'I want to speak to Mr. Chance,' I said.
'I expect to speak with him soon,' she said. She sounded middle-aged, with a chain smoker's rasp to her voice. 'May I take a message for him?'
I gave her my name and my phone number at the hotel. She asked what my call was in reference to. I told her it was personal.
When I hung up the phone I felt shaky, maybe from all the coffee I'd been sipping all day. I wanted a drink. I thought about going across the street to Polly's Cage for a quick one, or hitting the liquor store two doors down from Polly's and picking up a pint of bourbon. I could envision the booze, Jim Beam or J. W. Dant, some no- nonsense brown whiskey in a flat pint bottle.
I thought, C'mon, it's raining out there, you don't want to go out in the rain. I left the phone booth and turned toward the elevator instead of the front door and went up to my room. I locked myself in and pulled the chair over to the window and watched the rain. The urge to drink went away after a few minutes. Then it came back and then it went away again. It came and went for the next hour, winking on and off like a neon sign. I stayed where I was and watched the rain.
Around seven I picked up the phone in my room and called Elaine Mardell. Her machine answered, and when the beep sounded I said,
'This is Matt. I saw your friend and I wanted to thank you for the referral.
Maybe one of these days I can return the favor.' I hung up and waited another half hour. Chance didn't return my call.
I wasn't especially hungry but I made myself go downstairs for something to eat. It had quit raining. I went over to the Blue Jay and ordered a hamburger and fries. A guy two tables over was having a beer with his sandwich and I decided to order one when the waiter brought my burger, but by the time that happened I'd changed my mind. I ate most of the hamburger and about half of the fries and drank two cups of coffee, then ordered cherry pie for dessert and ate most of it.
It was almost eight-thirty when I left there. I stopped at my hotel—
no messages— and then walked the rest of the way toNinth Avenue .
There used to be a Greek bar on the corner, Antares and Spiro's, but it's a fruit and vegetable market now. I turned uptown and walked past Armstrong's and acrossFifty-eighth Street , and when the light changed I crossed the avenue and walked on up past the hospital toSt. Paul 's. I walked around the side and down a narrow flight of stairs to the basement. A cardboard sign hung from the doorknob, but you'd have to be looking for it to see it.
A.A., it said.
They were just getting started when I walked in. There were three tables set up in a U, with people seated on either sides of the tables and perhaps a dozen other chairs arranged at the back. Another table off to the side held refreshments. I got a Styrofoam cup and drew coffee from the urn, then took a chair at the rear. A couple of people nodded to me and I nodded back.
The speaker was a fellow about my age. He was wearing a herringbone tweed jacket over a plaid flannel shirt. He told the story of his life from his first drink in his early teens until he came into the program and got sober four years ago. He was married and divorced a few times, cracked up several cars, lost jobs, hit a few hospitals. Then he stopped drinking and started going to meetings and things got better.
'Things didn't get better,' he said, correcting himself. 'I got better.'
They say that a lot. They say a lot of things a lot and you get to hear the same phrases over and over.
The stories are pretty interesting, though. People sit up there in front of God and everybody and tell you the goddamnedest things.
He spoke for half an hour. Then they took a ten-minute break and passed the basket for expenses. I put in a dollar, then helped myself to another cup of coffee and a couple of oatmeal cookies. A fellow in an old army jacket greeted me by name. I remembered his name was Jim and returned the greeting. He asked me how things were going and I told him they were going all right.
'You're here and you're sober,' he said. 'That's the important thing.'
'I suppose.'
'Any day I don't take a drink is a good day. You're staying sober a day at a time. The hardest thing in the world is for an alcoholic to not drink and you're doing it.'
Except I wasn't. I'd been out of the hospital for nine or ten days. I would stay sober for two or three days and then I would pick up a drink.
Mostly it was a drink or two drinks or three drinks and it stayed under control, but Sunday night I'd been bad drunk, drinking bourbon at a Blarney Stone onSixth Avenue where I didn't figure to run into anybody I knew. I couldn't remember leaving the bar and didn't know how I got home, and Monday morning I had the shakes and a dry mouth and felt like walking death.
I didn't tell him any of this.
After ten minutes they started the meeting again and went around the room. People would say their names and say they were alcoholics and thank the speaker for his qualification, which is what they call the life story that he told. Then they would go on to talk about how they'd identified with the speaker, or recall some memory from their drinking days, or speak about some difficulty they were dealing with in the course of trying to lead a sober life. A girl not much older than Kim Dakkinen talked about problems with her lover, and a gay man in his thirties described a hassle he'd had that day with a customer at his travel agency.
It made a funny story and got a lot of laughs.
One woman said, 'Staying sober is the easiest thing in the world.
All you have to do is don't drink, go to meetings, and be willing to change your whole fucking life.'
When it got to me I said, 'My name is Matt. I'll pass.'
The meeting ended at ten. I stopped at Armstrong's on my way home and took a seat at the bar. They tell you
