The Next Right Thing (34 page)

“Here’s the thing.” Terry stopped to pick a bit of tobacco from his teeth. “You
don’t
deserve it. There’s nothing you’ve done in your whole life that means you deserve this party. Not this party or anything else that’s happened. Not this deal at Art Center—none of it. You don’t deserve the love of your daughter, either. You really don’t deserve that.”

He had my attention. He was going to tell me the absolute truth about something. I couldn’t imagine what.

“Because it’s a gift,” Terry said. “It’s not about deserving or earning or being a good guy. God loves you because that’s just what God does. Wade and I throw parties for your sorry ass because that’s what we do. It’s not about you, Randy. Which is mighty good news, because if it were about you, our lives would be a fucking nightmare.”

Cathy threw back her head and laughed—it was a version of Danny’s father that she recognized. But then she stopped laughing. We looked at each other.

“You know,” I said. “I never even asked how you met him, how you two came together.”

“He came over to the building a few times with John,” she said, “and then he showed up once by himself. At first he pretended he was trying to find John. And then he just started coming by. He understood Paloma better than anyone, the way she could be angry and then happy sometimes in the same minute.
When she was upset, he never took it seriously. He taught me how to take it less seriously.”

“He would have been a great father,” I said. “Hell, he
was
a great father.”

“I didn’t want to do it again after John,” Cathy said. “Another lawyer. But he was inside my heart before I knew what was happening.”

At just that moment, little Danny burped, though he didn’t wake up. I looked at him and then at his mother. “Cathy, I’m going to ask this once. And it’s only because I’d like to know, not because I’m going to blame you for anything. Do you really not know who was with Terry that night?”

As she gently touched Danny’s foot, Cathy sighed. “I knew Thomas for a couple of years. He worked for John, used to fix the building, come by for coffee sometimes. Terry liked talking with him when he came by, said he could find him some work. Thomas was good with Paloma, too, but different. Not so much like a father, more like a brother. I knew he had problems. He called me because he didn’t know what to do. He was telling me that my man was dead, but it was because he himself was lost, not because he cared about me. I kept his secret anyway. Maybe I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t his fault how Terry died. Thomas was like a child. Terry could have been a kind of father to him—like I think he was to you—but I guess Terry was lost by then, too.”

When Terry was first having trouble getting off heroin—long before I knew him—a group of well-meaning recovering alcoholics accosted DUI Dave, his sponsor, in the parking lot of the Coastal Club. They told Dave—for his own good, mind you—that
if he continued to work with Terry, the most unpromising newcomer anyone had ever seen, both of them would end up drunk. And those sweet, concerned guys didn’t want that to happen.

Dave—who is long dead now, of asbestosis and mesothelioma—told those fellows his exact thoughts on the subject: they could go fuck themselves if they thought they had any fucking say in how he did his fucking twelfth-step work. Terry was sleeping on Dave’s couch at the time, and Dave would bring Terry along to construction jobs in Riverside, where Terry would detox by walking around and napping in Dave’s truck.

Those guys in the parking lot of the Coastal Club were actually right. Terry wasn’t, in fact, a good bet, and maybe Dave could have spent his remaining years more productively. Alcoholics like to see a good return on their investment with newcomers, and the best return is when someone dies sober.

I knew exactly what had happened to Terry. It’s one of the oldest stories in A.A., but also the story that hardly anyone ever talks about. How could we? It’s too terrible and too absurd. I should have known, though. I, of all people, should have known.

Because as much as I had learned, there was always the one thing that I couldn’t wrap my mind around: why did he shoot drugs two days after his son was born?

In spite of his many fuckups—and they were legion: Busansky, pot dealing, and a hole in the integrity of his A.A. program the size of a moon rocket—in spite of all that, Terry realized that he was going to get everything he wanted. Cathy was going to have his baby, and he would be a beautiful smart boy. The rest of
it could be handled—he knew lawyers who had come back from worse. Terry would marry Cathy if she would have him, but even if she wouldn’t, well, there was the baby. It was what he’d wanted since forever.

Then he looked down deep within himself and realized that it didn’t make a goddamn bit of difference. Didn’t even put a dent in the thing. Not a fucking dent.

And then there was the thought about that body under the house, which just seemed like more of the blackness that was already pouring out of his heart. It wasn’t just that he’d fucked up. It was worse than that: the fuckup was older than the world, inescapable and total.

Terry must have spent a day pretending that he wasn’t heartbroken. Most addicts have at least one big idea hidden in their heart:
I will be okay when
. Even with all the step work and therapy and success, people still imagine they will be okay when they are rich. Or married. Or have a baby. Life for an alcoholic is often a process of discovering all the things that don’t make any difference.

Not that, either?

It was during that day and a half when he ran with Troy and sought comfort with Claire and shot drugs with Mutt Kelly. According to Cathy, he never saw his son. The
not even this?
must have been too horrible to face.

He found his way to Mutt Kelly because Mutt was an addict who was still in the game. Terry could have even convinced himself that he was going on a twelfth-step call—that he was going to help Mutt with his drug problem, with the Busansky mess, with whatever. Maybe that was even true as he was driving over to Mutt’s house. But he was also looking for drugs, something
that Mutt would know about and Terry, after a fifteen-year vacation, would not. The transition must have been seamless: one minute he was a guy looking to help another struggling addict, the next minute he was a guy looking to cop. Maybe it felt like he had never stopped being a guy looking to cop.

Here’s the really ugly part: the Terry Elias who saved my life didn’t die right away. I’m betting he persisted through most of the afternoon and evening. I can’t help but imagine that Terry was talking about sobriety all the way to Santa Ana and even once he had those little plastic bags in his pocket.

He was probably talking about it even while he was high. What else would he talk about?

Maybe it pissed off Mutt, but I’m guessing it didn’t. I’m guessing that Mutt was inside the same kind of warm, fuzzy insanity. Maybe they had talked themselves into believing that it was the last time for both of them. That’s in The Big Book, right? The part about finding out for yourself that you can’t control your addiction, that you have to surrender.

I bet my name came up. And Wade’s. Terry might have even told a dusty story about DUI Dave. Maybe he was struggling even after they copped the dope, telling himself it could still become a story about the day he almost lost everything. But there was also this great aching—the thought of that baby coming home to him—and the aching, which had become acute in the hospital, might have seemed like a wave that he needed to ride to shore.

In the last moments of Terry’s life, Mutt was the coward who didn’t call 911, even if he called Cathy two days later. I don’t blame him: cowardice is part of an addict’s job description, and considering how I myself dropped the ball with Mutt, how can I
blame Mutt for anything? But maybe Mutt was a little braver than that as Terry fell. Maybe he held him. And maybe, when my friend’s heart stopped and everything let loose inside him, that stupid biker said a prayer.

I don’t think so. I think Mutt was gone before any of that happened.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Terry was happy at the end. Sometimes when people binge after a long time clean and sober, they don’t regret it. They think:
What fucking idiots they all are to deny themselves this pleasure. This pleasure is worth everything
.

I don’t wish that for Terry, not even right before he died. I want to believe there was a moment when he stumbled against the bed, or knocked over a lamp into a bottle of vodka, a moment when the great happiness of the drug was pierced and he saw himself as a fool who had squandered a great gift. I want him miserable, fighting himself, and ashamed of his failure. I hope he felt like he let every one of us down. And it’s not for my sake that I want this. Not for Wade, not even for little Danny. Self-hatred can be a kind of grace, and that’s what I want for Terry, the best friend God ever gave me: a grace of the severest and most durable kind.

Sweet and powerful enough to carry him home.

Thanks:

Alice Barden, Christopher Barden, Lillian Barden, Philip E. Baruth, Lisa and Rick Brown, Alex Busansky, Terri Carney, Stephen V. Duncan, Jeremy Efroymson, Hilene Flanzbaum, William Georgiades, Susan Kamil, Claude Knobler, Andy Levy, Greg Lucas, Shaun McCracken, Brenda Mick, Mel Sarabia, Will Schenck, Tom Sholseth, Bill Walsh, Dani Weber, Peter Wims.

Noah Eaker, Leigh Ann Hirschman, Herv Inskeep, Bill Jarrard, Simon Lipskar.

John Wayne: A Novel

Born and raised in Southern California, Dan Barden now lives in Indianapolis with his wife, Elizabeth Houghton Barden, owner of Big Hat Books & Arts, and their son. He teaches writing at Butler University.

www.danbarden.com