I write MARLA in bold black marker on one of the blue sticky name tags and slap it on my chest. No one who’s anyone in here uses their real name. We’re all Jim or Mark or Karen.
Sunday night, after the church ladies have triple-counted the tithings envelope and stuffed it in a safe, wheeled the TV and DVD player into a padlocked closet, a couple dozen people are scattered on folding chairs in the basement rec room of Episcopal Church in the West Village. We sip coffee from little paper cups and nibble on grocery store chocolate chip cookies as a middle-aged man in a green polo shirt and sports coat steps up to the lectern.
“Hello, my name is Gary, and I’m an addict.”
“Hello, Gary,” the room replies.
“Welcome to the Help and Healing group of Narcotics Anonymous. I’d like to open this meeting with a moment of silence for the addict who still suffers.”
Gary bows his head, scabby scalp of new hair plugs staring us in the face like a teenager’s erupted zits. On the wall behind him are bulletin boards with colorful paper flyers begging for church volunteers and announcing the church’s food drive, Children’s Shakespeare in the Garden, and Parents’ Night Out.
Then he says, yellow mustache hanging over graying teeth, “I want to extend a special welcome to newcomers. If anyone here is attending their first NA meeting, would you like to introduce yourself?”
The first six rows all glance at each other, to the sides and behind them, searching for a new face. Several pairs of eyes land on me, but I’m not getting up there.
“Anyone who is new to this meeting?”
A tight-and-toned woman in a headband and neon purple tank top with coordinating yoga pants lifts out of her chair, hesitates, sits, then dashes to the lectern. Fingers gripping the edges for support, tendons straining in her tanned arms, she clears her throat and lifts her chin.
“Hi,” she says, sharp and neat like a department store clerk who’s about to blind you with perfume. Her sandy-blond ponytail sways with the nervous vibration running up her spine. Clears her throat again: “I’m Sarah, and I’m an addict.”
“Hello, Sarah.”
I sit in the back, out of range of the hyper-fundie twelve-steppers and their evangelic devotion. In the corner, away from the knee-bouncers and arm-scratchers who might mow me down in the event of a sudden escape. The ones still clinging to their doses from the methadone clinic.
“So…” Sarah’s lips turn a deep shade of tense, bloody pink as she presses them together with all the force of a gator bite. “I nearly murdered my husband this morning.”
An elderly woman in vintage Chanel cackles from the fourth row.
Gary steps in. “Go ahead, Sarah. There’s no judgment here.”
I do these a couple times a year—in rec rooms like this one with the soccer moms and bankers. The university professors and retail clerks in community centers. Combat vets and retirees in VFW halls. When I have a decision to make, these meetings help me think.
I listen to their stories of cashing out their kid’s college fund to go on a week-long bender in a $500-a-night hotel room. How Ron stiffed his convalescent mother-in-law on the nursing home check to score a hit then wound up on a hospital gurney with tubes in his stomach. When the boss just went too fucking far this time, so Megan got a fix on her lunch break and left a Chipotle dump on his leather chair.
“…I thought it was irritable bowel syndrome, always having to get up in the middle of dinner at a restaurant, at the movies,” Sarah says. “I thought my husband just had a sensitive stomach…”
But most of the time it’s about the craving. The taste on their tongues that won’t rinse out. It stalks them, haunts them. They imagine wild fantasies of what they’d do if pain and punishment were no concern. Or they talk about regret: people they’ve used and abused chasing the dragon. When they need a fix, nothing is sacred, and everyone’s expendable.
“…while we were at church this morning, he got up in the middle of the pastor’s sermon…”
I never got that far. Not so deep that I couldn’t see the surface. I played at the water’s edge, watching my only friend drift out with the suction of the ocean, getting smaller, until she disappeared beneath the waves.
“…but the worship band started playing and I got worried, so I went to check on him…”
One would be surprised how easy it is for a lost and lonely kid to become a statistic. When my mother and I escaped Massasauga, we had no money and only the clothes we wore that night. Surviving on charity and government assistance, we lived in shelters at first, then dirty motels once my mom found jobs waiting tables or bagging at the grocery store. I cleaned houses and ran errands for hobbled seniors. Took us a year to earn enough money to rent our first home. Bought an old used car, and a computer from Goodwill.
“…and I found him jerking off in the choir room beside the Easter decorations and clothing-drive boxes…”
Then I got kicked out of public school sophomore year. A social worker got involved, and I was referred to a shrink with a glass eye whose office smelled like kitty litter. That’s how I discovered the wonders of Zoloft and Lexapro, Valium and Klonopin. Dabbled a little in Effexor and Cymbalta while my psychiatrist turned me into a chemical experiment, trying to home in on the right combination and dosage for my particular mixture of depression, generalized social anxiety disorder, and post-traumatic stress. But the pills couldn’t cure my loneliness. The pit in my stomach grew more desperate and aching every day I spent longing to have just one friend in the world. Funny thing, though. An addict can never be your friend. They’re married to their fix. They’re ruled by it, worship it.
“…chronic public masturbator…”
Her name was Jenny. She was the big sister of the block. I became her favorite because I would share my pills with her. In return, she took me to the movies, to the diners and sports bars where the community college kids hung out. We stayed out all night riding around that shit town in her rusted Corolla. She would do my makeup and let me wear her clothes when we cruised the mall.
“…attacked him with a plastic Easter Bunny lawn ornament…”
Jenny was an addict. But not like the sloppy, skeletal, driftwood bodies you see on TV. She had a reliable supply from her dealer boyfriend and a steady job as a custodian at the nursing home. She taught me how to find the happy medium in my self-medication. How to make the nightmares go away. It wasn’t getting high, I told myself. It was getting better. Did you know heroin has anxiolytic properties? Any introvert in recovery will tell you they were never more socially engaged than when they were hooked. Until the fix wore off.
Jenny overdosed in a dressing room at Victoria’s Secret wearing six pairs of stolen underwear. She always said she would never shoot it. That was for junkies. But sooner or later they all pick up a needle.
I went to rehab three days later.
That’s where I met Maureen, a seventy-two-year-old former stringer for the Associated Press. She’d covered presidents and riots, celebrities and coups. She’d also picked up a coke habit along the way. But she managed to kick it in the nineties and started helping kids like me gain a little perspective. I was fascinated by her stories. Though they were a bit distorted by time and dementia, I listened to her talk for hours, imagining what I could see with a life like hers.
When I got out of rehab five weeks later, my mom brought me home to our new apartment far from Jenny’s memory. Clean and straight, I was making another new start.
“…but I didn’t use today,” Sarah says, her eyes red with stress-tears and pride. “I’m still eight years clean and looking forward to my divorce.”
We clap, because today this chick is iron. She’s a goddamn steel trap. Sarah’s the Hoover Dam.
“Thank you for sharing, Sarah. We’re proud of you.” Gary is back on his feet at the lectern, coffee stains in his mustache. “Now I’d like to recognize…”
I come here to remember that we’re all one stupid decision away from ruining our lives. For some, it’s addiction. But whatever our vices or secret inclinations, we’re all walking a thin line between order and anarchy. Some have better balance than others. Several years ago I came to a dangerous precipice in the pursuit of affection. These meetings remind me how easy it is to fall over the edge.
At the front of the room, a woman stands to read from the White Booklet: “‘Who is an addict? Most of us do not have to think twice about this question…’”
People think addiction is obvious, that it lives on someone like a python coiled around their neck. But that isn’t always the case. It can be quiet and patient. It wants to hide. Jenny was a normal, decent person until she got her first taste.
“‘…we lived to use and used to live…’”
Becoming an addict wasn’t her fault. No one takes their first hit believing it’s the first step to the end of their life. That cold, dark place of desperation is born of a certainty that there is no reality in which living and sobriety can coexist. A gun in one hand, and a hit in the other. Because right up to the second we’re hooked, we know we never will be.
“‘…there is one thing more than anything else that will defeat us in our recovery; this is an attitude of indifference or intolerance toward spiritual principles…’”
I reach into my pocket and roll the shell casing between my fingers, tracing the edge with my nail. This is right about the time I’m ready to leave. The program works for them—so be it. I just don’t see how wresting control from an addiction and giving it to a “higher power” accomplishes anything more than trading one crutch for another. How’s that taking responsibility?
* * *
Walking home from the meeting, thoughts of Jenny and Maureen follow me. Their memory reminds me how easy it is to get stuck. To become comfortably complacent until one day you wake up and you’ve pissed your life away. If Maureen were here, she’d tell me to suck it up and quit my bitching. That’s what a serious journalist would do. She’d say working with a man whose job it was to expose my family’s ugly secrets is a trifling concern compared to professional advancement.
There’s a rope tied around my waist, tugging me back and cinching tighter the harder I struggle; the only thing to do is cut it away. Be a razor.
When I get home, I email Cara then send a text to Ethan.
Avery Avalon
9:22 PM
I’m in.