89 days, and no stomach for the meetings
He’d been sober as a Mennonite quilter for 89 days, at the very tail-end of his life
Context
The wraith as the program's cautionary opposite, drawn precisely: eighty-nine sober days at the very end, but got by contempt for the thing that keeps people sober — the clichés, the anti-intellectualism, the smoke, the meeting-room atmosphere he calls a poker game in hell. He did it on white knuckles and abstraction and disdain, and he is dead; the intelligence that lets him despise the vapid slogans is exactly what the slogans are designed to get around.