I KNEW THAT I HAD NOT TAKEN A DRINK IN MORE THAN A month, but I was not counting days. And I was not going through the rigmarole of attending ninety meetings in ninety days. I had done this years ago, and in the end celebrated my success by going on a bender that lasted almost as long and landed me in the hospital.

I had asked people years ago about the significance of those ninety days. Why not sixty days, or a hundred days? Why ninety? No one could give me an answer. Someone suggested there were spiritual implications inherent in the passage of ninety days, but he could not expound further and in the end admitted that he really did not know what he was talking about.

I had also asked about the purpose of all who had fewer than ninety days of sobriety openly declaring their day count at the start of meetings. Someone suggested that it was to encourage others to open up more freely. I maintained the belief that it was for the entertainment of those who said such things.

The truth seemed to be that most of those in the program dealt with sobriety as they had dealt with alcohol, obsessively and compulsively. They did not liberate themselves from their alcoholic ways. They merely transferred them to a sobriety that seemed to me self-defeating and dangerously precarious, little more than a Pyrrhic victory over the torments and ill-being that had fucked them up and enslaved them in the first place. A sober invalid was still an invalid, a sober slave was still a slave.

No, I was not counting days. But I knew the importance of meetings and the inspiration and sense of fellowship I took away from a good meeting.

I decided that I would go on Ash Wednesday to Our Lady of Pompeii in the Village. With Palm Sunday it was one of the two days of the year when I went to church. Back when the old women—or their husbands, seeking free beer—came into Dodge’s bar on Bedford Street with palms from Pompeii that they had taken home and woven into sprays as their mothers had taught them to do, Ash Wednesday was the only day of the year that brought me to church. The observance of these two days were all that remained of my Christianity. They were the only Roman Catholic rites in which I engaged, as I saw Christmas and Easter as good pagan feasts that had been co-opted by the early Church. I liked the ashes, the frond-leaves and little plaited crosses of palm. I had it timed so that I missed the Mass and arrived just as the ashes or palms were given out. I don’t know what it was that I liked about them, but I liked them.

I would eat breakfast, take the subway to Sheridan Square, go to a meeting on Perry Street, then hit the church at the end of the nine o’clock Mass, when the lines for ashes were formed and moving rapidly. After that I would walk round Bleecker Street to Faicco’s, buy some ground pork and sausage. Then I would go to Murray’s and see if the parmigiano had the right shade of age to it in the half inch or so under the rind. If it didn’t, I’d go down to Dean & Deluca. I had been craving pasta with the sauce that was better than my grandmother’s, better than any chef’s, here or in Italy. It was better because I had taken the best from wherever I encountered it, and I had blended the best together, and then had made it better. And I would make it tonight, and I would eat it tonight and for the rest of the week. There was already a big jar of stock in the refrigerator. I had boiled it up the other day. It was good to be getting back my cooking jones.

Perry Street was one of the places where I once had done those ninety meetings in those ninety days, where I had learned that this was not a good thing for everybody, that it was more important to be sober and serene without counting on a string of beads that might choke us when the last bead was counted. That was sixteen years before, in a different winter, a different springtime. I had encountered a lot of good people at those meetings. And a few arch assholes. When one chose to speak at a meeting, it was customary to introduce oneself by first name, followed by the phrase “I’m an alcoholic.” Some people unnecessarily embellished this to “I’m a recovering alcoholic,” or “I’m a gratefully recovering alcoholic,” or some such thing. Among the habitués of the Perry Street meetings was a smarmy little putz who always wanted to speak and who always introduced himself as “an alcoholic and a sex addict.” I was sure it was his way of cruising for cock. I couldn’t stand him. And I had a hard time with the people who manifestly had little or no background of heavy drinking, who came to these meetings as others might attend church socials or coffee klatsches, solely to hear themselves talk. And talk, and talk. These people could and often did drive you to drink. I sometimes needed to absent myself from them or risk relapse.

I saw some people I remembered fondly, and it was good to see that they were still there and doing well. They looked older, as no doubt did I. But they all looked better, while I knew I looked worse. As I walked up the church steps, people marked with ashes were already leaving. I felt comfortable here, in this familiar old parish church, this church that misspelled Pompeii on its own calendars. I kept one of those calendars on my kitchen wall year after year. The local Italian undertaker was their featured advertiser.

The pale stone holy water font attracted me. I wetted my fingertips, genuflected, and made the sign of the cross on my forehead, where ashes, sprinkled with holy water, would soon be. I also liked holy water, the idea of it, the feel of it on my skin. I used to enjoy lighting candles as well, but the old votive candles and thin wooden candle-lighting sticks, with which you kindled one candle from the flame of another, had been replaced here and in most churches by electric candles with little toggle switches. So I did not pay to light a candle, and I did not light a candle. I put money in the poor box instead.

As always, my eyes were attracted to the statue of the Virgin Mary in the eastern apse. As always, I wanted to fuck it, wanted to rub my naked cock against the cool, smooth white alabaster of the Virgin Mary’s ankle and face. I knew that this was a gratification I would never have. At its unattended sanctuary in Cyprus I had fucked the sacred black stone that is believed to be the oldest of venerated objects, the slab in which the Great Mother was first perceived. Not far from there, at the edge of the Mediterranean, I had fucked the hard wet sand of the shore near the big rock where Aphrodite was said to have first stepped from the sea. But city churches were no longer kept open through the night. I thought of all those reliquaries in the Vatican and throughout Europe that contained the true blood of the Virgin Mary. I wondered whose blood it was, drained from the dead or from kicking stuck pigs.

Holy water. Seawater. The priest before the altar touched ashes to my forehead and spoke.

“Remember,” he said, “that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Like a phoenix, I thought, like a phoenix.

I ended up walking to Dean & Deluca, then walking home from there. The cold winds were still bitter, but the knowledge that the spring equinox was only weeks away made them seem less unbearable. I stopped to buy a bottle of wine for the sauce I would make. I decided on a good Barbera.

This was something that many in those meeting rooms would not do: cook with wine. Some would not even go into a liquor store or wine merchant’s. Some would even ask in restaurants if this or that dish was prepared with wine or alcohol of any kind. Such bits of stagy melodrama were usually affected or at best delusional. Who, having tasted both, could not tell the difference between the taste of life and the taste of death? Who could not tell the difference between the taste of good wine and the taste of dead-monkey juice?

I would use only about a cup of this wine, not measured but poured slowly from the bottle. It would be a shame to let the rest go to waste. I thought of Melissa. I thought of the rich red sauce. I thought of the deep scarlet wine.

It was all so much better when one was sober. All of it. I put on an album of Bach cello suites, sorted the groceries, took down a big enameled cast-iron pot and set it on the stove. I poured a glass of milk, took a ten-milligram Valium, sat on the couch, lit a cigarette, and relaxed. It would be a nice evening. And evening would become night. Yes. It was all so much better.