the day, and
decide what kind of expensive present to mail the Subject’s kid.
And then the matter of the dead bird, out of nowhere.
And then news of pressure from the AZ Cardinal administration to cooperate with some sort of insipid-type personality-profile
series of interviews with some profiler from
Moment
magazine, with personal backgroundish questions to be answered in some blandly sincere team-PR way, the unexamined stress
of which drives him to start calling Hallie again, reopen that whole Pandora’s box of worms.
Orin also shaves in the shower, face red with heat, wreathed in steam, by feel, shaving upward, with south-to-north strokes,
as he was taught.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Here’s Hal Incandenza, age seventeen, with his little brass one-hitter, getting covertly high in the Enfield Tennis Academy’s
underground Pump Room and exhaling palely into an industrial exhaust fan. It’s the sad little interval after afternoon matches
and conditioning but before the Academy’s communal supper. Hal is by himself down here and nobody knows where he is or what
he’s doing.
Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.
A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with a pinch of good dope, gets hot and is
hard on the mouth — the brass ones especially — but one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited
pot gets inhaled; there’s none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl’s big load, and Hal can take every
iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling.
Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.
The Academy’s tennis courts’ Lung’s Pump Room is underground and accessible only by tunnel. E.T.A. is abundantly, embranchingly
tunnelled. This is by design.
Plus one-hitters are small, which is good, because let’s face it, anything you use to smoke high-resin dope with is going
to stink. A bong is big, and its stink is going to be like commensurately big, plus you have the foul bong-water to deal with.
Pipes are smaller and at least portable, but they always come with only a multi-hit party bowl that disperses nonutilized
smoke over a wide area. A one-hitter can be wastelessly employed, then allowed to cool, wrapped in two baggies and then further
wrapped and sealed in a Ziploc and then enclosed in two sport-socks in a gear bag along with the lighter and eyedrops and
mint-pellets and the little film-case of dope itself, and it’s highly portable and odor-free and basically totally covert.
As far as Hal knows, colleagues Michael Pemulis, Jim Struck, Bridget C. Boone, Jim Troeltsch, Ted Schacht, Trevor Axford,
and possibly Kyle D. Coyle and Tall Paul Shaw, and remotely possibly Frannie Unwin, all know Hal gets regularly covertly high.
It’s also not impossible that Bernadette Longley knows, actually; and of course the unpleasant K. Freer always has suspicions
of all kinds. And Hal’s brother Mario knows a thing or two. But that’s it, in terms of public knowledge. And but even though
Pemulis and Struck and Boone and Troeltsch and Axford and occasionally (in a sort of medicinal or touristic way) Stice and
Schacht all are known to get high also, Hal has actually gotten actively high only with Pemulis, on the rare occasions he’s
gotten high with anybody else, as in in person, which he avoids. He’d forgot: Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice, of Partridge KS,
knows; and Hal’s oldest brother, Orin, mysteriously, even long-distance, seems to know more than he’s coming right out and
saying, unless Hal’s reading more into some of the phone-comments than are there.
Hal’s mother, Mrs. Avril Incandenza, and her adoptive brother Dr. Charles Tavis, the current E.T.A.
decide what kind of expensive present to mail the Subject’s kid.
And then the matter of the dead bird, out of nowhere.
And then news of pressure from the AZ Cardinal administration to cooperate with some sort of insipid-type personality-profile
series of interviews with some profiler from
Moment
magazine, with personal backgroundish questions to be answered in some blandly sincere team-PR way, the unexamined stress
of which drives him to start calling Hallie again, reopen that whole Pandora’s box of worms.
Orin also shaves in the shower, face red with heat, wreathed in steam, by feel, shaving upward, with south-to-north strokes,
as he was taught.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Here’s Hal Incandenza, age seventeen, with his little brass one-hitter, getting covertly high in the Enfield Tennis Academy’s
underground Pump Room and exhaling palely into an industrial exhaust fan. It’s the sad little interval after afternoon matches
and conditioning but before the Academy’s communal supper. Hal is by himself down here and nobody knows where he is or what
he’s doing.
Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.
A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with a pinch of good dope, gets hot and is
hard on the mouth — the brass ones especially — but one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited
pot gets inhaled; there’s none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl’s big load, and Hal can take every
iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling.
Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.
The Academy’s tennis courts’ Lung’s Pump Room is underground and accessible only by tunnel. E.T.A. is abundantly, embranchingly
tunnelled. This is by design.
Plus one-hitters are small, which is good, because let’s face it, anything you use to smoke high-resin dope with is going
to stink. A bong is big, and its stink is going to be like commensurately big, plus you have the foul bong-water to deal with.
Pipes are smaller and at least portable, but they always come with only a multi-hit party bowl that disperses nonutilized
smoke over a wide area. A one-hitter can be wastelessly employed, then allowed to cool, wrapped in two baggies and then further
wrapped and sealed in a Ziploc and then enclosed in two sport-socks in a gear bag along with the lighter and eyedrops and
mint-pellets and the little film-case of dope itself, and it’s highly portable and odor-free and basically totally covert.
As far as Hal knows, colleagues Michael Pemulis, Jim Struck, Bridget C. Boone, Jim Troeltsch, Ted Schacht, Trevor Axford,
and possibly Kyle D. Coyle and Tall Paul Shaw, and remotely possibly Frannie Unwin, all know Hal gets regularly covertly high.
It’s also not impossible that Bernadette Longley knows, actually; and of course the unpleasant K. Freer always has suspicions
of all kinds. And Hal’s brother Mario knows a thing or two. But that’s it, in terms of public knowledge. And but even though
Pemulis and Struck and Boone and Troeltsch and Axford and occasionally (in a sort of medicinal or touristic way) Stice and
Schacht all are known to get high also, Hal has actually gotten actively high only with Pemulis, on the rare occasions he’s
gotten high with anybody else, as in in person, which he avoids. He’d forgot: Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice, of Partridge KS,
knows; and Hal’s oldest brother, Orin, mysteriously, even long-distance, seems to know more than he’s coming right out and
saying, unless Hal’s reading more into some of the phone-comments than are there.
Hal’s mother, Mrs. Avril Incandenza, and her adoptive brother Dr. Charles Tavis, the current E.T.A.
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