[210] Hal and Mario have long since had to accepta the fact that Avril, at 50+, is still endocrinologically compelling to males.
a. ‘Accept’ isn’t the same as ‘be crazy about,’ of course.
[211] As with the neuro-gastric thing, only Ted Schacht and Hal know that Pemulis’s deepest dread is of academic or disciplinary expulsion and ejection, of having to schlepp back down Comm. Ave. into blue-collar Allston diploma- and ticket-outless, and now in his final E.T.A. year the dread’s increased many-fold, and is one reason Pemulis takes such elaborate precautions in all extracurriculars — making a Substance-customer explicitly suborn him, etc. — and is why Hal and Schacht presented him on his last birthday with the poster over Pemulis’s room’s console that has a careworn large-crowned King sitting on his throne stroking his chin and brooding, with the caption: YES, I’M PARANOID — BUT AM I PARANOID ENOUGH?
[212] Though it’s unmentioned, everyone in the waiting room except Ann Kittenplan is keenly aware that Lord and Postal Weight are Pemulis’s charges, Penn and Ingersoll Ax-handle’s; plus that neither Struck nor Troeltsch seems to have been summoned for potential discipline.
[213] Since tennis courts are laid side to side and played on by hard-hitting but fallible humans, errant shots are always going off sticks’ frames and net-posts and even fences and bouncing and rolling into other people’s territory. In starting at usually the quarterfinal rounds of serious tournaments there are ballboys to retrieve them. In early rounds and practice, though, the delicate etiquette is that you suspend play and get other people’s balls for them, if they come rolling across, and shoot them back over to the court of origin. The way to signal for this sort of help is to yell ‘Sorry!’ or ‘A little help on Three?’ or something. But both Hal and Axford seem constitutionally incapable of doing this, asking for help with errant balls. They both have to hold everything and go and run all the way over to some other court, halting at each intervening court to wait for a point to be finished, to get their own balls. It’s a curious inability to request aid that no amount of negative reinforcement from Tex Watson or Aubrey deLint can seem to correct.
[214] Where it’s a non-overhead run-back-to-the-baseline-after-an-offensive-lob-then-run-all — the — way — back — up — and — tap — the — netcord — with — your — stick — j ust — as — Nwangi — or — Thode-hits-another-offensive-lob-over-your-head-you-have-to-run-back-and-get-successfully-back-or-they-pile-extra-lobs-onto-your-regular-allotment pure pain-fest.
[215] A Clipperton-level legend involves the now long-gone little E.T.A. who in Y.W.-Q.M.D. had called MA’s Department of Social Services and characterized disciplinary Pukers as child abuse, resulting in the appearance at the portcullis of two stitchy-mouthed and humorless D.S.S.-ladies who hung creepily around all day and required Schtitt’s actually confining Aubrey deLint to his room, so purply furious was deLint with the kid who’d dropped the dime.
[216] No clue.
[217] Hal had missed out on the soft grass, clay, and Har-Tru surfaces of the Jr. Slams, because a singular disadvantage of attending a North American academy is that O.N.A.N.T.A. rules for Jr. Slams permit just one entrant per academy in each age-division, and John Wayne got the nods.
[218] The late J. O. Incandenza’s Meniscus Optical Products Ltd.’s development of those weird wide-angle rear-view mirrors on the sides of automobiles that so diminish the cars behind you that federal statute requires them to have printed right on the glass that Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, which little imprints Incandenza found so disconcerting that he was kind of shocked when U.S. automakers and importers bought rights on the mirrors, way back, for Incandenza’s first unsettling entrepreneurial payday — E.T.A.s like to postulate that the mirrors had been inspired by the always-foreshortened Charles Tavis.
[219] Extremely annoying host of InterLace Spontaneous-Dissemm. children’s program.
[220] ® CardioMed Fitness Products, a fourth-generation StairMasterish thing except set more to resemble a down-escalator somehow dickied to a sadistically high number of r.p.m.s, so that the exerciser has to sort of run climbing for his life to avoid getting hurled backwards all the way across the office by the machine, which is what accounts for the big square weight-room floor-mat attached to the cleared expanse of office wall opposite the rear of the machine, which Tavis had moved up to from his StairMaster after a frightening cholesterol-count report, and had had kind of a tricky time with at first, once requiring a back-brace.
[221] The Satellite pro Hal’d gotten a set from, a barrel-chested Latvian who thought Hal’s name was AIL
[222] N.b. again that Marathe’s native tongue is not good old contemporary idiomatic Parisio/European French but cont. id. Québecois French, which is about on a par with Basque in terms of difficulty, being full of weird idioms and having both inflected and uninílected grammatical features, an inbred and obstreperous dialect, and which in fact Steeply barely got an ‘Acceptable’ in, in U.S.O. technical-interview training in Vienna / Falls Church VA, and which does not admit of easy coeval expression in English.
[223] Viz. at the allusion to the supposed samizdateur’s anticonfluential and meta-entertainmentish and hologram-intensive Medusa-v.-Odalisque thing, which in fact the play-within-film fight-scene part can be broken down into a series of what are called ‘Fast Fourier Transforms,’ though what the hell ‘ALGOL’ is is anybody’s guess, unless it’s not an acronym but some actual Québecois term, ‘I’algol,’ which if so it isn’t in any dictionaries or on-line lexical sources anywhere in the 2nd or 3rd IL/IN Grid.
[224] Q.v. William James on ‘… that latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done,’ the line that actually snapped Lenz to what he was up to when he chanced to read it in a huge large-print edition he’d found behind a bookshelf along the north wall of the Ennet living room of something called The Principles of Psychology with The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, by William James (obviously), available in EZC large-font print from Microsoft/NAL-Random House-Ticknor, Fields, Little, Brown and Co., © Y.T.M.P., a volume that’s come to mean a great deal to Lenz.
[225] ® The Mobil Chemical Co.’s Consumer Products Branch’s Plastics Division, Pitts-ford NNY.
[226] ® Ibid.
[227] A.k.a. Haloperidol, McNeil Pharmaceutical, 5 mg./ml. pre-filled syringes: picture several cups of Celestial Seasonings’ Cinnamon Soother tea followed by a lead-filled sap across the back of the skull.
[228] National Security Agency, absorbed w/ A.T.F. and D.E.A., C.I.A. and O.N.R. and Secret Service into the ambit of the Office of Unspecified Services.
[229] The A.A.O.A.A., Unspecified Services’ most elite and least specific division, which on Hugh Steeply’s latest field-assignment is paying his salary, though his checks and alimony’s garnishment are routed through something called the ‘Foundation for Continental Freedom,’ which one fervently hopes is a shell/dummy.
[230] Charlestown/Southie street term for meters.
[231] Powdered vitamin B12, convincingly bitter and talc-textured, which Lenz has always preferred B12 to Manitol as a cut because Manitol gives him this allergic thing where he got very tiny red bumps with weird pale caps on his fingertips.