I also worry that the seemingly endless supply of money Portia has access to will dry up and leave us unable to pay the bills, but I know it’s not my business to ask about her situation, especially when she’s not charging me any rent, which allows me to keep paying for Danielle and Tommy’s place.
If I get a real teaching job, that’s when I’ll have a serious talk with Portia about money and our future together. How can I bring up the subject of cash when I am contributing so little?
My Narcotics Anonymous sponsor lives in South Carolina now, but we still talk on the phone regularly. His name is Kirk Avery, and he’s about twenty years older than me. When he first agreed to be my sponsor, I thought he would give me all sorts of advice, like a life coach. I think I was secretly hoping for a Mr. Miyagi who would share ancient secrets and teach me how to solve all of my problems, give me a cool antique car, kick the asses of all my enemies, and even get me hooked up with the hottest woman around. But Kirk turned out to be just a regular American guy who likes to go deep-sea fishing and paint little portraits of random things found in anyone’s house—a toaster or a bottle of Windex or a shoehorn or a roll of toilet paper—which he posts on his website and actually sells. It’s like he’s Andy Warhol or something, except he’s the most normal guy in the world otherwise. He was an accountant by trade, but he just retired recently. And he’s never really given me any advice at all. He just picks up the phone when I call, like he promised he would back when we were first paired up.
“That’s my job,” he said. “Just to pick up whenever you dial my number. And it’s the most important job a sponsor can take on.”
I thought he was insane when he said it, because it sounded so ridiculous. How could simply picking up the phone matter? I learned quickly just how much it mattered when I started calling him at all hours of the night because I wanted a fix and my life was falling apart. He’d stay up with me, just listening to me babble on and on about all of the stupid shit I was angry and worried about. And the monologues I delivered were so long that sometimes I’d stop and say, “Are you even still there?” and he’d always reply, “Eternally,” which I didn’t really understand at first, but now, in retrospect, I’ve come to see that Kirk Avery is the rare sort of man who keeps his promises, and I needed that type in my life more than I realized.
Every Christmas he sends me a four-inch-square painting, and I have them hanging in Portia’s and my apartment now, over my dresser. These are all random things too—a fly swatter, a corkscrew, an electrical socket, hardly the type of art most women would agree to hang in their homes. But when I explained that these were from my NA sponsor, and that simply looking at the little squares of art helped to keep me on the straight and narrow path, so to speak, Portia told me to hang them up right away, wherever I’d draw the most strength from seeing them. I chose the bedroom, because the nights can be bad sometimes. These little paintings are a bit like Tommy’s Quiet Riot mask for me. It’s not what’s actually painted that matters, but that the little artworks have arrived and continue to arrive with a regularity that I didn’t think possible for most of my life. I like to count them in the middle of the night, like the tree rings on a stump, knowing that I’ve been sober one year for every little picture, and that Kirk Avery has been a witness to each hard-fought drug-free trip around the sun.
There are eleven paintings on my wall.
I’ve been asked to be a sponsor myself, but I haven’t taken on that responsibility yet. I didn’t think I could handle it when I was recently clean, and then Tommy arrived, and I immediately wanted to give him all I had—the best of me.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m kind of like Tommy’s sponsor, even though he’s not an addict, and I hope he never will be.
One day in mid-August it’s too hot to be outside, and Portia’s in her office typing away as usual, so I decide to call Kirk Avery because I haven’t spoken to him in months.
“Mr. Chuck Bass,” he answers now without saying hello, because my name comes up on his cell phone, and I remember when I used to call him mostly from pay phones, my front right jeans pocket bulging with silver coins that each bought me a few minutes, back before either of us had a cell. “Tell me that you’re still clean and sober.”
“I am,” I say. “One hundred percent.”
“Congratulations, friend. It’s a clearheaded life for us.”
“How are you?”
“Well,” he says, like always, and I have spent many a night awake and thinking about how Kirk Avery rarely leaks any details regarding his life. He’ll tell me about some fish he “fought,” spending hours reeling in, or how many paintings he has recently sold on the Internet, but nothing else. Maybe that’s all part of the sponsor gig, making it about me and not him, but it’s weird how much I care about Kirk, when I know so little about the man. “What’s up?” he asks.
That’s my cue to tell him what’s on my mind—to get to the point of the call. It used to bother me, how direct he always is with me, but I’ve learned to appreciate the efficiency.
So I tell him all about Portia’s lax attitude toward her husband and how I can’t find a teaching gig, even though I technically graduated last December and now have six months of subbing experience under my belt, during which I kissed the ass of every administrator within eyesight, but the interviews always ask about the past. “I mean—they make you submit your goddamn life history on a piece of paper.”