The Next Right Thing (5 page)

“That’s
not
where you want to go.” MP smiled tightly. “I won’t have a boyfriend who beats people up.”

“Who told you?”

“That’s not where you want to go, either.”

“Okay,” I said. “I understand.”

“I don’t think you do.” MP untangled her ankles and turned toward me. “I’m dedicating my life to peace. That’s what yoga
is
. Getting closer to the source. Relaxing into the loving spirit of the universe. It’s not about beating people up.”

“I didn’t actually beat anyone up.” It wasn’t a good idea to tell her what I
had
done. “I’m going to clean that up with the guy.”

“Which guy?”

“The guy I didn’t beat up.”

MP took hold of her big toe and pulled herself down toward the deck. She’d found yet another way to tell me I was full of shit.

“Terry was my best friend,” I said. “I want to understand what happened.”

“Wasn’t it Terry who said that understanding was the booby prize?”

“Terry said a lot of things.”

“And that’s what this is about. You’re afraid if you don’t know why he slipped, you’ll slip, too.” MP rose from the deck and touched my head. “Can’t you see it’s all in there? Everything was okay until you stopped taking care of yourself. You think your anger means something, but maybe it’s just a bunch of bad transmitters. Maybe it’s just … 
alcoholism
.”

I followed her inside and started to fix some coffee. “I think it’s the other way around,” I said. “I think my comfortable life was covering this up. It’s my responsibility to Terry. I need to know what happened.”

My high-tech German coffeemaker didn’t have an opinion, but I heard MP walk away. Then I heard her walk back.

“This isn’t about how Terry died,” she said. “This is about your feeling that you betrayed him.”

About a year before, I’d run into Terry at Alpha Beta. We were in the fruit section. When did either of us begin to eat fruit? I had to admit that I hadn’t seen him in a while.

We did an awkward dance, and then for reasons that seem almost suspicious to me now, we hugged.

Terry smiled. I never trusted Terry when he smiled.

“What?” I said.

“Your ass starting to feel a bit tight?”

“My ass?”

“Your sphincter. That ring where all the tension goes?”

“Because?”

“Answer the question,” Terry said, “and then I’ll tell you why I’m asking.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think my sphincter is any tighter than usual.”

“Because that’s what happens sometimes,” Terry said, “when a guy starts slacking off on meetings. His asshole starts to get tight.”

I hadn’t been going to as many meetings as I used to, and when I did go, I wasn’t hanging out for endless hours in coffee shops afterward. For many years, I’d had no home but A.A. That year I’d discovered that I also had a home with MP. “If you don’t think I’m going to enough meetings, Terry, why don’t you just say so?”

“Am I your sponsor now?”

“Yes, in fact, you
are
my sponsor.”

“Well, fancy that.”

“Okay,” I said. “I haven’t been going to enough meetings. What did I miss?”

“You mean besides a feeling of peace and connection to your fellows?”

“Yeah,” I said, “besides that.”

“This whole eco-friendly recovery-home thing seems to be taking off.”

“The what?”

“Colin Alvarez has this idea that he can squeeze a few more
bucks out of the newcomers if he puts some solar panels on his recovery homes. The man’s a marketing genius.”

I laughed. I laughed hard. “Since when do you applaud Colin Alvarez?”

“Where have you been? How come you don’t know what’s been happening in your own community? You think you don’t matter, that you can go off and fall in love with yoga girl, and it won’t leave a vacuum in A.A.? But it does leave a vacuum, and this is what’s filling it: low-carbon-imprint fucking recovery homes.”

“Look at my face”—I pointed to myself—“this is me being contrite. I’m fucking sorry. I’ll see you at the meeting tonight.”

I did go that night, but I don’t think I went the next night.

Despite my desire for answers, I wasn’t quite ready to call everyone I knew and ask about an electrician named after a dog. And, one way or another, I knew I’d be seeing John Sewell, my ex-wife’s new beau and erstwhile employer of the mystery electrician, soon enough. It was midmorning, and I decided I’d better help Yegua clean out my garage. Helping him do anything was my most valued form of procrastination.

Yegua, my illegal alien assistant, smiled and flashed his teeth. I’d bought him those teeth myself, and he liked to remind me of my investment. My other laborers had given him the name Yegua—Spanish for “mare”—because there was a time between no teeth and new teeth when he had temporaries.
Large
temporaries.

We started tying all my electrical cords into neat bundles,
which always made me wonder why I had so many electrical cords.

Yegua didn’t have a green card, though he’d been working for me almost the whole time I’d been working myself. Always casually but impeccably dressed—even his jeans were ironed—he had lately grown his wiry black hair out into a mullet. Sometimes I mimed scissors and threatened to cut it off. I told him that women would like him better with shorter hair. Yegua always said he needed only one woman in Guatemala and one woman here. And both of them liked his mullet.

Yegua had put two sons through college in Guatemala, where he owned a business with a third. He was a better man than any man I knew. I guess I could have asked him whether he thought I was a racist, but I didn’t have the Spanish for the question. And I guess deep down I wasn’t prepared for the answer.

He finished coiling another cord, then took mine, too. I wasn’t doing a very good job, and he started over. He hung them from hooks under the cabinets.

“Somebody’s
buscándote
,” Yegua said. “
Tiene mala pinta
. He sits in the truck, watches your house. I thought it was one of your
camarades
, but now I don’t think so.”

Yegua was amused by the A.A. guys, like Wade, who came by to shoot the shit. He probably thought they were “bad paint jobs,” too. There wasn’t an ounce of bullshit in Yegua—when the couple next door adopted a baby from China, I couldn’t convince him that the child hadn’t been purchased. I thought about the truck parked across the street, and the bad paint job who sat and watched my house, and I had to imagine that my feelings of being followed weren’t mere paranoia. If this asshole
had parked in front of my house, it was a good bet that he’d been tailing me, too. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that it somehow had something to do with my friend Terry.

I held up my cell phone. “If he comes back, will you call me?”

Yegua smiled. He walked out of the garage toward whatever he would do for me next.

“My goddamn partner was Mexican,” I once told Terry. “I
can’t
be a racist.”

“Sure you can,” he said. “We all are. We all hate Mexicans and we all hate blacks and we all hate whites and we all
especially
hate women. That’s why the world is such a lovely place.”

That was when I had less than a year sober. We were on our way to Bare Elegance, a strip club near LAX, although I thought we were going to a Lakers game. Terry often changed his mind about destinations.

During a brief period between big luxury cars, Terry tried a Porsche Boxster. Something disturbed me about my big-boned, pale-faced sponsor driving recklessly in such a small car.

“I didn’t beat him because he was Mexican,” I said. “I beat him because I was mad. He just happened to be there, resisting arrest. He just happened to be Mexican.”

“Sometimes,” Terry said, “it’s not so helpful to look at your intentions. You gotta look at what happened. Did you, in fact, beat the shit out of a Mexican-American citizen of this country?”

“I did, but—”

“There’s no ‘but,’ ” Terry said. “A big part of this deal is getting used to the idea that there’s no ‘but.’ That’s what you did.
Therefore, that’s who you are. You’re a guy who beat a Mexican nearly to death. Can you hang out with that for a while? It’s like a can of tomatoes on a shelf. You just want to notice that it’s there. There might be some corn next to it. What you’re going to do is write down that there were some tomatoes, and then you’re going to write down that there was some corn. Or maybe you’re going to write down that you don’t have any more corn. We’re not going to judge any of this shit right now. We’re just going to call it by name. We’ll sort the rest of it out later. You get that?”

“No,” I said.

“Can you do it anyway?”

“Yes,” I said.

Manny Mendoza got my call at around eleven-thirty that morning. I pretended it was a whim. “I’m about to commit a crime. You want to have lunch and try to talk me out of it?”

“Why don’t you stay down south with the crazy white people?” Manny said. “Maybe they’ll let you found a cult or something.”

“Been there, done that. But hey, I’m learning Spanish. My crew is teaching me lots of filthy words.”

“Charming.”

Neither Manny nor I should have become cops. Manny because he should have become a professor or a priest. Me because I have an appetite for self-destruction and violence that no cop should ever have.

I’d been telling myself all week that I wasn’t headed north—in the direction of both my past and Terry’s death—but after this morning’s events, the gravity of Santa Ana caught me. My sister
hadn’t been this pissed off with me in eight years. MP had never been this pissed off with me—which made me think about how my marriage ended, which made me think about getting kicked off the force, which made me think about Santa Ana: the scene of my crimes.

A.A. newcomers are often warned to stay away from “people, places, and things” that remind them of their drinking. In the hierarchy of good advice, that’s right up there with the rhythm method and using the Hells Angels for concert security. Some days
breathing
reminded me of my drinking.

Manny and I met at Knowlwood burgers near the Santa Ana-Tustin border. I paid for the big baskets of cheeseburgers and fries because I still owed him. I would owe him forever.