“Of sorts.”
“What sort?”
“Poet.”
“Poet. There’s no money in that.”
“Evidently not.”
“Isn’t that a kind of financial suicide? To be a poet?”
“Hey, Brick?”
He looked over.
“Do I strike you as the kind of person who gives a shit about money?”
He nodded, more to himself than me, as if assessing whether or not to take offense at my confident tone. Apparently, decided to let it go. If there was to be a showdown, he’d pick the time and place.
“So,” he said. “You are in my house. Acting brave. How do you think this makes me feel?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t come here looking for trouble. You can choose to take that any way you like.”
He laid down the gun and barrel brush. “You’re here, screwing her in my house.”
“It’s her room,” I said. “I’m not aware there’s more to it than that.”
He glared at me. “Oh, there’s more. Much more.”
“And what would that be?”
“That would be that before you showed up, I was screwing her.”
“You mean, recently.”
“Before that trip she made to New York, where she met you and suddenly between us all bets are off.”
“People have a right to place their chips where they choose.”
“Listen to me. She’s a little cunt. A rat bitch. A real whore. You’ve let yourself in for hell. She’s not worth dying for. I know her three years and it’s been pain, nothing but pain. She’s incapable of stringing together two truthful sentences in a row. If it’s red, she says it’s black. If it’s wet, she says it’s dry. She’s a chronic liar.”
He picked up a dry rag and began furiously scrubbing the gun barrel. It was almost sexual. Giving the gun a barrel job.
I stood up. “I’m going to see me some San Francisco,” I said.
“You know,” he whined, “I really don’t like you being here in my house, banging my woman!”
I let the door slam on his reedy voice.
We found quarters in a Page Street dump near the Lower Haight Projects, in a seven-room ramshackle Victorian boardinghouse for drug addicts, secretaries, drifters, musicians, and the criminally insane. It was overrun with cockroaches and smelled like rancid old grease. To keep us afloat, Bernadette dealt drugs while searching for legit work. She wanted out of the game. We were both going to write poetry, make the local scene together. But until I could find my feet, she’d support us.
I went to 12-step meetings and poetry readings in the cafés and music clubs. Several hours each day sat in the Café International writing poems. Bernadette bought me a Walkman with headphones and a tape of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, which I listened to all day long as a way to combat the machine-gun thoughts in my brain ordering me to drink. When it got too much, when Dylan’s voice couldn’t drown out a craving so bad that the only way to stop it was to climb to the roof of the tallest building in San Francisco and swan-dive into the picture postcard, I shut my eyes, pleaded with God, whom I did not yet quite believe in, to please keep me sober. And each time, without fail, the urge left.
But still, I felt alone. Spoke to the other recovering drunks I encountered in the meetings, who shared with me their experiences, were encouraging, for which I was grateful. Yet something was missing. I couldn’t imagine what.
“Help me, nonexistent God,” I prayed. “Help me, damn you, in your goddamned exalted nonexistence!”
One day, in a meeting, a strange-looking man popped up before me like a little jack-in-the box and announced: “Ho, Little Brother! I’m your sponsor!”
“You are?” I said, warily inspecting the bizarre figure who stood before me, not altogether sure that I hadn’t hallucinated him. Black, five foot four, if that, dressed in what I later learned was a West African shaman’s cap, no shirt, a thick ugly scar dividing him belly to chest, a cowhide vest, old suit pants held by a limp-tongued belt, and heel-worn color-scraped blackish thrift-shop dress shoes with frayed laces. On a nearby chair lay something that could only belong to the weirdo: a medicine drum with eagle feather tied to it.
“I’m Carl Little Crow. Yesssss, Little Brother! And you, my new sponsee, are a newcomer to recovery. A new clean-and-sober baby.”
Others had advised me that I was going to meet some rather strange birds in the meetings, but this was too much.
“And what is your name, Little Brother?”
I wondered whether to say or not. Yielded reluctantly. “Alan.”
His eyes widened in delight. “Yesssss, oh, yessssss! Alan! I don’t know many Alans. Wasn’t Robin Hood’s minstrel friend called Alan-a-dale? You must be a minstrel!”
A smile crept over my lips. Clearly, he was harmless. Had a face that crossed Mount Rushmore with a chipmunk. A strange broad-nosed face with velvet black eyes and a curious dignity that I couldn’t quite place, had never seen before—a kind of inherent royal defiance.
Whatever else he was, he was no phony. I felt that. Odd, yes; another’s puppet, no. If I couldn’t figure out what exactly he was, still, he was like no one else I’d ever met.
“Let me take you to coffee,” he offered.
“Sure,” I said, having all of eight cents to my name.
We went to All You Knead on Haight Street. A lot of the recovering drunks and addicts seemed to hang out there. Settling into a booth, we each ordered the $1.99 breakfast of scrambled eggs, home fries, toast, and all the coffee you could drink.
He asked where I was from, how much sober time I had. When I told him less than a month, he was overjoyed. “You’re the most important person in the twelve-step meetings!”
“Why is that?”
“Because, Little Brother, you are closer to the last drink than many others. We have a tendency to forget. You’ll remind us.”
“How long have you been sober?”
“Eighteen years.”
He bristled with a fierce happy energy that I’d never seen before in anyone in my entire experience.
I asked what was involved in sponsorship.
“Gently, slowly, Little Brother, one day at a time, we walk through sobriety together.”
My heart sank. “Does that mean I have to see you every day?”
He laughed! Clapped his hands in glee. Happy as a child. “Noooo!!!! Oh, no, Little Brother! Nooooo! We just meet once in a while, to work the steps. If you get into trouble, call me. Have a question? I’ll answer if I can. Feel frightened? Call me. Think you’ll drink? Before you do, let’s talk. And between our get-togethers, go to meetings, as many as you can, and don’t drink, one day at a time, no matter what! Isn’t that simple?”
It wasn’t as if I had better options. And anyway, I was in California, land of the weird. Carl Little Crow fit right in with my sense of the Left Coast. I’d never met or seen anyone like him. A cross between Cochise and Ratso Rizzo.
“Sure,” I said. “Okay. You’re my sponsor.” As if I were doing him a big favor.
Breakfast came. We dug in. I learned that he was not from here. A back-alley gutter drunk from Chicago, he had come west with a recovery poet buddy named Fritz, otherwise known as Red Man. Had I met Red Man yet?
“No.”
“You will, Little Brother! You will!”
Asked me to tell him exactly what was going on in my life currently. I explained about losing my little girl, Isadora, how I ended up heartbroken, lost, in Tompkins Square Park, not caring anymore if I died, and how Jim Brodey the poet told me to save myself, and next I knew, Philip led me to Jackie, who 12-stepped me into my first meeting. I told about Bernadette and Brick, and where I now lived and what I was doing. Described the voices that spoke to me as I walked around on Haight Street, the glaring lantern-eyed toothless and tattooed devils that followed me, and what horrors I felt sure lay in store for me. I told him that right at that moment there were operatives of several intelligence agencies unde
rtaking surveillance of my every move. They were outside the restaurant—in all likelihood our conversation was being recorded.
I asked him what he thought of all that.
“Wonderful!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands. “And yet, you’re staying sober anyway. Why would you, if you’re so sure that you will meet a terrible end?”
I didn’t know how to answer that.
“Part of you suspects that it’s not true, even though it seems so real. That part of you is the part that wants to live. The Great Spirit is watching over you. You are a sobriety warrior, offering your chest to the bullets like a brave on his pony charging the horseback soldiers, indifferent to death. And the bullets cannot touch you! You are immune! In fact, the soldiers are phantoms.”
“It feels damned real when it’s happening.”
“But do you think it’s real?
“Part of me does.”
He nearly jumped out of his seat. In other booths, people looked around. “HO!” he cried. “Then do you think that you are crazy?”
“Yeah! I do!”
“Good! Wonderful! Because, Little Brother, you ARE crazy! And so what choice do you have but to enjoy it! Stop fighting how crazy you are! All your suffering comes from trying to pretend that you are sane.”
I knew he was right. I began to laugh from deep down.
“So, tell me, Carl Little Crow. Let’s say you’re right. It’s all delusions. Then what is real?”
“Sobriety is real. And the breath. The rest is mental, conjectural sleight of hand. God is in the breath. The Great Reality is deep within. And the way in is through the breath. You breathe involuntarily, despite yourself. It breathes you, without your permission. It doesn’t need your cooperation. You are helpless not to breathe. If breath is cut off, you will do all you can to find air. Breath is the source of your life. Breath is the gateway to God.”
Intellectually, I grasped what he meant, but viscerally had no real idea what he was talking about. Besides, was too worried about that strange, sinister-looking couple in an adjoining booth eyeballing me hungrily, no doubt thinking of the awful tortures they would subject me to once they had me in their clutches.
I told Carl about them. He turned, saw them, went over and chatted. When he returned he told me that they were not only good friends but also long-timers in recovery.
I looked pleadingly at him. All my defenses down. “Okay, so, you can see. I do need help, man. I think I’m insane. The fear is bad. It’s like it fills the air, all around, in everything, a world of fear. I’m crazy. Really crazy.” Tears filled my eyes. To think of me, in San Francisco, alone, confessing my madness to this Carl Little Crow, a self-described “Afro-Native American practitioner of shamanistic healing ways,” whatever the hell that was. Less than a dime in my pocket, a thirty-seven-and-a-half-year-old man with a month sober. How had I gotten here?
But it’s better than the park, the little voice inside reminded me, my Angel. It’s better than hangover, hunger, and hopelessness. Drinking got you here. But now, you have hope.
“Do you think there’s hope for me, Carl?”
His hands shot up, palms out, facing me. “HO! Little Brother! Do you see these hands?”
“Yes.”
“Are they steady?”
“Yes.”
“Look at my eyes.”
“So?”
“Are they clear?”
“Yes.”
“Look into my heart.”
“How? ”
“Close your eyes.”
I did.
“What do you see?”
“Chaos.”
But then something else appeared. A sort of calm, gentle, rhythmic breathing. “Is that me or you?” I said, a bit spooked.
“There’s no difference,” he said. “We are all one heart, one mind, one breath, brothers and sisters, members of the same family, the Society of the Last Chance.”
I opened my eyes and felt calmer.
“Little Brother. Come, walk with me.”
We strolled down Haight Street, past all the shops. Carl fit right in with the other weirdos out in the midmorning sun on the sidewalk, strumming guitars or reading tarot or just panhandling. As we walked, Carl glanced down at my shoes. “Slow your feet, Little Brother. Slow down. When we drink we are running from consciousness, from feelings, from the sight of the world. But now, we take it in. We savor it. We walk slow, observing our breath, letting our thoughts think themselves, without trying to interfere or control them. Slow your feet and breathe the perfume of clean-and-sober air.”
As he slowed, so did I, and as we walked he beat a slow tattoo on the medicine drum, as if announcing our clean-and-sober passage to passersby, who smiled, thinking us holy fools, a piece of local color, and the street folk grinned and nodded. Some called out to Carl, knew him. We passed a liquor store, and it was as though we moved under the murderous gaze of a gigantic panting tiger hungry for our flesh—and yet, nothing happened. We paused before a tree, one of those rotting on Haight Street, with shriveled sooty leaves and an emaciated trunk scarred with slogans, names, dates, crudely etched with pocket knives. Around Carl’s feet, small black birds with rainbow glints of bluish light in their coat feathers hopped by his ankles, as he leaned an ear close to the tree trunk and said to me: “Shhhhhh! It’s trying to tell us something.”
“Carl, what are you doing?”
“Listening, Little Brother.”
“To what?”
“To the tree.”
“Oh, yeah? And what’s Mister Tree saying?”
“It says to tell you, Little Brother: ‘Don’t drink!’ ”
54
CARL WOULD COME TO MY ROOM WHEN Bernadette was gone and sit on the floor cross-legged, listening to whatever I had to say. When he left, there’d be a ten-dollar bill on the table. He came by once with sage and “cleansed” the room of “bad spirits”—lit the sage and waved the thick smudge stick over each corner of the room with solemn incantations as I stood by with arms crossed and a condescending smile.
He had me sit out with him on the little back porch watching clouds pass as my brain screamed with boredom and dread, racing at light speed, wondering whether he was insane, or I, or both of us, and what on earth did it mean in the big scheme of things that I was seated on rusty metal folding chairs with a bizarro named Little Crow who had me occupied with watching clouds float over San Francisco?
All this wasn’t in the existential game book of my strategy for life. He came by once with a half-gallon of Peach Melba ice cream, asked if I had two large spoons, which I produced. Carl jumped up and down like a kid at a birthday party as I pried off the lid and dug out my first spoonful. “Yessssssss!” he crooned gleefully. “Thank you, Great Spirit! Little Brother and I having a clean-and-sober ice cream party on Wednesday afternoon, and there’s nothing else we have to do right now! AYE!-AYE! HO!-HO! HEE!-HEE! HEE!-HEE!”
We ate ourselves into a sugar coma, conversation fading to a battery-dying tape-recorder drawl, and when he said goodbye, I collapsed into bed and slept until the next day. That was how I got in yet another twenty-four hours clean and sober.
He liked to walk around San Francisco with me, hitting 12-step meetings where he shared with the fiery cant of an Elmer Gantry crossed with a Dakota war chief. We’d go to visit specific trees in Golden Gate Park that he claimed friendship with, and he stood unashamedly talking aloud to them as though visiting regal monarchs. The granddaddy of them all was an immense and nameless bark monument which he called, simply, “Grandfather,” and from the moment we saw it at a distance his feet slowed and he began to beat his medicine drum in slow parade step, me trailing behind, mortified, pretending not to know him and watching as tourists and parkgoers, especially children, paused to observe him with smiles ranging from admiring to ridiculing. Then, at a certain remove, he stopped, laid down his drum, and raising hands, palms out, shouted at the tree: “HO! Grandfather! How are you today?” And listened respectfully as I stood th
ere, looking around, not hearing anything.
“HO, Grandfather!” Carl Little Crow called again. “Here is little Brother, my friend. He is a warrior initiate in matters of the spirit. He is learning. We are walking together on the path as we cast off the great shadow of alcoholism from our hearts. Come, Little Brother! Say hello to Grandfather!”
He waved me forward as a group of Japanese tourists with cameras hung around their necks gathered and began to snap shots. I made a shrugging approach to the tree, tinged with skepticism and insolence.
“Little Brother,” whispered Little Crow. “Give Grandfather a loving hug! Go ahead! He’s so excited to meet you! He likes hugs!”
“Look, uh, Carl,” I said. “You know, I’m really glad you’re helping me, but, uh, you know, is this really necessary?”
“Yessssssss, Little Brother! Go on! He’s waiting!”
Horrified, I stepped up to the tree, glanced over my shoulder as the tourists hoisted their cameras and Carl beat a slow tom-tom on the drum. Got my arms around the trunk as best I could and hugged Grandfather.
And the damndest thing happened. I felt as though something warm and alive from the tree passed into me. The bark felt flesh-like, kindly, and I smelled its wood odor and leaves with the warm sun on my hair as a breeze stroked my cheek, and it felt good, nurturing. Something inside me longed for a grandfather, which I’d never really had, and I forgot all about the tourists, who lost interest, dispersed. I remained with eyes closed, cheek pressed to the tree as Little Crow beat the drum softly in my thoughts, like the pulse of the world, and when I let go the bark turned hard, the breeze fell, a cloud passed before the sun, and my hand grew cold. I stood in shadow, experienced a pang of separation, as though I had let go of the hand of my real grandfather, who in actuality had died when I was very young, and the other before I was ever born.
55
ONE DAY, I AWOKE CLUTCHING AT MY THROAT. A wolf burrowed bared teeth into my Adam’s apple, big paws pinning down my chest, trying to sink long incisors into my jugular. I thrashed, hands at my windpipe, shouting for help.
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