“You’re not going to get an argument from me.” 8
Lawrence Block
“There’s one set to go a week from Friday. Not here, nobody gets it in this fucking state. In Virginia, that son of a bitch who killed the three little boys. Four, five years ago it was. I forget his name.”
“I know who you mean.”
“The one argument I’ll even listen to is suppose you execute an innocent man. And I guess it does happen. This guy, though. You remember the case? Open and shut.”
“So I understand.”
“He fucked these kids,” he said, “and he tortured them, and he kept souvenirs, and the cops had enough physical evidence to convict him a hundred times over. A week from Friday he gets the needle. I put in my last day on the job, and I go home and pour myself a drink, and somewhere down in Virginia that cocksucker gets a hot shot. You know what? It’s better than a gold watch, far as I’m concerned.”
2
He’d originally suggested dinner at seven, but I’d pushed it back to six-thirty. When the waitress brought the check he grabbed it, reminding me that dinner had been his idea. “Besides,” he said, “I’m off the job in a matter of days. I better get in practice picking up the tab.” All the years I’d known him, I was the one who picked up the checks.
“If you want,” he said, “we could go somewhere else and you can buy the drinks. Or dessert, or some more coffee.”
“I’ve got to be someplace.”
“Oh, right, you said as much when we made the date. Taking the little woman out on the town?”
I shook my head. “She’s having dinner with a girlfriend. I’ve got a meeting I have to go to.”
“You’re still going, huh?”
“Not as often as I used to, but once or twice a week.”
“You could miss a night.”
“I could and would,” I said, “but the fellow who’s leading the meeting is a friend of mine, and I’m the one who booked him to speak.”
“So you pretty much have to be there. Who’s the guy, anybody I know?”
“Just a drunk.”
“Must be nice to have meetings to go to.” 10
Lawrence Block
It is, though that’s not why I go.
“What they ought to have,” he said, “is meetings for guys who drink a certain amount, and have no reason to stop.”
“That’s a terrific idea, Joe.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely. You wouldn’t need to hang out in church basements, either. You could hold the meetings in a saloon.”
“My name is Joe D.,” he said, “and I’m retired.” The meeting was at my home group at St. Paul’s, and I was there in plenty of time to open it up, read the AA Preamble, and introduce the speaker. “My name’s Ray,” he said, “and I’m an alcoholic,” and then he spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes doing what we do, telling his story, what it used to be like, what happened, and what it’s like now.
Joe had asked if the speaker was anyone he knew, and I’d avoided a direct answer. If he didn’t know Ray Gruliow personally, he certainly knew him by reputation, and would recognize the long Lincolnesque face and the rich raspy voice. Hard-Way Ray was a criminal lawyer who’d made a career out of representing radicals and outcasts, cham-pioning the country’s least sympathetic defendants by putting the system itself on trial. The police hated him, and hardly anyone doubted that it had been a cop, some years ago, who’d fired a couple of shots through the front window of Ray’s Commerce Street town house. (No one was hurt, and the resultant publicity was a bonanza for Ray. “If I’d known I’d get that much of a bounce out of it,” he’d said, “I might have done it myself.”)
I’d run into Ray in May, at the annual dinner of the Club of Thirty-one. It had been a happy event, we hadn’t lost any members since last year’s gathering, and toward the end of the evening I told Ray I was booking the speaker every other Wednesday at St. Paul’s, and when would he like to speak?
There were forty or fifty people at the meeting that night, and at least half of them must have recognized Ray, but the tradition of anonymity runs deep among us. During the discussion that followed his lead, no one gave any indication that he knew more about him than All the Flowers Are Dying
11
he’d told us. “Guess who I heard at St. Paul’s last night,” they might tell other members at other meetings, because we tend to do that, although we’re probably not supposed to. But we don’t tell friends outside of the program, as I had not told Joe Durkin, and, perhaps more to the point, we don’t let it affect how we relate to one another in the rooms. Paul T., who delivers lunches for the deli on Fifty-seventh Street, and Abie, who does something arcane with computers, get as much attention and respect in that room as Raymond F. Gruliow, Esq.
Maybe more—they’ve been sober longer.
The meeting breaks at ten, and a few of us generally wind up at the Flame, a coffee shop on Ninth Avenue almost directly across the street from Jimmy’s original saloon. This time there were seven of us at the big table in the corner. These days I’m often the person in the room with the longest continuous sobriety, which is the sort of
