AUTHOR’S AFTERWO RD

When I was 17, I had the world by the tail. I was an honors senior on scholarship at one of the great prep schools in the country, and I could write my own ticket to college. I was the oldest of four kids in a family that wasn’t the Cleavers, but it wasn’t bad by any standard. My father had gotten sober in AA in the early 1940s, and we had moved from three-deckers in South Boston and Dorchester to a twostory house of our own on the South Shore, with three acres of land and a barn that we didn’t really know what to do with.

In September of my senior year my mother was killed in a car accident, and in March my father died of a heart attack, and everything fell apart. Within weeks of my father’s death I had my first taste of hard liquor, a pint bottle of Bacardi Rum. That first pint lasted me a week. I’d take a sip before sitting down to watch TV, before starting my homework, before going out on a date. Suddenly the whole world was technicolor, everything was interesting; I had been half asleep and three-quarters bored my whole life, and now, for the first time, I was fully awake.

That was the first pint. When it was gone I managed to get another one. The second one lasted maybe 45 minutes. I got very drunk and very sick and I established the pattern of all my subsequent drinking experiences: I would drink as much as I could hold of as much as I could get my hands on as often as I could get my hands on it. My biggest problem was getting my hands on it, because at seventeen I looked about fourteen.

On the day of my father’s funeral they came down from Exeter to tell me I was getting a full scholarship to Dartmouth. By the time I got there in September, I was a full-fledged and fully enthusiastic alcoholic. From there it went the only direction it could possibly go, downhill, and rapidly. I wasn’t evil and I wasn’t really dangerous— although it was just luck that I never hurt anyone while I was driving drunk, fighting to stay awake, or holding one hand over one eye. When I was sober, I could be charming and funny. But all I ever thought about was my next drink.

From a simple recitation of the sequence of events, it might sound as though I’m implying that I became an alcoholic because of the family tragedy. That’s tempting, but far too easy. Looking back to earlier years, it’s easy for me to see the personality seeds that sprouted under the irrigation of alcohol. I think my father was able to see them too; he was always trying to get me to read AA literature.

At the same time, I’m not one of the people who believe that alcoholism is caused by character defects. I’ve known hundreds of people whose defects look a lot like my own, and only a minority of those people are alcoholic. What is undeniable is that when my defects met my alcoholism, it was a match made in heaven.

So no, I don’t blame my alcoholism on the death of my parents; it was going to happen anyway, and I’ve always been glad they weren’t around to see it.

My drinking lasted just over five years. The only period of consistent happiness I remember from those years was the six weeks I was locked up in an Air Force stockade outside of Denver. They worked us pretty hard during the day, but they gave us three good meals and a warm bed at night. I couldn’t believe how good I felt, or how happy I was. I remember singing at the top of my lungs in the shower one night, and the desk sergeant stuck his head in and yelled, “Hey! Perry Como! Knock it off! I’m trying to make a phone call out here.” I thought, “This is a great life. This life would be perfect if I could only get a drink.”

But eventually they discharged me and I was able to get a drink, and the disease took over again. Sometimes I put up a really obnoxious front—my first actual arrest was for “drunk and obnoxious;” I’ve never figured out whether that was a standard charge or one that they had invented for my behavior that particular night.

Certainly no great criminal, dangerous only by accident; but I truly thought I might have been God’s biggest disappointment ever. He had given me so much to work with, and I was such a total fuckup. People would ask me if I thought alcohol might be my problem and I’d say, “If only it could be that simple.” But it turned out that it was that simple.

I came to my first AA meeting on May 20th, 1962. I knew that night that I was home. I wish I could say that I hadn’t had a drink since, but this year (2012) I celebrated forty years of continuous sobriety. (Yes, that includes weekends, and yes, I do mean forty years in a row.)

My publisher asked me to write this section as an Introduction. I made several starts at that, and finally decided that I could do a better job on an Afterword. If this were an Introduction, I would have to try to convey to you in prose my love for AA, my gratitude for the fact that it first saved my life, and for the way it then informed every aspect of the life that it had saved.

I might talk about coming into AA at 22, when the average age was probably over 50, listening to heart-breaking stories from men who never got to watch their kids grow up, and knowing that I would get a chance to do those things right. Did I do all those things right? Of course not. Just enough of them to make all the difference in the world.

In an Afterword, I don’t have to convince you of any of that. If you’re reading this, I can assume that you’ve read what goes before, and if my love for AA hasn’t already come through, there’s nothing I can say at this point anyway.

WHY THIS BOOK?

I consider this book my legacy. Two of the great loves of my life have been poetry and Alcoholics Anonymous. Without AA, there wouldn’t be any poetry in my life.

In the twelfth step of the AA program, it is suggested that we “carry the message” to other alcoholics. Maybe a book like this can convey that message of hope in ways that haven’t been tried before, and reach people who might not be receptive to other means. Maybe it can generate hope in hearts where hope has been a stranger for a long time. Maybe it can enrich the sobriety of some who have already achieved it and who need an occasional dose of what art offers, the abiding sense that we are not alone.

WHY NOW?

It’s now or never. I’m dying. No, I’m not writing this from my deathbed. I’m sitting up at my desk, fully dressed. As I write I’m looking forward to going out this Thursday evening to do a reading at a little coffee house that has been good to me in the past. I’ll have to read sitting down, using supplemental oxygen, but my voice is still good and I’ll probably hang around long enough to sign a few books afterward.

But I’m very probably going to die before you do. After almost two years of surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation, a couple of weeks ago my wife and I decided against any further tests and procedures, and availed ourselves of hospice services. I’m very fortunate not to be in any particular pain, and I’m OK with the rest of it. There was a time I didn’t expect to live to see 25; now I’m 73. The difference is, as Raymond Carver said, “all gravy.”

Sometimes you’ll hear an AA say, “I have a disease that seems to believe that it can kill me, and go on without me.” I like to think that whatever little slice of the AA message I carry might somehow be able to go on without me.

APOLOGIA

Now comes the apology I owe you for the partial bait-and-switch in the title. The title suggests that this book is a volume of poetry, but a few seconds of browsing probably showed you that it also includes considerable prose. I could point to my poetic license, and make my stand on the ground that I have always been in favor of blurring all the dividing lines; that I believe that of all the categorical words defining literature, the word “poetry” is the only one big enough to include everything.

But there is also a less militant explanation.

This book was conceived as a slim volume of honest-to-God poetry. It’s now a couple of years since I circulated the first cut to a dozen or so friends and colleagues to get their opinions on what to keep, what leave out. Some of these first readers were poets, some were in recovery, and some were double winners.

Most of the pieces in that first cut were conceived as poems before word one had been written. But in putting together that first cut, I also drew on material from a folder that I called “Meeting Notes.” Sometimes an AA meeting will set off a chain of connections in my head that I find very exciting. On those occasions I sometimes write it all down when I get home.

A few of the poems in the first cut were the result of reworking prose from Meeting Notes. And as I browsed through Meeting Notes looking for other candidates I found some passages that could probably qualify under the general category of “prose poems.”

And there were other pieces that no one could possibly mistake for prose poems, but I just liked them too much to cut them. What the hell? My pre-readers could make that judgment for me. As it happened, some of my pre-readers liked some of the prose better than some of the poetry. So I went with it.

The line got further blurred when from pre-readers and eventually from editors, I got questions about some of the references in the poems. In “Drunks,” for example, what is the “Big Bed?” What are the Dropkick Murphys doing in there? I could have edited the poems to clarify, but that poem had stood that way for twenty years. It was true to the time and place of its writing, and I didn’t want to compromise that. Footnotes seemed to be the solution that let me have it both ways. Not ideal, but I’m not the first poet to employ them.

And if I don’t answer these questions now, who ever will?

Most important, when we considered alternative titles, was that without those five letters (P-O-E-M-S), there would be no indication on the outside of the book that there was any poetry involved at all.

ONE LAST EXPLICATION, AND A SMALL REQUEST

AA has two anonymity traditions which I consider sacrosanct. The result is that if this book is released in my lifetime, I can’t put my real name on it. But once I’m dead, anonymity is moot. So if the name on the cover of the book in your hand is other than “John X.,” you’ll know that I’ve gone on to the Next Great Adventure. If you’re a praying person, please say a little prayer for my widow. She made me very, very happy.