Pages 151–156

The urine business · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

Quarterly urine-testing day at the Enfield Tennis Academy, October, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The juniors queue across the lobby to fill sample cups for the tennis association's toxicologist, and seventeen-year-old Michael Pemulis and Trevor Axford work the line in ballpark-vendor caps, selling clean children's urine out of a wiener-tub. The voice is the communal, encyclopedic E.T.A. third person, and the farce keeps pausing to hand you dossiers: this is where the book properly introduces Pemulis, and Mario Incandenza — Hal's older, physically disabled, film-making brother — after only glimpses of both. Hal himself gets re-measured too.

Terms, in order of appearance

O.N.A.N.T.A. (p. 151) — the O.N.A.N. Tennis Association: junior tennis's governing, ranking, and drug-testing body.
GC/MS (p. 151) — real drug-screening method, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry; endnote 52 rates the mid-range choice.
Visine (p. 152) — real eyedrop brand; its small conical-tipped bottle is the discreet vessel of choice.
Fenway Park (p. 152) — real Boston baseball stadium; the vendor's tub and Sox-colors strap are genuine wienerman equipment.
TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT… (p. 153) — the founder's motto Tavis took down from the locker room (p. 81); endnote 32 has the translation.
Bolex (p. 153) — real Swiss make of movie camera; Mario's is head-mounted, with a police-lock brace and foot-treadle.
Allston (p. 154) — real working-class Boston neighborhood, next door to Enfield-Brighton; Pemulis's home turf.
Eschaton (p. 154) — a game, evidently; endnote 53 is the introduction — worth the flip.
Stanford-Bïnet (p. 154) — the real Stanford–Binet IQ test; the diaeresis is the book's own.
erumpent (p. 155) — real rare word: bursting forth, breaking out.
vade mecum (p. 156) — real Latin, "go with me": a carry-along handbook.

After you read: three things

1. You've heard Pemulis's password before. His callers must say "Please commit a crime" so any recorded sale reads as entrapment (p. 156; endnote 55 — Hal privately thinks the right word is suborned). Back on p. 75, Kate Gompert, describing the dealers she buys from: "One kid makes you ask him to please commit a crime." The book never connects them aloud; it just lets the phrase recur.

2. Read the truck's two doors (p. 153). The O.N.A.N. ensign — snarling eagle with broom, disinfectant, Maple Leaf, sombrero, half-eaten star-spangled cloth — is "rather ironically silk-screened" on one door; the old motto TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT… is "unironically emblazoned" on the other. Those two adverbs are doing exact work: what these kids mock, and what they mean.

3. The farce keeps opening onto the family (pp. 153–156). Mario, who wins the bottle-scavenging "game" because "if you're poor old Mario Incandenza you take your competitive strokes where you can find them"; Avril, who "had taken pains to let all three of her children know" her love was unconditional — note the deadpan; the late father, "revered as a genius in his original profession without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at"; and Hal, suddenly fourth in the U.S., who "says Fine and thanks you for asking." Weigh that Fine.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.