by David Poses
“Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she says.
Following her down the hall, I start planning a rebuttal to the accusations I expect her to make. In her office, she leaves the overhead lights off and turns on a desk lamp, apologizing for the darkness and saying something about the poisonous crud in fluorescent bulbs.
She sits but I stay standing, figuring I’d be in a stronger position to argue my case.
“With divorce,” she says, “sometimes it’s amicable, and sometimes it’s a shit show. Nine times out of ten, we can cut through the malarkey and get folks on the same page for the sake of the kid, but there’s always one mom and dad who can’t see eye to eye. That’s your folks. Now that I’ve met your dad in person, I get it. He’s really something. Do you have any memories of peace between him and Mom? A conversation that didn’t end up with them yelling at each other? An activity you did as a family?”
“We almost went to the Hard Rock Café for lunch on my twelfth birth-day—all of us.”
“Almost doesn’t count. Ever have a meal with both your parents?”
I share my earliest memory: three years old, sitting at the kitchen table with Mom on one side holding Daniel, Dad across from them. He’s not wearing a shirt. I can see the gold ankh symbol on a chain around his neck and his oatmeal. There was a corkboard on the wall behind him, covered in articles Mom had clipped from newspapers and magazines. I remember the words she wrote on masking tape around the border: “Caring is the art of sharing. Sharing is the art of giving. Giving is the art of loving.”
“Is that it for peace? That one breakfast?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know the biggest sign of trauma?”
“Uh—the presence of some sort of trauma?”
“The biggest sign of trauma is not recognizing you’ve been through it. Or minimizing or denying it. Or joking about it.”
Nancy pushes a box of tissues across the desk. “I think you know you need this,” she says. “I think you’ve been running from the issues for so long that you’re afraid to stop. That possible?”
“I don’t think my issues even qualify as issues. It’s not like I was raped or beaten. I never had to steal or sell myself.”
“You keep minimizing, but you’ve spent your whole life on the battlefield, Dave. Your folks have been too caught up in trying to kill each other to see the scared little boy in the crossfire, riddled with bullets. That won’t change if you clam up next weekend around Mom like you crammed up around Dad. You’re safe here. It’s okay to let your feelings out.”
A lump the size of a baseball forms in my throat. Nancy rises to her feet and wraps her arms around me. I start to cry and melt into her.
twelve
I’m eating a bowl of Cheerios when the dining room doors open with a crash and MJ bounds in, a shit-eating grin on his round tan face, wearing the kind of robe-and-pajama combo you see only on old people or black and-white TV shows. He crouches next to me.
“We have the same problem,” he whispers. “Laura and I are looking for a way to be alone. Any ideas?”
“Pray?”
MJ smiles and clasps his hands together.
The lights flash on and off. Standing by the door, Nancy announces the reopening of a path around the building. “Now that the snow’s melting, you can take walks outside.”
MJ winks at me. I turn around and Chessa runs her tongue along her lips.
“Ground rules,” Nancy says. “You can go alone or in groups, but to make sure there’s no funny business, boys go one way around the loop and girls go the other. There’s a one-hour time limit. If I can get from beginning to end in fifty-eight minutes, so can you.”
Before lunch, MJ and I conduct a reconnaissance mission on the gravel path through the woods. My lungs are searing, and my legs are rubber after five minutes of running. MJ isn’t faring much better. Squeezing his sides, he hatches a scheme to pretend we’re gay so the counselors will make us take walks with girls. I don’t see it working.
Chessa agrees. “But where there’s a will, there’s a way,” she says. “And my way is so fucking wet for your will right now.”
At the start of our walk, MJ clicks a button on his fancy diving watch. We go at a consistent pace. Thirty minutes in, we make a small rock pile on the left side of the path. Then Chessa and Laura time how long it takes for them to reach the pile. We refer to the rendezvous location as the “G-spot.”
On Thursday night in a dark corridor on the second floor, MJ, Laura, Chessa, and I whisper giddily about a dry run after breakfast, followed by the real deal later in the afternoon. I feel like I’m in a prison escape movie.
But I wake to thunderclaps and torrential downpours. The path is closed until further notice. Might as well be forever. My mom will be here tomorrow morning, and on Monday, I’m going home.
Clear skies on Saturday morning. The path is open, but I’m at the main entrance when Pete pulls up with Mom in the van. She gets out and starts to cry before dropping her bags. Then she holds her heart like it’ll explode if she lets go and hugs and kisses me until we get to the lobby, where Nancy is waiting with a box of tissues. Mom takes one and blots her eyes.
“Your son’s been doing fabulous work lately,” Nancy says. “Really opening up.”
“My father used to say I was worrying about the wrong kid when I told him how concerned I was about David’s emotional sensitivity. I always knew where I stood with Daniel, but he has so much of his father’s anger and impulsivity in him.”
“Uh-huh,” Nancy says. “Dave said he and his brother are very different.”
“Night and day. That’s why when Bob called last month and said ‘Your son’s a dope fiend,’ I thought for sure he was talking about Daniel.”
Nancy says, “Tell you what, Dave. Ron and I could use some time alone with Mom, so we’ll find you after lunch.”
Within minutes, MJ and I are sprinting down the path. Last fall’s leaves flail in the wind. Twigs snap between our feet. Clouds tick across the sky. I can see my breath.
MJ slides on the wet gravel, falls on his ass, and then trots with a limp, panting. He elbows me, long before the G-Spot. There are three silhouettes in the distance.
“Not them.”
“Laura told Vanessa.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, dude. Why does anyone do anything?”
Chessa rushes me. She slides her cold hand up the front of my shirt and pushes me against a tree, moistening her lips with her tongue. She grabs the loops on my jeans and we kiss urgently, hard at first. Then everything slows and I run my hand under her jacket and tease the small of her back. Her skin is soft and smooth and familiar.
Our bodies pinned together, I can feel Chessa’s heart beating, her lungs expanding and contracting. I time my breath to hers. For a short, blissful moment, I can breathe.
“Your son is a good kid with a bright future,” Nancy says, looking at Mom and then at me. “Dave, you’ve shown everybody such love and warmth and compassion.”
Where’s she going with this bullshit?
“But,” she continues, “you have to learn to be as good to yourself as you are to others.”
“I’ve been saying that for years,” Mom says. “You’re too smart and handsome and funny and clever not to feel better about your—”
There’s a knock at the door. An assistant asks Nancy and Ron to come into the hall. Seconds later, Nancy returns and tells me to join them.
“Anything you want to tell us, Dave?”
“About . . . ?”
“Chessa.”
I make an impulsive decision to say I’m gay. I instantly regret it.
Nancy closes her eyes. Ron shakes his head.
“Fine. I’m in love with her. I can’t help it.”
“Oh, give me a break,” Ron says. “Yes, you can.”
“Love’s a feeling. Last week, you said we can’t control our feelings.”
Nancy and Ron file back into her offic
e, and I follow.
“I’m sorry, Robin,” Nancy says. “Some new things have come to light.” She lays out the situation, and Mom’s eyes fill with tears. “You really had us fooled, Dave,” Nancy says. “Ron and I were just telling Mom how far you’ve come, but evidently—”
Ron wags his finger at me. “Evidently, nothing’s changed since day one. You’re still in addict mentality mode, still in denial, still haven’t reached out to your higher power.”
“I can’t force myself to believe in God.”
“Nobody’s forcing you to believe in God,” Mom says. “Your higher power could be a sneaker for all anybody cares. You just need something to believe in.”
“I have something—myself.”
“Dave.” Ron lets out a loud sigh. “You can’t be your own higher power.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because you just can’t. A higher power is something greater than ourselves.”
“If I can’t do this without God, that’s not exactly a vote of confidence in me.”
“It’s not you, Dave. Nobody can do it alone.”
“So atheists are fucked?”
I look at Mom, and for a moment, I think she understands. Then Nancy says, “This is what I meant about the jokes,” and Mom’s face goes cold.
“Robin,” Nancy says, “this is where tough love comes into play.” She looks me in the eye. “Dave, we’re asking you to leave.”
“What if I don’t want to go?”
Mom drops her head in her hands, and Nancy flashes me a smirky frown. “You have fifteen minutes to pack, and then you have two choices: I can get you a bed tonight at our halfway house in West Palm—you can be on a plane in an hour—or if you don’t like that, we’ll drop you off at the airport and you’re on your own. If you choose to run—I don’t care how strong or smart or funny you are—with God as my witness, you’ll never outrun this disease.”
thirteen
The terminal at Detroit International Airport is a quarter-mile corridor of mint green cinder-block walls. My connecting flight doesn’t leave for another hour, so I take a seat at one of the bars. The bartender dries beer mugs with a rag like a scene in a Western movie. He nods at the tap. “Got Bud on draft. Bud Light, Miller, Michelob . . .”
I love the idea of alcohol—swishing a martini with big green olives stabbed with a small plastic sword, marinating in a generous pour, or any drink in a glass with an interesting shape and a garnish or just an umbrella—but I hate drinking. For a moment, I consider ordering something my grandfather occasionally gets at a restaurant—a perfect Rob Roy or a Manhattan—but I wouldn’t take as much as a sip.
So I order a Coke instead. The bartender drags a glass through a trough of ice and fills it with soda.
When my parents got married, my grandparents gave them a fully stocked bar. What should have been a family room was literally a bar—a long, high slab of mahogany with a shiny brass rail for your feet, a dozen spinning bar stools, and a triple-tiered shelf lined with bottles. So many shapes and sizes and colors. I opened a few and smelled the contents but never tried anything.
If the bartender had said “We have morphine on intravenous drip, Percocet and Dilaudid pills, and transdermal fentanyl patches,” I’d be high right now. I don’t know how else to feel okay in my own skin. And I don’t see God or AA changing that or helping me accept or forget it.
Mike picks me up at the West Palm Beach airport in a beige Oldsmobile Alero with a maroon passenger door—a shade lighter than his crispy skin. The floor is littered with fast-food wrappers and dirty Dunkin’ Donuts cups.
Hot recycled air pumps from the vents as we cruise down a wide boulevard lined with strip malls teeming with pawn shops and liquor stores and places to wire money. This isn’t Palm Beach. Mike fishes a partially smoked cigarette from the ashtray and lights it and talks about his latest relapse.
“Almost a year clean before I started sucking on that glass dick again. Weekend of my thirty-fifth birthday, I swing by my dealer for a bag of rocks, and I go home and pop one in a stem. Soon as I start sucking and the flame gets brighter, I see all these faces. My sister and ex-wife. My daughter. Parents. Everyone. My friggin’ boss is there. They’re all looking at me, going, ‘Mike. What the F?’ And I’m all, ‘Fuck me.’ That was January. I did two weeks of outpatient and then moved into the halfway house.”
The long ash on Mike’s cigarette falls on his dirty yellow tank top. He jiggles and wipes it away, leaving black smudges. “Ah, shit.” He groans. “My fucking luck.”
We coast into a handicapped spot in a sea of cracked pavement in front of a boxy, two-story structure with stucco siding and a white wrought-iron fence. No sign in front. Could be anything.
On a grimy white coral path, small lizards scamper to avoid being trampled. Mike opens the door. It’s hotter inside than out. A straight-lipped receptionist fans herself with a pamphlet. “Tim,” she yells, “Mike’s back with the new guy.”
Short and stout, maybe forty years old, Tim struts into the lobby and introduces himself as “the sheriff around these here parts.” His belt looks kind of Western: black leather with white stitching and turquoise stones, a country club crest in place of a badge on his baggy blue polo shirt. We go to his small, dark office, where a noisy air conditioner sits in the window below a piece of cardboard.
Tim feels inside my bag but doesn’t look. He pulls out my CD case and flips through. “You should get some Journey albums,” he says. Cupping his hand over his ear, he belts out the beginning of “Don’t Stop Believin’” and transitions to inverted whistling—that sound when you suck air in—as he shuffles my paperwork. He takes a folder from a file cabinet, empties the contents into the trash, turns it inside out, and writes my name on it.
“We do two things here. Heal and deal. Daily group therapy, AA/NA meetings, fitness program, and a chore wheel that rotates every morning. Unless you get a real, job-type job in the community, you participate in chores every day. It is possible to get an outside job. JJ cleans the locker room at a gym, and Vin works part time at Blockbuster Video. Play your cards right, and that’s what you have to look forward to.”
As the name suggests, the two dozen male residents are halfway (that is, somewhere) between rock bottom and functional. This could be a Saturday Night Live spoof of MTV’s The Real World. Instead of attractive twenty-somethings lounging on sleek furniture, broken-down thirty- and forty-year old men lay on mismatched sofas with cigarette burns in the main lounge. They stare at the TV as if Wheel of Fortune holds the answer to all their problems.
Small fans push stale smoke in every direction of the open space, separated from the kitchen by a partial wall. The ceiling is high and arched. The white floor tiles are grimy and cracked and scuffed.
“Everybody, this is Dave. Dave, this is everybody.”
Nobody says a word or looks at me.
“The guys have been lethargic since the AC conked out last week,” Tim says. He sweeps a pamphlet off a bookshelf and waves it across his rear end.
One of the guys groans. “Jesus fucking Christ, Tim.”
“Blame the chimichangas,” Tim says. He shows me to the kitchen, whispers an apology for his noxious gas, and opens a commercial-grade refrigerator to a mess of store-brand condiments and plastic-wrapped packages of ground beef and chicken thighs. Everything has someone’s name on it. Even a rotting banana. Brad.
My room is a triple at the end of the first floor. Tim says the bars on the windows are “to keep the bad element out, not to keep you in.” He advises me to get a pair of flip flops unless “you want a wicked case of athlete’s foot from the shower.”
One of my roommates is lying on his bed, his lips moving as he reads a tattered Archie comic book. “He’s been here since December,” Tim says. “And he’ll probably be here after you’re gone. You’re still planning on sticking around until the end of August, right?”
“End of A
ugust?”
“Long as you have insurance or private pay and your account doesn’t go into arrears, you can stay for two years. After a while, you get to be pretty big fish in this little pond.”
The pay phone is in the basement. I call Chessa’s halfway house and leave a message. I imagine a cheery Victorian mansion with a wackadoodle paint job, and Chessa amid a gaggle of eighteen-year-old girls in bras and panties, cavorting around a lush garden (never mind that it’s twenty degrees in Duluth). Of all the locations in Hazelden’s network, are any two farther apart than Chessa’s and mine?
Steve hugs me when I find him in the smoking area—a small rock garden in the courtyard with a splintered picnic table and a sand-filled metal bucket for butts. He describes our housemates as “holier-than-thou evangelists.”
“Everything’s a cautionary tale with these assholes, or they’re giving you shit for not having an attitude of gratitude. They’re all, ‘You think your life’s hard? Try being a forty-year-old convicted felon, looking for a job. Try having three kids with three different baby mamas and a family court judge breathing down your neck for child support.’”
From the patio, a guy in a floral Hawaiian shirt yells, “You faggots coming to AA, or are you too busy sucking each other’s dicks?”
“That’s Dennis,” Steve says. “Used to be a big-time contractor in New York. Now he’s your average recovering crackhead with an attitude of gratitude.”
Tim leads in-house AA meetings in the main living room. After we recite the Serenity Prayer, he asks, “Who has something to say?”
Robbie, thirty-two years old, describes a scene in his double-wide trailer outside Jacksonville. “Dun’t get worse than being led out your place in handcuffs, nekkid, your kids holding onto your legs, crying, ‘Daddy, don’t go, don’t go.’”
At the other end of the couch, Dennis digs his fingers into a tennis ball. Next to him is a shirtless guy picking a scab on his stomach. Mike pumps the straw up and down in his Slurpee cup, making it squeal against the plastic lid. Robbie tells him to stop and then backtracks to the incident that led to his arrest—a home invasion gone wrong.
