The mangled MARY tattoo — his using days, written on his arm

pivotal · STANDING

• When: STANDING (background identity; the tattoo predates the story, its razor-blade edit dates to an unspecified coked-out night in his past).
• What: Foss's history arrives as an exhibit in Tiny Ewell's Stoic-Regret tattoo researches: "Chandler Foss has an undulating banner with a redly inscribed MARY on one forearm, said banner now mangled and necrotic because Foss, dumped and badly coked out one night, tried to nullify the romantic connotations of the tatt by inscribing BLESSED VIRGIN above the MARY with a razor blade and a red Bic, with predictably ghastly results." The endnote catalog of cocaine-hydrolysis effects gives him a standing physical signature from the same history — the oral-labia hemispasm that in him stays at the mild end of the scale: "a mild gnawing/writhing affect in Lenz, Thrale, Cortilyu, and Foss." Both marks — the botched tattoo edit and the facial affect — are the book's direct window on who Foss was before Ennet House: a cocaine addict whose worst moments were self-inflicted, impulsive, and survivable. (The listed "Cortilyu" is the April Cortelyu of event 6, spelled differently across raws — see Dating notes.)