The Braintree Commitment: fish jokes, the swatted hood, and the ride home

texture · July YDAU

• When: July YDAU — a White Flag Group Commitment to the Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group in Braintree, and the ride home up Rte. 3 after.
• What: Glenn K. travels on the Commitment in costume. Outside the church-basement door after the Our Father, when the biker Robert F./"Bob Death" asks Gately if he's heard the one about the fish, Glenn K. "in his fucking robe overhears, and of course he's got to put his own oar in" — jumping the setup with his own joke (what did the blind man say passing the Quincy Market fish-stall: "Evening, Ladies"), so that a couple male White Flaggers fall about and Tamara N. slaps at the back of his pointy hood, "without real heat, as in like what are you going to do with this sick fuck." In the back of Ferocious Francis's oxygen-tanked old sedan going home, he is trying to ask what the difference is between a bottle of 15-year-old Hennessey and a human female vagina when Crocodile Dicky N., riding shotgun, tells him to try to fucking remember there was ladies present — all of it around a grief-stunned Gately whose forehead is wrinkled in emotional pain the whole ride. And the narration files the deflating detail: "Glenn's cheap pseudo-demonic robes had the faint rank oily smell of a dish towel."