The Next Right Thing

OFFICIALLY, I STARTED DESTROYING MY LIFE
that Wednesday morning. But it had been on my mind for a while.

As I drove up Pacific Coast Highway past the Laguna Art Museum, I suddenly longed for still-sort-of-disreputable Santa Ana, where there would have been a neighborhood nearby that would better reflect my mood. There’s nothing worse than a beautiful town when you’ve got an ugly head. From every corner of always-blooming Laguna Beach, bougainvillea announced that unhappiness was not an option here.

It had been almost three weeks since Terry died, and I hadn’t done a damn thing but drink espresso and avoid the people who loved me.

It reminded me of when I first got sober. I didn’t want to drink, but I held the idea of drinking close, like a suicide bomb
inside my heart. Just bend my elbow and a world of possibilities would open up. Bad possibilities, but possibilities nevertheless. I’d never see my daughter again, but I’d make sure that a few people paid for their sins.

I could hear Terry’s voice:
Clamoring for justice again? Is that it, Randy?

I was waiting for the light beside the Cottage to change, staring into a pack of well-dressed skateboarders pointed toward Heisler Park, when my cell phone rang. It was Wade’s number, so I didn’t answer. Sometimes you’re too lonely to talk to your friends.

Instead, I drove my F-350 up to Jean Claude’s café in North Laguna. Like every other morning these three weeks, I would park my ass in a molded plastic chair beside a molded plastic table and try to clear my mind with double espressos.

That morning the sidewalk and the shrubs were still dewy. Across the parking lot, surfers were jaywalking across Coast Highway, shrugging into wet suits, blowing their noses into the street. Above the beach access, a gray shelf of fog announced the Pacific Ocean.

At a table nearby, a couple of rich people waved at me tentatively. I vaguely remembered being introduced to them by someone who thought I might design their home. She was too old to be his daughter and too pretty to be his first wife. I’d probably been dodging their calls, but they wouldn’t approach me here. I had perfected my sullenness. It was another way that my old life clung to me: sometimes I scared people.

For three weeks, I’d been pretending I was just a home designer and not that earlier, angrier version of myself. It wasn’t working. Every day it got harder to pretend I was anyone but myself.

Jean Claude set down another double espresso on the flimsy table. He was hardworking Eurotrash—a contradiction I liked. Also, the only guy in Southern California who didn’t look like he’d grown his goatee yesterday.

“Ça va?”
he asked.

“
Ça
fucking
va
. How about you? Who are you humping these days?”

“An important man, works for Obama. He’s too good for me, though. I want somebody bad, like you.”

One good thing had come out of the past three weeks: I’d finally found a way to describe the sound of my diseased conscience. It was a Styrofoam ice chest wedged behind the seat of an old pickup. The rougher the road, the louder it squeaked, until the noise became unbearable.

My cell phone rang again as Jean Claude was clearing away my second double espresso. This time I answered: “What the fuck do you want, Wade?”

“It’s not Wade. It’s Tom. Wade got into a fight. He wanted me to call you.”

“Tell him that I’m not coming.” I hung up.

They couldn’t be anywhere but the Coastal Club, one of the places I was avoiding, a place that I’d been avoiding even before Terry died. I poured my espresso into a sip cup and sped out of the parking lot. Something that had stuck with me from that lost decade of being a cop: running out of coffee shops and driving away too fast.

A simple white building in a glade of oak and eucalyptus just off Laguna Canyon Road, the Coastal Club was nicer than most
A.A. clubs because a rich gallery owner had endowed it thirty years ago. Then it took them almost half that thirty years to decide on a design. It was just down the road from the old Bhagwan Ranjeesh place—now a nursery school—and you could have mistaken it for a deal like that. The architectural equivalent of a freshly laundered linen nightgown. They’d done a good job.

I hated going there, but it was the place where my life began. Once I would have slept there if they had let me. I first met Terry in the gravel parking lot where I was now skidding my truck into a swirl of dust.

Wade stood at the front door beside Tom and several other fools from the seven
A.M.
meeting. It seemed like everyone but Wade wanted to tell me what had happened. But they were a little scared to tell me, too. Since Terry’s death, I’d become an authorized repository for community grief. One reason I hadn’t attended a single meeting since the funeral was that I was sick of people looking at me as though I might break down or explode. Wade’s pal Tom, an overweight photojournalist who’d taken the highway patrol on a chase through two counties last summer, gave me a jaunty and ridiculous salute. He and a guy I didn’t know at all, with dark glasses and a bomber jacket, stood behind Wade like Secret Service agents: arms at their sides but ready.

When I rolled up beside the curb, Wade said, “
Dude
.”

“In the truck,” I answered.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Tom said. “Troy Padilla came out of nowhere.”

“Out of
nowhere
,” the other guy underlined.

“In the truck, please,” I said to Wade.

“His dad’s a mafioso or something,” Tom explained. “He knows how to do that shit.”

“In the fucking truck.”

When we got back to my house above Bluebird Canyon, MP—only her father calls her Mary Pat—was back from yoga training and drilling up something in the blender that I might drink if I were dying of cancer. She gave Wade a hug. They’d gone to Catholic high school together in Ranch Santa Margarita. Wade had grown up surfing and perfecting his substance abuse and brushing his blond hair out of his eyes. MP had grown up riding horses, wishing she weren’t flat-chested, and steering clear of boys like Wade.

“He won’t talk to me,” Wade said. “All the way over here, he wouldn’t speak.”

“You guys are going to have to work this out,” MP said. “While I’m somewhere else.”

“He thinks I’m lying to him. This dude came out of nowhere to punch me, and he thinks
I’m
lying.”

I sat down on the Indian daybed that MP had found for me at a swap meet. Not as comfortable as my Eames chair, but it provided me a great view of my home. I’d taken a midcentury hillside ranch-style and redone the interior as contemporary cottage. Eclectic furniture like this daybed contrasted with the white ceilings, white walls, and white plank flooring. I had used traditional materials and hadn’t goobered them up with too many fixtures. Reclaimed oak beams in the ceiling were the darkest element by far. Otherwise, it was a playground for the light from the hills.

I’ll always be happy to see Wade—forever, for the rest of my life—but he’s the guy who finds your kitchen first. The guy who wonders if you’ve made coffee. The guy who pleads his case to your girlfriend. The guy who was now scanning my living room.
We’d been friends long enough that I could read his mind:
Is that a new Blu-ray player? The kind that records? How much does something like that cost?
You’d think he was still a crack-addicted surf rat instead of a guy with a modest trust fund and an afternoon job as a scuba instructor.

I’ll never not love him, though. Him and Terry.

“Coffee?” Wade asked.

MP shook her head and punched up the blender again. She was the only brunette with bangs I would ever love.

“Not until you drop the bullshit,” I said.

“Bullshit?”

MP had her back to me, but I could feel her smiling.

“The bullshit about how this guy attacked you for no reason.”