Coffee after the cracked tabletop: the minor-league/major-league God line

pivotal · ~Apr YDAU

• When: shortly after Gately, at about seven months sober, cracks a Provident tabletop with his head at the Sunday Beginners' Meeting; ~April YDAU by back-count (inference — see Dating notes).
• What: After Gately beats his head against a fake-wood tabletop in frustration at a Higher Power he can't understand ("this thing that was working. It drove him bats"), "F.F. had taken Gately out for eye-rattling amounts of coffee, after the incident with the table and the head." He listens "with the slight boredom of detached Identification" to the complaint that something Gately can't even understand can't plausibly want to save him — then suggests "maybe anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn't going to be major-league enough to save Gately's addled ass from the well-dressed Sergeant at Arms, now, was it?" Gately still doesn't quite know why it helped; it helped. The defining early act of the sponsorship, and the Crocodile method in its cleanest form: no theology, one joke, total redirection.