They’d been the odd couple of libations, the muscled fitness-guru and the tall slope-shouldered optician/director, often down there in the weight room til all hours, sitting on the towel dispenser, drinking, Lyle with his Caffeine Free Diet Coke, Incandenza with his Wild Turkey. Mario literally standing by in case the ice bucket ran out or Himself needed moral support getting to the urinal. Mario often fell asleep as the hour got severe, drifted in and out, slept upright and leaning forward, weight borne by his police lock and lead receptacle.
James Incandenza was one of those profound-personality-change drinkers who seemed quiet and centered and almost affectless when he was sober but would move way out to one side or the other of the human emotional spectrum, when drunk, and seem to open up in a way that was almost injudicious.
Sometimes, libated late at night with Lyle in the newly outfitted E.T.A. weight room, Incandenza’d open up and pour his heart’s thickest chyme right out there for all to be affected and potentially scarred by. E.g. one night Mario, leaning way forward into the police lock’s support, drifted awake to the sound of his father saying that if he had to grade his marriage he’d give it a C—. This seems injudicious in the extreme, potentially, though Mario, like Lyle, tends to take data pretty much as it comes.
Lyle, who sometimes would start to get tipsy himself as Himself’s pores began to excrete the bourbon, often brought some Blake out, as in William Blake, during these all-night sessions, and read Incandenza Blake, but in the voices of various cartoon characters, which Himself eventually started regarding as deep.[146]
8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT GAUDEAMUS IGITUR
If it’s odd that Mario Incandenza’s first halfway-coherent film cartridge — a 48-minute job shot three summers back in the carefully decorated janitor-closet of Subdorm B with his head-mount Bolex H64 and foot-treadle — if it’s odd that Mario’s first finished entertainment consists of a film of a puppet show — like a kids’ puppet show — then it probably seems even odder that the film’s proven to be way more popular with E.T.A.’s adults and adolescents than it is with the woefully historically underin-formed children it had first been made for. It’s proved so popular that it gets shown annually now every 11/8, Continental Interdependence Day, on a wide-beam cartridge projector and stand-up screen in the E.T.A. dining hall, after supper. It’s part of the gala but rather ironic annual celebration of L-Day at an Academy whose founder had married a Canadian, and it usually gets under way about!93Oh., the film, and everybody gathers in the dining hall, and watches it, and by Charles Tavis’s festive fiat[147]everybody gets to two-handed snack instead of squeezing tennis balls while they watch, and not only that but normal E.T.A. dietary regulations are for an hour completely suspended, and Mrs. Clarke, the dietician out in the kitchen — a former Four-Star dessert chef normally relegated here to protein-conveyors and ways to vary complex carbs — Mrs. Clarke gets to put on her floppy white chef’s hat and just go sucrotically mad, out in West House’s gleaming kitchen. Everybody’s supposed to wear some sort of hat — Avril Incan-denza positively towers in the same steeple-crowned witch’s hat she teaches all her classes in every 10/31, and Pemulis wears the complex yachting cap and naval braid, and pale and blotchy Struck a toque with a kind of flitty aigrette, and Hal a black preacher’s hat with a stern round downturned brim, etc. etc.[148] — and Mario, as director and putative author of the popular film, is encouraged to say a few words, like eight: