Tim Murphy - Christodora

“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.

But Hector couldn’t really concentrate. Out of the haze of the past few days, jigsaw pieces of anxiety were floating back into his consciousness: he had left Brisa, the dog, his prize bitch and only constant companion, with a tweaker friend in New York whom he thought would be trustworthy because he claimed he wasn’t doing meth anymore, just some ketamine. Hector took pride in that he never let his partying keep him from feeding, walking, or showering love on Brisa — he’d take her to the vet when he was crashing if he had to, numbed out on Klonopin — but he hadn’t much thought of the wisdom of leaving her with fucking Scooter Rosen, who had twice nearly died from GHB overdoses. Then there was the rental car. He hadn’t even thought to tell this lady — um, this Dreena or Deana? what was her name again? — about the car he’d left parked outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

And the kid. This thought pierced the glue of his brain. Walking out on the kid and the girl and the twink from Palm Springs in that apartment, everybody boinked out of their mind on what had to be about four different drugs. The scene started to take up space there again, as he listened to the AA people babble, growing like a vision in a nightmare that was peaking. He knew that the EMTs came. But still. .

He’d been staring off, absently watching the dogs in the dog run, when he blinked back and realized everyone was giving him that horrible kind, expectant look. He’d apparently not heard someone say something.

The rich woman who’d brought him here put a hand lightly on his arm. “Do you have a burning desire to say something?” she asked him softly.

He felt his face burn scarlet. They were all fucking waiting for him to say something? He shook his head. Everyone held him in their kind, concerned stare for a moment longer, as though they really didn’t believe him, before someone else raised their hand and the focus was blessedly taken off him.

Then — oh God — the meeting was ending, everyone was clapping, and they were standing and holding hands and saying that fucking prayer. The rich lady slipped her hand into his. Of course he’d come across this prayer in his past rehab stints. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. What the fuck did that mean? He’d acknowledged the last time he was in rehab that he couldn’t change the fact that Ricky and nearly everyone else had died and he hadn’t. Did he have the courage to change the fact that he’d become a meth head? He didn’t see it that way. He personally didn’t have an interest in changing it. He had the benefits that covered his rent, the food stamps, Brisa, and the buddies to party or crash with day and night. He still managed to get to Fire Island or take a plane somewhere now and then. And the way he saw it, the medications had been invented, he’d done his job. Nobody really died of AIDS anymore. He’d done enough.

As soon as the meeting was over, the rich lady and the AIDS bear Vinny walked over to him. “So what’s your story?” Vinny asked him. “Where do you live?”

He stared at Vinny blankly. “New York,” he said finally.

“Hector sort of found himself in L.A.,” the rich lady said.

Vinny had beautiful watery blue eyes that bore into Hector intensely, a look of empathy and connection that made Hector want to crawl in a hole. “You want to come with us for coffee?” Vinny asked.

“How are you feeling?” the rich lady asked him.

He struggled for words, openmouthed. He could walk away again. He could — what? Rudely walk away and go off and try to find the rental car. But he knew he wouldn’t do it. He knew he would kill himself before he got that far — the courage to kill himself, at the moment, was far greater than his courage to clean up the mess he’d made.

“I need to talk to you for a second,” he said to the rich lady.

She and Vinny looked at each other. “Just me?” she asked him.

“Just for a second,” he said. He managed to put a hand on Vinny’s upper arm. “Sorry, just a sec,” he said.

Vinny and the rich lady glanced at each other again. “No worries,” Vinny said. “We’re hanging out here for a second. Let us know if you want to tag along.” Vinny walked back over to the group at large — the group that was all smiles and chatter and hugs.

“What is it?” the rich lady asked. “You want me to take you to the ER?”

Did he? “I dunno,” he said. “I dunno where to go.”