Himself's two and a half months in Boston AA
which Hal has no idea that this piece of entertainment actually germinated out of James O. Incandenza’s one brief and unpleasant experience with Boston AA, in the B.S. mid-’90s, when Himself lasted two and a half months and then drifted gradually away, turned off by the simplistic God-stuff and covert dogma.
Context
The father's one failed run at recovery, buried where only the narrator can see it: JOI tried Boston AA, lasted two and a half months, and drifted off — "turned off by the simplistic God-stuff and covert dogma," the too-clever intellect's exact objection to the un-clever thing that saves. The datum sets the inherited disease against the abandoned cure: the alcoholic father who couldn't stay, whose contempt for the doctrine's simplicity is the same reflex that will nearly cost his son Hal, and the whole grim family pattern of being too smart for the only thing that works.