Ninety Days by Bill Clegg Read Free Book Online Page B

time ended up at the dog run. I’m getting used to the dog run smells of piss and shit and am no longer worried that someone I know will see me. The same people are usually there. A few old ladies, several professional dog walkers like Polly, who come with dozens of cool-tempered, strangely obedient dogs on leashes. And then there are the young guys in tracksuits, expensive ones like my friend Lotto’s. We met in the rehab Noah and Kate sent me to in Oregon last year after they organized an intervention with Dave and Kim. Lotto’s a rich kid from New York and at the age of twenty-two has been to ten or eleven rehabs and two therapeutic boarding schools, something I didn’t know existed before meeting him. He wears tracksuits—either Adidas brand or the shiny plush kind with fancy zippers and logos, the ones that look like they were purchased at expensive resorts. According to the last text he sent me, Lotto’s at the Betty Ford Center in California, already having relapsed two or three times since returning to New York from Oregon. These guys in the dog park remind me of him, just older, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, maybe thirty. I imagine they do coke all night and stumble out in the afternoons to let their dogs go to the bathroom. With bloodshot eyes and jumbo coffee containers from Dean & Deluca and Starbucks, they text and call from their cell phones and I imagine them scoring bags of drugs for the coming night. I wonder who lives like this—expensive dogs, good haircuts, new running shoes, worked-out bodies, fancy phones, tracksuits. Who other than people like me and Polly who’ve wiped out and are getting sober can dawdle in a dog run at three o’clock on a weekday afternoon? Dealers? None of my dealers were ever white. But that doesn’t mean that these guys aren’t dealing. Maybe they’re slightly older Lottos with families who’ve cut them off, so they deal drugs to keep using. The lifespan of this kind of dealer/user/aging rich kid must be short, I think, as I watch them retreat to the far benches of the dog run and grumble into their phones. I try to remember war stories from the meetings, or what Polly and Asa and lately I refer to as the rooms, to align with this profile but come up with nothing .
    My mind dances through these possibilities but I don’t share them with Polly for fear the speculation about dealers and using will trigger her. We talk a lot about Heather, how she’s starting to shoot coke with needles, is missing work and being warned. She’s going to lose her job, get arrested, or die, Polly says as she exhales a giant plume of cigarette smoke. And every time I turn around there’s a dealer in the living room and a bag of coke on the coffee table. I offer, careful not to be too pushy, to help Polly look for a rehab or move her to a new apartment—at least until she has ninety days—but Polly’s not ready. She says she’ll take me up on either offer if it ever seems necessary or gets too bad at home.
    We don’t usually stay in the dog run longer than forty-five minutes, so on most days I’m back in my apartment for at least the last half of The Oprah Winfrey Show. In the last few episodes there has been little in the way of redemption stories. Instead, there is lots of shopping and THINGS I LOVE, like pies and perfumes, and accessories. Still, I’m transfixed by the show, which, up until now, I’d never really watched. I’m tempted to, but don’t, rush Polly out of the dog run so I can catch as much of the show as possible. Somehow the four o’clock airing feels like an occasion, has the fizzy energy of watching the Academy Awards or the Grammys. There is a sense that the rest of the world is tuning in, and even though the show is taped, it feels live, as if Oprah is revealing something terribly important each day that her audience, which seems like everyone, absolutely must know. Even something as trivial as the best brownie in New England gets the royal treatment, or the