The Next Right Thing

by Dan Barden

  “Get in,” I said.

  As Troy opened the passenger door, a young woman emerged from the bushes behind Canyon Auto. She adjusted her jeans as though she’d just relieved herself. Odd enough, but Troy waved and shouted at her that he was catching a ride to the Coastal Club.

  “I can drive her, too,” I said.

  “Emma’s not going to the club,” Troy said.

  “What’s she doing, then—embarking on a trek across the continent?”

  When she reached my passenger window, I recognized Pierced Navel from this morning at the recovery home. Older than I had thought but no more than twenty. Tonight she wore a grungy button-down and Vans slip-ons. Her dirty-blond hair was an almost fashionable bird’s nest. Beneath the tough-girl facade, though, she was blank-canvas pretty, like a fashion model. I imagined she could be as beautiful or bland as she wanted. Still, something about her was very not right. If Claire Monaco’s troubles had transformed her face and body into a kind of brassy costume, this girl’s troubles had made her transparent. Somehow she reminded me of Claire but without any of Claire’s defenses. I figured I’d better apologize to her, too, but Troy, ever helpful, beat me to it. “Randy’s probably going to want to make amends, Emma.”

  Standing behind Troy, resting her chin on his shoulder, she opened her eyes wide, a cartoon of smart-ass expectation.

  “I’m sorry about scaring you this morning,” I said. “You want a ride?”

  “Nothing scares me,” Emma said. “And I don’t fucking care about your amends.”

  “That’s fair enough. Get in, Emma.”

  Like Troy, Emma had no effective defense against clear instructions. She pushed Troy in and took the window seat. She propped her back against the door to face us both. “You know what job I want? I want to be a sniper. Maybe have a license to kill.”

  “A fine ambition,” I said.

  “Don’t fucking patronize me,” Emma said. “I’m talking about killing people, maybe even you. And I’m not the only one—it’s a big career path for high school seniors.”

  “I got it, Emma. Just be sure I don’t kill you first. I’m as angry as you but with eight years of sobriety. That’s eight years of cunning.”

  Emma briefly chewed on that before she said, “How come you’re not a cop anymore? That’s a license to kill.”

  “You know all that stuff they ask you to write down in your fourth step?”

  Emma nodded warily as we entered the Coastal Club parking lot.

  I smiled at her. “That’s why I’m not a cop anymore.”

  She laughed and turned back toward the windshield. Her laugh was sharp and loud: it woke me up and squared my shoulders. When I slowed down for the creek bridge between parking lots, Emma opened the door and jumped out. I stopped to make sure she hadn’t broken her ankle. That was when she turned around and gave me the finger, high up, like she wanted the whole world to see. She shouted, “I’m smarter than you. Don’t forget that. You forget that, and bad things will happen.”

  “Okay,” I said to Troy, “who the hell is she?”

  “You don’t recognize her?” Troy said. “She’s a reality-TV star. She was on that show Treatment Center.”

  “Do I look like a guy who watches Treatment Center?”

  “Yes, you do,” Troy said. “That’s pretty much exactly your demographic.”

  “She your girlfriend?”

  Troy sharpened his eyes on me. “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know what I mean?”

  “No,” he said. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Tell me who she is.”

  “She was raised in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but she’s also this epic addict. She got kicked off that show for being too drunk and promiscuous, and you gotta understand that the point of that show is being too drunk and promiscuous.”

  “Where the hell is she going?” I asked Troy.

  “Recon.”

  “Recon?”

  “She’s always on a mission. She walks. She observes. She covers as much of the South County as she can, forcing it to yield its secrets. Boots on the ground, Emma says, rifle in her hand—thank God she doesn’t have the rifle yet. She’s too wired to meditate or pray—I think it’s her spiritual program. She’s been sober a few weeks this way.”

  “This is the sniper thing?” I said.

  “This is the sniper thing.”

  God help me, I liked her.

  In my first year of talking to Terry, it often seemed like he was going out of his way to avoid discussing the most pressing problems in my life. For example, if I wanted to talk about my pending conviction for aggravated assault. If I wanted to talk about the fact that my wife was not only divorcing me but also keeping sole custody of our daughter. If I wanted to talk about how I was going to make money now that the city of Santa Ana was no longer going to pay me.

  If we were anywhere near an A.A. meeting—which was often the case—or even anywhere near other A.A. members, Terry would point to whoever had less time in the program than I did—and even after a little while, there were many—and he would say, “You’re not the patient here today.” It was how Terry directed us toward A.A.’s “primary purpose”—to carry the message to the alcoholic who still suffers. It was his way of reminding me that we weren’t always here to talk about me. Terry wouldn’t tolerate self-pity. Helping others was the only way to help yourself. I sometimes had a hard time keeping that in mind, but it always saved my life.

  My truck idled outside the Coastal Club. Troy didn’t take the hint. I was not going to the meeting. I was dropping him off. But first he had to finish telling me how weird it was that when your dad’s in the Mafia, you don’t think there’s anything weird about your dad being in the Mafia.

  “The weirdness of the experience,” Troy said, “disappears right into the weirdness of the experience.”

  Troy’s pseudo-intellectualizing made me nostalgic for the straightforward if psychotic Emma. Insane and pretty used to be one of my favorite combinations. I married insane and pretty.

  Troy finally seemed to be wrapping up his spiel on the notion that maybe criminals should have their own recovery programs, too (he was reaching for the door handle), when my friend Wade poked his head through the window.

  “Park the truck,” Wade said.

  “No.”

  “I think you’d be happier.”

  “Like you?” I said.

  “If you don’t want to participate,” Wade said, “why do you drive newcomers to the club?”

  “He was wandering down Laguna Canyon Road,” I said. “Someone was going to run him over. And … hold up a goddamn minute … weren’t you two in a smackdown this morning?”

  “We’re good,” Wade said. “Aren’t we good, Troy?”

  “We’re good. Love and service, dude.”

  “Are you sponsoring this guy?” I asked Wade.

  “No.” And then Wade smiled. “Oh, man. I just got a download. You should be his sponsor.”

  Troy and I looked at each other. We silently agreed this was not a good idea.

  “You’re probably the only guy around here who’s not impressed by his family,” Wade continued, “with that badass cop background of yours.”

  “His father’s probably a pharmacist,” I said. “Dangerous people don’t talk about being dangerous.”

  “Don’t I get to have an opinion on this?” Troy asked.

  Wade stepped away from my truck, which didn’t mean the discussion was over. Wade never let go of anything that didn’t have claw marks on it.

  He stood beside my door, smiling at me, knowing he was about to pull his trump card. “You’re not the patient here today.”

  Fuck you, I thought, but I pulled into a parking space.

  FRANK GILLESPIE GREETED WADE and me outside the meeting room. Long before my time, he was a popular conference speaker known as California Frank. With his sparse gray hair, brown teeth, and early-stage emphysema, he could have been a time
traveler from the gold rush.

  “Welcome to the meeting. Is this your first time with us?” he asked me.

  “Screw yourself, Frank. Have you met our latest science experiment—Troy?”

  “Science experiment?” Frank said.

  “Wade and I are bringing him to meetings to see if they cure his alcoholism,” I said. “If they do, we’re going to try it ourselves.”

  Frank shook Troy’s hand. “You must be in bad shape, hanging around with these two. I’ll say a prayer. Maybe a few.”

  The Coastal Club’s meeting room was large and airy, with sliding glass doors along the north and south walls. There was no smoking anywhere inside the building. Not since the day it was built.

  We got coffee and took seats around the end of a long table near the back wall. The Knife in the Head Men’s Stag was named after a founder of the meeting who had once been so drunk that he got stabbed in the head and didn’t notice. A “stag” was a meeting for men only. Terry and Wade and I used to be regulars here. One of the abiding rituals of the meeting used to be this old-timer from Oklahoma who’d tell any newcomer who had risked sharing his pain or confusion: “It doesn’t sound to me like you’re done drinking, son. You’d better get back out there and do it right.”

  One night that newcomer had been me. I’d wanted to shoot the hillbilly bastard in both kneecaps. With ten minutes of time for reflection between each of the shots.

  After a few years, we had followed Terry to another men’s stag at an Episcopal Church downtown. Terry called it the Fluffy Sweater Men’s Stag. Every fall, half the meeting tied expensive sweaters around their necks. The rants were more tasteful. Wade and I used to bounce back and forth between the two meetings. Even in the days when we were all hanging together every night, there was no strict discipline about meetings: if Wade and I went to Knife in the Head and Terry went to Fluffy Sweater, we’d still all meet together at Jean Claude’s later.

  As the meeting started, I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a meeting here.

  After several readings from The Big Book, the chairperson, a skinny twentysomething with sun-bleached hair, announced the topic. “Why don’t we talk about acceptance?”

  Surfer boy picked a tall guy named T-Bone, a former session guitarist who now operated a window-cleaning business with a fleet of five trucks. T-Bone told us his name and that he was an alcoholic.

  “HI, T-BONE!” I had to admit it felt good to hear that call-and-response; it felt like home.

  T-Bone stood up. “I’m a drunk, so my thinking is never going to be anything but fucked. This”—he pointed to his head—“is broken. It won’t ever be fixed. I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass without forming an opinion. I imagine trouble and conspiracy everywhere. So when I pray, I ask God to help me accept the world exactly the way it is. I don’t like it when sober people shoot drugs and die. But who am I to say? Maybe that’s their right. You reap what you sow. A.A. is not for people who need it, it’s for people who want it.”

  Around the room, guys nodded or grumbled their assent. Then everyone clapped. Of course, he looked directly at me when he said “shoot drugs and die.” A few others did, too. I could have told myself that I hadn’t been to meetings in a while, so no one could know about my search for Terry’s last companion, but I knew Laguna A.A. better than that: the rumor mill was definitely churning. If anything, my absence was making it churn louder.

  I almost missed the kid calling on me. Something about “hearing from someone we haven’t heard from in a while.”

  Fuck. I sat up straighter in my folding chair. The entire meeting turned to look at me. “My name is Randy Chalmers, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  The wave of “HI, RANDY” felt good washing over me. For a long moment, I just stared, with nothing to say.

  “Sometimes I hate A.A. so much,” I began. “I’ve been to meetings with most of you, and if there were any real justice, all of us would be twisting in the wind. Terry Elias isn’t dead because he sinned, and no one here is still breathing because he’s a saint. If anyone has worked out a system for who’s going to stay sober, I’m wondering why the fuck he didn’t tell me that my best friend was going to OD. There aren’t five of you who worked harder at this thing than Terry did. Terry taught me I was powerless over alcohol, but I didn’t need to grovel before anyone. Not anyone. And that includes God. And every man at this meeting.”

  They took a moment to be sure I had finished. Wade gave me a thumbs-up as everyone started to clap. That’s what they do in Southern California A.A.: when you finish, they clap. Whether they like you or not. Sometimes because they don’t like you.

  My “share” became the informal topic for the rest of the evening. It was either insane or the best thing anyone had ever said, but no one was neutral. A shaved-head hipster who was rebuilding his copywriting career after five years of vodka and crack used his five minutes to assure me, as politely as possible, that I’d be drunk soon if I kept talking this way and avoiding meetings. Relatively speaking, the guy was a newcomer. The last time I’d heard him talk, he was counting days and not quite so sure of himself.

  When the meeting ended, Wade and Troy stepped ahead of me like bodyguards as we exited the club. They seemed to be scanning the horizon for evidence of any angry approach. But I had to admit it cheered me to feel that I was once again part of a pack. As I left the clubhouse, everyone shook my hand, even the bald hipster who had promised I would drink. Troy and he exchanged wary nods.

  “What’s his story?” I asked when we walked away.

  “He’s the manager of my recovery home.”

  “Did you piss him off?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So how come he shook my hand but ignored you?”

  Troy shrugged. “He’s surly with me because I’m one of his charges. Him and Colin Alvarez, that’s the way they roll.”

  After a few more well-meaning guys shook my hand, I found T-Bone standing at the end of the gauntlet.

  “Terry was a good guy,” T-Bone said. “I don’t want you to think I was sitting in judgment. Like I haven’t done worse shit. We just miss you around here.”

  It sounded like T-Bone was talking about more than a heroin overdose. “What ‘worse shit’ do you mean?”

  T-Bone quickly let go of my hand.

  “I’m not angry,” I said. “I’m just asking. Is there some gossip that I’m not aware of?”

  “The last thing I want to do”—T-Bone rubbed his hand over his mouth—“is spread rumors that I wish I hadn’t heard in the first place.”

  “Which is why I’d rather hear it from you.”

  “It’s A.A. bullshit, Randy. That doesn’t make it true.”

  “T-Bone,” I said, “just tell me.”

  We walked off from the crowd. T-Bone put his hand on my shoulder and spoke close to my ear. “I heard Terry had developed a taste for thirteenth stepping.”

  A thirteenth step is when you seduce a newcomer. Also known, for good reason, as “cripple fucking.” Most folks in A.A. regard this as the height of scumbag behavior, and Terry was one of them. I always thought it was part of his desire to be a father: nothing drove him farther around the bend than a compulsive thirteenth stepper, particularly a guy who preyed on newcomer women. I’d talked him out of violence on a couple of occasions.

  “Claire Monaco?” I said hopefully. “She was hardly new. And their thing wasn’t sexual. Trust me. It might have been better if it had been.”

  “Not Claire,” T-Bone said. “Some of the girls in the recovery homes were—what’s the word I’m looking for—active? We heard that Terry was involved with more than one of them.”

  “What does ‘active’ mean?”

  “They were making movies, amateur porn, posting it on the Internet. The rumor was that Terry had fooled around with that.”

  “Amateur porn? Jesus, T-Bone.”

  “What I heard,” T-Bone said carefully. “Doesn’t mean it’s true. Wh
at I heard.”

  “This was happening at the recovery homes?” I said.

  “A rumor,” T-Bone said.

  What the hell was Terry doing hanging out at the recovery homes, anyway? I wondered about Emma, too—she was exactly the kind of rudderless girl you didn’t want around that kind of weirdness.

  Up the sidewalk, Wade was lurking. My new friend Troy was lost for a moment somewhere in the crowd. I caught Wade’s eye, and he looked away. I said, “Couldn’t that be backlash after the thing with Claire? People were saying all sorts of crazy things about him.”

  “Yeah,” T-Bone said, straightening up. “That’s probably exactly what it was.”

  Like me, T-Bone was smarter than he was supposed to be. It didn’t bother him to be mistaken for a washed-up musician. Like me, he hid behind his failure. The truth was, he made more money now than he had working for the Eagles. And he was happier. I liked him because he had become, in sobriety, an honest man.

  “But you don’t think so,” I said. “You had a feeling the rumors were true.”

  He took his hand off my shoulder. He looked down before he looked me in the eyes. “That’s correct.”

  Just before we reached the truck, as I prepared to ask Wade, A.A.’s premier gossipmonger, calmly, why I’d never heard about Terry’s thirteenth stepping from him, my cell phone rang. It was my home number, and I worried it was MP with more bad news. She was making love, maybe, to a better man than me. Just wanted to share how much fun it is to bang someone besides a bitter ex-cop.

  I decided not to answer.

  Troy was explaining why they should change the name of the Knife in the Head Men’s Stag.

  “Don’t you think it invites a certain personality profile,” Troy asked, “if you’ve got so much violence right there in the name? Maybe it’s just my background, but—”

  “Shut the fuck up about your background”—I didn’t grab Troy by his shirt—“I don’t want to hear any more shit about how you grew up in the Mafia. Okay?” As I hauled myself into the driver’s seat, my home number called me again, and this time I pushed talk.