Rummies

by Peter Benchley

  If Preston had not already concluded that Dolores Stark was the Uri Geller of the booze business, he would have been surprised. As it was, he was almost amused as he watched her open the hollow book and pull out the half-full pint of 100-proof vodka.

  “Proust is a safe stash. Nobody ever reads Proust." She uncapped the bottle and started toward Preston, for some reason taking the long route around behind the desk. She stopped six feet from him and held out the bottle.

  What was she doing? Just give me the bottle! She wanted him to fetch it, to grovel for it. But why? I thought you were my friend!

  He lunged for the bottle. His hand was six inches from it when she upended it, and eight ounces of salvation drooled into the wastebasket. He stopped, his hand still extended, a clot of bile rising in his throat.

  "Whoops!" said the heartless, vindictive harpy. She picked up the wastebasket and sloshed the vodka around the scummy bottom. Then she took a step toward him. “One last social drink before we go?" A nasty grin crinkled her stony face. “Sorry I don't have a twist."

  He hesitated for a second, no more, but long enough for Kimberly to see that he was tempted. Her look of ashen horror engraved itself on the tablets of his mind.

  He slumped back in his chair, his face contorted by a racking sob.

  Dolores Stark set the wastebasket on the floor and said cheerily, “Welcome to the rest of your life."

  III

  He would have skipped from Kennedy Airport—would have found a motel with a cool, dark bar and spent a couple of days thinking things over—if Dolores Stark hadn't latched on to him like a Velcro suit and stuck with him from the office to the plane.

  He would have dodged into the men's room and knocked back six ounces of Dr. Smirnoff’s finest from the pewter flask in his briefcase, if she hadn't searched him like a zealous nanny and confiscated the flask, as well as the foil-wrapped packet of Valium that he always carried in his watch pocket, just in case.

  He would have at least managed a few quick see-throughs on the plane if the virago hadn't had the appalling bad taste to summon a supervisor and instruct him to tell the chief stewardess that Preston was not under any circumstances to be permitted to consume anything—including not only beverages but also sauces, condiments, garnishes and flavorings—that contained ethyl alcohol. She even warned him that Preston might feign cardiac arrest in a desperate attempt to con a beaker of brandy from a naive flight attendant. Preston saw the supervisor sneak glances at him over Dolores Stark's shoulder. He hated being noticed, cherished privacy and anonymity and the freedom they gave him to keep his little secrets. Now he had been publicly branded as a loon.

  For two thousand miles he sat in his seat and felt the stewardesses eyeball him as if he were a Palestinian terrorist. When he went to the John, two of them hustled the liquor cart out of his way and guarded it like wrens protecting their eggs.

  As the plane touched down in Santa Fe, Preston had to admit that he felt virtuous: This was the first time in his adult life he had flown sober. He had always believed that flying in an airplane was unnatural if not downright impossible, a patent violation of reality. The unanesthetized mind analyzes the experience and must conclude that it cannot be happening. The only way a rational man can endure flying, therefore, is to distance himself from the fact that it is happening. To Preston, there were but two groups of people who could fly sober, those whose critical faculties had been permanently damaged, and pilots, who had been conditioned to worship machines beyond all reason. So virtuous did he feel that he decided to reward himself with a drink or two. He deserved them, of course-—after a day like this, he deserved a Jeroboam— but he also needed them, if he was to suffer through an afternoon and evening of Mickey Mouse bullshit, slogans (“Welcome to the rest of your life," she had said to him. Jesus!) and facile and phony protestations of love and hope. He had edited enough self-help books to know that in the universe of therapies, everybody always loves everybody. He did not love everybody. And as for hope, he had found it to be a one-way ticket to disappointment.

  He had had four hours to think, and he had decided a few things. His wife, daughter and employer believed that he had a drinking problem. So, ipso facto, a problem existed. But to Preston, the problem was largely one of perspective. None of them drank at all—oh, a glass of wine now and then, but that wasn't drinking. If he had married the girl he squired around the watering holes of New Haven back in the sixties, a giddy tippler who could bend an elbow with the best of them, the perceptions of him would have been entirely different. He wondered where she was. She had been brought up, as he had (and as Margaret and Warren definitely had not), to recognize booze as a fine tool to be used judiciously for the relief of anxiety and stress. She would have understood that the only way Preston could shuffle along from day to day was to take periodic chemical holidays from himself. She wouldn't have called that a problem, not when he had never missed a day's work, never had a drunk-driving conviction, never brawled or made a public display of himself. She would have known that the memory lapses Warren trotted out as ammunition were just . . . memory lapses. Everybody has them.

  Warren and Margaret didn't understand, because they couldn't.

  If in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, then in the land of the teetotaler the social drinker is a rummy.

  Dolores Stark was convinced he was an alcoholic.

  But on what did she base her conviction? On what she had heard from Margaret and Warren (and from Kimberly, though she wasn't a reliable witness, having been primed by Margaret). Dolores Stark didn't know him, couldn't appreciate what it was like to live inside his head.

  Exactly what was an alcoholic, anyway? He bet that if you put a hundred people into a room, you couldn't get three of them to agree on a definition. Legend had it that Ulysses Grant was an alcoholic, but then Lincoln was supposed to have said something like: "If liquor fueled the job Grant did for this nation, then I'll have a case of whatever he's drinking." Winston Churchill kick-started every morning with brandy and kept pour-ling it on all day long. The stereotype was the bum who slept in a doorway and drank Thunderbird from a bag, but maybe he was the same guy who used to sleep on a couch in Pound Ridge and drink Cutty Sark.

  It was all a question of perceptions.

  He didn't blame Dolores Stark for her perceptions. She was in the salvage business. She had to believe he was a wreck wallowing in despair. She had to label him and try to convince him that the label fit. After all, she (Could hardly coax somebody into treatment—which ,was, remember, the way she made her living; more than a little element of self-interest there—by hinting that now and then he overserved himself with margaritas. She'd be out of work in a week.

  And Preston wasn't knocking treatment. There were people who needed it. No question. Especially for drugs. When drugs got their claws into you, they didn't let go. You had to be cleaned out, then broken down and built up again. And there were probably people for whom booze was like that. They couldn't give it up. They were hooked. Treatment was the only way out.

  For him, though, it was overkill, like treating sniffles with penicillin. He could have quit on his own. It would have taken him a few more false starts, but he could have done it. Sure, sure, he knew the old joke: "I have no trouble quitting; I do it all the time." But what had been missing was motivation, and now he had that. What distinguished him from the true alcoholic who could never quit on his own was the fact that (except on certain days like today), Preston didn't need alcohol. He liked alcohol. There was a difference.

  But he would humor them, at least for a while. He'd join the roster of movie stars and country singers, rock drummers and middle linebackers, who had put The Banner Clinic on the map. A stint at Banner was almost a required credential for the Beautiful People these days.

  Mostly, he was going in because no matter what he thought, Margaret's threats and Warren's were real. Maybe they were overreacting, maybe they were misguided, but they had the power to cause him a lot of pa
in, and he had quite enough pain these days, thank you very much. How long he would stay was another matter.

  Besides, who could say that he wouldn't get anything out of it? He might learn something. The worst that could happen was that he'd dry out for a while. On full salary. That couldn't hurt. Everybody could use a good flushing. He might even meet some celebrity lush who would write about his or her experience.

  Sign 'em up. Celebrity confessions were selling like Big Macs.

  Everybody benefits. Virtue plus twenty percent.

  Meanwhile, he had to concentrate on how to wrap his fingers around a couple of quick pops before he met he driver from Banner. He had been told that the driver would meet the plane, which he assumed meant—what with airport security precautions—that he'd be waiting it the baggage carousel.

  He stood up before the plane stopped—incurring from 1 stewardess a baleful glare but no reprimand because, lie figured, she was still afraid that if she said anything aggressive he might go into apeshit DTs—and worked his way to the front. It had to take fifteen or twenty minutes to unload everyone from an L-1011, so if he was first off, he'd have plenty of time to down a brace of white ones. Hell, four or five. Skate into the clinic on a nice comfortable cloud.

  The plane stopped, the door hissed open, he stepped out onto the ramp—and immediately a hand the size of a spare tire grabbed him by the arm.

  "Scott Preston?" said a voice as resonant as the voice of James Earl Jones.

  He looked up into the face of Lawrence Taylor—or his big brother—the most gargantuan man he had ever stood face-to-face with. At least six feet six, an easy three hundred pounds. He was wearing white trousers, white running shoes, a starched white short-sleeved shirt and a black necktie.

  He lowered his nose to Preston's mouth, sniffed and said, "You clean?"

  Preston gasped. "I beg your—"

  "You sober?"

  Preston tried to summon outrage, but his "Of course!" came out as a squeak.

  "Good. Makes life easier for both of us." He steered

  Preston down the ramp. As they stepped into the terminal, he said to an airline agent, ''Thanks, Harold."

  ''Anytime, Chuck. Pilot said this one was a pussycat."

  This one? What was he, a chimpanzee? The pilot had been talking about him? Over the radio? Screw this, he'd had enough. He tried to pull away. Not a chance. His arm would separate from his body before it would escape from the vise at the end of Chuck's arm.

  With gentle upward pressure, Chuck had him scuttling along on tiptoe.

  "Okay, I give," Preston said. "Time out."

  Chuck set him down and looked at him and seemed to decide that Preston would not flee the jurisdiction. He nudged Preston forward and shortened his step to synchronize their paces.

  They passed a bar. The bottles standing against the mirrored wall were illuminated from above, and they glowed with a magical light. Half a dozen men were crouched on stools, their hands cuddling cold glasses filled with warmth. Preston felt an ache, of envy, of nostalgia. He imagined that he was a sailor setting off on a voyage of unknown duration into unknown seas, looking back at his loved ones waving from the shore.

  His pace slowed. Chuck looked at him, saw what he was looking at, and said, "Don't even think about it. You show up at Banner blasted, they'll lock you up and put you through the whole detox number."

  They stepped onto an escalator leading down to the baggage area. "So," Chuck said pleasantly. "You're a juicer."

  "A what?"

  “Makes sense. Fella dressed like you, it's either juice or blow, and you don't have blow in your eyes."

  Preston stared at him.

  “Me, I was into blow. Forty grand a year." He shook his head. “Can't believe it, looking back."

  They collected Preston's suitcase. Chuck's hand wouldn't fit inside the handle, so he hung it from one finger. On him the suitcase looked like a purse.

  “Where did you play football?" Preston asked as he followed Chuck out of the terminal and into the parking lot. The question was not a guess: A man Chuck's size had been either a football player or a backhoe.

  “TCU, then the Steelers for three seasons. I was just getting good when some dude showed me how much fun it was to shove shit up my nose."

  “Oh. I'm . . . sorry."

  “Yeah. Like they say, life's a bitch, then you die."

  The car was a black Cadillac limousine with the letters B. C, stenciled in gold italics on the driver's door. Chuck dropped the suitcase in the trunk and opened one of the back doors. "There's fruit juice and sodas and stuff," he said. "And a TV if you want to watch fuzz and squiggly lines."

  "You mind if I sit up front? I don't feel like riding in a hearse."

  "Suit yourself." Chuck reached to open the front door. "I'm supposed to tell you: If you feel the need to regurgitate or defecate, please give me enough notice so I can pull over to the side of the road."

  ''What?"

  "Don't blame me. They make me use those words."

  Preston got in. Chuck shut the door and went around to the driver's side and squeezed behind the wheel.

  “Do people do that?" Preston asked.

  “Oh yeah. I had a guy—a priest, for crissakes—take a dump on the floor. Another time, I had this poet who said I was like that guy Charon, you know, the one who guards the River Styx? 'Chuck,' he says, 'they all pass your way.' Then he puked."

  "Well, you don't have to worry about me. I'm fine."

  "Right." Chuck's lip curled in what may have been a smile. ""Now you're fine. Tell me how you feel when we get closer." He pulled out of the parking lot and headed north.

  For a while, the landscape was all taco stands and gas stations and curio shops and by-the-hour motels. Then the sleaze thinned out, and Chuck turned off the highway and aimed the bow of the ebony ship into what struck Preston as perfect Hunter Thompson country—a ribbon of shimmering pavement that led directly to hell. On all sides, nothing but sand and cactus; ahead, nothing at all.

  Preston's stomach growled as a bubble of gas caromed around a cavity. He swallowed bile and said, just to hear the sound of a human voice, "Everybody spends a month here?"

  "If you shape up. Stormy Weathers was here six months. They decide for you. If you got any brains, you do what they say.''

  "They're that good?" He craved comfort.

  "The best. The story is, when Stone Banner dried himself out and decided to start his own joint, he stole the best people and the best gimmicks from all over the country. Smart. Specially for some dude who made his name sitting on a horse, hollering 'Let's get 'em, boys!' "

  “What's he like? Banner."

  Chuck reached into his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He said only, “He's helped a pile of people." He offered Preston a cigarette.

  Preston shook his head. "I don't."

  “You will." Chuck lit up.

  “I haven't smoked in fifteen years."

  “Uh-huh." His face was expressionless.

  Smug, Preston decided. That was the word for these people, for Chuck and Dolores Stark. They thought they knew everything. Everyone was predictable, followed a pattern. Surprises were against the law.

  Preston said, “Are you a Calvinist?"

  “You mean like a Moonie? No way."

  A tiny town rose in the heat haze and hung like a mirage over the desert and then soundlessly flashed by and vanished behind them.

  Hills began to emerge on the eastern horizon. At first they were black lumps, then gray, then—as the Cadillac closed on them at one hundred miles an hour—purple, their contours sharpening against the sapphire sky.

  Chuck pointed at what now loomed as mountains, and he said simply, “In there."

  "Where? What?" There was no “there" there. The road seemed to plunge straight into the mountains. The Banner Clinic was underground? Preston was damned if he'd spend a month in a cave.

  But at the base of the nearest mountain the road swooped to the right and snaked through a n
arrow pass between shoulders of rust-red dirt.

  Chuck flicked a finger toward a plateau atop one of the hills. "See up there?"

  Preston saw a sprawling white edifice of stone and glass, on which rays of the afternoon sun played like a thousand restless fingers.

  'That's Stone Banner's very own place. Got a swimming pool, tennis court, three-hole golf course, the works. He calls it Xanadu, like in Citizen Kane.'"

  The road spilled them into an oasis of green surrounded by the pastel hills. An automatic sprinkler system bathed sections of Bermuda rye grass at programmed intervals. Stands of palm trees offered shade to ducks floating on man-made ponds. A complex of adobe buildings—beige with red tile roofs—hunkered in the middle of the oasis. The road looped in toward the buildings, then out again, then made another loop by an airstrip and continued on, to nowhere.

  There were four adobe buildings, arranged in a square. The largest fronted on the paved roundabout. Chuck stopped the limo at the curb before a huge black-glass door, beside which, embedded in the adobe, was a discreet brass plaque that said the banner clinic. He did not turn off the motor but popped the trunk and got out.

  Preston followed. It was like stepping from a refrigerator into a sauna. The first breath of hot air hurt his chilled lungs.

  Chuck handed him his suitcase and said, "I'd take you in, but I gotta hump back and collect a lady lawyer coming in from Pasadena. 'Sides, you look like you can make it on your own."

  Preston managed a smile. "I hope you make it back to the NFL."

  "Not this pickaninny. I stray too far from here, for sure I'll find me a snowdrift and stick my nose in it."

  "Forever?"

  ''There's no such thing as forever, friend. All I know for now is, I got to serve a life sentence saving my life."

  Preston suddenly felt ill. He let Chuck take his hand and shake it.

  "Kick back and let it happen,” Chuck said as he ducked into the car. "You feel like a sack of wet turtle turds now, but believe me, when you get out of here, you'll feel like the prince of fuckin' peace.”