Ham (27 page)

I happily obliged. “She seems good. I know she's been through this before, but I think it's different this time. I'm glad you're going to be here. It's hard for her to be alone right now and I'm leaving in a couple of days.”

He asked how Family Week was. I told him tough, but she did really well. “She's dealing straight on.”

I told him I was encouraged to lay a lot of things on the table and it was good for our relationship.

“How about you?” he asked.

“Me? I'm fine.”

“I mean how was it for you?” he dug.

I sat for a moment. “Honestly, it brought up some stuff . . . I don't know if I never adjusted to the time change or I'm coming down with something or . . . I may have a drinking problem . . .”

What? What am I saying? How did that come out of my mouth?

Bill showed no signs of, well, anything. “Oh?” he said flatly.

And it was on.

Out of the blue.

“Well, I pretty much drink every day. I have since I was about sixteen.”

“How much?” he asked.

“In the past ten years, two or three bottles of wine a night. And vodka. No drugs. Ambien. I don't sleep well.”

Bill looked at me with knowing eyes. “For me using wasn't the problem. It was the solution. Until it wasn't. Until it stopped working.”

I wondered if he was wearing an “Easy Does It” T-shirt under his sweater.

I focused on my coffee and stirred it with my finger.

I flashed on all the nights I had sat alone, drinking, surfing porn on the Internet, never making plans because I didn't know what condition I'd be in. Or because I did.

Lugging trash bags of empty bottles to neighbors' trash cans so garbagemen and homeless recyclers wouldn't judge me.

The isolation. The thoughts of suicide. The good-bye letters I'd written to loved ones.

The smallness.

I continued. “When my partner's out of town it's pretty much full-time. Blinds are drawn. I don't answer the phone. Sometimes I do things I don't remember. Or say things or . . . I've just been so . . . sad.”

“Do you think you're an alcoholic?” he asked simply.

“I don't know. I've never used that word. I mean I know I drink a lot. But a lot of people are worse off than me.”

I remembered packing for our move from New York to Los Angeles. I'd come across an old journal of Danny's and, naturally, had read it. It said: “Sam is such an alcoholic. I don't know how much longer I can take this.”

I remembered carefully removing the page with a box cutter and tossing it away as if it didn't exist.

“I work,” I continued. “I've never been drunk onstage. I haven't been arrested or lost my savings or my relationship or my car, so . . .”

“When was your last drink?” he asked.

I flashed on sneaking down the fire escape stairwell in my boxer shorts and hoisting myself through a window and breaking into a restaurant. For a drink.
Was this a dream?
No. I had not given this episode a second thought until this moment, and it occurred to me that this behavior was . . . unusual . . . but not necessarily for me.

“Last week.” I left it at that.

Bill handed me his card. “If you're an alcoholic, you'll find out. If you're not, well then, cheers.” He dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table and we slipped into our coats and scarves and trod over the slushy sidewalk back to Liza's apartment building in silence.

Snowflakes the size of packing material wafted and floated down. There was a stillness. No breeze. It was quiet for New York. Considerate. Bill told me he would be back later that night but had some work to do. I politely shook hands with this stranger whom I'd practically vomited honesty to. He said our conversation was just between us. Then we parted as he started up toward Lexington and I toward the building. After three or four paces I stopped and turned around.

“Bill?”

He turned and we stood, staring at each other for a brief, endless moment.

“. . . I'm an alcoholic.”

As gently as the snow falling around us, he walked to me and gave me a short but dedicated hug. Then he walked away.

I took the elevator to Liza's apartment and let myself in. The staff meeting was over and everyone was gone. It was a Sunday after all. Liza yelled out from her bedroom, “Schmooli, is that you?”

I walked down the hall and to the doorframe of her room. And the dam broke. All of the tension of the last week, the last years, the last life, had culminated in this single moment of release. I couldn't speak. Liza remained in her bed, knowing somehow to let the moment stand.

“What is it? What happened?”

I somehow managed to move one foot in front of the other and made my way to her bedside, sitting on the edge next to her. She took me by the shoulders and stared deeply into my eyes. I collected myself and took a breath.

“I'm an alcoholic,” I said, and burst into tears once again.

She smiled and pulled me close and cradled me in her arms, rocking me back and forth, pushing the melting snowflakes from my brow and wiping the endless stream of tears from my eyes.

“I know, baby. I know.”

On my last night of being twelve years old, I dreamt that there were spiders, thousands of them, crawling all over the floor of my room and I was trapped in my bed. The dream was so real that when I woke on the morning of my thirteenth birthday, I wasn't sure if it had happened or not. The floor was clear, no sign of arachnids, but I was afraid to venture out. Afraid of being thirteen. The day was here.

Beginning years before, I had been warned by my father, with increasing regularity, that if I didn't “change” by the time I was thirteen, I would be in great trouble. I think he saw thirteen as the transition from boy to man—the time to relinquish forgivable childhood eccentricities before it was too late. He never specified what it was I should change or what trouble I would be in. However, without giving it a name like chicken pox or the measles, I knew that I carried an unspoken affliction, which I'd been reminded of at every turn, in sometimes overt but more often in subtle, nonspecific ways. It had been left for me to figure out and fix. Today I knew for sure. If I wasn't a normal, red-blooded American boy who liked normal, red-blooded American things, including normal, red-blooded American girls, all would be lost. It appeared all was lost.

I pulled back the blue corduroy bedspread that had protected me in my twin bed during the night and gingerly lowered a toe to the green shag carpeting, then scampered across it, knowing the spider nightmare was just that, but hedging my bets just the same. I ran to the single tiny bathroom, shared by the entire family. The pale blue tile floor was covered with a damp bath mat, and multiple, variously colored towels were hung over the sliding glass shower doors, providing the only privacy. The policy in our house was come-and-go-as-you-please save for my mother, who was the only one of us allowed to lock the door. One of her Carol Brady blond-streaked shag wigs sat on a Styrofoam head atop the toilet tank. I turned its pocked face toward the wall and removed my pajamas and stood before the mirror, naked, to give myself a careful and thorough inspection. Thirteen.

I wondered if I'd physically changed. Slightly doughy and pasty pale, but with muscular legs, broad shoulders, a strong jawline, and fantastic hair, currently bed-headed, but typically parted in the middle and feathered on the sides, I wasn't horrible. But that was just the outside. Inside it was scary. As I stared at my reflection, I wondered if the pounding of my heart and the fear in my soul was visible.

Then I ran back to my room and dressed in cutoffs and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt.

I had flag girl practice and I didn't want to be late.

•  •  •

Deana was the sinewy-muscled, tree-climbing leader of the girls' gang on our street and she hated me. I wanted the neighborhood kids to play “town,” in which we each had a pretend business and we rode around on our bikes to the “bank” and the “restaurant” and the “nightclub,” which was my establishment of choice, where I served Kool-Aid and performed my act. Deana wanted to play football or skin-a-squirrel or track-a-possum, I don't remember. She actually had a wild skunk as a pet, trained for battle.

Deana sent a message to me through one of her eleven-year-old lackeys that I had better stop encouraging this “stupid queer town game.” My father saw this as an opportunity for me to step up my manhood, and convinced me to send back a message for her to meet me in my front yard to settle this. “Settle this,” to me, meant talk it out—find a compromise. I was much more articulate and would have the upper hand. To Deana, “settle this” meant blood would be spilled.

Deana arrived, skidding to a stop on her rusty, sun-faded blue Huffy. The girl's bar had been removed so that her balls wouldn't get injured. Her long, ever-tanned arms and legs flexed in a tank top and cutoffs, which only made me look pastier and puffier in comparison. All of the kids surrounded us to see who would win the neighborhood crown.

Then Deana proceeded to beat the shit out of me.

She punched and kicked and spat and scratched. I didn't have time to play out the convincing speech about neighborly fraternity I had rehearsed only minutes before. I was terrified. This was uncivilized. We weren't little kids anymore. I had hair growing under my arms for Christ's sake. But Deana had more.

She grabbed me firmly by my moppy hair and swung me around so hard I was lifted off the ground in a circle like in a Popeye cartoon. Which would give way first, Deana's super-human powers or my hair? Finally, she let go and I missiled into a crumpled pile of exhausted flesh under a thorny bush. I pulled myself up from the dirt, dizzy and discombobulated. The crowd cheered and jeered. Deana kicked me in the stomach and I was down again, for the last time.

I looked up and saw my parents watching through the window: my mother's face registered panic and it was clear that my father had probably tied her to a chair to prevent her from rescuing me. His eyes pleaded for me to get up and try again. Did he really want me to hit a
girl 
? Even if I could? Was he too humiliated to stop the fisticuffs and rescue his sissy son? One way or another, he was going to let me fight my own fight. Even if I might not live to see morning.

That night I soaked in a hot tub while Deana was off somewhere, I was sure, ripping open a live rabbit with her teeth and smearing the blood all over her body in some kind of victory ritual. My muscles were tender and bruised. My hair hurt. But I knew that I was lucky it was the beginning of summer and I had three months for this to be forgotten before the gossip of the school year began. Deana was clearly the champion, but I took refuge in the thought that she would probably get fat, be a grandmother in her thirties, and sell army surplus. And I would be a star.

•  •  •

Jerry was a massive, lumbering, redheaded, freckled bully whose head was vastly disproportionately larger than the rest of his body. Like one of those effigies people burn at political rallies. In eighth-grade English class, when we were discussing electives for next term, our teacher asked what we'd be taking, and Jerry muttered, “Drugs.” Everyone in earshot snickered except me. I thought he was an idiot and I was sure he knew it from the eye roll I couldn't stifle. He hated me.

At the end of class, he cornered me at the door and told me to meet him after school at 3:30 because he was going to beat me up. Why anyone would make an appointment to get the shit knocked out of him was beyond me. I should have told him I had a previous engagement, a rehearsal, a late luncheon. Instead, I reported that 3:30 worked for my schedule and I agreed to meet outside by the basketball court. I didn't tell anyone about my appointment for assault and I was hoping Jerry didn't either. If I was going to get beaten up, I preferred that it be a private pummeling.

I was punctual as usual, and after waiting ten terrifying minutes for Jerry to arrive and rip me to shreds, I decided that if he couldn't be on time, it was his loss. I started around the corner of the adjacent brick building and there he was. Alone. His head seemed even bigger and bloatier than it had earlier in the day, teetering on his shoulders. His cheeks were red with freckly rage.

“Going somewhere, Sissy Boy?” he scoffed, with a curled lip and a cruel smile.

He clenched his fists and stepped toward me and my breath fluttered quick and shallow in a race with the speed of my thoughts. I had no idea what to do. I certainly wasn't going to fight him. I prepared for my fate and hoped he wouldn't disfigure my face, because I was going to be in show business and I was not really a character type. As he took another step closer, I blurted out, “I thought your joke about taking drugs next term was hysterical.”

My comment literally jolted him off balance as his giant head rolled to one side and his dilated pupils registered confusion. I had thrown the first punch, albeit verbally, and it had landed—Pow!

Round one—Sissy Boy!

Before he could recover, I said, “You should be in the talent show. Everyone thinks you're so funny.”

I thought his head was actually going to roll off his body. Muhammad Ali could not have stung more effectively.

Round two—Sissy Boy takes it again!

“You could be a professional comedian,” I continued with growing confidence.

Finally, he spoke. “Are you serious?”

“Dead,” I replied. “You're like George Carlin.”

A lost, inquisitive blankness came over him.

“I mean Cheechen Chong,” I added, hoping to score.

“Which one?”

I realized that Cheech
and
Chong must be two separate people.

“Both!” I said. “
That's
how funny you are!”