The Bird Market of Paris

  “He’ll be fine here,” Walden said.

  We stared at each other for a moment, then I stared at the bare wooden floor. Jesse had been a part of my life for over nine years.

  “I’ll take good care of him,” Walden repeated.

  I turned and left. My last avian responsibility had rolled down the block into someone else’s life. No more birds.

  I felt heavy, as if someone had just clipped my wings.

  On my way home, I stopped at the corner liquor store for a gold bottle of cream sherry and a bottle of Lillet, and there I was: a girl and her bottles.

  I opened the gold bottle, the too-yellow color of little-girl’s jewelry, in the cool of the rattling air conditioner, and poured a glass of the amber liquid over ice. It tasted vaguely of cough syrup. I had two. Three. I opened the Lillet and had a glass. I liked it because I had read that Lillet was Truman Capote’s favorite drink. I sat on my couch in my underwear and tinkled the ice in the glass, a sound that could put wings on angels.

  I felt loose and social, so I decided to foray into the outside world. I did my makeup by rote—it’s hard to see with the mirror wavering. For months I had written myself notes on pieces of blank printer paper in Sharpie strokes that read Do Not Go Out. I’d tape the note over the crack in the door at eye level, and sometimes the note still hung there in the morning, but other mornings the paper was crumpled on the floor or torn into uneven thirds, and I didn’t recall how that had happened. This night, I remembered ripping the note from the door’s seam, the crackling tape unsticking itself like a Band-Aid exposing an invisible wound. I crushed the paper into a tight wad, then unlocked the door and exited.

  I walked down my crowded Hell’s Kitchen street, past prostitutes I recognized, and the gang members with their sweet Boxer dog disguised as a killer in a studded leather harness. I chose a bar on Ninth Avenue and inhaled the pacifying scent of beer, sweat, and cigarettes. The place was crowded, as usual, with skinny girls clad in backless tank tops and jocks wearing Levis and long-sleeved, button-down cotton shirts. I glanced across the bar, recognized someone, and squinted to see her better. The chubby girl stared at me, too, slumped like a frumpy burlap sack of potatoes that had fallen off a truck. She had sad eyes. I squinted harder, trying to remember her face—she looked so familiar—and realized I was staring into a sepia-tinted mirror.

  I mounted a barstool, ordered a martini, and tried to bury the last few seconds. The drink couldn’t come quickly enough. I ordered another, and ferried it with me toward the back of the bar.

  A group of young guys and girls sat around a table in a semi-circle near the fire exit. The group looked safe and professional—all suits and power ties and shiny black shoes.

  “Have you seen a tall blonde girl and a shorter guy with glasses?” I asked a guy at the table, leaning into his ear and pointing into the crowd as I shouted over the jukebox streaming “Kryptonite” by 3 Doors Down through speakers on the ceiling. I stood on tiptoes and scanned the smoky room for my imaginary friends.

  “I haven’t,” the guy said, his arm around a pretty brunette, curls hanging over her shoulders.

  “My friends aren’t here yet. Can I sit with you while I wait?”

  The semicircle of bodies skooched and I sat on the end of the booth. We introduced ourselves. I sat with them for another drink and small talk as the songs on the juke cruised from decade to decade, “Disco Inferno” to “Jesse’s Girl.” After Santana’s “Oye Como Va,” the guy said, “You don’t have friends coming, do you?”

  “I do,” I insisted. “Maybe they went to another place.”

  One of the guys at the table brought a round of pink shots on a tray. The drink tasted like liquid Fruity Pebbles cereal.

  That’s the last memory I have of the night.

  I woke the next afternoon in bed, confused, naked, and covered in vomit. Who had vomited on me? I hazily recalled walking down Ninth Avenue with one of the guys from the table, bright lights and snatches of green eyes and a hand around my waist. Maybe he had vomited on me. I couldn’t have vomited on myself.

  I climbed down from my loft to find a yellow screwdriver on the floor next to my stereo, its innards strewn like bullets at a crime scene—circuit boards, metal tubes, and arterial wires—adding to the debris field of broken glass across my living room’s hardwood floor.

  There had been a struggle. The toilet was filled with toilet paper and overflowing slowly, water half an inch deep on the floor. Who had done that?

  The guy from the bar must have brought me home. He came inside and tried to get physical and I resisted, which explained the broken glass and stereo. He raped me, crawled into my loft bed, and vomited on me. Then he cleaned himself off from the rape and clogged my toilet.

  Oh, my God. I was a rape victim.

  The chain was locked on the inside of my front door. How could he have exited then chained the door from the inside? After the rape and the vomiting, I must have waited until he left and locked the door behind him.

  If he had raped me, he likely hadn’t used a condom and he probably had AIDS. Now I would contract AIDS.

  Still drunk, sweating slicks of alcohol, I dressed myself in jeans and a hoodie and walked to St. Clare’s Hospital emergency room. Ninth Avenue was so different in daylight, pigeons and sparrows gathering outside the pet shop, where the employees had tossed old seed onto the sidewalk, and the Italian ice vendor handing a lady a cup of raspberry that would turn her tongue bright blue. On Fifty-Second Street, a few cops stood outside talking to paramedics. I gestured to one of the cops and he approached.

  “Something bad happened to me last night,” I confided in a whisper. “I was raped.”

  I wanted to say something else, a phrase he wouldn’t have understood: I have no more birds. The officer sprang into cop mode and escorted me inside the hospital. I followed him as we bypassed the other people sitting in the emergency room’s waiting area. He approached the nurse’s station and whispered to them, and he and a nurse led me to a curtained cubby where the nurse instructed me to change into a gown.

  The cop and another police officer, along with two nurses, came to take my statement. I told them about the struggle, the items broken in the apartment, and the vomit.

  “What did he look like?” one cop asked, pen poised above his pad of paper.

  I waited a long time to answer, trying to access memories from the night before. I pictured the guy walking beside me, the lights bright on Ninth Avenue.

  “Brown hair?”

  “Tell us this story again,” said the cop.

  I filled in the gaps, telling them about the pink drink, the guys at the table, someone’s brother and a girl in a tank top.

  “You smell like alcohol,” said a nurse. “How much did you drink?”

  “I don’t know. No more than usual.”

  A doctor walked into the curtained cubby, followed by another nurse holding a box with capital letters spelling “RAPE KIT” on it. He asked me what had happened and I repeated the story, realizing that if I was the one who put the chain on the door, I might have been the one who destroyed the stereo with a screwdriver and vomited on myself during the night.

  The doctor examined me and took swabs away with him to the lab. He told me to wait. I sat there shivering, drunkenness turning into a hangover, still not sure what had happened the night before, but starting to grasp that I had fabricated the story to fill in time that had slipped past me like a ghost.

  The doctor returned with the two nurses, one still holding the rape kit.

  “You haven’t had sex,” the doctor said.

  I contemplated my bare feet and squelched a dry heave, the stench of bleach sending my stomach into a lurch.

  “Do you want to continue with this rape kit?” the doctor asked. “It doesn’t seem like anything has happened to you.”

  One of the nurses huffed. I looked at the box and told them I wanted to leave. The nurse rolled her eyes and walked out of the cubby.

  At h
ome, I threw my purse down and called Walden.

  “What was up with you last night?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You called me all night. You said you were with some guy from a bar and he didn’t want to hang out with you, so you freaked out and it sounded like you were breaking things. I told you to sleep it off, but you kept calling, so I took the phone off the hook. I’m sorry, it was late, and I told you not to call me in the middle of the night anymore.”

  “I don’t remember any of that.” I slumped on the couch, listening to Walden’s breathing, and to Jesse and Guthrie whistling in the background.

  “Walden? Can you take me to a meeting?”

  Part Three

  Chapter 19

  Walden and I sat in my third “beginners” meeting in as many days, held in a tiny, stifling church kitchen near Times Square, fans whirring as people filed in. Someone spoke at the front of the room about how he used to drink, how terrible his life had become, and how much better his life was since he had found the meetings. I cried the whole time, head down, and someone passed me a pack of tissues.

  Walden nudged me when it came time for newcomers to say their day count. I froze. If I said I was an alcoholic these people would think I was an alcoholic, and the proverbial jig would be up. The person at the front pointed in my direction. I had to choose.

  I said, “I’m an alcoholic, and I have three days sober.” The syllables felt like poison in my mouth … but people applauded. I looked at the smiling faces aimed at me. I hadn’t done anything to warrant applause.

  Walden nudged me again, and leaned into my ear. “I’m proud of you,” he whispered.

  Proud of me? I couldn’t remember the last time I heard those words. I’d heard, “Hey, get off of the table” and “Get out of this bar” and “You’re cut off.” No one had said they were proud of me in a long time.

  Walden and I walked into Times Square after the meeting. I looked into the faces of people on the street as if I were seeing the world for the first time, noticing how the light hit the buildings in the afternoon, smelling car exhaust and the perfume of roasted peanuts from a nearby vendor. I attended a meeting with Walden every day. I lost twenty-five pounds in three months. My hands stopped shaking in the morning. I freelanced enough to quit my job at the publishing house and write full-time, which allowed me to attend recovery meetings day and night, and go to movies and to the all-night diner with other recovering alcoholics in between.

  The compassionate people in the meetings taught me that self-esteem comes from esteem-able acts: doing good, helpful acts and learning new skills builds self-esteem, and self-esteem is one of the foundations of sobriety. I accompanied other alcoholics to meetings at detox wards in hospitals, where we told our stories and hoped we reached someone in the dark place where the disease’s gnarled roots had grown.

  I took drum lessons from a private tutor a few blocks from my apartment, and each time I nailed a Van Halen drum fill, I left feeling good about myself, drumsticks jutting from a back pocket in my tight jeans, earphones on my head, Rush’s 2112 album blaring, giving me aspirations.

  Walden gave Jesse back. I took Jesse everywhere with me, even into the shower. At my mailbox one day, I opened an envelope to find a greeting card with a panda bear on the front—it was from Richard Blanco in Miami, with these words written inside: “I miss you. I love you. We need to talk. Besos.”

  The other recovering alcoholics in the meetings talked about God. They said I should have a Higher Power, but that my Higher Power didn’t have to be an old man in the sky or a guy on a cross. I didn’t have to believe to stay sober, but they recommended it; they said it was easier to follow the program with a little faith. Some members had difficulty with this, but for me, God felt like a long-lost friend. I thought that sobriety entitled me to the red-phone connection to my Higher Power.

  I chatted with God. Did He want me to be sober? Was this my path? Maybe these meetings were only a speed bump, and I could continue drinking once I learned to control it better? I didn’t want to quit drinking, but I liked the attention I received in the meetings. It made me feel visible for the first time in years. But drinking was my habit—my companion—and the sober people were trying to take it away.

  One hot, summer day early in my sobriety, I decided I wanted a beer, and the compulsion pushed me to the corner deli instead of a recovery meeting. Alcoholism is a complicated disease with a schizophrenic quality. It talks with many voices. For me, it often spoke sweetly, like a kind schoolteacher, telling me it would be OK to have just one. Why not? Who was it going to hurt? Was I always going to be the kind of sheep that followed the herd to the shearing station? Or perhaps, on a hot summer day, I could indulge my thirst. No one would know.

  I wrapped my hand around the silver handle of the cold beer case. The door’s suction relented and I reached my hand toward a cold Rolling Rock. As my fingers curled around the bottle’s emerald neck, someone tapped my shoulder.

  “What are you doing?”

  I turned around, beer in hand. It was Richie, a guy I had met in the meetings who lived on my block. He spoke with a heavy New York accent, had a tattoo on his neck, and looked like he’d kill you if you annoyed him, but he was handsome, with a giant smile and shimmering eyes, and was serious about his sobriety.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Why are you holding a beer?”

  “Oh, is this a beer? I was here for a soda.”

  “You’re standing in the beer cooler,” he said, peeling the bottle from my hand.

  “I was going to drink a couple beers,” I admitted.

  “Well, you’re not now.” He pointed to the door with his thumb. “Get out of here.”

  A few weeks later I bounded toward the liquor store, jilted by another newcomer in the meetings who liked another girl instead of me. This time the voice ordered me to have a drink, said it would calm the knocking in my chest and lighten my emotional backpack. The guy will be shamed that you drank because of his cruelty, the voice said, and I believed it. I wanted to drink at him. As I turned to walk inside, someone tugged my sleeve. Richie.

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  “Into this liquor store?” I said.

  “For what?”

  “I was going to drink.” I couldn’t lie to this guy.

  “Well, you aren’t now. You’re coming with me to a meeting.”

  “Damn, what are you, my guardian angel?”

  “I might be.”

  Richie blocked me every time I wanted to relapse. I started testing the theory that Richie was my tattooed, motorcycle-driving guardian angel. If I felt close to drinking, Richie appeared. God didn’t want me to drink, and Richie was His messenger. Once, I was on a date with a cute guy when Richie walked into the restaurant and both my date and I said hello to him. I was “counting days,” unable to date according to the precepts of my recovery program, and my unknowing date had already earned years of sobriety. I had to admit my position as a newcomer to him. My date apologized, paid the bill, and left, leaving me at the table alone. Richie laughed and said not only was he preventing me from drinking, he was keeping me honest, too.

  I scraped together six months of sobriety, but it wasn’t easy, mostly because I wanted to earn sobriety my way, not by listening to the simple suggestions in the meetings. Healing a damaged nervous system takes a long time, and much of that time for me was spent wanting to return to the comfort of my habit. I spoke to God hourly, asking for signs directing me toward every little decision, becoming angry if the signs didn’t appear. “Should I have a turkey sandwich?” I’d ask God. If a turkey didn’t fall from the sky, I’d wonder why God was ignoring me.

  In December 2000, a representative from the National Endowment for the Arts called to say that I had earned a grant in poetry, a prestigious award that came with a $20,000 stipend. I had applied for the grant with a ten-page poem about chickens that I had written in Indiana. I should have been thrilled, but
I was uncomfortable. I felt like I didn’t deserve the award. I was sure the NEA would call me soon and say they’d made a paperwork error. Or, someone I knew would call and laugh that they had pranked me. I paced my apartment, the fear of the inevitable rising, waiting for the phone to ring. I needed a drink to tamp down the dragonflies in my stomach—and maybe to celebrate. Go ahead, the voice said, you deserve something stronger than a milkshake.

  If I could duck Richie, I could drink. I didn’t want to ditch recovery; I just needed a break. It wasn’t about the NEA grant. I hadn’t been practicing the principles of the recovery program; hadn’t cracked the blue book they gave me, which contained all the information I needed to stay sober; hadn’t asked anyone to be my sponsor, the person who would guide me through the rough terrain of early sobriety. In short, I did what people in the program called “half measures,” which, according to what I heard in meetings, would avail me of nothing—not half of something—nothing. Sobriety was supposed to be a miracle, but in this program, if I couldn’t commit to the steps I needed for recovery, sobriety would just be a pretty concept, an interesting topic to discuss over drinks.

  I told God that if He didn’t want me to drink, He could put Richie in my way. Before heading to the liquor store, I sat in a meeting and raised my hand and told everyone about my plan, giving God a chance to stop me, since we’d had that chat. Richie wasn’t there. A guy turned to me and said, “Hey, if you want to drink, go drink. We’ll refund your misery anytime you want.”

  If he had said, “Hey, don’t drink, it’s not worth it, you’re better than that, go to another meeting,” I may have considered that a sign. Instead, I had received consent.

  I prayed again, concentrating on beaming the words into the sky. “God, if You don’t want me to drink, send me another sign.” I shuffled to the liquor store and waited for Richie. I stood in front of the store’s window for a few minutes, looking at my reflection in the glass, the huge display bottles calling me inside. I purchased a bottle of Malibu rum and hustled home in case Richie saw me. I placed the bottle on the counter and sat on the couch and stared at it, giving God one more shot at stopping me. Maybe He needed more time. I’d wait for Ritchie to materialize, and continue if he didn’t.