He’s caught behind a bus whose big square ass is in both lanes and he can’t get around it in time to beat the train across the split, though, and the train crosses in front of the bus with a blast of its farty-sounding horn and what Gately sees as a kind of swagger to its jiggle on the street-level track. He can see people bouncing around inside the train, holding on to straps and bars. Below the split on Comm. it’s Boston U., Kenmore and Fenway, Berklee School of Music. The CITGO sign’s still off in the distance ahead. You have to go a shocking long way to actually get to the big sign, which everybody says is hollow and you can get up inside there and stick your head out in a pulsing neon sea but nobody’s ever personally been up in there.
Arm out like a hack’s arm, Gately blasts through B.U. country. As in backpack and personal-stereo and designer-fatigues country. Soft-faced boys with backpacks and high hard hair and seamless foreheads. Totally lineless untroubled foreheads like cream cheese or ironed sheets. All the storefronts here are for clothes or TP cartridges or posters. Gately’s had lines in his big forehead since he was about twelve. It’s here he especially likes making people throw their packages in the air and dive for the curb. B.U. girls who look like they’ve eaten nothing but dairy products their whole lives. Girls who do step-aerobics. Girls with good combed long clean hair. Nonaddicted girls. The weird hopelessness at the heart of lust. Gately hasn’t had sex in almost two years. At the end of the Demerol he physically couldn’t. Then in Boston AA they tell you not to, not in your first year clean, if you want to be sure to Hang In. But they like omit to tell you that after that year’s gone by you’re going to have forgotten how to even talk to a girl except about Surrender and Denial and what it used to be like Out There in the cage. Gately’s never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody’s hand except to say the Our Father in a big circle. He’s gone back to having wet dreams at age twenty-nine.
Gately’s found he can get away with smoking in the Aventura if he opens the passenger window too and makes sure no ashes go anywhere. The cross-wind through the open car is brutal. He smokes menthols. He’d switched to menthols at four months clean because he couldn’t stand them and the only people he knew that smoked them were Niggers and he’d figured that if menthols were the only gaspers he let himself smoke he’d be more likely to quit. And now he can’t stand anything but menthols, which Calvin T. says are even worse for you because they got little bits of asbestosy shit in the filter and whatnot. But Gately had been living in the little male live-in Staffer’s room down in the basement by the audio pay phone and tonic machines for like two months before it turned out the Health guy came and inspected and said all the big pipes up at the room’s ceiling were insulated in ancient asbestos that was coming apart and asbestosizing the room, and Gately had to move all his shit and the furniture out into the open basement and guys in white suits with oxygen tanks went in and stripped everything off the pipes and went over the room with what smells like it was a flamethrower. Then hauled the decayed asbestos down to E.W.D. in a welded drum with a skull on it. So Gately figures menthol gaspers are probably the least of his lung-worries at this point.
You can get on the Storrow 500[202] off Comm. Ave. below Kenmore via this long twiny overpass-shadowed road that cuts across the Fens. Basically the Storrow 500 is an urban express route that runs along the bright-blue Chuck all the way along Cambridge’s spine. The Charles is vivid even under gloomy thundering skies. Gately has decided to buy the newcomers’ omelette stuff at Bread & Circus in Inman Square, Cambridge. It will explain delay, and will be a subtle nonverbal stab at unique dietary requests in general. Bread & Circus is a socially hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of Cambridge Green Party granola-crunchers, and everything’s like micro-biotic and fertilized only with organic genuine llama-shit, etc. The Aventura’s low driver’s seat and huge windshield afford your thinking man maybe a little more view of the sky than he’d like. The sky is low and gray and loose and seems to hang. There’s something baggy about the sky. It’s impossible to tell whether snow is still actually falling or whether just a little snow that’s already fallen is blowing around. To get to Inman Square you veer over three lines to get off the Storrow 500 on Prospect St.’s Ramp of Death and slalom between the sinkholes and go right, north, and take Prospect through Central Square and all the way north through heavy ethnicity up almost into Somerville.
Inman Square, too, is someplace Gately rarely goes anymore, because it’s in Cambridge’s Little Lisbon, heavily Portuguese, which means also Brazilians in the antiquated bellbottoms and flare-collared leisure suits they’ve never let go of, and where there are disco-ized Brazilians can cocaine and narcotics ever be far away. The district’s Brazilians are another solid rationale for driving at excessive rates of speed, for Gately. Plus Gately’s solidly pro-American, and north of Central Square’s clot and snarl Prospect St.’s a copless straight shot through eerily alien lands: billboards in Spanish, plaster madonnas in fenced front yards, intricately latticed grape arbors looking seized and clutched at, now, by networks of finger-thick bare woody vines; ads for lottery tickets in what isn’t quite Spanish, all the houses gray, more bright plastic madonnas in nunnish getups on peeling front porches, stores and bodegas and low-suspension cars triple-parked, an all-out full-cast creche-type scene hung from a second-floor balcony, clotheslines hanging between houses, gray houses in rows squished right up next to each other in long rows with tiny toy-strewn yards, and tall, the houses, like being squished in from either side distends them. A couple Canadian and Nuck-owned stores mashed in here and there, between the propinquous Spanish three-deckers, looking subjugated and exiled and etc. The street shitty with litter and holes. Indifferent drainage. Big-assed girls stuffed like stuffed sausage into cigarette jeans in always trios in the twilight with that weird blond-brown hair Portuguese girls dye their hair to. A store in good old English advertising Chickens Fresh Killed Daily. Ryle’s Jazz Club’s upscale pub-type bar, guys in tweed caps and briar pipes in mouths at angles taking all day on a pint of warm stout. Gately’s always thought dark beer tasted like cork. An intriguing single-decker medical-looking bldg. with a sort of tympanum over the smoked-glass door with an ad that says COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF CONFIDENTIAL RECORDS that Gately’s always wanted to poke the old head in and have a look at what on earth they might be up to in there. Little Portuguese markets with food in there you can’t even tell what species it’s from. Once at a Portuguese take-out at Inman Square’s east end a coke-whore tried to get Gately to eat something that had tentacles. He had a sub instead. Gately now simply blows through Inman, heading for B&C over on the upscale northwest side nearer to Harvard, every light suddenly green and kind, the Aventura’s ten-cylinder backwash raising an odd little tornado of discarded ad-leaflets and glassine bags and corporate-snack bags and a syringe’s husk and filterless gasper-butts and general crud and a flattened Millennial Fizzy cup, like from a stand, which whirls in his exhaust, the tornado of waste does, moving behind him as the last pearly curve of the sun through baggy clouds is eaten by the countless Sancta Something and then whitewashed WASP church roofs’ finials farther west, nearer Harvard, at 60 k but sustained in its whirl by the strong west breeze as the last of the sun goes and a blue-black shadow quietly fills the canyon of Prospect, whose streetlights don’t work for the same municipal reasons the street is in such crummy repair; and one piece of the debris Gately’s raised and set spinning behind him, a thick flattened M.F. cup, caught by a sudden gust as it falls, twirling, is caught at some aerodyne’s angle and blown spinning all the way to the storefront of one ‘Antitoi Enter-tainent’