thing that’s apt to happen to you sooner or later if you don’t drink and don’t die.
Tonight, though, there were two men at our table who’d been sober longer than I by several years, and one of them, Bill D., had very likely been at my first meeting. (I didn’t remember him from that night, having been only peripherally aware of my own presence.) He used to share with some frequency at meetings, and I always liked what he said; I might have asked him to be my sponsor if Jim Faber hadn’t emerged as the clear choice for that role. Later, after Jim was killed, I decided that if I ever felt the need of a sponsor I’d ask Bill. But so far I hadn’t.
These days he didn’t talk much, although he went to as many meetings as ever. He was a tall man, rail thin, with sparse white hair, and some of the newer members called him William the Silent. That was an adjective that would never be attached to Pat, who was short and stocky and sober about as long as Bill. He was a nice enough fellow, but he talked too much.
Bill had retired a while ago after fifty years as a stagehand; he’d probably seen more Broadway plays than anyone I knew. Pat, also retired, had worked downtown in one of the bureaucracies quartered in City Hall; I was never too clear on which agency he worked for, or 12
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what he did there, but whatever it was he’d stopped doing it four or five years ago.
Johnny Sidewalls had worked construction until a job-related in-jury left him with two bad legs and a disability pension; he got around with the help of two canes and worked from his home, carrying on some sort of Internet-based mail-order business. He’d been very sullen and embittered when he showed up at St. Paul’s and Fireside and other neighborhood meetings a few years ago, but his attitude leveled out over time. Like Bill, he was a neighborhood guy, who’d lived all his life in and around Hell’s Kitchen and San Juan Hill. I don’t know why they called him Johnny Sidewalls, and I think he may have had the name before he got sober. Some sort of sobriquet’s almost inevitable when your name is John, but no one seems to know where this one came from.
When your name is Abie, on the other hand, neither a nickname nor an initial is required. Abie—short for Abraham, I supposed, but he always gave his name as Abie, and corrected you if you truncated it to Abe—was sober ten years and change, but new in New York; he’d sobered up in Oregon, then relocated to northern California. A few months ago he moved to New York and started showing up at St. Paul’s and a few other West Side meetings. He was in his early forties, around five-eleven, with a medium build and a clean-cut face that was hard to keep in your mind when you weren’t looking at him. There were no strong features there for the memory to grab onto.
It seemed to me he had a personality to match. I’d heard his AA qualification at a noon meeting in the Sixty- third Street Y, but all I could remember of his drinking story was that he used to drink and now he doesn’t. He didn’t share often, but when he did it tended to be bland and unexceptionable. I figured it was probably a matter of style.
The sharing tends to be less personal and more pro forma at small-town meetings, and that’s what he was used to.
At one of the first meetings I went to, a gay woman talked about having realized that drinking might be a problem for her when she noticed that she kept coming out of blackouts on her knees with some guy’s dick in her mouth. “I never did that when I was sober,” she said. I All the Flowers Are Dying
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have a feeling Abie never got to hear anything like that in Dogbane, Oregon.
Herb had been coming around about as long as Abie had, and he’d made ninety days the previous week. That’s a benchmark of sorts; until you’ve put together ninety days clean and dry, you can’t lead a meeting or take on a service commitment. Herb had qualified at a daytime meeting. I hadn’t been there, but I’d probably get to hear his story sooner or later, if he and I both stayed sober. He was around fifty, pudgy and balding, but almost boyish with the enthusiasm that’s characteristic of some members’ early sobriety.
I hadn’t been that way myself, nor was I as bitter about the whole thing as Johnny had been. Jim Faber, who’d watched the process, had told me I was at once dogged and fatalistic, sure I would drink again but determined not to. I couldn’t tell you what I was like. I just remember dragging myself from one meeting to the next, scared it would work for me and scared it wouldn’t.
I don’t remember who brought up capital punishment. Somebody did, and somebody made one of the standard observations on the subject, and then Johnny Sidewalls turned to Ray and said, “I suppose you’re against it.” That could have been said with an edge, but it wasn’t. It was just an observation, with the tacit implication that, given who Ray was, he’d be opposed to the death penalty.
“I’m against it for my clients,” Ray said.
“Well, you’d have to be, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course. I’m against any penalty for my clients.”
“They’re all innocent,” I said.
“Innocent’s a stretch,” he allowed. “I’ll settle for not guilty. I’ve tried a few capital cases. I never lost one, and they weren’t cases where the death penalty was a real possibility. Still, even the slimmest chance that your client might go to the chair concentrates an attorney’s mind wonderfully. ‘Go to the chair’—that dates me, doesn’t it? There’s no chair anymore. They let you lie down, in fact they insist on it. Strap you to a gurney, make a regular medical procedure out of it. And the odds against you are even worse than in regular surgery.” 14
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“What I always liked,” Bill said, “is the alcohol swab.” Ray nodded. “Because God forbid you might get a staph infection.
You have to wonder what latter-day Mengele thought that one up. Am I against the death penalty? Well, aside from the fact that it can’t be established to have any deterrent effect, and that the whole process of appeals and execution costs substantially more than feeding and housing the sonofabitch for the rest of his natural life, that it’s essentially barbaric and puts us on the same side of the line as China and the Muslim dictatorships, and that, unlike the rain which falls equally upon the just and the unjust, it falls exclusively upon the poor and un-derprivileged. Aside from all that, there’s the unfortunate fact that every once in a while we get our signals crossed and execute the wrong person. It wasn’t that long ago that nobody even heard of DNA, and now it’s getting a ton of convictions reversed. Who knows what the next step in forensics will be, and what percentage of the poor bastards the state of Texas is busy killing will turn out innocent?”
