Joe had asked if the speaker was anyone he knew, and I’d avoided a direct answer. If he didn’t know Ray Gruliow personally, he certainly knew him by reputation, and would recognize the long Lincolnesque face and the rich raspy voice. Hard-Way Ray was a criminal lawyer who’d made a career out of representing radicals and outcasts, cham-pioning the country’s least sympathetic defendants by putting the system itself on trial. The police hated him, and hardly anyone doubted that it had been a cop, some years ago, who’d fired a couple of shots through the front window of Ray’s Commerce Street town house. (No one was hurt, and the resultant publicity was a bonanza for Ray. “If I’d known I’d get that much of a bounce out of it,” he’d said, “I might have done it myself.”)
I’d run into Ray in May, at the annual dinner of the Club of Thirty-one. It had been a happy event, we hadn’t lost any members since last year’s gathering, and toward the end of the evening I told Ray I was booking the speaker every other Wednesday at St. Paul’s, and when would he like to speak?
There were forty or fifty people at the meeting that night, and at least half of them must have recognized Ray, but the tradition of anonymity runs deep among us. During the discussion that followed his lead, no one gave any indication that he knew more about him than All the Flowers Are Dying
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he’d told us. “Guess who I heard at St. Paul’s last night,” they might tell other members at other meetings, because we tend to do that, although we’re probably not supposed to. But we don’t tell friends outside of the program, as I had not told Joe Durkin, and, perhaps more to the point, we don’t let it affect how we relate to one another in the rooms. Paul T., who delivers lunches for the deli on Fifty-seventh Street, and Abie, who does something arcane with computers, get as much attention and respect in that room as Raymond F. Gruliow, Esq.
Maybe more—they’ve been sober longer.
The meeting breaks at ten, and a few of us generally wind up at the Flame, a coffee shop on Ninth Avenue almost directly across the street from Jimmy’s original saloon. This time there were seven of us at the big table in the corner. These days I’m often the person in the room with the longest continuous sobriety, which is the sort of thing that’s apt to happen to you sooner or later if you don’t drink and don’t die.
Tonight, though, there were two men at our table who’d been sober longer than I by several years, and one of them, Bill D., had very likely been at my first meeting. (I didn’t remember him from that night, having been only peripherally aware of my own presence.) He used to share with some frequency at meetings, and I always liked what he said; I might have asked him to be my sponsor if Jim Faber hadn’t emerged as the clear choice for that role. Later, after Jim was killed, I decided that if I ever felt the need of a sponsor I’d ask Bill. But so far I hadn’t.
These days he didn’t talk much, although he went to as many meetings as ever. He was a tall man, rail thin, with sparse white hair, and some of the newer members called him William the Silent. That was an adjective that would never be attached to Pat, who was short and stocky and sober about as long as Bill. He was a nice enough fellow, but he talked too much.
Bill had retired a while ago after fifty years as a stagehand; he’d probably seen more Broadway plays than anyone I knew. Pat, also retired, had worked downtown in one of the bureaucracies quartered in City Hall; I was never too clear on which agency he worked for, or 12
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what he did there, but whatever it was he’d stopped doing it four or five years ago.
Johnny Sidewalls had worked construction until a job-related in-jury left him with two bad legs and a disability pension; he got around with the help of two canes and worked from his home, carrying on some sort of Internet-based mail-order business. He’d been very sullen and embittered when he showed up at St. Paul’s and Fireside and other neighborhood meetings a few years ago, but his attitude leveled out over time. Like Bill, he was a neighborhood guy, who’d lived all his life in and around Hell’s Kitchen and San Juan Hill. I don’t know why they called him Johnny Sidewalls, and I think he may have had the name before he got sober. Some sort of sobriquet’s almost inevitable when your name is John, but no one seems to know where this one came from.
When your name is Abie, on the other hand, neither a nickname nor an initial is required. Abie—short for Abraham, I supposed, but he always gave his name as Abie, and corrected you if you truncated it to Abe—was sober ten years and change, but new in New York; he’d sobered up in Oregon, then relocated to northern California. A few months ago he moved to New York and started showing up at St. Paul’s and a few other West Side meetings. He was in his early forties, around five-eleven, with a medium build and a clean-cut face that was hard to keep in your mind when you weren’t looking at him. There were no strong features there for the memory to grab onto.
It seemed to me he had a personality to match. I’d heard his AA qualification at a noon meeting in the Sixty-third Street Y, but all I could remember of his drinking story was that he used to drink and now he doesn’t. He didn’t share often, but when he did it tended to be bland and unexceptionable. I figured it was probably a matter of style.
The sharing tends to be less personal and more pro forma at small-town meetings, and that’s what he was used to.
At one of the first meetings I went to, a gay woman talked about having realized that drinking might be a problem for her when she noticed that she kept coming out of blackouts on her knees with some guy’s dick in her mouth. “I never did that when I was sober,” she said. I All the Flowers Are Dying
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have a feeling Abie never got to hear anything like that in Dogbane, Oregon.
Herb had been coming around about as long as Abie had, and he’d made ninety days the previous week. That’s a benchmark of sorts; until you’ve put together ninety days clean and dry, you can’t lead a meeting or take on a service commitment. Herb had qualified at a daytime meeting. I hadn’t been there, but I’d probably get to hear his story sooner or later, if he and I both stayed sober. He was around fifty, pudgy and balding, but almost boyish with the enthusiasm that’s characteristic of some members’ early sobriety.
I hadn’t been that way myself, nor was I as bitter about the whole thing as Johnny had been. Jim Faber, who’d watched the process, had told me I was at once dogged and fatalistic, sure I would drink again but determined not to. I couldn’t tell you what I was like. I just remember dragging myself from one meeting to the next, scared it would work for me and scared it wouldn’t.
I don’t remember who brought up capital punishment. Somebody did, and somebody made one of the standard observations on the subject, and then Johnny Sidewalls turned to Ray and said, “I suppose you’re against it.” That could have been said with an edge, but it wasn’t. It was just an observation, with the tacit implication that, given who Ray was, he’d be opposed to the death penalty.
“I’m against it for my clients,” Ray said.
“Well, you’d have to be, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course. I’m against any penalty for my clients.”
“They’re all innocent,” I said.
“Innocent’s a stretch,” he allowed. “I’ll settle for not guilty. I’ve tried a few capital cases. I never lost one, and they weren’t cases where the death penalty was a real possibility. Still, even the slimmest chance that your client might go to the chair concentrates an attorney’s mind wonderfully. ‘Go to the chair’—that dates me, doesn’t it? There’s no chair anymore. They let you lie down, in fact they insist on it. Strap you to a gurney, make a regular medical procedure out of it. And the odds against you are even worse than in regular surgery.” 14