Free Will?

So the question really is whether I have any say in the matter, or whether I am just stuck sitting in here in this admittedly pleasant little room. I could go out of here, I think, to this thing called a beach, which I am lucky to have. I could put myself on that beach and look out at a green-turning-to-blue sea and pass the day away. I could sleep on the beach, I could find friends on the beach, I might even find love on the beach, or the meaning of life.

 

I believe in free will, and I believe that I am captain of my own ship, steering it expertly through dangerous waters (like aisle 6 at Walgreen's, which has the wine and whiskey for you and the poison for me. The bottles and labels look the same, and the liquid inside smells and tastes the same, which makes it tricky, but there it is.)

 

 

I believe I have free will, but did I have free will when I was lying in bed, with the bottle of Scotch under that bed? I was no longer waking or falling asleep, I was passing out and the coming to. That bum you see sleeping outside Walgreen’s, or under bridges or on park benches?

 

I just considered taking a selfie of me raising my hand!

 

So I am one of the guys you pass each day, if you live in a city big enough to have a homeless population. And I am here to tell you, we do not have free will. I was lucky to be reaching for the bottle in a 4500-square-foot apartment, but my luck would have run out in a few years or perhaps months. Then, I would have been reaching for the bottle outside Walgreen’s. I would be that guy you pass by and give a buck to.

 

So I didn’t have free will then, and honestly I doubt I have it now. I got up at 6:30 and fed the cat and did the kitty litter and took my medicines and washed my face and got on my knees and told God that I wasn’t feeling at all grateful (just then) but I knew that I should be grateful and in fact would be grateful as soon as the cortisol released by my anxious dreams had faded away. I would be grateful after I had gotten five strangers to smile at me and say “Buenos días,” on my walk to the bus station.

 

I have that power, to get them to say “buenos días.”

 

But do I really have free will?

 

I do not, as you know, attend AA, though I do go every weekday morning to a clubhouse that does indeed have an AA meeting. If I attended that meeting, I would certainly never tell you, and indeed would lie about attending that meeting, as I am now doing.

 

I was thinking about all this during the meeting that I didn’t go to.

 

I sit or don’t sit in a room full of Christians, and I’m doing my best not to correct the errors of their ways, which are many. So I had to escape the meeting without someone shouting “fuck you” at me, and fortunately I thought myself out of that one. AA has this absurd belief that the group itself can become your god, but there can be a lot of truth in absurdity. If you don’t have free will and you are living on a flattened cardboard refrigerator box outside Walgreen’s, you’re better off coming into AA (to which you will never admit) and trying to give your “free will” to the group.

 

I think of Yolanda, a wonderful woman I met at my first meeting of AA (shit, guess the cat is out of the bag). Yolanda told me my story as she had lived it, which is unsurprising though unsettling. We drunks and addicts are all living the same story—the sets are different. Then Yolanda, after pouring out her tale of abusive partners, lost jobs and friends, homelessness, prostitution—you know, all the usual stuff—did something amazing, miraculous.

 

She smiled at the group, apologized for leaving early (she was meeting an important client to finalize a deal), took her purse, and excused herself. 

 

Leaving a faint smell of an expensive perfume as she passed me.

 

Leaving me to look at my shoes, which had no laces, since they had taken them away from me in rehab, and I wasn’t organized enough to find new ones and put them in.

 

I mean, shoe laces?

 

So it’s a really good idea to find a group with people like Yolanda, or on the way to becoming like Yolanda. It’s a really good idea to admit that you don’t have free will, and in fact you may never have had it. I look at the people in the meetings I (don’t) attend, and I hear their stories and their shame. Half of the people have families that have been submerged in alcohol for decades. The miracle would have been if they had NOT become drunks.

 

But they’re full of shame, and so am I.

 

“You grew up gay in a small Midwestern town in the 1960’s,” a guy in the program once told me, matter-of-factly.

 

Both of my brothers have also had issues with alcohol, which might suggest a genetic component as well.

 

Did I have free will?

 

Should I feel ashamed?

 

The question is unanswerable and dangerous, of course. What I should do is get up and go to a meeting, where people like Yolanda let me sit down next to her because she too has felt that no one in the world would ever want to sit next to her. No one in the world would like to speak to her. No one in the world gives a shit about her, and if they did, they’d hate her. That’s what she felt when she first came into the rooms, and she smiles at me because she remembers exactly how broken she was, and she knows perfectly well that that’s how I am feeling too.

 

She thinks all of that as she passes by me, holding her purse and wafting her perfume as she prepares to meet her big-shot client.

 

She smiles at me.

 

Remember Yolanda?

 

At any rate, there I was (or wasn’t) in the meeting full of people wearing gold crucifixes in the meeting, and I was just telling them that their whole moral world was based on the lie of free will. 

 

I was pissing on their religion, in fact.

 

So it was time for a little footwork, and I skirted (or punted?), by admitting that the group might be a really good alternative to the false idol that dwells in the green plastic bottle under my bed.  Guys like Ulysses, Achilles, and Odysseus are always talking about “the gods who rule these parts,” and my job was to get away from the god of the filthy bedroom and into the arms of the god who rules the rooms.

 

“The rooms”—our way of saying the program.

 

But that was too complicated, so I told the joke that we all know, and that always gets a begrudging laugh anyway.

 

“This program is pure BRAIN WASHING,” shouts a guy in a meeting.

 

“Well, seems to me like your brain could use a good washing,” says some salty bitch two rows back.

 

Then I told them that if we didn’t have free will when we were drinking—well, who was calling the shots?

 

We drunks may not be able to believe in God, but we know about demons.

 

So I told the guys with the crucifixes around their necks that I didn’t know where my free will (if any) was, but it was a better idea that I bring it (if possible) to here, where Yolanda sits sweetly perfumed before her meeting. It’s better to leave the demons behind, really, and come into a room where…

 

…and of course I couldn’t say it…

 

…where, I continued bravely into the void, you might well meet Yolanda and something that we often talk about, in these meetings…

 

…oh, so often talk about!

 

…a three-letter word

 

…sometimes capitalized

 

…beginning with “g”

 

The buzzer goes off, my four minutes is up, and I am free.

 

I don’t have to say that word. God lives, and has taken that burden from me.

 

The group laughed, and I got away with it. 

 

Leaving the question, of course…

 

…do I believe it?