MY HEAD HURT WITH TRYING to understand whatever I’d just stumbled into. The electrician named after a dog, it turned out, was more than a figment of Claire’s imagination. His name was Mutt, he’d been prowling around my house, and he reported to Colin Alvarez. If Mutt had been with Terry when he died, how did that connect to Alvarez? And why was Alvarez checking up on me? I’d also learned that Colin had some weird things going on in his recovery houses—amateur pornography, for one. Somewhere in the middle of this was my sponsor, Terry, dead in that motel room in Santa Ana.

We headed back to the Coastal Club, where Wade had left his car.

“What did you mean,” I asked Troy, “when you said that this amateur-pornography rumor made sense out of some things you’d heard? What did you hear?”

“There’s a guy,” Troy said. “A guy I don’t like. He used to hang out at the house.”

“Does this guy have a name?”

“Busansky,” Troy said. “Simon Busansky.”

Never heard of him. “And why do I care about this guy you don’t like?”

“Because he’s a pornographer. And a scumbag.”

“He’s in A.A.?”

“No.”

“Then why was he hanging out at a recovery house?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why do they call these places recovery houses,” I asked, “when there’s so little recovery?”

“It’s not all like that,” Troy said. “But yeah, it’s sort of like that. I think that when a lot of people are getting better, maybe sometimes it attracts a lot of people who aren’t getting better.”

“Did Terry know him?”

“I heard that they were friends. I didn’t want to believe it, though. Simon’s already messed with one person I like.”

“Who did he mess with?”

“Emma.”

“The sniper?”

“You know how you asked me if she was my girlfriend? Actually, she was his girlfriend. But this guy … he’d make her do things. I’ve got a bad feeling that this porn they’re talking about has something to do with my friend Emma.”

It was my first moment of truly liking Troy. It had to happen sooner or later. He said “my friend” like he was drawing a line around her and you’d better not cross it. I checked Wade to see if he’d caught Troy’s brave inflection, but he was turned away from me, looking out the window.

I slapped his arm to bring him back to us. “You know this guy? The scumbag Busansky?”

“No,” Wade said. “I don’t think so. Terry was definitely becoming friendly with Colin, though. He maybe wrote some contracts for him. He was around the houses sometimes, hanging out with the newcomers, like always. That’s how he met Troy.”

Which told me nothing that I didn’t already know. Which made me wonder why Wade had bothered to say it.

When we got back to the Coastal Club, Wade closed the door behind him and walked back to his own car. I assumed that he wouldn’t be joining us for the “meeting after the meeting.”

As we pulled out of the parking lot, I asked Troy if he’d eaten anything recently.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean how long has it been since you put food into your body?”

Troy looked at his hands as though the answer might be hidden there. “I can’t remember.”

Newcomers were always going psychotic with low blood sugar. “Sometimes you think you want to commit suicide,” Terry used to say, “when what you really want is a bacon cheeseburger.”

I took Troy to Wahoo’s Fish Taco, where I ate a basket of mahimahi tacos and Troy ate two baskets. Afterward, we strolled the boardwalk. I smoked a cigar. Being around Troy was surprisingly low-maintenance. He talked about himself exclusively, and mostly he answered his own questions. Up to a point.

“How do you save for retirement?” he asked. This was as we passed the art deco lifeguard station that appears in most Laguna Beach postcards.

“How do I save for retirement?” I said. “Are you asking me specifically or in general?”

“Both,” Troy said.

“I make a lot of money,” I said. “But I spend most of it. I guess I figure I’ll keep moving into nicer houses, and that’ll be my retirement.”

Troy stopped walking. He tapped the filter on his Camel Light with his thumb. I took a hit off my cigar and wished I still smoked cigarettes.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I said.

“Because that’s not going to work,” Troy said. “You can’t save for retirement like that. Did you miss the part where home values dropped something like thirty percent?”

“If you know the answer,” I said, “why did you ask the fucking question?”

“I don’t know the answer,” Troy said. “But I guess I know what’s not the answer.”

That was enough foreplay for me, so I asked him again what had happened that last night with Terry.

“Is that why you bought me fish tacos?” Troy asked. “To ask me a bunch of cop questions?”

“I just want to know.”

“Do you know what the topic at the online A.A. meeting was today? It came from The Big Book. It was so good that I printed it up.”

Troy actually turned out his pants pockets before he found a piece of paper. It didn’t surprise me that there was no cash or keys to impede his search. “Here it is.” Troy silently read his piece of paper to himself, nodded, then looked off toward Japan.

I took exactly two puffs from my cigar before I couldn’t stand it anymore. “What was the fucking quote?”

“Oh.” Troy once again hoisted the piece of paper. “ ‘Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.’ Isn’t that awesome?”

“From Chapter Five,” I said. “And what does that mean to you, Troy?”

“Terry told me the same thing: it’s an inside job. I spent most of today asking myself why you would want to hit me, and then I read this—I must have done something that put me in a position to be hit.”

“Maybe I’m just homicidal. Did you consider that?”

“I’ve gotta do a fifth step. You wanna do my fifth step with me? At first I thought Wade was insane, but now I think it’s a good idea.”

Taking Troy’s fifth step, a process in which he read to me his “moral inventory”—a catalog of his resentments, fears, and misbehavior—didn’t necessarily mean that I was his sponsor. But that’s what it meant to most people in A.A. If you trusted someone enough to share with him your inventory, he might as well be your sponsor.

“You want me to be your sponsor? This morning I almost beat you.”

“My dad hit me once, too,” Troy said. “In many ways, I admire him more than anyone.”

“Just hold that thought,” I said, “and tell me, at least, how you met Terry.”

“If you’ll consider being my sponsor, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“Have you even done your fourth step, Troy?”

“I’m working on it,” he said. “I’ll do it right away.”

“Slow down,” I said. “Tell me how you met Terry.”

“How does anyone meet him?” Troy said. “He was hanging around my recovery house, saying lots of inappropriate shit that was actually quite appropriate.”

“Like what?”

Troy raised an eyebrow. “Like the stuff that you say? Like telling someone that they’d never be able to forgive their parents until they stopped taking money from them, like telling somebody else that an orgasm was a commitment. You want me to go on?”

“No.” I laughed. “I get the gist. But why was he there? Was he there on business?”

“I figured it was just what sober guys did, went and visited the newer sober guys. It seemed like he was friends with Colin. Like what Wade said, he did lawyer stuff for him. But mostly, it seemed like he was there to talk to me.”

“You?”

“And guys like me,” Troy said. “He’d tease me, but you know, I always felt special. You know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean.”

Troy dropped his Camel Light and crushed it. As he sat down on one of the wooden benches along the boardwalk, I took another hit off my cigar and really wished I still smoked cigarettes. Putting my foot on the bench beside Troy, I watched my smoke drift up the hill toward Las Brisas where once, many years before, I had watched O. J. Simpson put two beautiful women into a limousine and then return to the bar with them exactly forty-five minutes later.

“Did he talk to the girls, too?” I asked.

“You’re asking me if he fucked them?” Troy said.

I didn’t say anything.

“I never saw that, Randy. If it happened, I never saw it.”

“How about that last night?” I said. “Will you tell me about that now?”

“Will you be my sponsor?”

“Tell me about that last night,” I said, “and then we’ll talk about it.”

“I went outside for a smoke,” Troy said, “and he was parked across the street, which was kind of creepy. You know what I mean? He wasn’t on the phone or anything. He was just watching our house. Terry never seemed like a sitting-in-the-car kind of guy. Usually, it was like he had his door open before the car even stopped. When he saw me, he got out, and we started talking.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Same as always. What it was like when he first got sober, how hard it was. Nothing he didn’t talk about at meetings, but I’ve thought about this part of the night more than any other. He talked about how everyone had been sick of him, how they’d wanted him to die and get it over with. And then he asked me if I wanted to hang out. It was like he needed me more than I needed him, and I didn’t like that.”

“So why’d you go?”

“Because, you know, it was a privilege, too. Like we were going to be friends, and I wanted that at the same time I didn’t want that.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “This is me, remember? Where’d you go?”

“We went to Santa Anita, the race track? He said he was going to show me where he hung out before he got sober. He took me to this spot under the bleachers where his old bookie was, and he told me what this chump would be wearing and exactly what he would say to us. He was right, too. This is fifteen years later we’re talking about.”

It wasn’t fifteen years later. Terry had taken me on the same trip seven years ago, and I had been equally impressed. The bookie had said, Eh, Whitey, how’s your pretty wife? Even when I went, Terry hadn’t had a pretty wife in a long time.

“I was with him a couple of hours,” Troy continued. “The whole time he pretended that we weren’t looking for heroin. We were only taking a tour of all his old copping spots. I thought we were getting to be friends. Isn’t that fucked up?”

“And then what?”

“And then nothing,” Troy said. “We were supposed to look at some more places he used to cop, but he got pissed at me. I wasn’t up for any more Santa Ana. I talk big, but heroin scares the shit out of me. He started freaking out like, ‘You think I’m going to cop? You think after fifteen years of sobriety I’m going shoot drugs with an asshole like you?’ He told me I was a pussy because I’d only snorted it. He said that I had to be a recovering IV drug user to ride with him, and he kicked me out onto Orangethorpe near that TGIF. I thought he was kidding, but then he drove away.”

This wasn’t any Terry that I’d ever known. If it was true, not only had he abandoned Troy to his demons, he’d probably taught the demons a few tricks.

Troy paused to carefully fold the piece of paper with the quote on it. Then he stuffed it in his back pocket.

As he did this, I realized that the bench he was sitting on was the one that had been dedicated to DUI Dave, Terry’s own sponsor, whom I had never met. Terry had told me that Dave used the cuffs of his pants as ashtrays and that Terry had never known him to enter a building without smoking a cigarette outside first. A small brass plaque gave the date of his sobriety and the date of his death. Terry had paid for the plaque himself. If Troy had noticed, he might have said there were no coincidences, and then I would have had to drown him.

“I can’t stand the idea that a TGIF in Fullerton might be my last drink,” Troy said. “And don’t tell me that I can go drink right now. I know that. Will you be my sponsor?”

There was a time when I would sponsor anyone. The sicker and more annoying, the better. I thought it was my sacred duty to A.A. Sponsorship was also supposed to be the final step toward freedom from alcohol—the twelfth step, in fact—but I didn’t know if I believed that anymore. My own sponsor had been on some kind of fucked-up twelfth-step call the night he slipped and died.

“Terry was protecting you,” I said. “He must have known where he was headed, and he didn’t want you along for the ride.”

“Are you even listening to me? I want you to be my sponsor.”

“If you did a fifth step with me—and there’s no way you ever will—I’d make you tell everyone everything.”

“Is that what Terry did with you?”

“No,” I said. “That would be your special humiliation.”

“Just be my sponsor.”

“Tell me more about that night. He called Claire for sex?”

“I figured he was looking for an alternative to copping. You remember how he would flip out his phone and start dialing while you were still talking to him?”

I smiled.

“I like Claire and all,” Troy said. “I mean, from what I see at meetings, I think she’s trying, but Terry didn’t call her for any good reason.”

“What’d he say?”

“He wondered if they could talk. He asked her how her son was doing. The call ended pretty quickly after that.”

Visiting Claire was a marginally better idea than visiting Santa Ana, but not by much. I blew more smoke toward Las Brisas.

“That’s everything,” Troy said. “Just be my sponsor.”

I took my foot off the bench. “Let’s forget about the fact that I almost beat the shit out of you this morning. How insane it is that you’re even talking to me. Because I’m going to tell you that I don’t like you, Troy. I don’t like your attitude. Also, I don’t like your face. I don’t like your fake beefed-up body, and when you’re around me, I feel a little bit nauseated the entire time. Not like I’m going to puke, exactly, but like I’ll never be able to eat food again. I also can’t promise that I won’t beat the shit out of you. You upset me so much, in fact, that it’s probable.”

Troy looked at me, then stood up. I relaxed my legs for the punch I was certain was coming. He was entitled to it. “Still want me to be your sponsor?” I asked.

“You have no idea.”