[277] Trois-Rivières-region idiom, meaning basically ‘reason to get out of bed in the morning.’
[278] Where was Mrs. Pemulis all this time, late at night, with dear old Da P. shaking Matty ‘awake’ until his teeth rattled and little Micky curled up against the far wall, shell-breathing, silent as death, is what I’d want to know.
[279] The kid’s the former E.T.A. whose name keeps eluding and torturing Hal, who hasn’t gone over twenty-four hours without getting high in secret for well over a year, and doesn’t feel very good at all, and finds the kid’s name’s elusiveness infuriating.
[280] Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologic des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain.
[281] This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.
[282] (the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around)
[283] S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors.
[284] A crude and cheap form of combustible methedrine, favored by the same sort of addictive class that sniffs gasoline fumes or coats the inside of a paper bag with airplane glue and puts the bag over their face and breathes until they fall down and start to convulse.
[285] This has got to be a mispronunciation or catachresis on R.v.C.’s part, since Clonidine — 2-(2,6-Dichloroanilino)-2-imidazoline — is a decidedly adult-strength anti-hypertensive; the infant’d have to be N.F.L.-sized to tolerate it.
[286] Kate G.’s never done Ice, or crack/’base/crank, nor even cocaine or low-impact ‘drines. Drug addicts tend to fall into different classes: those who like downs and Mr. Hope rarely enjoy stimulants, while coke- and ‘drine-fiends as a rule abhor marijuana. This is an area of potentially fruitful study in addictionology. Note that pretty much every class of addicts drinks, though.
[287] Since last winter, when a stale smell, litter of dental stimulators, and single slender spit-wet butt signified that a certain upperclassman had been smoking panatelas late at night in V.R.3.
[288] The Continent’s Best Yogurt®.
[289] In point of a fact wholly unknown to Hal, BS: OTN was in fact a very sad self-hate-festival on Himself’s part, a veiled allegory of sponsorship and Himself’s own miserable distaste for the vacant grins and reductive platitudes of the Boston AA that M.D.s and counselors kept referring him to.
[290] Whether the girl’s hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident is never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that’s the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more spiritual wound/hideousness, and the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock.
[291] After a heyday during the pre-millennial self-help craze, CA’s receded back to being a splinter of the still-enormous Narcotics Anonymous; and Pat Montesian and the Ennet House Staff, while they have nothing against a resident with cocaine-issues hitting the occasional CA venue, strongly suggest that residents stick with AA or NA and not make splinters like CA or Designer Drug Addicts Anonymous or Prescription Tranquilizers Anonymous their primary fellowship for recovery, mostly because the splinters tend to have way fewer Groups and meetings — and some none at all in certain parts of the U.S. — and because their extremely specific Substance-focus tends to narrow the aperture of recovery and focus too much on abstinence from just one Substance instead of complete sobriety and a new spiritual way of life in toto.
[292] Fearful partly because the Ennet House Staff strongly discourages residents forming any kind of sentimental attachment to members of the opposite sex during their nine-month stay,3 to say nothing of attachments to Staffers.
a. This is a corollary of Boston AA’s suggestion that single newcomers not get romantically involved for the first year of sobriety. The big reason for this, Boston AAs with time will explain if pinned down, is that the sudden removal of Substances leaves an enormous ragged hole in the psyche of the newcomer, the pain of which the newcomer’s supposed to feel and be driven kneeward by and pray to have filled by Boston AA and the old Higher Power, and intense romantic involvements offer a delusive analgesic for the pain of the hole, and tend to make the involvees clamp onto one another like covalence-hungry isotopes, and substitute each other for meetings and Activity in a Group and Surrender, and then if the involvement doesn’t pan out (which like how many between newcomers do you suppose do) both involvees are devastated and in even more hole-pain than before and now don’t have the intensive-work-in-AA-dependent strength to make it through the devastation without going back to the Substance. Relevant gnomes here might include ‘Addicts Don’t Have Relationships, They Take Hostages’ (sic) and ‘An Alcoholic Is a Relief-Seeking Missile.’ And so on. The no-involvement thing tends to be the Waterloo of all suggestions, for newcomers, and celibacy’s often the issue that separates those who Hang from those who Go Back Out There.
[293] Apparently the current colored word for other coloreds. Joelle van Dyne, by the way, was aculturated in a part of the U.S.A. where verbal attitudes toward black people are dated and unconsciously derisive, and is doing pretty much the best she can — colored and so on — and anyway is a paragon of racial sensitivity compared to the sort of culture Don Gately was conditioned in.
[294] It’s a Boston-colored thing on Commitments to make all speech a protracted apostrophe to some absent ‘Jim,’ Joelle’s observed in a neutral sociologic way.
[295] Boston Housing Authority.
[296] Mixes 5/1 with ferric chloride to produce ‘A + B Blood,’ an F/X staple of low-budget splatter-films.
[297] The cartridge’s repetitive emphasis on the Mother Superior’s desire to silence the novitiate leads B. Boone — a lazy student but very bright girl — to opine that the silent brown-cowled Trappists who’ve been hanging superfluously around the film’s edges like some mute Greek chorus have been serving a symbolic rather than a narrative function, which strikes Hal as perceptive.
[298] It’s also a sly Schtitt-directed à-clef, of course, amounting to something like We Are What We Revile or We Are What We Scurry Around As Fast As Possible With Our Eyes Averted, though when Schtitt mentions the motto he never attaches any moral connotation to it, or for that matter ever translates it, allowing prorectors and Big Buddies to adjust their translations to suit the needs of the pedagogical moment.