money in the pocket and no defense
In short it was the familiar insanity of money in the pocket and no defense against the urge, and the thought of his woman holding his little girl in her little knit cap and mittens standing under the big clock in cold March dusk didn’t so much get pushed aside as somehow shrink to a tiny locket-size picture in the center of a part of him he and the Holmeses had set out busily to kill, with the pipe.
Context
The Commitment speaker's Bottom, and the book's most exact anatomy of the disease's arithmetic: payday, a vial, "the familiar insanity of money in the pocket and no defense against the urge," and the image of his waiting wife and daughter not pushed aside but shrunk to a locket-sized picture inside a self he was busily killing with the pipe. Then the cliff-edge — the empty biscuit pan, the scraped peanut-butter jar, the finger circling a pan with not one crumb left, the moment he sees what his family ate while he smoked their groceries. The Bottom is not the drug's worst physical damage but this: the instant the addict sees clearly what the appetite has cost the people it shrank to a locket.