Both House Director Pat Montesian and Don Gately’s A.A. sponsor like to remind him how the new Ennet House resident Geoffrey Day could be an invaluable teacher for him, Gately, as Staff.
“So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by clichés” is what Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was at 0825. “To turn my will and life over to the care of clichés. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Ask for help. Thy will not mine bе done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.”
Poor old Charlotte Treat, needlеpointing primly beside him on the old vinyl couch that just came from Goodwill, purses her lips. “You need to ask for some gratitude.”
“Oh no but the point is that I’ve already been fortunate enough to receive gratitude.” Day crosses one leg over the other in a way that inclines his whole little soft body toward her. “For which, believe you me, I’m grateful. I cultivate gratitude. That’s part of the system of clichés I’m here to live by. An attitude of gratitude. A grateful drunk will never drink. I know the actual cliché is ‘A grateful heart will never drink,’ but since organs can’t properly be said to imbibe and I’m still afflicted with just enough self-will to decline to live by utter non sequiturs, as opposed to just good old clichés, I’m taking the doubtless hazardous liberty of light amendment. Albeit grateful amendment, of course.”
Charlotte Treat looks over to Gately for some sort of help or Staff enforcement of dogma. The poor bitch is clueless. All of them are clueless, still. Gately reminds himself that he too is probably still mostly clueless, even after all these hundreds of days. “I Didn’t Know That I Didn’t Know” is another of these slogans that look so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drop off and deepen like the lobster waters off the North Shore. As Gately fidgets his way through daily a.m. meditation he always tries to remind himself daily that this is all an Ennet House residency is supposed to do: buy these poor yutzes some time, some thin pie slice of abstinent time, till they can start to get a whiff of what’s true and deep, almost magic, under the shallow surface of what they’re trying to do.
“I cultivate it assiduously. I do special gratitude exercises at night up there in the room. Gratitude-ups, you could call them. Ask Randy over there if I don’t do them like clockwork. Diligently. Sedulously.”
“Well it’s true is all,” Treat sniffs. “About gratitude.”
Everybody else except Gately, who is lying on the old other couch opposite them, is ignoring this exchange, watching an old movie whose tracking is a little messed up so that staticky stripes eat at the picture’s bottom and top. The Ennet House Director, Pat M., encourages new Staff to think of residents they’d like to bludgeon to death as teachers of patience, tolerance, self-discipline, and restraint. She can always tell when Gately’s exercising tolerant restraint, because of the slight facial tic that betrays his effort of will, and makes it a point to praise his willingness to grow and change when the cheek starts to spasm.
Day isn’t done. “One of these exercises is being grateful that life is so much easier now. I used sometimes to think. I used to think in long compound sentences with subordinate clauses and even the odd polysyllable. Now I find I needn’t. Now I live by the dictates of macramé samplers ordered from the back-page ad of an old Reader’s Digest or Saturday Evening Post. Easy Does It. Remember to Remember. But for the Grace of God. Turn It Over. Terse, hard-boiled. Good old Norman Rockwell–Paul Harvey wisdom. I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these clichés. In a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the cliché pool? No inflection necessary? Too many syllables, probably.”
Poor old Charlotte Treat, all of nine weeks clean, is looking primmer and primmer. She glances again over at Gately, lying on his back, taking up the living room’s whole other sofa, one sneaker up on the sofa’s square worn-fabric arm, his eyes almost closed. Only House Staff get to lie on the couches.
“Denial,” Charlotte finally says, “is not a river in Egypt.”
“Hows about the both of you shut the fuck up,” says Emil Minty.
Geoffrey (not Geoff, Geoffrey) Day has been at Ennet House eight days. He came in from Roxbury’s infamous Dimock Detox, where he was the only white person, which Gately bets must have been broadening for him. Day has a squished blank smeared flat face, one requiring great effort to like, and eyes that are just starting to lose the nictitated glaze of early sobriety. Gately tries to remind himself that Day is a newcomer and still very raw. A red-wine-and-Quaalude man who finally nodded out in late October and put his Saab through the window of a Malden sporting-goods store and then got out and proceeded to browse until Boston’s finest came and got him. He’d taught something horseshit-sounding like social historicity or historical sociality at some Jr. college up the Expressway in Medford and came in saying in his Intake interview that he also manned the helm of a scholarly quarterly. Word for word, the House Manager had said: “manned the helm” and “scholarly quarterly.” His Intake indicated that Day’d been in and out of a blackout for most of the last several years, and his wiring is still as they say pretty frayed. His detox at Dimock, where they barely have the resources to slip you a Librium if you start to D.T., must have been real grim, because Geoffrey D. now alleges it never happened: his story is he just strolled into Ennet House on a lark one day from his home five-plus miles away in Malden and found the place too hilariously egregious to want to leave.
It’s the newcomers with some education that are the worst, according to Staffer Eugenio M. They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head. Day wears chinos of indeterminate hue, brown socks with black shoes, and shirts that the House Manager had described on the Intake form as “East-European-type turtleneck shirts.” Day’s now on the vinyl couch with Charlotte Treat after breakfast in the Ennet House living room with a few of the other residents who either aren’t working or don’t have to be at work early, and with Gately, who’d pulled a night shift down in the front office till 0400, then got temp-relieved by Johnette Foltz so he could go to work down at the Shattuck Shelter till 0700, and then came and hauled ass back up and took back over so Johnette F. could go off to her N.A.-convention thing with a bunch of N.A. kids in what looked like a VW bus without a hood over the engine, and is now, Gately, covering Johnette’s half of the day shift until somebody else gets here, and is trying to unclench and center himself inside by tracing the cracks in the paint of the living room ceiling with his eyes. Gately often feels a terrible sense of loss, narcotics-wise, in the a.m., still, even after all this drug-free time. His A.A. sponsor over at the White Flag group says some people never get over the loss of what they’d thought was their one true best friend and lover; they just have to pray daily for acceptance and patience and the brass danglers to move forward through the grief and loss, to wait for time to harden the scab. The sponsor doesn’t give Gately one bit of shit for feeling bad: on the contrary, he commends Gately for his candor in breaking down and crying like a baby and finally telling him about it one a.m., the sense of terrible loss. It’s a myth no one misses it. Their particular Substance. Shit, you wouldn’t need to give it up if you didn’t miss it. You just have to Turn It Over, the emptiness and loss, Keep Coming, show up, pray, Ask for Help. Gately rubs his eye. Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of clichés—Day’s right about how it seems. Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering by the way things seem to him, he’s a dead man sure. Gately’s already watched dozens come through here and leave early and some of them die. If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the office late at night to clutch at his pant cuff and blubber and beg for help, Gately’ll get to tell Day that the clichéd directives of recovery are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say. But he’ll only get to say it if Day comes and asks. Personally, Gately gives Day like a month at the outside before he’s back tipping his hat to parking meters. Except who is Gately to judge who’ll end up getting the Gift of the program v. who won’t, he needs to remember. He tries to feel like Day is teaching him patience. It takes great patience and tolerance not to want to punt the guy out into Commonwealth Ave. and open up his bunk to somebody that really wants it, desperately, the Gift. Except who is Gately to think he can know who wants it and who doesn’t, deep down. Gately’s arm is behind his head, up against the sofa’s other arm. The VCR is on to something violent Gately neither sees nor hears. He can sort of turn his attention on and off like a light. Even when he was a resident here, he’d had this pro housebreaker’s ability to screen input, to do sensory triage. It was one reason he’d been able to stick out his nine residential months with twenty-one other newly detoxed housebreakers, hoods, whores, fired execs, subway musicians, beer-bloated construction workers, vagrants, cirrhotic car salesmen, bunko artists, mincing pillow biters, North End hard guys, Avon ladies, pimply kids with nose-rings, denial-ridden housewives and etc., all jonesing and head-gaming and desperate and grieving and basically whacked-out and producing non-stopping output 24/7.
At some point in here Day says, “So bring on the lobotomist, bring him on I say!”
Except that Gately’s counsellor when he was a resident here, Eugenio Martinez, one of the volunteer alumni counsellors, a one-eared former boiler-room bunko man and now a cellular-phone retailer who’d gone through the House under the original pre-Pat founder and now had about like ten years clean, Eugenio M. had lovingly confronted Gately early on about his special burglar’s selective attention and about how it could be dangerous, because how can you be sure it’s you doing the input screening and not the Spider. Eugenio had called addiction the Spider instead of the Disease, and dispensed his advice in terms of like for example “Feeding the Spider” v. “Starving the Spider” and so on. He’d called Gately into the House Manager’s back office and said what if screening his attention’s input turned out to be Feeding the Spider and what about an experimental unscreening of input for a while. And Gately had said he’d do his best to try and had come back out and tried to watch a Celtics game while two resident pillow biters from off the Fenway were on the couch having this involved conversation about some third fag having to go in and get the skeleton of some kind of fucking rodent removed from inside his butthole. The unscreening experiment had lasted half an hour. This was right before Gately got his ninety-day chip and wasn’t exactly wrapped real tight, still. Ennet House this year is nothing like the freak show it was when Gately went through. Gately has been Substance-free for four hundred and twenty-one days today.
Charlotte Treat, with her carefully made-up, ruined face, is watching the static-striped movie on the VCR while she needlepoints something. Conversation between her and Geoffrey D. has mercifully petered out. Day is scanning the room for somebody else to engage and piss off so he can prove to himself he doesn’t fit in here and stay separated off isolated inside himself and maybe get them so pissed off there’s a beef and he gets bounced out, Day, and it won’t be his fault. You can almost hear the Spider of his Disease chewing away inside his head. Emil Minty, Randy Lenz, and Bruce Green are also in the room, sprawled in spring-shot chairs, lighting one gasper off the end of the last, their posture the don’t-fuck-with-me slouch of the streets that here makes their bodies’ texture somehow hard to distinguish from that of the chairs. Nell Gunther is sitting at the long table in the doorless dining room that opens out right off the old donated VCR and monitor’s pine stand, whitening under her nails with a manicure pencil amid the remains of something she’s eaten that involved serious syrup. Joe S. is also in there, way down by himself at the table’s far end, trying to saw at a waffle with a knife and fork attached to the stumps of his wrists with Velcro bands. A long-ago former C.P.A., Joe Smith is forty-five and looks seventy, has almost all-white hair that’s waxy and yellow from close-order smoke, and finally got into Ennet House last month after a summer in the Cambridge City Shelter. Joe S. is making his fiftieth-odd stab at some kind of durable sobriety in A.A. Once devoutly R.C., he’s had crippling trouble with Faith in a Loving God ever since the R.C. Church apparently granted his wife an annulment in ’91 after fifteen years of marriage. Then for several years a rooming-house drunk, which in Gately’s view is like one step up from a homeless-person-type drunk. Joe S. got jumped and rolled and beaten half to death in Cambridge in the storm on Xmas Eve of last year and left to freeze in an alley, and ended up losing his hands and feet. Whenever residents Doony Glynn and Wade McDade are together in a room and Joe S. comes teetering in on his blocky prosthetic shoes, G. and McD. will stand up and shout together: “Hail Joe, Asleep in the Snow!” Repeated threats of Restriction and worse have not broken them of this practice. Doony Glynn’s also been observed telling Joe Smith things like that there’s some new guy coming in and moving into the Disabled Room with Joe who’s totally minus arms or legs or even a head and communicates by farting in Morse code. Which sally earned Glynn three days’ Full House Restriction and a week’s extra House Chore for what Johnette Foltz described in the Staff Log as “XSive Crulty.” There is a vague intestinal moaning in Gately’s right side. Watching Joe Smith smoke a Benson & Hedges by holding it between his stumps with his elbows out like a man with pruning shears is an adventure in fucking pathos, as far as Gately’s concerned. And forget about what it’s like trying to watch Joe S. try to light a match.
Gately, who’s been on Live-In Staff here four months now, believes Charlotte Treat’s devotion to needlepoint is suspect. All those needles. In and out of all that thin sterile-white cotton stretched drum-tight in its round frame. The needle makes a kind of thud and squeak when it goes in the cloth. It’s not much like the soundless pop and slide of a real cook-and-shoot. But still. She takes such great care.
Gately wonders what color he’d call the ceiling if forced to call it a color. It’s not beige and it’s not gray. The brown-yellow tones are from high-tar gaspers; a pall hangs up near the ceiling even this early in the new sober day. Some of the drunks and trank-jockeys stay up most of the night, joggling their feet and chain-smoking, even though there’s no movies or music allowed after midnight. Don G. has that odd House Staffer’s knack, already, after four months, of seeing everything significant in both living and dining rooms without really looking. Emil Minty, a hard-core smack-addict punk here for reasons nobody can quite yet pin down, is in an old mustard-colored easy chair with his combat boots up on one of the standing ashtrays, which is tilting not quite enough for Gately to tell him to watch out, please. Minty’s orange Mohawk and the shaved skull around it are starting to grow out brown, which is just not a pleasant sight in the morning at all. The other ashtray on the floor by his chair is full of the ragged new moons of bitten nails, which has got to mean that Esther Thrale, who Gately ordered to bed at 0230, was back down here in the chair having at her nails again the second Gately left to go mop up shit at the Shattuck Shelter. Another gurgle and abdominal chug. When he’s up all night Gately’s stomach gets all acidy and tight, from either the coffee, maybe, or just the staying up. Emil M.’s been sleeping in the streets since he was maybe sixteen, Gately can tell: he’s got that sooty complexion homeless guys have where the soot has insinuated itself into the dermal layer. And the big-armed driver for Leisure Time Ice, the quiet kid, Bruce Green, a garbage-head all-Substance-type kid, maybe twenty-one, face very slightly smunched in on one side, wears sleeveless khaki shirts, used to live in a trailer in that apocalyptic Enfield trailer park out near Allston; Gately likes Green because he seems to have sense enough to keep his yap shut when he’s got nothing important to say, which is basically all the time. The tattoo on the kid’s right tricep is a spear-pierced heart over the hideous name mildred bonk, who Bruce G. told him was a ray of living light and a dead ringer for the late lead singer of The Fiends in Human Shape and his dead heart’s one love ever, and who took their daughter and left him this summer for some guy who’d told her he ranched fucking longhorn cows east of Atlantic City, N.J. He’s got, even by Ennet House standards, major-league sleep trouble, Green, and he and Gately play cribbage sometimes in the wee dead hours, a game Gately picked up in jail. Joe S. is now hunched in a meaty coughing fit, his elbows out and forehead purple. Gately can see everything without moving his eyes at all.
And then Lenz. Randy Lenz is a small-time organic-coke dealer who wears sport coats rolled up over his big forearms and is always checking his pulse on the inside of his wrists. It’s come out that Lenz is of keen interest to both sides of the law; this past May he’d apparently all of a sudden lost all control and holed up in a Charlestown motel and freebased most of a whole hundred grams he’d been fronted by a suspiciously trusting Brazilian in what Lenz didn’t know was supposed to have been a D.E.A. sting operation in the South End. Having screwed both sides in what Gately secretly views as a delicious fuckup, Randy Lenz has, since May, been the most wanted he’s probably ever been. He is seedily handsome in the way of pimps and low-level coke dealers, muscular in the way certain guys’ muscles look muscular but can’t really lift anything, with complexly gelled hair and the little birdlike head movements of the deeply vain. One forearm’s hair has a little hairless patch, which Gately knows all too well spells knife owner, and if there’s one thing Gately’s never been able to stomach it’s a knife owner, little swaggery guys who always queer a square beef and come up off the ground with a blade so you have to get cut to take it away from them. Lenz is teaching Gately a restrained compassion for people you pretty much want to beat up on sight. And it’s obvious to everybody except Pat Montesian—whose odd gullibility in the presence of human sludge, though, Gately needs to try to remember, was one of the reasons why he himself had got into Ennet House—that Lenz is here mostly just to hide. He rarely leaves the House except under compulsion, avoids all windows, and travels nightly to the required A.A./N.A. meetings in a disguise that makes him look like Cesar Romero after a terrible accident; and then he always wants to walk home solo afterward, which is not encouraged. Lenz’s leg never stops joggling; Day claims it joggles even worse in sleep. Lenz is seated low in the northeasternmost corner of an old fake-velour love seat that he’s jammed in the northeasternmost corner of the living room. Randy Lenz has a strange compulsive need to be north of everything, and possibly even northeast of everything, and Gately has no clue what it’s about but observes Lenz’s position routinely for his own interest and files.
Second-month resident Charlotte Treat has violently red hair. As in hair the color of like a red crayon. She doesn’t have to work the usual outside menial job, because she has some strain of the Virus or maybe A.R.C. Former prostitute, reformed. Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It’s like long-repressed librarian ambitions come flooding out. Charlotte T. has a cut-rate whore’s hard, half-pretty face, her eyes lassoed with shadow around all four lids. Her also with a case of the dermal-layer sooty complexion. The thing about Treat is how her cheeks are deeply pitted in deep trenches that she packs with foundation and tries to cover over with blush, which along with the hair gives her the look of a mean clown. The ghastly wounds in her cheeks look for all the world like somebody got at her with a woodburning kit at some point in her career path. Gately would rather not know.
Don Gately is almost twenty-nine and sober and just huge. One shoulder blade and buttock pooch out over the side of a sofa that sags like a hammock. Lying there gurgling and inert with eyes half shut and a tolerant if ticcy smile. Gately looks less built than poured, with the smooth immovability of an Easter Island statue. It would be nice if intimidating size weren’t one of the factors in a male graduate’s getting offered the male Live-In Staff job here, but there you are. He has a massive square head made squarer-looking by the Prince Valiant-ish haircut he tries to maintain himself in the mirror, to save money. Room and board aside—plus of course the opportunity for Service—he makes very little money as an Ennet House Staffer, and is paying off restitution schedules in three different district courts. He has the fluttery white-eyed smile now of someone who’s holding himself just over the level of doze. Pat Montesian isn’t due in until 0900, and he can’t go to sleep until she shows, because the House Manager has driven Jennifer Belbin to a court appearance downtown and Gately’s the only Staffer here; Foltz, the other Live-In, is at a Narcotics Anonymous convention in Hartford for the long weekend. Gately personally is not hot on N.A.: so many relapses and unhumble returns, so many drug stories told with undisguised bullshit pride, so little emphasis on Service or serious Message; all those people in leather and metal, preening. Rooms full of Randy Lenzes, all hugging each other, pretending they don’t miss narcotics. Rampant vulnerable-newcomer fucking. There’s a difference between abstinence and recovery, Gately knows. Though who is Gately to judge what works for who. He just knows what seems like it works for him, today. A.A.’s tough Boston love, the White Flag group, old guys with suspendered bellies and white crewcuts and geologic amounts of sober time who’ll take your big square head off if they sense you’re getting complacent or chasing tail or forgetting that your life still hangs in the balance every fucking day. White Flag newcomers so crazed and sick they can’t sit, and have to pace at the meeting’s rear, like Gately when he first came. Retired old kindergarten teachers in polyresin slacks and a pince-nez who bake cookies for the weekly meeting and relate from behind the podium how they used to blow bartenders at closing for just two more fingers in a paper cup to take home against the morning’s needled light. Gately, albeit an oral-narcotics man from way back, has committed himself to A.A. He drank his fair share, too, he figures, after all.
House Director Pat M. is due in at 0900 and has application interviews with three people, 2 F and 1 M, who better be showing up soon; and Gately will get up and answer the door when they don’t know enough to just come in and will say Welcome and get them a cup of coffee if he judges them able to hold it. He’ll take them aside and tip them off to be sure to pet Pat M.’s dogs during the interview. The dogs’ll be sprawled all over the front office, sides heaving, writhing and biting at themselves. He’ll tell the applicants it’s a proved fact that if Pat’s dogs like you, you’re in. Pat M. has directed Gately to tell applicants this, and then if they do actually pet the dogs—two hideous white golden retrievers with suppurating skin afflictions, plus one has grand-mal epilepsy—it’ll betray a level of desperate willingness that Pat says is just about all she goes by, deciding.
A nameless cat oozes by on the broad windowsill above the back of the fabric couch. Animals here come and go. Graduates adopt them or they just disappear. Their fleas tend to remain. Gately’s intestines gurgle. Boston’s dawn this morning was chemically pink. The nail parings in the ashtray on the floor are, he sees, way too big to be fingernail bits. These bitten arcs are broad and thick and a deep autumnal yellow. They are not from fingers. He swallows hard.
Gately’d tell Day how even if they are just clichés, clichés are: (a) soothing, and (b) proclaim a common sort of common sense, and (c) license the universal assent that drowns out silence. And fourth, silence is deadly, pure Spider-food, if you’ve got the Disease. The older White Flaggers say you can spell the Disease “dis-ease,” which sums the basic situation up nicely. Gately should probably also tell him that the only real ultimate relief from the Disease is God, as in finding and cultivating some kind of personally comfortable and worshipable Higher Power; but Gately still can’t bring himself to say this kind of thing out loud. Pat has a meeting at the Bureau of Substance Abuse Services in Government Center at noon she needs to be reminded about, since she can’t read her own handwriting. Gately envisions going around having to find out who’s biting their fucking toenails in the living room and putting the disgusting toenail bits in the ashtray at like 0500. House Regs prohibit bare feet anyplace downstairs.
There’s a pale-brown water stain on the ceiling over Day and Treat the exact shape of Florida. Randy Lenz has issues with Geoffrey Day because Day is educated and a teacher and mans a journal’s helm. This threatens the self-concept of Lenz, who sees himself as a kind of hiply sexy artist-dash-intellectual. Small-time dealers never think of themselves as just small-time dealers. For Occupation on his Intake form Lenz had put “free lance writer.” And he makes a big show of the fact he reads. For his first sober week here in August he’d sat all day smoking and joggling in the northeast corner of the living room, holding open a gigantic medical dictionary and pretending to be reading medical words until Glynn and McDade started busting his balls about never turning the page. At which juncture he quit reading and started talking, making everybody nostalgic for when he just read. Johnette F. had put in the September Log that Lenz would, quote, “get on your very last nerve,” which Gately had underlined in a different-color ink. Plus Geoffrey D. has issues with Randy L., too. The dislike is mutual. There’s a certain way they don’t look at each other. And so now of course they’re mashed in together in the tiny three-man bedroom, since last week three guys in one night missed curfew and came in without one normal-sized pupil between them and all refused Urines and got discharged on the spot, and so Day got moved up in his first week from the five-man newcomers’ room to the three-man. Seniority comes quick around here. Lenz and Day: a beef may be brewing. Day’ll try to goad Lenz into a beef that’ll be public enough so he doesn’t get hurt but does get bounced out, and then he can leave treatment and go back to Chianti and ludes and make out like the relapse is Ennet House’s and never have to confront himself or his Disease. To Gately, Geoffrey D. is like a wide-open textbook on the Disease. One of Gately’s jobs is to keep an eye on what’s possibly brewing among residents and let Pat or the House Manager know and to try to smooth things down in advance if possible.
The ceiling’s color could be called dun, if forced. Someone has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn’t like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn’t happen. Here everybody has to make their little comment.
Time is passing. Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging and palpable. You can hear ticking in clockless rooms here. Gately changes the angle of one sneaker, puts his other arm behind his head. His head has real weight and pressure. Randy Lenz’s obsessive compulsions include the need to be north, a fear of disks, a tendency to take his own pulse, a pathological fear of every form of timepiece, and a constant need to know the time with great precision.
“Day man, you got the time maybe real quick?” Lenz. For the third time in half an hour. Patience, tolerance, reserve, compassion. Gately remembers his own first few straight months here: he’d felt the sharp edge of every second that went by. And the freak-show dreams. Nightmares beyond the worst D.T.s you’d ever heard of. One reason to have a night-shift Staffer down in the front office is so somebody’s there for the residents to talk at when—not if, when—when the detox nightmares ratchet them out of twisted sheets at like 0300. Nightmares about relapsing and getting high, about not getting high but having everybody think you’re high, about getting high with your alcoholic mom and then killing her with a baseball bat. Whipping it out for a court-ordered Urine and starting up and flames come shooting out. Getting high and bursting into flames. Having a waterspout shaped like an enormous syringe suck you up inside. A vehicle explodes in a bloom of enhanced flame on the VCR, its hood up like an old pop tab.
Day is making a broad gesture out of checking his wristwatch. “Right around eight-thirty, fella.”
Randy L.’s fine nostrils flair and whiten. He stares straight ahead, eyes narrowed, fingers on his wrist. Day purses his lips. Gately hangs his head over the arm of the sofa and regards Lenz upside down. “That look on your face there mean something there, Randy? Are you like communicating something with that look?”
“Does anybody maybe know the time a little more exactly is what I’m wondering, Don, since Day doesn’t.”
Gately checks his own cheap digital, head still hung over the sofa’s arm. “I got eight-thirty-two and fourteen, fifteen, sixteen seconds, Randy.”
“Thanks a lot D.G. man.”
And now Day has that same flared narrow look for Lenz. “We’ve been over this, friend. Amigo. Sport. You do this all the time with me. Again I’ll say it—I don’t have a digital watch. This is a fine old antique watch. It points. A memento of vastly better days. It’s not a digital watch. It’s not a cesium-based atomic clock. It points, with hands. See, Spiro Agnew here has two little arms: they point, they suggest. It’s not a fucking stopwatch for life. Lenz, get a watch. Am I right? Why don’t you just get a watch, Lenz. Three people I happen to know of for a fact have offered to get you a watch and let you pay them back whenever you feel comfortable about poking your nose out and investigating the work-a-world. Get a watch. Obtain a watch. A fine, digital, incredibly wide watch, about five times the width of your wrist, so you have to hold it like a falconer, and it treats time like pi.”
“Easy does it,” Charlotte Treat half sings, not looking up from her needle and frame.
Day looks around at her. “I don’t believe I was speaking to you in any way shape or form.”
“Peace,” Gately says softly, his head still hanging over. Joe Smith, upside-down, is having another coughing fit over in the dining room.
Lenz is staring blackly at Geoffrey Day. “If you’re trying to fuck with me, brother.” He shakes his fine shiny head. “Big mistake.”
Day puts his hands up to his cheeks. “Ooh I’m all atremble. I can barely hold my arm steady to read my watch.”
Lenz points his cigarette. “Big big big real big mistake.”
Emil M.’s contorted way forward in his chair in the way of somebody communicating that he’s trying to watch TV around a distraction. “Hows about I give you both a beating if you don’t shut up.”
A time-killing fantasy Gately has lately is in the middle of bullshit squabbles like this he all of a sudden picks Geoffrey D. up bodily and swings him by his dress shoes and uses him as a bludgeon to beat Randy Lenz’s over-groomed head in, freeing up two bunks at once. His progress consists of just entertaining such thoughts now instead of acting on them, which Pat M. reassures him is almost the same as patience. The Ennet House living room has no clock. Gately likes that his cheap watch counts off the seconds: sometimes he just sits and watches the seconds on his big wrist tick digitally off, to remind himself that an interval of time is passing, will pass.
Day has crossed his legs and laced his hands over the knee, a posture they all know Lenz detests for some reason. “So let me get this straight. We’re engaged in an argument about whether it’s appropriate for you continually to harass innocent watch wearers for the exact time in lieu of buying your own watch, and you win the argument by claiming that my argument is an attempt to quote fuck with you, and by threatening me with physical harm if I don’t acquiesce to your argument. This, to you, is winning.”
Lenz says, “I ain’t got time for this shit.”
Charlotte Treat slaps at her needlepoint frame to indicate she’s exasperated. “He didn’t threaten you.”
Emil Minty suddenly stands, making the ashtray topple. “I’m fucking serious.”
Gately twists on the couch to catch Minty’s eye. Past Minty, down at the dining-room table’s end, Joe S. is still coughing, still hunched over, his face a dusky purple; and Nell Gunther is behind him pounding him on the back so hard that it keeps sending him forward over his ashtray, and he waves one stump vaguely over his shoulder to signal her to quit. Gately locks eyes with Minty until the kid sits back down, running a hand over his Mohawk and wearily asking when he can get the fuck out of here.
“I’m just trying to get clear on what’s being said here,” Day is saying.
Only a couple months ago Gately would have stood up and stood over Minty and physically intimidated him to get him to sit down. Charlotte T. is trying to catch Gately’s eye as Lenz sits there joggling and telling Day all he’s saying is Day better hope to Christ he doesn’t make Lenz have to get up out of this chair right here. Minty is making no move to start cleaning up the ashtray’s mess. Gately has no idea where he’ll live or what he’ll do when his term as Live-In Staff is over.
Day joggles his own foot and asks Gately for his feedback on what’s transpiring here, whether Staff can confirm hearing a, how shall we say, he says, menacing aspect to Lenz’s tone and/or content. Joe Smith’s coughs have taken on your serious cougher’s deep slow searching aspect, like he’s trying to pronounce something.
“Easy Does It!” shrieks Treat, holding out her absurdly tiny needle, brandishing it.
“Peace on earth good will toward men,” says Gately, back all the way on his back, smiling up at the cracked dun ceiling, not even a hint of a tic to betray anything but a tolerant willingness to let it all pass, for the moment. To work itself out, seek its own level, settle, blow over. Die of neglect. He’s pretty sure he knows who farted.
“So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by clichés” is what Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was at 0825. “To turn my will and life over to the care of clichés. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Ask for help. Thy will not mine bе done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.”
Poor old Charlotte Treat, needlеpointing primly beside him on the old vinyl couch that just came from Goodwill, purses her lips. “You need to ask for some gratitude.”
“Oh no but the point is that I’ve already been fortunate enough to receive gratitude.” Day crosses one leg over the other in a way that inclines his whole little soft body toward her. “For which, believe you me, I’m grateful. I cultivate gratitude. That’s part of the system of clichés I’m here to live by. An attitude of gratitude. A grateful drunk will never drink. I know the actual cliché is ‘A grateful heart will never drink,’ but since organs can’t properly be said to imbibe and I’m still afflicted with just enough self-will to decline to live by utter non sequiturs, as opposed to just good old clichés, I’m taking the doubtless hazardous liberty of light amendment. Albeit grateful amendment, of course.”
Charlotte Treat looks over to Gately for some sort of help or Staff enforcement of dogma. The poor bitch is clueless. All of them are clueless, still. Gately reminds himself that he too is probably still mostly clueless, even after all these hundreds of days. “I Didn’t Know That I Didn’t Know” is another of these slogans that look so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drop off and deepen like the lobster waters off the North Shore. As Gately fidgets his way through daily a.m. meditation he always tries to remind himself daily that this is all an Ennet House residency is supposed to do: buy these poor yutzes some time, some thin pie slice of abstinent time, till they can start to get a whiff of what’s true and deep, almost magic, under the shallow surface of what they’re trying to do.
“I cultivate it assiduously. I do special gratitude exercises at night up there in the room. Gratitude-ups, you could call them. Ask Randy over there if I don’t do them like clockwork. Diligently. Sedulously.”
“Well it’s true is all,” Treat sniffs. “About gratitude.”
Everybody else except Gately, who is lying on the old other couch opposite them, is ignoring this exchange, watching an old movie whose tracking is a little messed up so that staticky stripes eat at the picture’s bottom and top. The Ennet House Director, Pat M., encourages new Staff to think of residents they’d like to bludgeon to death as teachers of patience, tolerance, self-discipline, and restraint. She can always tell when Gately’s exercising tolerant restraint, because of the slight facial tic that betrays his effort of will, and makes it a point to praise his willingness to grow and change when the cheek starts to spasm.
Day isn’t done. “One of these exercises is being grateful that life is so much easier now. I used sometimes to think. I used to think in long compound sentences with subordinate clauses and even the odd polysyllable. Now I find I needn’t. Now I live by the dictates of macramé samplers ordered from the back-page ad of an old Reader’s Digest or Saturday Evening Post. Easy Does It. Remember to Remember. But for the Grace of God. Turn It Over. Terse, hard-boiled. Good old Norman Rockwell–Paul Harvey wisdom. I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these clichés. In a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the cliché pool? No inflection necessary? Too many syllables, probably.”
Poor old Charlotte Treat, all of nine weeks clean, is looking primmer and primmer. She glances again over at Gately, lying on his back, taking up the living room’s whole other sofa, one sneaker up on the sofa’s square worn-fabric arm, his eyes almost closed. Only House Staff get to lie on the couches.
“Denial,” Charlotte finally says, “is not a river in Egypt.”
“Hows about the both of you shut the fuck up,” says Emil Minty.
Geoffrey (not Geoff, Geoffrey) Day has been at Ennet House eight days. He came in from Roxbury’s infamous Dimock Detox, where he was the only white person, which Gately bets must have been broadening for him. Day has a squished blank smeared flat face, one requiring great effort to like, and eyes that are just starting to lose the nictitated glaze of early sobriety. Gately tries to remind himself that Day is a newcomer and still very raw. A red-wine-and-Quaalude man who finally nodded out in late October and put his Saab through the window of a Malden sporting-goods store and then got out and proceeded to browse until Boston’s finest came and got him. He’d taught something horseshit-sounding like social historicity or historical sociality at some Jr. college up the Expressway in Medford and came in saying in his Intake interview that he also manned the helm of a scholarly quarterly. Word for word, the House Manager had said: “manned the helm” and “scholarly quarterly.” His Intake indicated that Day’d been in and out of a blackout for most of the last several years, and his wiring is still as they say pretty frayed. His detox at Dimock, where they barely have the resources to slip you a Librium if you start to D.T., must have been real grim, because Geoffrey D. now alleges it never happened: his story is he just strolled into Ennet House on a lark one day from his home five-plus miles away in Malden and found the place too hilariously egregious to want to leave.
It’s the newcomers with some education that are the worst, according to Staffer Eugenio M. They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head. Day wears chinos of indeterminate hue, brown socks with black shoes, and shirts that the House Manager had described on the Intake form as “East-European-type turtleneck shirts.” Day’s now on the vinyl couch with Charlotte Treat after breakfast in the Ennet House living room with a few of the other residents who either aren’t working or don’t have to be at work early, and with Gately, who’d pulled a night shift down in the front office till 0400, then got temp-relieved by Johnette Foltz so he could go to work down at the Shattuck Shelter till 0700, and then came and hauled ass back up and took back over so Johnette F. could go off to her N.A.-convention thing with a bunch of N.A. kids in what looked like a VW bus without a hood over the engine, and is now, Gately, covering Johnette’s half of the day shift until somebody else gets here, and is trying to unclench and center himself inside by tracing the cracks in the paint of the living room ceiling with his eyes. Gately often feels a terrible sense of loss, narcotics-wise, in the a.m., still, even after all this drug-free time. His A.A. sponsor over at the White Flag group says some people never get over the loss of what they’d thought was their one true best friend and lover; they just have to pray daily for acceptance and patience and the brass danglers to move forward through the grief and loss, to wait for time to harden the scab. The sponsor doesn’t give Gately one bit of shit for feeling bad: on the contrary, he commends Gately for his candor in breaking down and crying like a baby and finally telling him about it one a.m., the sense of terrible loss. It’s a myth no one misses it. Their particular Substance. Shit, you wouldn’t need to give it up if you didn’t miss it. You just have to Turn It Over, the emptiness and loss, Keep Coming, show up, pray, Ask for Help. Gately rubs his eye. Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of clichés—Day’s right about how it seems. Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering by the way things seem to him, he’s a dead man sure. Gately’s already watched dozens come through here and leave early and some of them die. If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the office late at night to clutch at his pant cuff and blubber and beg for help, Gately’ll get to tell Day that the clichéd directives of recovery are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say. But he’ll only get to say it if Day comes and asks. Personally, Gately gives Day like a month at the outside before he’s back tipping his hat to parking meters. Except who is Gately to judge who’ll end up getting the Gift of the program v. who won’t, he needs to remember. He tries to feel like Day is teaching him patience. It takes great patience and tolerance not to want to punt the guy out into Commonwealth Ave. and open up his bunk to somebody that really wants it, desperately, the Gift. Except who is Gately to think he can know who wants it and who doesn’t, deep down. Gately’s arm is behind his head, up against the sofa’s other arm. The VCR is on to something violent Gately neither sees nor hears. He can sort of turn his attention on and off like a light. Even when he was a resident here, he’d had this pro housebreaker’s ability to screen input, to do sensory triage. It was one reason he’d been able to stick out his nine residential months with twenty-one other newly detoxed housebreakers, hoods, whores, fired execs, subway musicians, beer-bloated construction workers, vagrants, cirrhotic car salesmen, bunko artists, mincing pillow biters, North End hard guys, Avon ladies, pimply kids with nose-rings, denial-ridden housewives and etc., all jonesing and head-gaming and desperate and grieving and basically whacked-out and producing non-stopping output 24/7.
At some point in here Day says, “So bring on the lobotomist, bring him on I say!”
Except that Gately’s counsellor when he was a resident here, Eugenio Martinez, one of the volunteer alumni counsellors, a one-eared former boiler-room bunko man and now a cellular-phone retailer who’d gone through the House under the original pre-Pat founder and now had about like ten years clean, Eugenio M. had lovingly confronted Gately early on about his special burglar’s selective attention and about how it could be dangerous, because how can you be sure it’s you doing the input screening and not the Spider. Eugenio had called addiction the Spider instead of the Disease, and dispensed his advice in terms of like for example “Feeding the Spider” v. “Starving the Spider” and so on. He’d called Gately into the House Manager’s back office and said what if screening his attention’s input turned out to be Feeding the Spider and what about an experimental unscreening of input for a while. And Gately had said he’d do his best to try and had come back out and tried to watch a Celtics game while two resident pillow biters from off the Fenway were on the couch having this involved conversation about some third fag having to go in and get the skeleton of some kind of fucking rodent removed from inside his butthole. The unscreening experiment had lasted half an hour. This was right before Gately got his ninety-day chip and wasn’t exactly wrapped real tight, still. Ennet House this year is nothing like the freak show it was when Gately went through. Gately has been Substance-free for four hundred and twenty-one days today.
Charlotte Treat, with her carefully made-up, ruined face, is watching the static-striped movie on the VCR while she needlepoints something. Conversation between her and Geoffrey D. has mercifully petered out. Day is scanning the room for somebody else to engage and piss off so he can prove to himself he doesn’t fit in here and stay separated off isolated inside himself and maybe get them so pissed off there’s a beef and he gets bounced out, Day, and it won’t be his fault. You can almost hear the Spider of his Disease chewing away inside his head. Emil Minty, Randy Lenz, and Bruce Green are also in the room, sprawled in spring-shot chairs, lighting one gasper off the end of the last, their posture the don’t-fuck-with-me slouch of the streets that here makes their bodies’ texture somehow hard to distinguish from that of the chairs. Nell Gunther is sitting at the long table in the doorless dining room that opens out right off the old donated VCR and monitor’s pine stand, whitening under her nails with a manicure pencil amid the remains of something she’s eaten that involved serious syrup. Joe S. is also in there, way down by himself at the table’s far end, trying to saw at a waffle with a knife and fork attached to the stumps of his wrists with Velcro bands. A long-ago former C.P.A., Joe Smith is forty-five and looks seventy, has almost all-white hair that’s waxy and yellow from close-order smoke, and finally got into Ennet House last month after a summer in the Cambridge City Shelter. Joe S. is making his fiftieth-odd stab at some kind of durable sobriety in A.A. Once devoutly R.C., he’s had crippling trouble with Faith in a Loving God ever since the R.C. Church apparently granted his wife an annulment in ’91 after fifteen years of marriage. Then for several years a rooming-house drunk, which in Gately’s view is like one step up from a homeless-person-type drunk. Joe S. got jumped and rolled and beaten half to death in Cambridge in the storm on Xmas Eve of last year and left to freeze in an alley, and ended up losing his hands and feet. Whenever residents Doony Glynn and Wade McDade are together in a room and Joe S. comes teetering in on his blocky prosthetic shoes, G. and McD. will stand up and shout together: “Hail Joe, Asleep in the Snow!” Repeated threats of Restriction and worse have not broken them of this practice. Doony Glynn’s also been observed telling Joe Smith things like that there’s some new guy coming in and moving into the Disabled Room with Joe who’s totally minus arms or legs or even a head and communicates by farting in Morse code. Which sally earned Glynn three days’ Full House Restriction and a week’s extra House Chore for what Johnette Foltz described in the Staff Log as “XSive Crulty.” There is a vague intestinal moaning in Gately’s right side. Watching Joe Smith smoke a Benson & Hedges by holding it between his stumps with his elbows out like a man with pruning shears is an adventure in fucking pathos, as far as Gately’s concerned. And forget about what it’s like trying to watch Joe S. try to light a match.
Gately, who’s been on Live-In Staff here four months now, believes Charlotte Treat’s devotion to needlepoint is suspect. All those needles. In and out of all that thin sterile-white cotton stretched drum-tight in its round frame. The needle makes a kind of thud and squeak when it goes in the cloth. It’s not much like the soundless pop and slide of a real cook-and-shoot. But still. She takes such great care.
Gately wonders what color he’d call the ceiling if forced to call it a color. It’s not beige and it’s not gray. The brown-yellow tones are from high-tar gaspers; a pall hangs up near the ceiling even this early in the new sober day. Some of the drunks and trank-jockeys stay up most of the night, joggling their feet and chain-smoking, even though there’s no movies or music allowed after midnight. Don G. has that odd House Staffer’s knack, already, after four months, of seeing everything significant in both living and dining rooms without really looking. Emil Minty, a hard-core smack-addict punk here for reasons nobody can quite yet pin down, is in an old mustard-colored easy chair with his combat boots up on one of the standing ashtrays, which is tilting not quite enough for Gately to tell him to watch out, please. Minty’s orange Mohawk and the shaved skull around it are starting to grow out brown, which is just not a pleasant sight in the morning at all. The other ashtray on the floor by his chair is full of the ragged new moons of bitten nails, which has got to mean that Esther Thrale, who Gately ordered to bed at 0230, was back down here in the chair having at her nails again the second Gately left to go mop up shit at the Shattuck Shelter. Another gurgle and abdominal chug. When he’s up all night Gately’s stomach gets all acidy and tight, from either the coffee, maybe, or just the staying up. Emil M.’s been sleeping in the streets since he was maybe sixteen, Gately can tell: he’s got that sooty complexion homeless guys have where the soot has insinuated itself into the dermal layer. And the big-armed driver for Leisure Time Ice, the quiet kid, Bruce Green, a garbage-head all-Substance-type kid, maybe twenty-one, face very slightly smunched in on one side, wears sleeveless khaki shirts, used to live in a trailer in that apocalyptic Enfield trailer park out near Allston; Gately likes Green because he seems to have sense enough to keep his yap shut when he’s got nothing important to say, which is basically all the time. The tattoo on the kid’s right tricep is a spear-pierced heart over the hideous name mildred bonk, who Bruce G. told him was a ray of living light and a dead ringer for the late lead singer of The Fiends in Human Shape and his dead heart’s one love ever, and who took their daughter and left him this summer for some guy who’d told her he ranched fucking longhorn cows east of Atlantic City, N.J. He’s got, even by Ennet House standards, major-league sleep trouble, Green, and he and Gately play cribbage sometimes in the wee dead hours, a game Gately picked up in jail. Joe S. is now hunched in a meaty coughing fit, his elbows out and forehead purple. Gately can see everything without moving his eyes at all.
And then Lenz. Randy Lenz is a small-time organic-coke dealer who wears sport coats rolled up over his big forearms and is always checking his pulse on the inside of his wrists. It’s come out that Lenz is of keen interest to both sides of the law; this past May he’d apparently all of a sudden lost all control and holed up in a Charlestown motel and freebased most of a whole hundred grams he’d been fronted by a suspiciously trusting Brazilian in what Lenz didn’t know was supposed to have been a D.E.A. sting operation in the South End. Having screwed both sides in what Gately secretly views as a delicious fuckup, Randy Lenz has, since May, been the most wanted he’s probably ever been. He is seedily handsome in the way of pimps and low-level coke dealers, muscular in the way certain guys’ muscles look muscular but can’t really lift anything, with complexly gelled hair and the little birdlike head movements of the deeply vain. One forearm’s hair has a little hairless patch, which Gately knows all too well spells knife owner, and if there’s one thing Gately’s never been able to stomach it’s a knife owner, little swaggery guys who always queer a square beef and come up off the ground with a blade so you have to get cut to take it away from them. Lenz is teaching Gately a restrained compassion for people you pretty much want to beat up on sight. And it’s obvious to everybody except Pat Montesian—whose odd gullibility in the presence of human sludge, though, Gately needs to try to remember, was one of the reasons why he himself had got into Ennet House—that Lenz is here mostly just to hide. He rarely leaves the House except under compulsion, avoids all windows, and travels nightly to the required A.A./N.A. meetings in a disguise that makes him look like Cesar Romero after a terrible accident; and then he always wants to walk home solo afterward, which is not encouraged. Lenz’s leg never stops joggling; Day claims it joggles even worse in sleep. Lenz is seated low in the northeasternmost corner of an old fake-velour love seat that he’s jammed in the northeasternmost corner of the living room. Randy Lenz has a strange compulsive need to be north of everything, and possibly even northeast of everything, and Gately has no clue what it’s about but observes Lenz’s position routinely for his own interest and files.
Second-month resident Charlotte Treat has violently red hair. As in hair the color of like a red crayon. She doesn’t have to work the usual outside menial job, because she has some strain of the Virus or maybe A.R.C. Former prostitute, reformed. Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It’s like long-repressed librarian ambitions come flooding out. Charlotte T. has a cut-rate whore’s hard, half-pretty face, her eyes lassoed with shadow around all four lids. Her also with a case of the dermal-layer sooty complexion. The thing about Treat is how her cheeks are deeply pitted in deep trenches that she packs with foundation and tries to cover over with blush, which along with the hair gives her the look of a mean clown. The ghastly wounds in her cheeks look for all the world like somebody got at her with a woodburning kit at some point in her career path. Gately would rather not know.
Don Gately is almost twenty-nine and sober and just huge. One shoulder blade and buttock pooch out over the side of a sofa that sags like a hammock. Lying there gurgling and inert with eyes half shut and a tolerant if ticcy smile. Gately looks less built than poured, with the smooth immovability of an Easter Island statue. It would be nice if intimidating size weren’t one of the factors in a male graduate’s getting offered the male Live-In Staff job here, but there you are. He has a massive square head made squarer-looking by the Prince Valiant-ish haircut he tries to maintain himself in the mirror, to save money. Room and board aside—plus of course the opportunity for Service—he makes very little money as an Ennet House Staffer, and is paying off restitution schedules in three different district courts. He has the fluttery white-eyed smile now of someone who’s holding himself just over the level of doze. Pat Montesian isn’t due in until 0900, and he can’t go to sleep until she shows, because the House Manager has driven Jennifer Belbin to a court appearance downtown and Gately’s the only Staffer here; Foltz, the other Live-In, is at a Narcotics Anonymous convention in Hartford for the long weekend. Gately personally is not hot on N.A.: so many relapses and unhumble returns, so many drug stories told with undisguised bullshit pride, so little emphasis on Service or serious Message; all those people in leather and metal, preening. Rooms full of Randy Lenzes, all hugging each other, pretending they don’t miss narcotics. Rampant vulnerable-newcomer fucking. There’s a difference between abstinence and recovery, Gately knows. Though who is Gately to judge what works for who. He just knows what seems like it works for him, today. A.A.’s tough Boston love, the White Flag group, old guys with suspendered bellies and white crewcuts and geologic amounts of sober time who’ll take your big square head off if they sense you’re getting complacent or chasing tail or forgetting that your life still hangs in the balance every fucking day. White Flag newcomers so crazed and sick they can’t sit, and have to pace at the meeting’s rear, like Gately when he first came. Retired old kindergarten teachers in polyresin slacks and a pince-nez who bake cookies for the weekly meeting and relate from behind the podium how they used to blow bartenders at closing for just two more fingers in a paper cup to take home against the morning’s needled light. Gately, albeit an oral-narcotics man from way back, has committed himself to A.A. He drank his fair share, too, he figures, after all.
House Director Pat M. is due in at 0900 and has application interviews with three people, 2 F and 1 M, who better be showing up soon; and Gately will get up and answer the door when they don’t know enough to just come in and will say Welcome and get them a cup of coffee if he judges them able to hold it. He’ll take them aside and tip them off to be sure to pet Pat M.’s dogs during the interview. The dogs’ll be sprawled all over the front office, sides heaving, writhing and biting at themselves. He’ll tell the applicants it’s a proved fact that if Pat’s dogs like you, you’re in. Pat M. has directed Gately to tell applicants this, and then if they do actually pet the dogs—two hideous white golden retrievers with suppurating skin afflictions, plus one has grand-mal epilepsy—it’ll betray a level of desperate willingness that Pat says is just about all she goes by, deciding.
A nameless cat oozes by on the broad windowsill above the back of the fabric couch. Animals here come and go. Graduates adopt them or they just disappear. Their fleas tend to remain. Gately’s intestines gurgle. Boston’s dawn this morning was chemically pink. The nail parings in the ashtray on the floor are, he sees, way too big to be fingernail bits. These bitten arcs are broad and thick and a deep autumnal yellow. They are not from fingers. He swallows hard.
Gately’d tell Day how even if they are just clichés, clichés are: (a) soothing, and (b) proclaim a common sort of common sense, and (c) license the universal assent that drowns out silence. And fourth, silence is deadly, pure Spider-food, if you’ve got the Disease. The older White Flaggers say you can spell the Disease “dis-ease,” which sums the basic situation up nicely. Gately should probably also tell him that the only real ultimate relief from the Disease is God, as in finding and cultivating some kind of personally comfortable and worshipable Higher Power; but Gately still can’t bring himself to say this kind of thing out loud. Pat has a meeting at the Bureau of Substance Abuse Services in Government Center at noon she needs to be reminded about, since she can’t read her own handwriting. Gately envisions going around having to find out who’s biting their fucking toenails in the living room and putting the disgusting toenail bits in the ashtray at like 0500. House Regs prohibit bare feet anyplace downstairs.
There’s a pale-brown water stain on the ceiling over Day and Treat the exact shape of Florida. Randy Lenz has issues with Geoffrey Day because Day is educated and a teacher and mans a journal’s helm. This threatens the self-concept of Lenz, who sees himself as a kind of hiply sexy artist-dash-intellectual. Small-time dealers never think of themselves as just small-time dealers. For Occupation on his Intake form Lenz had put “free lance writer.” And he makes a big show of the fact he reads. For his first sober week here in August he’d sat all day smoking and joggling in the northeast corner of the living room, holding open a gigantic medical dictionary and pretending to be reading medical words until Glynn and McDade started busting his balls about never turning the page. At which juncture he quit reading and started talking, making everybody nostalgic for when he just read. Johnette F. had put in the September Log that Lenz would, quote, “get on your very last nerve,” which Gately had underlined in a different-color ink. Plus Geoffrey D. has issues with Randy L., too. The dislike is mutual. There’s a certain way they don’t look at each other. And so now of course they’re mashed in together in the tiny three-man bedroom, since last week three guys in one night missed curfew and came in without one normal-sized pupil between them and all refused Urines and got discharged on the spot, and so Day got moved up in his first week from the five-man newcomers’ room to the three-man. Seniority comes quick around here. Lenz and Day: a beef may be brewing. Day’ll try to goad Lenz into a beef that’ll be public enough so he doesn’t get hurt but does get bounced out, and then he can leave treatment and go back to Chianti and ludes and make out like the relapse is Ennet House’s and never have to confront himself or his Disease. To Gately, Geoffrey D. is like a wide-open textbook on the Disease. One of Gately’s jobs is to keep an eye on what’s possibly brewing among residents and let Pat or the House Manager know and to try to smooth things down in advance if possible.
The ceiling’s color could be called dun, if forced. Someone has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn’t like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn’t happen. Here everybody has to make their little comment.
Time is passing. Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging and palpable. You can hear ticking in clockless rooms here. Gately changes the angle of one sneaker, puts his other arm behind his head. His head has real weight and pressure. Randy Lenz’s obsessive compulsions include the need to be north, a fear of disks, a tendency to take his own pulse, a pathological fear of every form of timepiece, and a constant need to know the time with great precision.
“Day man, you got the time maybe real quick?” Lenz. For the third time in half an hour. Patience, tolerance, reserve, compassion. Gately remembers his own first few straight months here: he’d felt the sharp edge of every second that went by. And the freak-show dreams. Nightmares beyond the worst D.T.s you’d ever heard of. One reason to have a night-shift Staffer down in the front office is so somebody’s there for the residents to talk at when—not if, when—when the detox nightmares ratchet them out of twisted sheets at like 0300. Nightmares about relapsing and getting high, about not getting high but having everybody think you’re high, about getting high with your alcoholic mom and then killing her with a baseball bat. Whipping it out for a court-ordered Urine and starting up and flames come shooting out. Getting high and bursting into flames. Having a waterspout shaped like an enormous syringe suck you up inside. A vehicle explodes in a bloom of enhanced flame on the VCR, its hood up like an old pop tab.
Day is making a broad gesture out of checking his wristwatch. “Right around eight-thirty, fella.”
Randy L.’s fine nostrils flair and whiten. He stares straight ahead, eyes narrowed, fingers on his wrist. Day purses his lips. Gately hangs his head over the arm of the sofa and regards Lenz upside down. “That look on your face there mean something there, Randy? Are you like communicating something with that look?”
“Does anybody maybe know the time a little more exactly is what I’m wondering, Don, since Day doesn’t.”
Gately checks his own cheap digital, head still hung over the sofa’s arm. “I got eight-thirty-two and fourteen, fifteen, sixteen seconds, Randy.”
“Thanks a lot D.G. man.”
And now Day has that same flared narrow look for Lenz. “We’ve been over this, friend. Amigo. Sport. You do this all the time with me. Again I’ll say it—I don’t have a digital watch. This is a fine old antique watch. It points. A memento of vastly better days. It’s not a digital watch. It’s not a cesium-based atomic clock. It points, with hands. See, Spiro Agnew here has two little arms: they point, they suggest. It’s not a fucking stopwatch for life. Lenz, get a watch. Am I right? Why don’t you just get a watch, Lenz. Three people I happen to know of for a fact have offered to get you a watch and let you pay them back whenever you feel comfortable about poking your nose out and investigating the work-a-world. Get a watch. Obtain a watch. A fine, digital, incredibly wide watch, about five times the width of your wrist, so you have to hold it like a falconer, and it treats time like pi.”
“Easy does it,” Charlotte Treat half sings, not looking up from her needle and frame.
Day looks around at her. “I don’t believe I was speaking to you in any way shape or form.”
“Peace,” Gately says softly, his head still hanging over. Joe Smith, upside-down, is having another coughing fit over in the dining room.
Lenz is staring blackly at Geoffrey Day. “If you’re trying to fuck with me, brother.” He shakes his fine shiny head. “Big mistake.”
Day puts his hands up to his cheeks. “Ooh I’m all atremble. I can barely hold my arm steady to read my watch.”
Lenz points his cigarette. “Big big big real big mistake.”
Emil M.’s contorted way forward in his chair in the way of somebody communicating that he’s trying to watch TV around a distraction. “Hows about I give you both a beating if you don’t shut up.”
A time-killing fantasy Gately has lately is in the middle of bullshit squabbles like this he all of a sudden picks Geoffrey D. up bodily and swings him by his dress shoes and uses him as a bludgeon to beat Randy Lenz’s over-groomed head in, freeing up two bunks at once. His progress consists of just entertaining such thoughts now instead of acting on them, which Pat M. reassures him is almost the same as patience. The Ennet House living room has no clock. Gately likes that his cheap watch counts off the seconds: sometimes he just sits and watches the seconds on his big wrist tick digitally off, to remind himself that an interval of time is passing, will pass.
Day has crossed his legs and laced his hands over the knee, a posture they all know Lenz detests for some reason. “So let me get this straight. We’re engaged in an argument about whether it’s appropriate for you continually to harass innocent watch wearers for the exact time in lieu of buying your own watch, and you win the argument by claiming that my argument is an attempt to quote fuck with you, and by threatening me with physical harm if I don’t acquiesce to your argument. This, to you, is winning.”
Lenz says, “I ain’t got time for this shit.”
Charlotte Treat slaps at her needlepoint frame to indicate she’s exasperated. “He didn’t threaten you.”
Emil Minty suddenly stands, making the ashtray topple. “I’m fucking serious.”
Gately twists on the couch to catch Minty’s eye. Past Minty, down at the dining-room table’s end, Joe S. is still coughing, still hunched over, his face a dusky purple; and Nell Gunther is behind him pounding him on the back so hard that it keeps sending him forward over his ashtray, and he waves one stump vaguely over his shoulder to signal her to quit. Gately locks eyes with Minty until the kid sits back down, running a hand over his Mohawk and wearily asking when he can get the fuck out of here.
“I’m just trying to get clear on what’s being said here,” Day is saying.
Only a couple months ago Gately would have stood up and stood over Minty and physically intimidated him to get him to sit down. Charlotte T. is trying to catch Gately’s eye as Lenz sits there joggling and telling Day all he’s saying is Day better hope to Christ he doesn’t make Lenz have to get up out of this chair right here. Minty is making no move to start cleaning up the ashtray’s mess. Gately has no idea where he’ll live or what he’ll do when his term as Live-In Staff is over.
Day joggles his own foot and asks Gately for his feedback on what’s transpiring here, whether Staff can confirm hearing a, how shall we say, he says, menacing aspect to Lenz’s tone and/or content. Joe Smith’s coughs have taken on your serious cougher’s deep slow searching aspect, like he’s trying to pronounce something.
“Easy Does It!” shrieks Treat, holding out her absurdly tiny needle, brandishing it.
“Peace on earth good will toward men,” says Gately, back all the way on his back, smiling up at the cracked dun ceiling, not even a hint of a tic to betray anything but a tolerant willingness to let it all pass, for the moment. To work itself out, seek its own level, settle, blow over. Die of neglect. He’s pretty sure he knows who farted.
( David Foster Wallace )
www.ChordsAZ.com