The Harvard Beach-Theme party catastrophe: the sphincter failure and the grass-skirt ride home

pivotal · February (a pre-YDAU winter), Subsidized era

• When: UNDATED ("one February," when Mildred was "almost seven months pregnant" — so a winter before Harriet's birth; Subsidized era)
• What: In a phase when Green, Mildred, and their trailer-mates crashed collegiate parties, Green found himself at a Harvard dorm's Beach-Theme Party — sand on the floor, grass skirts, Hawaiian music. So uncomfortable, out of place in his cheap leather jacket, and then "uncomfortably fascinated and repelled and paralyzed" by the Polynesian tunes (Don Ho, Sol Hoopi) that keyed his buried phobia, Green sat by the kegs downing beer-foam until "so blind drunk his sphincter had failed" and he shat his pants publicly. Mortified, he buried the fouled police-pants in the party's floor-sand "like a housecat's litterbox," donned a grass skirt from the pile, and rode the T and a bus all the way home in February in a leather jacket, asphalt-spreader's boots, and a grass skirt. He then spent three days in "a paralyzing depression of unknown etiology" on Doocey's sofa drinking Southern Comfort — the buried catastrophe that seals his Polynesia horror. (Mildred, pregnant, gave him "two days of high-volume shit" for abandoning her at the party.)