pissing on himself right from the start

The retrospective AA sentence that reframes the whole biography: the kid arcing OJ-and-vodka piss into the Atlantic wasn't horsing around at the water's edge, he was already doing to himself what the disease would spend twenty years finishing. The podium voice — Gately looking back from sobriety and finding the beginning already contained the end — is the program's characteristic reading of a life, the first drink recast as the first installment of the bottom.