Pages 902–906
A memoir chapter, framed from the hospital bed: how Bimmy Gately of Boston's North Shore — Beverly and Salem, Beverly Middle School, Beverly-Salem High — went from two-way football prodigy to what you've been watching in the Trauma Wing. Only Gately is present; his mother, the M.P., and Trent Kite move through in memory. One register note: the retrospection keeps the diction of that time and milieu, ugly slurs included, quoted as the boy heard them.
Terms, in order of appearance
- B.I.M. (p. 902) — the cognomen's source: "Big Indestructible Moron"; hence Bim, Bimmy, The Bimulator.
- duBois (p. 903) — street slang for a joint, in use since the early Boston pages (p. 75).
- Zog / The Turner Diaries (p. 903) — real white-supremacist shorthand and the real 1978 racist novel; the Orkin man's lecture material, eye-rolled by the kids.
- Quaalude (p. 903) — real methaqualone sedative (endnote 362); ages thirteen to fifteen, more or less.
- QuoVadis (p. 904) — Kite's kitchen-lab Quaalude isotope, Sominex pushed "one H3C molecule away"; the name is Latin: "where are you going?"
- "Water Lou" (p. 905) — Gately's spelling of Waterloo, Napoleon's terminal defeat.
- Howl (p. 906) — Ginsberg's real poem, recited by Gately's ruined English tutor "in high-volume Chaucerian English."
- L.T.I. (p. 906) — Long-Term Institution (endnote 365), Medicaid grade.
After you read: three things
1. The institution's accounting of a boy. Special-order helmets — "Gately was worth the cost" — a 4.4 forty in 7th grade, coaches promising a "limitless future" contingent on bearing down, the indestructible head doubling as a party object for breakable things. Coming a page after Hal's "we are all dying to give our lives away to something" (p. 900), this chapter is the same donation in another sport's uniform. And note the moral self-audit tucked in: he never bullied — "He just had no interest in brutalizing the weak. It's still not clear to him if this was to his credit or not."
2. Discipline is what let the ladder keep climbing. First duBois at nine; the neo-Nazi Orkin man's screwdrivers; Quaaludes and sidewalks ("The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks"); Kite's kitchen labs. Through all of it, iron in-season rules — Substances only after sunset, one Thursday joint before games — protected football for years; the structure served the habit, not the other way around. The retrospective podium line gets it exactly: pissing orange juice into the Atlantic in his Beverly drinking years, "it turns out he was pissing on himself right from the start, with alcohol."
3. English class is what killed it — then the ending lands twice. Not the body: Ethan From (the book p. 884 told you he never finished), four teachers who wouldn't pass work he couldn't do, his "Water Lou" — partly because Mrs. G. could barely read and Gately "wasn't interested in making her feel worse." He flunks Sophomore Comp, sits out a gray year, returns at 284 lbs. on scheduled oxycodone, and loses his spot to a clear-eyed freshman with "nearly limitless potential" — the institution's phrase, recycled for its next boy. Then his mother's hemorrhage, the sirenless ambulance, eyes too itchy to wave, her left-behind cigarettes: "He never played organized ball again."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.