A woman walked into the shelter — attractive, white, slim, rich-looking, skinny black jeans, ballet flats, a white eyelet gypsy blouse, dark hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, a leather bag, big sunglasses, iPhone in hand. The catcalls instantly started. She seemed hesitant to venture farther into the room.
“That’s the woman for you,” the staffer said to Hector.
Hunh? Hector thought. Who was she? He ignored the jeers from the other guys in the room and walked toward her, mortified.
She took off her sunglasses. “You’re Hector, right?” She sounded nice enough, but unsure, wary. He nodded. “I’m Drew.” She extended her hand, which he took. “I’m a friend of Ava’s and her daughter, Milly. You know, from the Christodora? I live here in L.A.”
It all kept coming back to that kid! he thought. A friend of the kid’s adopted mother. He nodded. “Thank you for coming to get me,” he managed to say.
The woman glanced around the room. “Are you ready to leave?” she asked.
Hector turned to the guy at the front desk.
“Nobody’s keeping you here,” he said.
“Thanks for everything,” Hector said.
“Good luck, buddy,” the staffer said, reaching under the desk to hand Hector a plastic bag. It contained the dirty clothes he’d peeled off before his cinder-block shower the day before. “Try to pull your shit together.”
Outside, the sun hit him like an angry blast. He put his hand over his eyes.
“I think I have another pair of sunglasses if you want them,” the woman said. She fumbled in her bag and pulled out another big, dark pair — ladies’, obviously. Hector took them, put them on gratefully. The woman giggled a little. “Very glamorous,” she said.
He barely smiled. They got in her Prius and she put on the air-conditioning. “I would never do this usually, except Ava told me all about you,” she said.
Oh God, Hector thought. He could only imagine what that meant. “Thank you,” he said.
“Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“You’re a meth addict, right?”
God, it stung to hear himself called that by a total stranger, to know that was how old colleagues described him now, too. But he nodded.
“I’ll help you sort out your situation here and get back to New York, either way. But do you want to stop?”
“I wanna die,” he told her.
She sighed. “Well, so did I. I had a drug problem, too. Can I ask you one thing? Would you be willing to go to an AA meeting with me now?”
“I don’t have a drinking problem,” he said.
“There’s a lot of drug addicts there, too. There are meth heads.”
Meth heads! That was all she thought he was — how casually she said it! But, well, she was right. Hector felt a frisson of shame, like maybe he wasn’t supposed to have become a meth head. Maybe he was supposed to have dealt with loss the way other folks he knew had, with a certain amount of bitterness, defeat, and fatigue, but with dignity, staying in his post, remaining a responsible citizen, a helper of his community. The idea exhausted him and even bored him a little bit. But he also felt that perhaps he had exhausted the role of a meth head. Hector Villanueva, who had worked alongside Bill Clinton and David Kessler at FDA — a meth head! This woman had met him only minutes ago and it was clear she thought of him, first and foremost, as just that.
“Sure, I don’t mind going to the meeting,” Hector told her. His life was in shambles, he thought. Where else did he need to be?
“There’s one in West Hollywood in an hour. You want to get something to eat first?”
“Sure.”
She drove to a Koo Koo Roo, a fast-food rotisserie-chicken place, on Santa Monica Boulevard. There were lots of young gay guys inside, all in tight tank tops and shorts, toting gym bags. Hector knew he looked like a homeless person in his oversize old T-shirt and jeans, his motorcycle boots, but he didn’t much care. At least he told himself as much. The woman ordered an unsweetened iced tea and a salad.
“I’ll get you something,” she told him. “You must be hungry.”
He was ravenous. He hadn’t had a real meal in what seemed like five days. “I’ll pay you back for all of this,” he told her.
She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t worry about it, just order what you want.”
He ordered a half-chicken and two sides. They sat down together. He was still crashing; it was hard for him to keep his eyes open. He felt gutted from the inside and far away from the bright, loud, pop-music-playing world around him. The woman gave him a kind, fatigued smile.
“Did you know Milly’s son in the Christodora?” she asked him. “Mateo?”
Oh, no, he thought. What was coming? He nodded. “The little Latin kid.”
“Right,” the woman said. “They adopted him. Well, pardon my weariness, but he actually — he developed a heroin problem a few years ago. And he’d come out here a few months ago for a rehab I recommended. And he was doing really well and staying with me and my partner, my boyfriend, out here, but he disappeared a few days ago and stole our bank cards, stole our money from ATMs, and we haven’t heard from him in two days. So — like I said — pardon my weariness, it’s been a very trying past few days.”
As the woman recounted this, a fresh wave of self-loathing crept through Hector’s gut. He’d abetted the kid’s downfall.
“I’m sorry,” he managed to say. “Really, thank you for coming to get me.”
“I don’t mind. I’ve been there. I’m nearly twenty years sober now, but I was there.”
“What was your drug?”
“I was just a drunk and a cokehead. Nothing very hard core. But, well, I mean, I was very young at the time — like twenty-five. And I just couldn’t cope with life. I was freaked out and scared and didn’t know how to live my life.” She looked at him keenly. “Ava told me about all the amazing work you did. Thank you, because I have many friends who are alive today because of the drugs that you helped create.”
Her words pierced him with discomfort; they felt too admiring. “I didn’t do that much,” he said.
“I know that you did. Ava told me.”
Hector stared down into his food, which he’d been attacking, his stomach sucking it into his system faster than he could fork it into his mouth.
“Do you have a Valium or anything like that?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “I don’t.”
“I’m crashing,” he said.
“Can you come sit in the meeting with me for an hour and if you’re freaking out or feeling suicidal after, I’ll take you to the ER?”
He nodded his head.
The meeting was actually around a bunch of picnic tables in a park — Plummer Park. Hector sat there alongside the woman, Drew, looking at the thirty or so people collected: a mix of women and men, some of the men obviously big queens, one or two trannies in the group — but put-together, employed-looking trannies, dressed more or less like Drew. About half the people seemed to have brought their little dogs along with them. Everyone was kissing, hugging, seeming so chipper. Drew introduced him to a few folks, including a sixty-year-old bearded leather bear named Vinny whose cheekbones had the sunken quality of men who had been on a particular, early generation of AIDS medications a decade ago.
It was hard for Hector to absorb it all, feeling like shit. How the fuck had he ended up here? Whenever he happened to make eye contact with someone, they gave him the same sweet, understanding, crinkle-eyed smile that made him cringe and look away. He picked up stray bits of what people were saying. When it got to the bear, Vinny, he went on mostly about how he was praying and meditating to help him take care of his eighty-five-year-old mother with Alzheimer’s in Pasadena.