Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  How we lose and how we try. How we get back up.

  John’s white. A Vietnam vet. He used to be a doctor but he got disbarred or whatever it is because he was an addict too, and his wife and three kids got caught up in it and now two of his kids are dead (one killed herself, the other dosed out in the backseat of her car up in Topanga), and his wife was back on her struggle again and that’s why she wasn’t here tonight, but he was still fighting to stay off. He’s always fighting to stay off. Same as the rest of us.

  I know his story backwards and forwards. I hear new bits and pieces every week. The kind of talking that goes on in rooms like these isn’t conversation. It’s confession. It’s little axes of words getting sunk deep in your heart.

  And you can look around while it’s getting told and see those axes in everybody else’s hearts too, and that’s how you know this group works. Being able to be seen, to look in another person’s eyes and not just hear them, but listen and feel it. You get to sit with their truth, to really feel their pain. And doing that takes my mind off mine. And I walk around with it afterwards too. Their truth and pain and mine too, all wrapped up. I carry all of it together.

  Rooms like this is where I learned that stories are worse than bullets sometimes, because bullets can pass through you or be taken out but stories can’t. Stories stick. Good stories don’t just do that, though, they can rearrange you inside. There’s no getting them out. And once they’re in, they can roll around and grow while you think about them and they can get bigger. They can change your mind about things, your thinking, even your heart. Sometimes years after you heard it, a story can change you.

  Hearing John’s made me know some people got it worse than me. Sure, I’d never have Rose. Me and her would never get married or have a family. But I didn’t have to watch her die either. We didn’t have kids only to lose them. Knowing you don’t have it the worst has been more help to me being sober than anything. I still got Rose with me. I got her spirit.

  Out of the corners of my eyes, I see Mira come in late, grab that apple-cinnamon tea like she always does, and sit in the back. We never look at each other. Nobody even knows we met here, or that we see each other, or that we started this plan because of this room, because its stories stayed caught in us.

  When this girl talking finishes up, I raise my hand and catch a nod from the leader and say what I always say, what I’ve been saying every week since I was eighteen, using a name I made up on the spot the first time and been stuck with ever since, “My name’s Ricky, and I’m an addict.”

  24

  Because I am Ricky, and I am an addict. Even if part of me died when I changed names, the sick part inside me lives on. It never goes away. It’s always down for more. And it’s being in rooms like this one at St. James after Rose died, letting myself be seen by people that know what it’s like to go through this is pretty much the only thing that’s been keeping me together for years.

  It used to be if you had something, I’d put it in me. And once it was once, it was twice, and then it was ten. I’m like a busted blender that way. You put anything in me and flip the switch, I won’t stop till I short out. That’s just how I’m built. So I had to unplug. It’s the only way.

  I’m not a stupid teenager anymore. I knew I couldn’t keep hurting myself and other people. That shit catches up to you. And when one day Saint Peter reads my ledger out to my face, I don’t want him to be reading only bad. I’m not saying I can balance it. I’m just saying, I can’t be all bad on my day of judgment. I refuse that shit. I got to find some good in me. Whatever good Rose put in, I’ve been building around it every day I’m sober. I’ve been doing it these years. Having a job. Paying taxes. Trying not to be a taker my whole life. Trying not to be someone that never cared about anybody.

  And for me, these meetings are glue.

  They patch me up. Keep me together. Only place on earth I can say I still get dreams that I used again. And when I wake up, I’m so ashamed my sobriety’s gone that I want to kill myself, and afterward I get hugs on top of I knows, and It’s okays, and We all go through thats.

  “Hi, Ricky,” everybody says in unison. John too.

  I nod at him and swing my eyes around the room so he doesn’t think I’m only focusing on him. John doesn’t know me and Mira paid off his mortgage today. That he’s good on that forever. Sure, it doesn’t solve any of his other problems, but he’ll have a place to live no matter what, and hopefully, that’s something.

  “My struggle for these days is,” I say, “I met a girl.”

  There’s nods at that, like the group already knows where I might be going. There’s a million things that can go wrong there when you’re in permanent recovery. A million.

  “I told her right away too, said I’m an addict, and she said, ‘How long?’ And I said, ‘All my life,’ and she said, ‘No, how long you been sober?’ I told her sixteen years last month. She said she’d take her chances. Didn’t ask what I did. Didn’t want to know where I’m from or what my growing up was like. Not right away, anyways.”

  People are listening hard now. Cheering for me, almost, but in a silent way. Everybody in here wants everybody to succeed. And if they do, it’s almost like you can too.

  “I mean, sitting with her, I just feel like there’s no point in her talking to me. Like, I told her not to invest in me. To put her time and energy into something shiny and new. And you know what she said? ‘I’m into fixer-uppers.’ ”

  This gets a laugh. Even from Mira. She did say that to me the first time. I don’t tell anybody the person I’m talking about is in the room, that we actually met two years ago, or that she’s still married, but this is how I can talk to her in a safe space. Say the things I never can while we’re together.

  “Some of you remember Rose. How she first brought me here and sat with me and held my hand when I wanted to run. She was my second chance.” I look at John and say, “John, you remember her.” I look at our group leader. “Sandra, you met her too.”

  Their eyes get sad and they nod heavy nods back at me. I don’t bring up Rose often, not in over a year, but I got to now.

  “There’s never any replacing Rose. She made me who I am. She’s why I’m still here. And I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. And sometimes with this other lady, I feel like I shouldn’t be feeling what I’m feeling because of Rose.”

  Nobody interrupts you here. Nobody tells you to stop talking.

  They let you have the time you need.

  “I guess that’s especially because, and this is the hardest thing, but my cancer’s back. I don’t need a doctor to tell me something’s going wrong. I’m having problems like before. Smelling smells that aren’t there again. I’m forgetting things. I know I don’t got much time left and I don’t know how to tell this girl any of this. I guess I just want to disappear and not deal with it.”

  But this is me telling Mira right now. Putting it into the air of this room so I don’t have to do it somewhere else.

  I can’t look at her, so I don’t.

  “So, all’s I’m saying is, if you don’t see me next week, or the week after, just know this group means something real to me. That it kept me going even back when I had to take three buses and go almost two hours one way just to get here because Rose wouldn’t have had it any other way. She wanted me out of the neighborhood, away from where I’d been using. She was always smart like that. And that trip helped give me a life. So. Just.” I don’t mean to stop there, but my words are clogging up inside me. I got to look up at the ceiling and hold some emotions in before I can finish with “Thanks.”

  It’s rooms like this that taught me pain is what makes people act the way they do. We’re afraid to get more than we already got. Or we’re trying to forget it for a minute. But pain is the driver. And it doesn’t have brakes. It only lets its foot off the gas once in a while.

  25

  After group I got twenty people wanting to talk to me on my way to the parking lot because they follo
wed me out to tell me it’s okay, to tell me to go to the doctor because, well, it could be anything, and I know enough not to self-diagnose. None of them is Mira, but we agreed on not ever being seen together in public, so I take all that and say thanks, and then I walk across the street to where I’m parked and I just get in and drive because that’s all I can handle right now, Rose’s music and Wilshire going east.

  We never did it, me and Rose. We wanted to. We tried. But she got too sick. We were going to do it anyway, gently, even when it got real bad, but one night she went home and never called again. I knew why. I wasn’t stupid. And after that I was so sad we’d never been together, but now I wonder if it’s better we didn’t, that maybe it would’ve fucked me up worse. But she was so beautiful, though, even skinny as she was. Under a hundred pounds near the end. Cheekbones poking out. A skeleton queen. A living catrina when she put on a ton of dark eye shadow—

  My ringer goes and I look down. Collins’s calling on my regular cell.

  I pick it up, put it to my ear, and for a full second, I wonder if talking on a cell phone like this, pressing it to my head, brought my cancer back. Radiation, or whatever. Not that it matters now.

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “I’ll cut to the chase.” Collins says things like this thinking it’s cool, like he lives in a seventies cop show, but then he surprises me when his voice gets softer, like he’s actually got some sympathy. “I’m real sorry to hear about your medical condition.”

  Soon as he says it—dude!—I feel anger light me up inside.

  All’s I can think is Fucking Frank dropped a dime on me. I could’ve heisted two, maybe three more spots with no interference. Nobody would’ve gotten hurt. Now, though? It’s a whole new game.

  “Frank told you.” I don’t make it a question.

  “Hell, no! You think that old hoss would say shit to anybody about you?” Collins laughs down the phone at me. “It was Laura. She’s worried about you.”

  “I’m sure she is.” But I’m thinking, Maybe she is. I’m willing to give her that.

  But see, Laura’s smart too. I’m sure she heard about the safe from Collins, the one with the explosives in the door that I missed. And if she thought I was working myself too hard, and that was why I missed it, or if she had any feeling that I might’ve been pulling some shady maneuverings, she would’ve wanted the business kept out of it, and the best way to do that is cut me right out.

  Intended or not, it’s a slick move, but it’s also the right move. And I admire that. For real. Because if I was in her shoes, I would’ve done the same thing to me.

  I say, “So, she told you what exactly?”

  “Just that you’re not working for Frank anymore, and why.”

  There it is. She basically fired me from everything freelance with that phone call. I don’t blame her. And I’m not mad at her.

  Still, though, it’s bad fucking timing. It changes everything. Makes the next step way more dangerous.

  It doesn’t take much to get Collins off the phone. He was uncomfortable anyways, but he was giving me the respect of at least calling me to let me know I wouldn’t be on any more DEA stuff. This will go for every agency from here on out. The word has been spread. I won’t be getting calls on anything anymore. I’m cut off. An island, floating on four wheels in the L.A. night.

  My phone beeps when I set it in the shotgun seat. I pick it back up to see I have a missed call and a voice mail that came through before I was even in group, both from Stenberg Locksmithing. When I listen to it, Laura’s in tears. She tells me how she had to do it, how she talked to Frank and they both felt like if they kept giving me jobs, that I’d just work my way right into the grave, and how they don’t want that, how they hoped that by making this tough decision that I’d go get treatment. At the end of it, she said she loved me like a brother, and I should come back and see them right away.

  It takes my wind out. I crack the windows on either side of me, and the night pours in, but it’s not helping. Not enough. So I pull over.

  I don’t delete the message, but I put the phone down. I have to.

  I have to focus.

  From my prepaid, I call Janine at home. I got the number by heart.

  She has that caller ID, and she’s seen this number once, so she knows that it’s me. She picks up without saying hello, and I just ask if a woman named Francesca is there, which is code for me telling her she needs to meet me up and we’ve got to talk. She doesn’t ask when or even where. She knows it’s now, she knows where, and she knows I’m about to be headed there.

  “Sorry,” she says, “you’ve got the wrong number.”

  And then she hangs up.

  There’s no way her phone’s tapped. Not even a remote possibility, but we don’t take chances.

  I could take the 10, but I’m almost to Vermont. I see the street sign for South Berendo flashing past and I think about that dude I read about in the papers, Walter Vega. I didn’t know-him-know-him, but I’ve heard of him. He got killed down that street in November, last year. He was like eight days out of prison too.

  Through Vermont and I can already see the old Bullocks Wilshire, standing up tall like an art deco temple—rectangular spines pushed out past the windows, guiding your eyes up to the top. With its gray stone and copper squares that rusted turquoise between banks of windows, that was Rose’s favorite in all of L.A. Turquoise was her favorite color. The place is a law school now, but it used to be a fancy department store, the kind where ladies in old movies buy hats with feathers.

  Wilshire’s playing nice tonight, putting me on green after green, passing me—intersection by intersection—on a chain to Downtown.

  I push PLAY. On comes the little whisper of tape reels turning and I’m feeling Rose counting in that space between. “Instant Hit” by the Slits plinks in, with its beat going over scratchy guitars. The girls start singing to me about how I’m going to self-destruct. How they know it because it’s how I’m built, how I’ve always been built. Rose put this song on there as a warning for me, just to say I got that in me, but there’s also a line about how I’m “too good to be true” and that’s pure Rose. From her to me forever.

  I ride on that for a while before it ends abruptly and then me and Rose count the seconds. The time in between. Her in 1992. Me in 2008. Together.

  NOFX butts in with their guitars and their beat. Putting out anger. Hitting me with a song that stings, “Day to Daze.” It’s another sad warning not to use again.

  See, Rose knew me inside out.

  She knew I needed to keep hearing this stuff every day of my life, every day I got left, so I’d know what I could become again if I ever started slipping.

  Knowing I got darkness inside me no matter what. That it doesn’t go away the older I get. That it’s just sleeping. That it can wake up anytime.

  Especially now.

  And I’ve got to take it. Got to put a saddle on all the stuff that makes me be me and ride it. Strategy. Lying. Cleverness. All the gifts I ever had that made me a damn good junkie have got to be used for good now.

  Even if I have to do some bad things first.

  Rudolfo “Rudy” Reyes, a.k.a. Glasses

  Monday, September 15, 2008

  Morning

  26

  Collins didn’t tell me I had to valet in order to go into the Beverly Hills Hotel. He just said meet him at the Fountain Coffee Room inside at 7:15 a.m., but he didn’t say where it was or how to get there.

  So I pull up at 6:55, anxious since this is nothing I’m used to. What happens is, I have to unlock my door so they can open it for me.

  This kid does it. He’s taller than me by shoulders and a head. He’s dark haired, stretching his pink polo just by standing there, like it’s a size too small.

  He says, “Are you checking in with us today, sir?”

  “No, getting coffee.”

  He tears some type of ticket and puts it under the near wiper before holding the stub out to me. He wants
me to take it.

  I seen this type of thing on TV and I seen Lonely do it, but I never had to do it by myself before. It’s harder than I thought to trade the ticket for the truck and trust this guy to take care of it for me.

  “You be good to it,” I say as I take the ticket. “It was my dad’s.” A 1975 Chevy Silverado. First truck my dad ever bought. I brought it back to being blue and white myself. Had to replace the steering too.

  “Of course, sir. Absolutely.”

  I watch him drive it off and disappear on a left turn into a lot before I go in. In the lobby, I go left but figure out quick that’s the wrong way.

  At the front desk, I ask for the coffee room and they tell me to go to the right and take the staircase down on the left. When I get to the bottom of the stairs, it’ll be on my right. I can’t miss it. They tell me it opens at seven.

  I go where they told me to go and find a chair by the top of the stairs. I take some time soaking up the carpets and the patterns on them, the light fixtures that must get dusted every day.

  I even look at how the writing for the POLO LOUNGE curls above its closed doors. Everything looks expensive here, even the doorframes.

  At seven, the doors to the Polo Lounge open but I go downstairs. When I walk into the Fountain, there’s no other customers yet.

  The waitress up front tells me to sit wherever I’d like, so I sit on the furthest end of the bar on the right, putting my back to the wall so I can see everybody walking by in the windows and they can’t see me unless they turn and look back over their shoulders.

  I put my arm on the seat next to me so people will know it’s taken. I feel stupid I wore a nice guayabera, light blue, some khakis, and shined shoes, since everybody I seen go by so far is in Tshirts or hotel robes.

  Maybe that’s a reason Collins picked it. If I showed up wearing a T-shirt, staff would just think I was staying here.

  What a government agent’s doing picking a place like this, I’ll never know, but it needed to be open early and it needed to be way away from Lynwood.