Out on the Cutting Edge

This time all it took was one conversation to bring on the feeling. I went back to my hotel room and sat in front of my TV set until it was time to go to the meeting.

At St. Paul 's that night the speaker was a housewife from Ozone Park. She told us how she used to take the first drink of the day as her husband's Pontiac was pulling out of the driveway. She kept her vodka under the sink, in a container that had previously held oven cleaner. "The first time I told this story," she said, "a woman said, 'Oh, dear Jesus, suppose you grabbed the wrong jar and drank the real oven cleaner.' 'Honey,' I told her, 'get real, will you? There was no wrong jar. There was no real oven cleaner. I lived in that house for thirteen years and I never cleaned the oven.' Anyway," she said, "that was my social drinking."

Different meetings have different formats. At St. Paul 's the meetings run an hour and a half, and the Friday night meetings are step meetings, centering upon one of the twelve steps of AA's program of recovery. This particular meeting was on the fifth step, but I don't remember what the speaker had to say on the subject or what particular words of wisdom I contributed when it was my turn.

At ten o'clock we all stood to say the Lord's Prayer, except for a woman named Carole who makes a point of not taking part in the prayer. Then I folded my chair and stacked it, dropped my coffee cup in the trash, carried ashtrays up to the front of the room, talked with a couple of fellows, and turned when Eddie Dunphy called my name. "Oh, hello," I said. "I didn't see you."

"I was in the back, I got here a few minutes late. I liked what you had to say."

"Thanks," I said, wondering what I'd said. He asked if I wanted to have coffee, and I said a few of us were going over to the Flame, and why didn't he join us?

We walked a block south on Ninth and wound up at the big corner table with six or seven other people. I had a sandwich and fries and some more coffee. The conversation was mostly about politics. It was less than two months before the election, and people were saying what everybody says every four years, that it was a damned shame there wasn't anybody more interesting to vote for.

I didn't say much. I don't pay any more attention to politics than I have to. There was a woman at our table named Helen who'd been sober about the same length of time I had, and for a while now I'd been toying with the idea of asking her out. Now I placed her under covert surveillance, and I kept coming up with data that got entered in the minus column. Her laugh was grating, she needed some dental work, and every sentence out of her mouth had the phrase you know in it. By the time she was done with her hamburger, our romance had died unborn. I'll tell you, it's a great way to operate. You can run through women like wildfire and they never even know it.

A little after eleven I tucked some coins alongside my saucer, said my goodbyes, and carried my check to the counter. Eddie rose when I did, paid his own check and followed me outside. I'd almost forgotten he was there; he'd contributed even less to the conversation than I had.

Now he said, "Beautiful night, isn't it? When the air's like this it makes you want to breathe more. You got a minute? You want to walk a few blocks?"

"Sure."

"I gave you a call earlier. At your hotel."

"What time?"

"I don't know, middle of the afternoon. Maybe three o'clock."

"I never got the message."

"Oh, I didn't leave one. It was nothing important, and anyway you couldn't call me back."

"That's right, you don't have a phone."

"Oh, I got one. It sits right there on the bedside table. It just don't work, that's the only thing wrong with it. Anyway, I just wanted to pass the time of day. What were you doing, looking for the girl some more?"

"Going through the motions, anyway."

"No luck?"

"Not so far."

"Well, maybe you'll get lucky." He took out a cigarette, tapped it against his thumbnail. "What they were going on about back there," he said. "Politics. I have to tell you I don't even know what they were talking about. You gonna vote, Matt?"

"I don't know."

"You gotta wonder why anybody wants to be president. You want to know something? I never voted for nobody in my life. Wait a minute, I just told a lie. You want to know who I voted for? Abe Beame."

"That was a while ago."

"Gimme a minute and I'll tell you the year. That was '73. You remember him? He was a little shrimp of a guy, he ran for mayor and he won. You remember?"

"Sure."

He laughed. "I must of voted twelve times for Abe Beame. More. Maybe fifteen."

"It sounds as though you were highly impressed with him."

"Yeah, his message really moved me. What it was, some guys from the local clubhouse got hold of a school bus and ran a bunch of us all over the West Side. Every precinct we went to I answered to a different name and they had a voter registration card for me in that name, and I went in the booth and did my civic duty like a little soldier. It was easy, I just voted the straight Democratic ticket like I was told."

He stopped to light his cigarette. "I forget what they paid us," he said. "I was gonna say fifty bucks, but it could have been less than that. This was fifteen years ago and I was just a kid, so it wouldn't take much. Besides, they sprung for a meal, and of course there was free booze for the bunch of us the whole day long."

"Magic words."

"Ain't that the truth? Booze was God's gift even when you had to pay for it, and when it was free, Jesus, there was nothing better."

"There was something about it that defied all logic," I said. "There was a place in Washington Heights where I didn't have to pay for my drinks. I remember taking a cab there from way the hell out in Brooklyn. It cost me twenty dollars, and I drank maybe ten or twelve dollars worth of booze, and then I took a cab home and thought I really put one over on the world. And I didn't just do this once, either."

"It made sense at the time."

"Perfect sense."

He drew on the cigarette. "I forget who it was ran against Beame," he said. "It's funny what you remember and what you forget. This poor bastard, I voted against him fifteen times and I don't remember his name. Here's another thing that's funny. After the first two, three times I voted, I couldn't go in a booth without getting this urge to cross 'em up. You know, vote the other way, take their money and vote Republican."

"Why?"

"Who knows why? I had a couple of belts in me by then and maybe that made it seem like a good idea. And I figured nobody'd know. Secret ballot, right? Only I thought, yeah, there's supposed to be a secret ballot, but there's lots of shit that's supposed to be, and if they can take and vote us fifteen times all over town, maybe they can tell how we're voting. So I did what I was supposed to do."

"The straight ticket."

"You got it. Anyway, that was the first I ever voted. I coulda the year before, I was old enough, but I didn't, and then I voted fifteen times for Abe Beame, and I guess I got it out of my system, because I never done it since."

The light changed and we walked across Fifty-seventh. A blue-and-white patrol car headed north on Ninth with the siren screaming. We turned to follow it with our eyes until it was out of sight. You could still hear it, though, whining faintly over the other traffic noises.

He said, "Somebody must of done something bad."

"Or it's just a couple of cops in a hurry."

"Yeah. Matt, what they were talking about at the meeting. The fifth step?"

"What about it?"

"I don't know. I think maybe I'm afraid of it."

The steps are designed to enable recovering alcoholics to change, to grow spiritually. The founders of AA discovered that people who were willing to grow along spiritual lines tended to stay sober, while those who fought change tended to go back to drinking sooner or later. The fifth step calls for an admission to God, to oneself, and to another human being of the exact nature of one's wrongs.

I quoted the language of the step to Eddie and he frowned. He said, "Yeah, but what does that boil down to? You sit down with somebody and tell him every bad thing you ever done?"

"More or less. Everything that bothers you, everything that weighs on your mind. The idea is that you might drink over it otherwise."

He thought about it. "I don't know if I could do that," he said.

"Well, there's no rush. You're not sober all that long, you don't have to be in a hurry."

"I guess."

"There's a lot of people will tell you that the steps are a load of crap, anyway. 'Don't drink and go to meetings and all the rest is conversation.' You've heard people say that."

"Oh, sure. 'If you don't drink you can't get drunk.' I remember the first time I heard somebody say that. I thought it was the most brilliant remark I ever heard in my life."

"You can't fault it for truth."

He started to say something, but stopped when a woman stepped out of a doorway into our path. She was a haggard, wild-eyed thing, all wrapped in a shawl, her hair stringy and matted. She was holding an infant in one arm, and she had a small child standing next to her, clutching her shawl. She extended one hand, palm up, wordless.

She looked as though she belonged in Calcutta, not New York. I'd seen her before during the past few weeks, and each time I'd given her money. I gave her a dollar now, and she drew back wordlessly into the shadows.

He said, "You hate to see a woman on the street like that. And when she's got her kids with her, Jesus, that's a hell of a thing to see."

"I know."

"Matt, did you ever do it? Take the fifth step?"

"I did, yes."

"You didn't hold nothing back?"

"I tried not to. I said everything I could think of."

He thought about it. "Of course you were a cop," he said. "You couldn't of done anything that bad."

"Oh, come on," I said. "I did a lot of things I'm not proud of, and some of them were acts a person could go to jail for. I was on the force for a lot of years and I took money almost from the beginning. I never lived on what I drew as salary."

"Everybody does that."

"No," I said, "everybody doesn't. Some cops are clean and some are dirty, and I was dirty. I always told myself I felt all right about it, and I justified it with the argument that it was clean dirt. I didn't actually shake people down and I didn't overlook homicides, but I took money, and that's not what they hired me to do. I was illegal. It was crooked."

"I suppose."

"And I did other things. For Christ's sake, I was a thief. I stole. One time I was investigating a break-in and there was a cigar box next to the cash register that the burglar had somehow missed, and there was close to a thousand dollars in it. I took it and put it in my pocket. I figured the owner'd be covered by insurance, or else it was money he was skimming, in which case I was just stealing from a thief. I had it rationalized, but you can't get around the fact that I was taking money that wasn't mine."

"Cops do that kind of shit all the time."

"They rob the dead, too, and I did that for years. Say you come on a stiff in an SRO hotel or an apartment, and he's got fifty or a hundred dollars on him, and you and your partner divide it up before you zip him into the body bag. What the hell, otherwise it just gets lost in the bureaucratic mill. Even if there's an heir it'll most likely never get to him, and why not just save time and trouble and put it in your pocket? Except that it's stealing."