Fight night: porch rebellion, ringside coaching, and looking just fine afterward

pivotal · 11-12 Nov YDAU, ~2330h-past midnight

• When: 11-12 Nov YDAU — the curfew ritual from ~2330h, the brawl and its aftermath past midnight.
• What: Minty's curfew ritual opens the night: he, Nell Gunther, and sometimes Gavin Diehl "make a nightly point of going to smoke outside on the front porch" and coming in only after Gately says twice he's got to lock the door, just as some limp rebellious gesture. When the three Nucks corner Lenz and the street erupts, Minty is spectator and instigator, never combatant: he is among those who "appear out of Ennet House's back door" to mill and jostle amid the mops and old furniture on the back porch, watching; mid-melee there are "exhortations from Minty" as Gately stomps the first Nuck, and "You can hear Emil Minty and Wade McDade exhorting Yolanda W. to use the spike heel." Only when it is over do "Minty and McDade come down off the back porch, finally, McDade for some reason wielding a mop." In the aftermath he is one of the boots ringing the downed Gately ("Green's and Minty's boots, Treat's purple plastic shower-thongs"), shouting "'Airdaddy!' Minty is shouting at Ken E." into the triage chaos and supplying the night's streetwise counsel — "'He can't go in no E.R. with a gunshot,' Minty says to Lenz." And the scene's closing physiognomy line is the Minty datum of record: "Everybody except Lenz and Minty looks unwell." — of the whole House, only the wired man and Minty are untroubled by what they have just seen.