A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“It’s all very Third Step, isn’t it? Taking the action and turning over the result. I had a sponsee who couldn’t get a job, the man had a real Swiss cheese resume, holes in it you could drive a van through. I had him send in job applications at the rate of one a day, and he did that for three weeks. And he didn’t get an offer from a single one of the firms he applied to.”

“And?”

“And what he did get, during the fourth week, was an offer out of the blue from a firm he hadn’t applied to, for a job he didn’t even know about. A good one, too. Would it have come his way if he hadn’t been sending out those applications? You couldn’t prove it one way or the other, but my own belief is that the result wouldn’t have come about without the action.”

“Do you sponsor many people?”

“Just a few. I get asked with some frequency, but before I say yes or no I’ll spend an hour over coffee with the person, and more often than not we’ll conclude that it wouldn’t really work too well. Or we decide to give it a try, and after a month or two one of us fires the other. I’m what they call a Step Nazi, and even when someone thinks that’s what he wants in a sponsor, the reality’s not always what he thought it would be. We keep walking past coffee shops.”

“I know.”

“I’m not hungry myself. Are you?”

“I filled up on cookies at the meeting.”

“Precisely why I’m no longer hungry. I don’t know who brings those boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate chip, but I wish he’d stop. I can’t stay away from them, and I may have to put them on my First Step list and cut them out altogether. And just thinking about it makes me shudder, which suggests it’s something I have to do.” He grinned, his face lighting up. “But not today,” he said.

“Like St. Augustine.”

“Exactly! ‘Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.’ I wonder if he actually said that. Matt, since we’ve established that we’re not hungry, do you want to come up to my place? I’ve got something there that I probably ought to show you. And I promise you I make better coffee than the Greeks.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard Greg refer to himself as a Step Nazi. He’d used the term after the funeral, when he told me he’d gotten Jack killed. He’d been pushing him through the steps, working him hard, and Jack had given himself over wholeheartedly to the process, rushing headlong into the amends called for in the Ninth Step. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, the step read, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Or oneself, I thought. But I couldn’t remember any warning to that effect in the literature.

Greg’s apartment was on East Ninety-ninth between First and Second, three blocks above the unofficial boundary between Yorkville and East Harlem. Irish and Italian Harlem, it used to be, but the Irish and Italians had long since moved a little closer to the American dream. There was still an Italian restaurant whose customers found it worth a special trip, and there were a few Irish bars left on Second Avenue. Well, bars with Irish names, anyway. The clientele looked to be largely Hispanic and West Indian, and it was Red Stripe and not Guinness advertised in neon in the window of the Emerald Star.

I hadn’t been here in years, and I could see that the neighborhood was changing once again. Between Ninety- seventh and Ninety-eighth, we passed a couple of five-story brick buildings undergoing renovation, with Dumpsters at the curb piled high with plaster and lath and flooring. And across the street they were throwing up one of those needle high-rises, a twenty-story glass-and-steel building on the site of a tenement.

I said it wasn’t what you expected to find in Harlem, and Greg reminded me that they were calling it Carnegie Hill now, the latest invention of the Realtors who’d thought up Clinton as a new name for my own part of town. Until then we’d been happy enough calling it Hell’s Kitchen.

He reminded me of Thoreau’s observation. “ ‘Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.’ And of neighborhoods that feel the need to change their names.”

The city kept reinventing itself, creating more and more places for its prosperous citizens. There’s nothing new about this, the process has been going on for more than a century, but when I looked at the buildings getting a gut rehab, I wondered what had become of the people who lived there before somebody got rid of their walls and floors.

I told myself to think about something else. Sure, an inner voice said. Forget the poor bastards. The city’ll take care of them, find ’em a nice Dumpster to live in.

What was it Jim had told me? It is your dissatisfaction with what is that is the cause of all your unhappiness. The wisdom of the Buddha, if not the one from the midnight meeting. Something to think about, on my way to Greg Stillman’s apartment.

“Mice,” he said, and sniffed the air. “But no cabbage. No wet dog with garlic either. Indeterminate cooking smells. Not too bad, all in all.”

Not as bad as the stairs themselves. The building code calls for an elevator in any structure of seven or more stories, and as a result there are a lot of six-story buildings in New York. This was one of them, and he lived on the top floor.

“I don’t actually mind the stairs,” he said. “I’ve been here long enough to take them for granted. When I came to New York I had a share on Eighty-fifth and Third, but I wanted my own place, and after a few months I moved in here. I got sober in this apartment, after having spent several years getting drunk in it. When I think of navigating those stairs drunk and stoned, I remember how they say God protects drunks and fools. I qualified on both counts.”

The apartment was small but well-appointed. I think it must have started life as a three-room railroad flat, but he’d removed the nonbearing walls to create one long room. He’d stripped the exterior walls to the brick, which he’d rendered glossy with some sort of lacquer. He’d painted the mortar black, and here and there among the red bricks was one he’d painted white or blue or yellow. There weren’t that many of those, just enough to provide an accent.

The chairs and tables were different styles, but somehow went together. Except for a couple of thrift-shop finds, he said with some pride, everything had been salvaged from the streets. In New York, he said, you found finer goods and furnishings out on the curb for trash pickup than other cities displayed in their shops.

An abstract painting, all vivid colors and sharp angles, hung on one wall. It was the gift of the artist, a friend he’d lost touch with. Another oil, a pastoral scene of barefoot nymphs and satyrs in an elaborate carved frame, he’d