JOI counsels and witnesses Eric Clipperton's on-grounds suicide

texture · YW (Year of the Whopper, ~2002); Clipperton's eighteenth summer

• When: YW, "two days before the Clays," at E.T.A.'s East House; predates JOI's own death by ~two years
• What: Clipperton — the junior who won by threatening to shoot himself with a Glock 17 if he ever lost — arrives at E.T.A.'s portcullis in psychic collapse after the O.N.A.N.T.A. computer accidentally ranks his extorted wins #1. Mario (his only real friend, from JOI's tennis-documentary circuit, event 10) gets him admitted; "J. O. Incandenza finally lets Clipperton in over Cantrell's and then Schtitt's vehement objections," being "while not quite strictly sober... lucid, and has a very low melting-point of compassion for traumas connected with early success." JOI has Mario's head-mount Bolex record the counseling session (to protect E.T.A. under O.N.A.N.T.A. rules); mid-session Clipperton draws the Glock and blows his brains out in front of both Incandenzas. JOI then takes Mario to the Veedersburg IN funeral — "the first of his life's two funerals so far" (the second being JOI's own). [Bears on the death and its open motive: a suicide JOI witnesses and cannot avert; JOI is "already in and out of rehabs" by now.]