The most ancient and gnarled of the Crocodiles — Gately's sponsor

pivotal · STANDING

• When: STANDING (background identity through the YDAU residency and hospital stretch).
• What: White Flag's "cantankerous old Francis ('Ferocious Francis') Gehaney" is "one of the most ancient and gnarled of the Crocodiles" and the man Gately "finally got up the juice to ask" to sponsor him. He has a white crew cut and skallycap and suspenders over a flannel-encased gut, "an enormous cucumber-shaped red schnoz you could actually see whole arteries in the skin of," brown stumpy teeth, emphysema with a portable oxygen tank whose blue tube is taped under the schnoz, the clear bright eye-whites of geologic sober time, and a mouth never without a toothpick. On his right forearm sits the faded tatt of "a martini glass with a naked lady sitting in the glass with her legs kicking up over the broad flaring rim," its legend reading SUBIKBAY'62USN4-07 — though scene 095 dates the same tatt "of Korean-War-vintage" (carried as written, see Dating notes). He is the man "who'd gotten sober under the Nixon administration and who communicated in the obscene but antiquated epigrams the Crocs all used"; and even he has a sponsor — "Ferocious Francis's own sponsor, the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge." What he is to Gately surfaces in one aside to Joelle about a fatherly presence: "The sponsor type. My sponsor's like that, Joelle, in White Flag."