Pages 200–211
No date, no plot: eleven pages of catalog, addressed to you — spend time around a halfway house and "you will acquire many exotic new facts." The facts run from dermatology and D.S.S. custody law through street vocabulary to the Program's paradoxes, then the catalog narrows onto one resident's fixation: Tiny Ewell — the little attorney last seen being driven to detox at dawn (pp. 85–87) — and his two-month obsession with other residents' tattoos, before handing the last word to Gately. The form looks like trivia; read it as the House's whole education, delivered in list order.
Terms, in order of appearance
- D.S.S. (p. 200) — real: Massachusetts's Department of Social Services, the child-custody agency; its power here is permanent.
- Unit (p. 202) — Boston street idiom the scene glosses; part of the residents' amusement at the complex's building names (pp. 193–197).
- abusable escapes (pp. 202–203) — the catalog of substitute compulsions; endnote 70's parable of the man pared of every escape is worth the flip.
- White Flag / Better Late Than Never (pp. 205, 209) — metro-Boston AA meetings, named the way real groups are; the House's weekly circuit.
- gonfalon (p. 208) — real word: a hanging banner, here inked across a back for The Dead.
- HOW DO YOU LIK YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOW MR DETH!? (p. 208) — mangles a real e. e. cummings line, "how do you like your blueeyed boy / Mister Death"; the spelling is the tattoo's.
- Talwin (p. 210) — real prescription painkiller; jailhouse currency, tradeable for cigarettes.
After you read: three things
1. The list's slope is the point. It starts with detox acne and doubled hearts and slides, without changing tone, into load-bearing equipment: newcomers praying to "wrap your mind in an old newspaper" and leave it in an alley; a head that spends its time "trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself"; everybody "identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different"; "That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable." When a line stops being funny, notice where you are.
2. The tattoos are irrevocability worn on skin (pp. 205–210). Ewell's taxonomy — the regretless, the stoic regretters, the Bikers — inventories MILDRED BONK "on his jilted right triceps forever" (the p. 39 household again), Lenz's PAMELA with no Pamela remembered, and the old White Flag men's decades-faded ink. The one who stops Ewell cold: the veteran with PUSSY "faded to pond-scum green" on his forearm, whose dignity "transcends even stoic regret" — one scene after Pemulis whispered that exact word as a weapon (p. 200). Note, too, mid-catalog: a first-category bonehead is explaining himself "to Ken Erdedy" — the man you left waiting for a phone call on pp. 17–27 lives here now.
3. Gately closes it (pp. 210–211). He patiently explains jailhouse method — canteen needle, fountain-pen ink, hundreds of jabs, hooch fomented in a toilet's flush-hole — and rates his own crude square and cross as "minor Rung Bells compared to some of the fucked-up and really irrevocable impulsive mistakes" whose consequences he'll "be paying off for a real long time." The catalog's theme, owned in the first person.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.