Bad Dog (6 page)

“I may not be much,” he tells us, “but I’m all I think about.”

Find people who have what you want, they tell us. And Clark definitely has what I want. A successful banker with a good job that doesn’t ruin his life, a devoted wife he describes as beautiful but still logical, a young child he claims has no obvious developmental issues, a West Side duplex, and, most impressive of all, a well-behaved boxer named Joey I look forward to meeting someday.

We read the Big Book and
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
and talk about a Higher Power, who we call HP.

“You cannot recover without a Higher Power,” Clark tells me. “It doesn’t matter what it is. Doesn’t matter at all. Only one thing’s important.”

“What’s that?”

“It has to be a power
other
than yourself.”

People think of the group itself, the spirit of our cofounders Bill W. and Dr. Bob. It can be a tree outside the meeting room, a voice in the wake of the wind, a verse in red in the book of the Lord—anything, absolutely anything at all.

Except ourselves.

But the real sunlight of the spirit doesn’t come from dead people or from inanimate stand-ins for a set of initials we don’t understand. The more I experience the fellowship, especially in those first few months, the more I know the overwhelming power of the person in front of us.

Mondays we have a speaker qualify for us, meaning they deliver a monologue for twenty or thirty minutes describing their experience, strength, and hope—or, in the shorthand of the program, what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now. A capsule history of a resurrection.

Strangely enough, although the speakers are as accidental as people on any jury in Manhattan’s Southern District Court, almost all of them are graceful, riveting, and sympathetic when they qualify. Drunks are good writers. Susan Cheever has called this “the eloquence we all seem to have when we tell our own stories.”

Friends in the program often tell me it was one of these qualifications that caused them finally to accept the possibility that the steps beyond the first half of the first one—
Admitted we were powerless over alcohol
—might be worth a look.

First, I am nudged toward acceptance by a single line in
my favorite book by my favorite author, Susan Conant, who wrote a series of eighteen Dog Lover’s Mysteries that I read and reread like some people take bubble baths. In
Stud Rites
, Conant’s fictional amateur detective, dog writer Holly Winter, points out that the chair of a national dog show “had been trained by experts: Alaskan malamutes and AA.”

Putting AA in impressive company.

And then I hear something extraordinary. I’ve chosen my particular meeting because it convenes in the mornings, always my best time, and because it is in a church basement near Lincoln Center, home of the New York State Theater and, more specifically, the New York City Ballet. Besides Bernese mountain dogs, these early days the only thing I love is ballet. I’m not sure why; but there you have it: a mystery. Going to the ballet by myself, or with Gloria, I am sled-dogged out of my body into a sphere of absolute beauty I get nowhere else.

One Monday, the speaker is a ballet dancer, a woman in her fifties who had been a soloist with the New York City Ballet years earlier. She is still very slender and tall but has cut her hair short and lacks the little-girl-lost conversational style I’d observed in other retired dancers.

“I drank ’cause I was afraid all the time,” she says. “And not really just the performances—I didn’t have nerves like that. I was afraid of the other dancers’ liking me, the ballet master liking me, was he going to cast me, would I get to go on the tour. It was just this fear I wasn’t likeable that made me drink and drug.”

I’d hear this over and over again in the rooms, this suspicion we are somehow, on a cellular level, repulsive to the human race. Therapists might call it shame, but it’s actually worse than that. It’s the original sin.

After I hear the ballet dancer’s story, I stop fighting. I remember
it now. My on switch turns off. I give something up. For the first time in my life, I feel like I have no control over anything. Only a very, very vague sense of trust in something I do not understand.

I go up to Clark and ask him if he will be my sponsor.

Hola becomes part of this vast dry conspiracy. My group meets every morning at seven a.m., and every morning at six a.m. I feel a set of ivory claws hit my shoulder, and she stands there and screams like a police siren until I physically vacate the bed.

“What’s wrong, Hola? Are you okay?”

At which point she catapults up on the bed next to Gloria, lies down in my spot, and promptly goes back to sleep.

Dogs are excellent at knowing the hour of the day, even adjusting for daylight savings time, but they’re terrible with weekends, holidays, and the concept of lounging around when there’s work to be done. Except for themselves, of course.

Tolerance for their own laziness is absolute.

I
F YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY
you drink, just stop.

Suddenly, your real life appears. The first person I ever talked to at a meeting, a dapper little man with a bow tie and a drawl, said, “You won’t feel better for a while. Many times, your life might seem like it’s getting worse. It really ain’t, but you’ll notice things more. Just don’t quit before the miracle.”

My friend Amanda, a former national triathlon champion who ended up drugging herself into grand-mal seizures and adult diapers, puts it this way: “Welcome to the jungle.”

Envy. Failure. Disappointment. When Thoreau said most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, he wasn’t playing colonial kazoo. Do I sound ungrateful?

Ingratitude. When you go into rehab or hook up with a twelve-step fellowship, you’re generally told to start pounding out a gratitude list. Every day. You’re told to do a lot of things every day, one day at a time, but for people like me this damned list was the most annoying.

“Come on,” says Clark one morning, after I tell him pointblank I have nothing to be grateful for. “Everyone has something.”

“Exception,” I whine, pointing at myself—and don’t think I don’t see my thumb point up at Whatever.

“How about your health?”

“Feel like shit.”

“Okay,” he says. He’s been here before: newcomers to the program are an absolute cramp in the shorts. “Your apartment. You own it, in Manhattan, greatest city in the world.”

“I hate it. It’s dark.”

“You have a job.”

“Yeah, telling people how to sell things on the Internet. I’m using my powers for evil.”

“Your wife.”

“She’s great,” I admit. “But she seems so unhappy.”

“Like how?”

“She isn’t working, just sitting in the back room playing her guitar. She’s trying to be all positive, but I feel like it’s wearing her out. She needs something good to happen.”

“Hmm,” he says. “She’ll probably leave you.”

“Can we move along here?”

“Okay, you went to Yale, wrote for some big magazines, got a fucking Emmy nomination. You got an MBA, published a couple books, pull in six figures. Your parents don’t have Alzheimer’s; your siblings aren’t living on your couch. You even like your in-laws, for freak’s sake. You found a way to put down the bottle, and you’re not even all that ugly yet.”

“Thanks.”

“So where’s the gratitude, Marty? Things could be a lot worse.”

I consider his point. It’s always seemed to me that believing things could be worse doesn’t necessarily plug in the waffle iron.

He has met his match.

We sit in silence as I contemplate how dismal and rubbery my omelet is, and then the corners of his mouth spasm. He’s thought of something.

“I’ve got it,” he says, remembering the only thing I’d ever discussed with him in terms of unadulterated, balls flopping, speed-metal joy. “Your dog! Hola! You’re grateful for her.”

I shake it.

“Hate to disagree,” I say. “She’s a monster.”

As you can see, Hola is not the monster. It takes me many months to get more grateful and many more to turn the lights on in my apartment, never quite losing the feeling that I have not only missed my cruise but am waiting at the wrong pier, in the wrong city, wearing the wrong pair of pants. It’s a common state of mind early in recovery. We go to work and come home, and our heads are open for the first time in years, our eyes are clear, and we look at what we’re doing, who we’re married to, where we live and say: “How did I get here?”

We look in the mirror and see a guy who’s out of shape, has alienated his friends, been written off by his family, has hillocks of debt, capillaries burst at the base of his nose, borderline cholesterol levels, no car, a long historical novel manuscript nobody wants to read, and a wife whose arms and legs are covered with tiny canine-incisor-shaped bruises.

If we’re good AAs, we wait a year to make any big decisions, but a lot of us hear that old train coming and jump off the tracks. We quit our jobs. We move away. Divorces are unfortunately common.

Around this time, the economy starts wandering, my wife gets a temporary job working nights and weekends in a gourmet cheese store, and my job doing online marketing at a large Manhattan agency gets so technical it actually begins to frighten me. Hola finds Lyme disease during a long weekend in the Catskill Mountains, where we have a second home called the Rock
House. Each night after work is a tango Argentino to disguise the five doxycycline pills she hates. She gets wise to the peanut butter, the turkey burger, the Jell-O.

Familiar story: middle-aged and underwhelmed. Where’s the spirit? Where’s the joy? Take a number and wait.

I am waiting, all right, although not for the self-pity to pass. It isn’t going to pass. This is the new way of life.

Then Hola jumps up onto the fifteen-hundred-dollar chaise lounge she calls her doggie bed and informs me that things are not as bad as I think. They are worse.

O
UR APARTMENT WAS CREATED
in a week after I’d come home one night half in the paper bag and sniped at Gloria: “This place is a dump. I feel like I don’t even have a home.” Life with Gloria could tend to be a pileup if you let it go too far. Although everything I said when drunk was said badly, it wasn’t all untrue.

She heard my passion and rushed around town with a concept in her head that seemed to consist of a single color and a show business notion of Versailles. Unfortunately for me, the color was pink.

Each day I came back to an apartment simultaneously emptying of brown cardboard boxes and filling with pink wallpaper with a rose pattern, pink overstuffed sofas, and a comfy chair-and-a-half that had an absurdly expensive doggie bed pawed all over it, pink chandeliers with roseate cut-glass shapes dangling over a bed with a pink duvet and shams. The floors were a refinished graham-cracker brown.

I felt like I was living in a crust being injected with raspberry Cool Whip.

Gloria bought paintings of chamber musicians and nineteenth-century ballet dancers with their massive limbs and cartoons from some abandoned romance strip from the golden
age of comics. And a small round table inlaid with stones painted with little images of black Maseratis and bikini models.

Sure.

They were pink roses. With the stiff-backed metal chairs with rose cushions, the effect was unmistakable.

“You know,” I said, “you turned our house into a French bistro.”

We started to refer to our apartment as the Bistro. I had an honest desire to start smoking.

It is after eight on a Friday, one of those warm, damp nights in early fall when Manhattan smells like an open-air restaurant next to a Brazilian yacht club. I’ve been sober some months now, have entire minutes when I feel almost sane. So I am impressing myself with my own savoir faire as I open the door to the Bistro after a long day of Internet marketing and find myself in a nightmare so dark, so worst-case scenario, even I couldn’t have imagined it.

There’s a scream from the living room—a woman’s shrill scream—and the terrible sound of a wild dog barking, deep and full-throated. I throw open the door and see a tableau:

Hola standing on her rear legs, almost vertical like a human being, her massive forepaws hurtling toward the ceiling, mouth agape and snarling with a wisp of saliva jetting upward, eyes blood pressure red and narrowed into desperate slits, her teeth snapping down like chalk falling on a slate.

Gloria is leaning back, twisting around, her fingers hardened into claws, stepping back into the wall at the moment Hola’s teeth crash shut, catching only a piece of her T-shirt and fragments of skin on her upper left arm.

“Ahhhh!”
she screams.
“Fuck you!”

Hola drops to the floor and stands there in a four-legged linebacker stance, snarling at Gloria, who is visibly trembling.

“Hola!”
I shout from the doorway.
“Off!”

The dog is in that state dogs get into when they’re just not thinking. Gloria’s eyes are vivid with panic and she turns herself around, facing the wall, her back to the dog, right hand wrapped around her body holding the broken, bleeding skin.

I recognize Hola’s body language: tail low and flat, ears back, eyes narrowed and direct, the fur on the back of her neck standing up: attack mode.

I step inside and slam the door behind me. The leash is on the floor just behind Hola—she’s backed Gloria up against the wall, and Gloria’s not moving—and the noise of the door distracts her a moment. I’m not afraid she’ll attack me; she never does. It’s always Gloria.

“Hola!”
I bark out, trying to get her attention off my wife.
“Hola—over here!”

Easily confused, she turns her head toward me, and I clap my hands and go,
“Ha! Over here! Hola! Ha!
”

I’m just making noise, hoping Gloria can get a moment to run into the kitchen, but she just stands there holding her injured upper arm, cowering against the wall.

I get behind the dog and snatch up the leash. Feeling in my jacket pocket, I’m praying there’s some kind of treat, and for once my prayers are answered: part of a granola cinnamon bar. It’s out and I’m stepping backward, leaning backward, saying, “Hola, come!”