The Next Right Thing

by Dan Barden

  By the time Troy finished his resentment list, sex inventory, and list of fears, we’d been talking for a couple of hours. My coffee was gone.

  “Anything else you want to tell me? This is the time to get it out. Not just sex but anything.” I wanted to make certain there were no monsters under the bed. In an alcoholic, festering secrets can kill.

  Troy thought about it. He was still at a place where thinking took tremendous effort. “I’m worried about one thing I left out.”

  “This is like a confessional. It’s not going beyond the cab of this truck,” I said. Aching to go to Jean Claude’s for another cup of coffee, I checked my glove box for any fugitive Excedrin extra strength. The massive headache that had been postponed by The Penguin was getting back on schedule. “Unless it’s funny, and then I’m going to tell everyone.”

  “You know how you’re always saying that I should shut up about my father being in the Mafia?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I think my exact words were ‘Shut the fuck up about your father being in the Mafia.’ I’m sorry about that, Troy. I’ve been a little edgy lately. I could have been kinder. I want to be kinder from now on.”

  “I’ve got a couple things to tell you,” Troy said. “I’m not from New Jersey—I’m from Seattle. I’m sorry I lied about that. But I think I know why I talk about him so much, why I’ve made him into such a …”

  “Legendary figure?”

  “Yeah, that. I guess I want to believe that he’s such a badass because it makes me feel better about what happened.”

  I waited.

  “The last time I lived at home,” Troy continued, “about two years ago, we got into a fight. I honestly don’t like what he does for a living. I got mad about something, and I said that if he were a real man, he’d find a different line of work.”

  I nodded. Troy stared down Victoria Street toward a scoop of the Pacific Ocean that was worth about 150K to my client Bill Trembly, who happened to live beside it.

  “He agreed with me. He fucking agreed with me, Randy. That’s what I couldn’t take.” Troy started crying, something I’d seen him do before, but this time I was glad for it. I moved my hand to the seat behind him.

  Troy continued, “I hit him in the face. He didn’t defend himself. It was like he wanted it. He just stood there. I hit him again, too.”

  From where we sat, I should have been able to see more of the ocean. A great big eucalyptus tree blocked my view. I thought about mentioning that to Bill Trembly, who could add even more to the value of his house with a smaller tree. Fuck eucalyptus trees anyway.

  Troy said it again: “He wanted me to do it.”

  “Can I tell you something,” I said, “that I’ve never told anyone but Terry? I think maybe it will help.”

  So I told him.

  I saved it for last. I didn’t know if I was going to share it at all. Around the time I came into A.A., a young man in San Diego had been successfully prosecuted for murder based on testimony from another A.A. member. In a blackout, he’d killed a couple living in his parents’ old house. When his sponsor was forced to testify, it was ruled that there was no privilege between members of a self-help group.

  “I tried to kill that guy,” I said. “If Manny hadn’t shown up, I’m sure I would have. I was drunk, but no more than a lot of times.”

  Terry knew what I was talking about. He just listened.

  “In my head, I was thinking he was a worthless fucking drug dealer. He’d run away from me, and he’d punched me, and I’d had all I could take. I started whaling on him, first with my nightstick, and when my nightstick broke, I punched him until my hands were bleeding. I was completely insane. I didn’t care what happened to either of us. I wanted to die, but I wanted to kill that motherfucker first.”

  I looked at Terry. It felt like ten minutes passed while I waited for him to speak.

  “What was his name?” Terry finally asked.

  “Balthazar. Balthazar Bustamante.”

  Terry shrugged. “You’re lucky the guy lived.” That was all he said for a long time.

  I’ve never been in a purgatory worse than that moment. Terry stared off out his window, and I stared at Terry. I was feeling more fucked than ever when he turned back toward me, smiling. Then he said something else. You have to understand, that’s how Terry was. Just when you couldn’t believe that he would pull it out, he pulled it out.

  “How big do you figure God is?” Terry asked.

  “Jesus, Terry, I don’t know.”

  “You figure He’s bigger than you and me?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You think He’s bigger than Orange County?”

  “Sure.”

  “How about almost killing a man? You think He’s bigger than that?”

  My brain was pea-sized back then, but I thought I could see where we were going. I nodded wearily. Reading the menu, I thought I’d eaten the meal. Holding the hammer, I thought I was living inside the house.

  “It’s like this,” Terry said. “There’s a part in The Big Book where it says, ‘Either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t.’ And then it asks us to make a choice. Everything or nothing? God or no God? A solution or the hell that you know by heart? What’s your choice, Randy? How big do you want God to be?”

  I’d read The Big Book twice, but I didn’t remember that. It was in a chapter called “We Agnostics,” which I looked up as soon as I got home.

  “What’s it going to be, Randy? This is where you get to say.”

  “I’m voting for a very big God,” I said. “Because I fucking need one.”

  There were no white lights, and I didn’t fall off a horse, but I think someone heard me.

  After that, Terry told me that he loved me, that we would be friends for the rest of our lives because of what we’d just done together. I had a hard time believing that, too.

  “One more thing,” Terry said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re going to have to make amends to that Mexican guy,” he said. “Face-to-face.”

  “You think?” I asked.

  “Only if you want to live.”

  I never did—surprise, surprise—make amends to that Mexican guy. About seven years ago, Manny found his address for me, but Manny also told me that I didn’t need to meet him, that it would cause more harm than good. Manny meant well, but he wasn’t an alcoholic. Colin Alvarez had been right: it was unfinished business, and I had never felt completely free of Santa Ana because of it. I had never stopped seeing myself as that bad cop.

  Of course, my failure to make amends didn’t stop me from telling Troy that he would have to make amends to his father.

  Troy just nodded.

  “Did he ever do anything nice for you?” I asked.

  “He did nice things for me all the time,” Troy said. “That’s not the point.”

  “That’s exactly the point. He loved you the best he could, and you’ve got to let him off the hook. Are you still taking money from him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do assets that were in his account show up in your account a few days later for reasons that have nothing to do with you selling him a product or rendering him a service?”

  “His office sends me a check every month.”

  “That’s gotta stop, too. You’re going to get a job. Either that or go to school. Now let’s get some more coffee.”

  I felt a bit hypocritical, having no immediate intention of making amends to Balthazar Bustamante, but that’s one of the cool things about A.A.: it is possible to walk another person toward “the sunshine of the spirit” while still keeping your own head firmly implanted up your ass.

  The uncool thing about A.A. is that there are other people in it.

  “You going to make amends to that guy in Santa Ana?” Troy said.

  “What makes you think I haven’t?”

  Troy looked at me.

  “Get out of my truck,” I
said. “It’s my turn to drive. If you’re fast, you can get to the other side before I lock the doors.”

  Troy stepped cautiously into the street. When he met me by the tailgate, he seemed totally unprepared for the hug that I gave him. I even kissed him on the neck. “I love you,” I said. “Doing this thing we just did means I love you.” They were the same words Terry had said to me, and probably the same words that DUI Dave had said to Terry. I was shocked to discover that I was telling the absolute truth.

  THEN CAME ALMOST THREE WEEKS of Crash talking to me only through Betsy, who was talking to me only through Jeep. Actually, Betsy still talked to me, though just to the extent necessary to extricate me from my legal troubles. All other conversations were, according to my sister, “toxic,” and she was very disciplined about avoiding them.

  I consoled myself with the entirely bullshit rationalization that not talking was a form of love, too. I was pathetic. Then Jean found out about Betsy playing go-between for me and Crash, and that ended, too, so I became something worse than pathetic.

  The police stopped calling me eventually. Once Laguna Beach PD had control over Colin’s little empire, with a generous cut for the DEA, they stopped worrying quite so much about Mutt’s murder. Colin pleaded to manslaughter, adding more to his already extensive tally of guilty pleas. He did Emma a solid by pretending that the gun was his when she’d actually bought it from a meth dealer in Lake Forest. For that kindness alone, I would visit him regularly in jail. No one was charged for Simon’s death by stupidity. The fact that I had saved the reality-television star from the clutches of the evil drug dealer must have taken the fun out of seizing any of my assets. They couldn’t prove that the money I’d given Terry had been anything other than an expression of love, but when had that stopped them before?

  The only question left to me was how the fuck did Terry get so far on the wrong side of things? No, it was bigger than that. The real question was how could he have let his mistakes, as horrible as they were, get in the way of his being there for that beautiful child? It didn’t escape me that it was a good question to be asking myself, too. John Sewell’s prediction that I would drive a permanent wedge between myself and my daughter had come true.

  Meanwhile, Sewell seemed to have delivered on his promise to give Cathy her money. She moved to a nicer place in Irvine and was looking into starting an associate’s program for nursing at Saddleback College. I went to see her and Paloma and Danny a few times, but I didn’t ask many questions about Terry. It felt more important to simply be in the room with them. Particularly because I’d avoided diaper duty with Crash, I liked pitching in for Danny. Paloma had a lot of curiosity about my daughter, and I answered all her questions without letting on how much they pained me. Maybe that was more of my penance. While I spent time with the family Terry had left behind, John Sewell was off somewhere beginning the process of replacing me in my daughter’s eyes.

  Colin’s downfall soon became just another cautionary tale about basement entrepreneurship in South Orange County. Life went on, and my own role—my failure to help my friend Terry and, maybe more important, a stranger, Mutt—was something I was learning to live with a day at a time. Sometimes I tried to imagine what that would have been like, helping Mutt. I had a track record with pseudo-tough guys; I would have been a good sponsor for him.

  When I wasn’t imagining myself sponsoring dead guys, I hid out at my shop. My A.A. family tried to turn me around. I was going to meetings again, and Wade and Troy and Emma used my house and my shop as though both belonged to them. Emma told me that MP—her new sponsor—had given her permission to consort with only two men in A.A.: me and Troy. This made me feel better about the possibility of getting back together with MP until I asked her if I should take it that way. At one point I had convinced her to stay at my house for a few minutes after she dropped Emma off. She drank a cup of herbal tea with me before she said, “Look at the safety you’re giving Troy and Emma. Those two are flourishing. And they owe a lot of that to you.”

  I tried to care because MP wanted me to care. “Maybe they’d flourish even more if you lived here, too.”

  She finished her tea and said, “You’re not the patient here today.” Then she smiled and left me again. At least she smiled, right?

  You’d think it would make me feel better, seeing the new lives that Emma and Troy created in the wake of my disaster. Emma was working the steps with MP like her hair was on fire, and Troy had a plan for the next stage of his life that would have impressed the hell out of me if I hadn’t been so malignantly self-centered: in a matter of weeks, he had become the computer fix-it guy of choice for Laguna Beach A.A., and he was getting himself together to apply for community college.

  Troy’s success meant that my house was filled with computers that he was working on. With his help, Emma had also turned one of my bedrooms into a small-scale video production facility from which she was posting to YouTube a meditation on every day of her sobriety. About half the time, the three of us would cook dinner together, and I had to admit, it was more entertaining than talking to myself. The two of them usually avoided doing the dishes by running off to a meeting.

  The only thing that came close to comforting me was the hope chest I was designing for Paloma’s quinceañera. In the Mexican culture, that’s a combination fifteenth birthday party and debutante ball, and Paloma had been planning hers since before Terry died. Now that Cathy had been given Terry’s insurance money, Paloma’s quinceañera would be slightly less elaborate than her wedding—if she married the prince of Monaco. I was glad that Paloma could have her party, but I hated that the largesse had come by way of John Sewell.

  The hope chest was based on an idea I’d had for Crash—and God knows I was planning on building one for her next. If you didn’t look too closely, it was a regular old, distinctively American hope chest. Made with good wood and better fittings but pretty much the same design that had served young women for centuries. The kind of piece that should live at the bottom of a big comfortable bed.

  That was only if you didn’t look closely. When you did, you saw that the chest was bisected on the top and the sides by faint seams. When you tried to open it the old-fashioned way, it wouldn’t: the hinges and the big brass lock were purely decorative. As you felt around, though, you realized that if you exerted a little pressure, those faint seams would separate and the chest would slide open sideways. The top rolled away at either side, like the ceiling of a football stadium, to reveal a warren of boxes. I’d made the boxes as complicated as possible, too. A few of them were large enough for sweaters and prom dresses, but it was the smaller ones that interested me. What would Paloma keep in them? Mementos of her mother? Love letters? Report cards?

  If it’s true, as an Art Center professor once told me, that “design is just a fancy word for problem solving,” I’m not sure what problem I was trying to solve. How to show a fifteen-year-old girl that life was complicated but also beautiful? Maybe it was a lesson in how far a man who had lost what he loved most would go to occupy himself? Just figuring out how to rig the hinges took two full days. Good thing I had thrown away my life. I had the time.

  One day, as I was finally getting satisfied with how the chest was opening and closing, Emma showed up at my shop. I pretended I wasn’t happy to see her. Troy was away for a few days to visit his father in Seattle. While they were together, Troy planned to make the big amends. His absence meant that Emma had doubled up on the task of trying to distract me from myself. She was riding a moped with cool leather saddlebags.

  “You notice anything amazing about me?” she said.

  “There’s nothing about you, dear, that doesn’t amaze me. I’m amazed, among other things, that your head doesn’t explode with all the crazy wonderful shit that’s bouncing around in there.”

  She smiled. “That’s actually a pretty good answer. Bravissimo, Randy.”

  After Emma figured out that she couldn’t get me to focus on how she’d managed to snag su
ch a mod ride, she took a laptop from the saddlebag and opened it on my worktable. I didn’t have any reason to recognize the laptop that Cathy Acuña had given Troy the first time we met her, the one she said her boss had given her. By now, my house was awash in laptops just like it.

  Emma said, “Troy would be really mad at me if he knew I was showing this to you.”

  I still wasn’t that interested. I was using most of my brain to wonder whether brass hinges were better than platinum hinges, even though the platinum hinges were already a done deal. “Why would Troy be mad?”

  “He’s afraid you’ll freak out and do something stupid.”

  Now I was interested. “Show me,” I said.

  “Promise you won’t do something stupid?”

  “Just show me.”

  It took forever for the fucking thing to boot up—God, I hate PCs—and once it did, the hard drive made enough noise to convince me it would die at any moment. Emma opened a video file, clicked on play, and immediately a woman who looked exactly like Claire Monaco was having sex with a well-beyond-middle-aged man. The video had those spooky drifting squarish gaps that corrupted video files sometimes get. It was a long video, and Emma gave me a quick tour through the rest of it: lots of positions and plenty of good shots of both their faces. I tried to imagine the circumstances of its filming. The camera was stationary, maybe on the other side of the room. Did these two even know they were being filmed?

  “Where did Troy find this?” I asked.

  “Right here on the computer,” Emma said, “the one he got from your friend Cathy? Troy says that’s why you should never put anything on your hard drive. We couldn’t figure out why that chick Claire Monaco would be on Cathy’s computer. God, that woman freaks me out every time I see her at the women’s meeting—and I’m the one who freaks everyone else out. Troy remembered that this computer must have belonged to some guy you really hate? The one who’s like stealing your daughter or something? Why don’t you ever tell me anything? You don’t think I want to hear about some guy who’s stealing your daughter? Is this the guy?”