The White Flag AA meeting (p. 355)
in time—oh there’s always plenty of time, the Disease is fiendishly patient—how in time they forget what it was like, the ones that’ve cockily drifted, they forget who and what they are, they forget about the Disease, until like one day they’re at like maybe a Celtics-Sixers game, and the good old Fleet/First Interstate Center’s hot, and they think what could just one cold foamer hurt, after all this sober time, now that they’ve gotten ‘Well.’ Just one cold one. What could it hurt. And after that one it’s like they’d never stopped, if they’ve got the Disease. […] or else, worse, maybe they kill somebody in a blackout and spend the rest of their lives in MCI-Walpole drinking raisin jack fermented in the seatless toilet and trying to recall what they did to get in there, Out There
Context
The Crocodiles' backseat catechism, the AA doctrine of forgetting stated whole: relapse is not a decision but an erosion of memory — the triple hammer-blow "they forget… they forget… they forget" — and its terminal case circles back to the blackout, killing a man you'll spend a life sentence failing to remember (the exact Walpole scenario Pat quantifies at p. 465). Abiding-by-memory (166/175) is this passage's photographic negative.