The Next Right Thing: A Novel

OFFICIALLY,  I  STARTED   DESTROYING   MY  LIFE  that Wednesday morning. But it had been on my mind for a while.
As I drove up  Pacific  Coast Highway past the Laguna Art Museum, I suddenly longed for still-sort-of-disreputable Santa Ana, where there would have been a neighborhood nearby that would better reflect  my  mood. There’s  nothing worse  than a beautiful town when you’ve got an ugly head. From every corner of  always-blooming Laguna Beach, bougainvillea  announced that unhappiness was not an option here.
It had been almost three weeks since Terry died, and I hadn’t done a damn thing but drink espresso and avoid the people who loved me.
It reminded me  of when I first got sober. I didn’t  want to drink, but  I held the idea  of drinking close,  like a suicide bomb inside my heart. Just bend my elbow and a world of possibilities would open up.  Bad possibilities, but  possibilities nevertheless. I’d never see my  daughter again, but  I’d make sure  that a few people paid for their sins.
I could hear Terry’s voice: Clamoring for justice again? Is that it, Randy?
I was waiting for the light beside the Cottage to change, staring into a pack  of well-dressed skateboarders pointed toward Heisler Park, when my cell phone rang. It was Wade’s number, so I didn’t answer. Sometimes you’re too lonely to talk to your friends.
Instead, I drove my F-350 up to Jean  Claude’s café in North Laguna. Like every  other morning these three weeks,  I would park  my  ass in  a molded plastic chair beside a molded plastic table and try to clear my mind with double espressos.
That morning the sidewalk and the shrubs were  still  dewy. Across  the parking lot,  surfers   were  jaywalking across   Coast Highway, shrugging into wet suits,  blowing their noses into the street. Above the beach access, a gray shelf of fog announced the Pacific Ocean.
At a table nearby, a couple of rich people waved at me tenta- tively. I  vaguely remembered being introduced to them  by someone who thought I might design their home. She was too old to be his daughter and too pretty to be his first wife. I’d prob- ably  been dodging their calls,  but  they wouldn’t approach me here. I had perfected my sullenness. It was another way that my old life clung to me: sometimes I scared people.
For three weeks,  I’d been pretending I was just a home de- signer and not that earlier, angrier version of myself. It wasn’t working. Every  day  it got harder to pretend I was  anyone but myself.
 

Jean Claude set down another double espresso on the flimsy table. He was hardworking Eurotrash—a contradiction I liked. Also, the only guy in Southern California who didn’t look  like he’d grown his goatee yesterday.
“Ça va?” he asked.
“Ça fucking va. How about you? Who are you humping these days?”
“An important man, works for Obama. He’s too good for me, though. I want somebody bad,  like you.”
One  good thing had come out  of the past three weeks: I’d fi- nally found a way  to describe the sound of my  diseased con- science. It was a Styrofoam ice chest wedged behind the seat of an  old  pickup. The  rougher the road, the louder it  squeaked, until the noise became unbearable.
My cell phone rang again as Jean  Claude was clearing away my  second double espresso. This  time I answered: “What the fuck do you want, Wade?”
“It’s not Wade. It’s Tom. Wade got into a fight. He wanted me to call you.”
“Tell him that I’m not coming.” I hung up.
They couldn’t be anywhere but  the Coastal Club, one  of the places  I was avoiding, a place  that I’d been avoiding even before Terry died. I poured my espresso into a sip cup  and sped  out  of the parking lot.  Something that had stuck with me  from that lost decade of  being a cop:  running out  of  coffee  shops and driving away too fast.

. . .
A simple white building in a glade of oak and eucalyptus just off
Laguna Canyon Road,  the Coastal Club  was  nicer than most A.A. clubs  because a rich gallery owner had endowed it thirty years ago. Then it took them almost half that thirty years to de- cide  on  a design. It was just down the road from the old  Bhag- wan   Ranjeesh  place—now a  nursery school—and you  could have mistaken it for a deal like that. The architectural equivalent of a freshly laundered linen nightgown. They’d done a good job.
I hated going there, but it was the place where my life began. Once I would have slept there if they had let me. I first met Terry in the gravel parking lot where I was now skidding my truck into a swirl of dust.
Wade stood at the front door beside Tom  and several other fools  from the seven A.M. meeting. It seemed like everyone but Wade wanted to tell  me  what had happened. But they were  a little scared to tell  me,  too. Since  Terry’s death, I’d become an authorized repository for community grief. One  reason I hadn’t attended a single meeting since the funeral was that I was sick of people looking at me as though I might break  down or explode. Wade’s pal Tom, an overweight photojournalist who’d taken the highway patrol on  a chase through two  counties last summer, gave  me  a jaunty and ridiculous salute. He and a guy  I didn’t know at all, with dark glasses and a bomber jacket, stood behind Wade like Secret Service agents: arms at their sides but ready.
When I rolled up beside the curb, Wade said, “Dude.” “In the truck,” I answered.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Tom said. “Troy Padilla came out  of no- where.”
“Out of nowhere,” the other guy underlined. “In the truck, please,” I said to Wade.
“His  dad’s  a mafioso or  something,” Tom  explained. “He knows how to do that shit.”
 

“In the fucking truck.”
When we  got back  to my  house above Bluebird Canyon, MP—only her  father calls  her  Mary  Pat—was back  from yoga training and drilling up something in the blender that I might drink if I were  dying of cancer. She  gave  Wade a hug. They’d gone to Catholic high school together in  Ranch Santa Marga- rita. Wade had grown up  surfing and perfecting his  substance abuse and brushing his blond hair out of his eyes. MP had grown up riding horses, wishing she weren’t flat-chested, and steering clear of boys like Wade.
“He won’t talk to me,” Wade said. “All the way over here, he wouldn’t speak.”
“You  guys  are  going to have to work  this out,” MP  said. “While I’m somewhere else.”
“He thinks I’m lying  to him. This dude came out  of nowhere to punch me, and he thinks I’m lying.”
I sat down on the Indian daybed that MP had found for me at a swap  meet. Not as comfortable as my Eames  chair, but  it pro- vided me a great  view of my home. I’d taken a midcentury hill- side  ranch-style and redone the interior as  contemporary cottage. Eclectic  furniture like this daybed contrasted with the white ceilings, white walls, and white plank flooring. I had used traditional materials and hadn’t  goobered them up  with too many  fixtures. Reclaimed oak  beams in  the ceiling were  the darkest element by far. Otherwise, it was a playground for the light from the hills.
I’ll always  be happy to see Wade—forever, for the rest of my life—but he’s the guy who finds  your kitchen first. The guy who wonders if you’ve made coffee.  The guy who pleads his case to your girlfriend. The guy who was now scanning my living room.
 

We’d been friends long enough that I could read  his  mind: Is that  a new Blu-ray player? The kind  that  records? How much  does something  like that cost? You’d think he was still a crack-addicted surf rat instead of a guy with a modest trust fund and an  after- noon job as a scuba instructor.
I’ll never not love him, though. Him and Terry. “Coffee?” Wade asked.
MP shook her  head and punched up the blender again. She was the only brunette with bangs I would ever love.
“Not until you drop the bullshit,” I said. “Bullshit?”
MP had her back to me, but I could feel her smiling.
“The  bullshit about how this guy  attacked you  for  no  rea- son.”
“His father’s in the Mafia,”  Wade said.  “He’s from New Jer- sey. He needs a reason?”
Even Wade knew better than to sit down in my Eames  chair, so he  passed it to stand in  front of the window watching the goats  across  the canyon. Wildfire control: they ate  everything on the hill until there was nothing left to burn.
“I think he’s the guy who was with Terry,”  Wade said. “That’s not why  he  hit you.  Once you’ve got Tom  and that
other bozo  defending you,  I know it’s a bigger story than that.” Wade smiled. My  friends can  get mighty full  of  shit, but
sometimes they’ll drop it if you  ask them. While Wade consid- ered how to tell me the truth, I watched Yegua, my Guatemalan laborer/assistant/better half, cross the backyard with a posthole digger.
“Well   .  .  .” Wade finally said. “I’ve been telling everyone he was the guy with Terry.”
 

“Do you know that for sure?”
“No,” Wade said. “But it makes sense.”
“How does it make sense, Wade? And if it made so much god- damn sense, why didn’t you tell me?”
Wade turned from the goats. “You were too busy  hiding out at  Jean  Claude’s. I thought I’d wait  until you  showed up  at  a meeting.”
“Fuck you,  Wade.”
Wade stared across the room at the nook where my electron- ics were stacked. I could feel that MP wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Okay,” I said after a while. “I’ll fix some coffee.”
Wade looked at me. “Rick Buford at the South Coast hospital meeting said  that this dude Troy  and Terry  had been driving around all day, checking out  Terry’s old drug  neighborhoods. A nostalgia trip. Sometime after  the funeral, Troy  told Rick how guilty he felt.”
“Feeling guilty doesn’t  mean he  was  with him when he died.”
Wade sat down on the couch. He leaned forward, his elbows on  his knees. “Rick said Troy told him that Terry fell like a tree, that he’d  never seen  anyone fall  like  that. He  saw  it  happen, Randy. Then he must have just bailed. Didn’t even call the fuck- ing paramedics.”
MP set down her protein drink and leaned against the coun- ter. For the first time in forever, I wished that she weren’t in my house.
My sponsor Terry was a big man, about six foot three, with silver  hair  and a pale  youthful face.  I’ve had moments when I thought he stood straighter than any  man I’d ever known. He’d been off booze and drugs for fifteen years  on  the night that he died. On the night he died from a heroin overdose in a shitty  motel room in Santa Ana.
My friend Terry would have fallen like a tree.
This  was what I’d been waiting for. My gift from God.  And not the loving God  people talked about at meetings but  a God, like me, who got pissed off when good men died. I’d been sitting on  my  ass for  three weeks  because I needed all  my  righteous strength and every bad impulse I’d been saving from eight years of sobriety to go kick the shit  out  of this little prick  from New Jersey.
MP walked down the hallway into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.
I said, “Let’s go find this asshole.”

. . .
The  first time I really  talked with Terry  was  over  breakfast at Corky’s.  He  was  already hanging with Wade then, although Wade still  had one  more drunk left.  They  had invited me  to breakfast after the seven A.M. meeting at the Coastal Club.
Sometimes people in A.A. will say, “Let us love you until you can love yourself.” I don’t think it would have worked on me. At the time I wouldn’t  have trusted anyone—besides my  SAPD partner, Manny, and my sister—who pretended to love me.
With Terry and Wade, though, it was a totally different deal. Corky’s was a great  place  to have breakfast, and I fell right into the food. Terry and Wade talked about people in A.A. whom I didn’t yet know. Mostly I ignored them. I wouldn’t admit that I needed this thing. When they asked me questions, I answered. Terry  seemed like the kind of smugly successful attorney I had always hated. And Wade seemed like a tadpole who needed to be
 

slapped every  time he said the word “dude.” Still pretending to be one tough hombre, I let them know early and often that I was a cop.
About  halfway through my  bacon, cheddar, and avocado omelet, I could feel Terry staring at me. When I met his eyes, he said, “You know, Randy, we don’t hang out  with you because we like you.  We don’t like you.  Isn’t that right, Wade?”
Wade nodded slowly.
“We hang out with you,” Terry continued, “because it’s head cases like you who keep us sober.”
It was an important moment in my life. I stood up from the table, threw down twenty dollars, and walked out  of the restau- rant. I think I told them to fuck themselves. Wade said I did, and Terry said I just walked out.
By that night, I knew who my sponsor was going to be.

. . .
Halfway to our  destination, I realized that I hadn’t  even said goodbye to MP.
“It’s not on Temple Hills,” Wade said. “And it’s not on Arroyo
Hills.”
“I don’t care, Wade, where it’s not.”
Wade looked at me  like I was rushing some terribly impor- tant process—the composition of a symphony, maybe. His sun- glasses  were  hanging from his  neck   by  one   of  those Croakie doodads. I pulled them off and threw the doodad out the window. “You  don’t  get to wear  that anymore.” I tossed back  his
glasses. “It looks  too stupid.”
The asshole Troy Padilla lived  in a “recovery home”—words that should be  said  in  quotation  marks. People in  Alcoholics
 

Anonymous were always  thinking up new  scams, and lately the new  scam  was this: rent a big house and fill it with newcomers who couldn’t pull  together a security deposit if they owned a gold  mine. Put  two  of them in  each room, invent a bunch of bullshit rules  about curfew and house meetings, and you  can rake  in  at least twenty grand a month over  the actual rent. At best,  it was “stone soup”: the n...