Port Washington: Pemulis sick into the spare-ball bucket
holding M. Pemulis’s head as Pemulis down on one knee is sick into a tall white plastic spare-ball bucket. [...] Pemulis, deep into the little hell of his own nauseous pre-match nerves, is too busy trying to vomit w/o sound
Context
The regimen's tax, collected backstage: Pemulis on one knee in the freezing tarp-passage, vomiting into a spare-ball bucket "full of old bald Wilson tennis balls and Pemulis's breakfast," while Schacht holds his head the way his mother held his. The pre-match retch is the body's honest verdict on competitive dread — nerves that live in the stomach, "the little hell of his own nauseous pre-match nerves" — and the whole apparatus (the muffling glass, the emptied bucket, the cover story) exists because "evidence of nervous incapacity of any kind gets noted and logged" at E.T.A. The Puker is the institution's shameful open secret.