The Next Right Thing (4 page)

ONCE, ON THE BACK
of his business card, Terry wrote exactly this: “Randy Chalmers has permission to be a ‘fake’ until the footwork leads to reality.” At the bottom, he signed it “Terry E. 1/26/04.”

We were eating lunch at Poor Richard’s on Pacific Coast Highway. He worked across the street. Mostly personal injury back then, but he was getting into real estate, too. I still had my disability, and I was two months sober. Terry used to call me for lunch. I didn’t do much in those days but sit and wait for the time between meetings to be over.

“Chalmers. It’s Elias. Meet me at Poor Richard’s in five minutes.” Then he would hang up. At the time I thought he operated this way only with me, but it was the same with everyone he sponsored. Letting you know that he understood you didn’t
have a goddamn thing going in your life. Letting you know that he wanted to spend time with you anyway. A kiss that felt like a punch.

We’d talk about how I couldn’t see a future for myself, how anything I imagined felt fake. At that time, I was only an
almost-
ex-cop. The proceedings that ran me off the force were ongoing. Terry asked me what I wanted to do, what I would do if anything were possible, if God loved me the way The Big Book said He loved me. I told him, but I also warned him that I would fuck him up if he told anyone else.

He leaned right into that one. He showed me his big bland face and said, “Take your best shot, asshole. I’m a
shyster
, remember?” He backed off a little and said, “Eight years ago I sat where you’re sitting, and there’s nothing you can teach me about being a loser. Do you know what it took to get from that seat to this one?”

“A big fucking attitude?”

Terry laughed. “I was a heart-stopped-on-the-operating-table-three-times dope fiend. Do you know what it took to get clean and sober after four years of shooting dope in the bathrooms of A.A.? What do you think it took to get me through law school after that? As far as whiners and malcontents, you’re minor league. Everyone around here wanted me dead so they wouldn’t have to watch me walk through one more meeting and destroy their fragile sense of hope. I asked you a question, you asshole.
What do you think it took?
”

“A miracle?” I asked quietly.

“All the love and power in the fucking universe,” Terry said. “Do you get that?”

That was when he wrote out the card. I felt like it had magic
powers. When the ink started to fade so badly that you could barely read it, I had it framed.

It wasn’t smart to be meeting Claire Monaco. It wasn’t smart to be
thinking
about Claire Monaco. A former—but probably still—porn actress/stripper/prostitute who’d been trying to get sober for a few years, Claire was trouble.

We met later that morning at Jean Claude’s. Wade came because I felt the need for backup. I knew Claire the way I knew a lot of people in A.A., but I’d certainly never met her for coffee. There were those who’d done less and lived to regret it.

Claire was a beautiful woman, but booze and drugs had not been kind to her skin, in spite of the self-tanner. If she didn’t stop soon, she was going to start looking like what she was: a thirtysomething drug addict washed up on the shores of A.A.

The tight-faced ladies around us—Jean Claude’s late-morning clientele—noticed her right off. Terry used to call this time of day “shrink-wrap central” because at any given moment between nine and eleven, you would see at least six hundred thousand dollars in plastic surgery sipping coffee.

I pushed my chocolate croissant in Wade’s direction; he didn’t hesitate. Jean Claude brought me a second double espresso without asking. I started in on Claire: “Troy Padilla says Terry called you that night.”

“Terry could have been a really great man.” Claire spoke through the froth of her latté.

“What?”
Wade said.

“Becoming a big shot in A.A. was the worst thing that could
have happened to him,” Claire said. “All these A.A. circuit speakers are hypocrites. All they really care about is telling everyone else what to do. One guy I met, he gave me a lecture about the steps while I was blowing him. I told him he should share it with his wife.”

“Which guy?” Wade said.

“Can we talk about the sex lives of hypocrites some other day?” I interjected.

The shrink-wrapped ladies might have recognized Claire from the papers. A few years ago, she’d been a local celebrity of the Kato Kaelin variety. She’d been rumored to be involved with a judge named Fogarty in the South County courthouse who had been accused by the local papers of trading judicial favors for sex with a variety of women of Claire’s ilk. None of this stuck to him, but sometime afterward, Claire became the victim of a sting operation. She spent three months in jail for prostitution and pandering. Maybe Fogarty figured that he could make himself look good at Claire’s expense, but his plan backfired:
The Orange County Register
believed that she had been punished for Judge Fogarty’s sins. After a protracted battle in the op-ed pages, the dust settled and Fogarty got to keep his job. That’s how the world often works—what’s shitty just stays shitty.

“You know, Randy, I met your girlfriend once,” Claire said. “I mean, back in the day, before any of us got sober.”

“Are you sober?” Wade asked through a mouthful of chocolate. “When did
that
happen?”

“Shut up, Wade,” I said. “You, too, Claire. Don’t talk about MP like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like the two of you were
back in the day
together.”

Claire smiled. I should have kept my mouth shut. It was a mistake to let her think this was a sore point for me. MP had supported her first try at college with a stint as a tantric masseuse, which was sort of like hand job from a hippie, and it was still her biggest shame from her drinking days.

When I was drinking, giving a tantric hand job would have been one of my
better
days.

I took a breather and smiled back at Claire. I moved the chocolate away from Wade so he would know not to eat it all.

“We came on too strongly,” I said. “You retaliated. If I apologize, can we talk nice again?”

“I get tired of being the most disgusting woman in A.A.,” Claire said. She checked the tables around us. I waited. The other customers avoided her eyes while tracking her movements.

“You gotta look into that whole nightmare with Alexander.” Again she looked around. “My son? That’s when Terry started to get weird. When he tried to take Alexander away from me,
that’s
where the bad shit begins.”

The part of Claire’s story the shrink-wrapped ladies
didn’t
know: when my friend Terry offered to help Claire appeal her pandering conviction—the one that Judge Fogarty almost certainly brought down on her—he also demanded custody of Claire’s five-year-old son, Alexander, in exchange. She wasn’t the best mother, and Terry loved the kid, but it was extortion, pure and simple. Was that the beginning of Terry’s end? At the time, I was too busy falling in love with MP to notice.

“I’m leaving, Claire.” I pushed out my chair. “I’ve heard this song before.”

“I’m trying to help you,” she said. “This is the background. Terry called me that last night, but I wouldn’t see him. He called me more than once.”

“Was he with anyone?”

“The first time he called he was with that kid from the Thursday-night beginners’ meeting—”

“Troy Padilla? Did Troy get him the drugs?”

“That kid? He’s just a kitten. No, it was the other guy. You remember that lawyer John Sewell who Terry used to work with? This guy—I think he was an electrician or a handyman—he used to work for John Sewell.”

“John Sewell?” I recognized the name because I read the newspapers. He was as big as a lawyer got in Orange County. I’d taken him and Terry fishing once. He was also dating my ex-wife—that part made the most sense: Claire’s modus operandi was to find the link between her worst instincts and your worst instincts. “John Sewell wasn’t with Terry that day. A guy like John Sewell doesn’t even get off the freeway in Santa Ana unless he’s getting paid a thousand dollars an hour for the privilege.”

“You’re not listening,” Claire said. “This guy, this electrician, he used to work for Sewell on some buildings that Sewell owns. That’s I guess how Terry met him? He had like a dog’s name or something.”

“This is what you have?” I said. “An electrician with a name like a dog?”

Claire straightened up. “Look, I don’t know the guy. When Terry called the second time, he said he was with some guy who used to work for Sewell, and all I can remember is that he was named after a dog.”

“Was he named after a dog,” Wade asked, “like Lassie or Rover? Or was he named after a dog as in he happens to have the same name as a dog you know?”

Claire and I took a moment to marvel at Wade.

“Terry called me that night,” she continued. “It sounded like a booty call, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him. But he told me he was doing a twelfth step on this guy. The guy with the name of a dog. The guy with the name of a dog was having some trouble with heroin.” A twelfth step was when a sober alcoholic visited a recently drunk alcoholic at his home. A.A.s did this less often now than in the thirties, when the fellowship had begun, but Terry had done more than his share.

“How stoned were you?” I said.

“I wasn’t stoned,” Claire said.

I didn’t say anything. I held her eyes.

“I was drunk,” Claire said.

Wade laughed.

“I didn’t call him,” Claire said. “He called me.”

I stood up. From behind the counter at the other end of the café, my friend Jean Claude caught my eye. He gave me what I’ve come to recognize as a Gallic shrug. I said, “You were drunk, Claire. You can’t even remember this guy’s name. You just want to cause some trouble. You don’t know shit.”

“I’m on your side,” Claire said. “I want to know what turned that sweet man into an unholy prick. Before that night, I hadn’t talked to Terry in over a year. Since he tried to take my son away. And if an angel hadn’t stepped in to help me, Terry would have pulled it off.”

Today I couldn’t deal with this. “Because you were willing to
trade your son for money. This is a problem that only junkies have, Claire.”

She looked at me and then down at the table. If she had started to cry, I could have told myself that I was trying to wake her up, help her admit what a mess she’d made of her life. But as Wade and I left the table and Claire sat there, I knew that wasn’t it. I wasn’t trying to help Claire, just like Claire couldn’t help me. I’d hurt her only because I wanted to hurt her.

AFTER I DROPPED OFF WADE
for his shift at Laguna Sea Sports, I drove home. On the way there, the back of my neck told me I was being followed, but my brain wrote that off to post-traumatic cop paranoia. There was a time about eight years ago when lots of people wanted me dead. Sometimes even the eyes in the back of my head have flashbacks.

Pulling up my driveway, I had an idea that MP would know more about my adventures by now. I could feel it in the way her VW Cabrio sat on the concrete.
You’re an asshole
, that little silver car seemed to whisper.

She was sitting cross-legged on the patio drinking green tea. She had changed into a tank top with a picture of the Virgin Mary on it—not a subtle girl, my MP. I closed the glass door behind
me and sat down in the Adirondack chair next to her mat. She offered the tea to me. I sniffed it and offered it back.

“You mad at me?” I asked.

“That’s not the word,” MP said.

“Disappointed?”

“That’s the word.”

“I’m sure it’s hard to understand.” The chair was easier on my back than any other chair I owned, including the one designed by Mr. and Mrs. Eames. How could there be so many great chairs and so few men worthy to sit in them?

“I don’t want to live with a cop,” MP said. “I want to live with a guy who designs homes and doesn’t have some fucked-up obsession with righteousness.”

It had been over a year since I’d heard her swear.

“Something wrong with cops?” I asked.