Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  Gates spoke then, standing up. He was clearly worked up, trembling. “I come here in a van,” he said. “I’m living off rehab food out on a damn fahm. We sufferin out there, and we droppin off like fellers in a TV mystery, one then another, old truck driver rednecker, sweet little girl, slippery dude counselor... I’m say in I don’t need you sorry-assed deacons telling me gratitude, dissing poor, sick muthers just cause they ain’t lying up a storm bout how rosy and lucky their asses are. Truth is, I ain’t happy to be here. I ain’t grateful to be sittin in this tiny room full of corn-fed farts listenin to a load of bullshit.”

  Gates sat down, his speech lying on the silence the way a used condom might lie on the floor of a nunnery.

  Jack sensed a certain animosity in the room, a poised wave about to roll down.

  A deep voice boomed from a darkened corner. “I’m Hubert, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi Hubert,” the room said. Jack was struck by how much this chorus suggested children welcoming their teacher.

  Hubert was a small shadow in the corner. He wore a flannel shirt, gray trousers. His face was in shadow, but Jack could make out a white cloud of hair. The man’s small, veined hands were in the light, resting on thin blue-jeaned thighs.

  “That’s the truth being spoken. We need it here, and I thank you. The truth is that old Grateful Grady used to be called P&M Grady back sixteen years ago when he came here. That P&M was short for Pissin and Moanin Grady, and I can’t honestly say that the new Grady is much of an improvement. The old Grady wasn’t fun to listen to, but at least he wasn’t so gawdawful pleased with himself.” Hubert paused, coughed, struck a match which illuminated his face (a narrow, hawk-beaked countenance with a cigar planted firmly between thick lips). Hubert inhaled, making the tip glow under the match. “But you got to forgive us all,” he said. “Accept us for the assholes we are and let any slights, imagined or real, go. I been sober sixty-eight years, sober longer than AA’s been standing, and that’s my advice to a newcomer. Sure Grady’s a blowhard. Sure I’m a pompous fool. Why should it be different? Who the hell did you expect to find sitting in these rooms, holding forth? You think a normal, insightful, well-balanced human with a gram of humility would spend it here? Course not. You got to have some compassion for us. I know that’s a lot to ask of a new person, but that’s the secret, that compassion. If you can find it in your heart to love us, or at least think, That old fart’s doing his damn-poor best,’ then you have given us what we need to help you. It’s simple: You can’t judge us harshly and then just dance off with the angels. The angels will be willing, sure, but that hardness in your heart won’t be letting you take wings. It’s in your best interests to give us some slack.”

  Hubert coughed again, and then coughed some more, his shoulders shaking, smoke huffing from his lungs as though he were a dusty sofa being whacked with a broom. He put a frail hand up and waved it, indicating that he was done.

  The old man’s talk had inspired Eunice, who raised her hand and said that she was grateful Jesus had led her to this meeting. “I see that we are all brothers and sisters, and that I have been wrong to think AA can’t help me just because it has a heathen element. I have let pride blind me, forgetting that my mission is to love you in spite of your sinful natures.”

  Jack felt that there was something condescending about this speech, but heads were nodding.

  The next person to speak, an elderly woman named Natalie, plugged her alcoholism novel, Champagne Hearts, and announced that she was going to be appearing on television speaking about her abuse issues and that she hoped, in her small way, to change the manner in which the world viewed alcoholism and A A (improving the present dismal image). She said that her novel was about people with fashion sense and intellectual style coming to terms with AA’s reputation for off-the-rack clothing and lowbrow tastes.

  Jack could sense that the others in the room had heard this before. They seemed somewhat listless, neither offended nor inspired. It was a given that, in any AA meeting containing more than ten people, at least one person was writing an AA novel or twelve-step recovery text.

  After the meeting, Martin spoke to Aaron. “I got some business with Hubert,” Martin said. “Me and Jack and Tilman here will get someone to drive us back later. You go on and take the others back.” Martin handed over the van’s keys.

  Martin walked over to Hubert. Eunice was already there, giving the man a hug. Eunice was gushing. Her voice had a kittenish squeak that Jack had never heard before and which he found unsettling. “You opened my eyes,” she told the old man.

  Up close, Hubert bore a remarkable resemblance to a sly, hundred-year-old Mick Jagger.

  He grinned up at Eunice and said, “You come back anytime, young lady. This meeting has always been short on good-looking women. I was forgetting I had a pulse. Sometimes there ain’t a female in this joint, and old George will be going on about his prostate, and I’ll be trying to remember why being alive is preferable to being dead. Well, there you are!” He thumped a silver cane soundly on the wooden floor. “The damn answer, sweet as honey in milk, obvious as the sun at midday. You are a fine-looking woman, Eunice, and I appreciate your sharing the bounty of your beauty with us old dinosaurs.”

  Eunice giggled.

  Martin interrupted. “Hubert. I need to talk to you about some difficulties we’ve been having out at New Way. I’m hoping you can help.”

  Hubert turned, grinned at Martin. “This young lady staying out there with you?”

  Martin nodded.

  “Okay. You know my thoughts on rehabs. I don’t care for them. Too much administrative deadweight, too much damn therapy cheerleading, but that’s a personal opinion, and I’ve never let it stand in the way of our friendship, and anything I can do to help this young lady find her feet on recovery’s road... well, I am at your service, and my first suggestion is that we adjourn to my house.”

  Hubert drove. Eunice came too, sitting up front in the passenger’s seat. She had already adopted a proprietary air toward Hubert, touching and squeezing his shoulder to punctuate her remarks, and she was now telling him about the injustices visited upon her by her children. She had found a fresh and sympathetic ear in the old man.

  “Children can be vipers,” Hubert said. “Some of them hold a grudge forever—and don’t even admit it’s a grudge although that’s just what it is. You keep them from pooping their pants, and they hold it against you. Fascist, they’re thinking. Wait till I get older. I’ll get you.

  “I had a couple of children, tried once to have me locked up, but I’m rich, so I run them off with lawyers. Don’t hear from them anymore. I could lend you some lawyers, should you feel the need.”

  Jack and Martin and Tilman sat in the back. Plenty of room; this was one of those long, station wagon trucks—what had Hubert called it? The Burb (“Let’s all get in the Burb here”)—and the old man drove it as though he were on a suicide mission, rolling through enemy lines, paying no heed to the stop signs and red lights that attempted to destroy his momentum.

  The house was a mansion on a hill, white stone, white columns.

  There was even a butler, dressed elaborately in black.

  “Don’t call attention to his condition,” Hubert said. “McPhee’s very sensitive and he is trying. He has failed to comprehend AA’s First Step, but he will.”

  McPhee the butler was drunk and wisely refrained from speaking. His eyes were very red and his hair stuck up oddly in back and he reeked of whiskey. His inebriation manifested itself in extreme caution. He shuffled, not lifting his feet from the carpet, and kept his elbows high, for balance, as though walking a plank. He brought each person a saucer, then a tea cup, then finally the teapot which—again wisely—he left for others to pour. He tripped once, but righted himself and smiled (possibly the most wretched smile Jack had ever seen, a smile that said, Pay no attention to this smile, its wearer is worthless, beneath contempt).

  After McPhee deposited the teapot on the low rosewood t
able and left for the last time—“That will be all, McPhee,” Hubert called after him— Hubert leaned forward and spoke in a whisper, “Man’s a chronicle of tragedies, dead wife, dead daughter. I’m not going to go into it. Right now he’s a little slow on the runway, little skittish about abandoning alcohol, but once he gets the hang of sobriety, he’ll soar. You mark my words, he’ll do fine.”

  No one disagreed.

  “You probably think I should let him go, fire him. You don’t know his history, but you are probably thinking it never does an alcoholic any good to be coddled. That’s what’s called enabling, you’ll say. Practice detachment, you’ll say. Well, I’ve seen plenty of fine, sober folks refuse to lift a finger in the name of detachment, and it ain’t a pretty sight. Truth is, there ain’t nothing more fastidious than some drunks when they sober up. They don’t want anything to do with the filth and mess of a real slobbering, puking booze hound.

  “You clean up some drunks, and they get like old Grateful Grady, full of fine sentiments and hot air and not a lick of recall for their miserable pasts. You don’t ever see guys like Grateful Grady hauling some poor hallucinating sinner to the VA hospital or talking to somebody in trouble at three in the morning. The Grateful Gradys of this world prefer to hold forth around the coffee pot, like that fat guy on the television who’s always explaining the world based on some books he’s read and some unpleasant experiences he had in college.”

  Hubert paused, took a deep breath, grinned. “Well, I guess I was about to go off there. Sorry. I feel strongly about this, but I didn’t invite you over here to rail at you.”

  “I like a man with opinions,” Eunice said. She smiled warmly.

  No one else said anything. They drank their tea. Finally, Hubert slapped his knees and said, “Okay, what can I do for you, Marty?”

  “It’s a long story,” Martin said. “And I should warn you, parts of it will stretch your powers of belief. There is a weird element here.”

  Hubert nodded, leaned forward. “Let her rip,” he said.

  Martin was thorough in his telling, and it took some time.

  Jack gulped the last cold dregs of his tea and wondered why his recovery had to be so complicated, so harried by loss and conflict. Here he was, involved in some bizarre intrigue (insane, murderous cults and paranormal events). All he wanted was quiet, the hope of salvaging some sort of a life.... Self-pity sucked him under, where he encountered Sara.

  She was leaning over a restaurant table. She was in a contemplative mood, tapping her perfect teeth with a celery stick. “When you were a kid, did you practice looking sad in mirrors? Looking, you know, tragic?”

  “Sure,” Jack said.

  “Me too. Why do we do stupid things like that? Tragic isn’t hip. Little eight-year-old kids giving that grim, existential stare, what’s that all about?”

  “I’ve already thought about that,” Jack said. “Actually, I’ve spent considerable time pondering the evolutionary utility of the tragic, brooding look in young people.”

  Sara leaned closer, broadened her smile, tapped Jack on the nose with the celery stick. ‘And your conclusion, Dr. Lowry?”

  “It’s a save-me look we’re cultivating. Find me, we are saying. I’m inside this troubled look, come and get me. In teenagers, it also embodies the hope of getting laid.”

  “I think evolution is getting too clever for its own good,” Sara said. “I think we should all try to be more straightforward.”

  Oh, Sara.

  Sara began to fade, still smiling as the room intruded, imposing its reality.

  Martin was winding down. “...So I was hoping you knew more about this cult, this Clear. Looks like we haven’t seen the last of them, and there’s a score to settle anyway. There’s a girl we’d like to find, if she’s still alive.” Hubert stood up, sighed. “I know about The Clear. I know about Dorian Greenway, and I know Ezra Coldwell. That dwarf in the hospital bed, that mummy that Tilman saw...” Hubert nodded at Ed Tilman. “You were looking at the lord of the manor when you were studying that dried-up invalid. You were looking at Ezra Coldwell. It was Dorian who went down to Staunton and took Ezra out of the mental hospital there and brought him back here.”

  Hubert sat back down. He looked tired, almost sullen. “There is some weirdness in what you’ve told me. But I recognize the fabric. I’ve watched it being woven for a long, long time. Here I’ve been talking about those no-count AA members that dodge their obligations, and you’ve come and slapped me with a warrant for all my sins. It’s true, I was hoping to dodge this debt. Now here it is, like a cat you’ve tried to drown, mewling at the back door.”

  He shook his head, a fit of anger, snatched a cigar from the table and lit it, igniting the match with his thumbnail. “I don’t know where to begin, although I suppose it’s all the same tangle and any strand will lift the whole knotted-up mess. I might as well start back when Ezra Coldwell killed his wife. That was in 1976, a dirty cold January, and he was drunk, drinking again after a brief dry spell, maybe a month, maybe two.”

  It was snowing that night,” Hubert said. “We were over at the AA club, the only one in town at the time... it’s gone now, used to be called Merchants cause that was the street it was on... whoa, I’m never gonna make it to the end of the highway if I go down every dirt road I see. Anyway, we were playing poker, me and Jim Wallace and a newspaperman named Heller when the phone rang. It was Anita, Ezra’s wife, and she was upset. Ezra was drinking again, getting mean and threatening the way he would, and she wanted a ride over to her sister’s and could someone from the club take her? We didn’t refer her to Ah Anon, tell her she wasn’t an alcoholic and her problems with an alcoholic required a different program. Heller, who took the call, didn’t say anything about detachment. He just said we’d he right over.”

  “I was scared,” Hubert said. “I didn’t say anything to the others, but I didn’t want to go where Ezra Coldwell was drinking. I’d been out to his house a couple of times in the past under similar circumstances, and the last time, when I’d dropped by to take him to a meeting and found him dead drunk, I’d seen a thing I was trying to forget.”

  Hubert had to back up again, the story just kept pushing him back in time like a bully shoving some poor kid down a hall.

  Hubert backed all the way to 1930 when he was twenty-nine years old. In 1930 he had stopped drinking after a drunk that damn nearly got him drowned out on a lake in a storm. He just swore off and somehow it worked, and he didn’t go to AA until 1948, about a year after the AA club appeared in Harken. He went then because a friend had just stopped drinking and was filled with AA zeal. “Thought I was doing him a favor, being supportive. I’d stopped drinking without AA and didn’t feel the need for it. But I took to it, just plain liked it and still do.” The meetings back then generally had four or five people, and there would always be a few who were in and out. A wet drunk in a meeting was nothing unusual.

  Ezra Coldwell walked into a meeting in 1968. He was a rich man’s son, the same as Hubert, and so they knew each other from the country clubs and those closed circles the rich go round and round in. He was a stunted, arrogant little man in his late forties, had a law degree but didn’t practice, managed various properties that his parents (off somewhere in Europe) owned. He always wore a suit and was something of a dandy. “He was maybe five feet tall then, but he got shorter as the years went by. It was some disease of the spine, maybe, although I never thought of it that way. I just saw him as a man who naturally grew smaller, his body shrinking right along with his soul.”

  Ezra Coldwell said he had to get sober or Anita would leave him. She was the one person he loved, the only thing on the planet that had his heart’s attention. He was ready to do whatever it took.

  He asked Hubert to be his AA sponsor. “He didn’t like me any more than I liked him, but I had the most time away from a drink, and Ezra always had to have the biggest, the best, the most.”

  Ezra Coldwell stayed sober through sixty-eight and sixty-
nine and drank in January of 1970. “People who aren’t alcoholics ask why, looking for some circumstance that sent him back,” Hubert said. “But we know it doesn’t work that way. Thing is, Ezra went to meetings every night that first year, and there was a big celebration when he hit that one-year-without-a-drink day, with Anita in a bright red dress, looking radiant and proud, looking like her man had just won the Pulitzer Prize, hugging him while the applause rained down (we must have had near forty people in the room that night; most of them not alcoholics at all, just cobbled-up well-wishers, relatives, people that owed him money, maybe). Then he stopped going to meetings that second year. When I’d run across him, I’d ask about it, but he’d say, the way they always do, that he was fine, that AA had braced him up, but he didn’t need it anymore. An old story: He figured he’d learned his lesson.” Ezra Coldwell started drinking again in 1970, and he would get a few months sober (eight and a half months being the record; that was in seventy-four) and then go back. “Anita left him once,” Hubert said. “In seventy- three. But he got so miserable and defeated she feared he would kill himself or drink himself to death. She went back. She loved him and didn’t know what to do. That’s another old story.”

  Hubert saw that his cigar had gone out, and he lit it, his head briefly enveloped in smoke. He began again: “Everyone was telling Anita to leave Ezra, but she was voting with her heart.”

  Alcoholism is a progressive disease (a fancy way of saying it gets worse). In Ezra’s case, worse meant physical deterioration, blackouts, wilder rages when drunk, and mental illness.