Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (9 page)

Barbara skimmed, not sure what she was looking for. Every note mentioned the drinking: either some detail of his patterns and the progression to high tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, loss of control, and the general falling apart of his life or something he said that indicated how self-aware he was or how open he seemed to changing. But Charmaine and Sister Angel, especially, were interested in everything. Never married. No children. No current partner—in fact, he’d denied long-term relationships altogether. Why no girlfriends? Barbara wondered. From Bruce’s description, he had been an attractive guy. Charmaine wrote that he seemed attached to his nephews, and Sister Angel noted that relationships with his sister’s children needed to be explored further. “Resentments,” she had written cryptically.

Educated at Princeton, majored in French. That would not have done him much good on the Bowery. Maybe his father had wanted him to be a diplomat. Did not graduate. No job history of any significance. Barbara wondered if that was the usual story of the chronic alcoholic who never got his act together or simply indicated a family with plenty of inherited money. She kept skimming. “Still v. guarded re sexual activity,” she read. Barbara snorted. If she were a man who had had both his clothes and his major coping mechanism taken away, and a nun started quizzing her about her sex life, she would probably be less than forthcoming too. On the other hand, she recalled that Sister Angel was very adept at getting at all sorts of personal information out of clients. Colleagues, too, for that matter. She was a great listener. Barbara had told her one or two stories herself about which Jimmy had said later, “You told her
that?
”

Before she could read further, someone hammered aggressively on the door. She jumped. She did not want to get caught snooping into charts she had no business with, especially this particular chart.

“Hey, open up!” It was Darryl’s voice. What was he doing here at this hour? She remembered with relief that she had locked the door.

“Just a second.” She went on the offensive with a tone of slight annoyance, though to her own ears, her voice wobbled a bit around the edges. “Be right out.”

She slapped God’s chart shut and slipped it in on the bottom of the pile. A yellow sticky note she had missed before shot out onto the desk. Charmaine’s writing. “Add death certificate, then file inactive.” Damn. She had become so absorbed in the personal information that she had forgotten her primary agenda, to see the official cause of death. According to this, it would be a while until that paperwork got into the chart. Unless she came back, she would miss the chance to see it. The inactive files consisted of floor to ceiling piles of very heavy boxes in a storeroom in the sub-basement, a dank and cavernous space that looked as if the Count of Monte Cristo might have tunneled through it. During her internship, they had taken her down there once to help dust and haul before an audit. Normally, however, no one dared try to find anything once it had been filed in the sub-basement.

She opened the door.

“Hey, since you’re here, you might as well do some work,” Darryl said without preamble.

Yeah, and happy New Year to you too, she responded silently. Barbara had always found Darryl scary and had no trouble believing he had been a major drug dealer.

“Guy down on the end there can’t sleep, wants to talk.”

“Sure, no problem.” Sometimes that unpredictable window of opportunity when an alcoholic’s pain got momentarily worse than his desire to drink came in the middle of the night. “Seize the moment.”

“I’m not really on duty anyhow. Should be home with the flu. Not my client. And the guy doesn’t like me much. Besides, I gotta check on something, need to see if the chart I’m looking for is in here. Don’t see why Sister Holier Than Thou can’t put her charts back like she’s supposed to before she leaves, nome sane?”

“No problem,” Barbara repeated. It was her job, after all, and she genuinely cared about doing it. But Darryl was usually more of an “I’ll do what I damn please. You got a problem with that?” kind of guy. Why was he explaining?

Four dozen voices chorused, “…and the wisdom to know the difference.” The meeting had started. To my relief, I had missed the hand-holding part. Call me resistant, but it still made me feel like a jerk.

It was my first real meeting since I’d gotten out. The mandatory meetings in detox didn’t count, in my mind. I looked around the room. About fifty people of all shapes and sizes perched on chairs too small for them in a church basement with inadequate lighting that made everything look even more dingy than it was.

“Tradition Three. The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking,” someone recited.

Did I really want to stop? I mulled it over. As I had learned in previous passes through AA, there’s a big difference between going on the wagon and getting sober. When I went on the wagon, I knew I could fall off it whenever I wanted.

It’s like the old joke among civilians who think alcoholism is funny. Sure, I can stop drinking, I’ve done it a thousand times. That’s not sobriety. To tell the truth, my bowels turned to water when I thought of
never.
Never feel the fire of old Jack trickling down my throat and spreading flames through my belly. Never pick up a cold frosty on a hot summer day. Not a problem at the moment, in January in New York. Jimmy’s uninvited voice commented annoyingly in my head: If it’s not today’s problem, don’t worry about it. One day at a time. A corny concept, but it makes sense.

They tell you that if you’re serious about recovering, you should sit in the front and raise your hand when it’s time to share. I acknowledged my ambivalence, as Barbara would say, by making my way over to the table in the back where a guy I knew from meetings stood guard over a mammoth coffee urn and several plates of cookies. Doing service, another thing they recommend if you really want to stay sober. We had never had a conversation of more than two sentences, but his face lit up at the sight of me.

“Hey, good to see you! Welcome back!” His friendliness made me want to snarl. Could I stay sober without giving up more attitude than I could afford to lose? Jimmy sober was still Jimmy. But he was such an odd duck that he’d be different from everybody else even if he lived in Iowa or South Dakota. Who was I without my attitude? You know, the quality that makes comedians portray New Yorkers as saying, “You got a problem with that?” every time we open our mouths. According to Jimmy, it’s a kind of body armor. Trust him for a military metaphor. The bitch of it was, he was right. The thought of being without it scared the hell out of me.

To my own surprise, I remembered the coffee guy’s name.

“Gary. How ya doin’?”

The coffee tasted like piss, but it was better than I’d gotten in detox. As I sipped, he said, “I hear you just got out of detox.”

Don’t ask me how people get to know things around AA. As I said, it’s an anonymous program. And most people do their best to avoid telling secrets and spreading malice, at least. But the grapevine, even in New York with its hundreds of meetings a week, still functions with impressive efficiency.

“Yeah, well, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Gary laughed as if it had been me and not Mark Twain who made that one-liner up.

“I hear someone from the fellowship died.” He sounded half sympathetic, half avid to dish the dirt. A stranger’s tragedy is just another piece of gossip. God’s death felt different because I’d known him. All right, I admit it, I’d cared about him. I had no desire to regale Gary with the details.

“Yeah. Died sober, anyhow, as far as I know.”

He nodded solemnly at that. I didn’t even know if it was true. But I somehow felt protective of God’s reputation. And just about anyone in AA would consider it a good epitaph, if not exactly good news.

“You were there?”

I made a face, conceding it.

“I heard it was that guy who called himself God. Big, WASPy dude? Not to break his anonymity,” he added.

Hypocrite.

“I guess he doesn’t need it any more,” I said drily.

“Ever heard him qualify?”

To tell your story at a meeting, you had to be sober for at least ninety days. I didn’t know God had ever made it for that long a stretch. Maybe after one of his times in rehab. Getting locked up was as good a way as any to get a drunk or druggie jump started on sobriety. Though trust me, it’s easy enough to drink or drug in jail if you want to.

I was tempted to squash Gossipy Gary, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. God’s death troubled me like an itch under a shoulder blade—maddening and almost impossible to relieve. I wanted to know what happened. Not to do anything about it. I didn’t think that far. For today, just to know. See? I could do one day at a time. I looked encouraging.

“Trust fund baby,” Gary said. “When I first got sober, I used to get such a resentment at guys like that. They’d had it so easy. What did I care whether they got better?”

That had been my own first reaction to God. Less than two weeks ago. It felt like forever.

“A lot of people didn’t like him. A couple of folks in this room right now made the mistake of getting into some kind of money stuff with him. Not dealing or anything, but you’d think people would know better than to bring financial relationships into the fellowship. Somebody always gets screwed, and then you’ve got more resentments than ever.”

I looked inquiring, but he wasn’t quite ready to break the anonymity of people who were alive and maybe present.

“People found him arrogant,” he said instead. “And there are always some folks who have trouble with anyone who relapses.”

Lord knows I’d had more than my share of relapses. Gary had forgotten that. He needed to put tactlessness on his fourth-step inventory, the list of his defects of character.

“Though there but for the grace of God….” Predictably, he offered another of those AA truisms that have the unfortunate merit of being true.

“No pun intended.”

“Huh?” No sense of humor, either.

“You happen to know any women he was close to in the program?” I only asked because I really wanted to know.

God and I had never got around to talking about sex. By the time they hit the Bowery, most guys aren’t interested. God, though, hadn’t been a typical Bowery drunk. He was just an alcoholic with no health insurance who ended up in a detox that took you in for free. Like me. I wasn’t homeless, anyhow. Was God? Maybe it’s a class distinction. If a drunk who’s broke and uneducated stays on a buddy’s couch or in a girlfriend’s bed to avoid actually being on the streets, he’s homeless. But if Godfrey Brandon Kettleworth III says he’s crashing in a relative’s spare room on Park Avenue, he’s not.

Gary recalled my attention, indicating a woman up near the front of the room.

“There’s a woman your friend God thirteenth stepped or something like it.”

This is a relatively polite AA term for hitting on a newly sober member. It implies that the exploitive person has been in the program for a while and should know better.

“You sure it wasn’t the other way around?”

“They were both in their first year,” he said. “It was around the time I heard him qualify. Then after a while I noticed they were sitting as far from each other as possible if they showed up at the same meeting. Bunch of women always in a huddle around her, casting dirty looks his way. Hey, you know what they say: The first year, you should put relationships on the shelf. Keep the focus on staying clean and sober.”

The speaker wrapped it up. A patter of applause broke out. Someone passed a basket around. “We have no dues or fees, but we do have expenses.” People shifted in their seats and got up to use the rest room or grab a smoke outside. AA meetings used to be the smokiest places in town apart from bars. Now the area outside the door of an AA meeting tends to be the second smokiest place in town.

Gary made a beeline for the door, his pack of Marlboros already in his hand. The woman he had pointed out swiveled in her seat to talk to someone in the row behind her. To my surprise, I realized I knew her. Her name was Maureen. She had short spiky hair that I remembered as dark brown. Now she had it fashionably streaked with improbable magenta highlights. Small, with a slight, boyish figure, she had the kind of face you’d probably call cute if you can stand the word cute. We’d spent a week in detox together once. She’d stayed clean for a while that time, while I’d gone straight back out to the nearest bar. I made my way toward her.

“Hey, Maureen!”

Her face lit up in a big smile that I remembered as soon as I saw it.

“Bruce!” She gave me a big hug. Detoxing together was a bond. On the other hand, like most alcoholic women, she had had bad experiences with men. I mean very bad experiences, a lot worse than any kind of hard time I could imagine myself or Jimmy giving a woman.

“I call myself Mo now. Celebrated a year just a couple of weeks ago. How about you?”

“Oh, you know me. You’re looking great. Really.”

“I know.” She did have an incandescent grin. “Haven’t seen you around in a while.”

“Well, I’m here now. Listen, can I take your number?” It just popped out. Getting people’s phone numbers is another of those things you’re supposed to do. If you’re going to pick up a drink or a drug in the middle of the night, you’re supposed to pick up the phone instead. Everybody in the program knows how that is. There’s always somebody willing to talk you through it. I had never made a habit of asking for numbers. I’d never actually called anyone but Jimmy. And no, I had never called him in the middle of the night instead of drinking. Yet.

“Of course!” Mo sounded delighted. She probably really was. She dug in a big bag, found a pen and a scrap of paper, and started scribbling. “I’m giving you my home, my work, and my cell phone. Call me any time. Really. If you need to talk, I’m there.”

I told myself that I only wanted to make sure I could get hold of her to find out what had happened between her and God. I sure wasn’t going to bring it up right there in the meeting. The break was over. No more talking. People began to take their seats, and a few eager beaver hands shot up. Mo gave me another quick hug and sat back down. The person next to her had left at the break, leaving an empty seat. She glanced back up at me and patted it invitingly. I shook my head, squeezed her shoulder once, and wormed my way back through the rows of seats and out. I had had about all the recovery I could stand for one evening.