Randy Lenz's secret relapse and animal-killing — the fuse the House's machinery can't see

pivotal · autumn YDAU (2009), culminating 11 Nov

• When: iterative escalation from "the summer" (Lenz's Ennet House entry) through 11 Nov YDAU; SteelSak escalation ~United Nations Day (24 Oct), the Browning knife adopted "near Halloween"
• What: The thread's fuse, and its central institutional failure. Resident Randy Lenz "has found his own dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerlessness issues" of early abstinence: walking home from nightly meetings he escalates from crushing rats to suffocating and cutting neighborhood cats and dogs, each kill sealed with a spoken "There." His "sobriety" is fraudulent — an emergency cocaine stash razored into "Bill James's gargantuan Large-Print Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion," self-justified as a "bonerfied" miracle of reduced Use — and he defeats the House's whole verification apparatus: solo-walkers are red-flagged as relapse-risks at Thursday's All-Staff Meeting in Pat's office, five spot-urines have been pulled on him, but anybody with half a clue can beat an E.M.I.T. screen (a cup of lemon juice; powdered bleach on the fingertips), so his urine comes back clean, he banks his monthly chips, and "Gately's basically decided to just let Lenz be" — the monitoring machinery looking straight at the problem and not seeing it. On 11 Nov, blocked from his animal "resolutions" by the faithful company of Bruce Green, coked off the Handicapped-toilet tank, Lenz unspools a confabulated autobiography and a catalogue of cults and Great Concavity folklore (unknowingly touching the A.F.R. via "a suicidal Nuck cult" of train-jumpers — See the AFR thread). Gately, meanwhile, decodes from Yolanda Willis's report that the "real friendly and fly" resident harassing her is Lenz — the House closing in on him just as he's about to detonate.