Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [89]
David told Pauline he had urgent family business, loaded Sally, his old bluetick hound, into the Land Cruiser, and drove north. Around Anaheim, he heard a faint rumble in one of the wheels. By downtown Los Angeles, it was a grating noise: a wheel bearing, possibly, if not the whole rear end. Wasn’t it natural law that cars always break down only an hour before the repair shops close on Saturday afternoons?
At the Toyota dealership in Glendale, mechanics clucked over the Land Cruiser’s advanced age and said obtaining parts could take from two days to two weeks. David’s cousins in nearby Atwater gave him a couch to sleep on. He woke up on Sunday morning in their living room, more lost hair forming a detached shadow on the pillow. What I need, he thought, is a meeting.
A woman at the AA Central Office directed him across the Hyperion Bridge to Silverlake. The meeting was called the Nightcrawlers Sunday Speaker and it started at noon. Even fifteen minutes early, David had to stand in the back of the overcrowded church auditorium.
IT WAS one of those things that sounded good from four months off—to give a forty-minute talk at the largest of all the Nightcrawler meetings. How would Lewis have known back in February that Lydia would dump him, then leave for Paris on the very date he’d agreed to speak?
A loose-knit AA group Lewis had fallen in with on his return to Los Angeles, the Nightcrawlers were mostly under fifty, mostly actors, artists, and writers who rented the auditorium for daily meetings. Lewis had made a lot of friends there, including Barbara, the woman who’d asked him to speak. An actress with long, curly light-red hair, see-through skin, and the endearing, perpetually worried expression of a pretty little girl squinting into the sun, Barbara was probably his best friend. Though they’d briefly dated, she quickly decided his attentions were too inconsistent. Once they each found someone else, Barbara had offered an avid, demanding brand of friendship. He had resisted—didn’t return her phone calls, wouldn’t meet for coffee—but she wouldn’t relent. Now they spoke daily, in person or by phone. Barbara browbeat him for the details of his life—what was he feeling, thinking, eating?—and he somehow had come to rely on this. She was like an emotional clearinghouse: “So, how do you feel about that?” she’d say, or “This one’s for your shrink, I think,” or “Maybe Harry could help you there” (Harry being Lewis’s present sponsor).
As for this speaking commitment, Barbara refused to let him off the hook; it might even, she said, distract him from self-pity. And she was right: to command the podium, he had to pull himself together or else look like a fool. The group laughed, as they always did, at how he worked Step One thinking he was writing PR material for Round Rock Farm. They gasped hearing how his first sponsor stole his girlfriend. And when he told them Lydia had scuttled, concern flickered in their eyes and he’d had to pause, catch hold of himself, accept the Kleenex Barbara held out.
Afterward, people stood in line to shake his hand. He was numb with relief. Barbara slid up to him and whispered, “Tops,” meaning she and a few others were going to the Tops coffee shop and he should meet them there.
“You going back up to Rito today?” said one Latino guy.
“No, no, I haven’t been there for years.”
“I thought you worked there.”
“No, not for almost three years.”
“I couldn’t hear well way in the back,” he said. “But my car broke down and I thought, if you were going up … It did seem too good to be true.”
“Hey, sorry, man,” Lewis said. “Good luck.”
By the time Lewis shook every well-wisher’s hand, two women had slipped him their phone numbers and three newcomer men had asked for his—all of which might have cheered him up, if he’d wanted anything besides a phone call from Lydia proclaiming her change of