Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  A middle-aged man in shorts and a baseball cap strolled past and tossed a handful of coins as if they were bread crumbs. A quarter and three dimes glinted. A mother walking with her toddler handed him a dollar; he trundled over to the case and dropped it in, delighted.

  $1.55. I could tally it in my head like calories.

  Toxic Shock Syndrome always got more tips if there was already money in the hat, so I took five of the dollar bills from my own wallet and sprinkled them lavishly around the guitar case, then launched into another song from my mother’s repertoire, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” From what I could calculate, this brought in two dollars and twenty-eight more cents from passersby. I segued into my own favorites now, my music: “Bigmouth Strikes Again” by the Smiths.

  “Sweetness,” I sang, ”I was only joking when I said by rights you should be bludgeoned in your bed.” I found myself attacking the song gustily with only one or two mistakes, though my voice strained; it had grown husky with age and disuse. I sang Patti Smith’s “We Three” next. Yet even though I tried to make it sound Elvis-y, no one paid attention.

  An ambulance whooped, then a crew of motorcycles. Laughter pealed across the pavement. A group of college students blew through, shrieking “Whoa, that is so sick!” and “Dude! Shut up!” swatting each other and playing keep-away with someone’s baseball cap. A few beefy, red-faced guys began congregating outside the Irish pub, carrying on as if it were their living room, talking loudly, telling stupid jokes, waving around their smartphones. A bottle smashed, then another; a cheer rose. An R & B band came on live in a nearby bar, the bass line pulsating sonically. I tried to sing over it: Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Christine.” Yet I hadn’t played it in twenty-five years. Without a synthesizer or any other instruments, it sounded surprisingly insipid. A young guy in a porkpie hat and leather vest wandered past gripping a 20-ounce can of malt liquor. “Jesus. Play some real music, will you?”

  A corn nut hit the back of my shin. Another bounced off my right shoulder.

  Back when the punk craze was big in Britain, enterprising fans had decided that the best way to show their appreciation was to spit at the bands instead of applauding. Like most cutting-edge trends, this one had taken more than a decade to find its way to suburban Michigan—which meant that after every gig Toxic Shock Syndrome played at the hard-core clubs, we were rewarded with a rain of phlegm. Then, some genius took our name to heart and decided to express his fandom by flinging tampons at the stage instead. People flung them at us by their strings, like little white mice. One night, one of them landed on Alfie Montana’s foot. It appeared to be used. Even though it turned out to have been soaked only in ketchup, that was pretty much it for him. “This is bullshit. Nobody throws used tampons at Joe Strummer or David Bowie!” he’d said, storming off.

  There was a reason, I realized now, why I had never, ever once performed sober.

  Halfway through the Clash’s “Spanish Bombs,” I stopped. No one in Memphis, it seemed, cared to listen to a punk song about the Spanish Civil War. I tried the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket.” Each note I sang was like a soap bubble popping as soon as it was formed.

  A bearded guy sauntered over and knelt down before my guitar case. He tossed in a five-dollar bill. My heart leapt. He smiled up at me, a big, edifying smile, bright as a comet. “Great song,” he said, nodding. “Total classic.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much.” I actually felt myself tear up.

  Still kneeling, he swiftly gathered up the five single dollar bills I’d scattered about the guitar case and jammed them into his pocket. “Sorry,” he said. “But I really needed to break a five for my laundry.”

  The crowds on Beale Street became a steady stream, all these excited, eager tourists flooding past me, bedazzled and pointing up at the neon signs as if they were constellations. I stood like a ghost among them, strumming unnoticed until—it seemed inevitable—I was basically a goddamn cop magnet now—a couple of police officers materialized. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” one of them said, not unkindly. “But you’re not allowed to busk in the Beale Street area unless you have a permit. Otherwise, you have to play at least three blocks thataway.”

  Snapping shut my guitar case, I wiped my nose on the back of my wrist. Even with my ANTHRAX sweatshirt on, I was shivering. “Keep it together, Donna,” I said aloud. I could talk to myself all I wanted: No one was listening.

  The sun was low on the horizon now. A metallic, fall chill began settling over the city. Not knowing what else to do, I began walking toward the sinking sun. Block after block. I crossed a wide boulevard and found myself in a little sliver of a park right on the edge of the water.

  The Mississippi. River of dreams, river of all-American mythologies. I had never actually seen it before. I had somehow imagined the river would shine as bright as mercury, like some liquid religious object, that it might speak to me in whispers. The promenade had been carefully sculpted, with railings and concrete terraces jutting out toward the water. I found a round bench amid the sea grass and set down my suitcase and guitar and stared out across the opaque, slow-moving river sliding past me like plates of mica. I was so tired. Please, please, I murmured.

  Yet, in the dying light, I was offered no insights, no comfort. I could smell only the mud, its faintly vegetal brackishness. A scrape of traffic echoed off a distant bridge, amplified by the unbroken flatness.

  My neck snapped. I’d started to nod off right there in the park. Aggie. We have to keep moving. Stiffly, I got back up and trudged toward Beale Street again, inland, then north, following the streets. I had to do something. But what? It amazed me how much of the world was barred to me without internet access, how much of my lifeblood remained locked away inside my confiscated iPhone back in Charlotte’s impound lot. After this, I swore, I’d travel with one of those little paper pocket address books I used to keep tucked in my purse. If I could ever find another working pay phone, I’d try to call our landline at home again. It was dinnertime. But already, I could hear it: Joey angrily refusing the charges, hanging up on me a second time, my heart shattering like an egg. And the only other number I knew was Brenda’s, of course. But that was unfathomable. What, exactly, could I say? Hi, I know I showed up on your doorstep after ten years begging for your advice, which I then refused to take. But now I’m in REAL trouble?

  Perhaps I could walk back to Michigan. Hundreds of thousands of Americans had once done that, hadn’t they? Just headed north on foot. Well. I covered one block, then another. I passed an office building, a square.

  Voices floated down the sidewalk. A group congregated outside a side door. A professorial, white-haired man with liver spots dotting his forehead stood talking to a plump young woman in a yellow-and-red fast-food uniform, her eyes spidery with mascara. A few skinny, long-haired guys with bug-eyes hugged each other like war veterans. A prim, middle-aged matron with a powder-blue shawl and pearl earrings shared a cigarette with a black woman in a beaded tunic and plastic sandals. Lots of people were smoking, in fact, and clutching coffee cups, their legs jiggling, their eyes darting about restlessly.

  Instantly, I knew. I knew this place already, and I knew these people. You could always tell: a group that made no sense visually, congregating impatiently by the side entrance of a church or a community center.

  Swallowing with relief, smoothing out my hair, I hurried over to one of the scruffier-looking men. “What time’s the next meeting?” I asked.

  He pressed on his phone and squinted. “Six minutes and counting.”

  “Hi. I’m Donna. And I’m an alcoholic.”

  “HI, DONNA.”

  “It’s been five years, six months, and—oh my God, what day is it now? It’s still Friday? Okay, so it’s”—I counted on my fingers—“five years, six months, and nineteen days since my last drink. And I have got to tell you, I have never been so happy in my life to be here.”

  There was no podium for me to speak from. Just rows of folding chairs. A refres
hment table was set up in the outer corridor offering coffee and bakery goods in exchange for donations. And I was so hungry, I’d splurged. Before getting up to speak, I’d tossed a dollar into the box and eaten two chocolate chip muffins and a raspberry jelly donut in rapid succession. The front of my sweatshirt was now dusted with confectioners’ sugar.

  But for the first time in years, as I stood before my fellow alkies, I did not perform my set piece about my father getting me drunk when I was eight years old. Instead, I stood before this group of strangers and told them my truth.

  From start to finish.

  I told them about catching my husband dressed as a French Maid with a dominatrix, then beating him by accident with a fish spatula, then taking my kids’ prescription meds and running away to Rockaway Beach to find Patti Smith, then calling my friend the ex-psychic (“who shall remain nameless”), then—based partially on her predictions, but mostly on my own deluded wishful thinking—how I’d driven all the way to Nashville to reunite with my high school sweetheart, only to get punched in the face by his quasi-ex-wife, then arrested, then thrown in jail with my car impounded—blah, blah—I recounted it all unflinchingly right up to that very moment, where I had only $9 left and had just been busking on Beale Street and pelted with corn nuts.

  I don’t know how long I spoke—I had the idea that I needed to move it along, so I’d been sort of “speed talking”—losing my place from time to time, and my story came out in a jumble—plus, perhaps from the stress, I began having a hot flash right in the middle of speaking, then a cold flash, so I took off my ANTHRAX hoodie, then put it back on, then started fanning myself with the paper plate my donut had been on, the remnants of my mascara streaking my face with inky rivulets.

  But I told them. That I was ashamed. That I was frightened. That I was lost and I didn’t know what the fuck to do next. But that now, at least, I was here.

  I might as well have ripped open my shirt, letting the buttons pop off and fly across the carpet, and just stood there with my breasts bared and my head flung back and my throat exposed.

  As I stood there panting and spent, all I could hear was the faint cluck of a wall clock ticking and the electronic blurp of someone’s mobile phone alerting them to an incoming text. From the back of the room, a cough; a plastic bag crackling. A few people glanced at each other, as if conferring. An older man in a tweed blazer hummed almost imperceptibly. I heard a woman murmur, “That is some bullshit,” and somebody else shush her. Mostly, though, the audience just nodded at me sadly, dumbly.

  “Thank you, Donna,” the voices came finally, in a feeble chorus. “Thank you for sharing.”

  Somebody else got up. “Well, okay now. Wow.” He sounded like an emcee deployed to rescue a variety show after a particularly bad comic. “Um. Hi, everybody. My name’s Bradley. And I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.”

  “HI, BRADLEY.”

  And that was it. Like a curtain had fallen and I was now absorbed back into darkness. Out by the refreshments table, my hands shook as I tried to hold the Styrofoam cup steady under the spigot of the coffee urn. The white-haired, blotchy-faced professor appeared at my elbow.

  “Look, we all fall off the wagon sometimes,” he said gently. “Twice this year alone, I’ve come to a meeting drunk myself.” He gave me a look of indulgent sympathy. “The point is, you came anyway. You did the right thing. Never mind ‘one day’ at a time. Just take it one hour at a time. You’ll get there.”

  “Excuse me, but I’m not drunk.” My voice must’ve been far louder than I’d intended, because people inside the meeting turned and glanced in my direction.

  “I’m not drunk,” I heard myself insisting. My voice rose. “I TOLD YOU, I’VE BEEN SOBER FIVE FUCKING YEARS. WHY DOESN’T ANYONE FUCKING BELIEVE ME? DID YOU NOT HEAR EVERYTHING I JUST SAID?”

  After the meeting concluded and everyone joined hands and recited the aphorisms and the Serenity Prayer, the others emerged from the inner sanctum looking renewed and anxious and exchanging soulful, weighted glances and slapping each other reassuringly on the back:

  “So Allie, does eight-thirty work for you, then? It’s not too late?”

  “Dude, you coming?”

  “I’ve got Bible study. Then the late shift.”

  “Dil says he picked up a cheesecake.”

  Nobody can linger the way a bunch of former druggies and alkies can—believe me, we can’t bear to disengage from anything—but eventually, people drifted back out into the night, while I remained on the peripheries of the dwindling crowd—my desperation and muteness growing—hoping against hope that someone might take pity on me and invite me along with them or offer me what—a loan? A meal?

  I was a stranger with a punched-up face and noticeable body odor. I looked like a catastrophe; hell, I wouldn’t have invited myself anywhere, either. Had I in fact been drunk, I realized, my compatriots in AA would actually have been more willing to help. But I was sober. I was sober, yet still, somehow, on an epic bender. For anyone struggling just to keep themselves together—for anyone hoping and praying that getting clean would improve them—I was nothing but bad news and quicksand.

  A chubby woman who had seemed to be overseeing the meeting began switching off the lights. She was dressed in a sea-foam-green sweatshirt and marshmallowy shoes. Her molasses-dark hair was growing out at the roots, so her scalp appeared cleaved by a seam. “Honey, you got anywhere to go?” She wheeled a plastic garbage container out into the corridor.

  “No, but it’s okay. I’m fine.” Though I heard my voice quiver.

  “Look,” she sighed, throwing up her hands. Her face was pillowy and sweet and dark-eyed: an underbaked cookie with two raisins poked in it. “I’d take you in myself, but my husband and I, we got all seven grandkids down with us for Columbus Day, plus my husband’s son Tyrone, and Tyrone’s girlfriend. Plus my dumb-ass brother Leo is driving over from Nashville tonight whenever he gets done with some Kid Rock fish fry. So we’ve got a full house already as well as a full RV parked in the driveway—”

  “No, no, it’s okay, really,” I said.

  “The most I have on me is a twenty.” She reached for her handbag. “Any place that’d be safe for a woman alone around here—that’s gonna cost you at least eighty, I reckon—”

  “No, no. Please, I can’t take your money.”

  She eyed me skeptically, but quickly dropped her wallet back in her purse. “You said you don’t have a car?”

  I shook my head.

  Sighing again, she finished folding up the last of the forgotten metal chairs and glanced around the church basement as if hoping a solution would present itself. “Timothy,” she called to a custodian sweeping up the corridor, “can I borrow your phone, please? Mine’s not getting any service down here.”

  A moment later, she was googling something. “Okay, honey, I’m looking for shelters for the night. We’ve got a notorious shortage here in Tennessee. There’s one over in West Memphis in Arkansas, near where I live. But trust me, it’s no place you wanna be. The problem is, most of the women’s shelters here are for families. Women with kids. And long-term. You here alone?”

  I nodded. Thinking of Austin and Ashley, though, I started to weep. My children. My beautiful children. “Is there any place just for me?”

  The round-faced woman frowned and shook her head. “Lemme ask you. With your face—well, we might be able to get you into a battered women’s shelter, depending on, you know, your story.”

  Miserably, I shook my head. As badly as I needed a place to sleep, the idea of lying about my injuries and taking a bed away from a more deserving family in danger was too terrible to contemplate.

  “Okay. Well? Hang on.” Wearily, she punched a few numbers into the phone and waited. “Hey Danette, it’s Celia…yeah…yeah…No, he’s fine now, thank you. We really appreciated all the prayers…yeah, we got that, too. Dale’s planning to share it with the grandkids this weekend, in fact. Julian, he loves those pears…Listen…Well, the doctor
put him on something called an ‘ACE inhibitor’? Yeah…that’s right…yeah, and a beta-blocker…I don’t know. ‘Levatol’? ‘Levatel’? Something like that?”

  Celia shot me an apologetic look. With her free hand, she pantomimed a yapping motion.

  “No…no…,” she said distractedly to her phone. “Listen, Danette, the reason I’m calling is, well, my meeting just ended, and we’ve got a gal here from out of town. Sort of a ‘book of Job’ situation. And I was wondering. At your church, you volunteer for a homeless shelter down here, don’t you?”

  As I watched Celia’s face for some indication of the response, I was astonished how hard my heart was beating.

  “Okay, well. Thank you kindly, Danette…” Celia said after some time. “Yes, I’ll see that she understands…and yes, absolutely.”

  She handed the phone back to the custodian and shook her head. “Well, Danette thinks the shelter takes women sometimes,” she said. “Though she can’t guarantee it. Check-in is at 7:30 p.m, though, so you’d have to be there in fifteen minutes if you even want a shot at a bed.”

  “Oh,” I said, crestfallen.

  “Though it’s not far from here at all, honey. I’ll draw you out a map on a napkin. Run like the wind. You can make it if you hustle.”

  A line of disheveled men clutching bundles and shopping bags and knapsacks snaked in a long line across the parking lot. I counted only one other woman, short and grizzled, with a cloud of crazed, gray hair obscuring her face, and layer upon layer of sweaters, making her appear rotund. A few of the men were in cheap suits and ties or shirts with designer logos; only when I looked at their shoes, with their worn, flapping soles, was it obvious how down-and-out they were. Otherwise, they were clearly trying to present their best faces to the world, still hoping to claim some dignity. One man, however, was fetid and clad in rags and swiping at the air around him.

  Oh, God, Aggie. A homeless shelter? I dropped my guitar at my feet. It had been banging against my right hip as I ran, bruising it, and I was now drenched in sweat and panting so hard, I sounded asthmatic. But I was here in line—wherever “here” was. Floaters appeared before my eyes, clumps of molecules and protozoa rising and falling. My brain felt like a bottle of salad dressing that had been shaken and was now starting to separate. I was out of ideas. I don’t have to stay, I told myself. And: It’s just for one night, right?