The NA grass meeting; Roy Tony's mandatory hug

texture · Mon 9 Nov YDAU (2009)

• When: Monday 9 Nov YDAU (2009), "the night after" the 8 Nov joint Interdependence Day picnic
• What: The NA arm of the required-meeting program, and the House inside a wider recovery ecology — the I.-Day picnic was a joint affair with Somerville's Phoenix House and Dorchester's "grim New Choice juvenile rehab." Johnette Foltz takes the House's two marijuana casualties, Ken Erdedy and Kate Gompert, to metro Boston's only grass-focused NA meeting so they can see "how completely nonunique and unalone" they are. Over the clinical catalog of marijuana withdrawal hangs unnamed clinical depression, "fog-like," while Gompert mimes shooting herself in the temple. The close: the ritual indiscriminate hugging Erdedy can't tolerate, escalating with the huge ex-street figure Roy Tony into a lesson in surrendered will — nobody likes the hugs; they do it because they've surrendered — resolved when Erdedy embraces him so hard "it looked like Erdedy was trying to climb him." The institutional stakes flash through Johnette's head mid-crisis: how the report of "an Ennet House resident assaulted at an NA meeting" she'd personally brought him to "would look written up in the Staff Log" (100).