The Next Right Thing (29 page)

It took under a second to make the list: Jean. Betsy. Manny. Who was I kidding? The citizens of Santa Ana. The citizens of California. Cops everywhere …

“It’s a long list,” I said.

“More than one?” Terry said. “Name for me just one.”

“Crash,” I said. “Crash would have a better life if I didn’t put alcohol into my body.”

“Crash?” Terry said.

“My daughter, Crash,” I said. “Alison.”

He nodded again. It felt like my life was hanging in the balance.

“You’re an alcoholic,” Terry said. He turned and held my eyes. “You don’t ever have to wonder about that again.”

From that moment, I never did.

I let Troy drive us toward Aliso Beach. Until today I could count on two fingers the men I had allowed to drive me anywhere in any vehicle during my adult life: one of them was dead of an overdose, and the other was Manny.

Troy looked skeptical as I instructed him to pull off PCH into the neighborhood above Victoria Beach. He parked in a space where we might be able to see a sliver of sunset. Where real estate
was this precious, the houses were even tighter than the rest of Laguna.

“We need to pray first.” I got out of the truck to look for someplace to kneel. There was a wooden bench above the beach access. Terry and I had prayed beside his couch, but a bench would work just as well.

Troy hesitated at the curb. “We’re on the street.”

“First of all,” I said, “nobody gives a shit what we’re doing. Second, do you think praying is the weirdest thing anyone’s done on this bench?”

Troy slowly got to his knees. We said the Serenity Prayer together, the way Terry and I had, and then I asked God to help us grow toward Him, to become better members of A.A., and to become better friends. I said this last part because Terry had said it with me.

Troy quickly got back into my truck. He had about fifteen pages in front of him: laser-printed, infinitely less dog-eared and more orderly than my own. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Okay,” I said. “Start reading.”

By the time Terry had driven me back from South Coast Plaza, the air in Laguna was cool and clear. A good afternoon to doze near the beach but not a good afternoon to sunbathe.

Then we got down to business, Terry sitting in a rocking chair and me sitting on his couch. It must have been the same old shit. I’ve heard a few fifth steps since, and nobody reinvents the alcoholic wheel. Every so often there’s a guy who starred in gay porn movies, or guarded the president of a South American
country, but usually it’s the same litany of resentments and rationalizations and fears. He did this to me and therefore I can’t have that. She said that to me and therefore I feel this. Dad lied. Mom left. We twist our lives into the shape of our anger.

Terry asked questions to make sure he understood. This was your first girlfriend? How old were you? Had Jean filed the papers yet? For the most part, though, he nodded and said, “There you go again, clamoring for justice.”

Which was funny, because I was a cop, but it was also true: I was always looking for some wrong to be righted. It had been that way since before I could talk.

Clamoring for justice again, Randy? Is that it?

When I shared the shameful parts of my sexual inventory, Terry sometimes shared an incident of his own or a dark thought he still entertained.

I came into the deal thinking I was the biggest scumbag in the world. I left thinking maybe Terry was.

But I felt better.

Troy had lied, cheated, stolen. He didn’t like the world the way he’d found it, so he’d tried to bend it to his will. He hated his parents for not helping him with this project. For the same reason, he hated every woman who’d loved him.

Someone had once described it to me as driving a car with concrete tires and insisting that the world be paved with rubber.

Troy’s sexual inventory was pretty bland. He’d slept with a half-dozen women, the kind of sweet girls who get mixed up with idiots like Troy. He was their project. I told him about Jean Trask, how I was her project.

By the time Troy finished his resentment list, sex inventory, and list of fears, we’d been talking for a couple of hours. My coffee was gone.

“Anything else you want to tell me? This is the time to get it out. Not just sex but anything.” I wanted to make certain there were no monsters under the bed. In an alcoholic, festering secrets can kill.

Troy thought about it. He was still at a place where thinking took tremendous effort. “I’m worried about one thing I left out.”

“This is like a confessional. It’s not going beyond the cab of this truck,” I said. Aching to go to Jean Claude’s for another cup of coffee, I checked my glove box for any fugitive Excedrin extra strength. The massive headache that had been postponed by The Penguin was getting back on schedule. “Unless it’s funny, and then I’m going to tell everyone.”

“You know how you’re always saying that I should shut up about my father being in the Mafia?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I think my exact words were ‘Shut the fuck up about your father being in the Mafia.’ I’m sorry about that, Troy. I’ve been a little edgy lately. I could have been kinder. I want to be kinder from now on.”

“I’ve got a couple things to tell you,” Troy said. “I’m not from New Jersey—I’m from Seattle. I’m sorry I lied about that. But I think I know why I talk about him so much, why I’ve made him into such a …”

“Legendary figure?”

“Yeah, that. I guess I want to believe that he’s such a badass because it makes me feel better about what happened.”

I waited.

“The last time I lived at home,” Troy continued, “about two
years ago, we got into a fight. I honestly don’t like what he does for a living. I got mad about something, and I said that if he were a real man, he’d find a different line of work.”

I nodded. Troy stared down Victoria Street toward a scoop of the Pacific Ocean that was worth about 150K to my client Bill Trembly, who happened to live beside it.

“He agreed with me. He fucking agreed with me, Randy. That’s what I couldn’t take.” Troy started crying, something I’d seen him do before, but this time I was glad for it. I moved my hand to the seat behind him.

Troy continued, “I hit him in the face. He didn’t defend himself. It was like he wanted it. He just stood there. I hit him again, too.”

From where we sat, I should have been able to see more of the ocean. A great big eucalyptus tree blocked my view. I thought about mentioning that to Bill Trembly, who could add even more to the value of his house with a smaller tree. Fuck eucalyptus trees anyway.

Troy said it again: “He wanted me to do it.”

“Can I tell you something,” I said, “that I’ve never told anyone but Terry? I think maybe it will help.”

So I told him.

I saved it for last. I didn’t know if I was going to share it at all. Around the time I came into A.A., a young man in San Diego had been successfully prosecuted for murder based on testimony from another A.A. member. In a blackout, he’d killed a couple living in his parents’ old house. When his sponsor was forced to
testify, it was ruled that there was no privilege between members of a self-help group.

“I tried to kill that guy,” I said. “If Manny hadn’t shown up, I’m sure I would have. I was drunk, but no more than a lot of times.”

Terry knew what I was talking about. He just listened.

“In my head, I was thinking he was a worthless fucking drug dealer. He’d run away from me, and he’d punched me, and I’d had all I could take. I started whaling on him, first with my nightstick, and when my nightstick broke, I punched him until my hands were bleeding. I was completely insane. I didn’t care what happened to either of us. I wanted to die, but I wanted to kill that motherfucker first.”

I looked at Terry. It felt like ten minutes passed while I waited for him to speak.

“What was his name?” Terry finally asked.

“Balthazar. Balthazar Bustamante.”

Terry shrugged. “You’re lucky the guy lived.” That was all he said for a long time.

I’ve never been in a purgatory worse than that moment. Terry stared off out his window, and I stared at Terry. I was feeling more fucked than ever when he turned back toward me, smiling. Then he said something else. You have to understand, that’s how Terry was. Just when you couldn’t believe that he would pull it out, he pulled it out.

“How big do you figure God is?” Terry asked.

“Jesus, Terry, I don’t know.”

“You figure He’s bigger than you and me?”

“I hope so.”

“You think He’s bigger than Orange County?”

“Sure.”

“How about almost killing a man? You think He’s bigger than that?”

My brain was pea-sized back then, but I thought I could see where we were going. I nodded wearily. Reading the menu, I thought I’d eaten the meal. Holding the hammer, I thought I was living inside the house.

“It’s like this,” Terry said. “There’s a part in The Big Book where it says, ‘Either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t.’ And then it asks us to make a choice. Everything or nothing? God or no God? A solution or the hell that you know by heart? What’s your choice, Randy? How big do you want God to be?”

I’d read The Big Book twice, but I didn’t remember that. It was in a chapter called “We Agnostics,” which I looked up as soon as I got home.

“What’s it going to be, Randy? This is where you get to say.”

“I’m voting for a very big God,” I said. “Because I fucking need one.”

There were no white lights, and I didn’t fall off a horse, but I think someone heard me.

After that, Terry told me that he loved me, that we would be friends for the rest of our lives because of what we’d just done together. I had a hard time believing that, too.

“One more thing,” Terry said.

“What’s that?”

“You’re going to have to make amends to that Mexican guy,” he said. “Face-to-face.”

“You think?” I asked.

“Only if you want to live.”