Who Bobby C is: Sorkin's savage third field-operative, the addict who prefers violence

texture · UNDATED (standing; earliest stratum "the days of his youth")

• When: UNDATED — standing portrait; his North Shore crewing for Sorkin is placed only in "the days of his youth"
• What: As Gately's memory introduces him, C is Whitey Sorkin's "bad-news new guy" — "a fuchsia-haired Harvard Square punk-type kid with a build like a stump and round black unblinking eyes," purple hair in "three great towering spikes," no lips, bare patches on his forearms "from constantly testing the edge on his boot-knife," an over-zippered leather jacket and a flaming-skull earring. What sets him apart in a book full of addicts is the pairing: he is an "old-fashioned street-junk needle-jockey" who is also the only I.V.-heroin addict Gately ever met who actively liked hurting people — Sorkin's "new third field-operative," who claimed to collect ears (the yrstruly narrative later shows him taking one, event 4). He runs his own "Nuck/fag crew" of Canadian thug-types and transvestites (seen assembled at event 3), and the fags in that set call him "Bob." His deep background is given by the yrstruly narrator in one clause: "C is Wos' former aquaintance from crewing with slopes on the North shore for Whity Sorkin in the days of his youth" — the sentence that welds the book's two C strata together, Sorkin's operation on one side and the Chinatown dealer Dr. Wo on the other. The street's own risk-assessment of him is one clause long: Lolasister will crew with Poor Tony "but not if its’ wet work and with Cs’ involvement its’ always wet work" (040, p. 0130). (Slurs and spellings in all quoted matter are as printed.)