Small Town

This morning, though, he was several degrees short of ravenous, and his next scheduled stop was in the Village, at Charles and Waverly. So he’d walked across Twenty-third and down Sixth. That stretch of Sixth Avenue had once afforded a good view of the twin towers, and now it showed you where they’d been, showed you the gap in the downtown skyline. A view of omission, he’d thought more than once.

And now here he was in a booth at Joe’s with orange juice and a western omelet and a cup of coffee, light, no sugar, and how depraved was that? It was ten o’clock, and he’d get to Marilyn’s by eleven and be out of there by one, with the rest of the day free and clear. Maybe he’d catch the two-thirty meeting at Perry Street. He could stop by after he left Marilyn’s and put his keys on a chair so he’d have a seat when he came back at meeting time. You had to do that there, it was always standing-room-only by the time the meeting started.

Recovery, he thought. The hottest ticket in town.

He let the waiter refill his coffee cup, smiled his thanks, then automatically checked the fellow out as he walked away, only to roll his eyes at his own behavior. Cute butt, he thought, but so what?

If he were to show up at a meeting of Sex Addicts Anonymous, he thought, nobody would tell him to get the hell out. But did it make his life unmanageable? Not really. And, more to the point, could he handle another program? He was in AA, sober a little over three years, and, because drugs played a part in his story, he managed to fit a couple of NA meetings into his weekly schedule. And, because his parents were both drunks — his father died of it, his mother lived with it — he was an Adult Child of Alcoholics, and went to their meetings now and then. (But not too often, because all the whining and bitching and getting-in-touch-with-my-completely-appropriate-anger made his teeth ache.)

And, because John-Michael was an alcoholic (and also sober, and anyway they weren’t lovers anymore), he went to Al-Anon a couple of times a month. He hated the meetings, and he wanted to slap most of the people he saw there — the Al-Anon-Entities, his sponsor called them. But that just showed how much he needed the program, didn’t it? Or maybe it didn’t. It was hard to tell.

Three years sober, and he started each day by visiting three bars and a whorehouse, inhaling the reek of stale beer and rancid semen. The bars were in Chelsea, all within a few blocks of his top-floor walkup on Seventeenth west of Ninth, and of course they were closed when he arrived for the morning cleanup. He had keys, and he would let himself in, trying not to dwell on the way the place stank, the odor of booze and bodies and various kinds of smoke, the dirty-socks smell of amyl nitrite, and something else, some indefinable morning-after stench that was somehow more than the sum of its parts. He’d note that and dismiss it, and he’d sweep and mop the floor and clean the lavatories — God, human beings were disgusting — and finally he’d take down the chairs from the tables and the stools from the bar top and set them up where they belonged. Then he’d lock up, and off to the next.

He hit the bars in what he thought of as working his way up from the depths, starting with Death Row, a leather bar west of Tenth Avenue with a back room where safe sex required not just condoms but full body armor. Then one called Cheek, on Eighth and Twentieth, with a neighborhood crowd that ran to preppy types and the aging queens who loved them. And, finally, a straight bar on Twenty-third Street — well, a mixed crowd, really, typical for the neighborhood, straight and gay, male and female, young and old, the common denominator being an abiding thirst. The place was called Harrigan’s — Harridan’s, some called it — and it didn’t reek of pot and poppers and nocturnal emissions, but that didn’t mean a blind man might mistake it for the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

In his drinking days, Jerry might have started the evening at Harrigan’s. He could tell himself he was just stopping for a quick social drink before he settled in for the night. He wasn’t cruising, certainly, because nobody went to a place like that trolling for a sexual partner. He supposed people who got drunk there sometimes went home with each other, but that was essentially beside the point.

But after a few drinks there, and maybe a line or two in the men’s room, a gay bar would seem like a good idea, and he’d be on his way to a place like Cheek. And there he might meet someone he’d take home or go home with, but he might not, and before the night was over he could well wind up at Death Row or some equivalent thereof, barely knowing what he was doing or with whom he was doing it, and, when he woke up hours later, sickened by what he remembered or terrified of what he didn’t remember, depending on just when the blackout curtain had dropped.