by Bill Clegg
Polly keeps sharing about Heather, keeps showing up to meetings, and continues to walk dogs in the neighborhood to cover her portion of the rent. May winds down and as it does I think, These have been the longest two months of my life. Not because they’ve been the hardest but because it seems that so much has happened, so many new people have come into my life, and even more have left. I’m hopeful but I’m also tired. I didn’t count on relapsing when I first came back to the city from White Plains. Didn’t count on how expensive those relapses would be. Money is tight. With the last relapse and money needed for one of the lawyers handling my settlement with Kate, I’ve wiped out what would have paid June’s rent. I’m trying to sell the only Eggleston photograph that’s of any value in a portfolio I have, but so far have had no luck. Dave’s friend, a respected art dealer, is doing her best—as a favor to Dave—to unload at least that one, but there have been no bites. On the bright side, an envelope arrives with a preapproved credit card and, on a lark, I send back the papers with a signature and a few weeks later a credit card appears with a $17,000 line of credit. From a cash advance that I get with this card I pay the June rent. It takes a number of visits to the ATM to advance that much cash from the credit card, and when I finally have $2,500 I deposit the money in my checking account and write a check to the landlord. One more month of shelter, I think, as I drop the envelope in the mailbox, and I’m genuinely grateful as I do.
During, in between, and after my meetings, I still think about getting high, still get cravings. I make my phone calls, share at The Library about it, but still feel as if I’m a sitting duck. Less than two weeks after my last relapse, I pick up again. It’s like all the other times. A memory of getting high, a sudden craving, the world narrowing to one desire. I can’t remember much about that day, the events or thoughts preceding the phone call to Happy. I remember using alone and then not alone. Someone I don’t know materializes, the way these people, these people precisely like me, always do. We run out. It’s nine in the morning. He says he has a connection uptown. I give him two hundred dollars, he leaves and doesn’t return. It’s a long, grim day and I scrape the stems and screens that I have, smoke them until they resemble charcoal, and eventually give up. There are a few beers left in the refrigerator. I drink one down, take a few Tylenol PMs, and lie in bed and wait until Happy or Rico turns his phone on. There is no doubt in my mind that I will call to get more. I can get a few hundred dollars from the credit card I advanced the rent money from. It’s mid-afternoon and the sun is pulsing on the other side of the drawn blinds. The old sheet nailed to the wall above the terrace door flaps with the air gushing from the wheezing air conditioner.
I wait, fall asleep for a little while, wake up at seven or eight, and even though I know the dealers are open for business again, I don’t call them. Later, I think. I’m exhausted. There’s a phrase I hear in the rooms all the time—Sick and tired of being sick and tired—and it couldn’t diagnose more acutely how I feel. I go out to the terrace, look down to 15th Street, and again think about jumping. Why do I always want to die? I think impatiently. I always have, as long as I can remember, and never as much as when I’m coming down from a high, nearing the ruin of consequences that wait. It’s so predictable, so selfish, and so weak. I go back inside and down the last beer—an Amstel Light, of all things. It doesn’t feel like an end but it will be. Perhaps not the end, but an end.
I sleep through the night without waking and begin the day as I’ve done most days since April. I go to the gym, get to the 12:30 meeting early, raise my hand, and count one day for the last time. I don’t remember who is there that day, but I do remember staying for the two o’clock and, after, going to the dog run with Polly. The dogs race in circles, hump each other, bark. The guys in the tracksuits make their phone calls and we sit in the middle of it all, me with one day and she with over three weeks. Look who’s on top now, Crackhead, she teases, and I laugh, for what feels like the very first time.
Later in the summer, a month after Polly is back from rehab, The Library closes for a day. It’s a Monday and the closing is either for a holiday or for a renovation of some kind. Polly and I agree to meet at Dean & Deluca at noon for a coffee and then walk east to a meeting at one o’clock. Walking up University I can see Polly sitting on a stool in the window. Before I get to the door I know something’s wrong. There is the angle of her slouch, her hair falling in her face, and the surest sign of all: her pajamas. Motherfucker, I say or think and rush inside. Motherfuckingmotherfucker! I shout as I get closer and see for sure that she’s a wreck, that she’s been using. Are you kidding me? I ask as I approach her on the stool. Usually when Polly relapses I react in the way she usually reacts with me—with disappointment, fear, even, but always with compassion, and always quick with a plan to get to a meeting.
This time I’m furious. But not as furious as I am when she says, I’m giving up. Sobriety isn’t for me. I had a long talk with Heather this morning and it’s what I decided. I cannot believe what I’m hearing. HEATHER?!!?? I bellow. Are you kidding? You’re now taking advice from Heather? She just looks at me. It’s not a conversation. She’s barely in front of me now. She’s already back in the apartment. Of course she looks terrible, of course she hasn’t slept all night. But what she’s saying is not part of the script. She’s supposed to get back on the horse, go to a meeting with me right away, and announce that she has one day. I’m done, she says, more matter-of-fact than defiant. I’m sorry, but I’m done. I don’t know what to say. We sit in the window and stare at each other and two things cross my mind: (1) I’m jealous that when we leave she will return to an apartment just a few blocks away to drugs, and (2) I’m sure she’s going to die. Not someday, not even soon, but now, today, right after we part ways. I know she’s going to die and I know that there is nothing I can do about it. She’s not as strong as Heather is, not as tough, can’t do the kinds of drugs she does. Do I call the police to raid Heather’s apartment? Is it better for her to be in jail than to be dead? What if Noah had done that with me? I’d be in jail now. But am I now so much better off? If I’d gone to jail I’d probably have a lot more than a few weeks sober by now. And then, right there, before I say another word, I pray. Jack is always telling me to pray and when I balk he usually just says, Whatever you’re doing isn’t working, so you might as well try. So now, for Polly, I do. To whom or to what I don’t know, but to something: Tell me what to say. Tell me what to say so she doesn’t die. Please. But no words come and I eventually say what my friend Lili said to me months ago after she found me deep in a bender at One Fifth: You want to die, die. You want to live, call me. But until then, leave me out of it. And just as I say these same words, Polly’s up off the stool, out the door, and back on the street. She’s gone. Just like that.
I go to the meeting in the East Village and the only one there I know is Pam. I raise my hand, announce my day count, and wonder if Polly doesn’t have the right idea. After the meeting I tell Pam what’s happened and she just shakes her head in her sanguine, maternal way and says, Sometimes you have to let them go so that they can come back. In the meantime, you pray they don’t die.
After the East Village meeting I go home, fall asleep, and the next day can’t bear to go to the 12:30 meeting. But what if Polly’s there? I think, and rush out the door to get to The Library on time. Polly’s not there. I stay for the two o’clock and Polly doesn’t show. She doesn’t turn up at the Meeting House either. For the next few weeks I go to every meeting, hoping she’ll appear. I see her once, on the street. She’s coming up Fifth Avenue, walking Essie and smoking a cigarette. She’s in her sweatpants, all angles and jutting bones, moving at a snail’s pace. She looks like the Grim Reaper’s girlfriend. We cross each other on the sidewalk and when I say hi she puts her hand up to wave me away. I keep going.
Asa tells me to pull back and let Polly hit her bottom. Jack and Annie and Luke do, too. But what if her bottom is death? What if there is something I can do that could keep her
from dying? At one point Asa recommends I go to an Al-Anon meeting. I drive people into those meetings, I joke. I don’t actually go there myself. Asa shakes his head.
Life goes on, my one day becomes a few days and then a few weeks. There is a night after dinner on Sixth Avenue when I say good-bye to Cy and look down toward Houston and wonder what Mark is up to. I walk down into the trigger zone and stand on the corner of Sixth and Houston and see that his lights are on. Shadows pass in front of the window and my heart races as I conjure scenarios of what is transpiring there. As if I have to imagine. The same thing is always transpiring there. I cross Sixth Avenue, cross down to the south side of Houston, and step toward the building. Fuck it, I think, like I always do at this moment, and head toward the door. But before I press the buzzer, I think of Polly. What if she calls me when I’m in there? What if she hears I’ve relapsed again? What if I don’t make it to the meeting tomorrow, stay up for a few days, and miss her when she comes back in? What if my picking up gives her another excuse to keep using? It’s narcissistic, I realize as I’m thinking it, but I can’t help but ask myself: What if my picking up results in Polly dying? The logic is suddenly so plausible, so powerful, and so likely that it stops me in my tracks. It stops me less than ten feet from the buzzer I’ve pressed countless times over too many years and with the same grim results. I’ve never been this close and not gone in.
I turn around and start walking north on Sixth Avenue, away from Mark’s, where I never set foot again. I call Jack and leave a message on his voice mail. I tell him I’ve gone into the trigger zone and come out clean.
Over the next few weeks there are a dozen or so times when the thought to call Happy or Rico or go to Mark’s happens in the way that it always has. The idea sparks and with it a craving to use and then the plans to figure out how I can. Each of these times I think of Polly or Lotto or someone in the rooms counting days who I’ve given my number to, and each of these times I stop long enough to call either Jack or Asa or Annie, and by the time I do the urge passes. And then, miraculously, the cravings disappear. The thoughts still come—I expect they always will—but the craving doesn’t follow. The desire to use or drink vanishes as stealthily as it used to arrive. I won’t even notice it go, just that it has.
Pink Cloud
It’s the Fourth of July and Elliot and I go for a hike on Bear Mountain. We hike and walk for a few hours and find our way to a ridge that looks south down the Hudson River to Manhattan. It looks like Oz, Elliot says as the ridge of buildings appears, floating on the horizon like a crown. I remember thinking the same thing in Dave’s car three months ago on the drive from White Plains. That car ride now seems a lifetime away.
Elliot and I return to the city just as it’s getting dark. The elevator man, the older of the two brothers, is smiling when we enter the lobby and we ask why. The roof is open! he says loudly, as if we should know why this is cause for celebration. For the fireworks! Of course, the fireworks, the Fourth of July. We get off the elevator on the twentieth floor and rush to the roof. The building is the last tall building on Seventh Avenue before the acres of town houses and low buildings of the West Village begin to spread south of 14th Street, so the view from the roof is breathtaking. We see the long lit riverbanks of New Jersey, the huddled buildings that make up what’s left of the financial district, the Met Life tower north of the Flatiron, and the tallest of all, the Empire State Building, celebrating in red, white, and blue lights. Never has the city looked so festive, so possible. Fireworks begin to explode up and down the Hudson River, south of Battery Park, and across town above the East River. I have never seen so many fireworks at once, and the two of us stand there, stunned. We kiss. Not for the first time since our affair several years ago and not for the first time that day, but in a way that makes it clear that something is beginning, or has begun and is now being acknowledged. It is one of the great kisses of my life. Jack warned me against getting involved romantically until I had ninety days, but it’s a suggestion I fail to take. The worry is that if there is heartbreak or romantic upset in those ninety days, one will relapse over it. Maybe because my heart was already broken, and Elliot came in like a friend and stayed as something more, it was different. I don’t know. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else, but I also don’t regret it.
Two days after the Fourth of July, I arrange to meet Asa at Mary Ann’s, a Mexican restaurant in Chelsea. Oddly, it’s the restaurant my girlfriend Marie took me to on our first trip to New York together, the summer after I graduated from college. When I go to the bathroom I look in the mirror that could well be the same mirror I looked at all those years ago. Twenty-one then, thirty-four now; jobless then, jobless now, I think, and then say to my reflection, Nothing’s changed. I look closer and see the creep of wrinkles around my eyes and along my brow, and the more-than-a-few gray hairs above. Some things have changed, I think, and then again as I return to the table and see two glasses of tap water.
I’ve asked Asa to dinner to tell him about Elliot. I’m nervous because I know he has developed feelings for me. I know this because he told me so a few weeks earlier—after a meeting, in my apartment—before he kissed me. I kissed him right back and for a little while, we kissed. It was a mistake, I knew it, but it felt good, and as with all the other mistakes that felt good, I had no power to stop this one before the damage was done. Asa had become my life raft and I had clung too tightly. I called him all the time, followed him from meeting to meeting, talked his ear off, and only now had begun to listen. After the kiss, I told him I didn’t and never would have romantic feelings for him and that I was sorry if I’d led him to believe otherwise. And let’s face it, I pointed out, trying to make light of the event but also reminding him of the obvious, I’m hardly a catch. Among other things, I have less than three weeks sober and I can’t stop relapsing.
What I said didn’t matter. Our relationship was never the same again. By then, Luke, Polly, Annie, and a few other people from the rooms had come into my life. Jack had, for weeks, perhaps expecting this very thing, encouraged me to spend time with and call people other than Asa. Spread the neediness, he said. There’s plenty to go around. And I did.
After the food arrives, I tell Asa about Elliot. The Fourth of July hike, the rooftop fireworks, the kiss, the whole shebang. So you’re seeing him now? He’s your boyfriend? Is that what this is about? he asks, gesturing to the burritos, the nachos, the restaurant. As I say yes, Asa pushes his chair back, crosses the dining room, and shoots out the door. I chase after him but he waves me away, shakes his head, and disappears down 16th Street. By this point I have lost a lot of people—clients, friends, colleagues, Noah—but watching Asa rush down the street away from me is one of the toughest losses. I didn’t, and still don’t, have anything to compare it to. How do you thank someone for saving your life? How do you apologize for needing him too much? For not being stronger when it mattered? If I had the words I would have said them. But that night I have only his name, which I shout uselessly as he hurries down 16th Street, his red hair and pale skin disappearing into the night like they had the first night we met.
Not long after, I get a phone call from Dave’s art dealer. There is an offer for the Eggleston photograph she is trying to sell for me, and it’s for what she’s asking. Even better, she thinks she has a buyer for two more, and even though their value is a bit less, the prospect of those two selling as well is like winning the lottery. With less than a thousand left in my bank account, and tens of thousands of dollars now piled up on credit cards, the timing of her phone call couldn’t be better. She eventually sells all three, and with that money I am able to stay in the 15th Street apartment.
Annie and I go to Coney Island. Neither of us has been there before, and it’s the day of the annual Mermaid Parade. We eat the creamiest, most delicious gelato imaginable and watch guys in drag and girls who look like guys in drag prance and jiggle on and alongside floats made of everything from macaroni to marshmallows. On the ride home we sit
down next to a woman who moves, dramatically and with great sighing, to the end of the subway car bench. When she’s not looking, Annie mimics her gesture and it is, this little impromptu impersonation, the funniest thing I have ever seen. We laugh so hard the woman leaves the car at the next station and we howl all the way back to the city. Later that night it occurs to me that I haven’t thought about drinking or using in weeks. I open a journal I’ve been keeping since White Plains and write: Coney Island with Annie today. No cravings for weeks. How did this happen?