Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  The next person to speak, the boy who appeared to be thirteen and whose hair was purple, spoke interminably about injustices done him by his parents and about how his outpatient treatment counselor had accused him of drug use because of a “dirty urine” when he hadn’t been doing any drugs at all and there must have been some mix-up at the lab.

  Jack found himself studying the walls. The usual AA signs had been hung, and he was surprised to find himself taking comfort in them: EASY DOES IT—ONE DAY AT A TIME—LIVE AND LET LIVE.

  Certainly there was something funky and welcoming about AA, this strange grassroots community founded by a failed stockbroker and a despairing proctologist. AA had, literally, saved millions of lives. The fact of its existence had also spawned dozens of peripheral programs using the same twelve-step program, created a mountain of self-help books, and unleashed a horde of opportunistic pop psychologists.

  And AA’s popularity had generated its share of critics who were unhappy with, among other things, its pragmatism, its God-as-we-understand-him spirituality, and its quaint sense of personal responsibility, community and service.

  The response to such attacks was simple enough: Yes, AA was flawed, but one didn’t complain about the paint job on the lifeboat when the ship was sinking. Reservations were for less desperate folk.

  When it came to treating alcoholism, there were no real contenders. Most recovering alcoholics were in AA.

  Jack was thinking these and other thoughts, admonishing himself for his lackadaisical AA attendance in the past, resolving to do better in the future, when he heard applause. A pretty girl got up, accepted a small round medallion, and said, “I’m Sam, and I’m an alcoholic. I’m not much for speeches, but I love you guys and thanks.” She waved the medallion over her head (more applause) and returned to her chair. The meeting’s leader said, “Anyone else got six months?” No one did, nor did anyone come up to claim a three-month, two-month, or one-month chip. “Anyone need a desire chip?” the leader asked, explaining that such a chip indicated a desire to stop drinking, one day at a time, and was something a new AA member might like to claim.

  Kerry went up and got a desire chip. “I’m Kerry,” she said, accepting the silver medallion. “I don’t know if I’m an alcoholic or not. I guess being an alcoholic is what people would call bad luck, so maybe I am. If it’s bad luck, I’ve got it. I figured I should stand up and get this chip because it’s all I’ll get. I mean, not to be negative, good stuff doesn’t exactly come to me, just the wanting of good stuff, just the desire for it. I’d have to be a moron if I still thought I’d ever really get anything worth having.” She blinked at everyone as though she might cry, then shook her head and hurried back to her seat.

  Everyone applauded enthusiastically, as though she had said something inspirational. AA was that way. You could say, “I hate you all and hope you die,” and AA folks would applaud. There were two interpretations for this group behavior. One was that AA members were an easygoing, nonjudgmental lot. The other, more cynical interpretation, was that A A members were not possessed of particularly good listening skills.

  Jack realized that he and some of his companions were also eligible for desire chips, but no one else claimed one.

  The basket was passed—Jack put in a dollar—and someone announced that a dance was being held at a local A A club. “Okay,” the leader said, “let’s close.” Everyone stood up, joined hands, and said the Lord’s Prayer.

  Outside, in the parking lot, a fight was in progress. A stocky, bearded youth was exchanging blows with a taller kid who wore a white dress shirt and a tie. The tall kid’s companions—easily identified because they wore the same uniform of dress shirt, tie, and black pants—regarded the contest with a single expression of distaste. Behind them was a shiny black van with tinted windows. This had to be the vehicle that had conveyed the group to the meeting.

  There were five of these young men, their hair cut short, their faces smooth and clean-shaven. Their stillness was remarkable; they were linked, holding each other’s hands in an absentminded, listless fashion that appeared to be an habitual clinging rather than some show of solidarity.

  The meeting attendees, who had now spilled out of the church into the parking lot, shouted at the circling combatants. The bearded youth crouched low, presenting broad shoulders to the long-arcing swings of his foe, an untutored boxer whose feet, in their shiny Sunday shoes, skidded awkwardly in the gravel. A small red-haired girl next to Jack screamed with sudden bloodthirsty volume, “Kill him, Bobby!”

  At that moment, the bearded youth darted forward, fired a fist into his opponent’s stomach, moved in close for a series of short, pummeling blows, then stepped back and connected with a left to the boy’s jaw. The boy wobbled on reedy legs and dropped, eliciting a satisfied shriek from Bobby’s cheerleader.

  Bobby shouted at his fallen foe. “Don’t be coming round here anymore! Don’t be fucking with us! You understand?”

  Old Walt was pushing through the crowd. “That’s about enough!” he was shouting. “What’s going on here?”

  The girl grabbed Walt’s arm. “It’s not Bobby’s fault,” she said. “They were passing out those crazy flyers again, stopping people, trying to keep them from going into the meeting.”

  The white shirts were moving, helping their fallen companion up, turning and walking him toward the van. They moved quietly, with no display of emotion. One of them pulled back the van’s sliding door and they lifted their injured comrade in. The last of them climbed in, and the door closed.

  Jack regarded the van with its hidden cargo of mute young men. The vehicle was squat, polished, somehow menacing. Jack couldn’t see a driver; the black windshield reflected a row of parked cars.

  Jack felt something flutter against his leg, bent down and retrieved a yellow sheet of paper. He saw that similar sheets, animated by a chill, harrying wind, danced over the gravel lot. He blinked at the one in his hand and read the banner line: YOU ARE IN HELL.

  The van’s engine came alive, and Jack looked up; headlights flared.

  A voice crackled into metallic life. “Children!” The voice boomed from twin trumpetlike speakers on the van’s roof. “I do not blame you for resisting the pain of enlightenment. It is your nature to do so. Know that The Clear loves you. The Clear is your salvation. The Unraveling is at hand, but you needn’t be afraid. We will save you in spite of yourselves.”

  The engine roared, and the van, tires sending gravel into the air, accelerated. All watched as the vehicle turned sharply and raced down the church’s long drive, its brake lights igniting for one red instant as it slowed to negotiate a hard left onto the road.

  “Jeez,” someone said.

  Jack recognized the voice and turned to find Kerry at his side.

  “Weird fuckers,” she said.

  “Troublemakers.” This was Walt, who bent down, snatched up a flyer, and crumpled it into a ball. “They call themselves The Clear, some crackbrained cult that believes addiction is demonic possession, or something. Their leader’s a nutcase named Greenway. They come around here recruiting. I don’t know...” Walt wiped sweat from his brow. Jack studied the old man, saw him for the first time, really, a man with a wash of gray on his unshaven jowls, thick, unruly eyebrows, and that watery-eyed squint that comes to some older folks when the world has taken to taunting them.

  “Trouble.” He turned away, shuffling toward the church. He paused, looked back, and shouted at Jack, “They always say Love, you notice that? All those assholes with an angle, all those self-appointed gurus and flimflam artists and scheming sharks, they all got love on their side, like they got the franchise on love, got it straight from God. I don’t blame Bobby. People go on about love, it makes me want to kick their butts.” He sighed, shook his head, and turned again, back to the church basement, the coffee pot, the waiting cleanup chores.

  Others obviously agreed with Walt. Bobby was the center of a congratulatory crowd. He had not survived the battle unscathed. T
here was a trickle of blood issuing from one nostril. But he grinned a victor’s grin and hugged his red-haired admirer, lifting her into the air. Her legs, encased in black nylon stockings, scissored ecstatically.

  In the van, Jack found himself sitting next to Kerry. He’d been staring out the window when she plopped herself down beside him. He knew it was her before turning. He recognized her perfume now, something like cinnamon (enlivened by a second odor, antiseptic, pungent, that emanated from the cast enclosing her arm).

  “So why does Wesley call you Professor?” she asked, not one for preamble. “Why do you call our Mr. Parks Wesley?”

  “Cause he asked me to,” she said.

  “Well,” Jack said, “I didn’t ask him to call me Professor. He just took to doing it when he learned that I taught at George Washington University.”

  “He doesn’t like you much.”

  Jack shook his head. “No, we’ll never be close.”

  “What do you teach?”

  “Nothing. I don’t teach anymore.”

  “Okay. What did you teach?”

  “American Literature.”

  That answer silenced her for a while. Jack turned and stared at the traffic. They were on the Beltway again. Ten o’clock at night and the world was alive with automobiles. Jack felt a headache coming on, felt an accompanying panic brought on by a conviction that all this busyness was sentient and malevolent. It didn’t help that cars rushed by with their horns blaring (wooooooohank), infuriated by Earl’s overcautious driving.

  Kerry’s voice was balm.

  “I been in a couple detoxes, a mental hospital,” she said. “I got this notebook full of poems and stuff I wrote in those places. Maybe you could take a look at it, see what you think.”

  “I’d love to,” he said.

  He lay in bed with her notebook. As soon as they had disembarked from the van, she’d run off to fetch it.

  It was a notebook that had traveled some. Several different pens had doodled on the brown cardboard cover. Officially, this notebook was a Hammond Spiral (the words commercially printed in blue, block letters) but Kerry had amended this with an inverted V between the words “Hammond” and “Spiral,” indicating that the word “Eggs” should be added.

  There was a drawing, much scribbled and shaded, of a horse’s head, an image encoded in the DNA of teenage girls. It was executed with about average skill. There was a scribbled homework assignment, page numbers, a cryptic note (“Jen. Never never never again.”), and two sentences in red block letters: THIS NOTEBOOK’S CONTENTS ARE COPYRIGHTED BY KERRY ELSA BECKETT. USE OF THESE POEMS WITHOUT HER CONSENT IS AGAINST THE LAW!

  The exclamation point made Jack smile. You hear that1 Against the law! Cautiously, he lifted the cover. The blue-lined page was inhabited by a single small poem with the title “DEATH.”

  DEATH hovered over many poems, and it was Jack’s experience that it was better not to read such poems—copyrighted or otherwise—unless they had survived centuries of critical scrutiny.

  Still, he read it:

  DEATH

  If I die while I’m asleep

  not expecting it

  I won’t be surprised or disappointed

  just a lump under the covers

  somebody else’s problem.

  I won’t be sad

  like my mom

  or scary

  like a goblin.

  I’ll just be dead

  no tears, no sobbin.

  Jack read the poem a second time. Hey. He liked it. Did he? Yes, he really did. He wouldn’t have to lie.

  He turned the page. The next poem, much longer, was entitled “The Garden,” and began, “The beautiful garden in the sun is laced with many-hued flowers and a myriad of colored butterflies that hover daintily in the dawn. My heart is filled with wonder as my feet travel the winding path...”

  So you can’t win every one. Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus, didn’t he?

  Jack read on. He did not, again, discover anything as charming as the first poem. The poems divided into two groups: romantically effusive ones in which words were loved not wisely but too well, and humorous poems that were more successful but—a failing of youth— not overly subtle.

  Some of the poems, written in obvious misery, reminded Jack that literature was cruelly indifferent to heartfelt emotion. You could write a really bad line while authentic sadness blinded you with tears. You could sit there on the edge of your bed, sick from stealing and drinking your parents’ Jack Daniels, shaky with guilt over that test you cheated on and still failed, frightened that you could be pregnant by your best friend’s ex-boyfriend who was, just like she said, a creep. You could be miserable with longing for... well, every teenage yearnable thing... you could sit there, crying shamelessly, writing as fast as you could, and literature, that prig, would respond with: “Cliched. Mawkish. Childish. Self-indulgent.” Literature scorned the genuine article, real, wallowing anguish. It cared—shallow creature—only for appearance.

  ‘These are terrific,” he told her.

  They were sitting in the day room. She looked radiant, a purple sweater draped over her shoulders, her black, wanton curls teasing the blue in her eyes.

  “You really like them?”

  The sunlight had come into the room, expressly to lick her throat (a cat’s tongue over cream).

  “Yes.”

  That night they went to an AA meeting in Falls Church. The young people’s group that Hurley’s detox patients had attended the night before did not have a meeting on Wednesdays, and, in any event, the hospital staff felt that the patients should be exposed to a variety of AA groups.

  This group’s members were, for the most part, older, with a substantial senior-citizen population. Jack had actually been to this meeting before, and he thought of it as a fundamental, blue-collar meeting. Nobody here was apt to talk about therapy or inner children or self-actualization. The answers were in the book Alcoholics Anonymous (generally referred to as the Big Book). Many of this group’s older members were unimpressed by a later book (written by cofounder Bill Wilson) that explained the twelve steps and twelve traditions of AA in detail. These old-timers thought of the Twelve and Twelve (published in 1952, thirteen years after the publication of the Big Book) as a new and heretical text, an elaboration that sullied the pragmatism and simplicity of the earlier work.

  It was a speaker’s meeting, and an elderly man was standing at the podium telling his story.

  It was not a riveting story, the room was overheated, and Jack found himself nodding off.

  Jack got up and left the room. He found the rest room, splashed water in his face, and felt better, although he didn’t feel well enough to listen to the rest of the old man’s talk. The man was in need of an editor, someone to tell him, gently but firmly, “Ease off on the ancestors; cut to the chase. Were you ever stabbed by a hooker? Rob a liquor store? Set fire to your high school? Anything?”

  Jack left the rest room and walked down the hall. He went out into the night air and sat on the steps. It was colder than it had been the previous night. He could see his breath in the air, feel the cold stars prick at his skin.

  A voice behind him said, “He ain’t even been born yet. He’s still going on about his father’s drinking. I reckon they’ll have to buzz him or gong him or whatever afore he gets to his own drinking.”

  It was Hinkle, the truck driver, and he sat on the steps and lit a cigarette, his ruddy, open expression turning, for a moment, falsely pensive as he inhaled deeply. Jack studied the truck driver’s profile, trying to guess the man’s age. He was probably somewhere in his thirties, but he could have been younger, his face reddened by alcohol and the elements. He had long, woolly sideburns that tapered into an unshaven jaw shadow, like a paved road turning to dirt before petering out. He wore a leather jacket, jeans, and brown boots, all three articles rubbed raw in spots.

  “I don’t seem to be getting a lot out of any of this,” he said, leaning back and spouting smoke
at the night sky. “If I had a beer in front of me, I guarantee you I’d have it inside me afore you could say alcoholism three times. I reckon I’ll just have to take my chances. I get in some scrapes on account of alcohol, but I get in some scrapes on account of women too, and I ain’t ever thought of giving up pussy.”

  He grinned at Jack. “Can you keep a secret?”

  Before Jack (who dreaded confidences) could answer, Hinkle said, “Don’t matter whether you can or not. It’s a done deal. My ride’s arrived.” He looked at his watch. “Right on time.” He stood up and dropped the cigarette on the concrete, crushing it with his heel.

  The black van had pulled to the curb. Hinkle was running down the steps.

  Jack stood up. “Wait!” he shouted.

  The van’s side door slid open and Hinkle hiked himself up, a hand clutching the door frame, foot on the running board. He turned and shouted to Jack, “Tell old Wesley Parks he can kiss my ass. It’s like you said, he ain’t been down the road we been down. He don’t know shit about wanting a drink.” Hinkle swung around, ducked, and entered the darkness. The door closed, and the van pulled away.

  Jack imagined Hinkle in the van, turning to his unlikely companions, the young, serious men in their white shirts, shirts that flickered in and out of the shadows as they caught the light of passing street lamps.

  After the meeting ended and they couldn’t find Hinkle, they drove slowly back to the hospital, Earl Simms muttering all the way. “I ain’t a baby-sitter. Somebody wants to run off, I can’t stop him. Sides, I’m a volunteer. You can’t fire a man ain’t hired.” He loudly proclaimed this to his passengers, convinced, apparently, that he was going to be reprimanded. But all Blanche said, on hearing the news, was, “Nobody’s committed here.