89 days, and no stomach for the meetings — "Boston AA had a humorless evangelical…"
Boston AA had a humorless evangelical rabidity about it that had kept his attendance at meetings spotty. And he never could stand the vapid clichés and disdain for abstraction.
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.