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[125] Plastic-mesh laundry baskets take two hands to carry and keep you from being able to dribble up more balls with your stick’s face; the cast-off janitorial buckets are the size of like a middle-size wastebasket, but they have a sturdy steel pail-type handle, and their hard-polymer composition makes for lasting wear. It was into just such a bucket that Pemulis threw up before his kind of suspicious V.D. down at Port Washington.

(Various gear-companies sell various specially designed ball receptacles with names like ‘Ball-Hopper’ and ‘Ball-Bank’ — the general Academy consensus is these are for dilettantes and pussies.)

[126] It being well-nigh impossible to keep the present from infecting even a playful and childlike Historical Consciousness, Canadians often end up playing picayune but villainous roles in Eschatonic TRIGSITs.

[127] A lot of these little toss-ins and embellishments are Inc amusing himself, not Otis’s TRIGSIT, which is 100 % all biz.

P.S. Wolf-Spiders Ruleth the Land.

[128] Most Valuable Lobber.

[129] M. Pemulis is, in the best Allston MA tradition, a good friend and a bad-news enemy, and even E.T.A.s who don’t like him are careful not to do or even say anything that might call for score-settling, because Pemulis is a thoroughgoing chilled-revenge gourmet, and is not one bit above dosing someone’s water-jug or voltaging their doorknob or encoding something horrid in your E.T.A. med-files or dickying with the mirror over the bureau in the little recessed part of your subdorm room so that when you look in the mirror in the A.M. to comb or tend to a blackhead or something you see something staring back at you that you’ll never entirely get over, which is what took over two years to finally happen to M. H. Penn, who afterward wouldn’t say what he’d seen but stopped shaving altogether and, it’s agreed, has never been quite himself since.

[130] Pemulis doesn’t actually literally say ‘breath and bread.’

[131] Before Boston Groups’ regular speaker meetings there are often closed, half-hour Beginners’ Discussion Meetings, where newcomers can share their cluelessness, weakness, and despair in a warm supportive private atmosphere.

[132] The word Group in AA Group is always capitalized because Boston AA places enormous emphasis on joining a Group and identifying yourself as a member of this larger thing, the Group. Likewise caps in like Commitment, Giving It Away, and c.

[133] Gately’s little bedroom in the damp Ennet House basement is plastered all over every part of every wall that’s dry enough to take tape with cutout Scotch-taped photos of all sorts of variegated and esoteric celebrities past and present, which are varied as residents throw magazines into the E.M.P.H.H. dumpsters and are frequently selected because the celebrities are somehow grotesque; it’s a kind of compulsive habit held over from Gately’s fairly dysfunctional North Shore childhood, when he’d been a clipping and taping fiend.