Dipsomania and decline: the weight-room confessionals with Lyle, the marriage graded "a C," and ceding E.T.A. to C.T.

pivotal · UNDATED (JOI's decline; "the last five years of his life")

• When: UNDATED; "during the last five years of his life" JOI liquidated assets and ceded E.T.A. control (020); the Lyle sessions run through his final years
• What: JOI was "one of those profound-personality-change drinkers who seemed quiet and centered and almost affectless when he was sober but would move way out to one side or the other of the human emotional spectrum, when drunk" — pouring his heart out, over Wild Turkey, to Lyle in the E.T.A. weight room late into the night while Mario stood by; one night confessing that "if he had to grade his marriage he'd give it a C" (event 5). His spiral into "the crippling dipsomania of his late father" (020) meant repeated detoxes — including one urgent late-March trip to McLean's in Belmont that Avril herself risked exterior transit to drive him to (064). Two endnote miniatures fix the texture of the decline: at the top-shelf bar in the Chestnut Hills Shopping Center — the one the E.T.A. A-squad staggers past on runs — "the boniface seemed to know Dr. Incandenza and called him by name, and brought him a double bonded without being asked" (n309 p. 1062); and the family's airport pickups from filming trips would find "Himself damp and pasty from the cabin pressure and not enough leg-room and his sportcoat pockets always clicking with little plastic bottles with unopenable caps," C.T.'s "Opheliac mad monologue of chatter" on the drive home grinding JOI's teeth so badly that when Mario let him lean out in the breakdown lane to be ill "there'd be grit in the throw-up that came out, white dental visible grit, from all the grinding" (n316 p. 1062). Over his last five years he "liquidated his assets and patent-licenses, ceded control over most of the Enfield Tennis Academy's operations to his wife's half-brother [C.T.], and devoted his unimpaired hours almost exclusively" to film. [Bears on the death and its open motive: the decline is the ground of the death and its open motive.]