p 442-489

this section in 6 parts

p 442-449
YDAU [2009] ca July
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person


synopsis:

On a 'Commitment' to the 'Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group' in Braintree, Gately reveals that he still has no solid understanding of the 'Higher Power' to which he is supposed to turn over his diseased will. He notes that those with a religious background have it easier, because even if they reject the notion of god that they've been taught, at least they have that notion to start with, whereas Gately has to start from scratch. He admits that he goes through the motions, but feels *nothing*. And then it happens again, the audience erupts in applause. The crowd is 'over 50% bikers and biker-chicks' and one of the bikers 'Bob Death' congratulates Gately,and asks if he's heard the one about the fish-- in which a wise old fish sees three young fish and asks them how the water is, to which they respond 'what the fuck is water?' On the ride home Gately is wracked with pain-- they always neglect to mention in AA that the way you get better is by way of pain. It turn out that the more vapid the AA cliche the more ghastly the thing it represents really is. After about 8 months sober, Gately began to recover memories of his childhood. His real father is an Estonian, who fled the scene early on. His mother was an alcoholic with a live-in lover a former Naval MP who would beat her,but do so only in her mid-section to keep the bruises out of sight. Gately would pretend to watch TV until his mother passed out, and then he would drink nearly all of the remaining vodka in her bottle, and then return the bottle to beside his mother, who would never know the difference in the morning. When she was sober she'd call him Bimmy or Bim, not knowing that his friends had invented the moniker , which is short for 'big Indestructible Moron.' In June, Gately had 'Got In Touch' with the memory of finding his mother covered in blood, after a cirrhotic hemorrhage. It had been ten years since he even thought of her in 'the long-term place' and he has never been to visit. His dreams the night of the Braintree meeting, Gately dreams he under a deep sea whose water is 'silent and dim and the same temperature that he is.'

p 449-450
YDAU [2009] very late October
place ETA
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Hal is having a recurring dream that his teeth are crumbling and rotting away. As he's pricing dentures, he wakes to find Mario's bed made up, because he has been spending nights at HmH, in front of the radio in an uncharacteristic state of agitation over the unannounced sabbatical of Madame Psychosis from her nightly radio program.

p 450-461
YDAU [2009] Nov 9
place ETA
narrated in third person

synopsis:

ETA is 16 males under capacity and females over capacity, meaning that they have to house some of them in the male dorms, which creates some problems, hormonal and technical. This also creates in terms of scheduling drills before class, problems which get Charles Tavis out of bed early in the morning. This particular morning Mario, 'the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered' is asleep right next to the sound system. Dawn drills are under way for the top players, and it's very cold. Schtitt overseas the drills from which JJ Penn is 'ominously missing.' Players practice backhands, forehands, 'tap & whack,' wind sprints, etc. Next are the star drills which require having a bucket nearby for 'distress,' and then the side to sides which are particularly hard on Hal's ankle. Everyone accepts clean towels from 'a halfway-house part-time black girl.' Schtitt admonishes the players for sluggish drilling, and singles out LaMont Chu, who has been heard complaining about the cold, telling him it will always be 'something that is too' -- too cold, too hot, too bright etc. Schtitt's ends his monologue by testing Hal to reiterate his point that the players have to be here in mind as well as body, Hal answers' The human head, sir, if I got your thrust. Where I'm going to occur as a player.'


p 461-469
YDAU [2009] ca July
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person


synopsis:

Part of Gately's job at Ennet House is to cook dinner on weekdays, which means that he gets to borrow Pat Montesian's 1964 Ford Aventura, which is a mint condition antique sports car with a driver's seat that Gately can barely squeeze into. He doesn't care; he loves that car. Gately lost his license permanently in YWQMD [2006] when he was arrested for DUI while driving on a suspended license. He also has these on his record-- bad-check forgery, malicious destruction of property, 2 D&Ds, 'a bullshit Public Urination,' breaking and entering, possession with intent. Then there's also 'a certain darker issue' of the upscale Brookline home that he broke into, whose owner had been eulogized in all the papers. Gately had a court stenographer who had been a former client check into the issue for him and learned that, over the objections of the ADA, the Murder-2 investigation had been taken over by the 'Non-Specific Services Bureau' and now focussed on 'certain shadowy Nucko-political bodies' in Quebec. Most of Gately's pending cases had been 'Closed Without Finding' contingent on his treatment and sobriety, all except for the driving DUI with a suspended license which carries a mandatory 90-day sentence. Gately did 17 months in Billerca at age 24 for assaulting two bouncers. He had beaten senseless the first and only guys who had tried to mess with him. He's more worried now about the availability of drugs and the lack of access to AA in jail. He had told Pat Montesian up front at his interview that he was basically coming to Ennet House to stay out of jail, and had no hope of getting clean. He had rubbed Pat's dog's scabby stomach, as she told him that his honesty, hopelessness and desperation were key to his recovery. Pat is in her late 30s and is literally half pretty having suffered a stroke which debilitated half of her face and body. Her first husband had divorced her because of her alcoholism, and after the stroke she Surrendered and came to Ennet House in a wheelchair and purportedly tried to eat the rocks when told to do so. Her right arm had 'atrophied into a kind of semi-claw' and she walks with 'dignified but godawful lurch.' She treated as a favorite, and went with him on most of his court-dates, driving him in the Aventura at excessive speeds. About 4 months into his residency the desire to ingest drugs magically disappeared. He had simply done what they said to do, gotten downb on his knees every morning and night, even though he didn't believe in any of it. It was like the 'infamous Boston AA cake analogy' that Gene M had explained: just imagine that you're following the instructions on the side of the cake box-- you don't have to believe a cake will result, or understand how, you just have to follow the directions, and the cake will get made. So he did, and it did work. He still can't figure out how. One of the Crocodiles, Ferocious Francis G explained that 'anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn't going to be major-league enough to save Gately's addled ass.' Months later, Gately no longer cares that he doesn't understands. On his one year anniversary Francis G presented him with a cake and he cried, although he later claimed otherwise. As a staff chef, Gately leaves something to be desired; he prepares overcooked spaghetti, boiled hot dogs, 'dense damp meat loaf with little pieces of American cheese and half a box of cornflakes on top, for texture.' But the house members don't dare complain, at least not directly.


p 470-475
YDAU [2009] May 1, pre-dawn
place Tucson
narrated in third person


synopsis:

Steeply asks Marathe if he remembers a Canadian experimental procedure, where electrodes were used to stimulate the brain in various places with varying results. Marathe relates this to his father's pacemaker. Steeply continues describing how the researchers by trial and error located the 'p-terminals' which when stimulated would produces intense pleasure. When they rigged lab rats with a lever that caused the electrode to stimulate the p-terminal, the rat would eventually stimulate itself to death. the eventually tried it on other animals with the same results, and they wished to find human subjects, but couldn't legally use prisoners. However word of the experiments had been leaked and soon after they had a line of volunteers at the clinic, who 'by free choice' wanted to have the electrodes implanted. Steeply invites Marathe to 'see the analogy' implicit to the Entertainment, and points out that these were Canadians. Of course, the CIA and the Canadian C7 immediately shut it down, and destroyed the lab.

p 475-489
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [or later?]
place Ennet House and later Antitoi Entertainent [sic]
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Pat M asks Gately to go the Purity Supreme market to buy some eggs because the two new residents Amy J and Joelle van D cannot eat the boiled hot dogs, he was about to prepare. Gately views this as catering to the 'addict's claim of special uniqueness,' but then again he does love driving Pat's Aventura. Whenever he takes the car out to do errands, he makes up for time spent going out of way, by driving like a maniac. He takes the car down Commonwealth Ave through Brighton, Allston and past the Unexamined Life where he no longer goes. As he 'blasts though BU country' he sees the college girls and thinks about sex, which he's never had sober. He gets away with smoking menthols in the car by keeping the windows down for cross-ventilation. He gets on the Storrow 500 and heads toward Cambridge to go a health food store, the Bread & Circus in Inman Square, which he can use as an excuse for the delay. As he speeds through Inman Square the Aventura kicks up a 'backwash' of debris. One such piece of debris lands with a clunk on the door to Antitoi Entertainent. In mid paragraph the narrative shifts entirely from Gately's drive to the action inside Antitoi Entertainent. Lucien Antitoi comes to the door in his ammo belt Colt 44 and flannel shirt and is annoyed to find no one there. He lives in the back of the store with his brother Bertraund, where they sleep on cots,smoke pot and constitute a 'not very terrifying insurgent cell' who had been under DuPlessis, but then spurned by the FLQ after his death. Lucien cannot speak French, and this means that Bertraund runs the show, which consists of harebrained schemes like draping the Canadian flag over the civil war statue on Interdependence Day, and fashioning doormats bearing President Gentle's image, and recently selling harmful pharmaceuticals as an attack on local youth. Bertraund had recently bartered with an old hippie for something that sounds much like DMZ, for among other things a garbage bag full of unlabeled read-only cartridges. The door squeaks loudly as Lucien closes it, and continues to squeak after he's bolted it. He has a broom with the end of the handle sharpened to a point, which doubles as a weapon. It's Lucien's job to watch all of the obscure unlabeled video cartridges that his brother acquires, and although they're in no discernible order, he knows what's on them. Bertraund's latest acquisition is a couple of tapes he picked up from a commercial display, and contained only the slogan in tiny raised letters--'il ne faut plus qu'on pursuive le bonheur' [happiness need no longer be pursued] and a stamped smiley face. Much to Bertraund's chagrin the cartridges were apparently blank. In a footnote, it's pointed out that this doesn't mean they are blank, since copy-capable cartridges require a 585 rpm machine to run,and the Antitoi's is a standard 450-drive. As Lucien sweeps he notices first one then another figure in a wheelchair outside the door, and he begins to hear squeaks. He realizes that this means the 'worst possible scenario' -- the AFR. As he pulls his Colt from his pants, the gun catches on his pants and along with the weight of his massive belly causes the pants to rip, and fall down around his ankles. He hobbles to the back room to warn his brother, but instead finds him with a railroad spike through his eye. The AFR members knock him to the floor, take his gun, and hit over the head with it as he listens in incomprehension to the their questions. The leader asks him to direct them to the 'Copy-capable' entertainment cartridge. Lucien understands none of this. His head is pulled back by the hair, and the sharpened broomstick is shoved down his throat skewering him. He has visions of childhood and his mother as he dies.


notes

That CT might have fathered his half-sister's child, Mario could possibly explain the unique deformities. It seems like DFW purposely pointed out [p 312-317] that CT was staying with the Moms and Himself on an extended stay at the time Mario was born, It seems odd that Hal's nightmare scene is from very late October, and Madame P is already off the air, since her suicide attempt was not until Nov 7. This section made me rethink my take on the two suicide-attempt scenes [p 219-223 and p 226-240] which I now think take place the same day, Nov 7, and are alternate takes on her overdose. This would mean that the murder of the Antitoi brothers probably takes place on Nov 8, since that has been established as Joelle's first night at Ennet House. The narrative shift in the last section seems unique thus far in the book, and this makes me wonder whether the point is to set it off as key. Another explanation might be that this occurs pretty close to the book's midpoint.