by Bill Clegg
I tell the cabdriver the address and I think I hear him say, Didn’t take long. Right away, I ask him what he just said and he responds calmly, in a Jamaican accent, Nothing my friend, nothing. We’re at Mark’s in a few minutes and to my surprise the meter registers a fare, which he is clearly waiting for. I pay and he mumbles something which I hear as Be God, but figure he means Be good.
I’m at the door. The same door I’ve stood at dozens and dozens of times. Looking at the same buzzer and hoping the same hope: that Mark is home and that Mark has drugs. Whatever hesitation struggled against desire on the terrace less than an hour before is now gone. I am giddy and antsy and shuffling before the door as if something wonderful is waiting on the other side. Nothing of the past months, nothing of the ruin and upset my using has caused, figures into this moment. Or if it does, it’s a dim unpleasantness that, along with every other worry, is being escaped. The world and its woe exist on this side of the door, where I am now; the place to hide from it all is on the other, where I’m going. I press the button and in seconds hear Mark’s voice, metallic and loud through the intercom. Who is it? he squawks, and before I say my name the door is buzzing open.
One Day
It’s early afternoon, two days after showing up at Mark’s apartment, when I return home. Benny hasn’t been fed for almost three days, and when I open the door she is meowing desperately. I immediately open a fresh can of cat food, put water in her bone-dry dish, and try to pet her, but she bites at my hands and skitters away. I plug in my cell phone, which is dead and I know will be full of messages—from Jack, Asa, Kim, Jean, Dave. I’m starving and I take one of the quiches from the refrigerator and eat the entire thing. I’ve purchased Tylenol PM from the bodega downstairs and take a handful to cushion the crash. I wish I had vodka or beer or some kind of alcohol, but even after forty-eight hours of crack and vodka at Mark’s the idea of bringing booze into this apartment seems out of bounds. So the Tylenol PM will have to do. Once the phone is charged I listen to the messages: three from Kim—one more worried than the next—two from Dave, whom Kim has called because she has not heard from me, none from Jack, two from Asa, and one from Polly.
Polly is a few years younger than I am, lives with her twin sister, Heather, who is the bartender at an Irish tavern in the West Village that serves burgers and steaks and chicken pot pies. Heather and Polly are coke addicts. Polly is trying to get sober, Heather is not.
Polly has six or seven days clean. I met her at that first meeting at The Library with Asa. When I raised my hand that day, as Jack had insisted I do, and said I had sixty days, Polly waved to me from across the room and smiled while everyone else clapped. Later, Polly raised her hand and shared that she was afraid Heather would overdose and that it had been difficult to put together more than a few days clean when their dealer was still coming in and out of the apartment at all hours.
One of the most frightening things Polly said that day was that she once had six years sober. She and Heather got sober after college and then, four years ago, after graduate school and a few broken hearts between them, they moved in together. Three years later, they both relapsed. Neither had gone more than a week since without getting high.
Polly lost her job as a schoolteacher six months ago and walks dogs to pay the few hundred dollars that is her portion of the rent-controlled apartment they share on St. Mark’s Place. Polly is my height, very thin, and is often wearing sweatpants and T-shirts that don’t look washed. Her hair is shoulder length, dirty blond, and greasy, and she reeks of cigarette smoke. She has a dog named Essie—a fat, mid-sized gray-and-white mutt she walks up and down the side streets of the East Village while she chain-smokes. Her clothes are usually covered in dog hair.
My first response to Polly when she smiled at me at The Library was Fuck, I hope she doesn’t want to talk after the meeting; but when she described—plainly, clearly—how desperate she was not to use again but feared she would, there was a moment when I confused the words she was saying with the words I was thinking, believed momentarily that they were coming from inside my head and not from across the room. I looked again at this skeletal, disheveled, unwashed mess, and as she spoke I got very still because everything she was relating was something I had felt before and in precisely the same way. When the meeting ended, I was the one to chase after her, down the stairs and into the street, to ask for her phone number.
Polly’s voice mail message is short and sweet: Hey, I didn’t see you in the meeting yesterday or today. What’s up? Call me. I do. She picks up on the first ring and says in a playful, schoolteacher tone, Billy boy, did you relapse? I mumble in response some kind of yes. She laughs. She actually laughs, and says, Get to a meeting, don’t sit on the pity pot, just get to a meeting. Don’t make a big deal out of it, just get back on the beam. And call your sponsor. I listen to Polly like I’m listening to someone telling me how to defuse a bomb strapped to my ankle. OK, OK, I say and agree to call her later that night.
It’s Thursday evening and I’ve already missed two meetings at The Library. I sit on my bed and look out the window toward the building that used to be Barneys but is now, vaguely and in ways that don’t make sense to me, a museum for Tibetan culture. Things change, things stay the same, but I remain an addict. I think about one of the writers I represented whose book is now on the bestseller list and being smothered in acclaim. She has kept in touch, came to rehab once for a walk, and gave me the first signed copy of the book, but she is gone now and my professional relationship to her work a thing of the past. As with Kate and Noah, and even friends like Dave and Jean, I can only envision her happiness and success and my lack of both. I don’t imagine that within any of their lives there is strife or fear or regret or sadness. When I have tried to explain this to Jack, he interrupts me and says, ENOUGH SELF-PITY! which of course I find humiliating. I also find it strange that with all the people who have left me messages on my cell phone, Jack is not one of them. I’m sure Kim called him—she’s had his number since I was in the hospital.
As the Tylenol PM begins to kick in, I start thinking about Jack’s patronizing phrases, his dismissive accusations of self-pity, and how he never just listens to what I’m feeling, what I’m going through. If not him, then who? He’s my sponsor, isn’t he? I think about going back to Mark’s, but I know there won’t be any more drugs there until evening when he can call Happy or Rico. Mark agreed not to tell Happy that I was in the bedroom when he came with the drugs two nights ago, because of the money I owe him. I wonder if Mark kept his word or instead tipped him off that I’m back in town. Worry about Happy mingles with my rising resentment toward Jack, and in a burst of frustration I pick up the lamp next to my bed and throw it against a wall. The light bulb shatters but the small wooden base remains intact. Next to the wall where I’ve thrown the lamp I see a meeting book. Reluctantly, I pick it up to see if there is a mid-afternoon meeting nearby. I can’t bear to call anyone else back and have no idea what I will say when I eventually do. I flip through the meeting book and see one starting in ten minutes a few blocks away at the gay and lesbian center. I go.
The meeting is small, gloomy, and filled with mostly middle-aged gay men who look sick. I’m on the end of two days smoking crack and guzzling vodka with no food or sleep, so I don’t look so hot either. The meeting is a round robin format where everyone is expected to talk once the speaker has qualified, which means he describes, in ten to thirty minutes, what it was like when he used, how he got sober, and what it’s like now. I make it through the first ten minutes of the speaker’s qualification and I can’t bear the idea of talking, of having to admit I’ve just relapsed; and I don’t want these guys crowding me after the meeting with their numbers and their understanding faces. I want to leave, so I do.
I call Polly from the street and she picks up right away. Did you go to a meeting and say that you’ve relapsed? she snaps without salutation and I lie and say yes. Which one? she asks doubtfully and I tell her. Did you call your sponso
r? I lie again and say yes. So what are you going to do now? she asks, and the truth is I have no idea. I tell her so and she says, Well, let’s talk. I don’t remember everything we talked about that night, but I do remember her telling me a story of getting drunk on a flight to Dallas, where, once she landed, she blew off the rehearsal dinner for a wedding she was supposed to be a bridesmaid in to go looking for an ex-boyfriend. She hit a bar on the way and ended up walking in traffic on a freeway outside the city and getting arrested. I tell her how I was—just three months earlier—thrown off a flight to Berlin because I was convinced the plane was crawling with DEA agents and said something bizarre to the flight attendant. We talk and trade war stories, and I walk west on 15th Street, north on Eighth Avenue, east on 16th Street, south on Seventh Avenue, west on 15th, completing the loop around the block again and again and again. Polly keeps me on the phone a long time, and I remember several times thinking that the dealers will be back in business soon and maybe I should get off the phone and go over to Mark’s. But I stay on the phone, walk in circles until I’m exhausted, and, finally, go home.
I call Kim that night. Dave and Jean and Asa, too. The call with Dave lasts less than ten seconds and he says, Good luck, call Kim. It’s clear he’s had it and that I am not his problem anymore. Kim is similarly short with me. I leave a message for Jean on her answering machine that I’m OK and will speak with her in the morning. Asa and I talk. As with Polly, we stay on for a long time. Long enough for me to fall asleep, because I wake up at four or five in the morning with all the lights on and my cell phone pressed between my ear and the pillow. I get up to turn off the lights and find Benny asleep next to the door. I want to pet her, tell her how sorry I am for leaving her alone without food for over two days, but I’m afraid she’ll bite me again, so I leave her alone and go back to bed.
It’s after one o’clock when I wake up the next day. It’s Friday and I’ve missed the 12:30 meeting at The Library, but I make coffee, eat a bowl of granola, shower, dress, and get out the door to make the two o’clock. Polly and Asa are both there when I walk in but I don’t recognize anyone else. C’mere, Crackhead, Polly says and pats the seat next to her. She is wearing what looks like pajama bottoms. Asa, freckled and immaculate in his usual uniform of tight Izod, jeans, and colored belt, sits on my other side. I’ve never been so happy to see anyone as I am these two. The meeting begins. There are two speakers—one with just over a year sober and the other with decades—who talk about early sobriety and the first ninety days. Of all days I should be listening, but I can’t stop thinking about the four-hundred-dollar cash advance I put on my credit card to buy drugs. I start thinking about how much money I have left on that card and the others. I tally up ten grand or so and begin to imagine how I could put together a war chest of drugs for one last bender and then make use of the seventeenth-floor balcony off my apartment. No pills this time, no chance of failing again. Polly rubs the back of my neck and I can smell the cigarette smoke coming off her clothes. The speakers go on speaking, a hat gets passed and fills up with dollars, people raise their hands and announce their day counts—twenty-four, eighty-eight, thirty. People clap. Polly raises her hand and says nine or ten or something in that range. More clapping. She pinches my leg, I raise my hand. One day, I say, and the place explodes.
The meeting ends and as it breaks up six or seven people approach me, give me their numbers, and tell me to call anytime. I notice a short, thin, dark-haired girl wearing overalls and a striped cardigan whom I think I know from somewhere. I’m pretty sure it’s the on-again, off-again girlfriend of Noah’s screenwriting partner, but I can’t think of her name. She disappears through the door and up the stairs before I can remember.
I go with Polly to the dog run in Union Square Park and watch Essie get humped by the smallest dog I’ve ever seen. She wanders slowly around the narrow dirt yard, but her suitor keeps pace, bouncing from behind on brittle twig-thin legs. Polly and I drink coffee and the afternoon slips by. She tells me about having been a competitive swimmer in college and, years later, getting drunk on beer in the morning before going to work teaching elementary school kids. Here we are, Crackhead, she says, gesturing with her right hand toward the dog run, and then, like a wise sober owl, says, Exactly where we’re supposed to be.
Three days later I don’t see Polly at the 12:30 or two o’clock meetings at The Library. She doesn’t show up to the Tuesday meeting either. She doesn’t return my calls, and the few people we have in common haven’t seen or heard from her since last Friday. Despite Jack’s warnings that I should keep my distance and not chase after her, I hang out in front of the building where she and Heather live. She never appears. Finally, on Wednesday, she shows up at the two o’clock meeting, late, and sits toward the back. I try to catch her eye but she stares into her lap. She looks even more unkempt and ragged than usual and after the speaker finishes qualifying, she raises the same hand she used six days before to gesture grandly toward the dog run, Union Square, our lives. I’m Polly, she mutters. I have one day.
The Rooms
I have eight days now and Polly has three. The last few days we’ve met at the 12:30, stayed for the two o’clock, and each time ended up at the dog run. I’m getting used to the dog run smells of piss and shit and am no longer worried that someone I know will see me. The same people are usually there. A few old ladies, several professional dog walkers like Polly, who come with dozens of cool-tempered, strangely obedient dogs on leashes. And then there are the young guys in tracksuits, expensive ones like my friend Lotto’s. We met in the rehab Noah and Kate sent me to in Oregon last year after they organized an intervention with Dave and Kim. Lotto’s a rich kid from New York and at the age of twenty-two has been to ten or eleven rehabs and two therapeutic boarding schools, something I didn’t know existed before meeting him. He wears tracksuits—either Adidas brand or the shiny plush kind with fancy zippers and logos, the ones that look like they were purchased at expensive resorts. According to the last text he sent me, Lotto’s at the Betty Ford Center in California, already having relapsed two or three times since returning to New York from Oregon. These guys in the dog park remind me of him, just older, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, maybe thirty. I imagine they do coke all night and stumble out in the afternoons to let their dogs go to the bathroom. With bloodshot eyes and jumbo coffee containers from Dean & Deluca and Starbucks, they text and call from their cell phones and I imagine them scoring bags of drugs for the coming night. I wonder who lives like this—expensive dogs, good haircuts, new running shoes, worked-out bodies, fancy phones, tracksuits. Who other than people like me and Polly who’ve wiped out and are getting sober can dawdle in a dog run at three o’clock on a weekday afternoon? Dealers? None of my dealers were ever white. But that doesn’t mean that these guys aren’t dealing. Maybe they’re slightly older Lottos with families who’ve cut them off, so they deal drugs to keep using. The lifespan of this kind of dealer/user/aging rich kid must be short, I think, as I watch them retreat to the far benches of the dog run and grumble into their phones. I try to remember war stories from the meetings, or what Polly and Asa and lately I refer to as the rooms, to align with this profile but come up with nothing.
My mind dances through these possibilities but I don’t share them with Polly for fear the speculation about dealers and using will trigger her. We talk a lot about Heather, how she’s starting to shoot coke with needles, is missing work and being warned. She’s going to lose her job, get arrested, or die, Polly says as she exhales a giant plume of cigarette smoke. And every time I turn around there’s a dealer in the living room and a bag of coke on the coffee table. I offer, careful not to be too pushy, to help Polly look for a rehab or move her to a new apartment—at least until she has ninety days—but Polly’s not ready. She says she’ll take me up on either offer if it ever seems necessary or gets too bad at home.
We don’t usually stay in the dog run longer than forty-five minutes, so on most days I’m back in my apartment for at
least the last half of The Oprah Winfrey Show. In the last few episodes there has been little in the way of redemption stories. Instead, there is lots of shopping and THINGS I LOVE, like pies and perfumes, and accessories. Still, I’m transfixed by the show, which, up until now, I’d never really watched. I’m tempted to, but don’t, rush Polly out of the dog run so I can catch as much of the show as possible. Somehow the four o’clock airing feels like an occasion, has the fizzy energy of watching the Academy Awards or the Grammys. There is a sense that the rest of the world is tuning in, and even though the show is taped, it feels live, as if Oprah is revealing something terribly important each day that her audience, which seems like everyone, absolutely must know. Even something as trivial as the best brownie in New England gets the royal treatment, or the doughnut that is OUT OF THIS WORLD, which she’ll shout about loudly and with mannish glee. Whatever it is she’s shouting about, I’m there. And I’m sorry it’s over when it is. There are more commercials in the second half hour, so my glimpses of the show are skimpy and I’m cranky it doesn’t start later. The first time I get back to the apartment by four o’clock, I can’t believe how long the show goes on without a commercial break at the beginning.
Later that year, in the fall, Oprah picks a book about drug addiction for her book club. The book came out a few years before and, at the time, I started to read it but stopped. I’m not sure exactly why I stopped—probably because I had too much reading and editing to do for work—but I didn’t make it past the first twenty or so pages, which I barely remember. I do remember thinking it had a macho arrogance but that the writing—vivid, swift, fresh—was very good. That’s all. This was during a period when I was struggling—and not successfully—to control my drug use and my drinking. No one but Noah knew I smoked crack. But this guy, this author, said he smoked crack, too, and I was fascinated that he was able to get sober. I read many of the interviews with him when the book was first published, pored over the articles where he talked about rehab, what they tried to teach him there, the tools for recovery they suggested he use—the Twelve Steps, the support of other alcoholics and addicts—and how he rejected it all and relied on his own willpower to quit. Over the years, Noah had begged me to go to rehab, but like this guy I didn’t think I needed what they had. In all of his interviews and later, on Oprah, he described confidently, persuasively, how he realized he could quit on his own and he didn’t, and still doesn’t, need a program of recovery. It was all very appealing, what he described, and the willpower he cited appeared to be incredibly strong. He simply chose to stop drinking and drugging because, he said, he knew if he didn’t he would die. Back when the book first came out, when I first heard what he had to say about recovery, it sounded perfectly logical, and I strongly identified with the belief that the usual routes of rehab, Twelve Steps groups, and other fellowships of recovery were not for everyone. Not for this guy. Not for me. I just hadn’t made the choice yet, I reasoned then, and figured that when I finally did decide to stop, I would, like this guy, be able to.