The Bones (28 page)

Frank spent two weeks in the hospital, during which he requested no visitors other than Honey, who would arrive promptly at
ten in the morning and leave at four to beat the afternoon traffic. Since Frank was not very communicative, she would quietly
read gossipy magazines and periodically hold a straw to his wired mouth so he could suck his food. Interviews, Robert had
advised him, were not to be given now, so what was written and said about Frank did not have the benefit of his unique perspective.
Ever the loyal manager, Robert had issued the standard statement calling it "a terrible accident" and let it be known Frank
was seeking treatment. Honey briefed Frank on the press coverage, and he was amused by its usual scolding moralistic tone,
only wishing it were tied to a project he could promote.

She enjoyed the role reversal since rarely did Frank's deep neediness assume such literal shape, and although one wouldn't
associate the maternal instinct with Honey's resume, the simple act of taking care of Frank in his hour of vulnerability,
of doting on and nourishing him, made her feel as if she had a role to play beyond that of the striving doxy.

Frank's experience led to the traditional series of usually short-lived vows taken by people who have, by some dire circumstance,
been rendered painfully aware their time on the planet may be more brief than they had initially realized and perhaps their
behavior needed to be reexamined. These included, along with the court-mandated drying out, resuming psychotherapy and being
more solicitous of Honey, who, in his helpless eyes, was doing the Florence Nightingale routine rather touchingly.

Ordinarily a man with Frank's extensive injuries would be sent home to recuperate, but given his special circumstances, it
was determined, rather than going where he would be prey to temptation and the depravity to which it invariably led, it was
best for him to head directly from the hospital to the Four Winds Clinic in Malibu and do his convalescing under their rigorous
supervision. So when the doctors pronounced him ready to leave, Honey and Robert bundled him into Robert's Sunsation and deposited
him on the clinic doorstep. After completing some cursory paperwork, Frank was admitted to the community of accountants, lifeguards,
chefs, housewives, doctors, office workers, rich kids, actors, salesmen, bankers, and Indian chiefs within.

Frank was placed in a Spartan room with Barney Coughlin, a middle-aged Century City lawyer who had been reduced to eating
out of Dumpsters after his alcoholism had caused him to mislay his wife, kids, house, and law practice. Barney had been a
taciturn guy who drank to allow himself to access the inner sexy dragon that, at the ingestion of the third highball, would
reliably burst forth, flames shooting from each orifice, and dive headfirst into the nearest punch bowl. At a loss without
a Scotch and soda in his hand, Barney was learning how to communicate while sober, which, for a boozehound, is like learning
to speak after a massive stroke, and his counselor had told him that to begin healing he must acknowledge the destructiveness
of his actions by verbalizing them. Barney took this to mean verbalizing them to whoever happened to be nearby. It was the
beginning of Frank's punishment to be a captive audience for Barney's endless mea culpas about how his terrible behavior had
prompted his Dumpster-diving descent.

After ten minutes in the room with the now pathologically apologetic Barney, Frank had an overwhelming desire to fire up a
joint. But he had nowhere to go so he sat on his cot, stripped of his everyday wardrobe (they all wore blue jumpsuits), his
professional role, his dignity, everything other than his identity as a drug addict/alcoholic (he had been informed he was
both), and took the logorrheic medicine Barney administered.

Like virtually every other clinic whose mission was to treat addiction, Four Winds embraced the twelve steps much in the way
the medieval church embraced the Eucharist; that is to say, questioning it was frowned upon. After Frank had been given the
Big Book, the Bible of AA, and told to commit its precepts to memory, the first task he was charged with was writing an autobiography
of his addiction. He was issued a Bic pen and a writing tablet and put to the grim task. Writing didn't come easily to Frank
(the detective novel he had told Lloyd about those many years ago had been chimerical), so while the prospect of telling his
story appealed to his narcissism, the actual writing of it was a colossal struggle made more difficult by the fact that he
would rather walk barefoot on broken glass than be at Four Winds in the first place. Frank's normal tendency in this situation
would have been to have Robert find him a ghostwriter, but alas, that is not how rehab works.

Left to his own desperate devices, stripped to his bare, humbling essence as a man of nearly fifty whose life has veered completely
out of control, Frank sits at the cheap pressed-wood desk in his room (mercifully, Barney is at one of the endless meetings)
and tries to think where to begin. Enough of Frank's brain cells are functioning coherently to let him know if his performance
in rehab is less than tip-top, the court will not look kindly when it comes time to recommend punishment, so he grudgingly
forces himself to put pen to paper and eventually manages to fill enough pages to convince the people who are running the
program that he has the requisite sunny attitude.

It is the standard litany of substance abuse that has now become so worn-out you can watch it on the Recovery Channel, and
its cliched aspect does not escape Frank, who has always fancied himself a pedigreed descendant of renowned artistic toasters
like Thomas De Quincey, Arthur Rimbaud, and Lester Young, all of whom believed copious intake of intoxicants lit their creative
fires and led them to heights unimaginable had they twelve-stepped their way to dull sobriety. But as Frank reflects on this,
it dawns on him that addiction, once the exclusive purview of the explorer, the outlaw, the artist/deviant who lived a heightened,
poetic existence on the twilit edges of polite society, had now become about as freaky-deaky as Cheez Whiz. It reminds him
of the time he had first seen a cop with long hair. If cops had long hair, it was no longer the signifier it had been. It
had lost its meaning so what was the point? Ergo drugs and alcohol; at least on an intellectual level. The physical level,
the lewd tango they reliably performed with the pleasure center of the brain, was something else altogether, something more
difficult to dismiss.

But as Frank sits in his chair and stares at the wall, a perception he had held from his teenaged years, when he had discovered
sex and jazz and Zap Comix, begins slowly to change. And it leaves him depressed. Because if he is not a hipster, a flipster,
a chemically enhanced finger-popping daddy who lives a blessed outsider's existence passing merry judgment on the burghers
of America, then what, exactly, is he?

Willpower is not something people usually associate with Frank Bones since his life is hardly a paragon of self-restraint,
but spending over twenty years, as he has done, in the trenches of a brutal, thankless business without once wavering in his
determination to succeed, while perhaps not on the order of Mao Tse-tung driving the Kuomintang off the mainland, certainly
required a great deal of focus and perseverance, and he draws on these qualities as he sits through interminable meetings
where all the attendees have been indoctrinated in the same gospel that has transformed Barney Coughlin into a Twelve Stepford
Wife and listens to the alternately pathetic, lugubrious, only fitfully amusing stories that collectively form a road map
of how everyone had wound up in Loserville-by-the-Sea spilling their guts out to a group of pasty-faced, coffee-swilling strangers.

"Hello, my name is Frank and I need a fuckin' drink." Still working the room. "But seriously, I'm a joker and a soaker and
a midnight toker . . ." Here he sees the group leader, Donny Sober Fifteen Years, a burly man in his fifties with thinning
hair pulled into a ponytail and wall-to-wall tattoos, shoot him a look to curdle milk. In his newly oversensitive state Frank
instantly changes course, saying, "Alright, alright, I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict and . . . " Blahbity, codependent,
blahbity abusive childhood, blah blah blah. It would not be exaggerating to say after a few days of struggle (starting with
the seven A.M. wake-ups, the middle of the night for a user) Frank got into the swing of the rehab thing, and ninety days
later he is pronounced ready for another try at life in the so-called real world.

Honey picks him up and they ride down the Pacific Coast Highway with the California sun glinting off the early-autumn ocean.
She smiles when she sees a dolphin leaping in the blue distance. Looking straight ahead, Frank raises his right hand like
the Boy Scout he'd been in Texas nearly forty years earlier and swears to try harder.

When he returns to the stage the following night, three and a half months after his nocturnal visit to the Melnick home, he
looks at the audience, primed for some kind of reference to his recent misadventures, and says:

This is the first time in more than three months I'm talking to a group of people who can handle their liquor.

It is good to be back on stage because the stage is his clean, well-lighted place, an area of roughly eighty square feet in
which he is the undisputed potentate and from which he can rule unchallenged with all the dramatic bravado of Vlad the Impaler,
the Romanian monarch/psychopath who meted out justice by literally skewering people. To leave the charmed space, this enchanted
area of laughter and applause, is to experience disappointment, contradiction, and complication, in short, the inherent vicissitudes
of daily life that mortals must endure. But to remain in its spotlighted confines is to cling to the idea that some kind of
control is achievable.

The first few nights he's back at the Comedy Shop, Frank breezes through his allotted twenty minutes, the pace of his set
picking up steam as he feels himself hurtling toward the moment he will have to descend from the stage and into the debauched
miasma of the bar area, where he is invariably made the center of attention by its comedian habitués, most of whom are not
on a wagon of any sort, much less one that doesn't serve booze or pot. They jokingly tempt him by waving drinks or joints
in front of his face as they say things like "You don't have a drug problem as long as you can afford drugs."

Frank appreciates these transgressive efforts with the eye of someone for whom transgression is a way of life, but he is resolute
in his desire to at least try to stay clean. He doesn't want to repeat the experience he has just had because, however much
it may have added to his legend, what he will never admit to anyone is how embarrassing it was.

Sparky has gone back to Kansas after having heard his activities had come to the attention of local law enforcement, and his
absence is well-timed given Frank's attempt at reformation. But when Candi Wyatt approaches him on his second night back,
pushing her breasts into his arm as she leans in for a kiss in a dark corner of the club, he is faced with another level of
enticement. She suggests repairing to the Hummer later for some reunion sex, not having heard it had been returned to the
dealer, and Frank is faced with a question as important as whether to continue as a substance abuser: Is it still open season
on pussy? Honey, after all, had more than come through when he was in the hospital recovering from the grievous bodily harm
he had done himself. She had been there every day, never judging, and provided him with a loving kindness in short supply
in other areas of his life. He believes he should at least attempt to reward this behavior with a stab at fidelity, if for
no other reason than to see if he is capable of doing it. So it is with an exceedingly heavy heart and an effort bordering
on heroic that he looks down at Candi's eager, unlined face, sees the contours of her nipples pressing against her tight Comedy
Shop T-shirt, and says, "I'd love to, babe, but when I was in rehab, I took a vow of chastity." And then his head bursts like
a honeydew melon hit by a shell from a .357, sending shards of skull and brain bits in all directions as horrified onlookers
dive for cover.

No, not really. It just feels that way.

When Candi asks if they can at least go for a drive later he imparts the deeply unfortunate news that his license has been
revoked.

At this point Frank is not suited for a life without access to either a well-stocked bar or stash. Users usually have no hobbies,
since being a user, more or less, is their hobby. Anticipating scoring, scoring, using, coming down, and then repeating the
cycle take up a lot of time, and other than his interest in guns, which he felt he should steer clear of at this point for
self-evident reasons, he didn't have a lot of outside interests with which he could easily distract himself. It isn't as if
he is going to learn Chinese or study art history or take up photography. That perhaps he should, that it might actually not
be a terrible idea to develop an interest in an area where he could apply his considerable intellect, hasn't yet occurred
to him. So on a typical day, he would rise around noon, go somewhere walking distance for breakfast where he would linger
over coffee and the papers for two hours, then trudge home and watch television or casually read about UFOs or politics or
nuclear proliferation until it was time to go to the club, where for twenty minutes he wouldn't feel like a corpse.

As anyone with substance issues will tell you, being around friends who are still using is not conducive to staying clean,
so, other than at the Comedy Shop where he would be with his comic compatriots in a public setting that served as a cap on
their more depraved tendencies, the only person Frank saw with any regularity was Honey. Although she was simpatico, her skills
as a psychologist were limited, which left them without much to discuss that was any help to Frank, who was not primed for
their maundering exchanges.