Even the Wicked

"Sometimes it works that way."

"So I straightened out some things in my life," he said, "and then I picked up a drink, and guess what?

Everything's fine."

"That's great," I said.

He narrowed his eyes. "Sanctimonious prick," he said. "You got no right to patronize me."

"You're absolutely right, Marty. My apologies."

"Fuck you and your apology. Fuck you and the apology you rode in on, or should that be the Appaloosa you rode in on? Sit down, for Christ's sake. Where the hell do you think you're going?"

"Catch some air."

"The air's not going anyplace, you don't have to be in a rush to catch it. Jesus, don't tell me I insulted you."

"I've got a busy day," I said. "That's all."

"Busy day my ass. I'm a little drunk and it makes you uncomfortable. Admit it."

"I admit it."

"Well," he said, and frowned, as if the admission was the last thing he'd expected from me. "That case I apologize. That all right?"

"Of course."

"You accept my apology?"

"You don't need to apologize," I said, "but yes, of course I accept it."

"So we're okay then, you and me."

"Absolutely."

"You know what I wish? I wish you'd drink a fucking beer."

"Not today, Marty."

" 'Not today.' Listen, I know the jargon, all right? 'Not today.' You just do it a day at a time, don't you?"

"Like everything else."

He frowned. "I don't mean to bait you. It's the booze talking, you know that."

"Yes."

"It's not me wants you to drink, it's the drink wants you to drink.

You know what I'm saying?"

"Sure."

"What I found out, I learned it helps me more than it hurts me. It does more for me than it does to me.

You know who else said that? Winston Churchill. A great man, wouldn't you say?"

"I'd say so, yes."

"Fucking Limey drunk. No friend to the Irish either, the son of a bitch. More for me than to me, he was right about that though, you got to give him that much. I got the story of the year, you realize that?"

"I guess you do."

"The story of the year. Locally, I mean. Overall scheme of things, what's Will in comparison to Bosnia, huh? You want to weigh 'em in the balance, Will's lighter than air. But who do you know that gives two shits about Bosnia? Will you tell me that? The only way Bosnia sells a newspaper's if you can manage to get 'rape' in the headline." He picked up the second bottle of Rolling Rock and took a sip. "The story of the year," he said.

* * *

After I finally got away from him, what I probably should have done was go to a meeting. When I first got sober I had found it unsettling to be around people who were drinking, but as I grew more comfortable with my own sobriety I gradually became less uneasy in the presence of drink. Many of my friends these days are sober, but quite a few are not, and some like Mick Ballou and Danny Boy Bell are heavy daily drinkers. Their drinking never seems to bother me. Now and then Mick and I make a night of it, sitting up until dawn in his saloon at Fiftieth and Tenth, sharing stories and silences. Never on those occasions do I find myself wishing that I were drinking, or that he were not.

But Marty McGraw was the kind of edgy drunk who made me uncomfortable. I can't say I wanted a drink by the time I got out of there, but neither did I much want to go on feeling the way I felt, as if I'd been up for days and had drunk far too much coffee.

I stopped at a diner for a hamburger and a piece of pie, then just started walking without paying too much attention to where I was headed. My mind was playing with what I'd learned about Will's letter and when it had been mailed, and I worried this piece of information like a dog with a bone, running it through my mind, then thinking of something else, then coming back to it and turning the thoughts this way and that, as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and I could fit them into place if I just held them at the right angle.

I was headed uptown when I started, and I suppose if I'd picked up a tailwind I might have walked clear to the Cloisters. But I didn't get that far. When I came out of my reverie I was only a block from my apartment. But it was a long block, a crosstown block, and it put me at a location that was significant in and of itself. I was at the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, standing directly in front of Jimmy Armstrong's saloon.

Why? It wasn't because I wanted a drink, was it? Because I certainly didn't think I wanted a drink, nor did I feel as though I wanted a drink. There is, to be sure, a part of me deep within my being that will always thirst for the ignorant bliss that is alcohol's promise. Some of us call that part of ourselves "the disease," and tend to personify it. "My disease is talking to me," you'll hear them say at meetings. "My disease wants me to drink. My disease is trying to destroy me." Alcoholism, I once heard a woman explain, is like a monster sleeping inside you.

Sometimes the monster begins to stir, and that's why we have to go to meetings. The meetings bore the monster and it dozes off again.