The persona: the "Mr. Howell" yachting cap, the Allston chip, the provocations

texture · UNDATED (standing, into YDAU)

• When: UNDATED (standing self-presentation across YDAU)
• What: Pemulis's signature look and manner: the bright-white yachting cap Mario calls his "Mr. Howell hat" (worn with fake naval braid, sometimes a pulse-synced light-up ear-hoop); the comb "to get that wide-furrowed look that kids from Allston favor"; a physically "muscular but fundamentally physically narrow" frame where "everything about him seems to Hal to taper and come to a point, like a bad El Greco"; and a signature verbal tic — "this habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other before he says anything." His working-class Allston/Irish chip is worn openly: he is "barred by deLint and Nwangi from shirts that mention the Sinn Fein or that extol Allston MA in any way, in competition." When roused (Tenuate plus adrenaline) "his blue-collar Irish" comes "right out." Under the poise sits the character key the endnote apparatus makes explicit: his deepest dread is being expelled and forced back down into blue-collar Allston with no diploma — a fear magnified in his final year, the stated reason for his elaborate caution in dealing, and the joke behind the poster Hal and Schacht gave him, a brooding king captioned "YES, I'M PARANOID—BUT AM I PARANOID ENOUGH?" (n211 p. 1035). His dealer's caution extends to a recursively self-cancelling answering machine ("This is Mike Pemulis's answering machine's answering machine," scene 165), since "no really relevant caller would be fool enough to leave his name on any machine of Pemulis's anyway." The caution has a concrete institutional watcher: of the few prorectors diligent about room-inspections, "the hatchet-faced Kenyan Tony Nwangi" has "got the Pemulis/Troeltsch/Schacht suite under extremely beady scrutiny at all times" (n73 p. 0998). The manner is that of a needling performer: he loves to sing in the shower-tile, does cruel on-request impressions (Bacon's-pope face-contortions; whispering "Pussy" to an exhausted lifter, scene 055) and trades quick locker-room repartee with the cohort as half of the "Peemster and Hal" duo (scene 034) — this though he is one of only a handful of players in the room not ranked in the continental top 64. His reputation for merciless invention precedes him: a helplessly window-stuck Ortho Stice was "just praying like hell it wouldn't be Pemulis… God only knows what that son of a whore'd've thunk of to do to me here all helpless and immobilated" (scene 167).