the CA apparatus and Denial Aisle — "The only empty seats are in…"
The only empty seats are in the meeting’s back row—‘Denial Aisle,’ the back rows are usually called—and Joelle is surrounded by catexic newcomers crossing and uncrossing their legs every few seconds and sniffing compulsively and looking like they’re wearing everything they own.
Context
The Cocaine Anonymous apparatus rendered in ethnographic detail: the long preamble and Xeroxed formalities, the back-row "Denial Aisle" where the fresh newcomers cross and uncross and sniff in everything they own, the standing hard-faced men who never sit. The meeting is a fully furnished social institution with its own geography of resistance — Denial literalized as the aisle you sit in when you're not ready — and the texture is the substance-cage's opposite number, the room built to hold the people the drug has emptied out.