go to any more in Hollywood. Hollywood is a snotpile. But I was willing to try. I would do whatever I could not to lose the limo job.
I’d driven by the Marina Club a hundred times when I lived in Venice and I’d seen people standing outside on the sidewalk smoking and holding Styrofoam cups but I had never been curious enough to stop and find out what was going on inside.
I parked my Pontiac up the block on Washington Boulevard just in case I needed a quick getaway, then walked back.
The meeting time posted outside on the door on a stick-on blackboard was eight o’clock. A guy with long sideburns in a Harley jacket, smoking a cigarette—blocking my way—stopped me going in and shook my hand. “Hi. I’m Vince,” he said grinning. “Welcome to the Marina Club.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“First time here?”
“Yeah. Does it show?”
“Like neon,” he said smiling. “So what’s your name, brother?”
“Bruno.”
“Well, welcome, Bruno. How many days you got clean and sober?”
“I’ve stopped counting,” I said. “A week or so.”
Vince sneered, then pointed. “Coffee’s all the way in the back. The meeting starts in five minutes. P.S.: You came on the right night. It’s Phil S.’s twentieth birthday. He sponsors me and five or six of the regular guys here. Big doings. He’ll be the main speaker.”
“Lucky me,” I said.
“No joke, Phil’s a miracle. Twenty-five years in the slam—pronounced dead twice—he gives a great message.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Hey Bruno…keep coming back.”
“Ten-four. You too…brother.”
The fluorescent lighting in the Marina Club reminded me of the intake corridor at old County Jail, downtown. The meeting hall contained over a hundred chairs and was filling up fast.
After waiting in line and getting my free cup of coffee there were only a few seats left, so I decided not to sit down and subject myself to small talk. I stood at the back of the room near the bathrooms.
As it turned out Harley Vince in the leather jacket was also the guy leading the meeting. He called the room to order. As before, at the last meeting I went to in Hollywood, someone got up to read part of the Big Book: Chapter 5.
I was starting to feel trapped and closed-in. Beginning to sweat. This was a bad idea. There were way too many bodies—people pressing against me—a crowded hall populated by smiling, miracle-oozing, AA robots. The smells of bad breath, sweat, and the unventilated men’s room behind me was beginning to make me want to bolt.
Then a pimpled teenage girl standing next to me, with ratty pink hair and torn jeans, held out her hand. “I’m Jeannie,” she whispered.
“Bruno,” I said back.
“First time here?”
“Yeah. You?”
“No. But I’m back again,” Jeannie sighed. “I had ninety days then I had a bad slip. My boyfriend’s back in County on a probation beef. I decided to try the program again.”
“I hear that,” I said.
“It’s really because Phil S. is speaking that I’m here. His wife sponsors me—well, she used to sponsor me. Anyway, everybody loves Phil. Have you heard him talk?”
“No. But I met Vince at the door—the biker guy leading the meeting. He filled me in that old Phil has pretty much been canonized around here.”
Jeannie was smiling. “Canonized?”
“Forget it.”
“Just keep coming back, Bruno. It takes what it takes. If I can do it anybody can.”
A couple of minutes later, when the reading was over, Vince was back at the podium. “Any newcomers?” he yelled.
Five or six people stood up and gave their names and how many days they were off booze and drugs. Ten dozen of the faithful cheered and hooted and clapped.
Then pimples next to me raised her hand. Vince motioned for her to talk.
“I’m Jeannie,” she yelled. “I’m back. I’m an alcoholic. I have two days sober.”
“That’s great, Jeannie!” Vince boomed over the mic. The crowd clapped.
Now Captain Harley was pointing right at me. “And the guy next to you…Bruno? Right? Your first meeting, right?”
Jeannie nodded yes on my behalf.
More clapping and a few cheers.
“C’mon up here, Bruno. First timers get a seat right up front. Right here next to our speaker.”
Trapped. All eyes on me. I had no choice.
The great Phil S. went on for over forty minutes. He was sixty-six years old and skinny and gray. He’d robbed twenty-six supermarkets and been stabbed in prison and shot in the knee and crashed his bike into a police barricade at a hundred miles an hour and been pronounced dead and lots of other stuff. All until he found God and AA and