Most of the cases Gately had had pending his P.D. had gotten Closed Without Finding,[191] contingent on Gately’s entering long-term treatment and maintaining chemical abstinence and submitting to random urinalyses and making biweekly reparation payments out of the pathetic paychecks he earned cleaning shit and sperm under Stavros Lobokulas and now also cooking and live-in-Staffing at Ennet House. The only issue not resolved on a Blue-File deferral was the business of driving with a DUI-suspended license. In the Commonwealth of MA, this issue carries a mandatory 90-day bit, as in like the penalty’s written right into the statute; and the case’s P.D. has been up-front with Gately about it’s only a matter of the time of the wheels’ slow judicial grind before some judge Red-Files the issue and the case and Gately has to do the bit at someplace MCI-Minimum like Concord or Deer Island. Gately isn’t too hinked about 90 inside. At twenty-four he’d done 17 months at Billerica for assaulting two bouncers in a nightclub — it was more like he’d beaten the second bouncer bloody with the unconscious body of the first — and he knew quite well he could get by in a Commonwealth lockdown. He was too big to fuck or fuck with and not interested in fucking with anyone else: he did his time stand-up and gave nobody any provoking cause; and when the first couple hard guys had come after him for his canteen cigarettes he’d laughed it off with ferocious jolliness, and when they came back a second time Gately beat them half to death in the corridor behind the weight room where he could be sure plenty of other guys could hear it, and after that one incident was out of the way he could simply get by and not get fucked with. Gately now was hinked only about the prospect of getting just one or two AA meetings a week in jail — the only meetings sober inmates get are when an area Group comes in on an Institutional Commitment, which Gately’s been on — when Demerol and Talwin and good old weed are almost easier to get in jail than in the outside world. Gately cringed now only at the thought of the Sergeant at Arms, the distinguished-looking shepherd guy. Going back to ingesting Substances had become his biggest fear. Even Gately can tell this is a major psychic turn-around. He tells the newer residents right up front that AA’s somehow gotten him by the mental curlies: he’ll now go to literally Any Lengths to stay clean.
He’ll tell them right out that he’d first come to Ennet House only to keep out of jail, and hadn’t had much interest or hope about actually staying clean for any length of time; and he’d been up-front with Pat Montesian about this during his application interview. The grim honesty about his disinterest and hopelessness was one reason Pat even let such a clearly bad-news specimen into the House on nothing but a lukewarm referral from a P.O. up at the 5th District office in Peabody. Pat told Gately that grim honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek. Desperation helped also, she said. Gately scratched at her dog’s stomach and said he wasn’t sure if he was desperate about anything except wanting to somehow stop getting in trouble for things he usually afterward couldn’t even remember he did them. The dog trembled and shuddered and its eyes rolled up as Gately, who hadn’t been told about Pat’s thing about wanting her dogs petted, rubbed its scabby stomach. Pat had said like well that was enough, that desire for the shitstorm to end.[192] Gately said her dog sure did like having its stomach rubbed, and Pat explained that the dog was epileptic, and said that just a desire to stop blacking out was more than enough to start with. She pulled some Commonwealth Substance-Abuse study in a black plastic binder off a long black plastic bookshelf filled with black plastic binders. It turned out Pat Montesian liked the color black a lot. She was dressed — really kind of overdressed, for a halfway house — in black leather pants and a black shirt of silk or something silky. Outside the bay window a Green Line train was laboring up the first Enfield hill in the late-summer rain. The downhill view from the bay window over Pat’s black lacquer or enamelísh desk was like the only spectacular thing about Ennet House, which was otherwise a wicked awful dump. Pat made a sound against the binder with a Svelte nail-extension and said that in this state study right here, conducted in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, over 60 % of the inmates serving Life sentences in hellish MCI-Walpole and not disputing that they’d done what they’d done to get in there nevertheless had no memory of having done it, whatever got them in there. For Life. None. Gately had to have her run it by him a couple times before he isolated her point. They’d been in blackouts. Pat said a blackout was where you continued to function — sometimes disastrously — but weren’t aware later of what you did. It’s like your mind wasn’t in possession of your body, and it was usually brought on by alcohol but could also be brought on by chronic use of other Substances, synthetic narcotics among them. Gately said he couldn’t recall ever having a real blackout, and Pat M. got it but didn’t laugh. The dog was heaving and quivering with its legs spronged out to all points of the compass and kind of spasming, and Gately didn’t know whether to quit rubbing on it. To be honest he didn’t know what epilepsy was but suspected Pat was not referring to the woman’s leg-shaver thing his totally alcoholic past girlfriend Pamela Hoffman-Jeep used to scream in the bathroom when she used. Everything mental for Gately was kind of befogged and prone to misprision for well into his first year clean.
Pat Montesian was both pretty and not. She was in maybe her late thirties. She’d supposedly been this young and pretty and wealthy socialite out on the Cape until her husband had divorced her for being a nearly fullblown alcoholic, which seemed like abandonment and didn’t improve her subsequent drinking one jot. She’d been in and out of rehabs and halfway places in her twenties, but then it wasn’t until she’d almost died from a stroke during the D.T.s one A.M. that she’d been able to Surrender and Come In with the requisite hopeless desperation, etc. Gately didn’t wince when he heard about Pat’s stroke because his mom hadn’t had D.T.s or a classic stroke, but rather a cirrhotic hemorrhage that made her choke and deprived her brain of oxygen and had irreparably vegetabilized her brain. The two cases were totally, like, apart in his mind. Pat M. was never in any way a mother-figure for Gately. Pat liked to smile and say, when residents pissed and moaned about their own addictions’ Losses during the weekly House Community Meeting, she’d nod and smile and say that for her, the stroke had been far and away the best thing that’s ever happened to her because it enabled her to finally Surrender. She’d come to Ennet House in an electric wheelchair at thirty-two and been unable to communicate except via like Morse-Code blinks or something for the first six months,[193] but had even without use of her arms demonstrated a willingness to try and eat a rock when the founding Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name told her to, using her torso and neck to like chop downwardly at the rock and chipping both incisors (you can still see the caps at the corners), and had gotten sober, and remarried a different and older South Shore like trillionaire with what sounded like psychotic kids, and but regained an unexpected amount of function, and had been working at the House ever since. The right side of her face was still pulled way over in this sort of rictus, and her speech took Gately some getting used to — it sounded like she was still loaded all the time, a kind of overenunciated slurring. The half of her face that wasn’t rictusized was very pretty, and she had very long pretty red hair, and a sexually credible body even though her right arm had atrophied into a kind of semi-claw[194] and the right hand was strapped into this black plastic brace to keep its nail-extensioned fingers from curling into her palm; and Pat walked with a dignified but godawful lurch, dragging a terribly thin right leg in black leather pants behind her like something hanging on to her that she was trying to get away from.