Resident at Ennet House: a young flask-alkie from Ashland KY

pivotal · STANDING — Nov YDAU residency

• When: STANDING — the frame for everything below: McDade is a live-in resident of Ennet House through November YDAU, contemporaneous with the dated scenes (4 Nov through the post-shooting hospital window).
• What: Wade McDade is a young Ennet House resident, introduced as a hard-core bottom-shelf alcoholic ("flask-alkie") from Ashland, Kentucky. He has complex nests of blue and red serpent tattoos running down the insides of both arms and a flaming skull on his left shoulderblade, and is required to wear long-sleeved shirts every day to his menial job at a Store 24 — even in the store's brutal heat — because the Pakistani manager believes customers won't buy cigarettes and lottery tickets from a man with "vascular-colored snakes writhing all over his arms." His teeth are ruined — the sight of them gives Joelle van Dyne the fantods, in a passage that sets them directly against the blackened teeth of residents who hit bottom with the glass pipe (the substance-of-record tension; see Dating notes). He uses a special anti-acne soap (a gnawed cake of which surfaces, absurdly, in Tiny Ewell's hand after a dream).