Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (2 page)

She hooked her arm through his, and they wobbled onto the ice, joining the families of tourists circling around a central knot of serious figure skaters in pert little miniskirted outfits.

“I want to help, you know I do,” Jimmy said. “I told him fifteen years ago that I wouldn’t enable him, but any time he wanted to put the bottle down, I’d be right beside him. Hell, I’ve missed him. We’ve been best friends since we were eight years old. It’s just—you do have a disease of helping, petunia.”

“Oh, I do,” she said. “What do you think I’ve been working on all these years in Al-Anon and therapy? I promise I’ll maintain some boundaries. I won’t screw it up.”

Jimmy turned his head to give her a quick kiss, endangering their precarious balance.

“I appreciate that, pet,” he said. “I know how hard you try. It’s just—you know, I can’t help thinking—if we don’t screw it up, maybe Bruce won’t screw it up this time.”

Sister Angel clanged a lugubrious bell. Some convent from before Vatican II must have had a yard sale. I threw away the stub of my cigarette and emerged from the stuffy little smoking room. The patients, many of whom had spent some time as guests of Uncle Sam, called it the Gas Chamber. After two days, I knew the drill. The staff didn’t count on us to make it to an AA meeting once we left the detox. So they brought AA to us. A few of the guys already sat in a circle of butt-destroying folding chairs. At almost every meeting one collapsed under someone’s weight. My new friend tilted his backward against the wall. He looked ultra-cool even in the Fifties-sitcom PJs they made us wear. He was probably the only guy on the Bowery with a bathrobe from Pierre Cardin. Or at least the only one who’d bought it new. You’d be surprised what you can get from the Salvation Army.

“Take off your sunglasses, Godfrey,” said Sister Angel. Her voice held a note of resignation. She said it a dozen times a day. She had made it clear that in this detox, he would not be known as God. He had said we’d see about that, though not to her face. He waited a few seconds before removing his shades, casually, as if it was his own idea. He jerked his head at me. I ambled over and sat down next to him. Sister Angel put down the bell and clapped her hands for silence.

“Who’s the speaker?” I muttered.

“Some poor bastard from outside,” God said out of the corner of his mouth. Sure enough, one guy wasn’t wearing pajamas. He had a square, red Irish face, blue jeans, plaid flannel shirt, a watch cap, and big clumping work boots with a little snow still melting off them. White Christmas. In two days, I had almost forgotten there was such a thing as weather.

One of the counselors led off, an African-American dude with a better hairdo than Beyoncé. Medium tall, sleek, and glossy, he had a body builder’s biceps, abs, and pecs. Besides the fancy cornrows, he sported enough tattoos for a one-man show and a diamond chip in one of his bicuspids.

“Hi, I’m Darryl, and I’m an addict. Let’s start the meeting by going around with first names only.”

“Used to deal,” God murmured in my ear. He meant drugs, not poker.

“I’m Bob, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Mike, alcoholic.”

“My name ees Hieronimo.” A stocky little guy, he had a heavy Puerto Rican accent.

Mike leaned over and muttered, “Why you’re here.”

“Drinking. I am here for drinking. Drinking and drinking, drinking all the time.”

“
Basta
,” Mike hissed. Another big red-faced Irish guy, he knew a little Spanish, like most New Yorkers. A regular melting pot, detox.

Godfrey leaned toward my right ear.

“I’m God,” he muttered under his breath, “and I’m an arrogant sonofabitch.”

I agreed with him.

He waited till the antsier guys squirmed with impatience. Then he drawled, “Hi, I’m God…frey.”

When everyone had spoken up, the visitor took his watch cap off and scratched a little, like a dog settling down. The top of his bald head reflected the red Exit sign over the door.

“My name is Benny, and I’m an alcoholic. I’m here to tell you what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now.”

All drunkalogues are the same. I drifted in and out. God dozed. He woke up when Benny’s story about how he’d bottomed out got a laugh.

“I got out of here five years ago on New Year’s Day. The only reason I didn’t go right into the nearest bar was that I slipped on some ice and lost all my change down a grate.”

He waited till the chuckles died down and everyone had finished shaking their heads over an all too familiar experience before he went on.

“I’ve been sober ever since, one day at a time, by the grace of God. I spent the holidays with my family this year. I had maxed out my credit with them, puking on their carpets, insulting their in-laws, stealing from their wallets, breaking promises to their kids. My sister and I used to be really tight. She looked out for me until she couldn’t stand it any more. Five years ago, she told me I could never come home again, and if the booze killed me, I’d be doing the family a favor.”

God had started to smirk, but at some point during that last speech the expression froze and lay forgotten on his face. I would ask him later what had jerked his chain. Or maybe I wouldn’t.

“The best present I got this Christmas was a hug and her forgiveness,” Benny ended. Tears stood in his eyes. He wasn’t Tiny Tim, but I felt like crying myself.

Meetings close with everyone standing in a circle and holding hands. Have I mentioned recovery can be embarrassingly corny? Sister Angel bustled up to glare at God until he took his left hand out of his pocket and grabbed my right.

“God grant me the serenity…to accept the things I cannot change…courage to change the things I can…and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The Serenity Prayer is so good it’s hard to make fun of. As soon as it ended, we dropped each other’s hands like burning coals and did our best to make our getaway. One of the counselors blocked us. Boris was a Russian immigrant four inches taller and twice as wide as God. They both towered over me. I’m the compact, wiry type. I used to say it didn’t cost much to give me a full tank of high-test. Boris used to put away two liters of vodka a day. He gets it that alcoholism is a disease. My best friend Jimmy’s girlfriend Barbara, who’s a counselor herself, says most Russians think it’s something prosperity will fix. They think
capitalism
will fix it.

“Everybody stay put.” Boris had a booming basso voice like the guy in the opera. “There’s something the whole community has to talk about.” All of a sudden we were a community. We sat down. Did we have a choice?

The head counselor, an old white guy named Bark, took over.

“There have been a few incidents of things going missing lately. Money and small items. Not just from staff, but some patients’ belongings too. This is not okay.”

A few guys exchanged furtive glances. Some looked hostile. Several looked bored. A couple, only a day or two off their last fix, were nodding out. To lift cash and watches or whatever, jewelry maybe, from desks, lockers, maybe pockets, you have to be awake. These guys were crashing.

“Patients’ belongings,” I murmured. “Gee, I guess I didn’t have my stock certificates on me when I went out to get blitzed on Christmas Eve.”

For all I knew, my buddy God had reason not to find it as ludicrous as I did to think of any of us owning stocks. But he was cool. “Yeah, I guess this accounts for our cash flow problem.”

“I know you’ve all survived on the streets. So have I,” Bark rasped. He’d smoked three packs a day for a hundred years. When he could get them. “We all know the code of the streets. When I was living in a box, I thought a pint of Thunderbird was the best thing in the world.” That got a laugh. “And I thought squealing on a buddy was the worst. But this detox is not the streets. If you know something, if you see something, tell your counselor. Or confront the thief, because he’s screwing you. He could be stealing your last chance.”

I would not have made a money bet on anybody coming forward. The code was no squealing. I also noticed that although they talked about the community and had the staff there as if the warning was for everybody, they were talking at us patients. Bark added that the thief or thieves would be prosecuted if found. That kind of took the shine off the appeal to our higher selves. After that, they let us put away the chairs and go to lunch.

In this no-frills detox, Sister Angel handed out chores as if they were penances. That afternoon, God and I drew a couple of hours of Hail Marys scrubbing the floor in the patients’ lavatory.

“Five bucks to a pack of Marlboros you’ve never done this before,” I said.

“You’d lose,” he said. “I was in the Army. Got to Nam for just long enough to start enjoying the drugs,” he drawled, “and the war was over.”

“I lucked out. Much too young. Didn’t your family try to get you out of it? Or at least out of getting drafted?”

“Not a chance,” he said. “Even then they considered me a lily of the field: I toiled not, neither did I spin. You know the saying, ‘God doesn’t do windows?’” His mouth twisted. “They had the connections, but their idea of tough love was not lifting a finger to get me out of the draft.”

“The family called you God?”

“Only in moments of exceptional sarcasm. Otherwise it was Godfrey. My sister Emmie called me Guffy.” His grim face softened. “She couldn’t pronounce Godfrey when she was little.”

“So what happened after Nam?”

At twenty-five, he told me, he came into a big trust fund. He’d been squandering it ever since. Hot and cold running booze and pharmaceuticals, with an occasional side trip to AA and a series of detoxes and treatment programs spiraling downward from Betty Ford to the Bowery.

“Speaking of toiling not,” I said, “I need a smoke.”

God banged the scrub brush smartly against the side of the bucket and tossed it in. Water went splashing. The prevailing atmosphere of ammonia—where we’d already scrubbed—and urine—where we hadn’t—swirled into my nostrils and throat when I made the mistake of breathing.

“Is the coast clear?”

I stuck my head out the bathroom door and looked both ways. No staff in sight. We had kept the door to the stairs that led up to the roof unlocked with paper shims and wads of chewing gum. The roof, though windy, was a lot nicer than the smoking room.

We sheltered in the lee of one of those giant oak water barrels that perch on New York rooftops. A gray mist had settled over the city. The quiet, empty streets and softened contours of the buildings looked kind of peaceful. I took a long, hungry draw on my cigarette.

“The coast is clear.” God cracked about an eighth of a smile. His eyes remained sad. “We used to say that when we were kids.”

“You and your sister?”

God sucked up smoke. The tip of his cigarette glowed like Rudolph’s nose.

“Sisters. Emmie’s the baby. Lucinda and Frances are older.” He spoke on the inhale, then blew out a perfect smoke ring. Terminally cool. “Lucinda’s an intellectual. Mind like a steel trap that could take a wolverine. Eats a bowl of graduate students for breakfast every morning. Frances is so WASP she’s got a stinger in her butt. Faculty wife, but she does the charity circuit too. Carries on the family tradition.”

“Champagne for poverty?”

“Right.” Another smoke ring. “Thinks Thunderbird is a car. No use for me, of course. Don’t waste your quarter.” I assumed he referred to the proverbial one phone call you get when you’re arrested. No point calling someone who won’t make bail if you need it or at least come down and pick you up.

“Emmie’s different.” He managed to send the next smoke ring straight up, so it hovered over his head like a halo. “She would have hung on if the others hadn’t got to her. None of them speak to me now.”

“What, no enablers?” There’s usually someone who’ll rescue you time after time, hoping you’ll change. Letting them be controlling is a small price to pay. You just have to lie a little harder and stash the booze somewhere inventive. “Nieces and nephews who’d do anything for Uncle God?”

His lips tightened. “No,” he said. Oops. Slammed door. We all had a few, or we wouldn’t be on the Bowery. A pigeon—New York City wildlife—fluttered onto the low parapet around the roof. It flapped, cooed, strutted around for a while, and took off again. “Except my grandfather on the Brandon side. You could say he’s been enabling me. He’s been dead a long time, so he can’t get on my case about how I spend his money.” As if to demonstrate what a big spender he was, he threw his cigarette over the edge. It made little sizzling noises in the damp air all the way down to the street. Conspicuous waste. Nineteen out of twenty of our roommates downstairs would have snuffed the butt and put it in their pocket for next time.

“Let’s go.”

Without further conversation, we picked our way among the mysterious excrescences that dot city rooftops like mushrooms and plodded down the stairs to finish cleaning the bathroom.

Charmaine the nursing coordinator looked exasperated. As far as I knew, it was her habitual expression. But then I was always right in front of her when I saw it.

“For someone with no intention of staying sober,” she said irritably, “you know an awful lot about sobriety. Where do you think that’s going to get you?”

“Now you ask what am I going to do different this time.”

It wasn’t very nice of me to tease her. But if I couldn’t drink, I had to do something not to die of boredom. As Charmaine glared at me, a hubbub broke out down the hall. I heard a burst of angry shouting peppered with those explosive Fs and Ks that occur when someone uses the F word several times in a sentence. Charmaine bounced up out of her chair, ready for action if needed. I followed her down the hall. The noise equivalent of a couple of Sumo wrestlers shook the walls of Darryl’s office.

“Out! Get the fuck out of my fucking office and don’t come the fuck back until you can fucking behave like a fucking civilized human fucking being.”

That sounded like Darryl on a tear, all right. Not so much of the grateful recovering at the moment. God strolled nonchalantly out the door. Why was I not surprised? I expected another furious roar to follow him out, but more of a sullen whine emerged.