“But I beat you to it.”
“You did.”
“I want to confirm our date for Saturday,” I said. “But with the proviso that I may be late getting to the SoHo meeting. I’ve got a few hours of work, doing my impersonation of a thug.”
“I beg your pardon?”
I outlined my task in a couple of sentences. “So we’re leaving for Brooklyn at three,” I said, “and we can probably get there in half an hour, and get her things packed and loaded in the car in another hour, and a half hour to get home would put me under the shower around five o’clock. But.”
“But it could take a lot longer.”
“We might not even get going until three thirty or later. And Richard could easily get lost on the way to Cobble Hill, or hit heavy traffic. And there might not be a hassle with the drunken boyfriend, but if the possibility didn’t exist she wouldn’t need to bring me along. And the longer it all takes, the more I’ll need that shower.”
I waited for her to say something, and she didn’t. If I hadn’t heard her radio playing in the background I’d have thought we’d been disconnected.
“Well, that’s what I wanted to call you about,” she said.
“About Donna and Vinnie?”
“No, about Saturday night. I have to break our date.”
“Oh?”
“I’m getting together with my sponsor.”
“On Saturday night.”
“That’s right. Dinner and a meeting and a long talk that we really have to have.”
“Well,” I said. “I guess it’s not going to matter how long it takes me to get back from Cobble Hill.”
“Are you upset?”
“No,” I said. “Why should I be upset? You do what you have to do.”
XXIII
AROUND NOON I walked over to the Y on West Sixty-third where Fireside meets. They have two meetings going at once, and I’d generally gone to the beginners meeting. This didn’t mean that it was reserved for people who were still using training wheels, but that members were encouraged to keep the discussion focused on basic topics—i.e., staying away from a drink a day at a time. This rule, such as it was, was often honored in the breach, but in the main the sharing was about alcohol, and the art of getting through the hours without it.
Sometimes I went to the other meeting, generally making my decision on the basis of which room was less crowded, or whether I felt like climbing an extra flight of stairs. On this particular day I noticed that the woman in the speaker’s chair at the beginners meeting was one I’d heard elsewhere within the past week, so I went upstairs. It was Thursday, so the upstairs meeting was a step meeting, and they were on the Eighth Step. If that was a coincidence it wasn’t an extraordinary one; there are only twelve of those particular pearls of wisdom, and two of them have to do with amends, so that made it, what, a five-to-one shot?
Still, it struck me as the right step at the right time. I grabbed some coffee and a couple of Nutter Butter cookies and took a seat on the right, and heard the speaker explain how his perception of the step had changed over time. The first time he made his Eighth Step list, he said, there were just a couple of names on it—the wife who’d stayed with him despite what his drinking had done to their marriage, the kids he’d neglected. Most of all he’d harmed himself through his drinking, wrecking his health and costing himself jobs, and he figured he’d make sufficient amends to himself and to his family just by staying sober.
But with time, he said, he began to see how his drinking and his alcoholism had undermined every relationship he’d ever had, and how his actions or inaction had made him an emotional loose cannon, caroming around the deck of the pitching ship that was his life, smashing into everything nearby.
I tuned out for a moment, thinking about the metaphor; until he’d explained it, I hadn’t understood what was so dangerous about a loose cannon. I’d always pictured an artillery piece in France, say, during one of the wars, raining shells on the enemy position. Was the aim off if the cannon was loose? But an unmoored cannon on a warship—well, sure, I could see how that could be a problem.
You show up at these meetings to stay sober and you walk out with a fucking education.
After the meeting, I decided that the coffee and the Nutter Butter cookies covered enough of the four basic food groups to add up to lunch. I went back to my room and tried to find something on TV, but nothing held my interest. I’d already read the paper at breakfast.
So I sat down and started making a list. All the people I’d harmed. I wrote down a few names—Estrellita Rivera, obviously, and my ex-wife, obviously, and Michael and Andrew, obviously—and then I stopped.
It’s not that I’d run out of names, just that I didn’t feel like writing them down. Or looking at the ones I’d already written, thank you very much. I turned over the piece of paper with the four names on it, but that wasn’t enough, so I tore it in half and in half again, and kept going until I’d created a small handful of confetti. If I’d had matches handy I might have burned the scraps, but I decided the wastebasket would do.
I called Jim and told him what I’d just done.
“You know,” he said, “there’s a reason they gave each of the steps a number. It’s so that a person can do them in order.”
“I know.”
“Which doesn’t mean that you can’t think about them when they come to mind. And that’s what you were doing, thinking about Step Eight. So you wrote down some names and realized you’re not ready for the step yet, and that’s fine.”
“If you say so.”
“I do,” he said, “but if you’d rather see this as further evidence that you’re a rank or two below pond scum on
