Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  Acknowledgments

  This book and others before it have all profited immensely from the world-class copy editing of my friends Hendle Rumbaut and Michael Ambrose. Friends have rallied round when the darkness of the writing life has made self-destruction seem my best option. These people are: Neal Barrett, Brad Denton, Marty Cohen, Susan Wade, Mary Willis, David Pexton, Kelley Perko, Jill Hartman, Carol Dodgen, Wilson Brown, Joyce DiBona, Tracy Nunn, Gordon Van Gelder, Marci Davis, Ellis Smith, Larry Perlman, Bill Putney, Rev. Liz Decker (my religious advisor and sweetheart), and Paul Walters (who, back in 1990, when I was adrift, suggested I might like Austin and why not come on down?).

  This book is for my

  good friends and writing colleagues,

  Jeff Hartman and Carolyn Banks.

  So here you are in the front of this book, guys.

  Plenty of room for the both of you.

  No need to do anything

  that will get us all thrown out of here.

  There. Isn’t this nice?

  Somewhere in the echoing innards of the old Seventh Street Hurley Memorial detox, a drunk was shouting. He was shouting Wu whas wu whas wu whason over and over, a mantra that might, to many, have meant nothing.

  Jack Lowry understood. I guess you learned your lesson, that’s what the drunk was screaming. He was reprimanding himself, in the voice of a parent, spouse, child... who knows?

  The drunk ran down, words turning to slush, silence.

  Jack was sitting on his bed in his underwear. He reached forward, snagged his pants from the back of a chair, and tugged them on. He stood up, and the residue of the gin he had drunk washed over some loose brain cells, tumbling them in a cold pine-scented surf.

  He walked out into the hall. The light was harsh, the brown floor tiles uneven. His feet were bare.

  He had been here before. Twice. This time he’d stayed sober for five months. He had thought he was getting a handle on it.

  To his right, a barred window faced out on the night. At the other end of the corridor, a nurse’s station guarded double swinging doors.

  Halfway down the hall a gumey was parked against the wall. Jack approached the gurney and its recumbent passenger.

  She lay sleeping with her head propped up by pillows, her right arm in a huge, L-shaped cast surrounded by rumpled green sheets and plaster dust. She was a young woman with curly black hair. Her mouth was slightly open, showing a gleam of white tooth. Her left cheek was smeared with plaster. She looked like an angel haplessly caught in some construction site explosion.

  As Jack watched, she turned her head and closed her mouth. A small sigh escaped her, the corner of her mouth quivered, and a dazzling smile suddenly flared, as brief and bright as a struck match on a moonless night. Then her features were set, silent, the bones of her face noncommittal. She slept on. He looked at the blue band on her wrist and read the typed-in name: KERRY BECKETT.

  “Hey, what are you doing?”

  The night nurse was a big-boned woman named Blanche.

  “Hey Blanche,” Jack said.

  She slowed some, seeing who it was. “Oh, it’s you. I saw you were back.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all the same to me. There’s probably people you could be apologizing to, so don’t waste it on me. I get paid the same no matter what you do.”

  “That’s a good attitude.”

  Blanche snorted, frowned. “I don’t need you telling me good attitudes. You wouldn’t know a good attitude if it bit your ass. What are you doing sneaking up on this young thing? Probably trying to peek down her skimpy gown, see some teenage titties.”

  “What happened to her? Is she going to be okay?”

  Blanche shrugged. “Who knows? She’s another willful one. Everybody calls it alcoholism these days, that’s all the rage, but I call it willful. Steal a car and drive it flat into a tree. Ain’t your car, ain’t your tree... but that’s no matter, just do it.”

  “She stole a car?”

  Blanche frowned and said nothing. She leaned forward. “You stick to your own troubles. That should be plenty to occupy you.”

  Big Ernie, the nightshift orderly, came up, looking, as always, morose, perhaps dangerously so. “Hey,” he said. “We got an incident here? We got something going to have to be damn wrote up?”

  Blanche assured him that this was not the case, and Jack Lowry went back to his room. There were two beds, but, for the moment, Jack had the room to himself.

  The room was small and dismal. There were paintings on the wall (so generic that the eye couldn’t rest on them), an end table, a lamp, a dresser. Jack tried to imagine that he lived in some impoverished, overpopulated country where such a room would be coveted, would be a sign of great status. A family would live here, many children, several relatives, chickens, a dog, perhaps a goat. They would be happy, grateful for this place.

  They would be so happy that others would come and kill them, prompted by envy and malice.

  Jack sighed. Positive thinking wasn’t for everyone. He thought about Sara. Every now and then, during the six months of their acquaintance, they had gone to a cafeteria where a sign on the wall stated, in hand-printed caps: ANY FISH CAN HAVE BONES. Clearly the employees had grown tired of geriatric patrons hobbling back up to the counter with their fillets of flounder and their miffed expressions. Finally some overwrought and underpaid food server had grabbed a magic marker and produced this sign. Jack and Sara had laughed on first seeing it. Any fish can have bones became a shorthand for those flawed people, places and events that were the stuff of life. Any fish can have bones. Any room in a hospital detox can be less than aesthetically satisfying. Jack closed his eyes, convinced that he would not sleep. But he did.

  In the morning, seven people appeared for breakfast.

  Jack sat next to an older man, a banker perhaps, wearing a white shirt and tie.

  “Tilman,” the man said, nodding to Jack. “Ed Tilman.”

  Jack introduced himself and went off to get coffee.

  When he returned, the man named Tilman said, “What are you in for?”

  “In for?”

  Tilman nodded, smiled. He had a small, round face, round eyes. His white mustache had a faintly parasitic look.

  Tilman seemed to be waiting for an answer, so Jack shrugged, sat down with his coffee, and said, “I guess I’m in for alcoholism. Guess that’s what we are all doing here.”

  The man continued to smile. He reached out and clutched Jack’s shoulder. “That’s what they’d like us to think,” he said. He squeezed Jack’s shoulder, winked broadly, and released his grip. He stood up, bowed to everyone at the table, turned and left the room.

  “Dude’s crazy,” said a skinny teenager wearing a brown jumpsuit. “Talks a lot of loopy conspiracy shit. ‘I ain’t interested,’ I told him, but he wouldn’t stop. How did you break that arm?”

  This last remark was directed at Kerry Beckett, who sat opposite the boy.

  She looked up, revealing the bluest eyes Jack had ever seen, eyes that would have made Shakespeare nervous because there was the stuff of bad poetry lurking in those eyes, exaggeration, metaphors to make an academic bark with abrupt, disdainful laughter. That blue.

  “Car crash.”

  And there was a voice that would have made angels trip over each other, crowding up loutishly, hollering back off!, slamming an elbow into a neighbor’s stomach, pinching, anything mean to get closer to the source.

  The kid said his name was Al. Jack realized that this boy might be Kerry’s age, part of her peer group. Jack studied Al with new interest. Al’s head was shaved, one of his eyebrows was pierced with a silver ring, and he might have been wearing mascara. His skin was pale, possessed of a damp luminosit
y, a blind cave salamander glow.

  Jack had encountered enough young people to know that there existed females drawn to this sort of male, for reasons too mysterious to ever yield to rational analysis.

  Would young Kerry find her heart beating faster?

  Al was now launched on a monologue regarding car crashes he had endured and their legal ramifications. Surely she would not be drawn to Al’s mind?

  Jack studied Kerry. She sat straight at the table. She wore a flannel shirt—a man’s shirt? what man?—and the clumsy white cast (bent at a right angle at the elbow) rested in its sling just beneath the swell of her breasts with something of the aspect of a cradled infant. All this created that powerful vision of nurturing madonna and teenage trailer-park nymph that is so irresistible to the detoxing male.

  I’m in love, Jack thought. He thought it the way one might think, after an accident with a chainsaw, “I’ve just lopped off my thumb,” the thought as yet unaccompanied by pain.

  After breakfast, they watched a Father Martin video about alcoholism. Father Martin was a cheerful recovering alcoholic and a priest.

  There was good news and bad news about alcoholism. The good news was that alcoholics could learn to abstain from drinking (primarily through the auspices of Alcoholics Anonymous). The bad news was that once you were an alcoholic you remained one. Your future didn’t hold any convivial, social drinking days.

  None of this was news to Jack.

  After the video, they filed into a small room where chairs were arranged in a circle. As far as Jack was concerned, this was the low point of any day at Hurley detox: group therapy.

  Jack hated sharing his feelings or, for that matter, being the recipient of shared feelings. It didn’t help that the counselor was Wesley Parks, an intense young man with a goatee, who had been here on Jack’s last visit. Unlike most alcoholism counselors, Parks was not a recovering alcoholic and seemed, in fact, to dislike alcoholics.

  Jack sat in a chair and Parks said, “Back again, Professor?” Parks insisted on calling Jack Professor. This was all part, Jack assumed, of an attempt to impress upon Jack Lowry, Ph.D., just what a liability the intellect was in the battle with alcoholism.

  “Do you think you could tell us why you drank again?” Parks asked.

  “No,” Jack said.

  “Come on, Professor, you’re an intelligent man. You’re very articulate. Give it a try.”

  “You’re not an alcoholic. I don’t think you are capable of understanding the compulsion.”

  Jack knew that this was a sore subject, that Parks was defensive about this.

  Parks looked like he might get into it, haul out the old argument about a doctor not needing to have a disease in order to treat it. The discussion would have suited Jack, something to kill the time while dodging the dreary emotional outpourings of group.

  But Parks leaned back, took a breath, smiled. “We can discuss my qualifications some other time. Right now, I’d like to go around the room and see how everyone is doing today.”

  Nobody was faring really well, which is what you might expect from folks who, prompted by DTs, hallucinations, suicide attempts and altercations with the police, had arrived in Hurley Memorial’s shabby detox unit.

  An unhappy fat woman next to Jack said it was her children’s fault she was in the hospital. They had packed her suitcase and brought her. “Throwed out,” she growled. “Like a dog that’s gone blind or a burned-up pot roast. All I got left is the sweet love of Jesus.”

  A truck driver named Hinkle told a long story about driving a load of chickens to Texas. He told about all the people he met on the trip. He described them in detail and was able to recall whole conversations.

  Parks finally interrupted. “What does this have to do with your alcoholism?”

  Hinkle frowned and shrugged his shoulders.

  Kerry said she wasn’t an alcoholic.

  “Sure I drink,” she said. “Who doesn’t? But that’s not my main problem.” Parks asked her what that might be, this main problem?

  “I’m a loser. That’s all. My daddy was a loser, and my momma is a loser and I got a sister living in Des Moines who is a loser. And my baby brother died in his crib when he was two months old—just expired for no good reason unless maybe he saw his future clear and lost heart.”

  “That’s quite a negative attitude for a young person,” Parks said, and Jack had to agree.

  “It’s negative, all right,” Kerry said, nodding her head as though congratulating her counselor on getting the point so quickly. “There’s nothing positive about being a loser.”

  When Ed Tilman was asked how he was, he smiled cagily. “I’m fine,” he said. “You can write it down. ‘Patient has no complaints.’”

  “Are you aware that you have a drinking problem, Ed ?”

  Tilman’s smile expanded.

  Parks continued, “Your wife says you have been drinking approximately a case of beer a day since 1982.”

  “She might say that,” Tilman said. “Someone could have gotten to her, made her say that. Or someone who sounded like her might answer her phone and say that.”

  This stopped Parks for a minute, and Tilman nodded as though he’d scored a point.

  The teenager, Al, had to be awakened in order to participate. He wanted to know if they’d be graded on sharing in AA meetings and if he could get a paper, some kind of signed document, to hand on to his attorney.

  The last man to share was a short bald black man named Gates. “I got four generations of alkyholic in me,” he said. “I been to A and A meetings in fifteen states. This place don’t show me nothin. Where’s your Mister Bill Wilson? Where’s your Mister Doctor Bob? This ain’t shit for treatment.” Group ended on that note.

  In the evening, they were all put in a van and taken to an AA meeting. The driver of the van was an ancient man named Earl Simms, a volunteer who had been a patient at the hospital and hadn’t had a drink in seven years. His hands still shook, and he called everyone Joe or Sally, and he drove the van at a consistent thirty miles an hour, which got him some death threats from his passengers. When trucks doing seventy-five would hiss by them on the Beltway, rocking the van as though it were a dinghy on open seas, Jack would feel some anxiety.

  “We gonna be dead alkyholics,” grumbled Gates.

  The meeting was held in a church basement in Alexandria, Virginia.

  It was early October, a chilly night. Jack climbed out of the van into the parking lot and walked, with his sullen companions, toward a side door where a clump of people were standing around, talking loudly, smoking cigarettes, laughing. Clouds of smoke rose into a sky full of glittering stars.

  Jack had never been to this meeting before. AA’s Intergroup listed the meeting as a young people’s group, and the detox staff had decided that Al and Kerry needed to see kids their own age “in recovery.” It couldn’t hurt the older detox patients to see this either. It would be inspirational. Gates, small black cauldron of discontent, was not convinced. “Young peoples got no bidness in A and A. They sposed to be gettin down. A and A’s for us old, whupped muthers.”

  Jack had been to AA meetings before, on his previous stays in Hurley, and he’d even attended some AA meetings between detoxifications, having been told that consistent AA attendance was the long-term treatment for alcoholism. He’d never managed to go to more than a few meetings before drifting away.

  The meeting Jack found himself in was, indeed, filled with young people. They sat around a long, low table, balanced precariously on tiny chairs (during the day, the room accommodated small children). Most of the people in attendance appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties. There were a couple of kids who looked to be thirteen, and one disheveled old man named Walt who had been sober for many years, and who saw that the coffee got made. Old Walt enjoyed being of service to young people, prompted by either a genuine affection and concern for their welfare—or some deviant, pedophilic impulse disguised as altruism.

  Jack
realized that this mean-spirited thought was generated by his own dismal and pathetic desires. He was forty-two years old, and yearning for a girl less than half his age. He realized that this infatuation was the product of boredom, despair, and loneliness. On his two previous visits to Hurley detox, he’d seen unlikely romances arise (a swarthy cab driver and a retired exotic dancer had had to be expelled for carnal high jinks). There was something about withdrawing from alcohol; sexual liaisons arose to fill the vacuum. Jack even remembered, vaguely, nurse Blanche delivering a lecture on the danger. She said it was strongly suggested that new sexual/romantic relations be avoided during the first year of sobriety. Jack remembered, then, studying his companions (an unshaven Charles Manson lookalike, a balding fat man in a rumpled suit, a skinny, near-catatonic girl wearing an “Andrea Dworkin Rules” T-shirt, and a woman in her late seventies who had to continually fight the notion that she was on a Caribbean cruise). Jack felt, at the time, that Blanche’s warning was unnecessary, that these people were safe from romantic entanglements, but the Charles Manson lookalike and the fat man actually did develop a relationship that went deeper than simple mutual esteem... and wound up living together, which ended in acrimony and drunkenness, and which served to give weight to the truth of Blanche’s lecture.

  Jack awoke from this reverie to find that the meeting was in progress. Someone had already read “How it Works” (the beginning of Chapter 5 in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, a sort of capsule summary of the program), and now a guy with a ponytail was speaking. “I lie all the time,” he said. “It’s just a habit I got from my using days. Ask me something, I’ll probably lie.”

  Heads were nodding around the room. It was a paradox that Jack had yet to grasp. People in meetings came to trust each other by sharing candidly about their lives. Obviously, the group liked and trusted the person presently speaking. They admired his honesty in describing an unflattering character defect. But—and this seemed to elude them—he was saying that he was an habitual liar, not, in fact, someone to be trusted.