The Next Right Thing

by Dan Barden

“Same as always. What it was like when he first got sober, how hard it was. Nothing he didn’t talk about at meetings, but I’ve thought about this part of the night more than any other. He talked about how everyone had been sick of him, how they’d wanted him to die and get it over with. And then he asked me if I wanted to hang out. It was like he needed me more than I needed him, and I didn’t like that.”

  “So why’d you go?”

  “Because, you know, it was a privilege, too. Like we were going to be friends, and I wanted that at the same time I didn’t want that.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course I do,” I said. “This is me, remember? Where’d you go?”

  “We went to Santa Anita, the race track? He said he was going to show me where he hung out before he got sober. He took me to this spot under the bleachers where his old bookie was, and he told me what this chump would be wearing and exactly what he would say to us. He was right, too. This is fifteen years later we’re talking about.”

  It wasn’t fifteen years later. Terry had taken me on the same trip seven years ago, and I had been equally impressed. The bookie had said, Eh, Whitey, how’s your pretty wife? Even when I went, Terry hadn’t had a pretty wife in a long time.

  “I was with him a couple of hours,” Troy continued. “The whole time he pretended that we weren’t looking for heroin. We were only taking a tour of all his old copping spots. I thought we were getting to be friends. Isn’t that fucked up?”

  “And then what?”

  “And then nothing,” Troy said. “We were supposed to look at some more places he used to cop, but he got pissed at me. I wasn’t up for any more Santa Ana. I talk big, but heroin scares the shit out of me. He started freaking out like, ‘You think I’m going to cop? You think after fifteen years of sobriety I’m going shoot drugs with an asshole like you?’ He told me I was a pussy because I’d only snorted it. He said that I had to be a recovering IV drug user to ride with him, and he kicked me out onto Orangethorpe near that TGIF. I thought he was kidding, but then he drove away.”

  This wasn’t any Terry that I’d ever known. If it was true, not only had he abandoned Troy to his demons, he’d probably taught the demons a few tricks.

  Troy paused to carefully fold the piece of paper with the quote on it. Then he stuffed it in his back pocket.

  As he did this, I realized that the bench he was sitting on was the one that had been dedicated to DUI Dave, Terry’s own sponsor, whom I had never met. Terry had told me that Dave used the cuffs of his pants as ashtrays and that Terry had never known him to enter a building without smoking a cigarette outside first. A small brass plaque gave the date of his sobriety and the date of his death. Terry had paid for the plaque himself. If Troy had noticed, he might have said there were no coincidences, and then I would have had to drown him.

  “I can’t stand the idea that a TGIF in Fullerton might be my last drink,” Troy said. “And don’t tell me that I can go drink right now. I know that. Will you be my sponsor?”

  There was a time when I would sponsor anyone. The sicker and more annoying, the better. I thought it was my sacred duty to A.A. Sponsorship was also supposed to be the final step toward freedom from alcohol—the twelfth step, in fact—but I didn’t know if I believed that anymore. My own sponsor had been on some kind of fucked-up twelfth-step call the night he slipped and died.

  “Terry was protecting you,” I said. “He must have known where he was headed, and he didn’t want you along for the ride.”

  “Are you even listening to me? I want you to be my sponsor.”

  “If you did a fifth step with me—and there’s no way you ever will—I’d make you tell everyone everything.”

  “Is that what Terry did with you?”

  “No,” I said. “That would be your special humiliation.”

  “Just be my sponsor.”

  “Tell me more about that night. He called Claire for sex?”

  “I figured he was looking for an alternative to copping. You remember how he would flip out his phone and start dialing while you were still talking to him?”

  I smiled.

  “I like Claire and all,” Troy said. “I mean, from what I see at meetings, I think she’s trying, but Terry didn’t call her for any good reason.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He wondered if they could talk. He asked her how her son was doing. The call ended pretty quickly after that.”

  Visiting Claire was a marginally better idea than visiting Santa Ana, but not by much. I blew more smoke toward Las Brisas.

  “That’s everything,” Troy said. “Just be my sponsor.”

  I took my foot off the bench. “Let’s forget about the fact that I almost beat the shit out of you this morning. How insane it is that you’re even talking to me. Because I’m going to tell you that I don’t like you, Troy. I don’t like your attitude. Also, I don’t like your face. I don’t like your fake beefed-up body, and when you’re around me, I feel a little bit nauseated the entire time. Not like I’m going to puke, exactly, but like I’ll never be able to eat food again. I also can’t promise that I won’t beat the shit out of you. You upset me so much, in fact, that it’s probable.”

  Troy looked at me, then stood up. I relaxed my legs for the punch I was certain was coming. He was entitled to it. “Still want me to be your sponsor?” I asked.

  “You have no idea.”

  I’D BEEN WANTING TO TALK to Wade alone since I left him at the Coastal Club. There was something that bothered me about the way he’d gone quiet while Troy and I talked.

  MP was asleep by the time I got home after dropping off Troy. I was back on my deck, smoking another cigar. It was near midnight. I called Wade. He picked up on the fourth ring. “That house where Colin Alvarez lives?” he said. “I’ve been to that house.”

  About a year before Terry died, we lost track of Wade for a while. It wasn’t as though we stopped seeing him, either.

  The way you lose most people in A.A. is they stop going to meetings, but Wade never slacked on attendance. Wade was A.A. He’d always been a pretty good salesman—of scuba lessons, of stereo equipment, of time shares—but his greatest profession would always be meetings.

  One day, though, I noticed that he wasn’t around so much anymore. Terry and I became edgy with each other almost immediately. We were both what my sister Betsy would describe disparagingly as “alpha males.” Wade, however, was something like an alpha male minus. He anchored us in A.A., but also provided a buffer between us. Without him, Terry bossed me around in ways that I didn’t need to be bossed around: he’d buy me tickets to basketball games he knew I didn’t want to attend, take me to dinner at Sinatraesque cigar bars that made me uncomfortable.

  We talked to Wade about his absence, but that was like pushing rope. He agreed that he should be around more—you’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right—and nothing changed.

  He also seemed to have more discretionary income than usual. He would ski at Whistler, let’s say, rather than Tahoe. And he started to develop the kind of expensive interests that he could never quite pull off before. He suddenly had all this old-school high-end hi-fi equipment, for example, and on the rare times we did see him, he would try to get us to listen to LPs with him.

  Then one day Wade drifted back into our lives. It started with a phone call. I was only then starting to carry a cell phone. Sometimes, when it rang, I would stare at it.

  “Hello.”

  “It’s Wade.”

  “Hi, Wade. How’d you get this number?”

  “Is there something wrong with me calling you at this number?” His voice got higher. “Am I not supposed to call you?”

  “Chill out,” I said. “I’m just shocked when it rings. Sometimes it seems like a toy I carry to pretend I have a job.”

  “You have a job,” Wade said. “You have a good job.”

  “Anyway,” I said.

  “I’m calling to te
ll you that I’ve been growing pot under my house.”

  You get that in A.A. a lot: people saying what no one has ever said to you before. Once, after a meeting, a guy told me that he fucked his German shepherd. Just like that. No one ever told me that kind of thing when I was a cop.

  “Should we be chatting about this on a cell phone?” I asked.

  We met at Jean Claude’s, something I didn’t do for the guy who fucked his dog. Wade explained that he’d made over two hundred grand that year growing hydroponic marijuana under his house. He didn’t touch the stuff. All he did was run the risk. Guys came and set it up. Guys came and took it away in trash bags.

  At first I didn’t see what the problem was. “No shit?”

  “I don’t want to lie about this anymore,” Wade said. “Every time I go to a meeting, I feel like a freak.”

  And then he cried. Guys like Wade and me, there comes a time in our lives when the only thing we have is A.A. For some of us, that time comes more than once. That day at Jean Claude’s bakery and café, Wade felt like he’d betrayed his only true family. I felt privileged to be his friend while he passed this spiritual kidney stone, but I called Terry so he could be there, too. I wanted Wade to know that we were in this together; I also didn’t want Terry to miss Wade’s low point. That’s another thing you can’t explain to a civilian: how beautiful that lack of hope can be. I put my hand in the middle of Wade’s back as Terry hugged him. I told Wade that I loved him. Terry said, “If you’re done being a lowlife scumbag criminal now, maybe we can get on with our lives?” Sensing that something was up, Jean Claude spotted us our chai lattés. We all started talking again every day.

  Wade’s confession was sparked by the fact he was about to get busted. With Terry’s legal help, he soon made a deal to avoid jail. Wade traded away most of what he’d earned—his drug-related assets—in exchange for a pass on the criminal charges. He’d probably exchanged some information, too, but I hadn’t asked.

  These so-called “asset forfeiture” programs had begun even before I became a cop, and I’d been around to watch them grow. What most people didn’t realize was that the cops didn’t have to convict you in order to take your possessions. If they found illegal drugs in your car or house, your car or house now potentially belonged to law enforcement, whether or not you even got tried. They didn’t always exercise this right, but the right was always there. The abuses, though, were legendary: one drug cop I knew had such a thing for Jaguar XK-Es that the drug dealers in his jurisdiction stopped buying them. They found that they got busted less frequently in a Mercedes.

  Of course, cops becoming more interested in cash and property than convictions had some problematic implications. If a suspect or his lawyers made it easier for the police to get to his bank accounts, might the cops be that much more inclined to give him a pass on the prison sentence? Or: what if the suspect made it easier for the cops to figure out how to take other people’s bank accounts? Maybe then they would let him keep more of his own assets? To some agencies, this way of doing business just made good sense. I never liked it much myself—it sounded more like horse trading than justice.

  But I wasn’t a cop anymore when Wade found himself in the soup. And so I was just glad that my friend didn’t have to go to jail.

  “Simon Busansky owned that house,” Wade said to me over the phone. “That house was one of the places they grew and processed the pot.”

  Simon Busansky: pornographer, boyfriend to crazy Emma, guy who freaked Troy out.

  “I thought you didn’t know who Simon Busansky was,” I said.

  Wade was quiet for a moment before he said, “I didn’t know him well. I don’t have strong opinions about him like Troy. He was just a guy who was near the top of the pot-growing food chain.”

  “You explicitly told me that you didn’t know him.”

  “Yeah,” Wade said.

  “So you lied to me. What you’re saying is you lied to me.”

  “I lied to you.”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “I walk around my life pretending that shit didn’t happen,” Wade said. “It’s weird to be reminded of it, especially like this. Terry was the one who totally saved my ass that time.”

  “But you don’t know anything about Busansky?”

  “I didn’t know that he was a pornographer,” Wade said.

  “How did he avoid going to jail?”

  “I assume he made a deal with them, too. I’m sure he lost everything. I gotta figure he lost that house.”

  “How do you figure Colin now owns that house?” I said. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Not sure, man.”

  “And why the fuck is Busansky hanging around Colin’s recovery houses? That doesn’t seem right to me. There’s no way Terry could be involved in this, is there?”

  “I hope not.”

  “How about fucking newcomers?” I said. “You still think he wasn’t fucking newcomers?”

  “No way, man. That I’m sure about.”

  “I need to find this guy Busansky. Can you help me?”

  “Dude, it freaked me out to be anywhere near that house. I gotta steer clear of this, you understand?”

  Uh-huh.

  Before he hung up, Wade told me again how sorry he was for holding out on me. The funny thing was that I felt like he was still holding out on me.

  When I went back into my house, I did what I sometimes do: stand at the threshold of our bedroom and watch MP sleep. She didn’t move. The soft gray light from the window crossed her back. She was twelve years younger than I was, but maybe that wasn’t the only reason she slept peacefully while I did not.

  She’d found her way into A.A. the same as anyone—on a wave of more or less crushing despair—and yet I knew my sins were a lot worse than hers. Why did I inflict my bad dreams on someone who didn’t have any? That’s what I thought about on that threshold between our bedroom and the rest of the house. When we first slept together, I would wake up from nightmares to find her happily reading a book. It took me the better part of six months to realize that it was my nightmares that had made her book necessary.

  As my eyes got used to the light, I started to get interested in her bare back above the covers, in her neck and the way it flared around her shoulders into the softness above her breasts. Although I couldn’t see it from here, I imagined her skin, the way it smelled and tasted, as though no poison had ever poured through it. I knew that wasn’t the truth, but it always seemed that way.

  I realized she was lying in bed staring at me. She didn’t say anything, but she looked at me as though the events of the morning were on her mind and she was trying like hell to hold them against me, but there was something about the softness of our bedroom and both of us needing not to talk about what had happened. I pushed off my shoes and undressed before I even entered the bedroom. It seemed right to walk through the doorway in nothing but my skin.

  WHEN I REACHED FOR MY CELL PHONE the next morning, MP was nestled beside me. But when I told her I was calling Manny, she moved away quietly, then headed for the bathroom, without a glance in my direction.

  “You know any drug cops down here in Laguna?” I asked Manny. I had to speak with someone who could give me the scoop on whatever asset forfeiture deal might have led to Simon Busansky selling his house to Colin Alvarez.

  “There’s a funny guy named Sean I met once. A surfer. We met at some kind of DEA junket in Palm Springs, and he was ready to give me a surfing lesson in the pool. He’s still Laguna PD, but I think he’s on some liaison with the DEA, too.”

  After taking a second to think about cops who were surfers, I remembered that I knew the guy myself, though he hadn’t been DEA when I used to run into him. Sean Wakefield came around A.A. a few years ago. He’d been going to secret meetings for police, but they weren’t working. When someone pushed him in my direction, I advised him to join the general population, and that worked for a while.

  I called Sean’s cell, and as
his voice mail picked up, I happened to be looking out my window at the Pacific. I reached for my binoculars. It wasn’t a great set of waves, but it wasn’t bad enough to keep a guy like Sean away. By the time I got down to Brook Street, he was peeling off his wetsuit at the top of the stairs.

  Sean’s almost-cherry seventies El Camino was parked—illegally—at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. He sat down on his tailgate, and I gave him a latté from the Orange Inn. Sean had grown up in Atlanta, and he had some of that big, stupid southern sheriff thing going on. As he pulled on a T-shirt, I could see that he was in even better shape than he used to be. If he was drinking, it wasn’t beer.

  “What’s this?” Sean said. “The sponsor patrol?”

  “Was I your sponsor?”

  “I never asked you to be, but … yeah.”

  “That relationship works better when both parties know about it,” I said.

  Sean tossed his wet suit into the truck and wrapped a towel around his shorts. “I heard about Terry.” He sipped some coffee. “Sorry.”

  Over Sean’s shoulder, the ocean was gray like you never see unless you live in a beach town. Greasy gray like the bottom of a dead fish. Terry had been the one who pushed Sean in my direction. Say hello to Sean. Sean’s the patient today.

  “Actually,” I said, “that’s why I’m here. I’m trying to figure out what his last few weeks were like. I might also have some information for you, you know, as a cop.”

  “You’re not here to drag me back to meetings?” Sean smiled. “I’m disappointed.”

  “What the hell do I care, Sean? If I thought I could get away with what you seem to be getting away with, I’d start surfing, too. And I fucking hate surfing.”

  Sean took a last look at the sea as he stepped into his flip-flops. “A few times I thought about calling you.”

  I told him about the guy I knew only as Mutt and gave him the license plate of the Suburban. I didn’t mention Simon Busansky’s name. I didn’t mention Colin Alvarez by name, either, though I did give him Colin’s address. Did that address ring any bells from his DEA work? I reminded myself that it could be a dangerous game, sharing information with someone who was hooked in to a federal agency.