Body and persona: the stall, the medicine ritual, oral-hygiene evangelism, substance tourism

texture · STANDING

• When: STANDING — recurring bodily and social texture across YDAU
• What: Schacht's body is his signature. The Crohn's sends him to the commode-stalls so reliably that his entrance alone commands space; he keeps about eight amber bottles of medicine and a whole administration ritual (event 15); he snores so hugely "you can hear Schacht snoring all the way across"; in the weight room he does near-vertical sit-ups, face purple and forehead pulsing, and his stall-suffering is academy shorthand — "Do Bridget having a tantrum! Do Schacht in a stall!" goes the call for impressions. He is E.T.A.'s oral-hygiene apostle: Hal's floss-and-brush kit is to him an example to all, teammates hit him up for Anbesol before the truck ride, his term paper for the Quebec-history course takes up the violent French-Catholic protests against municipal fluoridation under Mulroney, and he keeps a poster of early annular-chemotherapy cancer-cell microphotos he "won't take down even after you're sick of it." Where substances go he is a tourist, not a resident: he gets high only occasionally, "in a sort of medicinal or touristic way," enjoys the occasional panatela, and can forget to finish his portion, so interested does he become in how he already feels — "He's one of these people who don't need much, much less much more." He knows Hal gets covertly high and has never said a word about it, though he privately believes a psychic credit-card bill is in the mail.