abstinence versus recovery: AA, NA, and the Crocodiles — "AA’s tough Enfield-Brighton love, the White…"
AA’s tough Enfield-Brighton love, the White Flag Group, old guys with suspendered bellies and white crew cuts and geologic amounts of sober time, the Crocodiles, that’ll take your big square head off if they sense you’re getting complacent or chasing tail or forgetting that your life still hangs in the balance every fucking day.
Context
The book's sharpest internal contrast between two recovery cultures, and the theme's key distinction inside it: "abstinence v. recovery." NA is caricatured as performance — war stories told with pride, leather-and-metal preening, hugging that pretends not to miss the Substance, newcomers as prey — whereas AA's White Flag Group is figured as the real thing precisely because it is unglamorous and merciless: the Crocodiles, old men with "geologic amounts of sober time," administer a "tough Enfield-Brighton love" that will decapitate any complacency. The distinction that matters to the theme is that merely not-using (abstinence) is not the same as the daily interior work (recovery); the Crocodiles exist to enforce the difference.