by Mark Dawson
He had found this meeting on his first night in ‘Frisco. It was a lucky find: there was something about it that made it special. The room, the regulars, the atmosphere; there was a little magic about it. Milton had volunteered to serve the drinks on the second night when the grizzled ex-army vet who had held the post before him had fallen off the wagon and been spotted unconscious in the parking lot of the 7-11 near Fisherman’s Wharf. Milton always remembered Dave explaining that service was the keystone of A.A. and since taking care of the refreshments was something he could do without opening himself up to the others it was an excellent way to make himself known while avoiding the conversations that he still found awkward.
He opened the storage cupboard, dragged out the stacked chairs and arranged them in four rows of five. The format of the meeting was the same as all of the others that Milton had attended. A table was arranged at the front of the room and Milton covered it with a cloth with the A.A. logo embroidered on it in coloured thread. There were posters on the wall and books and pamphlets that could be purchased. Milton went back to the cupboard, took out a long cardboard tube and shook out the poster stored inside. It was made to look like a scroll; he hung it from its hook. The poster listed the Twelve Steps.
Milton was finishing up when the first man came down the stairs. His name was Smulders, he worked on the docks, he had been sober for a year and he was the chairman of this meeting. Milton said hello, poured him a coffee and offered him a biscuit.
“Thanks,” Smulders said. “How’ve you been?”
“I’ve had better days.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Maybe later,” he said, the same thing he always said.
“You know what I’m going to say, right?”
“That I shouldn’t brood.”
“Exactly. Get it off your chest.”
“In my own time.”
“Sure. Mmm-hmm. Good cookies––gimme another.”
Milton had already begun to feel a little better.
IT WAS a normal meeting. The chair arranged for a speaker to share his or her story for the first half an hour and then they all shared back with their own experiences. Smulders had asked one of the regulars, a thirtysomething docker that Milton knew called Richie Grimes, to tell his story. They sat down, worked through the preliminaries, and then Smulders asked Richie to begin.
“My name is Richie,” he said, “and I’m an alcoholic.”
Milton was dozing a little but that woke him up. Richie was a nice guy.
“Hi Richie,” the group responded.
“I’m pleased I’ve been asked to share tonight. I don’t always talk as much as I know I ought to but I really need do need to share something. I’ve been holding onto it for the last six months and unless I deal with it I know I’ll never be able to stay away from coke and the bottle.”
The group waited.
“I’m grandiose, like we all are, right, but not so much that I’d argue that mine is an original problem. You know what I’m talking about––money.” They all laughed. “Yeah, right. Most alkies I know couldn’t organise their finances if their lives depended on it, but if I’m not the worst in the room then I’d be very fuckin’ surprised, excuse my French. I lost my job a year ago for the usual reasons––attendance was shitty and when I did turn up I was either drunk or thinking about getting drunk––and instead of taking the hint I decided it’d be a much better idea to get drunk, every day, for the next month. By the end of that little binge, the savings I had managed to keep were all gone and the landlord started making threats about throwing me onto the street. I couldn’t work, no-one would even look at me not least give me a job, if I got evicted it was gonna get a hundred times worse, and so I thought the only thing I could do was borrow some money from this dude that I heard would give me credit. But he’s not like the bank, you know? He’s not on the level, not the kind of dude you’d want to be in hock to, but it wasn’t like anyone legit was about to give me credit and my folks are dead so the way I saw it I didn’t have much of a choice. I went and saw him and took his money and after I dropped a couple of Gs on a massive bender, the one that took me to rock bottom, then I found the rooms and I haven’t drunk or drugged since.”
A round of warm applause punctuated by whoops from the eager alkies in the front row.
“I know, it’s good, best thing I’ve ever done, but despite it being his cash that allowed me to stay in my place, give me somewhere to anchor myself, the stability I need to try and do all this stuff, he don’t necessarily share the sentiment. He’s not into community outreach, know what I mean? So he sent a couple of guys around yesterday. They made it clear that I’m running out of rope. He wants his money back. With the interest and ‘administration charges’ and all that shit, I’m looking at the thick end of six grand.”
He had laughed at this as if it was a particularly funny joke, then put his head in his hands and started to sob. His shoulders quivered and Milton watched him, awkwardly, until one of the other guys shuffled across the seats and put his arm around him.
There was silence for a moment until he recovered himself. “I got a job now, like you all know about, but even though it’s the best thing that’s happened to me for months it still barely covers my rent and groceries and if I can save twenty bucks a month then I reckon I’m doing well. That don’t even cover the interest on the loan, not even close. I don’t expect any of you to have any clever ways for me to fix this. I just wanted to share it because, I gotta be honest, I’ve felt the urge to go and buy a bottle of vodka and just drink myself stupid so I can forget all about it. But I know that’d be a crazy idea, worst thing I could do and now, especially after I’ve shared, I think maybe I can keep it behind me, at least for now. But I’ve got to get this sorted. The more it seems like a dead end, the more I want to get blasted so I can forget all about it.”
16
MILTON WAS STACKING the chairs at the end of the meeting, hauling them across the room to the walk-in cupboard, when he noticed that the woman he knew as Eva was waiting in the entrance hall. She was sitting against the edge of the table, her legs straight with one ankle resting against the other, with a copy of the Big Book held open before her. Milton watched her for a moment, thinking, as he usually did, that she was a good looking woman, before gripping the bottom of the stack of chairs, heaving it into the air and carrying it into the cupboard. He took the cloth cover from the table, tracing his fingers over the embroidered A.A. symbol, and put that in the cupboard, too. He shut the cupboard, locked it, then went through. Eva had stacked all the dirty cups in the kitchen sink.
“Hello,” she said, with a wide smile.
“Hello. You alright?”
“Oh, sure. I’m great. Just thought you could do with a hand.”
“Thanks.”
She stood and nodded down at the table. “Where does that go?”
“Just over there,” Milton said. “I’ve got it.” He lifted the table, pressed the legs back into place, picked it up and stacked it against the wall with the others. He was conscious that she was watching him and allowed her a smile as he came back to pick up the large vat, the water inside cooling now that the element had been switched off. She returned his smile and he found himself thinking, again, that she was very attractive. She was slim and petite, with glossy dark hair and a Latino complexion. Her eyes were her best feature: the colour of rich chocolate, smouldering with intelligence and a sense of humour that was never far from the surface. Milton didn’t know her surname but she was a voluble sharer during the meetings and he knew plenty about her from the things that she had said. She was a lawyer, used to work up in Century City in Los Angeles during clearance work for the networks. Now she did medical liability work at St Francis Memorial. She was divorced with a young daughter, her husband had been an alcoholic too, and it had broken their relationship apart. She had found the rooms, he hadn’t. She shared about him sometimes. He was still out there.
“Enjoy it t
onight?” she asked him.
“Enjoy might not be the right word.”
“Okay––get anything from it?”
“I think so.”
“Which other meetings do you go to?”
“Just this one. You?”
“There’s the place on Sacramento Street. Near Lafayette Park?”
Milton shook his head.
“I do a couple of meetings there. Mondays and Fridays. They’re pretty good. You should––well, you know.”
He turned the urn upside down and rested it in the sink.
“How long is it for you?” she asked.
“Since I had a drink?” He smiled ruefully. “One thousand and ninety days.”
“Not that you’re counting.”
“Not that I’m counting.”
“Let’s see.” She furrowed her brow with concentration. “If you can manage to keep the plug in the jug for another week, you’ll be three years sober.”
“There’s something to celebrate,” he said with an ironic smile.
“Are you serious?” she said, suddenly intense. “Of course it is. You want to go back to how it was before?”
He got quick flashbacks. “Of course not.”
“Fucking right. Jesus, John! You have to come to a meeting and get your chip.”
Anniversaries were called birthdays in the rooms. They handed out little embossed poker chips with the number of months or years written on them, all in different colours. Milton had checked out the chip for three years: it would be red. Birthdays were usually celebrated with cake and then there would be a gathering afterwards, a meal or a cup of coffee.
He hadn’t planned on making a fuss about it.
He felt a little uncomfortable with her focus on him. “You’ve got more, don’t you?”
“Five years. I had my last drink the day my daughter was born. That was what really drove it home for me––I’d just given birth and my first thought was, ‘God, I really need a gin.’ That kind of underlined that maybe, you know, maybe I had a bit of a problem with it. What about you? You’ve never said?”
He hesitated and felt his shoulders stiffen. He had to work hard to keep the frown from his brow. He remembered it very well but it wasn’t something that he would ever be able to share in a meeting.
“Difficult memory?”
“A bit raw.”
The flashback came back. It was clear and vivid and, thinking about it again, he could almost feel the hot sun on the top of his head. Morocco. Marrakesh. There had been a cell there, laid up and well advanced with their plan to blow up a car loaded with a fertiliser bomb in the middle of the Jemma el Fnaa square. The spooks had intercepted their communications and Milton had gone in to put an end to the problem. It had been a clean job––three shots, three quick eliminations––but something about one of them had stayed in his head. He was just a boy, they said sixteen but Milton guessed younger, fourteen or fifteen at the outside, and he had gazed up at him and into his eyes as he levelled the gun and aimed it at his head and pulled the trigger. Milton was due to extract immediately after the job but he had diverted to the nearest bar and had drunk himself stupidly, horribly, awfully, dangerously drunk. They had just about cashiered him for that. Thinking about it triggered the old memories and, for a moment, it felt as if he was teetering on the edge of a trapdoor that had suddenly dropped open beneath his feet.
He forced his thoughts away from it, that dark and blank pit that fell away beneath him, a conscious effort, and then realised that Eva was talking to him. He focussed in on her instead, “Sorry,” she was saying, “you don’t have to say if you’d rather not, obviously.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“No, forget I asked.”
A little brightness returned and he felt the trapdoor close.
“It’s fear, right?” she said.
“What do you mean? Fear of what?”
“No, F.E.A.R.” She spelt it out.
He shrugged his incomprehension.
“You haven’t heard that one? It’s the old A.A. saying: Fuck Everything and Run.”
“Ah,” Milton said, relaxing a little. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”
“I’ve been running for five years.”
“You still get bad days?”
“Sure I do. Everyone does.”
“Really? Out of everyone I’ve met since I’ve been coming to meetings, you seem like one of the most settled.”
“Don’t believe it. It’s a struggle just like everyone else. It’s like a swan, you know: it looks graceful but there’s paddling like shit going on below the surface. It’s a day-to-day thing. You take your eye off the ball and, bang, back in the gutter you go. I’m just the same as everyone.”
Milton was not surprised to hear that––it was a comment that he had heard many times, almost a refrain to ward off complacency––but it seemed especially inapposite from Eva. He had always found her to have a calming, peaceful manner. There were all sorts in the rooms: some twitchy and avid, white-knuckling it, always one bad day from falling back into the arms of booze; others, like her, had an almost Zen-like aspect, an aura of meditative serenity that he found intoxicating. He looked at them jealously.
“What are you doing now?” she asked him impulsively.
“Nothing much.”
“Want to get dinner?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Anywhere you fancy?”
“Sure,” he said. “I know a place.”
THEY WERE THE ONLY people in Top Notch. Julius took their order and set about it with a cheerful smile, and, soon, the aroma of cooked meat filled the room. He brought the burgers over on paper plates and left them to get on with it, disappearing into the back. Milton smiled at his discretion; there would be wry comments when he came in tomorrow. The food was as good as ever and the conversation was good, too, moving away from A.A. to range across work and family and life in general. Milton quickly found himself relaxing.
“How are you finding the Steps?”
“Oh, you know…” he began awkwardly.
“Which one are you on?”
“Eight and nine.”
“Can you recite them?”
He smiled a little ruefully. “‘We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.’”
“And?”
“‘We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except where to do so would injure them or others.’”
“Perfect,” she said. “My favourites.”
“I don’t know. They’re hard.”
“You want my advice? Do it in your own time. They’re not easy, but you do feel better afterwards. And you want to be careful. Plenty of people will be prepared to take your amends for you––”
“––and they can, too, if they’re prepared to make my amends.”
“You heard that one before?”
He smiled. “A few times. Where are you? Finished them?”
“First time around. I’m going back to the start again now.”
“Step Ten: ‘We continued to take a personal inventory.’”
“Exactly. It never stops. You keep doing it, it stays fresh.”
Eva was an easy talker, something she affably dismissed as one of her faults, but Milton didn’t mind at all; he was happy to listen to her, her soft west coast drawl smoothing the edges from her words and her self-deprecating sense of humour and easy laughter drawing him in until it was just the two of them in an empty restaurant with Julius turning the chairs upside down on the tables, a hint that he was ready to call it a night and close.
“That was really nice,” she said as they stood on the sidewalk outside.
“It was.”
“You wanna, you know––you wanna do it again next time?”
“I’d love to.”
“Alright, then, John.” She took a step toward him, her hand on his shoulder as she raised herself onto tiptoes and placed a kiss on his cheek. She lingered th
ere for a moment, her lips warm against his skin, and as she stepped back she traced her fingertips across his shoulder and down his arm to the elbow. “Take it easy, alright? I’ll see you next week.”
Milton smiled, more easily and naturally than was normal for him, and watched her turn and walk back towards where she had parked her Porsche.
17
PETER GLEASON was the park ranger for the Golden Gate National Recreational Area. He had held the job for twenty years, watching all the communal spaces, making sure the fishermen and water sports enthusiasts observed the local regulations, keeping an eye on the wildlife. Peter loved his job; he was an outdoorsman at heart and there could not have been many places that were as beautiful as this. He liked to say that he had the best office in the world; his wife, Glenda, had heard that quip about a million times but he still said it because it was true and it reminded him how lucky he was.
Peter had been a dog-lover all his adult life and this was a great job to have a hound. It was practically a requirement. He had had four since he had been out here. They had all been Labradors. Good dogs, obedient and loyal; it was just like he always said it, you couldn’t go far wrong with a Lab. Jethro was his current dog. He was two years old and mongrel, part Labrador and part pointer. Peter had picked him out as a puppy and was training him up himself. He had the most even temperament out of all the dogs and the best nose.
It was an early Tuesday morning in December when Peter stopped his truck in the wide, exposed and bleak square of ground that served visitors to Headlands Lookout. It was a remote area, served by a one-track road with the waters of Bonita Cove at the foot of a sheer drop on the left. He stepped carefully; yet another dense bank of fog had rolled in overnight and visibility was down to twenty yards. It was cold and damp, the curtain of solid grey muffling the sound. The western portion of San Francisco was just on the other side of the Bay, usually providing a splendid vista, but it was invisible today. The only sign that it was there was the steady, eerie boom of the foghorns, one calling and the other answering.