by T. Braddy
Still, handling the rig fit me, fit my personality. Paid well, too. Might have been something I’d have gravitated back to, if not for the DUI. The only driving gig I could get now would have to involve bank heists or high-speed chases. Not only had I been cited for drinking and driving, but I’d been involved in a near-fatal car accident. For those reasons, I’d probably never be allowed within spitting distance of a rig, so long as I lived. You could be plenty of things and still be a truck driver, but you had to have a clean record.
Oh, well.
I went about my job, all the while listening to the din of people outside, the sounds of talking and laughing just loud enough to compete with the old Warren Zevon Mickey had playing on the speakers. It was early enough that the streets weren’t overcrowded with people, but it was never early enough that there wasn’t at least a small congregation wandering down River Street.
It was one of the things I loved about the city. In many ways, it was a ghost town, an old place with older spirits, but it was nevertheless a living city. You could find so much life in this place just by looking around, but the feeling that something ancient lingered in every building, in the air, in the river itself, was omnipresent. Even people who didn’t believe in the afterlife – in the rumors and old legends – even they admitted that something was in the air of this place. The sidewalks and old roads overhung with weather-beaten trees practically teemed with the supernatural. It had been commercialized, and the cottage industry associated with the ghost tours obscured (but did not eradicate) the true feeling that something more-than-human existed here.
I fought like hell to resist being pulled into the otherworld, the world most people cannot see. Sometimes I awoke standing at the foot of my bed, mumbling nonsense words to myself. Having conversations with the air, or someone who’s since disappeared.
It was my burden to shoulder, for whatever reason, but I had hoped a change of scenery would have cured me of my nocturnal adventures.
Guess I should have picked a place a little less haunted.
Weird thing was, with the continued influence of the dead interrupting my life – and perhaps because of it – I somewhat selfishly hoped to get a better sense of Vanessa’s time here. Every death seems to leave an imprint, so I kind of figured traces of Vanessa would be left behind like the scent on worn laundry. No dice. Sometimes I thought I caught a hint of her, but I wasn’t a dog, a beagle plunging down a foxhole, so I should have known better.
“Rolson, you okay?”
I looked up, saw Mickey standing in the office entrance.
“Yeah, fine, fine. What’s up?”
I went to continue wiping down the table I was on, only to realize the rag wasn’t in my hand and I was standing not next to a table but behind the bar. I glanced from Mickey to where his eyes were focused.
On the bar was a bottle of Beam, a glass full to the rim of the stuff, and a High Life, all arranged in a neat little line. A model train of booze. A company of soldiers, ready for battle.
The smell reached me, a fundamental desire creeping into every inch of me that had the ability to want something, and I stepped back from the stuff like it was slithering across the bar.
“I don’t. I um–” I stammered, trying to find an explanation that wouldn’t sound crazy or like complete bullshit.
Mickey unfolded his arms, revealing an Ellroy novel tucked under one armpit. He approached carefully, a hostage negotiator in a tense back-and-forth.
“You sure you’re feeling all right?”
I tried to think of a lie but discarded it. “I don’t know what happened. I started cleaning the tables, and I got to thinking of some old ghosts, and I reckon I just ended up over here.”
Mickey was irascible but not tyrannical about his position as the bar’s owner, so I wasn’t surprised to find a touch of sadness in his eyes. “You’re a good worker,” he said. “You don’t need to justify your struggle with me. I’d have been more surprised if you never got tempted.”
How could I explain that it wasn’t a temptation but...never mind. Even the thought made me seem crazy.
“I don’t–” I began, but Mickey cut me off with the swipe of a hand.
“You don’t need to prove anything to yourself, Rol,” he said. “You’ve got nothing to punish yourself about.”
“Oh, but I do,” I responded.
“Aw, hell, we all do. Doesn’t mean we have to act on it. You want a job here, you got one. But this shouldn’t be a place where you flog yourself with a cat o’ nine tails, hoping to draw blood. You paid your penance back where you came from. This is you on the other side, you hear me?”
I nodded but said nothing.
The lines in Mickey’s face drew deeper as he thought.
“Why don’t you head into the cooler, organize the kegs? Looks like you got the tables all done out here.”
I did just that, but not before telling Mickey thank you.
* * *
“People today, they’ve lost that sense, you know,” Winston said. “Giving over command of your addiction to a higher power, to something larger than yourself. A lot of people struggle with that. They just don’t believe in something that’s not tangible.”
I thought of an old blues song, could almost smell the dank odor of an abandoned juke joint. “I don’t have any trouble with that part of it,” I said.
It was making amends with the people I had wronged that really got to me. The list, as they say, went on and on, some of the names no more than names at this point. Most of them were dead, and half of them owed me an apology, just as I owed them one.
“You’re all the way down on step eight, my friend,” Winston said. “To me, you’re still struggling with steps three and four. You’ve got to understand who you are before you go off and start trying to apologize to people.”
I thought about my experience earlier that day. I wasn’t even totally clear on step one, it seemed, and even though I hadn’t taken a drink, I couldn’t quite convince myself I was powerless over it. I could say the words, repeat them at the meeting, but part of me thought it was something else driving me to drink, and I couldn’t quite let go the way I should.
“That boss of yours can help you with giving over to a Higher Power,” Winston said. “That’s one you have to re-up constantly. You get enough days behind you, you start to feel bulletproof. It’s that pride. That pride turns your sobriety into the end of Bonnie & Clyde. You’ve got to keep reminding yourself that it ain’t you who’s in control.”
“What about Mickey?”
Winston gave me a sly look. He smiled, said, “That old coot ain’t told you he used to be a preacher-man, giving traveling sermons and doing pop-up revivals? You ever see that one movie where Steve Martin played the revival preacher?”
“Yeah,” I said, holding on to the fact that he’d been a fraud.
“Your man Mickey was one of them. He’d turn his face bright red with all that screaming about Jesus. Jumping around on stage, touching people’s wounds and deformities. Had them folks turn into real believers, right there on the spot. Could make a devil’s sidekick turn angelic.”
“Huh,” I said. It was all I could say.
Winston cleared his throat. He was leaning against the table where the coffee went. “He wasn’t even afraid to lead a black church’s revival. He’d go on in, head held up high, and he’d just jump right into whatever his sermon was for the evening. At first we’d, well, you know we’d look at him funny, but he’d win us over. Black folks can be sorta strange about who they let into their midst, when it comes down to the Word of God. But him, he’d step right up and get his feet wet in the blood of the lamb, right there before God and all the rest of us. He could holy roll with the best of ‘em.”
“What caused him to give it up?”
“He– well, huh,” Winston started, trying to find the words. “It isn’t much of my business to go around telling other people’s secrets, but I reckon Mickey’s done gone past the point of cari
ng about such things. Plus, I figure it’s your business to know, seeing as you work for the man. Might give you some sympathy for him.”
I felt my mouth drying up. Even if I didn’t know what was happening, I felt a slight precognition about what it might be. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be good, and so I steeled myself for it.
“He had a wife. Pretty little thing, she was. Mickey lucked out, because he’s got a face like a half-breed bulldog. Slender girl, with that kind of dark blonde hair you don’t see as much anymore. Chestnut, I reckon you’d say. Real pretty girl. Mickey, he’s a good few decades older’n me, but I remember his wife back from when he came through preaching one time, when I was younger.”
I could already feel the sinking in my stomach. I didn’t want to hear the rest, but I already committed and had to be dragged through his story. I wanted to say something, tell him I knew exactly what happened, even if I didn’t, because then it would save me the grief of knowing. I wouldn’t be able to look at him the same, with or without the truth.
“Mickey, he started hitting the bottle pretty hard after his wife had a miscarriage. He wanted a kid something awful, and Maria, she got sick in the wake of it. Thought she was going to die.”
I didn’t need any sort of special insight to know there was a sad ending to this story. I had never met Mickey’s wife or kid, and he hadn’t mentioned either.
“Finally, she got pregnant and carried a baby to term. Had a little girl they named Theresa. But Mickey, he was pretty far gone by then. Maria slipped on a bit of the post-baby blues, and she ended up wrapping her brains around a shotgun shell.”
“Jesus Christ. He’s never mentioned anything like that.”
“Why would he? Spent plenty of years in a wasteland of his own making after that. Drank himself out of the ministry. Raised hell and put a rock under it. Damned lucky he didn’t drink himself blind or dead, and he survived flinging himself at oceans of booze. Not unlike you, my friend. Except he did it for decades.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“Oh, some family members took it, I suppose. Mickey was black with spite by then. No real attachment to people or things. Never heard if he tried to contact that little girl or not.”
I thought of the jolly, irascible guy who had taken me in and shown me the right way to pour up cocktails, even if I wasn’t allowed behind the bar during normal business hours. He didn’t seem like the guy sandbagged by loneliness and sorrow, but maybe my own troubles had clouded my vision of his.
“How’d he end up a barkeep in Savannah?”
“In a roundabout way, same as most folks who put stakes down in this city. People don’t realize they’re trapped until they bump up against the outer wall. Mickey probably didn’t even realize he couldn’t leave until he wanted to.”
“If he ever wanted to.”
Winston smirked. “Men like us – women, too – don’t make permanent plans. Man’s got some things he’d like to work out for himself, but he done got too old and too set to act on ‘em. He’s got regrets, same as you. Same as me. He just got paralyzed by them, I reckon.”
I commented that it seemed we all had something in common, that we were all men who had lost the women in our lives.
He seemed to take a long drag on that thought. Finally, he said, “People lose everybody, they live long enough. My daddy’s gone. Two of my brothers. Hell, there’s probably more men gone in my family than women, but the women just impacted me more. You think of any men traced a line in the desert of your life like Vanessa?”
I shook my head. My mother, maybe. Definitely my mother. My Aunt Birdie, the kind old woman who raised me like her own, who had passed just after I’d squeaked out a high school diploma and went to working construction for some scoundrels in Vidalia.
“It just seems weird is all.”
Winston patted me on the back. His bony hands felt old, craggy against my shoulder. “You talk to people tonight, you listen to them. You hear? They’ll give you all you need to know about loss. Every single one of them’s lost something worth hanging onto, and they don’t pull other people into their grief. Don’t try to be so self-centered as that.”
He wasn’t smiling anymore, and he seemed to be making a point out of me. I took the hint and wandered off, looking for another Diet Coke.
* * *
I went to a meeting that evening, totally out of my usual cycle, so more than a few of the faces I saw were new. I didn’t share, but I sat in the back and drank coffee and listened. It wasn’t an enjoyable experience by any stretch of the imagination, and yet I liked being there. It was humbling, as though I were learning and paying my penance simultaneously. I felt like, by sitting there and listening to people discuss crawling on their knees toward oblivion, somehow I was paying my spiritual debt. I wasn’t much of a churchgoer, though sometimes if the memory of my mother started digging its heels into me, I’d find myself in the back pew of a strange chapel.
As the meeting progressed, I was not surprised to find that the stories themselves sounded vaguely familiar. Addiction is addiction, and though it wears many hats, the basic underlying principle is similar, if not the same.
The self-delusion. The shame. Waking up with the shakes. The internal bargaining. The bottoming-out moment, or moments. All of these things presented themselves like memories of my own life, as told by someone else. It was never not a bizarre experience, but that’s what made me amenable to it, I guess. There was almost something mystical to the process, something beyond my perception, and that, too, added to my feeling that it was like wandering the woods of Lumber Junction, chasing down a ghost and finding its killer.
I made eye contact with two old-timers during the Serenity prayer and then stood around with the others, chatting for a few minutes before approaching the guy who ran this meeting.
“Good stories tonight,” I said. I’d met him on occasion but couldn’t remember his name.
“Lot of pain,” he replied, smoothing out his thinning hair. “These people are struggling to find meaning in a sometimes meaningless world. How is the program working for you?”
“Structure and boundaries,” I said. “That’s what it provides me.”
“Idle hands are the Devil’s plaything. Indeed, indeed. How about the spiritual aspect? Lot of men today, especially smart ones like yourself, have trouble finding an inlet to the underlying message of faith and understanding, but for me, that is an integral part of it all.”
I thought of midnight conversations with Emmitt Laveau, him three days in the ground, flesh hanging from his bones, but still finding a way to talk with me about finding his murderer. “I don’t have any particular qualms with the afterlife, no.”
“You found a church down here – what’s your name...Rolson? Because I can think of no better way–”
“I’m fine, thanks,” I replied. Even though he persisted in giving me a pitch of what he thought the modern religious experience should be, I demurred as politely as I could. Something about being in a pew on Sundays struck me as unnecessary, but I couldn’t quite say why that was.
“You change your mind, you don’t hesitate. It’s not the holy roller nonsense you might have experienced before. Lotta bikers – former bikers – and blue collar types come to our church. Drug dealers, drug users. They’re all welcome, and it’s real laid back. There’s no dress code, no real preaching.”
“Sounds like a meeting.”
“Kind of is a meeting. There is some talk of Jesus, some relating to the afterlife, but it’s not heavy-handed. We focus more on the human aspect of spirituality. The suffering and the day-to-day struggle of keeping your head up. It’s a community of people, and we support one another.”
He slicked back his thinning hair again, and I noticed his knobby, crooked fingers for the first time. A working man’s hands. He was not a preacher, not a man looking for a handout from his parishioners. Seemed like he cared about the mission, but it just wasn’t the line I was looking for. Meetings
I could handle, but church was one step beyond my comfort level.
As soon as I could wiggle out of that conversation, I made my way outside, craving a cigarette. The night was hot for October, and the streets were oddly quiet and without movement, like walking through a still life in one of the doctor’s offices here in town.
I was as sociable as I’d ever been, but once the usual post-meeting chit-chat was done, I got out of there. I couldn’t abide lingering for too long, and I guessed it had something to do with the contrast of the meeting format. I wasn’t expected to be directly empathetic during the meeting; I could sit passively and listen. Make connections with my own personal life. It was selfish, but I hadn’t ventured far enough away from my own addiction to help anybody else. I sometimes still felt like I was drowning, and the meetings were my lifeline.
I took the long way around back to the house, taking in the scenery of this new, curious place.
You could almost feel something drifting through the air, something otherworldly, but you had to be attuned to it to get the full rush. Drinking dulled that sensation, rounded it off so it went away, but being able to experience it was one of the most spectacular aspects of living in Savannah.
And then there were the people, some just passing through and others resident spirits here in town. I caught glimpses, mere snapshots, of the whole picture of Savannah.
A necking couple on a park bench. Distant shouts from a group of college kids about who had polished off the most beer that night and who would be fucking pissing in the bed, you douche bags. A man of indeterminate age but who looked to be in his eighties, clasping his hands and staring at a spot somewhere in the atmosphere. The slightly unnerving feeling of passing a darkened house where rumor had it, a guy had murdered his kid. Wind blowing the moss, looking like old beards, in all directions. The streetlights throwing a sickly yellow cast over everything, making it seem as though I were living in another time.
