House operations and the "exotic new facts"; Urines, curfew, Restriction, and the no-locks rule

texture · expository present, autumn YDAU (2009)

• When: UNDATED expository present (autumn YDAU); Ewell's tattoo obsession is a "two-month" early-residency span
• What: The institutional texture and the disciplinary apparatus together. A halfway facility like Ennet House teaches "many exotic new facts" — D.S.S.'s irreversible custody power, detox acne, street lexicography (sporting lint, Eating Cheese, bit, Unit — the joke behind the residents' amusement at the E.M.P.H.H. building names), the vocabulary of Recoveryspeak ("sharing means talking, and taking somebody's inventory means criticizing that person"), and the Program's load-bearing paradoxes (the Substance you must quit has become what you can't lose without losing your mind; nobody ever reports being glad they relapsed; "no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable"). It pivots on irrevocability (n.71, "You Can't Unring a Bell") into Tiny Ewell's tattoo taxonomy. The apparatus that enforces it is small and hard: random Urines — over a quarter of incoming residents get discharged for a dirty Urine within their first thirty days, "and it's the same at all other Boston halfway houses" — a 2330h curfew, weekly Chores, the Overnight Log, and an escalating ladder of Restriction and Full-House Restriction (one resident's grievance: a month's Full-House Restriction "for using freaking mouthwash," 052). Operationally: except for the two front/back offices and the two basement Staff bedrooms, none of the House's interior doors have locks, "for predictable reasons" (scene 106).