The Topper Motel is this shithole dive on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City.  The rooms are small and stink and stains are everywhere—you know, those brown misshapen outlines on the deteriorating wallpaper, the thick, dirty carpet, the musty bed sheets—and there is no telephone and no mirror in the bathroom and the only clear picture on the television set is transsexual porn streaming in from the VHS player in the motel office.  But there is at least a small kitchenette that Jason and Brad were able to use to cut up and organize and cook the drugs, and while Jason sits in an old wooden chair, his legs up in the air, crossed, the heels of his bare feet on the bed, Brad is sitting on the edge of the bed, shooting Dilaudid into his arm because the crack is unusually strong.

Jason isn’t as fucked up as Brad, although he is pretty drunk and high from the joint they’d shared on the drive to the motel, but he’s still the better option to leave the motel to pick up Brad’s wife, with whom Brad cannot be seen because of the no-contact order issued by the judge when Brad punched her in the stomach and then dragged her by her hair across the floor of their five bedroom home until blood began to surface on her scalp, trickle down her face, already wet with tears and streaming make-up.

“But if I get another Dewey I’m fucked,” says Jason.
“You’re already fucked,” says Brad, his voice hoarse from smoking the crack he and Jason had put together in the kitchenette with some Arm & Hammer baking soda, since they didn’t get a chance to pick up the ether and turn the ‘caine into freebase, which is more pure, not as wasteful, although highly flammable.  Remember when Richard Pryor caught fire?

Jason returns to the motel with Sam, Brad’s wife, and Sam has an enormous bruise on her right arm from the last time Brad and Sam got drunk and into a fight and Sam tried to strangle Brad and Brad had used both hands to twist Sam’s right arm to the point where it almost broke—well, something snapped and popped—but she didn’t call the cops or seek medical attention, and besides, Brad said he’d kill her if she did.

“What’s up, babe,” says Brad.
“Thanks for waiting for me,” says Sam, chewing nervously on a large wad of blue gum.
“Whatever, Bitch.  There’s still plenty left.”  Brad smiles quickly and then jabs the needle into his arm again and his eyes roll out of sight, up into his skull, and Sam sits down on the bed next to him and begins nibbling on the piercings in his ear, her gum getting tangled up in the piercings, causing short blue strings to dangle from the spiky metal.

Jason takes his feet off the bed and crushes up a Dilaudid tablet and cooks it up on the torn off bottom of his Mountain Dew can and he draws the liquid into the syringe and takes another guzzle from the Jagermeister bottle before banging the D into his stream.  The warmness instantly swirls around inside of him and makes his balls tingle, his eyelids flutter, then droop, and his mouth forms a half-smile when he recalls yesterday’s fellowship.

After the meting, he’d invited newcomer Brad along with some of his sponsees to the Starbucks across the street from the Beverly Center and Brad and the sponsees were enthusiastically asking him how he did it, how he’d managed to stay sober for so long—for almost ten years—and his response was simple:

“I’m no different from you guys.  We’re all just one drink away from losing our sobriety if we’re not vigilant about it.”  And Brad—who had been ordered by the court to attend meetings for beating the shit out of his wife again, and as a step toward dropping another no-contact order—took a big slurp of his Caramel Frap, chuckled, and said,” So you’re telling me if I get ten years sober under my belt that I’m gonna be just as fucked up as us newcomer chumps who just come into the program?”

But the other sponsees knew what Jason was saying and didn’t dare second-guess.   Brad, on the other hand, was visibly annoyed that Jason did not respond.  He was annoyed and lit up a cigarette and the annoyance turned to anger and he finished his cigarette quickly and flicked the butt out on to LaCienega Boulevard, nearly hitting the spoiler of a purple Lotus that came screaming past.   Jason could tell something was up, and besides that, he was paranoid, paying special attention to facial expressions, little nuances that are usually too ambiguous to bother with, but in this case it was clear, and Jason knew that Brad knew that Jason was full of shit.

“I’m telling you, man, I could smell that vodka on you,” says Brad as he plucks the stem from Sam’s lips and passes it over to Jason, who puts his lips on the stem, even though it’s way too hot, and even though crack was never really his thing, but he takes a long, steady pull, the small rock crackling loud enough to get a thumbs up from Brad, who follows with a high five when Jason exhales this gigantic cloud of smoke.

“Now that’s a good sponsor,” says Brad.
Jason quietly says, “Right,” and then, “I drank the night before—the night befuckingfore—and you smelled that vodka on me?”
“I think I was still high when we got there.”
“Starbucks?”
“Yeah.”
“What?  Rock?”
“I smoked me a blunt before the meeting.”
“Oh.”
“It heightens your senses and shit, you know what I mean?”
“You’re so clever, baby,” says Sam, rubbing Brad’s thigh, then squeezing his crotch.
“Damn, bitch,” says Brad.  “I thought only the sextacy made you all horny like that.”
“You make me like that, baby.”
“Then you can suck my dick, bitch,” Brad laughs.  “I’m sure J won’t mind.  If fact, you can suck his dick, too.”

Sam looks over at Jason and smiles, her make up uevenly and thickly applied, like she had one of her rug rats do it so she could double fist her rum bottle, her dirty-blonde hair unwashed and pulled back tight into a pony tail, large hoop earrings dangling from her lobes.  She looks like a whore off the job and it’s enough to cause Jason’s penis to move, become fuller, though never to the point of erection.

“I’m a married man,” Jason says rather lamely, smiling, flashing his scratched up generic gold band.
“I’m a married woman, honey,” Sam mumbles, a long, thin unlit ultra light menthol dangling from her lips.
“I’ve made worse mistakes,” says Brad coolly, stretching himself out on the bed, loaded.
“Honey, I’m the best thing’s ever happened to you,” says Sam, grabbing Brad’s crotch again, a large hard-on visible beneath his jeans.
“Keep dreamin’, babe,” says Brad, beginning to unbutton his jeans.

Jason is pretty fucked up, but he is also becoming uncomfortable, because he’s not at that point where nothing matters, and he’s feeeling those pricks of remorse about the initial relapse just yesterday, just two days shy of ten years.  And he still hasn’t told his wife, who keeps texting and calling, thinking he’s at the meeting he’d lied to her about, and the phone is becoming hot in Jason’s sweating hand, with each subsequent ring and each subsequent text more difficult to ignore than the last.

The next time she texts (where are you?  call me asap! please, baby!) he turns off the phone and takes another hit off the pipe, chases it with a shot, a drink, a smoke, and he finally hits that spot where nothing matters anymore, and he’s nodding, each cig from the chain burning out between his fingers, the skin bubbling, slowly forming blisters, and when a cigarette tip stings him badly enough to jerk him upright in his chair he sees Brad and Sam, both naked, Brad slamming Sam’s head against the wall, his hands in a tight vice around her neck, choking her, blood smears on both of their naked bodies, mostly on their faces and chests.

Listlessly, clumsily, Jason reaches over for the stem and takes a big pull and fills his lungs full of crack smoke until his ears ring, eyes pop.

Sam is now on the bed, face down, lifeless, her ponytail broken into a splay of dirty blonde hair all the way down to her lumbar spine, and Brad is penetrating her ass and pulling at her hair, her head swaying in unnatural movements, like a doll filled with foam, or a woman with a snapped neck.

“Where are you going?” Brad asks Jason, still thrusting into Sam’s lifeless body, his teeth sparkling white thorough his mask of dried blood.
“Across the street.  Ralph’s.  Gonna get more beer.”
“Don’t be long,” says Brad.  “You’re up next.”

Jason smiles as broadly as he can, his eyes filling up with tears, and he manages to squeak out an “Ok, dude, be right back.”

In front of the Topper Motel, right off Ventura Boulevard, is a payphone.  Although his first inclination is to dial 911, he thinks about this for the very long time that it seems but is not, and finally he punches in the numbers: 9 1 1.

On the ride out of Studio City and into West Hollywood the traffic is typical and allows Jason to change out of his button down with his own blood speckling the sleeves from banging, and the shirt reeks like those musty bed sheets back at the motel and the Jagermeister he must have spilled on his chest at some point during the night.

All he has in the car is an old Van Halen T-shirt, the one from the 1984 tour with the angelic toddler on the front, wrapped inside the VH logo, and the shirt is wrinkled and tight-fitting and like nothing Jason actually wears anymore; in fact, he keeps it wadded in the back seat as a rag of sorts to spot clean the new BMW, and the rearview mirror of the Bimmer simply isn’t tall or wide enough to allow him to properly fix his wildly disheveled hair, although he believes he’s got it down now, though nothing can really be done about his pale sunken face and the dark bags beneath his squinting blood shot-eyes, so he parks a block or so down and throws on a pair of aviators he keeps in the glove box and fiddles around with his hair some more before he saunters over to the Log Cabin meeting on Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, where the normally chipper greeter is too stunned to extend his hand or even muster up a welcome and instead looks around at the others huddled about the front of the building, laughing, talking,  smoking, to gauge how similar their reactions are to his, but they’re all too self-absorbed and most won’t even make it into the meeting; and as Jason makes his way down the middle aisle to the front of the meeting, to the table at which he always sits, he sees his sponsor and some of his other buddies from the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and they, too, are taken aback and in shock and cannot squarely look at Jason, instead looking down into Jason’s white Birthday cake, which in carefuly crafted cursive red icing reads:  Right on, J!  10 Years!  And now Jason is looking over at the cake, too, and he watches as his sponsor shakily lifts the cake from the main table and moves it on to another table in the back of the room and places it atop the clutter of AA literature, and Jason is certain that everyone in the room, all 100 or so of them, are zooming, even if they are settling themselves into their seats since it’s already five past seven in the morning.

Jason cannot bare to look up, eyes fixated on his shoes, and for the first time he notices the mismatch, one an oversized Birkenstock—Brad’s—the other a very white running shoe—his; and speckles of blood and vomit are on each; and as Jason continues to look down, thinking he will not be able raise his head even once throughout the long, grueling entirety of the meeting, he does at last stand, head still bowed, tears streaming down his face, still not capable of looking at a single person in the room, even with the aviators covering his swollen, bloodshot eyes.

But he is standing, the only one in the room who will, all the rest sitting motionless,  tense, quiet, their eyes locked on his every move; and Jason’s lips are trembling, his knees shaking, and all he can hear is his own rapid heart beat; and all he can smell is the offensive stench of his own body odor, which others around him can smell also, some of whom are trying hard not to breathe through their nostrils.

Jason’s not sure how the hell he could have possibly made it back into this room, much lees back up to his feet, when the meeting leader had asked if there were any newcomers in the room today, and he’d initially thought of running, but he was too frozen to run, too tired, and he was fearful, ashamed, a mere speck of piss on the floor, and he felt utterly demoralized, and when the clapping finally registered, Jason, too, began clapping, slowly, cautiously, continuing to clap with the others as he is overcome by this overwhelming sense of gratefulness that he hopes will never leave him the way it did just two days earlier, and he finally manages to look over at his sponsor, who is also clapping, and nodding his head in approval, a profound sadness nonetheless flattening his expression, and Jason can remember the day his sponsor told him those same fateful words he had told Brad and the other sponsees just yesterday at Starbucks–and Jason can picture he and his sponsor in that tiny In-N-Out booth, his sponsor with twenty plus years of sobriety, chewing laboriously on a Double-Double but still managing to convey the message, and Jason also remembers how bullshit it all sounded, and how ridiculous his graying sponsor looked with ketchup and mustard all over his curly gray-black beard.

And Jason never could deliver those lines without questioning the wisdom, without picking them apart as if he were crafting a thesis, but when he did deliver them to those around him, the sponsees, the newcomers, the so-called life-blood of the fellowship, they certainly believed Jason and nonetheless put their trust in him, and even if there were one or two or maybe even three newcomers who were skeptical, it no longer matters, because they too believe what Jason had said, for here he is, standing right before everyone:  shaky, pitiful, a broken man wiping tears from his face, wondering if anything can still be salvaged, and he drops back down to his metal folding chair and looks down at his cell phone and sees that his wife had stopped calling long ago, right around midnight, and never in his life has he felt so alone in such a large group of people, and he wonders what it’s going to take this time, as he gets up out of his chair and walks back down the aisle and out onto Robertson, not bothering to look at anyone as he walks away, trying really hard not to give a shit about what any of them think.

He finds his car and lights up a cigarette and he again wonders what they all wonder and he knows the drill about how they will ask and wonder and ask and wonder, because he, too, is wondering, asking, pressing:  What is it going to take? What’s going to be different? And he knows that others will continue to press even if he goes through the temporarily placating motions, and he tosses his unsmoked cigarette to the pavement and must decide which way he will drive on Robertson before he gets into his car.  And when he does finally get into his car, Jason has a hunch that he is driving in the wrong direction, yet he doesn’t believe enough in the other direction to go through the hassle of turning the car around,  and slowly he feels himself going mad with an entanglement of thoughts, most of which vanish before breaking his will, some of which take on lives of their own, capable of eating away at any remaining composure and dignity.

Finally he parks the car on a stretch of the Boulevard that is completely bare, some kind of red zone, and he kills the ignition, mezmerized by this new boutique called GOD IS TED, and the boutique appears to be a cafe and an oxygen bar and a hip menswear shop, so Jason gets out of the car and walks up to the front door of the boutique and presses the intercom button.  The sweet young voice on the receiving end chirps “Yes!?”  to which Jason replies, “God is here,” and the girl pauses for so long that Jason must say, “Hello?” and the girl suddenly clears her throat and finally she asks, “Ted?” and Jason says, “Ted is dead,” and the girl responds with another awkward silence before saying,”What?” and Jason says, “God is Jason,” and the intercom crackles into a haunting silence and the front door to the boutique automatically unbolts, and even before Jason goes inside he knows that it will all soon be over.