By: Linda Boroff At some point, April begins to hang out with Pam, and they soon attract the nosy interest that surges and crackles around the Club like atmospheric electricity before a storm. "Baaaad company," intones old Ken B, referring, of course, to Pam. "But it ain't for me to judge." Ken is a cowboy from Salinas, cured by dry heat and whisky to the shade and texture of a bronc saddle, with inch-deep wrinkles across the back of his neck. He narrows his blue, codger alkie eyes at me and winks. "Not with the life I done led." I smile and nod and edge away. I do not care to hear Ken's drunkalog again; how he and Jack Kerouac used to toss them back in the dive bars of Prunedale and Chualar. How, at the end, Ken realized that Jack was going to ride that pony all the way down, and he had shaken Jack's hand one last time and gotten himself to a meeting and lived. "April's only trying to have a little fun," I tell him, adding, "in sobriety," because that is the mantra. Actually, I am not quite sure what "fun in sobriety" consists of. Since my early teens, fun is what I hope I had, once I come to. And so far, my sobriety only fits that definition of warfare as ninety percent boredom and the rest pure terror. We join hands in a circle and bow our heads for the Lord's Prayer that ends the 5 p.m. meeting at the old Monterey Alano Club. The devout lower chin to chest and squeeze their eyes tight shut, beseeching the Lord for one day at a time. I am a peeker, so I encounter Pam's large, improbably gray eyes staring defiantly at something that only she can see lurking out beyond the circle. Pam's beauty is in the category of big flowers and fireworks and prom queens-a brief, stunning trajectory with a relatively steep and swift descent. Her tawny hair still seems drunk. I probably stare a little too hard, because she catches my eye and gives a little simper of annoyance. I quickly shift my attention back to God and my feet. Monterey has always been hospitable to drinking writers, Steinbeck at the top of the pile, of course. A couple of old-timers swear they fucked some of his women. And speaking of fucking, young "newbies" such as I, fresh out of rehab, attract the intense, focused solicitude from the men that lost zebra foals on the Serengeti attract from lions. Other men appoint themselves our guardians, and naturally there is a leonine element to that as well. When we discuss "acceptance" in the meetings, I do not think of powerlessness over alcohol, but rather of fitting into a new social niche. My marriage had drowned before the wedding gifts were broken in. My job as an advertising copywriter soon followed. I can no longer look forward to closing out the bars in Carmel, slipping and staggering hilariously down the dark, empty streets with some middle-aged golfing swell. And the few friends who still call have an annoying tendency to remind me of dares accepted, of tirades delivered. To them, the Club, a watering hole for sober alcoholics, contains only losers, paupers, and oddballs, but I fit at least two of those categories. That I do accept. The Club occupies an ancient building on Alvarado Street; a stolid, square story of nonjudgmental adobe, with a single barred window beside a front door so low that even I have to duck through it. Inside, shapeless old armchairs and naugahyde sofas patched with tape embrace a sooty fireplace. The dingy green walls are papered with sobriety slogans and bumper stickers in gothic blackletter: A New Pair of Glasses, Friend of Bill W, and other code by which we drunks can spot one another. To enter the club, you must not have had a drink within the last twenty-four hours. This steep hurdle keeps the place fairly decorous. Employee/members serve short orders from behind a pearl gray formica bar. Preserved for some reason under yellowing resin are a tattered two-dollar bill, a blue plastic anchor from a Cracker Jack box, and a seven of diamonds. Just as alcohol brings unlikely people together, so does its mirror, recovery. At the Club, dowagers from Carmel rub elbows with housemaids and hookers from Seaside; Naval Postgraduate School officers with Confederate pedigrees pour out their anguish to black Army privates from Fort Ord. Whether you swilled Everclear beneath a freeway overpass or quaffed snifters of old brandy in Pebble Beach, you are "right where you belong, "the standard welcome. The Club is our refuge from a world of people who leave their drinks half-finished when they pay the tab; who think "I'll have a couple with you" means cocktails not bottles; who are reasonably certain, when they take their first sip, where they will awaken the next day, and with whom. When April walks up to me one afternoon in the Long's drugstore on Del Monte Boulevard, I force myself to stop and chat. Though we have never spoken, we know, thanks to the meetings, details about one another's pasts that might take "normies" months or years to confide. "You're Claudia P, aren't you?" she says. I nod. This distinguishes me from Claudia B, the addicted nurse, and Claudia N, the old truck stop waitress from Memphis. My reticence doesn't faze April. She is in her late thirties, blonde and trim, with a hint of Doris Day pertness. Her plaid skirt and brown pumps are as proper and respectable as any parent could wish in a sixth grade teacher, which she is. Her white cotton blouse is tied at the neck with a bow. Get me out of here, I think. "I think we need to get you out of here," April says. Early that morning, the phone had summoned me into the lucid terror that was my habitual waking mode. "What do you want, Matthew?" "You didn't call me back last night, so I figured maybe you didn't get my message." "I got it." "So what's your answer?" I said nothing. "Look, Claudia, a divorce doesn't have to be a declaration of war. I'm trying to work with you. Keep the communication open. I made a simple, logical request." "You're supposed to pass your requests through Lew." "That grubby little shyster will want a thousand bucks for divvying up a hundred bucks worth of crappy furniture." "What do you want with fifty bucks worth of crappy furniture?" "Karen and I need something to sit on, for Chrissake. And sleep on." "Who's Karen?" "None of your business." I hung up. This conversation and the images it spawned have led me into bad emotional terrain, so I am browsing the liquor aisle-not with specific intent, I tell myself-merely to sightsee. But I remain at April's side as she guides me out of the store, into the fresh ocean breeze whipping sand across the road from the nearby dunes. I say, "My ex-husband has found somebody." "Good!" April says, as if I have just grasped long division. "He wasn't right for you. And hopefully he won't bother you anymore." She takes my arm playfully but firmly. "I live just up the street. I'll fix us lunch, and then we can go to a meeting." Her tidy home is filled with comfortable, quality furniture. The omelet she fixes for me is perfect. "I've never been married," she laughs. "Just a spinster schoolmarm. Why don't you spend the night in my spare bedroom? I think that would be wise. You don't need to be alone right now." I blurt, "I simply cannot imagine you drunk." "People say that a lot. But oh my, it got bad." She waves her hand as if referring to a sinus infection or a sprained ankle. "Come meet my mice." If a mouse could visualize Paradise, it would resemble April's mouse resort, where she cares for them with tender officiousness. Something in the uniform perfection of their minute features, their moist ruby eyes, kinetic whiskers, and snowy, shivery little bodies, completes her. They live in spotless cages filled with exercise contraptions, mazes, mounds of wood shavings and sumptuous mousechow. "The world is so cruel to mice," she says. "It makes me feel good to give a few of them a decent life." That night, lying in the spare bedroom beside them, I become aware of nocturnal scuttles; of scores of tiny paws in frenetic motion, burrowing into the cozy dark as their tribe has done for millennia. I feel as though I am a proto-mammal, secreted away deep in my tunnel, awaiting the Asteroid and my call to destiny. As the daughter of a minor diplomat, April grew up in courts-not the type that you slink into and plead to drunk and disorderly, but real ones, like the Court of St. James. Yet, beneath the politesse I sense subterranean heat; a glow that never flares up but never quite dies out either, like a peat fire. The next evening, as the meeting starts, I cross the room to sit with April and Pam, under the intent gaze of Old Ken and his buddies. I feel guilty. The emotions of such self-appointed protectors run high and in the direction of control. Drunk or sober, they are lonely, desperate men. So I know I am moving in their judgment from lost toward astray, probably well on my way to reckless, wanton, and worse. But after the meeting, I seat myself before the fire, beside Pam. The younger men orient toward us in their female-tropic way. "Hey Justin!" Pam beckons a youth with smooth, dark blond hair parted in the middle, then whispers to me, "Check out the bulge in his pants." "Hi Claudia," Justin says. "It's nice to see you laugh. We were starting to wonder if you even could." I had been hauled into rehab from the emergency room, after passing out pulseless at a private hotel party during the AT&T Pro-Am golf tournament. I learned later that some caddies had dragged me into the hallway for the paramedics to find. After being resuscitated at Community Hospital, I was caught climbing down from my gurney to prowl for drugs. "I can't watch you every minute," the night nurse said, yanking leather cuffs tight to my wrists. "They just brought in a bad car accident. Three people are fighting for their lives right now, while you're trying to throw yours away." It was four a.m. Her eyes were reddened and angry. Talking with Justin now, I feel the soggy black curtain hanging over my life suddenly lift. I take a deep breath, trying to fix the moment in my memory, because I am pretty sure the shadows will drop back down again momentarily. But to my surprise, a full twenty minutes pass before I suddenly recall the years of running away, the failed aspirations; the bruises and fractures of mysterious origin; the charcoal leaked from the stomach tube onto my nightgown, the numberless detoxes. The rue and disgust. Justin grew up poor, mean, and white in Detroit, and joined the Army from the streets, where he had been living ever since his father shot him in the chest with a starter pistol. At Ford Ord, he managed to reach the rank of corporal before his drinking triggered an early discharge-honorable, he was at pains to tell me. "Pretty hair, like copper," he says later that night, running it through his hands in the light of my bedside lamp. "Pretty blue eyes. Pretty everything. Look at me." "You'd better go," I say. "The neighbors will tell my ex-husband I had a man stay over." Justin puts his head on my breasts. "Don't make me go. Please, please don't." I don't. Justin and three sober musician friends rent a furnished house in crime-riddled Seaside. They park their motorcycles in front, stick sobriety slogans on the walls, work at dead end jobs, go to meetings. All wear knives. The music they play is so loud, hard and furious that the cheap sheetrock of the house creaks and wobbles beneath its onslaught, shedding its paint in a fine dust. When April, Pam, and I drop over one day with a couple of female mice as a housewarming gift, Justin's former sergeant, Gavin Brantley, is sitting at the kitchen table in his uniform, drinking a cup of coffee. Gavin is twenty-two and the handsomest man I have ever seen. His very beauty buffers me against any real |
attraction; I prefer lovers who do not take my breath away or outshine me. So I am able to gaze dispassionately at the large hazel eyes, the broad, smooth brow and dark eyebrows perfectly aligned; the clear, planar cheeks, the curved mouth just shy of feminine. He seems to personify that romantic, Rupert Brooke boy-soldier purity and vulnerability that makes you want to cry.
Pam is only mildly impressed; her taste in men runs to the felonious-blank, wanted-poster stares and greasy mullet hair. But April is staring at Gavin in a sort of otherwordly trance; for her, everyone else in the room has simply ceased to exist. April spent her childhood touring the famous museums of Europe; her degree is in art history. She must have spotted those rare classical dimensions at once in Gavin, a relatively straightforward kid from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, oblivious to Renaissance aesthetics. He is a tanker, and his conversation is of guns, sports, and Fort Ord trivia. But April couldn't be more rapt if he were revealing the location of the lost treasures of the Anasazi. Despite Gavin's angelic looks, he has the morals of the average noncom and speedily helps himself to what is freely-insistently-offered. He begins to spend nights, then weekends at April's place. I suspect she is giving him money; Pam is certain of it. "April," I say, "I hope you're being ...careful." "Why, whatever is it that I should be careful of?" She flushes, her eyes darting about. "At least," I beg, "don't fall in love." Even as I speak, I realize how idiotic this sounds. "For some people, sex is …just recreation." "Are we projecting here?" "But they say…" "What do 'they' say?" She has the schoolteacher's peremptory expectation of an answer to every question she asks. "No relationships the first year of sobriety?" "Nonsense! Everyone sees the world through their own lenses, Claudia. Try turning them on yourself." Within Justin, despite his years of conning, stealing, lying, seducing, and score settling, dwells a tender, constant heart. Who knew? He admires my college degree and enrolls in night school. On my birthday, he borrows a robin's egg blue, three-piece doubleknit suit and escorts me to lunch at the Lodge at Pebble Beach, parading me into a roomful of startled millionaires, calling the Maitre d' "my good dude." "Don't fight it," Pam says. "He's exactly what you need." "If Justin is what I need, then what is Gavin to April?" "The next worst thing to a drink." "That's what I'm afraid of." "I take that back. Pam looks at me steadily. "Alcohol she knows is poison." "What should we do?" Pam shrugs. "Pray for her." "That's not enough." "We're powerless, remember? Over people and things." "Pam, don't talk platitudes." "I'm talking Program. We can't fix April. That's how we got into trouble. Drinking to fix ourselves. Drinking because we can't fix ourselves. Drinking because we can't fix anybody else." "But she saved me from going back out." "God saved you," says Pam. I roll my eyes. "Why, you don't believe in the Program at all!" she shouts. Here at the Club, apostasy is a high crime. People move away discreetly. "And who appointed you the grand interpreter of the Program after six months?" "Don't you dare judge me," Pam shouts. "I've got a son I can't see. Parents who want nothing to do with me. I was a hooker by age thirteen." She begins to sob. "I've got nothing but the Program. What do you expect me to do? She's making an ass of herself. We've all done it. You have, I'm sure." I think back on my arid, superficial love life, conducted with men who ask nothing beyond a night or two; drowning not just my sorrows but all potential joys as well-shunning the commitment I don't merit, the intimacy I fear, the security I scorn. April soon abandons her dowdy dresses for jeans and t-shirts. Her hair grows longer, and she begins to wear makeup. At the Club, she talks about Gavin by the hour; how his love is freeing her from the stifling protocols and expectations that warped her life. "I was a perfect little lady, always trying to please parents who couldn't be bothered to notice me. If only I made high enough grades, if only I behaved well enough, my parents would accept me like they did my brother. No wonder I drank. I was literally suffocating on other peoples' expectations." I don't know what to say. The rule doesn't exist that I haven't found a way to break. And I have never let anyone get close enough to control me. It only goes to show how accommodating, how very adaptable is alcohol-fucking up the overly compliant and the rebel with equal efficiency. "And won't the eyebrows go up back east when they find out I'm with a younger man. An enlisted man!" I force a chuckle. She spends afternoons photographing Gavin, mapping out elaborate educational and employment strategies for him after the Army. She cannot comprehend his choosing to be with anyone but her in the coming years. "April's burnt," says Justin, shaking his head. "Not to defend Gavin," I say, "but April can be .... hard to turn down. And if she thinks he needs money, she'll practically force it on him." "It don't take a whole lot of forcin'," Justin says. "Gavin, he don't earn shit." The Club frequently holds dances; it is an open secret that these are the hottest parties on the Peninsula, though not a drop of alcohol is allowed. People converge on the Club from as far away as San Francisco and even L.A. The hunger to live and love again, to resurrect romance from the wreckage, makes for an intensity that contrasts with the Babbity upscale mixers and parties I used to prowl for lovers. Dancing with Justin in the Club's ersatz twilight amid shabby decorations-the theme is "The Fifties"-I spot old Ken and Claudia, my truck stop waitress namesake, gliding smoothly cheek to cheek. I feel a sudden rush of affection so intense I nearly stumble. Perhaps it is the woeful teenage music, the valiant approximations of ducktail hairdos and ponytails and bobby-sox; the struggling but irrepressible human spark. A sob catches in my throat, which I quickly conceal with a slight cough. Held tight in Justin's quiet grasp, I let myself settle, tentatively, into what I can only call love. When the dance ends, we pour from the Club in our dozens to stroll around Monterey, euphoric under the clear, cold sky: It is two a.m. on a Sunday morning, and we are not puking, fighting, or comatose. The sirens we hear are not coming for us. Miracles! After that night, Justin begins to spend more time at my place and finally moves his possessions: a single cardboard box half full of tattered T-shirts, jeans, motorcycle magazines, a couple of coffee mugs. A worn Army certificate attests to his skill at jumping from helicopters. In a Polaroid snapshot, an obese woman waves from a blue sofa. I remind myself that his life is only beginning, but it still seems like a scanty showing. One afternoon, April and I stop by Justin's house and find the place full of Seaside girls, the type Justin dismissively refers to as "hams." I recall a Dorothy Parker short story, her depiction ringing as true now as it did in the nineteen twenties: the drugstore makeup and black-ringed eyes and pale skin; the elaborate hairdos, sweet perfume, cheap high heels and tight, pastel skirts. They have taken the place over by instinctive territorial entitlement, sitting at the kitchen table and stuffing themselves with cake, prattling about movie stars, beauty school, and how drunk they got over the weekend. "I'm studying to be a dentical assistant," one of them tells me. April stands stiffly at my side. "Gavin," she finally breaks in with strained lightness, "I think it's time we left." Gavin does not respond. He is sitting beside a girl in mauve lipstick whose long, streaked hair tumbles over cleavage tattooed with a ladybug. I look imploringly at Justin, and he rolls his eyes and taps Gavin on the shoulder. "Hey, your lady's talkin' to you, man." Gavin looks up. "Mind your own fucking business," he says evenly. "And keep your fucking hands off me." I feel the cords tighten along Justin's arm and see the sudden fist. I draw in a breath and close my eyes. In the silence, one of the hams pops her gum. "You got it." Justin turns away. In his room, he sits on the bed and covers his eyes. "That little motherfucker." He rises, then sits back quickly. I know how he longs to destroy everything in the room, then charge out and smash Gavin's pretty face to a bloody pulp. Somebody is going to do it eventually. "Justin," I say, "this is a victory for you. You proved you don't have to resort to violence every time someone's an asshole." "Another time, college lady." Justin stares at the floor. Over the next several weeks, April seems to implode and crumple. The more elusive Gavin becomes, the more obsessed she grows. She forgives him all, yet he stays away, refusing to return her phone calls. After the meetings, she seeks me out for agonized, repetitive post mortems: How can Gavin act so contrary to his own interests? This fling has to burn itself out soon. The tramp is blowsy and coarse, their union an abomination. I ask if Gavin has repaid any of her money and instantly regret the question. At last, I tell myself to obey Pam's dictum and let go. April will get over Gavin in her own time; perhaps my weary attention is actually fueling her obsession. I find excuses to leave the Club early: Justin, struggling through English 1A, needs me. But the truth is, I am busy frolicking in bed with him, styling my hair, shopping for makeup; gorging on the mundane preoccupations of normalcy-becoming a ham. I hear that Pam has moved to Big Sur with one of her lovers; rumors fly that she has "gone back out." It is late afternoon turning toward evening, and a chilly winter haze has descended on Monterey. Under the low gray sky, April's street is quiet and remote. "Somethin' ain't right," Justin says. He knocks at her door several times. When there is no answer, he takes out his knife and deftly disables the dead bolt with a couple of sharp jerks. The door swings wide into frigid silence. The house seems uninhabited, and there is an odor that I do not recognize but that raises the hair on my arms. We find April lying on the living room sofa under a tartan blanket. To my relief, she opens her eyes and stretches out her arms. "Oh my dear, dear friends," she says. "I am so glad to see you." "April," I hear myself saying. "Where have you been?" But of course I know exactly where she has been. It is a question I should be asking myself. April has colored elaborate red horns and black goatees onto all the photographs of Gavin. "Such a pretty, pretty boy," she mumbles, "but so wicked." "Shit," says Justin from the guest bedroom. "The mice. Don't come in here." But I do, and I scream. April stays in the hospital for several months, emerging in a state of medicated serenity. She is welcomed back warmly to the Club as a survivor of relapse, a journey from which many do not return. Whatever they did to her in the hospital, it had not been enough to dislodge Gavin. When I glance at her during meetings, her eyes are shining beatifically, her mouth quivering. I know that she is thinking of her errant, elusive lover, reliving the transitory hours of ecstasy and nurturing the fond hope that is all he has left her. I hear around the Club that old Ken B holds me and Pam accountable as the chief architects of April's decline, and that may be true. Nevertheless, I believe that for a brief time, her life glowed with an eerie and thrilling luminescence, like the seashore at night, beyond which lurks the cold, dark, and drowning deep. |