So much has happened that I can’t really write about it. I could, of course, if I had processed it all, but I couldn’t. I know that I went to a meeting last Friday, and an old timer asked me, inexplicably, how I was doing. I gave the usual formulaic answer, and she pressed me.
“I think I might be on the verge of a relapse,” I told her.
It was a strange thing to be saying, since I hadn’t been (consciously) thinking any such thing. But there it was, a true thing coming out of a false man.
I did the meeting and left to go to Marshalls—a store that sells for reduced prices things I absolutely don’t need, but can convince myself I do. So I bought two rolls of garish Christmas paper to cover notebooks (even garish people need notebooks, after all) and went home to ponder it all.
Jeanne called.
She wanted to know what she had done, since I wasn’t answering my phone much and was pleading being in the wrong place at the wrong time when I did pick up. So I told her that I had just been to a meeting and just declared my impending lapse in sobriety.
So we talked about that, and then agreed on next steps. The obvious one was to call my shrink, to see if the antidepressants that I take when times are good will keep working (at a higher dose) when times are rough.
Then it was time to go to the Poet’s Passage, where I thought it might be an idea to clue Lady in about my possible future slip.
“Fight it,” she said.
There was craziness inside and outside of my head. The craziness on the streets came from ICE, which crashed a car driven by an American citizen. The agents dragged her out of the car, handcuffed her, and then held her for several hours before releasing her. The video is below—if no one has bothered to take it down.
It was jarring to realize that even now, I don’t have much control. I go to meetings every day; I pray as much as my knees allow; I peer at a picture taken of myself on the day I went into rehab for the (hopefully) last time. I am the model alcoholic, in some senses, but really I’m a guy who got lucky by just skating by. Other people work a lot harder than I do; they suffer relapses that I am spared.
Has anybody ever written about what it's like to live with alcoholism? We do the confessional / coming-to-Jesus memoirs really well, but no one had ever written a book that would tell me that, eight years after my last drink, I would find myself in Costco, alone in the vast wine section. I had no desire to drink, and no idea why I was there; nor could I say why it felt so good, oddly, to be surrounded by a poison that nearly killed me. But I was there, and I was able to get myself out of…there.
Which is the story of my sobriety.
So I haven’t relapsed, though I have told you the story that I heard in my meeting this morning. Because it wasn’t me in the wine section, it was actually Brad, a guy in my group. He came in a year ago to his first AA meeting, and got around to tell us the story of how he got to us only today.
He was suicidal, his wife was out of town, but he got to a phone (somehow) and got to an English speaker (after four tries). So Brad ended up on our doorstep on the day Trump ended up winning his way back to the White House. Since no one could talk about politics, we ended up welcoming Brad into his new world instead. He’s still here, and he’s the guy who got stuck in Costco, not me.
A distinction without a difference. Today was both an anniversary for Brad and a new day for another guy, who was coming into the rooms for the first time. Things are turning, turning, until they come round just right, I think, though it may be only because the Democrats have swept every race they could enter last night. But anyway, Brad got through the door, the new guy got through the door, and there’s even a chance that the country will squeak by and get through the door as well.
Some of us will find ourselves standing blankly in the wine section of Costco, of course. There are a lot of doors, as any drunk can tell you, and not all of them lead to rooms that have the exit plainly marked.
But there is a way out, even if I don’t know it, or if I can’t see it. I ended up in the rooms—Brad did as well. He got back to the rooms today after visiting the war zone in Costco yesterday.
He got out safe.
We can, too.
