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Thanks for keeping me sober: A recovery memoir
Excerpt of a novel in progress. Chapter: "Running away from Big Guy"
by Robert Clark Young
The Surf Bowl stood across the street from the roller coaster on the boardwalk at Santa Cruz. Walking in, I couldn’t tell if I was in a bowling alley, a restaurant, or a bar. It was a combination of all three. We took a booth in an amorphous area that lay at the nexus of the bowling alley and the restaurant and the bar. We could hear pins exploding and waitresses chatting and the cocktail-lounge TV blaring a baseball game.
Monique was drunker than she’d been in the morning, and with exaggerated dignity and seriousness she ordered a glass of Northern California wine and put her head in her hands and gazed with woozy, insipid love down at her alcoholic, midget boyfriend, whom we all called Big Guy.
Tanya ordered the Surf Bowl Burger with steak fries and salad; she was a hearty, sexy girl who enjoyed life and food and lovemaking, and I was dizzy with ecstasy to have her with me. Our legs and knees were touching and our free hands were holding as she ate.
I hadn’t had a drink in five months, so I ordered just a cranberry juice. Big Guy did the same, then he and I got down to talking.
“Okay, I’m willing to try an A.A. meeting,” he said. “I’ve heard how A.A. works. You have to spend a lot of time apologizing, and then you get to go on with your life.”
“Well, not exactly. I think you’re referring to Steps Eight and Nine, the amends process. I’m only on Step Four, but I have a general understanding of what an amends is. It has nothing to do with apologizing. As drunks, we’re used to apologizing all the time, and then going out and doing the same old shit. An amends is an action step. With an amends, you give the victim a chance to tell you what you can do to make up for what you’ve done.”
He looked stricken. “They get to decide that?”
“Of course.”
“What if they tell me to jump off a building?”
I thought about it. “Well, I don’t think you’re ever required to commit suicide. The Steps are designed to keep you alive. Anyway, you’re really making the amends for yourself, not the other person. By doing exactly what they want, to make things better, you’re in fact helping yourself.”
His flesh had faded to the color of cantaloupe. “Oh my God, I don’t think I can do this. You mean, I have to go around and find everybody I’ve ever fucked over, and they get to tell me exactly what to do to make up for it?”
Monique snorted. “That would take you about twenty fucking years, making up for all the shit you’ve pulled.”
I told him, “It’s one day at a time, Big Guy, and it’s one step at a time. Don’t worry about Steps Eight and Nine. I’m not worried about them, I’m not there yet. And you’re a long way from there. The only thing you need to focus on right now is taking Step One: ‘Admitted that we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.’”
“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know about this stuff at all. All of those people I’ve fucked over—I’d have to do everything they said—oh Jesus—”
Monique looked at him with drunken seriousness, trying very hard to concentrate. “What about all those pimps you turned in to the cops so you could take over their corners?”
“Oh shit, I can’t face them, they’d kill me, I can’t face anybody like that. Look—I have to go to the bathroom, I have to go to the fucking bathroom right now.” He got up and walked quickly away.
“Big Guy,” I called after him, “you’re getting way ahead of yourself—” But he just kept going.
“You’ve really scared him now,” Tanya said. “You’ve told him too much, Bob. A.A. isn’t supposed to be about a gang of pimps who are trying to kill you.”
“Pimps are mean enough,” Monique said, “without a person having to do a bunch of A.A. shit that gets everybody pissed off.” Monique had been a working girl for a long time, both before and after becoming Big Guy’s girlfriend, and she knew all about pimps.
Ten minutes later, he still hadn’t come back from the bathroom. So I went looking for him. I had a sick hunch about where to look first. I followed the sounds of the televised baseball game to the bar.
I didn’t go in. I didn’t want to and I didn’t have to. What I saw made my heart tremble.
Big Guy was standing at the bar, slamming down an empty shot glass.
My sponsor’s words rang resolutely in my head: Bob, let me be very clear with you: If he starts drinking around you, you need to run away. Literally run. Run the hell away from him as fast as you can.
I ran as fast as I could back to the booth. “We have to run,” I told Tanya.
“Don’t tell me,” she said.
“I’m telling you,” I said.
I flagged the waitress and I was throwing bills onto her tray when Big Guy came ambling back from the bar with his hands in his pockets and a serene smile stretching across his face. “Hey you guys, I’m ready for my A.A. meeting now.”
I looked at him in terror. If he starts drinking around you, you need to run away. Literally run. “I’ve gotta run,” I told him.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve gotta—I’ve literally gotta run.”
Tanya was standing. “I’ve gotta run too. I’m really sorry.”
“We’ve both gotta run,” I said, and Tanya and I started running. Literally. We ran out of the restaurant and through the bowling alley. We ran out the front entrance and we ran across the parking lot. We held hands and we ran as fast as we could run.
Tanya glanced back and said, “Oh shit.”
“What?”
I turned around and saw that Big Guy and Monique were running after us. I had never seen Big Guy run before, or indeed partake in any physical activity beyond lifting a glass or a bottle or trying to make a girl. He ran like a midget, all lurching torso, with minimal pump to the legs and arms. Monique, with all of her tall grace and strength, ran like an athlete, and soon she was ahead of him. She had more than enough wind to yell at us as she came running:
“Tanya, you bitch! Bob is our friend, not yours. You forced him to quit drinking and now you think you can take him away from us. You can never take our friends away from us. We love him.”
But Tanya could, indeed, take me away from them. I stopped and stood on the curb, looking back at my old friends as they came running after us. Tanya took my hand and she said “Come on,” and she dragged me stumbling and running across a busy street, and by the time we got to the other side the light had changed and all of the traffic that constituted reality and life and sanity was between me and my old friends, between me and my past, forever.
In memory of Jim “Big Guy” McClelland, August 31, 1959—September 10, 2001
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