Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (27 page)

“Can you imagine all that trouble from just having a smoke now and then?”

I laughed sadly. “That's a terrible story. Can I be perfectly honest with you?”

“Sure.”

I watched her face. It must have worn the same expression just before the Peruvian struck her.

“I want you to know that I think, first of all, that you're a hell of a brave lady, taking care of your children the best you humanly
can. This is a hard world. It can't be easy, alone with three kids, and having to make some hard choices. I think you're really great.”

Surprised tears started in her eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

“And, well, about the smoking thing, I don't know. I smoke. Nasty habit. But it never got me to the streets. Drinking did that. And I heard some drinking in your story. I don't know. Wonder if that's a cause?”

She didn't look hurt. Taken aback, but not offended. “Well, maybe,” she said. “It never—well, maybe it did occur to me, a little, but not as
the
problem. But I'm willing to think about that. Especially seeing as it comes from someone who knows about it a hell of a lot more than I do, and is very nice and helpful and well-intentioned.”

I blushed. Told her about some of my experiences. And what getting into recovery had done for me already.

“How long's it been for you?”

“Eight days,” I said proudly. “Going on nine.”

She was impressed. Said: “I don't think I've ever gone eight hours without a little taste.” She asked what she should do. I told her to look in the Reno
Yellow Pages
under “alcoholism.” Recovery, I said, is all around us, if only we make an effort to find it and really want to change.

“I do,” she said. “I'm done.”

I nodded, and that's all there was to say.

In Reno, before she disembarked with the kids, a real operation, I handed her my recovery book. She clutched my hand tightly and gratefully and thanked me for helping. And could she have one last cigarette? I lit her up and sent her on her way.

It was my first effort to carry the message of recovery to another. And I don't know whether or not it took. But inside, I felt wonderful. And for the rest of the trip, I knew, I'd stay sober, right to California.

BERNADETTE LIVED IN THE MISSION DISTRICT. I called from the bus depot. She told me to come right over. I cabbed it, grinning out the window at the sunny San Francisco landscape, heart bursting with expectation. Arrived at a quaint white house on a pretty side street. Danced up the steps, garbage bag in hand, knocked. An angry, lanky, balding, goateed man in a black tee and blue jeans answered.

“You're Alan,” he said with extreme displeasure.

“Yeah,” I said, heart sinking.

“She's in there.”

He stepped aside. I entered. She was in a bedroom, the door to which she slammed shut behind me and threw her arms around my neck.

“Who's the guy in the bad mood?” I asked, smiling uneasily.

“That's Brick. I rent a room from him. And now he thinks he owns me.”

“He seemed very bummed that I'm here.”

“Oh, to hell with him,” she snarled. “It's his place and he's a damn control freak.” And standing close to the door, she screamed out: “FREAK!”

“But you guys aren't together, right?”

Well, not exactly. Yes and no. He was a drug dealer. Had agreed to lie to the INS on her behalf. He was her only source of income. She dealt too, on the side, small-change stuff, mainly pot, also a little coke. It paid the rent. But never mind about him. FUCK HIM! How long would I stay? How much money did I have?

“Fifty-four dollars after the cab,” I said.

 

We made love with desperate intensity. I was not to leave the room: Brick would be out there, lurking. Let her deal with him.

Come morning, she left to see friends who might help us move somewhere. She couldn't stand a day more with Brick.

But by midmorning, annoyed with my confinement, I left the room and found Brick seated at the wooden dining room table, cleaning a large-caliber silver-plated revolver.

“Mind if I sit?”

“Help yourself.”

Watched him clean the weapon with slow deliberate strokes. “Forty-four Magnum?”

“Yes.” He glared and went back to cleaning. “I hear,” he said, “that you served in the Israeli Army.”

“That's right.”

He nodded. Ran a rag dipped in gun oil through the chambers. “You know,” he said, “I'm the reason you're out here.”

“How do you figure?”

“She's afraid of me. So, she's got you now to stand between us when she moves out. That's what she wants, right? To move? You're her muscle.”

“I've got no truck with you. If she wants to move, what business is it of yours? Last I heard, this is a free country.”

I saw his rage spurt up into his throat and how hard he struggled to swallow it back down, face visibly trembling. “So, she does want to move?”

“Seems so.”

“That's where she went just now? To look for a place for the two of you?”

“Something like that.”

He nodded. Thrust a brush down the long gun barrel, twisted in and out. “I hear you're a writer.”

“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 undertaking 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?”