Scene 076: aa raquel mask speaker

• pp. 367-368: the unfunny rehearsed newcomer; Boston AA's ego-radar; deprecating the Program rather than the Self as "the subtle but cardinal Message-offense"; the host crowd's worst punishment — getting embarrassed for you; applause "with the relieved feel of a fist unclenching."
• pp. 368-369: the Filene's Complaint Dept. man — hammer kept under the desk, "whacketa whacketa," diving under at every knock for nearly the last year of his drinking — and the Crocodiles roaring with Identification because it was just the truth.
• p. 369: the poetics of the podium: truth "unslanted, unfortified… maximally unironic"; "An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone"; pseudo-sincerity feared as much as irony; Gately meanwhile brooding on the veiled "pseudo-intellectual-type girl" and her hauntingly familiar voice.
• pp. 369-370: "Fake It Till You Make It"; the Program's "definite cultish, brainwashy elements" and Gately's candor about handing his brain to Pat M. and Gene M. for the scrub ("more like deprogramming than actual washing," given the Spider's psychic job); Gately's verbal-honesty discipline — saying "Lucky" instead of "Grateful" because only the former is always true; Ferocious Francis's shoulder-punch: right where he's supposed to be.
• p. 370: causal attribution = death, podium-wise; the skinny hard-faced girl — "a member of a splinter 12-Step Fellowship, an Adult-Child-type thing called Wounded, Hurting, Inadequately Nurtured but Ever-Recovering Survivors" (p. 372; Carlisle brackets the acronym [WHINERS]) — posits stripping-at-sixteen as Cause; male eyes do the "crawly north-to-south thing"; "Gately can see every ashtray on the table shake from the force of Joelle V.'s shudder" at the Naked I reference.
• pp. 370-372: the etiology unspools — adopted into a foster home with a paralyzed catatonic biological daughter the mother insists be treated as normal ("It," dragged to slumber parties, school, double dates); the quiet smiling Aetna-claims-processor father's nightly "advantage"; the Raquel Welch full-head mask, "RAQUEL!" in extremity; the speaker's silent tidyings-up to preserve the mother's Denial — and the cold calculus that if the diddling stopped, she'd be "promoted to the role of Raquel."
• pp. 372-374: the seminally scarring night — the mask's horsehair tangled in Its moussed coiffure, the vanity-mirror lights, Its lit-up post-diddle face contracted into "a carnal bliss beyond smiles or sighs" (n.142: the diction is the narrator's, not hers — though she really did say chordate phylum); the identical expression on the household's devotional photo of a hiked-robed stone saint with arrow-pointing cherub; flight to Route 1, stripping, the needle, "rasa the tabula."
• p. 374: the room's heads clutched "only partly in empathy" — self-pity less offensive than the appeal to exterior Cause; the Why of the Disease as a labyrinth "inhabited… by the twin minotaurs of Why Me? and Why Not?"; In Here vs. Out There; the Disease as the thing "eating your heart raw and (if you're lucky) eliminating your map for good."
• pp. 374-375: Boston AA's root axiom as "almost classically authoritarian, maybe even proto-Fascist"; the YTMP ironist's rosewood-handled-boot-knife commode-seat engraving: "Do not ask WHY / If you dont want to DIE / Do like your TOLD / If you want to get OLD" (n.143: Sic).

Backward

• Continuous with scene 074 (same meeting): Gately's brooding on the "aphasiac terror" moment (p. 369) is the p. 366 subjunctive exchange; the voice mystery again points at Joelle's Madame Psychosis radio identity (pp. 181-193) and stays unresolved.
• The devotional photo is (unnamed) Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa — the same ecstatic-annihilation iconography the book attaches to the Entertainment's lethal bliss (cf. the attaché scenes 007/011/014/025/028: pleasure that erases the face).

Forward

• The stripper's "It" anticipates Joelle's own contested deformity/beauty question (Notkin's account, pp. 788-795) and the U.H.I.D. veil logic — a face that cannot be looked at; her shudder and billowing veil here and in scene 079 mark her private Identifications.
• The Raquel Welch mask — a dead sex-goddess's empty face strapped onto a faceless body — rhymes with the Entertainment's veiled/masked mother-death figure (Joelle as Madame Psychosis in Infinite Jest (V?), described pp. 788ff and n.24) and with every smily-face mask in scene 074.
• "Why Me?/Why Not?" minotaurs and the no-Cause axiom set up Gately's later crisis of How-without-Why (the Big Question with Ferocious Francis, pp. 442ff) and Marathe's barroom meditation on choice with Kate Gompert (scene 156, pp. 774ff).
• The commode-seat graffiti's author — an ironist who "decamped back Out There" — is irony's own cautionary tale, the book's verdict in miniature (cf. the anti-irony essayistic burst at pp. 369-374 with Hal's "hip cynical transcendence" worry, p. 694, scene 135).

• p. 368: "The worst punishment Gately's seen inflicted on a Commitment speaker is when the host crowd gets embarrassed for him." — empathy as discipline.
• p. 369: "it was just the truth… It can't be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone." — the book's irony-sincerity credo at its most explicit.
• p. 373: "some hideously mobile and expressive layer… had blindly contracted… into the sort of pinched gasping look of neurologic concentration that marks a carnal bliss beyond smiles or sighs." — Its face; the bliss-beyond-the-human that is also the Entertainment's signature.
• p. 374: "The Why of the Disease is a labyrinth… inhabited… by the twin minotaurs of Why Me? and Why Not?" — Cause vs. responsibility, the scene's doctrinal core.
• pp. 374-375: "Do not ask WHY / If you dont want to DIE…" — the proto-Fascist Prime Directive in latrine doggerel; irony and obedience in one artifact.