It’s the ugliest clock in the world that reminds me and I say to my bartender, “It seems to me that everything is centered around twelve.” The clock’s twelve numbers sneer at me in a golden shimmer. “At the store, we buy a dozen eggs. At the bakery, a dozen doughnuts. A dozen long-stemmed blood-red roses at the florist’s.” I almost drain my drink, almost, because it’s just about one o’clock in the morning and at one, he’s going to pull the plug and we’ll all have to leave. But he can’t kick me out as long as there’s a drop left in my glass. I’m a paying customer, after all. “And clocks too,” I say, nodding at the ugly clock. “Twelve numbers on the face. Why not ten? Why not fifteen?”
“Could be because there’s twenty-four hours in a day, Zach,” the bartender says. He glances at the clock and I can see the hour hand sneaking toward the number one.
“Then there should be twenty-four numbers,” I say. “Thirteen o’clock, fourteen o’clock, all the way up to twenty-four o’clock. But no, we do a repeat. We stop at twelve and start over, even though it’s not a new day.”
“Time!” he yells and I tell myself it’s in reaction to my argument, but he picks up the clock and waves it over his head. “Time to go home! Work day tomorrow!”
I hate Sundays when the bar closes at one instead of two. The bartender says he does it for our own good, so we can get up in the morning to go to work after a long weekend. Or look for work, in my case. I say he does it because Sunday nights are the nights he puts it to the wife. I’ve seen her picture…it would take me an extra hour to get it up for that.
“Where’d you get that thing anyway?” I point at the clock as the bartender puts it down.
“Time, Zach,” he says.
“I know. Where’d you get it?”
He nods as someone obediently sets his empty glass on the bar. “Present from my mother when I opened this place.” He looks at the clock, touches it briefly with the tip of a dishtowel. “She thought owning a bar meant I’d have hanging flower baskets all over the place. A quaint little pub, she called it, a bistro. So she figured a clock that looked like a flower basket would fit the decor.” He draws out the last word, giving it two long syllables, making it sound like day-core, and I wonder where a day’s heart would lie.
“It’s damn ugly,” I say.
He looks toward the door. “Yeah, well. What can I do? It’s from my mother.”
I can still remember when this place opened three years ago. I stopped in on opening night and I’ve been coming ever since. And now it occurs to me that I don’t know my bartender’s name. I talk with him every night, I’ve seen pictures of his wife. I even know who gave him his clock. He knows my name and seems to use it every chance he gets, but I never call him anything. Nobody seems to call him anything. Nobody has to. He’s always right there when you’re ready for another, slipping a fresh glass on a napkin that’s so crisp, it can clean under your fingernails.
“Hey,” I say. “What’s your name anyway?”
He looks at me hard. “Zach, you’ve had enough. Let’s go.”
“No, what is it? I really don’t know.”
He points toward the window. “Zach, what’s the name of this place?”
I picture the blinking blue neon outside. Benny’s Barstools. You can’t sit on anything in this place but a barstool. Even the tables and booths are set high so that you sit on a barstool to reach them. “I thought,” I say slowly, “that you were using alliteration.” At his blank look, I quickly add, “I thought you just needed a B-name to go with Barstools. Your name is really Benny?”
“Out, Zach.” He reaches for my glass and I snatch it back. “Zach, either drink it up now or it’s going down the drain.”
I slam it back. “Can’t even get what you pay for anymore,” I grumble. Sliding off the barstool, I head for the door.
“See you tomorrow, Zach,” he calls.
“Yeah, if you’re lucky.”
He laughs.
Outside, I walk down the sidewalk, then sit on a bench under a streetlight. I wish it was moonlight, but the sky is clouded over. It’s one o’clock in the morning and I’m not sure where to go. I think about howling.
1:00. I admit I am powerless over alcohol, that my life has become unmanageable.
Watching the intermittent car go by, I debate whether or not I should go home. I see Benny lock up and walk away, whistling, and I wonder how long it’s been since I whistled. Puckering my lips to try, nothing comes out but a dry sputtering sound. Like a motor that won’t quite catch.
I could go home, but there’s no one there. Kat and the kids left a long time ago. My sheets are so rumpled, even I can’t stand them anymore, so I sleep on the floor, pulling our smelly old quilt over my head. Kat is attached to that quilt. One of her sorority sisters made it for us when we got married. I always wanted one of those dual-control electric blankets. I wonder if the dials have twelve settings, miniscule filaments of heat firing up with each notch. Kat wants to have the quilt in her new apartment, but I tell her she has to come and get it for herself. So far, she hasn’t shown up. Not in almost a year. Twelve months, I think, and my lips twist and I feel them crack.
Sighing, I stand and head for home. A hard floor is better than a cold bench under a streetlight, I think.
I stop by Benny’s Barstools’ window and peek in. All the lights are off, but I can still see the face of that damn clock. It glows in the dark. In the luminescent sickly-sea-green, I see the fancy hands rubbing up against the fancier numbers. One-twenty. I blink, making the green blur and the hands disappear, and then I leave.
At home, I notice how everything has changed. It’s always the middle of the night or the earliest morning when things become clear. There’s a layer of dust everywhere. I can see where my fingers touched, where my knees brushed against tables. There’s still dishes in the sink, even though I gave up using dishes months ago. I share this place with spiders now, multi-sized specks of silver and black and brown, hovering over my head in their webs. Kat hates spiders, she always screams for me to kill even the tiniest ones. I never told her, but mostly, I caught them and set them free through a loose screen in our bathroom window.
I feel my eyes fill up and I know it’s time for my regular one-thirty in the morning not-very-manly cry. I’ve stopped fighting it, it hits every morning like this, like clockwork, ever since Kat and the kids walked out. At least it’s early in the morning when there’s no one around but the spiders to witness it. I sit down in my recliner, but I stay leaning forward, not grabbing the handle that would tilt me back and put my head to rest. Dangling my hands between my knees, I lift my chin and give way. The tears know where to go; I think there are tracks on my face. New tracks, worn over old. I wish Kat was here to kiss them smooth.
I wonder when it all got away. I wonder when I lost control. And I decide it’s time. It’s time to get it back. Get it all back.
2:00. I come to believe that a Power greater than myself can restore me to sanity.
I am sick of my morning cry, I am sick of the spiders above my head and the dust motes clouding the air. I might even be sick of the fuzziness in my head, but my head is too fuzzy to figure that out. “Jesus Christ!” I mutter, staggering to the kitchen and opening the fridge. I vow to get rid of every bit of liquor there.
But it’s already empty. From last night’s tirade? Last week’s? Maybe. I can’t remember. It could be that I’ve just depended on Benny’s Barstools for so long.
I search through my cupboards, reaching into the gaps where toaster pastries used to be and colorful sugar cereal and lollipops and gummi-fruits that look like the real thing, but taste like candy. I realize I miss the rainbow of the stocked family shelf, the sweetness of soaring sugar counts.
Finally, I find something I can throw away, something so symbolic, it makes my knees weak. A half-empty glinting jar of maraschino cherries, rolling red and shiny in their juice, and a box of plain brown toothpicks. Before she went away, Kat decorated drinks for me with these, trying to convince me that the cherries made the drink special, a stay-at-home special, as special as a bourbon at Benny’s. She filled my glass with diet Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Mountain Dew, then floated the cherries, speared through with the toothpick. In the white sodas, the 7-Up and the Sprite, I could see the tiny trickle of cherry blood. The dark sodas hid it, but I knew it was there. Just like I knew the tastiest soda would never give me a buzz. “Just like Benny’s, Zach, see?” she said, handing me a glass she attempted to frost, but only succeeded in making cold and slippery. “There’s no need to go out.”
I always smiled at her, drank my slippery soda, fucked her until she was stupid with satisfaction and sleepiness, and then I went to Benny’s anyway. A warm wife smelling of my semen at home, and a bar that offered real drinks and real frosted glasses and toothpicks with fancy red shredded cellophane at the end. Not just cherries, but pineapple and mandarin oranges. Sometimes salty olives, depending on what I ordered. I thought I had it all.
I think about praying as I fall on my knees in front of the wastebasket. The Sacred Twelve Steps say to look to God, and so I think of television shows where earnest actors look to the skies and pray in soft shaky voices. I clear my throat as the cherry jar makes a solid liquid thunk at the bottom of the basket and the box of toothpicks open and spill, a hopeful whispering clatter. Then I look at my ceiling, the only sky I have, and say softly, “God? I need you. I gotta start thinking straight again.” I wonder if I look dramatic and sincere and I imagine swelling music.
3:00. I make a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understand Him.
Irest my head on the rim of the garbage can. “It’s up to you, Lord,” I say. “I am your responsibility.” That doesn’t sound right and so I ransack my brain for the appropriate thing to say, and then I remember. “Thy will be done, okay?”
I think about who God is, how He’s changed over the years. When I was a boy, he was this ferocious white-haired giant, pointing a sharp finger directly at me like he was going to puncture my little balloon face the moment a cuss-word came out of my mouth or I decided to lie or I achieved a little-boy erection thinking about what I saw my dad doing to my mom one night. Then for a while, God became a rock-star Moses, scraggly and scruffy and wearing purple robes, his hands forked in peace signs as he rocked and rolled to Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. When I stepped into adulthood, he faded for a while, coming back in blinding bright moments like the births of my two kids and the death of my mother, and mostly now, he is a haze. A powerful haze, a still-purple haze, but a form I can’t quite get a grip on.
I feel my brain lurch sideways and I wonder if I passed out, if my memories of Ferocious God and Superstar God are just a part of alcohol-induced hallucination. “Look, God,” I say, getting on all fours and crawling toward my couch. “I’ll say it again. Thy will be done, not mine, okay? Not mine.”
The couch seems twelve miles high, but I am amazingly light after disposing of my cherries and toothpicks. I crawl up and stretch out, resting my head on a pillow that smells of Sunday afternoon popcorn, stale soda and spoiled milk. I decide to stay here; it’s more comfortable than my bedroom floor and so I thank God for leading me to this soft discovery. Everything is going to be fine, I think.
4:00. I make a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself.
When I wake up, I think it must be morning, but it’s only an hour later. I stare at the ceiling and think about how I’d like nothing more than to crawl into my bedroom and curl myself around the warm body of my wife. Reaching over my head for the telephone, I yank it onto my chest and dial her number. Her new number. The number that doesn’t have my name linked with hers in the phone book. I’m listed under her and I think of the wrongness of that, of how she should be under me. Under me, sweet and open and ready to take. But Z comes after K, I remind myself, and we are all sworn to following the alphabet. I wonder for a moment why we didn’t stop after the twelfth letter. How many are there anyway? I pause for a moment. Twenty-six. Not even divisible by twelve. Kat answers on the fourth ring.
“Sweetheart,” I say. “It’s me. I really need you. I can’t even go in our bedroom anymore, because I know I won’t find you there.”
“Jesus, Zach,” she says and I know she’s rubbing her forehead. “You’ve got to stop making these early-morning phone calls. I’m a working woman now, remember? I have to get up in two hours.”
“You shouldn’t have to work,” I say. She took the first job she could get, a secretary at my kids’ school. She told me proudly that they hired her on the spot and now she could earn money and be home when the kids were home.
“I do have to work, Zach,” she says and it sounds like her mouth is right next to the phone and I picture her tiny white teeth taking nicks out of the receiver. “Because of you, remember?”
I shake my head. “That’s all over, Kat. I’ve given it up. I’m going to go to meetings again. I even threw away my last jar of maraschino cherries and my last box of toothpicks. Remember those? Remember how you got them for me?”
I expect her voice to soften, but it doesn’t. “Were you at Benny’s Barstools tonight?”
“Well, yeah. I decided to quit when I got home—”
“Call me when you’ve been away from there for two weeks, Zach. Two weeks.” Fourteen days. The phone goes dead.
I let the whole thing slide to the floor. I think about my wife. I haven’t seen her in so long. I try to put a date on it and I can’t. I think about my kids, I haven’t seen them in even longer. She won’t let me, put a court order on me the last time I drove them home when I’d had a few. A few too many, she said, but it was really only a few.
Standing up, I kick the telephone out of my way, relishing the shattered bleat as it hits the wall. I walk briskly to the bathroom and look at myself full-out in the mirror. “You’re pathetic,” I say. I shake my finger and scowl, thinking of Ferocious God, thinking of puncturing my own face. “You’re going to make it better.” Instantly, a calm smooths itself over my shoulders and I stand taller. I frown at myself, try to look firm, like I did the day I caught my boy stealing bubblegum. I did the typical march-him-back-and-makehim-apologize parent thing. But a part of me glowed with pride. He pulled it off, after all, in today’s world of high-tech security cameras, coded labels and alarm systems, and security guards on every corner. “So what’s the best way to make it better?” I ask. “Organize! Figure out what you have to do!” I smile. I know the answers. I can do this. “Let’s go make a list,” I say to my reflection. “Once we know everything that’s wrong, we’ll be able to make it right.”
I imagine myself in a three-piece navy blue suit, a blue tie with silver diamonds knotted at my throat. Holding a brand new pure leather briefcase in my hand (the old one is too representative of my prior life, so Kat gets me a new one, a blood-red one), I stride to the kitchen table. I nod at Kat, who stops cooking my breakfast long enough to pour me a cup of fresh hot coffee. “Thank you, darling,” I say out loud to this glorious image. Then I pull out a notebook. Dreaming of coffee and bacon and eggs and a silk-robed soft-skinned wife straddling my lap, I start on my list.
5:00. I admit to God, to myself and to another human being the exact nature of my wrongs.
After staring steadily at the wall for a few moments, I decide to start with a Game Plan. Every goal can be achieved through a Game Plan.
1) Figure out where things went wrong.
2) Fix them.
3) Find a meeting and stick with it.
4) Get another job.
5) Get Kat and the kids back.
Isit back and flip the page. Now comes the hard part. Shaking my hands, then cracking my knuckles vigorously, I clear my throat before hunching over the notebook. I write until sweat pours from my temples, so I know I must be getting to the crux of the situation.
1) I drink too much.
2) I ignore Kat and the kids.
3) I lost my job.
4) I spend a lot of our money on drinking.
5) I never do anything around the house.
6) I lie to Kat about where I’ve been.
7) I’ve lost all my friends except for a bartender named Benny.
8) I lost my license.
9) I put the kids in danger when I drink and drive with them in the car.
10) I slept with another woman, but just once, and I don’t remember her name.
11) I don’t put Kat and the kids first.
12)
For a while, I leave number twelve blank. I’m not sure what to put there, but I know it’s important. It’s the sum-up point. I think about Kat, sleeping across town in the twin bed she bought from Goodwill. In a short while, she’ll get up, take a hot shower and have some coffee by herself in that tiny kitchen. I remember her getting up early some mornings, just to scrub my back, to wrap her arms around my waist. “Let me clean you inside and out,” I would say. “You’re a dirty girl.” She threw back her head and laughed and I kissed her neck, not minding the taste of the soap.
She always smelled so damn good.
I look at the number twelve on my list and then I fill in the blank. “I broke Kat’s heart.”
Going back into the bathroom, I recite each of the twelve items out loud to my reflection. I do it again. And again. By the sixth time, my face in the mirror tells me there’s a new understanding, a new depth. “And remorse,” I say. “I am so sorry.” I find myself crying again. It’s a different cry than at one-thirty in the morning, a new cry with a deeper tone and timbre. I look at my face in the mirror, study the tears, and think that they look larger, clearer than ever before. It’s working, I think, and this makes me cry harder.
6:00. I am entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
“This is it,” I say out loud. Crumpling my list, I toss it into the toilet and flush. “They’re gone. It’s over. It all begins again today.” I remember the maudlin, “This is the first day of the rest of your life” motto that appeared on every bumper sticker and cross-stitch pattern and top-forty song in the seventies and suddenly, it all makes sense.
I go to the kitchen and check off Step One on my Game Plan. I make a half-mark on Step Two, because I figure admitting all this stuff is halfway resolving them. Fatigue comes over me, as heavy and smelly as Kat’s sorority sister’s old quilt, and I tuck my notebook into my pocket. Returning to the couch, I try to catch some z’s.
7:00. I humbly ask Him to remove my shortcomings.
At seven, my eyes automatically open and I stare at the ceiling again. No matter how drunk, no matter how sober, no matter how employed or unemployed, I always wake up at seven. I curse the clock in my head. Then the every-morning thought erupts in my brain and drips down to my tongue. I lick my lips.
I want a drink.
A Bloody Mary, rich red tomato juice, sharp clear vodka that goes straight to my sinuses, a stalk of celery as green as spring. They make them at the little restaurant down the street. Vegetables (and vodka) for breakfast.
I moan and roll over, covering my head with my pillow. I picture Ferocious God, but with the wild hair and robes of the rock star. “Please, God,” I say. “Take it away. Please make this easy.”
I get up and decide to do battle with the craving by pitting it against steamy hot water and Kat’s liquid soap. I even use her little loofah. She left it behind, she was in such a hurry to leave. Holding it to my nose, I inhale her and get an instant erection. Jerking off also helps to relieve the craving. I decide, as I towel off, to head the other direction this morning, follow a new road, find a new diner, and order bacon and eggs and hot coffee. I’ll have to imagine the waitress in a silk robe.
8:00. I make a list of all the people I’ve harmed and become willing to make amends to them all.
At a diner called Ruby Belle’s, the bacon and eggs taste pretty good, the coffee much better. I look quickly at the menu before ordering, half-hoping Bloody Mary will be there, but she isn’t. I take that as a sign from God that I’m on the right path.
The waitress, her name is Stacy, according to her crooked nametag, refills my coffee and smiles at me. I admire her and wonder what she would look like in one of Kat’s nightgowns. I wonder if the skin behind her knees and inside her elbows is as soft as it looks. Her legs swing open and closed under the short uniform, her breasts beg to be squeezed, tomato-plump in the generous scoop neck.
I open my notebook and stare at it over the lip of my mug. Something looks wrong and I get out my pen, drawing circles around the Game Plan. I circle and circle, trying to zero in on what’s wrong, and then I realize it. The kids. The fifth item says, “Kat and the kids.” I always think of the kids together, as a single unit. Yet surely I’ve hurt them both individually.
I think of the last time I had them for a visit, the last time I drove them home to their mother’s. I went through a red light and then skidded up onto a sidewalk. No one was hurt, but I remember looking into the rearview mirror and seeing Will’s face, gone white like they say it goes in books. His eyes were wide and he looked right at my reflection and his glare refracted directly into my eyes. I tried to laugh, but he only blinked, then looked out the window. After I pulled the car off the sidewalk and we headed toward Kat’s apartment, Will said in this impossibly low voice, “Dad, I’m tired of this. I don’t want to see you again.”
I wondered when his voice changed and then I laughed again, looked at him in the mirror, grinned as broadly as I could to show I could take the joke. “Aw, c’mon, Will. It was just a little slide. The road’s slippery tonight.”
He looked back out and I knew he was seeing the dry pavement. At thirteen, he couldn’t drive yet, but he knew wet from dry.
“It must be the tires,” I said.
“It must be you’re drunk,” he said. The white was gone from his face, replaced with two giant red stains on his cheeks. He’s had those red stains his whole life. When he was born, they were there, like cherry tomatoes on his baby face and I asked the doctor if they were birthmarks. The doctor said, “No, you’ve got yourself a high-spirited son.”
When I pulled in the apartment’s parking lot, Will was out before I even stopped the car. He ran up the walk and slammed the door behind him. My daughter, Marie, just shook her head and said, “Bye, Dad.” From the way she walked slowly to the door and shut it without looking over her shoulder, I thought better of going in to say hello to their mother.
To my wife.
Later, Kat called me and told me I wouldn’t be seeing them again. When I argued, she said she would get a court order and she did. The kids testified that I drove them home drunk several times. When the judge found out I was driving with a suspended license, my fate was sealed. My fatherhood was taken away.
We met in the judge’s chambers and it felt like we were in counseling. I told myself we would all walk out cured. Will spoke to the judge straight-out, his new voice deep and steady. I looked at him and wanted to tell the judge about the time Will stole bubblegum and I marched him back to the store. I’m not sure what Marie said, exactly. She spoke so softly, I couldn’t hear and the judge had to lean forward, almost folding himself across his desk. Kat sat ruler-straight the whole time, never once looking directly at me. When the judge told me I could no longer see my children, Kat nodded, thanked the judge, and walked out the door, the kids following. I sat and stared at the judge until he told me there would be no cure today.
I used to carry Marie on my shoulders, her fat legs fitting perfectly in the grooves by my neck. She pumped her fists in the air and shrieked that she could see the whole world from up there. And she could see everything that was important; the Santa at the end of the Christmas parade, the home run at the ball game, the nearest porta-potty at the state fair. Once, I stumbled and we both went down and Marie smacked her head on the sidewalk. We had to go to the hospital and the doctor snarled at me as I sat in the waiting room, buying cup after cup of bad vending-machine coffee.
Kat wouldn’t let me carry Marie after that, even though Marie begged and begged. She knew it was an accident. So we would sneak away together and I’d carry her then.
Now sixteen, she’s almost as tall as me. At the last Christmas parade, I joked and offered to carry her on my shoulders and she told me she could see everything just fine now, thank you.
Stacy the waitress comes back to my table and offers me another refill. I nod, hold out my mug. She bends, just a little, though it’s unnecessary, and gives me an eyeful. I take advantage of it and smile at her breasts.
“You know,” she says, “I get off at about five.”
I sip my coffee, lick my lips. “You know where Benny’s Barstools is?”
“Sure.”
“Why don’t you come by after work? I’m always there.”
She dips her head, then walks away, hips swaying to a warm beat I can’t help but recognize. I let my gaze linger. And linger. Then I remember I don’t go to Benny’s anymore.
“Shit,” I whisper. Pulling the Game Plan toward me, I put an addendum under number five:
5) Get Kat and the kids back.
Get Kat and Will and Marie back. And if I can’t get Kat back, get Will and Marie back. Definitely get Will and Marie back.
Then I underline, “Get Kat back.” I need her skin.
9:00. I make direct amends to people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
At nine o’clock, I stand across the street from my kids’ school. I know that the main office is just behind the front doors and I’m sure that the shadow passing across the blinded windows must be Kat. My mind gives the shadow Kat’s face, her high cheekbones and dimpled chin, and then I recognize her gently sloping shoulders, her arched neck.
The sign at the door says visitors must check in at the secretary’s desk and so I do.
When she sees me, I tell myself that the look on Kat’s face must be joy. Her eyes widen and she gets those tomatoes on her cheeks, just like Will. I smile at her and open my arms. “Hello, sweetheart,” I say.
“What are you doing here?” she hisses.
I start to move toward her desk, but she comes around it, grabs me by the arm and pulls me into the hall. “I thought I’d come by and offer you a cup of coffee. Or a late breakfast. Or an early lunch,” I say. Looking around, I spot the teacher’s lounge. “I’ve always wanted to see the inside of one of those,” I say. “Want to go in there? Is there a coffee machine?”
“Zach, you can’t stay here. I have work to do,” she says. She yanks on my arm, leading me toward the front doors.
“I wanted to see you,” I begin, reaching into my pocket for the notebook.
“Well, I don’t want to see you! Not until you’ve been sober for two weeks, Zach! Two weeks!” Fourteen days.
I spreadeagle my arms when we get to the doorway and she gasps as she pushes against me. She knows she’s no match for my bulk, but she tries anyway and I’m surprised by the force of her little body against mine. Finally, she stops and pants, looking down at the floor. “Zach, please,” she says.
I look past her down the hall and I wonder where my kids are. “Do you think it would be okay if I take Marie and Will out at lunch hour?” I ask.
She puts her hands to her face. “They don’t want to see you, Zach,” she whispers.
She’s crying and I’m instantly sorry. I put my arm around her shoulders. “Oh, sweetie,” I say. “I just wanted to come and apologize. For everything. And I want to tell the kids too.” I think of the Game Plan. “Marie and Will,” I amend.
She turns her back to me, sliding out from under my arm. “You’re always sorry,” she says. “Now, Zach, please just go, before someone sees you.”
Too late. A man steps out of the office. “Is there a problem, Kat?” he asks. He’s bigger than me. She looks quickly between us. “No, Bob, it’s fine. This man was just leaving.” I step forward, sling my arm back around her shoulders, then offer my hand to Bob. “I’m Zach,” I say. “Her husband.”
Kat looks at me, the tomatoes bursting, before running into the office. Bob just looks at my hand, then shakes his head. “You’d better go, Zach,” he says.
“I guess so.” I take one more quick look around, hoping the bell will ring and I’ll see my kids, but the hall remains silent. I smile at Bob, then turn and leave.
10:00. I continue to take personal inventory and when I am wrong, promptly admit it.
“God, you’re stupid,” I mutter as I walk down the street to a phone booth. “You should have brought flowers.” Kat’s favorites, a dozen blood-red roses, a cliché, but something she loves. I picture myself peeking around a huge bouquet and seeing those tomatoes bloom on Kat’s cheeks again, but this time with the pink of pleasure. I hear her squeal.
In the booth, there’s a torn copy of the phone directory. I find the school’s number and scrounge enough change out of my pocket for the call. I don’t have much left after the tip I left for Stacy. I felt I had to leave a big one; I’d be standing her up later.
Kat answers the phone. “North High School,” she says. Her voice sounds shaky and moist.
“Kat,” I say, then pause. She doesn’t hang up. “I’m sorry, Kat,” I say quickly. “I shouldn’t have done that. It was a mistake. I’m a dumb fuck, okay? I’m sorry.” Still silence, but I can hear her breathing. I make my breath match hers, then I slow it down, a trick I learned in our childbirth classes so many years ago. I hear her growing calmer, so I take a chance. “Kat?” I ask, making my voice as soft and sincere as possible. “Can I come to see—”
She slams the phone down so hard, my ears ring.
Sighing, I hang up my own phone, then caress the receiver as if it was her cheek. I think about the Game Plan.
2) Fix it.
The best way to fix things, I know, is to go back to meetings, to following the Sacred Twelve Steps. But Christ, I hate going. “Hello, my name is Zach and I’m a fucking alcoholic.” I always picture those steps as a staircase. A staircase of words. The words blink and mutter and repeat and after I’ve said them enough, they just don’t mean anything anymore. It’s like going to church. For years, you mumble the Apostle’s Creed with the congregation, but you just don’t know what it all means.
Kat thinks the meetings work and she loves her Al-Anon meetings. I wonder if they have Twelve Steps. I wonder how they do introductions. “Hello, my name is Kat and my husband is a fucking alcoholic.” And I wonder who she talks to there. There used to be a guy named Bob and when I got home at night from Benny’s, she’d always be on the phone with him. Even if I fucked her silly before I left.
Bob. I stop for a moment and look back at the school. Then I shake my head.
I have to find a meeting. I’ll call and tell her about it tonight. Then she’ll know I’m serious.
11:00. I seek through prayer and meditation to improve conscious contact with God as I understand Him, praying only for the knowledge of His will for me and the power to carry that will out.
It takes a lot of walking and about a dozen churches, but I finally find one that has a meeting at noon. That only gives me an hour to kill. I’m not hungry yet, after that huge breakfast, plus I know the meeting will have coffee and doughnuts, so it doesn’t make sense to spend money on what will be free later. I stand around for a while, looking at the closed door. The meeting is in the church basement and it has its own separate entrance, as if they’re trying to weed out the drunks from the saints. Finally, I walk away a little bit and face the street. I hate to look like an alcoholic.
Five or ten minutes pass, so I decide to go up to the church proper. At least, I think, I’ll be out of the view of the passersby, who look at me and sneer. Inside the church, I walk up the long aisle. My footsteps echo and I brush my hand over each pew, feeling the softness of the wood. The stained glass windows pour down a colored light and I watch my feet as they splash through puddles of red and green and yellow. When I run out of pews, I look up at the altar.
A big-ass crucifix hangs there, about twenty feet of Christ dangling and dying. At that size, I can see all of him in graphic detail, from the nails entering his wrists and ankles to the wound in his side. He looks down at me and I think how tired his eyes look. “You look like you need a belt,” I say. I try to laugh, but those eyes take the sound right out of me.
I look around; there’s no one else there. “Okay,” I say to the giant Christ. “I’m back for another try. I’ve gotta get Kat and the kids—Marie and Will—back. And this seems to be the only way to do it.” I remember the morning with Stacy, the hot coffee and her full breasts, and Christ’s eyes seem to narrow. “I know, I shouldn’t have said I’d meet her. It was just reflex, okay? I’m really serious this time. Really.”
I sit in the front pew, then awkwardly lower myself onto the padded kneelers. I feel my kneebones sink in and it’s not half bad. In my head, I go over the Twelve Steps I’ve learned time and time again, heard chanted at meetings, read posted over my bathroom sink, on the refrigerator door, and the lowered flap of my car’s sun visor (Kat’s doing). Somewhere in there, I know I’m supposed to make a bargain with God. I’m supposed to decide to stick it out.
“Look, God,” I say, looking back up at the crucifix. “I’ll try and get here more often, okay? Maybe I can stop in for a service when I come for meetings. So I’ll be in touch. And maybe you can show me how to do this stuff? Can you like, lead the way? Because I’m at a loss here.”
I swallow and look at my hands. Carefully, I fold them, letting each finger curl and nestle with the others. “It’s supposed to be easy,” I say. “Just stop. No more drinks. Like turning off a faucet.” I shake my head. “But it’s like I have a leak somewhere.”
I stay like that for a while. It feels pretty good, in the cool and the quiet. After a time though, even the soft kneepads hurt my joints, so I sit back in the pew. The wood curves, just like it was meant to cradle me.
When the church bells begin to ring, I know it’s noon and I get up to head downstairs. I nod at Jesus, do a little bow, then promise to come back.
And I mean it this time.
12:00. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, I try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice the principles in all my affairs.
It doesn’t take long to get to my turn. I carefully set my black coffee and chocolate doughnut on the empty seat beside me. Standing, I fold my hands, dangle them meekly at my crotch. “My name is Zach,” I say slowly. “And I am…still…an alcoholic.” They applaud and for a moment, I enjoy it. I think I feel the breeze from all those beating hands and between those hands and the eyes upstairs, I think I can do it. I can turn off the faucet. I sigh and lift my face.
1:00 Denial
At the end of the meeting, I stand off to the side and help myself to the cheese and sausage tray that someone brought. She’s been sober for a year and she thought we’d celebrate by eating something other than doughnuts. The sausage is good and the cheese is that pepperjack stuff I love, so I keep visiting the snack table and taking a few pieces.
While I’m eating, I watch everyone else. And I notice things like unkempt hair, baggy clothes, dark shadows under their eyes. Their hands shake as they hold their coffee cups. They all speak too loud and too fast, and I swear, each of them licks their lips until they’re chapped and raw.
I realize, watching them, that I’m not like them at all. Looking down, I admire my khakis and my button-down shirt. No tie today, no work to go to, but I look nice anyway. I’ve always paid attention to my appearance. I tone my voice carefully and always make sure to speak clearly and slowly. I know that only I can see the slight tremor as I hold my coffee cup. Nobody can be absolutely steady.
Looking at the others, I think of the phrase, “sloppy drunk.” And I’m not. Not like them.
After swiping one more handful of sausage and cheese, I crumple up my coffee cup and throw it away. Then I head out, blinking in the light of the afternoon.
2:00. Anger
At home, I wander around, look at the paper, wander some more, attempt to straighten up. I think about how if everything was still okay, I’d be at work, a couple hours away from coming home, but Kat would be here, probably having a mid-afternoon cup of coffee and something sweet. I usually called her about now and she’d tell me what we got in the mail, what we were having for supper. And I’d look forward to coming home.
I look around at the stack of newspapers I just pushed together by the front door, the dishes I scrubbed, draining and drying in the sink, the bed I just made for the first time in I don’t know how long. And I think, I shouldn’t be doing any of this.
All this. All this emptiness, just because I like to go to the bar at night. I’m here by myself, in a place too big for one, and she’s living with the kids in a place too small for three. I think of Bob and up the count to maybe four. She’s working and I’m not.
All because of Benny’s Barstools?
I’m not a mean drunk, I’ve never raised a hand to her. Most nights, I left her sated and sleepy in our bed. Most days, I got up in time to say hello to the kids, to head off to work, despite a pounding headache or a queasy stomach. Most days. I had supper with them all the time, I never stayed late at the office on account of work or some woman. Just once because of some woman, and that wasn’t at work, that was later. At Benny’s.
Mostly, I came home after. And when I crawled into bed, Kat would roll over and curl into me and I would smell her hair and touch her and sometimes we made love all over again. I never let her down, not once, no matter how much I had. She always made it. No whiskey dick here. All drunks have whiskey dick.
My hands begin to shake and I sit down on the couch, folding my fingers against each other, trying to get them steady. I think of the drunks at AA, but I know my shakes are different. Mine are from wanting to strangle someone. I want to strangle Kat.
Snatching the phone from its cradle, I dial her number. She’s not home from her job yet, of course, and neither are the kids, so I yell into the phone, into the ear of the answering machine, “I went to a fucking meeting, Kat! I did what you told me to! Now get your ass straight home! I don’t deserve this, I don’t fucking deserve this!” The phone becomes slippery and I realize my hands are sweaty as well as shaky. “You tell that Bob to stay there and fuck himself, you come home. You’re my wife, those’re my kids, you come home now!”
I try to slam the phone down, to get that satisfying bang and clang of a phone smacked silly, but the damp receiver shoots out of my hand like a missile and bounces across the floor. I reel it in, hand over hand, and then slam it down, but the satisfaction is gone. The shakes and the sweats are worse and I hold onto my knees and throw my body into a fast rock. When I close my eyes, I see blood-red and I feel a growl deep in my throat.
This shouldn’t be happening, I think. I just have to get control of the situation and pull it all back together. I squeeze my eyelids so tightly, the red turns to black and I fall into it like a bottomless night.
3:00. Bargaining
After a bit, the darkness begins to have edges to it and I climb back out. I sit on the edge of the couch and hold my head in my hands. Get control, I think. Take deep breaths. And I do.
Pulling out the notebook, I glance quickly at my Game Plan, then move to a new page. The key to everything is organization, I think, and so I write the days of the week down in a long column. Maybe, maybe, I think, if I just go to the bar one night a week, and so I try to pick one. My hand hovers over each of the days and my pen is like a divining rod.
But there is no day, no favorite day, no day that starts with D for drinking. Maybe every other day. I start with Monday and carefully draw what looks like a wine glass with toothpicked fruit in it. It doesn’t look quite right, and I doodle some more, and the fruit looks more real and I draw a little squiggly line for the liquor and then I color it in. I move on to Wednesday and the glass grows bigger and by Friday, it’s full to the brim. Then, all of a sudden, I have glasses drawn after every day of the week.
“Shit!” I throw the notebook across the room. “All right!” I yell at the ceiling. “I’ll go every night, I have to, it’s my right, but I’ll only have one drink and I’ll come home right after!”
The phone rings and I grab it, thinking again about just slamming it down, a second chance at getting the slam right. Instead, I holler, “Hello!” as loud as I can.
“How dare you call here and shout like that!” Kat shrieks at me. “Your kids heard that message, do you know that? Do you think that makes them want to come home? Do you think it makes me want to come home?”
“I went to a meeting!” I bellow. “I went there just for you! I had to listen to a woman prattle on about how she hasn’t had a drink in a year and her whole life is a dozen blood-red roses and she fed us cheese and sausage!”
“One meeting doesn’t make you sober!”
“Yeah, well, drinking doesn’t make me a drunk!”
We’re silent for a moment, both of us breathing heavily over the phone. I think I hear Marie’s sobs in the background and there’s the slam of a door.
I clench my fist around the phone, force my voice to go soft and mellow. “Look, Kat,” I say. “Come home. We’ll work it all out, I promise. I’ll get resumes together this weekend, hit the employment offices on Monday. I mean it. I’ll have just one drink a night at Benny’s, maybe even every other night—”
Kat slams her phone in my ear, just the way I wanted to slam her. I hesitate, say, “Kat?” before banging my own phone, then going one better and pulling it out of the wall and throwing it after my notebook. “Fuck!” I yell. “It’s just not fucking worth it!”
Lying face down on the couch, I cover my head with the pillow and try to bring blackness around me. I push my nose into the cushion, yank the pillow around my ears, try to soften the blackness into a smooth gray, to smother the air from my lungs.
If I let myself up, I will pull every hair from my head. I will throw things and punch walls and kick furniture. I will say every curse word I know, at least a dozen times over, and my voice will shatter windows.
But the smooth gray tucks me in.
4:00. Depression
“It doesn’t matter,” I say to the gray, my lips moving against the couch cushion. “I can go to meetings, she doesn’t care. I can just have one drink a night, one drink! And come straight home to make her happy, but she won’t care. I could give up drinking altogether, but it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.”
I think about our wedding day, eighteen years ago. We toasted each other at the wedding table, our elbows linked, Kat’s Bride glass filled with diet soda, my Groom glass with straight whiskey. Neither of us like champagne. She watched me drink it and later she tugged on my arm and asked me if it wasn’t time to go. “Just one more,” I said. I was enjoying myself, it was my wedding, for Christ’s sake. There was music, all my friends were there, they were happy for me. So I had one more and she asked again, and I had one more and my friends started joking about how I was pussywhipped already, not even married six hours. So I had another and she began to cry.
I took her home then and told her I was sorry and filled her in such a way that she’d never forget that night in a million nights. And she smiled at me then, through her tears, there under me, and she asked for more, and I gave her more. I gave her more until she fell asleep beneath me, me still inside her until I shriveled and slid out. Then I poured myself a drink, looked out the window of our new apartment, and wondered what in the hell I’d done.
Now, the pillow slips off my head as I prop my chin on my fists. “I should’ve known then,” I say. “I should’ve known then and I should’ve walked out that night.”
I let myself cry, just one more time. I think of my kids and I cry. Marie and Will. I remember Will learning to walk, careening into a wall and bloodying his nose. I held my handkerchief to it until it stopped bleeding and he stopped sobbing. I gave him a sip of my rum and coke to calm him down. I remember watching Marie leave on her first date, her walking down the sidewalk with her arm around that scrawny boy’s waist and I stood at the open door and glared them away before I set off for Benny’s.
And I think of Kat.
And I cry and I think the whole time, this is the last time. I’m done. It’s over. There’s no need to run up those steps again. There’s no one waiting at the top.
5:00. Acceptance
Swinging open the door, the sound and the smell hits me and I take the deepest breath of my day. My stool is there, waiting, and Benny smiles at me. “Hey, Zach,” he says. Before I’m even settled, he has my drink squarely in front of me.
“Rough day, Benny,” I say, using his name and thinking how comfortable it sounds. The barstool is molded to my ass and the drink fits neatly in the crook between my thumb and forefinger.
“Again?” Benny shakes his head. “Seems like you always have a rough day.”
“Same old, same old,” I say and swivel in my seat to check out the early crowd. Some are new, but others I recognize and they lift their drinks or smile in my direction. I repeat their gestures. I feel the tension drain from my shoulders and neck and the liquor warms my throat and stomach. When I hear the thunk and rustle behind me, I know Benny has set down a basket of my favorite party mix. He always gives me my own basket, though I share it when someone sits next to me.
The door opens and for a moment, I think it is Kat walking in. But then I see the younger body, the feet neatly encased in white sneakers, the low-riding jeans and belly top. The hair though, the hair could be Kat’s. It swings just the way hers does, barely touching her shoulders.
Stacy sits next to me and I offer her my basket. “Benny, this is Stacy,” I say. “Set her up with what she wants.”
Stacy brings her hands up beneath her chin as she orders and I hear chimes. On her forearm is a load of silver bracelets and they shiver together and sing and shine. I count them. Twelve.
“Of course,” I say out loud.
Stacy looks at me, raises her eyebrows.
“Your bracelets,” I say. “You’re wearing twelve.”
She shakes her arm, sending the silver sound into the air. “My favorites,” she says.
I nod toward the ugliest clock in the world. “See, it seems to me everything is centered around the number twelve,” I say. “Like that clock there. Or a dozen eggs. A baker’s dozen. Twelve blood-red roses.”
Benny rolls his eyes, but I smile at him as he turns away. Everything slips gently back into place, like pieces of a puzzle or disks and vertebra snapped softly in line. Raising my drink, my lips meet the glass’s edge exactly. I put my arm around Stacy’s waist and it’s like I find a groove and my arm rests against her skin like it’s rested there a very long time.
I laugh out loud and raise my glass in the universal signal for another.