“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.
I
rest 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.
A
fter 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.