by Mike Doughty
I’m feeling jumpy. I skipped out on the men’s meeting in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I go to on Saturday nights, my mainstay of late. It’s filled with groovy art dudes, and the occasional Polish guy from the neighborhood’s enclave. Groovy art dudes intimidate me, even though I am one, because I feel their very existence proves me to be a sham. This meeting, because it’s only men, no women to impress, is particularly soulful and honest; hearing the groovy art dudes open their hearts, express their insecurities, is extremely moving to me. But I skipped it, and now there are uninvited, unwanted feelings knocking around me.
I spent the morning moping in the hotel bed, watching Jerry Lewis lumber around exhaustedly on the set of his telethon, but I got smart and dialed up a meeting on the internet. There was one ten minutes away, at a university, in a nondescript student union. I went up to the floor with the meeting on it; there was a student in the elevator with me. She wore a yellow t-shirt that said Life, Pot, Microdots. So, likely not looking for the meeting, I judged. I walked up and down the hall, peering into the sterile meeting rooms.
“Are you looking for . . . a meeting?” the microdot-shirt girl said.
What . . . kind of meeting? I said. She must be looking for something else.
“A twelve-step meeting?”
Oh! It’s supposed to be in here, I said, pointing into Room 3508. You a friend of Bill’s? (I alluded to it earlier; a code for twelve-step people.)
“No? . . .” she said.
I took a closer look at her face. Yellowish-grey.
“My first meeting,” she said.
It was just the two of us sitting in the empty conference room, with its institutional chairs and dry-erase board. I was panicky—suddenly I’m responsible for helping this girl, by myself.
I smiled. So what happened?
She shook her head, didn’t want to talk about it.
Once you get your shit together, you stay in to help other people. It keeps you clean. It astonishes me that I get one of the best feelings in my life when I encounter a stranger, suffering from the same thing I suffer, who needs help. It was not ever thus.
You sure? I said.
“I had a really bad night,” she said. I was filled with tenderness. I could’ve sobbed out loud.
The door opened, a woman walked in. She had a gee-whiz-dadgum-jim-cracky! sort of demeanor. She, too, was passing through Los Angeles, and found this place on the website.
So, apparently, they’d canceled the meeting because of Labor Day. We had one anyway. The gee-whiz lady knew the preamble by heart; she recited the twelve steps. Impressive. I cringed every time she said “god”—this new girl’s got to think that’s creepy, I thought, all the god god god over and over.
I spoke. I talked about this misguided hole-filling excursion. I talked about how amazing it was that wherever I was in the world, I could find it—Bangkok, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Detroit, Des Moines—something would happen to me in a meeting, something in me would settle. I talked about how the god thing had baffled me, how Homer Simpson was my spirit-animal, how, even now, in a life buttressed by prayer, I was truly ambivalent about god: I believe as much as I disbelieve. It’s considered tactless to address someone directly in a meeting—the term is crosstalk—so I tried to say it from my heart, not to aim it at her.
The gee-whiz lady spoke. Eleven months ago, she woke up, bruised and cut, outside a bus station, not knowing what happened. She was more orthodox twelve-step than me—I guess that’s more common to people relatively new to recovery—and was into slogans: Keep coming back, Progress not perfection, One day at a time!
And that terrible cliché: Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
But you know what? Hell yes it is.
We turned, hesitantly, to the new girl. “OK,” she said. Tears came to her eyes. She’d woken up rough that morning, in an inexplicable place, had to walk home—in Los Angeles, where walking is either an eccentricity or humiliation. Her sister forced her to come to the meeting. She was flying to ________soon, how could she do that without drinking? She was a keen atheist. She had to tell her dad about something terrible—she didn’t say what—something she wrecked or negated.
After the meeting, I talked to her in the elevator. I imagine this is strange to hear, I said, but you’ve helped me so much today—you don’t even know. I heard myself in you, and I remembered. If you want to get into this, go out and find people you identify with; find people who make you feel that you want what they have. I found freaky art people whose lives and hearts and minds I wanted. Maybe you’re looking for someone exactly like you, or somebody unlike you, I don’t know, but there’s as much variety in the rooms as there is in the world, keep looking. I have a dozen friends who got sober at your age—or younger!—there’s a meeting in New York called Never Had a Legal Drink. You don’t have to believe in god, the rooms are full of atheists—I am one sometimes—I heard about a meeting in San Francisco called the Fuck God, No Readings group.
Good luck, I said as the elevator doors opened. A ludicrous thing to say. There’s no luck involved in this.
“Good luck to you, too,” she said.
She walked out of the elevator and into the rest of her life.
Copyright © 2012 by Mike Doughty
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doughty, Mike.
The book of drugs : a memoir / Mike Doughty.—1st Da Capo Press ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-306-82050-2
ML420.D737A3 2012
782.42166092—dc23
[B]
2011020815
First Da Capo Press edition 2012
Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com
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