A Drop of the Hard Stuff

I said, “Jim, I’m all right.”

“I know that.”

“Mark and I left the room in good shape. There was still a faint odor of bourbon, but we left the window open, so it’ll be gone by now.”

“Probably true.”

“And he wouldn’t have come back. He tried something and it didn’t work, so he’ll try something else.”

“Stands to reason.”

“But you still want to come up.”

“Why not?”

We went upstairs, and I opened my door to a room that was just as I’d left it, if a good deal colder. I closed the window. Jim looked around the room, then walked over to the window himself. “Nice view,” he said.

“It’s something to look out at,” I said, “when I’m in the mood to look out at something.”

“A man couldn’t ask for more. It seems to suit you.”

“I think so.”

“And when you wake up tomorrow,” he said, “you’ll have a year.”

“Sometimes that sounds like a lot,” I said, “and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“You know what else you’ll have tomorrow? One more day to get through. And sometimes that’s a lot.”

“I know.”

“And it’s all a day at a time, and there’s no need to think in long-range terms, but if you keep it up you might wind up with long-term sobriety. You know how to make sure you achieve that elusive distinction?”

“How?”

“Don’t drink,” he said, “and don’t die.”

I told him I’d see what I could do.

When he left I decided I needed more than a shower. I drew a hot bath and soaked in it until the water wasn’t hot anymore. It took the tension out of my muscles and the back of my neck, but what it didn’t do was make me sleepy. I lay in bed with the lights out, and of course the new mattress felt unfamiliar, and so did the pillow. There was nothing really wrong with either of them, and it was clear to me that they weren’t keeping me awake. It was my mind that was keeping me awake.

I got up and turned the light on. Jim had once suggested I read the chapter on Step Seven in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions as a cure for insomnia. “It’ll stop a charging rhino in his tracks,” he said. “Years ago I’d read the first chapter of Swann’s Way, which is as far as I ever got with Monsieur Proust. Put me out every time. But the Seventh Step is almost as good.”

I read the first couple of paragraphs, then put the book back on the shelf and hauled out Jack Ellery’s account of the double homicide on Jane Street. I read it through and set it aside and thought about it, and decided I wasn’t any closer to sleep than I’d been before, and that it felt out of the question, at least for the time being.

I thought about Motorcycle Mark, and how there’d been more to him than I would have suspected. People surprise you that way, especially the sober ones. It had been sheerest happenstance that led me to call him: a phone call from someone else had led me to ask if he’d called, and he’d responded by asking for my number and giving me his, and I’d taken it from him more out of politeness than anything else. And, because I didn’t have my phone book with me, and because I still had his number in my wallet, he’d been the one I’d called. And I couldn’t have made a better choice.

Funny how it works.

I decided I ought to have his number in my book, and that the task of copying it, along with the other cards and slips of paper in my wallet, was just the right sort of task for my current state of mind. I sorted everything, put a batch of receipts in the cigar box where I stow them when I remember, and found a fine-point pen to copy Mark’s number and the others I’d accumulated since I last forced myself to perform this particular task.

Halfway through, something brought me up short. I stared at the card in my hand, copied the number into my book, stared at the card some more, and returned it to my wallet.

I picked up Jack’s confession, read it through one more time, and noticed something I’d missed the first time through. “I will call him S.,” he wrote of his partner, and so he did, S. for Steve. And then when he described the killing itself, he called the man E.S. For Even Steven, obviously.

Maker’s Mark, I thought. There was Mark Sattenstein, and there was Motorcycle Mark, and now there was Maker’s Mark.

Why had he picked that brand?

It wasn’t a very popular bourbon. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it advertised—but then I tried not to pay much attention to liquor ads these days. It was expensive, but less so than Dickel or Wild Turkey, and it didn’t have their reputation. Nor was it a brand I ordered often.

At bars I didn’t always specify the brand. I might just order bourbon, or I might look at the bottles on the back bar and name whatever label caught my eye. Old Crow, Old Forester, Jim Beam. Jack Daniel’s. There were bourbons I’d try because I liked the sound of their name, or the look of the bottle they came in. And when I went across the street for a bottle I generally came back with Early Times or Ancient Age, or maybe J. W. Dant— something modestly priced and serviceable, smooth enough to go down easy, strong enough to do the job.

It was Carolyn Cheatham who had a fondness for Maker’s Mark. She was Tommy Tillary’s girlfriend, and one night she turned up at Armstrong’s without him. She lived nearby on Fifty-seventh Street, just a few doors west of Ninth Avenue, in an Art Deco building with a sunken living room and high ceilings, and that night the two of us began consoling each other and wound up sharing her bed, along with a fifth of Maker’s Mark.

She killed herself in that apartment, shot herself with a gun Tommy had given her. She called me first, and I got