The Taste of Salt (9 page)

We met at a bar, of course. Ironic, right? I was on my third beer, feeling loose and good. She was with her girlfriends, nursing a seltzer. She didn't drink much, I found out later. She wasn't preachy about it. She'd drink wine or a gin and tonic once in a while—she didn't
mind
drinking. But when she started to get drunk, she would stop. She had the brakes everybody in this room doesn't have.

We got to talking. She worked at the Cleveland Museum in the Africana Department as a curatorial assistant. I had just started with the Cavs, at the lowest rung on the ladder of the trainers. But I loved being at all the games, hanging out with the guys (even though, a lot of the time, I was just fetching ice and watching the more senior trainers work). I loved how we'd all go out after a game for a beer or two or four. I loved how the night would come on and then pass. It was 2000 and things were looking pretty rough for the Cavs. LeBron? Well, he was still a high-school kid—one hell of a high-school kid but not ready to go pro yet. So wasn't much happening with the Cavs. Even so, being around the players, around guys who play at that pro level—well, there's nothing like it. You can't imagine it. I was twenty-five. Everything was in front of me. Sometimes
somebody would have a little bit of cocaine with them and they'd do it in the bathroom of whatever bar we were in. I didn't do it every time, but I liked it. I liked the way it cut through the warm fuzziness of alcohol, gave everything a hyped-up brilliant sheen. Made me feel like the king of everything. It was a great combination. It was a great time. I was young and good-looking and about to be accomplished. That's when I met Theresa.

It all went very smoothly for a long time. There was the dating, there was the love, there was the living together, there was the wedding, there was us, and through it all, I was drinking, but it was just part of the job. Just part of the job, I told her. I told myself that, too. I told myself that as we started to fight more and more. I told myself that as she began to turn away from me when I tried to kiss her and then I stopped trying to kiss her. I told myself that when one night coming home late and fuzzy-headed from beer and cocaine turned into two, and then three and then four and then I lost count of how many nights, oh hell, it was every night, every night I was away from her, every night I was drinking. I told myself that as I shouted at her, a man I didn't even recognize myself to be, shouting like a madman at my sweet brown wife with her sweet brown dreads and her delicate hands. I told myself that as she cried. I told myself that as she packed her bags, as she laid her hand on
my cheek and said, “Baby, I can't live like this anymore, and you won't get any help. So I've got to go.” I stood at the door for a while after she left, looking at the space in the parking lot of our apartment building where her car had been. And then I went back to our apartment and opened the refrigerator and got a beer, sharp and cold and kind, and one by one by one, I drank myself into my second stint in rehab. And that's why I'm here. I don't want to pick it up again. I want to get out of my mother's basement. I want to stay sober. I wish I didn't have to take things one day at a time. I want to know right now that I'm gonna stay away from that bottle for good. I wish to God there was some way to know for sure.

Tick was so grateful to the Cavs for taking him back. He hadn't been at all sure that they would. Before he went to rehab, he'd been missing staff meetings, telling players to ice body parts that they should have been heating and vice versa. He was working with a hangover so often that he was terrified he'd hurt someone—cause some kind of harm to those million-dollar legs and arms. When he got nervous, he drank. And that just made it harder the next day and on and on.

He couldn't believe it when he was first hired onto the training staff of the Cavs. He loved basketball and he was good at it. He loved playing, the running and sweating and passing and jumping—everything about it. But well before
high school was over, it became apparent that he was only good for a kid at a midwestern prep school. Which wasn't good enough for the big time. So he applied to Penn State and got in. He went there. Mostly because of the football and basketball—he thought he'd at least like watching, maybe play intramural. He did for a while, too. He majored in physical education. And partying. He did enough of that to have declared a double major. When he thought about it, which he didn't much, he felt a kind of wonder that he'd made it out of college at all with so many lost nights. But he charmed and cajoled and last-minute studied his way to a degree, and then he figured out what he wanted to do with his dented basketball dream. He wanted to work with athletes—pro if possible, he'd take what he could get if not. He wanted to be close to those bodies and understand the power that they had that he didn't. And somehow, he knew that he'd never make it through applying and getting into and finishing a master's program in physical therapy if he didn't sober up. So he went to rehab for the first time and dried out and went to meetings. For a few years, he sobered up and found out that he was good at finding where it hurt in a body and helping to ease the ache. When he found his way to the position with the Cavs, it was like God was calling his name. It was a chance to be near the players, a chance not to be behind a desk. He knew, from the moment
he sat next to one of the players after a game and massaged a cramp out of a calf, that he had come home.

He hadn't been around this many guys who could have been his brothers since he'd left for high school. Yeah, they were all much, much younger than he was, with their Escalades and their boomin' systems and their easy, disposable way with women. (One time he heard one of the guys say to another, “Yeah, girls are just like Kleenex. It's always another one in the box.”) But he liked it—the towel snaps and the rough language. It was so tonally different from his high school. He found himself slipping back into speech patterns that he'd left in the old neighborhood once he'd spent enough time at Dean. Adding some new wrinkles, too. Seemed like there was some new slang, some new name for something or other every day.

Saying that he worked for the Cavs came in pretty handy in bars, too. There'd been no steady girl since his divorce—he just couldn't settle down. And the women who hung around the team? Well, let's just say they weren't the settling-down type. (An aside: I adored Theresa—she was a fantastic sister-in-law.) At first, even though he wasn't one of the players, he was still together enough and good-looking enough to pull the prettier, more appealing women. But as the booze got out in front of him (again, so sneakily, so slowly, but again), he started to find that women he was
fucking in joyless trysts that he often could not recall in the morning were just depressing. Crass and dumb and overly made-up and prone to belching and farting and then laughing about it. They had rough skin and smelled of gin or the edgy tang of cocaine. There was nothing to talk with them about—most of the time, they were both too drunk to talk anyway. For the most part, he didn't even find them pretty. But he fucked them anyway. That was the really sad thing. He felt such contempt for them and for himself as he slid in between their waiting open legs. But he couldn't stop.

His first day back at the job, he was awake shortly before the alarm went off. He lay there for a while, feeling the ceiling press down toward his head, but then it was time to get up and get going. He rolled over to his nightstand and picked up the Alcoholics Anonymous big book that he kept there. He loved the old-fashioned, kind of corny way it was written: “Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon.” He offered a brief prayer to whatever was out there that he could do this. He sighed, put the book down, and made his bed. In his time at the rehab, he had become a master bed-maker; hospital corners and sheets so tight that you could, in fact, bounce a quarter off them. He tried once and was oddly pleased to find that it was possible. At Riverrun, they made a very big deal of the addict
or alcoholic's need to start taking care of him- or herself, to start living by the rules, to start having order in their lives. He stood admiring his tightly made bed and tried not to think about the fact that he was thirty-four years old and living in his mother's basement. He looked at himself in the mirror while he was shaving and said, “One day at a time,” out loud. It was not as reassuring as he hoped it would be. This day would include using his mother's computer to look at apartment ads so he could begin to see how hard it was going to be to save up enough to get one. How many thousands of dollars would it take to be a man again? He rinsed the lather from his face.

He went upstairs. His mother had set out breakfast for him, just like she used to do for Daddy. Scrambled eggs and bacon and slightly dark toast. He was hungry, which was a check mark on the good side. So often, for so long, he woke up sickened by the thought of food. It got so bad that he started to find it peculiar that some people actually wanted and enjoyed breakfast. That was one of the first things he had to learn at rehab: to eat normal food at normal times. To think of something besides his next drink, his next hit. At rehab, they were treated much like children, all the rules to follow and good behavior to learn. Now that he was home, it wasn't much different. As he sat at Mom's table, he felt about six years old. She touched the back of his neck
as he hunched over his coffee. Her hand was warm and dry. His eyes stung at her touch.

“Did you sleep all right, Tick?”

“Yeah, Mom. Good. Thanks.”

She sat down across from him, her hands folded around her own cup of coffee. She looked at him without saying anything for a few long minutes. Then she sighed and said, “You sure you're all right now?”

How could he tell her the truth? That you didn't know. He didn't know. “I'm okay right now, Mom. I'm going to a meeting tonight if I don't get hit by a bus on the way to work. That's all I can tell you. You know what they say.”

She looked genuinely curious. “What? What do they say?”

“One day at a time. That's the only way I can take it now.”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed, as though she'd expected him to offer her some deeper revelation. “Your father says that to me all the time when we talk. I don't know how you all do it.”

“Only way to do it, Mom. Only way I can see, anyway.”

“Mmm.” She sipped her coffee and looked distantly out the window. Silence fell over the kitchen. He put his mug down and stood up to leave. He could hear a sparrow singing outside. His mother seemed to be lit from within, but
he supposed it was just the sunlight through the window, hitting her at the right angle. He leaned down to kiss her goodbye. “I'm sorry, Mom. I'm sorry about everything.” She nodded and pressed her hand to his back, briefly. Then he left.

Somehow, he had hung on to his car. His mother had kept it in her driveway, and he was able to make payments on it from Riverrun for the time he was there. It nearly cleaned him out, but he needed to keep some vestige of independence, something that would allow him to get around the city, to be a man alone. He thought of nothing as he drove to work. He eased up to every yellow light with the caution of an old man wearing a hat (his friend Josh had once told him that old men in hats were the slowest, most cautious drivers; anecdotal evidence proved that to be true). He pulled into the basement parking lot of the arena feeling a little breathless, as though he'd just run an obstacle course. It had been some time since he'd been behind the wheel sober.

He had to meet with the head trainer who was his boss first, of course. Of the many people he'd let down, sometimes Tick felt worst about having let down Bob Trumbull. He was large and dark brown and serious of manner. He never raised his voice and he always got what he wanted. Except from Tick. He'd wanted him to succeed—Tick
could feel it in the fatherly looks he gave him, the deeply concerned way he'd ask about how things were going. He'd been left hanging in the wind by the way Tick ended up coming into work so hungover and shaky that the player he was to work with refused to let Tick touch him. “Fuck if I'm letting that fool fuck up my leg” was the graceless but not inaccurate way that he put it. Bob saw Tick's crash coming for a while but it still hurt when he had to bring the whip down.

So now they sat uncomfortably across from each other at Trumbull's desk. Trumbull kept bending and unbending a paper clip. Tick sat on his hands. “So,” said Trumbull. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks.” Tick felt as though he ought to say something more but he couldn't think what that might be.

“You feel ready to be back? Like you'll be able to stay focused?”

“I'm going to do my best, Bob. I think I'm ready. I did a lot of thinking while I was away. I want to do things different now. I want to do them right.”

Bob bent his paper clip again, wordlessly. “Well, we're glad to have you back, Tick. But I can't let you near the players again until I have a chance—until
we
have a chance—to see that you're really back and ready. These young men are very valuable commodities and they've got to be handled
carefully—kind of like racehorses.” A slight smile crossed his face at this, and then he was serious again. “They have to feel totally comfortable with whoever's working with them. They have to have absolute trust. So we'll need you to do support work for a while—cleaning up the whirlpool, working with supplies, things like that.” He didn't look at Tick as he said this.

Tick nodded. His heart rested heavily somewhere just below his belly button. No player contact. Cleaning out the whirlpool, a nasty job that no real trainer would do. And he was gonna be doing it. He wanted to lay his head down on the cool wooden surface of Trumbull's desk and close his eyes. He wanted to hit something. He knew it wouldn't solve anything, but he wanted a drink. But rather than do any of those things, he only nodded. One day at a time. Right. One minute at a time. Right.