IJ study archive

Scene 139: joelle ca biscuits bottom

Scene
139
Pages
707–711
When
Sat 14 Nov YDAU (2009), evening ('tonight, 11/14' p. 710); speaker's Bottom was a payday in 'cold March dusk' per the raw, while '224 days ago tonight' computes to ≈ 4 Apr YDAU — the novel's own ~5-day disagreement, cited as written
Where
St. Elizabeth's Hospital Grand Rounds Auditorium, Enfield — the 'Reality Is For People That Can't Handle Drugs' CA Group; Gately two floors up in the Trauma Wingin: St. Elizabeth's Hospital (Trauma Wing)
POV
Joelle van Dyne (3rd person), in Denial Aisle under the veil

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 7)

Summary

Fresh from mopping the unconscious forehead of Don Gately — feverish, tube down his throat, refusing Demerol two floors up in St. E.'s Trauma Wing — Joelle slips into the back row of a Cocaine Anonymous meeting she'd normally avoid, surrounded by sniffing newcomers and hard-faced standing men commenting on her knees and veil. The Commitment speaker from Mattapan's Freeway Access Group skips the macho drugologue and goes straight to his Bottom: a weekend binge-smoker whose payday vial-kick with two Holmeses from Riveting swallowed the grocery-and-rent check while his pregnant wife and little daughter waited under the bank clock; coming home at dawn to an apartment empty except for a Last Warning from the B.H.A., a Pam-shiny biscuit pan, and the scraped-out peanut-butter jar that told him what his family had eaten while he ingested their rent. On the kitchen floor, six unopenable stories up, he chose Shattuck Shelter over the window — and his first night sober the shelter's supper was, by coincidence, peanut butter sandwiches, and whatever he silently thanked for that particular sandwich became his Higher Power. Joelle, eyes sandy from forgetting to blink, feels the ratchet in her belly turn three turns to the good: for the first time she's sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means facing — and for the first time in a long time she considers possibly showing somebody the face.

What to notice

The scene's formal event is Identification performed by the prose itself: the speaker's story arrives not as quotation but re-voiced through Joelle's listening, the third person taking on his idiom mid-sentence — passing up two-and-a-third vials "was only a fucking fool way out of touch with the whole seize-the-opportunity concept could pass that shit up" — narration doing exactly what it claims a meeting does, dissolving the membrane between teller and hearer. Watch the word "by coincidence" recur, set off by dashes: the shelter bed, the peanut-butter supper, the Program Holmes on the mop crew — the story's own polite hedge, letting grace stay deniable for anyone not ready for the God-word. The suicide option gets a paragraph of pure real-estate fact — "The window didn't open but could be broke through with a running start." — two flat sentences with no feeling attached, the burning-building choice rendered as a building spec. And Joelle's conversion arrives with its agent unnamed — "Something has taken the tight ratchet" — she doesn't turn, something turns her; while at the same moment the speaker's face "has lost its color, shape, everything distinctive": a veil descending on him in the exact scene she first considers lifting hers.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 707: those who Come In already shattered enough to trade dependence for "robotic platitudes and pep-rally cheer" — the ones who stick and Hang; whether Joelle (whose first JOI appearance was in Low-Temperature Civics) is one remains to be determined, but she's starting to Identify with the shattered.
  • p. 707: why she's at CA at all — the meeting is in St. E.'s Grand Rounds Auditorium, "a couple floors down" from Gately [n.291: Ennet Staff discourage splinter fellowships as primary — fewer meetings, aperture-narrowing Substance-focus]; Denial Aisle; the standing men; her "fearful sentiment" for Gately [n.292: House rules against resident romance; AA's first-year no-involvement suggestion, the hole-pain analgesic logic, "Addicts Don't Have Relationships, They Take Hostages"].
  • pp. 707-708: the speaker — tall, yellowish, weightlifter's build, frightening sloe eyes; seven months in; "Joelle can tell he's trying to tell the truth and not just posturing"; she can Identify past the idioms [n.293: 'Holmes'; Joelle's dated down-home racial vocabulary — the note pointedly names no state — "doing pretty much the best she can"]; the truth's "irresistible unconscious attraction at meetings."
  • p. 708: the setup — wife and daughter in Perry Hill Projects, baby on the way; weekend missile-binges ("Like getting strapped to a Raytheon missile... Jim" [n.294: the Boston-colored Commitment apostrophe to an absent 'Jim']); the one-tensky-vial plan; the family stationed under the Brighton Best Savings clock to "help" deposit the check.
  • p. 709: the Bottom begins — two Holmeses brandish vials; "the thought of his woman holding his little girl in her little knit cap and mittens... didn't so much get pushed aside as somehow shrink to a tiny locket-size picture"; rye in the old Ford Mystique; "the fat woman with the little helmet with horns on it done already like fucking sang."
  • p. 709: the curtain of charity over the night; dawn return — the apartment's emptiness "pulsed and breathed"; the green B.H.A. Last Warning [n.295: Boston Housing Authority]; the fridge: near-empty grape jelly and half a can of biscuit mix, "and that… was all"; the knife-scraped Food-Bank peanut butter and a clotted box of salt are "the whole rest of the kitchen."
  • pp. 709-710: what broke him in two — the shiny empty biscuit pan and the safety-seal rind on the trash; the locket-picture swelling into his wife and daughter eating charity biscuits "while he was out ingesting their groceries and rent"; "his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice"; the sixth-floor window that "could be broke through with a running start."
  • p. 710: he didn't jump and didn't know why ("some God-involvement, sitting there on the floor"); walked four clicks to Shattuck Shelter, no note; asked for a CA meeting straightaway; 224 days ago tonight; the coincidence-laden first night — the Shattuck supper of peanut butter sandwiches and gritty Sunny Square coffee.
  • p. 710: Joelle's response — nail-lines down the Styrofoam cup; choosing "consciously to believe it isn't affected"; the ratchet turned "three turns to the good"; sure for the first time she wants to keep straight "no matter what it means facing. No matter if Don Gately takes Demerol or goes to jail or rejects her if she can't show him the face"; first time in a long time — "tonight, 11/14" — she's even considered showing somebody the face.
  • pp. 710-711: the close — while other Shattuck residents bitch about peanut-butter-sandwich supper, whatever he silently thanked "became his Higher Power"; Universal Bleacher let him go but he mops third-shift at Logan; wife in an Unwed Mothers Shelter with Shantel, Restraining Order standing, one phone call with his daughter last month; no conclusions, no obligatory Gratitude — just that "the choice he made on the kitchen floor was the right choice, personally speaking."

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: a complete Commitment-speaker drugologue done right — Bottom, surrender, Higher-Power-as-whatever-you-thanked-for-the-sandwich, coincidence as grace — and its effect: the mechanism by which Identification turns a listener's ratchet.
  • Irony and Sincerity: Joelle's critical faculties (he's an "autodidactic orator," the pauses could be affected) overridden by a conscious choice to believe — sincerity as decision; the scene answers scene 138's Attitude-of-Platitude coda with the platitudes working.
  • Disability and Deformity: the veil at a back-row meeting, the standing men's comments — and the breakthrough: considering showing somebody the face, U.H.I.D.'s central discipline cracking open toward Gately.
  • Communication and Solipsism: against It's "hell for one" (scene 135), the meeting demonstrates the one technology the book endorses for actually conveying interior pain — a stranger's story making a roomful of strangers Identify.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Opens mid-argument from scene 138's final sentence (the substitution-excuse coda) — the "Some Substance-dependent persons, though..." pivot is the clearest seam between the JOI-film material and Ennet-world.
  • Joelle's first JOI appearance "in this very Low-Temperature Civics" (p. 707) hooks directly into Hal's L-TC meditation one page earlier (scene 138, p. 706) — father's filmography and Ennet House joined through her.
  • The speaker's window-vs.-kitchen-floor choice restates scene 135's burning-high-rise suicide logic in lived form — flames, window, and a man who didn't jump; the pairing is explicit.
  • Same night, across the river: Kate and Ruth trudge down Prospect St. in Cambridge toward Curfew with Poor Tony behind them (scene 136) — the House's two off-campus parties on 14 Nov, one being saved, two being stalked.

Forward

  • Gately's Trauma Wing state (tube, fever, refusing Demerol, "certain men with hats wished him ill") summarizes the post-shooting situation from the Nuck firefight (pp. 601-619, scene 120) and previews the long hospital-bed/wraith sequence (pp. 809, scene 161ff) where Joelle's visits, the Demerol temptation, and the show-him-the-face question all mature.
  • "Showing somebody the face" continues the veil/deformity-or-perfection enigma (Molly Notkin's account, pp. 788-795, scene 159; the Madame Psychosis radio scenes; U.H.I.D. doctrine pp. 533-538, scene 104) — dated here precisely: 11/14, the night her resolve forms.

Notable passages (10)
  • p. 708: "The truth has a kind of irresistible unconscious attraction at meetings, no matter what the color or fellowship." — the scene's engine; addiction-recovery extraction.
  • p. 709: the locket-image — "didn't so much get pushed aside as somehow shrink to a tiny locket-size picture in the center of a part of him he and the Holmeses had set out busily to kill, with the pipe." — addiction's anti-love mechanics in one figure.
  • pp. 709-710: the biscuit pan and peanut-butter rind ("what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two") — the Bottom's physical evidence; among the book's great sincerity set-pieces.
  • p. 710: "Something has taken the tight ratchet in Joelle's belly and turned it three turns to the good.... the first time in a long time—tonight, 11/14—Joelle's even considered possibly showing somebody the face." — her conversion moment, dated.
  • pp. 710-711: "whatever he silently thanked for just that particular sandwich he held and chewed... that thing became his Higher Power." — the book's most concrete Higher Power; pairs with Gately's kneeling-to-nothing problem.

Endnotes digested here

  • n.291 (p. 1053): CA as post-craze NA splinter; Ennet Staff steer residents to AA/NA as primary — splinters have few meetings and narrow recovery's aperture to one Substance instead of "complete sobriety and a new spiritual way of life in toto."
  • n.292 (pp. 1053-54): why the sentiment is "fearful" — Staff discourage resident attachments; sub-note a: Boston AA's first-year no-involvement suggestion, romance as delusive analgesic for the newcomer's hole, covalence-hungry isotopes, "Addicts Don't Have Relationships, They Take Hostages," celibacy as the Waterloo of all suggestions.
  • n.293 (p. 1054): 'Holmes'; Joelle's dated, unconsciously derisive verbal acculturation — "a paragon of racial sensitivity compared to the sort of culture Don Gately was conditioned in."
  • n.294 (p. 1054): the Boston-Commitment habit of apostrophizing an absent 'Jim,' which Joelle notes "in a neutral sociologic way."
  • n.295 (p. 1054): B.H.A. = Boston Housing Authority.

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