Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (5 page)

“No pulse, and he’s not breathing. I’m starting CPR. Angel, call 911!”

Sister Angel tap tap tapped away. Sylvia got me and a couple of the other guys to move him onto the floor. She knelt beside him. I shoved my bed back to give her room. She whipped an alcohol pad out of her pocket, ripping off the paper with hands that trembled. Quickly, she wiped down the whole lower half of his face. I wouldn’t want to do mouth to mouth resuscitation in the age of AIDS. The pump they’re supposed to use was probably in a drawer in the nursing station. There was no time.

First she did the two breaths again. Then she wiggled her knees around, positioning herself further down his body with her knees wedged up against his ribs. She was so little that she had to tilt forward to get her short arms right over the middle of his chest. She positioned herself with elbows locked, thumbs clasped, fingers splayed out, the heels of her palms digging in right around his diaphragm. Her lips moved as she counted in a half-voiced whisper, keeping the rhythm steady.

“One and two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen.”

She slid up his side just far enough to do another two breaths. Her cheek lay against his face as she checked for breathing again. If his chest had been moving even slightly on its own, she would have seen it. She went back into the chest compressions, arms rigid, elbows locked, thumbs hooked together, palms pressing down.

“One and two and three and….”

She kept going and going. Sweat poured off her face, raining down onto her hands as they dug into his chest, trying to force life back into him. Every once in a while she looked up, her eyes scanning. Sister Angel hadn’t come back. The street outside lay quiet.

It must have been two in the morning when we finally heard sirens. Sister Angel led in three EMS people, two men and a woman, and a couple of pairs of cops. They overflowed the small space around God’s bed. They rigged a folding screen and went in with their defibrillators and oxygen or whatever it is they use.

It didn’t work. For the second time that night, everything stopped. The techs folded the screen back and came out looking grim. God was dead.

The next morning, I got discharged. It felt anticlimactic. I was so depressed that I walked past I don’t know how many bars and liquor stores without even thinking about going in. Eventually I reached a subway station. I let my feet carry me down the stairs. I wasn’t in the mood to jump the turnstile. The three dollar bills I found in my pocket looked as if I’d put them through the laundry. I probably had. I bought a Metrocard, hopped the first train that came along, and went home.

Home was a fourth-floor walkup in an old-law tenement on Second Avenue. It was located just a little too far north to be on the fashionable Upper East Side that the old Yorkville neighborhood where Jimmy and I grew up had morphed into and a little too far south to be considered Spanish Harlem. I had a railroad flat. One room led right into the next.

I used the room looking out on Second Avenue as a living room. The decor consisted of a battered couch, a faux leather recliner with a temperamental mechanism, and a TV with a few knobs missing. I’d salvaged all of them from Dumpsters. The room doubled as a storeroom. That is, cartons I’d never got around to unpacking teetered in unstable piles. I didn’t have a clue what was in most of them. Alcohol hadn’t done my memory any good.

The other end room was the bedroom. A king-size mattress took up most of the floor space. A lot of crumpled clothes, clean and dirty, lay strewn all over the bed and on the narrow strips of floor. Sorting and folding, like giving up alcohol, was one of those things I was always going to get around to later.

A variety of candles with their bottoms drip-melted onto equally unmatched saucers provided ambiance. Two speakers not much bigger than cigarette boxes that plugged into my Walkman added sound effects. Every once in a while I brought home a woman who wanted romantic, and that was it. Hey, candlelight, music, a snifter of fine brandy—what more did she need? Okay, a tumbler full of anything 86 proof or better. It went with a Don Juan somewhat the worse for wear who suspected that his liver was beginning to affect his capacity for sexual athletics. A passed-out Romeo who might or might not remember her name in the morning. Or, if she left before morning, that she’d been there at all.

The middle room must have been one of the last kitchens in New York with a claw-footed bathtub in the middle of it. Too chipped and stained with rust to be worth anything on the market, it probably should have been in a museum. I had rigged a curtain all around it and stuck one of those hand-held telephone showerheads with a flexible cable onto the faucet so I could take a shower in it. I couldn’t leave anything on the stove when I took a shower. But at least I had a clean kitchen floor. After every shower, it was mop or wade.

Today I felt an urgent need to soak. Instead of showering, I tossed things around till I found a stopper for the tub and a couple of towels that might have been clean. I ran the water hot enough to fog the windows in the other rooms. Then I rolled up another towel to use as a pillow behind my neck, lay back, and stretched out until my crossed ankles were resting on the rim of the tub, letting the Bowery steam out of me.

I was so spaced out that the water cooled off some before I thought to scrabble underneath the tub for the pack of cigarettes and box of kitchen matches that I stashed there. As I fished around for the Baggie I kept them in, my fingers touched something smooth, cylindrical, and metallic and, when that started to roll, something else smooth, cylindrical, and glass. Beer can and liquor bottle. More than one of each, by the ensuing clinking and rattling. Moment of truth. I grabbed a bottle by the neck as it rolled out from under the tub. Empty. I leaned farther over the side like a shipwrecked man in a lifeboat trying to catch a fish with his bare hands. Beer can. Empty. Another bottle rolled just beyond my reach. Discount bourbon. I couldn’t always afford top shelf. This one had a couple of fingers in the bottom.

I hung there by my armpits, my bare butt sliding around in the enamel tub, up to my hips in tepid water, thinking about it. Well, not exactly thinking. More of a vegetative state. Was it worth the effort? I had once cracked an ankle chasing a bottle out of that tub and onto that floor. Not that I considered the pros and cons. When my armpits started to hurt, I slid back into the tub and lay back again. I hooked my toes around the tap and ran a little more hot water in. Of such small, mindless decisions is sobriety made. One moment at a time.

If Christmas Day counted as my first day sober, I now had eleven days. My brain still felt a little foggy. But if I stayed sober, my mind would get sharper, my digestive tract would get less acidic, and I would have a lot more energy than I did at this moment. On the down side, I would get to feel all my feelings and remember all my mistakes. Except for those I’d made in a blackout. Blacked out memories were gone forever.

I wished I couldn’t remember God dying in the next bed. I’d seen more than my share of dead people. You do when you’ve been skating on the edge of the abyss as long as I had. Stumbling over poor old Elwood had been almost par for the course. Not much difference between a passed out drunk and a corpse. A few cubic inches of air. And he’d been on his way out anyway. Once I got over the sheer surprise of it, I’d handled it okay. But God’s death weighed heavily on me. I’d never before been right there at the moment when somebody I knew switched off.

What the hell had happened? He’d been fine the day before. He’d still seemed okay when he got back from his pass. Though I know from my own experience that anyone can be fooled, I thought he’d been clean. His shades might have hidden glassy eyes or pinpoint pupils. The whole detox had gotten used to God wearing them practically all the time. I couldn’t even remember if he’d had them on. Surely staff would have checked his eyes when he signed back in. Wouldn’t they?

If he’d been high, why had he come back? For a habitual addict of any kind, it takes a lot of chemicals to overdose, believe me. God hadn’t looked high at all. He’d seemed satisfied, even a little smug, about whoever he’d seen or talked to. His family? He’d said he didn’t have any contact with them. But he might have gotten in touch with them. A lot of the Twelve Steps are about coming to terms with the harm you’ve done and making amends.

On the other hand, a lot of people say the steps are consecutive for a reason. Even if I decided to try sobriety for a while, it would be a long time till I’d expect myself to apologize systematically to the many people I’d pissed off. God had hardly been any further along. Though he and I got along just fine, I had begun to get the feeling that he could be a vindictive kind of guy. And there was a lot I didn’t know about him. He’d mentioned his sisters and their families. Who else had he been close enough to hurt? I knew he’d been in and out of AA the way I had. That meant he’d met hundreds of people from every possible background. They were all supposed to be anonymous.

But people are only human. All sorts of things happen in AA. Men hit on women. Some men hit on men. People loan each other money, even get involved in business transactions. And not everybody manages to zip the lip as firmly as they’re supposed to about who they’ve seen at a meeting and what they’ve heard them say. Especially if they relapse.

The water got closer and closer to cold. I heaved myself up and out of the tub. I pulled the plug and wrapped a towel around my waist. The refrigerator stood only a few steps away. Being interested in food was another thing that came back gradually. And having enough forethought and disposable cash to stock the refrigerator took more sobriety than I had had in a while. I opened the door and gazed in.

I saw about what I’d expected: some bread so moldy it was well on the way to penicillin; a plastic container whose contents had sprouted what might prove to be the cure for cancer; a wedge of mummified cheese; a couple of shriveled limes—I vaguely remembered Laura going fancy on me with tequila last time she’d come over, which was months ago—and, of course, a couple of six-packs. I stood there looking at them for a long time. Then I swung open the freezer door. Oh shit. A Ziploc bag with a little packet wrapped in aluminum foil in it, what was left of a gram of cocaine. Now what was I going to do with that? Flush it? Sell it? Say the hell with it and use it?

I stood there with both doors open long enough for steam to start rising from my body as the cold air from the fridge and freezer hit my skin, still relatively warm from the bath. My mind was a complete blank. My hand went tentatively out toward the baggie a couple of times and then pulled back, as if I were a marionette on strings. I needed a drink. Funny, huh? I wanted a drink to relieve the anxiety I felt about my conflict over whether or not to do the coke. If I was going to pick up, maybe I should just get it over with.

I didn’t know which way I would go until I slammed the white enamel doors. The phone had to be around here somewhere. I’d seen my cell phone lying on the mattress in the other room, but I knew that was one bill I hadn’t paid for months. I didn’t think my land line service had been cut off. My old black clunker had a long cord. It could be anywhere. I finally dug it out from under a stack of sections of the Sunday
New York Times
that I had meant to read or put out for recycling some day. I dialed Jimmy’s number. I figured I’d give it four rings and then hang up.

He answered on the third ring. I could hear a variety of sounds in the background. A sports commentator and crowd sounds must be football on TV. The tripping rhythms of Irish instrumental music, a jig or reel, were radio or a CD. On top of that, what any friend of Jimmy’s would recognize as simulated black powder rifle fire from his Civil War reenactment website boomed out. Jimmy was a great multitasker. Great. I had a task for him.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s me. I’m home. I need you to come over and throw some stuff away for me.”

He arrived half an hour later with two shopping bags full of groceries and a couple of giant dark green garbage bags. He went for the refrigerator first, sweeping the six packs still linked together in their plastic collars into one of the bags. I wondered how long it would take him to think of the freezer. Nanoseconds. The coke went into the garbage bag. He didn’t have to turn around to read my reluctance to throw away the money it represented. Crack was cheaper than this stuff, but even I wasn’t that much of an idiot. He scooped up cans and bottles from the floor and dumped them in after it.

“Forget the money,” Jimmy said, as the empties crashed and tinkled. “It’s like the money over the bar. It’s gone.”

I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture, so I started telling him about God. Jimmy was a good listener. He also knew I already had his sobriety lecture on my hard drive, as he would have put it.

“Charismatic and caustic. Sounds like you with a pedigree,” Jimmy commented. “What did he look like? I might have seen him at a meeting.”

“Tall, blond. Aristocratic. Snotty looking bone structure, good skin, great teeth. You’d probably remember. Someone who said, ‘Hi, I’m God, I’m an alcoholic’ would stand out.”

“You know what? I do remember.” Jimmy named a meeting in a church on Fifth Avenue, across from the Park, that got a lot of carriage trade. Anyone who thinks alcoholics are a bunch of lowlifes should check that meeting out. Even in the age of animal rights, at this time of year there would be enough fur coats in there to stock a boutique. “A couple of years back, they made a big fuss about him calling himself God. A few people got all worked up about it at a business meeting. They took a group conscience.”

Business meetings are where AA members who happen to be control freaks get a chance to use
Robert’s Rules of Order
. They take more time than anyone who isn’t a control freak wants them to.

“Who won?”

“He did. I sat through a few impassioned speeches about how there’s no requirement to have any particular beliefs. He pointed out that it actually was his name. Godfrey, right? It’s coming back to me. Some of the folks at that meeting didn’t like your friend at all.”