there for her third anniversary a few months ago. Her approach was purposeful, and I assumed she had something to say about marijuana and its effects over time. I didn’t recall a whole lot of pot in her story, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find something there to identify with.
But it wasn’t that at all. Some months ago she’d moved in with her boyfriend, another sober alcoholic. He was still an alcoholic, but he was no longer a sober one, and she wanted out.
“I’m such an idiot,” she said. She had long auburn hair, and kept pushing it out of her eyes, and it kept falling back across her face. “I’d heard his story, for God’s sake. I knew he went out every time he put a couple of years together. But he was sober when I met him, and he had more sober time than I did, and I thought he’d stay sober.”
But he hadn’t. She’d kept her rent-stabilized apartment—“What is it they say? I may be crazy but I’m not stupid”—and that’s where she was staying now, but she had a whole lot of stuff at his place in Cobble Hill, and she hated to leave it but was afraid to go there by herself.
“I don’t think he’d do anything,” she said, “because he’s a very gentle guy. At least when he’s sober. But he does have a history of spousal abuse. I’m not telling tales, it’s in his qualification, he mentions it every time he tells his story. And he always says it only happened when he was drunk. Well, he’s drunk now, isn’t he?”
“You want me to go with you.”
“Would you?” She put her hand on my wrist. “Not as a favor. I mean it would be a favor, a major one, but I’d want to pay you for it. In fact I’d insist on it.”
“You’re a friend,” I said, “and it’s the sort of thing friends do for each other. I don’t think—”
“No,” she said firmly. “My sponsor was the one who suggested this. And she was very clear that I had to pay you.”
She had the time picked—Saturday afternoon—and had arranged our transportation. Did I know Richard Lassiter? Bald Richard, gay Richard, speed freak Richard? He had a car, and everything of hers in Cobble Hill would fit easily in the trunk and backseat. He was going to pick her up at Eighty-fourth and Amsterdam at three sharp, and they could stop for me on the way to Brooklyn. I said it would be simpler if I met the two of them uptown, and that three o’clock would be fine.
“I’m paying Richard too,” she said. “He put up an argument but I insisted.”
“Sponsor’s orders.”
“Yes, but I think I’d have insisted anyway. He says he’ll come upstairs with me, in case Vinnie is there. I left a message on his machine, I’m coming Saturday afternoon, please don’t be there, di dah di dah di dah. But what do they call it when you take a sleeping pill and it keeps you awake?”
“A slip,” I said.
“Ha! Very good. No, I remember now, they call it a paradoxical effect. Very common with alcoholics. I think my phone message could have a paradoxical effect on Vinnie. ‘Stay away? The fuck I’ll stay away. Whose place is it, you toxic bitch?’ ”
“If Vinnie’s from Bensonhurst, you do a good imitation.”
“He is, as a matter of fact, and thank you. But if he’s there, well, Richard’s a sweetheart, but his is not the world’s most intimidating presence.”
“For that you want a thug like me.”
“An ex-cop,” she said, “and a man who can take care of himself on the mean streets of New York.”
“Including Brooklyn.”
“Including Brooklyn.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “A thug indeed,” she said. “Hardly that, my dear. Hardly that.”
After the meeting I joined the crowd at the Flame, and at one point the conversation centered on my share. “Do a lot of any substance,” a fellow named Brent said, “and something happens. If you drink, sooner or later you fall down a lot, you have accidents, you pick up DUIs, you crash cars, you wreck your liver—I could go on, but you get the point. If you do enough cocaine, your septum rots away and your nose caves in, and you damage your heart and God knows what else. Shoot speed, and it finds a variety of ways to kill you. Drop enough acid, and you go on a trip and can’t find your way back from it. Everything you do, it’s always got a price tag on it.”
Someone quoted the oil-filter commercial. “ ‘You can pay me now,’ ” she murmured, “ ‘or you can pay me later.’ ”
“With marijuana, what happens is subtler than that. What happens when you smoke enough marijuana is nothing happens. Your whole life just stays where it is, treading water.”
They batted that around a bit, and I said, “Yeah, that’s him, all right. The women in his life even stay the same age. His first girlfriend was twenty-five and they’ve all been twenty-five ever since. He’s living in the same apartment—”
“Well, that’s New York, Matt. Who moves out of a rent-controlled place?”
“Granted, but he’s using plastic milk crates for bookcases, and I’ll bet he’s had them performing that service for twenty years. On the other hand…”
“What?”
“Well,” I said, “I know the folly of comparing my inside to somebody else’s outside. And I know people have good days and bad days, and maybe I just caught him on a good day. And God knows this isn’t the life his parents had in mind for him when they paid his tuition at NYU. And if you check the dictionary you’ll find his picture next to
“But?”
“But I have to say the son of a bitch seems happy.”
I would have called Jan when I got in, but it was late and I decided to let it go until morning. I was up early, and when I came back from breakfast I called.
“I was just about to call you,” she said.
