Scene 173: gately sorkin twin towers
Characters present
Characters referenced
Open questions this scene bears on
Connects to
Summary
Lying in terrific infected pain and trying to Abide between cravings, Gately remembers his criminal apprenticeship: from age ~18 to 23 he and Gene ("Fax") Fackelmann were Whitey Sorkin's "Twin Towers" — collecting bets and debts for the perpetually cluster-headached North Shore bookmaker, a community operation run on affability, beepers, and only carefully staged violence (Fackelmann's controlled first-round cruelty vs. the "ferocious and uncontrolled" thing that dislodged inside Gately once he started). Sorkin's desperate compulsive-gambler debtors were Gately's first exposure to what addiction turns a person into, years before he connected the concept to himself. The crew's pharmacology gets anatomized — Gately's oral Percocets and needle-terror, Fackelmann's beloved Dilaudid, the five-second crib-under-a-breathing-sky hallucination injection gave Gately — and Trent Kite's arrival completes the crew. The memory lands on its real destination: a blinding white afternoon just after Christmas, Gately ironing fake licenses in a stripped luxury apartment while watching B.U. play the Forsythia Bowl, blubbering "out of emotional nowheres" at the sight of B.U.'s walk-on punter — two years younger than Gately, an unnamed Orin Incandenza — and at the loss of his own one gift, organized ball. Two days later he was pinched for assaulting a bouncer with the unconscious body of another bouncer.
What to notice
The frame sentence arrives four pages in — Gately "trying to Abide between cravings for relief by remembering" — and retroactively recasts the whole criminal memoir: not reverie but analgesia, memory chosen over Demerol, and the memory he steers into is deliberately a grief. Notice the sentence the Forsythia Bowl replays: the announcers give the punter "the potential to be a lock for a pretty much limitless pro ball career if he bore down and kept his eye on the carrot" — the same coach-liturgy recited over Gately himself two scenes back, prize swapped for carrot, one boilerplate future issued to two North Shore boys and redeemed by only one. The optics do the rest: winter glare falls across the fenced-last HDV so the players look "bleached and ghostly" — Gately literally watching the ghost of his alternate life while ironing forged identities for "rich blond male boys" who will be issued futures without bearing down at all. And notice the idiom the collection work is narrated in — "It was all like this community", the debt gently reframed as the delinquent party, Vice cops betting at civil-servant discounts: the book lets organized crime sound like a fellowship or support network, because for these addicts, debtors and enforcers alike, that is exactly the function it served.
Beats
- pp. 911-912: pre-burglary career — small promotions off strung-out nurses he X'd; Whitey Sorkin (bookmaker, Rte. 1 titty-club owner, UV-lamped to "the constant shiny color of a sort of like dark soap" by his cluster-headache regimen); the Pakistani M.D. at Our Lady of Solace, Beverly, "Teddibly Soddy" about Mrs. G.'s cirrhotic stroke — neurologic level of a Brussels sprout — and the directions to the Point Shirley L.T.I.
- p. 912: Fackelmann's portrait (towering, slope-shouldered, priapistic, walrusy mustache "with a nervous life of its own"); Gately now "Don… nicknameless"; the Twin Towers — explicitly not popular-entertainment muscle, working by beeper and borrowed cell-phones [n.367].
- pp. 912-913: collection as diplomacy — making the debt itself "seem like the delinquent party"; the betting community (Vice cops included, at civil-servant vig discounts); the compulsive gamblers who lie and believe their own lies — "Gately's first exposure to the concept of real addiction and what it can turn someone into"; Sorkin's psychosomatic cranio-facial hell and the Cafergot surcharges [n.368].
- pp. 913-914: the graduated-violence doctrine; Fackelmann's "easy but ultimately shallow sadism" gets the first-round hose-work; Gately's "something ferocious and uncontrolled on a slope" that, once dislodged, "started to roll on its own" — then a week of guilt-tripled drug intake; the hardest cases call for Gately's slope [n.369].
- pp. 914-915: economics — 5% of Sorkin's 10% vig, $1,000+/week, "not even 60% enough" against the Towers' rigid narcotics scheduling; moonlighting (Fackelmann's I.D.s and creative checking; Gately's card-game Security; V. Nucci's Osco-skylight rope = the entree to formal burglary); Percocets/Bam-Bams vs. Dilaudid trust-economy; Gately's needle-dread and Virus-terror, Fackelmann cooking and tying him off with fresh Medicaid-Iletin works [n.370]; the five-second Dilaudid hallucination — gargantuan toddler in an XXL Fisher-Price crib under a sky bulging "like a big gray lung."
- p. 915: Trent Kite gets the administrative Shoe from Salem State, joins the crew, throws together "some old-time QuoVadis" and meets Dilaudid — "a new friend for life"; Kite and Fackelmann's furnished-luxury-apartment scam; Gately prefers "bold nighttime merchandise-promotion to fraud" (fraud means meeting the people you steal from).
- pp. 915-916: the frame breathes ("Gately lay in the Trauma Ward in terrific infected pain, trying to Abide… by remembering"); the white post-Xmas afternoon: ironing laminates for rich Philips Andover [n.371] kids' fake licenses; B.U. v. Clemson in the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance Forsythia Bowl on a first-gen InterLace HDV (the last luxury furnishing to be fenced); the bleached, ghostly players in window-glare; the announcers' walk-on-punter inspiration story; "The B.U. punter was two years younger than Don Gately."
- p. 916: the blubbering "out of emotional nowheres" — loss of organized ball, "his one gift and other love," his stupidity, "that blasted cocksucking Ethan From," his Mom's "Sir Osis and vegetabilization" and four years of failure to visit — crying like a babe over hot laminates "amid fraudulent stink and tear-steam"; pinched two days later in Danvers (one bouncer as weapon against another); Billerica Minimum three months after.
Endnotes
- n.367 (p. 1077): the Towers did change cell-phones constantly against taps and Pen Registers (Sorkin buying new units, Gately borrowing student R.N.s' phones); Gately's biggest career challenge: remembering all the numbers and apartment addresses "strafed on Bam-Bams just about all the time."
- n.368 (pp. 1077-1078): the headache spansules — note reads "Cimetidine—®SmithKline Beecham… for generalized cranio-vascular woe (derived, kind of interestingly, from the same ergot rye-mold as LSD)" where the main text says Cafergot; the ergot derivation fits ergotamine, not cimetidine — as printed. The ergot/LSD aside seeds Sixties Bob's Sandoz pedigree (scene 175).
- n.369 (p. 1078): the two outright demaps of the era were jobbed out to the Québecer freelancers DesMontes and Pointgravè; Gately's one demap was "essentially an accident" — Maced mid-collection by a blond Heineken-drinking debtor, red curtain of rage, the head turned 180° with the Mace can up one nostril — "the most professionally horrified Gately had ever been up until the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T." (i.e. DuPlessis, the botched burglary that set the whole plot's A.F.R. clock running).
- n.370 (p. 1078): Iletin = purified pork insulin, ®Lilly — the diabetes scrip behind Fackelmann's endless factory-fresh syringes.
- n.371 (p. 1078): Philips Andover — "an elite private high school up near the Methuen salient."
Themes in this scene
- Addiction and Recovery: addiction defined before drugs enter — the gambling debtors who "lie and believe their own lies" are the disease's portrait, and Gately's deadpan inventory of the crew's "rigid physical scheduling of narcotics needs" shows him already inside it; the frame (Abiding via memory instead of Demerol) is the recovery counter-weight.
- The Body and Tennis: Gately's body as squandered gift — the bench-curl-squat bulk, the lost "organized ball," and the ghostly image of the punter who kept his eye on the carrot; the Forsythia Bowl is the road-not-taken made visible on a fenced-last HDV.
- Memory and Forgetting: Abiding-by-memory made explicit — Gately in terrific infected pain "trying to Abide between cravings for relief by remembering" (pp. 915-916); the frame sentence retroactively recasts the whole criminal memoir as chosen analgesia, memory steered deliberately into a grief (the Forsythia Bowl blubbering) rather than toward the Substance.
Connections
Backward
- Backstory continuous with Gately's childhood/football/oral-narcotics history (pp. 902-906, scene 171) and with the Ethan Frome wound ("that blasted cocksucking Ethan From" — the assigned book that derailed him, told in his school-collapse history ~pp. 902-906).
- n.369's "suffocated Canadian P.I.T." = Guillaume DuPlessis (scene at pp. 55-60, scene 016): this note quietly confirms the DuPlessis death as the second of only two demaps on Gately's conscience, and the hinge that put the A.F.R. and the Finest on him — the reason he's in this ward at all (shot in the Nuck raid on Ennet House, pp. 608-619, scene 120).
Forward
- The Gately/Orin near-miss: the unnamed walk-on B.U. punter is Orin Incandenza (cf. Orin's punting origin, pp. 283ff) — the novel's two protagonists-by-bulk converge on a screen years before the Year-of-Glad gravesite ("two years younger than Don Gately" calibrates their ages); pairs with Gately watching Mr. Bouncety-Bounce in scene 175 and with the Gately/Hal/JOI's-head dream (scene 175 p. 934; scene 003 p. 17).
- Whitey Sorkin's Enfield National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation and Cafergot dependence set up the Sixties Bob/Eighties Bill scam mechanics of scene 175.
- Mrs. G.'s cirrhosis ("Sir Osis," the four unvisited years) reaches back to the M.P./Hefenreffer childhood scenes (pp. 809, scene 161ff region) and forward to Gately's St. E.'s resolve-by-memory.
- Chronology strain (cited, not adjudicated): the Bowl is pinned to "the last New Year's Eve of Unsubsidized Time" (Dec 2001), but scene 175/177's frame calls the Fackelmann period "over four years later" recalled in YDAU (p. 937), and n.376 prices Dilaudid "at Y.W.-Q.M.D. [2006] valuations" — the well-known Gately-timeline inconsistency; cited as written.
Notable passages
- p. 912: the Fackelmann portrait ("a walrusy mustache that seemed to have a nervous life of its own") — the mustache as mood-organ pays off through scenes 175/177.
- p. 913: "They'd sit there and look into Gately's eyes and lie and believe their own lies" — addiction's essence located in gamblers, pre-drugs; prime addiction-recovery anchor.
- p. 914: "something ferocious and uncontrolled on a slope inside the big kid got dislodged and started to roll on its own" — the violence that will both save Ennet House (pp. 608ff) and horrify him; key Gately psychology.
- p. 915: the Dilaudid crossing — "a gargantuan toddler in an XXL Fisher-Price crib in a sandy field under a storm-cloudy sky that bulged and receded like a big gray lung" — Herman the Ceiling That Breathed as drug-vision; the crib/playpen image-system that closes scene 177.
- p. 916: "he found himself blubbering at the loss of organized ball, his one gift and other love" — the punter paragraph entire; the Orin convergence and Gately's grief for the body's career; essential anthology passage.
What links here
- Fackelmann/Kite crew dynamics; the Dilaudid crib-hallucination
- Finding his mother's cirrhotic hemorrhage; the end of football; the first cigarette
- Lynn origins: the ten-year-old dropout who found Sorkin
- MCI-Billerica: the 17-month bit; learning the meter-shunt
- Muscle for the bookie Whitey Sorkin — the "Twin Towers"; renamed "Don," nicknameless
- Recruiting Kite: a new friend for life
- The Danvers bouncer assault; pinched; out on Sorkin-bonded bail
- The Dilaudid partnership: cooking up for Gately, and a love past sense
- The Forsythia Bowl: weeping over the B.U. punter
- The Twin Towers: Sorkin's field muscle
- The burglary vocation: the luxury-apartment scam and the B&E crews
- The crueler Tower: first-round coercion
- The disease model as the podium teaches it: cross-substance, cunning, and "a thing that basically hides"
- The moonlight: I.D.s and creative checking
- The punting career: New Orleans Saints, then the Phoenix Cardinals trade
- The recovery crux: refusing all narcotics despite unimaginable pain — sobriety held above relief
- V. Nucci ("Nooch") and the entree to burglary
- Scene 040: yrstruly xmas eve
- Scene 175: fackelmann scam wraith returns
- Scene 177: dilaudid binge
- Scene 185: fackelmann sunshine beach
- Fackelmann's scam; the wraith returns
- Gately and Sorkin's Twin Towers
- Gately and Sorkin's Twin Towers (p. 915)
- Gately watches the punter: blubbering at the loss of organized ball
- Gately watches the punter: the Division-1 body as paid muscle
- Gately watches the punter: the punter who kept his eye on the carrot
- Gately watches the punter: two years younger, and still in the game
- Gately, Sorkin, and the Twin Towers
- Gately, Sorkin, and the Twin Towers — "Gately lay in the Trauma Ward…"
- Gately, Sorkin, and the Twin Towers — "The fact that Gately was devoted…"
- Hal supine in V.R.5; Pemulis and the lab (pp. 910–911)
- Hal supine, Pemulis wants to interface (p. 911)
- Hal supine; Pemulis wants to interface — "The art-cartridge critics and scholars who…"
- Hal supine; Pemulis wants to interface — "The monotone was the reason why…"
- Hal watches Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms
- Hal watches Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms — "The art-cartridge critics and scholars who…"
- addiction defined before the drugs
- blubbering over the one gift lost
- grief broadcast in a register no one receives · S1
- grief broadcast in a register no one receives — "Then this too began to seem…" · S1
- guilt as the reason to triple the dose
- non-overlapping stashes, the needle-dread, the Virus
- the crib under the breathing sky
- the need-schedule outruns a handsome living
- the stash-check that finds nothing