by Mandy Miller
I take a seat in the back row as the crowd filters in. Men, women, old, young, all shades and sizes. Some wear suits, others shorts and flip-flops. Some with hundred-dollar haircuts, others look like their last haircut was perpetrated by a blind man wielding blunt garden shears.
Seated between a young man wearing a faded Nirvana T-shirt, and a middle-aged man in a pinstriped suit who looks to belong more at the University Club than a church hall with a bunch of junkies, I survey tonight’s crowd. Who among us has robbed their grandmother of her Social Security money? Who has sold their body for a fix? Who has excused themselves from a business meeting to do a line of cocaine from a toilet seat lid with a hundred-dollar bill? Who has killed? Who will die soon?
On any given night, there are more than fifty AA or NA meetings in Fort Lauderdale. They happen in churches like St. Anthony’s, but also in back rooms of car dealerships, the library, high school gyms, and even one on the beach conveniently located in front of the Elbo Room, the oldest dive bar on The Strip. I come to St. Anthony’s because of its proximity to The Hurricane, but also because I like the anonymity of the large crowd. Absolute equality in mutual affliction. From time to time, I recognize an attendee and nod, but mostly I keep to myself. Here, I’m nobody. Not the one who took her life well-lived as a conscientious student, soldier, lawyer, wife, and threw it in the trash like junk mail. At St. Anthony’s I’m just like everyone else—trying to get by, one day at a time.
Every now and again, I go to an AA meeting at the community college downtown, but I mostly stick to NA and at St. A’s. I prefer NA over AA. The NA crowd’s harder core, more authentic, although the idea that someone who jams needles into her arm, foot, groin, is more authentic than someone who drinks a fifth of firewater every night, does seem perverted. Maybe I just enjoy NA’s no-holds-barred gallows humor about how it takes much longer to drink oneself to death than it does to OD and thus, drunks think they’ve got more time to cheat.
Not long after I started coming to St. A’s, Hachi, my soon-to-be sponsor, tried to lighten my mood with a well-worn NA joke. “You know the difference between drunks and junkies? The drunk steals your stuff, but the junkie steals your stuff then helps you look for it.”
So here I am. Still coming. Still sober. Scared shitless of losing it again. Of losing what’s left of my life.
A hand cups my ear. “Traffic sucks. Sorry I’m late.”
The hand belongs to Hachi. She’s a diminutive Seminole woman with cinnamon skin and a ready smile which belies the trouble she and her people have seen. She’s from Sugar Bay, a one-stoplight town on the banks of Lake Okeechobee, where addiction is as common as undocumented pickers. Hachi drives sixty miles east across Alligator Alley to attend meetings because there are no meetings in Sugar Bay. She says her people prefer stay loaded than get sober because all that would mean is they’d have to face what little’s been left to the descendants of the great Chief Osceola. She may be exaggerating a little, but if that’s what gets her here, I’ll let it slide.
A skinny woman shuffles up front to face the crowd. Even from the back row, I can see she’s short on teeth and long on nerves, body and voice trembling, a barely breathing live wire.
“My name is Beth, and I am an addict.”
“Hi, Beth,” the crowd replies.
Beth tells the story of how she used to be a second-grade teacher with a husband, two kids, and a home. Now she lives under the Third Avenue bridge, because she was raped at a homeless shelter—it’s safer to sleep on the streets. Beth describes having had back surgery two years ago, after which her doctor prescribed painkillers. When the prescription ran out, she asked for more, and then more again, and again after that. Eventually, the doctor refused, and Beth moved on to another doctor at a pain clinic, a place she’d seen advertised on the back of a free local rag. And then on to another clinic, and another, each one giving Beth what she thought she wanted. “They were prescription drugs, so I thought it was okay,” she says. But as with all things that seem too good to be true, she was wrong.
Hachi grasps my hand and squeezes tight.
“It was easy,” Beth says. “I kept showing them my old MRI from before the surgery. I said my back still hurt. I’d get three hundred and sixty blues, you know, Oxy, and a hundred and twenty Xanax every monthly visit at every clinic. Nobody checks how much you’re getting. But the more I took, the more I wanted. I started to sell half my stash to buy the next. Before I knew it, I was shooting up heroin in the public bathroom at the bus station. And then I got arrested. When I got out of jail, my husband was tired of believing my promises to quit, so he moved the kids out of state, and I moved in under the bridge.”
From my days prosecuting drug crimes, I know all about pill mills. So-called pain clinics are one-stop shops for junkies like Beth. Like me. For a couple of hundred dollars, a “patient” can see a doctor and spin tales about the pain she’s in that would make a soap-opera writer proud. A few chart notes later, the doctor hands over a prescription for 240 thirty-milligram tablets of OxyContin, and throws in prescriptions for Xanax and Adderall for good measure. The unholy trinity―one painkiller, one tranquilizer, and one stimulant―the addict’s version of heaven on earth, courtesy of Big Pharma. One hundred percent legal. Often one hundred percent lethal.
After Beth’s brutal testimonial, the moderator suggests a break which, in NA speak means “time for a cigarette.” I’m no longer a smoker, but a time-out from the despair seems like a good idea, so Hachi and I troop out to the parking lot with the band of not so merry-makers.
“Grace, sooner or later you’re going to have to get up there,” Hachi says.
I pretend I haven’t heard her, routing around in my bag for a piece of Nicorette.
“I know you said they could make you come here, but they couldn’t make you say the words. But haven’t you been stubborn long enough?”
I start to walk away, but she grabs my shoulder.
“Come on, you’ve come a long way on the Twelve Steps. It would do you good to share.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I’ve never missed a meeting since I got out of jail. But it’s not my way to wear my heart on my sleeve.”
“That’s not what sharing is, and you know it. It’s about facing up.”
I stare up the inky night sky perforated by thousands of stars.
“Not that I think it’s a great idea, but if you can buy a bottle of booze every week, look at it for the entire seven days, and never take a sip, I’d say you’re strong enough to stand up there and share your story.”
“H, please, not tonight.”
“What was your poison this week?” She points at the plastic bag.
I feel my nostrils flare.
“Okay, okay, I’ll shut up,” she says, and leans against the wall beside me to watch the crowd milling around the parking lot, a captive audience for drug dealers. I’m glad to see a police cruiser across the street, its blue lights a reminder of the high cost of failure for all of us, no matter our vice.
She puts an arm around my shoulder. “How are you doing?”
“One day at a time, as they say. And I hope you’re keeping track of those days.”
Hachi keeps a log of the meetings I attend, which she sends monthly to the Bar on my behalf. She doesn’t much like the assignment, doesn’t much like authority at all for that matter, but, like me, she’s committed to my staying clean, so she puts up with reporting to the Man, as she calls any authority. Ten years of sobriety has done little to tone down Hachi’s rebellious nature, an instinct rooted deep in her Seminole history. Although staying sober has allowed her to rebuild her life and relationships with her family and friends who had written her off as a lost cause back when she was mainlining smack, she admits the urge has never gone away. Never will, she says, and it’s that concession, that inability to bullshit, that makes her the perfect sponsor for me. I’m not one for happy talk or false promises.
She turns to go back inside to make her own allocution.
“You coming?”
I shake my head, anxious to check on whether Zoe’s out of jail yet.
“Maybe we can grab a coffee soon?” she asks.
“You know where to find me.”
Once she’s gone, I pull out my phone and scroll through emails, one from Faith asking if I’m coming up to Palm Beach for her annual Labor Day clambake. Another from Marcus Jackson, one of the few people from my ASA life I still keep up with, asking me if I want to go to a preseason Dolphins game.
“I heard whoever did him gave him a blow job before he got capped.”
I look around for the source of the comment and spot a man and a woman leaning on the hood of a car a few feet away, smoking.
Pretending to be engrossed in my phone, I inch toward them.
“Yeah man, it’s so random,” says the cadaverous man. “Bet the parents are all pissy. Pay a fortune to send your kids to a school like that and…” He pantomimes shooting a gun.
The man’s companion, a woman with mushy features and yellow teeth, snorts, “Dude didn’t deserve it right where he got it, though,” she says, moving a curled hand up and down by her crotch.
They both dissolve into laughter, but, as if a switch has been flipped, the woman’s face hardens into a grimace. “Maybe the asshole got what he had coming.”
They take a few last drags on their cigarettes and disappear back inside.
I could follow them or wait for them until the meeting is over. But no. The powers that be may be able to make me go to meetings every night, but they cannot make me listen to every last tale of sorrow and loss. And the thought of waiting out here with the cops and the dealers hanging in the shadows, both waiting to take advantage of the ones that fall off the wagon tonight, is nothing I need to be part of.
I drop the plastic bag in the dumpster behind the church and head for home.
Chapter 11
The dog is as black as night, icy blue eyes like stars. The dog doesn’t bark, doesn’t move an inch. The dog just sits at attention, as if the dog has been waiting for me to come home.
I step through the gate.
“Vin, who you got there?” I say, approaching, but tentatively, given the size of the wolf-like beast. Some kind of behemoth mix. Shepherd? Husky?
The dog’s plume of a tail starts swishing back and forth.
The dog’s wearing a camouflage vest.
“Remember that last bad dream? When you asked me to keep you company until the storm passed?”
“Same damn nightmare every time.”
“And I told you I had a plan?” He holds out the leash. “Well, this here is my plan.”
I find myself stepping forward and taking the leash.
“Sweetheart, you shouldn’t be alone so much. So I thought—”
“You got me a dog?”
“Sure did,” Vinnie says, a look of childlike pride on his face.
I run my hand through the dog’s thick, bristly fur.
“Way I see it, you got bad dreams, and you’re alone too much, and you always had dogs as a kid, and—”
“And you didn’t ask me first?”
“Nope. Just got her.”
“Her?”
“Yep. A her. Like you.”
Vinnie commands the dog to stand, which the dog does. On three legs. The back left leg is missing.
“You got me a dog with three legs?”
“Yep. Like I said, just like you.”
“I have one leg and a fake.”
“True, but you get the idea. She’s a tripod, at least that’s what Dogs of War call her.”
The dog licks my hand and sets about sniffing my pant legs.
“Dogs of War?”
“That’s the rescue where I got her. They bring retired military dogs back from war zones and adopt them out to help veterans. Like you.”
I zero in on the embroidered words on the dog’s vest—Working Dog. Do Not Pet.
“You think I need help?”
“Sweetheart, we all need help sometimes, right?”
I ruffle the dog’s ridiculously large teepee-shaped ears. “You are a pretty girl.”
The dog’s tail wags double time.
“Look, she likes you. I knew she would,” Vinnie says.
“Likable, right. That’s the first word people use to describe me.” I hold out a hand for her to sniff. “What service?”
Vinnie’s face darkens. “She was assigned to a Marine handler in Afghanistan. They got ambushed when they were out on patrol. Handler was killed and she was shot in the leg. Had to amputate it to save her, so she was no good as a military dog no more. Dogs of War paid for her to be brought back and to find her a home.”
I point at myself.
“Yep, you. Your casa is her casa now. You have some training to do together, but other than that she’s good to go.”
“Wait a minute. I’m the vet here. How’d you get her?”
Vinnie bites his lip, as clear a confession of guilt as I’ve ever seen.
I raise a hand. “I don’t want to know.”
Vinnie pulls several pages from his back pocket. “Your discharge papers.”
“I can’t believe you took those!” I reach out and snatch them back.
He pulls a dog biscuit from his pocket. “Sit, Miranda, sit,” he says, and she does, long pink tongue lolling to one side.
“Her name’s Miranda?”
“Yep, Miranda. That’s always been her name. They said it wasn’t good to change it.”
I cover my face with my free hand, keeping the dog I now know to be Miranda, on a tight leash with the other.
“Wha…What’s wrong? You don’t like her?”
I pull my hand away from my face and laugh so hard Vinnie starts laughing too.
After a few seconds he stops. “Why are we laughing?”
“Miranda? Really?
“So?”
“You have the right to remain silent, etc. etc. You remember that, don’t you?”
His eyes widen. “Like the Miranda warnings the cops read you to get you to tell them all the shit you’d rather not talk about?”
I extend my hand. “That’s ten bucks for you this time.”
Vinnie’s hand goes to his mouth. “Oops.”
“And yes, Miranda from Miranda versus Arizona, the most famous criminal case ever.”
“She’s perfect for you, right?” he says, a slight note of worry in his voice.
“Come on, black hair, blue eyes, missing a leg, what dog could be more perfect for me?” I lever myself onto my knees, not the most elegant of moves given the lack of flexibility in Oscar’s ankle area, and Miranda hops up and gives me a kiss on the nose. “She’s got a little hitch in her giddy-up, but she gets around pretty good for an old war dog.”
Vinnie stands back like a proud father. “I’d say you both do,” he says, but his words are muffled due to the fact that I have my face buried in my dog’s warm, furry neck.
***
My phone rings.
Vinnie levels a BBQ spatula the size of a shovel at me. “Let it go, why don’t you? Nothing good happens after the sun goes down,” he says, flipping a burger high in the air. “Unless it’s happens between the sheets. If you know what I mean.”
“Men, all the damn same. Right, girl?” I say to Miranda, her eyes fixed on the flying patty.
I pull the phone from my pocket. I can’t take the chance of missing a paying client. Criminals get arrested during their workday, which is night. “Hel-lo,” I say between bites.
“And she wasn’t breathing and there was blood, and…” It’s as if I’ve walked in on a conversation, each word merging into the next in a manic flood.
It’s a woman. Can’t quite place the voice.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!”
I hold the phone away from my ear, the screams like nails on a blackboard. Miranda’s ears prick up and she sits at attention, as if she’s waiting for a command.
“Who is this?”
Silence for a
second. “It’s me, Gretchen. Zoe’s mother, for Christ’s sake.”
“She hit her head when she fell. There was blood all over.”
“Who? Zoe?”
“Yes, Zoe!”
“Fell where? How?”
“In her—” her voice cracks.
“Slow down, Gretchen. Take a deep breath and start at the beginning.”
She’s gasping, trying to get out the words.
“Anton and I were at a function at the Ritz.”
“Wait, what? First tell me, did you bail Zoe out?”
“Yes, but they didn’t let her out until 4 a.m. Can you believe that? Who’s running that place?”
“Gretchen, what about Zoe? Is she okay?”
“You asked me to start at the beginning, so stop cutting me off!”
I bite my tongue.
“We had committed to the gala months ago. We’re major donors, you know.”
I focus on the rhythm of the electric-blue pool water eddying around the filter to stop myself from saying, “Of course you are.” Instead, I say, “Go on.”
“And Anton goes to Guatemala to perform cleft-palate surgeries for free every year. And so we went. To the gala, I mean. We thought it best to keep up appearances.”
“Gretchen, dammit! Tell me, what happened to Zoe?”
“We shouldn’t have left her alone.”
“Jesus. What happened?”
“Okay, okay.” A few deep breaths. “My husband ordered in her favorite meal, spaghetti and meatballs. When we left, she was on the computer in her room. She said she’d be fine.”
“Go on.”
“We didn’t stay long at the gala. Well, I didn’t. I left about nine o’clock. Anton stayed.”
“And?”
“And when I got home, I knocked on Zoe’s bedroom door, but she didn’t answer. She has a hard time sleeping, she’s never asleep early. But I thought maybe she had headphones on or something. I went to my room to get ready for bed.”