"His personally chosen Higher Power is Satan": the un-kickable White Flagger, and the gavel that ends the break

pivotal · 8 Nov YDAU

• When: 8 Nov YDAU, the big White Flag Group meeting (Joelle van Dyne's first AA meeting).
• What: The defining characterization lands inside Gately's standing pitch to new Ennet House residents that Boston AA can't kick you out — after a catalogue of everything these rooms have already heard, the capper: "Four-year White Flagger Glenn K.’s personally chosen Higher Power is Satan, for fuck’s sake." And the tolerance is total: "Granted, nobody in White Flag much likes Glenn K., and the thing with the hooded cape and makeup and the candelabrum he carries around draw some mutters, but Glenn K. is a member for exactly as long as he cares to Hang In." Then, late in the meeting, his one on-page act doubles as the scene's structural hinge: at the raffle-break's end Joelle delivers her unraveling of "But For the Grace of God" (a subjunctive senselessly transposed to the indicative), and Gately — with absolutely nothing in his huge square head to Identify with — feels the old greasy panic, the smily-face threatening the veil, for a second sure he's going to get high again; "and the moment hangs there, distended, until" the November raffle coordinator glides up in scarlet velour and formally gavels the break closed, letting the infant leave its playpen alone inside him. The novel's most spiritually vertiginous AA beat is broken up by a Satanist with a plastic gavel.