Disturbing the Peace

  “One for the road, huh?” And Bill Costello began heaping more sugar into his coffee than Wilder had ever seen anyone do. “ ‘One for the road.’ Ah, God, how often we say that, people like us. Then next day we open up the paper: TOT SLAIN BY DRUNK DRIVER, and we think, hell, nothing like that could ever happen to me. Right?”

  “How long’ve you been – I mean when did you have your last drink?”

  “Nine years ago next month. October sixteenth, Nineteen Fifty-one. Oh, don’t get me wrong, John, I’m not boasting. I’m deeply grateful for my sobriety, but it’s nothing to boast about. People offer me a drink at parties and I ask for a Coke or some damn thing. If they press me I say I don’t drink, and if they press me harder I say I’m an alcoholic. Not an ‘ex-alcoholic’ or a ‘reformed alcoholic,’ because you see there’s no such thing. In AA we never promise anything, to ourselves or each other, except that we’ll stay sober for one more day. Twenty-four hours. That’s why it’s so important to attend a meeting every night if you can, when you’re starting out. But hell, John, I can’t explain the Program all at once; you’ll discover it yourself. Let me just leave a few things with you.” And out of the briefcase came a handful of bright brochures (one entitled “Who, me?”) to be spread on the table. “These are just to put in your pocket. This is more important: this is your directory of meetings all over the city. Dates, times and addresses. You’ll find four or five to choose from every night – high-school gyms, church basements, loft buildings – all kinds of places.” Then his false teeth flashed in a grin of invitation and challenge. “Feel like hitting one tonight? With me?”

  And Wilder stuttered through an apologetic lie about having guests for dinner.

  “Tomorrow night then? Or no, wait; damn. I’m tied up tomorrow night.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll go to one alone.”

  “Good. That’s a good sign in itself. Many beginners are shy about walking into that first meeting alone. Well, we’ll hit a few together later on. And here,” he said, probing in the briefcase again. “This isn’t a gift, John, only a loan. I don’t care how long you keep it but I want it back; it’s a dearly prized possession. Once you get into it you’ll see why, and you’ll want to buy a copy of your own. This is what we call the Big Book – our definitive text.” It was as black as a Bible, and heavier. “Don’t try to read it all at once; take it a chapter at a time. Let it soak in. One more thing. You’ll see I’ve written my home and office numbers on the back of your directory. Now in theory, your sponsor’s always available on the phone for times when you feel you’re slipping, got to have a drink, can’t control yourself; he’s the guy who comes over or meets you somewhere and talks with you. Trouble is in my case I’m out of town a lot, so let’s leave it this way: whenever I leave town I’ll notify Dr. Blomberg and give him another number you can use, another sponsor, and of course I’ll inform that man too. Fair enough? Well. It’s been a pleasure.” He spilled an overly generous amount of change on the table and led the way out to the street. “You headed downtown? I’ll walk you over to Lex. What line of work you in, John?”

  “I sell advertising. What do you do?”

  “Oh, I guess you’d say I’m in show business. Television.”

  “You an actor?”

  “No, the writing end. Did Hollywood screenplays for a good many years; before that I did radio. Now I sort of divide my time between here and the Coast. I’m one of the three story editors on ‘Let’s Ask Daddy.’ ”

  “Well, I’ve certainly heard of that show, but I’m afraid I’ve never—”

  “You’re very fortunate.” There was another vigorous handshake and another gleam of dentures under the streetlights. “I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to watch the son of a bitch. Good luck, John!” And Bill Costello hurried away.

  Wilder chose his first meeting because it wasn’t far from home and didn’t start until well after Tommy was asleep. But it was held in a church basement – he had uneasy memories of churches – and at first he didn’t know how to be less conspicuous: hanging around the sidewalk as the other members arrived, or going inside to study the two rumbling coffee urns and the two homemade cakes (chocolate and coconut) along the rear wall.

  “Most of you know me,” said a man at the rostrum at last, while Wilder squirmed in the back row of folding chairs, “but I see some new faces tonight so I’ll go through the old routine. My name’s Herb and I’m an alcoholic.”

  And there was an almost thunderous response of “Hi, Herb!”

  “I think we’ll have a fine meeting tonight – two very fine speakers – but first I’d like to call on Warren here to read the Seven Principles.”

  “My name’s Warren and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, Warren!”

  The Seven Principles seemed to go on forever as the air grew dense with cigarette smoke and loud with coughing, and then a homely girl with a barely audible voice (“Hi, Mary!”) was called upon to read the Twelve Steps.

  “Our first speaker is no stranger here,” Herb said, “but he’s so modest a man that I’m sure he won’t introduce himself properly. Bob’s a highly successful management consultant – so successful in fact that I just heard today, and I didn’t hear it from him, that he’s been elected president of the Management Consultants’ Association of New York. He always gives a stimulating, provocative talk, and – well, I’ll leave the rest of it up to him.”

  Bob sprang for the rostrum like a man who runs a mile before breakfast every day, adjusted the perfect tailoring on his meaty torso, proclaimed himself an alcoholic and could scarcely wait for the cries of “Hi, Bob!” to dwindle before he launched his attack.

  “I know ‘management consultant’ may sound nice and solid,” he said, “but there was a time not too long ago when I couldn’t manage myself – couldn’t even consult myself without a triple Scotch in my hand, and we all know what those kind of consultations amount to. Oh, I guess I had it pretty bad in the war, picked up a few scratches – Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima – but hell, that’s no excuse: millions of guys had it bad in the war. Anyway when I got out of the Marines I made a poor adjustment to civilian life – and I don’t have to tell you good people what I mean by that. Went to business school and flunked right out because of my drinking; got a couple of jobs and lost ’em because of my drinking. Then I lost – lost my wife because of my drinking. Wonderful woman; stuck it out as long as she could for the sake of our little girl; finally just couldn’t – couldn’t stick it out any longer.” And after that, he said with an appropriate tremor in his voice, he had touched bottom.

  But the rest of Bob’s story was all uphill: he had joined the Program with the help of a wonderful sponsor; soon he was back in school and doing well, holding down a job on the side to help support his child; after graduation a number of lucky breaks had helped him toward his present career. His former wife had married a fine man – a very lucky man – his daughter had made a wonderful adjustment and become a lovely teenager with whom he had a wonderful relationship; he himself had married again to – well, to the most wonderful girl in the world.

  “Oh, I can count my blessings, sure,” he concluded. “I count ’em all the time; but deep down I know there’s only been one truly wonderful thing in my life, and that’s my association with wonderful people like you – this wonderful organization of AA, this wonderful, wonderful fellowship. Thank you.”

  And he got a wonderful round of applause.

  Their final speaker, Herb said, was a very gracious lady, a busy housewife and mother with many social and charitable obligations who nonetheless found time to drive all the way in from Westport several nights a week for AA; her presence was always a pleasure and he was sure they’d enjoy her remarks.

  She was in her middle forties and pretty in a square-jawed way, very trim and fashionable in her full, sweeping clothes. “I’m Eleanor,” she said, “and I’m a very, very grateful alcoholic.”

  She told of how in the worst of her drinking years sh
e’d had to fix not one but three martinis for herself at five o’clock each day: one in the kitchen to help her through the preparation of dinner, one beside the hall telephone in case it rang – “I was terrified, simply terrified of talking on the phone without a drink” – and one near the children’s bathroom in readiness for her supervision of their baths. Then of course there had always been wine with dinner and brandy afterwards, until she’d come to realize she was a slave to alcohol. And in the happy, post-Program part of her recital she made frequent use of the phrase “my sobriety.”

  “Eight’ll getcha five that broad’s never been drunk in her life,” said the man beside Wilder, nudging his ribs and breathing whiskey fumes in his face. “Fucking society broad; matron of honor. Drives in from Westport in her Lincoln fucking Continental. Gets her kicks this way. Wait’ll you see her serve that fucking cake.”

  But Wilder didn’t wait for that. There was a passing around of baskets to collect dollar bills, an announcement listing members in various hospitals who would certainly appreciate cards and flowers; then everyone rose for an intonation of the Lord’s Prayer and he was free.

  He found the darkest bar in the neighborhood and drank until he was certain Janice would be long asleep – certain too, as he sank into a taxicab, that if the morning’s paper read TOT SLAIN BY DRUNK DRIVER it wouldn’t be his fault.

  “Before we begin,” Dr. Blomberg said at their next session, “I talked with Mr. Costello today. He’s been called out to Los Angeles, doesn’t know how long he’ll be gone, but he asked me to give you this name and number in case you—”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay; thanks.”

  “Have you been attending the meetings?”

  “Two. The first was lousy—” he tried at some length and with no apparent success to explain that – “but the second was better, up in the West Seventies. They had it in an abandoned movie theatre; I sort of liked that. Had an ex-cop who’d been fired off the force for drinking, said he was a security guard in a bank now but knew he’d lose that too if he went back on the bottle; then there was a girl who’d been a prostitute until her sponsor helped her find work as a hairdresser. …”

  “And you haven’t been drinking?”

  “No.” That was a lie – even after the second, better meeting he had sneaked three warm bourbons in the kitchen before going to bed – but it seemed a lie worth telling, at prices like this. “And I’d really rather talk about other things, doctor. I mean I always thought you were supposed to tell a psychiatrist whatever was on your mind. For instance, coming over here from work today I was thinking about the books we have at home. There must be four, five thousand books – I’m not exaggerating – and maybe twenty of them are mine. All the rest are my wife’s. Thing is, you see, I don’t read. I’m a very, very slow reader. Guess that’s the main reason I’ve spent most of my life watching movies. I must’ve seen damn near every movie ever made since back around Nineteen Thirty-six – but don’t let me get started on the movies; I’ll get back to the movies soon enough, okay? Anyway, a few years ago my wife got me into one of these commercial speed-reading courses and I was hopeless. I mean the other people were poor readers too but they didn’t seem ashamed of it the way I was. They all made progress; I didn’t. Dropped out of the course halfway through, lost about five hundred bucks. I guess it’s what you people call a block.”

  “Mm. And I imagine that must have made difficulties for you in school.”

  School. The word made him squirm in his chair and clutch his forehead before he remembered Spivack’s caution against such gestures, but what the hell: he was paying this man. “School,” he said. “You really want to dig into that whole can of worms? My half-assed childhood? My crazy parents and all that?”

  “Your crazy parents?”

  “Well, not crazy in your sense – nobody ever had to lock them up or anything – but they were crazy as hell. Called themselves ‘business people’ all through the Depression, which meant my father was employed as an accountant in one office building and my mother did secretarial work in another. As long as I can remember they’d be lecturing me about ‘Management’ and ‘Free Enterprise’ and ‘Venture Capital.’ And this was their dream: my mother had this set of secret recipes for some kind of candy – she’d gotten ’em from her own family, back in Nebraska – and they were convinced all they’d need was a little luck and a little Venture Capital to establish their own business. Marjorie Wilder’s Chocolates. Very classy, very expensive; chocolates with snob appeal. And do you see where I was supposed to fit in? The only child? The son and heir? I’d learn the business from the ground up; they’d groom me to take over; I’d be the damn prince. By the time they retired we’d all be millionaires, and when they died they’d have a living memorial: Marjorie Wilder’s Chocolates, Inc.; John C. Wilder, President. Do you see what I mean by crazy?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Had a feeling you wouldn’t. Never mind. School. I started out in the city school system, which damn near humiliated my parents to death. They couldn’t afford a private school, but they found something even better. You know Grace Church? Episcopal church down on East Eleventh? Well, it’s fairly wellknown – used to be anyway – and one of the big things about it was the boys’ choir. The church ran its own little school for boys: if you could sing you not only got free schooling, you got paid. Every kid in the choir got five bucks a week, the soloists got ten, and pretty soon I was the soprano soloist. Of course I never did well at schoolwork, but in that school it didn’t matter: they let me get by because I was such a hotshot in church. Not just every week, but in the big Christmas and Easter services when people came from all over to hear the Magnificat, or the Messiah. I’d stand there in the middle of the front row, about a head shorter than anybody else, and take off on these long, intricate solo parts, and God damn it I could feel all the women out there going apeshit over me. Do you get the picture? Little Mickey Rooney with the voice of an angel? Jesus Christ.”

  “I’m afraid our time is up, Mr. Wilder.”

  Their time was up time and again, twice a week, leaving him to stumble for Lexington Avenue with a headful of things he wished he’d said, whispering to himself all the way home on the subway; and Blomberg’s first question at the next session was always the same: Had he been keeping up with his meetings?

  “… Yeah, yeah. Went to a new one last night, down in the Village. There was a young girl, started drinking at Sarah Lawrence; had an affair with one of her teachers and when he dropped her she tried to kill herself, wound up in Bellevue. Funny: after all these meetings she’s the only other ex-Bellevue patient I’ve met – or heard, rather.” He didn’t tell of how he’d tried to pick the girl up after the meeting, with Varick Street in mind (she’d been a slender, bedraggled girl with big suffering eyes), or of how she’d almost physically recoiled from his suggestion that they might “get a cup of coffee somewhere” and hurried away down the sidewalk alone.

  “But look, doctor; let’s get back to where we were, okay?”

  School consumed another therapeutic hour, with digressions back and forth in time: “… Ah, I was always kind of a dud in that school, soloist or not. One thing, I was a pious little bastard. It wasn’t only the singing I loved; I loved the whole damned formal-religion scene – the rituals, the vestments, the prayers, the stained-glass windows – and I think I must’ve been just about the only kid in school who did. There was a lot of blowing farts in the choir loft, whispering dirty jokes and passing around dirty pictures, sometimes passing around half-pints of whiskey, daring you to take a nip. What I’m getting at, those other kids were on to everything: they had the kind of healthy skepticism it took me years to learn. Old Wanamaker’s Department Store used to hire us every afternoon during Christmas season, to sing carols, and of course nobody complained because it meant a few more bucks for each of us, but can you imagine how much real money must’ve changed hands between the God damned store and the God damned church? What kind of horseshit is t
hat?

  “… A lot of the kids were out of luck when their voices changed – some kids’ voices didn’t change ‘right’ for choral work, and even if they did, there was only a small section for tenors and baritones; they couldn’t keep everybody. My voice changed right – not solo quality, but good enough – so they made a tenor out of me and let me stay through the twelfth grade; then I went into the army. Have we got any time left?”

  “A few minutes.”

  “Because if I get going on the army it’ll take forever, and it’s not that important anyway – not nearly as important as what came afterwards. Let me just tell you one thing. At the induction center they gave us all an IQ test. Didn’t call it that, called it the Army General Classification Test, but everybody knew what the deal was. You had to score a hundred and ten to qualify for officers’ training – or any other halfway decent job, for that matter – and my score was a hundred points. So I asked if I could take it again, and some clerk said I could apply for it at my ‘next post,’ which turned out to be a basic training camp in North Carolina. And I did. There were only half a dozen of us taking it that time, and there was kind of a nice, easygoing lieutenant in charge: he let us watch while he corrected the papers, and when he came to mine he said I’d scored a hundred and nine. Then he said, ‘Curious thing; you didn’t get a single question wrong, but you only did about half of them.’ I said something like ‘Well, but, sir, if I got them all right, doesn’t that indicate—” And he said, ‘It indicates a hundred and nine. You must be a very slow reader, that’s all.’ ”

  And it was a week or two later that he had a fight with Janice – or a quarrel that came closer to a fight than anything since long before Bellevue.

  It didn’t happen until after dinner, after the dishes were washed and Tommy sent to bed. He was sitting on the sofa looking over the acres of books and wondering how anyone, with any kind of IQ, could possibly read so much, when she came and sat beside him.