The binoculars hit the 'Vette: Thrust the zero-shit counselor of Gately's resident days

texture · ~YDPAH (Gately's early residency)

• When: "the very early part of" Don Gately's Ennet House residency — ~YDPAH per the dating of that residency on Gately's own timeline
• What: During Gately's near-discharge prank — he and a methedrine addict had posted a fake CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign on the Unit #2 methadone clinic's door and were watching the resulting dawn riot from the Ennet House fire escape — the addict laughed so hard she dropped the House Manager's borrowed ornithology binoculars, which fell and put "rather a nasty dent" in the roof of a counselor's car just pulling in below. The counselor was Calvin Thrust, and the sentence that introduces him is the book's fullest single portrait of him: "four years sober and a former NYC porn actor who'd gone through the House himself and now took absolutely zero in terms of shit from any of the residents, and his pride and joy was his customized 'Vette." Gately and the addict got pinched and put on Full House Restriction and "very nearly kicked out." NOTE the sobriety stamp: "four years sober" here, in a scene set roughly a year before the YDAU present — where scene 161 gives the same figure (Dating notes).