SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA. Eight o’clock in the morning, 1990. I lay in bed, thinking about the hospital. A heroin addict named Danny had come in the night before. I could still feel the pressure of his head on my shoulder as he sobbed his wretched heart out. I’d started to work with him, then left about midnight. I wanted to go back that morning, see how he was doing. Poor bastard.

A hard knock on the door. Just from the knock, I knew this day was my  day.

I got up, put on the bathrobe my friend Molly had made for me --- a black and white thing --- and went to open the door. There were venetian blinds on the windows. They were partly closed, but through the slats I could just see the hands and the handguns. I felt this strong desire to disappear. I opened the door. One guy held up a badge with one hand --- a Drug Enforcement Agency star.

“My name is Gary Annunziata, and I’m with the Drug Enforcement Agency,” he said. “Your name Brian O’Dea?”

“I wish it wasn’t, but it is.”

He nodded almost imperceptibly. “May we come in?”

“You’ve got the gun.”

“That’s right. You got any guns in there, Mr. O’Dea?”

“No.”

“You sure about that?”

“I’m positive.”

They came in.

“You know why we’re here?”

“No, I don’t.”

The other cop, the bad cop, Doug, laughed. “Don’t bullshit us, O’Dea,” he said.

“I’m not into bullshitting anymore.”

Doug snorted. “Let’s get this straight, O’Dea. We know what you do. We know you work with drunks and dopers at the hospital. We know you do good. But this ain’t about change or rehabilitation. This is about crushing your life, motherfucker. Now do the right thing.”

Something rumbled deep in my gut. “The rightest thing I can think is to call my lawyer.”

Doug laughed outright. “Listen, asshole, I wouldn’t be calling your lawyer, because he’s fucking next, and so is every other lawyer down at that fucking Main Street law office.”

So that was it, then. My whole law thing was out of the bag.

“Brian,” said Gary, the good cop, “we’re going to have a couple of people come down here. Do you mind?”

“No, no. Knock yourself out.”

They got on the radio, and in two minutes there were eight cops in my apartment on the side of the hill in the Riviera district of Santa Barbara. They started to tear my place apart right away.

I asked to go to the bathroom. They checked it out and said, yeah, go. I shut the door, and after a minute I had a terribly thorough bowel movement. I flushed and imagined following it down down and out, out of everything that was happening here.

There was a knock on the bathroom door. “You still in there, O’Dea?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Just about done, are you?”

“Oh yeah.”

***

I had a glassed-in pool room out on the deck that overlooked the town. This Gary guy and I went out there.

“I guess you must have thought we’d never come,” he said. “I mean, you working in hospitals with dopers and all.”

“Listen,” I explained. “I’ve got nothing to say. Honest to God, I don’t. I’ve got absolutely nothing to say. Please don’t try to trick me into answering questions. But you know what? I’ll just talk to you. We’ll talk about the weather, about sports, about girls, about drinking. We’ll have a game of pool, and we’ll let them do what they need to do. That’ll be fine.”

Gary drank a beer and we shot pool and talked. Weather, sports, girls. The crew was there for a few hours, and they finally found my storage shed receipt. I had a storage shed in downtown Santa Barbara, and they said they had to go down and search it and oh, by the way, they weren’t going to arrest me that day, but I should get ready because they’d be coming back to get me someday soon. There was an indictment coming for me, so I should be prepared.

“Fine,” I said.

“Oh and by the way,” said Doug, “this woman right here, Sergeant Smith, she’s with the Santa Barbara County Police. Soon as we’re done at your storage shed, she’s going to arrest you and take you to Santa Barbara County Jail.”

“You can’t do that,” I said. “That county jail is known to be one of the worst places on the planet.”

Doug smiled. “It seems, O’Dea, you owe a fine of $500 for driving without a licence.”

“Jeez. I forgot about that. What can I do about it, guys?”

“Talk to Sergeant Smith,” Gary suggested.

Sergeant Smith came over. She was a nice-enough-looking woman, small, dark-haired. I recommended she overlook this peccadillo.

“No,” she said. “I got to take you there and fingerprint you and book you, but if you pay the fine then and there, you can leave right away.”

I phoned my girlfriend, Susannah, a textile designer I’d met only recently. She worked nearby. Susannah didn’t know a whole lot about my life. She did know I’d had a life.

“Honey, can you come down to my storage shed?”

“Hmm. Well, I suppose so, yes.”

“And would you mind grabbing $500 from the bank for me on your way? Be down there in, say, about five minutes.”

“Okay, Brian,” she said. “I’m working on something, but I’ll meet you there in about forty minutes.”

“Susannah, honey, uh... I can’t tell you how important this is. The police are here with me, quite a few of them, and I’m going to my storage shed. Meet me there in five minutes.”

In five minutes, Susannah pulled up. Eight cops and I were standing outside the storage shed.

“Oh Jesus,” she said. She handed me the money and got back in her car.

They ripped my storage shed apart, and then I hopped in the back of a Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s car and went and got booked and paid $500 and got out.

***

Everybody said I should flee the scene.

“Run for it, Bri,” they said. “Go, baby.”

In fact, I couldn’t run anymore. One guy I knew had been in the Bastille Day Parade in Paris when he was picked up by the DEA and Interpol. Another friend of mine was arriving from the South Pole, pulling into the southernmost port in Chile, just getting off his boat. The DEA were waiting for him on the dock. There was nowhere to go, not a safe place in the world for people like me. Anyway, that wasn’t why I couldn’t run. What was I going to do instead? Sober as I was, I couldn’t go back to dealing. Anyway, that wasn’t why I couldn’t run. I just couldn’t run. This was my chance to get this thing done. I had to get it done with. This shit had been crawling all over me for years, even though it hadn’t been showing its face.

When I got back home from my booking at the county jail, I went straight off to an AA meeting. I’d been going three times a day since I’d gotten sober eighteen months earlier. I went to the AA meeting, and I stood up in the AA meeting, and I said, for the first time in my life, I need help. “The wreckage of my past has finally caught up with me. The police are telling me I’m looking at thirty to life.”

The room was quiet.

“If any of you know me and have watched me for the past few years, here in Santa Barbara, I’d appreciate it if you could write a letter on my behalf.”

A guy in the back stood up. He was going to say he felt my pain, right?

“Brian,” he said. “You always look so fucking good. I’m so glad to see you’re finally deciding to save your ass instead of your face. Because, Brian, you know what they say? They say a man can’t save his face and his ass at the same time.”

He sat down. That was the first time I’d heard that little ditty, but it made perfect sense to me. I’d always wanted everybody to believe that I was an island, that I could handle anything. Asking for help was like climbing Everest.