330 PM Richie
A line of clouds was growing to the west. Their tops were white, but their undersides were blue and green. Richie looked up at them, shielding his eyes with one hand. He was trying to figure out which way they were moving when Nina said, “Um, hello, earth to Richie, it’s your turn.”
Five bocce balls dotted the lawn, two red, two blue, and one yellow. There was one dark jack, the target that they were aiming for. Richie tossed his last ball. After bouncing once, it knocked Nina’s out of the way, then nestled up against the target. It was his eighth win in a row.
“This is getting ridiculous.” The stacks of gold bracelets on Nina’s wrists jingled as she brought her hands to her hips. “Like, it’s not fun anymore.”
Rami walked down the lawn and started collecting the balls.
“Maybe we can handicap him or something,” he said.
“What if we blindfolded him?”
Rami dumped the balls onto the grass at their feet, next to Nina’s half-empty bottle of Sancerre.
“We should definitely blindfold him.”
On his chair near the kitchen, Lev took a sip of something brown, then turned the page in a biography of Mao Zedong.
“Sure.” Richie shrugged. “Blindfold me.”
They used Nina Guzman’s scarf, which was silk and Hermès and had up until this point been looped around her wrist. Rami tied it, and when the fabric draped across Richie’s nose, he nearly gagged on the sandalwood of Nina’s perfume.
“You’re at least going to have to give me some indication of where the jack is,” he said. “Otherwise I’m going to smack someone in the head.”
Nina threw the jack. Richie heard a soft thud.
“It’s at your ten o’clock,” Rami said, placing a heavy ball in Richie’s right hand. “Or maybe, like, ten thirty.”
Richie turned a few degrees to his left. Birds chirped in the trees above him. He licked his lips, took a small step forward, and tossed the ball. A moment later, when he lifted the scarf an inch, he saw the ball pressed up pleasingly against the jack.
“Holy shit,” Rami said. “I mean, really. Holy shit.”
Nina linked her hands behind her neck. “Total fluke. I bet you can’t do it again.”
But he did, and this time with no help from Rami. Nina sucked her teeth.
“It’s not fair,” she said. “You haven’t had a bottle of Sancerre.”
Richie decided to let that one go.
He had always thought that the worst part about getting sober would be the twelve steps he would have to take to prove that he was sober.
But it turned out that wasn’t true, and that the real worst part was also, confusingly, the best part: his life really had improved without alcohol.
It felt like an insult, like a giant I told you so from the universe.
Every day he woke up refreshed and well rested; his abdominals were clear and defined; he was saving an obscene amount of money by not purchasing drinks, and also by resisting the foolhardy purchases that those drinks often inspired (first-class flights to London; eight pairs of the same three-hundred-dollar sneakers; more drinks).
He had also discovered that he was surprisingly good at things.
Sometimes this was on account of everyone else being drunk; other times eluded explanation.
Substances had repressed his natural abilities, and now that those substances were gone, everything came a little easier.
Running, crosswords, boutique fitness classes, bocce.
When was the last time he had played it?
He couldn’t remember—probably because he had been wasted—yet now here he was, winning game after game after game.
Everyone was surprised by it, and that included Richie.
When it came to the steps themselves, he’d discovered that some of them were easier than others.
For example, he worried that the first one—admitting that he had a problem—would be a challenge, but he breezed right past it.
He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t cured a hangover with a screwdriver, and he kept a bottle of Smirnoff in his backpack.
There was only one word to describe a person like that.
Steps two and three were a little harder.
He had never met a Higher Power that hadn’t let him down with its hypocrisy, so the idea of suddenly turning his life over to a newfound faith struck him as basically impossible, like being asked to skate across an iceless lake, or to speak fluent Japanese.
Still, he needed something, or he would never make it all the way to twelve.
So after many nights he landed on the will to survive—the blunt drive to make it from one day to the next one, even when every cell within him was begging to call it quits.
For Richie, this would have to be it: the belief that, despite all evidence to the contrary, tomorrow would be better, and that the opportunity to see the sun rising above the water towers of Manhattan was a reason to try a little harder today.
After that: a stringing together of fearless moral inventories; a tearful admission of faults; a pleading for the removal of sticky character defects.
The creation of lists of persons he had harmed, which was followed by stilted, direct attempts to make amends.
This Roster of the Wronged included, but was not limited to: Satya Patel (for spilling a margarita on her shoes); Sasha (for blacking out during his speech at her wedding); Theo (for more or less the same thing); and Nina Guzman (for too many things to count).
There was Jackie Miami, which felt counterintuitive but necessary, along with his mother, and his stepfather, and Mia, and a whole host of other friends and half-strangers he had drunkenly trampled over.
Also, there was Adam. One Saturday this past spring, Richie had asked him if he wanted to take a walk around Red Hook, on the waterfront in Brooklyn.
It was a neighborhood he didn’t know that well, and he hoped the absence of memories might make the job easier.
The last time Richie had seen Adam was when he had come to bail him out of the precinct near South Street Seaport; that was a week before he went into recovery, which now felt both very far away and also nauseatingly close.
It was a warmish day, but the wind coming off the bay counteracted the sun, and Adam showed up wearing a thin black fleece.
They walked down Ferris Street until they reached a park overlooking the water.
There they found a set of benches that afforded views of Governor’s Island and, farther west, the Statue of Liberty.
The sun was low in the sky, and the windows of the Financial District shone red and gold.
Richie asked Adam how work was going, and with a hint of embarrassment Adam said, “No, yeah, it’s actually going pretty well.
” They sat there, the sun sinking lower and lower, until they both decided it was getting a little too cold, at which point they doubled back to the Red Hook Tavern on Van Brunt Street.
They took a table by the window. Adam ordered a hamburger, and Richie a side of french fries.
“I want to apologize,” he said, once they were halfway through the meal. He had been sitting on the words for the better part of three hours, and he was surprised by how easily they came out.
“For what?”
“For everything, I guess.”
“You don’t have anything to apologize for.”
“Okay.” Richie wiped grease from his hands. “I mean, that is factually not true.”
Adam turned a ketchup bottle over and tapped on its side with the heel of his right hand.
“I can never seem to do this right.”
Richie took the bottle. He knocked it once and a glob of ketchup fell onto Adam’s plate.
“I was a bad boyfriend. I took you for granted, and I treated you like shit.”
“You were going through a rough time.”
“I cheated on you more times than I can even remember.”
“You were sick, Richie.”
“When we were living together, I stole a hundred dollars from you. You had it sitting in that bowl you used to keep on the dresser—just this wad of cash. I just took it.”
“Maybe you needed it.”
“I didn’t need it. I took it just to take it. Just because I could.”
“I accept your apology.”
With more force than he intended, Richie said, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. That’s not really what this is about.”
“But I want to. Why wouldn’t I?” Adam took another bite. He said, “I swear to God, this is the best hamburger in New York City.”
Adam swallowed. He picked up a knife and began carefully spreading the ketchup over the half of the hamburger bun that he hadn’t eaten.
To his surprise, Richie found himself becoming angry.
He wanted to continue listing all the ways he had been a dick to Adam, right up until the moment where something shifted in Adam’s face, and he was overcome by the same rage that Richie had felt for the last decade.
He wanted Adam to yell, and to tell Richie that he was unforgivable.
Part of the reason for all this was that he still loved Adam, and he thought that if Adam was hurt enough to be angry at him, then that would mean that Adam might love him too.
He also couldn’t understand how someone could be so good and so kind, particularly after everything Adam had been through.
He wanted to crawl inside that kindness and break it open, if only to see what shape it took when it fell apart.
“Don’t you have a birthday coming up?” Adam asked.
“Not until August.”
“It’s weird that we’re almost thirty-five. I don’t feel thirty-five. Do you?”
“Honestly? Yes.”
“You should do something to celebrate.”
“I’m trying to do less celebrating these days.”
“Okay, then something easy.” Adam set both his elbows on the table. There was a spot of ketchup to the left of his mouth. “What if we got a place out east over Labor Day?”
“I think that would be pretty expensive.”
“I’m good at finding cheap places on Airbnb.”
“The apartment you found in Mexico City didn’t have a door, Adam.”
“The pictures were misleading. Look, I’ve decided.
We’re doing this. I’m going to look as soon as I get home.
It’s going to be fun! I promise.” Adam finished what was left on his plate.
Standing up, he tossed his wallet on the table, next to his empty plate.
“I’m going to the bathroom. And don’t you dare think about paying for this.
You only ordered fries, which you’ve barely touched. ”
He walked toward the back of the restaurant.
Richie looked down at Adam’s wallet. It was an overstuffed leather billfold, and without really thinking he reached over what remained of his fries to pick it up.
Inside there was a corporate American Express, a Chase Visa, twenty-four dollars in cash, and five different business cards.
He flipped through them one by one, and as he was returning the stack to the wallet, he saw a yellow Post-it note, folded in half and stuck behind Adam’s driver’s license.
On it, he had written a quote with a blue pen that was losing its ink: I can bear any pain, it said, as long as it has meaning.
When their server arrived with the bill, he’d given her one of his own credit cards.
Then he’d slipped the Post-it note back into Adam’s wallet and returned it to the other side of the table.
In Amagansett he crouched down, picking up another bocce ball, this one red, and brushed a bit of dirt from its face.
“What if we make him throw it with his feet?” Rami said.
Nina asked: “How do you throw something with your feet?”
“Isn’t throwing something with your feet called kicking?” Richie said.
“Not technically.”
“What about his left hand?” Nina adjusted her bracelets, pushing them up her arm. “We could make him throw it left-handed.”
“I’ve been throwing it left-handed.”
Rami stretched his arms above his head. Dark circles of sweat stained his armpits.
“Okay, what about this,” he said. “What if we spin him around really fast, get him good and dizzy.”
“Interesting.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Rami raised a hand. “This is even better. What if instead of spinning him, we have him do cartwheels?”
“Oh, that’s good.”
Richie pushed the scarf up an inch with his finger. He said, “Cartwheels is where I draw the line.”
“Lame.”
“Fine. Spinning around it is.”
Nina took off her sunglasses. “Do not fall and fuck up that scarf, Richie.”
“No one’s going to fuck up your scarf, Nina.”
Rami placed both his hands on Richie’s shoulders.
“Okay,” he said, “here we go.”
The world spun around him, its sounds blending to a pleasant whoosh. Then, before anyone could tell him which way he was facing, and as the earth sank and lifted in waves beneath his feet, he tossed the ball with a little added verve.
He heard the sound of something shattering. A man screaming, “Fucking fuck.”
Nina said, “Oh, shit.”
Richie lifted her scarf. Near the kitchen, Lev was holding his hand to his face. Blinking twice, Richie refocused the world, merging it back into a singular version of itself. He saw glass in shards at Lev’s feet, and bourbon dripping from the ends of Lev’s hair. The bocce ball lay a few feet away.
“I should probably go get some ice,” Rami said, and began jogging toward the kitchen.