by Bill Clegg
Before the summer is over, almost two months since that grim day in Dean & Deluca, Polly calls. It’s morning and I haven’t left for the gym yet. At first, I think I’m imagining her name on the screen of my cell phone—I have so many times. I pick up. She asks me to meet her at the dog run, and I say I’ll leave immediately. I peel out the door and run down 15th Street, past Sixth Avenue, past Fifth, all the way to Union Square. I manage to call Jack as I huff and puff toward the dog run and leave an excited message. And, like the last time I saw Polly and a few other times since, I pray. To whatever forces have kept me sober this long, I pray for the right words. TELL ME WHAT TO SAY! I yell as I run. Please.
I arrive at the dog run and Polly is sitting on our usual bench. Essie is waddling nearby. I don’t need any words because she has the ones that matter. I need help, she says, not looking particularly hungover or strung out, just tired. Will you take me to a meeting? she asks. Are you kidding? I answer. I’ve been waiting my whole life. And though the words are lazy and said playfully, as I say them I know they’re true. I know in that instant that everything that has happened—every last lucky, lonely, destructive, delusional, selfish, wretched, insane, desperate second of it—has made this moment on the bench with Polly possible. I’m sober enough to show up, addict enough to be asked. I’m one of her kind and she’s one of mine and there is no one in the world who can help us but each other. I tell her about the night on Houston and Sixth Avenue in front of Mark’s apartment, how I stepped away and she was the reason. Nah, Crackhead, it would take a hell of a lot more than me to keep you from the pipe. We laugh, the way addicts laugh about the agony of their using in the only way that makes it bearable: with each other.
Soon after that morning, Polly and I move all of her belongings into a truck driven by a scruffy cute guy from the rooms, someone neither Polly nor I know. Polly shares in a meeting that she’s moving and that she needs a truck, and this guy materializes and offers not only his truck and his driving skills but his hands and back as well. He and I spend hours shoving boxes and chairs and bookcases into the small one-bedroom apartment in Astoria Polly finds on Craigslist.
Heather comes by while we are moving Polly out and without a word walks in and out of the apartment, around the truck, and alongside us as we haul bags and furniture down the hall and into the street. I worry she is going to let me have it before we’re finished, but just before the three of us pile into the truck, she turns to me and says without looking me in the eye, Thank you. Tailgate shut, Polly jammed in the front seat between me and the cute guy driving, we start to roll down St. Mark’s Place. Wait! Polly shouts. I forgot something in the apartment. Before the truck comes to a stop, she is nudging me to let her out. I hesitate, afraid she’s changed her mind, that once she gets out she’ll never get back in. C’mon, it’s just gonna take a minute, she says, more wistful than impatient. I let her out and watch as she keys the lock to the building door and disappears inside. Something unfamiliar plays on the radio and the stranger next to me taps the wheel. Minutes pass and my eyes are closed when Polly climbs in next to me. She’s shaking, her eyes are red from crying, and there is nothing in her hands retrieved from the apartment. Go, she croaks-more-than-speaks. Before I change my mind, go. And so we do. It takes most of the afternoon to move Polly into her new apartment. Neither of us ever sees the cute, generous guy again.
On the last night of summer, at the end of Labor Day weekend, Elliot and I play tennis. It’s a beautiful night—crisp, clear, and the sky is crowded with clouds that look like enormous waves crashing against a shore. After we play, we walk up the West Side Highway to the pier and collapse on the grass. The sky turns pink above us. The air is chilly and the green and red lights of New Jersey blink across the water. As the sun dips lower, the pink darkens against the clouds, and everything—the city, the river, the people around us—appears to shrink against the magnificent sky. Neither of us speaks. In a few minutes it will be dark. In the morning, summer will be over. I am happy, I think—for the first time in my life, happy. I’m sober, surrounded day and night by other sober people, the urge to drink and use has left, finally; I have just enough money in the bank to pay the rent and send tiny checks to the many people and places I owe, and I’m with someone I have no secrets from. I wish I could stop time, I tell Elliot. If I could, I would stop it right now, under this great pink cloud. We shiver in our damp tennis clothes and huddle into each other for warmth. I know, Elliot whispers into the darkening night. Wouldn’t it be wonderful.
Shoulder to Shoulder
On a Sunday night in September, I raise my hand in a meeting and say that I have ninety days. It is at the Meeting House, and Polly and Jack are there. Luke and Annie are there, too, along with a few other people from The Library. Though I have left messages to tell him when and where and asking him to please come, Asa is not. At midnight that night, when the Empire State Building turns its lights off as it always does, it is officially a new day, and the day after that another and the day after that another and so on and so on until a year, and then another and then another and then four, and as I write this now—five years, eight months, and two days. And with the help of the rooms, the people in them, and the power their words and actions and courage have shown me—a power that is unquestionably greater than myself, greater than my desire to use, to drink, and to die—tomorrow will, likely, be one day more.
Before the end of the year, Jean invites me to a party. It’s a dinner for someone important, and it’s large and seated and in her apartment. Jean’s had lots of parties since I’ve come back to New York, and with each one she has said, Don’t worry, it’ll be a bore anyway, but with this one she says, over dinner at Basta Pasta, that she wants me to come, that her daughters are coming and that she’d like me to be there. Of course I say yes. The dinner is a month away, and I worry about it from the moment she asks. All my outings with Jean this year—theater, music, movies—have been one-on-one, and the few suppers at her apartment have been in the kitchen, with Paul, her chef, cooking and chatting behind the counter. I haven’t been to one party or social function that hasn’t been a sober gathering of people from the rooms, or a small group of very close, very supportive friends. It’s only when I think about going to this party at Jean’s that I recognize fully how protected these months have been, how sealed off. Jean’s parties, even on a good day, are not for the faint of heart. But as a first outing, after hiding inside a sober cocoon for half a year, it is downright terrifying. I keep imagining people asking one question: What do you do? And when I imagine what I say in response, I come up with nothing. I was in book publishing, and now.…In the rooms it’s not uncommon for people to be out of work or taking time off to get sober, so answering that question in the past tense there is easy. But at this party, I imagine the group will be a little less fluent in the language of falling apart.
On the night of the party, I arrive late so I won’t have to navigate the cocktail hour for very long before dinner. I don’t ask Jean who she has me seated next to, because I don’t want her to worry. But of course I worry. During cocktails I talk to Jean’s daughters, who are always friendly. At dinner I sit next to an exquisite middle-aged woman, dressed in a perfect suit and deftly arranged scarf. Just as she introduces herself, a waiter comes and asks if we’d like red or white wine. She places her elegant hand and long fingers over the top of the empty wine glass next to her dinner plate and says, I won’t be drinking tonight. After I blurt, Same here, she places that same hand on my shoulder and says, I gather you’ve had quite a year. Welcome to the rooms. How many times had I been convinced there was a dark conspiracy of intricately placed people observing, entrapping, stalking, and circling? So many. Now, with this kind, sober woman sitting next to me in the thicket of a challenging dinner party, I experience the flip side of this paranoia—the opposite of all that wild-minded dread, the feeling instead that there are forces conspiring on my behalf, placing people in my way at precisely the right moments to guide m
e on whatever path I should be on. Like a blubbering imbecile, I grab her hand and say, You have no idea how happy I am that you’re here. She asks what meetings I go to and she knows The Library well—a former sponsee of hers goes there regularly. Madge? she asks. Have you heard of her? It turns out she was—pedigree of pedigrees—Madge’s first sponsor. It was a beautiful dinner.
Early in the summer Annie and I begin to meet every Saturday at various meetings. We try one and then another and always get together for coffee after. She graduates from The Library before I do. In September she gets a job teaching performing arts to kids in the Bronx during the week. Three years later she arranges to perform a showcase for the faculty at her graduate school and, at last, receives her MFA. Once she goes back to work, Saturdays become the only time I see her. Aside from the occasional Broadway musical and dinner at the Carnegie Deli, they still are.
It won’t be until November that I begin to think about going back to work, and when I do, I am—out of the blue—offered a job at a literary agency. The very thing I puzzled and panicked and stressed and moaned about since the day I returned to New York all those months ago—a job, work, my career, money—solves itself without my doing a thing. I told you so, Jack gloats on the phone when I tell him. All you had to do was get honest, get sober, and offer help to a few addicts and alcoholics along the way. The rest took care of itself. I accept the job but with two requests: that I start in March instead of right away and that I’m free to leave the office every afternoon to attend a two o’clock meeting. They agree, and until that first day of work I spend the remaining months as I have since April: gym, three meetings a day, dog run with Polly, Oprah, and seeing as many alcoholics and addicts in recovery as I can find.
After the dinner at Mary Ann’s, Asa drifts away. Still, I call him on my anniversary every year to thank him for helping me get sober and ask him to call back and let me know how he’s doing. For the first few years he does, and we exchange messages for a while until we give up and another year passes. This year I call and don’t hear back from him. I call a few more times, and still nothing. I give up and weeks later I overhear someone say they heard he had gone out, that he was drinking again. I call him right away and leave another message, but again, not a peep. A few weeks later I decide to call from the BlackBerry I’ve been given at work and not the cell phone he’s used to. Just as I hoped, he picks up. I don’t recognize his voice. It’s different—quicker, tighter—and by the sound of it anything but happy to hear from me. He does not ask how I am or what’s going on in my life. He does not ask one question during the entire phone call. He tells me he’s drinking and using coke recreationally and that he’s happier, more confident, and having more sex than he was when he was sober. He reminds me that coke and booze were never his problems, heroin was, and he’s able to manage it. He tells me that the meetings are a cult and require the people who go to them to agree that they’re defective, and he doesn’t have any use for that kind of thinking anymore. When I finally get a word in, I ask him to be careful and awkwardly remind him that buying coke is illegal and that I don’t want him to get arrested. This sets him off and he yells that doctors and psychiatrists are breaking more laws than dealers and tells me not to call if I’m only going to lecture him or try to persuade him to get sober or go to a meeting. Don’t call me, he says, and it feels like a punch. Don’t call me, he says in the voice that is not the voice I knew—the one that coaxed me off the street, charmed drugs out of my hands, told me how the rooms and the people in them saved his life, talked me to sleep on the phone the night after my first relapse, told me not to give up, and asked me, the night we first met at the New Venus diner, to meet him at The Library the next day.
I am in the lobby of a movie theater on Third Avenue and 11th Street when Asa hangs up. Soon after, Cy arrives. You OK? she asks. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. It takes a few seconds before I can answer. I still can’t believe what I’ve just heard. I’m not sure, I say, but I think I just have. I have not seen or heard from Asa since.
___
Heather shows up at The Library later that year. She raises her hand and counts one day. She relapses, returns, and relapses again. She has the same gift her sister has and when she tells her story—plainly, powerfully, honestly—everyone strains to hear. Polly’s parents come to town, and we all go to breakfast at the diner on Seventh Avenue and 15th Street. Heather shows up half an hour late, high, belligerent, shouting about her boss, taxes, stingy tips, and until the bill is paid no one but she speaks. She comes back into the rooms, counts days again, and then disappears. Eventually she loses her job and, not long after, the rent-controlled apartment on St. Mark’s Place. Polly allows her to move into her apartment in Astoria and sleep on the couch under one condition: no alcohol or drugs in the place. For the most part, she’s complied.
There is a time, later, years later—after I’ve completed, with my sponsor’s help, an unflinching review of my behavior before getting sober—when I begin to face the people I did harm to. Some I haven’t seen in a long time—six, eighteen years—and some I may have seen the day before. One by one, I sit before them and read what I spent days writing—describing the harm I caused, offering to make the wrong right, if possible, and asking what I left out—and each time, when it’s the moment for the person I am addressing to respond, what each one says is nothing I expect. Each time, I walk away feeling—at the edges—gratitude, relief, compassion, but at the center what can only be described as love. For a while the world will appear more as it is and less as I make it, and I will have a new courage to face the remaining wreckage of the past. I was an active addict and alcoholic for over twenty-three years. The list of people I harmed is long, and I have only scratched the surface.
Seven months after our Labor Day evening on the pier, Elliot and I break up. There is a night when it is clear that it is over, and I name it, and then cry for the first time since that morning in Lotto’s kitchen. I cry uncontrollably, outlandishly, and Elliot, as he had when we were together, sits by my side, holds my hand until I can pull it together. We don’t see each other for over a year, and then slowly, gradually, we begin to meet again as friends, as we do now, on tennis courts, with racquets in our hands, and between us, a speeding ball, a net.
Noah and I get back together. Something I give up wanting suddenly arrives, again, and with much hope. But it is clear from the very start—though it takes us both a year to accept—that in order to work, our relationship needs me to be an active addict and alcoholic, that the thing we thought tearing us apart all those years was actually what was holding us together. Without that dark glue, we come apart. I learn from him later, after we break up, that there was more to the dark glue than I knew. Of course he had his own battles, of course he struggled with his own demons that had nothing to do with me. I was too mired in my own to see, too invested in his being what I needed him to be to recognize him as he was. But all that comes out later, in fits and starts, and even then it takes a long time for me to believe.
Not so long ago, Noah and I run into each other at the Knickerbocker. Cy and I show up there, late, after seeing a movie nearby. Noah is sitting across from the bar, at a corner table, with his boyfriend. I haven’t seen him for months, though we’ve spoken and e-mailed and in our way stayed in touch. He doesn’t see us at first, and for a long time remains undistracted from his very engaged, very focused conversation. When he sees us, he quickly stands to come over. He crosses the room—this room that held so many of our best and worst nights—and slows before reaching our table, recognizing something as he does. He stops and turns to the side slightly, gesturing to the bar, to the restaurant, out to the street, and back to us. Hi, Bill, he says, a big smile on his face, holding out his hands as if to contain every last awful, ridiculous inch and minute of our shared history. Hi, Noah, I say. And we laugh, finally.
Lotto gets kicked out of the rehab in California. Somehow a stolen car is involved, but he will avoid arrest and prison an
d end up—after a year and a half of living at home and relapsing and finally being cut off from financial support—back in another rehab in Georgia. This one sticks. He stays there for a year and continues on in a nearby sober-living community for another year. I will get one message in all this time that fills me in on the ups and downs. A few months ago I see him on the street with a tall, tough-looking friend of his from Georgia. He has two years sober and is in town to visit his parents for a few days before going back. My addict ass can’t be here long, he says in the same Mulberry-Street-meets-boarding-school voice. And when it is, I bring protection, he laughs, nodding to his muscled buddy. He tells me the women in Georgia are hot but lazy, and about a meeting down the street from the apartment he’s just moved to. It’s a club. We have a flat-screen TV and a pool table, and it’s seltzer and fucking Pepsi but it’s cool. Before we say good-bye, he gives me his cell phone number—the same one he’s had for the last two years. Some kind of record, I say, and we both laugh. As of this writing, his phone number has not changed.
___
Annie gets married. The wedding is less than a week after Noah and I break up, over a year after I’ve been back at work, and the ceremony and the reception take place on a sloping field next to a lake in Ithaca, New York. I drive to the wedding with Rafe, the wildly articulate guy from The Library who never quite becomes a close friend in the way Annie and Luke have, but whose knowing looks and Hi, Bills have become a steady, counted-on part of my recovery. He agrees to be my sponsor when Jack moves upstate to teach at a small college. Rafe and I stop for lunch on the way, during which my sister Kim calls, upset because my younger brother has been the cause of another drunken brawl and, after, an ugly scene at my mother’s house. I feel helpless. I know what to say and how to act with other addicts and alcoholics, like Polly, but I have no clue what to do for my brother or how to help my family. I tell Rafe about my family, my struggling brother, breaking up with Noah, being single, without romantic possibilities or entanglements for the first time since high school—and he listens. I tell him I feel lonelier and more alone than I can ever remember feeling. He reminds me that feelings aren’t facts (another one of Jack’s old expressions that I used to cringe at but now cling to), and that I’m sober, which means I may be low but I’m not lost, powerless but not useless. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, he snaps, and not for the first time suggests the simple, surefire solution for self-pity that on my own I always forget: Call another addict with less time sober than you. And so I do.