The Home for Wayward Clocks (28 page)

Sighing, I hang up my own phone, then caress the receiver as if it was her cheek. I think about the Game Plan.

2) Fix it.

The best way to fix things, I know, is to go back to meetings, to following the Sacred Twelve Steps. But Christ, I hate going. “Hello, my name is Zach and I’m a fucking alcoholic.” I always picture those steps as a staircase. A staircase of words. The words blink and mutter and repeat and after I’ve said them enough, they just don’t mean anything anymore. It’s like going to church. For years, you mumble the Apostle’s Creed with the congregation, but you just don’t know what it all means.

Kat thinks the meetings work and she loves her Al-Anon meetings. I wonder if they have Twelve Steps. I wonder how they do introductions. “Hello, my name is Kat and my husband is a fucking alcoholic.” And I wonder who she talks to there. There used to be a guy named Bob and when I got home at night from Benny’s, she’d always be on the phone with him. Even if I fucked her silly before I left.

Bob. I stop for a moment and look back at the school. Then I shake my head.

I have to find a meeting. I’ll call and tell her about it tonight. Then she’ll know I’m serious.

11:00. I seek through prayer and meditation to improve conscious contact with God as I understand Him, praying only for the knowledge of His will for me and the power to carry that will out.

I
t takes a lot of walking and about a dozen churches, but I finally find one that has a meeting at noon. That only gives me an hour to kill. I’m not hungry yet, after that huge breakfast, plus I know the meeting will have coffee and doughnuts, so it doesn’t make sense to spend money on what will be free later. I stand around for a while, looking at the closed door. The meeting is in the church basement and it has its own separate entrance, as if they’re trying to weed out the drunks from the saints. Finally, I walk away a little bit and face the street. I hate to look like an alcoholic.

Five or ten minutes pass, so I decide to go up to the church proper. At least, I think, I’ll be out of the view of the passersby, who look at me and sneer. Inside the church, I walk up the long aisle. My footsteps echo and I brush my hand over each pew, feeling the softness of the wood. The stained glass windows pour down a colored light and I watch my feet as they splash through puddles of red and green and yellow. When I run out of pews, I look up at the altar.

A big-ass crucifix hangs there, about twenty feet of Christ dangling and dying. At that size, I can see all of him in graphic detail, from the nails entering his wrists and ankles to the wound in his side. He looks down at me and I think how tired his eyes look. “You look like you need a belt,” I say. I try to laugh, but those eyes take the sound right out of me.

I look around; there’s no one else there. “Okay,” I say to the giant Christ. “I’m back for another try. I’ve gotta get Kat and the kids—Marie and Will—back. And this seems to be the only way to do it.” I remember the morning with Stacy, the hot coffee and her full breasts, and Christ’s eyes seem to narrow. “I know, I shouldn’t have said I’d meet her. It was just reflex, okay? I’m really serious this time. Really.”

I sit in the front pew, then awkwardly lower myself onto the padded kneelers. I feel my kneebones sink in and it’s not half bad. In my head, I go over the Twelve Steps I’ve learned time and time again, heard chanted at meetings, read posted over my bathroom sink, on the refrigerator door, and the lowered flap of my car’s sun visor (Kat’s doing). Somewhere in there, I know I’m supposed to make a bargain with God. I’m supposed to decide to stick it out.

“Look, God,” I say, looking back up at the crucifix. “I’ll try and get here more often, okay? Maybe I can stop in for a service when I come for meetings. So I’ll be in touch. And maybe you can show me how to do this stuff? Can you like, lead the way? Because I’m at a loss here.”

I swallow and look at my hands. Carefully, I fold them, letting each finger curl and nestle with the others. “It’s supposed to be easy,” I say. “Just stop. No more drinks. Like turning off a faucet.” I shake my head. “But it’s like I have a leak somewhere.”

I stay like that for a while. It feels pretty good, in the cool and the quiet. After a time though, even the soft kneepads hurt my joints, so I sit back in the pew. The wood curves, just like it was meant to cradle me.

When the church bells begin to ring, I know it’s noon and I get up to head downstairs. I nod at Jesus, do a little bow, then promise to come back.

And I mean it this time.

12:00. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, I try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice the principles in all my affairs.

I
t doesn’t take long to get to my turn. I carefully set my black coffee and chocolate doughnut on the empty seat beside me. Standing, I fold my hands, dangle them meekly at my crotch. “My name is Zach,” I say slowly. “And I am…still…an alcoholic.” They applaud and for a moment, I enjoy it. I think I feel the breeze from all those beating hands and between those hands and the eyes upstairs, I think I can do it. I can turn off the faucet. I sigh and lift my face.

1:00 Denial

At the end of the meeting, I stand off to the side and help myself to the cheese and sausage tray that someone brought. She’s been sober for a year and she thought we’d celebrate by eating something other than doughnuts. The sausage is good and the cheese is that pepperjack stuff I love, so I keep visiting the snack table and taking a few pieces.

While I’m eating, I watch everyone else. And I notice things like unkempt hair, baggy clothes, dark shadows under their eyes. Their hands shake as they hold their coffee cups. They all speak too loud and too fast, and I swear, each of them licks their lips until they’re chapped and raw.

I realize, watching them, that I’m not like them at all. Looking down, I admire my khakis and my button-down shirt. No tie today, no work to go to, but I look nice anyway. I’ve always paid attention to my appearance. I tone my voice carefully and always make sure to speak clearly and slowly. I know that only I can see the slight tremor as I hold my coffee cup. Nobody can be absolutely steady.

Looking at the others, I think of the phrase, “sloppy drunk.” And I’m not. Not like them.

After swiping one more handful of sausage and cheese, I crumple up my coffee cup and throw it away. Then I head out, blinking in the light of the afternoon.

2:00. Anger

At home, I wander around, look at the paper, wander some more, attempt to straighten up. I think about how if everything was still okay, I’d be at work, a couple hours away from coming home, but Kat would be here, probably having a mid-afternoon cup of coffee and something sweet. I usually called her about now and she’d tell me what we got in the mail, what we were having for supper. And I’d look forward to coming home.

I look around at the stack of newspapers I just pushed together by the front door, the dishes I scrubbed, draining and drying in the sink, the bed I just made for the first time in I don’t know how long. And I think, I shouldn’t be doing any of this.

All this. All this emptiness, just because I like to go to the bar at night. I’m here by myself, in a place too big for one, and she’s living with the kids in a place too small for three. I think of Bob and up the count to maybe four. She’s working and I’m not.

All because of Benny’s Barstools?

I’m not a mean drunk, I’ve never raised a hand to her. Most nights, I left her sated and sleepy in our bed. Most days, I got up in time to say hello to the kids, to head off to work, despite a pounding headache or a queasy stomach. Most days. I had supper with them all the time, I never stayed late at the office on account of work or some woman. Just once because of some woman, and that wasn’t at work, that was later. At Benny’s.

Mostly, I came home after. And when I crawled into bed, Kat would roll over and curl into me and I would smell her hair and touch her and sometimes we made love all over again. I never let her down, not once, no matter how much I had. She always made it. No whiskey dick here. All drunks have whiskey dick.

My hands begin to shake and I sit down on the couch, folding my fingers against each other, trying to get them steady. I think of the drunks at AA, but I know my shakes are different. Mine are from wanting to strangle someone. I want to strangle Kat.

Snatching the phone from its cradle, I dial her number. She’s not home from her job yet, of course, and neither are the kids, so I yell into the phone, into the ear of the answering machine, “I went to a fucking meeting, Kat! I did what you told me to! Now get your ass straight home! I don’t deserve this, I don’t fucking deserve this!” The phone becomes slippery and I realize my hands are sweaty as well as shaky. “You tell that Bob to stay there and fuck himself, you come home. You’re my wife, those’re my kids, you come home now!”

I try to slam the phone down, to get that satisfying bang and clang of a phone smacked silly, but the damp receiver shoots out of my hand like a missile and bounces across the floor. I reel it in, hand over hand, and then slam it down, but the satisfaction is gone. The shakes and the sweats are worse and I hold onto my knees and throw my body into a fast rock. When I close my eyes, I see blood-red and I feel a growl deep in my throat.

This shouldn’t be happening, I think. I just have to get control of the situation and pull it all back together. I squeeze my eyelids so tightly, the red turns to black and I fall into it like a bottomless night.

3:00. Bargaining

After a bit, the darkness begins to have edges to it and I climb back out. I sit on the edge of the couch and hold my head in my hands. Get control, I think. Take deep breaths. And I do.

Pulling out the notebook, I glance quickly at my Game Plan, then move to a new page. The key to everything is organization, I think, and so I write the days of the week down in a long column. Maybe, maybe, I think, if I just go to the bar one night a week, and so I try to pick one. My hand hovers over each of the days and my pen is like a divining rod.

But there is no day, no favorite day, no day that starts with D for drinking. Maybe every other day. I start with Monday and carefully draw what looks like a wine glass with toothpicked fruit in it. It doesn’t look quite right, and I doodle some more, and the fruit looks more real and I draw a little squiggly line for the liquor and then I color it in. I move on to Wednesday and the glass grows bigger and by Friday, it’s full to the brim. Then, all of a sudden, I have glasses drawn after every day of the week.

“Shit!” I throw the notebook across the room. “All right!” I yell at the ceiling. “I’ll go every night, I have to, it’s my right, but I’ll only have one drink and I’ll come home right after!”

The phone rings and I grab it, thinking again about just slamming it down, a second chance at getting the slam right. Instead, I holler, “Hello!” as loud as I can.

“How dare you call here and shout like that!” Kat shrieks at me. “Your kids heard that message, do you know that? Do you think that makes them want to come home? Do you think it makes me want to come home?”

“I went to a meeting!” I bellow. “I went there just for you! I had to listen to a woman prattle on about how she hasn’t had a drink in a year and her whole life is a dozen blood-red roses and she fed us cheese and sausage!”

“One meeting doesn’t make you sober!”

“Yeah, well, drinking doesn’t make me a drunk!”

We’re silent for a moment, both of us breathing heavily over the phone. I think I hear Marie’s sobs in the background and there’s the slam of a door.

I clench my fist around the phone, force my voice to go soft and mellow. “Look, Kat,” I say. “Come home. We’ll work it all out, I promise. I’ll get resumes together this weekend, hit the employment offices on Monday. I mean it. I’ll have just one drink a night at Benny’s, maybe even every other night—”

Kat slams her phone in my ear, just the way I wanted to slam her. I hesitate, say, “Kat?” before banging my own phone, then going one better and pulling it out of the wall and throwing it after my notebook. “Fuck!” I yell. “It’s just not fucking worth it!”

Lying face down on the couch, I cover my head with the pillow and try to bring blackness around me. I push my nose into the cushion, yank the pillow around my ears, try to soften the blackness into a smooth gray, to smother the air from my lungs.

If I let myself up, I will pull every hair from my head. I will throw things and punch walls and kick furniture. I will say every curse word I know, at least a dozen times over, and my voice will shatter windows.

But the smooth gray tucks me in.

4:00. Depression

“It doesn’t matter,” I say to the gray, my lips moving against the couch cushion. “I can go to meetings, she doesn’t care. I can just have one drink a night, one drink! And come straight home to make her happy, but she won’t care. I could give up drinking altogether, but it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.”

I think about our wedding day, eighteen years ago. We toasted each other at the wedding table, our elbows linked, Kat’s Bride glass filled with diet soda, my Groom glass with straight whiskey. Neither of us like champagne. She watched me drink it and later she tugged on my arm and asked me if it wasn’t time to go. “Just one more,” I said. I was enjoying myself, it was my wedding, for Christ’s sake. There was music, all my friends were there, they were happy for me. So I had one more and she asked again, and I had one more and my friends started joking about how I was pussywhipped already, not even married six hours. So I had another and she began to cry.

I took her home then and told her I was sorry and filled her in such a way that she’d never forget that night in a million nights. And she smiled at me then, through her tears, there under me, and she asked for more, and I gave her more. I gave her more until she fell asleep beneath me, me still inside her until I shriveled and slid out. Then I poured myself a drink, looked out the window of our new apartment, and wondered what in the hell I’d done.