At some point, April began to hang out with Pam, and they soon attracted the nosy interest that surged and crackled around the Club like atmospheric electricity before a storm.
"Bad comp'ny, that one," intoned old Ken B, referring to Pam. "But it ain't for me to judge. Not with the life I done led." He winked a bleached blue alkie eye at me and grinned. Ken was a cowboy from Salinas, cured by dry heat and whiskey to the shade and texture of a bronc saddle. Deep wrinkles crosshatched the back of his neck.
I smiled and edged away, not caring to hear Ken's drunkalog again: how he and Jack Kerouac used to toss them back in the dive bars of Prunedale and Chualar. How, at the end, Ken realized that Jack was going to ride that pony all the way down, and so he had shaken Jack‘s hand one last time and gotten himself to an AA meeting and lived.
"April's only trying to have a little fun," I said, adding "in sobriety," which seemed de rigueur. Actually, I was not sure of what "fun in sobriety" consisted. Since my early teens, fun was what I hoped I had had, after regaining consciousness. And so far, sobriety only fit that definition of war as ninety percent boredom and the rest pure terror.
We joined hands in a circle now, and bowed our heads for the Lord's Prayer that ended the five p.m. AA meeting at the old Monterey Alano Club. The devout would lower chin to chest and squeeze their lids tight shut, but I am a peeker, so I could watch Pam's large, stormy gray eyes gazing defiantly at something lurking out beyond our circle that only she could see. Pam's beauty was in the category of magnolias and fireworks and prom queens: a brief, stunning trajectory with a relatively steep and swift descent. Her tousled, tawny hair still looked drunk. I probably stared a little too hard, because she caught my eye and gave a little simper of annoyance. I quickly shifted my gaze back to my feet.
Monterey has always been hospitable to drinking writers, Steinbeck at the top of the heap, of course. A couple of old-timers at the club swore they had fucked some of his women. And speaking of fucking, young "newbies" such as I, fresh from rehab, attracted the intense interest from the men that limping zebras on the Serengeti receive from lions. Other men would appoint themselves our guardians, and naturally there was a leonine element to that as well.
When we discussed "acceptance" in the meetings, I did not think about alcoholism, but rather about fitting into this new culture. "Out there," as we termed the drinking world, my marriage had drowned before the wedding gifts were broken in. My job in advertising soon followed. I could no longer look forward to closing out the bars in tony Carmel-by-the-Sea, slipping and staggering hilariously down its dark, cobbled streets with some middle-aged golfing swell. Any friends who still called had an annoying tendency to remind me of dares accepted, rants delivered. To them, the Alano Club, a watering hole for sober alcoholics, hosted only losers, paupers and oddballs, but I fit at least two of those categories. That I could accept.
In those years, the Alano Club occupied an ancient building on Alvarado Street; a stolid, square story of adobe with a single barred window. The building had settled, so that taller members had to duck through its canted front door. Within, shapeless old armchairs and tape-patched Naugahyde sofas embraced a sooty fireplace. Dingy green walls were papered with sobriety slogans and bumper stickers in gothic blackletter: A New Pair of Glasses, Friend of Bill W, and other code by which we drunks could spot one another. To enter the Club, one must not have had a drink within the last twenty-four hours. This steep hurdle kept the place fairly decorous. Employee/members served short orders from behind a pearl gray Formica bar. Preserved for some reason under yellowed shellac were a two-dollar bill and a seven of diamonds.
Just as alcohol brings together unlikely people, so does its mirror, recovery. At the Club, dowagers from Pebble Beach rubbed elbows with housemaids and hookers from Seaside; Naval Postgraduate School officers with Confederate pedigrees poured out their anguish to Black Fort Ord Army privates from Compton. Whether you had swilled Everclear beneath a freeway overpass or quaffed Cognac amid Ferraris at the Concours d'Elegance, you were "right where you belong," the traditional greeting.
The Club was our refuge from a world of people who left their drinks half-finished when they paid the tab; who thought "let's have a couple" meant cocktails not bottles; who were reasonably certain, when they took their first sip, where they would awaken the next day, and with whom.
When April greeted me one afternoon in a drugstore on Del Monte Boulevard, I had to force myself to stop and chat. Though we had never met, we knew, thanks to the meetings, details of one another's lives that might have taken "normies" years to confide.
"You're Jennifer P, aren't you?" she said. The initial distinguished me from Jennifer B, the addicted nurse, and Jennifer N, the old truck stop waitress from Memphis. My reticence didn't faze April. She was in her early forties, blonde and pert. Her plaid skirt and brown pumps were as respectable as any parent could wish for in a sixth grade teacher, which she was. Her white cotton blouse was tied at the neck with a drooping bow.
Get me out of here, I thought.
"I think we need to get you out of here," April said.
Early that morning, the phone had summoned me into the lucid terror that is my usual waking state.
"What do you want, Matthew?" I tried not to think of his face.
"You didn't call me back last night, so I figured maybe you didn't get my message."
"I got it, all right."
"So what's your answer?" I said nothing. "Look, Jen, a divorce doesn't have to be a vendetta. I'm trying to work with you. I made a simple, reasonable request."
"You're supposed to pass your requests through my lawyer."
"That grubby little shyster will want a thousand bucks for divvying up a hundred bucks worth of crappy furniture."
"What do you want with fifty bucks worth of crappy furniture?"
"Karen saw a few pieces she liked, that's all."
"Who's Karen?"
"None of your business."
I hung up.
That conversation, and the images it spawned, had led me into bad emotional terrain, so I was browsing the liquor aisle—not with intent, I assured myself—but merely to sightsee. Nevertheless, I let April guide me out of the store, into the fresh ocean breeze whipping sand across the road from the beach dunes nearby.
I said, "My ex-husband has found somebody."
"Good!" April nodded cheerily, as if I had just grasped long division. "He wasn't right for you. Let's hope he won't bother you anymore." She took my arm playfully but firmly. "I live just up the street. I'll fix us lunch, and then we can go to a meeting."
Her tidy home was filled with quality antique furniture that looked inherited. The omelet she made for me was perfect. "I've never been married," she laughed. "Just a spinster schoolmarm. Why don't you spend the night in my spare bedroom? I think that would be wise. You don't need to be alone right now."
"I simply cannot imagine you drunk," I blurted.
"People say that a lot. But oh my, it got bad." She grimaced, as if at a sinus infection or a sprained ankle. "Come meet my mice."
If a mouse could visualize paradise, it would be April's white mouse resort, where she cared for them with loving officiousness. Something in the uniform perfection of their moist ruby eyes, kinetic whiskers, and snowy, shivery little bodies, completed her. They lived in spotless cages filled with exercise contraptions, mazes, wood shavings and sumptuous mousechow.
"The world is so cruel to mice," April said. "It makes me feel good to give a few of them a safe, happy life."
That night, lying beside them in the guest bedroom, I became aware of nocturnal scuttles; of tiny paws in frenetic motion, burrowing into the cozy dark as their tribe has done for millennia. I felt like a proto-mammal myself, huddled deep in my tunnel, awaiting the Asteroid and my call to destiny.
As the daughter of a minor diplomat, April had grown up in courts—not the type that you slink into and plead to drunk and disorderly, but real ones, like the Court of St. James. Yet, beneath her politesse I sensed a consuming glow that never flared up but never quite died out either, like that of a peat fire.
The next evening, as the meeting began, I crossed the room to sit with April and Pam, under the intent gaze of Old Ken and his buddies. I felt guilty. The emotions of these lonely, self-appointed protectors ran high. I knew that I was moving, in their estimation, from lost to astray—probably well on my way to reckless and wanton.
But after the meeting, I again sat beside Pam at the fireplace, where the younger men congregated. They oriented toward us in their female-tropic way, like plants turning to the sun.
"Hey Justin!" Pam beckoned a young man with smooth, dark hair parted in the middle. "Come meet Jennifer." She whispered in my ear, "check out the bulge in his pants."
"Hi Jennifer," Justin sat down beside me. "It's nice to see you laugh. We were starting to wonder if you even could."
I had been dumped into rehab from the Community Hospital emergency room after passing out pulseless at a celebrity party I had crashed during the AT&T Pro-Am golf tournament. I later learned that some caddies had dragged me outside for the paramedics to find.
After being resuscitated, I was caught climbing down from my gurney to prowl for drugs. "I can't watch you every minute," the night nurse said, yanking leather cuffs tight to my wrists. "People are fighting for their lives here, while you're trying to throw yours away." It was four a.m. Her eyes were red and watery.
Chatting now with Justin, the black curtain around my feelings unexpectedly lifted. I tried to fix the moment in memory, because I was pretty sure the shadows would quickly return. But to my surprise, a full twenty minutes passed before I suddenly recalled the failed aspirations; the bruises and fractures of mysterious origin; the charcoal leaked into my hair from nasogastric tubes.
Justin had grown up poor, white, and tough in Detroit. He had joined the Army from the streets, where he had been living since age fourteen, after his father had shot him in the chest with a starter pistol. At Ford Ord, he had reached the rank of corporal before drinking triggered his discharge—honorable. He was at pains to tell me all this.
"Pretty hair, like copper," he said later that night, running it through his hands. "Big blue eyes. Why won't they look at me?"
"You'd better go," I said. "The neighbors will tell my ex I had a man over."
"Who cares?"
I could not think of an answer.
Justin and three newly sober friends had rented a furnished house in crime-riddled Seaside. They parked their motorcycles in front, stuck sobriety slogans on the walls, worked at dead end jobs, and went to AA meetings. All wore knives. The music they played was so loud and furious that the cheap sheetrock walls creaked and wobbled beneath its onslaught.
When April, Pam, and I dropped over one day with a couple of female mice as a housewarming gift, Justin's former sergeant, Gavin Brantley, was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee.
Gavin was twenty-two, and the most handsome man I have ever seen. In his uniform, he had that sort of Rupert Brooke, World War l beauty that almost makes you want to cry. His looks actually buffered me against any real attraction; I prefer lovers who do not take my breath away or outshine me. So I was able to gaze dispassionately at the clear hazel eyes, the broad, smooth forehead and dark brows perfectly aligned; the clear, planar cheeks and the curving young mouth just shy of feminine.
Pam was only mildly impressed; her taste in men ran to the felonious—blank, wanted-poster stares and greasy mullet hairdos. But April was watching Gavin in a sort of otherworldly trance. For her, everyone else in the room had simply ceased to exist.
April had spent her childhood touring the famous museums of Europe; her degree was in art history. So she must have spotted those rare classical dimensions at once in Gavin, a straightforward kid from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, oblivious to Renaissance aesthetics. He was a tanker, and his conversation focused on guns, sports, and Fort Ord trivia. April couldn't have been more rapt if he were discussing the lost treasures of the Anasazi.
Despite Gavin's angelic looks, he had the morals of the average noncom and speedily helped himself to what April freely—insistently—offered. He soon began to spend nights, then weekends at her place. I suspected she was giving him money; Pam was certain of it.
"April," I said tentatively to her after a meeting, "I hope you're being… careful."
"Why, whatever could you mean?" She flushed, her eyes darting about.
"At least," I begged, "don't fall in love with him." Even as I spoke, I realized how idiotic that sounded. "For some people, sex is just. . . recreation."
"Are we projecting here?" April said frostily, arching her brows.
"No. I just worry that..."
"Nonsense. Everyone sees the world through their own lenses, Jennifer. Try turning them on yourself." Eyes closed, I nodded.
I soon discovered that within my Justin dwelt a tender, constant heart, despite his years of conning, lying, seducing, and score settling. Who knew? He admired my college degree and enrolled in night school. On my birthday, he borrowed a robin's egg blue, three-piece double-knit suit from his roommate and escorted me to lunch at the Lodge at Pebble Beach, parading me into a roomful of startled millionaires, calling the maître d' "my good dude."
"Don't fight it," Pam grinned with lecherous relish. "He's exactly what you need."
"If Justin is what I need, then what is Gavin to April?" We had saved her a seat at the meeting as usual, but she had failed to show up.
"The next worst thing to a drink."
"That's what I was afraid of."
"I take that back." Pam said. "Alcohol she knows is poison."
"What should we do?"
Pam shrugged. "Pray for her."
"No, really. I owe April. She saved me from going back out."
"God saved you." I rolled my eyes, and Pam stared at me, horrified. "Why, you don't believe in the Program at all!" People moved away discreetly; around here, apostasy was a high crime.
"All I mean," I said, knowing I had crossed into perilous terrain, "is that we shouldn't just abandon her."
Pam's eyes brightened with tears. "Don't you dare judge me. I've got a son I can't even visit. Parents who want nothing to do with me. I was a hooker by age thirteen." She began to sob. "The Program is all I've got. What do you expect me to do? Sure, April's making an ass of herself. You've done it. We all have." I thought back on my history of arid, superficial relationships; my shunning of the commitment I distrusted and the intimacy I feared, avoiding not only rejection but all potential joys as well.
April soon traded her dowdy dresses for miniskirts and tight shirts. She began to wear makeup and let her hair grow out wild and curly. At the Club, she spoke of Gavin by the hour; how his love was freeing her from the stifling expectations that had warped her life.
"Oh, wasn't I the perfect little lady, always trying to please parents who couldn't be troubled to notice me. If only I made high enough grades, if only I dressed or sang perfectly, then maybe they'd love me like they did my brother. No wonder I drank."
I hardly knew how to respond. Few rules existed that I hadn't found a way to break. It only went to show alcoholism's amazing ability to destroy the overly compliant and the rebellious with equal efficiency.
"And won't the eyebrows go up back east when they find out I'm with a younger man. An enlisted man!" April cackled with glee. I forced a chuckle.
Her world now revolved entirely around Gavin: photographing him, mapping out education and employment strategies for him after he left the Army. She could not comprehend his choosing to be with anyone but her in the coming years.
"April's burnt," said Justin, shaking his head.
"I'm not defending Gavin," I said, "but April can be hard to turn down. And if she thinks he needs money, she'll practically force it on him."
"It don't take much forcing," said Justin. "Gavin, he don't earn shit."
The Club frequently held dances, and it was an open secret that these were the best parties on the Monterey Peninsula, though not a drop of alcohol was permitted. People traveled from as far away as San Francisco and even L.A. The hunger to live and love again, to resurrect romance from the wreckage, contrasted vividly with the Babbitty country club bars I had cruised for lovers.
Dancing now with Justin in the Club's twilight amid shabby decorations—the theme was "The Fifties"—I spotted old Ken and Jennifer N, my truck stop waitress namesake, gliding wrinkled cheek to cheek. I felt a sudden rush of affection so intense I nearly stumbled. Perhaps it was the woeful teenage music, the valiant approximations of ducktail hairdos and ponytails and bobby-sox; the struggling but irrepressible human spark. A sob caught in my throat, which I quickly concealed with a slight cough. Held tight in Justin's quiet grasp, I let myself settle, tentatively, into what I can only call love.
When the dance ended, we poured from the Club in our dozens to stroll around Monterey, euphoric under the clear, cold sky: It was two a.m. on a Sunday morning, and we were not puking, fighting, or comatose. The sirens we heard were not coming for us. Miracles!
After that night, Justin began to spend more time at my place and finally moved in his possessions: a couple of cardboard boxes containing tattered T-shirts and jeans, motorcycle magazines, coffee mugs. A worn Army certificate attested to his skill at jumping from helicopters. In a Polaroid snapshot, his obese mother waved from a blue sofa. I reminded myself that his life was just beginning, but it still seemed like a scanty showing.
One afternoon, April and I dropped by Justin's house and found the place full of Seaside girls, the type that Justin dismissively referred to as "hams." I recalled a Dorothy Parker short story, her depiction of the type ringing as true now as it did in the nineteen twenties: the drugstore makeup and black-ringed eyes and pale skin; the elaborate hairdos, sweet perfume, cheap high heels and tight, pastel skirts. These modern flappers had taken the place over by some innate territorial entitlement, sitting at the kitchen table and stuffing themselves with cake, prattling about movie stars, beauty school, and how drunk they had gotten over the weekend. Gavin was sitting beside a girl in mauve lipstick whose long, streaked hair tumbled over cleavage tattooed with a butterfly.
"I'm studying to be a dentical assistant," she told me.
April stood stiffly at my side. "Gavin," she finally broke in with strained lightness, "I think it's time we left." Gavin did not respond. I looked imploringly at Justin, who rolled his eyes and tapped Gavin on the shoulder.
"Hey Gav, your lady's talkin' to you."
Gavin did not look up. "Mind your own fucking business," he said evenly. "And keep your fucking paws off me." I saw the cords tighten along Justin's arm and the sudden fist. I drew in a breath and closed my eyes. In the silence, one of the hams popped her chewing gum.
"You got it." Justin turned away. In his room, he sat on the bed, rose halfway, then sat back quickly. I knew how he longed to charge out and smash Gavin's pretty face to a bloody pulp. Somebody was going to do it eventually.
Over the next several weeks, April seemed to implode and crumple. The more distant and aloof Gavin grew, the more obsessed she became. She forgave him all, yet he stayed away and ignored her calls. After the meetings, April would seek me out for agonized, repetitive post mortems: How could he act so contrary to his own interests? The tramp was blowsy and coarse; he must soon come to his senses. I asked if Gavin had repaid any of her money and instantly regretted the question.
At last, I told myself to obey Pam's dictum and let go. April would have to get over Gavin in her own time. I made excuses to leave the Club early: Justin, struggling through freshman English composition, needed me, I told myself. But in truth, I was busy frolicking in bed with him, styling my hair, shopping for makeup; gorging on the mundane preoccupations of normalcy, no different from the hams.
It was late afternoon, and a chilly winter haze had descended on Monterey. April's street was quiet; remote and foreboding.
"Something ain't right," Justin said. He knocked at her door several times, then took out his knife and disabled the dead bolt with a sharp jerk. The door swung wide into frigid silence. There was an odor that I did not recognize. It raised the hair on my arms. We found April lying on the living room sofa under a tartan blanket. To my relief, she opened her eyes and held out her arms.
"Oh my dear, dear friends," she said, in the tone of a society hostess, "I am so very glad you've paid me a call." She had colored elaborate red horns and goatees onto all of Gavin's photos. "Such a beautiful boy," she said, looking at them sadly. "But so very, very wicked."
"Shit. The mice," said Justin from the guest bedroom. "Don't come in here." But I did, and I screamed.
April was admitted to an inpatient recovery program somewhere in Arizona, where she spent several months, emerging in a state of medicated serenity. She was welcomed back warmly to the Club as a survivor of relapse, a journey from which many do not return.
Whatever they had done to her in the hospital, it had not been enough to dislodge Gavin. When I glanced at her during meetings, her eyes were shining beatifically; her mouth quivering and her head swaying gently, as if to some sweet, inaudible song. I knew that she was thinking of her errant lover, reliving their transitory hours of ecstasy and nurturing the fond hope that was all he had left her.
I heard around the Club that old Ken B and his cronies held Pam and me accountable as the chief architects of April's collapse, and that may have been true. Yet, for a brief time at least, her world had glowed with an eerie and thrilling bioluminescence like the seashore at night, beyond which lurks the cold, dark and drowning deep.
