O
Michael Pemulus is nobody’s fool. When Hal Incandenza grabbed his, Pemulus’, balls, he, Pemulus, knew game-time was a foot [sic].
“We’re agreed then,” said yachting-hat-clad Pemulus, “for the good of all ETA, we have to take out the big guy.”
“The slinger of sticks”
“The slapper of balls”
“The Canadian Cannanite”
“The trophy gobbler, sponsor serpent, and string diddler extraordinaire."
The boys grinned at each other like a pair of down-and-out hyenas who’d come across a befuddled pheasant asking for directions to the nearest Whattaburger. They knew if they were ever found out, the consequences would start with expulsion and end in a keyless cell of an interdependent prison, never allowed within two clicks of another grass, clay, asphalt, acrylic, concrete, or polyethylene court. Yet the alternative was far worse. The Peemster desperately needed a doubles partner to pull him out of his digestively enforced sub-sixty-four mire, up into the radiance of tennis tolerability. Pemulus was done playing jump rope with the coveted cut-off line. He’d decided on a more permanent, and in his mind, Pemulus’ mind that is, less risky solution, in that it was one enormous risk instead of like a chinese-water-tortured drip drip drip of mediumish-sized risks.
And but no one has quite yet worked out what Hal’s motivations are, not even himself, Hal that is. Though if Hal were to transcend the stairs down to the weight room and consult a certain sweat-infused semi-levitating guru, the guru would surely point out how when Waynecandenza stepped onto the court, everyone, but the big R recruiters in particular, were like a hell of a lot more interested in the first syllable of that pairing than the last three. Except he’d, the guru that is, be more likely to say it like ‘There is no creature save the humble slug who favors one leg over two.’ And also provide a much-needed rejoinder about the advanced age of the Earth.
But so Hal grabbed the Dunlap sack of Pemulus’ don’t-ask-don’t-tell acquired tennis balls1, triple checked the synchronicity of their watches, pulled a white beanie with eye and mouth holes extracted down over his face, and set off to the mess hall staircase lugging two huge ball sacks.
O
Don Gatley didn’t know whether he was being fooled. He had just awoken from a nap after a particularly gruelfull dream-watch followed by a particularly stucky AM sesh with Stavros. Tiny standing over him was perhaps the very last thing he wanted to see. The thought crossed Don G’s overlarge mind that a large proportion of Ewell’s diminutive body could likely fit inside his, Gatley’s, rather un-diminutive head with rather little contortion required on either man’s part. Tiny had already started talking and so D.G. decided to take an extra-long moment to rise from the miasma of sleep.
“-from that sparkling academy upon a hill he reaks, reaks I tell you! Could smell it from a mile, no a kilometer! away. And belive you me, if I can, then those silver foxes protecting their golden cubs will too, and that’ll be the end of our mutualism. Like the little oxpecker who, in her industriousness, believes now is the perfect, nay the only!, time to strike! To go proverbially straight for the nuts, if you sniff my wind.”
Don G makes a sound that onlisteners could misattribute to the love-child of an Easter Island head, and one of the Stonehenge stones.
“And it’s not just me!” Tiny continues without regard for his level of audience-capture. “Anchor tattoo said the same, as did Wrist Scar, Tramp Stamp, and Bicep Slur. He’s there right now, he could be high at this very moment, for all we know he -”
Don G held up an irascible [sic] hand, lobbed a string of choice expletives directed vaguely in Tiny’s direction the way a talking-head-magician nearing the end of a milktoast career might lazily lob knives in the general direction of his paralyzed, all-too-young assistant from Nebraska or South Dakota who has a somewhat solar dream of making it to the big city with her jeans and her dignity intact.
Finally, he, Don, grumbled out, “Who?”
“Erdeddy!” Ewell squeaked. “The new kid!”
O
Hal checked his watch. Five minutes to the hour, Pemulus would be getting into position right about now. He didn’t love the idea of sacrificing a metric oz of their precious cargo, but he and the Peemster had agreed that nothing else would do, and they knew nobody but Wayne touched the strawberry Nesquik. Hal let out a fart that sounded vaguely like a question mark, rubbed his tongue against his throbbing left molar, he’d have to get Schatt to take another look, and adjusted the collar of his alpaca jacket. He checked for the third time his bags full of balls were ready for release. Four minutes to the hour.
O
Gatley had heard enough. In his first year at EHDARH, he’d played house-uncle to a couple of kids who’d found their menial task down at Montery Ono’s Lorry, Engine, Sedan, and Truck Stop. Every 6:42 AM weekday, Jese Northup would drag herself from bed, slump over to Louie Firmament’s room2 and do her darndest to pry him out from under his covers which, due to what he claimed was a congenital gland issue, were always internally crusted with at minimum a triple layer of congealed sweat. It was at this point a sort of game played by all but two Ennet House residents to come up with progressively more vile metaphors at the expense of Lou’s glands3. A bus, three T stops and another bus later, they’d arrive like clockwork 27 minutes late to M. Ono’s where they’d catch the sharp side of his vaguely eastern european tongue, causing Jese to apologize in a sufficiently pitiable manner to scrape out another day rolling under cars on colorful wheelers appropriated from the formerly germanic Dorchester East Elementary School Nurturing Und Testing Services, a proto-concept that marketed itself as a school for auto-didactic children which meant that these elementary school-aged kinders had like eight so-called ‘study halls’ in a day then went home. Several full classes of matriculation came and went before one cynical divorcee had the proverbial balls to ring up the alleged school for neglect or false advertising or some bullshit which was thrown out by a glaucomic judge. And but the bad PR was enough to convince even the laissezest-of-faire parents to withdraw their precious honey bunches of oats from DEESNUTS.
But so one such clockworked morning at Monty’s, Louie F had had it up to here with the yelling and groveling from his boss and girlfriend respectively. The worst part for Lou was the forgiveness. Had Lou possessed the means and desire to spill his proverbial guts to a licensed sad-eyed middle-aged man, said man likely would have pointed to Lou’s childhood, starting from the kind of age where strangers would call him a “tike”, when Lou’s dad, who resembled every corporate villain second-in-command in every animated children’s cartridge, would slump through their home’s rusted steel garage door and stumble to his deep-cushioned rocker-recliner where Lou’s mom would stride up with gravitas, wipe a high-rainbow shade of lipstick from his, Lou’s dad’s, neck and proclaim this time to be the last time, all while their little tike shrank as deeply into the couch as was tikeishly possible. Lou’s mom would storm out leaving a breadcrumb trail back to the bedroom of half-wiped tears while Lou’s dad would be exhaling Zs before little Lou’s only and much-rewatched Mr. Bouncety Bounce cartridge concluded. Sometimes, Lou’s mom would get as far as packing up a suitcase and calling the cab company, but through various permutations of flowers, roses, and grovels, she would always wearily sigh, begrudgingly smile at a self-deprecating comment, and descend into her spouse’s arms once again. And but then when Louie had the first shadow under his chin and his mom caught the first whiff of pot, she wouldn’t talk to him for a week. One entire week, during which Louie cycled through various permutations of flowers and roses and grovels, and not one sigh, begrudging smile, nor hug of forgiveness in sight. And so, his rather inexhaustive playbook utterly exhausted, Louie did what his mom had never done. Louie left. Left for keeps.
All this, the hypothetical overpriced new leather couch owner would connect back to Louie’s having-it-up-to-hereness, and he, the couch-man, would hypothetically proceed to connect all this to Louie proceeding to take a short walk to the corner visible from the daily morning bus where a certain grey-beanie clad Guatemalan sold him a half g at a remarkably fair price for a street transaction4. So but Louie knew the real reason was that despite a half year’s sobriety, the spider was still ravenously inside him, clawing at his innards with its legs and fangs and maybe a stinger, and but so today in particular that arch-arachnid did diligently nibble away at Louie’s brains, his lungs, his groin, his liver, his skin, his eyeballs, the roof of his mouth, the floor of his mouth, the bottoms of his feet and between each of his little piggy toes, and so on. And so, who would say a corner-sourced half gram wasn’t warranted?
Ono. Ono would and did say exactly that. Ono, in a way that Louie would later describe as maternal, said he’d taken a chance hiring druggies, and that once an addict always an addict, and that Louie better not show his map in this zip again or else serious anatomical reconfiguration would precipitate5.
And so, one bus, three T stops, one wheelchair-bound homeless man, and another bus later, Louie F and Jese N would arrive back at Ennet House Drug & Alcohol Recovery House and after a terse conversation with Pat M in which no epileptic dogs’ bellies were scratched, L Firmament was expelled from the premises and Jese N was permitted to remain, which everyone more or less agreed was fair as her only crime was one of association or arguably accessory. And but before Pat and the residents could sort wound from lesion, Jese’s clacking bootheels graced the House for one final time, she being hippily attached to Firmament who, with one look at Gatley, knew this was not a situation that would be improved by obstinance.
Pat suspects that Jese couldn’t stand the thought of being left Lou-less from when her own personal mommy used to fly into not just blind, but also deaf, rages which often involved untargeted strikes so near to Jese that who could be blamed if one accidentally struck a foolish little girl too dumb to get out of the way, and where was daddy during all this but quick-stepping to his Honda Accord and touching petal down to metal, sometimes while little Jese wailed against the cold exterior of the Accord’s locked doors and pounding her diminutive fists against the Accord’s hermetically-sealed semi-transparent windows.
Gatley doesn’t care to speculate.
And but so, thinking back to Louie and Jese, Don G sets out for that sparkling academy upon a hill.
O
Honda Civic, white. Nissan Centra, black. Ford Torus [sic], navy. Ford Explorer, black. Toyota Camry, puke green. Chevy Cavalier, white. Chevy Celebrity, grey. Honda Accord, red. Dodge Caravan, grey. Mitsubishi Galant, caterpillar green. Volkswagen Jetta, nazi red. Audi A4, bud flower green. Nissan Pathfinder, grinder black. Subaru SVX, rolling paper white. Dodge Neon, first lighter blue. Acura TL, color of the inside of Erdeddy’s eyelids when he presses his palms into his eyes as he frequently finds himself doing when the only entertainment he has is watching each car scurry past the wrought iron gate that he has become subservient to for this portion of his life. Erdeddy’s so fixated on a Honda Odyssey the color of the mid-esophogus bile he, Erdeddy, coughs up when he’s smoked five bowls, three-and-a-half bongs, six dubois, or one King Crab6, that he almost misses the unmissable form of Don Gatley cresting the ETA hill and stalking what appears to be directly towards his, Erdeddy’s, booth.
Now in normal circum/happen-stances, Ken is glad enough to see the stone-slab-headed Ennet House administrator. There have even been times Ken was glad for the presence of his housemate with the look and sting of a box-jellyfish. Now however was not one of those times. The night prior, Erdeddy had made what Katie described with no shortage of graphic metaphors as the life-shortening misstep of criticizing Big Don’s somewhat limp fettucini7.
As Erdeddy replays last night’s scene, as well as Kate’s guarantee of Erdeddy’s days until utter spagettification at the golemesque hands of Gatley being numbered, and that number being like countable on one hand if the hand is missing a few fingers from a horrific fishing accident, Erdeddy also sizes up the expression on the film-projector canvas of Gatley’s map to be one of the ask-questions-never variety, and he, Erdeddy, realizes that his legs are moving before his consciousness can fully process his decision. Before the Bile Odyssey can lay into its horn, Erdeddy is out of the booth, past the courts, and through the ETA doors. Ken stops for a count of ten thunderous heartbeats before he peers out the window, hoping Don G wouldn’t have followed him onto ETA grounds. As Erdeddy peeks through the glass, the sunlight streaming through the window is abruptly blotted out by the mountainous form of Gatley, at which any volcanologist worth their NaCl would renounce volcanology in favor of miracles of Christ upon seeing that his, Gatley’s, top hasn’t yet blown.
Gatley reaches the door. Erdeddy hits a dead sprint. He ducks down one hallway as Don G barrels after. He leaps as a gazelle down a staircase as Don carumphs behind him. He nearly crashes ass-over-teakettle into a bristle-lipped adolescent girl with a Fiends in Human Shape tee and an innumerably kittened backpack. The whole while, Don Gatley stomps closer. He closes thirty feet as a vaguely Austrian voice yells at them to cease and desist with great immediacy, twenty-five feet as Ken weaves around a boy wearing a white beanie over his face like a ski mask and who almost jumps out of his skin at the sight of Gatley barreling towards them, twenty feet as Erdeddy vaults a lunch table and Gatley smashes right through it spewing brown-paper-bag lunches around the room at mach two. Fifteen feet as Erdeddy catches a bizarre reek of lemons-left-out-in-the-sun-at-high-noon-in-Death-Valley. Ten feet as Erdeddy makes for a corridor intersection where a bunch of students appear to have just gotten out of class in what he’s hoping will provide a crowd to disappear into. As the crowd scatters upon sighting the human equivalent of a charging bull, Gatley reaches for Erdeddy’s pipe-cleaner forearm with his cinderblock mitts, and as if by spontaneous apparition, the ground underfoot fills with a sea of peach-fuzz tennis balls. In a moment that makes Erdeddy believe for the first time in some higher power, he, Erdeddy, escapes the expert-mode Minesweeper field without touching a single tennis ball. For Gatley, despite hitting the knees daily, the Red Sea crashes around him. Before he can register the intricacy of the situation, he, Gatley, is completely horizontal, suspended not unlike the sun as it decides whether it should once again set on the British Empire. His crash is regarded as a seismic anomaly by increasingly frustrated Boston, MA drivers who are now backed up all the way to Fenway by a car backup chain-reaction resulting from a temporarily unmanned tennis academy gate. Erdeddy disappears into the bowels of ETA as Gatley’s lights flicker and extinguish.
Gatley blinks awake to a rotund woman with a chef’s hat and four golden stars featured prominently upon her apron standing over him. A gaggle of lean children have made a sort of semi-circle around him. The rotund woman murmurs something about an ambulance which Gatley waves off, saying he just needs a minute, something to drink, and the spine of Ken Erdeddy. The chef sends a tall child wearing a Barenaked Ladies Detour de Force shirt away, and he quickly comes back with an opaque mug. Don G touches it to his lips.
Gatley tries to stand, but stumbles. He must have hit his head harder than he thought. Gatley looks around and sees the circle of children start to melt like wax candles. He sees his own hands become torches of flame that scour and liquify any of the children that approach. He excoriates them to stay back as the former chef, now turned into Ursa Major, gives Gatley a quizzical look. At that moment, Gatley decides that he’s very tired, and maybe just this once he should hit the knees without pretending to himself to hit the knees. It is with a heavy heart he notices, he no longer like has any knees, or so he tells Ursa Major.
And but so, deep in the burrows of Don G’s subconscious, he notices a disembodied yachting cap push through the circle of waxen children. From the other end of an infinite tunnel, Gatley hears the gossamer whisper of the cap screaming at the tippity top of its cotton lungs, “DON’T DRINK THE STRAWBERRY NESQUIK!”
The last words to leave easter-island-headed Don G’s mouth before his death-march through the psychic underworld are a feeble, likely imperceptible, “I drank this.”
1) M.P. kept a comically large squirrell’s-hoard of tennis balls on what he offensively termed his “reservation” for times when he, Pemulus, desired to blow off the old steam by playing “Settlers & Indians.” A game, though stretching the very definition of that very word to its very local maxima, Pemulus invented where he would slam tennis balls over the net at like mach two into the crowd of twelve to fourteeners who were ostensibly supposed to dodge, though this being neither the Matrix, nor the Olympics, this endevaour [sic] was more a matter of luck than skill. One E. Ingersoll proved repeatedly to have luck spurn him like a certain Quebec-based group was rumoured to spurn legs. If one of the little buddies did get struck, the rules of S&I dictated they run a circuit of the court squalking like a turkey, whereas the rules of biology dictated they lay down on the ground clutching the struck vestige [sic] and wailing for winter to come and kill off the lone settler. This all occurs in what Pemulus chortlingly refers to as his “PPM drills.”
2) Jese asked Pat when she and Lou2a first moved in if they could share one room to which Pat informed Jese in the least uncertain of terms that this was strictly verboten and under no circumstance would Jese and Lou be permitted to be horizontal in the same zip regardless of time of day, degree of supervision, or phase of the mother-fucking moon.
2a) Jese & Lou had been dating for just sub-three years when they moved into Ennett House. They’d met at couples therapy, Jese having the three to four PM slot with her dubiously Native American girlfriend, and Lou having the four to five PM slot with his clepto-cougar girlfriend, though these were not terms either of them used. Much to the chagrin of Jese & Lou’s now former girlfriends, their couples therapist claimed the whole situation as a double victory for insurance purposes.
3) Including but n/l/t: Jese’s shucking the corn, hatching the egg, extracting the piggie from the blankey, popping the weasel, de-shelling the snail, slurping up the soggy weiner, squeezing out the turd, or performing the brit milah.
4) $31.49. The Guatemalan was strangely anal about providing exact change which subsequently clinked around in Louie’s pocket for the rest of the day until he dropped it on the ground in front of a wheelchaired homeless man with a sign informing passersby that he, the homeless man, needed cash for urgent canine wisdom tooth surgery. No dog was ever sighted.
5) M. Ono did not actually say serious anatomical reconfiguration.
6) Don’t ask.
7) Erdeddy had loudly proclaimed the noodles looked like they had the consistency of moist sand, and that they looked better than they tasted. All other Ennet House Drug & Alcohol Recovery House residents froze in one of those he’s-right-behind-me-,-isn’t-he type of ways.
