Ennet House's hard case — mohawk, tattoos, ballism, redolence, 'Fang'

pivotal · STANDING

• When: STANDING (background identity through the Nov YDAU residency); the tattoo catalog is undated; the redolence datum rides an 11 Nov interface hour; the cognomen datum rides a ?/14 Nov journal scene.
• What: Gately's Staffer's-eye portrait: Minty is "a hard-core smack-addict punk here for reasons nobody can quite yet pin down," planted in an old mustard-colored easy chair with his combat boots up on a standing ashtray. "Minty's orange mohawk and the shaved skull around it are starting to grow out brown, which is just not a pleasant sight in the morning at all." He has been "on the streets since he was like sixteen," Gately can tell: the sooty complexion homeless guys get, worked into the dermal layer and thickened, "making Minty look somehow upholstered." The tattoo catalog gives his history in two exhibits: "the DORIS in red-dripping Gothic script just below the left breast of Emil Minty, who yes apparently did love once," and "a palsied and amateur swastika with the caption FUCK NIGERS on a left biceps he is heartily encouraged to keep covered, as a resident" (caption as printed). The endnotes add pharmacology — cocaine hydrolysis produces "in Emil Minty a ballism so out-of-control he snorted Bing only once," a physiological reason his Substance is smack — and, via Day's fastidious complaint in Gately's interface hours, hygiene: settling in at a meeting "next to a positively redolent Emil M." And per Day's comparative journal of the male residents' genital cognomens, Minty's Unit is "'Fang' (Minty)" — the catalog's one predatory entry.