House prankster and needler

texture · STANDING — Nov YDAU residency; dated instances 4-15 Nov

• When: STANDING — recurring comic behavior across the residency, with dated instances: 4 Nov (pudding theft), 8 Nov (Walkman at the White Flag raffle break), ~10 Nov (the supper tall tale, reported 0450h 11 Nov), 14 Nov (tormenting David K.), and 12-15 Nov (the cartridge complaint, during Gately's hospitalization).
• What: McDade is the House's resident cut-up and low-grade tormentor. An unnamed resident's transcript complaint to Pat names "the pathetic harassments of Minty and McDade" as an ambient nuisance of House life; a second transcript the same afternoon describes his pudding theft — a Hunt's Pudding Cup left in the resident fridge at 1300 gone by 1430, McDade solicitously offering to help look for it with the pudding still on his chin. He runs a standing spaghetti-night bit with Doony Glynn — "Some of that extra-fine spay-ghetti tonight, Doonster" — done "in the voice of a Kentucky sheriff," leading Glynn to the table "as if Glynn were a damaged child," staged while Gately is still in the kitchen. At the 8 Nov White Flag speaker meeting he has a Walkman going at the raffle break (technically OK, the narration notes, but not a real good idea). At supper he spins Ken and Joelle a straight-faced tall tale about a counselor from his time "in Juvenile in Jamaica Plain" who "had this condition where each leg was shorter than the other," insisting it's an AA point to be accepted on faith, Randy Lenz backing him deadpan — Joelle sees she's being had and finds it funny anyway. By 14 Nov he's re-watching "that Korean thing" in the common room while Pat asks Johnette to "keep Emil and Wade from tormenting David K.," and at the House Bitch and Complaint meeting relayed to the hospitalized Gately he gripes that if he has to watch Nightmare on Elm Street XXII: The Senescence one more time he'll take a brody off the House's roof.