Scene 090: gately shattuck janitor

• p. 434: Annie P.'s "sunlights on the side"; the 0430h Inbound Green Line plus two trains to bombed-out Jamaica Plain; the work itself — anti-fungal delousing of cot floors and walls, toilets, and the shower area requiring equipment, mask, and a preliminary industrial hose ("human waste in the showers on a daily fucking basis").
• pp. 434-435: Stavros Lobokulas — long cigarette-filter, the enormous collection of women's-shoes catalogues behind the truck seats (Gately "very much needs to assume" he only browses); the billing scam (3 hours done, 8 billed); Stavros's afternoon at Pine Street Inn with other "broke and desperate yutzes" cruised from halfway houses.
• p. 435: the inmates' inventory — schizophrenia the norm, D.T.s guys treating heaters like TVs, puke-buckets aimed at "like golfers treat the pin," the hidden corner where sperm moves slowly down the walls ("way too much sperm for just one or two guys, either"); "The whole place smells like death no matter what the fuck you do"; Gately's head-switch and vengeance-grade input-screening; the dead-eyed night supervisors his own size who keep offering him a job, and his Thanks Anyway; home by Greenie "with his Gratitude-battery totally recharged."
• p. 435: this was the menial job he landed with three days left on his resident month's deadline, and he's kept it since.
• pp. 435-436: the stragglers who won't clear out by 0500h — the worst guys, clumping behind him to spectate the feces-jetting "like a sport and yelling encouragement"; "a couple have those little shaved patches on their arms" (transdermal-patch users); thrashing and screaming in the cots; reclaiming the sperm corner the minute he's done.
• p. 436: almost always someone he knows from addiction and B&E days — the walking anti-advertisement for using; the finski or pack of Kools and a little quiet AA "if they seem like maybe they're ready to give up"; otherwise the Street-and-Jail stare at a point just behind their heads.
• p. 436: Stavros's great ambition — the upward-mobile women's shoe store ("what is there to really say about ambitious career-dreams involving feet?"); Gately's restitution math and his private doubts about "the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved": Stavros's daily thrown mop and bellowed "Why don't you sorry motherfucks just go home?" — thirteen-plus months of finding himself hilarious.

Backward

• The ad-agency line (p. 436) reads as a deliberate coda to Hal's advertising-history reverie (pp. 410-418, scene 087): the one demand-creating spectacle V&V never devised is the unsponsored sight of end-stage addiction.
• The "little shaved patches" on the stragglers' arms (p. 436) echo n.169's transdermal 'Happy Patches' (scene 088, two scenes earlier) — the drug culture's hardware ambient even here.
• Gately's solitary cleaning of what no one else will face sits directly after Mario's all-night Ajax-scrubbing of the Clipperton room (pp. 433-434, scene 089) — paired caretaker scenes.
• The supervisors' job offers he keeps declining quietly mark how far he's come from taking whatever paid (cf. the Gately/Fackelmann B&E backstory threads, pp. 55-60, scene 016 and the late Gately sections).

Forward

• The Shattuck recurs in scene 092: mopping there is where Gately now hears his childhood Sir Osis "Clopaclopaclop" (p. 449), and the early-shift world supplies the towel-cart Ennet girl at E.T.A. drills (pp. 457-458, scene 094 territory) — the two hill institutions' service economy.
• Gately's restitution-poverty and double-shift exhaustion set up his irreplaceability as live-in Staff (the Lenz-walks era, pp. 539, scene 105ff) and the night everything goes wrong (pp. 601-619, scene 120).

• p. 434: "sunlights on the side" — Annie P.'s coinage; moonlighting inverted for the 0500h shift.
• p. 435: "Gately gets to the shelter at 0459.9h. and just shuts his head off as if his head has a kind of control switch. He screens input with a fucking vengeance" — willed non-spectation as survival discipline; counter-image to the book's passive viewers.
• p. 436: "a better ad for sobriety at any cost than any ad agency could come up with" — anchor passage where the recovery and advertising threads touch.
• p. 436: "Why don't you sorry motherfucks just go home?" — Stavros's thirteen-month witticism; sobriety without compassion, in one repeated joke.