How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
I kept telling myself to calm down, but I was still so angry, at Harris and Tierden, of course, and at Browning for having stopped me, and most of all at Mom, for having put me in this kind of horrible position where this dirty-minded old prejudiced sack of s*** was trying to find a nice way to say Some of us noticed your mom is a crazy drunken slut. (21.31)
The thing that has to really suck about having alcoholic parents in a town like Lightsburg is that everyone knows it's going on and they'll talk about it with pretty much everybody—except you, that is. What's interesting is that even though Karl knows what these people are saying about his mom is true, he still doesn't like them talking about her.
Quote #8
"I'm going to a meeting this evening, and if I stay dry till tomorrow morning, I'm back to one day of sobriety."
"I've got eighty-two days," I said. "The first one's the hard one, and then the rest are hard, too." (22.55-56)
There's something so sad about Karl having to advise his mom's boyfriend about kicking his alcohol addiction. It kind of goes along with the fact that even though the Madmen are the ones that are deemed to need therapy, they still generally have it more together than the adults in their lives.
Quote #9
"You said you will have one day," I said, calculating, "but you met my mother on Thursday night—"
"And then got so chickenshit-scared that I got drunk after work on Friday and didn't wake up till ten A.M. Saturday. Scared she'd turn me down, scared I'd get there and she would have forgotten, mostly just scared. If there was ever a good reason to stop drinking it's having done something that stupid." (22.58-59)
Bill is a good example of what alcohol does to people—it makes you scared of facing life, which just makes you drink more. Little does Bill know that his decision to get drunk rather than go to Put-in-Bay with Beth actually causes her to get drunk as well.