The Next Right Thing (11 page)

“Welcome to the meeting. Is this your first time with us?” he asked me.

“Screw yourself, Frank. Have you met our latest science experiment—Troy?”

“Science experiment?” Frank said.

“Wade and I are bringing him to meetings to see if they cure his alcoholism,” I said. “If they do, we’re going to try it ourselves.”

Frank shook Troy’s hand. “You must be in bad shape, hanging around with these two. I’ll say a prayer. Maybe a few.”

The Coastal Club’s meeting room was large and airy, with sliding glass doors along the north and south walls. There was no smoking anywhere inside the building. Not since the day it was built.

We got coffee and took seats around the end of a long table near the back wall. The Knife in the Head Men’s Stag was named after a founder of the meeting who had once been so drunk that he got stabbed in the head and didn’t notice. A “stag” was a meeting for men only. Terry and Wade and I used to be regulars here. One of the abiding rituals of the meeting used to be this old-timer from Oklahoma who’d tell any newcomer who had risked sharing his pain or confusion: “It doesn’t sound to me like you’re done drinking, son. You’d better get back out there and do it right.”

One night that newcomer had been me. I’d wanted to shoot the hillbilly bastard in both kneecaps. With ten minutes of time for reflection between each of the shots.

After a few years, we had followed Terry to another men’s stag at an Episcopal Church downtown. Terry called it the Fluffy Sweater Men’s Stag. Every fall, half the meeting tied expensive sweaters around their necks. The rants were more tasteful. Wade and I used to bounce back and forth between the two meetings. Even in the days when we were all hanging together every night, there was no strict discipline about meetings: if Wade and I went to Knife in the Head and Terry went to Fluffy Sweater, we’d still all meet together at Jean Claude’s later.

As the meeting started, I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a meeting here.

After several readings from The Big Book, the chairperson, a skinny twentysomething with sun-bleached hair, announced the topic. “Why don’t we talk about
acceptance
?”

Surfer boy picked a tall guy named T-Bone, a former session guitarist who now operated a window-cleaning business with a fleet of five trucks. T-Bone told us his name and that he was an alcoholic.

“HI, T-BONE!” I had to admit it felt good to hear that call-and-response; it felt like home.

T-Bone stood up. “I’m a drunk, so my thinking is never going to be anything but fucked. This”—he pointed to his head—“is broken. It won’t ever be fixed. I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass without forming an opinion. I imagine trouble and conspiracy everywhere. So when I pray, I ask God to help me accept the world exactly the way it is. I don’t like it when sober people shoot drugs and die. But who am I to say? Maybe that’s their right. You reap what you sow. A.A. is not for people who
need
it, it’s for people who
want
it.”

Around the room, guys nodded or grumbled their assent. Then everyone clapped. Of course, he looked directly at me when he said “shoot drugs and die.” A few others did, too. I could have told myself that I hadn’t been to meetings in a while, so no one could know about my search for Terry’s last companion, but I knew Laguna A.A. better than that: the rumor mill was definitely churning. If anything, my absence was making it churn louder.

I almost missed the kid calling on me. Something about “hearing from someone we haven’t heard from in a while.”

Fuck
. I sat up straighter in my folding chair. The entire meeting
turned to look at me. “My name is Randy Chalmers, and I’m an alcoholic.”

The wave of “HI, RANDY” felt good washing over me. For a long moment, I just stared, with nothing to say.

“Sometimes I hate A.A. so much,” I began. “I’ve been to meetings with most of you, and if there were any real justice, all of us would be twisting in the wind. Terry Elias isn’t dead because he sinned, and no one here is still breathing because he’s a saint. If anyone has worked out a system for who’s going to stay sober, I’m wondering why the fuck he didn’t tell me that my best friend was going to OD. There aren’t five of you who worked harder at this thing than Terry did. Terry taught me I was powerless over alcohol, but I didn’t need to grovel before anyone. Not anyone. And that includes God. And every man at this meeting.”

They took a moment to be sure I had finished. Wade gave me a thumbs-up as everyone started to clap. That’s what they do in Southern California A.A.: when you finish, they clap. Whether they like you or not. Sometimes
because
they don’t like you.

My “share” became the informal topic for the rest of the evening. It was either insane or the best thing anyone had ever said, but no one was neutral. A shaved-head hipster who was rebuilding his copywriting career after five years of vodka and crack used his five minutes to assure me, as politely as possible, that I’d be drunk soon if I kept talking this way and avoiding meetings. Relatively speaking, the guy was a newcomer. The last time I’d heard him talk, he was counting days and not quite so sure of himself.

When the meeting ended, Wade and Troy stepped ahead of
me like bodyguards as we exited the club. They seemed to be scanning the horizon for evidence of any angry approach. But I had to admit it cheered me to feel that I was once again part of a pack. As I left the clubhouse, everyone shook my hand, even the bald hipster who had promised I would drink. Troy and he exchanged wary nods.

“What’s his story?” I asked when we walked away.

“He’s the manager of my recovery home.”

“Did you piss him off?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So how come he shook my hand but ignored you?”

Troy shrugged. “He’s surly with me because I’m one of his charges. Him and Colin Alvarez, that’s the way they roll.”

After a few more well-meaning guys shook my hand, I found T-Bone standing at the end of the gauntlet.

“Terry was a good guy,” T-Bone said. “I don’t want you to think I was sitting in judgment. Like I haven’t done worse shit. We just miss you around here.”

It sounded like T-Bone was talking about more than a heroin overdose. “What ‘worse shit’ do you mean?”

T-Bone quickly let go of my hand.

“I’m not angry,” I said. “I’m just asking. Is there some gossip that I’m not aware of?”

“The last thing I want to do”—T-Bone rubbed his hand over his mouth—“is spread rumors that I wish I hadn’t heard in the first place.”

“Which is why I’d rather hear it from you.”

“It’s A.A. bullshit, Randy. That doesn’t make it true.”

“T-Bone,” I said, “just tell me.”

We walked off from the crowd. T-Bone put his hand on my
shoulder and spoke close to my ear. “I heard Terry had developed a taste for thirteenth stepping.”

A thirteenth step is when you seduce a newcomer. Also known, for good reason, as “cripple fucking.” Most folks in A.A. regard this as the height of scumbag behavior, and Terry was one of them. I always thought it was part of his desire to be a father: nothing drove him farther around the bend than a compulsive thirteenth stepper, particularly a guy who preyed on newcomer women. I’d talked him out of violence on a couple of occasions.

“Claire Monaco?” I said hopefully. “She was hardly new. And their thing wasn’t sexual. Trust me. It might have been better if it had been.”

“Not Claire,” T-Bone said. “Some of the girls in the recovery homes were—what’s the word I’m looking for—active? We heard that Terry was involved with more than one of them.”

“What does ‘active’ mean?”

“They were making movies, amateur porn, posting it on the Internet. The rumor was that Terry had fooled around with that.”

“Amateur porn? Jesus, T-Bone.”

“What I heard,” T-Bone said carefully. “Doesn’t mean it’s true. What I heard.”

“This was happening at the recovery homes?” I said.

“A rumor,” T-Bone said.

What the hell was Terry doing hanging out at the recovery homes, anyway? I wondered about Emma, too—she was exactly the kind of rudderless girl you didn’t want around that kind of weirdness.

Up the sidewalk, Wade was lurking. My new friend Troy was lost for a moment somewhere in the crowd. I caught Wade’s eye,
and he looked away. I said, “Couldn’t that be backlash after the thing with Claire? People were saying all sorts of crazy things about him.”

“Yeah,” T-Bone said, straightening up. “That’s probably exactly what it was.”

Like me, T-Bone was smarter than he was supposed to be. It didn’t bother him to be mistaken for a washed-up musician. Like me, he hid behind his failure. The truth was, he made more money now than he had working for the Eagles. And he was happier. I liked him because he had become, in sobriety, an honest man.

“But you don’t think so,” I said. “You had a feeling the rumors were true.”

He took his hand off my shoulder. He looked down before he looked me in the eyes. “That’s correct.”

Just before we reached the truck, as I prepared to ask Wade, A.A.’s premier gossipmonger, calmly, why I’d never heard about Terry’s thirteenth stepping from him, my cell phone rang. It was my home number, and I worried it was MP with more bad news. She was making love, maybe, to a better man than me.
Just wanted to share how much fun it is to bang someone besides a bitter ex-cop
.

I decided not to answer.

Troy was explaining why they should change the name of the Knife in the Head Men’s Stag.

“Don’t you think it invites a certain personality profile,” Troy asked, “if you’ve got so much violence right there in the name? Maybe it’s just my background, but—”

“Shut the fuck up about your background”—I
didn’t
grab Troy by his shirt—“I don’t want to hear any more shit about how you grew up in the Mafia. Okay?” As I hauled myself into the driver’s seat, my home number called me again, and this time I pushed talk.

It was Yegua. “The
cholo
is here, parked out front.”

I PUNCHED IT TO GET BACK
to Bluebird Canyon, hoping to catch said
cholo
before he took off again. I told Wade that Yegua had seen the guy parked by my house and that I thought it might have something to do with Terry.

Wade said, “Dude, you think you’re being
watched
?”

“I start asking questions about Terry,” I said. “And now there’s some guy parked in front of my house. Don’t tell me I’m paranoid.”

“Whatever,” Wade said.

“Don’t fucking
whatever
me, Wade. Pornography? Thirteenth stepping? I didn’t even know Terry hung out at those houses, and now I’m hearing that it was some kind of fuck festival over there?”

“What are you talking about?” Wade said.

“T-Bone said Terry was a thirteenth stepper. He said he was hanging with girls at the houses who were doing amateur porn.”

“It’s news to me, too.”

“Bullshit, Wade. There’s nothing around this town that’s news to you. When a bird falls from a tree
outside
an A.A. meeting, you hear about it. You want me to believe you didn’t hear about this?”

“I didn’t hear about this,” Wade said evenly.

I turned back to Troy, figuring he was the one I really should have been interrogating. “You’re living in one of those houses. You didn’t know about this, either?”

“I knew about it, but I also didn’t know about it.”

“Explain that to me, please.”

“It makes sense of some things that I heard.”

As much as I wanted to know what that meant, just as we came up Bluebird Canyon, I spotted a battered old Suburban across the street from my house. The driver seemed pretty convinced of his invisibility until I passed my driveway and pulled up beside him. I leaned on my steering wheel and stared through Wade’s window. No more than thirty, the guy looked like a refugee from 1969, with his unkempt beard and authentically dirty long hair. He might have been handsome, in that old-fashioned Protestant-surfer-Jesus way, but his attitude was too grim for that. He stared back at me with sharp, angry eyes.

He didn’t confront me the way I thought he might. Nor did he cower. Those sharp, angry eyes just kept it up. How’s a stalker supposed to look at you anyway? Defiantly? This guy seemed pissed off, all right, but he was also contained.