Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [25]
Red turned to Lewis. His eyes were kind. “How much time do you have now, Lewis?”
Lewis knew what Red meant: how long had he been sober? “Fifteen days.”
“Terrific! And you’re here for how long?”
“Thirty,” said Lewis.
Red’s forehead pleated. “Lewis, you have the rest of your life for cultural history. Why not take the next two weeks to get grounded in sobriety? Read the Big Book. Talk to other alcoholics.”
“I’d clean this place up for you.”
“You would, would you?” Red smiled, rueful, and tapped the corner of an envelope on the blotter. “Tell me, Lewis. Who’s your sponsor?”
Lewis picked at the piping on the sofa arm.
“You have a sponsor?”
“No.”
Red aimed the envelope at Lewis. “It’s a good idea to have a sponsor.”
“Yeah. But …” The whole concept of sponsorship gave Lewis the jitters. One of the more excruciating things about life in the Blue House was hearing grown men say, My sponsor says I should do this; My sponsor says I shouldn’t do that—as if no one could blow his own nose without special dispensation.
“Tell you what,” said Red. “You get yourself a sponsor, and if he thinks it’s a good idea for you to work on your paper, we’ll talk. Okay?”
Lewis couldn’t say how unokay this was. He clutched the sofa arm, trying to think. Red returned to the mail and, after a few minutes, shot Lewis another sharp look.
Against his own will, Lewis was embarrassing himself, behaving like a fool, like a clingy girl who wouldn’t take no for an answer—like that girl from Texas in his Shakespeare class. He’d slept with her once and she’d glommed on like industrial-strength adhesive. Dogged him everywhere. He would be at a bar and suddenly, on the next stool, there was Tex primly sipping a beer and radiating pain. He’d ignore her as long as he could, then break down and talk to her. Eventually, he’d grown curious: just how long would she sit there without acknowledgment? Hours. Several times, in fact, she outlasted him.
Lewis, so strangely paralyzed, prayed he wouldn’t sit here for hours, a pathetic, groveling supplicant.
Red spoke abruptly. “You say you like to write?”
“I don’t know how much I like it,” Lewis said. “But yeah, I do a lot of writing.”
“Tell you what. You write something for me, you can have a couple hours on the computer. But I don’t want you over here all the time hiding out with the damn thing.”
“I was thinking you need some help with your correspondence.”
“No,” said Red. “I’d like your drinking history.”
“My what?”
Red wanted a narrative about how Lewis’s family drank, how Lewis drank, and whatever trouble alcohol or drugs had caused him—arrests, humiliations, jobs and friendships jeopardized or lost, all of it. “I don’t want the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Red said. “But try to be thorough.”
Lewis assumed Red needed text for another brochure and was certain he’d only disappoint him. Next to the stories told at the Blue House AA meetings—including Red’s own impressive saga, which had achieved the status of legend—Lewis’s drinking career had the dramatic content of skimmed milk. A guy named Oscar had come out of a blackout with his arms torn up and bleeding only to find his beloved cat drowned in the bathtub. Chuck had woken up married to a woman he didn’t recognize. Lawrence had been stabbed in a kidney while shooting dope in a West Hollywood alley. Lewis could count maybe half a dozen blackouts, total, and he’d always woken up at home and in bed, safe and sound and—regrettably—alone. “I don’t know if I can provide what you’re looking for,” he told Red.
“I’m not looking for any one thing,” Red said. “Just tell the truth. Can you do that?”
The truth, thought Lewis, was just what would make ’em snore.
AFTER Lewis left, Red Ray locked the door and slit open a letter from his ex-wife. A note, really; half a sheet of heavy, ivory stationery, the message typed and brief. Evidently, Joe wanted to go out for track. The meets were on Saturdays, which meant he couldn’t come down to Red’s for three months, four if the team made the state finals: “You could come up here and see him run.”