunk as her head hit the table was more or less a nightly thing, and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep fell automatically in love with any man she termed ‘chivalrous’^[374] enough to carry her out to the parking lot and drive her home without raping her, which rape of an unconscious head-lolling girl she termed ‘Taking Advantage. ‘ Gately got introduced to her by Fackelmann, who one time as he came up through a sports bar called the Pourhouse’s parking lot to dialogue with a Sorkin-debtor Gately saw Fackelmann staggering along carrying this unconscious girl to his ride, one big hand quite a bit farther up her prom-looking taffeta gown than it really needed to be to carry her, and Fackelmann told Gately if Don’d give this gash a ride home he’d stay and do the collection, which Gately’s heart wasn’t in collections anymore and he jumped at the trade, as long as Fackelmann could promise him she could hold her various fluids in the 4x4 he was driving. So it was Fackelmann who told him, as he put the tiny and limp but still continent body in his arms in the parking lot of the Pourhouse, to watch his personal six, Gately, and be sure and violate her a little, because this gash here was like one of those South Sea-culture gashes in that if Gately took her home and she woke up nonviolated she’d be Gately’s for life. But Gately obviously had no intention of raping an unconscious person, much less even putting his hand up the gown of a girl that might lose her fluids any second, and this locked him into the involvement. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep called Gately her ‘Night-Errand’ and fell passively in love with his refusal to Take Advantage. Gene Fackelmann, she confided, was not the gentleman Gately was.