David Wallace - Infinite jest

Twenty-four girls are drilled in groups of six on four of the Center Courts. The 32 boys (minus, rather ominously, J. J. Penn) are split by rough age into fours and take a semi-staggered eight of the East Courts. Schtitt is up in his little observational crow’s nest, a sort of apse at the end of the iron transom players call the Tower that extends west to east over the centers of all three sets of courts and terminates w/ the nest high above the Show Courts. He has a chair and an ashtray up there. Sometimes from the courts you can see him leaning over the railing, tapping the edge of the bullhorn with his weatherman’s pointer; from the West and Center Courts the rising sun behind him gives his white head a pinkish corona. When he’s seated you just see misshapen smoke-rings coming up out of the nest and moving off with the wind. The sound of the bullhorn is scarier when you can’t see him. The waffled iron stairs leading up to the transom are west of the West Courts, all the way across from the nest, so sometimes Schtitt paces back and forth along the transom with his pointer behind his back, his boots ringing out on the iron. Schtitt seems immune to all weather and always dresses the same for drills: the warm-ups and boots. When the E.T.A.s’ strokes or play’s being filmed for study, Mario Incandenza is positioned on the railing of Schtitt’s nest, leaning way out and filming down, his police lock protruding into empty air, with somebody beefy assigned to stand behind him and grip the back of the Velcro vest: it always scares hell out of Hal because you can never see Dunkel or Nwangi behind Mario and it always looks like he’s leaning way out to dive Bolex-first down onto Court 7’s net.

Except during periods of disciplinary conditioning, alfresco A.M. drills work like this. A prorector is at each relevant court with two yellow Ball-Hopper-brand baskets of used balls, plus a ball machine, which machine looks like an open footlocker with a blunt muzzle at one end pointed across the net at a quartet of boys and connected by long orange industrial cords to a three-prong outdoor outlet at the base of each light-pole. Some of the light-poles cast long thin shadows across the courts as soon as the sun is strong enough for there to be shadows; in summertime players try to sort of huddle in the thin lines of shade. Ortho Stice keeps yawning and shivering; John Wayne wears a small cold smile. Hal hops up and down in his capacious jacket and plum turtleneck and looks at his breath and tries a la Lyle to focus very intently on the pain of his tooth without judging it as bad or good. K. D. Coyle, out of the infirmary after the weekend, opines that he doesn’t see why the better players’ reward for hard slogging to the upper rungs is dawn drills while for instance Pemulis and the Vikemeister et al. are still horizontal and sawing logs. Coyle says this every morning. Stice tells him he’s surprised at how little they’ve missed him. Coyle is from the small Tucson AZ suburb of Erythema and claims to have thin desert blood and special sensitivity to the wet chill of Boston’s dawn. The WhataBurger Jr. Invitational is a sort of double-edged Thanksgiving homecoming for Coyle, who at thirteen was lured from Tucson’s own Rancho Vista Golf and Tennis Academy by promises of self-transcendence from Schtitt.

Drills work like this. Eight different emphases on eight different courts. Each quartet starts at a different court and rotates around. The top four traditionally start drills on the first court: backhands down the line, two boys to a side. Corbett Thorp lays down squares of electrician’s tape at the court’s corners and they are strongly encouraged to hit the balls into the little squares. Hal hits with Stice, Coyle with Wayne; Axford’s been sent down with Shaw and Struck for some reason. Second court: forehands, same deal. Stice consistently misses the square and gets a low-pH rejoinder from Tex Watson, hatless and pattern-balding at twenty-seven. Hal’s tooth hurts and his ankle is stiff and the cold balls come off his strings with a dead sound like chung. Tiny bratwursts of smoke ascend rhythmically from Schtitt’s little nest. Third court is ‘Butterflies,’ a complex VAPS deal where Hal hits a backhand down the line to Stice while Coyle forehands it to Wayne and then Wayne and Stice cross-court the balls back to Hal and Coyle, who have to switch sides without bashing into each other and hit back down the line now to Wayne and Stice, respectively. Wayne and Hal amuse themselves by making their cross-court balls collide on every fifth exchange or so — this is known around E.T.A. as ‘atom-smashing’ and is understandably hard to do — and the collided balls sprong wildly out onto the other practice courts, and Rik Dunkel is less amused than Wayne and Hal are, so, nicely warm now and arms singing, they’re shunted quickly onto the fourth court: volleys for depth, then for angle, then lobs and overheads, which latter drill can be converted into a disciplinary Puker if a pro-rector’s feeding you the lobs: the overhead drill’s called Tap & Whack’: Hal pedals back, terribly ankle-conscious, jumps, kicks out, nails Slice’s lob, then has to sprint up and tap the net’s tape with his Dunlop’s head as Stice lobs deep again, and Hal has to backpedal again and jump and kick and hit it, and so on. Then Hal and Coyle, both sucking wind after twenty and trying to stand up straight, feed lobs to Wayne and Stice, neither of whom is fatiguable as far as anyone can tell. You have to kick out on overheads to keep your balance in the air. Overhead, Schtitt uses an unamplified bullhorn and careful enunciation to call out for everyone to hear that Mr. revenant Hal Incandenza was letting the ball get the little much behind him on overheads, fears of the ankle maybe. Hal raises his stick in acknowledgment without looking up. To hang in past age fourteen here is to become immune to humiliation from staff. Coyle tells Hal between the lobs they send up he’d love to see Schtitt have to do twenty Tap & Whacks in a row. They’re all flushed to a shine, all chill washed off, noses running freely and heads squeaking with blood, the sun well above the sea’s dull glint and starting to melt the frozen slush from I.-Day’s snow and rain that night-custodians had swept into little wedged lines up against the lengthwise fences, which grimy wedges are now starting to melt and run. There’s still no movement in the Sunstrand stacks’ plumes. The watching prorectors stand easy with their legs apart and their arms crossed over their racquets’ faces. The same three or four booger-shaped clouds seem to pass back and forth overhead, and when they cover the sun people’s breath reappears. Stice blows on his racquet-hand and cries out thinly for the inflation of the Lung. Mr. A. F. deLint ranges behind the fence with his clipboard and whistle, blowing his nose. The girls behind him are too bundled up to be worth watching, their hair rubber-banded into little bouncing tails.

Fifth court: serves to both corners of both boxes, catching each others’ serves and serving them back. First serves, second serves, slice serves, shank serves, and back-snapping American Twist serves that Stice begs off of, telling the prorector — Neil Hartigan, who’s 2 m. tall and of so few words everybody fears him by default — he’s having lower spasms from a mispositioned bed. Then Coyle — he of the weak bladder and suspicious discharge — gets excused to go back into the eastern tree-line out of sight of the distaffs and pee, so the other three get a minute to jog over to the pavilion and stand with their hands on their hips and breathe and drink Gator-ade out of little conic paper cups you can’t put down til they’re empty. The way you flush out a cottony mouth between drills is you take a mouthful of Gatorade and puff out your cheeks to make a globe of liquid that you mangle with your teeth and tongue, then lean out and spit out into the grass and take another drink for real. The sixth court is returns of serve down the line, down the center, cross-court for depth, then for placement, then for deep placement, w/ more taped squares; then chipped center- and cross-returns against a server who follows his serve to the net. The server practices half-volleys off the chips, although Wayne and Stice are so fast that they’re on top of the net by the time the return gets to them and they can volley it away at chest-height. Wayne drills with the casual economy of somebody who’s in about second gear. The urns’ dispensers’ cups can’t stand up, their bottoms are pointy and they’ll spill any liquid still in them, is why you have to empty them. Between squads Harde’s guys will sweep the pavilion of dozens of cones.

Then, blessedly, on the seventh court, physically undemanding Finesse drills. Drops, drops for angles, topspin lobs, extreme angles, drops for extreme angles, then restful microtennis, tennis inside the service lines, very soft and precise, radical angles much encouraged. Touch- and artistry-wise nobody comes close to Hal in microtennis. By this time Hal’s turtleneck is soaked through under the alpaca jacket, and exchanging it for a sweatshirt out of the gear bag is a kind of renewal. What wind there is down here is out of the south. The temperature is now probably in the low 10’s C.; the sun’s been up an hour, and you can almost see the light-pole and transom shadows rotating slowly northwest. The Sunstrand stacks’ plumes stand there cigarette-straight, not even seeming to spread at the top; the sky is going a glassy blue.

No (tennis) balls required on the final court. Wind sprints. Probably the less said about wind sprints the better. Then more Gatorade, which Hal and Coyle are breathing too hard to enjoy, as Schtitt comes slowly down from the transom. It takes a while. You can hear his steel-toed boots hit each iron step. There is something creepy about a very fit older man, to say nothing of jackboots w/ Fila warm-ups of claret-colored silk. He’s coming this way, both hands behind his back and the pointer poking out to the side. Schtitt’s crew cut and face are nacreous as he moves east in the yellowing A.M. light. This is sort of the signal for all the quartets to gather at the Show Courts. Behind them the girls are still hitting groundstrokes in baroque combinations, much high-pitched grunting and the lifeless chung of cold hit balls. Three 14’s are made to squeegee the more extrusive melt back into the little banks of frozen leaves along the fence. At the horizon to the north a bulbous cone of picric clouds that gets taller by the hour as the Methuen-Andover border’s mammoth effectuators force northern MA’s combined oxides north against some sort of upper-air resistance, it looks like. You can see little bits of glitter from broken monitor-glass in the frozen stuff up by the fences behind 6–9, and one or two curved shards of floppy disk, and they’re a troubling sight, Penn being absent amid troubling leg-rumors, Postal-Weight with two black eyes and his nose covered with horizontal bandages that are starting to loosen and curl at the edges from sweat, and Otis P. Lord alleged to have come back from the emergency room at St. Elizabeth’s last night with the Hitachi monitor over his head, still, its removal, with all the sharp teeth of the broken screen’s glass pointing at key parts of Lord’s throat, apparently calling for the sort of esoteric expertise you have to fly in by private medical jet, according to Axford.

They all get on the outside of three cones of Gatorade, bent or squatting, sucking wind, while Schtitt stands at a sort of Parade Rest with his weatherman’s pointer behind his back and shares overall impressions with the players on the morning’s work thus far. Certain players are singled out for special mention or humiliation. Then more wind sprints. Then a brief like strategy-clinic-thing from Corbett Thorp on how approach shots down the line aren’t always the very best tactic, and why. Thorp’s a first-rate tennis mind, but his terrible stutter makes the boys so uncomfortable they have a hard time listening.[181]

The whole first shift’s on the eighth court for the final conditioning drills.[182] First are Star Drills. A dozen-plus boys on either side of the net, behind the baselines. Form a line. Go one at a time. Go: run up the side line, touch the net with your stick; then backwards to the outside corner of the service box and then forward to touch the net again; backward to the middle of the service box, forward to touch net; back to the baseline’s little jut of centerline, up to net; service box’s other outside corner, net, baseline’s corner, net, then turn and run like hell for the corner you started from. Schtitt has a stopwatch. There’s a janitorial bucket[183] placed in the doubles alley by the finish point, for potential distress. They each do the Star Drill three times. Hal has 41 seconds and 38 and 48, which is average both for him and for any seventeen-year-old with a resting pulse rate in the high 50s. John Wayne’s low of 33 occurs on his third Star, and he stops dead at the finish point and always just stands there, never bending or walking it off. Stice gets a 29 and everyone gets very excited until Schtitt says he was slow starting the watch: the arthritis in a thumb. Everyone but Wayne and Stice uses the retch-bucket in a sort of pro forma way. Sixteen-year-old Petropolis Kahn, a.k.a. ‘W.M.’ for ‘Woolly Mammoth’ because he’s so hairy, gets a 60 and then a 59 and then pitches forward onto the hard surface and lies very still. Tony Nwangi tells people to walk around him.

The cardiovascular finale is Side-to-Sides, conceived by van der Meer in the B.S. ‘60s and demonic in its simplicity. Again split into fours on eight courts. For the top 18’s, prorector R. Dunkel at net with an armful of balls and more in a hopper beside him, hitting fungoes, one to the forehand corner and then one to the backhand corner and then farther out to the forehand corner and so on. And on. Hal Incandenza is expected at least to get a racquet on each ball; for Stice and Wayne the expectations are higher. A very unpleasant drill fatigue-wise, and for Hal also ankle-wise, what with all the stopping and reversing. Hal wears two bandages over a left ankle he shaves way more often than his upper lip. Over the bandages goes an Air-Stirrup inflatable ankle brace that’s very lightweight but looks a bit like a medieval torture-implement. It was in a stop-and-reverse move much like Side-to-Sides[184] that Hal tore all the soft left-ankle tissue he then owned, at fifteen, in his ankle, at Atlanta’s Easter Bowl, in the third round, which he was losing anyway. Dunkel goes fairly easy on Hal, at least on the first two go-arounds, because of the ankle. Hal’s going to be seeded in at least the top 4 at the WhataBurger Inv. in a couple weeks, and woe to the prorector who lets Hal get hurt the way Hal let some of his Little Buddies get hurt yesterday.

What’s potentially demonic about Side-to-Sides is that the duration of the drill and pace and angle of the fungoes to be chased down from side to side are entirely at the prorector’s discretion. Prorector Rik Dunkel, a former 16’s-doubles runner-up at Jr. Wimbledon and a decent enough guy, the son of some kind of plastic-packaging-systems tycoon on the South Shore, tied with Thorp for brightest of the prorectors (more or less by default), regarded as kind of a mystic because he refers people sometimes to Lyle and has been observed sitting at community gatherings with his eyes closed but not sleeping … but the point is a decent enough guy but not much into any kind of exchange of quarter. He seems to have received instructions to put the particular hurt on Ortho Stice this time, and by his third go-around Stice is trying to weep without breath and mewing for his aunts.[185] But anyway everybody goes through Sides-to-Sides three times. Even Petropolis Kahn staggers through them, who after Stars had had to be sort of lugged over by Stephan Wagenknecht and Jeff Wax with his Nikes dragging behind him and his head swinging free on his neck and given kind of a swingset-shove to get started. Hal feels for Kahn, who’s not fat but is in the Schacht-type mold, very thick and solid, except also carrying extra weight in terms of leg-and-back-hair, and who always tires easily no matter how hard he conditions. Kahn makes it through but stays bent over the distress-bucket long after the third go-around, staring into it, and stays that way while everybody else removes more soaked bottom layers of clothing and accepts clean towels from a halfway-house part-time black girl with a towel cart, and picks up balls.[186]