Out on the Cutting Edge

"I got a sponsor when I was about two days out of detox. I got his number next to my phone. The phone doesn't work and I've never called him anyway. We go to different meetings, so I never see him, either."

"What's his name?"

"Dave. I don't know his last name, and I have to say I'm beginning to forget what he looks like, it's so long since I saw him. But I've never yet thrown his number away, so I guess he's still my sponsor. I mean, I could call him if I had to, right?"

"Sure."

"I could even take the step with him."

"If you felt comfortable with him."

"I don't even know him. Do you have anybody that you sponsor, Matt?"

"No."

"You ever hear anybody's fifth step?"

"No."

There was a bottle cap on the sidewalk and he kicked at it. "Because I guess that's what I'm leading up to. I can't believe it, a crook looking to confess to a cop. Of course you're not with the department no more, but would you still, you know, be bound to report anything I said?"

"No. I wouldn't have the legal right to withhold information, the way a priest or a lawyer might, but that's how I'd treat it. As privileged information."

"Would you be willing? It'd be a whole load of shit once I got started, you might not want to sit through it."

"I'll force myself."

"I feel funny asking."

"I know. I felt the same way."

"If it was just me involved," he began, then broke off the sentence. He said, "What I want to do, I want to take a couple of days, sort things out in my mind, think some things through. Then if you're still willing we can get together and I can talk some. If that's all right with you."

"There's no hurry," I told him. "Wait until you're ready."

He shook his head. "If I wait till I'm ready I'll never do it. Gimme the weekend to sort it out and then we'll sit down and do it."

"Sorting it out is part of it. Take all the time you need."

"I been doing that," he said. He grinned, put a hand on my shoulder. "Thanks, Matt. That's my block coming up and I think I'll say good night."

" 'Night, Eddie."

"Have a good weekend."

"You too. Maybe I'll run into you at a meeting."

" St. Paul 's is just Monday through Friday, right? I'll probably get there Monday night, anyway. Matt? Thanks again."

He headed for his building. I walked up a block on Tenth, walked east on one of the cross streets. A few doors from the corner of Ninth Avenue, three young men in a doorway went silent at my approach. Their eyes followed me all the way to the corner, and I could feel their stares like darts between my shoulder blades.

Halfway home a hooker asked me if I felt like partying. She looked young and fresh, but they mostly do these days; drugs and viruses keep them from lasting long enough to fade.

I told her we'd have to make it some other time. Her smile, at least as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's, stayed with me all the way home. At Fifty-sixth Street a black man, bare to the waist, asked me for spare change. Half a block farther, a woman stepped out of the shadows and made the same request. She had lank blond hair and the face of an Okie out of one of those Depression photographs. They each got a dollar from me.

There were no messages at the hotel desk. I went up to my room and took a shower and got into bed.

Some years back three brothers named Morrissey owned a small four-story brick building on West Fifty-first half a block from the river. They lived in the top two stories, rented out the ground floor to an Irish amateur theater, and sold beer and whiskey after hours on the second floor. There was a time when I went there a lot, and there may have been half a dozen occasions when Mickey Ballou and I were there at the same time. I don't know that we ever exchanged a word, but I remember seeing him there, and knowing who he was.

My friend Skip Devoe had said of Ballou that, if he had ten brothers and they all stood around in a circle, you'd think you were at Stonehenge. Ballou had that megalithic quality, and he had too an air of wild menace just held in check. There was a man named Aronow, a manufacturer of women's dresses, who one night spilled a drink on Ballou. Aronow's apology was immediate and profuse, and Ballou mopped himself up and told Aronow to forget it, and Aronow left town and didn't come back for a month. He didn't even go home and pack, he took a cab straight to the airport and was on a flight within the hour. He was, we all agreed, a cautious man, but not overly cautious.

Lying there, waiting for sleep to come, I wondered what was on Eddie's mind and what it might have to do with the Butcher Boy. I didn't stay up late worrying about it, though. I figured I'd find out soon enough.

The good weather held all weekend. Saturday I went to a ball game. The Mets and the Yankees had both had a shot at it. The Mets were still leading their division, in spite of the fact that nobody was hitting. The Yankees had slipped to six or seven out and it didn't look as though they were going to turn it around. That weekend the Mets were in Houston for three games with the Astros. The Yankees were coming to the end of a home stand, hosting the Mariners, and I got to see Mattingly win it with a double down the line in the eleventh.

Coming home, I stayed on past my stop and rode down to the Village. I had dinner at an Italian place on Thompson Street, caught a meeting, made an early night of it.

Sunday I went over to Jim Faber's apartment and watched the Mets on the cable sports channel. Gooden held the Astros to three scratch hits through eight innings, but the Mets couldn't get any runs across for him, and Johnson pulled him in the top of the ninth for a pinch hitter, Mazzilli, who promptly flied out to deep short. "I think that was a mistake," Jim said softly, and in the bottom of the ninth the Houston second baseman walked, stole second, and scored on a sharp single through the middle.

We ate at a Chinese restaurant Jim had been wanting to try, then went to a meeting at Roosevelt Hospital. The speaker was a shy woman with an expressionless face and a voice that didn't carry past the first two rows. We were in the back and it was impossible to hear a word. I gave up trying and let my mind wander. I started thinking about the game and wound up thinking about Jan Keane and how she'd enjoyed going to ball games even though she had only a vague notion of what they were doing out there on the field. She told me once that she liked the perfect geometry of the game.

I took her to the fights once but she hadn't cared for that. She said she found it all exhausting to watch. But she loved hockey. She had never seen a match until we went together, and she wound up liking it far more than I do.

I was glad when the meeting ended, and I went straight home afterward. I didn't feel like being around people.

Monday morning I earned a couple of dollars. A woman who'd sobered up at St. Paul 's had moved in a few months ago with a fellow in Rego Park. He'd been sober at the time, but he'd slipped around for years, drifting in and out of the program, and he picked up a drink again shortly after they set up housekeeping. It took six or eight weeks and one good beating for her to realize that she'd made a mistake and that she didn't have to go on taking it, and she'd moved back to the city.

But she'd left some things at the apartment and she was afraid to go back there by herself. She asked what I would charge to ride shotgun.

I told her she didn't have to pay me. "No, I think I should," she said. "This isn't just an AA favor. He's a violent son of a bitch when he drinks, and I don't want to go out there without someone who's professionally qualified to deal with that sort of thing. I can afford to pay you and I'll be more comfortable doing it that way."

She arranged for a cabbie named Jack Odegaard to run us out and back. I knew him from meetings, but I hadn't known his last name until I read it on the hack license posted over the glove box.

Her name was Rosalind Klein. The boyfriend's name was Vince Broglio, and he wasn't a terribly violent son of a bitch that afternoon. He mostly just sat around chuckling ironically to himself and sucking on a longneck Stroh's while Roz packed up a couple of suitcases and a brace of shopping bags. He was watching game shows on TV, using the remote control to hop back and forth between the channels. The whole apartment was littered with boxes of half-eaten pizza from Domino's and those little white cartons of takeout food from Chinese restaurants. And empty beer and whiskey bottles. And overflowing ashtrays, and empty cigarette packs wadded up and tossed into corners.

At one point he said, "You my replacement? The new boyfriend?"

"Just along for the ride."

He laughed at that. "Aren't we all? Along for the ride, I mean."

A few minutes later, without taking his eyes off the Sony, he said, "Women."

"Well," I said.

"If they didn't have pussies there'd be a bounty on 'em." I didn't say anything, and he glanced my way, looking to read my expression. "Now that," he said, "might be construed to be a sexist remark." He had a little trouble getting his tongue around construed; and he got interested in the word and let go of his original train of thought. "Construed," he said. "I gotta get construed, blewed and tattooed. My whole problem, see, is I got misconstrued once. How's that for a problem?"

"It's a pretty good one."

"Let me tell you something," he said. "She's the one with a problem."

Jack Odegaard drove us back to the city, and he and I helped Roz get her stuff into her apartment. Before the move she'd lived on Fifty-seventh a few doors from Eighth Avenue. Now she was in a high-rise at Seventieth and West End. "I had a big one-bedroom," she said, "and now I'm in a studio, and my rent's more than double what it used to be. I ought to have my head examined for letting go of my old place. But I was moving into a beautiful two-bedroom in Rego Park. You saw the apartment, if you can imagine what it looked like before the shit hit the fan. And if you're going to commit to a relationship you have to show some faith in it, don't you?"

She gave Jack fifty bucks for the trip and paid me a hundred for my hazardous duty. She could afford it, just as she could handle the higher rent; she made good money working in the news department of one of the TV networks. I don't know what exactly she did there, but I gather she did it well.

I thought I might see Eddie at St. Paul 's that night but he wasn't there. Afterward I walked down to Paris Green to talk to the bartender who'd recognized Paula Hoeldtke's picture. I thought he might have remembered something, but he hadn't.

The next morning I called the telephone company and was told that Paula Hoeldtke's phone had been disconnected. I was trying to find out when this had happened and for what reason, but I had to go through channels before I could find somebody who was authorized to tell me. The service had been terminated at the customer's request, a woman told me, and then asked me to hold the line for a moment. She returned to inform me further that there was an outstanding final balance in the customer's favor. I asked how that could be; had she overpaid the final bill?

"She never received her final statement," the woman told me. "She evidently didn't leave a forwarding address. She had put down a deposit prior to installation, and the final bill came to less than the funds on deposit. In fact-"