Jo Piazza

by Love Rehab

  “What’d you do to that one?” I hissed.

  “I made the mistake of telling her I only dated girls that were either really hot or remarkably brilliant.”

  “That sounds flattering.”

  “She asked which one she was.”

  “What the hell did you say?”

  “I said she certainly wasn’t a rocket scientist … turkey.”

  I still didn’t know what Dave meant when he called his poor victims turkeys, but whatever it did mean, I was sure it wasn’t flattering.

  Old Judge Turner first asked Annie about her family and, strangely enough, her bar, and after twenty-five minutes moved on to her probation.

  “Annie, do you think that you have fulfilled all the obligations of your probation?”

  “I do, Judge Turner,” Annie said with a smile so sickeningly sweet I wanted to laugh, but I could tell the judge was just eating it up.

  “Do you think you’re still a menace to this good town of ours? Have you learned your lesson about drinking too much?”

  “I’m not and I have, with the help of my wonderful counselor.”

  Judge Turner turned to Joe, who had been sitting in the chambers when I arrived and hadn’t so far even glanced back at me.

  “Doctor, would you mind answering a few questions?”

  “Of course not, Your Honor.”

  “What have you seen these past ninety days in your counseling sessions with Annie?”

  “I’ve seen a woman who was very dedicated to her recovery … once she finally admitted she had a problem. Admitting that took a while for her, but it takes a while for anyone. Once she knew what her demons were, she was ready to tackle them head-on.”

  “And have you seen any signs of relapse, Doctor?”

  At this, Joe finally turned and half looked at me.

  “All of us get close to relapsing, and all of us continue to grapple with bad judgment. But Annie has consistently made the right decisions, even when she has been put in situations that would have caused her to lapse back into bad behavior.”

  Now Joe looked me square in the eyes and gave a half smile, one that was almost sheepish and made the grooves around his eyes move in miniature smiles along his temples.

  “Would you recommend that her probation be lifted?”

  “I would recommend that she continue in her rehabilitation program because I think that it has helped her enormously and I think she gains strength from it, but yes, I think she is ready for her probation to be lifted.”

  I was holding my breath waiting to find out if Annie was going to get her life back, but I also needed to know whether my probation was going to be lifted.

  Could Joe and I go back to just being friends and forget the fact that I drunkenly kissed him after finding out my ex-boyfriend was marrying his secretary?

  “Well, Annie, I hereby lift your probation. Please don’t go stealing any cop cars, and stay away from Mrs. Dinkdorf’s cat.”

  “Woot!” Annie whooped as she practically dove over the wide mahogany desk to hug Judge Turner, her pencil skirt creeping up to reveal a bright purple thong. I blushed on her behalf as I walked next to Joe and held out my hand in congratulations.

  “Nice job, Doctor.”

  He reached out to shake the proffered palm before enveloping me in a bear hug.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered in my ear, his breath cool on the lobe.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Let’s talk later,” he said, nodding at Annie who had turned to tackle Joe.

  “I can drive my motherfucking car! Sorry, Your Honor, but I can DRIVE. MY. MOTHER. FUCKING. CAR!”

  Joe agreed to leave his car at the courthouse in order to let Annie drive the two of us home.

  “Does this mean you want to get a drink, An?” I asked.

  “Not even a little, to tell you the truth. I feel pretty great being sober. You know, I never really got hangovers …”

  Joe and I nodded. This was a point of pride for Annie.

  “But I never felt a hundred percent, either. You know, Frank Sinatra used to say that he felt bad for sober people because that was the best they were going to feel all day. I used to drink to feel better, but now, three months off the sauce, I always feel pretty good.”

  “I feel pretty good too,” I declared without being asked. “Look, I’ll just admit it to you both. I wasn’t great when I heard the news about Eric and Lacey. Yes, her name is Lacey. I am now using her real name. And I wanted to call him and that was wrong.” I turned. “And, Joe, I put my tongue in your mouth.” At that, Joe laughed.

  “Sophie,” he said through a giggle. “That wasn’t a capital offense. So you kissed me. You were drunk.”

  “But you’re a recovering alcoholic. That makes me a jerk.”

  “Do you think I kissed you back because your lips tasted like wine?”

  Wait, he kissed me back? He had said it before, but saying it again meant it was likely true. I didn’t know what to say. But at that, Annie changed the subject the way she tends to do when attention is deflected away from her.

  “Let’s have a party tonight to celebrate. I’ll get some of the cooks from the bar to come over and make us dinner. We’ll fire up the karaoke machine and call some of the girls in from the city. It will be a very sober celebration of being sober. Except you guys can drink if you really want to. Oooo, I want to get a dartboard for the house. Do you think we could get a dartboard? I don’t know why, but I just got an incredible urge to play some darts.”

  I happened to know that Alan and Chris, Annie’s arresting officers, had gotten her a deluxe dartboard as a ninety-days-sober present and that they were planning to bring it by tonight, after they made sure all went well with the judge.

  “Ha. Let’s get some food first and then we can look into a dartboard.”

  Everyone was on board with the party, and soon it felt like half the town had come out to celebrate Annie being off probation, being allowed to go back and work in her bar if she so chose, and the fact that she was ready to start a new life. Three of Annie’s ex-girlfriends even showed up, all of them following her around like lovesick puppies. I was tempted to tell them about LAA before deciding it would be a conflict of interest. Tito had managed to make a screen using a large white sheet rigged to the back fence so that the lyrics for karaoke were projected large enough for everyone to see across the yard to sing along. While he was hauling it downstairs from the linen closet I saw him pause on the stairs to give Katrina a whack on the backside. She didn’t protest. I didn’t know what that was all about. Tito certainly wasn’t her type. He was all man.

  There was singing and dancing until midnight, when the neighbors with small kids politely asked us to keep things down. And through the entire evening Annie didn’t take a single drink. She did learn that she sucked at darts sober, but I think Chris and Alan let her win a couple of times so she wouldn’t feel so bad.

  Joe was a social butterfly all night, and every time I thought we might get a chance to be alone, one of us was interrupted by someone else bubbling up about how nice a time they were having or trying to pull one of us onto the makeshift stage to sing with them. Before I knew it, I was heading upstairs to fall asleep, leaving the cleaning until the morning and any resolution with Joe, well, unresolved.

  Make a list of all the persons (exes) we have harmed, and become willing to make amends

  Making amends is a big part of any twelve-step program. Because addicts (even love addicts) tend to leave behind them a trail of emotional wreckage, it is important to identify the people who have been hurt along the way and try to do justice to that relationship that was breached. Amends are like a step up from an apology. You have to really mean it and try to make it right.

  It’s a nice thing to do for other people, but it’s also about your own emotional healing. Admitting you have wronged someone helps take away some of the shame you have been feeling.

  This started a long discussion about whom we should make am
ends to.

  How did we determine if we had actually hurt someone?

  I had been pondering amends on a Thursday night as I walked the five blocks from my grandmother’s to Matt and Robert’s. My high school boyfriend and his husband had heard about LAA through the town gossip mill and wanted a complete download. Robert is something of a gourmet chef so there was no way I was going to say no to dinner in their completely fabulous renovated Craftsman.

  It was chilly for the first week in October and I wished I had worn a sweater over the halter top I was certain Matt would be judgy about. I gave myself a little mental pat on the back that I was wearing a truly excellent pair of Tory Burch flats procured from Princess’s extensive collection. As I glanced down to admire them I noticed an inscription on the sidewalk that had been there about as long as I could remember.

  Someone had scratched “Ally loves Pete” in the sidewalk cement on Eleanor’s corner about ten years ago. I didn’t know Ally or Pete but I always speculated about their semi-permanent declaration of love and where they were now. Did they meet in high school like Matt and me and make it through college, relationship intact, save for a three-month break when Ally flirted with the idea of making out with girls and Pete had a night of debauchery with his English professor? Did they come back to town after college, get married, and start a family here? I played the “Ally and Pete: Where are they now?” game all the way to Matt’s.

  “Hey, S. B. Hawk!” Matt greeted me, smiling as he used his tenth-grade nickname for me, based on the singer Sophie B. Hawkins. Her one hit, “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover,” was playing the first time we had awkward sex in the bedroom of my parents’ house while they were at some kind of conference for my dad’s job in Arizona. Ironic, I know.

  “Hey, D. Mc.” I countered with a familiar moniker. DMc stood for Dylan McKay. As I mentioned before, Matt had a thing for 90210.

  Matt and Robert are one of those painfully perfect couples. They both stand just over six feet and have the same wiry but muscled builds, which allowed them to double their wardrobes of John Varvatos and Marc Jacobs when they moved in together. The gays just have everything figured out.

  Michael Buble was playing on what I knew were hidden wireless speakers and Robert was tasting from a bowl of ceviche I was sure he had lovingly begun marinating in lime hours earlier.

  “Hon”—he motioned for Matt to come over—“do you think this needs more cilantro?”

  Matt strode over and took a mouthful from Robert’s proffered spoon.

  “Oh, my God.” My ex-boyfriend moaned in a way that was oddly familiar and vaguely uncomfortable. “No, baby. It is perfect. Just perfect.” He turned around and gave his husband a kiss on the mouth.

  “Now I want some!” I smiled. Robert proceeded to spoon-feed me, too. I could never tell how much Robert really liked me. I wasn’t sure if he humored me because I was part of Matt’s history or if he was grateful to me because I was probably the woman who helped my ex finally come out of the closet.

  My “help” in this area came up once we were eating our first course of risotto on the boys’ back deck.

  “Did I ever do anything to hurt you while we were dating?” I asked Matt.

  “You mean besides losing tape 11?” Matt said, raising one of his elegantly shaped eyebrows. “Because that was painful for me.”

  “I will be sorry about tape 11 until I am an old lady in a nursing home somewhere, but no, that’s not what I mean. Like, did I ever do something really bad to you?”

  “You forced me out of the closet. That wasn’t great,” Matt said.

  “What do you mean I forced you? You came out when we broke up.”

  Robert, sensing that there was about to be drama, started clearing away the plates.

  “Darling,” Matt began in an even tone, “I am not mad at you. I want to say that from the beginning. But you were a wicked little bitch when I broke up with you. You told the entire school that you thought I was gay because you felt shitty about our breakup.”

  My hand went to my mouth. “I didn’t tell the whole school you were gay.” But then I remembered how things went down thirteen years earlier. Matt, always the gentleman, had come to my parents’ house and taken me for a walk down to the beach. He held my hand and told me that he didn’t think we were right for each other. I naturally began sobbing. I was losing the love of my life, the man that I was definitely going to marry and have babies with. My romantic future had ended before it even had a chance to really begin.

  After Matt walked me home, I called Annie, who was in Florida for the weekend with her dad and her uncles, to commiserate.

  “He’s gay,” Annie said. “I think Matt is just gay for breaking up with you. He doesn’t like chicks.”

  Now remember that this was 1999. Ellen had come out to Oprah only two years earlier. Glee hadn’t happened yet. Ricky from My So-Called Life was still considered a borderline pariah. High school lacrosse players in the New Jersey suburbs just didn’t come out of the closet until college. Gay, and I hate myself now for saying this, was still an insult. Those were dark times.

  And so that seed was planted in my head. I was angry and I was vindictive. I hated that Matt had rejected me. Whenever one of my girlfriends would talk to me about the breakup (which was near constant because I couldn’t shut up about it), I would end the conversation by shrugging my shoulders and laughing as I said, “Maybe he’s gay.”

  The problem was Matt was gay and he thought that I knew. (I didn’t.) So within the month, he told his parents and eventually our friends at school. Matt Siggman was one of the most confident men that I knew. Once he made the decision to no longer hide who he was, he legitimately changed the way people thought of gay people in our town. He was still captain of the lacrosse team, but he was out and he was proud. Two more guys from the team came out the following year, and shortly after, our high school was one of the first in the country to start an LGBT alliance—all good things to come out of me being a crazy little bitch, right?

  I must have spaced as I remembered how things went down because Matt was pinching a little bit of chub at my hip.

  “S. B. Hawk, hey, you! That was a long time ago. I have forgiven you. You were a ‘see you next Tuesday’ but maybe that is how things were supposed to go. My life is infinitely better for having come out of the closet in high school,” Matt said. “I went into college as a poised and confident gay man. Maybe I should thank you.”

  I looked up at my adorable high school boyfriend. “No. I need to apologize. I have never apologized to you for the things I said and did after our breakup but now I will. I am sorry, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

  I did mean it. There was no excuse, besides being seventeen, to have behaved so badly and lashed out in such a vehement way just because a relationship was coming to its natural end. I thought of the next rule for our LAA group.

  Rule 7: Sometimes things just end, and that has to be OK. You don’t always (sometimes it is justified)

  have to be a “see you next Tuesday” about it.

  We hugged it out. Robert reemerged from the kitchen with an entire raspberry truffle cheesecake in a pie tin.

  “For the rest of the lovelorn,” he said, presenting it to me.

  “Cheesecake, Robert? You’ve watched too many episodes of The Golden Girls,” I teased, eagerly accepting the cake.

  Robert nodded. “It’s true. In high school, I managed to tape all the reruns of Golden Girls off Nick at Nite.”

  I was genuinely happy that my first love had found his perfect soul mate.

  I was still a little foggy from Robert’s impeccably curated wine pairings when there was a knock on my bedroom door, around 2:30 a.m. This time it was unaccompanied by a cowbell.

  I sat up with a start. Princess and Nahla rolled over simultaneously, their matching pink sleep masks inching up their noses as they shifted their weight to their right sides. My first thought was that it was Joe. That he finally wanted to be alone with
me and talk about things. I adjusted my white tank top so that it showed a bit more cleavage (why was I constantly kidding myself?) and yelled, “Come in.”

  “Stella is missing.” This was the second time Jordana had come to my room in the dead of night, but now she was more concerned than crazy.

  “What do you mean missing?” I asked.

  “I mean missing. She didn’t come to bed, and I thought maybe she was staying up writing in her journal. I even thought, Ooohhh, maybe she has a dalliance going with Dr. Twelve Steps.” Dr. Twelve Steps was obviously Joe and that one hurt like a sharp jab in my side.

  “But after midnight I got nervous so I riffled through her things and found her wallet missing, and a duffel.”

  Princess sleeps like a log due to an intense herbal regimen she swallows before bed, so it took three tries to shake her awake as well as a sleepy growl from Nahla, who was also displeased at having her beauty rest disrupted.

  “Stella’s missing. We think she left.”

  Realizing there was a problem that she could potentially help solve, possibly with her intuitive powers, crystals, and some chanting, Princess came to pretty easily, ordered us to put a pot of coffee on the stove, and said she would meet us downstairs in fifteen minutes after she “got herself together.” I never imagined there was a proper outfit for being woken up in the middle of the night to search for a missing housemate, but I now know it involves mules and a coordinated twin set.

  Jordana rallied the other house members, and fifteen minutes later we were all sitting in the living room when we heard Princess shriek and went running to our room. Maybe there was a crazed killer in the house. Maybe he had staged it to look like Stella ran away but he had really dragged her off in the dead of night and now he was after Princess.

  Princess was staring at the makeshift closet she had constructed for the overflow of her things.

  “Christian is missing. My Christian Louboutin heels are missing,” she said with a low rumble in her tone that indicated she would stab a bitch for stealing her shoes. She would have given them to anyone who asked, probably even a stranger on the street, but the impropriety of taking without asking was simply too much for Princess to bear.