A Drop of the Hard Stuff (30 page)

I couldn’t take my eyes off the glass. I’d had glasses of that size and shape when I lived with Anita and the boys in Syosset. Like every proper suburbanite, I’d had a fully equipped bar in the den, with all the glasses one might be called upon to provide for one’s guests. And, while nobody had ever asked me to mix up a batch of old-fashioneds, that was the glass of choice for serving a drink on the rocks. This wasn’t one of the glasses from that set, which I could only presume were still in the finished basement of the Syosset house, but it was that type.

Yet I could swear I recognized the glass. It was just the sort in which Jimmy Armstrong served drinks on the rocks.

Or a double bourbon, straight up, no ice, if that was your pleasure.

This glass, this glass on my desk, was filled to within perhaps a half inch of its brim with a clear amber liquid. I was able to identify it as a bourbon called Maker’s Mark. There may be gifted human beings who could have made that identification on the basis of the color and aroma alone, but I am not one of them. I did not recognize the brand so much as I deduced it, and I based my deduction on the presence of the bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon that stood on my desk just a few inches from the glass.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look anywhere but where I was looking—at the desk, at the glass and the bottle.

Thoughts rushing at me, one after the other:

It was a hallucination. There was no bottle, no glass, no smell of whiskey.

It was a dream. I’d come home, I’d lain down for a nap, and now I was having an impossibly vivid drunk dream.

It was my sobriety that was the illusion, the hallucination. I’d been chipping around for months, having a drink here and a drink there, telling myself and everyone I knew that I didn’t drink anymore. But it was all a lie, a 364-day lie, and the proof lay before me, because I’d poured a drink before I left my room that morning and there it was, waiting for me on my return.

I blinked, and it was still there. I forced myself to look away, and then looked back, and it was still there. I felt myself drawn toward it. I wanted to approach it, not to pick it up, God no, not to touch it, but to somehow make it go away. I had to make it go away. I couldn’t let it stay there.

I don’t know how long I stood there, neither approaching the desk nor walking away from it. Then finally I wrenched myself away, yanked the door open, slammed it shut, locked the whiskey away behind it. I rushed down the hall, didn’t even ring for the elevator. I dashed down the stairs and out into the street.

D
URING MY DRINKING DAYS
, there were worse things than hangovers. Blackouts were worse—coming to and realizing there were vast holes in one’s memory, hours when some other part of oneself was running things, steering the car and grinding the gears. Seizures were worse, and waking up in a hospital bed in restraints. And, more subtly, the day-by-day erosion of one’s whole life, that surely was worse than a hangover.

Hangovers were bad enough, however, and some of them were worse than others. But what I remember most vividly in that regard is not so much any particular hangover as the way one of them ended.

I was in my hotel room, and I felt terrible, and knew that the only thing that would ease my pain was a drink. And of course there was nothing in my room to drink. If there had been, I’d have drunk it the night before.

So I got myself dressed and downstairs and around the
corner, and it must have been around eleven because Armstrong’s was open but the lunch crowd wasn’t there yet. In fact the place was empty, or the closest thing to it, and Billie Keegan was behind the stick, and he took one look at me and knew not to say a word. Instead he set a glass on the top of the bar, and filled it about halfway full, so that I wouldn’t spill it if my hands happened to shake a little.

I stood there while he poured, and I took a breath, and I felt better. I hadn’t had a chance to get the alcohol to my lips yet, let alone into my bloodstream, but its simple physical proximity made all the difference. It was there, and I was going to be able to drink it, and it would help me feel better again—and because I knew this I felt better already.

I thought of this when, finally, I heard Jim Faber’s voice.

First I had to find a phone that worked. Then I had to dial his number, and wait while it rang, and when his wife answered I had to ask to speak to Jim. She said, “He’s not here, Matt. He’s got a rush job keeping him at the shop. Do you need the number?”

“I have it,” I said. “And I’ve got plenty of quarters too.”

I don’t know what she might have made of that, because I broke the connection before I could find out. I spent one of those abundant quarters, and waited while it rang, and then he answered. And right away I felt better.

“I don’t think you had a hallucination,” he said. “I know that sort of thing can happen, but that’s not what this sounds like to me. I think you’ve got a real glass of bourbon on your desk, and a real bottle keeping it company. You said Maker’s Mark?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, if you’re determined to hallucinate, you might as well go straight to the top shelf. I only had it a couple of times myself,
but it seems to me that Maker’s Mark was pretty decent sippin’ whiskey.”

“I used to know a woman who liked it.”

“You don’t suppose—”

“She’s dead,” I said. “She died a long time ago.”

Carolyn, from the Caroline. Another name for my Eighth Step list, I thought, if I stayed sober long enough to write one.

“You didn’t pour it for yourself, Matt, and you’re not in the middle of a drunk dream either. You went out this morning, and that was waiting for you when you got back. You know what happened.”

“I left the door locked.”

“So?”

“It wouldn’t be that hard to swipe a key from behind the desk. Or to open the door without one.”

“And?”

“And somebody came into my room,” I said, “and brought a bottle with him.”

“And a glass from Armstrong’s.”

“It could have been from anyplace. Half the bars in the city have that kind of rocks glass.”

“So he brought a bottle and a glass.”

“And set the stage,” I said. “Poured a drink. Left the bottle there, with the cap off.”

“Just the one glass. Inconsiderate bastard, wasn’t he? Suppose you had company?”

I said, “Jim, he wanted me to drink.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“You didn’t even want to, did you?”

I thought about it. “No,” I said, “I didn’t. But at the same time
I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I felt like a bird hypnotized by a snake.”

“Stands to reason.”

“I found the thought of drinking it terrifying. As if it might jump off the desk and pour itself down my throat. As if it had that power.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was magnetic,” I said. “I didn’t want it, but I was drawn to it anyway.”

“You’re an alcoholic,” he said.

“Well, we knew that.”

“Yeah, and we just got some more evidence, in case we entertained the slightest doubt.”

“I wanted to pour it down the sink,” I said.

“Better than keeping it around.”

“But I was afraid to go near it. I didn’t want to take a step in that direction, let alone pick it up.”

“You were right.”

“I was? Isn’t it crazy, giving the shit that kind of power?”

“It’s already got the power.”

“I guess.”

“The way you give it more power,” he said, “is by picking it up and drinking it. And the first step in picking it up and drinking it is picking it up at all.”

“So I left it there.”

“And locked the door on it. What time is it? Shit.”

“What’s the matter?”

“This isn’t something for you to do all by yourself,” he said. “I’d go with you after the meeting, assuming I can wrap this up in time to go to the meeting, but I don’t like the idea of letting it sit there for the next few hours. Or letting you sit somewhere
between now and meeting time, locked out of your room and with no place to go. I’d come over now, but—”

“No, you’ve got work to do.”

“It would be really inconvenient to leave now. You’ve got phone numbers, right? People in the program, people who live nearby?”

“Sure.”

“And you’ve got quarters.”

“And subway tokens,” I said, “though I can’t see how one of those will come in handy right now.”

“You never know. You’re where? Down the block from your hotel?”

“Five blocks away. It took me that long to find a working phone without somebody already using it.”

“Make some calls. Get somebody to keep you company, and call me as soon as you pour out the booze. Will you do that?”

“Sure.”

“Call me from your room. And if you can’t find somebody, don’t go back to your room alone.”

“I won’t.”

“Call me instead. And we’ll figure out something. Matt?”

“What?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Sometimes things get a little crazy right before a person’s anniversary.”

There were a couple of phone numbers I didn’t have to look up. Two of them were Jim’s, of course, at home and at his place of business, and another was Jan’s. I’d already spoken to Jim and I wasn’t about to call Jan.

I’d have called her if I had to. When I was just starting to string sober days together, before we’d begun to become a couple, she’d made me promise to call her before I picked up a drink.
In the world we shared, sobriety trumped everything, so even if we had ceased keeping company, either of us could call the other in order to stay sober.

But not now. There were plenty of other people I could call, and they were a lot closer than Lispenard Street.

I was limited, though, to the ones whose numbers were in my wallet. Now and then someone will hand me a card, or a slip of paper, and I’ll find room for it in my wallet until I get a chance to copy it into my book. I have a little memo book, itself about the size of a business card, that I use for AA phone numbers, and that’s where they wind up. I keep the book in my room, next to the phone, so that it’s handy if I want to call someone. I almost never do, the only AA calls I make with any frequency are to Jim, but it’s good to have the book, if only because I can periodically copy down new phone numbers and clear out my wallet.

The point of this is that I now needed to call someone, and I had plenty of phone numbers, but they were all in the book. If I wanted to have someone with me when I returned to my room, I was largely limited to whatever numbers were still in my wallet. There were a few of those, and the first one I came to was Motorcycle Mark. I caught him on his way out the door, and he said that was no problem, he didn’t have anything to do that wouldn’t keep. Where should he meet me?

I said I’d meet him at my hotel, and by the time I’d walked the four or five blocks he was already there, with his bike parked out front. On our way through the lobby he said he’d noticed the hotel hundreds of times, and often wondered what it was like inside. It seemed all right, he said, and I agreed that it wasn’t bad.

The door to my room was locked, as I’d left it, and as I was fitting the key in the lock I had this sudden image of finding the room not as I remembered it but as I’d left it that morning, with no bottle and no glass and no smell of whiskey. And Mark, in his
boots and leather jacket and with his helmet under his arm, would nod his head knowingly and talk gently to me in that tone you use with ambulatory psychotics. Calming me down, talking me off the ledge.

The image was so vivid it made me reluctant to open the door. But I did, of course, and it was all still there, the uncapped bottle of Maker’s Mark, the glass filled almost to the brim, the chair positioned to welcome me, and the raw smell of bourbon suffusing the room.

“Fucking Jesus,” Mark said.

“That’s what I walked in on.”

“Man, the smell! It’s like a fucking distillery. That’s not from one drink sitting in a glass.”

“It’s strong, isn’t it?”

He moved past me, walked over to the bed. “Come here, Matt. Look.”

That was what made the smell so strong. My pillow and mattress were soaked. My visitor had upended a bottle of bourbon over my bed.

I turned from it, went to the desk. The open bottle had no more than a couple of ounces missing, less than the glass contained. So he’d come to my room with a glass and two bottles, poured a drink, emptied a bottle on my bed, and left me plenty of bourbon to get good and drunk on.

“Unbelievable, man. Who could pull some shit like this?”

“Steve,” I said.

“You know the guy?”

“Just his name.”

He shook his head, and we both stood there for a moment, taking it all in. Then he said, “First things first, Matt. The bottle and the glass.”

“Right.”

“You want me to—”

“No, let me do it,” I said, and picked up the glass and carried it into the bathroom. I held the thing at arm’s length, as if it were a snake that might whip its head around and bite me, and I upended it over the sink and ran water to wash its contents down the drain. I held the glass under the tap and rinsed it out, and then I dropped it in the wastebasket. It was a perfectly good drinking glass, and perfectly safe now that I’d rinsed the residue of bourbon out of it, but what did I need with it?