Long Past Stopping (30 page)

 

T
HAT NIGHT, DAWN,
whom I still had never seen talking to anyone, approached me after the alumni meeting and asked, “Heroin?”

“What?”

“You're a junkie, right?”

“Uh, yeah. How did you guess that?”

“Me, too. I can spot them from a mile away. It's nice to have another one here. I can't stand these crackheads.”

“What crackheads?” I asked.

“Sorry. I call everyone crackheads.”

“Oh.” I realized I wasn't being too responsive. Although I had been stealing glances at her for the past four days, I hadn't come up with a plan for actually talking to her.

“Well, nice to meet you, Oran,” she said, freaking me out even more by using my name.

“You too…uh?”
Why was I pretending not to know her name?

“Dawn,” she said, smiling. “See you around.”

I smoked two more cigarettes in a row in the hopes of combating my anxiety. It wasn't working.

 

L
UCKILY, I HAD
to do group therapy for only one day before the weekend, which, unless we had visitors, was pretty much open for us to do whatever we wanted. Josh found me after lunch and asked if I played chess.

“I'm not that good, but I'll play.”

“Don't worry, I suck, too,” he said.

We found a bench outside, and he beat me over and over again, but the games were close enough that I kept thinking I had a chance against him.

“You're a fucking chess shark,” I accused him after he beat me five times in a row.

“No, I'm not. Honestly. I'm just lucky, I guess. One more?”

“Sure. What the fuck else am I going to do? You don't have anyone visiting today?” I looked around at the parents and spouses scattered on the lawn, all in deep conversation with their loved ones.

“Nobody knows I'm here except my boss. I couldn't even tell my parents,” he answered. I was hoping he had forgotten about his little fantasy of working for the mob, or at least come up with a new one.

“Check. Motherfucker.”

My competitive side got the best of me. This was the first time I had checked him all day.

“Stalemate,” he said.

“What do you mean, stalemate? I got you. You can't move anywhere.”

“Exactly.”

“So I finally won.”

“No. It's a stalemate. Nobody won. It's a tie.”

“A tie? But I got you trapped. There's nowhere for you to go.”

“Another one?”

“Sure. Why not?” I said, setting up my pieces. “But watch out. I'm going to fuck you up this time.”

Sunday was the same. Played chess all day, and to make up for lack of skill I started coming up with more and more outlandish intimidation techniques.

“You better move that fucking queen because my bishop is coming after that bitch. I'll teach her to take both my goddamn knights.” I was starting to sound like the hockey players.

Josh never reacted, though. He just moved his queen and said, “I believe that's checkmate.”

“Fucking son of a bitch!”

“Another?”

“Okay.”

“Hey, you know that girl Dawn over there?” he asked, glancing past me. I turned around to see her sitting on the grass.

“Uh-huh?”

“I think she has a crush on me.”

“On you?” I suddenly got very jealous. I couldn't concentrate on our game. “Why?”

“Why not?” he asked defensively.

I didn't want to tell him
because you're balding, and despite your claims about being in the mob, you look like a fucking computer programmer
.

“No. I mean, why do you think that?”

“Because in group the other day she said she was distracted because she kept thinking about some guy.”

“But still. Why you? There's like fifteen guys here.”

“Well, first…I'm the only guy even close to her age, and second, I think she brought it up in group because she wanted me to hear it.” His logic sounded about right, and it depressed the hell out of me.

“How do you know she didn't bring it up so you would tell me?” I said, joking around.

“I don't,” he said in all seriousness. “But I doubt it's you. She's only eighteen.”

Jesus. How did these eighteen-year-olds end up in rehab?

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty-five,” I said, feeling old, too old for her at least.

“See what I mean? I'm only twenty. So who else could it be? Checkmate.”

“Fucking son of a bitch!”

“One more?”

“Okay.”

 

O
N SUNDAY NIGHT
they loaded all of us who weren't hanging out with our families into a van and drove us to an outside AA meeting. It was like a field trip. People even got dressed up for the occasion. I just assumed we would go to Ventura or something, but we drove to Malibu instead. We got there an hour early, and even before anyone showed up, I could tell that this wasn't going to be a normal meeting. On a picnic table outside the high school gym that held the meeting, there was a huge spread of papaya and mango, smoked salmon, at least ten kinds of cheese, prosciutto, salami, an assortment of freshly baked breads, and on and on. Josh and I lurked around the table, eating as much as we could before people started arriving.

“Wait till you see who shows up for this thing,” said Dawn, joining us in our feast.

The first person to show up at the meeting drove a black BMW with tinted windows. There wasn't a single other car in the basketball court, which served as a parking lot, and still it took this guy over ten minutes to park the thing. A few of us were smoking cigarettes and critiquing this guy's parking ability when finally he turned off his car and got out wearing pajamas.

“Holy shit, that's what's-his-name,” I said as the guy tried to make a straight line for the entrance. He was weaving all over the place. “Jesus, he's a fucking mess. I always forget that guy's name. Goddamn. Not Gary Busey. You know, the other actor with the low voice.”

“You should have seen him last week,” Dawn said. “Two guys had to help him walk. He was so cracked out. That guy should not be driving.”

“I'd say he seems more drunk than cracked out,” I said.

“I meant drunk. I say ‘cracked out' about everything,” she reminded me.

I had been to a fair amount of these meetings, but this was the first celebrity I had seen, and they didn't seem to be working too well for him either. As the time got closer to the meeting, more and more people
showed up whom I recognized, or who were pointed out as being in this or that movie or rock band. Those of us who had dressed up didn't stand out too much, but I was clearly out of my element dressed in the thrift store clothes I had bought before I had lost twenty pounds from my most recent heroin-and-cocaine diet. I hadn't found any reason to shave in the last two weeks either. Rather than avoid me, though, these people, who normally would have to run down the street to escape fans and paparazzi, wouldn't leave me alone. Even that guy wearing the pajamas who had been in that movie—what was his fucking name?—went out of his way to shake my hand. I didn't like it. I got the vibe that everyone was trying to figure out who was who (I know I was), but that once they figured out I was a nobody, that would be the end of it.

“So what do you do? You play music?” some guy covered in tattoos, wearing supertight jeans and pointy boots, asked me.

“Yeah…” I answered, keeping it vague, hoping he didn't ask me whom I played with.

“It's hard for us musicians, always on the road. You know, I used to be fine until some hot chick would show up at the hotel with a pile of cocaine. Next thing I know, I'm in the fucking emergency room and the tour's canceled.”

I nodded my head to imply that I knew what he was talking about, but the only hotel room I had stayed in on tour was somewhere in the middle of Montana where we had broken down. I had slept on the floor under the bathroom sink.

“Now it's like…I don't care where the fuck we are, man, but when I get that urge it's just like…I got to go to a meeting, plain and simple. But listen, man, I know what it's like out there, so if you ever need to talk to anyone man, call me.” He wrote down his number on a piece of paper but didn't include his name.
Asshole,
I decided. Did he just take it for granted that I knew who he was?

When the meeting started, a British guy got up at the podium and, instead of telling any kind of story, he told us that a documentary had just come out about his band, and if we wanted to know how he ended up in AA we could go see the movie.
Another asshole.

Because promoting his movie took only five minutes, another guy got up there. He must have been in his seventies.

“I'm Buddy and I'm an alcoholic,” he started.

“Hi, Buddy,” almost two hundred people said in unison.

“My drink of choice was methadone,” he added, which got a laugh out of even me, and I tried hard not to laugh at these meetings. Humor
was just another form of recruitment as far as I could tell. You start laughing at their jokes, and pretty soon you start thinking, “Hey, maybe these guys aren't so bad after all. At least they can laugh at themselves.” I had good defenses against the more typical recruiting tactics, but humor was the weak spot in my armor. I had to watch out for that.

Buddy made up for the previous guy's poor storytelling. He was a jazz musician in the '50s and '60s and played with all the greats, not because he was that good a musician but because he supplied the drugs. By the time touring groups made it to California, they were often so sick that they would have traded their instruments for a shot of dope. The only thing Buddy asked for in trade was a chance to jam with them. So Buddy got to play with Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Monk…the list was endless. Sounded pretty good to me, except he kept finding himself in jail and had to have his heart valve replaced four times.

 

A
T MONDAY'S PEER
meeting Fist told Doug, “When you say you love me, I feel conflicted, because as much as I'd like to think I'm special, I know that you say that to all the guys.”

There were a few chuckles from the group, but most of us just shook our heads or quietly groaned. It didn't stop them from laughing at their own joke and high-fiving each other again.

 

I
DON'T KNOW
how they decided whom to put in which group, but my group was made up of mostly flight attendants. I was the only straight guy aside from Bruce until a police statistician named Peter joined us after my first few weeks.

It turned out this place also had a deal with American Airlines. The flight attendants were an odd lot. Always amicable, they would never get emotional about anything. They always knew exactly when to laugh or shake their heads in disbelief when I told them my stories, but they never had much to say about themselves. While they were always “doing well,” “feeling good,” or “confident about their sobriety,” at least once a week we lost one of them to the facility across the street.

“As some of you already know, Pamela took a whole month's worth of Zoloft last night. We're not sure when she'll be back with us,” Bruce started. “Does anyone have feelings about this they want to talk about?”

I just stared at my hands, and no one else seemed to be forthcoming with any feelings.

“How about Kim? You were close to her, weren't you? How are you feeling today?”

“Hmm. It's too bad about Pam. I know she was really feeling good about this process because we talked a lot about how great we've been doing. I'm just grateful that I'm still feeling very strong right now,” Kim answered. It was as if American Airlines gave their flight attendants an answer book before sending them here. Knowing the right answers hadn't kept Pam from taking a whole bottle of Zoloft.

“Okay then. Let's move on to Peter.” I still felt that Bruce was something of an idiot, but at least he knew when to give up. Getting anything like an honest answer from these flight attendants was like trying to get high smoking Ivory soap, something I had done on more than one occasion.

“So, Peter, do you mind sharing with the group how you ended up here?”

Peter had just checked in the night before.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I do,” he answered.

“Okay. Do you mind sharing why you have a problem with it?” Bruce tried.

“Because this is between me and my wife. That's why.” He was trying so hard to sound calm, but underneath his calm composure was a rage I had never seen the likes of. Peter's skin was so red it looked like he had a sunburn.

“Can you tell us how you feel about being here, then?” Bruce asked.

“Sure, I feel ashamed.”

“Good, now we're getting somewhere. Why?”

“Because I don't belong here. I'm not an alcoholic. I'm here to save my marriage. That's all.”

“So can I ask how you ended up in the hospital?”

At this question Peter's skin turned something closer to purple, but his voice still didn't waver.

“You have no business bringing that up in front of other people. That is confidential information, and I will see to it that you are held accountable for this clear abuse of trust.”

“Actually it's not. Anything said in this group is confidential by law, so I haven't said anything that can be repeated outside of this room.”

“Well, we'll see what my lawyer has to say about that. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to check out now.” He stood up to go.

“Okay. We can't stop you from leaving, but we'll have to notify your wife.”

Peter paused midstep and turned back to say something. It looked as if his head were about to explode. He couldn't find whatever it was he wanted to say and, much to my relief, continued to the door.