Rummies

by Peter Benchley

  "Quotes are a cheap way out, a way to avoid your own feelings. You've been shutting off your feelings for years, drowning them in booze, anesthetizing yourself from life. Remember I told you you'd feel lonely but wouldn't recognize it? Your best friend isn't there anymore to give you distance from your feelings, so instinctively you go to the next best thing: You use somebody else's words about feelings. Understand?"

  It took Preston a second to say, ''I never thought of that."

  “No, you sure didn't." Marcia smiled at him. "Besides, the parallel isn't right. Hamlet's 'undiscovered country' was death. Yours is life."

  Preston gaped at her. This woman is dangerous.

  "Now," Marcia said, resuming her hands-on-knees position, looking once again at the floor, "I want us to help Cheryl deal with her feelings about losing Karen. But I want Scott to help too, and he can't help till he knows us a little better. So let's everybody remember one thing we didn't want to deal with or we didn't know about ourselves before we got here. I told him about my trip with the Dumbos." She laughed. "I'm not sure he believed me, but it's the truth. . . . Hector?"

  “No sweat, man," said Hector. "The thing I'd blocked most was that when I stabbed myself it wasn't no accident." He looked at Preston. "I tell you, man, when you take a handful of reds in the morning and a handful of yellows at night, and in between you're sniffin' and snortin' whatever the dude's got, there comes a time when you're out of fuckin' balance. I stared at that knife for musta been five minutes before I stuck it in my guts, and I still swore up and down it was an accident." He laughed. "You believe that?"

  ''No." Preston shook his head. "I can't. I really can't."

  "Sure you can, Scott," Marcia said with a crooked smile. "You can relate to that. All he was trying to do was make his quietus with a bare bodkin." She turned to Hector. "Which is how some douchebags say 'off yourself.' " She pointed at Cheryl.

  "It's all about blindness," Cheryl began. "That's what the disease does, it blinds you. I never drank liquor, so I couldn't be in trouble, right? I never once missed work. 'Course, that might have been because I didn't have a job. I never drank in the morning. Why should I? I slept all morning so I could drink all the rest of the day. You're supposed to eat a balanced diet, so I found something with malt and hops and grain in it. A hundred and eighty calories a can, twenty-four cans a day, I had to be eating enough." She shook her head. "Christ, what a jerk!"

  Immediately, Hector leaned over and wrapped her in one of his huge tattooed arms. "C'mon, tell guilt to take a hike."

  Lewis patted her knee. "It's all in the past, hon. What's done is done." He looked up at Marcia and said, "This isn't helpful."

  "Yes, it is, Lewis. Your turn."

  Lewis sighed. "Well, if we're talking about blindness, how about convincing yourself that a vodka enema is a perfectly normal way to have a social drink?" Lewis paused dramatically, pleased to see all eyes locked on him.

  He hasn't told this one before, Preston thought. He must've been saving it for some special moment.

  "I'd just had an ulcer," Lewis continued, "and I couldn't drink. But that just meant that I shouldn't take alcohol into my poor abused stomach, right? So one night when Kevin was sitting there getting sweetly smashed on one of our thirty-dollar bottles of Margaux, I got angrier and angrier till it occurred to me that my

  House of Heavenly Highs had a front door and a back door.”

  "Mutha ..." Hector said.

  "Don't knock it till you've tried it. Fastest high I ever had in my life. Up the gee-gee, in the bloodstream . . . liftoff!-

  Lewis laughed, which must have given tacit permission to the others to laugh too, for Hector suddenly guffawed and Cheryl tittered and Marcia chuckled. Preston put his hand over his mouth and tried to swallow his laughter—he did not feel entitled to assume membership in this fraternity—but a staccato "unh-unh-unh" escaped between his fingers.

  Marcia let the laughter subside and then said, '*How does this make you feel, Scott?"

  "Like an alien. This isn't me. I've never done these things. I can't conceive of doing them."

  "Well, what have you done? There must be some reason you're here."

  "Actually done! Nothing. That's my point. If this . . . these stories, these experiences ... if this is alcoholism, or addiction, or whatever you want to call it, that's not me."

  "Right. You know, Scott, the fun thing about this disease is, it grabs everybody in a different way. Cheryl's friend Karen, she didn't do anything either. She just drank half a bottle of wine a day, every day, couldn't stop. And because she couldn't stop she got to hate herself, couldn't stand how weak and worthless she was, couldn't see the point of going on."

  Marcia paused, and she looked at Preston and wondered if the time had come. Was he strong enough?

  Should she wait a day or two, let him get his bearings before she . . . Piss on it. It's Miller time, Scott. Here we go.

  "Let me paint a picture for you, Scott. Let me paint a picture of a nice, sophisticated, college-educated, upper-middle-class New York guy who doesn't know it but is drinking himself to death ... a real hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool rummy. Okay?"

  "If you must." Preston sighed theatrically. "Go ahead: Take two from column A, two from column B, and create your stereotype. But that's not me."

  "No, no. I know. This'll just be a rough portrait, a lot of guesswork. But let's say, if any of the things I describe don't apply to you, raise your hand. Okay?"

  "Sure." Preston hoped he looked bored, hoped no one else could hear the locomotive sounds his heart was making.

  "Let's see . . ." Marcia gazed at the ceiling. "He grew up in a family where booze was part of the diet: drinks with lunch, drinks before dinner, drinks at the country club. The rule was, when you're happy you have a drink to celebrate, when you're sad you have a drink to console yourself. In college he was proud of his capacity. He could hold his liquor. That was the deal: A gentleman drank as much as he could hold, no more.

  "He got married, had a kid or two, kept drinking. No problem. Then, in the past couple of years, a change: Once in a while he'd say something or do something that the next day he'd feel like apologizing for. Even worse, some days he couldn't remember that he'd said it or done it. Maybe a friend would call up and say, 'Boy, you really tied one on last night,' and they'd have a good laugh till he'd have to face that rough moment and ask—with another awkward little laugh—if the friend knew how the car had come to be parked sideways in the driveway, or maybe how the car had gotten home at all."

  Preston stared at the floor. He felt sweat running down the crack in his ass. His ears popped as the muscles in his jaw ground his molars together. He longed for oblivion.

  "Don't forget, Scott," Marcia said, a sunny smile on her face, “stop me whenever I miss the mark. By the way, does the name Richard Speck mean anything to you?"

  "Speck? No."

  "Richard Speck woke up one morning a lot of years ago, and he couldn't remember the night before either. Maybe he had a good laugh about it, I don't know, but it didn't last long because what he'd done the night before was knife eight nurses to death in Chicago. They say he still doesn't remember doing it. He swore he didn't know he had a problem. Anyway, that's not you. So: Our nice New York college guy, he and his wife don't go out much anymore. Maybe it's because they're not asked much anymore, or maybe it's because he thinks dinner parties are a bore, and the real reason is he can't drink as much as he wants to at somebody else's house or at a restaurant because, naturally, it'll be a little embarrassing when he falls asleep at the table or shouts at the waiter—both of which he can do at home and who cares. Oh, maybe the wife cares, but she's used to it, and if his kids care, well . . . kids are taught not to criticize grown-ups, they just keep it all bottled up inside themselves, and he doesn't have time to notice that the kids aren't bringing friends home the way they used to. Maybe he has some vague memory of the last time his kids' friends came over and he was standing there waving a drink at the TV set
and calling Dan Rather a jerk-off. Maybe not.

  "Now, throughout all this, he has a feeling—just a feeling—that this isn't exactly normal, and all he wants these days is to feel normal. It used to be that booze made him feel good, really good, but now the best he can hope for is normal. So he has a couple of pops every hour or two, all day long, and most times he gets away with it fine, but now and then he raises his voice when he shouldn't or challenges his boss over some stupid thing or sleeps past his stop on the train. It's gotten to be more than now and then, though. It's to the point where the people who love him have decided to call him on it. But he thinks: What do they know? They don't have to get through my day. They—"

  "You know what this is?" Preston interrupted. "This is every cliche in the book.''

  "I see, Scott. And cliches don't apply to you."

  "Not ... not all of them. I'm not just a catalogue of textbook behaviors."

  "You're special."

  "I'm me, that's all. Everybody doesn't have to fit your cookie mold."

  "Okay, Scott. How about you buy this one thing: The deal's gone bad. The gentleman isn't holding the liquor anymore. The liquor's got the gentleman. Cheryl, remind Scott. Give him the word."

  "Blindness," said Cheryl.

  "Uh-huh. The disease has blinded you, Scott. It isn't normal to have to take a sedative drug just to ignite the day. It isn't normal to swallow so much of a chemical that it kills your memory. It isn’t normal to shut down two-thirds of your sensory system every day of your life." She leaned forward, forcing him to look at her. "How's your sex life, Scott?"

  "None of your business."

  "Sure." Marcia laughed. "I've been there."

  Hector said, "One time it got so bad for me that I warned God I'd sell my soul to the devil if He didn't give me one more hard-on."

  Lewis said, "I hope He said no, for all our sakes."

  Marcia raised a hand and stopped Hector before he could threaten Lewis. She said to Preston, "Forget the portrait. Can you tell us why you drink, Scott?"

  "Sure. A combination of conditioning and a high-pressure life. Publishing doesn't pay well, but it demands a lot. You feel you—"

  "Stop! No more 'you.' No more 'one.' No more impersonal third-person singular. You can't skate away with generalizations. I want to hear 'I.' "

  He nodded. "I feel I have to maintain . . ." He stopped. "Man, that feels awkward."

  "Doesn't it though? You're learning."

  "Anyway, I—we—wanted a house and a car and a kid who goes to good schools. At work there's a lot of pressure to find the best-seller. I try to write magazine articles on the side, do movie reviews. You know what it costs to keep a child in private school, pay a mortgage? Before the first of January is over, I'm looking at out-of-pocket after-tax expenses of about fifty thousand dollars. I—"

  "Wait a sec. Let's make a list here. The reasons you drink the way you do are, one, a high-pressure job; two, a lot of financial demands; three, it's just a habit. Is there a number four?"

  "Opportunity, I guess. Every day there are business lunches, cocktail parties. It's a boozing business."

  "So we'll call number four peer pressure or environment." One at a time, like a child counting for its mother, she raised four fingers.

  Preston sensed a new danger, another knife being unsheathed.

  "I'll grant you, Scott, that's heavy stuff. I don't know how you've survived this long."

  Here it comes. He said, "You don't have to patronize me."

  "Yes, I do," she said. "I really do. Because for a college boy with a brain, you are without a doubt the stupidest /mc^ I ever did meet."

  Preston had been prepared, so he was able to be angry. "What's this good cop/bad cop routine?" he said. "One minute you're my friend, the next you're sticking it to me."

  "I'm your friend, Scott. But friends don't like friends to lie to them. Don't take my word for it. Hector, what did you think of Scott's explanation?"

  Hector said, '' Horseshit.''

  Cheryl, unprompted, said, "Right on."

  Lewis looked at Preston and said, "Why isn't everybody in publishing with kids in private school a falling-down drunk?"

  "What we're trying to tell you, Scott, is you don't drink because you have problems. You have problems because you drink. And you drink the way you do because you can't not. It's got you, Scott, and it ain't gonna let you go. You gotta shake the fuckin' monkey off your back and kill the sucker.''

  You don't drink because you have problems, he repeated to himself. You have problems because you drink. Wait a second. That is a revolutionary thought. He didn't have anything to say, but his mouth must have been open because Marcia raised a hand.

  "Don't argue, don't question, don't fight," she said. **Just think for a while. You got enough to chew on." She slapped his knee. "And listen. And if you have something to contribute, then speak, because we're going to try to help Cheryl deal with her loss of Karen.'' She took Cheryl's hand. "It feels like a little bit of you died, doesn't it?"

  "Yeah," Cheryl said, "and I only knew her three weeks."

  "You know why it hurts so much?"

  "We had a lot in common?"

  "That too, but more: It was the first intense relationship you ever allowed yourself to have, the first one you didn't shut off with—"

  Suddenly a shriek erupted in a room nearby—a pained and painful, ear-piercing, genuine goosebumper of a human cry of agony.

  Preston started out of his chair, wide-eyed, frightened. Marcia grabbed him by his belt and slammed him back into his chair. No one else had stirred.

  "Don't worry about it," Marcia said.

  "What was thatV

  "Self-expression." Before she could reassemble her words to Cheryl, another shriek exploded and dissolved

  into a wail of despair, punctuated by a crash and some muted rhythmic thumps.

  Marcia smiled at Preston and said, "See? Therapy can be a real blast."

  VI

  DUKE FLATTENED HIMSELF against the wall and covered his ears to blunt the blades of pain that the tumult before him was inflicting on his tequila-ravaged brain. Maybe he'd picked wrong; maybe he should've gone to jail. Treatment was supposed to be mellow, soothing. Nobody'd told him therapy was war.

  He wished he could be absorbed by the paint. Yet he wouldn't have wanted to miss this. It was better than Animal House, something to regale his children with (children, that is, if Clarisse would ever again give him access to her pearly gates). It was just that he wanted to be a spectator, not a player, and he knew that as long as he was visible, somebody was going to insist that he join the group grope. These people were like the Red Chinese: We all work together or we don't work at all. You say you want to march to your own tune, they grab you by the flute and stick it up your ass till you agree to play the national anthem along with everybody else.

  He couldn't remember exactly how it had happened, but somehow this tedious therapy session—everybody mumbling about how they were prisoners of alcohol or how the demon cocaine still visited them in their dreams; he thought he'd go off his tree listening to all the whining—had suddenly exploded like a skyrocket. Somebody had said something about somebody else being uptight and superior. Then some other person had said you can't go out into the world thinking you're better or even different because that leads to isolation, which is a prescription for failure. Then the object of all this said she was sick of being picked on and she felt like kicking the shit out of all of them, and then Dan, the counselor, said something like "Why don't you, then?" and WHAM!—like when a fist hits a mirror, the place was a shambles.

  The folding chairs had been kicked back and cast aside. Six people were bunched on the floor, as if praying to the God of Weird. One of them—Dan, the escapee from Woodstock, with his scruffy beard and granny glasses—was holding a chair and encouraging a fiftyish woman who looked like a rejected bratwurst (overstuffed in all the wrong places) to beat the crap out of it with a stuffed cloth baseball bat. And not just a
ny fiftyish woman. This was NATASHA GRANT (or her remains, anyway), one of the great movie stars of the past forty years, who had defined glamour for two generations, who had had too much too soon and too often, and who had always believed that she was the fantasy creature described in press releases, a belief difficult to sustain when the press releases started describing how she had been fired from this picture and that TV show for being smashed, stoned or simply bloated.

  Now this raving beauty over whose image Duke and countless millions of other ambitious lads had pulled their puds was nothing more than raving—a frowzy, frazzled fishwife gone berserk, howling, weeping and cursing. At a chair.

  The four other votaries—including a man whom Duke recognized as a former Padres shortstop named Clarence Crosby—were all clustered around Natasha, shouting, "We love you, Nat!" and "Feel the love, Natasha!" and trying to pat and hug her, which was a dangerous game, since Natasha was flailing like a dervish, waving that club, which, if it caught you right, could do damage, no question, especially to the face or the balls.

  Dan ducked behind the back of the chair to keep from having his nose pulped, and when he peeked out from a new angle he spied Duke.

  "Duke! Get in here!"

  "Me?" Duke didn't move.

  "Get in here! Now!"

  "But what am I—"

  "Tell Natasha how much you love her!" Dan ducked as the club skinned the top of his head and Natasha shrilled like a stepped-on dog.

  "Oh . . . right." Duke took a couple of steps forward. / haven't even been introduced to the woman. Why should she believe I love her? Maybe I should offer to show her my sheets. He kneeled down and tried to nudge his way into the mass of thrashing arms and legs, but a little butterball of a woman—all Duke knew about her from this one session was that she was a hairstylist who still had nightmares about how she had permed an entire glorious head of hair off her best customer while ripped on Gallo chablis—hip-checked him and blocked his way.

  "You're new," Butterball sniffed. "You can't love her as much as I do."

  "Right you are," Duke said, and he backed off.