lie about things like that? I cross-check when there’s a reason to.”
Behind me in the newsroom, keyboards blazed. The full-time reporters. Hard news. What a poser I was.
“You’re young,” he exclaimed. “You’re a good writer. I can use someone like you.”
As if I didn’t have a job already.
He described the benefits of freelance. The promise of doing a variety of assignments. The ability to pitch stories to multiple editors. “I like your early articles, those profiles of bums and addicts. That prostitute.” He paused. “The later ones have been soft. Don’t you think?”
My head drifted as I thought about that; those stories did have an edge. I’d written them after graduating from Channel House, a recovery home. I’d hung out in Hollywood, interviewing any drifter or street performer who’d talk to me. “I used a tape recorder,” I offered. “That’s how I did those stories.” I realized I was gripping the armrests. I faced the editor and tried to relax.
“There you go,” he said. Papers shuffled on his desk. “I want to see stories like that. You’ll get an extra week’s pay. After that week, give me a call and we’ll talk about articles.”
“You don’t want anything next week?”
“Consider it severance pay. The least we can do.”
I knew I should press him: Why not two weeks’ pay? Why was I being laid off if he liked my writing? But I didn’t want to jeopardize the relationship. I let my face drift. “Freelance again,” I said.
“Welcome aboard.” His chair rolled back, and his hands thumped the desk; he was making sure I heard. When I stood and extended my arm, he grabbed my hand and shook it.
I stepped out of his office feeling stung and numb, swinging Charlie back and forth along the short aisle between desks, stepping briskly, wanting to disappear. Since I’d never been given a desk or computer, I’d always felt like an interloper anyway. I knew most of the reporters, but it wasn’t as if we confided. Even as I scuttled toward the stairs, I wanted Helen in sports or Cameron at the city desk to call out. Helen’s keyboard clacked. Cameron bantered on the phone. I hurried on. Ex-addicts excel at that, rushing into the pain we long to escape.
My pal Charlie led me downstairs and out the office door, into the bedlam of pedestrians bent for home. Footsteps spat across concrete at odd angles. A stroller nearly clipped me. August is usually a slow month on Glendale sidewalks even in late afternoon, but I was jostled along and held up short. I scurried too quickly, mishandling Charlie and striking his tip along the edge of storefronts on my right. He didn’t complain. I blustered across alcoves as the heels of my Western boots echoed the recesses. I found myself clenching my jaw. Before I came to the street corner, I had to huddle in a doorway. How many counselors had told me to stop and breathe—breathe, for God’s sake—when I got like this? Holding Charlie against my chest vertically, his tip resting on the concrete and his rubber grip pointing up, I lifted my hat to rake my fingers through my hair. I took off my dark glasses to wipe my face with my forearm.
It was a part-time job anyway, I told myself. Eight hours a week. Hardly paid anything. Hack writing in a dying industry. But it was the best job I’d ever had. In San Francisco I’d been stuck in data processing, taking orders over the phone back when those jobs existed on this side of the Pacific. Writing for the community paper was the only gig where I hadn’t felt hemmed in by blindness. The fact that it was part-time and low pay—that this was all I could get—what was the point of remaining sober? I’d struggled to stay clean for twenty-seven days shy of two years. Even on the best days, I found myself longing for a whiff of crack—just a small rock to take me away. Today I needed to get home before I did something rash.
I reached Charlie forward and set off for the street corner. When his tip caught on my left, my opposite hip glanced against something: a parked bicycle? It didn’t fall. I knew I should slow down, but I charged on, driven by the risk of dawdling, as if I could hear my personal triggers—click, click, click—snap toward relapse.
Cross-traffic signaled the end of the block. I made my way left and should have waited for the light’s cycle as footsteps ran past me across the intersection. Instead I hustled from concrete onto the gentle slope of road pavement, swinging Charlie back and forth. A horn blared on my right. A man yawped, incoherent. Charlie found the opposite curb, and as I stepped onto concrete, a car whizzed behind me. I turned north and caught an MTA bus toward home in Burbank.
When I got off downtown and the bus pulled away, the sidewalk felt forlorn after the bustle of Glendale. A woman’s heels disappeared around a corner. A man’s shoes scraped away and then back, pacing. Diesel hung in the air. The longer I waited for the Empire line, the more the shame began to gnaw at my stomach. There’d been rumors for months that the paper would be downsizing, and the new man had started with me. I could get that. But he’d done it by questioning my accuracy. He’d laid me off by saying, “Welcome aboard.” And I’d folded like a wet leaf.
I turned away from the sun, away from the noises of the street, my crown sweating inside my hat. I had about an hour until the N.A. meeting at Victory Church, but I was two blocks from the tinkling of high-balls on a bar. I thought about calling my sponsor, but my neck tensed into knots. I pressed my thumb into Charlie’s rubber grip past the point where my knuckles hurt. My left foot tapped the ground as I stood still as a bum. I dreaded seeing anyone and was afraid of being alone.
A bus hissed, releasing a whoosh of air. Doors clattered open. My face was wet with sweat. I turned and stepped forward. “Empire?” I called.
“Kevin!” Dotty barked from the driver’s seat, which groaned as she shifted her weight.
Charlie’s tip glanced against the side of the bus, then found the doorway. I stepped in, relieved and panicked to be heading home.
“Why the face?” Dotty said. “What happened?”
I forced a smile. “Just got a freelance gig,” I said, my voice high-pitched and cheery.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” she said, her voice gruff. “Good for you!”
I sat against a window and laid my hat on my lap. I’d been fired before. Laid off. Let go. Of course I could adapt. I was only twenty-seven, for God’s sake. I’d used crack for less than two years; I was not one of those rigid ex-addicts.
When I got off the bus at Lincoln Street, I set out along the sidewalk in an obstinate rush, tilting forward, a right angle to Charlie’s line swinging back and forth down to the concrete. To my left, from the open door, voices buzzed from inside the local bar.
“Hey, partner!” a man stammered from somewhere near the doorway, his tone open, friendly.
I frowned. From the hot sidewalk, I smelled bratwurst and old urine. My head throbbed. I kept charging. Halfway down the block, I struck the outside of my right ankle midstride against something hard as hell—a shopping cart, which clanked as it pitched over the curb into the street. Stupid-ass cowboy boots, I thought, grabbing my foot, wincing, hopping in circles on my other foot. Charlie clattered to the concrete, no help at all.
“Kevin!” Ray called from across the street—or in the street. “You okay?” His voice was unmistakable—high-pitched and concerned. He was twelve years old and had just begun to open up after ten months with us.
It happens to me a lot: private moments turn public all of a sudden.
“Watch
