The Christmas-Eve crewing day: the ear, the second roll, and "not 2Bdenied"

pivotal · 24 Dec YDPAH

• When: Christmas Eve, 24 Dec YDPAH — a full daylight-to-night crewing day in Cambridge and Boston
• What: "It was yrstruly and C and Poor Tony that crewed that day and everything like that." Across the yrstruly narrator's testimony of that day, C is the crew's engine of surplus violence. In the morning roll of the "Patty citizen" lured into his own car, C wants to kill the victim outright — "elemonade the Patty's map for keeps" — and take the car to a Chinatown chop connection; overruled by Poor Tony, he still breaks the man's jaw as insurance against informing, and "C insisted and was not 2Bdenied and took off one ear which there was a mess and everything like that," then throws the ear in a dumpster — prompting the narrator's flat "so what was the exact pernt to that like" (and confirming, in action, the ear-collecting Gately had heard him claim, event 1). The day runs on: copping from Roy Tony at the Brighton Projects, a beef with the narrator over shot-splitting in the Copley library men's room, NyQuil boosted into "Cs' coat" in Central Square. In the evening's second roll — an older drunk lured from the Bow&Arrow, C watching him through the window steam — "C messes up his older map to a large degree," wants to siphon a vehicle and set the man on fire, and takes even his shoes; the take is $400-plus. Then the night's fatal governance question: where to cop for Christmas. Against Poor Tony's white-faced pleading for anywhere but Chinatown, C dopeslaps him and insists on Dr. Wo's "well known exellent skeet" — and the narrator's aside supplies the trait that will kill him: "when has any body known C to ever wait he gets dopesick faster than us," already in the Shivers and "all piss and vinegar for Wo." "C is not 2Bdenied." (All spellings as printed; the narrator's identity is an open question — see Dating notes.)