The wrench in the ointment that nobody in Providence has counted on is the picket-and-knuckleduster-wielding appearance of Brown University’s entire Dworkinite Female Objectification Prevention And Protest Phalanx outside the Pizzitola Athl. Center’s main gates right at game-time, two FOPPPs per motorcycle, who blow through the filigreed gates like they were so much wet Kleenex and storm the arena, plus a division of Brown’s pluckier undergraduate N.O.W.s who execute a pincer-movement down from the cheap seats up top during the first time-out, at the precise moment the Brown cheerleaders’ first pyramid-maneuver ends in a mid-air split that causes the Pizzitola’s Scoreboard’s scorekeeper to reel backward against his controls and blow out both HOME’s and VISITORS’ zeroes, on the board, just as the FOPPPs’ unmuffled Hawgs come blatting malevolently down through the ground-level tunnels and out onto the playing floor; and in the ensuing melee not only are cheerleaders, Pep Squad, and comely Brown U. sirens all either laid out with picket-signs wielded like shillelaghs or thrown kicking and shrieking over the burly shoulders of militant FOPPPs and carried off on roaring Hawgs, leaving the Yale power forward’s delicate nervous system intact if overheated; but two Brown U. Bruin starters, a center and a shooting guard — both too wrung-out and dazed by a grueling week of comely-siren-auditioning and — rehearsing to have sense enough to run like hell once the melee spills out onto the Pizzitola hardwood — are felled, by a FOPPP knuckleduster and a disoriented referee with a martial-arts background, respectively; and so when the floor is finally cleared and stretchers borne off and the game resumes, Yale U. cleans Brown U.’s clock by upwards of 20.
Then so Fackelmann calls up Eighties Bill and arranges to pick up the skeet, which is $137,500 with the vig, which E.B. gives him in large-denomination pre-O.N.A.N. scrip in a GO BROWN BRUINS gym-bag he’d brought to the game to sit next to the ursine-headed CEO with and now has less than no use for, but so Fackelmann receives the skeet downtown and blasts up cheesy Route 1 to Saugus to deliver the skeet and pick up his vig on the vig ($625 U.S.) right away, needing to cop Blues in what’s starting to be the worst way, etc. Plus Fackelmann’s figuring on maybe a small bonus or at least some emotional validation from Sorkin for bringing in such a mammoth and promptly-remitted wager. But, when he gets to the Rte. 1 titty bar at the rear of which Sorkin has his administrative offices behind an unmarked fire door and all wallpapered in stuff that looks like ersatz wood panelling, Gwendine O’Shay wordlessly points behind her station at Sorkin’s personal office door with a terse gesture Fackelmann doesn’t think fits with the up-beatness of the occasion at all. The door’s got a big poster of R. Limbaugh on it, from before the assassination. Sorkin’s in there working spreadsheets with his special monitor-screen-light-filtering goggles on. The goggles’ lenses on their long protruding barrels look like lobsters’
eyes on stalks. Gately and Fackelmann and Bobby C never spoke to Sorkin until spoken to, not out of henchmanish obsequity but because they could never tell what Sorkin’s cranio-facial vascular condition was or if he could tolerate sound until they verifiably heard him tolerating his own. (Sound.) So G. Fackelmann waits wordlessly to hand over Eighties Bill’s skeet, standing there tall and soft and palely sweating, the overall shape and color of a peeled boiled egg. When Sorkin hikes an eyebrow at the GO BRUINS bag and says the knee-slapping hilarity of the joke escapes him, Fack-elmann’s mustache positively takes off all over his upper lip, and he prepares to say what he always says when he’s flummoxed, that whatever’s being said is with all due respect a goddamn lie. Sorkin saves his data and pushes his desk chair back so he can reach all the way down to the fireproof drawer. The goggles are often used in data-processing sweatshops and list for a deuce. Sorkin grunts as he hauls out a huge old Mass Lottery box for Quik-Pick cards and heaves it onto the desk, where it bulges obscenely, filled with 112.5K U.S. — there’s 112.5 fucking K in there, all in ones, 125K minus vig, what Sorkin via O’Shay believes to be Eighties Bill’s winnings, all in small bills, because Sorkin’s pissed off and can’t resist making a little like gesture. Fackelmann doesn’t say anything. His mustache goes limp as his mental machinery starts revving. Sorkin, massaging his temples, staring up at Fackelmann with his goggles like a crab in a tank, says he supposes he can’t blame Fax or O’Shay, that he’d have OK’d the bet himself, what with the neurologic tip on the Yale forward they had. Who could have foreseen thuggish Femínazis screwing up the ointment. He utters a bit of Gaelic that Fackelmann doesn’t know but assumes to be fatalistical. He peels six C-notes and an O.N.A.N.ite 25-spot off a wad the size of an artillery shell and pushes them across the metal desk at Fackelmann, his vig on the vig. He says What the fuck (Sorkin does), this Eighties Bill kid’s irrational sentimentalism for Yale will sooner or later catch up with him. Veteran books tend to be statistically philosophical and patient. Fackelmann doesn’t even bother to wonder why Sorkin refers to Eighties Bill as ‘kid’ when they’re both about the same age. But a high-watt bulb is slowly beginning to incandesce over Fackelmann’s moist head. As in the Faxter starts to conceptualize the overall concept of what must of happened. He still hasn’t said anything, Pamela Hoffman-Jeep emphasizes. Sorkin looks Fackelmann over and asks if he’s gained some asymmetrical-type weight, there. Fackelmann’s left tit does look noticeably bigger than his right, under his sport-coat, because of the legal envelope with 137 1000s and one 500 in it, the skeet from an Eighties Bill who thought he’d lost. Just like Sorkin thought E.B.’d won. The slight high whine in the room that Sorkin thinks is his ínfernatron disk-drive is really the whine of Fackelmann’s high-speed mentation. His mustache roils like a cracked whip as he works his own internal mental spreadsheet. 25OK in one lumpy sum represented like 375 sky-blue grams of hydromorphone hydrochloride[376] or like 37,500 10-mg. soluble tablets of the shit, available from a certain rapacious but discreet Chinatown opiate-dealer who’d only deal synthetic narcs in 100-gram weights — which all translated, assuming Kite could be persuaded to pack up his D.E.C. 2100 and move far far away with Fackelmann to help him set up a street-distribution matrix in some urban market far far away, into close to like let’s see carry the one like 1.9 million in street-value, which sum meant that Fackelmann and to a lesser jr.-partner extent Kite could have their chins on their chests for the rest of their days without ever having to strip another apt., forge another passport, break another thumb. All if Fackelmann just kept his map shut about O’Shay’s confabulation of Yale/ Brown//Brown/Yale, mumbled something about an I.V.-adulterant causing a sudden and temporary gigantism in one tit, and blasted out of there straight down Rte. 1 to this one Dr. Wo and Associates, Hung Toy’s Cold Tea Emporium, Chinatown.