Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“It’s not a date.”

“What then?”

“I’ll pay you back.” How, I hadn’t any clue. “Can we leave it at that?”

“Just because I’m going to be a mother soon doesn’t mean I’m going to become a prying old frump, so fine, yes. Who’d have thought? Me: a mommy and a sugar daddy. Hang on a second so I can get my wallet. And when I come back say, ‘Thanks a million, Daddy Warbucks.’” She heaved herself up again. I was saved.

We were down below the house of God seeking redemption, reciting in a circle, names, steps. John Doe was there, and I knew it wasn’t luck. Addicts are reliable as clocks, and John Doe probably attended a meeting every day. For now, all I could do was look across the circle at him. He looked back for a second, then frowned and turned away quickly.

“I want to think I’m better off now, but it’s like I can’t find love anymore,” a man said. “’You know what it is to be a recovering alcoholic?’ I ask my sober friends. It’s losing the family you haven’t had yet. You try to ask a girl on a date, and you can’t ask her if she wants to go for a drink or go dancing, because you don’t goddamn booze anymore and you know if you’re going to dance you’re going to need a drink to be willing to look ridiculous. You’ve seen every movie in the theater and you’re so sick of looking at the same stupid Caesar salad on a menu, and this girl is something, but you don’t even bother asking her out because there’s no out where you can bring her except the two restaurants in town you’ve already gone and the bowling alley and you’re not twelve years old. So you stay at home, sober and alone.” The circle looked back at him, nodding sympathetically. “I met this girl the other day. Mary is her name. She was in the frozen foods section of the grocery store, and she looked at me, said, ‘You’re here to save me from this TV dinner, aren’t you?’ And we talk and we laugh, just standing there for like fifteen minutes. My ice cream is melting. Then she goes, ‘Hey, let’s go get one of those crazy flaming drinks from the Hibachi place?’ And I don’t want to be like, ‘No, sorry, I’m a hundred and forty-six days sober.’ Because a hundred and forty-six days sober means to everyone else that this guy is messed up. And I wonder, is it going to be just me and my addiction for the rest of my life?”

Now I cleared my throat to get John Doe’s attention. He held his chin in his hand like a cliché of a thinking man.

“With the right woman, it won’t matter,” said an older man. “My name is David, and I am seven years sober.” Applause. “I’ll tell you, there was a time I thought I’d never again have a friend in the world. Several years ago, I was in a car accident on my way to pick up my daughter from soccer practice. When my wife came to the hospital, the first thing she said to me was, ‘That could have been our daughter. I’m not taking chances anymore; I want a divorce.’ It was also the last thing she said until she called to say the papers should be arriving in the mail shortly for me to sign. She packed up that night, and I lost custody of my daughter. I was in and out of court for two years. Then, I met a wonderful woman named Laura. She encouraged me to seek help for my addiction. It was hard. I won’t say it wasn’t. But when we’d go to a party and I was uncomfortable, she held my hand. When I wasn’t sure I could do it, she told me I could. Last year we were married, and now we have custody of my daughter every weekend. We’re expecting a little one next March. I don’t know where I’d be without these meetings and the support of friends like you all. I couldn’t be more grateful. But I guess my point really is this: there is life after addiction.”

Everyone began clapping. “Thank you for sharing, David,” somebody said. The woman next to John Doe was tearing up. I cleared my throat again. John Doe put his face in his hands.

“Do you need a drink of water of something?” Mo asked.

John Doe looked up. “Bathroom,” he mouthed.

“Parched,” I told Mo.

“Look, I know you want pills, but I need them, and it doesn’t do me any good selling them.” The yellow light skittered across the floor.

“It does you sixty dollars,” I said.

“I don’t need sixty dollars.” He pressed down on a metal button on the bubbler, and a weak parabolic stream jumped up and fell down with a metallic sound.

“I’m not asking for charity. I’m a paying customer.”

“You don’t get it. Your money means nothing to me. I’m not that kind of consumer. Sixty dollars is not sixty dollars’ worth of pills. It’s not sixty dollars’ worth of relief from the conditions of existential nausea, if you know what I mean.” I knew what he meant. That’s why I needed the pills. I followed him into the men’s room.

“You can go buy sixty dollars’ worth of pills with my sixty dollars.”

“These are controlled substances, as in, I don’t get to walk into the pharmacy and pick some up in the aisle with the mouthwash. This week, I realized my goddamn joie de vivre is dimming out. Everything tastes like cornflakes. I need the wind on my back. I want the up, up, up, kite-like. Capisce, little girl?”

“Can’t we negotiate?” I looked down at a yellowing urinal.

“If you had something to offer, that would be one thing,” he said. “You want to take a ride? My car is parked outside.” I suddenly became aware of how alone we were in the men’s room. With his finger, he drew a circle around the button of my jeans, then under my hair and slipping up my neck, I felt the sly tingle of winter. “Beggars can’t be choosers, you know. This is some topnotch Dexedrine.”

“I could choose to scream rape right now and the only thing you’d be begging for is a court-ordered attorney.”

He dropped his hand away from me.

“Like I said before, I’d never play poker with you.” He reached for a cigarette in his pocket, thought better of it. We were inside a church.

“So what’s it going to be?”

“You don’t have anything? Nothing? Perc, Oxy, Xanax, Codeine, anything?”

“Well, I do have some painkillers I never took for a back injury.”

“You’d better not be talking about ibuprofen.” He lit his lighter and waved the small flame.

“Hydrocodone,” I said. “But I don’t have them with me.”

“Credit I don’t do.” He lit a piece of paper towel that curled in ravenous orange seams of fire as he dropped it to the floor and stomped on it.

“What if I gave you sixty in collateral now and brought you a month’s worth of painkillers at the next meeting?”

“Sixty and the pills.”

“So now my money seems to mean something to you?”

“Sixty and the pills.”

“Forty and the pills.”

“Sixty and the pills.”

I walked back into St. Agnes Community Room with a pocket empty of cash and full of amphetamines. There was still a chance.

The doctor pages through her notes for a few minutes. I get the sense she’s trying to show me that she’s only operating off of what I’ve told her, that these are my words she’s clarifying, not her own assumptions.

Did it concern you that John Doe made a sexual advance on you? she finally asks.

I’d heard enough from Lucy to figure it was the nature of a man.

And yet you were a minor.

Am a minor.

And you realized that sexual relations between a minor and an adult would be considered statutory rape.

Hence my threat.

But it did not concern you that John Doe might be pursuing an illegal sexual relationship with you?

I was buying drugs from him. I was aware that he was willing to step over the law.

So did you feel some sense of connection to him in this shared willingness to cross the lines of licit and illicit?