The Next Right Thing (33 page)

Laughing, I looked back toward his house, where his father
was standing in the doorway. “Nice shoes. Jesus tell you to become a beatnik?”

“With a name like Balthazar, you gotta feature yourself. The chicks at Fullerton dig it.” Balthazar kicked at the grass. “Soon as my dad came in and said you were at the door, I thought,
Shit, that cracker motherfucker
. I kept thinking I was going to find you, explain what happened. I haven’t sucked a pipe or had a drink since God whacked me over the head.”

“Good for you, man. That’s great. I’m sober, too.”

Miracles, the old-timers say, are God’s way of staying anonymous. It was hard not to be impressed. But I would never turn this into an inspiring A.A. story. We still hated each other. If anything, it had become a pleasant hatred.

“What do you guys call this thing you’re doing so poorly?” Balthazar said.

“You guys?”

“You’re in A.A., right? Just because I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid doesn’t mean I can’t recognize cultlike behavior.”

Manny would love this guy.

“We call it making amends,” I said. I stood there for a minute.

“I’m listening,” Balthazar said.

“Okay,” I said. “I take responsibility for the whole deal. I was a homicidal cop, and you were an innocent victim of my rage. You can record that and take it to the grand jury.”

“That’s easy to say, Officer Chalmers, now that I’ve signed the settlement and I can no longer sue your ass.”

“Would it have been easy for you to say?”

“Let’s find out.” Balthazar smiled. “I was a drug-addicted drug dealer bringing sickness and violence to my community.
And you can’t record this because I won’t hurt my father again.” That also had the ring of truth. I could see on Balthazar’s face that he thought so, too. My old enemy laughed and shook my hand. “It’s done. Take it to the bank. I forgive you.”

“Just like that?”

“No,” Balthazar said. I remembered his street name: De Niro. Because of that scene in
The Untouchables
where the actor, playing Al Capone, kills a man with a bat, Bustamante’s favorite weapon. “I want you to do something for me.”

“Tell me.”

“Come to church with us sometime,” De Niro Bustamante said. “My dad will wet his pants with joy.”

The restaurant Paloma had chosen for her quinceañera was owned by an old character actor who’d had a long career as a movie gangster. The hallway to the banquet room was thick with pictures of the owner standing next to the guy who was standing next to the guy who was standing next to Marlon Brando. Or whoever. The restaurant itself was dizzying. The ceiling of the main dining room, which was twenty-five feet high, was covered with toys and circus memorabilia. They had probably been assembled over the years—the dust said decades—with no thought for any plan. It was an inexpensive place to eat Italian food, though, and the celebratory haphazardness of the decor encouraged a good time. The waitpeople wore white tuxedo shirts and smiled in a way that didn’t seem forced.

I turned from admiring the pictures on the wall to see my own heart looking back at me. Crash was wearing a white blouse, a brown skirt, and cowboy boots that her aunt had bought her.
The boots reminded me that I owed my sister my life, not only for getting law enforcement off my back but for encouraging Crash to speak with me again.

“I guess your mom didn’t have time to say hello,” I said.

Crash checked me out for a moment like she wasn’t sure if she should stay. I took it like a man, mostly, and then I tried to meditate for the second time in my life, the way that MP had tried to teach me: I counted my breath, in and then out, in and then out. I got to a miraculous seven before Crash said, “I need to know something, Dad. Did you have anything to do with John going away?”

I took another deep breath. “More or less.”

“What does that mean?” she said. “Did you do something? What did you do?”

“John made his own problems. Maybe I increased them. It’s one thing I’m not going to apologize for. He would have hurt you and your mother eventually.”

“More than you’ve already hurt us?” Crash said.

“I deserve that,” I said. “And more. But I think you also know there’s no force in the universe that could ever make me go away.”

Crash smiled, so I put my arm around her and we entered the banquet room, which was festive with party dresses and paper flowers and a mirror ball hanging above it all. Paloma wore a tiara. Traditionally, the princess is escorted by several boys her own age—some of them relatives, some of them classmates—who wear faux military uniforms complete with epaulets and scabbards. The boys had begun dueling with their swords outside the Mass at St. Joseph’s and still hadn’t stopped.

“Hey,” I said. “After the party, you want to drive to Vegas, fill
the back of the truck with fireworks, and blow up stuff in the desert?”

Crash narrowed her eyes. “I’m wearing a skirt, Dad.”

“Is there some law that says you can’t cause explosions wearing a skirt?”

She smiled, it seemed to me, with great compassion. As we made our way to the bar to get some Shirley Temples, I turned to face her. “Is it time to stop calling you Crash?”

“Alison is a nice name, too.”

I danced three times with Cathy, twice with my daughter, but only once with Paloma—the kids with the swords had kept her busy. I’d just finished some kind of Mexican hokeypokey, and Alison and I were watching little Danny practice his smiles, a skill she assured me he’d mastered only in the last hour.

Paloma had joined us, and she argued that Danny had been smiling before Alison started making faces at him, a point that Alison conceded by putting her arm over Paloma’s shoulder. I was wondering what would result from bringing my daughter to a party where she could become friends with the secret daughter of her almost stepfather when I looked over to see Troy and Emma dancing. That made me wonder how soon before they would be sleeping together. When Troy held out a chair for her after getting her a soft drink and a plate of cookies, I thought,
Good for you, buddy. Good for you
.

It wasn’t a bad night for me, either. I think that was Emma’s doing, but I didn’t ask. When I found a legitimate break in the action, I asked MP to dance. It was a slow dance, uncharacteristic for this party. I didn’t say anything for a while. Then I said,
“Can it be time for you to go on a date with me?” She pulled herself closer and said, “It can be that time not next Saturday but the Saturday after that.”

Even Wade found his way to the party via cell phone. As part of his coursework for his masters in social work—why should Troy be the only one going back to school?—he’d arranged a ride-along with Manny, and he wanted to let me know that he was in the patrol car right now. I invited both of them over for a piece of cake later on.

With all my life clustered around me, I shouldn’t have been surprised when the bartender tapped me on the shoulder and told me that I had another friend who wanted to talk. I found Sean sitting on a bench outside the front door of the restaurant. We’d been going to meetings together almost every night for a couple of weeks. A few nights ago, he’d told me that his boss wanted him to do a couple of late shifts, that he’d start catching a few more meetings during the day. That wasn’t the entire truth. There was a thickness around him like shame. And like being drunk.

“I’m assuming you did something really stupid,” I said.

“Pissing inside my supervisor’s locker?”

“Did anyone see you?”

“Dude, that’s half the fun.”

As we talked, my daughter came through the doorway with Danny in her arms. She helped him wave to me, and both Sean and I waved back.

“Is that Terry’s kid?” Sean asked.

“You can’t tell?”

Alison turned, still waving Danny’s hand as the heavy wooden door closed behind her. For the first time in forever, that squeaking
Styrofoam ice chest in my head was quiet. The world was only the world: the coolness of the night, the slatted wooden bench under my ass, the traffic noise from Orangethorpe.

Once I was sure that my new sponsee was on the right side of things, I brought him into the restaurant. As the decor dazzled him, I asked the bartender to make us both cappuccinos.

Who knew if Sean would ever get sober, but I loved him. The way I loved Terry and Wade and Troy and every other loser I’d known in A.A. Or, as an old-timer named Joey Buttons once told me: Jesus didn’t hang out with the thieves and whores because he wanted to save their souls. He hung out with them because they were
more fun
.

As Sean devoted himself to a plate of lasagna with a side of tamales, I watched Alison and Paloma charge around the room as though they’d been friends all their lives, navigating the happiness of the party with an intensity that was half modern dance and half street hockey.

When Cathy sat down beside us, she gave Danny to me without so much as a nod. I can’t understand why anyone ever trusts me, but I’m always moved when they do. Danny slept in my arms.

I started talking to Cathy about Terry. I’d never spoken to her this way. Sean looked up from his plate of food but then must have realized that it was just an A.A. story, one that he’d either heard before or would hear again, so he went back to eating. It was, in fact, the Italian food that had reminded me.

When I finished my certificate program at Art Center, it just happened to be the same week as my second A.A. anniversary. Terry and Wade were so proud of me that they decided to throw
a party. They got it catered by this Italian restaurant in Newport Beach, and they decorated the courtyard of Terry’s condo with streamers and balloons and signs. They told me that all I had to do was invite anyone I wanted. They repeated that instruction many times: anyone you want. They were preparing “a big shindig”—that’s what Terry called it—and there would be plenty of food to go around.

When the evening came, they were in for a shock. Although I’d met and was friendly with hundreds of people in Laguna Beach A.A., I’d invited only five. The Italian sausages alone would have fed sixty. Wade had printed out from his computer a huge banner that said
CONGRATULATIONS RANDY!
The few of us milling around underneath it looked pathetic.

Terry must have been pissed. He made sure everyone had enough to eat before he retreated to his living room, where he smoked a cigar and left me to guess how much the whole deal had cost.

Afterward, when I was hiding in his backyard on a chaise longue, he came out to sit next to me. I was still addicted to cigarettes, and I’d made it about halfway through a pack of Camels. Terry chewed on the dead plug of his cigar. Neither of us spoke for a while.

It felt like graduation, and I had to wonder what came next. Especially if I had alienated my friends.

“I know what happened,” Terry said. “And I’m not mad at you.”

“What happened?” I didn’t know myself.

“It was my fault,” Terry said. “You didn’t feel like you deserved the party. I should have thought of that before I told you to invite people. You had a bad case of low self-esteem.”

Terry leaned back in the other chaise and threw his cigar butt over the fence. Any other day, he would have choked on an expression like “low self-esteem.” I offered him a Camel. I dug out my lighter and gave him that, too.