The homeward ride’s camaraderie was marred only by the fact that someone near the back of the bus started the passing around of a Gothic-fonted leaflet offering the kingdom of prehistoric England to the man who could pull Keith Freer out of Bernadette Longley. Freer had been discovered by prorector Mary Esther Thode more or less Xing poor Bernadette Longley under an Adidas blanket in the very back seat on the bus trip to the East Coast Clays in Providence in September, and it had been a nasty scene, because there were some basic Academy-license rules that it was just unacceptable to flout under the nose of staff. Keith Freer was deeply asleep when the leaflet was getting passed around, but Bernadette Longley wasn’t, and when the leaflet hit the front half where all the females now had to sit since September she’d buried her face in her hands and flushed even on the back of her pretty neck, and her doubles partner[92] came all the way back to where Jim Struck and Michael Pemulis were sitting and told them in no uncertain terms that somebody on this bus was so immature it was really sad.
Charles Tavis was irrepressible. He did a Pierre Trudeau impersonation no one except the driver was old enough to laugh at. And the whole mammoth travelling squad, three buses’ worth, got to stop and have the Mega-breakfast at Denny’s, over next to Empire Waste, at like 0030, when they got in.
Hal’s eldest brother Orin Incandenza got out of competitive tennis when Hal was nine and Mario nearly eleven. This was during the period of great pre-Experialist upheaval and the emergence of the fringe C.U.S.P. of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, and the tumescence of O.N.A.N.ism. At late seventeen, Orin was ranked in the low 70s nationally; he was a senior; he was at that awful age for a low-70s player where age eighteen and the terminus of a junior career are looming and either: (1) you’re going to surrender your dreams of the Show and go to college and play college tennis; or (2) you’re going to get your full spectrum of gram-negative and cholera and amoebic-dysentery shots and try to eke outsome kind of sad diasporic existence on a Eurasian satellite pro tour and try to hop those last few competitive plateaux up to Show-caliber as an adult; or (3) or you don’t know what you’re going to do; and it’s often an awful time.[93]
E.T.A. tries to dilute the awfulness a little by letting eight or nine postgraduates stay on for two years and serve in deLint’s platoon of prorec-tors[94] in exchange for room and board and travel expenses to small sad satellite tourneys, and Orin’s being directly related to E.T.A. Administration obviously gave him kind of a lock on a prorector appointment if he wanted it, but a prorector’s job was only for maybe at most a few years, and was regarded as sad and purgatorial … and then of course what then, what are you going to do after that, etc.
Orin’s decision to attend college pleased his parents a great deal, though Mrs. Avril Incandenza, especially, had gone out of her way to make it clear that whatever Orin decided to do would please them because they stood squarely behind and in full support of him, Orin, and any decision his very best thinking yielded. But they were still in favor of college, privately, you could tell. Orin was clearly not ever going to be a professional-caliber adult tennis player. His competitive peak had come at thirteen, when he’d gotten to the 14-and-Under quarterfinals of the National Clays in Indianapolis IN and in the Quarters had taken a set off the second seed; but starting soon after that he’d suffered athletically from the same delayed puberty that had compromised his father when Himself had been a junior player, and having boys he’d cleaned the clocks of at twelve and thirteen become now seemingly overnight mannish and deep-chested and hairy-legged and starting now to clean Orin’s own clock at fourteen and fifteen — this had sucked some kind of competitive afflatus out of him, broken his tennis spirit, Orin, and his U.S.T.A. ranking had nosedived through three years until it levelled off somewhere in the low 70s, which meant that by age fifteen he wasn’t even qualifying for the major events’ main 64-man draw. When E.T.A. opened, his ranking among the Boys’ 18s hovered around 10 and he was relegated to a middle spot on the Academy’s B-squad, a mediocrity that sort of becalmed his verve even further. His style was essentially that of a baseliner, a coun-terpuncher, but without the return of serve or passing shots you need to stand much of a chance against a quality net-man. The E.T.A. rap on Orin was that he lobbed well but too often. He did have a phenomenal lob: he could hug the curve of the dome of the Lung and three times out of four nail a large-sized coin placed on the opposite baseline; he and Marlon Bain and two or three other marginal counterpunching boys at E.T.A. all had phenomenal lobs, honed through spare P.M. devoted more and more to Es-chaton, which by the most plausible account a Croatian-refugee transfer had brought up from the Palmer Academy in Tampa. Orin was Eschaton’s first game-master at E.T.A., where in the first Eschaton generations it was mostly marginal and deafflatusized upperclassmen who played.
College was the comparatively obvious choice, then, for Orin, as the time of decision drew nigh. Oblique family pressures aside, as a low-ranked player at E.T.A. he’d had stiffer academic demands than did those for whom the real Show had seemed like a viable goal. And the Eschatonology helped a great deal with the math/computer stuff E.T.A. tended to be a bit weak in, both Himself and Schtitt being at that point pretty anti-quantitative. His grades were solid. His board-scores weren’t going to embarrass anybody. Orin was basically academically sound, especially for a somebody with a top-level competitive sport on his secondary transcript.
And you have to understand that mediocrity is relative in a sport like junior tennis. A national ranking of 74 in Boys 18-and-Under Singles, while mediocre by the standards of aspiring pros, is enough to make most college coaches’ chins shiny. Orin got a couple Pac-10 offers. Big 10 offers. U. New Mexico actually hired a mariachi band that established itself under his dorm-room’s window six nights running until Mrs. Incandenza got Himself to authorize ‘F. D. V.’ Harde to electrify the fences. Ohio State flew him out to Columbus for such a weekend of ‘prospective orientation’ that when Orin got back he had to stay in bed for three days drinking Alka-Seltzer with an ice pack on his groin. Cal-Tech offered him an ROTC waiver and A.P. standing in their elite Strategic Studies program after Decade Magazine had run a short interest-piece on Orin and the Croate and Eschaton’s applied use of c: \Pink2.[95]