The Last Times I Partied Before Starting AA by Matthew Klam

In meetings, I go back to this one story because it's such a keeper. I tell it to get it off my chest, to remind myself that I'm alone, that I needed to save myself, that I'm one of many. What's that Buddhist aphorism, "All of life is a joke"? I tell it to help other people who are still partying.
      I'm in bed with this artist guy. We've been drinking peppermint schnapps. When I breathe, I feel the air go down my windpipe all minty. I'm in this apartment with nothing in it. Just some clothes hanging on nails on the wall. Throughout college I'd been a virgin. Now I'm promiscuous. I didn't mean to become promiscuous but it keeps me aware that I am worthless and desperate and on the wrong road.
      He's skinny with long blond eyelashes. Skinny, but at the same time soft. The lights are off and we're going "Mmm, fresh" between draining cans of beer. Lying on the bed in the dark, we go back and forth about our wild dreams. "I want to live in Bali for a year" . . . "Become an actor" . . . "Play the shakohachi flute."
      "Sometimes," I say, "I pretend that somebody's gonna rescue me out of this."
      The final word implies an idea so jarring that he smiles, nods knowingly. Quietly beside me he says, "I have this fantasy to murder my lover." The bottle of schnapps sticks to my hand. We pass it between us, sucking on the empty.

After a silence I'm lying there thinking, "Are we here to talk all night or screw?" and then it hits me, "Hey, stupid — I'm his lover!"
      I'm drunk as hell and I'm telling myself, "Don't fall asleep, don't fall asleep." And though I'm lying there with a guy who just said he was going to kill me, I'm caressing his neck and cheek because I don't want to appear uncool, I don't want him to worry. There is nothing in his apartment, not even a clock on the wall, no boom box, no soap, no towels. He's got these little etching knives on the floor a few feet away from us. They have resin handles.
      He's hung drawings on the walls in one room. I remember staring through the gray light at those drawings, plain, wood block prints of an abstract design, wondering if he was any good as an artist. Then, after he says he's going to kill me, after I see the knives lying there on the floor beside the bed, at this point, before anything else happens, I fall fast asleep.
      Was I doing this to myself on purpose? "You put yourself in harm's way," my brother once wrote, using the military's clipped cement-head jargon. I think I thought I was either going to get harmed or not, and I could not influence the outcome.
      A little later I wake up in the guy's apartment — not dead — and put my clothes on in the dark. The guy's totally zonked. His name was Spencer. I feel like lifting my leg and kicking his skull in. He was a cook at a restaurant I'd worked at a few months before. What a head case. Him I mean.
      I open the door. There's no lock on the door. The doorknob is missing and I have to stick my finger in the hole to pull it open. It's a swinging metal door that divides me from the junkie outside on the floor. Out in the stairwell the wind is blowing around. I wait, blinking, for my eyes to clear, to see. I walk carefully, scaring mice and bigger mice, their crazy voices talking in my head, how mice like cheese. The sounds of the mice are mingling with my father's screaming voice, "What are you doing, Eileen?" I'm in trouble. I step over the junkie. As I do so I see that there is no difference between the junkie and me because we've both been sleeping on the floor.
      That's all. In the darkness I am illuminated by final truth. That's the punch line to my story.

But it goes on. Two days later I'm ironing my shirt for work when there's a news flash on TV: during a military mission in northern Africa, some Army Rangers rope from a helicopter into the downtown area of a city we have no business policing, to remove prisoners from a hotel, and the helicopter is hit with a rocket launched by the bad guys hiding on the roof of another hotel. The fucking smugglers are shooting at the Army Rangers, and the helicopter is lying on its side in an alley, and they are not being rescued. There had been radio contact with the downed Rangers, but now it's lost. I'm looking at my brother's address through bleary eyes. They don't say what unit it is on TV, and my parents don't answer when I call. I get my dad's brother Mick at his office who says he'll turn on the news and hangs up. I'm breathing in the foul steam of the iron, it's tinged with rust. I feel like pressing the iron into my face until my lips curl into leather, roasted shrimp, until my eyes boil and explode, until it fries the cartilage in my nostrils and sets the bones on fire. I keep halfway crying: twisted face, but no tears; high whimpering noise, but no release. Later my father calls to tell me Tom's still in Germany, their unit hasn't left yet. He asks what else is going on. Nothing I could think of.
      When I get to work that night I see that I am not on the schedule after all. I stand in the kitchen doorway by my manager Rob's office dressed for waitressing as he dips wine glasses in an ice bucket and wipes them off. In the dining room I listen to the quiet rhythm of silverware dropped onto a tablecloth, wine goblets clanging together. The kitchen smells of herbs frying in butter. He asks how I got the bump on my nose, then where I grew up. I tell him how Missy could pull red wire licorice through the gap in her front teeth, how she died on her bike (truck in reverse, before they made that beeping noise). I'm imagining her face and body with whatever she'd have by now, front teeth, eyeliner, a little leather briefcase, her own Italian pumps. I sit down at the bar and start to write Tom a letter but my friends are pouring, people begin coming in off the street, and when I get to the subway station much later it's quiet and I'm numb and loaded, waiting there the way I would at any time of day as a guy on the bench next to me pulls his windbreaker over his head and smokes crack. I move away and check for my wallet in my purse and find the piece of paper I started before, the letter to Tom that says, Hey, I wanted to tell you.