The Call

The meeting has just started when Nick pulls out his cell phone. He looks at the screen. We’re sitting next to each other in steel fold-out chairs, and I can see it’s a text message, but I can’t make out what it says. He nudges me with his elbow, then leans in close, keeping his voice low.

“C’mon,” he says, “we have to go.”

This is the morning after New Year’s and the place is packed with locals and tourists and newcomers who very likely, after a bout of hard partying the night before, made resolutions to swear off the bottle once and for all. Some of them are still drunk or terribly hungover. The odor of stale alcohol hangs in the air. Nick and I are in the center of the middle row, so it takes some maneuvering to get to the aisle. Someone is reading aloud “How It Works” and a cranky woman gives me a dirty look when I accidently bump her knee trying to slip by her. Outside Nick tells me what’s going on. This is about a year before he learns that he has cancer, though he must’ve already had the ugly seed of it growing inside him, metastasizing as we speak.

“You know Johnny D.?”

I shake my head. I’m terrible with names and it’s only getting worse with age.

“The carpet guy?” he says.

That jogs my memory.

“Yeah,” I say.

Johnny of Johnny’s Carpet Cleaning. His name and business is written in wavy script on the side of a van I’ve noticed a few times in the parking lot outside our A.A. club. But I don’t recall seeing that van or Johnny at a meeting in quite a while. So many people come in and out of the rooms of A.A. that nobody could possibly keep track of them all.

Nick claps me on the back.

“Well,” he says, “you’re going on your first Twelfth Step call, buddy.”

At the time I’m only one year and eight months sober and don’t feel qualified to be rescuing drunks, which is what a Twelfth Step call is about. If they’re halfway coherent, you do your best to convince them of the severity of their problem, and usually, since they called for help in the first place, they’re willing to listen. You want to get them when they’re most vulnerable and remorseful, when they’re hungover, feeling sick and lousy and full of regret. You want them to vow not to drink, at least for today. Then you take them to a meeting right away. Sooner the better. I tell Nick I don’t feel too confident about this, trying to save a drunk with so little sober time under my belt. It’s a job for more experienced members of A.A.

“Even if you only had one day,” he says, “it’s one day more than this poor bastard. Besides, it’s not about time. It’s about being there for another drunk when he needs you.” He unlocks the car door for me and I get in. He slides in on his side and starts the engine. “This isn’t my first Twelfth Step call with this guy. ‘Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly . . .’” he says, quoting from the Big Book about how sobriety comes quickly for some and slowly, if ever, for others. “Either way we don’t give up. Put on your seat belt.”

Johnny lives in a nice two-story house in a middle-class neighborhood in Lake Arrowhead. But the front yard is overgrown with weeds, and the house’s paint is chipped in spots along the eaves and around the windows. One of the glass panes in the front door is broken out and covered with cardboard. A van is parked at an odd angle in the driveway. Nick and I get out of the car and walk up to the porch. He rings the bell. There’s no answer. He looks at me and rings it again. Again there’s no answer. He reaches for the doorknob and turns it. It’s unlocked. Nick goes in first but I’m right behind him, and we don’t have to go far to find the guy, just past the foyer, in the living room where he’s passed out on the couch.

Fortunately he’s lying on his side, so he didn’t choke on his vomit, because there’s a mess of it on the cushion beside his head. He’s wet his pants, too, but the hardest part is seeing his little boy, maybe seven or eight, curled up in the lounge chair next to him, playing a video game on the TV. The sound is off so as not to disturb his father, I’m guessing, though in his state it wouldn’t have mattered. The little boy is wearing Ninja Turtles pajamas. He has big round eyes, and I remember looking into them, as he looks at us, before he returns his attention to the game. That really gets me. How two strangers coming into his home doesn’t even faze the kid. And his ears! I’ve never seen anything like them. They stick straight out from his head. I looked it up later and it’s a condition, a deformity, commonly known as bat ears. Imagine the teasing and ridicule he gets at school. Combine that with a drunk for a father, and apparently no mother to take up the slack, and it’s easy to see why the kid prefers to reside in the world of video games rather than the messed-up one around him.

I’d say Johnny is in his early thirties, but the drinking life ages you, and he looks older. He has thick bags under his eyes and the coarse skin of a heavy smoker. On the coffee table is an empty half gallon of cheap Popov vodka, an empty pack of Camels, an ashtray full of butts, and the cell phone he used to text Nick, apparently before he passed out. Nick scoots Johnny’s legs back to make a spot to sit.

“Johnny,” he says. “Johnny. Wake up.”

That doesn’t do it, so Nick shakes him a little. Slowly Johnny’s eyes open. Slowly it dawns on him, who he’s looking at. I doubt he remembers texting Nick. The first time he tries to sit up, he falls back on the couch, but on the second attempt he makes it.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

I know those words all too well. I’ve said them myself so many times to so many others in circumstances very much like this one.

“You have nothing to be sorry about. You’re an alcoholic,” Nick says, “just doing what us alcoholics do best. But we’re here for you, man.”

Johnny puts his elbows on his knees and hides his face in his hands and then it pours out, tears and all, admitting how he needs help. How he knows it’s killing him but he can’t quit. How he hates himself. How he loves his son and doesn’t want to lose him. His feelings run from fear and frustration and sadness to anger, hopelessness, despair, and self-pity all rolled into one painful outburst. I look at the kid. He hasn’t missed a beat playing his video game. It’s as if he hasn’t heard a word, and that gets me again, how he’s able to shut it all out. Shut it all down. After a while, when the sobbing subsides, Nick pats him on the back.

“Let’s get you to a meeting.”

“Right now?”

“After you shower and change,” he says. “We can’t bring you like this.”

Johnny looks at his son.

“What about Hunter?”

“What about him?”

“I can’t leave him alone.”

“He can come with us.” Nick nods at me. “Jim will look after him.”

“It’s no problem. It’s no big deal,” I say. “I have three boys myself.”

Johnny tells him to put on some clothes, and when he heads for his room, we help his father up off the couch and guide him down the hallway, one of us on each side, so we can catch him in case he falls. In the bathroom, he has trouble getting his pants off and keeping his balance, so Nick puts the lid down on the toilet seat and makes him sit first. The last thing we want is him slipping and cracking his head. He can’t get his fingers to unbutton his shirt, they’re shaking too much, so I help him.

He looks at me.

“Pretty pathetic when you can’t unbutton your own fucking shirt.”

“Hey,” I say, “one time I was up at Deep Creek. You know how steep the trails are there. I bent over to tie my shoe and I was so plastered I went right over the side. Must’ve fell ten, fifteen feet. I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself.”

“No shit?”

“No shit,” I say. “I was pretty bruised up but I didn’t break a bone.”

It isn’t true, the story I tell him, but if it makes him feel better, I don’t see the harm. He showers and changes, and soon, at least from appearances, he’s presentable in Levi’s and a V-neck sweater and some suede slip-ons. Hunter does a good job getting himself ready, except that he has his T-shirt turned inside out. “Better grab a jacket,” Nick tells him, before we leave. It’s the tail end of winter, and it’s chilly, forty degrees tops today.

The meeting runs two hours, and by the time we get back, it’s more than half over. That means I’m in charge of looking after Hunter for the next thirty or forty minutes. There’s a Rite Aid drugstore in the shopping complex across from our A.A. club, and to escape the cold I figure we can kill some time browsing the aisles. I buy him a box of Hot Tamales and a Hulk Hogan action figure. I get a pack of cigarettes for myself.

Outside the store, while I’m lighting up, we hear sirens. They get louder and louder, and then there it is, an ambulance, pulling up in front of the A.A. club. Two paramedics jump out and rush inside. In no time a small crowd from the Rite Aid gathers in the parking lot and they’re all staring. If I’d had any sense I would’ve taken the kid’s hand and led him in the opposite direction, so he never would’ve had to see his father wheeled out on a stretcher, one shoe missing. If I’d had any sense I might’ve reacted more quickly and kept this memory, this image, from being imprinted on the young boy’s mind. But I’m caught up in the moment and don’t think fast enough.

I expect Hunter to run after his father. I expect to have to grab him. I expect him to shout or scream or burst into tears. But none of these things happen. Instead he stares at the ground, and after the ambulance leaves and the crowd disperses, he sits down on a nearby bench. He opens the bag from the Rite Aid and takes out the Hulk Hogan action figure and starts working the arms around. I understand his reaction. I have a boy around his age who once witnessed me have an alcoholic breakdown at the dinner table and quietly got up and took his plate over to the couch and turned on the TV. I’ll never forget that. It’s a sad and pathetic thing when the innocent child becomes accustomed to the insanities of the parent.

Having someone carted out on a stretcher during a meeting would ordinarily be grounds for adjourning early. But the members of A.A. are not ordinary. Most of us are used to seeing the inside of ambulances and jails, blacking out or wrecking cars, and when we’re trading war stories in a meeting, we’ll often laugh at such things where others would naturally recoil in horror. Or disgust. Hell or high water that meeting continues, and I sit there with Hunter until it’s over, all as if nothing unusual has happened. Finally Nick and the others come out the door. I can see him looking around for me, so I wave to him. He spots me and we walk toward each other across the parking lot. Hunter, he’s still playing with his Hulk Hogan, and he can’t hear us. We’re too far away.

“What happened?” I say.

“He passed out. Just fell out of his chair right onto the floor and started to seize.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Jesus Christ is right,” Nick says. “He was twitching and convulsing all over.”

“You think he’ll be okay?”

“I think so. He was starting to come out of it when the paramedics got here.” Nick reaches into his pocket and hands me a cell phone. This is back in the day of flip-tops when you didn’t need a password to get into somebody’s phone. “It’s Johnny’s. Hang on to it. I called his parents and they’re on their way now. Can you look after Hunter a little longer? They’re driving in from Indio, so it’ll be a couple hours. I want to be at the hospital when Johnny comes to and see if I can’t get him to check himself into rehab.” Nick glances at the kid sitting on the bench outside the Rite Aid. “He’ll lose that boy if he doesn’t clean up.”

I’m surprised he hasn’t lost him already, but I don’t say it. I ask about the boy’s mother. Nick shakes his head.

“No,” he says, “she’s worse off than him. That’s why the kid lives with Johnny.”

With time to kill I drive Hunter over to Lake Arrowhead Village where there are restaurants and outlet stores and souvenir shops. I tell him that his grandparents are on their way to pick him up, that they’ll be here soon, and while we’re waiting we go to McDonald’s and I get him a Happy Meal. I buy myself a Big Mac. We take the warm bags down to the lake and sit on the bank. It’s not a huge lake, maybe a couple miles long, but the water is clear and blue and it’s nice to look at. The shoreline across from us is cluttered with expensive homes. Most are unoccupied, second homes for wealthy people from LA and Orange County who only use them in the summer or on winter holidays. In among the houses are tall pines and beyond them are mountains and more trees. Our breath is white in the cold air and the wind off the lake makes my eyes water.

“You go to Grandview?” I say. Grandview is one of the elementary schools up here.

“Yeah,” he says.

“What grade?”

“Second.”

“I got a little boy in fourth. Nate Brown. Do you know him?”

He doesn’t say anything and I let it go at that. Soon a momma duck spots us eating and swims over with seven baby ducklings trailing her in a straight row. That’s enough to get a smile out of anybody, but not this kid, at least not today. But he still feeds them, tearing pieces off his hamburger bun and tossing them into the water. I do the same.

Hunter doesn’t look at me.

“Is he dying?”

“What?”

“My dad, is he dying? You can tell me,” he says. “I’m old enough.”

These are not the words of a child, and they startle me, how plainly and emotionlessly he speaks of something so absolute as death. Maybe, as a way of steeling himself, he’s considered it a real possibility for his father many times before. I’m guessing he has, and it makes me wonder about my own boys, if I worried them like this. I’m sure I did, and it pains me. I wish it were different but I know it is not.

“I have a right to know,” he says.

I try to put my arm around him but he’s not having it. He pulls away.

“Your dad is fine,” I tell him. “He just drank too much and passed out. They called the ambulance because they couldn’t wake him up. But he’s not dying. Don’t think like that. He’s going to be okay.”

He looks down at the dirt, then out across the lake. I think for a second.

“You know how to skip rocks?”

He doesn’t say anything.

I pick up a rock and throw it sidearm across the lake. It bounces along the surface three times before it sinks. I do it again. Four skips this time. I catch him looking. “Give it a try,” I say. He acts like he’s not interested, but after some coaxing, if only to shut me up, he looks around for a rock. On his first two throws the rocks hit the water and go straight down.

“This is stupid,” he says.

“You just have to get the hang of it,” I say.

I tell him that he wants a flat rock, the flattest he can find, and then I show him how to hold it, between his thumb and index finger. “Let your wrist do the work,” I tell him. I demonstrate how you lean over and fling it from your waist, from the side, so your arm is parallel to the water. He gives it another try and this one sails out across the lake, skipping once, twice, three times.

“There you go,” I say, “now that’s a throw.”

I think I detect a smile. Then Johnny’s cell phone rings. It’s Hunter’s grandmother. She’s waiting on us at the Rite Aid, and I tell her we’ll be there in ten minutes. The boy throws another rock. It skips three times. Those crazy ears of his are bright red from the cold.

She’s standing outside the doors of the Rite Aid when we get there. Her hair is gray and made up into a bob and she’s wearing a faded Levi’s jacket, jeans, and boots. As we approach, the grandfather slips out from behind the wheel of a Ford pickup parked nearby and comes over and shakes my hand. He wears a straw cowboy hat. There are a couple bales of hay in the back, so I’m guessing they own a small ranch in the desert of Indio. He thanks me for my troubles, and I tell him it’s no trouble at all. She thanks me, too, and when she bends down and hugs the boy, he hugs her back. They seem like decent people. I like to think that he’ll be okay.

I like to think that his father will be okay, too. I like to think that he’s hit his last bottom and won’t drink anymore. I like to think that the next time the boy goes to the lake it’ll be with his father and they’ll feed the ducks together and skip rocks. Then I think of my youngest, Nate, and I don’t remember ever taking him to the lake to feed the ducks and skip rocks. I promise myself I will, and I do, the following week. We have a fine time, just the two of us, and later when I tell Nick about it, he says that’s one of the gifts of sobriety, how we come to appreciate lives other than our own.

Fast-forward about eight months.

I haven’t seen Johnny or his son since that day. Talk around the A.A. circle is that he moved off the mountain and into a halfway house in San Bernardino after he left rehab. Another rumor is that he’d moved back home with his parents in Indio. I don’t know how much if any of it is true, but I’m doing some shopping at our local grocery store when I spot him and Hunter in the aisle with the breakfast cereals. Those bat ears, they aren’t sticking out anymore. He must’ve had them worked on, and recently, because behind each ear is a thin strip of white gauze. And Johnny looks younger, thinner, no alcoholic bloat. It’s summer and he has on a tank top and his shoulders are sunburned. The boy wears shorts and flip-flops and he looks sunburned, too. I’d say, by the looks of them, that they’ve been down at the lake swimming. Maybe fishing. Hunter is pushing the cart. He stops and pulls a box of Lucky Charms off the shelf.

“Can I have these?”

“How about the Honey Nut Cheerios?” Johnny says. “You like those. They’re healthier.”

“I’m tired of Cheerios.”

“Put it back,” he says, but when the boy starts to do as he’s told, Johnny sees the disappointment in his eyes and has a change of heart.

“Okay, okay. But next time it’s Cheerios.”

Hunter smiles. I thought I’d detected a faint smile from him at the lake some eight months earlier when he skipped his first rock, but there is no mistaking this one. Neither of them notices me watching, and I’d like to say hello, but it’s better this way. Seeing me would only take them back to a place that I’m sure they would prefer not to go. I push my cart past them and continue down the aisle.