The Next Right Thing (13 page)

“I’m working on it,” he said. “I’ll do it right away.”

“Slow down,” I said. “Tell me how you met Terry.”

“How does anyone meet him?” Troy said. “He was hanging around my recovery house, saying lots of inappropriate shit that was actually quite appropriate.”

“Like what?”

Troy raised an eyebrow. “Like the stuff that you say? Like telling someone that they’d never be able to forgive their parents until they stopped taking money from them, like telling somebody else that an orgasm was a commitment. You want me to go on?”

“No.” I laughed. “I get the gist. But why was he there? Was he there on business?”

“I figured it was just what sober guys did, went and visited the newer sober guys. It seemed like he was friends with Colin. Like what Wade said, he did lawyer stuff for him. But mostly, it seemed like he was there to talk to me.”

“You?”

“And guys like me,” Troy said. “He’d tease me, but you know, I always felt special. You know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean.”

Troy dropped his Camel Light and crushed it. As he sat down
on one of the wooden benches along the boardwalk, I took another hit off my cigar and
really
wished I still smoked cigarettes. Putting my foot on the bench beside Troy, I watched my smoke drift up the hill toward Las Brisas where once, many years before, I had watched O. J. Simpson put two beautiful women into a limousine and then return to the bar with them exactly forty-five minutes later.

“Did he talk to the girls, too?” I asked.

“You’re asking me if he fucked them?” Troy said.

I didn’t say anything.

“I never saw that, Randy. If it happened, I never saw it.”

“How about that last night?” I said. “Will you tell me about that now?”

“Will you be my sponsor?”

“Tell me about that last night,” I said, “and then we’ll talk about it.”

“I went outside for a smoke,” Troy said, “and he was parked across the street, which was kind of creepy. You know what I mean? He wasn’t on the phone or anything. He was just watching our house. Terry never seemed like a sitting-in-the-car kind of guy. Usually, it was like he had his door open before the car even stopped. When he saw me, he got out, and we started talking.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Same as always. What it was like when he first got sober, how hard it was. Nothing he didn’t talk about at meetings, but I’ve thought about this part of the night more than any other. He talked about how everyone had been sick of him, how they’d wanted him to die and get it over with. And then he asked me if
I wanted to hang out. It was like he needed me more than I needed him, and I didn’t like that.”

“So why’d you go?”

“Because, you know, it was a privilege, too. Like we were going to be friends, and I wanted that at the same time I didn’t want that.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “This is me, remember? Where’d you go?”

“We went to Santa Anita, the race track? He said he was going to show me where he hung out before he got sober. He took me to this spot under the bleachers where his old bookie was, and he told me what this chump would be wearing and exactly what he would say to us. He was right, too. This is fifteen years later we’re talking about.”

It wasn’t fifteen years later. Terry had taken me on the same trip seven years ago, and I had been equally impressed. The bookie had said,
Eh, Whitey, how’s your pretty wife?
Even when I went, Terry hadn’t had a pretty wife in a long time.

“I was with him a couple of hours,” Troy continued. “The whole time he pretended that we weren’t looking for heroin. We were only taking a tour of all his old copping spots. I thought we were getting to be friends. Isn’t that fucked up?”

“And then what?”

“And then nothing,” Troy said. “We were supposed to look at some more places he used to cop, but he got pissed at me. I wasn’t up for any more Santa Ana. I talk big, but heroin scares the shit out of me. He started freaking out like, ‘You think I’m
going to cop? You think after fifteen years of sobriety I’m going shoot drugs with an asshole like you?’ He told me I was a pussy because I’d only snorted it. He said that I had to be a recovering IV drug user to ride with him, and he kicked me out onto Orangethorpe near that TGIF. I thought he was kidding, but then he drove away.”

This wasn’t any Terry that I’d ever known. If it was true, not only had he abandoned Troy to his demons, he’d probably taught the demons a few tricks.

Troy paused to carefully fold the piece of paper with the quote on it. Then he stuffed it in his back pocket.

As he did this, I realized that the bench he was sitting on was the one that had been dedicated to DUI Dave, Terry’s own sponsor, whom I had never met. Terry had told me that Dave used the cuffs of his pants as ashtrays and that Terry had never known him to enter a building without smoking a cigarette outside first. A small brass plaque gave the date of his sobriety and the date of his death. Terry had paid for the plaque himself. If Troy had noticed, he might have said there were no coincidences, and then I would have had to drown him.

“I can’t stand the idea that a TGIF in Fullerton might be my last drink,” Troy said. “And don’t tell me that I can go drink right now. I
know
that. Will you be my sponsor?”

There was a time when I would sponsor anyone. The sicker and more annoying, the better. I thought it was my sacred duty to A.A. Sponsorship was also supposed to be the final step toward freedom from alcohol—the twelfth step, in fact—but I didn’t know if I believed that anymore. My own sponsor had been on some kind of fucked-up twelfth-step call the night he slipped and died.

“Terry was protecting you,” I said. “He must have known where he was headed, and he didn’t want you along for the ride.”

“Are you even listening to me? I want you to be my sponsor.”

“If you did a fifth step with me—and there’s no way you ever will—I’d make you tell everyone
everything
.”

“Is that what Terry did with you?”

“No,” I said. “That would be your special humiliation.”

“Just be my sponsor.”

“Tell me more about that night. He called Claire for sex?”

“I figured he was looking for an alternative to copping. You remember how he would flip out his phone and start dialing while you were still talking to him?”

I smiled.

“I like Claire and all,” Troy said. “I mean, from what I see at meetings, I think she’s trying, but Terry didn’t call her for any good reason.”

“What’d he say?”

“He wondered if they could talk. He asked her how her son was doing. The call ended pretty quickly after that.”

Visiting Claire was a marginally better idea than visiting Santa Ana, but not by much. I blew more smoke toward Las Brisas.

“That’s everything,” Troy said. “Just be my sponsor.”

I took my foot off the bench. “Let’s forget about the fact that I almost beat the shit out of you this morning. How insane it is that you’re even talking to me. Because I’m going to tell you that I don’t like you, Troy. I don’t like your attitude. Also, I don’t like your face. I don’t like your fake beefed-up body, and when you’re around me, I feel a little bit nauseated the entire time. Not like
I’m going to puke, exactly, but like I’ll never be able to eat food again. I also can’t promise that I won’t beat the shit out of you. You upset me so much, in fact, that it’s probable.”

Troy looked at me, then stood up. I relaxed my legs for the punch I was certain was coming. He was entitled to it. “Still want me to be your sponsor?” I asked.

“You have no idea.”

I’D BEEN WANTING TO TALK
to Wade alone since I left him at the Coastal Club. There was something that bothered me about the way he’d gone quiet while Troy and I talked.

MP was asleep by the time I got home after dropping off Troy. I was back on my deck, smoking another cigar. It was near midnight. I called Wade. He picked up on the fourth ring. “That house where Colin Alvarez lives?” he said. “I’ve been to that house.”

About a year before Terry died, we lost track of Wade for a while. It wasn’t as though we stopped seeing him, either.

The way you lose most people in A.A. is they stop going to meetings, but Wade never slacked on attendance. Wade
was
A.A. He’d always been a pretty good salesman—of scuba lessons, of stereo equipment, of time shares—but his greatest profession would always be meetings.

One day, though, I noticed that he wasn’t around so much anymore. Terry and I became edgy with each other almost immediately. We were both what my sister Betsy would describe disparagingly as “alpha males.” Wade, however, was something like an alpha male minus. He anchored us in A.A., but also provided a buffer between us. Without him, Terry bossed me around in ways that I didn’t need to be bossed around: he’d buy me tickets to basketball games he knew I didn’t want to attend, take me to dinner at Sinatraesque cigar bars that made me uncomfortable.

We talked to Wade about his absence, but that was like pushing rope. He agreed that he should be around more—
you’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right
—and nothing changed.

He also seemed to have more discretionary income than usual. He would ski at Whistler, let’s say, rather than Tahoe. And he started to develop the kind of expensive interests that he could never quite pull off before. He suddenly had all this old-school high-end hi-fi equipment, for example, and on the rare times we did see him, he would try to get us to listen to LPs with him.

Then one day Wade drifted back into our lives. It started with a phone call. I was only then starting to carry a cell phone. Sometimes, when it rang, I would stare at it.

“Hello.”

“It’s Wade.”

“Hi, Wade. How’d you get this number?”

“Is there something wrong with me calling you at this number?” His voice got higher. “Am I not supposed to call you?”

“Chill out,” I said. “I’m just shocked when it rings. Sometimes it seems like a toy I carry to pretend I have a job.”

“You have a job,” Wade said. “You have a good job.”

“Anyway,” I said.

“I’m calling to tell you that I’ve been growing pot under my house.”

You get that in A.A. a lot: people saying what no one has ever said to you before. Once, after a meeting, a guy told me that he fucked his German shepherd. Just like that. No one ever told me that kind of thing when I was a cop.

“Should we be chatting about this on a cell phone?” I asked.

We met at Jean Claude’s, something I didn’t do for the guy who fucked his dog. Wade explained that he’d made over two hundred grand that year growing hydroponic marijuana under his house. He didn’t touch the stuff. All he did was run the risk. Guys came and set it up. Guys came and took it away in trash bags.

At first I didn’t see what the problem was. “No shit?”

“I don’t want to lie about this anymore,” Wade said. “Every time I go to a meeting, I feel like a freak.”

And then he cried. Guys like Wade and me, there comes a time in our lives when the only thing we have is A.A. For some of us, that time comes more than once. That day at Jean Claude’s bakery and café, Wade felt like he’d betrayed his only true family. I felt privileged to be his friend while he passed this spiritual kidney stone, but I called Terry so he could be there, too. I wanted Wade to know that we were in this together; I also didn’t
want Terry to miss Wade’s low point. That’s another thing you can’t explain to a civilian: how beautiful that lack of hope can be. I put my hand in the middle of Wade’s back as Terry hugged him. I told Wade that I loved him. Terry said, “If you’re done being a lowlife scumbag criminal now, maybe we can get on with our lives?” Sensing that something was up, Jean Claude spotted us our chai lattés. We all started talking again every day.

Wade’s confession was sparked by the fact he was about to get busted. With Terry’s legal help, he soon made a deal to avoid jail. Wade traded away most of what he’d earned—his drug-related assets—in exchange for a pass on the criminal charges. He’d probably exchanged some information, too, but I hadn’t asked.