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‘Some vital part of my like personhood would die without something to ingest. This is your view.’

‘Sometimes you don’t listen real well, Hallie. That’s all right. Spend some time figuring out this needing. Like what part of you’s come to need it, do you think.’

‘You’re alleging that’s the part that’ll die.’

‘Just whatever part you feel has come to need what you’re planning to take away from it.’

‘The part that’s dependent or incomplete, you mean. The addict.’¹

‘That’s just a word.’

a. q.v. Note 334 sub.

[322] Johnette F., whose very first stepmother had been a Chelsea MA police officer, was conditioned in early childhood to refer to police as ‘police’ or ‘the Law,’ since most B.P.D. personnel find the street term the Finest sardonic.

[323] People outside the Boston AA community always use The and say The Ennet House; this is one way to always tell somebody new or from outside the community.

[324] 17 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT Sometimes at odd little times of day the E.T.A. males’ locker room downstairs in Comm.-Ad. is empty, and you can go in there and sort of moon around and listen to the showers drip and the drains gurgle. You can feel the odd stunned quality customarily crowded places have at empty times. You can take your time dressing, flex in front of the big plate mirror over the sink; the mirror has projecting side-mirrors so you can check out the old biceps from either side, see the jawline in profile, practice expressions, try to look all natural and uncomposed so you can try to see what you really might normally look like to other people. The air in the locker room hangs heavy with the smells of underarms, deodorant, benzoin, camphonated powder, serious feet, old steam. Also Lemon Pledge and a slight smell of electrical burn from overused blow-dryers. Traces of powder and fuller’s earth³ on the blue carpeting, down in too deep to get out without a steamer. You can take a comb out of the big jar of Barbicide on the shelf by the sink, and like a.38-caliber blow-dryer, and experiment boldly. It’s the best mirror in the Academy, intricately lit from all perspectives. Dr. J. O. Incandenza knew his adolescents. At slack times, sometimes head custodian Dave (‘F.D.V.’) Harde can be found in here, taking a tiny nap on one of the benches that run in front of the lockers, which he claims the benches do something palliative for his spinal funiculi. More often there’s one of Dave’s incredibly old and interchangeable menial-task janitors in here running a carpet sweeper or spraying industrial disinfectant in the urinals. You can go into the shower area and not turn the water on and sing, really let go. Michael Pemulis’s own vocals sound pro-quality good to him, but only when he’s surrounded by shower-tile. Sometimes when it’s empty in here you can catch snatches of voices and intriguing feminine-hygienic noises from the females’ locker room on the other side of the lockers’ wall.