Hey, good-looking, Hank says.
He’s always hitting on me. He’s not handsy about it, just kind of flirty. Sometimes he’ll bump against me, but I don’t mind. I like him but not in that way. He knows. As long as he does, and he doesn’t get handsy, I’m OK with it.
He hands me a clipboard with a list of detox clients. It’s the first of the month. Everyone got their checks so most of our beds are empty. Beds. They’re actually exercise mats on the floor with a blanket and a sheet and a pillow. We had beds once, but clients pissed themselves and ruined the mattresses. So now we have mats.
Hank points out a guy on mat two. No name. A John Doe. Just came in, Hank says. Too drunk to do an intake. He doesn’t know him. Thought maybe I would. I take a look. Young. A pale red plaid shirt covers his thin chest. Strings of blond hair stick to his forehead. I don’t recognize him.
Hank wrote, “10:30 p.m.,” by the guy’s name, the time he checked him in. I start at eleven. I wonder if the guy had really been that drunk or if Hank just didn’t want to do the intake because it was so close to quitting time. Put him on a mat, leave the paperwork for me. He may dig on me but that don’t mean he’s not lazy. I give Hank a look
Don’t do me like that, Katie, he says. It ain’t about that. He was too drunk.
He goes on: One of our regulars, Walter Johns, asked for detox and told Hank that there was a man passed out on the sidewalk in front of Fresh Start. Walter didn’t know him. Hank did Walter’s intake and then went outside with a volunteer. The guy was laying on his back by a trash bin. Hank shouted at him and he kind of mumbled and rolled onto his side. Hank and the volunteer put on plastic gloves and lifted him up under the arms and half-carried, half-walked him inside. They put him on a mat to sleep it off.
Go over and look at him, Hank says. Maybe you know him.
I will. Can I have some coffee first?
Hank’s the super on the swing shift; I’m working the overnight shift. I’m in charge tonight because my super called in sick, so it’s just me and another guy, Joe, working. He’s what our boss, Tom, calls a paid intern. He’s a graduate student at the School of Social Work at San Francisco State University. In staff meetings, Tom talks about how we should all follow Joe’s example and go to school, get a college degree. I don’t know what Tom’s thinking. He’s not an alcoholic, that’s one thing. He started here years ago doing community service to work off parking tickets and got hired. He went back to school, graduated college. I was still a client then, but I remember staff complaining how Tom was getting promoted ahead of them because he had a degree and they didn’t. He’s nice enough but he doesn’t know. Neither does Joe, and he’s nice enough too. Real eye candy. Got an ass that won’t quit. I’m just saying. But he didn’t drink half his life away like the rest of us. AA meetings are our classes. Our sobriety chips are our degrees. Tom thinks it’s too easy to go from the street to work at the place where we detoxed. He likes to think that’s what he did, but he didn’t. He had a job delivering pizzas and he got another job working with drunks, that’s what he did. Good for him. He went to school. Not all of us will. Not all of us want to risk failing. That’s one good way to start drinking again. We got no work history to get hired anywhere else but Fresh Start. We know the clients. We used to drink with them. That’s a kind of education. Tom should be satisfied with that. If he’s so big on college, hire those kinds of people. He can’t because the pay is too low. But we’ll take it. Aim higher, he says. If you’re drowning you can’t just be satisfied with a life preserver. You got to swim toward shore. He doesn’t know. The life preserver is my sobriety. I hang on to it a day at a time like the Big Book says.
Hank clocks out, lights a smoke, and sits at a table in detox. Before he got sober five years ago, he was beaten up one night and woke up in San Francisco General unable to see because his eyes were all swole up. That was it. That did it. Not being able to see freaked him out and he got into a recovery program and stopped drinking. He smokes too much. His sandpaper voice deep with hard scratches. Cigarettes will kill you just like alcohol, but I figure you can only give up so many addictions in one lifetime. He’s quit enough shit. He’s also losing his hearing in his left ear. Whoever beat him up gave that side of his head a good workout. When I talk to him, he cups his bad ear with his left hand, and he leans into me like something unseen is pushing him. He did my last intake. I don’t know if I can do this, I told him. You’ll be OK, he said in that voice of his. I know, I said, a day at a time. I’ve heard it all before. You haven’t heard this, he said. At first you got to take it a minute at a time. Tell yourself, I won’t drink for sixty seconds. Then take it to the next sixty.
I followed his advice. He wasn’t hitting on me then. He was like a big brother. Still is. He just gets flirty. A minute at a time became a day at a time. Some days are harder than others. Some days, I’m back to a minute at a time. Little things. Like a cloudy day, something that simple and my mind goes dark. I get depressed. Sixty seconds, Katie, I go, sixty seconds. You’d think after almost two years sober I’d have it down, but the urge to drink is like an allergy. You never know what’s going to set you off sneezing. It’s a big deal to Hank that he did my last intake. That I stopped drinking after he put me in detox. Like he had a hand in it, and he did, but I’m the one who chose to stop. He didn’t make that choice. He didn’t stop me from buying a bottle. I stopped me. That’s my ego talking, I know. Ego can lead to anger and anger can lead to drinking. I should be grateful to Hank. I am. I just wish I liked him the way he’s liking on me. Being alone, that can be hard too. Sixty seconds, Katie. Count. Sixty seconds.
Walter stirs from his mat. He sits staring at his feet. Getting up, walking stiff-legged, he staggers as if the floor has slanted to one side. He moves toward Hank, his right arm stretched out to grab the back of a chair. He sits. Hank gets him a cup of coffee and Walter tries to drink it but his hands shake. He sets the cup on the table, leans forward, and sips. His lined face drains into his chin like it might slide right off. He and Hank ran together on the street when Hank was still drinking. Everyone he knows is on the street. I may have drunk with Walter too, when I was out there, I don’t remember. Probably. I drank from, like, when I was fourteen to must’ve been thirty-four, thirty-five, maybe. I watch Hank and Walter talking. It’s quiet, I might join them. Everyone I know is either still drinking or in recovery. How do you see someone outside that loop? I wonder. What would Joe and I talk about?
I’ll do the bed check, Joe says.
OK, I say, and give him the clipboard.
Every half hour we walk through detox to make sure the clients are OK. By OK, I mean breathing. Used to be we checked on them once an hour, but last year a client, Carol, died in detox so now we check on them every thirty minutes. I’m not sure it matters. If someone stops breathing five minutes after we check on them, what are we supposed to do? I guess we’d do our walk-throughs every fifteen minutes. Pretty soon we’ll be sitting beside them until they wake up.
Carol was a friend of mine. She and I used to drink together back in the day when I was running the street. I sobered up but she stayed out there. I’d placed both her and Walter in the McLeod Hotel but they dropped out. Too many people died there, they told me.
Turns out, on the night she did herself in, Carol had mixed Valium and vodka. You can’t OD on Valium alone, but if you mix it with alcohol, well, off you go. But how was anyone to know what Carol had taken when the cops led her out of the paddy wagon? I was told she was walking and talking. Not well, but no different than any other intoxicated client. An hour later she was dead. I wasn’t on that night. I found out the next day. It hit me hard. When I stopped drinking I used to sit with her, usually around Van Ness where we had panhandled together. Her unwashed red hair, dulled from sleeping in Golden Gate Park, hung to her shoulders covering the holes in the collar of her jean jacket. She flashed me a smile, the lines in her face etched with dirt. Looking at her, I felt grimy, even woozy, like I was back doing it with her, like I had never cleaned up. It took a few seconds for that god-awful feeling to leave but when it did, I was like so happy. I felt light and clean, the Bay breezes ruffling my shirt and my hair still damp from a shower that morning, and my mouth didn’t taste of all kinds of stink from drinking, and it was hard to hold back how good I felt.
Carol would tell me how happy she was for me. But if she had wine, she’d always offer me a drink. If I said anything—you know, like, It was a long day today—she’d say, Here, have a drink. I’d not sit with her long. You don’t go to a whorehouse for a kiss; you don’t hang out with a drunk for their company if you’re not drinking. I don’t remember who told me that but it’s true. I didn’t want to slip. Still, I felt bad when I heard she died. Guilty somehow. Like because I’d gotten sober, she died alone. I would have died if I hadn’t quit. I was glad I wasn’t Carol, and that made me feel guilty too.
I watch Joe pause by each mat and notice a paperback sticking out of his hip pocket. He’s a reader. He always has a book. With all his education and the fact he’s a good ten years younger than me I’m guessing, I know he wouldn’t look at me twice, but he’s fun to watch. That ass. I’m sure he’d want to take a date to a club for a beer. Maybe not. Maybe after being around drunks all day at work the last thing he’d want is a drink. There’s always Starbucks. That’s what I’d tell him if he gave me the chance.
I tease Joe, call him a normie, you know, as in normal. He’s a normal guy. He’s not an alcoholic. He can have one drink and stop and not even think about it. When I was drinking, sometimes I’d stop after one just to prove I didn’t have a problem, but I wanted a second drink and a third and a fourth and on and on. Hank says sobriety is a state of mind. That after so many years you can look at a billboard advertising some kind of booze and not think about it anymore than you would a car passing you on the road. I’m not there. I see a sign for booze and for a second it’s like a contact high. I can feel it running through me.
I’m a little old for Joe, I know, but younger guys can like older women. Joe does little things like holding a door for me or he’ll ask if I want a cup of coffee when he gets one for himself, and he’ll walk me home if I don’t have a ride. Not too many men look at me like a woman they would ask to walk home. His momma raised him right is all I’m saying. He stops at the door of the Bridge Hotel and I turn around and face him and that’s when I think he should kiss me. He doesn’t. Just says, See you at work tomorrow, Katie.
Sometimes, I dream of my ex, Matt, a heroin addict. We met in the Redwood City program. When he got out, he rented a room on the second floor of a house in the Richmond and sold plasma until he found a job working for a gay phone-sex company. I had just moved into Oliver House. On weekends, I’d request a pass and go over to his place. I’d show up in the morning and he’d still be in bed and I’d take off my clothes and crawl in with him.
The last time we were together, I heard him in the hall shower after I’d spent the night, and I decided to give him some love. I got out of bed, put on my robe, and walked into the bathroom. I eased the shower curtain back, thinking I’d slip in and surprise him. I almost started laughing thinking how he’d jump in surprise, and I saw him standing under the water, back to me, tipping back a beer, and I jerked back almost falling. Matt spun around.
Goddamn, Katie! What are you doing?
I ran out the bathroom and into his room and started putting on clothes; Matt followed me dripping water.
Katie, it’s not what you’re thinking.
What is it I’m thinking, Matt?
It’s just a beer. I can drink a beer.
He reached for me and I slapped him and his hand went up to his face and I pushed past him to the hall carrying my shoes.
Katie!
I hurried down the stairs and ran outside still holding my shoes, my hair all crazy from sleep like the fucked-up, barefoot, homeless woman I once was.
He called here once late at night on his day off. Like two months ago. I answered and he said he saw a client he thought had been sober drinking in a club in the Haight. What do we do? he asked. I mean I thought she had cleaned up. I wondered if he had tried to pick her up and then recognized her and freaked out. Sometimes Carol and I would go to clubs on the first of the month when we got our general assistance checks. We’d drink with all the normies and get just as drunk as them. Guys would take us home. Be careful, girl, we’d say to each other. It was never great sex, kind of hurried and sloppy, and they’d get off not thinking too much about me. I waited for them to fall asleep. Then I’d wander their apartment, sit in the living room in the dark like it was my place. The shelf of paperback books. The kitchen sink cluttered with unwashed dishes. The framed prints with trees and inspirational sayings. I remember one: It always seems impossible until it’s done—Nelson Mandela. I thought of that when I got sober, how I stared at those words written below pale mountains pressing against a purpling sunrise. Then I rinsed my mouth with toothpaste I found in his bathroom. I went back to the bedroom and smoothed out the sheets on my side of the bed. Not really my side. The side I slept on. Anyway, he didn’t move. I didn’t want to wake him. Would he remember me if he did? Probably. Maybe not at first but probably. Would he want me? Might. But it’s weird because I wouldn’t be drunk and I’d have this stranger on me with morning breath. Anyway, he didn’t so much as move. I forgot what he’d been drinking. I eased out, closing the door behind me like I was never there.
I wonder if Joe had been drinking the night he called all upset about the client he saw drinking. I wonder who she was. Did he hit on her before he knew who she was? Joe can drink. He can hit on anybody he wants, I don’t care. I mean I do but I don’t. Maybe he’s still at that stage where he can get wasted and still come to work. Maybe it’s not a stage. Maybe he can do that the rest of his life. I don’t know. I can’t.
I lean back in my chair, watch Joe bend over each mat as he checks the detox clients. Tight jeans. It was at an AA meeting, I think, that I heard someone say you shouldn’t get in a relationship at work during your first two years of sobriety, to avoid the kinds of stress that can send you back to drinking. But not working and no sex is another kind of stress. Been sober eighteen months. I got a job and I’m not drinking. No reason I shouldn’t try my luck with a fuck buddy.
I see you watching that boy, Hank says.
What you saying?
Katie girl, you’d turn him inside out.
I’d go easy on him.
I gotta wiggle a worm, don’t know nothing about if you need salvation.
