The Tar Pit (2 of 9)

The place was about to close. The last remaining alcoholics had all but gone home. I was hunched over the table with one knee in a booth and a foot on the floor, filling the sugar containers. I could feel myself nodding out, but I’d hoped it wasn’t obvious. I felt my eyes open when I heard a gravelly voice say, “What’s going on with you, man?”

My head turned toward the voice, and one of the regulars I somewhat knew was laid back in the booth with his leg up in a cast and propped on the bench. He sat sideways in the booth, almost laying down, but leaning against the wall. The clean white Stetson cowboy hat he wore was pulled down just enough that I couldn’t see his eyes. His chin and cheeks were visible, and I could see that he was a few days past the need for a shave. A gnarled voice spoke through his cigarette smoke. “I’ve seen you here for a while… and we talk… and you’re always alert, and real hard worker, but today… I don’t know.” He looked directly at me like he knew the deal from his own experience. “You just don’t look right.”

He raised his chin, but I still didn’t catch a glimpse of his eyes. The guy tapped an ash from his cigarette and leaned back against the wall.

“I’m alright,” I said. “I’m just tired. It’s been a long night.”

“Alright,” said the man. “Fair enough.”

I looked around for a distraction, for a way to get away from his conversation, and from what he represented to me, sitting there with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and his wounded leg recovering under the cast, healing even as it lied there propped up on the bench.

I searched my section for another empty sugar container, but the only one that needed filled was on his table, and then I was done for the night… and I could go home. I looked at the glass sugar dispenser, and almost asked him if I could reach over his booth and grab it, but I paused, uneasy about talking to him, since he’d all but called me out on being high at work. Screw it, he’s leaving in a second. I’ll get it then. I was about to turn around and walk to the kitchen with my box of salts and peppers and sugar tubs and little packets of the pink stuff and the yellow stuff that tastes fake like chemicals in my coffee so I never use it, but the guy raised his chin again, nodded to the pack of full-flavors on the table and said, “You smoke?”

“Cigarettes? No,” I answered, having recently fantasized that I was going to quit smoking at the end of this pound of tobacco I have in a bag that will probably take me a year to hand-roll my way to the bottom of. “Well, yeah. I guess I do, for now. I’m trying to quit though. It’s… so bad for you.”

“Tell me about it,” the guy’s voice growled behind the hundreds of packs he’d smoked before I was even born. “Want one? I’m trying to get rid of ‘em and I’ve only got a few left. I’m quitting. This is my last pack. So you’d be doing me a favor.”

He wanted me to sit down and smoke with him, not just take one and smoke it on the way home. “Come on,” he said. “Smoke with me my last. I’m kicking this habit tomorrow.”

I turned and looked behind me, passed the otherwise empty booths of the smoking section and into the lobby, where the hostess who had been working the cash register had already gone home for the night. “Fuck it,” I said, sliding into the booth and lying back in it the way he was, with my leg up and leaning against the wall behind me. I filled his sugar container, then lit one up.  

“Look,” he said, the brim of his hat tilted down over his eyes so the smoke would rise along its curved sides then straight up to the ceiling above him. “I quit drinking twenty years ago… and by passing my sobriety along to others who need it, I’m able to keep mine going. You and I have talked. I know a little about what you used to be into, and I know you were clean and doing well and trying to move somewhere else.”

He tapped another ash into the tray. I blew a long arm of smoke in the air and tapped an ash too.

“I know it’s none of my business,” he continued, half-raising his hand, half shrugging, “And I’d never even bring it up if you and I hadn’t sat and had those couple of conversations we had, but… it looks like you’re uh… a little, uh… feeling alright right now.”

“Yeah, I feel alright,” I said.

“What happened? You don’t mind me asking. You were so adamant about getting clean and hitting the road… hiding out somewhere and writing a book about everything you’d learned. It was inspiring. Shit, you had me convinced. I was ready to go into the great wild open and chase a dream with you.” Then he whispered underneath his white Stetson, “So, you got a habit? Or are you just chipping?”

I rounded over my shoulder and peered into the empty lobby at the silent cash register and turned back around. Then, in a sitting position, facing him where he stayed, laid back and hidden behind his hat so I couldn’t see his eyes, I told him everything. I told him how I’d lost so much weight I couldn’t show my face at the office. And how three months ago, I’d called all my clients and let them know I’d be out of town for a while, and that I’d contact them when I got back. I told him how I’d kicked cold-turkey in a cheap, dirty drive-up motel, then got this job serving spaghetti to the suburban folks west of Youngstown. I explained that I was clean for a couple of months and only relapsed a week or two ago. Just long enough to know I’ll have some sickness to face, and I’ll run for years to avoid three days of pain.

“I keep myself balanced on three bags, split into two shots a day, one in the morning and one at night,” I admitted. “I need to get the fuck out of town. Just… go.” I shook my head with a look of disgust obvious in the way that I held my mouth tight at the corners. “Every year I say, ‘I swear this is the last winter I’m spending in Youngstown.’ And every year another winter comes and I’m still here… and look,” I said, the smoke flipping from the tip of my cigarette. “Look at it outside.” My finger gestured to the window where even though it was dark out, we both knew the ground was covered in a thick layer of white.

I breathed in a lung of smoke and let it out. “I’m ready to just go somewhere and be homeless,” I said. “Just to get away from all these… arm’s length connections I have here. I know too many people. It’s too easy for me to just… go get a front for a few hours and come back with the money later, plus enough for another one. It makes it impossible to quit… for very long, anyway.”

“The geographical cure only works if you’ve had enough,” said the man, still looking down. “And only if you don’t keep doing the same things you were doing in the place you just left.”

“Well…” I said, standing up and grinding the cigarette butt into the ashtray with my thumb. “I’ve had more than enough. All I need is a clean slate. I just need a chance… that’s it. One chance... I will not fail.”

“Ah, there’s that determination I like.” The gruff chin of the man seemed to expand as he smiled underneath the brim of a hat that reflected an identity he only came to peace with after years of sobriety.  

“Thanks for the smoke, I said.”

“You need to move out of that place.” He was referencing my roommate’s house, the bad influence I’d just told him about. “Get a place of your own,” he said.

“I can’t. I don’t have the money.”

“Ain’t no such thing as can’t,” said the man. “Take all the tips you get from us on Wednesday nights and put them in a separate pocket. Better yet, take all the tips you get after 8 pm every night and put them in a separate pocket. Then put the money in a shoebox when you get home, and don’t touch it. I bet you can move out in a month,” he said.

And he was right. Sort of.

I did do what he suggested. Only, if I didn’t make enough to cover my fifty-dollar-a-day habit, I would have to dip into the shoebox and pull out the remainder of what I needed. Still, I managed to save up a couple hundred in the shoebox that was now sitting on the desk in my room. One month after seeing that man in the clean white hat, I was looking in the newspaper for rooms to rent and a tiny one-line add caught my eye. I called the number and got ahold of the guy I’m renting the room off of now. “I need to get away from my roommates,” I told him. “They’re going down bad roads.” I just neglected to tell him that I had been going down those roads too. Otherwise, I’d been genuine with my words, and the man on the other end of the phone seemed genuine in his understanding of my plight, and he agreed to meet me.

I washed my hair and put on a nice shirt, and when I arrived at the address he told me to meet him at, I was excited to find a mansion fronting on Wick Park on the Northside of Youngstown. I pictured myself coming home to a home that was home to one of the richest individuals the city had to offer a hundred-years ago. I was somewhat let down when the man who showed up with the keys led me up a set of stairs along the side of a garage attached to what the gentleman explained was once a carriage-house when the place was built back in 1907. “These were the servant’s quarters up here,” he said, unlocking the outside door. “Shared kitchen and bath.” He put a key in the door of the first room on the right and opened it. “It’s small, but… it’s a room.”

I walked in. There was a bare striped mattress on the floor, a tiny wooden desk with a wooden chair, and a small dresser in the corner. That’s all there was room for.

“It’s perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”

The man with the keys was a tall fellow. Taller than me, at least. He had a kind face and a strong handshake, a generous smile and a hard jawline. We stood, just outside my door. Two more doors surrounded a small kitchen sink, a counter and stove, a refrigerator, and a bathroom door. The door that led to the outside was just to the right of mine. I stressed my urgency to escape my bad influences and the man agreed to split the security deposit between my first few month’s rent, and he let me move into the room for three-hundred dollars a month.

I told him I’d call him back at the end of the week, and by complete chance, I had agreed to help an old girlfriend paint her mother’s house that same week. I painted their living room, their kitchen, and two bedrooms on a Tuesday, then hung out and drank beers with her mom until it got late. I refused any money her mom, also an old friend of mine, offered to pay me, but on my way out the door, she shoved a few folded bills in my hand and pushed me out onto the porch. “Take it,” she said. “Thank you. You earned it.”

I looked in my hand when I got in the car and found three hundred-dollar bills, folded up into a tiny square. I hadn’t mentioned my situation to her mother. She just happened to give me the exact amount I needed. I quit my job at the spaghetti joint that next weekend, and that same day, I moved from the Westside to just a handful of blocks from downtown. I used the money I had in the shoebox to buy a bunch of cans of spaghetti and ravioli and soup, some saltine crackers, and a six-pack of toilet paper, and I sweat and shit the heroin out of my system in a week of cold, wet bedsheets. There was a foot of snow on the ground that week and I didn’t put one footprint in it.

(Continues...)