Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
There are three prominent fraternal organizations for actors in New York, and years ago an actor named Maurice Jenkins-Lloyd had summed them up to anyone who'd listen. "The Players are gentlemen," he'd intoned, "pretending to be actors. The Lambs are actors, pretending to be gentlemen. And the Friars -- the Friars are, neither, pretending to be both."
I don't know which category Jenkins-Lloyd belonged in. When I knew him he was mostly drunk, pretending to be sober. He used to drink at Armstrong's, which used to be on Ninth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth. His drink was Dewar's and soda, and he could drink it all day and an night without showing it much. He never raised his voice, never turned ugly, never fen off his chair. Toward the end of an evening he might slur his words some, but that was about it. Player, Lamb, or Friar, he drank like a gentleman.
And died of it. I was still drinking myself when he died of a ruptured esophagus. It's not the first cause of death you think of for alcoholics, but it doesn't seem to happen to other people. I don't know exactly what causes it, whether it's the cumulative effect of pouring booze down a gullet for all those years or the strain of vomiting a couple of times every morning.
I hadn't thought of Maurice Jenkins-Lloyd in a long time. I thought of him now because I was going to an AA meeting on the second floor of what used to be the Lambs Club. The elegant white building on West Forty-fourth had some years ago become a luxury the Lambs could no longer afford, and they had sold the property and shared space with another clubsomewhere else in midtown. A church of some sort had bought the property, and it now housed an experimental theater along with facilities for other church activities. On Thursday nights, the Fresh Start group of Alcoholics Anonymous paid a nominal fee for the use of a meeting room.
The meeting ran from eight-thirty to nine-thirty I got there about ten minutes early and introduced myself to the program chairman. I helped myself to coffee and sat where he indicated. There were eight or ten six-foot tables arranged in an open rectangle, and my seat was at the far end from the door, next to the chairman's.
By eight-thirty there were about thirty-five people sitting around the tables and drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. The chairman opened the meeting and read the preamble, then called on someone to read a portion of the fifth chapter of the Big Book. There were a few announcements -- a dance that weekend on the Upper West Side, a group anniversary in Murray Hill, a new meeting added to the schedule at Alanon House. A group that met regularly at a Ninth Avenue synagogue was canceling its next two meetings because of the Jewish holidays.
Then the chairman said, "Our speaker tonight is Matt, from Keep It Simple.
I was nervous, of course. I'd been nervous from the minute I walked into the place. I'm always like that before I lead a meeting, but it passes. When he'd introduced me there was a round of polite applause, and when it died down I said, "Thanks. My name is Matt, and I'm an alcoholic." Then the nervousness was gone, and I sat, there and told my story.
I talked for about twenty minutes. I don't remember what I said. Essentially what you do is tell what it used to be like, what happened, and what it's like now, and that's what I did, but it comes out different every time you tell it.
Some people's stories are inspirational enough for cable television. They'll ten you how they were down and out in East St. Louis and now they're president of IBM with rising expectations. I don't have that kind of story to tell. I still live in the same place and do the same thing for a living. The difference is I used to drink and now I don't, and that's about as inspirational as I get.
When I finished there was another round of polite applause, and then they passed a basket and everyone put in a dollar or a quarter or nothing at all toward the rent and the coffee. There was a five-minute break, and then the meeting resumed. The format varies at different meetings; here they went around the room, and everybody had his turn to say something.
There were maybe ten people in the room I recognized and another half-dozen or so who looked familiar. One woman with a strong jawline and a lot of red hair took off from the fact that I'd been a cop.
"You coulda come to my house," she said. 'We had the cops there once a week. My husband and I would drink and fight, and some neighbor'd call the cops, and they'd come. The same cop showed up three times running, and the next thing you knew I was having an affair with him, and before you knew it him and I had a fight, and somebody called the cops. People were always calling the cops on me, even when I was with a cop to start with."
At nine-thirty we said the Lord's Prayer and closed the meeting. A few people came over to shake hands and thank me for leading the meeting. Most of the others hurried out of the building so they could light their cigarettes.
Outside, the night was crisp with early autumn. Summer had been brutal, and the cool nights now were a relief...
Out on the Cutting Edge. Copyright © by Lawrence Block. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
