Part III - Chapter 4 (or 22). A Burning Bush

I woke up around eight AM reaching for the phone to call-in sick but forgot that it had been tossed through the window during my holy tantrum. My neighbor, Teddy, was in the front yard checking out the scene of the crime.

I went out to retrieve the phone. He scratched a sore on his bald spot and asked, “You were making a racket yesterday, Max. Who’s Lucky?”

I was relieved I hadn’t imagined an apparition and waved him off, “Some old guy from Pal’s.” 

Still picking at the scab on his pate, and knowing how drunk I'd been, he prodded, “Well, you were alone. I checked. Every time you broke a window you’d shout, Ata Boy! Or, Bravo!” 
Shit, I thought: Lucky wasn’t there. I wouldn’t let on that I wasn’t sure. Why does he do that, I asked myself, prod and poke into my business? I couldn’t let him know whether I remembered any of it… I did, after all, I did remember in a way… just not the way he saw it.

 I dismissed Ted, tried out the phone after retrieving it, and was surprised that it still worked. Not that I cared. I called the boss anyway and left a message explaining that I was back from the trip but wasn’t coming in to work. I had a whole list of reasons for my tardiness but didn’t give any of them other than, “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

I pulled the covers over my head, curled up in the fetal position, and tried to sleep. Fits of excuses and regrets bubbled-up through the goo of a booze saturated consciousness and I didn’t sleep until about three-thirty or four PM. Every time I started to fall asleep, the Fu was saying, “Don’t call me. I don’t want to see you ever again.” The pain was unbearable. I wanted to kill myself but suicide just wasn’t something I’d ever been inclined to do.

Staring up at the ceiling, I remembered all of the times I’d prayed and had gotten out of situations. Praying to some kind of phantom like God was out of the question. I wasn’t about to pray to an imaginary deity. Still, the idea grew on me… after all; no one else was taking my calls.

Okay, I figured I’d give it a shot… not expecting anything, “Whoever you are, I don’t want to talk to second in command. I want to talk with the chief. If there’s some kind of Satan, it can fuck-off too. What’s the deal? What can I do? What do you want of me? Give me a sign of some sort: a reason to believe in a reason to believe!”

Lying in bed, I waited for an answer.

There was nothing.

“That’s what I thought: nothing.” The idea occurred to me that I ought to do something for emphasis… like that time in jail… get on my knees. Reluctantly, I rolled out of bed and knelt… if only to seal the deal… to confirm by disbelief and that there was nothing on the other end of any effort I made.

“All right; you bastard, I’m on my fuckin’ knees. Moses got a burning bush… where’s my sign? Give me some direction, anything, damn it!”

As I suspected, there was nothing.

“That’s what I thought,” I prayed, and got back in bed …defiant, but then fell into a deep slumber.

A cop-knock on the door woke me. I looked at the clock… it read eight PM. I noted it had been almost exactly twenty-four hours since I left that half drink on the bar at Pal’s.

I crossed the room to the door, in bare feet on broken glass, past a bag of weed and several roaches in the ashtray on the desk. It didn’t matter; I was probably going to jail if the knock on the door came from a cop. I peeked through the blinds in front of the broken-out window.

Yep, I saw a dark blue uniform with a shiny badge pinned to it. I recognized him. It was Ryan.

“Are you Max McGee?” he stood back when I opened the door. He held a clip-board with a bunch of paper that looked like reports.

“Yeh, I am, what can I do for you?” Hell, I knew what was next. I waited for the order to turn around and be cuffed.

“We’ve received a report today about something that happened yesterday.” Ryan flipped the papers to read but hesitated a minute, “Were you in Manuel’s at six-thirty AM yesterday?”

“Yeh, I was.” I wasn’t nervous or worried about going to jail. I was hung-over big-time and nothing mattered. I was surrendered to whatever was going to happen.

Then he said something I hadn’t expected, “I’m not here to make an arrest. There are no charges yet. I’m simply here to fill out a report on the events of yesterday.” His eyes went from looking me over, to the baggie on the desk.

 “Oh? It wouldn’t be so bad if you did… arrest me, that is.”

He held a report on a clipboard where I could read it. I shook my head indicating I was in no shape to read anything.

He might have smiled… like he understood, “Okay, I’ll read the report to you of these events and then you can make your own report if you disagree with what Rodney Goldberg and Mrs. Adrienne Baker told us.”

He read the report and I listened. Rod’s version of events cited several witnesses who weren’t there in case I planned on fighting it. I saw a bit of humor in that. I didn’t know that was his surname, Goldberg, until then. How close could I get calling him the Gold Brick?

I knew that the only real witness was Manuel. He insisted that he hadn’t seen anything and that his back was to the bar when it happened.

“It’s all pretty much as it’s written,” I heard myself answer.

“I have a recording of your phone calls to Mrs. Baker. Can you verify if it is your voice in the recording?”

I listened to the venom that was coming from the recording, “Yep, that’s my voice.”

“Then you agree with the report?”

“Yeh, well, the essence of it’s true… Rod lied about some of the witnesses, but, hell…”

“Would you like to file your own report?” Ryan was going out of his way to be helpful.

“Naw… It is no use. It happened pretty much as, what, reported?”

“I thought I should a mention that Mrs. Baker didn’t want to have you arrested but Mr. Goldberg wanted you charged for an anti-Semite Hate Crime… you know, you called him Gold Brick. She talked him out of filing charges. He has three months to do so and, if he doesn’t, you’ll be okay.”

When he said this, a lump lodged in my throat. Tears started to flow down my face. I couldn’t stop it from happening… I wasn’t crying… but I started saying something I had never said seriously before, “You’ve been straight with me, officer, but I don’t know what I am going to do. I almost wish you’d arrest me. I think I’m an alcoholic and, trust me, I’ve tried everything to control it. Damn it, I even went down to the VA in LA… tried to check in but they were short of beds.”

Ryan said something that annoyed me and that I had no intention of following through with, “You seem like a decent man. Why are you messing around with these losers? They have AA meetings a few blocks from here. I think they’re around six. You could go to one before work in the morning.”

I must have looked hesitant. He started to walk away but added, “You might meet a better class of people to hang out with there too.”

I closed the door thinking; shit, I’d rather drink myself to death than meet with a bunch of fuckin’ drunks at a pathetic A.A. sob-fest. A better class of people, indeed: Didn’t he know that the Fu was probably from a classier bunch of folks, worth more than anyone in Montecito or Hope Ranch? Immediately following that thought, when I sat down at my desk, was; oh, yeh, she’s classy alright!... fooling around while married, the dalliances with low-life creeps, the weekly, and sometimes daily, visitations by police, the booze and heroin… yeh, it was the material of trailer-trash… high-end, Riviera-Trailer-Trash, for sure… we weren’t all that different from the people on Cops.

I went back to bed.

The next morning, I got out of bed completely refreshed. There was no urge to have a drink and I was compelled by an overwhelming desire to get to the Alano Club at six.

I drove over there but the meeting didn’t start until six-forty-five. I waited for the doors to open and was the first in line at the coffee machine. The rooms looked different in the room to me that morning. The people were brighter and more cheerful as they greeted each other. A nice looking blond woman welcomed me with a hug. A white-haired, well dressed, Hispanic man, crossed the room. He greeted me, and shook my hand with the AA salutation; “I’m Angelo, I’m an alcoholic. We have been saving a seat for you.”

I’d heard it before, and mocked it, but this time it seemed natural and a perfect way of saying, “Welcome, I’m like you, have some coffee and take a seat.”

The meeting began with some formal readings that I would have normally ignored. This time the words rang true as they described alcoholism. Then something extraordinary happened. The leader of the meeting asked for newcomers to stand and introduce themselves. I found my legs following suite as that damned lump arose in my craw and I admitted, like I had to Officer Ryan the day before, “My name is Max, and I’m an alcoholic.”

Tears again rolled down my cheeks. I had no control over my emotions and I was glad no one expected me to say anything more. I knew then that I had gotten the direction I’d been seeking for so many years.