Read Ninety Days for Free Online Page B

at an Irish tavern in the West Village that serves burgers and steaks and chicken pot pies. Heather and Polly are coke addicts. Polly is trying to get sober, Heather is not.
    Polly has six or seven days clean. I met her at that first meeting at The Library with Asa. When I raised my hand that day, as Jack had insisted I do, and said I had sixty days, Polly waved to me from across the room and smiled while everyone else clapped. Later, Polly raised her hand and shared that she was afraid Heather would overdose and that it had been difficult to put together more than a few days clean when their dealer was still coming in and out of the apartment at all hours.
    One of the most frightening things Polly said that day was that she once had six years sober. She and Heather got sober after college and then, four years ago, after graduate school and a few broken hearts between them, they moved in together. Three years later, they both relapsed. Neither had gone more than a week since without getting high.
    Polly lost her job as a schoolteacher six months ago and walks dogs to pay the few hundred dollars that is her portion of the rent-controlled apartment they share on St. Mark’s Place. Polly is my height, very thin, and is often wearing sweatpants and T-shirts that don’t look washed. Her hair is shoulder length, dirty blond, and greasy, and she reeks of cigarette smoke. She has a dog named Essie—a fat, mid-sized gray-and-white mutt she walks up and down the side streets of the East Village while she chain-smokes. Her clothes are usually covered in dog hair.
    My first response to Polly when she smiled at me at The Library was Fuck, I hope she doesn’t want to talk after the meeting; but when she described—plainly, clearly—how desperate she was not to use again but feared she would, there was a moment when I confused the words she was saying with the words I was thinking, believed momentarily that they were coming from inside my head and not from across the room. I looked again at this skeletal, disheveled, unwashed mess, and as she spoke I got very still because everything she was relating was something I had felt before and in precisely the same way. When the meeting ended, I was the one to chase after her, down the stairs and into the street, to ask for her phone number.
    Polly’s voice mail message is short and sweet: Hey, I didn’t see you in the meeting yesterday or today. What’s up? Call me. I do. She picks up on the first ring and says in a playful, schoolteacher tone, Billy boy, did you relapse? I mumble in response some kind of yes. She laughs. She actually laughs, and says, Get to a meeting, don’t sit on the pity pot, just get to a meeting. Don’t make a big deal out of it, just get back on the beam. And call your sponsor. I listen to Polly like I’m listening to someone telling me how to defuse a bomb strapped to my ankle. OK, OK, I say and agree to call her later that night.
    It’s Thursday evening and I’ve already missed two meetings at The Library. I sit on my bed and look out the window toward the building that used to be Barneys but is now, vaguely and in ways that don’t make sense to me, a museum for Tibetan culture. Things change, things stay the same, but I remain an addict. I think about one of the writers I represented whose book is now on the bestseller list and being smothered in acclaim. She has kept in touch, came to rehab once for a walk, and gave me the first signed copy of the book, but she is gone now and my professional relationship to her work a thing of the past. As with Kate and Noah, and even friends like Dave and Jean, I can only envision her happiness and success and my lack of both. I don’t imagine that within any of their lives there is strife or fear or regret or sadness. When I have tried to explain this to Jack, he interrupts me and says, ENOUGH SELF-PITY! which of course I find humiliating. I also find it strange that with all the people who have left me messages on my