Ninety Days (5 page)

I have no retail experience, no bankable talents. I remember how a colleague at my first job in New York took copywriting courses at the Learning Annex, left publishing, and became a successful advertising executive. But this guy was brilliant, exceptionally brilliant, and that world would require, I imagine, schmoozing with potential clients, wooing new business over dinners and drinks, and without booze to get me through, it does not seem possible. Graduate school of any kind would be a decent way to delay the oncoming future, but with what money? How could I incur student loans on top of the already formidable and growing debt I’ve amassed from rehab, legal bills, and credit cards? Never mind that my third-tier college transcript is a speckled mess of mediocre grades and summer courses at the University of Connecticut to make up for the semester I lost when I was expelled. What graduate school would have me?

The custodian of the Meeting House has still not shown up to unlock the doors. I’ve left messages everywhere and still no one is picking up. The meeting begins in half an hour, and as my future prospects seem less and less appealing I start to think again of going to Mark’s. It’s the end of the day, Mark is no doubt ready to get high, and the dealers are about to turn their cell phones on.
Fuck it,
I say and start walking down 16th Street, away from the Meeting House, toward Sixth Avenue, toward Mark’s. I can feel the adrenaline spark through my veins and the doomy clouds of my futureless future begin to streak away. Just as I approach Sixth Avenue I see someone on the north side of 16th Street waving. It’s Asa. Neat as a pin, fit as a fiddle, and heading right toward me.
You going to the meeting?
he chirps, and I can’t muster an answer. He looks especially crisp today in his usual uniform.
What’s going on?
he asks, and as I struggle to come up with something to say to get away from him, he puts his freckled hand on my upper arm and says,
OK, let’s go.

By the time we get to the Meeting House, the door has been unlocked and someone is inside making coffee. The dusty schoolhouse smell mingling with the aroma of cheap, freshly brewed coffee acts as an antidote to the giddy, pre-high adrenaline of just minutes before. The obsession to use fades just as quickly as it had arrived, and while I watch Asa help the old guy who’s setting up the meeting move a bench to the far wall, it hits me how close I just came to relapsing, and what a miracle it is that he materialized precisely when he did.
Jesus, I’m sick,
I think. Unlike the people who can get sober on willpower, I need cheap coffee, church basements, serendipitous sidewalk interventions, and relapsing cokehead dog walkers. But what is most discouraging is that all these things and more—Jack, Polly, Madge, Asa, The Library, my family, my remaining friends, the staggering losses and humiliations of the past few months, the empire of people I’ve hurt—are still, it seems, not enough to keep me clean.

People come in from their day, mostly nine-to-five types who can’t make the midday meetings like the ones at The Library. They start filling the chairs and benches of the large room which doubles, depending on the hour, as a Quaker meeting house, a dance studio, and a gathering space for other programs of recovery. Chic, chatty, confident—these people seem a world away from the struggles that must have brought them here.
How the hell did they do it?
I wonder, as I remember how close I just came to picking up. If Asa hadn’t hauled me in from the street, I’d be right now pressing the buzzer at Mark’s apartment. Right now waiting for him to buzz me in and hand me a crack pipe. It was Asa and nothing else that kept me from using just minutes ago.

I look around from sober face to sober face and wonder again how these people found their way. How will I? I sense that just being here and in places like it will not be enough. I’m in the room but not of it. Present but not a part of. Saved, for a little while, but not sober. Not really. I come like a beggar to these meetings and I’m fed, yes, pulled in off the street even, as I was today. But it’s clear that something beyond my own need and ability to ask for help will keep me here, involve me in what is going on, connect me to something greater than my addiction, and give me a fighting chance of staying clean and getting on with my life. But what?

The meeting begins. As the basket is passed and people toss in their bills, I raise my hand and say that I have eight days, and as I do I know that eventually, not today, and probably not tonight, but at some point soon, I will pick up. I don’t know what I’ll do with my life, if I’ll ever have a full-time job again, another love, where I’ll live or even if I will, but I will use again, this much I know.

My parents divorce the year I move to New York. I am twenty-one and they sell the deep-in-the-woods Connecticut house I grew up in and move to New Hampshire. They go there to save their marriage, but soon after they get settled, everything falls apart. It is my mother who leaves, finally, after years of threatening to, and in her flight back to Connecticut, as my father cancels credit cards and makes bank accounts inaccessible to her, she somehow lays her hands on a little pile of silver—ingots and coins they’d purchased as investments decades before.

A few years after their divorce is finalized, my mother gives me the silver to sell for her in the city. At the time, the market for precious metals is low and we decide to wait and sell later. The silver sits in the back of my closet for years in an old red and blue nylon knapsack I picked up in Scotland on my study-abroad semester in college. She asks about it occasionally but either I am too busy or it’s not quite the right moment to sell. Eventually, she stops asking. The market crests and crashes dozens of times while the silver sits, unsold and unseen, in closets of apartments I move to in Midtown, the Upper East Side, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village. As I move, the silver moves. I forget it exists until I am packing up my things to leave One Fifth and see the familiar old knapsack. I don’t remember, at first, what it holds but notice how unbelievably heavy it is when I pull it down from the shelf in the hall closet. It goes with the rest of my things to the studio on 15th Street, gets shoved to the back of another closet, and there it sits.

Meanwhile, my eight days become eleven and Polly’s four become seven and then—after she joins Heather on a long, coke-crazed night—one. We raise our hands at The Library, count our days; people clap, encourage, and pass us their phone numbers. My routine calcifies: wake up, feed Benny, long workout at the gym, Library meetings at 12:30 and two o’clock, dog run with Polly,
Oprah,
Meeting House at six, diner dinner with Asa or others from the meeting, and phone calls to Jack, Kim, Asa, Jean, and Polly in between, before, and after. Once or twice a week I’ll see Dave or Jean or Cy for dinner or a movie, but Jack has warned against straying too far outside the fold of recovery until I have ninety days. Bags of food arrive at least once a week from Jean, and when we see each other she’ll ask if I enjoyed this or that and if there’s anything special I’d like. I will never have much to say in response other than
Thank you.

On Saturdays there is a 10:30 a.m. meeting that many people from The Library go to, and on Saturday evenings a big gay group that, God help me, because Asa goes, I go to. The skinny boys with white belts are crawling all over the Saturday night meeting. Rafe is usually there, too, always says
Bill
in his particular tone and clocks me in his laser-like way, making it clear he sees me far more clearly than I see myself. Most of these guys talk about dance clubs and Fire Island, and they’re all young and cute and skinny, and I don’t belong. I feel uncouth and lumpy and unkempt and listen only for the differences in their stories, not the similarities. I’m gay but in this place I feel as if there’s a manual for gays that covers everything from clothes, hairstyle, and slang to eating, drinking, and using habits, and everyone in the room owns it but me. I tell Jack this one night on the phone and he asks me if there have been other experiences, other times, when I felt as if I never got the manual. When I think back to high school, college, book publishing, crack dens even—every world I entered—I felt exactly the same way: that there was a set of rules, a primer of some kind, that everyone else had read and understood but I had never seen. Like so many of my worries, Jack tells me, this one—right down to the word
manual
—is one of the bedrock feelings of most alcoholics and addicts. Again I’m relieved in some way, but also humiliated and annoyed that most everything I complain about he is able to label and place within both his own experience and the broader population of alcoholics and addicts.
You’re just a garden variety junkie,
he tells me yet again and says good night.

At one of the gay meetings I meet, or re-meet, a guy named Luke whom I met a few times through mutual friends over the years and who, to my surprise, is sober. He’s a screenwriter, my age, has a sober boyfriend, and has stories of using that make me wish we’d gotten sloppy together at least a few times. He feels like family from the second we reconnect, and even though he is only a year and a half sober, he seems like one of the Big Kids, like Madge and Rafe and Pam. Luke went to college with Noah and they know each other vaguely. The mutual friends, Noah connection, and similar stories of using make Luke one of the few people from the rooms who bridge both my old life and new. Everyone else is a world away from book publishing and my life with Noah, which is mainly a relief, but sometimes, when I am trying to relate details of the life I lived and ruined to people like Polly and Asa, it can be frustrating. When I try to explain this frustration to Jack, he just laughs and says,
Honey, keep coming back
(an expression, minus the
honey,
people use in the rooms, usually when people counting days raise their hands and share).

So. The silver. It just sits there. I bump into it a few times while pulling shoes down from the upper shelf of the closet, or knock against it as I’m putting away some blanket or box. This is Mom’s, I remind myself each time, not mine. I have a few thousand dollars in my account—money remaining from a former client who repaid money I’d loaned her last year to cover an unexpected tax bill. Kim contacts the former client when I’m in Lenox Hill and miraculously a big chunk of cash materializes just as a deposit is needed for rehab. It is only in the last week that Kim has transferred the remaining money—just a little over two thousand dollars—into my checking account.

After the deposit at the rehab (which represents less than a quarter of the total bill, which they’ve agreed to let me pay back over time), the next big expense is the apartment. The deposit on the apartment and the broker’s fee came from money I borrowed from Elliot—a guy I had an affair with a few years before, who became a friend. He lived with his ex-boyfriend a few blocks from One Fifth and they had, a few years back, broken up. The affair is short and boozy and ends weeks after it began on a weekend when Noah is away. Afterward, we become friends and see each other for dinner every few months or so. I don’t see Elliot much in the six months preceding my relapse, but once I make it to White Plains he is one of the few people other than Jean who visit on a regular basis. He comes on the weekends to play tennis on the cracked, weed-choked asphalt slabs that pass for courts. We play for a while and walk the grounds. We don’t talk much, but the distraction of the game and the easy air between us are welcome reprieves from the tormenting thoughts of my recent history and my all-too-near future. Elliot arrives each time with tennis racquets in hand and little gesture toward or judgment of the dark path that led me here. Elliot is exactly my age, exactly my height, similarly featured and colored, but has an enviable midwestern openness and ease that I don’t possess. Elliot runs a highly respected nonprofit organization, we have virtually no one in common, and besides Dave and Jean and Julia and Cy, he is one of my few remaining friends. My once crowded life has dwindled to a few resilient stragglers. Elliot is one.

So Elliot lends me the money for the first month’s rent, deposit, and broker’s fee. I ask him because before I return to New York, he offers to lend me money if I need it. Some last scrap of vanity has kept me from going into my financial problems with him but he clearly detects trouble. At the time that he offers, asking Elliot for money seems out of the question, but weeks later he’ll be the one person I think I can ask. I can’t ask Dave for one more favor or helping hand, as he’s at the breaking point already, and I can’t risk losing Jean’s friendship—​
especially
not now when I have so few people left. I have a strong sense that if I asked her, it’d be curtains. Her wealth, I imagine, must be a familiar elephant in the room, a known animal brushing against most interactions. Now that I’m wiped out financially, it suddenly becomes, between us, an entire herd.

The first day Jean visits me in White Plains we go for a walk. As we walk I complain about how I’m not sure I can return to New York because I have no money, not sure I can stay in the rehab because it’s so expensive, not sure I won’t have to move in with my sister in Maine, and not sure I’ll ever crawl out from under the mountain of debt that has risen since the day I relapsed two months ago. It’s all I talk about because at the moment it’s all I can think about. As we’re walking Jean stiffens and goes quiet. She swats an invisible fly from her face and she doesn’t turn to look at me when I ask her if she’s OK. The elephant has its hoof on her throat and suddenly I recognize that the only way to make it go away is to name it. Loudly. So I blurt out something about how I’m suddenly poor, getting poorer by the second, and that I’m terrified. That I’m going to need to talk about being terrified with my friends, and since she’s one of the few I have left, I need to be able to worry to her without her thinking I’m doing so because I want her to solve the problem.
So ditch me because I’m tedious, but not because you’re worried I want you to bail me out.
I don’t remember what she says to this but I remember her laughing, and that by the time we returned from our walk, the elephants had lumbered away.

So I return to New York, see the studio on 15th Street, and even though the rent is pretty cheap, I can’t afford it. The landlord and broker need all that money. Since Jean and Dave are out, and because most of my family is broke, I ask Elliot. The first time in my adult life I’ve asked anyone for money, and Elliot’s
yes
is as uncomplicated as if I’d asked him for a French fry off his dinner plate. As uncomfortable as the asking is, as grim as the circumstances are that bring me to the question, the yes is a miracle. The yes, with all its confidence and kindness, is like Jane’s kiss on the street near One Fifth, or Jean’s bags of food. It cuts through the plaque of shame and reminds me that somewhere underneath the wretched addict is a person worth being kind to, even worth betting on. And I do not look like a good bet, that much is clear from any perspective, but when I tell Elliot I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay him back, he just says,
I’m not worried. I know you will.

With Elliot’s money, May’s rent is paid. I have no idea where June will come from. I’m eleven days sober, have a couple of grand in the bank, and with less than two weeks before it’s time to pay next month’s rent, I remember the silver. Of course,
the silver.
I’ll sell the silver, pay the rent for June and July at least, and pay my mother back someday, somehow. At coffee after the Meeting House that night I ask Luke if he knows of a place that buys silver and he tells me about a guy on 25th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. As soon as he says the address my stomach tightens: it’s in one of Jack’s off-limits trigger zones, just a few doors down from the office building where our literary agency had been. I don’t say anything to Luke, but as I head toward home that night I think, I won’t tell Jack and I’ll just get it over with.

The next day, I grab my little blue and red knapsack and head up Sixth. The store is a combination pawnshop and rug showroom. It’s huge and dark with great piles of carpets rising from the dusty floors and spider plants withering in the window. As I wait for someone to come out from behind the piles of rugs to help me, I imagine how many unseen rooms like this exist in the city, spaces behind doors I’ll walk by a thousand times and never see. Since coming back, I’ve been amazed by how little I’d noticed before. Streets I’d walked on for ten years and never saw what was on them: pink town houses, eighteenth-century synagogues, ceramic shops, spectacular doorknobs, Italian bookshops. As with so much, I had been aware of so little off my narrow path or outside my own limited world. And there are so many worlds—fashion, academia, real estate, dance, education, firefighting, finance, advertising—each feeling, I imagine, like the center of the universe. All these separate and self-contained worlds making up entire cities within the city, coursing alongside and invisible to one another.
How is this occurring to me for the first time?
I wonder. How small my life and the world it happened within both seem now. What I know: book publishing, restaurants that serve vodka, crack dealers and crack dens. Bookstores, literary agencies, rug-strewn, book-crammed living rooms of editors and authors; gloomy apartments where people smoke themselves into shaky shadows, these I know. And now there are all the meeting rooms where I go each day and the diners and coffee shops we descend on in packs after. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are the rooms for sex addicts and crystal meth addicts and debtors, and the rooms for all the people who love them—a whole empire of rooms filling regularly, every hour of every day and with no one paying or getting paid to be there. Invisible cities, invisible rooms we pass by until by way of desperation or desire or ultimatum they are revealed to us. Like this room—a dusty cavern with spider plants, Persian rugs, and now a knapsack filled with silver.

A middle-aged man with a trim beard, dark skin, and a bright, singsong voice comes out and says hello and can he help me. I unpack the silver and after he’s inspected each ingot and coin he pulls out a calculator and begins to elegantly tap the keys until, after a minute or two, he turns the face of the gadget to me and on its screen is a figure just north of six thousand dollars. Nearly three months’ rent, I calculate, and right away, without pausing, I say,
Deal.

After he slowly writes out a detailed receipt and cuts me a check, I rush to the nearest Chase branch—the one at Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street—and deposit it into my checking account. I go to the teller instead of an ATM, thinking the money will make its way into my account faster. I hand over the check, grab my second receipt of the day, and head toward the door. I enter the small vestibule that separates the inside of the bank from the street. I’ve been here before, hundreds of times—it’s the branch where Kate and I opened the business and client trust accounts for the agency—but suddenly I remember the last time I visited, over two months before, deep in the bender that landed me in the emergency room at Lenox Hill. I remember that I’d run out of drugs and exceeded my ATM limit for the day, so with passport and cash card in hand, I rushed to this branch. Rough from many sleepless nights and crashing from more than an hour without a hit, I withdrew three thousand dollars, stuffed it in the upper front pocket of my black Arcteryx jacket, and headed for the door. In my hurry I failed to notice that the zipper on the bottom of the pocket was unzipped, and when I stepped out of the bank into the vestibule, the cash dropped from my jacket. With air rushing through the doors on either side of me, the money flew everywhere. Hundred-dollar bills, mostly. I remember how, for a moment, it didn’t look real and I was mesmerized. It looked like one of those game show challenges where people are put in a chamber of wind-tossed cash and they have thirty seconds to grab as much as they can. But when I saw a hundred-dollar bill fly out the door into the street I snapped to life.