Gately happened onto Demerol at age twenty-three when intra-ocular itching finally forced him to abandon Percocets and explore new vistas. Demerol was more expensive mg. for mg. than most synthetic narcs, but it was also easier to get, being the treatment of medical choice for mind-bending post-operative pain. Gately can’t for the life of him remember who or just where in Salem he was first introduced to what the boys on the North Shore called Pebbles and Barns-Bams, 50 and 100 mg. Demerol tablets, respectively very tiny and tiny, chalky white scored discs with
on one,side and Sanofi-Winthrop Co.’s very-soon-beloved trademark, a kind of
on the other, that rakish
just puncturing the square envelope of itchy-eyed North-Shore life. And remembering even the
feels like Entertaining the obsession. He knows it was not long after Nooch’s funeral, because he’d been alone and crewless at whatever moment whoever handed him two 50 mg. tablets way too tiny for his big-fingered hands, in lieu of whatever else it was he’d wanted, laughing when Gately said What the fuck and They look like Bufferin for ants or some shit, saying: Trust Me.
It must have been his twenty-third summer Out There, because he remembers being shirtless and driving down 93 when he ran out of everything else and pulled off into the JFK Library lot to take them, so small and tasteless he had to check his open mouth in the rearview to make sure he’d gotten them down. And he remembers not wearing a shirt because he’d gotten to study his big bare hairless chest for a long time. And from that somnolent P.M. in the JFK lot on he’d been a faithful attendant at the goddess De-merol’s temple, right to the very finish.
Gately remembers crewing — for good bits of both the Percocet and De-merol eras — with two other North Shore narcotics addicts, who Gately’d grown up with one and had broke digits for Whitey Sorkin the migrainous bookie with the other. They weren’t burglars, either of them, these guys: Fackelmann and Kite. Fackelmann had a background in creative-type checks, plus access to equipment for manufacturing I.D., and Kite’s background was he’d been a computer-wienie at Salem State before he got the Shoe for hacking the phone bills of certain guys deep in trouble over 900 sex-lines into the S.S. Administration’s WATS account, and they became naturals at crewing together, F. and K., and had their own unambitious but elegant scam going that Gately was ever only marginally in on. What Fackelmann and Kite’d do, they’d rig up an identity and credit record sufficient to rent them a luxury furnished apt., then they’d rent a lot of upscale-type appliances from like Rent-A-Center or Rent 2 Own down in Boston, then they’d sell the luxury appliances and furnishings off to one of a couple dependable fences, then they’d bring in their own air mattresses and sleeping bags and canvas chairs and little legit-bought TP and viewer and speakers and camp out in the empty luxury apartment, getting very high on the rented goods’ net proceeds, until they got their second Overdue Notice on the rent; then they’d rig up another identity and move on and do it all over. Gately took his turn being the one to bathe and shave and answer a luxury-apt.-rental ad in borrowed Yuppiewear and meet the property management people and sweep them off their Banfis with his I.D. and credit rating, and forge some name on the lease; and he usually crashed and got high in the apts. with Fackelmann and Kite, though he, Gately, had had his own digit-breaking and then later burglary career, and his own fences, and tended more and more to cop his own scrips and his own Percocets and then later Demerol.
Lying there, working on Abiding and not-Entertaining, Gately remembers how good old doomed Gene Fackelmann — that for a narcotics addict had had a truly raging libido — used to like to bring different girls home to whatever apt. they were scamming at the time, and how Fax’d open the door and look around in pretend-astonishment at the empty and carpetless luxury apt. and shout ‘We been fuckin robbed!’
For Fackelmann and Kite, the rap on Gately was that he was a great and (for a narcotics addict, which places limits on rational trusting) stand-up guy, and a ferociously good friend and crewmate, but they just didn’t for their lives see why Gately chose to be a narcotics man, why these were his Substances of his choice, because he was a great and cheerful stand-up jolly-type guy off the nod, but when he was Pebbled or narculated in any way he’d become this totally taciturn withdrawn dead-like person, they always said, like a totally different Gately, sitting for hours real low in his canvas chair, practically lying in this chair whose canvas bulged and legs bowed out, speaking barely at all, and then only the necessariest word or two, and then without ever seeming to open his mouth. He made whoever he got high with feel lonely. He got real, like, interior. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep’s term was ‘Other-Directed.’ And it was worse when he shot anything up. You’d have to almost pry his chin off his chest. Kite used to say it was like Gately shot cement instead of narcotics.
McDade and Diehl come in around 1100h. from visiting Doony Glynn down somewheres in the Gastroenterology Dept. and try to give Gately’s left hand archaic old unhip high fives as a goof and say the Bowel guys’ve got Glynn on a megadrip of a Levsin[361]-codeine diverticulitis compound, and the Doon seemed to have undergone a kind of spiritual experience vis-a-vis this compound, and was giving them ebubblient high fives and saying the Bowel M.D.s were saying that there was a chance the condition might be inoperable and chronic and that D.G.’d have to be on the compound for life, with a rubber bulb for Self-Administration, and the formerly fetal Doon was sitting up in a lotus position and seemed to be a very happy camper indeed. Gately makes pathetic sounds around his oral tube as McDade and Diehl start to interrupt each other apologizing for how it’s looking like they might not be able to stand up and legally depose for Gately like they’d be ready to do in a fucking hatbeat if it weren’t for various legal issues they’re still under the clouds of that their P.D. and P.O. respectively say that walking voluntarily into Norfolk District Court in Enfield would be tittymount to like judicio-penal suicide, they’re told.
Diehl looks at McDade and then says there’s also disparaging news about the.44 Item, that by everybody’s reconstruction of events it’s more than likely Lenz might have promoted the Item up off the lawn when he legged it off the E.M.P.H.H. complex just ahead of the Finest. Because it’s fucking vanished, and nobody’d have rat-holed it and not given it up knowing what’s at stake for the good old G-Man in the deal. Gately makes a whole new kind of noise.
McDade says the more upbeat news is that Lenz has been possibly spotted, that Ken E. and Burt F. Smith had seen what looked like either R. Lenz or C. Romero after a wasting illness on their way back from wheeling Burt F.S. to a meeting in Kenmore Square, mostly from the side of the back they’d seen him, wearing a back-split tux and sombrero w/ balls, and apparently officially relapsed, back Out There, drunk as a maroon, so totally legless when they saw him he was doing a drunk’s old hurricane-walk, fighting his way from parking meter to parking meter and clinging to each parking meter. Wade McDade here thinks to insert that the confirmed scuttlebutt is that E.M.P.H.H. is getting ready to rent out Unit #3 to a long-term mental-health agency caring for people with incapacitating agoraphobia, and that everybody at the House is speculating on what a constantly crowded and cabin-feverish place that’s going to be, what with the terribleness of the predicted winter coming up. Diehl says his nasal sinus can always tell when it’s going to snow, and his sinus is starting to predict at least flurries for maybe as early as tonight. They never think to tell Gately what day it is. That Gately can’t communicate even this most basic of requests makes him want to scream. McDade, in what’s either an intimate aside or a knife-twist at a Staffer who’s in no position to enforce anything, confides that he and Emil Minty are arranging with Parias-Carbo — who works for an Ennet House alum at All-Bright Printing down near the Jackson-Mann School — for engraved-looking formal invitations for the agoraphobic folks in Unit #3 to all just come on out and over to Ennet House for a crowded noisy outdoor Welcome-to-the-E.M.P.H.H.-Neighborhood bash. And now Gately knows for sure it was McDade and Minty that put the HELP WANTED sign up under the window of the lady in Unit #4 that shouts for Help. The general level of tension in the room increases. Gavin Diehl clears his throat and says everybody says to say Gately’s like wicked missed back at the House and everybody said to say ‘ ‘s up?’ and that they hope the G-Man’s up and back kicking residential ass very soon; and McDade produces an unsigned Get Well card from his pocket and puts it carefully through the railing’s bars, where it lies next to Gately’s arm and begins to open up from being folded and shoved in a pocket. It’s clear the thing was shoplifted.