The locker room and the Loach saga (pp. 970–971)
by E.T.A.’s own Mario Incandenza, who’d been sent dashing out from the Back Bay co-op where his father was filming something that involved actors dressed up as God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt, using subway tokens as the ante, and Mario’d been sent dashing out to get another roll of tokens from the nearest station
Context
The Loach saga's deus ex machina, and JOI's filmmaking appears purely as logistics: a shoot exists so that Mario can be out of it, dashing for subway-token ante, at Park Street, with a hand extended. The film itself gets one subordinate clause — God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt — a perfectly JOI-catalogue conceit (Watt is Himself's stock player) delivered as background noise to the actual grace-event, Mario touching Loach's "fuliginous hand." The one time in the anthology a JOI production materially changes a life, it does it by accident, through an errand.