The P.G.O.A.T. enters the recovery arc: the freebase overdose, then the first White Flag meeting

pivotal · 7-8 Nov YDAU

• When: the walk to Molly Notkin's party and the freebase overdose 7 November YDAU; Joelle's first White Flag meeting as a new Ennet resident 8 November YDAU
• What: How the recovery spine claims Joelle van Dyne (Madame Psychosis, the P.G.O.A.T.). Already on the walk to Notkin's she registers Step One from inside: "The Fun has long since dropped off the Too Much," she has lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, and she has "in a way done as they'd made Jim do near the end and admitted powerlessness over this cage, this unfree show" (058). At the party she means her freebase binge as suicide — "she liked this more than anyone can like anything and still live" — and OD's on Molly Notkin's bathroom floor (defib paddles and priests), landing five days at Brigham & Women's and then, via a private arrangement with somebody on the House's Board of Directors, in Ennet House. Her first designated meeting, under new-staffer Gately's supervision, she is the veiled cynic who cannot swallow the slogans: she objects that "But For the Grace of God" is "a subjunctive, a counterfactual" and so senseless as an indicative, and that Substances have brought her to where she must have Blind Faith in language that makes her want to "put her head in a Radarange." The exchange is the thread's set-piece on the newcomer's intellectual resistance meeting AA's anti-analysis grain (ev11). See the Joelle timeline (her biography), ennet (her residency), the Gately timeline (Gately as her Staffer).