Pages 434–436

Interdependence Day evening — Mario's movie · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

A short one, back at street level after the Clipperton legend: Don Gately's second job. Five mornings a week, on top of overnight Staff duty at Ennet House, he rides three trains to Jamaica Plain by 0430h to clean the Shattuck Shelter For Homeless Males alongside his boss Stavros Lobokulas, the contractor who owns the company. It's habitual-present narration — a routine, not an event — told close to Gately's head, in his register. The shelter's squalor is described bluntly and at length; that's the scene, not a detour.

Terms, in order of appearance

"sunlights on the side" (p. 434) — moonlighting flipped for a 5 A.M. shift; Assistant Director Annie P.'s coinage.
Shattuck Shelter (p. 434) — real Boston homeless shelter in Jamaica Plain, attached to the Lemuel Shattuck state hospital.
sub-table (p. 435) — off the books; paid in cash, unreported.
Pine Street Inn (p. 435) — real, and genuinely Boston's biggest homeless shelter; already named at p. 178.
Kaposi's Sarcoma (p. 435) — real cancer producing skin lesions, closely associated with AIDS.
D.T.s (p. 435) — delirium tremens, alcohol-withdrawal hallucinations; ambient at Ennet House since the pp. 270–281 tour.
shaved patches (p. 436) — bare arm-spots for stick-on transdermal drug patches, the habit endnote 169 described one scene back.
finski (p. 436) — five-dollar bill.
Kools (p. 436) — real brand of menthol cigarettes.
B&E (p. 436) — breaking and entering; Gately's old line of work, seen in action at pp. 55–60.

After you read: three things

1. The Gratitude-battery. At 0459.9h Gately "just shuts his head off as if his head has a kind of control switch. He screens input with a fucking vengeance" (p. 435) — and rides home "with his Gratitude-battery totally recharged." Watch the mechanism: the menial job (a house requirement he landed with three days to spare) turns the worst room in Boston into fuel for staying sober.

2. One line about ads. The men Gately knows personally — "always 25–30 and look 45–60" — are "a better ad for sobriety at any cost than any ad agency could come up with" (p. 436). It lands twenty pages after the long advertising history of pp. 410–418: the one demand-creating spectacle no agency ever devised.

3. Two sobrieties, side by side. Stavros: eight years clean, creative billing, shoe catalogues, and a daily thrown-mop "witticism" he still finds hilarious after thirteen months. Gately: a finski, a pack of Kools, a little quiet AA — only "if they seem like maybe they're ready to give up." Gately's own verdict is the scene's quietest line: he has "his private doubts about the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved."

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.