IT WASN’T UNTIL the sun rose that I realized I had been up all night walking around and then sitting down in different places. Sometime during all of that I got drunk and some other time it rained. That’s what I remember best, the rain. First, it started to land on me softly like kisses, and then it started to sing in an even, settling sort of way. It gave me something to do, which was listen to it, and a place to hide, which was inside it. Then there were thousands of drops coming at the same time and they started to roar, but I didn’t want to leave, because it defined both parts of me: the outside part confronting the rain and the inside part that stayed warm and safe. I waited in the rain because it let me know that inside me there was still something alive that hadn’t been ruined.
“Where the hell have you been?” Dino said through his teeth when I walked into Herbie’s Coffee Shop and stood behind the counter.
“You’re a mess. Get over here.”
He dragged me into the dishwashing section like I was a misbehaved schoolgirl and started running the water. “Shit, you got vomit all over your shirt. Where have you been? Never mind. Here.”
He stuck my head under some warm water running out of those huge industrial faucets, and shoved a white T-shirt into my hands.
“Now, change your clothes and comb your hair. Here, use this.” He handed me his red, green, and black Afro pick. “Jesus, now sit down and drink a cup of coffee.”
I threw my shirt into the garbage and sat down in Dino’s large one, drinking the cup of black coffee he put in front of me. The lights were so bright, you could see everything wrong and nauseating about the place.
“Do you realize that you have not shown up for work for a few days and you lost your goddamn job? Or are you in better shape than I think?”
A new waitress came whizzing by just then. She was old and had hair dyed silver and sprayed so hard it wasn’t hardly hair at all.
“That’s the Snitch,” Dino said, chewing on a toothpick. “They hired her when you didn’t show. She’s always going over to Momma and saying, ‘Dino threw out the crackers,’ when I only did it because the mice chewed through the cellophane. Now you wait here until I get off and then I’m taking you to a meeting with me.”
I sat in Herbie’s for a couple of hours until Dino was ready. The Snitch kept coming by asking if I wanted anything, being snitty ’cause I was taking up a table. Every time I said no, she clucked.
“You just leave her alone,” Dino told her. “That girl is my responsibility.”
I watched Snitch all afternoon long. I never took my eyes off her. She was a terrible waitress because she was rude to everyone she worked with. When she’d pass the busboy, she’d never say, “Excuse me,” she’d only say, “Watch your back.” When the customers asked what kind of soup there was, she’d say, “Read the menu.” In between it all, she’d be clucking all the time and occasionally squealing to Momma.
Dino and I walked uptown from work. We had never been next to each other outside of Herbie’s before and it was funny to see him out of uniform. In the sunlight I could tell that Dino got into looking like a cool, older black man. He wore soft green pants, tight around the ass, double knits with a little flair at the bottom over his two-toned shoes. He wore a tan V-neck sweater, a little tan cap, and lots of jewelry around his neck. He had a thin mustache that looked somewhat debonair, and a gold ring on his right hand.
“That drinking thing,” he was saying, “all has to do with the twelve steps. It has to do with accepting a higher power no matter how you interpret it.”
People looked at us once in a while as we walked. I guess we were an interracial coupe.
“I am over sixty years old,” he said. “I woke up one morning and I looked around and realized that America is the land of opportunity and a smart man like me should be able to make a good dollar. So first, I stopped doping and drinking. Since then I got a mobile home in North Carolina, satellite dish, everything. I got a woman there and my son. I got another son in Detroit and I take care of him too.”
He was smiling now, like he was on top of the world, like he knew the way and got joy just from telling me all about it.
“I do not take my worries home with me. I go to AA meetings, to AA dances, to the movies. But I make sure that when I hit that department store alone at night, I don’t bring any troubles in there with me or else they sneak up behind you and take over.”
I saw Dino three times a week. I wasn’t some girl he could impress at a party. I saw how boring and hard his job was and how little he got paid. I saw him stumble out tired and frustrated, hanging around late sometimes like he had no other place to go.
“This is the meeting that I like the best,” he said. “It’s not near my house, but it’s worth the extra trip.”
The church basement in Chelsea was full. There were maybe a hundred and fifty people there and it wasn’t even dinnertime yet. Many of them were black men.
“That’s why I like this one,” he said.
There was every kind of black man you could imagine. There were quiet gay men with skinny bodies, young turks with wild hair, old sophisticated intellectual types, businessmen paunchy in their suits, younger artists trying to get straight, and a whole contingent of street guys, smoking heavily around the coffee machine and asking each other for cigarettes. There was also a handful of Buppies in their dry-cleaned blah, and dudes like Dino.
Someone was talking. When he finished, there was a collective sigh and then a lot of people raised their hands.
“My name is Tom and I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict,” said one good-looking young man, with an actor’s composure and booming vocal tones.
Then everyone else said, “Hi, Tom,” in a monotone unison, and then he said, “Hi.”
Tom started to talk about how much he had wanted to cop that morning and how easy it would have been. When he finished, everyone raised their hands again and another guy started to talk.
“My name is Jeff and I’m an alcoholic.”
Jeff was a bloated, nerdy-looking guy with thick glasses and food stains on his shirt, a typical egghead.
“Hi, Jeff.”
“Hi.”
Jeff talked about what his wife said to him the day before that made him want to drink and how much pressure there was at his job. It all went like that, being lonely or under too much pressure or not having a place to sleep or a bad memory. Whatever it was, they were all saying it and saying their names and everyone said “Hi” and each one had a reason why they wanted to get wasted and why they did or didn’t let it happen. But after I realized how the whole operation functioned, I also realized what was different between them and me. They wanted to stop and I didn’t. That got me off the hook real quick. So I stopped paying attention to the specificities of what each one of them was saying and got more into observing the atmosphere, like how each person talked as long as they needed to talk. Even if they started to ramble, nobody stopped them. Sometimes it got really boring but no one looked bored. I kept shifting my eyes back and forth between the yuppies and the street people. I couldn’t help feeling that the businessmen were part of the derelicts’ problems. But there was no hostility between them. Everyone was concerned with their own personal thing. There they were, sitting in the same room talking about the same topic, except that the employed brought their coffee in little deli cups and the street people drank the coffee provided by the AA.
I was leaning back, relaxing into the voices, when a white guy behind me started to speak. I wasn’t paying attention at first but I could tell from his voice that he was white. It was in his pronunciation and the little sounds he made between the words. He got more nervous as he talked, clearing his throat too much and mumbling. Then he must have leaned forward on his chair because his hard breathing was suddenly on the back of my neck and it felt wrong. Something in his voice made my stomach get tight before I could realize why. I think my stomach heard him before my head did.
He’s been having problems with his woman, he said in between coughing and other distortions. She didn’t want to see him anymore so she cut out with no note, nothing. He knows where she’s staying, though, and keeps trying to get in touch.
“I just want her to talk to me,” he said. “Just talk to me.”
It was the way he repeated the “talk to me” part that made my spine pull away from my back. He repeated it at AA exactly the way he had repeated it on the answering machine tape on my living room floor.
A kind of unfamiliar stillness came over me, the kind you read about in books when people reach the tops of mountains or hide from the soldiers or watch their lover leave forever. Sitting behind me was the same man who had put his hands around my Punkette’s neck and broken it. It was the man who had carried her limp, light body through the projects and heard it splash into the slimy, shiny surface off the East River Drive. It was the man whose voice sat on a spool of cassette tape in a box in my apartment.
In my head was the sound of a waterfall that hit the rocks like a drum solo or a forty machine-gun salute. That’s when I turned around and saw his long hair and David Crosby mustache, and his leather jacket with the worn-out fringes. It was the next-door neighbor from Charlotte’s building. The cab driver with the electric shock on his door to keep the junkies away. It was the same man.