IJ study archive

Scene 171: gately bim football decline

Scene
171
Pages
902–906
When
narrated from Gately's St. E.'s bed, ~19-20 Nov YDAU (2009); content retrospective, Gately's North Shore boyhood through age 17 in 'that last September of Unsubsidized Time' (B.S. 2001, the year before Year of the Whopper)
Where
retrospective: Boston's North Shore — Beverly and Salem MA (Beverly Middle School, Beverly-Salem H.S.); framed from St. Elizabeth's Trauma Wingin: Boston North Shore (Beverly/Salem/Danvers) · St. Elizabeth's Hospital (Trauma Wing) (also)
POV
Don Gately (3rd person limited, memoir-style retrospection)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 4)

Summary

The history of how Bimmy Gately — "B.I.M.," Big Indestructible Moron — went from two-way North Shore football prodigy with a 4.4 forty in 7th grade and an indestructible oversized head (party trick: letting people break lunchboxes and lacrosse sticks over it) to a 284-pound, oxycodone-scheduled dropout. The arc runs first joint at nine, first drunk with a neo-Nazi Orkin man, Quaaludes at thirteen (and Trent Kite's kitchen-lab "QuoVadis" isotopes), through the mnemonic brown-out era of "The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks," while at home the M.P. beat the progressively weaker Mrs. Gately and eventually decamped. Gately's iron in-season discipline protected football for years, but English class — Ethan From, in-class themes, teachers who refused to pass a kid who couldn't do the work — was his "Water Lou": he flunked Sophomore Comp, withdrew a year to save his junior season, and came back enervated, narcoleptic, and needing 15 mg of oxycodone every three hours, losing his starting spot to a clear-eyed freshman with "nearly limitless potential." When his mother's cirrhotic hemorrhage put her in a Medicaid Long-Term Institution that October, Gately — eyes too itchy even to wave goodbye — smoked his first cigarette from the pack she left, never went back to clean out his lockers, and never played organized ball again.

What to notice

The biography is organized around a single synecdoche: the head — prized by every institution exactly for what it supposedly lacked (the Moron acronym worn as a nickname), its imperviousness the one gift anyone ever paid for. Notice what the party trick actually is: a boy inviting damage — elevator doors, lunchboxes, a sock full of nickels — and being loved for absorbing it. Set that against the scene's quietest sentence — "Things might have been different if the M.P. had ever knocked Gately around" instead of concentrating on his mother — and the trick reads as a child offering his one indestructible surface for the blows being dealt elsewhere in the house. Notice too how sober memory is shown working: whole years "telescope" into single images and B-movie titles, decline catalogued as low-budget cinema, with bystander wreckage flicked off in single sentences (the hired English tutor who, after a March of evenings in Gately's company, leaves for juvenile rehab at 95 pounds). And the cigarettes: the first gasper Gately ever smokes comes from the half-finished pack his mother left behind on the day of the sirenless ambulance — in a childhood where he'd once left stolen cigarettes in Mrs. Waite's mailbox as an amends, the same sad currency now paid out to him as an inheritance.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 902: the cognomen — Bim, Bimmy, The Bimulator, from "Big Indestructible Moron"; the yard-wide head and special-order helmets; every coach's "limitless future" contingent on bearing down.
  • pp. 902-903: the player — fullback and outside linebacker, 230 lbs. benching more, 4.4 forty in 7th grade; head-down isolation runs, "the top of his special helmet was like a train's cowcatcher"; the head as fearless party object (elevator doors, cafeteria trays, violin cases); the gnarled ear under the Prince Valiant cut; the dented-violet cheekbone from a North Reading kid's sock full of nickels — "It took Beverly's whole offensive line to pull Gately off what was left of the kid."
  • p. 903: a boys' boy with "a jolly ferocity… that scared girls"; not a bully — "He just had no interest in brutalizing the weak. It's still not clear to him if this was to his credit or not"; "Things might have been different if the M.P. had ever knocked Gately around instead of focusing all his attention on the progressively weaker Mrs. G."
  • p. 903: initiations — first duBois at nine in a vacant summer cottage during the televised riots; first drunk on the jackboot Orkin man's screwdrivers, the kids rolling their eyes at the Zog/Turner Diaries lectures; the crew narrowing to getting high, air-guitar, and things to break over Gately's head; Attention-Deficit/Special-Ed classification, the Language Arts deficit "at least partly because Mrs. G. could barely read and Gately wasn't interested in making her feel worse."
  • pp. 903-904: the telescoped memory of pissing orange juice into the Atlantic — "he was pissing on himself right from the start, with alcohol" (his own podium line); Quaaludes (n.362) and Hefenreffers define ages 13-15.
  • p. 904: Trent Kite (n.363) — chinless tapir-nosed Dead-head wienie whose drug-set rank rested on turning vacationing parents' kitchens into labs: BBQ-sauce-bottle Erlenmeyers, nutmeg-and-sassafras MDMA-family psychedelics (n.364), designer meth from Tryptophan, tetrahydrofruan decocted from PVC pipe cleaner, Sominex pushed "just one H3C molecule away" from methaqualone: the QuoVadis.
  • p. 904: The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks — (Quaaludes) + (not even that many beers) = WHAP; the crew resenting having to walk anywhere; meanwhile the M.P. decamps with a Newburyport divorcée "who apparently put up a more sporting fight than Mrs. G."; the eye-cast and false chin-dimple as the era's legacy; Percocets at least removed the upright mobility that made one vulnerable.
  • p. 905: the discipline that protected ball — Substances only after 1800h in season, one Thursday duBois before games, REM-sleep in class; varsity as a freshman, on academic probation; the sinister set expelled around him while "Gately kept hanging in and on til seventeen."
  • pp. 905-906: the academic collapse — Kite carries math and science; the French teacher handled by the Offensive Coordinator; but English "just fucking killed him": four teachers with the "sieg-heil idea that it was somehow cruel to pass a kid that couldn't do the work"; his "Water Lou"; the hired English tutor who, after a March of evenings in Gately's company, lands in juvenile rehab reciting Howl "in high-volume Chaucerian English."
  • p. 906: flunks Sophomore Comp in May; withdraws a year to preserve junior eligibility; with football's "psychic emergency-brake" off, the sixteenth year is a gray blank (the red chintz couch; the eczematous Rite-Aid assistant with gambling debts; convenience-store crud and "the vegetables from his mother's vodka glass, while she slept").
  • p. 906: the return at 284 lbs. — narcoleptic, 15 mg oxycodone every three hours, P.E.T.-scanned for M.S.; even Classic Comics Ethan From beyond him; Kite gone early to Salem State; starting spot lost in game three to a freshman with "nearly limitless potential"; Mrs. Gately's cirrhotic hemorrhage and the sirenless ambulance to a Medicaid L.T.I. (n.365) in Pt. Shirley; eyes too itchy to wave adios; the first gasper from her left pack; "He never played organized ball again."

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: a complete etiology — environment, initiation, escalation up the ladder (beer/pot → Quaaludes → Percocets → oxycodone), the bargaining discipline that protects one love until the Substances take that too; told with the retrospective AA framing ("pissing on himself right from the start") of Gately's podium voice.
  • The Body and Tennis: Gately's body as institutional asset — the indestructible head as equipment, coaches purchasing helmets and grades, "limitless future" rhetoric identical to E.T.A.'s plateaux-talk — and the body's slow repossession by the Disease (284 lbs., narcolepsy, the kitten on the field).
  • Fathers and Sons: no father at all — the M.P. as violent non-father whose abuse bypasses Gately, the chain of "neckless, buzz-cut, and pre-infarcted coaches" as ersatz patriarchs whose love is conditional on yardage; the protective tenderness toward his barely-literate mother that helps doom his Language Arts.
  • Memory and Forgetting: sober memory shown at work from the hospital bed — whole eras "telescope into one memory" (the orange juice pissed into the Atlantic; the Killer Sidewalks years as a B-movie title, pp. 903-904), retrospection framed in the podium idiom of self-accounting ("pissing on himself right from the start"); the past retrieved as discipline, not flashback.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Companion panel to Hal: Gately's football = Hal's tennis (the gifted body given away to a sport, with substances scheduled around it); the freshman with "nearly limitless potential" who takes Gately's spot is the John Wayne figure of this biography; reading this directly after scene 170's "give our lives away to something" makes the pairing explicit.
  • The sock full of nickels (p. 902) — the literal injury behind Veals's throwaway simile for Fully Functional Phil's crossed eyes (scene 168, p. 880); a two-scene echo binding ad-land's whimsy to street damage.
  • Mrs. Gately's cirrhosis and the L.T.I. across the Yirrell Beach span (p. 906) — the mother thread continued from Gately's childhood scenes (the M.P., the chintz couch); her oral-narcotics-era abandonment shadows Gately's Demerol "mother's warm hand" simile (scene 169, p. 887).
  • The M.P.'s bumper-stickered Ford and decampment (p. 904) — the same stickers Gately summons as anti-craving material at p. 891, scene 169; his absence is why nobody ever "knocked Gately around," p. 903.

Forward

  • Ethan From / "Water Lou" / ghostwords: pays off scene 169's bedside shame about SINISTRAL and OMMATOPHORIC (p. 884) — the wraith's vocabulary landing in a head English class convinced was "basically dumb"; the Gately-as-failed-reader thread runs to the book's final Fackelmann pages.
  • Trent Kite (n.363): the chem-wienie origin of the scene-169 crew; the note confirms Kite's later role in the DuPlessis home-invasion (scene 016, pp. 55-60) and that he "ended up regretting [it] exponentially more than Gately did, once the A.F.R. got through with him" — Kite's off-page fate at A.F.R. hands (cf. the Antitoi-shop interrogations).
  • Endnotes digested: n.362 — methaqualone now manufactured outside O.N.A.N. jurisdiction as Parestol; n.363 — Kite's later crewing (above); n.364 — the methylenedioxy family glossed (MDA; MDMA 'X'; MMDA-2 'Love Boat'; MMDA-3a 'Eve'; DMMDA-2 'Starry Night'); n.365 — L.T.I. = Long-Term Institution.

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 902: "His coaches had to order special helmets. Gately was worth the cost." — the institution's accounting of a boy; the-body-tennis anchor.
  • p. 903: "He just had no interest in brutalizing the weak. It's still not clear to him if this was to his credit or not." — Gately's moral self-audit in miniature.
  • pp. 903-904: the OJ-into-the-Atlantic image — "it turns out he was pissing on himself right from the start, with alcohol" — podium-ready retrospective insight; pull-quote for addiction-recovery.
  • p. 904: "(Quaaludes) + (not even that many beers) = getting whapped by the nearest sidewalk… Happened time after fucking time." — the era's whole I.Q. in one equation.
  • p. 905: "During football season he ruled himself with an iron hand until the sun set, then threw himself on the mercy of sidewalks and the somnolent hum." — discipline as the addict's enabling structure.
  • p. 906: "The backs of Gately's eyes were too itchy for him to even be able to stand out on the red pocked stoop's steps and see to wave adios." — the mother's exit; the scene's quiet devastation, and the first cigarette.

What links here Timeline events here (8) · Connected from (6) · Passages quoted here (27) · Motifs (3)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs