“What’s wrong?” Bernadette leaned over my face, kissing me. “Dearie! You’re having a nightmare.”
“I’m awake!” I gasped. “I just can’t seem to swallow!”
Sat up with a start, peered around the room, windpipe lax, esophagus paralyzed. “Can’t swallow,” I gasped, pointing at my throat with a look of anguish.
Bernadette grinned uneasily. “Huh? Of course you can.” “No,” I muttered, “help me!”
“Honey, just relax. Try to breathe!”
What in God’s name was she talking about? How do you relax when choking to death? Ran to the bathroom, slammed the door shut, fell to my knees, laid my cheek on the toilet seat lid, and prayed there, helpless as a child.
“Please, God. I’m choking. Help me.” And with that, heaved a great sigh and gulped down spittle, air. My lungs began to work.
It happened again in a movie theater. Bernadette had given me enough scratch to go see three films at the Strand Theatre. I bought a big sack of dollar burgers from Carl’s Jr., smuggled them in, settled down, and began happily watching the second film, Death Wish. In the climactic scene where Charles Bronson is cornered by police, my ability to swallow went kaput, just like that. Hand at throat, heart pounding, I looked around in wild-eyed terror for someone to help among the hoboes, derelicts, addicts, mentally ill, homeless, prostitutes, criminals, and young hipster film buffs, but no one looked as if they could care less or would even know how to assist. I stood up, hands at throat, tried to change posture, but the dark flashing images, the loud cheap speakers, remote and alienating, just increased my panic. I wanted to scream “Help! I’ve forgotten how to swallow! I’m dying!” but couldn’t speak.
I left the theater and hurried down Market Street, rushing past hustlers flashing stolen jewelry, evil-looking street buccaneers with gold teeth and derisive eyes, and it came to me that these were an advanced guard of infiltrating satanic henchmen out to get me. I shifted into evasion mode, weaving and bobbing through a kaleidoscope of threats from which there was no rest, reversing course, then pivoting to the opposite direction, attempting to elude and surprise my pursuers with illogical and spontaneous zigs and zags, like some cosmic broken-field kickoff return performed in a field of flaming asteroids. Then, head ducked, I marched up Market Street to Church, a friendly little street unlikely to host killers. But still my pursuers were closing fast, and, panic-stricken, I couldn’t decide whether to duck into Aardvark Bookstore or pretend to go for a leisurely bite in Azteca Taqueria.
Hunger won out. Burrito it was. Ducked in there, ordered a Chicken Super Burrito. And the moment I did so recognized my fatal error. At the counter, the big-bellied man in bean-stained apron fixed me with his pockmarked face and listless gaze. What was he looking at? I noted an open office door and a video monitor of some kind. Quickly scanned the ceiling: security camera. They had me on tape! Wouldn’t even need to send operatives now: knew exactly what I looked like, my every mannerism, where to find me, even—would calculate that it must be someplace approximate to here.
GET OUT NOW! screamed my panicking brain. But if I did, I’d tip my hand, force them prematurely to attempt my abduction and slaughter. The counter worker’s lips moved, forming words. Terror froze me. What was he saying? I leaned close.
“Refried or whole beans?” he asked.
An obvious trick. The wrong answer would surely seal my fate. Refried or whole? How to answer? It was agonizing. I realized: there wasn’t any right answer. Either way, I was doomed. The trap lay in stalling while trying to decide. GET OUT, screamed my brain, and with a pounding heart and exploding head I turned and bolted out, ran down the sidewalk. Glancing back, I tripped and went sprawling headfirst across the pavement, where I lay, wind knocked out, gasping for breath. “Where are you, Carl Little Crow?” I cried out, tears welling in my eyes. I felt so abandoned and ashamed. “Help me, please!”
Suddenly, I heard the voice of Carl Little Crow advising me to pray to whatever God was mine, and found myself calling upon YHWH, ancient God of the Jews, right there on Church Street in San Francisco. I felt a flow of warm solace, and a hand lifted me to my feet. I hurried to get to a 12-step meeting, knew there was one starting soon in the Haight and that there, waiting for me, would be cookies, coffee, my alcoholic brothers and sisters who would understand the nightmare that I had just gone through.
56
WHEN I WAS TWO MONTHS SOBER, IRAQ INVADED Kuwait and, in turn, America invaded Iraq. Iraq responded by shooting missiles into Israel’s largest city, Tel Aviv, where my daughter, Isadora, and her mother were holed up in a hotel room lined with plastic against chemical attack, my daughter’s screaming face strapped into a gas mask.
I called Esther, who held the telephone up to the window so that I would hear the air raid sirens and Iraqi Scuds. Then she held it close to Isadora so that I could hear her crying protests as she struggled to wrestle the gas mask off. Three-year-olds and gas masks don’t make a good fit.
“That’s your daugh-ter!” Esther raged scornfully. “The one that you abandoned. She’s in a gas mask, under missile attack, while you muck around playing the poet in San Francisco!” And slammed down the phone.
Frantic, I called Carl, who said: “Little Brother, you must now pray to the Great Father, your God, Yahweh, and I will pray to the Great Spirit of the Dakotas. Pray for a miracle! But don’t drink, Little Brother. You’re powerless over Bush, Saddam Hussein, and Scud missiles. Killing yourself with alcohol will not help Isadora. And no matter what that woman, your ex-wife, said, forget it. You’re an alcoholic with a life-threatening disease, getting sober, taking care of yourself, learning how to live without a drink one day at a time. You will see, Little Brother: someday that will help your daughter more than anything else you can do.”
But frantic, I called the Israeli consulate to see if Israeli Army veterans were needed. I’ll go right now, I offered. My daughter…I broke down, wept, nerves shot. The Israeli at the other end listened with kind patience and said: “Do not worry, Mr. Kaufman. Your daughter will be fine.”
“I hope so,” I sniffled. “I do hope so!”
But when I hung up, the thought of anything happening to Isadora was unbearable. Knew that she was a remarkable child destined to become a remarkable woman—that she must live! That she, no less than I, was the reason my mother had struggled to survive the Holocaust, and was not only the future, but the truest incarnation and redemption of my mother’s lost and vanquished youth—a youth destroyed by five years of hunger, hiding, death-fear, during the interminable Nazi occupation of Europe and systematic slaughter of the Jews. Isadora was the little daughter my mother had lost at term, who turned her from a melancholic but essentially sweet and good-natured young woman into a mentally ill pill addict given to explosive violence, as if venting on me not only her own thwarted aspirations but frustration at the trap of her marriage to an illiterate and largely indifferent gambling addict. The bruises and welts that covered my arms, neck, and back throughout my youth told the true story of her life—an Aramaic narrative of wounds that others did not want to read or believe. Isadora was a sweet, sane, beautiful child—a hopeful light born out of darkness, a living candle, and I would gladly lay down my newly sober body and life to save her if I could.
But I couldn’t. Not only was I not wanted or needed in Israel, but without a drink to steady me I was too mentally ill even to apply for welfare assistance. A few times I’d gone down to the welfare office at 1440 Harrison, where lines of homeless kept melting through the doors without anyone seeming to emerge, and I developed a paranoid conviction that the poor were being euthanized in there. Here I was, too crazy even to apply for the sort of assistance that the mentally ill are eligible for. And to my name I had, at the time of Iraq’s missile attack on Israel, exactly $3.24 and a pack of cigarettes.
Depressed, I lay on my bed, closed my eyes, and prayed for death to simply come finish me off. Was so helpless. Useless. Please, God, I prayed: help Isadora. And the rem
otest whisper of the voice of my Angel said: When your mother was a child, there was no safe haven on earth for a Jew, and she was hunted like an animal with no one to care for her or defend her. Millions of her fellow Jews were gassed, burned, shot, and the world said nothing, did nothing. Then there was the state of Israel. And then your mother had you. You became Israeli, served as a soldier in Israel’s defense, and fathered Isadora, who is now Israeli too. And though Saddam and his army want to chemically gas the Jews of Israel, Isadora is in her own country now, surrounded and defended by a Jewish army, and against gas she has a mask to wear in a plastic-sealed room—which is by no means a good thing, but compared to what your mother had a great improvement—and Isadora will be fine.
So, reassured, I went mercifully to sleep. Later, in accounts of this episode in Israel’s history, it became known as a kind of modern miracle that so few Jews were killed by Saddam’s rockets. They were intercepted by both the Israeli Air Force and American patriot missiles; and any that somehow landed successfully failed, for the most part, to take Jewish life.
It was a smaller, lesser sidebar miracle, but one nonetheless, that in distant San Francisco an alcoholic Israeli-American Jew, terrified for his daughter’s life, yet did not take a drink and reposed, instead, in the arms of his 12-step program and in a God that he still only vaguely sensed the presence and meaning of.
57
CARL LITTLE CROW CALLED ME ONE DAY GASPING for breath, barely able to speak. “Little Brother,” he gasped, “I’m having a heart attack. Must go to the hospital. I don’t want an ambulance. Need your help to get there. Sorry for the trouble.”
“I’ll be right there, Carl!”
I called Suzy, a friend from the 12-step meetings, who rushed over with her car, picked me up, and drove us at top speed to his apartment. Carl was stretched on the floor clad only in white briefs, unable to move, barely conscious. The apartment unfurnished, dirty. Food-encrusted plates and butt-heaped ashtrays lay about. There was no television, no books, no pictures on the hand-smudged walls. Clothes were piled on the floor. I stood there stunned. “Carl,” I whispered. “Oh, my God!”
He was my chief link to recovery, my lifeline, the first human being in the entire world for whom I’d felt unequivocal trust.
“We need to call an ambulance,” said Suzy.
“No,” Carl whispered.
“No? But you need to get to a hospital now!”
“You take me,” he whispered.
“Alan, you’ll have to help me dress him.”
We did, first his pants, then shirt—the first time I’d ever seen him in one—then the shoes. We found his wallet and keys and I carried him in my arms out the door and downstairs to Suzy’s car, where we laid him out as best we could in the backseat and drove at breakneck speed to San Francisco General Hospital. Suzy apologized and said she was expected back home. I remained at Carl’s side, unable to let go, as he lay on the gurney. A doctor said he would be taken to emergency surgery. Terrified, wondering what would become of my sobriety without him, I held on to his hospital gown, refusing to release him, even when they began to wheel him to surgery. Carl whispered hoarsely, “Little Brother, you must let go. I can’t help you now. These nice people will care for me. Go, Little Brother. Don’t drink! Go to a meeting! I love you.”
“I love you, Carl,” I said, tears filling my eyes.
Shocked, I stumbled from the hospital, wandered through Mission streets where bars called out to me and liquor stores beckoned. Gutter drunks and junkies leered with amused smiles, as though the demons possessing them—the kind that had once inhabited me—knew by what a fragile thread my recovery now hung.
I was too numb to understand where I was going, and yet somehow my feet took me to a 12-step meeting on Valencia Street. I sat at the large table in the center of the room, head buried in my arms. “Carl, what will I do now? Oh, God, please, don’t let Carl die. He’s the only one who understands me. The kindest, best person in the world, my sobriety brother. Please, O Lord, I need him to stay sober or I will die.”
I was praying, face hidden, when there came loud applause and I felt hands slapping my shoulders and back.
When I lifted my head, someone growled: “Congratulations!”
“Uh—what for?”
“You’ve just been elected to run our meeting for a term of six months!”
“But I can’t! I’m brand-new! I’ve only got two months sober.”
“Well, that’s two months more than anyone else in this room got! Congratulations!”
During one of my first meetings as the new secretary, a gutter drunk came in bearing a forty-ounce beer bottle and sat in back, drinking and making a racket. A muscle-bound biker and amateur boxer named Monk stood up, accompanied by two sober brawler types, and approached the wet drunk, snatched the bottle from his fist, dragged him screaming and protesting onto the sidewalk, and poured the bottle into the gutter. The trio then proceeded to beat the living hell out of him, shouting that if he ever dared bring booze into a meeting again they’d break him in two.
Appalled, I ran out and pushed them off the drunk, who ran for his life, hurling insults over his shoulder as he went.
When we were all back in our seats, I gravely surveyed the room and, bringing to bear the accumulated gravitas and wisdom of my full two months of sobriety, said: “That sort of behavior is unacceptable. Twelve-step recovery is supposed to be about us loving one another, helping each other. I want to pass a motion here and now that no such scene ever again occurs in this meeting. All in favor raise your hand.”
“But wait!” said a fellow named Jack. “First there’s gotta be discussion. We’re democratic.”
“All right, then. Who has got something to say?” Skeptically, I looked around.
“I do!” spoke up an eighty-nine-year-old woman with snow-white hair named Irene. “I think that Monk and the boys did great. It was real loving. We’re recovering drunks, hanging on for our lives. Bringing booze into our meeting is like pointing a gun right in our face and pulling the trigger. This is supposed to be a safe place for us to come.”
The room exploded in thunderous applause.
“Now, wait a minute—”
“I got another motion!” said Irene. “I say let’s make Monk our official bouncer and give him our okay to bust any alkie’s ass but good who tries to put us all at risk by bringing booze into this here meeting! All in favor?”
Every hand in the room shot up with cries of “AYE!”
“All opposed?”
Not a one.
“Motion passes,” Irene declared. “Monk, honey, congrats! C’mere and give Ireney a big kiss.”
Monk lumbered over and planted a wet one on Irene’s cheek. “That’s my boy,” she said, smiling coquettishly, patting his face with her dainty hand.
By then the meeting had ended. We all said the Serenity Prayer and I sat at my desk, watching, dejected, as the room emptied out. Someone came up to me and said, grinning: “Every meeting makes its own rules. There are no el presidentes in twelve-step recovery. We’re all just a bunch of drunks helping each other stay sober one day at a time.”
“But a bouncer?”
“Whatever works,” he said with a smile.
BOOK SEVEN
58
AT FOUR MONTHS SOBER IT WAS NICE TO LIVE OFF Haight Street, apartment-managing seven boardinghouse rooms in a flophouse Victorian. I got the job just after Carl’s release from the hospital. He was too weak to sponsor me, but I still called him in emergencies, which were frequent. When Bernadette decided that I was too insane to cohabit with—which I was—and bailed, leaving me penniless, foodless, cigaretteless, and furnitureless with the rent and telephone bills due, I called Carl.
Still quite weak, he spoke barely in a whisper. “Yes, Little Brother? What’s going on with you?”
“I thought you said that if I stayed sober and worked my program, my Higher Power would take care of all the rest, especially for the first year. Well
, Bernadette has split, I’m flat broke, rent’s due, telephone about to be cut off. I got no food and I’m sleeping on a bare mattress on the floor. Is this what I got clean and sober for? To go homeless? I mean, how in hell is some hocus-pocus Higher Power going to get my goddamned rent paid? Can you tell me that?”
“Little Brother, what did I tell you to do when problems occur?”
My mind raced. Couldn’t think of what it could be. “I don’t remember!” I snapped. And then I did. “Oh, yeah. You said when it gets hard, go to a meeting and things will get better.”
“That’s right.”
“But how will going to a meeting help with this?”
“Little Brother, all we ask in recovery is that you keep an open mind and try what we suggest. So, here’s my suggestion: go to a meeting and see whether or not things get better.”
“But I don’t—”
“Just try, Little Brother. Okay? Let me know what happens.”
I hung up, cursing Carl under my breath. Damned brainwashed 12-step zombie! But I rose from the mattress, begrudgingly slipped on my heel-worn Durango boots, and headed out the door, down Page Street, to a 12-step meeting in a community center by Golden Gate Park.
About halfway through the meeting, I found myself grinning. Three-quarters through, and I was laughing to split my sides. By meeting’s end, I was positively ecstatic. For one hour I hadn’t thought about my trouble, except to talk about it in the meeting and get lots of hugs and well-wishing, plus a few offers of piecework for a little pickup cash, which I declined.
“No need,” I said, smiling. “My Higher Power’s got it!” And really believed that as I tripped down Page Street, smiling from ear to ear like a holy happy fool. So what if I go homeless tomorrow, I conjectured. So long as I’m clean and sober today, there’s a ball game. You never know: things just might improve.
I found a barely smoked three-quarter-length cigarette on the pavement, and gratefully lifting it to the sky said aloud: “Thank you, God!” and put it in my pocket for later. At home, stretched out on the mattress, lit up my found butt and just whiled the time away, blowing smoke rings and not worrying about much.
Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Page 22
