“That sounds like religion,” I said suspiciously. I was thinking “cult,” actually. Next she was going to ask me to join her on the street corner to sell fund-raising bouquets for the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
“Not religion: spirituality,” she repeated.
“What’s the difference?”
“Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there. Alan, you and me, we’ve been in hell.”
Tears started in my eyes. She took my hand, squeezed it. I flinched. Wondered what she was after.
And then I met the ugly truth of my desperation, that if selling street-corner flowers for the cult is what it took, I’d go. There was nothing left of my pride. Perhaps I’d never had any to begin with.
“Jackie, I don’t know you as well as I know Philip. But if he trusts you, then, OK, I trust you. Maybe I just need some kind of help. I’ll do what it takes. What do you want me to do? I can’t believe that anything will work on a hardhead like me.” I pointed at my moist eyes. “But you see this? You’ve got me. I’m out of options—I can’t go back to the streets. So, okay. Tell me, this recovery deal. Where do I apply? When do I start? I’m done, Jackie. Believe me. I’m finished.”
Lightly she touched my shoulder, rose, and said very quietly and gently that I should go upstairs and shower if I wanted, while she washed and dried my clothes. And then I should nap while she made me some food. And after dinner, we’d go to a meeting together.
I nodded tiredly and said: “O.K.”
49
THE MEETING WAS IN A LARGE COMMUNITY-CENTER basement with dingy walls. There was a coffee urn, Styrofoam cups, cookies, chairs in rows, a table and chair. I looked around for drunks, couldn’t see any, just successful-looking folks who stood chatting and backslapping each other, some embracing intensely, a convivial mood in the air. What kind of deal was this, I wondered. Evidently, apart from Jackie, I seemed to be the only actual drunk in the room. Perhaps this was some sort of anthropological group devoted to the study of drunks, and I was their monkey specimen. Some professor type to prod me with a stick, explain various points about the way that drunks work. Well, if that’s what it took to get sober, I stood ready. I’d sell scented candles on street corners if they asked me to. Now that I was resolved not to return to hell, I’d do anything that would lift the obsession to drink.
She sat us somewhere in the middle of the crowd, who had begun to seat themselves, and instead of calling me out to serve as a lecture specimen, people shook my hand and welcomed me. Three well-put-together specimens of mental health and professional attainment seated themselves up front and then, one after another, stood and told, with gentle humor and lots of laughs, the worst drinking stories I’d ever heard.
One, who now occupied a prominent place in the world of art museums, described her years as a jailbird, prostitute, and back-alley drug addict. And that’s when things were going well for her. From there she descended into realms of nightmare that made my skid row seem like Sutton Place.
Another, a university professor, a wino, used to sleep blacked out under a highway overpass, unaware of his bodily functions.
The third, a top-level manager in a Fortune 500 company, had once made his home in the men’s shelter and twice had been declared dead in the ER.
Newcomers were asked if they wished to introduce themselves. Nervously, I watched a few others. And then, as Jackie’s eyes filled with emotion, my shaking hand rose. Jackie slipped her arm through mine, and I said: “My name is Alan. And I am an alcoholic.”
PART TWO
BOOK SIX
50
I HAULED A BLACK TRASH BAG TO THE GREYHOUND station. It contained the last five remaindered copies of The New Generation from the Strand Bookstore along with a composition notebook, Bic pens, and a sack of peanut butter sandwiches. Three days. Three thousand miles. San Francisco.
In the pocket of my jeans I had sixty-seven bucks I borrowed from Jackie and Philip and a pack of Marlboros.
Eight days sober. A recovery old-timer had told me: “Time takes time. Don’t be in any rush to get this thing. Let it filter in slow. What’s the hurry?”
I took it easy, one day at a time, and felt flooded to my marrow with a new sense of hope. But still, I had to get out of Dodge, flee New York: my blood stained every street in that town. Resolved to stay sober no matter what, hungrily I absorbed advice from those around me. One especially crusty old-timer had said: “On that bus, do not drink, even if your ass falls off. Put it in a bag, stick it in your pocket, bring it to the first meeting you hit in Frisco. They’ll glue it back on for ya.”
I was like someone covered with fatal burns over 90 percent of his body who sees, without any rational explanation, portions of skin miraculously regenerate, and all just because he sat in some meetings, heard things, and began to follow a few simple suggestions:
A) Put the plug in the jug. Don’t take that first drink. All your troubles begin with the first. Think it through. Ask yourself: what will be the consequence?
B) Don’t drink, no matter what. Period.
C) Remember HALT: Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired. If you feel hungry, eat. (Carry a candy bar.) If you feel angry, calm down. Anger will get you drunk. Feel lonely? Isolated? Well, get the hell out of the house. Call someone. Go to a meeting. Connect. If you’re tired, nap. Easy does it.
D) Just stay sober for today, twenty-four hours.
Simple guidelines for a complicated guy. When all else failed, they told me: pray.
“To what?” I’d asked.
“Don’t matter,” they’d said. “Whatever you like. Pray to the doorknob.”
“But I’m no holy roller.”
“This is not about religion,” said one who had five years sober. “You ever heard of a religion where the words God and fuck get used by members in the same breath?” The five-year man pursed his lips thoughtfully and, leaning forward, said: “You been to hell?”
“That I have,” I said, smiling sadly.
“Well, then, what the hell do you got to lose by giving heaven a try?”
“Thank you, fucking God,” I said as I slid to a sit on the bus station floor.
In the busy station, desperate-looking travelers rushed to gates, driven by echoing loudspeakers. Bus terminals are not like airports or train depots, which tend to draw a moneyed clientele. Greyhound is the celestial ferry of the underclass, chariot of the poor. Those who ride the dog often don’t look well. But even among these, I stood out as a sorry case. Only by the power of my newly awakened spirit and the tickled humor of my smile could I claim a place among them. For I was arisen not from the dead but from the undead, and if some might question whether I even existed at all, well, without a drink in my hand, I wasn’t so sure myself.
And yet I felt a sense of newfound freedom. Had previously thought my life’s purpose was to write great literature and champion causes. Now I understood: my first duty was to live. The knife was at my throat. Here was proof of life: I had tried so hard to die. And the blade was not in any other hand but mine, turned on me. So I must do anything not to drink. I had my work cut out.
I supposed that I now knew enough, had faith enough, to make it safely overland for three days aboard the bus, a fast-moving silver bullet on wheels, painted on both sides with the emblem of a dog running for its life.
I felt so relieved not to have a hangover. And though through sober eyes the world looked severely businesslike, frantic, joyless even, now and then inside I felt flashes of causeless happiness, cosmic winks, that brought smiles to my lips. In the meetings I had been promised that my shaking hands would soon be still. So here in the terminal there was nothing to do now but sit back with shaking hands and smoke a cigarette.
An old black woman in a wrinkled dress came along, dragging a garbage bag identical to mine. Hers, filled to bursting, seemed to weigh a ton. Hauling it strained the sinews of her neck. She stopped about ten feet away, slid to a sit against my w
all. Her feet were shod in Carolina work boots, untied laces trailing on the ground, and hair done up in little braids tied with colored rubber bands.
She searched the floor around her feet, and with a pleasure that I well knew from gutter days found a smoke and lit up, inhaled, exhaled, and spoke to herself. There is a kind of conversation with yourself that is sane and another sort that is with imaginaries—hers was the latter. When she noticed me looking her way, she gazed back with the disarming impudence of a child. Mad for sure, but sweetly so. Older too than I imagined. Must have been in her late seventies, early eighties, perhaps. What a world, I thought, to leave one like her homeless and hungry. What social order could allow this? What political system supports this? What economic theories justify this? Greed and indifference permit the old and infirm to die neglected. Being sober did not mean that I should ever make accommodation with a world that says: She is none of our affair.
And yet, here I was too, an Ivy League grad schooler with a published book, a writer, former museum program director, fund-raising wheeler-dealer, Israeli soldier—and had as little as she, maybe less. We shared the same dirty bus terminal floor.
The old woman was crazy, but so was I, with my long secret history of hearing voices, PTSD delusions, the stabbing phobia—all undocumented because I was good at hiding. But then, for twenty-two years, in full view of myself, I’d poured down my own throat a killing substance that drove me to ever-worsening depths of madness. I had, then, no cause to pity her. We were the same. Each hanging on by our fingernails. And realizing this, the strangest thing happened. I felt a sudden sense of warmth hatch and spread through me and heard a small faint whisper of a voiceless voice say: “Just smile.” Which I did, straight back at her, and in her face appeared the warmest, prettiest beaming little girl, and there we sat on the terminal floor, two broken children, smiling at each other.
51
I HAVE ALWAYS PREFERRED THE BACKS OF BUSES. Up front, the elderly, the migrant families, the single mother with kids, the young European backpackers, the theological student returning from seminary, but in back sat all us sinners. And here was quite a bunch of us: a pig farmer returning to Iowa from a whirlwind tour of New York’s brothels that had left him penniless; an ex-con in a nylon stocking cap who had finished parole and planned to play out a new hand in the Promised Land of California; a still-pretty bottle blonde barfly type with boozy eyes.
Everyone began chatting as soon as we crossed into New Jersey and broke out bottles, joints, pipes, capsules, powders. I even saw one guy shift a rig from one pocket to another. I was seated next to a wino with cornflower-blue eyes and a trucker’s cap announcing him to be a Proud Nam Vet. The vet had the wino’s purplish bloat and inflamed potato nose.
“Corey,” he said, offering a tough bony handshake, and that’s all he said. He took out a pint of Mad Dog 20/20 and sat turned to the aisle, sipping quick nips. I sat with eyes closed, reciting the Serenity Prayer.
There wasn’t an open seat down front or I would have moved in a heartbeat, just to save my hide. A fifth of Wild Turkey was circulating, and each time one of the back riders stepped from the small bathroom a wave of pot smoke engulfed us all. This continued unabated till we were halfway across Pennsylvania, when the driver, an immense big-bellied man with nicotine-stained walrus mustache and eyes bleached by a lifetime of hard travel, pulled us over, set the brake, and slowly walked to the rear.
Leaning whiskers so close you could smell his Camels and coffee breath, he said: “Now, you nice folks surely are aware that drugging and drinking aboard a public interstate conveyance is punishable by a fearsome fine and mandatory jail. It won’t matter to the authorities if you’ve never even crossed paths with a parking ticket. Highway Patrol will take you off in cuffs and you will feel the full brunt of the law. Is there anyone back here that don’t understand them words?”
Everyone turned to stare coldly out the window, or at the ground, fuming, eyes quicksilver with glaring insolence.
He came erect, surveyed the tops of our outraged heads with amusement. “Do time in the joint just to get buzzed on rotgut on a ninety-nine-buck one-way bus ride to nowhere? Makes no sense, but what do I know? Well, no matter. When you get to where you’re going, pick a bar stool and stay on it till you can’t tell your ass from your elbow and hoist one for me. Okay? But no drinking or drugging on my bus. We all understanding each other here?”
No one said anything.
Carefully, smiling at the passengers on both sides of the aisle, he made his way back to his seat, started up the engine, and with a great hydraulic clamor merged back into the high-speed traffic flow and once more we were under way.
Almost immediately, the party resumed, and with even greater intensity. Wasn’t until Chicago that I could change seats, advance into the drug-free zone. Until then, I sat with frozen smile, eyes glued to the scenery, nostrils filled with the reek of pot and the sour smell of cheap booze.
After Chicago, for a time, no one sat beside me, a welcome respite. But as we neared Iowa, Corey, the Nam vet, settled into the seat next to mine. My heart sank. It was night, most of the passengers asleep, even those in back, and Corey said: “It’s crazy back there. Hope you don’t mind. You got a friendly face.”
“Don’t mind at all,” I lied, troubled. What did he want? Paranoia bells rang. Was it because we were both vets? Something in my demeanor that spelled “military vet”? Or “wino”? And if so, what did he want with me? My PTSD needed no interface with others’ nightmares. I had plenty of my own.
“You got a minute to talk? Something private I’d wish to share with you.”
Didn’t say yes or no. Just looked at him. Then: “Why would you want to share your private stuff with me, a total stranger?”
“Because it’s the only way I can. I’d consider it a favor.”
I said nothing.
“I’ll take that for a yes,” Corey said. “Because it ain’t a no.” He removed his cap, ran his fingers through his gray-streaked brown hair. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said, groping for the right words. Everything inside me wanted to wall him out, scream, “Don’t begin at all! Leave me the hell alone!” But my soul would not allow it. He was someone suffering for lack of human contact who needed to unload trouble, and it seemed incumbent on me as a recovering alcoholic, despite the inconvenience, to listen.
I said: “Well, why don’t you begin at the beginning?”
He told me that before he got off the bus in Des Moines, where his old folks were waiting for him, he needed once and for all to clear his conscience of something that he had never told anyone.
“Why tell me?” I said. “Why not go to a priest?”
“I don’t think a priest will get it.”
“But I will?”
“You got a good face,” he said. “I know faces. You’ve seen things. You’re not like everyone. It’s just a thing that I need to get rid of before I see my folks. I’ve been away for thirty years. In all that time, I haven’t seen them face to face, not even once. Just postcards and phone calls is all we’ve had.”
“How does that feel?”
“Strange,” he said. And the look in his eyes was familiar, I knew that look—had the same one each time I returned from duty in Gaza.
“What brings you back now?”
He looked at me in such a way that conveyed the full weight of his reply: “Going home.”
“Home,” I said. “I didn’t know there was such a place left anymore.”
“I hope so. Or I just blew my last stake for nothing on Des Moines, Iowa.”
“Then there is home,” I said. “There has to be.”
A shadow appeared under the peaked brim of his Nam vet cap and cloaked his eyes in a bandit mask of murky memory light that seemed to engulf us, everyone aboard, in a single antechamber of recall. He told me how as a combat soldier on leave in Saigon he had shot a man in a drunken brawl in back of a gambling joint. Man pulled a knife. So he pulled his gun, one he’d l
ifted off a dead VC. And shot him point-blank in the head. He had killed boocoo Charlie in the bush, and it was like nothing to him. He wiped the gun clean of prints, left it next to the corpse, just walked away. The crime never followed, just the memory of it. Next, he was stateside, down South, in a bar. Some dumb disagreement became a fight, and when the other guy went out into the parking lot after him, with his gang, intending harm, he pulled a .45 and killed that man too. The others fled.
He looked at me to see how I was taking all this.
“Go on,” I said, knowing that the story wasn’t done, couldn’t be. “There were others, right?”
He nodded. “I knew you’d see. In fact, there was one more. I won’t say where. All I know is, he was armed and I was armed, but when the guns came out, he lost his nerve.”
He hung his face, voice barely audible. “I had a choice.” “What choice?”
“I didn’t have to. He just stood there. Couldn’t follow through. I always said: you pull a gun, you use it. He couldn’t. But I would not hesitate. Wasn’t even angry. Just a matter of my code. You draw your gun, you fire. So, I dropped him. Almost like it was a lesson for him to learn. But that was the end of his education. It puzzled even me. You know what I’m saying?”
“Actually, I do.”
“I thought you would.”
We just sat there, heads leaned close.
“I never told anyone. It was all years ago. But that last time I knew was wrong. I couldn’t get him out of my mind, his eyes. It hurt to think about. It isn’t about the law. I don’t give a crap for the law. The law don’t know what happened to me in the Nam, shit-all! The law says over here you gotta act like a hairdresser but over there, in the jungle, you get to go Rambo. Double-standard shit is what it is. Schizo. Hell, in the Nam I was cutting off VC ears to prove my head count. I even scalped one or two, dried them in the sun, cured them, wore ’em around my neck. I left my uniform shoulder patches stuffed in the mouths of my dead enemy, like a calling card. I had no soul. Went there with one, returned without. The guy who killed those men was soulless, dead, in my way.”
Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Page 19