A morning in the House: Geoffrey Day arrives; Gately's live-in credo

timeline_event

texture · Fri 6 Nov YDAU (2009), 0825-0832h

When: Friday 6 Nov YDAU (2009), 0825-0832h
What: A representative Ennet House morning, and the thread's clearest statement of what the institution is for. Gately, supine on the Staff couch after an all-night Dream-Duty shift plus janitoring at the Shattuck, holds the morning room together while new resident Geoffrey Day (46, six days in off a red-wine-and-Quaalude bottom) performs contempt for the program's clichés at nine-weeks-clean Charlotte Treat. Around the Day-Lenz friction the scene builds Gately's interior credo: each slogan "looks so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drops off and deepens"; an Ennet House residency is meant only to buy these "poor yutzes" "some thin pie-slice of abstinent time" until something true can surface. The residents' gallery (Minty, Green, hiding-from-both-sides Lenz, handless Burt F. Smith) fills the room. It closes on the book's deadpan grace note — "Peace on earth good will toward men" — Gately being the one who'd farted.