At the end of my third week back in Las Vegas, I went to visit a friend. Jack had been released from prison before me, and by the time I’d arrived at the halfway house, he was already gone, but he’d left a message that I should come see him where he tended bar. He and I had once ridden in chains together from the Clark County jail to a prison outside of Tucson, Arizona—part of a small group of Vegas guys that included a loan shark, a bookie, a Hells Angel, a mob boss, an embezzler, and several other men you wouldn’t want looking for you. My case had made the national news, so everyone knew my offense: aiding and abetting the theft of a machine gun from a National Guard armory. Jack was a former politician who’d not only embezzled city money but given fat contracts to friends in exchange for kickbacks. Those friends had rolled over on him like speeding cars going into a sharp turn.
That morning I’d applied for a telemarketing position at the Las Vegas Review-Journal: minimum wage, no benefits, and no future, but no one else would give me a break. So I gritted my teeth and filled out the application. “If something comes up, we’ll call you,” the man said. I told him I’d follow up with him on Monday, and he shrugged like: Whatever.
Beat from cycling around town all morning collecting rejections, I scarfed down a fast-food burger that settled into my gut like wet plaster. I just wanted to sit in the air-conditioning and pretend things were going to be OK, but a kid in his polyester uniform started slinging ammonia water from a mop bucket, and the smell made my sinuses hurt. So I decided to pedal over to the bar where Jack worked, take him up on his invite. Maybe he would have a line on some work. Bartenders often know what’s going on.
After the bright sun outside, my eyes took time to adjust to the dim light in the bar. Some patrons looked me up and down. I was the only white guy there.
“New Guy!” Jack called, using my prison nickname. His smile reminded me of the time he’d laid down gin on a card sharp, stunning the common room into silence and winning fourteen cartons of smokes. Not a smoker, he’d traded them for ice cream. His Afro was a little grayer, but his skin glowed, and he looked younger than when I’d last seen him more than a year ago. Clearly the freedom health plan was working for him. He wiped the bar top, drew a lager, and set it in front of me.
I looked at it, hesitant. I’d been dreaming of a beer, but the halfway house, which was run by the Nevada Department of Corrections, had a strict no-drinking policy. I’d been abstaining since my release, for fear of violating my parole. In the supermarket I’d walk by the beer coolers like a man visiting a shrine at the end of a pilgrimage.
“Dude,” I said, “they could send me back if they catch me with booze on my breath.”
Jack smiled. “Just have a couple, and after, eat some of these.” He pulled a pack of peanut-butter crackers off a rack.
I told him about my uncle who’d advised me that if I wanted to hide my drinking, I should eat a spoonful of peanut butter afterward. “He always smelled like whiskey and peanut butter,” I said.
Jack laughed. “I bet he drank his whiskey mixed into a Coke bottle to hide his drinking.”
“He did.”
“Mine did too.”
I looked at the beer. “I don’t have to be back for a few hours.”
“A brother has got to pace himself.”
The foam had flowed over the rim and created a puddle around the glass. My mouth felt the want of it.
I had a complicated history with alcohol. Alcoholism had burned people to death on my dad’s side of the family, and he had threatened to kill me if I started drinking in high school. I believed him. (You ever been hit so hard you pissed yourself?) My mom’s relatives were liquor-never-passed-their-lips Methodists, except for the one black sheep who was smart enough not to mention it in front of Grandmother.
I drank only twice before high school graduation. The first time was a beer with a couple of guys I’d just met. We were floating on inner tubes on Lake Tamarisk, an artificial lake in the middle of the California desert, with houses on one side, a trailer park on the other, and a nine-hole golf course at one end. My family lived in a single-wide on the far edge of the trailer park, and my dad worked at Eagle Mountain mine. Feeling guilty and terrified someone would see us, I drank one beer, then slowly poured two more into the lake while the other guys weren’t looking.
Ironically, my second drink was some gin-based thing my dad gave me in the middle of my junior year. It was a blustery New Year’s Eve, and he’d just landed a new job after being laid off from Eagle Mountain that fall. We were celebrating, and I suppose he thought a drink was in order despite his earlier threats. We’d been evicted from the trailer park, and our family of six was living in a ten-foot travel trailer huddled against the winds, but at least we weren’t outdoors anymore, like we’d been right after the eviction. And we could eat now—and not just jackrabbits and pinto beans, or Spam and fried potatoes cooked over a campfire. We could save some money in anticipation of the next disaster.
After graduation and several false starts at various jobs, I got hired at a fast-food joint, working the closing shift and going to morning classes at the community college. About a week into that job the assistant manager invited me to a party. When I told him I didn’t drink, he grinned. “We got to solve this problem,” he said.
At the party, I figured a beer or two would be no big deal. My dad would sometimes have a couple at a barbecue, and nothing bad had ever happened. I was new in Las Vegas and wanted to make friends.
That night I fell into my first drunken stupor: Jumped out of a second-story window on a dare. Made out with Pam, a hot brunette who worked the morning shift. Threw up in a rosebush and scratched my face. The next morning I woke up on the floor next to Pam. Someone had thrown a blanket over us, but we still had our clothes on. My mouth felt like old velvet, and my head hurt worse than after any dirt-bike accident, punch, or football hit I’d ever taken.
Later, when I clocked in for my evening shift, my coworkers were eager to talk about what had happened: “Man, that was some wild shit when you went out the window and hit the ground and rolled up onto your feet. Like, holy shit, we thought you were this quiet weirdo, but no way. You were a wild man. Hey, want to get high?” I didn’t, but I also didn’t want to refuse, and it was nice to be invited.
After that, I became a freight train of booze rolling through Vegas.
Sitting at the bar, I once again didn’t want to say no. It had been almost two years since my last drink, but riding all over that miserably hot city and failing to find work had played havoc on my self-esteem and my body. I felt a powerful thirst that overshadowed any I’d ever had for water.
More guys came in, and Jack introduced me as one of his friends from prison and asked if they knew of any work. No one did. While Jack served them, I stared at the beer like a blackjack player weighing the odds of taking a hit. If I got caught, I could go back to prison.
I took a sip. The beer was even better than I’d remembered. It sent a shiver through my body as it went down. Holy smokes. The edge melted away, and warmth spread through me. I took another. The barstool squeaked as I shifted my weight. The background chatter comforted me like the steady hum of tires on a long car trip. In here, I could belong for a few minutes. I was with an old friend who knew what I’d been through, and all the things we didn’t say were as meaningful as an hour of conversation with someone else. I remembered dreamy Sundays with my ex-wife, when we would listen to records and drink tequila sunrises, a bubble of sound and hazy light and a palpable vibration around us.
Things would be OK.
Jack filled my glass twice more. The neon light, the cigarette smoke, the jukebox playing a soul song, the clatter and dings of video poker and slot machines—it was like being inside a mirage. I laughed and joked with Jack and the others, but really I was outside myself, watching a show about a guy just trying to fit in somewhere.
After two more beers I ate a couple of packs of peanut-butter crackers, washed them down with a soda, and said bye to Jack. He told me to come back if I’ve got the time. I said I’d enjoyed the visit, but what would we ever talk about other than prison? I never saw him again.
Out front, I unlocked my bike. The treeless streets shimmered in the heat. Lightheaded, I steadied myself against a lamppost as an unease crept over me, like I was hearing the buzz of a rattlesnake but didn’t know where it lay coiled. Some cars tooled around, but no one was out in the heat except for a couple of dudes passing a paper bag back and forth in the shade of a dumpster. I checked my watch: a few hours left before curfew. A restlessness filled me. I wanted to fly into the desert, to be alone in a great space with no walls or fences, surrounded only by horizon and sky.
I rode west, leaning into the dry air and pumping my legs. In a few miles I would reach the city limits, a boundary I wasn’t supposed to cross. But fuck it. If they wanted to give me a parole violation for standing alone among the cactus and scrub brush, let them. Not that anyone from the halfway house would drive by. What would they be doing out there? None of them struck me as “Let’s drive along a road that turns into gravel then stops miles from anywhere for no reason” kind of people. I was that kind of person.
My sweat evaporated in the wind as I pedaled. The water bottle mounted on the bike sloshed, about three-quarters full. The traffic became less and less, and I passed by a couple of subdivisions under construction, the houses all variations on the same design, the exposed wooden frames like shipwrecks on a beach. In a hundred years they would be so much broken Spanish tile scattered over the desert. The road got rougher, so I slowed down, not wanting to shake the bike to pieces. I coasted to a stop and looked out across the landscape. Lizards scurried by, going about their lizard lives, waiting for a raven’s sharp beak to the back. When my siblings and I were kids, we would catch them and were horrified the first time one of their tails popped off in our hands. We ran with the tail to our mom and dad, in a panic that we’d killed the creature. Our parents’ knowing smiles caused me to question their humanity, until they told us the tails would grow back. It was just a defense mechanism.
What would I sacrifice to keep living?
I breathed into my abdomen, the dry air filling my lungs and warming my insides. This time of year, the height of summer, everything smelled of dust, dried wood, and bone, like I’d never catch the scent of rain on the wind again. It also felt like home, which for me as a child had been a series of desert locations: isolated outposts like gold rush camps; a small farm we had to leave after being lied to by the landowner; our homestead close to the border, which the bank had foreclosed on. Occasionally cowboys would ride by looking for their cattle, see us kids on foot, and shake their heads because we didn’t have the good sense to wear boots and wide-brimmed hats.
My whole life I’d known the looks of those who thought they were better than me. When I’d been shipped from prison to prison, chained in a van, people in cars speeding past would stare, hoping to see what bad men rode inside, but the van’s windows were darkened to shield the public from any obscene gestures we might inflict. When marshals let us out in rest stop parking lots, we stepped onto the asphalt one by one, like steers through a chute, blinking at the light, hands bound to our waists, no way to shade our faces, chains clinking like Marley’s ghost. Except we haunted the dreams of good people.
But here along that rough road, there was no one to judge—just me and the desert. The wind flowed over me as if I were a wing. I stared into the almost-white sky, where a hawk floated on a thermal. Blinking away the sun blindness, I looked about at the Joshua trees, creosote brush, and yucca foresting the desert floor. Beyond that, gray and red mountains stood above the horizon. I could almost hear my mother’s voice in the distance, like when I was twelve and she’d stand on the edge of the campground on our homestead, backed by the fire my dad stoked with mesquite, and call to my siblings and me, her voice carrying through the gloaming: “Night’s falling. Come eat.”
I turned to look back at Las Vegas, spread across the valley. The roar and hum of it. Cars along the highway gleamed like polished stones as they disappeared into the dust, smog, and heat waves. The city appeared to float on a silver lake, with its shining towers and promise of prosperity and respite from the scorching desert. But my respite was the desert. I’d left it to come to this city, and, once there, I’d wrecked myself with alcohol, destroyed my marriage, and landed in prison before I’d turned twenty-one.
I needed to get back to the halfway house or face a write-up. I squinted into the sky beyond the mountains.
Over the next two months I would drink more and more. One night, as I returned on the edge of curfew, my stagger and glassy eyes would give me away. The administrator wouldn’t send me back to prison, but she would confine me to the halfway house unless I was at work, and I’d barely make it through my last two weeks there. For decades after, I would alternate between staying dry and spiraling out of control, with each spiral lasting longer and longer until one day a doctor would tell me, Quit now or you will die.
My beer buzz had dissipated, as if the heat had sucked the alcohol out of my body. To quench my thirst, I drank the water from my bottle in one go. Better to die with it in you than in the bottle next to your corpse, the old-timers used to tell us. I turned my bike around and pedaled down the sun-glazed road, feeling as if I’d never make it out of that big-hearted desert.
