The Clarinet Polka (63 page)

I don't think I've ever seen him so pissed off. He was so mad he couldn't even speak to me. I don't know what the bail was, but he paid it. I was going to have to come back for a court appearance. I had all these charges against me—driving under the influence and reckless endangerment and resisting arrest and I don't know what all—but that was for some other day, and I can't begin to tell you how happy I was to get out of that jail cell.

We get out on the street, and I'm thinking, Christ, how fast can I get away from the son of a bitch so I can get a drink?

He said, “You think I don't have anything better to do with my money than piss it away cleaning up after you?”

I said, “I expect you've got lots of things better to do with it.”

I got in his blue Chrysler and I realized I'd never seen this one. That's how long it'd been since I'd been home. He was staring straight ahead out the windshield. He wouldn't even look at me.

“I'm surprised you haven't written me off by now,” I said.

“There's a difference,” he said, “between being a criminal and being an asshole.”

He drove over to the Island and parked at the Yacht Club. I didn't know what we were doing there, but I didn't ask. He bought us each a 7UP and carried them down to a table by the river. Boy, did that cold pop taste good. He offered me a couple Tylenol and I took them.

“Good thing that kid was a grasshopper,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “you bet.”

It was about noon by then, and the sun was beating down. You've probably got a good idea what I was feeling like. Your basic scum on the side of the toilet bowl has more self-respect than I did, but it had been sixteen or eighteen hours since I'd had a drink and what I really needed, goddamn it, was that next drink. I was ready to do anything to get it. The last thing I wanted to be doing was sitting with my father staring at the river. I couldn't figure out what we were doing there.

“Some guys have got to hit bottom,” he said. “You hit bottom yet?”

“I don't know,” I said, but if I hadn't hit bottom, I'd sure hate to see what the bottom looks like.

All I could think was, for Christ's sake, Dad, whatever you're doing, get it over with. Don't you understand, I need a drink.

“You in withdrawal yet?” my father asked me. I just looked at him. How could he just say it like that? Just flat out like that? If you could say
withdrawal
, you might as well say
alcoholic
.

Well, he'd quit, hadn't he? He hadn't had a drink in years. I was twisting around inside myself any which way trying to find anything so I wouldn't look so pathetic, so I said, “I guess you've seen some hard times yourself.”

“What would you know about it?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You're goddamn right, nothing.”

He was finally looking at me. We sat there for a minute or two looking at each other.

Just a few hours ago I'd been in hell, and like you do when you're in hell, I'd been praying my ass off. I'd confessed that I'd sinned, and it's true, I had sinned. And now that I was out, what was I going to do? Just forget all about it? Say, oh, well, it was all just bullshit and I don't believe any of that stuff anyway? Once before I'd asked the Holy Mother to help me, and she had helped me. And everybody and their dog had been trying to help me, but I'd pushed them all away. I don't know if I can tell you, but it was coming down on me, like the full weight of it. Here I was, this hopeless miserable asshole, getting offered another chance.

“Dad,” I said, “I feel like a total piece of shit. I'd rather die than go on living like this.”

“Okay,” he said, “I'll take you somewhere you can dry out.”

TWENTY-TWO

Where the old man took me was the RGH. I was already heavy into withdrawal when I got there, and they didn't give me nothing, just let me ride it on through. I was one sick puppy, believe me. Most of it's a blur in my mind now, thank God. You might not know this—I didn't know it in so many words—but withdrawal from alcohol is worse than withdrawal from heroin.

They kept me twenty-four hours. I came out of there, and I wasn't feeling any too wonderful. The old man picked me up and drove me straight to a center—a place up near the Pennsylvania line—and I was in for the thirty-day cure. What they offered you was three squares a day, a bedtime snack, as much coffee as you could chug down, and a bunch of other drunks to talk to. They had meetings every night and they strongly suggested you go to them. A doctor came by maybe once a week to make sure one of us hadn't decided to drop dead.

The first week I didn't sleep hardly at all. I watched a lot of shitty movies, and I played a lot of pinochle, and poker for bottle caps, and even chess, which believe me is not my game. Gerry, one of the guys who ran the place, kept telling me that nobody ever died from lack of sleep, but I wasn't so sure. I couldn't believe what a mess I was. Just walking around the building a few times damn near killed me.

They ran their meetings along AA lines. That's how they put it. They weren't real AA meetings for the simple fact that AA won't be part of anything where people are being charged for a service. But they talked about the Twelve Steps and like that, and you were encouraged to tell your story and listen to what the other drunks had to say. And they kept pointing out to us that our best chance of staying sober once we got out was to head straight for the nearest AA meeting.

For the first little while I just sat through those meetings like a stone. It's amazing how I could have been hanging on to my pathetic little scrap of false pride at that stage of the game, but I guess I was, and asking me to join AA felt like asking me to join the Mickey Mouse Club. Well, maybe it was the third or the fourth meeting, I don't know, but the light went on. And that doesn't even get close to it. It was more like Saul on the road to Damascus.

You've probably heard about the Twelve Steps, right? They've got twelve-step programs for every damn thing under the sun now. You want to quit using nose spray, they've probably got a twelve-step program to help you do it—it's ridiculous, if you ask me—but the reason it's caught on is that it works. But you've got to be brutally honest with yourself, and for most of us, that's a real hard one.

Step One is when you admit that you've got no power over alcohol, and Step Two is when you realize that the only thing that can save you is some higher power. I remember sitting in the meeting, and of course I'd heard it all before, but there's hearing it and then there's
hearing
it, and I finally got it—I'd already hit Steps One and Two in that crappy little jail cell in the basement of the Raysburg police station. The guys in the meeting probably thought I was bored or pissed off or something, but I had to get up and walk outside because I was, you know, pretty choked up.

The weather was real nice, I remember that. And I was almost to the point I could enjoy it again. And I walked away from the building and sat down under a tree and, like they say, contemplated the state of my soul. Naturally I remembered when Janice had given me that brochure listing all the meetings in the valley, and her little speech about alcoholism being a disease and like that, and how she'd talked to Father Obinski on my behalf, and I thought, okay, Janice, I'm a little late, but here I am.

*   *   *

When you're serious about trying to turn things around for yourself, thirty days goes by in a flash, and I wasn't ready. Gerry kept saying to me, “You know, Jimmy, when it's going to be really tough? When you first go home.” He didn't need to say that. I already knew that. I couldn't imagine living in South Raysburg and not drinking. There's bars all over the damn place—not to mention that the PAC 's only a couple blocks away from our house—so once I got home, I knew I couldn't stick around for very long.

Linda and I talked for hours. I felt real bad about how worried everybody had been about me. I'd just, you know, completely vanished off the map, and the only contact they'd had from me was when I'd called up Linda and lied to her about being in Nashville. So I told her the truth about that whole miserable time—what I remembered of it anyhow. When you're drinking as hard as I'd been, there's lots of it that just doesn't get stored very well in the old memory bank.

Naturally I asked my old man how he'd quit. It'd never crossed my mind that he'd been in AA, so he really surprised me. He'd been active in AA for years, all the time Linda and I were growing up. These days he put most of his free time into the church, but he still went to meetings every now and then. “How come I didn't know that?” I said.

“Well, I guess I didn't go out of my way so you'd know it. Back when I was active, we took the anonymous part real serious.”

“Hell, Dad, how come you never said anything to me? You know, when I was getting really heavy into the sauce.”

“What the hell was I supposed to say? I made things pretty clear to you, didn't I?”

“Well, you did in your way. But you could have—I don't know, grabbed me and really made me listen to you.” You see what I was doing? I was still trying to find other people to blame it on.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” he says. “Jimmy, I been talking myself blue in the face to you your whole life, and you never paid the least bit of attention to me. You're just as bad as I was. Hell, when I was growing up, you couldn't tell me a damn thing, and you're the same way—and besides which, I'll let you in on a little secret, bright boy. If just talking to somebody made them stop drinking, there wouldn't be any drunks left in the world.”

I had to do my number for the judge—please note, Your Honor, that I am a veteran—and he must have liked hearing about the thirty-day cure and me planning to leave town because he let me off with a sharp slap on the wrist.

I had some long talks with my mom too, and Mondrowski came over to wish me luck, and even Patty Pajaczkowski came to see me, if you can believe that. Everybody was trying to convince me I could stay in Raysburg and still be okay, but I didn't believe it.

Linda told me that Janice had been real hurt by the way I'd just vanished and never wrote to her or called her—“hurt to the quick,” she said, and boy, I sure wished she hadn't put it that way. But Linda figured she'd got over it. Janice was going out with that kid Tony and she seemed happy with him, and of course she was the star of the polka band. They'd played at the Pączki Ball and had been very well received. “Call her up, Jimmy,” Linda said. “She'd be so glad to hear from you. She thinks of you as one of her best friends.”

Well, maybe Janice had got over me, but I wasn't sure I'd got over her, and “one of my best friends” wasn't how I would have put it. I was still feeling real shaky, you know what I mean? And I didn't want to go looking for some excuse to fall off the wagon. And I thought, hell, if she's happy with that Tony kid, who am I to rock the boat? I figured I'd write to her at some point.

Then I hopped the Hound for Austin and sat there that whole long ride reading the Big Book—that's the AA book, you know, where they've got the stories of Bill and Dr. Bob and those other guys who started the first groups back in the thirties. It was like reading the lives of the saints.

Jeff Doren picked me up at the station, and we went to the Soap Creek Saloon. He drank beer and I drank 7UP, and we drank a toast to our old pal Ron Jacobson, just about the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet.

*   *   *

I stayed with Jeff for a few weeks until I found my own place—this little garage fixed up into an apartment over west of the university between Lamar and Guadalupe. Fifty bucks a month, if you can believe that. I told you Austin was a cheap place to live. And I went out and applied at Braniff. While they were thinking about it, I got on busting bags at the airport because I had to get some money happening, and I knew if I didn't find something to occupy myself pretty damn quick, I'd go straight down the tube.

Thank God for AA. I'm one of these guys who really did that double ninety you hear about—ninety meetings in ninety days—and if that doesn't get you heavy into AA, nothing will. Maybe it's because I was coming from a Catholic background, but for me it felt like joining a religious order. I drank so much coffee I thought I was going to turn into a coffee bean. To this day, I don't care much for coffee except for a cup in the morning when I get up.

Eventually they had an opening at Braniff, and I slipped right into it. It was a terrific airline. They'd had some tough times, but they'd just changed management, and they were making a real effort with the public. That's when we were flying those pastel-colored aircraft—kind of a joke, but fun too—orange and red and green and pink aircraft. They were a good outfit to work for. And I bought myself an old piece-of-shit Chevy pickup truck. Needed some work on it, and I didn't mind doing the work. So I was on the road again.

Anybody new to AA, for a while the most important person in your life is your sponsor. I was real lucky getting the guy I got—although he drove me nuts from time to time, which, I guess, is one of the thing's your sponsor's supposed to do. His name was Art, and I can't tell you his last name because of the anonymous thing.

Art was one of those guys who came back from Korea with a hell of a thirst, and alcohol had screwed his life up so bad he had an ex-wife and three grown-up kids who wouldn't speak to him. He was a trim guy for somebody his age, and he had a little gray beard, one of these goatee things, and if you saw him walking down the street, you'd think he was—I don't know what, a jazz musician maybe—but certainly not some kind of heavy dude in the Department of Public Works, City of Austin, which is what he was. After he'd turned his life around, he'd started a new family, so he had a pretty young wife and two little girls in grade school, and his house was like a refuge for me. A million hours I sat around drinking coffee or 7UP with him while he chewed me out or cheered me up or whatever.