Then one night he wandered into Big Danny's Dead-beat Bar & Grill. It was conveniently right around the corner, and it gave him everything he needed, including a surprisingly effective recipe for keeping things submerged. It called for lots of beer, but no hard liquor; a mind kept distracted, sedated, and numb; people he couldn't care less about; and absolutely zero point zero romance.
He'd found that beer worked best, as a control mechanism: carefully regulating the dosage of numb. Somewhere between nine and fifteen cold ones, he slipped into the dead zone. Any more than that, and it was anyone's guess. That was why Nora had always insisted upon Comfort: it took you over so fast, you never knew what hit you.
Numb was the ticket: freed of both his monster and his rational mind, it made circular thinking easier, and put him on an even intellectual keel with the rest of Big Danny's highbrow clientele. After a while, even his temper subsided: these people were simply too stupid to argue with.
As for sexual abstinence, it was no longer a problem. The kind of females who frequented the bar were about as appealing as cheese mold. And by now, he was utterly terrified of women. Their effect on him. His reaction to them. Their power over him.
Nora had been his final lesson.
He had never gone back to Chameleon's again.
BUT NOW—SITTING here with his eighth glass of Pabst, surrounded by burnouts and hopped-up human dregs—Syd felt the first stirrings of a shift within him, like a tiny switch flicking at the back of his brain. Right in the vicinity of that long-forgotten itch.
Enough, it seemed to be saying.
Enough . . .
And that was when he felt the presence, stalking him from behind. The one and only Marc Pankowski, here to feed on his malaise. Syd had almost forgotten how evil he was: what a soul scavenger, what a parasite of sorrow. The simple fact that Marc was stalking him let him know how far he'd fallen, how totally screwed-up and vulnerable he must appear from the outside; and that was the most terrifying realization of all.
At that moment, his dread resurged. But with it, for the first time in ages, conviction. Suddenly, he was remembering something that Jules had said, way the hell back in the post-Karen, pre-Nora days. A vintage piece of Jules-style wisdom, replaying once again behind his eyes. It was, quite naturally, on the subject of depression; and Syd couldn't help but wonder why he'd forgotten it so long.
Maybe it had just been waiting for the right moment to remind him.
Maybe that moment had finally come.
When the blues hit you bad, Jules had said, sometimes you've just got to roll with 'em, just let life run its course. And if it knocks you down so hard that you can't get up, then sometimes you've just got to lay there and let it kick you around for a while. That's the way of the world, my man. Anybody who knows will understand.
But a lot of times, you'll wake up one day to find that the blues have wandered off to greener pastures, found some other fool to kick around; and that in fact, you've just been laying there kicking yourself for God only knows how long.
At that point, it's probably time to get up. Dust yourself off. And get on with your life.
Eighteen months, he realized now, was an adequate period of mourning: for Jules, for Nora, for the life that might have been. He did nothing to honor their memory by hiding in this hole: drinking himself stupid, slowly wasting away.
A year and a half.
Maybe that was actually long enough.
Then Syd looked up, and Marc Pankowski was there: Depression Incarnate, etched in living weasel-flesh. Suddenly, Syd was actually almost happy to see him.
It wasn't every day you got to face down your demons.
Now if we were at Chameleon's, Syd found himself thinking, it would probably be time for the ol' "Band Gambit." He'd try to guess what I thought of the tunes, feed me back precisely what I wanted to hear. The mere act of thinking blew dust off Syd's brain. He felt himself starting to smile.
But if there's no music playing, he mused, what will Marc try to use? Syd did a quick mental inventory. Good ol' Messrs. Hunk and Weed were still having angry words, at the far end of the bar; that might be good for a Pirates reference. Beyond that, Syd got a little fuzzy. This bar is smokin'? This dive really sucks?
It was hard to imagine. Marc took a seat beside him, his mouth already beginning to open. Syd braced himself, did a little psychic drumroll. It was the moment of truth.
"I hate the fucking 'Love Connection,' " Marc said.
Syd laughed, a single hard bark of absurd comprehension.
It was all so very casual: as if they were good friends, or the most perfect of strangers. Marc had that way of insinuating himself: a remarkable confidence that came from being ahead of the game because he was making it up on the spot.
Syd said nothing, let him play his hand.
Marc reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a pack of smokes, offered one to Syd. Marlboro Lights. Syd declined. "You didn't quit smoking," Marc said. It was nearly a question. To which Syd pulled out his pack of un-filtered Camels. Marc smiled, showing little yellow teeth. "I was gonna say. You always have a cigarette in your hand."
Marc paused to light one up, Syd watched him, waited. If Marc noticed Syd's watchfulness, he gave nothing away. He was used to fielding attitude. It was part of his job description.
On the tube, a vacuous blonde Malibu Barbie described the intimate details of her "love connection" with the grinning goob to her left. Marc grimaced and shook his head, as if the sight physically pained him. "Jesus God," he moaned. "Look at the rack on that bitch. Can you imagine getting your hands on something like that?"
Syd looked at the blonde, did the inevitable comparison. Now it was Syd's turn to look physically pained.
"Oh, man, I'm sorry." Marc really looked it, too. Very slick. It was a measure of how good he was that he'd cut straight to the core of Syd's pain in less than thirty seconds. "Oh, shit. You're still thinking about her, huh? I didn't know, man. I really didn't. I'm sorry."
And it wasn't just the manipulation Syd minded— wasn't just the fact that the buttons were still there to be pushed. It was the presumption of intimacy: the bogus, unclean transition from stories passed on the rumor mill to deeply shared personal experience. He knew that Marc had never even seen Nora, much less watched them together. That Marc should feel free to yank on those chains triggered something in him. Something he hadn't felt in a long long time.
It was clear that Marc saw it; his big show of contrition kicked into overdrive. "Hey, whoa, man. Lemme buy you a drink," he said at once, didn't even wait for Syd to respond. "Danny! Hey, Danny! Set up my buddy here!"
Syd watched the bartender lumber toward him, fought down the urge to laugh. He didn't want a beer off this guy. He didn't want another drink at all. What he wanted, more than anything, was just to get the hell out of this place. He felt, all at once, both unhinged and hyperclear, as if suddenly awakening from a dream. He looked around the bar, at all those bleary-eyed faces, and he thought MY GOD WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
And through it all burned the image of Nora: the woman who had so undone his life and reduced him to this. In that moment he wished: if only he could take back those seconds, excise them strategically from his life— from the moment she first stepped through the door and her eyes found his face. And that sly smile beguiled him.
And she walked right up and said . . .
"Holy shit." Syd paused for a moment, stunned, while a little light bulb went off over his head. "Holy SHIT." Putting together a vision out of intuition and dime-store magic.
"You know what?" he said, addressing Marc for the first time. He clapped one hand on Marc's shoulder, and Marc visibly contracted, as though flinching in advance.
But Syd only smiled. "I would like a drink, now that ya mention it," he said, in deadly earnest. "But beer's not what I need."
Then he turned to Danny and said, "Dan, muh man. I need my brain back.
"Make me a Hemorrhaging Brain."
"Huh?" Bi
g Dan said, utterly clueless. "Whuzzat?"
"That's what I thought you'd say," Syd replied, as the last piece of the puzzle fell smack into place. He smiled as he got up off his stool. "May I?"
The whole room went silent as Syd went around the bar. Big Dan stared, too amazed to react. Syd, for his part, was just as amazed that Dan even had the ingredients. It was a good sign. As he pulled them out, whipped down a glass, and started to pour, he realized that it felt more than natural. It felt absolutely right.
He thought about Jules, and the road to redemption.
The brain came out perfect.
And Syd began to live again.
27
IT TOOK ABOUT ten weeks to ready himself. Syd had fallen into more than just psychological disrepair. The first law of bartending was you gotta look good; and right now, quite honestly, he looked anything but. He had a dumb-looking beard and an even dumber-looking beer gut, and he could pack two weeks' luggage into the bags under his eyes.
It was considerable damage. But not irreversible. One step at a time was the way to go. There was no small irony in Syd's selection of the phrase; his exposure to the grinding machineries of the State had not sold him on the earnestly lockstep programming of the Twelve Step hordes. He had no interest in becoming just another A.A. addict, sweet and well-intentioned though so many of them were. He'd been to enough meetings now to know of what he spoke. They were a tight-knit circle of folks who were hanging on to hanging on: strung out on mutual confession, circulating the bottomless pipe of shame. In that sense, A.A. was like a gateway drug to Jesus that they just kept passing around and around.
Syd understood the attraction, didn't fault them for their reliance upon it. It just didn't speak to him. Not to mention the fact that he had other problems to contend with that were best not shared with a group.
No, Syd's personal journey back from hell was by necessity a solitary one. But he did borrow from them their most important rule. The fundamental keystone of recovery.
One step at a time.
Syd's first step was to leave Danny D.'s, thank them for their hospitality, and never look back. It was one of the most painless procedures Syd had ever undergone. The next step was only eight trillion times harder: quitting drinking.
At first he'd balked at the concept. He'd always felt that, in a binge-or-cringe culture, moderation made more sense than abstinence or excess. And moderation was the hardest: both to achieve, and to sustain.
In the beginning he tried to weasel deals with himself. Well, I'll just have two beers a night, except for the nights when I have four. And I won't start drinking until at least nine each night, except of course on those nights I start at six. . . .
Ultimately he realized that he was only fooling himself; that moderation was great in theory, but that he had developed a very real problem—maybe not full-blown alcoholism yet, but well on the way. And that until he could muster the will to break his reliance upon alcohol on a daily basis, to not need to have it in his life, moderation was a joke.
He quit that day.
The next month was hell. But he did it, by sheer dint of will. In the process, he dropped twelve pounds, all of it bloat. And he broke the constant craving, the knee-jerk reflex that made him squirm in his seat every time a beer commercial came on. He felt stronger.
That strength made it easier to take the next step: starting—and sticking to—an exercise program: running, swimming, lifting weights, working his way up from fifty to three hundred sit-ups a day. There was plenty of stuff at the Y to work with, now that he was of a mind. As he acquired a taste for the pain of exertion he realized it was a pleasure to feel the intricate mechanism that was his body at work. The subtle play of muscle and sinew made him feel more human, helped to beat back other, darker memories. It was worth the effort.
It was still incredibly hard. But he did it religiously. And it got easier.
The next step was to pick up every bartending guide and mixological dictionary on the market. He studied and crammed and crammed and studied every nuance of bartending protocol and lore: comparing every recipe to his memory of Jules's; cross-referencing every suggested technique with the ones that he'd watched in action a thousand times.
He locked down the difference between Collins and Highball, Sour Rocks and Cordial, Sham Pilsner and Goblet. He learned that the difference between Seagram's 7 and Seagram's V.O. was the Canadian border and six-point-eight proof. He practiced slicing and arranging fruit till he had it down to an art.
Meanwhile, of course, he continued to work. He became a regular at Manpower and every other temp agency in town: taking any job, no matter how seemingly demeaning, finding the value in it. He worked steadily, slowly paid off his bills. The day he zeroed out his credit card he even splurged a little, bought himself a little Sony CD/cassette boombox. With cash. Otherwise, he lived on very little.
Frugal living allowed him to save. When a '68 Cougar showed up in the papers for three hundred dollars, Syd checked it out. His suspension was up; he had his license reinstated. His insurance premiums were brutal; he paid in full and on time, and didn't lose any sleep over it.
By the end of ten weeks, he had lost both his beard and the puffiness that had buried his cheekbones. His gut was tapered. His clothes fit for the first time in ages. His body felt strong, his mind alert. Except for the eyes, he looked five years younger.
As a bartender, he had everything he needed but experience.
Then, and only then, did he take the next step.
THE ROAD TO Chameleon's looked completely the same. It was almost as if that nightmare year-and-change had never happened. He didn't know why he felt so surprised; the world, of course, had kept right on going. It was only his life that had gone up in flames. His and Jules's.
And possibly Nora's, as well.
No, he told himself, quashing the spiking pang of memory. Forget about her. He couldn't allow himself to think about Nora; at least not anymore than he could help. She's history, she's gone, and good riddance. Eradicating her from his mind was excruciating but necessary, like scraping an infected wound clean. He blotted out all thought of her, told himself that if he never saw her again, it would be way too soon.
But it was hard, it was hard, to negotiate the turns where he'd watched his friend's face smack and slide against the glass. It was hard to keep driving and try to ignore the ruthless tug of memory, atrocity and rage.
It was important, at this point, to keep himself focused. That was all in the past. He was here for a reason. It would not do to derail.
But, God, did it ever make him want a drink.
It was slightly easier going on the straightaway, with the familiar sign in the narrowing distance. Nostalgia began to replace the harsher memories, whittle away at the pain. He started thinking about the people he was liable to see—Trent, Jane, Red, the regular crowd—and it took a little tension off the edge of his smile.
Most important, of course, was Randy Sanders: the owner of the bar, with whom Syd had set up this appointment. Randy always did the hiring and firing, even if he did leave the lion's share of responsibility to Jules—or whoever had taken his place. He was a good guy, and they'd always gotten along, though in reality they were no more than pleasant acquaintances. There were no illusions of loyalty or enduring friendship to bank on. At least not at this point.
At least not from Randy's side. Syd's agenda, on the other hand, rested almost entirely on those essential building blocks. He had loyalties to honor. Sins to atone for. And a friendship to redeem. Even if that redemption came after the fact.
Even if it was a matter of too little, too late.
Pulling into the parking lot, Syd felt his throat tighten and his stomach constrict. Jesus, he was nervous. He took a last drag off his Camel, snubbed the butt in the ashtray. He'd cut down a good bit since he'd started working out. But for all his overt healthifying, he still couldn't bring himself to quit, much less suck on a filtered cigarette. Might as well snap a nipple on a b
ottle of Bud, toss a condom over your pecker just to jack yourself off.
Syd caught himself automatically steering for his old parking spot, froze with his foot on the brake. There were a trillion other available spaces in the near-empty lot, most of them closer than his traditional spot. And none of them made him feel like he had just danced all over his own grave. He wheeled right up to a spot by the door, parked, and took a long sixty seconds to calm himself down before cutting the engine and heading inside.
The tunes, as always, were booming: at the moment, a bit of vintage Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. Scared as he was, it brought a smile to his face. He took off his shades, let his eyes adjust to the dimness.
He didn't see her until she was almost upon him.
"Wow." Coming to a stop three paces away and staring at him, head cocked in thoughtful scrutiny. "I was starting to think we'd never see you again."
"Hi, Jane." He was almost afraid to meet her eye-to-eye. He forced himself to, was glad he did. Her gaze was penetrating yet open, questioning without the overreaching taint of suspicion.
"Hey, stranger." She smiled, and it was clear that she was happy to see him, too. He smiled back, and they hesitated awkwardly, on the brink of friendly embrace, just long enough to make them laugh at the absurdity before at last they came together. He squeezed her hard. She squeezed back.
"It's so good to see you," he said.
"Good to see you, too." She punctuated the hug with a kiss on the cheek. It had been ages since anybody had held him close, even for a second. Nine months ago, Tommy'd given him a terse little hug—a stiff upper-body, two-slaps-on-the-back, soldier, may God go with you sort of male-bonding embrace—just before showing his ass the door.
Syd didn't want to break the connection; he had forgotten how much he craved the contact, body and soul. He rocked her back and forth, went mmmm. She laughed, gave one last punctuating squeeze, and gently pulled away.
"You've changed," she said.
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