I didn’t cross the street. The kid with the smashed face and broken legs was not the only mugger in the neighborhood, and it struck me that I wouldn’t want to meet another one with drink in me.
No, I had to get to my home ground. I was only going to have one drink, maybe two, but I couldn’t guarantee that was all I would have, nor could I say with assurance what one or two drinks would do to me.
The safe thing would be to get back to my neighborhood, have one or at the most two shots in a bar, then take a couple of beers back to my room.
Except that there was no safe way to drink. Not for me, not anymore. Hadn’t I proved that? How many times did I have to go on proving it?
So what was I supposed to do? Shake until I fell apart? I wasn’t going to be able to sleep without a drink. I wasn’t going to be able to sit still without a drink, for Christ’s sake.
Well, fuck it. I had to have one. It was medicinal. Any doctor who looked at me would prescribe it.
Any doctor? How about that intern at Roosevelt? I could feel his hand on my shoulder, right where the mugger had grabbed me to shove me into the alley. “Look at me. Listen to me. You’re an alcoholic. If you drink you’ll die.”
I’d die anyway, in one of eight million ways. But if I had the choice, at least I could die closer to home.
I walked over to the curb. A gypsy cab, the only kind that cruises Harlem, slowed as it approached. The driver, a middle-aged Hispanic woman wearing a brimmed cap over kinky red hair, decided I looked all right. I got in the back seat, closed the door, told her to take me to Fifty-eighth and Ninth.
On the way there my mind was all over the place. My hands were still trembling, though not so violently as before, but the internal shakes were as bad as ever. The ride seemed to take forever, and then before I knew it the woman was asking me which corner I wanted. I told her to pull up in front of Armstrong’s. When the light changed she nosed the cab across the intersection and stopped where I’d told her. When I made no move she turned around to see what was wrong.
I’d just remembered that I couldn’t get a drink at Armstrong’s. Of course they might have forgotten by now that Jimmy had eighty-sixed me, but maybe they hadn’t, and I felt myself burning with resentment already at the thought of walking in there and being refused service. No, fuck them, I wouldn’t walk through their goddamned door.
Where, then? Polly’s would be closed, they never ran all the way to closing hour. Farrell’s?
That was where I’d had the first drink after Kim’s death. I’d had eight sober days before I picked up that drink. I remembered that drink. Early Times, it was.
Funny how I always remember what brand I was drinking. It’s all the same crap, but that’s the sort of detail that sticks in your mind.
I’d heard someone make that very observation at a meeting a while back.
What did I have now? Four days? I could go up to my room and just make myself stay there and when I woke up I’d be starting my fifth day.
Except that I’d never fall asleep. I wouldn’t even stay in the room. I’d try, but I couldn’t stay anywhere, not the way I felt right now, not with only my own whirling mind to keep me company. If I didn’t drink now I’d drink an hour from now.
“Mister? You okay?”
I blinked at the woman, then dug my wallet out of my pocket and found a twenty. “I want to make a phone call,” I said. “From the booth right there on the corner. You take this and wait for me. All right?”
Maybe she’d drive off with the twenty. I didn’t really care. I walked to the corner, dropped a dime, stood there listening to the dial tone.
It was too late to call. What time was it? After two, much too late for a social call.
Hell, I could go to my room. All I had to do was stay put for an hour and I’d be in the clear. At three the bars would close.
So? There was a deli that would sell me beer, legally or not. There was an after-hours on Fifty-first, way west between Eleventh and Twelfth. Unless it had closed by now; I hadn’t been there in a long time.
There was a bottle of Wild Turkey in Kim Dakkinen’s front closet. And I had her key in my pocket.
That scared me. The booze was right there, accessible to me at any hour, and if I went there I’d never stop after one or two drinks. I’d finish the bottle, and when I did there were a lot of other bottles to keep it company.
I made my call.
She’d been sleeping. I heard that in her voice when she answered the phone.
I said, “It’s Matt. I’m sorry to call you so late.”
“That’s all right. What time is it? God, it’s after two.”
“I’m sorry.
“It’s all right. Are you okay, Matthew?
“No.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No.”
“Then you’re okay.”
“I’m falling apart,” I said. “I called you because it was the only way I could think of to keep from drinking.”
“You did the right thing.”
“Can I come over?”
There was a pause. Never mind, I thought. Forget it. One quick drink at Farrell’s before they closed, then back to the hotel. Never should have called her in the first place.
“Matthew, I don’t know if it’s a good idea. Just take it an hour at a time, a minute at a time if you have to, and call me as much as you want. I don’t mind if you wake me, but—”
I said, “I almost got killed half an hour ago. I beat a kid up and broke his legs for him. I’m shaking like I never shook before in my life. The only thing that’s going to make me feel right is a drink and I’m afraid to take one and scared I’ll do it anyway. I thought being with someone and talking with someone might get me through it but it probably wouldn’t anyway, and I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called. I’m not your responsibility. I’m sorry.”
“Wait!”
“I’m here.”
“There’s a clubhouse on St. Marks Place where they have meetings all night long on the weekends. It’s in the book, I can look it up for you.”
“Sure.”
“You won’t go, will you?”
“I can’t talk up at meetings. Forget it, Jan. I’ll be all right.”
“Where are you?”
“Fifty-eighth and Ninth.”
“How long will it take you to get here?”
I glanced over at Armstrong’s. My gypsy cab was still parked there. “I’ve got a cab waiting,” I said.
“You remember how to get here?”
“I remember.”
The cab dropped me in front of Jan’s six-story loft building on Lispenard. The meter had eaten up most of the original twenty dollars. I gave her another twenty to go with it. It was too much but I was feeling grateful, and could afford to be generous.
I rang Jan’s bell, two long and three short, and went out in front so that she could toss the key down to me. I rode the industrial elevator to the fifth floor and stepped out into her loft.
“That was quick,” she said. “You really did have a cab waiting.”
She’d had time to dress. She was wearing old Lee jeans and a flannel shirt with a red-and-black checkerboard pattern. She’s an attractive woman, medium height, well fleshed, built more for comfort than for speed. A heart-shaped face, her hair dark brown salted with gray and hanging to her shoulders. Large well-spaced gray eyes. No makeup.
She said, “I made coffee. You don’t take anything in it, do you?”
“Just bourbon.”
“We’re fresh out. Go sit down, I’ll get the coffee.”
When she came back with it I was standing by her Medusa, tracing a hair-snake with my fingertip. “Her hair reminded me of your girl here,” I said. “She had blonde braids but she wrapped them around her head in a way that made me think of your Medusa.”
“Who?”
“A woman who got killed. I don’t know where to start.”
“Anywhere,” she said.
I talked for a long time and I skipped all over the place, from the beginning to that night’s events and back and forth again. She got up now and then to get us more coffee, and when she came back I’d start in where I left off. Or I’d start somewhere else. It didn’t seem to matter.
I said, “I didn’t know what the hell to do with him. After I’d knocked him out, after I’d searched him. I couldn’t have him arrested and I couldn’t stand the thought of letting him go. I was going to shoot him but I couldn’t do it. I don’t know why. If I’d just smacked his head against the wall a couple more times it might have killed him, and I’ll tell you, I’d have been glad of it. But I couldn’t shoot him while he was lying there unconscious.”
“Of course not.”
“But I couldn’t leave him there, I didn’t want him walking the streets. He’d just get another gun and do it again. So I broke his legs. Eventually the bones’ll knit and he’ll be able to resume his career, but in the meantime he’s off the streets.” I shrugged. “It doesn’t make any sense. But I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
“The important thing is you didn’t drink.”
“Is that the important thing?”
“I think so.”
“I almost drank. If I’d been in my own neighborhood, or if I hadn’t reached you. God knows I wanted to drink. I still want to drink.”
“But you’re not going to.”
“No.”
“Do you have a sponsor, Matthew?”
“No.”
“You should. It’s a big help.”
“How?”
“Well, a sponsor’s someone you can call anytime, someone you can tell anything to.”
“You have one?”
She nodded. “I called her after I spoke to you.”
“Why?”
“Because I was nervous. Because it calms me down to talk to her. Because I wanted to see what she would say.”
“What did she say?”
“That I shouldn’t have told you to come over.” She laughed. “Fortunately, you were already on your way.”
“What else did she say?”
The big gray eyes avoided mine. “That I shouldn’t sleep with you.”
“Why’d she say that?”
“Because it’s not a good idea to have relationships during the first year. And because it’s a terrible idea to get involved with anybody who’s newly sober.”
“Christ,” I said. “I came over because I was jumping out of my skin, not because I was horny.”
“I know that.”
“Do you do everything your sponsor says?”
“I try to.”
“Who is this woman that she’s the voice of God on earth?”
“Just a woman. She’s my age, actually she’s a year and a half younger. But she’s been sober almost six years.”
“Long time.”
“It seems like a long time to me.” She picked up her cup, saw it was empty, put it down again. “Isn’t there someone you could ask to be your sponsor?”
“Is that how it works? You have to ask somebody?”
“That’s right.”
“Suppose I asked you?”
She shook her head. “In the first place, you should get a male sponsor. In the second place, I haven’t been sober long enough. In the third place we’re friends.”
“A sponsor shouldn’t be a friend?”
“Not that kind of friend. An AA friend. In the fourth place, it ought to be somebody in your home group so you have frequent contact.”
I thought unwillingly of Jim. “There’s a guy I talk to sometimes.”
“It’s important to pick someone you can talk to.”
“I don’t know if I can talk to him. I suppose I could.”
“Do you respect his sobriety?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Well, do you—”
“This evening I told him I got upset by the stories in the newspapers. All the crime in the streets, the things people keep doing to each other. It gets to me, Jan.”
“I know it does.”
“He told me to quit reading the papers. Why are you laughing?”
“It’s just such a program thing to say.”
“People talk the damnedest crap. ‘I lost my job and my mother’s dying of cancer and I’m going to have to have my nose amputated but I didn’t drink today so that makes me a winner.’ “
“They really sound like that, don’t they?”
“Sometimes. What’s so funny?”
“ ‘I’m going to have my nose amputated.’ A nose amputated?”
“Don’t laugh,” I said. “It’s a serious problem.”
A little later she was telling me about a member of her home group whose son had been killed by a hit-and-run driver. The man had gone to a meeting and talked about it, drawing strength from the group, and evidently it had been an inspirational experience all around. He’d stayed sober, and his sobriety had enabled him to deal with the situation and bolster the other members of his family while fully experiencing his own grief.
I wondered what was so wonderful about being able to experience your grief. Then I found myself speculating what would have happened some years ago if I’d stayed sober after an errant bullet of mine ricocheted and fatally wounded a six-year-old girl named Estrellita Rivera. I’d dealt with the resultant feelings by pouring bourbon on them. It had certainly seemed like a good idea at the time.
Maybe it hadn’t been. Maybe there were no shortcuts, no detours. Maybe you had to go through things.
I said, “You don’t worry about getting hit by a car in New York. But it happens here, the same as anywhere else. Did they ever catch the driver?”
“No.”
“He was probably drunk. They usually are.”
“Maybe he was in a blackout. Maybe he came to the next day and never knew what he’d done.”
“Jesus,” I said, and thought of that night’s speaker, the man who stabbed his lover. “Eight million stories in the Emerald City. And eight million ways to die.”
“The naked city.”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
“You said the Emerald City.”
“I did? Where did I get that from?”
“The Wizard of Oz. Remember? Dorothy and Toto in Kansas? Judy Garland going over the rainbow?”
“Of course I remember.”
“ ‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road.’ It led to the Emerald City, where the wonderful wizard lived.”
“I remember. The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, I remember the whole thing. But where’d I get emeralds from?”
“You’re an alcoholic,” she suggested. “You’re missing a couple of brain cells, that’s all.”
I nodded. “Must be it,” I said.
The sky was turning light when we went to sleep. I slept on the couch wrapped up in a couple of spare blankets. At first I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but the tiredness came over me like a towering wave. I gave up and let it take me wherever it wanted.
I can’t say where it took me because I slept like a dead man. If I dreamed at all I never knew about it. I awoke to the smells of coffee perking and bacon frying, showered, shaved with a disposable razor she’d laid out for me, then got dressed and joined her at a pine plank table in the kitchen. I drank orange juice and coffee and ate scrambled eggs and bacon and whole wheat muffins with peach preserves, and I couldn’t remember when my appetite had been so keen.
There was a group that met Sunday afternoons a few blocks to the east of us, she informed me. She made it one of her regular meetings. Did I feel like joining her?
“I ought to do some work,” I said.
“On a Sunday?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Are you really going to be able to accomplish anything on a Sunday afternoon?”
I hadn’t really accomplished anything since I’d started. Was there anything I could do today?
I got out my notebook, dialed Sunny’s number. No answer. I called my hotel. Nothing from Sunny. Nothing from Danny Boy Bell or anyone else I’d seen last night. Well, Danny Boy would still be sleeping at this hour, and so might most of the others.
There was a message to call Chance. I started dialing his number, then stopped myself. If Jan was going to a meeting, I didn’t want to sit around her loft waiting for him to call back. Her sponsor might not approve.
The meeting was on the second floor of a synagogue on Forsythe Street. You couldn’t smoke there. It was an unusual experience being in an AA meeting that wasn’t thick with cigarette smoke.
There were about fifty people there and she seemed to know most of them. She introduced me to several people, all of whose names I promptly forgot. I felt self-conscious, uncomfortable with the attention I was getting. My appearance didn’t help, either. While I hadn’t slept in my clothes, they looked as though I had, showing the effects of last night’s fight in the alley.
And I was feeling the fight’s effects, too. It wasn’t until we left her loft that I realized how much I ached. My head was sore where I’d butted him and I had a bruise on one forearm and one shoulder was black and blue and ached. Other muscles hurt when I moved. I hadn’t felt anything after the incident but all those aches and pains turn up the next day.
I got some coffee and cookies and sat through the meeting. It was all right. The speaker qualified very briefly, leaving the rest of the meeting for discussion. You had to raise your hand to get called on.
Fifteen minutes from the end, Jan raised her hand and said how grateful she was to be sober and how much of a role her sponsor played in her sobriety, how helpful the woman was when she had something bothering her or didn’t know what to do. She didn’t get more specific than that. I had a feeling she was sending me a message and I wasn’t too crazy about that.
I didn’t raise my hand.
Afterward she was going out with some people for coffee and asked me if I’d like to come along. I didn’t want any more coffee and I didn’t want company, either. I made an excuse.
Outside, before we went separate ways, she asked me how I felt. I said I felt all right.
“Do you still feel like drinking?”
“No,” I said.
“I’m glad you called last night.”
“So am I.”
“Call anytime, Matthew. Even in the middle of the night if you have to.”
“Let’s hope I don’t have to.”
“But if you do, call. All right?”
“Sure.”
“Matthew? Promise me one thing?”
“What?”
“Don’t have a drink without calling me first.”
“I’m not going to drink today.”
“I know. But if you ever decide to, if you’re going to, call me first. Promise?”
“Okay.”
On the subway heading uptown I thought about the conversation and felt foolish for having made the promise. Well, it had made her happy. What was the harm in it if it made her happy?
There was another message from Chance. I called from the lobby, told his service I was back at my hotel. I bought a paper and took it upstairs with me to kill the time it took him to call back.
The lead story was a honey. A family in Queens—father, mother, two kids under five—had gone for a ride in their shiny new Mercedes. Someone pulled up next to them and emptied both barrels of a shotgun into the car, killing all four of them. A police search of their apartment in Jamaica Estates had revealed a large amount of cash and a quantity of uncut cocaine. Police theorized the massacre was drug related.
No kidding.
There was nothing about the kid I’d left in the alley. Well, there wouldn’t be. The Sunday papers were already on the street when he and I encountered one another. Not that he’d be much likelier to make tomorrow’s paper, or the next day’s. If I’d killed him he might have earned a paragraph somewhere, but what was the news of a black youth with a pair of broken legs?
I was pondering that point when someone knocked on my door.
Funny. The maids have Sunday off, and the few visitors I get call from downstairs. I got my coat off the chair, took the .32 from the pocket. I hadn’t gotten rid of it yet, or of the two knives I’d taken from my broken-legged friend. I carried the gun over to the door and asked who it was.
“Chance.”
I dropped the gun in a pocket, opened the door. “Most people call,” I said.
“The fellow down there was reading. I didn’t want to disturb him.”
“That was considerate.”
“That’s my trademark.” His eyes were taking me in, appraising me. They left me to scan my room. “Nice place,” he said.
The words were ironic but the tone of voice was not. I closed the door, pointed to a chair. He remained standing. “It seems to suit me,” I said.
“I can see that. Spartan, uncluttered.”
He was wearing a navy blazer and gray flannel slacks. No topcoat. Well, it was a little warmer today and he had a car to get around in.
He walked over to my window, looked out of it. “Tried you last night,” he said.
“I know.”
“You didn’t call back.”
“I didn’t get the message until a little while ago and I wasn’t where I could be reached.”
“Didn’t sleep here last night?”
“No.”
He nodded. He had turned to face me and his expression was guarded and hard to read. I hadn’t seen that look on his face before.
He said, “You speak to all my girls?”
“All but Sunny.”
“Yeah. You didn’t see her yet, huh?”
“No. I tried her a few times last night and again around noon today. I didn’t get any answer.”
“You didn’t.”
“No. I had a message from her last night, but when I called back she wasn’t there.”
“She called you last night.”
“That’s right.”
“What time?”
I tried to remember. “I left the hotel around eight and got back a little after ten. The message was waiting for me. I don’t know what time it came in. They’re supposed to put the time on the message slip but they don’t always bother. Anyway, I probably threw away the slip.”
“No reason to hang onto it.”
“No. What difference does it make when she called?”
He looked at me for a long moment. I saw the gold flecks in the deep brown eyes. He said, “Shit, I don’t know what to do. I’m not used to that. Most of the time I at least think I know what to do.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re my man, like you’re working for me. But I don’t know as I’m sure what that means.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, Chance.”
“Shit,” he said. “Question is, how much can I trust you? What I keep coming back to is whether I can or not. I do trust you. I mean, I took you to my house, man. I never took anybody else to my house. Why’d I do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, was I showing off? Was I saying something along the lines of, Look at the class this here nigger has got? Or was I inviting you inside for a look at my soul? Either way, shit, I got to believe I trust you. But am I right to do it?”
“I can’t decide that for you.”
“No,” he said, “you can’t.” He pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger. “I called her last night. Sunny. Couple of times, same as you, didn’t get no answer. Well, okay, that’s cool. No machine, but that’s cool, too, ’cause sometimes she’ll forget to put it on. Then I called again, one-thirty, two o’clock maybe, and again no answer, so what I did, I drove over there. Naturally I got a key. It’s my apartment. Why shouldn’t I have a key?”
By now I knew where this was going. But I let him tell it himself.
“Well, she was there,” he said. “She’s still there. See, what she is, she’s dead.”