A. Okay, here goes.
The first time Kevin asked me to sponsor him, I said no. I was physically afraid of him. He had a malevolent gleam in his eye, and I just thought, this guy’s trouble.
I was about three years sober, and we ran into each other most weeks on the T, the trolley line that took us both to different meetings we attended at a particular church in Brookline, Massachusetts. This is more than twenty-two years ago.
He asked again, and since we’re not supposed to say no to an AA request, I agreed. His eyes lit up.
“You sponsah the monstah!” he said, with his pronounced Boston accent.
Like I said, his name was Kevin. He’d been a high-flier on Wall Street in the eighties and then crashed and burned, a cocaine cowboy and a casualty of the high life. A veteran who, if he was to be believed, had seen plenty of combat in Vietnam in the 1970s, he had a hard time staying clean. To his credit, every time he picked up, he somehow found his way back to a meeting.
He wasn’t a monster. He was smart, thoughtful, extremely well read, and curious. When I went through a breakup with a fiancée, he insisted on seeing me every day. He was worried about me.
And then one day, life became too hard for him, and he decided he would end it all.
He and another drunk shared a bottle of Listerine on a five-degree Boston winter night. Kevin wanted to kill himself, but he didn’t want his daughter to think he was a suicide, so he figured that he would freeze to death and his motives would be forever obscured.
Morning came. The Boston police found the two men. The other one was dead. Kevin still had a pulse, so they took him to Boston City Hospital, where he was intubated and comatose. The law of Massachusetts is that you cannot declare a frozen person dead until you have tried to heat him up. Kevin had a core body temperature of seventy-nine degrees. His nurses told me that no one had ever survived after having been admitted to their hospital with such a low core body temperature.
Kevin remained in a coma for thirty days. When he regained consciousness, the chaplain came to visit him. “Is there a person of your faith you’d like to see?”
“I want to see my AA sponsor, Mike.” He somehow managed to rattle off my phone number.
The chaplain called me and told me the story. I went to see him.
Kevin looked like someone you see in a photograph of Holocaust survivors. His robust physique was gone—he must have lost all of his muscle mass through his ordeal—and his teeth were missing. I felt as though I were talking to a ghost.
“You think I’m constitutionally incapable of getting this thing?” Kevin asked. I remember thinking that I didn’t have the right answer.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think you just like to drink and use.”
I can still see in my mind’s eye Kevin mulling that answer over and then nodding in agreement.
He knew he wouldn’t be leaving the hospital for a while, so he asked me to bring a book for him to read—Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French.
It’s a very fine novel. I told you Kevin was a smart guy.
Little by little, Kevin’s recovery began. Since he was a veteran, he was able to receive treatment and shelter at various VA facilities in the Boston area. I didn’t have a car back then, so I would take several buses to go see him at one facility and then another. He was clean and sober, going to meetings, and putting his life back together. He was regaining his physical strength—he was so excited when he could do a pull-up again.
He got a new set of teeth.
We went to get his driver’s license. That was a moment of triumph for him.
Finally, he was able to get a subsidized studio apartment in Beacon Hill. I never visited him there—he was probably ashamed of how small it was—but it was home.
He even gave me the draft of the novel he wrote, about a Vietnam veteran who went to Wall Street and got into drugs.
Kevin worked the Steps and chose to do his Fifth Step with a priest. I couldn’t argue with that, but I did feel miffed. I wasn’t good enough? But how can you argue when a sponsee tells you he wants to do his Fifth Step with a priest?
We went to meetings all over town together, and it was fun. As I said, Kevin was smart and thoughtful. He just had a terrible disease.
Which finally took him out. In the mid- to late 1990s, I’ve since learned, the purity of heroin available on the streets suddenly shot upward. It was so much stronger than anything people had seen before. People were dying by the droves.
And then it was Kevin’s turn. I forget now how I got the news, but somebody called me and told me that Kevin had overdosed on heroin—as if there’s a good, healthy “dose” and he simply missed the mark. And that was the end of the story, or so I thought.
A few years later, I was living in Los Angeles and newly engaged (to a different woman, of course). I got a letter in the mail. This was the 1990s, before email destroyed the gentle art of letter writing.
It was a letter from Kevin’s daughter, the one from whom he had wanted to hide his suicidal impulses by sharing that bottle of Listerine on that five-degree Boston night.
She wanted to know about her father, and she had some questions for me. How she found me, and how she found my California address, I have no idea.
She lived in Washington, D.C., and if I ever visited Washington, she would love to meet me and ask about her father.
I’m never in Washington, D.C. I have no business there. I have a few friends, and some family, but I never go there.
With one exception.
My fiancée and I were flying there that same weekend to attend a cousin’s wedding.
I called her and we made a meeting time at Washington’s Union Station. She was eighteen and as sweet as could be. Once we sat down, she got right to the point.
“You knew my father,” she said. “Did he ever mention to you whether he molested me? I have no idea if it happened, and I need to know.”
Astonished by the question, I found myself in the same position as I had been at Boston City Hospital, when Kevin, toothless and rail thin, asked me if he was constitutionally incapable of getting this thing.
I thought back, and I keenly regretted the fact that he had not done his Fifth Step with me, because then I could have given a definitive answer.
“He never said anything of the sort,” I said. “I knew your father well. I know he did a lot of bad things, but he always spoke about how much he loved you. I can tell you with certainty that it never happened.”
She looked relieved. We spoke for a few more minutes and went our separate ways. I haven’t seen her since.
How could I be so sure? I couldn’t. But what I told her was true—he had never said anything about that, and we talked about everything under the sun, as open and honest as two men can be. It nagged at me—maybe that’s why he needed to talk to a priest instead of me. I’ll never know.
You can debate the legitimacy of my definitive answer. Reasonable minds may differ. But in reality in my heart, I didn’t believe that he had done it. So why share doubts I didn’t have? If you would have handled the situation differently, that’s fine, but that’s how I did it.
I tell you this story because every year on my anniversary, I dedicate my coin to Kevin’s memory. He was a profound friend, and I treasured and still treasure our relationship. But the real reason I tell you this story is because now I have four children, including two daughters, and I never, ever, ever want any of my children to have to track down one of my AA sponsors and ask him what kind of person I was.
I once heard a girl in a meeting say, “If you drank once with me, you knew I was an alcoholic. If you drank twice with me, I knew you were, too.”
If you talk with me once about sobriety, you’ll see how serious I am about it. If you talk twice with me about sobriety, I’ll know you’re just as serious.
You must be, because you’ve come along on this journey with me. I hope that I’ve reduced some of the mystery and confusion surrounding Twelve Step recovery. I hope I’ve answered some of your questions and paved the way for you to find the people who can answer the rest.
I owe everything important in my life—my marriage, my four children, my sense of self-worth, my spiritual life, my health, my freedom, and my identity—to the Twelve Step programs of which I am a member. I hope that you find what I’ve found, and that’s why I wrote this book.