That I’ve been searching for the same things ever since.

—Grace

It’s like lightning, like love, like the cure. And if you haven’t felt it you can’t judge—or at least shouldn’t. If you haven’t felt it, how could you ever really know what us addicts, us experts, are up against in this life of programs and counselors and sponsors, what we face because of or in spite of our earned expertise? Ask, and if any one of us is telling the truth we’ll admit that our kind of lying is like a religion.

This is why they say no one does this alone. Why they say once an addict equals always one. Why they say your program membership should be lifelong. Why they mandate ninety meetings your first ninety days. It’s tough to guess how many are here except to say that it’s more maybe than expected and never enough as it should be. Up front a new group leader—he’s a shaggy redhead with freckled arms—sits on a table and sips a steaming mug. He raises a hand and waits until the gabbing stops, until the members scrape their chairs into place; he waits and clears his throat and sets aside his drink and stands.

Hello, I’m an addict and my name is Randy, he says. Welcome to the Learning to Live chapter of Narcotics Anonymous. I’d like to open this meeting with a moment of silence for the addict who still suffers. This settles us. Randy hops off the table and pads near a portable chalkboard.

Is there anyone attending their first meeting? he says. If so, welcome. You are the most important people here. All we ask is that everyone present follow one law: Never attend a meeting with drugs or paraphernalia on your person. If you’re carrying, please take it outside and leave it and we’ll welcome you back. This protects our meeting place and the NA fellowship as a whole. Randy moves near the first row of seats. He’s short and soft, a mix that usually gives grown men a complex, but somehow commanding. You have to make five years or more to lead a group, which means for us—or at least those of us who’ve been in this place, those who’ve tried and failed, who’ve quit and joined—Randy is an apostle. If you’ve used today, please seek out a fellow member at the break or after the meeting, he says. It costs nothing to belong. You are a member when you say you are.

As is my habit, I scan the shoes of the members in my row—it ain’t a clean pair among them—then off to my sides. My neighbor’s arm is sprent with needle pricks, his thumbnail discolored. No way to justify this life, my life, but slamming a needle is a whole other harm. Randy leads us in the we version of the Serenity Prayer: God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

We finish and members volunteer—everyone’s always so eager to submit—to read from the basic text.

Who is an addict?

What is the program?

Why are we here?

How does it work?

The twelve traditions.

The meetings begin the same. So goes a theory of resurrection.

An addict, any addict, can stop using, lose the desire to use, and learn a new way of life, they say.

They say and they say and it sounds so easy, as if living clean is no more than hitting the right switch, as if it takes something less than heroics to face history dead-on, to accept the life we’ve earned. The meetings are meant to be havens, but not everyone comes for safety. I wasn’t but few blocks away last meeting when this guy approached me—breath smelling like the worst breath—claiming he had what I need. I’d seen him in the meeting, reciting the steps, even stuffing money in the seventh principle basket, seen him running his glazed eyes up and down the rows. No, I think I got what you need, I said, and offered him a handful of mints.

We make fearless and searching inventories.

Hello, I’m an addict and my name is Mark. My drug of choice is meth. I used to deal it, then, bam, my first hit. Couldn’t breathe without the shit after that. Every day spent chasing the next score. The next hit and nothing else. Up for a friggin week straight sometimes, getting high, no food, a sip of water when I remembered. A real addict too. Would piss myself if the dope wasn’t finished and a trip to the bathroom meant missing a hit. It wasn’t long before people I’d known all my life turned their heads when they saw me coming, seen someone resembling the old me, with the way, on a good run, I’d shrink down to a percent of myself, skin with a few sharp sticks inside. Got so bad I couldn’t friggin stand to walk past a mirror. The dope dropped me so low that I broke in my mom’s place and stole her wedding ring. Worthless man, no other way to put it. Scum who didn’t deserve to live.

We make fearless and searching inventories and tell the fearful to keep coming back. Keep coming back and it works. We can stand up and testify when we so choose. But what would I tell them? That the first time I took my eldest. That Dawn, my best friend, promised I’d feel better and forget. That I’ve been waiting for that to happen ever since. Though when we tell our story, a bit of our trouble becomes another’s, there will be no fearless and searching inventory for me. Not today. My business is my business until it isn’t.

Randy announces Cleaniversaries, and awardees stroll up to accept their tags. It makes me think of the time I earned a tag, years ago, my first stint in NA. Was proud of it too, but not proud enough to show it. Too afraid of what people might think, or, worse, what they might say. The awardees palm their foil-scripted color tags and stroll back to their seats while the rest of us boom our hands together. Honest, it makes me jealous seeing them. Makes me anxious for my time to come. And when it arrives this time, who cares who sees? When it comes this time, let them all see.

We pass around the seventh-principle basket. We search for something to give, singles mostly, a few fives and tens, an odd twenty. I scrounge for dollars, the best I can do. We read up to the twelfth tradition, the first one I learned by heart: Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.

 

The other night I watched a show on drugs. It talked about this study where they rigged rats to a machine that shot them with cocaine every time they pressed a bar. The man on the show explained that the rats pressed the bar at the expense of food, sex, sleep, pressed even when it meant they’d suffer electric shock, kept right on pressing for hits until they fell out dead.