1 AA, or 10,000 Days at a Time

On December 25, 1994, I took my last drink. I was fifteen years old.

Getting sober at fifteen sucks.

Getting sober at fifteen on Christmas sucks more.

Getting sober on Christmas as a Jew is more or less neutral. It neither sucks nor does it not suck.

I didn’t have to worry about how to make it through a Christmas family gathering sober, staring wistfully at the bowl of eggnog, wishing it was spiked.

But I did have to worry about New Year’s Eve.

Getting sober on Christmas sucks because, by virtue of the unchangeable nature of the calendar, you will be, should you make it, six days sober on the most important drinking night of the year: New Year’s Eve. Amateur night. I knew that even if I made it to December 31, I wouldn’t make it any further. I was doomed before I started.

Of course, I was getting ahead of myself. As I am now. I should start at the beginning. The day I quit. Day One.

Actually, no, I should start before the beginning. The days I tried and failed to get sober. When I’d quit and then immediately un-quit the second I felt a craving. The second I felt anything at all. I should start there, before I stopped. That’s the real beginning.

Actually, no, I should start before then, at the real real beginning. June 10, 1935. That’s the day Dr. Robert Smith, an Akron-based proctologist and lead singer of the Cure, took his last drink and got sober with the help of Bill Wilson, a failed New York stockbroker. The birthdate of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Or I guess we should start before that. How’s April 2, 1840? That’s when six alcoholics founded a mutual aid society, the Washingtonians, and found a way to stop drinking by helping one another.

Shoot, I don’t know where to start. Let’s go back to the beginning of human history, when one caveman looked at another caveman as he wiped fermented saber-toothed tiger piss off his beard and said, “Ogg, you think you might have drinking problem?”

Seemingly from the time humankind learned the counterintuitive process of rotting a beverage to make it taste worse and you feel better, there have been those who lost control.

The drunks. The addicts.[*1] The lushes. Your dad. Me.

Until the 1940s, alcoholics were thought of as lost causes, not worth the time or energy it took to try to help them. Because they never took that help. They never stopped. They always, every time, broke your heart and never got better. If you had the bad luck of marrying a drunk, you had few choices:

Pray for a miracle of healing.

Kill your spouse.

Pray for the miracle of your spouse spontaneously dying.

The dead-spouse option was by far the most likely to occur.

Alcoholics were doomed.

Then came Sigmund Freud, who said, “Alcoholics aren’t doomed, they’re gay!”

Not kidding. I’m barely even paraphrasing.

Freud postulated that “problem drinkers” were merely latent homosexuals drinking to cover that up and that all the drunk needed was to submit to a full battery of Freudian analysis, integrate the self and he would emerge sober, thirsty only for vagina.

If you can believe it, Freud’s theories did not make a huge impact on recovery rates for alcoholism.

By and large, heading into the 1930s, hospitals straight up wouldn’t treat alcoholics. Refused at the door. Alcoholism was seen as a moral failure, a weakness of the will. Medicine couldn’t treat that any more than it could treat a chronic thief. If a drunk was particularly bad off, they might get thrown into the “loony bin” for a night and tossed out on their asses in the morning but that was about it.

There were some exceptions. In New York City, an alcoholic could get dedicated inpatient help at a comedically dangerous clinic called the “Towns Hospital.”

Charles B. Towns was a former life insurance salesman with zero medical training who just opened a fucking hospital because I guess you could do that back then? The Towns Hospital was a high-priced clinic for well-to-do drunkards and junkies who could afford to pay the up-front fee for a cushy five-day stay, which included a round of Mr. Towns’s notorious belladonna treatment, the recipe to which, and I’m not making this up, was given to him by a “mysterious stranger” who said he’d discovered a compound that would cure alcoholism. It was a noxious cocktail of, and I’m not making this up, equal doses of “deadly nightshade” and “insane root.” You’d hallucinate, puke and purge, and when you started taking, and I’m once again not making this up, big watery shits, they figured you were ready for discharge (physical, not rectal). Towns Hospital self-reported a cure rate of 90 percent based on, and I swear I’m not even making this up, assuming patients who never returned to the hospital had been cured. I guess it never occurred to Mr. Towns that perhaps dying of alcoholism was preferable to riding the snake of the insane-root-and-diarrhea treatment.

It was about this time that a new idea began to formulate around the “Just what is wrong with alcoholics?” conundrum. What if they were not constitutionally weak reprobates? What if they were sick?

The head physician of Towns Hospital, William D. Silkworth, a man whose name sounds like a stoned caterpillar in a psychedelic 1970s animated film, began to describe alcoholism as a disease rather than a moral failing. This idea eventually took ahold of the American understanding of what it meant to be an alcoholic and addict. These were not bad people struggling to be good; they were sick people trying to get well. By the time I hit my first AA meeting in 1993, barely fourteen years old and fresh out of my first rehab, this idea was well integrated into the American cultural understanding of substance abuse. It was a foregone conclusion.

But back then, no one agreed with Silkworth. His contemporaries scoffed at the idea of disease as anything more than a useful metaphor, and it took a national movement and the full, sustained lobbying force of the National Council on Alcoholism to get the psychological community to submit to the disease model.

The truth is, it’s hard to know what addiction really is.

It’s a kind of limbo problem: neither psychological disorder nor not, neither physical malady nor not, neither moral failing nor not. It’s easier to describe what it isn’t than what it actually is.

It’s a mystery why some people drink like pigs and some people find it easy to drink enough to enjoy themselves. And it’s not just drinking a lot that makes you an alcoholic. Even Silkworth admitted that some non-alcoholics actually consume more alcohol than people who develop alcoholism.

We all know those people. They drink constantly but it doesn’t seem to affect their lives. They are jolly, hardworking, and productive despite drinking enough each night to kill a Shetland pony. We even came up with a word for people like this: “Irish.”

So what is an alcoholic, exactly? What differentiates them from the rest of the world? I guess it’s twofold and within each of those folds is an MC Escher painting-worth of nooks and crannies of pathological complexity. But to simplify:

1. Your life begins to deteriorate due to your drinking and drug use.

2. Despite the deterioration, you are unable to stop or regulate it.

In other words, drinking fucks up your life and you can’t stop. That’s a waterslide to rock bottom. My slide was short.

By the time December 25, 1994, rolled around, I’d been in and out of four rehabs, locked in a mental hospital, arrested more times than I remember, assailed with a battery of psychological diagnoses such as Conduct Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Clinical Depression, ADHD, and White Kid Who Thinks He’s Black Disorder.

I was on an array of psychological medications, including Zoloft and Desipramine, which never made me feel less crazy, never seemed to help at all. I’d dropped out of school in the eighth grade, got sucked into the special-education-school-to-prison pipeline, mandated to schools for the severely emotionally disturbed (those are actual kinds of schools!), picked myself up by my Fila straps, got into a high school, flunked ninth grade, got kicked out, went to another school for the mentally disturbed, dropped out, went back, flunked again, started home study, didn’t do the study part, flunked again. That was quite a run-on sentence but what do you expect from a writer who flunked ninth grade three times?

But none of that made me an alcoholic. Plenty of people have chaotic lives and make a mess of their school careers. Many people flunk and have psychological problems.

What marked me as alcoholic was the realization that all these widgets of chaos were a direct result of my drinking and drug use. It was a realization that resonated in my bones like a tuning fork that had found its right frequency. With this realization came another. I knew what to do. I would steel myself to stop for long enough to get my life together. But I always drank the next day. I was fifteen years old and I’d totally lost control of my drinking and drug use. I couldn’t stop.

Back in 1933, Bill Wilson was having a similar experience. Fresh out of his third trip through Towns Hospital, Bill was approaching his rock bottom. All the treatment he’d tried had failed. Even the good old reliable insane root.

At his lowest point, he was approached by an old friend, Ebby Thatcher, who was then a member of the Oxford Group, which was an American Protestant back-to-basics Christian religious order whose mission was to spread the gospel through acts of service. Ebby had become sober with the help of the group and was convinced that helping another person to stop drinking was the only way he’d be able to stay stopped. Bill rejected the help because, let’s be honest, Shakespeare couldn’t create a character more annoying than “Guy who stopped drinking seven weeks ago, found Jesus, and is back to make sure you get sober and find him, too.” But that night, after Ebby left, Bill had a white-light religious experience that convinced him Ebby was right. Bill stopped drinking and never started again.

Five months later, Bill was on his way to America’s bustling rubber capital—Akron, Ohio—for a stockholders meeting and, if you can believe it, they were not thrilled with the performance of the fresh-out-of-diarrhea-rehab broker in charge of their account. The meeting went poorly. Humiliated, Bill slunk back to his hotel to sleep off the shame. The only problem? In the lobby, precariously placed between the hotel entrance and the elevators, was a cocktail bar, alive with the kind of bustling nightlife energy you picture instantly when you think “Hotel bar in Akron, Ohio.”

Bill began to sweat.

Bar. Elevator.

Bar. Elevator

Bar. Elevator.

He wasn’t going to make it. Five months sober, and he’d been bested by a bad day and a taproom. This moment, the moment where willpower crumbles under the weight of a craving, was a moment he’d lived through before. It’s one every addict has experienced. Sometimes it’s only an hour after your proclamation to stop; sometimes it’s five months later. But it always seems to come. It’s the moment when you realize willpower is not enough to get you past the bar and into the elevator. The bar wins. Every time.

But then Bill happened to look between the bar and the elevator. Sliced into the wall, like a life ring bobbing in a churning sea, was a pay phone. Next to the pay phone was a contact sheet for local houses of worship. Bill remembered Ebby’s visit, how Ebby had just reached out to Bill in order to save his own skin. Ebby was sure the only way to stay sober was to talk to someone who was still drinking and try to convince him to stop. Bill reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of change. He knew he couldn’t make it past the bar all the way to the elevator. But he could make it to the phone. He could make it halfway. He just hoped someone would be there waiting for him.

Sitting down at the pay phone at the Mayflower Hotel in Akron that night, Bill started calling local churches at random. When someone picked up, he’d explain that he was an alcoholic and he needed to talk to another alcoholic. Unsurprisingly, again and again, they hung up. I mean, imagine you’re a rabbi and you get a phone call from a man with the sounds of an orgy in the background, asking you to connect him to another sex addict. You probably wouldn’t assume the best. On his last nickel, Bill got a sympathetic pastor with some experience dealing with problem drinkers. “I know someone. Sit there and I’ll have them call you back.” That someone was Dr. Bob. And that call would save not only Bill’s and Bob’s lives but mine too, sixty-five years later.

With just that tiny action, the mere attempt to help someone, Bill had relieved the pressure of the craving enough to drag himself the rest of the way to the elevator and go to sleep, sober one more day.

A quick note: In the above paragraph, I suggested that the pastor put Bill in touch with Dr. Bob directly, but that was a lie, told for stylistic reasons. It worked best in the sentence I wrote and, as a non-historian, I’m allowed to do whatever I want and no review board will ever come for my tenure or call me out for academic censure. Watch: Dr. Bob had a famously long and elastic flaccid penis and would wrap entire flasks of brandy up in its ribbon-like form in order to hide bottles from his wife. See? Silence. Just you and me here, pal.

But speaking of Dr. Bob’s wife, that’s who Bill got connected with on the phone that night in Akron. Dr. Bob was passed out, drunk, unable to give consent to meeting with some weird newly religious ex-drunk stranger, but Bob’s wife, Anne Ripley Smith, assured Bill he’d be up for it.

The next day Bob woke up hungover and grumpy when Anne revealed the news: “You have a date tonight with a guy I’ve never met.” Bob was furious and refused. Anne then did some Ohio doctor’s wife version of “You’re never getting this booty again if you don’t,” and Bob relented. Resentfully, Dr. Bob agreed to meet with Bill Wilson for fifteen minutes, if only to appease his wife.

Bill came over, passionately kissed Anne while making deep eye contact with Dr. Bob and whispering in Bob’s ear “Are you willing to go to any length to stay sober?” Yes, OK, I made that up too. And while it isn’t “historically accurate,” they’re all dead now and can’t prove it didn’t happen.

What definitely did happen is Bob and Bill awkwardly greeted each other and retired into a room, just the two of them, for this fifteen-minute meeting. Bob didn’t come back out for hours. Something happened in that room that would bend the arc of history, change the destiny of millions of people, and provide a spark of hope to otherwise hopeless alcoholics and addicts from that point on. Something that at the time felt insignificant, a chance meeting between two random people, one sick, one sicker, that in hindsight was a pebble in the pool whose ripple effect would cascade through time, growing wider and wider. It was a demarcation point in the timeline. And someday that line would wind its way to me.

Bob sat down expecting what he’d always gotten, a lecture on his drinking and a finger-wagging admonishment that he needed to stop. But Bill didn’t even mention Bob’s drinking. He talked only about his own. Bill didn’t arrive there to get Bob sober; he came that day to keep sober himself. This inversion of traditional approaches to sober outreach seemed to strike a chord with Bob—something was different about hearing a man who’d suffered in the drink himself instead of a highly educated insane-root salesman. Bob could hear him, could relate, could say, “Yes, this man drank like me and look at him now. He’s gotten sober; perhaps I can, too.” With that inversion, AA began.

Bob didn’t get sober instantly after that meeting. It took a few weeks and a few drinks to taper the good doctor off the sauce. His last drink came immediately prior to an anal surgery he was performing on a patient and for which he took a drink to calm his nerves. That last part I am not making up, and it’s one of the most delightfully disturbing parts of early AA history. Ahh, the thirties, when men were men, and a proctologist, shaking with withdrawals, would, rather than simply bowing out of a surgery, sip a little gin, steel himself, and stick a scalpel in your butthole.

So now there were two people sober in AA—which did not yet exist as it was really just two old dudes not drinking. But even this early, they realized that the only hope the two of them had of staying sober themselves was to find new blood. Think of it like a spiritual Ponzi scheme: The pyramid didn’t work unless the base kept growing.

Enter AA member number three. Bill and Bob went to a local hospital together and talked to a man there about the miracle they’d found: each other. Now they encountered the hard part at the beginning of a religious order—the sheer lack of numbers makes it hard to stake a claim on any discovered truth. “If this information was so valuable, why aren’t more people on board?!” “If you’d get on board, we’d have more people!” Luckily for Bill and Bob, the alcoholic dilemma was dire, and people were desperately seeking solutions. Bill Dotson, the man in the hospital, took to the message delivered to him, and upon discharge from the Akron hospital never drank again. AA was now a group of three.

Bill, other Bill, and Dr. Bob spent the summer tracking down alcoholics and convincing them that sobriety was possible through the tenets of the Oxford Group. It began to work.

Satisfied that his job in Akron was done, Original Bill went back to New York invigorated and determined to start a group there.

Bill started the first New York AA group in his home. I keep calling this AA but the truth is that it wasn’t until years later when the organization would look back and realize that’s what it was. At the time, everyone in Akron and New York thought they were simply members of the Oxford Group: the bad-boy club of ex-drinkers within the religious order. But there was tension. The Oxford Group’s specifically Protestant Christianity would agitate against the grain of sand that was to be AA until it finally cut ties with the Oxford Group and emerged as its own little pearl.

As this proto-AA continued to grow, it attracted more and more people who didn’t fit into a Protestant mold. Catholics and agnostics and Jews and Hindus and Muslims all drink too much. All needed an answer. The early members saw this need, this primary purpose: to carry its message to the suffering alcoholic—whoever that alcoholic might be or pray to. So they began a painful extraction from Oxford. This breakup was tough but was made easier the way most messy breakups are made easier: Someone starts praising Hitler.

Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group, went on record thanking heaven for Hitler because at least he fought off the bloody commies and, thank heaven for Hitler, AA had its official cause to leave.

AA, now entirely off on its own, needed a way to introduce itself to the world, a way to show people what AA was all about. They decided to write a book. In this book, they outline their program, their ideas of what alcoholism is and how to get better from it. Many of the ideas in this book were borrowed directly from the Oxford Group’s list of spiritual principles, but AA left Christ out and thus offered everyone salvation.

With the publication of its book, Alcoholics Anonymous, AA was truly born. And somehow, against all odds or logic, six decades later, fifteen-year-old juvenile delinquent me would find in that book all of the wisdom and inspiration I needed to leap off, once and for all, the hedonic treadmill on which I had been running. This chance meeting between senior citizens of the 1930s, this book written by and for losers, was all I needed to recover. At least for a while.

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When I finally, for real for real, totally, this time I mean it, decided to get sober, I was already in AA. I got sent to rehab for the first time when I was thirteen, only a year into drinking and doing drugs. But, man, was I good at it! I stuffed a lot of dysfunction into just that first year. By the time I got to whatever it was I considered rock bottom and decided to join AA, I had already been attending meetings on and off for two years. Since that first rehab, I’d been sent to and kicked out of three more, always for behavioral issues. I really hated rehab. There was something truly pointless and inane about the system of juvenile rehab programs. Out of all four of the rehabs I consider alma maters, I know of only two people who actually got sober.

So why did it seem everyone I knew got sent to rehab?

The answer is Nancy Reagan for some reason.

As early AA expanded, it became clear that infrastructure would be needed to handle the influx of people trying to get sober. Now that there was a solution that did not include insane root or lashing yourself to a tree to wait for the cravings to leave you, there was a surge of addicts trying to stop. With the increase in demand came an increase in the need for places people could go to dry out in an environment that was safe and medically sound. Enter the idea of rehab.

Rehabs vary in scope and severity, from Betty Ford clinic–style mansions overlooking the Pacific, to sprawling medical complexes with state-of-the-art facilities, to basically an apartment building run by a pair of shady ex-cons who have spray-painted the word REHAB on the front of the building. There was something about the lay expertise of AA’s recovery platform that ported easily over to the world of rehabilitation. AA was by and for alcoholics, and therefore being an alcoholic was seen as qualification enough to run a rehab. As a result of this lack of oversight, the system had massive potential for abuse. The first rehab to fall victim to the potential for abuse was…the first rehab. Well, it was one of the first anyway. It was founded by a charismatic AA member named Chuck Dederich, who took acid, had a breakthrough, quit AA, got other AA members and people fresh out of prison to follow him, and set up shop at a storefront in Venice Beach in 1958. For a while, Chuck called it the Tender Loving Care Group before ultimately settling on the name Synanon. Its innovation was twofold: 1. The advent of the reformed addict as professional drug counselor, and 2. The invention of “attack therapy.”

In Synanon, they played “the Game,” which was essentially a group therapy session where the members of Synanon, newly sober or struggling to be so, would sit around and attack one another. They’d call one another out for lying, for hypocrisy, for bad hygiene. No rules, no limits. This attack group was fundamental to the functioning of Synanon. Even the leadership was fair play, as they would jot down the attacks and use them to make policy adjustments. The Game was a new and exciting way to do therapy. No one had ever thought of the therapeutic benefits of being called a stupid fucking piece of absolute shit by a two-day-sober heroin addict. Synanon seemed to keep people sober. Treatment was long-term, two or three years. Then they made a, let’s just say, rather extreme adjustment to their treatment plan. They became Hotel California. Chuck decided addicts were not really ever capable of recovery and therefore should stay at Synanon for a bit longer: their entire lives. And somehow this did not dampen the enthusiasm for the program?? By the time Synanon fell apart as an organization, it had swelled to include 1,300 full-time clients/patients/heads shaved. It somehow grew and grew in popularity while getting weirder and weirder, like Michael Jackson, Elon Musk, and the United States of America.

Was Synanon a cult? Let’s see.

Everyone must shave their heads? CHECK.

Couples must ask permission to get married? CHECK.

Mass divorce, couple swapping, and forced abortions? CHECK.

Attempted murder by dropping a rattlesnake in someone’s mailbox? CHECK! CHECK! CHECK!

After the attempt at snake murder, Synanon fell apart. And yet, against what would seem to be obvious logic, the tactics and techniques forged by Synanon lived on. The idea of a rehab you can never leave was more or less abandoned, but inexplicably, the other brainchild of an alcoholic’s acid revelation became a standard technique in rehabs for years to come: attack therapy. This “therapeutic” “modality,” straight out of the mouth of the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, became commonplace. In rehab after rehab, this method was employed with nothing but anecdotal proof that it did anything therapeutic. Abuse-as-therapy provided a smoke screen for all sorts of other abuses to come. Anything that looked suspect or abusive could easily be excused away as a mysterious and nonintuitive tactic sprung out of the deep wisdom of a practitioner who was almost always just some random guy whose only qualification was that he nearly drank himself to death. Try googling it yourself and you’ll see that just about every result of “attack therapy” will start with the word controversial and end with the words shut down due to allegations of abuse.

You would think that this kind of sadistic therapy through torture would have lived a short life, but then came the crack panic of the 1980s, tough love, and Just Say No. And that’s when the throat goat herself, Nancy Reagan, took it upon herself to stamp out drugs, and a generation of kids had to sit through elementary school lectures on the scourge of drugs co-presented by a cop and an ex-gangbanger who would pop and lock and rap about how he caught hepatitis from a needle. For most kids, that was as far as it went. But for those of us who got addicted to drugs young or, just as likely, those who simply dabbled in drugs but had panicked parents, we were sent to rehab, flooding the system throughout the late 1980s and early ’90s. How much abuse you faced at these rehabs was largely luck of the draw. Terrified parents trying to keep their kids alive weren’t the best vetters of a program’s therapeutic modalities and as a result, a lot of kids were put through “scared straight” carnage sessions.

But no amount of abuse scandals made the rehab fever break. I never felt particularly abused in rehab, more like bemused. To me the counselors were just another group of adults telling me what to do. They might as well have been telling a dog to speak mandarin.

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I hated adults. It was sort of a defining characteristic. To me, adults meant authority, and authority meant someone telling me what to do. I viewed my job at that age as telling anyone who was telling me what to do to go fuck themselves. But it was more than that. I’d been swatted around from adult to adult, authority figure to authority figure, for my whole life, each of them playing a new tune in what felt like a psychic symphony meant to tie me up in a web of control. From therapists, guidance counselors, teachers, and principals to police, rehab counselors, and psychiatric diagnostic technicians, every adult I knew or met seemed to be telling me what to do, informing me of what was best for me, demanding I walk a path laid out by them. I seethed with resentment. I vibrated with hatred for anyone who was an adult.

Then I got to AA, and it was all adults. I was totally screwed. Never gonna work. It was filled with people who looked like my mom, the cops, the teachers, and, since it was AA, some reformed prison Nazis, too. Adults. They’ll just tell me what to do, I’ll tell them to fuck off, and they’ll hate me.

Then they started to talk.

And they didn’t much mention what I should do; they talked mostly about what they did. Talked about how they hated everyone around them. Hated authority. Hated the cops. Drank to deal with the hatred of others and the consequences that living with that kind of hate had on their own lives. They drank like me. They talked like me. They couldn’t stop drinking like me. They were just like me. Except they didn’t drink. Maybe I could stop like them.

But I was fifteen. One day sober. I didn’t know how to stop. I didn’t even know if I wanted to. I just knew I couldn’t keep living like that, bouncing from institution to institution while trying my best to get fucked up on the way to each. And so, for the first time in my whole chaotic run at life, I asked for help.

In this post–Nancy Reagan rehab world, most big cities had established “Young People in AA” groups to cater to the massive influx of younger members. I was young even by these standards. I was, by at least five years, the youngest person in any meeting I stepped into. At my age now, five years is nothing. A forty-three-year-old and a forty-eight-year-old are the same. But when you’re a young teenager, five years is a giant chasm. On one end is a kid trading Pokémon cards and on the other is a dude lighting a cigarette after fucking his girlfriend. Or in my case, lying about having a girlfriend.

I raised my hand at the Monday Night Young People’s meeting at 2910 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland and said the words that seem to be a requisite for the kind of medicine offered by AA: “I am an alcoholic. I need help.”

And then I got up and left.

Classic alcoholic cry for help. “I will do whatever it takes. Now, see you later, I’m off to see if that help is out in the hallway!”

But a little piece of AA magic happened when I left. One of the residual grains of AA stardust left over from that phone call Bill W. made to Dr. Bob from the Mayflower Hotel that night so many decades ago: The way to stay sober yourself is to help someone else find their way to sobriety. That ethic, ingrained in the mind of every sober member of AA, is so pronounced that, though I didn’t know it then, someone was bound to follow me outside and offer me the help I asked for.

Someone did.

His name was Pidgeon, now a divinity school professor, but back then a recently sober guy trying to get his shit together. He walked out into the hallway, threw his arms around me, and told me, “It’s going to be okay.”

Somehow, that hug was enough to stabilize me, get me back into the meeting, and really synthesize the first piece of wisdom AA has to offer. A slogan so ever-present it has become a joke, the main thing you hear an AA guy say on “The One Where Chandler Gets Cirrhosis” episode of Friends or whatever: “One day at a time.”

On its face this idea is laughably simplistic, the kind of advice I hate most because it’s so obvious it feels like an insult. Like, yeah I get that you’re saying “One day at a time,” but it’s pretty obvious you mean “One day at a time, for the rest of time, say goodbye to having a good time.”

But there’s deep wisdom in the concept. When you’ve found drugs and alcohol to be the only thing that’s ever made your life feel okay, the problem is never about staying sober for a day. Anyone could do that if they had to. The problem is being sober from now on. Living without your medicine, living in that pain, living like this from now on. That’s the terror.

The power is in the hyper-focus on the twenty-four hours in front of you. Just stay sober today. Don’t worry about staying sober for the rest of your life; that’s impossible. Worry about not drinking until you go to bed tonight. Worry about tomorrow when it comes, and if you have to, fuck it, just get high then. But stay sober today. Then of course, you wake up tomorrow, ready to snort a line, and realize, to your horror, that it’s not tomorrow, that it’s become today again. NOOOOOO! Tomorrow never comes. You start the process over. Just for today.

A day at a time you start cobbling days together. One day becomes two. Two becomes three. Three becomes six. Then it’s New Year’s Eve. Or, it was for me.

So back to where we started: six days sober and it was New Year’s Eve. Bad timing. Then to make matters worse, I got invited to a party. I’m not sure I can overstate how exciting a party invitation is to a fifteen-year-old, and it was even more so for me because my friends and I never got invited to parties anymore. We were the types to crash your party, throw the keg through a window, call you a bitch, and then leave. Word got out quickly and our social engagement calendar had dried up. But somehow, someone in the suburbs outside of Oakland made the foolish decision to extend an invite for a New Year’s rager to my crew.

Now I was faced with a dilemma. I was six days sober and absolutely aching to get high. I knew in the marrow of my still-forming bones that to attend the party meant to drink again. Who cares, right? It’s just six days. Not much to rebuild. But here’s the thing: I’d never gone six days before. This was the longest streak of sobriety I’d put together since the first time I got high. Six days takes way more work than six years. Anybody can cobble together years once you get past the hump of days, but how do you get from zero to six days? That’s the miracle. So I had a choice to make. Go to the party, celebrate the new year and throw those half-dozen days into the fire, or stay sober one more day. And I did have options for the night. A super fun teenage party or an AA dance.

The AA dance is hard to describe to the uninitiated. Imagine a disco, pumping with the energy and vibration of Saturday Night Fever. Imagine the electronic music tent at Coachella, thousands of festivalgoers gathering for a final exuberant celebration of their night, the headliner’s stage empty, the tent filled with only those who want to squeeze as much party out of their night as possible, the energy electric and filled with possibility. Imagine that.

Got the image? The AA dance is the exact opposite of that.

Now imagine a Vietnam vet on oxygen for his emphysema shaking his tail feather in a wheelchair to “It’s Raining Men” with a former (?) prostitute on a small dance floor in an old church with the lights on. That’s the vibe.

So, fun party at the risk of losing everything, or a night of torture at a Rotary Club?

I chose the AA dance.

And it was awful.

Boring. Torture. Rotary Club.

I found the only other person in the room under sixty, a girl named Rose, and we sat outside smoking cigarettes and talking about how thoroughly our lives sucked. At 12:01 my mommy picked me up and drove me home. The worst New Year’s ever. At least at the time. In hindsight, I can see how monumental that night was. What a tectonic shift that choice was to go suffer and stay rather than party and go. I’ve had many cool New Year’s Eve experiences. Packed comedy clubs where I was the star of the show. Vacations where I watched fireworks on the beaches of Mexico. Raves where I DJ’d and danced in the new year surrounded by thousands of the most beautiful people imaginable. But that night, sitting under a sad floodlight with Rose smoking Newports, both of us wondering what was going to happen to our lives next, that night was the best New Year’s of my life. It was the New Year’s when I chose my life. This was who I was. This was what I wanted. I wanted to live. The next day I woke up, and New Year’s was yesterday.

Today was, once again, today. I was a full week sober.

A week becomes a month. A month becomes three months. Your brain clears. Now you’re sober. Most people think that getting sober is the start and finish of the process. The problem is the drinking; the solution is arresting it. But of course, that’s not true at all.

The symptom is the drinking, but for most people, by the time they arrive in AA, that symptom is so pronounced, so loud, that it seems to be the entire disease. The process of simply not drinking clears the way to figuring out what the actual problem is. Once you get sober, you start the painful work of figuring out why you drank like that in the first place; why you’re the type of person who, once it began to affect your life, didn’t immediately stop, or curtail it. Or why you tried and failed countless times. Why you swore you were done and then watched yourself drink again. No one likes getting high more than having a good life, not even the alcoholic, so why are so many willing to drink their lives away? Well, some people just can’t help it. And mostly because we can’t seem to figure out what “it” is.

I’ve heard the analogy of an alcoholic being something like a car with a mechanical issue. The first thing you need to do is get off the road and bring it to a mechanic. That’s getting sober and going to a meeting or a rehab or a therapist. Most people who drink too much are like the guy who, hearing an awful noise in the engine, just keeps driving in the hopes that their car has an immune system and will figure out a way to self-repair. The noise gets worse. The problems spread. What was a noise is now a clunk. The clunk becomes a grinding. The grinding becomes smoke. Finally, you surrender. You have to take the car in and ask for help.

Once at the mechanic, you find out what the problem is. Busted transmission, engine failure, acute cirrhosis. That knowledge is VITAL. Without it you cannot move forward. But that knowledge doesn’t fix the car. It only makes the fixing of the car possible.

That knowledge is the famous first step in AA’s twelve-step program of recovery:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

The unmanageable part, that’s the loud part. Figuring that out is pretty easy from the outside. It manifests itself in a litany of consequences, from constantly being late to work all the way to killing a family in a drunk-driving accident. Those are the consequences that come with a life of drugs and drinking untempered by moderation. The alcoholic creates a wake of wreckage behind them. And the consequences get slowly worse over time. As you descend into the pit, all you’re focused on is the pendulum swing of day-to-day living, which starts mild: I’m stressed, my wife doesn’t understand me, I got too drunk and offended the bartender. Then it gets a bit worse: Do I have drugs? Am I dope sick? Maybe I’ll steal some money from my kids. Then it approaches the gutter: My liver’s failing. My family left me. I died.

But it’s harder to see it from the inside. The problem with the hyper-focus on the immediate ups and downs of the life spent in a bottle is that you don’t notice the descent. You slide down slowly, so slowly you don’t realize you’re sliding. Until one day, like the frog in the pot, you’re cooked before you notice. And sometimes it’s not even about noticing. Sometimes you literally can’t remember what happened.

Blackouts are the scariest and most potentially hilarious facet of dysfunctional alcoholic drinking. Here are the top four greatest blackout stories I heard in AA:

1. A person started drinking in San Francisco and woke up in Jerusalem.

2. A person started drinking, woke up in the middle of beating someone up, had no idea why, processed it, figured the guy must have done something to deserve it, and kept going.

3. A person started drinking and woke up in a toddler’s bedroom. No toddler present, thank God. With no idea why he was there, he opened up the window and slipped out into the backyard.

4. A person started drinking and woke up in a threesome with his monogamous girlfriend and his best friend. He stayed present long enough to understand what he was seeing, screamed “Fuck yeah!,” and slipped back into a blackout.

From the outside, of course, it’s clear. It’s unmanageable. If your life is like this, the answer is obvious. Stop drinking. Entire problem literally solved. If only most problems had solutions that clear.

But no addict stops. Because they can’t. They just keep focused on that daily up and down, and keep cracking the bottle to deal with it. That’s being powerless. That’s the real problem. Powerlessness and unmanageability.

Or to put it another way: I had two problems. Strawberries and mindfuck.

The problem with the alcoholic/addict is a lot like having an allergy to, say, strawberries. Whenever I ate strawberries, bad things would occur. Rash, itchy throat, random swelling. I could not eat strawberries without some kind of unpredictable allergic reaction. The solution should be obvious and easy to implement. Avoid the strawberry at all costs. Just don’t eat strawberries! It’s not that complicated. Lots of people have allergies and you don’t see them dancing on a knife’s edge, nibbling at a peanut, hoping they can eat just enough to stave off anaphylactic shock.

But I also have mindfuck! Mindfuck works like this: Despite knowing full well that I cannot eat the strawberry and be okay, every time I see a strawberry, all I can think is: Strawberries!

The sweet juicy bliss of nature’s red bulb of nectar. The thin outer skin breaking apart under the slightest pressure from my teeth, the delicate crunch of that perfect grid of seeds, the rapture of sinking into the meat of the thing. Tart, refreshing, perfection.

Oh the strawberry!

Strawberry pie! Strawberry ice cream! Strawberry soup!

I. Must. Have. Strawberries.

You grab a strawberry, take a bite, and the allergic reaction hits you immediately. How did this happen again?

That’s how mindfuck works. The AA book describes this mental process as “being unable to recall with sufficient force the memory of the suffering of even a week or a month ago” and “strange mental blank spots.” Walking through the world, you are fully aware of how you react to drinking and drugs. You know how bad they are for you. You know the consequences. But the moment you see or think of the bottle, all you can remember is the good feelings waiting for you in there, the party contained in the aquarium. To put it simply, I get really hazy thinking when I stare at a bottle of gin. That’s unmanageability and powerlessness. That’s strawberries and mindfuck.

So if you can’t control your drinking using your own mind because it can’t seem to remember why you weren’t drinking in the first place, if you’ve lost all power over the bottle, what do you need? Having no power means you need…like a Tim Allen catchphrase…more power. And is that power located inside the mind of the very person who just admitted it was powerless? I don’t think so, Tim. It’s time for some Home Improvement. But where do you find it? UNNNGH?!

This brings us to steps two and three of AA’s twelve steps:

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

And:

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Uh-oh. The God dilemma. There’s a lot of song and dance around this sticking point, where AA members insist that they aren’t a religion and that that power greater than yourself can be anything you want, anything at all, including purposefully absurd suggestions such as adopting a doorknob as a god.

This is a cute trick meant to either a) clear the way for people with an aversion to religion so as many people as possible can get help, or b) try to distract from an inconvenient truth: AA is a religion.

It’s a sticky reality that most AA members choose to ignore. AA is a mystical, deity-driven solution to a public health crisis, and if you are an atheist, at best you must engage in some willful cognitive dissonance in order to take advantage of what it has to offer.

AA wants to have it both ways—to be a medically sound solution to alcoholism, which it frames as a physical allergy and a disease, and to be a soul-enriching solution to alcoholism, which it frames as a spiritual malady. And it may be both, but imagine going to the doctor for a yeast infection and having him suggest “Have you tried sacrificing a vulture to Zoroaster? If that doesn’t work for you, how about a doorknob?”

I’m not an atheist, never had religious anxieties, and didn’t personally find this to be a sticking point, but the longer I stayed in AA, the more I thought about the person who arrived as a true nonbeliever and who would invariably be treated as though their belief system was a manifestation of ego or an unwillingness to get better rather than a fundamental problem with a program that purports to be for all but cannot work without conformity of belief on at least some level. People in AA will say “AA isn’t religious, it’s spiritual” like that’s a knowledge bomb drop, ignoring the fact that the dictionary definition of spiritual is “relating to religion.”

That said, despite the fact that, to me, it is clearly a religion, AA as a religion has a remarkably lax policy on what you need to believe in. If more religions resembled AA, the world would be a much more peaceful place. AA ascribes to God no attributes but love and power. The two things most lacking in an alcoholic’s life.

Some AA members are fantastically religious in their faith of origin, some are tree-worshipping deists, some are true agnostics who simply believe in the power of the collective consciousness of AA, the goodwill and mutual aid a sufficient power to effect change. I have not, so far, ever met a person who actually believes in a doorknob.

Of course, there’s another explanation of how and why AA plays so fast and loose with the God dilemma: It knows (as much as a leaderless organization can “know” anything) that it’s a contradiction in terms, and embraces the incongruity. Since AA has no leadership, since it has no clergy or governing body, it can make its own rules. Ground into the sausage of AA are the inconsistencies. These are not evidence of bullshit, but rather useful idiocies, paradoxes that don’t make too much sense, but do make healing possible. God therefore is not a doorknob but a doorstop, a small wedge keeping open the entrance into newfound freedom, a dogma of non-dogma, a way in.

I think I believe in all of these explanations. That all of these ideas exist in AA at once, that AA contains multitudes. I appreciate the low bar AA sets to get you to the power you need.

And look, it shouldn’t be that hard to admit you need a power greater than yourself. If you are on step two then it seems safe to assume you just did step one. Literally one step ago you admitted you were powerless over alcohol. A beverage. A fucking beverage, for sale right now at a 7-Eleven, has beaten you to such a pulp that you need to change your entire life. So yeah, if you’re powerless over a beverage, it shouldn’t stretch you to your breaking point to say, “I need a power greater than myself if I want to regain my sanity.”

There’s a saying that I think sums up the concept of step two quite nicely and explains, I think, the spirit behind the doorknob: “It doesn’t matter what your higher power is, as long as it isn’t you.”

Because the problem is you and, as they say in AA, “A broken window can’t fix a broken window.”

The idea with steps one through three is to realize what’s happening, diagnose what’s wrong, and then get out of the way so that it can be fixed. How do we do that? We do it like Michelangelo. Not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Don’t try to solve an addiction problem by eating a sewer pizza and trying to fuck an intrepid human reporter. I was talking about the other Michelangelo. Someone once asked the Italian Renaissance master how he was able to make a thing as perfect as the sculpture of David. Michelangelo said, “It was easy, I just got a block of marble and chipped away all the parts that weren’t David.” Okay, did Michelangelo really say this? Unlikely, unless in addition to being one of the great artists in history, he also spoke in perfect parable. But it’s precisely what AA is asking you to do, to take away all the parts that aren’t you until you return to form. Your true self, unencumbered and free. A masterpiece. Just get out of the way and let the artist do his work. All you have to do in steps one through three is admit, understand, and allow. And how do you actually chip away the “not David” parts of you? By working the rest of the steps!

Steps four and five are the heavy-lifting steps. “The work” as they’d call it if AA was filled with vapid Hollywood actors, which it is, so they do.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

This is the scary part and definitely where most people stop, realize what’s being asked of them, and bail back into a bottle. The hell I know is better than the hell I imagine.

Taking a true and honest hard look at ourselves was exactly what most alcoholics were drinking to avoid. But without this deep look at the self, one has little hope of recovery or sobriety in the long term. Most alcoholics and, as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to believe, most humans, live on the propulsion of trauma. At some point in our lives, something happens that hurts us, scares us, causes us pain. It’s inevitable, it’s life. When a trauma happens that is too big to face, process, and recover from, we retreat from the trauma, guard from the pain, build a wall around our distress. From that point on, a sliver of our brain power is spent on avoiding what’s behind that wall. If we get too close to the wall, to the pain, we get scared and recoil, bouncing hard away, retreating to where the pain isn’t, to where it’s safe. What was once a straight path in our brains is now a safer detour around the tender part.

Depending on the severity of the trauma, most of us can handle one of these. But when they start to build up, when you have to wall off multiple traumas and find yourself propelled in multiple directions by multiple indelible instances of pain, it’s quite easy to get lost in the maze that your mind has become and to find yourself living a life that isn’t really under your control. There are so many forces pushing you forward in so many different directions in order to avoid ever having to look at your pain that what should and could have been a straight walk forward now looks more like a pinball’s travel history, bouncing from wall to wall, slamming around, unsure of which direction you were headed in the first place. You have lost the thread of yourself, you have lost control. You are now a passenger in your own life, traveling only the convoluted paths you’ve paved by walling off other ones. You are now just trying to hold on. This is why you’ll sometimes meet a person with a dysfunction so glaring and a solution so apparent that you feel like shaking them and screaming at them, “It’s so obvious what you need to do to get better! Why won’t you just fucking do it?!” And you’re right! It is obvious. It would be easy to change. For you. But for them it’s impossible; they can’t see what you can. They can’t see over the wall.

The fourth and fifth steps are an archaeological dig. Wall discovery. An analysis of the self and a walk backward through the strata, deeper and deeper, to find and dismantle, to get back to the self, to set the trajectory right again. To open the roads.

It’s a simple but terrifying process, trauma by trauma, fear by fear, resentment by resentment, you put them down on paper until it’s all there in black-and-white. A life of frenzied propulsion now static in a notebook. Then you open that notebook and read it to someone else.

I did this. Somehow I made it through the two steps that tend to stymie most people. I wrote it all down and sat with my sponsor, ready to confess.

Which reminds me that I should have mentioned sponsors earlier. The “sponsor” is an organic outcropping of the connection between Ebby and Bill, then Bill and Bob. One-to-one connection was the way the program began and has become as close to a “must” as AA has. When you get sober you are expected to ask someone, nervously, like a pubescent boy at a school dance, if they will sponsor you. This does not mean they provide a logo for your race car; it means that they become your confidant and guide through the AA program and its twelve steps. Over time it has also come to take on a general mentor-like role as well, a lay therapist walking you through all of life’s decisions. Some sponsors are laid-back, never-prescriptive spiritual guru types who happily feed you enough rope to hang yourself with, dispensing small bits of fun wisdom, often in the form of light mockery.[*2] Some are really heavy-handed militaristic types who demand you not make a single decision without running it by them. I had one of these once.

Right after my father died and my life felt totally unmoored, I thought maybe a Big AA Daddy could help me make the decisions I was feeling incapable of making alone. Part of his regimen was that every day I had to call him and tell him something that I could use his help with. This made for some awkward conversations on the days when nothing was bothering me. One day, excruciatingly searching my brain for something to bring up, I made a tactical mistake. “Uh, well, I guess this girl did ask me out but she seems a bit off and I’m not into her at all, so I said I didn’t think it was a good idea.”

Like a shark smelling chum in the water, my sponsor pounced: “Oh! And tell me, just HOW is your way going when it comes to finding a partner?!”

Confused, I told him what he wanted to hear: “I guess, like, badly?”

He smiled. “YES! VERY badly! You need to call that woman and tell her you’d LOVE to take her out!”

This didn’t sound right to me and I said, “But I’m extremely unattracted to her.”

He cocked his eyebrow, daring me to continue.

I sighed, “Okay, fine, I guess I’ll go out with her.”

She and I spent a very awkward hour with each other over coffee. She kept offering to convert to Judaism in order to marry me. I came home that same night to a $300 arrangement of roses in a cartoon M&M vase she’d had delivered with a note that read “Think about my offer!” I called my sponsor and told him all of that, and he gulped, “Yeah, maybe that was a bad idea.”

We stopped working together shortly thereafter.

Getting sober so young was a particular challenge when it came to sponsorship. I didn’t want to get mentored by some old loser. Some of these people were seriously old. Like, twenty-seven! My first sponsor was a guy named Ron who was barely nine months sober himself but had fallen in with a traditionalist faction of AA in the Bay Area and was pretty fired up about his recovery. I was in puppy love with a girl from my rehab and was whining about it to him one night when he stopped me and recited advice that he was clearly repeating verbatim from someone further up the sponsorship food chain: “You just need to tell her that you’re interested in a relationship that’s spiritual, emotional, and physical with the goal of marriage in mind.” Why was everyone in AA obsessed with me getting married!?

I shook my head. “Dude, I’m fifteen.”

So a traditionalist wouldn’t work. I decided I’d go to a meeting, scan the room for the coolest-dressed person, and ask one of them. I ended up finding a guy named Eddie whose message of recovery to me was: “Someday, you’ll look around the room at all the women in the meetings and be able to tell yourself, ‘I fucked her, I fucked her, I fucked her….’ ”

With this kind of motivation, I began making my way through the twelve steps hoping to someday squirm in my seat as a dozen middle-aged alcoholic women stared daggers at me. Eventually I limped through enough steps to arrive at the grand confessional.

The fifth step is simple, you just sit there, open up the pages of your resentments, fears, and the harms you have done to others and read them out loud to a barely interested sponsor.

It’s an ancient ritual, the confession. There seems to be power in saying things you already know out loud to someone else. You start to see patterns of behavior, strands of fear running through your life that have been your primary operating system. You see how you react, again and again, in exactly the same way, to the things that make you uncomfortable. You see how your actions have created the world you inhabit and how your perception of the world has been shaped by these actions. You peer over the walls you have built and what’s held back there is never quite as scary again. That’s the primary power of confession, at least in AA: Once you read your darkest secrets to another person and see that that person is largely unimpressed, that it’s just kind of standard operating procedure to them, it’s hard to stay ashamed of those secrets.

When I completed my fifth step, my first sponsor looked at me and with great gravity asked, “Is there anything you left off of this that you haven’t told me? Anything you said you’d never admit to anyone? Have you taken human life or had sex with an animal?”

Over the years I repeated a version of this question (without the specifics) to all of the people whose fifth steps I heard. One guy looked at me and said, with a casualness I can’t forget, “Well, me and my mom made out a couple of times, but we were both adults.”

There was something about the breezy use of the term made out that really struck me. I tried not to betray any surprise and just said in support, “Thank you for admitting to Frenching your mom. You don’t need to be ashamed of this anymore.”

He shook his head, no. “Oh, I’m not ashamed of it, I just don’t talk about it much.”

Yeah. I get that.

Having read my fifth step out loud, I felt freer and more buoyant in the world. I’d begun to tear down the walls in my mind, and it was feeling like an easier place to get around in. I had a chance. Here’s the nasty truth: Most people in AA drink again before they get past the fifth step. For many, the ugliness of who they think they are is just too much to face. People can waltz through the first three steps but when the time comes to truly face the life they’ve made, many alcoholics freeze. For them, the unexamined life is worth dying over.

Having made my confession, it was time to start attempting to live a better life. This is the meat of steps six and seven:

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

It basically comes down to this: Having made a list of all your problems and shared them out loud with someone takes away the shame and makes it possible to adjust your way of living, but, just like stopping drinking, it does not fix you. The fix comes through diligence, willingness, and incremental change. Sure, praying to a deity is a nice gesture, but that’s simply laying the groundwork of willingness for the real work that lies ahead. And the worst part of that work follows steps six and seven immediately. It’s the part we all know from movies and TV: making amends.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

There’s no way around it; it fucking sucks. As I said, most people don’t get past step five, but the survivors aren’t safe yet. Like a rake at a casino, a big ol’ claw comes and removes a huge chunk here, too.

I mean, it makes sense. It’s one thing to admit to yourself and one other guy what you are and what you’ve done. It’s entirely another to call up your aunt and admit to stealing her anxiety medication. The amends steps are daunting, made more so by the length of time you spent drinking and hurting people. The longer you were out there, the more people you have to apologize to. One of the biggest problems with the ninth step is that addicts are profuse apologizers before they enter recovery. Living in a manner that alienates everyone you love, constantly decimating their trust in you, one has to develop a hair trigger on saying sorry. Sorry, I stole your money! Sorry, I rented out the spare room in our house to a crack buddy who paid rent in rocks! Sorry, I said sorry and then almost immediately did the thing I said I was sorry for again! Sorry, I lied to you, I promise it will never happen again! Sorry, that also was a lie!

It gets to be so that the people who love you stop buying it, but you just keep trying to sell the apology anyway since that’s all you have to offer. And you are sorry. You just lack any ability to translate that “sorry” energy into “not doing it again” energy. By the time an alcoholic gets sober she or he has generally exhausted their friends’ and families’ ability to give a fuck about an apology. The trust bucket fills up a drop at a time, but it only takes one kick to knock it over. So, once in recovery and arriving at the ninth step, the apologies stop and the amends begin. To amend behavior is to make better, to change. Sometimes this change begins with a formal mea culpa, but rarely does it end there. It’s common for an attempt at an amends to be spurned, rejected entirely, but that doesn’t stop the change. There’s a caveat in the ninth step that some people in AA take advantage of to justify not apologizing directly: except when to do so would injure them or others.

That single line has been manipulated in the recovery community as much as “a well regulated Militia” has in the school shooter community.

One of the funniest passages in the AA book is the segment where they explain why telling your wife you used to cheat on her while you were drinking is not always necessary. I mean, look, I have no clue what the most ethical answer is for fessing up to an affair, but the idea of a bunch of old men, newly sober, sitting around having a symposium on how to tackle their alcoholism and deciding, “You know what, it might actually be better if we didn’t tell our wives about the prostitutes! Better, you know, for them!” is such perfect comedy, I salute them for the ability to write it with a straight face.

The principle behind “except when to do so would injure them or others” is sound, however. It sometimes makes more sense to start living like you’re sorry than to simply say you’re sorry. If living well is the best revenge, it might also be the best amends. Change your life and you’ll often find people more receptive to your apologies. Because, of course, the problem was never the apology; it was the person making it. Once you demonstrate you have changed into a person whose word you can trust, an apology becomes more possible to accept. So how do you become that person?

The change comes in what AA calls the “maintenance steps,” steps ten, eleven, and twelve:

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

These are the “take these tools and apply them to your life” steps. Step ten is about changing your attitudinal perspective on yourself. Becoming disciplined about your decency. I started learning, very slowly, about the process of becoming a good person. It was difficult work made easier by the fact that since I was fifteen, my patterns of behavior hadn’t been entirely fused into my nervous system. I was malleable and ready to be re-formed. Someone once described the process of getting better like this:

At first I would lie. Then I would lie and return a week later and say, “Last week I lied to you. Sorry.” Then I would lie and immediately admit, “You know what, that was a lie. Sorry.” Then I would stop the lie as I was about to tell it, beat it back, and tell the truth instead. And then, after a while, I found I no longer wanted to lie.

AA is like that. It’s a bizarrely effective holistic cognitive behavior overhaul. Through the twelve steps and a culture of publicly reinforced moralism, the alcoholic gets shocked out of their instinctual shadiness. The lies, the manipulation, the abuse and narcissism are attacked from multiple angles like a psychological chemotherapy until it goes into full remission. Until the instincts are changed. It rearranges your molecules. Is it brainwashing? Yes. But as a popular AA speaker once said, “Maybe you could use a good scrubbing!”

The eleventh step is the “spiritual journey” part of AA’s twelve steps and it’s so fantastically vague, it can literally mean anything. I gave it a shot. I read Siddhartha and was vibrating for a week, tempted to hug a tree growing in front of a coffee shop I frequented. That wore off. I thought about Transcendental Meditation, but declined due to the signup fee. I did guided meditations and prayer beads and morning readings and read The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. Nothing seemed to transform me in any powerful way.

Then, when I was sixteen and about a year sober, I was on my way to an AA conference in Reno, Nevada, and stopped for gas. The attendant, a striking fifty-year-old Polynesian man with long black hair and bracelets covering his wrists, walked right up to me with a quizzical look in his eye. “You’re headed to the AA conference, aren’t you?” he asked. My mind was blown. “How did you know?!” I asked, forgetting the large AA medallion I wore around my neck. He smiled gently. “I had a dream about you. I knew you’d be coming. I’m Saul, I’ve been sober twenty years, and I’m going to help you learn to meditate.” This was the sign from above I’d been waiting for. Truly amazed, I felt like I was walking on air. Saul attended the conference that weekend. I spent it under his wing. He explained that he was a Hawaiian kahuna and that he’d had some vision of me. I eagerly accepted the role of his spiritual charge. After that weekend, I’d spend hours on the phone with him, learning to meditate, a jade pig he’d sent me resting on my root chakra, breathing energy into its little form, feeling the spiritual power of what he called “talisman meditation.”

One day Saul simply fell out of my life, but he always dwelled in my memory as a holy man who drifted into my life at exactly the right moment, zapped me with spirit, and sent me on my path.

Years later, a sober guy who’d moved from Reno to Oakland cocked an eyebrow when I mentioned I’d once had a kahuna from Reno AA teach me how to meditate.

“Saul?” he asked, his voice dripping with skepticism.

“Yes! That was the guy!”

“Yeah, Saul tried to fuck me and every other young dude who got sober back then.”

“Hmm,” I said, thinking of the jade pig resting two inches from my cock, as Saul’s breathy voice urged me to breathe deeper. “That does make more sense than a kahuna who works at a mini mart having a psychic vision of my arrival.”

But since he never got as close to me as the pig did, I decided to keep him as a positive memory. So what if he was quietly masturbating during our meditation sessions? He too had a talisman to focus his energy toward: pubescent wannabe gangsters trying to find themselves.

Before he lost interest in me (which, now that I think about it, was right around when I started shaving), Saul sent me a book of Hawaiian spirituality, written, like many books of Polynesian wisdom, by a white woman. In it I read a passage that I’d never forget as it seemed to typify the entire journey through transformative spirituality that I had embarked upon. It read, “The world and the people in it are the cause of all of your problems. But obviously you cannot change the world and all the people in it. Change yourself and you will find that the world and the people in it have changed around you.”

Slowly but surely, I started to change.

I got to the end of the steps and emerged a diametrically altered person. But like that book told me, the change was terraforming. At the end of the steps, I lifted my head up to find that the world had changed. Every adult who’d been my enemy had become just a person, their radioactivity muted under a thousand pounds of spiritual lead. I’d despaired of ever righting my course, and suddenly I felt like the world held promise for me. I wasn’t angry anymore. Anger and rage had been my defining characteristics for much of my young life, and they now seemed stripped from me. My old self was like a chimera who’d taken control of me and had suddenly departed the organism. I didn’t just feel different; I felt transformed. Totally and fundamentally. I’m really trying hard here not to say I was born again but there was little difference. As the AA book describes and my experience bore out, I was on “the broad highway, shot into the fourth dimension of existence.”

The steps had worked on me.

I was sixteen years old.

Bizarrely, though the twelve steps are the AA program of recovery, countless people go to AA for years and simply never work through them. I don’t mean the people who work them and get stuck on one, the difficult soul-wrenching work simply too much for them. That I can understand. It’s terrifying to get deep down into the muck of your own psyche. It’s too much for some to bear. I’m talking about the incredibly common phenomenon of people who come to AA, attend meetings, participate in the communal aspect of it, and simply never even attempt to do the work.

They’re called twelve step groups! Because of the whole “twelve step” part! Not doing the steps when you’ve joined AA is a lot like this….

Forget alcoholism. That’s not your problem. Your problem is that you’re broke. You need money and you need it bad. Everything you’ve tried to do to make money has failed you. You’re powerless. Then suddenly, there’s some hope. One night you’re watching TV and you see an infomercial with a guy saying, “I made millions taking out real estate ads in newspapers around the country.” This seems promising! Your problem is a lack of money; this guy seems to have money! Bingo bango.

At the end of the infomercial the guy says to attend a meeting to find out more. They meet at the conference room of the Courtyard by Marriott on Tuesdays! Even better! An in-person meeting. You’re gonna attend the fuck out of that meeting and find out more. So Tuesday comes. It’s a nice group of people. The speaker, this time a lady, says she, too, made millions selling real estate ads in newspapers around the country. “This is promising!” you think. “It worked for this lady, too! I’m gonna come back here next week and get even more info!” A week goes by, you go back to the Courtyard by Marriott, dip one of those stale Danish sugar cookies that the meeting provided into a nasty cup of coffee, and tuck in to hear this week’s keynote speaker. This guy, a gay Black man in a wheelchair, says he also made millions selling real estate ads in newspapers around the country. At this point you’re convinced: It worked for the guy on TV, it worked for the woman, it worked for the gay Black guy in the wheelchair, it seems like it will work for anyone! It could work for you, too. In fact, it will work for you. You’re sure of it.

The next step is obvious. Attend next week’s meeting.

This goes on for years. Every week you are in that meeting, every week someone else is talking about all the money they made selling real estate ads in newspapers around the country. You’re now friends with most of them. You go to a local diner to eat after the meeting every Tuesday. They offer to pay. They all have money now. But you’re as broke as ever. It’s not working for you like it’s working for all of them. In fact, you haven’t made a fucking cent this whole time and, worse yet, you’ve wasted a year of Tuesday evenings in these fucking meetings when you could have been home watching the new season of CSI: Bakersfield.

Infuriated, you realize this stupid program is a lie; it doesn’t work at all. They lied to you!

Do you see the problem here? The problem is that you forgot to actually do anything. You didn’t call a single newspaper. You didn’t take out a single ad. You didn’t even take anyone’s advice. You didn’t take any action at all. So of course you’re still broke. All you did was go to meetings and listen to other people talk about their money.

This is absurd, right? No one would do this. It doesn’t even make sense. But people in AA do it all the time. The vast, vast majority of people in AA who I saw drink again did so without having completed the steps. I’m not saying it’s easy to do them. It’s not. But it, quite literally, is AA. Deciding AA doesn’t work without doing the steps is like deciding a sandwich won’t fill you up without eating it.

This isn’t to say AA meetings themselves have no value. Without the meeting, I’m not sure what AA even is. Sure, the steps are the actual spiritual program of action, but the meeting is the house of worship. The in-person arm of AA is the meeting. Across the world, every night, in every city, there are groups of alcoholics having a meeting. They vary in size and structure, but the general experience is something like this:

In the basement of a local church or a meeting room in a hospital or Masonic lodge, an AA group has rented out the space and transformed it into a lighthouse for the chronically thirsty. You, a person who’s trying to get sober, look up the nearest meeting online and you show up, not knowing what to expect. When you arrive, you will notice a smoking band of miscreants, not exactly looking like they fit in at the entrance of a church. More than that, they don’t look like they fit together. Hipster Joe and Gangbanger Steve are hugging and sharing a laugh. Housewife Barb laughs at an off-color joke that Biker Nick made. As you approach, however, they all turn in notice of you. A hand is extended; it’s Gangbanger Steve.

“Are you new?” he asks.

You have absolutely no clue what he means by this. “Yeah, I’m like super new. Or wait…” You pause, wondering what the right answer here is: “No. I’m old. I’m as old as the wind.”

The miscreants laugh at what to them is a familiar confusion. “You’re new!” shouts Barb. “Welcome! Go on in and grab a seat, the meeting starts soon.” You smile and walk in. The conviviality out front is so unexpected, you can’t even discern if it was mockery or earnestness. You’re so brittle and scared, everything feels like an affront. It’s incredibly embarrassing for you to be there, but for them, it’s as cool as anything could be. They are people who, having gotten sober and fallen in love with AA, have absolutely zero self-consciousness about being alcoholics. You do not share this lack of shame.

A quick side note about shame before we come back to that meeting: To get sober now is to be incredibly lucky on a historical level. Almost everyone thinks being a recovering alcoholic is cool. The stigma is nearly completely wiped out. But in the early days it was acute and painful and was, I think, one of the main reasons for the second A in AA. The “Anonymous” was such an important ethic back then. To admit you were here, to admit you were an alcoholic, was to commit social and professional suicide. I didn’t fully appreciate this until, years into AA, I hit bottom on sexual compulsivity. A girl I didn’t want to sleep with had propositioned me and, at the time, I lacked even the slightest ability to say no when it came to sex. My policy was, if you were willing, I was game. No exceptions. This led to some Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock–type nights that I’d sooner forget.

This was one.

She came over and I couldn’t help noticing, postcoital, my partner for the evening was furiously scratching a bright red spot on her butt. “Oh great,” I started to panic. “She’s got Butt AIDS. Or Butt Crabs or butt something.’’ I smiled politely and said good night, even though she was in my house. The second she was out the door I ran, fully melting down, into the cabinet under the sink to find something to kill the phantom infection. I grabbed a can of Lysol and stripped naked, spraying my body with disinfectant. I looked out the window and saw her walking by, truly hoping that she hadn’t looked in the window and seen me, freshly fucked, delousing myself, though perhaps that might’ve been a wakeup call for her, too.

At that moment I realized I needed to make a change of some sort. I finally understood the saying “Part of a healthy sex life is never having to douse yourself in benzalkonium chloride.” The next day I went to a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting. I pulled up and was instantly filled with anxiety as I stared at the fifty-yard walk I’d have to make from the car to the entrance. For years I’d been attending AA meetings, and only right then did I finally understand how ashamed those early AA members must have been to attend meetings before the world had met cool sober people like Sam Malone and Eminem. Society does not think sex addicts are “cool.” I didn’t want anyone to see me slink into that meeting. My heart was pounding. I pulled my hat down and hustled into the meeting. The gathering itself was pretty much a relief. I almost instantly understood that whatever I had, it was different from what these people were struggling with. I was a slut. They were suffering from a malady way beyond their control. They talked about liquidating their savings accounts on prostitutes, about getting off work at 5:00 p.m., flipping on the computer to watch porn the second they got home, and before they knew it, the sun was coming up. I was more of a porn from 11:00–11:08 p.m. type.

I honored these people in their struggle and silently thanked them for helping me put my own sex life into perspective. There was one quirk of that program that left me less than magnanimously free of judgment, though. In Sex Addicts Anonymous, or at least at that meeting, everyone who shared started off by announcing how long they had been “sober.” This isn’t done in AA, at least not as an official custom. Maybe the fact that sex addiction, like food addiction and some others, is one of those incredibly rough forms of habituation where fully abstaining isn’t an option. The challenge in these programs is finding a way to stay “sober” while still engaging in a healthy version of the thing that brought you to your knees, no pun intended. So perhaps smaller milestones of abstinence needed to be announced to affirm to the group that it was possible. Their definition of sobriety was the length of time it had been since they’d last engaged in some form of destructive sexual behavior. So again, every person who spoke would introduce themselves, “Hi I’m So-and-So, I’m a sex addict, and I’ve been sober X amount of time” and then begin sharing their thoughts.

A guy showed up close to the end of the meeting, sat down right next to me, and raised his hand to speak. They called on him and he said, “I’m Richard, I’m a sex addict, and I’ve been sober for thirty minutes.” Thirty. Minutes. He kept talking, but I stopped listening. I panicked, knowing what was coming next. The meeting was about to end and, like every twelve step group, it would end the same way: We would stand, hold hands, and say the Serenity Prayer. I was sweating looking at those thirty-minute-sober hands, the fingers still moist from fingering a sex worker in the car in the parking lot of the meeting. I knew that momentarily those cum-drenched hands would be outstretched to me to join in a communal prayer of support. I love my fellow man but not that much. The second the meeting ended I beelined for the door, tipping my cap to the brave and horny men and women in that meeting. Nothing but respect to them, but that was one hand I could not hold. I’d forgotten my Lysol.

Anyway, back to our friend’s first AA meeting.

The meeting starts. Inexplicably, Gangbanger Steve is the secretary of the meeting and, you assume, the president of all of AA? Calling the meeting to order, Steve instructs the group to begin in a prayer. “Oh shit,” you think, “here comes the religion.” But it’s the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

“Okay,” you think, “that wasn’t so bad. I wouldn’t say group prayer is firmly in my comfort zone, but as prayers go that one was pretty inoffensive.”

Steve continues reading the standard preamble to any AA meeting, and then gets to a terrifying part: “Not to embarrass you but rather to give us a chance to get to know you better. Are there any newcomers? We define newcomers as people in their first thirty days of sobriety. Please introduce yourself by your first name only.”

You freeze, panicked. This was not what you’d had in mind. You were just here to check things out, to sit quietly and observe. But now all eyes are on you. Housewife Barb smiles big and nods: “That’s you!” Hipster Joe looks in your direction: “What’s your name, bro?” Fuck. You aren’t going to be able to escape this. Okay, what did they say, “by your first name only”? Okay, you take a deep breath and say your name: “Bob.” You think the worst has passed. It has not. Everyone looks at you in confusion, clearly you have said something wrong. “Uh. It’s Bob. I’m Bob.”

Silence.

You fumble for a new approach. “Er…uh…my name is Robert?”

Hipster Joe’s eyes go soft in compassion, “And what are you?”

What? You do not have a clue. “Uh, Jewish? Libertarian?”

Joe smiles again, “Are you an alcoholic?”

You don’t fucking know what you are! How would you? You’re in minute four of your first AA meeting ever. Terrified of engaging further you relent, “Oh! Oh yeah. Yes, alcoholic here. Big-time.” Everyone smiles and begins to applaud. Hipster Joe shakes your hand, with a hearty Stepford-feeling “Welcome!”

If this was “not to embarrass you” they somehow chose the most embarrassing format possible. You exhale. The meeting moves on. Steve introduces the evening’s speaker; it’s Biker Nick. He begins, “Hi, I’m Nick and I’m an alcoholic.” Everyone answers back, “Hi, Nick!” So that’s how you introduce yourself here.

Nick tells his “story.” It’s a classic formula you’ll hear at pretty much any AA meeting. Depending on where you are in the country, it will be called “sharing,” “giving your pitch,” or your “qualification.” And it is certainly all three, sharing who you are, a sales pitch on why the listener should stay in AA and a proof testimony that you actually qualify to call yourself an alcoholic. It’s a short rundown of your drinking, a description account of the consequences it wrought, and then a description of the journey into recovery and the bounty it bestowed on the speaker. In short:

I drank and it was the only thing that made me feel okay. Eventually it destroyed me, I entered AA, got better, and then…I went to college.

By the time I finished the steps, I found myself a fairly transformed person. It was not subtle or progressive; it was dramatic and profound. I was sixteen years old, I’d struggled with my mental health and general emotional stability all of my life, and I suddenly found myself in control of those faculties. I’d flunked school so many grades in a row I’d given up on making it all the way through. But now I wanted to, and set out to take my GED. Somehow I was able to focus when it came to preparing for the test, and I passed. I still remember my hands shaking when the letter came from the state of California, trembling as I broke the seal in the envelope, crushing the letter in my hand that said I passed, jumping up and down with my mother and grandmother in celebration. Breathing this massive sigh of relief as I suddenly realized my struggle with school was over.

Never again would I be required to learn anything I didn’t volunteer for. This might seem like a strange milestone, but you’d have to have had my life, had to have sat with me through all those special-ed classes, all the IEP meetings, all the aptitude tests, all the learning-disability diagnostic sessions. You’d have had to hear clinician after clinician tell you that your brain was broken and, even though you knew you were smart, find it basically impossible to prove them wrong. When they’d forget to hire a professional ASL interpreter, you’d have to have been the person relaying this awful news to a deaf mother about her son, which is you. Meeting after meeting, diagnosis after diagnosis, I took on the identity of a kid without hope.

That GED was a way out. Maybe my brain was broken but not as badly as they thought.

The moment I opened that envelope, my mother relaxed her grip on my life. She, who had made it her sacred duty to find me help even if it destroyed me in the process, had a seemingly instant transformation once my high school career came to an end. I assume she saw the commitment to sobriety and the high school equivalency as as good as it was going to get and decided to let go. To stop worrying.

Strangely, though I got held back so much, I was out of school early; though I had been chronically irresponsible and wildly out of control behaviorally, I suddenly no longer had any rules to abide by, no curfew to respect, no one to answer to. I was sixteen and emancipated. I was six months sober and free.

My grandmother, despite being a lifelong atheist, always said she thanked God for AA for saving her grandson’s life. She thanked a God she did not believe in. That’s how powerful the medicine in AA is. As a graduation present she sent me to the 1995 AA International Convention in San Diego.

Every five years, AA holds its mega-event, a gathering of AA members from all over the world. It’s like the AA Olympics, and it’s the closest you’ll ever come to an assembly of the entire body of AA at once. There is a flag ceremony, meetings in baseball stadiums, huge block parties. It’s quite an affair. My grandmother bought a hotel room and a plane ticket for me and my brother David, who would be attending as my chaperone. The second we checked into the hotel, David, who was not a natural chaperone, told me he was headed to Tijuana to go get drunk and high and that he’d see me at the end of the weekend.

I struck out to explore this mini-city of AA, and by the time I sat in the main meeting Saturday night, surrounded by sixty thousand other alcoholics and addicts, cheering as the flags from over a hundred nations were placed onstage by sober people from those countries, I had been fully converted. I was vibrating with spiritual energy. I was one among many. A sober alcoholic who could do anything with my life. I, who had felt doomed, who had grown up poor and been institutionalized more times than I remembered, who had been told I was worthless and would amount to nothing, had found my way out. I’d found my home. I’d found my people. This was my Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. This was my Buddha under the lotus. I was a member of AA, and I would do what it took to stay sober, in AA, for the rest of my life, one day at a time. I realized in that stadium that I’d been given a gift, a reprieve, a chance I had to take and use it to help others like me. The possibilities of my life were now endless. I was all potential. All life. All coiled up energy, all kinetic possibility.

I was free. I was free. I was free.

Now I needed to figure out what I was going to do.

One of the main things people who get sober are terrified of is, once they stop drinking and getting high, they will have nothing to do. It seems a reasonable fear, but if you look at it again, even for a second, you’ll realize there’s something very wrong with the worldview that manifests such a fear. If you worry that if you stop drinking and getting high you will have nothing to do, it stands to figure that all you do is drink and get high. Drugs are meant to be a supplement to life, not a substitute for one. This is the fear not of a party animal but of a drug addict. But again, it makes sense that if all you do is one thing, quitting that one thing will make you feel like you’ll never do anything again. But actually the inverse is true. If all you do is get high, and you successfully stop, you will come to find that there is space to do literally every other thing.

I set about doing just that.

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For the first few years I was basically the mascot at Oakland AA meetings. I was barely a teenager, the shiny new thing, the kid who inspired fawning seventy-year-olds to tell me how lucky I was to have gotten sober so young. How lucky. So lucky. It always felt like “Hmm, this is lucky? This is what you call lucky?”

“Hey, it’s Saturday night, what’s everybody up to?”

“RECOVERY BOWLING!” they’d scream.

And I’d wince, but once I got past that, it actually was fun.

Those adults, the ones I’d hated, didn’t just stop being awful; they became dear to me. They became my friends. They taught me how to live. They taught me to grow up. I remember in my last high school, right after I got sober, I was talking to a kid about a conversation I’d had with a friend, “Old Man Bill,” a sweet man who loved me from the second I started attending meetings. Every time I’d come to a meeting, he’d shake my hand and tell me, “I’m so proud of you. I’m so glad you’re still here, Moshey.” He literally never pronounced my name correctly despite the fact that AA is famous for being the place where people introduce themselves by shouting their own names out loud. I loved him for that.

The kid I was talking to stopped me. “Old Man Bill? How old is this guy?”

I thought about it. “Hmm, like maybe seventy-five?”

The kid was baffled. “You have a seventy-five-year-old friend?”

I smiled, proud. “Yeah. I guess I do.”

Time went by, and I stopped being the youngest person in the room. As I grew, so did my fervency for the message of AA. I became a cheerleader, an evangelist for the cause. My life became consumed by AA. Other than a six-month hiatus I spent as a drug dealer (more on that later), I went to a meeting every single day for years. I loved it. I was absolutely convinced that I’d found the truth and was absolutely on fire to tell other people about it.

I was unique in the fact that I’d gotten sober so young. I was exceptional in the fact that I knew how to articulate my journey so well. I started to get asked to speak at AA meetings and conventions around the country. It was here that I first experienced what it was like to perform for a crowd. To make them laugh. To make them feel things with my words. People say that the best speakers in the world can be found at Toastmasters, an organization that teaches socially awkward people how to give compelling speeches about sales trends, and in AA. Sure, you’ve got your TED Talkers and your Brené Browns, but those people are experts. AA contains the largest talent pool for amateur public speakers in the world. It was easy to talk about AA.

The topics are compelling: alcoholism, venereal disease, bank robbery, and then hope! And God even! AA is like church but with premarital sex.

AA does a way better job of providing a “cool” version of spirituality than these weird hipster evangelical preachers with their oversized glasses frames, A.P.C. drop-crotch pants, and T-shirts that read “Dabbin’ for Christ.” AA is a homegrown, uniquely American pseudo-religious form that only appeals to a specific demographic: the naughty. Where else will you see men covered in tattoos who admit to taking human life and talk about meditation? Where else do you find movie stars talking with union steelworkers about the best way to remain humble and vulnerable? Where else do you find such sexy, broken people talking with such earnestness about self-improvement? One year, The Village Voice pseudo-jokingly declared a particularly sceney AA meeting in SoHo to be the “best place to see and be seen in New York.” The next week the meeting quadrupled in size, a bunch of sudden alcoholics made manifest by The Village Voice’s “Best of” edition. Those interlopers came and went, but AA’s veneer can be so seductive that once in a while, alcoholics actually are created out of thin air. I’ve seen it. A non-alcoholic will come to an open meeting to “support a friend” and be so enamored of what they find there that they will ask to attend another meeting. And another. And another. Suddenly, quite out of nowhere this person “realizes” they are actually an alcoholic. Are they? Or is AA just providing a form of spirituality and life improvement that doesn’t really exist anywhere else? Invariably this person stays sober long enough to be asked to speak at a meeting and then the burden falls on everyone else to pretend to take this person seriously as they describe their “rock bottom” as a single night out drinking with the gals that ended with giving an anonymous hand job at a dance club.

“Sounds like fun,” says one real alcoholic, listening quietly.

“I gave one of those dead sober last week,” says another.

But no one tells them to leave. There’s an internal taboo in AA about ever outwardly doubting someone’s claims of legitimacy when it comes to their alcoholism.

And for very good reason. No one knows who is or is not an alcoholic.

The person you declare non-alcoholic might die of an overdose the night you tell them to leave. I’m certainly lucky that no one told me I was too young as a teenager getting sober. I might have been too young, but I was in AA long enough to watch people younger than me die upon relapse. Better to leave the doors wide open and welcome those who may not truly “belong” in AA than to make that door hard to walk through and shut out those who do. So people, in general, try to keep their mouths shut. But that doesn’t mean no one rolls their eyes when hearing someone describe the consequences of their drinking by describing the look of disappointment they saw in their pet horse’s eyes.

I wasn’t like this. I was a fucking absolute mess of a kid. I know that for sure.

But I was still a kid.

Around fifteen years sober, at thirty years of age, as fundamentalist a believer in AA dogma as a person could be, I started to feel something I never thought would be possible: doubt.

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I’d worked the steps into the core of my intellectual being. I was a firebrand AA speaker—an absolute and total believer. I made a pretty compelling case for AA as a funny guy with little orthodoxy in my general beliefs but plenty of it in my AA message. In other words, I was cool and open-minded about everything but AA. When it came to the program, my message was unique, but it was unambiguous: AA worked and it worked absolutely. It worked if you worked it. Always. I helped a lot of people with this version of AA. But I also found myself exasperated by the people who wouldn’t work it or wouldn’t work it right. Why wouldn’t they save themselves? And didn’t they know that by speaking about the wishy-washiness of their own program they were diluting the AA message? Didn’t they know they were killing people?

Fundamentalism takes a toll on you and on the people around you. Knowing everything means that people who act or believe in another way are not different, but wrong. In some ways I can’t be blamed for the fundamentalist I became. And compared to some factions in AA, I was certainly no traditionalist. AA had been in a “back to basics” creep since the 1980s. This kind of thing happens with a lot of old-fashioned movements when they begin to encounter modernism.

In the ’80s, the “inner child” era of psychology became prevalent. People in AA were, for the first time, confronting their traumas and childhood wounds through means other than the steps. At first this was welcomed, as AA has no official opinion on getting outside help or supplemental assistance with issues not pertaining to drinking. In fact, AA has no official opinion on anything. But when people started bringing stuffed animals to meetings, cuddling with them to nurture their inner children, when people started to gender-neutralize the twelve steps by substituting “God as we understood Him” with “God as we understood God,” when people started bringing the lessons they’d learned from the therapeutic couch into the halls of AA, the stalwarts in AA began to rebel.

This rebellion was the dominant strain of AA when I got sober: an angry AA fighting against the phantom villain of the watering-down of a formerly pure and perfect program. The past-perfect principle is not unique to AA, but in a younger spiritual path like AA, it is easier to see its effects. If you wanted to make people listen in AA, declaring it perfect in its principles but in danger of being destroyed was a shortcut for attention. Shouting at a drug addict for talking about drugs too much in an AA meeting was commonplace.[*3] None of this sentiment has anything like the force of law behind it, by the way. There is no mechanism of control in AA other than pressure. No one is in charge. You can, quite literally, stand up at any AA meeting in the world and scream “Fuck you and fuck AA! I’ve been drinking in the bathroom, and I’m here to fuck someone right now!” and the worst that could happen to you is that you’ll be asked to leave that meeting, that night. Come back the next week and you’ll be welcomed.

Anyway, as a result of this desperate attempt to “save” AA, countless offshoots were created in an arms race to be the purest strain, the dankest version of AA.

The big-daddy of offshoot AA was the Pacific Group, which boasted of hosting the largest meeting in the world. It’s still around. Every week, twelve hundred alcoholics gather in Los Angeles and adhere to an oddly rigid behavioral code that you’ll find yourself wondering how it applies to not drinking. Pacific Group members are not to let their facial hair grow, not to swear, not to discuss drugs. They must wear a tie every time they speak, ladies must wear dresses (or, adjusting to progressive feminism, a sharp pantsuit). The Pacific Group became so influential that it spawned a number of clones throughout the country including the Atlantic Group in New York. Many of these clones, like a game of telephone, slightly altered the strictures imposed on their members, and over time some became disturbingly extreme.

There were the Pod People, a particularly amusing subgroup in AA, so nicknamed due to their eerie similarity to the villains in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Their leader, a shoe shiner in San Francisco, figured out an incredibly specific system of working all twelve steps in about ten minutes, on a single sheet of paper. They all, for fear of being kicked out of the group, did the steps like this, twice daily, after which they spent twenty minutes in Transcendental Meditation. Should you have desired, say, Zen meditation instead, you would have been booted and told, “We can’t help you.”

They all shared an oddly similar inflection, a manic, mile-a-minute cadence with the words fuckin’ and used to want to fucking kill myself sprinkled in literally every sentence. It was strange the fixation on suicide they had. It was almost as if working the twelve steps in this abbreviated way gave them an abbreviated reprieve. It gave them ten minutes’ worth of recovery. To this day, with a blindfold on, I could still tell you if I’m listening to a pod person speaking.

There was the Midtown Group in Washington D.C., a bizarre offshoot of the Pacific Group where mostly suburban white people in Abercrombie outfits would encourage their mostly young members to not only stop dating people from outside the group, but to begin dating people within it. It devolved into a weird sex and sobriety group for teens before Newsweek did an exposé on the group and they scattered.

As different as all of these groups (and countless more) were from one another, they all shared a less “official” and more heinous rule, which was to forbid or strongly discourage the use of any psychiatric drugs, which some members had decided were a violation of sobriety. Just what everyone with actual mental illness wants: a guy who owns a Smoothie King franchise in a strip mall prescribing a regimen of AA basics to cope with acute schizophrenia. This lay psychiatry has obvious consequences, and more than one person in AA has killed themselves due to negligent sponsorship.

I’ve named just a few, but any city will have, if you look hard enough, an AA group of kooks who have made up, from seemingly out of nowhere, a set of inane and absurd strictures you must adhere to in order to get some of that good, pure “old-time AA.” Of course, there is another word for these types of things: cults. If you’re reading this from within one of these groups and reject my characterization, let me also point out that cults never feel like cults when you’re in them. The Manson girls felt like Charlie had some unadulterated hold on the truth, too. AA is close enough to being a cult itself that if you’re in a spin-off that’s more culty, get out and call your mom. She misses you.

These kinds of groups thrive because AA has a power problem and an oversight problem. Undue deference is given to people with “time,” that is, people who have stayed sober for sustained periods. An unearned moral authority is bestowed upon members based solely on how long they have stayed sober. “Old-timers” are treated as gurus simply by virtue of their sober date, not by virtue of their virtue. And most AA old-timers are delightful. Many are very wise, a lifetime of applying principles resulting in a keen enlightenment. Some are even guru-like. But many are not. Some are horrific assholes. Some are miserable. A few are even psychologically sadistic manipulators. This is, of course, true of any group of people. Some will be sweet; some will be sick. The difference in AA is, since there is no real central power structure, the power is bestowed upon people with time. They are propped up by a group of vulnerable people looking for answers. What compounds this problem is the lack of even marginal oversight by literally anyone in AA. There is no one watching. No one tracking predators. No one to hear a whistle blow. There is just a reliance on the goodwill of the body politic of AA and that “God’s will” shall be done. Abusers and thought-manipulators have been allowed to operate with impunity from mini-cults to huge groups. They can’t be stopped, because there is no one to stop them.

I wish I could say I was too smart to fall for these tactics, but I think it was more luck of the draw. None of this kind of militant AA ever gelled in Oakland, and the closest to a culty subgroup I ever found myself in was Young People’s AA, a loosely affiliated group of meetings and conferences where people who got sober young could find one another, stay sober together, and give one another hand jobs and amateur piercings.

Young People’s AA was a kind of roving family, a sort of recovery Dead tour where the young members of AA from each respective city would travel from place to place, gathering at large annual conferences. We would stay up all night, drinking coffee and energy drinks,[*4] dancing, attending meetings, making out with each other, figuring out how to grow up. These conferences were a social bright spot for a demographic prone to feeling isolated or alienated from their peers for making the choice to be sober. Back at home, most young people got fucked up and most sober people were old. But at these conferences? It was a taste of a utopia that could never exist in daily reality: thousands of young people who were cool, fun, funny, fuckable. A scene. A subculture. Or maybe, depending on how you looked at it, a cult of our very own.

Having gotten sober so young and stayed sober so long, I took on the self-appointed job of keeping Young People’s AA in Oakland from careening off the rails into rigidity or chaos. I saw it as my duty as a “Young Old-timer” to stave off the creeping militarism of these spin-off groups while at the same time making sure Young People’s AA, particularly in Oakland, remained a place where people took recovery seriously. We would have fun. But we would stay sober, goddamn it.

We were a mighty dysfunctional family, keen on incest, and constantly losing cousins. Being in AA means watching friends die, over and over and over. It means watching people come to AA destitute and desperate, watching them recover, watching them get their lives back, and then watching them relapse and fall into the same destructive patterns that brought them to AA in the first place. It means watching people who had an easy time getting sober decide to drink and then, realizing they’ve made a grave error, become unable to get sober again. Sober living is heartbreaking living. It is, quite literally, life or death. And in Young People’s AA, these stakes were in the hands of teenagers. There’s a beauty to it, no question, but there’s a terror to it, too. And so, even as I got older, I stayed around the Young People’s meetings, determined to help the people like me find a new way of life, determined to be a stabilizing force, determined to stay as long as I could.

I was the sheriff in that town, and my methods were loved by many and resented by plenty. If a male AA member was fucking someone who was newly sober and vulnerable, I would scare up a goon squad and confront them with a hearty “We don’t do things like that around here.” Sure, I had a cool haircut and liked techno but in practice, I was as much of a conservative AA cop as the people whose unearned power I lamented above.

This all came at a cost. I alienated people who felt judged by me. Whatever, I thought, heavy lies the crown.

Then, slowly, exactly like Prince Harry, I started to realize that I didn’t know if I believed in the monarchy.

It wasn’t sudden. It was a process. And, ironically, my departure came as a result of my recovery journey. As I started to get older, the stridency with which I had carried myself was becoming less and less meaningful to me. And more painful. I began to realize that my judgment was holding me back from connecting to people I loved. My best friend started dating someone nine months sober, a clear violation of Sheriff Moshe’s rules of conduct, which stipulated romantic relations were allowed only with members who had a year or more sober. When I found out my best friend had been in a relationship for months and hadn’t told me, I didn’t get it.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He looked at me confused. “Because I was afraid of what you would think.”

This was a tough pill for me to swallow. Somehow, in my quest to help everyone, I had pushed the people I loved so far away they couldn’t even tell me they’d found love. This was a small thing, but it reverberated in a million ways. Little things. Small judgments. Someone would not pay at an “on your honor” parking lot and I’d call them out, embarrassing them in front of a group, wagging a spiritual finger. I’d pontificate from the podium, fire and brimstone, and then wonder why some people seemed turned off by me.

I went to a new sponsor, John, a more Eastern religion and Jungian psychology type of old-timer, and asked if he could help me eschew my judgment of others, if he could help me become a softer man. He asked me a simple question: “What would it look like if you never commented on anyone else’s behavior, ever?” I’m not exaggerating when I say the thought sent an actual chill down my spine. I never forgot that chill. That’s how deeply I was tied into telling other people how to act.

This is not to say no one ever needs to be called out for bad behavior; they absolutely do. But a good rule of thumb I learned in AA was, when considering if you should, to ask yourself these questions:

1. Does it need to be said?

2. Does it need to be said right now?

3. Does it need to be said by me?

It almost never needed to be said by me. This is the big problem with being a judgmental prick. After a while, whatever you are saying, righteous or not, can be dismissed by the person you are saying it to as a manifestation of a pattern of you not minding your own business.

So I set out on a mission to rid myself of commenting on other people’s behavior, and the journey was miraculous. At first I found it agonizing torture. I would see an infraction at an AA meeting and look around in a panic thinking, “I need to say something! If I don’t, every teen in AA will drink within a fortnight!” I’d catch eyes with my sponsor, who would shake his head no. I’d think, “Fine, then whatever comes of this is on John’s hands. I hope he can cleanse his fingers of the blood of Oakland’s youth.” I’d bite my tongue, hands shaking, teeth clenched.

Months went by.

Now I’d see an infraction, know it was wrong, judge it in my head, but think, “Phew, they are FUCKING up. But I won’t say anything. Let them die, it is not my place to stop it.” It was getting easier to watch the obvious sins of my peers, the flagrant moral code violations, and not say anything.

More months went by.

Now something unexpected occurred. Not only was I easily able to hold my tongue, but I also found my tongue no longer needed holding. I had stopped caring what other people were doing. When something happened that I would not have approved of in the past, I either didn’t care or didn’t notice. More than that, I didn’t even think it was wrong any longer. I’d moved from “Isn’t that awful?!” to “Isn’t that interesting?” Surprising no one but myself, I found it a much easier place to be.

But there was another, even more unexpected place I found myself in, having worked through this know-it-all-ism. The softness I found on the other side of it became the small thread I pulled in the holistic worldview I’d been clinging to. If the sky didn’t fall when someone decided to fuck that newly sober girl, or text through the meeting,[*5] or lie about this or that, then maybe none of the absolute truths I found in AA were as absolute as I’d thought.

And that was it. That is the problem with fundamentalism: Either all of it is absolutely true, or it becomes possible that none of it is. Sometimes I think if I’d been able to join AA with more of a “wear it like a loose garment” relationship, I’d have been able to stay. Most people aren’t burdened by this absolutism. Most people approach systems of belief like a buffet where you take what you want and leave the rest. But, as I used to scream, heavy with judgment, from behind the podium in AA: The part you leave might have been the part that would have saved your life.

So I took it all. Until I couldn’t take it anymore.

---

—

For years after that, I felt my connection to AA slipping away from me. It was imperceptible at first, and for a long time I couldn’t or wouldn’t admit to myself that what was happening was a slow-building crisis of faith. Ironically it was faith itself that led to my breaking point. Specifically, it was the Lord’s Prayer.

One thing I forgot to mention in my description of the typical AA meeting, perhaps in an effort to be charitable, is that yes, they begin meetings with the Serenity Prayer, but in many meetings, they end with the Lord’s Prayer. You know, the Lord? Jesus Christ? When I first entered AA, this prayer was jarring. As a Jew, there was no way I was going to be saying that. Reciting the Lord’s Prayer is less Jewish than eating pork belly while playing polo on the Sabbath. But after a while of being sober, out of my desire to fit in and adhere to AA’s cultural norms, out of the social pressure not to “make myself different from my fellows,” I relented and made my ancestors roll over in their dusty graves.

For years I chanted this prayer, but once I pulled that thread I mentioned above, I began to question its appropriateness again. I lived in Oakland, where there were Muslims and Jews and atheists and Buddhists and Wiccans getting sober. Never would we end our meetings with a Wiccan invocation to the trees. Never would we scream “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet!” at the close of a meeting. It began to drive me a little crazy, what an obvious barrier to people of other faiths this prayer was and how willfully ignorant of that conflict people in AA seemed intent on staying.

When I brought it up, particularly outside of the Bay Area, I’d generally receive an eye roll and an admonition that we say that prayer because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” This infuriated me. Isn’t changing to make sure we help the most people the way we’d always done it, too? Isn’t that the actual reason AA split from the Oxford group and Christianity in the first place, a desire to break down barriers imposed by affiliation to religious groups?

It became my pet issue, my cause. I’d put so much of my time and energy into AA that I had to be able to effect some change. Right? No. No one was interested.

I tried making the issue heard at a national level by jumping through the arcana of AA’s policymaking process, a system so opaque and boring you should be thanking the guy who wrote the Lord’s Prayer I’m not going to describe it. It failed to even make it out of the Oakland meeting to be heard at a regional level.

So I wrote an impassioned letter to the AA publication The Grapevine, trying to get a dialogue started. It was never published. Now, look, I’ve been a writer for long enough to know that not everything you write gets published. Nor should it. But this is the AA Grapevine, not The New Yorker. It’s not exactly a sexy publication filled to the brim with submissions. This is a publication where literally every issue has a multipage spread of full-color photos of empty rooms where meetings are sometimes held. They have the space. I knew why they didn’t publish me. They either disagreed or didn’t want to enter the fray. Okay. I gave up. The message coming back to me was clear, and I could accept defeat.

Then I made the mistake of going to AA’s world convention again. I headed to San Antonio, hoping that maybe I could relive that glory moment in San Diego fifteen years earlier. Maybe that would jump-start my reconnection to this thing that had meant so much to me for so long but was increasingly feeling like a stranger to me.

I sat in the main meeting at the Alamodome Sunday morning, and at the end of the meeting, the chairperson announced that we’d rise and say the Lord’s Prayer. I mean, look, it was in Texas, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the previous world convention had been the first to abstain from the Lord’s Prayer altogether and end every meeting with the Serenity Prayer (surprise, it was in Canada).

The fact that they were saying it again meant that either a) they were appeasing Texans (always a good idea considering open-carry laws); or b) that people had complained after the last conference and that “Old-time Religion AA” had won again. It was a regressive move and one that disappointed me. But it didn’t crush my spirit. I would have been okay. It was what happened next that was a crushing blow.

The cadence of the Lord’s Prayer, which I know better than I should as a Jew, is a big part of it. The Catholic version does this weird rushing thing toward the end. The Protestant version, aka the Oxford Group version, aka the AA version, has these little pauses built into it. You’ve probably heard it:

Our Father (pause), who art in heaven (pause), hallowed be thy name (pause). Thy kingdom come (pause), Thy will be done (pause), on Earth (pause) as it is in heaven (pause).

Right at the “heaven” pause, in a stadium full of sixty thousand people, with a Jew in the nosebleeds pressing his lips closed in a silent and impotent protest, someone else was lodging a protest of their own. Right in that pause, a voice erupted, clear as crystal to everyone in that stadium, a scream, “THANK YOU, JESUS!”

Look, I have no issues with Jesus. I really hope it doesn’t seem like I do. This isn’t about Christianity, of course, but about its place at the AA table. That scream, that “wrong place, wrong time” prayer to the Christian God, slammed down on me like a guillotine. I’m sure that that lady was just overcome with emotion. She was probably having a moment like I had in San Diego at the same conference, fifteen years earlier. She was having her own conversion moment.

Most likely her sponsor elbowed her to shut up, and they laugh about it to this day: the time when she was so overcome at an AA meeting, she yelled to the Lord at the top of her lungs like she was at Joel Osteen’s house of embezzlement.

For me, up in the stands, I was having a different experience. I felt something break. I looked around and for the first time since I’d gotten sober, the first time since I’d found this new way of life, I felt like I didn’t belong.

As I melted down, someone from the podium, I’m not kidding, started to sing “Amazing Grace.”

I was in Texas, in a convention hall where we were praying the Lord’s Prayer, thanking Jesus, and singing “Amazing Grace.” This was church.

I didn’t belong here.

That wasn’t the last meeting I went to. Not by a long shot. I kept attending for a couple of years after that. But it was the last meeting I was able to convince myself that there was nothing frayed about my connection to AA. Now I could say it out loud. Something was wrong.

It felt a lot like what I imagine a spouse feels, fifteen years into a relationship, waking up one morning to realize they don’t have the same feelings for their partner they once did. Or perhaps a more accurate comparison is, it felt how I imagine a church elder feels when they realize they are simply not a true believer anymore. Where do they go? What do they do? Do they pretend to believe to protect their soul and their way of life? Or do they acknowledge what is happening? Do they face their fear of the unknown? Do they find a way to walk alone? In AA, an often-heard admonition is “Don’t leave before the miracle happens,” but the miracle had happened for me fifteen years ago. Am I supposed to wait for it to re-happen?

AA tells you what to do when you feel these things. Call someone. Go to a meeting. Read two pages from the Big Book. Jerk off until the edge of cumming and then back off slightly. Strike that last one, not sure what that was doing in my notes for this book.

But the feeling that you’ve simply moved past AA benefiting you is as close to a total taboo as you can get. You’d be more well received at a meeting telling everyone you’re planning to take LSD that night than to intimate you’ve reached a point where you need to move on from AA. You’ll often be told such thoughts are the product of a diseased mind. But I’d been in AA too long to feel terribly frightened by that stuff. I used to be the one telling people that. The fact was, I would attend meetings and feel more anxious afterward than I did when I went in. I’d read through the AA book with people I sponsored and realize I was starting not to believe the things I was telling them.

More than anything I stopped knowing for certain that I was an alcoholic.

AA has this idea of the immutable state of the alcoholic. It is a permanent state; it exists like a fly in amber. Or, as cute sassy ladies in Florida AA meetings say, “You’re a pickle, hun!” Because, once you’re a pickle you’ll never be a cucumber again. This immutability is vital to the AA understanding of alcoholism, because it gives a very clear picture of what to do: Never drink again. But it was this immutability I stopped feeling like I could believe in.

After Texas, but unrelatedly, I had a number of dear friends start drinking and getting high again. These were not tertiary people; these were my core sobriety friends. People I had been sober with for years, for decades. These were my fellow “AA Young People” who I’d trudged with, lived with, struggled with, cried with. These were people who I’d known to be alcoholics just like me. They were my brothers and sisters in arms. They were just like me. And they decided they were no longer alcoholic and drank again.

The results were decidedly mixed.

Some were fine and remain fine to this day. Some were bad off and should never have tried drinking again. And some, mystifyingly, just kinda reverted back to being hard-partying, not particularly out of control but not particularly temperate types. In other words, they were kinda like regular young people. Except now they weren’t so young.

What I came to realize is that AA doesn’t make space for these types, because it can’t. In AA they say bluntly, “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.” In AA, if someone relapses and they are fine, they are excused as never having been “real alcoholics.” If they relapse and have bad consequences, they are held up as proof of the AA conception of alcoholism. If they relapse and are fine but years later lose control, it’s pointed out that it’s never safe to drink again.

AA suffers from the same problems that plague a lot of systems, which is the inability to contend with the power of a world that’s more chaos than it is order. AA has binary rules about drinking and sobriety and the state of alcoholism and addiction, because nonbinary rules would simply not work. There is a message in “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.” There is no message in “Once an alcoholic, it’s possible, even likely, that you will have to be vigilant about substance use in the future, but hey you never know! You might be fine but also there’s a large possibility you’ll be dead in a year after you start drinking again, but people are different so who knows?”

How’s that for a pickle?

AA is an attempt to save the most people the most quickly and for that, the message of “never again” is the most effective. I understand why. I just don’t know what I believe about myself anymore. I got sober at fifteen. Fifteen years old. What else about me was immutable from the time I was fifteen? My impeccable sense of style and little else. This whole book is a record of how changed I have become. How flexible life has asked me to be. Everything changes. Getting sober so young, I would be willfully non-introspective if I never entertained the idea that yes, in fact, my problem drinking was a phase. I was a child.

But then there’s my habituation in sobriety, my sexual compulsivity, the bag of thirty kinds of vape juice I used to carry around. I quit smoking, then went to vaping, then nicotine gum, then nicotine toothpicks, then nicotine pouches. Clearly I don’t have zero addict in me.

There aren’t easy answers, especially with residual thought conditioning still swimming around in my head. It’s not so much that I no longer think I am an alcoholic; it’s that I no longer think I have a clue what the term means once a person stops drinking. Within AA, when you are sober for a long time, the term alcoholic becomes like a reverse panacea. Since you are no longer drinking, it’s not that which makes you still an alcoholic: It’s your thinking, your alcoholic way of being. It’s a spiritual state. One that hangs on an edge, buffered from peril by spiritual works and fellowship. It’s the way you think. It’s the way you interact with the world. It’s you. It’s everything. Alcoholics are artistic, we are sensitive, we are brittle, we are wild, we are intelligent, we are unique, we are the only people who can save one another. A guy in a meeting might describe throwing a bottle at someone in a road rage incident, saying, “I’m still such an alcoholic.” Sir, is it possible that that was less about alcoholism and more about you being an asshole?

AA offers no worldview where it’s healthy to say, “I used to do AA but don’t need it anymore.” A person who stops going is a dry drunk, guaranteed misery and always at risk of relapse and, of course, as it says in the Big Book, “And with us, to drink is to die.” In other words, be afraid. Stay with us forever or you will die. Fear was not a healthy enough motivator for me to stay anywhere anymore.

And so, after much agony, much soul searching, after so many years in AA where I would grit my teeth waiting to fall back in love with it, I stopped going.

It’s been many years since my last meeting. I miss it. Well, less that than I miss how it used to make me feel. Life in AA was exciting. I was on a mission, and every day was another chance to save a fellow alcoholic. Life’s primary purpose was clear. As the circumstances of my life ebbed and flowed, as my career waxed and waned, I could always say, “This is nothing. This means nothing. My real mission in life is to save people.” Five times a week I would gather with other like-minded people and we would share in fellowship about this noble mission we were embarked upon. When I stopped going to AA, nothing slid in to take its place. There was an empty spot where all that work had been. Some days I fill it with the beauty and fullness of my life, and some days I fill it with hours of PlayStation. I’m neither miserable nor ecstatic most days. I’m just some guy. Not an alcoholic guy, not a sober guy, not a dry drunk, not a crazy guy. Just a person passing through time.

This last December 25, I celebrated twenty-nine years of sobriety. I’m still sober. Maybe from force of habit. Maybe the way hair keeps growing on a corpse. Maybe from fear of consequence. Maybe because my life is good, and I can’t quite see how drinking could make it better. Maybe because I have a family now and every risk assessment has gotten more precarious.

One thing is clear to me. AA saved my life. It gave me some of the best, most exciting times in that life. I love AA and will always be grateful that it was there at the exact moment I needed it. It is deep, powerful medicine, and I still believe it can really work. If you are struggling to stop drinking, AA can be a great place to find help. But I don’t believe it’s the only way. Even though I used to know that it was.

The principles I learned in AA are still the main tools I use to navigate the world:

Be honest. Pause when agitated. Don’t allow myself the luxury of justifiable anger. When I’m in conflict with someone, assess what I did wrong without even considering how wrong the other person might have been. Apologize when I hurt someone. Never admit when I cheat on my wife.

Realize my place in the world. Recognize that there are things greater than me. Help people wherever I can. Don’t keep secrets. Avoid the deliberate manufacture of misery. Don’t take myself too seriously.

Live one day at a time.

Even all these years later.

Skip Notes

*1 Throughout this section I will be using the terms alcoholic and addict, drugs and alcohol, and high and drunk interchangeably.

*2 I was once with a friend who sat next to me talking to his sponsor on the phone, complaining about an upcoming court date he had the following week and how unfairly he was sure the judge would treat him. He explained his dilemma and then instantly had to start over at the beginning, louder this time. When he was done, he did it again, now screaming into the phone what he was sure was going to happen in that hearing. Then suddenly he frowned and put the phone down. “What was that?” I asked. My friend sighed and said, “He kept saying he couldn’t hear me. Then he said, ‘Sorry, it seems like you’re calling in from a week in the future, the connection isn’t good.’ And he hung up on me.”

*3 In AA there is perhaps no area of cognitive dissonance more pronounced than “old-fashioned AA’s” relationship with drugs and drug addiction. Narcotics Anonymous has a much more coherent understanding of the relationship between alcoholism and addiction, which is that there is no “relationship” because they are one phenomenon. In AA, people bend over backward to convince themselves there is something unique or peculiar about alcoholism versus drug addiction. None of it adheres to much logic. Don’t get me wrong, most people in AA don’t care at all, but there’s always some guy grumbling about how you shouldn’t talk about drugs in an AA meeting because it’s an “outside issue.” Tell that same person you’re sober five years but smoked meth last night, and he’ll tell you you’re no longer sober.

*4 It was coffee when I first got sober but then Red Bull and Monster Energy drinks pushed the “quintuple espresso” experience out, and suddenly kids were drinking seventy-three energy drinks over the course of a weekend and pushing the definition of sobriety to its breaking point. Are you truly sober if you have a seizure due to overconsumption of Monster Hydro Super Sport Killer Kiwi? The funniest thing about this was that ten years after the energy drink was introduced to sober culture, people who had been twenty were now thirty and had been drinking daily twelve-packs of supercharged soda for a decade. There is nothing like a sober energy drink belly where a beer belly could have been.

*5 Speaking of texting through meetings, one of the best things I ever saw in a meeting was a former member of the Sex Pistols speaking at a meeting and going apoplectic when talking about people texting at meetings. He was screaming “This is AA, damn it! You don’t text through the goddamn meeting!” It was the most un-punk-rock thing I have ever seen or heard in my life. Fuck it, keep texting, Anarchy in the AA!