the harelip dealer's household: get high just to stand it — "Who wouldn’t have to get high…"

A bottom-narrative told flat, and a familiar figure at the center of it: the harelipped Allston dealer with the snakes and the chickens, rent traded for live mice, a life so degraded the resident's only account of why they stayed high ninety percent of the time is the rhetorical shrug that closes it. "Who wouldn't have to get high just to stand it" is the whole self-medicating logic in one line — the using as the only endurable response to the life the using made.