by Dan Barden
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if it has something to do with Terry’s death, I was out of his life a long time before any of that shit went down. You know that better than anyone. You know exactly when I broke things off.”
“Thanks for calling, Claire. Take it easy.” I started to hang up.
“I was trying to apologize for being an asshole,” she shouted. “Can you just—”
“Okay.” Calling yourself an asshole was always good for another minute of my time.
“I shouldn’t have brought MP into our conversation this morning.”
It sounded like an authentic apology. “I’m sorry, too, Claire. I like you. You’re trouble, but I like you.”
It took her a moment to fill the silence that followed my admission. “I like you, too, Randy.”
Claire hung up. She didn’t ask for anything. She didn’t feed me another line about an electrician named after a dog. She didn’t try to hurt me. Either this was a new strategy to destroy men’s lives or she’d actually apologized. When she started coming to meetings a few years ago, there had been a moment when she got it—she knew why she was there—but that moment passed, and she became the kind of A.A. you needed to watch out for: someone who will take you down quicker than you can lift her up. Claire still had volunteers, though. For one short, bad moment a couple of years before he died, Terry had been one of them.
Every alcoholic has one thing that cuts to the marrow. The thing that he wants but can’t quite achieve, the thing that he’s always on the cusp of, the “until I get this, I am nothing.” For some of us, it’s professional success. For some, it’s a good marriage. For Terry, it was children.
Terry wanted kids more than anything.
His own father had been an Irish Catholic bank president with eight kids. Terry could no way ever hope to become a bank president—he’d been arrested for everything from a teenage armed robbery to kiting checks right before he got sober, and the fact that he’d been able to join the bar was an A.A. miracle—but he always believed he should have kids. He just never found the right mother.
That deal with Claire Monaco, his attempt to extort her son from her, was at the extreme end of a long line of attempts to put together a relationship that would produce kids. His choices weren’t always awful, but they were always off by enough that we had to wonder if Terry wanted what he said he wanted. He went out with fifty-year-old empty-nesters. He went out with psychotically driven career women—the kind who couldn’t stop long enough to fill a gas tank, let alone get pregnant. He went out with social-climbing party girls making their way through A.A. as though nothing needed to change about their shallow lives except their consumption of alcohol. Those girlfriends were the hardest for us to take. There was a certain kind of female narcissism that Terry was blind to. I don’t know how many times we tried to tell him: She’s only using you, dude. She doesn’t even see you. When that kind of girlfriend moved on for a nicer home and car, Terry was always surprised.
He told me once that he and his wife tried to have children, pushing themselves through fertility treatments and in vitro right to the door of adoption, but his drug addiction destroyed the marriage before that could happen. All he ever told us about his ex-wife was that she’d been a psychiatric social worker when they met, and now she was a high school teacher somewhere in the Bay Area.
If you knew anything about Terry, you knew he wanted to have kids. Wade and I, his real children, thought it was funny how hard he worked at it. It was the one area of his life where we could count on him being out to lunch, almost completely unconscious of the disconnect between his ambition and his actions. He tried Big Brothers for a while, but he got in trouble for spending too much money on the kids. He made himself available for babysitting whenever some single mother in A.A. needed it, but he wasn’t much good at that, either. It was like he was trying to be some twenty-first-century version of a 1950s father—a version of parenthood that somehow didn’t involve much parenting.
I came to visit him one evening when he was looking after Claire Monaco’s four-year-old son, Alexander. This was before their difficulties. It was nine P.M. on a Wednesday, and they were watching Black Hawk Down. Alexander’s eyes were glossy with the candy that had been opened all around the two of them: heroic quantities of Twizzlers and peanut-butter cups and foil-covered chocolate eggs. Terry waved and smiled at me as I entered the living room. Alexander never broke his gaze from the TV.
“Have you guys eaten anything?” I asked.
“Sure,” Terry said, his eyes returned to the screen.
“I mean besides this crap. Something with protein in it?”
Terry shook his head. A Somalian guerrilla died horribly on the wide screen, and Alexander pushed himself farther into Terry’s shoulder.
I ordered pizza, and I began trying to be aware of whenever Terry was babysitting.
He regarded me sometimes as an expert on children, but in that funny way of people who have no idea what your expertise is.
“What if the kid doesn’t like you?” he asked once.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
We had been skin diving among the kelp forests off Emerald Cove, something that Terry had spent the whole morning outfitting himself for at Laguna Sea Sports, thanks to Wade’s employee discount, but which we never did again.
We were climbing up the rocky shelf of the beach. I sat down and began idly popping the bulbs of washed-up kelp plants.
“I mean …” he said. “You know what I mean.”
“Like, the kid won’t be amused by you? What are we talking about? An infant or a teenager?”
“I’m talking every age. I’m talking whatever age.”
I tossed a big gross mess of kelp back toward the water. Why I’d even picked it up, I wasn’t sure. It felt good to be the one who was giving Terry advice.
“It’s beside the point, I guess is all I can say. You spend a lot of time cleaning them up when they’re babies, making sure they stay alive, and they love you the way someone loves an airplane that’s keeping them in the sky. Mostly, you don’t have time to ask those questions. And when they’re older, it’s beside the point, because it would be like asking them whether they like their own arm or leg. You’re so much a part of them. I don’t even care if my daughter likes me. I just care whether she allows me to participate in her life, and if she ever stopped doing that, I’d have to camp out on her doorstep until she changed her mind.”
“That sounds good,” Terry said. He was looking at the ocean when he said it, and I couldn’t see his eyes.
It was about six months after my babysitting intervention, in that same condo, the last one that Terry owned. It was sort of art deco with picture windows overlooking the ocean and two carports under each unit. Efficient but not unbeautiful. Architecturally, it seemed to recognize that it lived on a bluff above Pacific Coast Highway, and it never aspired to be more wonderful than that.
As I parked beneath his apartment, I was aware that Terry’s obsession with starting a family was getting out of hand. People told me about his difficult relationship with Claire, how sometimes they seemed like a couple and sometimes it seemed like Terry wanted to be Alexander’s father. We hadn’t seen each other in over a month. I was getting busy with work, but I hadn’t met MP yet. I was going to lots of meetings, so I noticed he was MIA—he’d retreated from the wagging tongues—but I didn’t think much of it until I tried to reach him and he didn’t return my calls.
Terry appeared at his front door in an unbuttoned white dress shirt and a pair of board shorts. He smiled when he saw me but didn’t say anything, only opened the door. I sat down, pulled my cell phone from my pocket, and tossed it on the coffee table.
“They must think I’m in bad shape,” Terry said, “to send you.”
I forced a laugh. “Who is ‘they,’ Terry? Why does there have to be a plot for me to come visit you?” But there was plenty of truth to what he was saying.
; “Because there is,” Terry said. “Maybe it’s just you and Wade. But I’m familiar with the scenario.” I didn’t like the look of that smile. It was his “fuck you” smile.
“Forget about Wade and anyone else,” I said. “This is you and me talking.”
“I’m trying to save this beautiful kid,” Terry said, “from a mother who might kill him in the process of killing herself.” He pointed toward the cabinet that held the wide-screen television. Above it—I hadn’t noticed—was a photo of Alexander.
“He seems like a great little boy,” I said stupidly.
“You want to say the word, Randy? You think I’m blackmailing Claire Monaco?”
The reason he thought he couldn’t go to meetings in Laguna anymore: when Claire Monaco ran afoul of Judge Fogarty, Terry offered to help her out financially in exchange for custody of the kid. Folks had opinions about this. How could they not?
I shrugged, another admission of powerlessness.
“What am I supposed to do?” Terry said. “Watch the opportunity pass me by? Sit here while this kid’s life is trashed?”
“You don’t know that his life will be trashed.”
“That’s what assholes always say when they want to excuse their complacence. ‘I don’t know.’ And while we’re at it, Randy, where the fuck have you been? You come over to my house like a visiting dignitary. You’re going to patronize me? Where were you when nobody in A.A. would even spit on me? Where were you when I pulled my head out and made the fucking dean’s list at law school every fucking semester that I was there?”
It was a big moment for me. For the first time, maybe the only time, he was letting me into the hell of his own addiction. This was the real thing. Since I’d met him, I’d seen Terry acting six different kinds of crazy, but I’d never seen him acting like such a victim. He was alone. In his mind, at least, he was completely alone, and he seemed at that moment like a man who had been designed for the relief that only heroin or massive amounts of booze could provide. If you want to know the truth, it was kind of glorious, in a fucked-up way.
“You weren’t here for any of that,” Terry continued. “And you’re not going to be here for this kid. This is my deal.”
What the hell could I do? I couldn’t imagine any good outcome for either of us. I’d try again later.
As often happens, though, my dilemma got worse before it got better.
Someone slammed Terry’s front door three times, hard and deliberately. And then I heard a woman’s voice shrieking at him to open the door.
Of course it was Claire.
Terry leaped toward the front door, but I moved quickly to stand in front of him. The next words that came out of my mouth were probably the most mysterious and effective words I’ve ever spoken. All the more mysterious because I barely understood what I was saying. And because of the man who I was speaking them to.
I held up my index finger in front of his face, the way someone from another century might correct an unruly child. “I’m not angry with you. Angry with you is the last thing that I am. But I’m going outside to talk with this woman, and you’re not to interfere. If you leave this room while I’m chatting with her, I will drop you where you stand. And then I still won’t be angry with you.”
For reasons that I might not fathom even when I’m sitting at God’s knee and He’s whispering in my ear, Terry nodded and sat back down on the couch.
Claire had been standing so close to Terry’s door that she jumped back when I opened it. She was a lot skinnier back then; those were the days of crack pipes and precious little eating. Even after she got her bearings back, she moved with the anxious, staticky jerks of a cartoon cat. She radiated disease. Being with her in those days—even to say hello on your way into a meeting—was like being in the presence of some wily version of death. No wonder most people treated her like Shiva, destroyer of worlds.
I put my hand on her back and led her toward the carports underneath the apartments. There was another line of units higher on the hill, and it wasn’t a particularly private place, but Terry couldn’t see us, and I didn’t mind that everyone else could. If things went south, it wouldn’t hurt to have witnesses.
“What are you, his press agent?” Claire said.
“Don’t bother trying to make me angry, Claire. I’ve been worked on by experts.”
“He’s trying to take my fucking child away, Randy.”
“Running over here is going to help you how, Claire? You want to get arrested for assault? This is your plan for making sure he doesn’t take Alexander away?”
She looked at me earnestly and, I thought, soberly. It was maybe occurring to her that I didn’t have Terry’s back on this particular enterprise.
“Why are you even here?” I said. “You act like Terry has some power over you, like he can take your kid away. Unless I’m missing something, he can’t. You’d have to give him custody. He’s not the child’s father, right?”
“No, he’s not.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here?”
Something was forming in her brain, some calculation of her self-interest. It wasn’t a surrender to the truth so much as a surrender to the facts. I was about to understand her situation perfectly.
“I need him to give me some money,” she said.
Even I wasn’t quite ready for that one. She needed money to get out of her present troubles, and she was tempted to give her son to Terry in exchange, or at least trick him into thinking she might.
It was stunning to me that I could feel sorry for her, but I did. It took me a moment to speak. “He can’t be the last house on the block, Claire. You’ve gotta have someplace else to go.”
“It’s a fucking miracle my mother still talks to me. But she doesn’t have any money.”
I thought about that. When I realized where I was headed, I took a deep breath. You go through life thinking that the moment of greatest danger will look like the moment of greatest danger, but that isn’t it at all. The moment of greatest danger mostly looks like the moment of greatest understanding. That’s so true they should teach it in school.
“How much do you need, Claire?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean how much money can I give you right now that will make it possible for you to never darken Terry’s door again? Enough money to dig yourself out.”
“Ten grand would be a good start,” she said, “but what I really need is twenty.”
I pulled a check from my wallet and wrote it out for twenty-five thousand. “There are two conditions,” I said. “You have to stay away from Terry, and if anyone asks you, you didn’t get the money from me. Can you do those two things?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“I’m not kidding,” I said. “You can’t tell anyone, and if you talk to Terry again, I will devote a month of my life to bringing down hell on your head. You got it?”
She got it. So well that a year and a half later, when I met her in the café with Wade that morning, she didn’t risk mentioning the money. But she had talked to Terry the night he died. I wouldn’t hold that against her, but I did hold it against myself that I hadn’t talked to him, too.
HAD TERRY BEEN WITH A PROSTITUTE that night? Another junkie? Would it be easier to forgive a woman who had run from the scene than a man? Was it someone he’d met in A.A.? That was how people often slipped: in pairs. One junkie trying to talk another junkie out of copping. The disease, however, was a champion debater, and often the Good Samaritan ended up copping, too.
With the darkness settling into the hills, I headed back home. Approaching the day-labor station in Laguna Canyon—a stucco box on the side of the hill, a bathroom and shelter from the rain—I had to wonder how much work my guys were losing because I had no projects to put them on. Yegua was too polite to mention it, but the undocumented economy must have noticed my absence. What happened to the gabacho with the F-350 who paid us too much?
I was about to duck down another gopher hole of remorse
when I saw Troy Padilla ambling pathetically along the other side of Laguna Canyon Road. The guys at the day-labor station made walking look dignified, but Troy couldn’t pull it off. He must have been on his way to a meeting at the Coastal Club. I locked up my wheels and pulled a U-turn across the median. A Range Rover honked. A VW Phaeton honked at the Range Rover. My grille arrived at the spot where Troy had been staring into the gravel ahead of him.
Troy backed away. He looked pathetic doing that, too.
I threw myself out of my truck. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I shouted. “Relax.”
“Relax” was not one of Troy’s menu options. Which was probably my fault.
“Just stay the fuck away from me,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I want to apologize.”
“You want to make amends to me?” Troy said.
Fucking A.A. jargon. “No, I don’t want to make amends—I’ve come to apologize. I don’t think you were with Terry at the end, and I was wrong to—”
“Make me piss my pants?”
I looked down. “That’s not how I was going to say it.”
“It’s all right,” Troy said. “It wasn’t all you. I was sharing just now with my friend. I think I was channeling some earlier trauma. Kind of a post-traumatic stress reaction.”
I laughed. “I’m pretty sure you were channeling a pre-traumatic stress reaction. I was going to kick your ass.”
“Maybe that’s what triggered it,” Troy said. “I have a family history of violence. It was a good thing, though. This was a bottom for me.”
More A.A. jargon.
“I threaten Wade,” he continued. “You threaten me. I piss my pants. It’s a cycle of violence. It doesn’t stop unless someone stops it. I’ve gotta be the guy who stops it. You know what I’m saying?”
To shut him up, I nodded. “You want me to drive you to the meeting?”
Troy stared at me. He could probably write a term paper about his violent family history, but he couldn’t decide whether he wanted a ride.