Actually it's pretty interesting a fair percentage of the time, and sometimes it's better than a night out at a comedy club. When you speak at an AA meeting you're supposed to tell what your life used to be like, what happened, and what it's like now. Not surprisingly, a lot of the stories are pretty grim— people don't generally decide to quit drinking because they've been hurting their sides laughing all the time. Still, the grimmest stories come out funny some of the time, and that's how it went that night inRichmond Hill .
Toni went first. She'd been married for a time to a compulsive gambler, and she told how he had lost her in a poker game and won her back several months later. It was a story I'd heard before, but it was especially funny the way she told it this time. She got laughs all through her talk, and I guess her mood was infectious, because I followed her and found myself telling stories from my days on the job, first as a patrolman and then as a detective. I was coming up with things I hadn't even thought of in years, and they were coming out funny.
Then Richie finished out the hour. He'd run his own public-relations firm through years of blackout drinking, and some of his stories were wonderful. For years he had his first drink of the day every morning in a Chinese luncheonette onBayard Street . "I got off the subway, put a five-dollar bill on the counter, drank a double scotch neat, got back on the subway and rode to my office. I never said a word to them and they never said a word to me. I knew I was safe there, because what the hell did they know? And, more important, who would they tell?"
We had coffee and cookies afterward and one of the members gave us a lift to the subway. We rode back intoManhattan and uptown toColumbus Circle . It was past eleven by the time we got there, and Toni said she was hungry and asked if anybody wanted to get something to eat.
Richie begged off, saying he was tired and wanted to make an early night of it. I suggested the Flame, a coffee shop where a lot of the crowd from our home group generally winds up after a meeting.
"I think I'd like something a little more upscale," she said. "And more substantial. I missed dinner. I had a couple of cookies at the meeting, but aside from that I haven't eaten anything since lunch. Do you know a place called Armstrong's?"
I had to laugh, and she asked me what was so funny. "I used to live there," I said. "Before I got sober.
The place used to be onNinth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth, which put it right around the corner from my hotel. I ate there, I drank there, I cashed checks there, I ran a tab there, I met clients there, Jesus, I did everything but sleep there. I probably did that, too, come to think of it."
"And now you don't go there anymore."
"I've tended to avoid it."
"Well, we can go someplace else. I didn't live around here when I was drinking so I just think of the place as a restaurant."
"We can go there."
"Are you sure?"
"Why not?''
The new Armstrong's is a block west, at Fifty-seventh and Tenth.
We took a table along the wall and I looked around while Toni made a pilgrimage to the ladies' room. Jimmy wasn't around, and there was no one in the joint I recognized, neither employees nor customers. The menu was more elaborate than it used to be, but the same sort of dishes were featured, and I recognized some of the photos and artwork on the walls. The general feel of the place had been upgraded and yuppified a notch, and the overall effect was more fern bar than saloon, but it wasn't all that different.
I said as much to Toni when she came back. She asked if they'd played classical music in the old days.
"All the time," I told her. "When he first opened up Jimmy had a jukebox, but he ripped it out and brought in Mozart and Vivaldi. It kept the kids out, and that made everybody happy."
"So you used to get drunk to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?"
"It did the job."
She was a pleasant woman, a couple of years younger than I, sober about the same length of time. She managed a showroom for aSeventh Avenue manufacturer of women's wear, and she'd been having an affair for a year or two with one of her bosses. He was married, and for months now she'd been speaking up at meetings and saying she had to end the relationship, but her voice never carried much conviction and the affair survived.
She was a tall leggy woman, with black hair that I suspect she dyed and a squareness to her jawline and her shoulders. I liked her and thought her good-looking, but I wasn't attracted to her. Or she to me—
her lovers were always married and balding and Jewish, and I was none of the above, so that left us free to
be friends.
We were there well past midnight. She had a small salad and a plate of the black-bean chili. I had a cheeseburger, and we both drank a lot of coffee. Jimmy had always given you a good cup of coffee. I used to drink it laced with bourbon, but it was even good all by itself.
Toni lived at Forty-ninth and Eighth. I walked her home and dropped her at the lobby of her high-rise, then started back to my hotel.
Something stopped me before I'd gone more than a block. Maybe I was wired from speaking inRichmond Hill , or stirred up some from returning to Armstrong's after such a long absence. Maybe it was the coffee, maybe it was the weather, maybe it was the phase of the moon.
Whatever it was, I was restless. I didn't want to go back to my little room and its four walls.
I walked two blocks west and went to Grogan's.
I had no business there. Unlike Armstrong's, Grogan's is a pure ginmill. There's no food served, there's no classical music, and there are no pottedBoston ferns hanging from the ceiling. There's a jukebox, with selections by the Clancy Brothers and Bing Crosby and the Wolfe Tones, but it doesn't get much play.
There's a television set and a dart board, and a couple of mounted fish, and dark wood walls and a tile floor and a stamped-tin ceiling.
There's neon in the window advertising Guinness stout and Harp lager.
The Guinness is on draft.
Mick Ballou owns Grogan's, although someone else has his name on the license and ownership papers.
Ballou is a big man, a hard drinker, a career criminal, a brooding man of cold dark rage and sudden violence. Circumstance had thrown us together not too long ago, and some curious chemistry kept drawing me back. I hadn't figured it out yet.
The crowd was sparse, and Ballou himself wasn't there. I ordered a glass of club soda and sat at the bar with it. There was a movie playing on one of the cable stations, a colorized version of an old Warner Bros.
gangster movie. Edward G. Robinson was in it, and half a dozen others I recognized but couldn't name. Five minutes into the movie the bartender went over to the set and turned down the color-level knob, and the film was magically restored to its original black-and-white.
"Some things should be fucking left alone," he said.
I watched about half of the movie. When my club soda was gone I had a Coke, and when that was gone
I put a couple of dollars on the bar and went home.
* * *
Jacob was on the hotel desk. He's a mulatto, with freckles on his face and the backs of his hands, and curly red hair that's starting to go thin on top. He buys books of difficult crossword puzzles and Double-Crostics and works them in pen-and-ink, staying slightly buzzed all the while on terpin hydrate and codeine. The management has fired him a couple of times over the years for unspecified reasons, but they always hire him back.
He said, "Your cousin called."
"My cousin?"
"Been calling all night. Four, five calls, must of been." He plucked a sheaf of message slips from my pigeonhole, leaving the letters behind.
"One, two, three, four, five," he counted. "Says call her whenever you come in."
Someone must have died, and I wondered who. I wasn't even sure who was left. What family there was had long since scattered far and wide. Sometimes I got a card or two at Christmas, once in a great while a phone call if an uncle or cousin was in town and at loose ends. But what cousin did I have who would call more than once to make sure a message got to me?