I worried about the sins that led me to meet some of them and how those people would recede into the crowd once I gave up the sins that had brought us together, all the loves and friendships and days and nights of excitement and pleasure and giddy fear. I thought about all the memories that would fade and then vanish. I wondered if I’d be able to do it. I didn’t see how I could. It seemed like too much to ask, to take so much of it back.
And here was this guy trying to do it all by himself in this room full of sex addicts and me, a spectator as always. You had to give him credit. You have to give the whole recovery culture credit, I swear. I’m sure there are all sorts of things I wouldn’t like about it if I was immersed in it myself, but I do admire it. Where else in the world are people taking “searching and fearless moral inventories”?
At the end of the meeting, Don turned the last page in his sheaf and said, “Okay, that’s it. Thank you for listening.”
“Thank you, Don,” everyone said.
Whatever ambivalence I felt about the process, I was glad to have been there for it, to be an audience for his redemption. Before we left, the leader of the group, who had introduced the fifth stepper said, “Does anyone have anything they need to say before we call it a day?”
It seemed that no one was going to speak, but then a man in his late 60s in a purple golfing shirt and tan shorts stood up. He looked like someone’s grandfather, a retiree who would give you preachy advice about buying American-made cars and have a pool table at his house. As soon as he was on his feet, he was sobbing.
“My name is Larry. And I might be a sex addict. I don’t really know.”
“Hi, Larry.”
The man stood there barely able to speak. Finally he said, “Last night, my wife and my family found out who I really am. I don’t know where I’m sleeping tonight. They all hate me. I didn’t know where to go. I hope you can help me. I need help. I need you to help me however you can.”
He stood there and cried trying to say more, but he couldn’t figure out what else to say. I couldn’t imagine what else there could be to say. He had said it all.
Dave, the leader said, “We can help you. We’ll find a place for you tonight. Don’t worry about that. Maybe a couple of guys can stay late and talk to Larry with me?”
A few guys, obviously veterans, nodded their heads that, yes, they would stay and take care of Larry. I got the feeling that they would, and that he would be okay, even though he was clearly at the beginning of something very dark, or at the end of it.
When we got in the car, Greg said, “Man, I was surprised to see him there.”
“Who?” I said.
“The guy who was talking. The fifth step guy.”
“Don?”
“That’s not his real name.”
“You know him?”
“No, not personally,” he said. “You really didn’t recognize him? He’s pretty famous.”
Greg didn’t tell me who the guy was, and I didn’t ask. I looked at the dashboard clock. It was something like 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday. It was a strange start to the weekend.
67
MR. GRATE AND BENCH DIDN’T SHOW UP FOR A RESERVATION. When I clocked out at eleven, I thought it was strange that he hadn’t appeared yet. I couldn’t remember another time he had checked in so late. But sometimes people landed and then met up with friends. I thought maybe he had gone out with old college buddies who happened to be in town. Maybe his rolling carry-on bag was next to him in one of our city’s many strip joints.
Our policy was to charge people when they didn’t show up for their reservations. But when the night auditor went to charge Mr. Grate and Bench’s card, he found that I had not gotten one when I took the reservation. The auditor told the manager, and then the manager did a bit of investigating and found that I had failed to get a card for any of Mr. Grate’s several reservations.
When I arrived for my late afternoon shift as usual, my manager called me to her office and explained what had happened and what she had discovered. It was clear that much of her day had been spent on an internal audit, scanning through a sample of the reservations I had taken to see whether I routinely bucked policy or if I had made a special exception for Mr. Grate.
“I guess I was just sort of being lazy,” I said. “He’s a regular. He’s never failed to show up before, so I thought it’d be okay not to get a card. He was in a rush that day, and I let it slide.”
I’d been a good and reliable employee, so she was satisfied with that, but she said that I’d have to find the money for the missed reservation somehow. The owner of the motel had been alerted to the situation, and she wasn’t going to be happy unless that revenue was accounted for in the next batch-out.
“If it was me, I’d just call the guy and explain what happened, see if he’ll pay. I mean, even if he thinks he’s in the right or whatever, some people will give you a card number just to put the issue to rest. Otherwise, I’m afraid you’ll have to pay it yourself.”
I thought about it for most of my shift. I thought about calling him to see what he’d say. Maybe he’d say that he had never booked the reservation in the first place, that I had fucked up, and that the whole thing was my fault. I wondered if maybe something terrible had happened. Maybe his mother had died, or one of his kids. Maybe he was dead, and I’d never get a new job.
Everyone who worked at the motel hated no-shows. They inevitably represented a chain of events that circled back in a variety of other ways: chargebacks from the credit card company when the cardholder disputed the charge, people who showed up on the wrong date only to learn they’d already been charged for a missed reservation they had mistakenly booked for the wrong time. They meant unpleasant phone calls and bad reviews online. No-shows weren’t good for anyone.
I came up with the smartest, most succinct way of explaining the situation to my future employer, and practiced my calm and helpful delivery. Twice, I picked up the phone to call him, and twice I returned it to its cradle without dialing.
Just before the end of my shift, long after I’d made the decision, I went to the computer and swiped my own card for the $150 charge, thinking all along about how broke I was. So fucking broke, so fucking broke, so fucking broke. I prefer not to spend my money this way.
I could barely hold out until the end of my shift, when I could leave the lobby and convert the five-dollar bill in my wallet into sixteen tokens and a one-dollar tip. I could go straight from work. I didn’t even have to go to my apartment first. No one was waiting for me. I didn’t have so much as a dog awaiting my return. I spent the rest of my shift thinking about the arcade.
68
IN A MOMENT OF DESPERATION, I WOUND UP IN A BOOTH with a guy I had a bad feeling about. Late at night especially, one’s standards could slip unimaginably. It never happened to me during the day, at least not with the same sweaty fervor. In the daytime, I might have ended up in a booth with a fallback in the absence of someone more appealing. But after midnight, a man I’d walked past ten times, and with good reason, gradually began to seem like a viable option.