All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  So the decision is made.

  Steal the charger.

  Evade the zealots.

  Outrun the security guard.

  Which only gets him outside, and what’s he supposed to do then? He has no getaway car, no accomplice, no diversion, no help. He’d still be in the middle of an outdoor mall, and it doesn’t seem like the best plan to run to a bus stop, standing there, casually waiting for a lift. He’d get picked up, all right, not by a bus but a cop, trapped in juvie within the hour.

  His only chance is to offer his followers an alternative. Something better than petty theft. Something that makes them forget all about his nonexistent crime spree. Something that keeps their attention fixed on a new commodity, so they forget about his indiscretion.

  He opens Twitter again on the laptop: I wonder how many of you would meet me at the Golden Gate Bridge? I have something up my sleeve that you won’t want to miss!

  He waits ten seconds and peeks at new notifications. Eight people have favorited it. Five people have retweeted it. One user called AbbyDubz has responded with this: CU there, while another person going by UnhappyCamper says We are with you!

  And one celebrity in an Apple Store will give his fans the crescendo they want.

  TheGreatJake: Meet me there in an hour for the finale!!!

  He is at 4 percent battery life.

  He powers the phone down to save juice but still holds it in his hand.

  He passes all the customers and the redshirts in their bustling cathedral. He nods at the security guard and makes his way to the bus stop. He’ll be back at the Golden Gate soon.

  Not thirty seconds later, reflexively, Jake checks his phone, even though it’s off, like someone scratching a phantom limb, a part of himself that’s missing.

  19.

  Kathleen is inside a body bag, and she can’t work the zipper from the inside. She is hung-over. She is still a little drunk. She is a relapsed alcoholic.

  She can barely make out her surroundings; everything seems filmy to her boozy and dehydrated eyes. This isn’t her room, her apartment. In fact, that’s not her arm thrown across her stomach. That’s not her snoring. That is a man, someone who she can’t remember meeting last night.

  Three years of sobriety die, lit on fire, and now here she is, squirming around in its ashes, these sweaty sheets. She took the easy way out last night, she knows that, but what she hadn’t known—and you can’t really understand relapse until you do it yourself—is the visceral and profound shame.

  Her head feels like someone is smashing windows in there.

  The thing with relapse is that it’s accompanied by suffocating melancholy. So she’s not only dealing with her mistake to dive in all that bourbon; she’s dealing with dismal extrapolations, running through a maze of what this means. Namely, she won’t be able to stop, won’t be able to resist alcohol now that the levee buckled. It’s like she has all these dormant demons living inside her and, once revived, they start galloping around her head, shouting. They have opinions, desires. They have to-do lists, and number one on all of them is to have a morning beer. This will help her head feel better and will dull the shame, tamp it down into a corner of her psyche, something she can ignore.

  The man keeps snoring next to her. Kat hasn’t looked at his face, only his forearm thrown across her stomach. There is a mole. There is an impressive amount of hair. She lies there on her back, naked and hopeless.

  That’s the thing about being sober. It’s not like the compulsion to get wasted goes away. It’s always lurking inside. Kathleen has not been feeding it liquor, and without any nourishment the impulse goes into suspended animation. These sleeping monsters might not be in charge once you get sober, but they hibernate, bide their time to take over again, waiting for you to be at your weakest moment, and, with soft, fraying defenses, they ruin everything.

  She ruins everything.

  “Hey you,” a groggy voice says. It’s guttural, baritone.

  The fingers on the hand on the arm connected to the body of a man she’s recently screwed but doesn’t remember; these fingers stretch and have too-long fingernails, and then he pats her on the belly, asking, “How did you sleep, mama?”

  “Do you have any beer?”

  “We bought a six-pack on the walk home. There should be a couple left.”

  She still hasn’t looked at him. The room is a disaster, like a teenager lives here. There are posters on the wall of rock and roll bands that Kathleen has never heard of. A desk that only has a pair of sunglasses on it. A snowboard propped in one corner.

  “Can I have a morning kiss?” he says.

  Okay, it’s time to look him in the face, if not for the simple pleasure of alerting him that there won’t be any kisses. There won’t be anything except a morning beer, getting dressed in a rush, bolting, cringing, crying, dreading, drinking. Kat’s eyes start at the hand and wrist and forearm resting on her and work up the arm, but she doesn’t even need to see his face. She knows exactly who this guy is by the art on his bicep. He has a fresh Celtic cross, the ink intensely black, brand-new and shiny.

  “You,” she says, aghast.

  “You,” he says back, smiling.

  Kathleen stares in his young face, thinks about her old one. She thinks about how he and his ilk are running Kat out of San Francisco, pricing out all the oddballs. She wonders if he shouted “You’re evicted!” when he came.

  He makes a couple hyperbolic puckering sounds, waiting for that smooch.

  Kathleen sits up and places her feet on the floor, her back turned to him. “Oh, my head,” she says. “How much did we drink?”

  “How much did you drink,” he says. “I only had a couple beers. You were already cross-eyed when I got there.”

  “Did I call the shop or something?”

  “Dumb luck,” he says. Kathleen hears the bed creak, the guy standing up. He walks around and he’s naked, though not completely naked: He’s wearing his amphibian shoes. If he wore those during sex, Kathleen might have to kill herself. “I stopped in the bar for a quick pint, and there you were,” he says. “Lucky, huh?”

  This might turn out to be a good thing, she thinks. And she means it. That urge to run to the refrigerator for a morning beer and soon after tossing shots down her throat, washing away what she’s learned this morning—sex with a webbed-foot techie!—instead of muffling her woes with liquor she should go to a meeting. Call Deb. Tell her the truth.

  “Sorry to be rude,” he says, fumbling on his desk with a pair of aviator sunglasses, putting them on his face, “but I need to check my email.”

  “Why are you wearing sunglasses?”

  “These are my computer.”

  “Of course,” she says. She’s heard of this wearable Google computer, has seen a few around the Mission. There are stories, lovely legends, of people getting their asses kicked just for donning them—for what they represent, for how they’re dismantling every bit of the strangeness that made San Francisco extraordinary in the name of face computers.

  “I need to go,” she says.

  “Send email to Lindsay,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I’m not talking to you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Glass, send a message to Lindsay Johnson,” he says to the sunglasses.

  Kathleen hates to ask this next question, doesn’t want to admit to him that she had blacked out long before they got here, but she needs to know if calling a cab is in order: “What neighborhood are we in?”

  “Mission. Those new luxury condos on 20th Street.”

  “Of course.”

  Kathleen can’t help but wonder why he would have sex with her. Yes, she’s mortified at spending a night with him, but he should be, too. He’s young and rich and attractive, and she’s none of those things. She is a relapsed alcoholic.

  That desire to go to a meeting wilts. She doesn’t want to stand up in front of all those people and admit that she threw three years away. Doesn’t want to confide in
them. Doesn’t want to do anything that will require processing or analyzing. Doesn’t want to confront the shame that’s thinning out her blood, right along with the booze.

  “Mind if I snag a beer on my way out?” she asks.

  He is raising his voice: “Lindsay Johnson. Not Lindsay Miller. Glass, send a message to Johnson. Johnson.”

  If she were to draw a caricature of their night together, she wouldn’t need to exaggerate anything. Him with his frog-feet and sunglasses, her with the bourbon and blackout.

  “Can I have the beer?”

  “Johnson! Johnson! Johnson! Johnson!”

  He actually stomps one of his webbed feet, a techie tantrum. He never put on clothes and Kathleen appreciates that about the young man. He’s comfortable in his own skin, and she admires that, is jealous. She might find him ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean she can’t see something to respect here. He’s freshly tattooed and in a new condo and he’s nude in front of a one-night stand screaming at his sunglasses, and he doesn’t have one ounce of bashfulness. She’s a drunken dinosaur who needs to turn off her twitchy mind. It’s obvious who’s enjoying a better life, and the beer beckons.

  “I’ll see myself out,” she says, dressing and leaving his room, walking down the hall into the kitchen. This place is ridiculously nice. Everything brand-new. State-of-the-art. Pretty soon, the whole city will be a wearable computer.

  She opens the fridge and there are two beers. She takes out both bottles. She thinks about drinking one now to get this sad party started, then thinks better of it. The most important thing is getting out of here. She tucks the beers in her purse and approaches the front door.

  He’s still yelling at his sunglasses: “Johnson! Johnson!”

  SHE AND THE beers make their way down Valencia Street, in the opposite direction from her apartment. She’s walking up to 24th, so she can slip inside what used to be her favorite bar before she got sober.

  If she’s going on a run, it might as well start in style, at a place she has fond memories of.

  Of course, there really aren’t any memories, in the traditional sense. Kathleen wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about a certain night or day; she wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a precise story. No, all these memories are melted like old mixed drinks, ice diluting everything to an unrecognizable cocktail. Yet despite all that, Kathleen holds this place in a broken regard, and she walks with purpose, which isn’t easy considering her headache.

  “Why don’t you imbibe?”

  These are the beers talking.

  Yes, when you’re a relapsed alcoholic on the lam from your life, beers talk to you.

  She nods at the beers’ solid suggestion.

  She opens one and drinks most of it in a sip. Then she sets the empty bottle next to a parking meter for the homeless to collect—not that there are any of those left in the neighborhood, but in case one finagles her way back into the Mission before being deported.

  She takes her cell phone from her purse. She has eleven texts from Deb and three missed calls. These will not be returned this morning. No, that’s the last thing she can stomach. Deb will speak with reason, she’ll be practical, and this isn’t a morning for pragmatism. This is a morning for a bender.

  She powers off her phone and tucks it away, burying it in the bottom.

  Drinking with a hangover has always had one of two outcomes for Kathleen: Sometimes she can’t get drunk the next day, no matter how hard she cocktails. She is impervious to spirits, so much swimming in her already that her system can’t take any of it in. Other times, though, she gets wasted incredibly fast and this morning is proving to be in the latter subdivision.

  A lone beer and she is cooked.

  The one-night stand is gone. The headache is gone. The word cunt is gone. All that stretches out before her on the morning street is good times.

  She turns on 24th Street, passes the BART station and McDonald’s. It’s socked-in, but there’s not any wind. The sky is the color of raw shrimp.

  At last she’s here. It has been three years since she’s been inside the bar’s black walls. In fact, the whole place is pitch, even the floors. Many a night, Kat had been so wasted here that she rested her head on the bar, staring down at the black floor like it was going to swallow her, but it never did. The bar knew better than to eat its clientele.

  The room even allows its customers to stargaze, bits of smashed mirrors pocking the ceiling. Everyone gets to pretend to look through a telescope, spying a better world.

  As if the bartender expects Kathleen to walk in, he peeks up from his newspaper and says, “Did you hear they’re tearing down the Elbo Room?”

  He’s an old-timer, somewhere in his sixties. Kat has talked to him many times, shut this place down with him, speaking in tongues. He owns the place and wears a shirt that says Spank me, it’s my birthday. Legend has it that this bar burned down in the early aughts, and he rebuilt it, making it look exactly the same.

  “Why are they doing that?” she asks.

  “Putting up more condos.”

  “They’re ruining the neighborhood,” she says.

  “We all ruin the neighborhood when we first come in,” he says. “I did. You did. Now it’s a new set of assholes ruining things. Cities are moving targets, always taking fire. But don’t worry: In ten years, the current assholes will get squeezed out and they’ll be talking like us.”

  “Small victories,” she says.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you,” he says.

  Kathleen can’t think of a reason to lie. Bars can do that to you, especially in places black as confessionals. “I’ve been sober for a few years.”

  “I tried that a couple times myself.”

  “Bourbon.”

  “Welcome back,” he says, pouring them both big ones.

  They take their shots at exactly 8:56 in the morning.

  “It’s not just the Elbo,” he says. “The Attic closed. So did Pop’s. They’re pricing us out. There might not be any dive bars left in the Mission. Can you imagine? My landlord would love to shut this place down and open some boutique with gourmet cheeses and pedicures.”

  “Is it really your birthday?”

  “You don’t need an excuse to spank me.”

  “Can I have another shot?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Have you eaten anything?”

  Kathleen shakes her head no, wonders what happened to the quality of service in this establishment. She’s seen people asleep on pool tables, taking a catnap before bellying back up to finish the job—or start the next one. She’s seen people ordering drinks with minds malfunctioning on liquor, talking like stroke victims. And now this guy wants to scrutinize the contents of her stomach?

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I need a guinea pig,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “Be right back.” He disappears through a black door by the bathrooms.

  Kathleen sits there, enjoying the beer and the bourbon zooming through her, adding some carbonation to her flat life. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Kathleen feels elated. The galloping demons are having a house party in her head. She wants to play the Beach Boys on the jukebox. She wants to dance. She wants to dance with every member of the Beach Boys. She wants to kiss every Beach Boy and thank them for their harmonies. But she’ll settle for a dance with the cranky barkeep once he’s back. He might know how to cut a rug. This is what’s been missing from her life, a release, an escape. Sobriety is all about being aware and available, and don’t get her wrong, she likes those things, but not all the time.

  The bartender comes out carrying a tray. On it are two sourdough bread bowls filled with clam chowder.

  “It’s a San Francisco classic!” he says.

  “Why is this happening?” she asks.

  “I’ve wanted to try this, and you need some food. I keep buying these bread bowls and they rot back there. I always forge
t about them. But these aren’t that old, I don’t think. At least, no mold I can see. This is perfect. The only way I’ll keep serving you is if you put something in your stomach. Try this with me.”

  He hands her a spoon and clutches his, holding it out for Kathleen to cheers with, and she does and there’s a pitiful clinking noise and the bartender smiles.

  “Fine,” she says, “I’ll try.”

  “Here’s the twist. Here’s what makes my chowder different from all the other joints.” He takes the bourbon bottle and floats a shot right on top of their soups. He stands there beaming at Kat and says, “Merry Christmas!” He mixes everything up in his bread bowl and digs his spoon in for a hearty mouthful.

  “Surprisingly refreshing,” he says, heaping more of it in.

  Kathleen sits there watching him and can still hear him saying “Merry Christmas,” though it’s nowhere near December and nowhere near funny and his SPANK ME birthday shirt makes Kat even sadder, and since there’s no official kitchen in the back of the bar, this soup is from a can—she hopes—and it should not be eaten, even with the guarantee that the bread isn’t moldy, and all the elation that she had been feeling curdles. In fact, she despises the Beach Boys and their harmonies and dances in dive bars and morning beers and watching a bartender shovel alcoholic chowder in his face is the worst thing you can ever endure.

  “I’ll be right back,” she says, pushing herself up, getting her purse, wobbling toward the black door.

  “You shouldn’t leave me alone with your bowl,” he calls over. “I might help myself.”

  “Go ahead and help yourself!”

  “You first!”

  “Help yourself!”

  “Hurry!” he says.

  Kathleen is outside. The whole world is the color of that chowder; the fog makes everyone on the sidewalk squint from its glare as they beeline to the BART station as they’re starting their dutiful day, while Kat can barely stand up. She can’t believe what she’s done, what she’s thrown away. Everything she’s worked so hard to build is dead. She feels the decapitation of drunkenness.