Ennet House: sobriety, gentle shut-down affect, cribbage with Gately

pivotal · ~YDAU, Oct-Nov

• When: YDAU, his Ennet House residency (present-tense through Nov YDAU)
• What: At Ennet House Green is a sober, big-armed, roughly twenty-one-year-old "garbage-head all-Substance-type kid," face "very slightly smunched in on one side" (a residue of the aunt's grief-clutch, per event 3; see Dating notes for the 066/116 spelling variant), in sleeveless khaki shirts. Gately likes him for his quiet — "he seems to have got sense enough to keep his map shut when he's got nothing important to say, which is basically all the time" — and, with major-league sleep trouble, Green plays cribbage with Gately "in the wee dead hours." His counselor, the tough-loving Calvin T., complains that "listening to Green is like listening to a faucet with a very slow drip," and that Green seems "not serene or detached but totally shut down, disassociated." Green's normal cerebral state is "about one fully developed thought every sixty seconds." He credits the program plainly: if Boston AA is a brainwashing cult, "he guesses he'd got himself to the point where his brain needed a good brisk washing" (echoing Gately's own line). At the 8 Nov White Flag meeting (074) he amuses Gately by asking permission before going down to the men's head, helps Parias-Carbo lug Joelle's cloud-and-dragon dressing-screen upstairs, and — Gately "pleased to see" it — raises his big hand as a newcomer for the meeting's publicly offered Big Book.