o but also know that causal attribution, like irony, is death, speaking-on-Commitments-wise. Crocodiles' temple-veins will actually stand out and pulse with irritation if you start trying to blame your Disease on some cause or other, and everybody with any kind of sober time will pale and writhe in their chair. See e.g. the White Flag audience's discomfort when the skinny hard-faced Advanced Basics girl who gets up to speak next to last posits that she was an eight-bag-a-day dope fiend because at sixteen she'd had to become a stripper and semi-whore at the infamous Naked I Club out on Route 1 (a number of male eyes in the audience flash with sudden recognition, and despite all willed restraint automatically do that crawly north-to-south thing down her body, and Gately can see every ashtray on the table shake from the force of Joelle V.'s shudder), and then but that she'd had to become a stripper at sixteen because she'd had to run away from her foster home in Saugus MA, and that she'd had to run away from home because . . . --here at least some of the room's discomfort is from the fact that the audience can tell the etiology is going to get head-clutchingly prolix and involved; this girl has not yet learned to Keep It Simple--. . . because, well, to begin with, she'd been adopted, and the foster parents also had their own biological daughter, and the biological daughter had, from birth, been totally paralyzed and retarded and catatonic, and the foster mother in the household was--as Joelle V. put it later to Gately--crazy as a Fucking Mud-Bug, and was in total Denial about her biological daughter's being a vegetable, and not only insisted on treating the invertebrate biological daughter like a valid member of the chordate phylum but also insisted that the father and the adopted daughter also treat It as normal and undamaged, and made the adopted daughter share a bedroom with It, bring It along to slumber parties (the speaker uses the term It for the invertebrate sister, and also to tell the truth uses the phrase `drag It along' rather than `bring It along,' which Gately wisely doesn't dwell over), and even to school with her, and softball practice, and the hairdresser's, and Campfire Girls, etc., where at whatever place she'd dragged It along to It would lie in a heap, drooling and incontinent under exquisite mother-bought fashions specially altered for atrophy and top-shelf Lancome cosmetics that looked just lurid on It, and with only the whites of Its eyes showing, with fluid dribbling from Its mouth and elsewhere, and making unspeakable gurgly noises, completely pale and moist and stagnant; and then, when the adopted daughter now speaking turned fifteen, the rabidly Catholic wacko foster mother even announced that OK now that the adopted daughter was fifteen she could go out on dates, but only as long as It got to come along too, in other words that the only dates the fifteen-year-old adopted daughter could go out on were double dates with It and whatever submammalian escort the speaker could root up for It; and how this sort of stuff went on and on; and how the nightmarishness of Its continual pale soggy ubiquitousness in her young life would alone be more than sufficient to cause and explain the speaker's later drug addiction, she feels, but that also it so happened that the foster family's quiet smiling patriarch, who worked 0900 to 2100 as a claims processor for Aetna, it turned out that the cheerful smiling foster father actually made the wacko foster mother look like a Doric column of stability by comparison, because there turned out to be things about the biological daughter's utter paralytic pliability and catatonic inability to make anything except unspeakable gurgly noises that the smiling father found greatly to a certain very sick advantage the speaker says she has trouble openly discussing, still, even at thirty-one months sober in AA, being as yet still so retroactively Wounded and Hurting from it; but so in sum that she'd been ultimately forced to run away from the adoptive foster Saugus home and so become a Naked-I stripper and so become a raging dope fiend not, as in so many ununique cases, because she had been incestuously diddled, but because she'd been abusively forced to share a bedroom with a drooling invertebrate who by fourteen was Itself getting incestuously diddled on a nightly basis by a smiling biological claims processor of a father who--the speaker pauses to summon courage--who apparently liked to pretend It was Raquel Welch, the former celluloid sex goddess of the father's glandular heyday, and he even called It `RAQUEL!' in moments of incestuous extremity; and how, the New England summer the speaker turned fifteen and had to start dragging It along on double dates and then having to make sure to drag It back home again by 2300h. so It had plenty of time to be incestuously diddled, that summer the smiling quiet foster father even bought, had found somewhere, a cheesy rubber Raquel Welch full-head pull-on mask, with hair, and would now nightly come in in the dark and lift Its limp soft head up and struggle and lug to get the mask on and the relevant holes aligned for air, and then would diddle his way to extremity and cry out `RAQUEL!' and then but he would just clamber out and off and leave the dark bedroom smiling and sated and lots of times leave the mask still on It, he'd like forget, or not care, just as he seemed oblivious (But For the Grace of God, in a way) to the fetally curled skinny form of the adopted daughter lying perfectly still in the next bed, in the dark, pretending to sleep, silent, shell-breathing, with her hard skinny wounded pre-addiction face turned to the wall, in the room's next bed, her bed, the one without the collapsible crib-like hospital railings along the sides. . . .