Cliched Truth

In one section of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which turned 20 this year, we follow Don Gately, erstwhile expert in breaking and entering (B&E) and addict, to a meeting of a Boston chapter of AA. Wallace gives us several harrowing glimpses into addiction, one of which comes from “John L.,” who shares at the meeting at Ennet House recovery center:

”. . . then you’re in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed his smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it’s the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you’ve both worn for weeks now get torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where you heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest’s center and center-less eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you’ve been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land it. You see now that It’s your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It’s gotten you into is undeniable and you still can’t stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can’t stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. . . . You are in a kind of hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around” (347).

If few writers can match Wallace’s vivid inventiveness, many can write harrowing addiction stories. But Wallace goes on to describe the miracle of recovery:

“The process is the neat reverse of what brought you down and In here: Substances start out being so magically great, so much the interior jigsaw’s missing piece, that at the start you just known, deep in your gut, that they’ll never let you down; you just know it. But they do. And then this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee is so lame that you just know there’s no way it could ever possible work except for the utter morons.”

Yet, “you heed the improbable warnings because by now you have no faith in your own sense of what’s really improbable and what isn’t, since AA seems, improbably enough, to be working, and with no faith in your own senses you’re confused, flummoxed, and when people with A time strongly advise you to keep coming you nod robotically and keeping coming, and you sweep floors and scrub out ashtrays and fill stained steel urns with hideous coffee, and you keep getting ritually down on your big knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a burnished shield against all who would ask aid of it – how can you pray to a ‘God’ you believe only morons believe in, still? – but the old guys say it doesn’t yet matter what you believe or don’t believe, Just Do It they say, and like a shock-trained organism without any kind of independent human will you do exactly like you’re told, you keep coming and coming, nightly, and now you take pains not to get booted out of the squalid halfway house you’d at first tried to get discharged from, you Hang In and Hang In, meeting after meeting, warm day after cold day . . . ; and not only does the urge to get high stay more or less away, but more general life-quality-type things . . . things seem to get progressively somehow better, inside, for a while, then worse, then even better. . . . (350)”

Which goes to show you, Gately tells the new residents at Ennet House, “the truth is usually not just un- but anti-interesting.” Every one of AA’s “seminal little mini-epiphanies . . . is always polyesterishly banal” (358).