by Bill Clegg
The food finally arrives and the girls return from the bathroom looking a little more awake than before they left, which is my cue to eat quickly, throw a few twenties on the table, and go. I tell Lotto to meet me at the 12:30 the next day, that we can get coffee after. He gets up and extends his hand in the way that all young straight boys do these days. I ignore his hand and give him a hug instead. Be good, I say into his ear. And meet me tomorrow.
To my great surprise, he does—at 1:30, on the bottom step of The Library. I see him as I’m leaving to grab a coffee before going back to the two o’clock. Tracksuit, Ray-Bans, gold necklace, cigarette. He’s just a kid but he looks like a sixty-year-old casino lizard from Atlantic City. Where’s my coffee? he says laughing and starts walking to University before I even say hello.
Lotto tells me all about Tess. How she grew up all over the world, how her father is some kind of diplomat. He drops the names of a few very famous people who he says are to Tess practically family. Lotto hits his stride when famous people come into the picture. There is almost never a story that doesn’t somehow come around to a celebrity. From the socialites he went to the therapeutic boarding schools with (whores) to the athletes who shop at the diamond store his parents own (whoremasters) to the rap stars who frequent the parties he goes to (masters of all whoremasters)—there are famous people. And always they are described as friends or practically family. This story is no different. But one difference is how he talks about this girl. She, too, has been to rehab, it turns out. She just gets me, he says, and shrugs. I ask if she goes to meetings of any kind and he says that she’s figured out a way to use a little heroin on the weekends and not drink at all. Booze was her problem, not drugs, he says seriously. And since heroin is not my thing, there’s no temptation for me. I listen to him and for a minute think he’s joking. When I realize he’s not, I tell him he’s out of his mind. We’re good for each other, he argues. She keeps me away from coke and I keep her away from booze. She’s getting an MFA and we’re going to open a gallery together in Soho with my cousin Sam. I honestly don’t know where to begin; his earnestness is so palpable that I can’t bear to say anything beyond suggesting we head back to The Library to catch the two o’clock meeting. We can make it, I say like a parent trying to make homework or going to the dentist sound like fun. Lotto’s face pinches and by some miracle he actually follows me back to the meeting.
Lotto and I trade phone calls over the next few days. He says he’ll show up at meetings but never does. He leaves a long message one night and tells me how glad he is we’re friends, that we’re in each other’s lives, that it’s fate that we should be on this journey together, and I know from the charged sentimental urgency in his voice that he’s high. This is the last message I get for a week. And then, the day after taking Polly to Connecticut, while I’m doing laundry in the basement of my building, I get a call from his mother. Something has happened, she says, and could I come over to their house right away. It’s late afternoon and I had been planning to go to the Meeting House at six. But instead I immediately start walking over to Gramercy Park. On the way, Lotto’s mother, who sounds as exhausted and bewildered as I’ve ever heard anyone sound, tells me what happened. Four nights before, Lotto and his younger cousin Sam were in his bedroom. Lotto had a bag of cocaine and Sam apparently wanted to try it. Lotto, according to his mother, tried to persuade him not to but he was persistent. So Lotto cuts him a line and within minutes Sam has a seizure and is soon unconscious. They call 911, and by the time the ambulance arrives he is dead. Apparently he’d taken several antianxiety medications that day, and combined with cocaine they caused his heart to fail. The family—Lotto’s father’s brother—had to be called and they and the police have agreed it’s a no-fault fatality. Lotto’s mother is telling me all this because they want him to enter a year-long treatment program in Northern California, some place a consultant they hired has strongly recommended. Lotto is, she says, refusing to go and threatening to kill himself.
I arrive at Gramercy Park just as Lotto’s mother is finishing the story and ask her to remind me what the address is. Yep, that’s the one, I mutter to myself as I look up at the enormous place. I expect Lotto’s mother to greet me at the door, but instead it’s Lotto. I had imagined him looking strung out, red-eyed, and shaky from all that’s gone on and by his mother’s description. But he’s freshly showered, shaved (for once), and in jeans and polo shirt. I barely recognize him without the tracksuit, sunglasses, and beard, and see, for the first time, that underneath Lotto’s usual costume, he’s handsome. Maybe this is what the girls see in him, I think, and not just the cash and access to clubs and parties. Lotto gives me a hug and apologizes for his mother’s calling. We go to the kitchen and he sits on the counter and starts talking.
Whatever grief Lotto feels is hidden behind a head of combed hair, a clean shave, and a steely tone. I didn’t know, he says over and over again. I didn’t know. His cousin didn’t seem high, he says, didn’t seem like he was on anything. Who knew about the medications!?!? Jesus! he bellows, his composure now gone. Lotto tells me that when Sam bullied him into trying a line of coke he didn’t think it was such a big deal. How was I supposed to know? HOW?!? he yells across the kitchen. How the fuck is this my fault!??! And now my mother has you up in my shit. Billy, don’t even try to talk me into going to rehab. There aren’t any left to go to!
For a moment, as I run down the list of rehabs I know he’s been in and out of, I think he may be right. Have you been to this one in Northern California your mom has lined up? I ask, genuinely not knowing the answer. No, he says, but it’s a fucking cash machine like all the rest. You put the druggie in and they take the cash out. And there is no way I’m going for a year. No. Fucking. Way. He tells me how his mother has called Tess and told her Lotto has left town, that he’s in treatment again and not to call. Tess, in turn, texts Lotto that she needs to step away. Too much drama, she writes. BITCH!! he shouts. He punctuates what he’s yelling with a refrain that goes something like I’m going to walk out this fucking door and find a fucking gun and blow my fucking brains out before I go to rehab again. It goes on like this for over an hour, and when I start thinking of Lotto in the city, shame-saddled with his cousin’s death, heartbroken and suicidal, I think, He won’t live. Which is what I say. You’re not going to live. I tell him that he’s going to be dead just like his cousin—not by a gun, which we both know he’s not going to get, but by an overdose. And as I say this I remember Lotto on one of our evening walks in Oregon. He is describing his group of friends in high school standing on a corner in the Bronx trying to score weed, Freezing our hairless balls off, all of us wearing these big puffy North Face jackets—blue, red, green, purple—we looked like a pack of Skittles. He says this out of the corner of his mouth, deadpan, a smartass twenty-one-year-old sounding like an old Catskills comedian warming up a room. I remember him showing up at the airport in Portland a year ago, waving his boarding pass, how excited and lonely and lost he seemed. And here he is, lost again, trying to put a tough face on a horrible tragedy, trying to call the shots when his world, by his own hand, has fallen apart once more. I start crying. It’s the first cry in months, the first one since I walked out the door of my life five months ago, since that relapse that sent me headlong into a two-month suicide dive. I had, then, walked out the door and into the city like Lotto is about to do. I’m looking at someone who is about to be dead, I keep thinking, and then I think of his cousin Sam, whom I never met but heard a dozen stories about. Sam was two years younger than Lotto, an on-again, off-again partner in crime since elementary school who somehow never got in trouble or took things as far as Lotto did. Sam did well enough in high school to go to a cushy four-year liberal arts college in Florida, where he had just finished his sophomore year. This kid who, from a distance, had a better chance than Lotto of making something of his life is now dead. We die, I think. That’s what we do. Whether we want to or not that’s where this goes. I think of Polly doing lines
during Heather’s overdose. I think of me, less than two weeks ago, going to get lighters to do enough drugs to jump off a seventeen-story terrace. Polly, Heather, Lotto, me—we don’t stand a chance. You don’t stand a chance, I blubber through tears at Lotto. You don’t stand a chance unless you go. You’re going to end up just like Sam. Or you’re going to kill someone else you love and end up in jail. Lotto doesn’t move or speak, just sits on that sleek stainless steel counter.
Lotto’s mother comes in. She gets me a tissue to wipe my eyes, but I can’t stop sobbing. If you only cry once every few years, it’s not pretty. This was not pretty. Are you OK? she asks, and I say, pointing to Lotto, I will be if he goes to California.
And he does. Though I’d like to think my tear-streaked speech in the kitchen is what pushed him to make the right decision, I learn later from his mother that she and Lotto’s father threatened—convincingly this time—to throw him out, cut him off entirely, and let him fend for himself if he didn’t go, and stay, for a whole year. He texts me the next morning: Going to Cali. Wish me luck, brother.
The next night, I relapse. Polly is still in rehab, Lotto will be tucked away in his eleventh or twelfth rehab in Napa Valley, and I’ll be coming home from the Meeting House, thinking about Noah, work, money, all the things Jack has counseled me to stop thinking and worrying and grieving about. And then I think about getting high. I think about it and then I do it. It’s after midnight when I call Rico. I use the occasion to pay him back the thousand dollars I owe him and buy a bag of crack. I smoke it down and at two in the morning go to Mark’s. He’s there with three other people—two middle-aged guys and a kid in his early twenties. I sleep with all of them and smoke their drugs, since I have reached my ATM limit and have access to no more money. My, my, how the mighty have fallen, Mark cracks when he returns to his bedroom to survey the scene. And I think, I’ve always been down here, it’s just more obvious now.
I leave Mark’s around noon, crawl into bed, blast the air-conditioning, and take a fistful of Tylenol PM. Polly leaves a message from the pay phone at High Watch. She’s going to meetings all day and night, she says, and the food is good. She misses Heather and Essie and me but she’ll be home soon. Heather, who has calmed down and called Polly to say she can still live in the apartment, is renting a car and picking her up next Monday. I’m comin’ home, Crackhead. You better be sober.
I don’t tell Polly or anyone else, including Jack, about the relapse. I keep it a secret, just like I used to with Noah. I think I’m doing it for her and not me. I think it’s some kind of sacrifice so she doesn’t begin to get the idea that staying sober is impossible. I don’t want her to think what I’m beginning to suspect: that none of what works for Jack and Asa and Luke and Annie is going to work for me. I’m like Lotto, without the wealth, without the endless safety nets of rehab after rehab. I’m like Sam and like I imagine Lotto would be if he hadn’t left for California: a goner.
Done
First Monday in June. Polly’s two weeks in rehab are up and Heather brings her back to the city in time for the two o’clock meeting. She comes in just before it starts and sits down across from me. She looks younger, brighter. I’m so used to seeing Polly in her pajamas or in unwashed sweatpants and T-shirts that it’s jarring to see her in clean jeans and a blouse, her hair washed and skin clear. At the break, when Polly raises her hand and announces that she has seventeen days, the place goes wild. Later, when she shares about her time away, Pam and others sob and sigh with what can only be described as joy.
At the dog run afterward, Polly tells me that Heather has promised to slow down, and if she uses, not to use in the apartment. Polly seems hopeful, but I can’t help but doubt that whatever promises Heather has made she will surely break. And soon. Now that Polly has some clean days together, I look on the bright side and think maybe we’re both out of the woods, finally. I haven’t told her about my relapse and don’t plan to.
Our schedule of the 12:30, two o’clock, and dog run resumes. Jack has insisted that I take a service commitment at a meeting, so I make coffee and set up the chairs at the Meeting House on Wednesday nights. There’s another guy who shares the commitment with me—a gentle fellow in his early forties whose story is very different from mine. His story reminds me of my father’s—years of drinking and a slow, steady narrowing of a life until the loneliness causes enough agony to instigate change. For my father, it wasn’t until his mid-sixties, when he was living alone in a small house in New Hampshire, twice divorced, with children who didn’t speak to him and friends and siblings who had, one by one, gradually disappeared. What is bewildering to me is that my father didn’t get sober—instead he switched from scotch to beer—but he still went through the kind of change that I see happen in the people who do. It began, at least from what I can tell, with a young couple who lived nearby. Dad got to know the husband because he also had a small plane at the nearby landing strip. One thing leads to another, and the couple invite my dad over for dinner. Sometime soon after the dinner, the wife is diagnosed with a serious cancer and given less than a year to live. They find out that there are experimental treatments that take place in Boston and all of a sudden their lives are in chaos. Whether he offered or they asked I don’t know, but my father begins watching their dog—a poodle, of all things—while they are away. He gets very attached to the dog and it begins to stay over at his place for longer and longer stretches. As the wife becomes weak from the treatments, she is no longer able to drive herself to Boston for her frequent doctor’s appointments. The husband is a commercial airline pilot, as my dad had been, so there are many times when he is simply not available to drive her. My father steps in and begins driving. This goes on for several years until, eventually, the woman dies. I remember my father mentioning the couple and their tragic situation during one of the first conversations we have when I’m back in New York from White Plains. By this time, her death was near. I remember being baffled by and jealous of his instinctive care for these strangers, particularly since, until now, he’s had very little to do with my life or with any of my three siblings. My father and I speak two or three times a week that spring and summer, and there isn’t one time when he doesn’t mention these people or their poodle, which I think has basically become his. Before this, conversations with my father usually involved patiently listening to him complain about the president (it never matters which one), Congress, the health care industry, or an old favorite, the Kennedys. But now, most of the whipping boys have vanished. Not all, but most. In their place are detailed accounts of this woman’s decline, the toll on her husband, and the latest attempt to reverse what appears to be irreversible. And questions. About my days, how I fill them, and recent developments with Polly and Asa and Jack, all of whom I’ve described to him in detail, the first people in my life since grammar school I’ve talked about with him or even mentioned. During this time he also becomes increasingly involved with my younger siblings, whose twenties are drawing to a bumpy close. He makes sure they have insurance, lawyers for legal troubles, money for night classes. And my nephews, his grandsons—he attends every birthday in Maine, flies his small plane to recitals and sporting events even. It doesn’t happen overnight, but phone call by phone call, action by action, he becomes part of our lives, a member of the family—the father, the grandfather and friend he never was. That he still drinks, albeit far less than before, is none of my business (Jack’s phrase, not mine).
The Wednesday setting-up-the-meeting commitment takes all of twenty minutes before the meeting, and yet I bring it up in every conversation, every description about my routine, every discussion about getting sober. People who address the United Nations or perform open heart surgery no doubt talk less about what they do than I did about those twenty minutes of flipping light switches, brewing coffee, and arranging chairs once a week. After tennis in the mornings with Elliot, or at dinner with Jean at Basta Pasta, I go on and on. I even tell them about the commitments I don’t have yet. After nin
ety days, Jack says, I need to chair a meeting. There are ten different meetings a week at The Library—speaker meetings, topic meetings, meditation meetings, et cetera—and I wonder and worry about which one I’ll get and if I’ll be confident enough to sit in front of the group and lead. Whenever I try to talk to Jack about this stuff he cuts the conversation short with Worry about which one when it’s time. Get ninety days, and then let’s talk about it. So until then, it’s mostly Jean and Elliot and, amazingly, my father who I talk to about this stuff. And, of course, Polly.