Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (p. 834)
And Gately, even in recovery, can still summon great verbatim chunks not only of drug-addicted adolescence’s ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Ren and Stimpy’ and ‘Oo Is ’E When ’E’s at ’Ome’ and ‘Exposed Northerners’ but also the syndicated ‘Bewitched’ and ‘Hazel’ and ubiquitous ‘MAS*H’ he grew to monstrous childhood size in front of, and especially the hometown ensemble-casted ‘Cheers!,’ both the late-network version with the stacked brunette and the syndicated older ones with the titless blond
Context
The wraith condescends about whether Gately's old enough to remember broadcast TV, and Gately's rebuttal is a lexical feat of his own: verbatim recall of great chunks of 'Cheers!' and the rest — the drug addict's version of Hal's mental Xerox, with the entertainment unit where the O.E.D. would be. The archive files this under its Old-TV-shows motif; the shows are here in the wraith conversation, p. 834, not among the p. 832 flood-terms.