Pages 911–916
The frame is one sentence long — Gately "in terrific infected pain, trying to Abide between cravings for relief by remembering" — and the rest is the memory: his criminal apprenticeship, ages roughly eighteen to twenty-three, as half of bookmaker Whitey Sorkin's "Twin Towers" on Boston's North Shore, alongside Gene ("Fax") Fackelmann. Sorkin's name has drifted past before (the street chapters, p. 128ff); Fackelmann, the walrus-mustached Dilaudid man of pp. 886 and 892, gets his full portrait here. Memory, in this chapter, is literally the substitute for Demerol.
Terms, in order of appearance
- vigorish / vig (p. 912) — real bookmaking slang: the bookie's cut; Sorkin's is ten percent, the Towers get half.
- Cafergot (p. 913) — real ergotamine migraine drug; Sorkin's cluster-headache regimen (endnote 368) also explains the UV-lamp skin.
- Bam-Bams (p. 915) — Percocets, after the Flintstones baby (with "Pebbles," p. 892).
- Iletin (p. 915) — endnote 370: real Lilly-brand pork insulin; the fake-diabetes scrip behind Fackelmann's endless fresh syringes.
- the Forsythia Bowl (p. 915) — a college bowl game wearing three real brands: "Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance."
- Philips Andover (p. 915) — endnote 371: the real elite prep school, source of the fake-license rush order.
After you read: three things
1. Gately met addiction before he met needles. Sorkin's operation runs on community and diplomacy — Vice cops betting at civil-servant discounts, collections framed so the debt itself seems "like the delinquent party." The education is the desperate gamblers: "They'd sit there and look into Gately's eyes and lie and believe their own lies" — "Gately's first exposure to the concept of real addiction and what it can turn someone into," years before he applied the concept at home. Note the violence doctrine too: Fackelmann's shallow, controlled cruelty versus the "ferocious and uncontrolled" thing "on a slope" inside Gately — the same force you watched dislodge on the Ennet House lawn (pp. 608–612), followed then as now by a week of guilt.
2. The crew's pharmacology has a footnote worth flipping. Gately's oral Percocets and needle-terror; Fackelmann cooking and tying him off anyway, for the recurring five-second Dilaudid vision — a gargantuan toddler in an XXL Fisher-Price crib under a sky that "bulged and receded like a big gray lung" (Herman the breathing ceiling of pp. 809–810, returned as drug weather). Endnote 369, meanwhile, quietly closes a ledger: two demaps in the whole career, one an accident — and the other phrased as "the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T.," which you've known about since pp. 55–60.
3. The memory's destination is a football game. A blinding white afternoon just after Christmas: Gately ironing fake laminates in a stripped luxury apartment while B.U. plays the Forsythia Bowl on the last unfenced furnishing. The announcers tell an inspiration story about B.U.'s walk-on punter — never named here, but you've heard that legend before (p. 291) — "The B.U. punter was two years younger than Don Gately." And Gately, "out of emotional nowheres," blubbers over the hot laminates: the loss of "his one gift and other love," "that blasted cocksucking Ethan From," his four-years-unvisited mother. Two days later, the Danvers arrest — one bouncer swung at another — and Billerica.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.