money in the pocket and no defense — "This was his cliff-edge, his personal…"
This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice, standing there loose-faced in the kitchen, running his finger around a shiny pan with not one little crumb of biscuit left in it.
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.