“It’s already got the power.”
“I guess.”
“The way you give it more power,” he said, “is by picking it up and drinking it. And the first step in picking it up and drinking it is picking it up at all.”
“So I left it there.”
“And locked the door on it. What time is it? Shit.”
“What’s the matter?”
“This isn’t something for you to do all by yourself,” he said. “I’d go with you after the meeting, assuming I can wrap this up in time to go to the meeting, but I don’t like the idea of letting it sit there for the next few hours. Or letting you sit somewhere between now and meeting time, locked out of your room and with no place to go. I’d come over now, but—”
“No, you’ve got work to do.”
“It would be really inconvenient to leave now. You’ve got phone numbers, right? People in the program, people who live nearby?”
“Sure.”
“And you’ve got quarters.”
“And subway tokens,” I said, “though I can’t see how one of those will come in handy right now.”
“You never know. You’re where? Down the block from your hotel?”
“Five blocks away. It took me that long to find a working phone without somebody already using it.”
“Make some calls. Get somebody to keep you company, and call me as soon as you pour out the booze. Will you do that?”
“Sure.”
“Call me from your room. And if you can’t find somebody, don’t go back to your room alone.”
“I won’t.”
“Call me instead. And we’ll figure out something. Matt?”
“What?”
“Didn’t I tell you? Sometimes things get a little crazy right before a person’s anniversary.”
There were a couple of phone numbers I didn’t have to look up. Two of them were Jim’s, of course, at home and at his place of business, and another was Jan’s. I’d already spoken to Jim and I wasn’t about to call Jan.
I’d have called her if I had to. When I was just starting to string sober days together, before we’d begun to become a couple, she’d made me promise to call her before I picked up a drink. In the world we shared, sobriety trumped everything, so even if we had ceased keeping company, either of us could call the other in order to stay sober.
But not now. There were plenty of other people I could call, and they were a lot closer than Lispenard Street.
I was limited, though, to the ones whose numbers were in my wallet. Now and then someone will hand me a card, or a slip of paper, and I’ll find room for it in my wallet until I get a chance to copy it into my book. I have a little memo book, itself about the size of a business card, that I use for AA phone numbers, and that’s where they wind up. I keep the book in my room, next to the phone, so that it’s handy if I want to call someone. I almost never do, the only AA calls I make with any frequency are to Jim, but it’s good to have the book, if only because I can periodically copy down new phone numbers and clear out my wallet.
The point of this is that I now needed to call someone, and I had plenty of phone numbers, but they were all in the book. If I wanted to have someone with me when I returned to my room, I was largely limited to whatever numbers were still in my wallet. There were a few of those, and the first one I came to was Motorcycle Mark. I caught him on his way out the door, and he said that was no problem, he didn’t have anything to do that wouldn’t keep. Where should he meet me?
I said I’d meet him at my hotel, and by the time I’d walked the four or five blocks he was already there, with his bike parked out front. On our way through the lobby he said he’d noticed the hotel hundreds of times, and often wondered what it was like inside. It seemed all right, he said, and I agreed that it wasn’t bad.
The door to my room was locked, as I’d left it, and as I was fitting the key in the lock I had this sudden image of finding the room not as I remembered it but as I’d left it that morning, with no bottle and no glass and no smell of whiskey. And Mark, in his boots and leather jacket and with his helmet under his arm, would nod his head knowingly and talk gently to me in that tone you use with ambulatory psychotics. Calming me down, talking me off the ledge.
The image was so vivid it made me reluctant to open the door. But I did, of course, and it was all still there, the uncapped bottle of Maker’s Mark, the glass filled almost to the brim, the chair positioned to welcome me, and the raw smell of bourbon suffusing the room.
“Fucking Jesus,” Mark said.
“That’s what I walked in on.”
“Man, the smell! It’s like a fucking distillery. That’s not from one drink sitting in a glass.”
“It’s strong, isn’t it?”