Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [20]
He didn’t know, really, where he was. He hadn’t seen a map. He knew he was north of L.A., north of the San Fernando Valley, and perhaps not far from the ocean. Sometimes, as he roamed the house at night, he watched fog billow up against the windows, a series of ghostly shoulders. By day he noted citrus groves, clear skies, a thick yellow afternoon light.
The mansion itself seemed a comic travesty—a ravaged, once-lavish confection, a villa turned loony bin. It was called the Blue House, but the name barely hinted at its peculiar exterior color, an insistent, almost process blue, the color of robins’ eggs, swimming pools, or glacial fissures. Inside, rooms with twenty-foot ceilings were cluttered with sprung sofas, ugly coffee tables, and folding chairs; parquet floors were strewn with fake Persians and rag rugs. AA meetings took place in the ballroom, whose pillars were carved into ornate hanks of twisted rope, the slate floor hand cut in a wild sunflower pattern clearly inspired by van Gogh’s work at Arles. Meals were eaten in the formal, wood-paneled dining room at six chrome dinettes, the kind Lewis spilled milk on as a child, with surfaces that looked like cubed Jell-O. Rackety older white refrigerators were shoved up against the dark wood wainscoting and stocked with milk and juices and packaged pastries you could heat up anytime in battered toaster ovens. Experienced residents said this was Round Rock’s biggest selling point over other recovery houses: always enough to eat.
Lewis located two pay phones in closets off the living room and the lobby. Once, he shut himself in and, depositing the last of his change, called his philosophy professor. Amanda answered, and Lewis hung up without speaking.
He bummed cigarettes until Carl told him he could get small loans from the house manager—it would all show up on his bill. The notion of a bill caused a twinkle of alarm and then was blissfully forgotten, a twenty-dollar loan immediately sought and granted.
On his second Friday night, after dinner, Lewis squeezed into a Buick with five other men and rode through rural darkness to a town called Buchanan, where a large AA meeting was held in the domed auditorium of a former Masonic Temple, now a Teamsters union hall. There were women present, the first Lewis had seen in days. He sat next to one, a plump and fortyish knitter, who kindly gave him an unpleasantly sour lemon drop. He stayed awake for some of the speaker’s story, so as not to appear rude; but the lulling tick of her needles wore him down and sleep, in a heavy green wave, reclaimed him.
On one early-morning ramble, Lewis slipped into the parlor, where the TV played all night to a host of chronic insomniacs. “If it isn’t Rip Van Winkle,” said Chuck, a small old guy with a white butch cut. A plumber, Chuck had retired to tend bar in a two-bit beer joint in Castaic and promptly drank himself into bankruptcy. Even sleeping through most AA meetings, Lewis had absorbed more biographical data about his companions than he cared to know. He knew, also, that this was Chuck’s second visit to Round Rock; after his first discharge, he’d made it as far as the bar in Rito called Happy Yolanda’s before his first scotch rocks.
“Remember how Harlow slept when he came here? Laid his head on a hamburger steak one night like it was a boudoir pillow.” This was John, the house manager, a blue-eyed Irishman whose nose and cheeks bore a permanent, bright webbing of red capillaries. John, sober for five years, had no discernible sense of humor, bullied the men, was rumored never to sleep, and otherwise, so far as Lewis could see, provided clear inducement for a person to keep drinking.
A late-night talk show was turned down so low that Lewis had to stop breathing to hear a gospel-pop singer describe her work with Haitian orphans. Then Gene, a tall and doughy ex-football player holding