Halfway

by Tom Macher

  That night in group, Program stalked brother to brother, taking each one in, eyes twinkling, opening his mouth to speak, and then no, he’d save it or not yet or not worth his time or there’s too much of you to get into. For now, anyway.

  I realized he was still standing in front of me. What’s up? I said.

  What’s up? He looked around to see if I was talking to someone else. What’s up?

  I don’t know, am I stupid or what? I leaned forward. Yeah, I said. What’s up?

  Oh, man. Program shook his head. Little brother, I don’t get you. But you need to get me, he said. If you don’t, I’ll take away baseball. Then I’ma come down to that school, pull your ass right out, make you get your GED. I’ll have you flipping fucking burgers, making motherfucking milk shakes.

  I’ll tell you how life in the House goes: you become fast friends, and because of this you’ll get in a car with your new fast friend and go somewhere, but that place won’t be the place you thought you were going. I believe Ray signed us out to a meeting. It was Friday night. He had his usual crew. Rick K., Atlanta John, Chad H.: the cool guys, basically, all of them in their jeans and wifebeaters, eyes glazed, not giving fuck all. We drove to Baton Rouge. He let them off on Chimes. This is all bars, head shops, tattoo parlors, typical college scene. No idea what they were doing, though I could guess. Next he drove to Alex Box, LSU’s baseball stadium. Under lights, the field glowed, grass so shiny it seemed wet, foul lines stark white, purple and gold flags, deep crimson on the horizon west of the levee beyond the right-field wall. It was beautiful.

  He bought me a ticket, nachos, a dog and cold drink, Cracker Jacks. He leaned back and watched the game. While he watched, I watched him. He didn’t like this, or pretended not to. He shoved my shoulder. C’mon.

  I couldn’t help it. The dude scared me. It wasn’t physicality but how cool he was. Cool. Not GQ but cool. Real cool. Nothing fazed him.

  Listen, he said. You got to stop fucking up at school. How you fixing to play ball if you’re not in school anymore? He’ll take baseball from you, just like he said. Isn’t this your thing? Isn’t it what you love? It’s what you’re going to do, right?

  I hope so.

  The fuck you mean, I hope so? His jaw tensed. I got offered a scholarship to play football. Did you know that?

  I can’t picture you in school.

  How’s that? he asked.

  I’m just saying.

  Just saying. Shit, if you think I’m dumb, say it, he said. I know what goes on at school.

  Nothing goes on there.

  Pfft. After school.

  I go to practice.

  I’ve driven by there.

  And?

  Wait. He squinted at me in disgust. Are you? A virgin? He could barely say it. You are, aren’t you?

  I wanted to sound tough. Hell, yes, I said. I’m saving myself.

  Are you kidding? He searched the stands, as if wanting to escape. Fuck you, nancy, he said. I’m mad, actually pissed. At school? He leaned forward and spit. How are you a virgin at school?

  It’s not like I’m trying to be.

  Trying’s dying, fool. I mean, look. It’s a fairly simple process. You stick your little dick in their pussy. It’s easy. All you got to do is look right in their eyes and smile. Then their pussies water.

  Pussies don’t water, I said, though honestly, I wasn’t sure.

  Whatever, virgin. What’s the furthest you been, anyway?

  Blow job, I said, which was true, though she’d been a hooker.

  Huh. How much you pay?

  Twenty-five bucks, I admitted.

  He whistled. Not bad. And what his name?

  Program.

  You’re lucky he didn’t kill you. Ray shifted his weight, pulled a tin of Kodiak from his pocket, and began whipping his finger against it. I’m looking at a long time, he said. Do you know what I’m saying?

  I knew what he was saying. Yeah, I said. Contracts.

  * * *

  I JOGGED THE OUTFIELD ON MONDAY, scanning the trees, but Mike wasn’t in them. That’s what happened. Where was he? I wondered. Who was he with? I stopped running. Running made no sense. I walked back to the dugout, untied and removed my cleats, peeled off my socks, pants, cup, and jock, slid on a pair of shorts. I placed a ball inside my glove, put everything in my bag.

  Coach was on the mound, addressing the subtleties of holding a runner on first. Shoulders hunched and cap pulled low, he looked to first, then into the catcher’s mitt. Quick glance at first. Long stare toward home. Maybe he heard the dugout gate or felt it. Just before I turned to the library, he stepped off the bump.

  He was holding a ball in his right hand in a way I’d held a ball all my life. It’s the way you hold it before throwing it in your glove and popping the leather, which is how you break in a glove and something you might do a hundred times on any given day, so much that, even alone in center field, you will pound your fist into your glove from habit, and I expected him to do this now as he watched me pull the gate shut and take sight of him and my would-be teammates huddled on the mound—C’mon, I thought, pound that leather, pop it, be normal—but Coach just looked at me, and in his eyes I saw my own history with this sport, the love I’d felt when I first picked up a bat, how ever since, it’d been all I wanted to do, and his look seemed to say, I get it, circumstances change, sometimes there’s nothing to do but accept it. He nodded. And I walked away.

  Some of the Brothers

  RANDY G. was forty-three, had a haircut by Flowbee, a hunched back, shoulder fat, a child’s thin legs. Before the House, he’d lived with his mother in a postwar prefab in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked at an art-supply store, was a huffer of glue, Magic Markers, a garbage-can junkie. I’d like to say his story ends well, but he slammed Dilaudid in the group-room john and Program told him, Take two brothers and pack your shit. Randy G. was gone.

  Andy C., seventeen, had a baby face, baby-blue eyes, head razored to the scalp. He stood five foot one, weighed a hundred pounds. In another life, he might’ve been a featherweight fighter, coxswain, or jockey, but in this life, he was a heroin junkie and gutter punk, a dumpster diver and panhandler. He wore a black bomber jacket, black cargo pants, and twenty-eyed Docs. I don’t know what happened to Andy. He left one day. Disappeared. Gone forever.

  Jack Rehab, twenty-four, had been a logger until he freebased cocaine. Gleeful, exuberant, he quit cutting and climbing, pawned his chain saw and ax. He was in love and, like any romantic fool will do, followed his heart. Some guys he knew sold rock from their home. They were slobs, their house a mess. He cut them a deal—I’ll clean your home for whatever. While he scrubbed, they threw stones—Here, bitch, scrub, bitch, clunk.

  Rehab had stringy hair and rotting silvery teeth, wore shoes and clothes gone out of fashion many years ago, but had come to revelation and would do whatever it took. He had the lingo down, could recite the Twelve Steps one to twelve and twelve to one, knew verbatim the first five chapters of the Big Book and most of the stories. God-fearing, spiritual, grateful, and willing, he would go to any length.

  Andy P., nineteen, Virginia, had been full of promise at one age. I can’t remember his drug of choice. Coke? Pot? I don’t know. I have no memory of him breaking Stricts, stealing Confo money, or wiping his own Hours off the board. He was a wallflower. No idea what became of him. Best guess he’s using now, dead, or married and living a bland life with offspring full of promise who’ll grow up to be junkies who push their mom down the stairwell.

  Three Dog came from Luland, Metairie, or Kenner, wherever he felt like that day. His mother lived in Kenner, his aunt in Luland, his grandfather in Metairie. His dad was dead. He’d split time between the three places, and you could fuck yourself if you didn’t get why he claimed all three. They were all the same anyway, bedroom communities outside NOLA. His dad had been a surgeon and his grandfather, too, or politicians—a real prominent family—and he was supposed to be a surgeon as well, only he’d made the same cr
ucial discovery as Jack Rehab. Here’s a fourteen-word story: rock cocaine will make your ass feel real, real good, for a little while. Now Three Dog looked forward to five years if he didn’t finish the program. No one cared. We made a pool when he got in, gave him three days, a week, tops.

  Like quite a few, Jon B., nineteen, got in claiming no DOC, just recreational use. He was, he said, more or less a good guy. Not one clue, he insisted, why I’m here. But as with Rehab and Three Dog, you could see it in his teeth: dinned and silvery, from a distance you might think he’d been drinking a heavy red, but once you got closer, if you listened to the spaces instead of the words in his stories, you’d say, Nope, that’s not cabernet on this boy’s teeth, this fool’s been smoking rock cocaine.

  There is also the story of the old man who, like Mike O., had true humility—a fundamental understanding of who he was, who he wanted to be, and an earnest desire to get there. We called him Sweet Daddy. Fifty-three, a crackhead from Gary, Indiana, he showed up speaking nonstop of a woman back home. She was his impetus for sobriety, his one true thing. Later, he would speak of other matters, and later still, he grew to speak of everything, be it the relative merits of Formula 409, the streaking patterns left on windows by paper towels versus newspaper, or his feelings about sobriety. We would have called him Captain Planet, I suppose, except he didn’t seem to give a fuck about rules or what he had to clean, what he could or couldn’t read, when he could sleep, watch TV, nothing. Checks didn’t bother him. Majors was just another day. Three meetings—pfft, he’d make five. He lived for Kitchen Crew; Group Funks were better than flying solo. His journal and Big Book always at hand.

  Dude blew my young mind.

  Habitual and steady, he freely named himself—he had alcoholism, the disease, was a vampire, would suck the life right out of you. Now, he was on a mission back to his woman, and he’d go to war, the moon, Mars, or Venus, a distant ring of Jupiter if he had to. He described her smooth skin, the intricacies of her breath and heartbeat, her sense of humor, the way she laughed at herself or bit her lip, how she hummed, her whole body vibrating when he’d nose her ear. He had the feel of a man who’d thought so long about a thing that it had become him.

  I began to wonder if she was even alive.

  Timmy D., a common drunk, was so old and brittle we had to keep him out of the wind. Somewhere between forty-five and seventy and six foot four, weighing 115 pounds, he hailed from Gulf Shores, Alabama, where he’d been an offshore pipe fitter on rigs. You don’t have to be an OSHA rep to know booze and a welding arc don’t mix. The fingers on his right hand were fused to his wrist. He had to use a forearm to ignite a Zippo, but ignite that fucker he did.

  I didn’t think I belonged: I was very young. Only Mike O. was younger.

  Chad H., twenty, had glazed eyes, permanently dilated pupils. They were a consequence, same as wretched kidneys or Timmy D.’s hand, and Program said they’d stay that way—a while—but Chad was all whatever. He dressed grungy, granola, urban hippie. DOC: heroin. When he spoke, his words mirrored his pupils—slow, elongated, blurred. He rarely made meetings, worked the steps only to satisfy Phase, and generally did not care. In a perfect world, he would’ve made a fine wallflower like Andy P., but Ray liked him, and that meant trouble.

  Lionel, seventy-five, a common drunk like Timmy D., was the oldest brother I saw. A dinosaur, really, he’d enter group with his arms crossed already, sit down, lean back, yawn, and cross his ankles. He spoke dubiously in grunts and fuck-yous and privately doubted he was an alcoholic—if such a thing even exists, and it doesn’t!—but as much as he wasn’t, he was a hell of a lot closer to one than any of us. He’d spilled more liquor than we’d drunk, smelled more than we’d seen, and so on. Of course he would die alone, leaving behind children with holes in their chests and mixed feelings, wreath already wilted.

  Atlanta John, a has-been college baseball star, used to play catch with me in the grass behind the group room. He had a good arm, was tall, handsome in a surfer way, with iced-up highlighted hair, a perfect nose, strong chin. He was enterprising. He carried a backpack filled with a variety of cigarettes he sold on Property for a marginal profit. This was a no-no but also convenient, and no one was ratting him out. He made a few bucks. So what. It saved us a trip. But things got bleak for Atlanta John, or they got good, and he bought a couple twelvers of Coors Light and visited a No Contact brother named B (nineteen, crystal meth, HIV-positive) who lived in a trailer across Main. They drank and shot crank and fucked each other until they died.

  Steve G., a musician, disappeared quietly back into the never-never of wherever he’d come from.

  Chad C., coke, died of a heart attack at twenty-one.

  None of us had been boys who raised our hands in class. We’d sat in back, stared out the window, etched initials into our desks, looked off one another’s papers, popped gum, yawned, snapped what’s-her-face’s bra, spat wads of phlegm into palms we wiped on our jeans or the back of your shirt. In the bathroom, we sniffed glue or choked each other out until we felt light-headed and good. At recess, we fought or hooped or repaired to the woods to smoke cigarettes and weed and light pine straw on fire.

  In total, we were men who began early and could not cope, kicked out of here and there, who’d been molested by or molested our brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, babysitters, coaches, neighbors, priests, teachers, coworkers, dealers. We all faced jail or the road, but we were all tough, stubborn, bulletproof.

  Jack Rehab left on a bicycle, pedaled right off the Property and down West Road toward the highway, a suitcase dangling from each handlebar. We all stood at the Property’s edge, smoking, placing bets, watching him stomp pedals, his body jerking one way and then the next, trying to balance the unequal weight of his luggage. It was pathetic, triumphant, pathetic.

  In March, I lived in the back bedroom of Room Four, window, a bunk bed. Lionel the alcoholic slept wall, and because the House was crowded that spring, Andy C. slept below me. In the front bedroom were Jack Rehab and Sweet Daddy.

  Sweet Daddy spoke of ordinary sunshine through glass, winter in Gary, dirty snow piled up along the sidewalk, rusted-out cars, the meat loaf his woman cooked, her mashed potatoes and gravy. We never got a name. It was just his woman, his girl, my lady, their link so tight that after all the years and transgressions, a name didn’t matter. This is how love is, he seemed to say, pay attention, young bucks. His talks took place outside the group room near the Coke machine, positioned to watch the road or hear the phone ring. He spoke slowly, measured. He rolled the tip of a Newport between his thumb and index finger. Some tobacco came loose, fell to the ground at his feet. Standing up was a procedure. He’d palm his thighs and lean forward, and brothers would ease toward him in case he didn’t make it.

  He’d done such fucked shit that the most fucked thing he could have done was just a blip, an afterthought, he only considered in relation to his movements. And all his movements circled back to her. He spoke of everything about her, called her pussy a pie. This was what it came back to—that whole show. Everything else a cherry on top, the icing, crumbs on your macaroni and cheese, and yet he didn’t speak about their lovemaking in some dirty, lowbrow way, but instead as beautiful, necessary.

  How long, he asked, are we supposed to be here?

  No one could answer. No one knew. There was no answer. We were here, it was understood, until we weren’t.

  We’d all seen, heard, or known of someone who’d walked in four or five months. Psycho Ray, on the other hand, was approaching a year.

  Like Sweet Daddy, guys spoke longingly of the outs, places they’d been or were going, movies currently showing, movies we’d miss. Mike O. talked about his foster homes, how no one cared. He described his foster parents, by and large check collectors, none of them terrible people; it wasn’t like that. I talked about the commune where my mom took us when we were kids. And my dad. That’s where I’d go, I told Mike. If I left. Either place. You should come, too
, I told him. I’ve called them. They got a farm. If we work on it, we can live rent-free. Timmy D. talked about his wife—he missed her—and Ray talked about his mom. Nob remembered the Carolina shore, and Captain Ron dreamed of joining the air force. Hair-pie, who was different, who wore loafers and pleated slacks, whose drug of choice was not a drug at all but spending money, who came from an old family that could trace its heritage, land rights, and chattel to the days of European aristocracy, who used to sit behind the group room—quiet and alone and meditating—who never got a sponsor, nor tried to make Phase, who was so grandiose he was proud of his grandiosity, who said his Verbal of “Hello, my name is Hair-pie, and I think I’m better than you” with such gusto and verve staff changed it to “Hello, my name is Hair-pie, and three things I admire in you are,” spoke of his now deceased father, his two younger siblings, the family he’d have to steward, the pressure he felt. G-Dub, who was bald up top and had a mullet in back, talked about the guns he owned. E-Dog spoke of crystallized sunsets over the New Mexico mountains, how the sky bled deep inky blues and heavy grays when a storm approached. Guys talked about jam bands—Phish, the Dead, Widespread—and touring. They talked about nitrous tanks and the quick goodbye of darkness. They talked pinpricks, constipation, the itch, air bubbles in syringes, and argued could you or could you not die from air bubbles. They talked about going up, coming down, dicks cocaine-limp. They talked about the taste of gun oil, how a rope feels around your neck. They talked meds, pharmaceuticals, various shrinks and shrink methodology. And yet for all the bragging, minimizing, and half-truths, we rarely spoke about wanting to die. Kill yourself in the House, the thinking went, and your ass was in trouble. Even mentioning it brought consequence. We called “I want to kill myself” the magic words. Say them and get shipped. Older dudes, veterans of treatment centers, institutionalized all, spoke around it. They had “dark thoughts” or “felt blue.” But one night in group this sad sack said he wanted to kill himself. Fretting, worried, he wrung his hands and tore at his hair. I wondered what the others thought. They looked around. No one was dumb enough to say this aloud.