IJ study archive

Scene 034: locker room big buddies

Scene
34
Pages
97–105
When
Tuesday 3 Nov YDAU (2009), ~1640-1700h — continuous with scene 032
Where
males' locker room, Comm.-Ad. Bldg., E.T.A.in: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. locker rooms
POV
3rd person, increasingly inside Hal

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 11)

Summary

The locker-room slump continues and deepens. The narrator unpacks C.T.'s Big Buddy System (Hal's quintet: Beak, Blott, Arslanian, plus Ingersoll traded off-book from Axford, who confessed a horrible compulsion to close a door on the kid's fingers); the players' piebald tennis-tans and Lemon Pledge sunscreen lore; the fatigue word-inflation riff ("Tard tard tard" — "We need an inflation-generative grammar"); the Incandenza phenotype genetics (Hal "sleek, sort of radiantly dark, almost otterish"; Orin got the Moms's side; "Mario doesn't seem to resemble much of anyone they know"); and — casually, mid-flow — Hal's covert routine: on non-Buddy days he drifts down into the tunnels, returns "substantially altered in mood," and showers among the little kids with Visine, mint floss, and a traveller's toothbrush in his Dunlop bag. Schacht's stall-bound feet occasion a timeless meditation on the defecatory posture as humble, accepting waiting. The scene ends with Freer's "good Nazi" crack at Schtitt, Stice bristling with a towel on his head, and the room's emotions "inverting themselves every couple seconds."

What to notice

The scene's biggest move is how it hides Hal's secret: the tunnel paragraph is buried mid-scene in exactly the register of the surrounding trivia — Pledge lore, Big Buddy policy — and one adverb does the concealing, three times over ("stroll casually", "casually drift off", "stroll casually back"): the routine slides past the reader the way it slides past the room. Much of the narration is ventriloquism — the Big Buddy material drifts into the administration's own handbook voice, "This happens; the administration accepts it; not everyone's cut out for what's required of you here" — an institutional shrug rendered as if it were the boys' own thought. Bodies keep arriving in pieces: the piebald tans, then "Everyone's reflection is sort of cubist in the walls' shiny tiling", then Hal's face distending tile to tile "with an optical twang" — the father's optics vocabulary ambient even in a locker room. Mario gets a paragraph to himself, one sentence long, the typography isolating the family's genetic question mark. And catch the small tense slide in the Schacht passage: the defecatory reverie runs timeless and present until it reaches the body itself — "Schacht suffered from Crohn's Disease" — the narration slipping into past-tense case history for a few clauses, as if already remembering him from somewhere later.

Beats — page-by-page
  • pp. 97-98: Towel census (Stice's trademark black); the children on the benches; shy Arslanian's snout at the door; the Big Buddy System explained — C.T.'s parental-brochure rationale, the Axford/Ingersoll finger-compulsion trade, Possalthwaite's young-old face and stress-sucking lips.
  • p. 98: Big Buddy politics: liaison vs. informant tension; C.T. driving Lateral Alice Moore to ferret burnout-forecast data; attrition among 13-15s who "just can't hang."
  • pp. 98-99: Hal as Big Buddy: he too struggles with "a strange urge to be cruel to Ingersoll, who reminds him of someone he dislikes but can't quite place"; likes "getting to be kind in a way that costs him nothing"; sometimes discovers his own beliefs only as they exit his mouth — vs. wanting to "go off by himself and do secret stuff in underground ventilated private."
  • pp. 99-100: "Tard" litany; tans like "bodies hastily assembled from different bodies' parts"; Lemon Pledge as UV-40 sunscreen discovered by some unknown jr. player.
  • p. 100: Word-inflation: "Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation"; Troeltsch: "We need an inflation-generative grammar"; Stice's daddy's "tuckered out."
  • pp. 100-101: Hal's drawbridge-finger semion; the genetics paragraph — Umbrian name diluted, Himself's Pima-cheekboned darkness ("Himself had looked ethnic, but he isn't extant"), Hal's secret worry he looks half-feminine, Orin's cheerleader split, Mario resembling no one.
  • pp. 101-102: The tunnel routine: casual drift-off, return "substantially altered in mood"; cartoon-character shampoo, Visine AC in a Schacht-free stall, floss, gargle — Schacht admiring the hygiene as "an example to them all" (dramatic irony at full wattage).
  • pp. 102-103: R-and-R fantasies (bongs, lingerie catalogs, wooden-spoon granola, getting laid); Pemulis singing Johnny Mathis's 'Chances Are' ("loves to sing around tile"); Shaw's exceptional spit-bubble; Ingersoll cites the I-Day Eve Saturday off; "Every jr. player presently in this room is ranked in the top 64 continentally, except Pemulis, Yardley and Blott" (p. 103).
  • p. 103: Stice names the day's three-setters: "Spodek and Kent for an instance" — Carol Spodek and Millicent Kent, the girls' side flickering in.
  • p. 103: Schacht's feet under the stall → the millennial meditation on defecatory waiting (Luther's shoes, centurions' sandals, Popes' slippers); Schacht's Crohn's (n.43) from his ulcerative-colitic dad, plus gout in the right knee.
  • pp. 103-104: Struck's arithmetic of the day's five-plus hours of exertion ("under fucking Loach's beady browns"); Troeltsch's fever-excused single match and Freer's needle ("Funny how Troeltsch how his health always seems to rally when A.M. drills get out"); Stice on stressing "the pubertyizing skeleton."
  • pp. 104-105: Mandated tennis-ball squeezing; Hal's blue-tinged swollen ankle; the saddening light, "a grief felt in the bones"; "they've all been just here before, just like this, and will be again tomorrow."
  • p. 105: Whose fault is the suffering — Tavis or Schtitt; Freer's "good Nazi"; Stice's loyalty flare (towel on head); Hal rising in stages on the good ankle.

Themes in this scene

  • The Body and Tennis: the fullest inventory yet — piebald tans, Pledge husks, Crohn's and gout, blue-swollen ankles, skeletal-stress complaints; bodies "hastily assembled from different bodies' parts" by the regimen itself.
  • Language and Grammar: fatigue exceeding the lexicon ("None even come close, the words"), word-inflation theory, "inflation-generative grammar" — the kids doing descriptive linguistics on their own suffering, in Avril's prescriptive house.
  • Addiction and Recovery: Hal's tunnel routine hidden in plain syntactic sight — the Visine/floss kit as concealment apparatus; Schacht's admiration making the secrecy ache.
  • Communication and Solipsism: Hal discovering beliefs only as they exit his mouth; Wayne's total silence; the urge-to-cruelty Hal can't trace; kindness "that costs him nothing" as connection's cheap substitute.
  • Family and Hamlet: the phenotype paragraph is the family system written on bodies — "Himself had looked ethnic, but he isn't extant" does the death in a relative clause; Orin = Moms's side, Hal = Himself's, Mario = nobody's (a genealogical question mark the book never cashes).
  • Time and Perception: "time in the P.M. locker room seems of limitless depth" (p. 104) — fatigue thickens duration until the room sits outside the clock, and "they've all been just here before, just like this, and will be again tomorrow" folds the day into a recurrence experienced from inside; the saddening light is "a grief felt in the bones."

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • "Reminds him of someone he dislikes but can't quite place": the Ingersoll riddle — most readings land on C.T. or on Hal himself; left unresolved here as in the text.
  • "A grief felt in the bones" closing the fatigue material: the locker room's communal melancholia is the benign twin of Kate Gompert's It (scene 024) — same run of scenes, same somatic vocabulary, opposite valence; and the saddening light is the same dusk falling on Marathe and Steeply (pp. 94/97, scenes 031/033) — the chapter's two threads cross day-into-night together.
  • Hal's faintly swollen, blue-tinged ankle (p. 104) is the referent of the YG frame's "The bad ankle hasn't ached once this whole year" (p. 17, scene 003) — the ankle's biography spans the book's outermost ring (Carlisle catch).
  • The mandated tennis-ball squeezing (p. 104): Orin, years gone from tennis, still does it (p. 44, scene 012) — the regimen outliving the career, habit as the body's memory.
  • Ingersoll's I-Day-Eve-Saturday remark (p. 102) independently corroborates the archive's adopted I-Day dating: 3 Nov + Saturday-off = Sat 7 Nov, I-Day Eve; Gala Sunday = 8 Nov.

Forward

  • Hal's "underground ventilated private" is the Pump Room of scene 013 — this scene shows the habit's social camouflage from outside; the Visine-and-floss kit returns when Hal tries to quit and the routine's exposure-risk peaks in the urine-testing/Pemulis crisis.
  • I-Day Eve Saturday and the Gala point to the WhataBurger Jr. Invitational frame and Mario's I-Day film screening (pp. 380, scene 081+); Port Washington is the big meet at pp. 263, scene 065+.
  • Barry Loach's beady browns: the trainer whose extraordinary handshake-backstory arrives in scene 183's locker-room narration (pp. 966-971) — first appearance is this growled aside.
  • Schacht's Crohn's-and-gout portrait grounds his later philosophy of playing without ambition (pp. 268, scene 065+) — the one E.T.A. body already past the Show, and the one kid Hal's hygiene-theater completely fools.
  • The Big Buddy System frame here is the institutional home of Pemulis's big-buddy muscimole pitch (scene 022, pp. 66-67) and of all six session-vignettes in scene 036.

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 98: the Axford/Ingersoll door-hinge confession — comic horror; the book's recurring intrusive-cruelty motif (cf. Avril's politeness, Lenz later).
  • p. 98: "getting to be kind in a way that costs him nothing" — Hal's self-audit; communication-solipsism anthology.
  • p. 101: "Himself had looked ethnic, but he isn't extant." — grief hidden in a usage joke.
  • pp. 101-102: the tunnel-and-Visine paragraph ("substantially altered in mood") — addiction concealment rendered as grooming routine.
  • p. 103: the defecatory-waiting meditation ("Luther's shoes on the floor beneath the chamber pot... awaiting epiphany") — set-piece, oddly devotional.
  • pp. 104-105: "they've all been just here before, just like this, and will be again tomorrow... a grief felt in the bones" — E.T.A. time as eternal recurrence; annularity adjacent.

What links here Timeline events here (37) · Connected from (8) · Passages quoted here (39) · Motifs (6)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs