Somewhere along the way, p.22
Somewhere Along the Way, page 22
“You were not drinking and then you got drunk, but now you are going to stop again?”
“Uh, right.”
“Yep, I was thinking about firing you. It’s unfair to Rob when you are so undependable.” There was no excuse I could offer. “Yet when you didn’t drink for three months, you were great.”
“Thanks,” I said weakly.
“Okay. You got it. Another chance, but the next time it happens, you’re out with two weeks’ notice.”
“I really appreciate it, I do. Thank you.” And the odd thing was, I was honest about that too.
Anthony called me and asked me how everything was, and I told him and he congratulated me, then immediately asked, “What meeting are you going to today, or have you already gone?”
“I wasn’t planning on one because…”
“All right, I’m coming to pick you up and take you to a meeting. We’ll talk more on the way.”
As annoyed as I was at him, he’d been right about my job dilemma, so just maybe he might be right about everything else. In retrospect, I’d not believed that my previous contacts in AA had anything to teach me. They were all women. Was I sexist?
In the car, he said, “Ninety in ninety.”
I said, “Yeah. I know.”
“Will you commit to that?” He was not speaking unkindly, but he was stern.
“I don’t want to and then disappoint you.” I sounded so lame, and I knew this was the wrong thing to say as soon as it was out of my mouth.
“Max. This isn’t about me. I’m not your dad that you have to obey or please. This is for you. It will help you if you think of what I’m suggesting as things that I have done myself and they work, and you can choose to do them to help yourself. If you don’t want to, and I know you don’t, no one does, not at first, do them anyway. It’s like I told you to pray. You didn’t want to. Fine, but it’s the action that counts. It’s going to the meeting that counts. Whether you want to or not. You can act your way into right thinking, but you can’t think your way into right action. Your thoughts are what are going to lead you back to drinking. Your actions, as you repeat them, will finally move your thoughts in the right direction, and you’ll want to drink less.”
“Oh,” was all I could think of as a response. No one had ever put it quite that way. In AA, I’d heard a lot of suggestions that seemed suspiciously like orders and made me want to rebel and not do a single thing. Or at least to not do everything. I wanted to pick and choose what I would do. And all I heard was what I ought to do and no explanation except for “that’s what we do.”
Anthony continued, “No alcoholic and no human wants to be told what to do. We rebel at ‘you must,’ ‘you ought to,’ ‘you have to,’ and worst of all, ‘you should.’ We’re just humans like everyone else, but unlike normal people, our actions and thoughts can lead us to pick up alcohol and drugs and maybe die.”
The way he emphasized the last word scared me. I’d not thought of the possibility of dying, but I suppose ending up in the hospital having my stomach pumped wasn’t what I’d thought of either. The way Anthony talked made sense, though his manner wasn’t especially warm and fuzzy. He was sort of stern, like a parent, but it didn’t bother me. Some of the dykes in AA talked me in a sort of “oh, you poor thing” manner that bugged me the same way their suggestions did. I could tell he cared about me, and he wasn’t going through the motions. He said the steps were suggestions in the way that opening the ripcord when you were in a parachute was a suggestion. Oh, right.
I didn’t truly want to stop drinking, not really until that moment. I realized I’d had in the back of my mind that I could drink again after I was feeling better for the short three months of my first leap into sobriety. The word “die” had a certain ring to it. I also thought of Chris but rapidly pushed the thought away.
We sat through the meeting and I kept hearing people say the same things. Maybe I’d heard them before, but I’d not really heard them. Laurie’s saying about taking the cotton out of my ears came back to me. I didn’t know what it was exactly but I knew I didn’t want to die or be miserable.
After I made that leap, I started to hear other things.
Someone told a story, a parable, I suppose.
There was a man who was stuck in a deep hole in the ground and he couldn’t get out of it. A preacher came along and told him, “Oh, I can pray over you and God will get you out.” Someone else said to him, “I think you ought to try and build a ladder.” A third person told him, “You just have to use positive thinking, that’ll get you out.” Finally, a fourth man came along and said, “I’ve been in this hole and I can tell you how I managed to get out of it.”
I got it.
One guy in a meeting said, “You can save your ass or you can save your face, but not both. Pick one. I go for saving my ass.” He’d been talking about the fear of asking for help or the denial of needing help. Right.
In the car with Anthony on the way back to Adrian’s, I said, “I don’t want to drink anymore.”
Anthony grinned. “That’s a good start. Keep telling yourself that and keep doing what we’ve been talking about. You don’t have to suffer anymore, truly. You don’t. Alcoholism is a disease, and one of its primary symptoms is you are convinced you don’t have it. Congrats on getting over your denial.”
Part III: What It’s Like Now
Chapter One
Anthony gave me something called Shame and Addiction to read. I had to read it through twice before I could even start to make sense of it.
Shame and addiction are Siamese twins.
Most of us come into recovery as innocents. In the rawness of hitting bottom and accepting the first step about powerlessness, we are like children hoping everything will be fixed now. The reality is that getting sober merely gets us to the starting gate. Eventually if we are true to our recovery, we will collide with the feelings we ran from for years.
I looked up “shame” in the dictionary. It said, “the painful feeling of having done something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous, etc.” Whoops, that hit home.
Recovery is not a destination, it is a journey.
There was a lot more.
Anthony said, “The word ‘admit’ might remind you of what someone says who’s guilty of doing something wrong. It actually means, ‘recognize that which is true.’”
“Right. I am recognizing the truth of my powerlessness over substances because I used them when I didn’t want to. I couldn’t stop or predict what would happen when I did.”
Anthony scrutinized me. “You have to be gut-level honest and really ready to face the truth about yourself, or this doesn’t work or it won’t work for long.”
“I don’t think I was ready when I tried before. I just didn’t want to feel bad.” I told Anthony all about my cavalier approach to AA, my petulance and the disingenuous way I tried to please women who were trying to help me. The secrets, the lies. And all the drugs and what happened to me at work. But I didn’t say anything about Chris. I wasn’t ready for that.
“And now?”
“Yes. I’m there.”
“Good. We’re going to be talking a lot about shame. And you as an alcoholic and an addict are riddled with it. You as a gay person are also unfairly subjected to much more shame than the average person. You get the difference between shame and guilt?”
“Yes, but I had to look them up,” I said proudly, and he laughed.
“Okay, tell me.”
“Guilt is specifically related to an act. Shame is the general feeling of unworthiness.”
“That’s right. Homophobia is designed to make us feel unworthy, ashamed of who we are.”
“Yeah. It’s awful.”
“We have the double whammy of being ashamed of being alcoholics and being gay. Those two things are as an inseparable as shame and addiction.”
I sat back in my chair. The café bustled around us. I was scarcely aware of the clink of cups and the chatter of other patrons. Anthony stayed silent, I think to give me the space to absorb what he said. I took it in, and at that moment, my life began to make sense to me. I knew that what I been living wasn’t the life I wanted. I wanted something else.
* * *
As Anthony said, going to meetings got easier. I dragged my tired, sorry ass to a meeting every day. Sometimes I went to one downtown at noon before I started my delivery route. The besuited business people in that meeting didn’t give off the same disdainful air of the people in the law offices. They were, in fact, friendly in the manner that everyone at AA meetings is friendly. Alcoholism is a great democratizer.
At first, I was suspicious, but slowly I began to trust more. I still avoided women’s meetings and stuck to either mixed gay meetings or straight meetings such as the noontime Financial District meeting. I couldn’t say why, but going to these meetings made me less anxious and less bored. I suspected it was something to do with how I viewed women. I took a big leap and I told Anthony about it.
“Did you ever think that might be about your internalized homophobia, i.e., shame?”
I was shocked. “No. Never.”
“Think about it. Think about how you used to drink and pick up sex partners.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t told him about my difficulties with orgasms. That would have to wait for a bit. But the word “shame” popped into my consciousness when I thought about how I’d behaved. I couldn’t stand to face my sex partners in daylight, I couldn’t even pick someone up and attempt sex unless I was drunk. Adrian was the exception, but our relationship was a whole other level of dysfunction. I was going to tell Anthony all about it. Sometime.
I told him about my issues with the God stuff, and as usual, he was empathetic and told me what he’d done instead of telling me what to do. I was starting to recognize this pattern and it made me smile, but I came to realize exactly how shrewd Anthony was. He always threw stuff back at me. What did I think I had to do? What was really going on with me? He never told me what to do, so I couldn’t rebel against him.
“I have to listen to other people talk about their concepts of God and use them to develop my own.”
He grinned. “Bingo.”
Within a month, I was able to stop saying I was a newcomer, which pleased me inordinately. I would look around at meetings thinking everyone looked so goddamn happy, it was impossible to picture them as a sloppy drunks, but that’s how they described themselves, and I had no reason to doubt them.
* * *
“Want to go around the corner?”
It was Rob asking me if I wanted to get high.
I was silent. I had gone ahead and done that those first three months I was sober, but now I was imbibing no consciousness-altering substances. None.
“No, thanks,” I said before I could think about it too much. At that instant I wanted to get high, but I stopped myself.
Rob looked at me quizzically but only said, “Okay,” turned on his heel, and left.
I sat in the office and ate the sandwich I’d brought. If nothing else, if I didn’t smoke a joint, I wouldn’t be tired when I came down. That was something to tell myself to stave off that sudden craving for the mellow peace of being high.
When I told Anthony my story, I hadn’t left out the part where I continued to smoke dope even though I’d stopped drinking and taking drugs.
He said, “It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but two things happen. The first is you give yourself permission for pot and then you can easily justify anything else as you did. The second is you cannot start learning how to get through life sober. This is not about deprivation, it’s about finding other ways to cope.”
It was gratifying to tell Anthony about my choice because it gave me a little glow of achievement. It wasn’t that Anthony didn’t say the things I’d heard before, but somehow, I had stopped being cynical and was doing the things he’d described to me that he had done that kept him sober. The list seemed endless, though, and Anthony wouldn’t cut me a break or let me slack. He praised my page-and-a-half essay on the first step and promptly assigned me to read the second step and write a page or two on my belief in a Higher Power.
“But why do I have to write all this stuff down?” I heard the ghost of my old whiny tone, but he merely raised his left eyebrow. He could raise one eyebrow at a time; it mystified me.
“Because I say so.” He laughed and added, “You are in need of direct adult supervision. Everyone is, including me.”
I knew he was joking because his eyes twinkled, but underneath he was dead serious.
“Thinking and writing makes it clearer to you. The writing prompts the thinking. Then you read it aloud to me. Those are the three elements.”
“I don’t know what to say because I don’t believe in a Higher Power.” I put the imaginary quotes around the phrase with my voice.
“Well, read some more. Listen to other people. I told you my story. The Higher Power just has to work for you.”
With my job secure for the moment, the biggest issue I had was finding a place to live for which I could pay very little. It almost killed me, but I asked Anthony for help. I added, “I can’t pay hardly anything but I could trade for labor, yard work, housework, or something.”
“Hm. Let me think about it.”
A couple days later, he called me and said he’d found something that might work. “I know a guy in the program who has an in-law apartment.”
“A what?”
“In-law. Like a little place where your mother-in-law could live.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Here’s his number. It’s up to you to go talk to him. I told him about you.”
This was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I’d have to negotiate with some strange guy. I was silent. I didn’t want to whine but Anthony could read my mind even on the phone.
“Max. You can do this. It’s scary, but you can do it.”
“Right.”
It turned out that this fellow, Rick, would let me stay for three months almost rent free but I’d have to help him fix the place up—painting and cleaning, and work in the garden, and generally be his slave. I thought about working my regular job and then doing all that as well, and it was daunting. I’d have a place to live and it would get me away from Adrian. I didn’t want to separate from her, but I knew I had to.
I said yes. It was another leap into the unknown.
* * *
Anthony would not let me off the hook about my Higher Power.
“I got nothing.” I shrugged and gave him my best sheepish smile.
“Keep listening, reading, and thinking and it’ll come to you,” Anthony said. “Remember, this is for you, not for me. Whether or not you do it doesn’t affect me either way other than I don’t want you to drink. There are other ways to get sober, but this is the one I know. It works for a lot of other people as well, but there aren’t shortcuts. The steps are in order for a reason.”
I was as grouchy as I could be about it, but somehow, I had grasped that I had to try, and the act of trying was the main purpose.
A couple days later, I was sitting in the Financial District meeting where I heard one of the suits, an executive in an accounting firm of some kind, nobody I would even talk to, let alone want to listen to, open our meeting with the usual ten-minute share. And as a subject, he chose the second step. When he started to speak, I began to shut down, but by brute force I made myself listen as Anthony had instructed me. Keep an open mind.
Hal read a couple of sentences from the book on the steps.
“I used to think religion was a form of insanity, a socially acceptable form of insanity. I didn’t have any religious background. God was also a social construct. I didn’t have any need for it or him or whatever.”
Okay. That was me.
Hal said, “I was a scotch drinker. Gallons of scotch. Oceans of scotch. The hangovers were brutal. My wife was going to leave me, my kids couldn’t stand to be around me. ‘I’ll quit, honey. Tomorrow, I promise’ and then I wouldn’t, I’d just keep on drinking.
“I finally called the AA number and I went to a meeting, and I wore a three-piece suit. Can you imagine? I thought that I had to look good. The meeting was in the evening and no one else there was dressed up like me. I’d even shaved.” The people seated around the table laughed along with Hal.
He continued, “There was an old guy there. He had to be seventy-something. After the meeting, he made a beeline for me. ‘You’re a smart guy, I bet,’ he said. ‘No one tells you what to do.’ I was so foggy I was almost speechless. The old guy asked me, ‘If you’re so smart, how come you can’t stop drinkin’?’ He had me there. I mumbled something.”
I let this seep into my brain. Okay. I was smart too. This Hal guy was clearly not a dummy even if he was a suit.
Hal said, quoting the old man he’d met, even making his voice sound scratchy and old, “‘You probably think you’re God.’ ‘No. I don’t.’ I was offended he’d think that. ‘You act like you are, though. Everyone has to dance to your tune, do what you say, probably, you’re always right.’”
Hal grinned. “When I thought about it, if I was honest, what he said was mostly true. I was a big shot. I told people how to handle their money, rich people with large amounts of money. So yeah, I thought I was fairly intelligent. Then the old guy says, ‘You ain’t God. You don’t have any control over nothing.’ Okay. He had my attention. So he goes, ‘What’s the definition of insanity?’ I said I didn’t know. ‘Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’”
Hal stopped and looked as though he might cry any second. Another surprise to me. He visibly teared up. The fancy haircut, three-piece-suit dude was about to cry. We waited until he got himself in hand.
“That was me. I drank every day and told my wife over and over that I was sorry, I’d change. And I never did. I just kept right on doing the same frigging thing.
