“This is Amy Vassbinder in Hell’s Kitchen,” the reporter said, “where there are no huts and flamethrowers, but where shooting people is something else.”
Elaine hit the Mute button. “I notice they’re calling it Hell’s Kitchen again,” she said. “What happened to Clinton?”
“When it’s a story about rising property values,” I said, “then the neighborhood is Clinton. That’s when they’re talking gentrification and tree planting. When it’s gunshots and crack vials, then it’s Hell’s Kitchen. Glenn Holtzmann lived in a luxurious high-rise apartment in Clinton. He died a couple of blocks away in Hell’s Kitchen.”
“I figured it was something like that.”
“I’ve seen Barry before,” I said. “George’s friend.”
“Around the neighborhood?”
“And at meetings.”
“He’s in the program?”
“Well, he’s been around it. Obviously he’s not sober. You just saw him drinking a beer on camera. He may be one of those guys who stays sober between drunks or he may just come around now and then for the coffee and the companionship.”
“Do a lot of people do that?”
“Sure, and some of them wind up getting sober. Some aren’t alcoholic at all, they’re just looking to get in out of the cold. That’s a problem for some AA groups, especially now that there are so many people living on the street. They’ve stopped serving coffee and cookies at certain meetings because the refreshments tend to draw too many people who don’t belong. It’s a tough one, because you don’t want to exclude anybody, but you want to make sure there’s a seat available for the alcoholic who wants help.”
“Is Barry an alcoholic?”
“Probably,” I said. “You heard him tell the world how he spends his life on a park bench with a beer in his fist. On the other hand, the acid test is whether or not alcohol makes your life unmanageable, and only Barry could tell you that. He might say he’s managing just fine, and maybe he is. Who am I to say?”
“What about George?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think I ever saw him at a meeting. I guess we can call his life unmanageable. His dress and grooming might pass for eccentricities, but when you gun down strangers on the street it tends to suggest that something’s not working. But was it the beer that did it? I have no idea. I suppose he could have scavenged enough empty cans to drink himself into a blackout, but he could just as easily have been cold sober and decided that Glenn Holtzmann was Ho Chi Minh’s kid sister. The poor son of a bitch.”
“Barry said he was mellow.”
“He probably was,” I said. “Until last week, when he got a little tense.”
I stayed the night and didn’t get back to my hotel until sometime the following afternoon. I stopped at the desk for my mail and messages and went on up to my room. A Mr. Thomas had called twice, once the night before and again at ten-thirty that morning. He had left a number with a 718 exchange, which would put him in Brooklyn or Queens. I didn’t recognize the number, nor did the name mean anything to me.
The other message, logged at eleven the previous evening, was from Jan Keane, and the number she had left was one I recognized. I spent a long moment looking at the eight letters of her name, the seven digits of her number. I hadn’t dialed that number in quite a while, but if she hadn’t left it I don’t think I would have had to look it up.
I wondered what she wanted.
It could be anything at all, I told myself. It was probably AA-related. Maybe she was serving as program chairman at a meeting in SoHo or Tribeca and wanted to book me to speak. Maybe she’d run into a newcomer whose story was similar to mine and thought I might be able to help him.
Or maybe it was personal. Maybe she was getting married and wanted to let me know.
Maybe she’d ended a relationship, and for some reason wanted me to know that.
Easy enough to find out. I picked up the phone and dialed her number. Her machine kicked in on the fourth ring, and her recorded voice invited me to leave a message at the tone. I had just started to do so when her actual unrecorded voice cut in. I waited while she disengaged the machine and then she was back on the line, asking me how I was.
“Alive and sober,” I said.
“ ‘Alive and sober.’ Is that still your standard response?”
“Only to you.”
“Well, I’m both those things myself, old friend. I celebrated another anniversary in May.”
“May twenty-seventh, isn’t it?”
“How did you remember that?”
“I remember stuff.”
“Yours is in the fall, and I don’t remember stuff. This month or next?”
“Next month. November fourteenth.”
“Armistice Day. No, I’m wrong. That’s the eleventh.”
Neither of us had been sober when we first came into one another’s lives. We’d met in the course of a case I was working. Years before, a woman in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn had been stabbed to death with an icepick, ostensibly by a serial murderer. After I’d left the force they finally pulled in the serial killer, and it turned out he couldn’t have committed this one particular murder. The victim’s father hired me to sift the cold ashes and try to find out who was responsible.
Jan Keane had been married to a man named Corwin at the time of the original homicide, and had been a neighbor of the dead woman in Brooklyn. She had long since divorced and moved to Manhattan, and my investigation eventually led me to her loft on Lispenard Street, where the first thing we did was crack a bottle and get drunk together. The second thing we did was go to bed.
It seemed to me that we were a pretty good match at both of those activities, but before we’d had a chance to practice much she announced that she couldn’t see me anymore. She’d tried AA before, she said, and was determined to give it another chance, and the conventional wisdom held that it wasn’t a good idea to hang out with a heavy drinker while you were trying to get sober yourself. I wished her the best of luck and left her to the world of church basements and sappy slogans.
Before I knew it I was finding my own way into that world, and not having an easy time of it. I hit a couple of emergency rooms and detoxes. I kept putting a few sober days together and then picking up a drink to celebrate.
One night I turned up on her doorstep, unable to think of any other way to get through the night sober. She gave me coffee and let me sleep on her couch. A couple of days later I went over there again, and this time I didn’t have to sleep on the couch.
They advise against getting emotionally involved during early sobriety, and I have a feeling they’re right. Somehow, though, we both stayed sober, and for a couple of years we kept each other company. We never lived together, but we did reach a point where I was spending more nights at her place than at my own. She cleared out a dresser drawer for me and made some room in the closet, and an increasing number of people came to know that they could try me at Jan’s if they couldn’t reach me at my hotel.
So it went on for a while, and it was good some of the time and not so good some of the time, and there came a time when it coughed and sputtered and died like a car running on empty. There were no big fights and not much in the way of drama. We didn’t run up against any irreconcilable differences. We just ran out of gas.