Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  “So,” he said. “You want to come to Round Rock.”

  Ahh. A friendly sort, with a distinctly visible nimbus of goodwill, a light-flecked shading surrounding his face. Lewis managed to sit up straight. Then again, there was a light-flecked shading around everything—thanks, no doubt, to the many meds he’d been given in detox. “What I want,” Lewis said, “is to get outta here. Why can’t I just leave?”

  “With your record, you walk out of here, get drunk, and hurt someone, detox is liable. So somebody else needs to take responsibility for you.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t ask anyone to drive a hundred miles up here on a stupid bureaucratic technicality.”

  “Why not?”

  “No,” Lewis said darkly. “I just couldn’t.”

  “I’m sure Bobby told you there are beds upstairs.”

  “I couldn’t stay here.”

  “If you don’t come with me, you know, they’ll send you over to the state hospital.”

  This was the first mention Lewis had heard of a state hospital. “And where would that be?”

  “Camarillo,” said Red Ray. “The alcoholism ward. It’s not so bad. Can get pretty hairy, but some guys actually like it.”

  Lewis knew about Camarillo. Who didn’t? The big nuthouse. One time he’d been driving with a girl through the Santa Monica Mountains, trying to find a route back over to the coast, and they ran across the place. Tucked up against green rolling hills, the hospital formed a whole little town unto itself. There was no checkpoint, no guard, and they drove right onto the grounds. All the buildings were white with red tiled roofs. The streets were wide and freshly oiled and lined with healthy, thick-trunked palm trees. Expanses of green, closely cropped lawns shimmered in the sun. The girl he was with said she wanted to make love. It would be funny, she said, to have sex at the nuthouse. They drove around looking for a likely spot. The flower beds were all low to the ground, and there were no shrubs. No walls, no nooks. That was the thing about a nuthouse, Lewis guessed: no privacy. Curiously, nobody came out and asked why they were driving around in slow-motion circles. In fact, the only person they saw was a huge-headed man tottering down a red-painted sidewalk. Lewis suggested they do it in the car. The girl said that wouldn’t work for her, so they drove on down the coast.

  Lewis was shocked to hear they’d ship him to Camarillo. He was angry, too, that neither Bobby nor the breathing-impaired doctor had mentioned this possibility. On the other hand, it would be ironic if he did wind up inside. He could call that girl and say, “You’ll never guess where I am. Here’s a hint: no place to do it.”

  Red, meanwhile, was standing with his hands splayed on his hips, fingers drumming at high idle.

  “Sorry,” Lewis said. “Just thinking about this girl I used to know….”

  Red regarded him without interest. Not in the mood for reminiscence, Lewis guessed. “And, uh, your place—what goes on there?”

  “You’d work. Go to AA meetings. Get back on your feet. There’s counseling. Three squares a day. Softball on Sunday.”

  Lewis knew about AA, and not only from the meetings at detox. He’d had to go to six meetings after he got that DUI. He’d heard a few good stories about people shooting dope with famous musicians, stuff like that. Once, a leader had called on him to speak—or rather, to “share.” Would he like to share? No, he wouldn’t, but he didn’t want to hurt the guy’s feelings, either. He told that meeting he was impressed by the rigor with which they were trying to solve their problems. He had no doubt that their efforts would pay off. When he finished talking, the man next to him thumped Lewis on the shoulder. “Keep coming back,” he’d said.

  “I’m not crazy about AA,” said Lewis.

  Red shrugged. “We do have one requirement, and knowing it might save us both some time. The only requirement is a desire to stop drinking.”

  Lewis had heard that phrase before, in the AA rules. His first impulse was to say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s just forget it then, but his present options were beginning to compute. Upstairs. Nuthouse. Remote drunk farm. He felt compelled to cry out against the mounting absurdity. “I’m just not so convinced I need any of this. It feels like a big mistake, as if I’ve been caught up in the system, like I’ve found myself in a tomato soup factory, only I’m not a tomato. I’m not a tomato, I tell all the machines, but they say, Well, you’re on the conveyor belt, you’re in the boiling vat—as far as we know you are a tomato.”

  Red chuckled. “Oh, hell,” he said. “You can get out of here like that. Call a friend, anybody—that girl you were thinking about. Have her pose as your sister and sign you out. They won’t check. They just want a signature.”

  Lewis focused on a few square inches of the brown plaid couch and thought about who to call. Sam, his philosophy professor, would probably come, but in a year or two, Lewis would be asking him for recommendations. He was a brilliant student, but I did have to bail him out of the drunk tank. As for the girl who’d been to Camarillo, she might not be so pleased to hear from him. He wished he knew the name of that girl at the party, the one with the bucket-of-milk face. And there was Sergei, a Russian physicist whose papers he edited, but with all the vodka Sergei swilled, Bobby would probably take one whiff and lock him in the rubber room.

  Lewis couldn’t think of anyone else, anybody he wouldn’t be too ashamed to ask. Fear set in at a low hum. Dark winged things flickered in the corners of his eyes. Or maybe he was just glimpsing Red’s fingers drumming with impatience. Down the hall, someone was cheerfully whistling “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  Lewis reached for his knapsack and stood up. “Let’s blow this pop stand.”

  Lewis’s abrupt lurch upwards startled Red Ray, and it practically made Lewis pass out. His blood still wasn’t moving at normal speed, and the room burst into bright squiggles.

  “Easy now,” Red said, grabbing Lewis’s shoulders. They swayed, and briefly it seemed that they might go down together. Red recovered first, then righted Lewis. “I take it,” Red said, “you want to come with me.”

  LEWIS slept all the way to Round Rock and through much of his first week there, or as much of it as he could. He was awakened for meals and also for AA meetings, where he stayed conscious long enough to say, during check-in, “Lewis, alcoholic.” In detox he’d learned it was easier to go with the flow than explain to a room of the newly converted that he personally was not a member of their tribe.

  He shared a room with Carl, the snoring virtuoso. Carl was a high-school biology teacher; he had a wife and three towheaded little girls whose pictures occupied the nightstand between his and Lewis’s single beds. A binge drinker, Carl kept getting arrested with underage hookers he picked up at a bar in Oxnard called the Joy Room. After arrest number three, Carl’s wife had thrown him out of the house and he had come here, to Round Rock, presumably to wreck Lewis’s run on sleep. Lewis, awakened in the early morning hours, swore the curtains rose and fell—indeed, that the entire room shuddered—with each of Carl’s snores. There was nothing to do but get dressed and wander around.

  He didn’t know, really, where he was. He hadn’t seen a map. He knew he was north of L.A., north of the San Fernando Valley, and perhaps not far from the ocean. Sometimes, as he roamed the house at night, he watched fog billow up against the windows, a series of ghostly shoulders. By day he noted citrus groves, clear skies, a thick yellow afternoon light.

  The mansion itself seemed a comic travesty—a ravaged, once-lavish confection, a villa turned loony bin. It was called the Blue House, but the name barely hinted at its peculiar exterior color, an insistent, almost process blue, the color of robins’ eggs, swimming pools, or glacial fissures. Inside, rooms with twenty-foot ceilings were cluttered with sprung sofas, ugly coffee tables, and folding chairs; parquet floors were strewn with fake Persians and rag rugs. AA meetings took place in the ballroom, whose pillars were carved into ornate hanks of twisted rope, the slate floor hand cut in a wild sunflower pattern clearly inspired by van Gogh
’s work at Arles. Meals were eaten in the formal, wood-paneled dining room at six chrome dinettes, the kind Lewis spilled milk on as a child, with surfaces that looked like cubed Jell-O. Rackety older white refrigerators were shoved up against the dark wood wainscoting and stocked with milk and juices and packaged pastries you could heat up anytime in battered toaster ovens. Experienced residents said this was Round Rock’s biggest selling point over other recovery houses: always enough to eat.

  Lewis located two pay phones in closets off the living room and the lobby. Once, he shut himself in and, depositing the last of his change, called his philosophy professor. Amanda answered, and Lewis hung up without speaking.

  He bummed cigarettes until Carl told him he could get small loans from the house manager—it would all show up on his bill. The notion of a bill caused a twinkle of alarm and then was blissfully forgotten, a twenty-dollar loan immediately sought and granted.

  On his second Friday night, after dinner, Lewis squeezed into a Buick with five other men and rode through rural darkness to a town called Buchanan, where a large AA meeting was held in the domed auditorium of a former Masonic Temple, now a Teamsters union hall. There were women present, the first Lewis had seen in days. He sat next to one, a plump and fortyish knitter, who kindly gave him an unpleasantly sour lemon drop. He stayed awake for some of the speaker’s story, so as not to appear rude; but the lulling tick of her needles wore him down and sleep, in a heavy green wave, reclaimed him.

  On one early-morning ramble, Lewis slipped into the parlor, where the TV played all night to a host of chronic insomniacs. “If it isn’t Rip Van Winkle,” said Chuck, a small old guy with a white butch cut. A plumber, Chuck had retired to tend bar in a two-bit beer joint in Castaic and promptly drank himself into bankruptcy. Even sleeping through most AA meetings, Lewis had absorbed more biographical data about his companions than he cared to know. He knew, also, that this was Chuck’s second visit to Round Rock; after his first discharge, he’d made it as far as the bar in Rito called Happy Yolanda’s before his first scotch rocks.

  “Remember how Harlow slept when he came here? Laid his head on a hamburger steak one night like it was a boudoir pillow.” This was John, the house manager, a blue-eyed Irishman whose nose and cheeks bore a permanent, bright webbing of red capillaries. John, sober for five years, had no discernible sense of humor, bullied the men, was rumored never to sleep, and otherwise, so far as Lewis could see, provided clear inducement for a person to keep drinking.

  A late-night talk show was turned down so low that Lewis had to stop breathing to hear a gospel-pop singer describe her work with Haitian orphans. Then Gene, a tall and doughy ex-football player holding a pot of fresh coffee and mugs, blocked his view.

  “Jesus,” Lewis said after his first sip. “No wonder you guys stay up all night, drinking this tar.”

  “This ain’t strong,” said Chuck. “Drink a cup over at Red’s. He has that burnt-tasting stuff in little cups.”

  “Espresso?”

  “Shit, I don’t know.” Chuck had a forearm tattoo of a woman sunk ass-first in a martini glass with a banner that said MAN’S RUIN.

  “Who’s been over to Red’s?” asked Gene.

  “He had me over there fixing a drain,” said Chuck.

  “He never once asked me over,” said Gene.

  “He doesn’t ask anybody over,” said John. “He lives there for a little privacy. I catch one of you over there buggin’ him, you’re out the same as for drinking or drugging.”

  “I wish he still lived over here with us,” said Gene.

  “Red never lived in this house,” said Chuck.

  “That’s right,” said John.

  “Did so,” said Gene. “I heard he was here till he was going to get married. Then he fixed up his place. Only the girl dumped him.”

  “Pure caca,” said John.

  “That’s not what I heard,” said Lee. With long blond hair and rock-star good looks, he was, at nineteen, the youngest guy at the farm. “I heard Red lived here till Ernie chased him out with a shotgun.”

  The men in the parlor burst out laughing, even Lewis.

  “I’m just telling you what I heard,” said Lee.

  “It’s those voices in your head again,” said John.

  “I don’t have voices in my head,” said Lee.

  “You’re crazier than a rat in an oil drum,” said John. “You all are. A bunch of moody, sad-sack girls. Red this, Red that.”

  Lewis slipped from the room. Except for John, he didn’t much mind the men. Or even being here at Round Rock. The almost heady lack of responsibility is how he’d always imagined life in a pricey private mental ward. Things could be a lot worse; he’d already heard stories of treatment programs where residents were made to pick up fields of dog shit, march in formation, and stay in group therapy sessions until everyone was blubbering. Here, nobody said boo as he slumbered through the days. Still, moving on through the dark, shabby rooms, he finally had to park himself on a dusty sofa, light a cigarette, and puzzle out how he, Lewis Fletcher, had come to be in a facility for recovery from alcoholism when, so far as he could tell, he wasn’t alcoholic.

  Young Lee had confided at dinner that his last high was an ounce of hash, an eightball of coke, six Quaaludes and a dash of crystal, all hastily washed down with Cuervo shooters as police crossed a dance floor to arrest him for punching a bouncer. “Pooped my pants in the squad car,” he concluded cheerfully. At another meal, the men at Lewis’s table discussed what they drank when the booze ran out. Vanilla extract. Mouthwash. Aftershave. Everybody agreed aftershave was the worst—because of the burps it gave you. Lewis had never owned such a stash as Lee’s, nor had he sampled any one of the potions listed by his tablemates. At worst, he’d been playing a little fast and loose with alcohol in the last term.

  He’d taken the last two quarters off to save money and finish a raft of incompletes. Six incompletes. Six incompletes out of nine courses. Without classes to attend, he began to feel peripheral, like the hangers-on lurking around every graduate program. The papers haunted him. “Flaubert and Racism in Late-Nineteenth-Century France,” “Swedenborg, Blake, and Valuation of the Imagination,” “Inscape and Individuation: Concepts of Self in Hopkins and Jung” … Where to start? Always, it seemed, with a little lubrication, a quick stop at the Think Tank, where he invariably ran into a colleague or a professor, someone, at any rate, who bought him one more drink, and one more after that. Many Round Rock residents blamed their drinking on raging fathers, pillhead mothers, overcontrolling wives and girlfriends. Lewis blamed his on literary culture.

  LAWRENCE, a sweet homosexual speed freak who manned the clothes room, took Lewis under his wing, at least sartorially. “You have to class up. Beatniks are so passé,” Lawrence said, and slipped him freshly laundered, donated clothing, all of it cleaner, newer, and more fashionable than anything Lewis had left in his professor’s garage.

  Chipper in his new clothes and increasingly well-rested—he had a sense of swimming through viscous green liquid toward a dim light—Lewis began to seek out intelligent conversation. Carl liked to talk about waterskiing. Lee punctuated the briefest exchanges with fast, furious jamming on the air guitar. Lawrence spoke knowledgeably of designer labels and suit cuts. The only person who displayed anything resembling a literate sensibility was the head honcho himself. Red Ray was the only speaker at AA meetings who didn’t put Lewis out cold: he was funny and modest, and once he’d even quoted from a Blake poem: “I give you the end of a golden string….” Also, when Red laughed, it was quiet, inward, almost like a sob. Lewis found this endearing, especially in such a large man.

  The trouble was, everybody else wanted a piece of Red Ray, too. Whenever he came into the dining room, there was an obvious, communal hush. Hands reached for Red’s hand. Men interrupted their own conversations to greet him. This reminded Lewis of the time he and a girlfriend went to see a man who trained animals for Hollywood. The man had trained a bear for beer ads and a
stag for insurance ads and now ran a riding stable. When the three of them walked out to the barn, the farm dogs leapt joyously in front of the trainer, dropping sticks and toys at his feet. In the corral, horses edged toward him, pushing and nudging and surreptitiously nipping at one another to get closer, to be the one spoken to and petted. That’s what it was like when Red Ray came into the Blue House—the same animal magnetism. As Red passed his table, Lewis didn’t reach out a hand, but inside he craned and yearned with the rest of them, one more beast nuzzling up.

  ON HIS second Sunday, visitors’ day, Lewis felt strong enough—and social enough—to play softball. A diamond had been chalked into the base of the mansion’s gently sloping lawn. The game served primarily as a diversion for residents who, like Lewis, had no visitors, although a few visitors also played, and any number of Round Rock alumni arrived to flesh out the teams. Lewis was instructed to choose a side: Shitheads or Doodads. He chose the former—Red Ray was their pitcher—and thus made what he learned was a lifelong commitment. As the day warmed up, his teammates peeled off their sweatshirts, revealing T-shirts that read, ONCE A SHITHEAD ALWAYS A SHITHEAD. Lewis played both the morning and the afternoon game, back to back, a total of twenty-two innings. The next morning, his ninth at Round Rock, he could barely walk and couldn’t move his neck at all. Lewis was, in fact, in worse pain than when he was fresh out of detox, and John informed him that R & R was over and it was time to go to work.

  WHEN Round Rock first opened, Red started out thinking—his first mistake, he always said—that if he put the drunks to work in the groves, the farm would support itself. This didn’t play out precisely as planned: the groves were in such a state of neglect, the handful of newly recovering alkies so shaky, and Red’s farming knowledge so halting that the first project—removing deadwood from a two-acre grove—took three months.