"You know, Rafe, you're impossible at times."
"I don't mean to be. I just want to know. Knowledge is power, as they say."
"Then go over there and find out."
"No. I want you to go. Because if I come back with a tale of some wild Satanic rites, you'll think I'm putting you on. You see for yourself and then come back and tell me. Whatever you say, I'll believe, and that will be that."
More sneaking around. Lisl didn't like it, but now her own curiosity was aroused. If Ev wasn't attending a church meeting in the basement of St. James every Wednesday night, what was going on down there?
"Okay. I'll take a look. But then that's it. If it's nothing screwy, we drop this whole thing and get off the poor guy's back. Agreed?"
"Agreed."
Lisl hurried across the street to the looming shadow of the church and went directly to the door she had seen Ev use. She didn't pause. If she did she knew she might actually think about the silliness of this whole evening and what she was doing and reconsider it.
She pulled open the door slowly and saw a deserted stairway. She entered and tiptoed down the two flights to the basement. She saw light and heard voices at the end of the hallway and cautiously made her way along until she found the meeting room. The doors stood open, spread wide into the hall like wings. She peered into the room from a safe distance.
Folding chairs were set up in short rows facing the opposite end of the low-ceilinged room. Most of the chairs were occupied and the few people left standing were sliding into the rows to get a seat. Everyone held either a cigarette or a Styrofoam cup of coffee or both. The air was already thick with smoke; clouds of white billowed in the glare of the naked fluorescent bulbs clinging to the ceiling. Ev was seated at the end of the last row. Alone.
Lisl hung back in the dimness of the hall and watched.
A balding man stood at the head of the group. He too had a cup of coffee and a cigarette. He was speaking but the words were garbled. Lisl crossed the hall to hear him. She slipped behind the nearer open door and listened. She had a clear view of Ev through the slit between the wall and the door.
"—the same faces as usual here. Our 'regulars.' But we haven't heard from some of you in a long time. We all know why you come here, but I think some of you old-timers hang back too much, thinking we know all about you. But we don't. So how about it? How about one of you founding members getting up and giving us the benefit of your experience?"
He waited but no one moved. Finally he pointed to the back row.
"Everett. How about you? We haven't heard from you in a long time. How about it?"
Ev stood slowly. He looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat twice before speaking.
"My name's Everett," he said, "and I'm an alcoholic."
Knotting the fingers of her hands together, almost as if in prayer, Lisl leaned toward the strip of light before her and listened.
Everett was nervous at first. He hadn't done this in a while, but he was overdue for some testimony. It was time.
His nerves eased as he began talking. He knew the patter of his story like he knew basic calculus. He'd told it often enough.
"It started for me when I'm sure it started for most of you—as a teenager. I wasn't a drunk right away. That took time, and lots of practice. But the warning signs were there, right from the start. All my friends drank now and again when we could liberate some booze from our folks or persuade some stranger to buy us a case of beer, but I always seemed the happiest when we could get some and the most disappointed when we couldn't.
"And once I started to drink I couldn't stop. I didn't realize it then, but when I look back now I can see that even as a kid I didn't know how to stop. The only thing that kept me from seeing it then was the fact that our supply was always limited. Our purloined booze always ran out before I could get myself good and sick.
"My fraternity house at Emory fixed that. We bought beer by the keg and I got thoroughly ripped on a regular basis. But only on weekends, at our parties, where I became something of a legend for the amount of alcohol I could put away. During the week, though, I managed to keep up an A average. I was the envy of my peers—the honor student who could party with the best of them. This was in the mid to late sixties, when pot became the campus drug of choice. But not for me. I was too ail-American for that hippie locoweed.
"Not that I didn't try it. I did. At one time or another along the way I've tried everything. Plenty of times. But I remained loyal to my friend the bottle. Because nothing else could ever find that special spot within me that needed touching. Only booze could reach that place and soothe it. I was at Woodstock, and like too many of the people there, I don't remember much about that weekend other than endless rain and oceans of mud. I had to see the movie to find out what it was really like. But I wasn't wrecked on pot or mescaline or the bad brown acid that was going around. Oh, no. That would have meant I was some hippie freak with a drug problem. Not me. I had my friend along. I was wasted on the case of bourbon I'd brought from my good old home state of Kentucky."
He shook his head as he thought of the years that followed. So much pain there. He hated dredging it up, but he had to. That was what this was all about. He couldn't allow himself to forget the misery he had caused himself… and others.
"You can all guess how the rest of the story goes. I graduated, got a job with a technical firm that had just moved into the Sun Belt, began working in computer technology. In those days it took a roomful of equipment to do what a desktop PC does today. If I were still with the company today, I'd probably be a millionaire. But the booze used the pressures of the job to tighten its hold on me.
"Then I fell in love with a wonderful woman who was made foolish by her own love for me. Foolish enough to believe that she could be more important to me than my old friend the bottle. Little did she know. We married, we started a life together, but it was a menage a trois—my wife, me, and the bottle. You see, I still thought of the bottle as my friend. But it was a jealous friend. It wanted me all to itself. And slowly but surely it poisoned my marriage Hntil my wife gave me an ultimatum: her or the bottle.
"Those of you who have been there can guess which one I chose."
Ev took a deep breath to fill the emptiness inside him.
"After that it was a steadily accelerating downward spiral for me. I lost one job after another. But my superiors always gave me a decent recommendation when they let me go. They thought they were doing me a favor by helping me hide it from the next company that had the misfortune to hire me. This prolonged my intimate relationship with my friend the bottle because it delayed my inevitable bottoming out.
"And did I ever bottom out. I went through detox three times before I finally realized that my friend of twenty years wasn't really my friend. He had taken over my life and was destroying me. The bottle was in the driver seat and I could see that if I didn't take back the wheel, he was going to run me off a cliff.
"So that's what I did. With the help of AA, I took back control of my life. Complete control." He smiled and held up his coffee cup and cigarette. "Well, not complete control. I still smoke and I drink too much coffee. But everything else in my life is under strict control. I've learned to manage my time so that there's no room left in my life for booze. And there never will be again."
He considered mentioning his daily challenge—standing outside Raftery's Tavern every time he passed and staring in the window for exactly one minute, daring the booze to try to lure him in—but decided against it. Someone else here might decide to try the dare… and lose. He didn't want to be responsible for that. He figured he'd said enough.