IJ study archive

Scene 183: locker room loach saga

Scene
183
Pages
964–971
When
20 Nov YDAU (2009), 'IMMEDIATELY PRE-FUNDRAISER-EXHIBITION-FÊTE GAUDEAMUS IGITUR' (caps dateline, p. 964); Loach saga flashback reaches back ~9+ years
Where
E.T.A. boys' locker room (Female side audible through the wall); Loach saga: B.C., St. John's Seminary, Park Street Stationin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. locker rooms · Downtown Boston (also)
POV
unnamed E.T.A. player, 1st person plural ('a couple of us'; catalog guesses Axford)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 11)

Summary

Under a caps dateline, an unnamed E.T.A. player narrates the locker room before the Gaudeamus Igitur fundraiser exhibition: the timeless pre-match ritual of taping, shaving, fuller's earth, and rumor — including an "hysterical" report that the arriving Québec squads look like "some sort of Special-Olympicish Québec adult wheelchair-tennis contingent" (the sub-14s sent to verify never return), word that Poutrincourt is AWOL, and Anton Doucette's sighting of the missing Pemulis "lurking" by the West House dumpsters looking "anxiously depressed." While Barry Loach shaves and tapes his ankle, Hal unsettles bystanders by musing that the locker room feels recorded — everyone "Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines... call-uppable for rebroadcast," and therefore "erasable. By whom?" The scene then unspools the E.T.A. legend of how the degree-less Loach became Head Trainer: youngest of a staunch Catholic brood, his trainer's vocation hostage to an older brother's Jesuit calling; when the brother's faith in human goodness necrosed, Barry took up his challenge — stand at Park Street Station looking derelict and ask passersby not for change but simply to be touched. Nine months of alms tossed from arm's length nearly dissolved Loach into the street's "absolute silt," until fourteen-year-old Mario Incandenza, sent out for subway tokens from one of Himself's shoots, took the outstretched hand literally and heartily shook it — which led, convolutedly, to Loach's E.T.A. job.

What to notice

The novel takes leave of Hal's exterior in deposition format: the "we" narrator never hears him directly, so Hal's last locker-room words arrive as contested testimony — Traub and Whale "later said Hal was being weird", one heard Fourier where the other heard Furrier, and moribund enters the record "but Whale couldn't confirm" — the first chapter's inside/outside gap assembling itself out of witnesses who can't agree on what they heard. Hal's eerie thesis that the room is all recording is meanwhile being enacted two benches down: everyone lapsed into "autopilot ritual", and Troeltsch sits in a disconnected headset "broadcasting his own match in advance" — a rebroadcast running before its event. Then the Loach saga swaps registers entirely: "In outline form, the saga goes" marks it as Big Buddy oral tradition, and its diction keeps the piety deniable with a shrugging "or whatever" — "ordained or frocked or whatever" — even while it preaches the book's plainest sermon about touch. Notice the two holes the legend leaves on purpose: the brother whose dead faith started the whole Challenge is simply dropped, fate unresolved, and the redemption machinery itself is skipped in one blur of a phrase — a "convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series of circumstances" — before the ending swerves to the sauna-lock punchline: the tradition can carry grace only so long as it is allowed to shrug.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 964: the caps GAUDEAMUS IGITUR dateline; the patron catalog (Warshavers, Buckmans, Dr. Hickle's creepy niece...) the players never see arrive; the gala's audience/performer flip.
  • pp. 964-965: ritual inventory — Gauze-Tex, fuller's earth (Coyle, Freer, Stice, Traub) vs. sawdust (Wagenknecht, Chu); Wayne hooded in his towel running a coin over his knuckles, Joni Mitchell low in his locker; Troeltsch broadcasting his own match in advance into a disconnected headset; Kornspan at the sink, no one near; Arslanian blindfolded in an ascot; rumors shifting antigens.
  • p. 965: Pemulis missing since early A.M. — Doucette saw him "lurking" by the West House dumpsters, "anxiously depressed"; Otis P. Lord returns from post-op (gauze choker, red ellipse around mouth and nostrils) to a small univocal cheer; the wheelchair-contingent rumor and the unreturning scampering sub-14s.
  • pp. 965-966: Thode and Stott audible invoking "Camilla, goddess of speed and light step"; Poutrincourt AWOL and Thode's tantrum; Schacht's strutted knee-brace Frankenstein-walk; the four-minute anatomy of Loach's shave-tape-AirCast routine on Hal's ankle; "Everybody's had his hands on Loach's shoulders at one time or another."
  • p. 966: Hal's weirdness per Traub and Whale — no customary Snickers; the locker room "occluded, electric," everything done so many times it feels "recorded... locked down and stored and call-uppable for rebroadcast"; "But also, as a consequence, erasable... By whom?"; "Fourier Transforms" misheard as "Furrier Transforms"; the unconnected faces; the venue rumor — buses to mostly unused courts "in the deep-brain tissue of the M.I.T. Student Union," arranged through Mrs. Inc and alumnus Corbett Th-Thorp's mammoth favors; Traub: Hal also said moribund.
  • p. 967: Loach as "wingless fly"; the saga begins — the staunch-Catholic Loach brood and Mrs. L.'s clergy dream; attrition by war (Y.T.M.P. Brazil), grouper, Atlantic City round-cards, marriage, cymbals; the pious brother's seminary calling frees Barry for "the liniment-and-adhesive ministry."
  • p. 968: the brother's faith "spontaneously combusted" at twenty-five — "a kind of degenerative Lou Gehrig's Disease of the spirit"; card-tossing in his St. John's room (coincidentally just down Comm. Ave. from E.T.A.); Barry's interviews across the wastebasket; Brothers Karamazov comparison ("not nearly as erudite"); Barry fixes the hitch in the brother's card-toss mid-debate.
  • p. 969: the Challenge set (Mrs. L. on 25 mg/day Ativan, n.384: "enough to anxiolytize a good-sized Clydesdale"): look derelict at Park Street and ask passersby only "Touch me, just touch me, please"; the pitch read as stem-argot — he hauls in more $ than his work-study job; the brother slouched at the T exit nixing near-misses; the bag-lady headlock.
  • p. 970: months pass; Incompletes, job lost; Loach's "own soul began to sprout little fungal patches of necrotic rot"; collegial warmth comes only from the other stem-artists, who adopt his pitch and crowd it; the brother's fate "never gets resolved in the E.T.A. Loach-story"; Barry nearly absorbed into "the absolute silt at the very bottom of the metro Boston socioeconomic duck-pond."
  • p. 971: month nine — Mario, fourteen, sent dashing for subway tokens from Himself's Back Bay shoot (God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt, subway tokens as ante), rerouted to Park Street by a dumpster fire, "largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies," takes every outstretched hand literally — handshakes all around, Loach's "fuliginous hand" included — and the "convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series of circumstances" lands Loach the Asst. Trainer job; promoted when the then-Head Trainer's sauna accident gets all sauna locks removed and temps hard-wired to 50°C.

Themes in this scene

  • The Body and Tennis: the pre-match liturgy at maximum resolution — taping, bracing, shaving, the body serviced like equipment; Loach's "ministry" makes the trainer's table an actual altar; "everybody's had his hands on Loach's shoulders" is the only sanctioned touch in the building.
  • Irony and Sincerity: the saga's engine — a literal plea for human contact is structurally unreadable as anything but a hustle; only Mario, the book's one irony-free perceiver, can take the words at face value, and his literalism is what saves a soul; the "we" narrator keeps the legend at affectionate, joshing distance even while it preaches.
  • Communication and Solipsism: "Touch me, just touch me, please" misheard for nine months; citizens substituting "abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact" — the figurant economy of the city; in the locker room, Hal's strange remarks land on Loach who is never heard to respond.
  • Surveillance and Disguise: the wheelchair "Special-Olympicish" contingent is the A.F.R. arriving in plain sight, the rumor laughed at while the scouts who go to check don't come back; Poutrincourt's AWOL absence belongs to the same infiltration; Loach's derelict get-up is the saga's own disguise-experiment.
  • Ghosts and Wraiths: Hal's "recorded... call-uppable for rebroadcast... erasable, By whom?" reframes the whole company as cartridge figurants — the wraith's vocabulary surfacing in Hal's mouth on the novel's last E.T.A. day.
  • Disability and Deformity: Mario's "clawlike hand" is the instrument of grace; wheelchairs as Trojan horse; Lord's gauze choker and the red ventilator ellipse — the book's damaged bodies all convened in one room.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Same day, hours after scene 179: Hal's no-Snickers flatness, "moribund," and the recorded/erasable feeling continue the morning's interiority — now seen from outside, through Traub/Whale's garbled hearsay (the inside/outside Hal gap of scene 001 forming in real time).
  • Pemulis "lurking" out by the West House dumpsters looking "anxiously depressed" — post-expulsion (17 Nov, n.332; see scene n332) and post-discovery that his ceiling stash was gone (scene 174, p. 916); this is his last main-text sighting. Trust-math context: scene n324.
  • The wheelchair-contingent rumor + unreturning sub-14s + Poutrincourt AWOL = the A.F.R.'s arrival at E.T.A., prepared by Marathe/Steeply's serial (scene 088 etc.) and Poutrincourt's exposure to Steeply (pp. 675ff); the novel never shows the raid — a major right-frame thread (see the essay on the ending).
  • Loach's Park Street Challenge is the previously promised story of "Barry Loach" from the prorector roster (scene 070, pp. 307ff); his brother's spiritual necrosis parallels the AA "spider" and Geoffrey Day's Bottom (n.90; see scene n090).
  • Mario's redemptive literal handshake matches his function defined in scene 015 ("easier to fix something if you can see it") and his night-walks among Ennet House's lit windows (pp. 589-593).
  • The God/Devil-poker shoot with Cosgrove Watt slots into the n.24 filmography orbit (scene n024); Watt's presence links back to scene 179's Watt biography, same day.
  • Otis P. Lord's monitor removal closes the Eschaton injury thread (scene 073; Hal heard the news in scene 179, p. 948).

Notable passages (5)
  • p. 966: "they all in here existed basically as Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines, locked down and stored and call-uppable for rebroadcast at specified times... But also, as a consequence, erasable. By whom?" — late-Hal ontology; ghosts-wraiths and entertainment fused.
  • p. 965: "some sort of Special-Olympicish Québec adult wheelchair-tennis contingent... a couple of the sub-14's... scampered out and up the stairs to check the rumor and failed to return." — the A.F.R. arriving as a joke nobody checks; chilling on reread.
  • p. 968: "a kind of degenerative Lou Gehrig's Disease of the spirit" — the brother's anhedonia rendered as neuropathology; pairs with Kate Gompert's It.
  • p. 969: "to hold out his unclean hand and... simply ask passersby to touch him. Just to touch him." — the Challenge's terms; the book's barest statement of the contact-hunger under all its addictions.
  • pp. 970-971: "substituted abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact... Mario had extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach's own fuliginous hand" — setup and payoff; irony-sincerity's whole argument in one handshake.

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Connected from

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