17

The Sponsor

I MET HER in a coffee shop near her apartment, which was located in an expensive area in downtown Toronto. Even though every nerve I had was vibrating from the shock of being abandoned by Jerry to my own inadequate devices, I noticed right away that she was a miracle of grooming. Every detail was perfect. Her lipstick was shiny precision, her skin alabaster, and I’d never seen an outfit—sweater and slacks—look sleeker and softer. In spite of her perfection, she somehow managed to exude warmth.

“Hello, darling,” she said. “You look wonderful.” She seemed to understand instinctively that the normal social cues weren’t going to work with me. There would be no small talk, no idle chit-chat. She’d either have to guide the conversation or let it die a lingering death at the wobbly iron coffee shop table.

“Are you still looking for a sponsor?” she asked.

I nodded dumbly.

“And you’d still like me to be your sponsor?”

Another nod.

Then she laid out her personal guidelines for sponsorship. It was brilliantly clear and practical. She wanted me to know that I could talk to her and none of what I said would be repeated. She was there to support me with her own experience but wasn’t a professional counsellor. If our relationship wasn’t working for either of us, there would be no hard feelings. If I was unhappy, I should let her know right away.

In addition to being stunned generally, I was stunned at her ability to speak her mind and to be honest and direct. I’d never heard anything like it. I might have been able to function socially if this was how friends always communicated!

After she’d set out the guidelines, she proceeded to unsheathe her cigarettes. They were quite a bit classier than other cigarettes, as was her lighter, which was silver and highly polished. After she lit up, she carefully lined up the package and lighter on the table and breathed out a perfectly formed plume of smoke.

“So, why don’t you tell me about yourself?” she said. Those were the words I’d been waiting to hear all my life.

Out it poured. Jerry, my drinking life, my social life, my work, my drinking, my drinking. My barely functional sober life. My drinking. I went on for perhaps an hour, during which she made only a few noises, of sympathy mostly.

“Oh, you poor thing,” she said. Or “That’s awful.” Her words were beyond soothing.

When I finally wound down, she asked if I’d like another coffee. When we’d each gotten one and had lit fresh cigarettes, she told me a bit about herself.

Her story was fascinating, the way that many alcoholics’ are. She’d had a privileged childhood that included being chauffeured to and from school and live-in servants. This had been followed by a marriage to a much older, very distinguished man, and then a series of losses, both of money and of love, and a drinking problem that flared into a bonfire. She’d gone into recovery and had been sober for three years.

To me, this was astonishing. Three years was an eternity. I’d gone nearly ten months and was having trouble seeing how I was going to make it one more day. Life as a sober person seemed unsupportable. Unsustainable. Or it had until I dumped my entire life story on this remarkably gracious woman.

Walking home after our first coffee date, I was tired in a way I don’t remember being before. I was unburdened. Whatever it was that I’d gotten out in our marathon get-to-know-me session had left me feeling exposed and mildly deranged, but I felt lighter, too.

From then on my new sponsor, Willa, took me on as her pet project. She introduced me to people. Invited me with her to dinner parties with her friends, who were sophisticated professional people in their forties. She talked to me about money. How she’d lost most of hers and how she’d begun to get it back. She answered my phone calls, and we went for walks and had coffee.

I was dependent on Willa but in a totally different way than I had been on Jerry. Leaning on him had destabilized me more. He was the wobbly crutch, always threatening to go out from under me. When the relationship collapsed, so did I. Willa helped me to feel sturdier and more confident that I would soon be walking on my own. When I despaired of things like ever finding any sober friends my own age, she pointed out that there is often a lag time between letting something go and something new filling up the void.

In the meantime, I was mesmerized by her.

First there was the fact she was so clean. Elite surgical units had barnyard standards next to Willa. Everything in Willa’s studio apartment, which was on the fourteenth floor of an exclusive building, was white. Her white bed was made up to look like a couch. Her houseplants had been recently polished. As we chatted, Willa breezed around with a small white handkerchief, which she used to dust anything that caught her eye.

“I love it when things are just so,” she said happily, flicking the kerchief at the lampshade.

So did I. Nothing in my room at the co-op was anywhere as clean as things were at Willa’s, but sometimes when I woke up lately, I’d notice a satisfying orderliness to everything in my sight lines. The sun’s rays filtering through the blinds and latticing my Peruvian patchwork quilt were brighter. The day outside seemed to beckon rather than threaten, as had been the case when I would wake up hung over and paralyzed with thousand-pound remorse.

Willa knew her neatness was extreme. She told me she’d just recently begun using her wastebaskets. “Before that I would go downstairs to the Dumpster to get rid of things.”

“You mean you took the elevator fourteen floors to the basement for every piece of garbage?”

“That’s right,” she said cheerfully. “But now I let the bin get one-quarter full before I take it down.”

She took immense pleasure in eating and cooking and dressing well.

“Oh,” she’d say before she served me something, “you are going to love this! It’s so fabulous!”

Then she’d set down a white china plate of boneless chicken breast, four perfectly steamed spears of asparagus, and a spoonful of rice that held the shape of the serving implement. Sometimes the rice was from a package and then she would exclaim over how marvellous it was.

“This Rice-A-Roni is so wonderful!”

And it was.

From her beautifully blocked sweaters to her carefully applied lipstick, Willa was getting a huge kick out of her life. And she spread that enthusiasm to me.

Every time she saw me she’d say, “Oh my god, you look so adorable!” and then go on to praise my hair or makeup or some item of clothing.

I was, compared to Willa, a schlump, even though I was now a mod and tidier than ever before. But she seemed to see only what was working.

“We’re the same, you and me,” she’d say. “We get it.”

I didn’t know what “it” was, but I loved being in her club.

She took note of my various unhappinesses, mostly related to being broke and being lonely, and did her best to include me in her social life. But she also knew I needed friends my own age.

“Why don’t you go to one of those dances,” she said one afternoon as we were having coffee in Yorkville.

“Dances?”

“There are sober dances specifically for young people in recovery,” she said. “I’ve heard people talk about them at meetings.”

I’d always loved dancing. Like a lot of people with a substance abuse problem, I secretly thought myself an incredible dancer. Like if I’d just had some training, I would have put Madonna to shame. And when I got loaded, I became a maniac on the dance floor. One time when I was drunk dancing at a club that played only seventies stadium rock and R&B, I remember a man turning to me, looking me up and down, and admonishing, “Girl, shake it, don’t break it.”

WHEN THE FOLLOWING Saturday rolled around, I steeled myself to do this supposedly fun thing. I was going to a dance. Alone. Sober.

Willa called to encourage me before I stepped out the door. “You can do this,” she said, like I was preparing for major surgery or heading into battle.

I walked to the subway station to catch the train downtown. I thought about my situation. Nearly a year into my sobriety, I was still as afraid of new social situations as it was possible to be. Walking into a room full of strangers without any sort of buzz to drown out the fear was a prospect that made my knees shake. The idea of standing around in some church basement like the world’s oldest, most socially bankrupt wallflower made my stomach hurt.

Would I be expected to dance alone?

Was I supposed to ask other people to dance?

I’d rather die.

I couldn’t form a clear memory of school dances. If my friends and I went, it was only after we were so thoroughly loaded the events were a blur. I recall people slow-dancing while holding each other’s asses at hockey dances, but those events didn’t really count, seeing as they were more about the drinking than the dancing.

When I got off the subway, I slowly climbed the stairs to the street. The night smelled like heat and car exhaust. I fought the urge to go home and stay in my room until I was old enough to move into the retirement village for elderly, depressed, sober alcoholics and instead forced myself to walk into the dance, which was held in a basement just off Wellesley Street. I paid my six dollars and slunk inside, sure that this was the most pathetic thing I’d ever done. My whole life had been spent trying not to be as lame as I secretly knew I was. The entire point of my drinking was to hide my social and emotional retardation. And here I was showing up, friendless, and in a state of near panic, at a dance that looked exactly like the kind you’d see at a junior high school, only the people weren’t as cute.

The huge dark room was lightly populated with people. Far too lightly. Quite a few loitered at the edge of a stage set up on the right-hand end of the gym. In the middle of the room, a knot of serious dancers were doing their thing. When I say serious, I mean they were good. They were doing actual moves above and beyond the drunken flail and the hammered hoedown. A couple of them were breakdancing. I slid up against the wall and watched.

The music was all techno and dance. C&C Music Factory exhorted everyone to dance now, and Deee-Lite said groove was in the heart. I’d recently begun to think of myself as alternative, because it seemed better than being a fucking loser, which is how I often felt. Alternative, to me, meant wearing black and listening to punk and indie bands and thrash metal. The Breeders, Nirvana, early Metallica, The Clash, and some hard-core, like DOA and Hüsker Dü. The makers of that music frequently seemed to feel like losers, too. No shame in it. I wasn’t sure how the electronic dance music at the gym fit with my music-for-losers aesthetic, but it made me want to move.

I watched the dancers, and in a minute or so it dawned on me that I was no longer so scared. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see people I vaguely recognized from the young people’s meeting. Some of them seemed to be alone, too. The dim light took away my sense of being exposed, and I was about to sit down on the edge of the stage when a woman sidled up to me.

“Fuck, he’s hot,” she said. “I love his arms.”

I’d seen her before at the young people’s meeting. She was only a few years older than me, maybe in her mid-twenties, but she affected this odd, middle-aged matron style somewhere between Jackie O and Carol Burnett. Her hair was parted in the middle and flipped up at the ends. She wore a boxy, bright green suit jacket. I think she worked in a thrift store and it looked like she’d come straight there from her shift. She smelled like mothballs and cigarettes.

She was staring fiercely at a guy in a wife beater and baggy pants who was all pretzelled up and twirling around on the floor. He did have sinewy arms.

I nodded.

“And I fuckin’ love this song,” she said, starting to move her feet in a restless shuffle, still burning eyeholes of lust in the break dancer.

“Me too,” I said, mostly to myself. I was having an out-of-body experience. I was at a social event by myself and I hadn’t yet died. In fact, I was talking in a friendly, if meaningless, way with another person who was kind of interesting.

“Come on,” said the girl, who told me her name was Rainey. I followed her onto the dance floor. She peeled off her green blazer and dumped her purse on top of it. I stood uncertainly, unsure whether to do the same.

She leaned in and shouted in my ear, “The place is full of drug addicts. Don’t leave your purse alone.”

Right.

I noticed her arms were scarred with ropy track marks and she noticed me noticing.

“See,” she said, grinning. “Fucking addicts!”

I put my coat and purse beside hers. And we started to dance. Technotronic “Pump up the Jam.” Soon we were surrounded by other dancers, most of them from the young people’s meeting. A few of them were amazing dancers, the kind who showed up on boy-band videos. Others had more enthusiasm than skill.

After a few dances, sweat poured down my face and pooled at the waistband of my tights and, in the greatest miracle of all, my relentless thinking finally stopped. I had no idea it was possible to get a break from self-consciousness without putting yourself into a drug- and alcohol-induced blackout. It was a revelation right up there with that one-day-at-a-time concept. I wasn’t self-conscious or afraid or ashamed or any of the other colours in my limited palette of painful emotional states. God save me, but I was free. Techno had done it! I was dancing in a hot, stuffy church basement, and for once in my life, I didn’t care that I wasn’t dancing with the coolest people in the coolest club.

After the music ended at 2 a.m., the people who were left went to an all-night pancake restaurant around the corner. Surrounded by club kids, cops, and hookers, we ate breakfast and drank coffee and talked in that slightly giddy way people do when they’re sleep deprived.

I got home at around four in the morning. I crept into the house, trying not to wake up my housemates. As I climbed the old staircase, I caught a whiff of myself. I smelled like dried sweat, perfume, and pancake syrup. The guy in the room across from mine, who was working on a doctorate in political science, was on his way out of the bathroom.

“Holy shit,” he said. “You were out late.”

I nodded, trying to contain my enormous smile.

“What were you doing?”

I shrugged. “I was out with some people.”

Oh yes, I was.