Possibly a bit too much frankness follows but I guess it’s all right after all this time.
* * * * * * * *
So there I was, somewhere around 1981 and I was probably a couple of months sober via AA. I wasn’t in tip-top shape. Maybe the time I drank on Antabuse had something to do with it but for a full year after getting sober my hands shook so badly that I got in the habit of anticipating money I would need and putting it and ID in an easy to access pocket because the tremor was obvious if I tried to open my wallet and handle cash. In other words, I tried to minimize required hand movements in public, any transaction where there would be a focus on my hands, because I was embarrassed by the shakes.
The previous summer, when I’d landed in the hospital after a several week long binge (I never ate while on a binge) at the end of which I’d vainly tried, while drunk, to slice my wrists (realized as soon as I shattered the glass on the counter top and applied it that I’d drunkenly chosen the wrong type, a regular glass would have done some damage but this was a crinkle kind of glass that crumbled as it dug), I had thrown myself into studying the paintings of Magritte and Ernst, convinced somehow that they would save me. In AA, a couple of months sober, I realized how insane that was. 20 plus years later I don’t think it was a crazy way to wrestle with the world. It just wasn’t going to get me sober.
I give a bit of that history just to highlight how vulnerable the fresh AA person is and likely is to be for a while. AA has its good points and its bad. For me, the good points outweighed the bad while I was getting sober.
It’s advised that one choose a sponsor, someone with long term sobriety who you can call when the urge to drink is strong and you’re thinking you can’t make it another second. Someone who can help you be mindful of and stick to the principles and steps. This is a reason it’s a program of principles rather than personalities, because people are a frail lot and AA does try to set it up for a person to be guided and protected by principles. So you don’t end up being taken captive or hoodwinked by personalities who take principles and bond to them their private program for sobriety which has everything to do with how they think the world should be run, how they think you should live, and nothing to do with just not taking that first drink.
While everything was still a jumbled mush of coffee-colored shadows and anemic light, I chose my sponsor. I forget how many years my sponsor was sober. A woman in her late 40s or early 50s. It wasn’t the 24 or so years I now have. But it was more than ten years. She was a woman with a strong, almost strident personality whose facade confessed no hesitation or self-doubts. She usually didn’t go to the meeting house where I’d landed, but there she was one morning when I was about two weeks without a drink and listening to her I knew immediately, this would be my sponsor. Her voice had the deep seductive allure and salesman conviction of those bodyless spirits on television commercials who make their living selling you cars that cost the price of a home. She looked straight in the eyes without flinching. If anyone tried to say, ” I have to drink because such-and-such has happened and I can’t handle it,” she was quick and sharp with the knife cutting away the excuse. “No, there are no excuses, you just don’t take the first drink. Drinking has no relation to anything in your life. No relation to anything in your life.” She was calloused and without pity in that way, as a hard-line, long-term AAer is expected to be, but compassionate as well, quick to amend with all that you could do and must do to take care of yourself and get through the minute-by-minute. There was no wavering to her, she permitted no ifs or buts, and some people didn’t like her for it. But I needed someone who wouldn’t waver, who had that calm alluring voice, who had bright red hair red lipstick red nails, who could take a room by silent storm just through sense of presence. Her big thing was not to remind you to say “No, I can’t take a drink” but to instead say, “Yes, I’m sober.” Cut out the no’s, she said. Phrase everything in your brain to be a yes. And suspecting this and some of her firey temperament would help perhaps get me through, I said, “Will you be my sponsor?” and she said yes.
She later confessed she’d had her doubts about me but that may be also why she said yes. Because I was a challenge, perhaps, and because we made a peculiar looking pair. She was a “housewife” and didn’t work but when you talked to her or heard her you never thought “wife” and it never occurred to you she may have ever cooked a roast. And I needed someone like that because older women who’d had children, at least the ones I’d met, seemed to be more accepting of gray rooms and extenuating circumstances and less likely to say bullshit. Well, they didn’t. They simply didn’t say, “That’s bullshit”, their upbringing and religion didn’t allow it, and I needed someone who wasn’t afraid to say, “That’s bullshit.” Also, these older women were friendly enough but I got the impression preferred me on the other side of the room. In 1982 there were more young women in AA than there had been just two years previously, but we were still rather rare. And there weren’t many young women who’d been on the road for years, who were punk, who dressed in leather and torn clothing not as a weekend fashion statement but a fundamental way of life, an outlook on the world. In fact, at the meeting places I attended, I was the only one. My sponsor later said she thought I didn’t have much of a chance of getting sober but she took me on anyway.
I write all this because there was a great side to my sponsor as well as a darker side. And it wouldn’t be fair to not include the great side, that saw me through those first months of hellish days and nights.
The dark side later split us up. Hard. In an ugly way. But I was sober.
We probably looked a questionable pair, my sponsor and I. She, a middle-aged, slightly heavy woman with red hair, a forceful personality but thoroughly upper middle class. Me in my torn jeans and leather cap and decaying leather jacket and shaking hands and hardly a dime in my pocket most of the time.
Where my sponsor fucked up later was deciding what was best for me, what she wanted me to be, telling me how I should and shouldn’t live, what books I should and shouldn’t read, trying to dictate politics. She started to control, and it surprised me. And we split up. I said you’ve way overstepped boundaries and we never spoke again. But she wasn’t like that at the beginning. The fears she had may have been there early on and I’d overlooked them, but in the beginning there was no mention of politics. She wasn’t yet carrying a gun. And because she’d accepted me as someone to sponsor I had painted her in my mind as being sympathetic with my sympathies. Why else would she be my sponsor? I was invited to her home where there was a big bowl of expensive jelly beans on the table and I learned they were Reaganites but AA is not about politics, it’s about principles. There are no politics in AA. You ignore that kind of thing.
So I’m several months sober. My sponsor and I used to go get something to eat some times after meetings, often with others. We were probably, that day, on our way after a meeting to such a place where I’d often just get a cup of coffee as I couldn’t afford a dine-out meal, and sometimes my sponsor would be kind enough to get me something to eat. She asked me if I minded if we stopped at a bookstore first. I said sure–after all her car, she was driving so like I was going to say no. I wondered why she asked because why ask someone who loved books if they minded stopping at a book store. And there was a hint of mystery in that tenor alluring, Jaguar salesman voice of hers. A hint of mystery in her manner, but there had been increasingly a hint of mystery in her manner. She would say something provocative and I would question it and she would smile and say we could talk about it later, when I had more sobriety under my belt.
I was used to only being around musicians for years and I bumped into a lot of other lifestyles in AA. Homeless lifestyles on the south side of town and totally glass house lifestyles like my sponsor had in one of the really better-heeled suburbs. I was thinking about how I’d bumped into a lot of different lifestyles, and was enjoying getting those glimpses, as she swung her car into a small and blank empty parking lot in front of a two-story 50s red brick building, the bottom floor occupied by a dusty let-us-do-your-taxes office and an office supply store that was still in business but looked like no one had been home for 15 years.
Between the tax office and the office supply store was a door that one would never have noticed, though right there in plain sight. Where’s the book store I thought. We entered through that door directly onto a flight of wooden steps that was less reminiscent of film noire than brown paper wrapped packages. As we went up the stairs I thought what is this. At the top were two doors, one to the left and one to the right. I’m not a porno kind of person and I fully expected her to walk me into some kind of otherworldly Story of O sex shop with no pink frilly “Your first time, try this unaggressive bit of fun.” Because of the increasing sense of something secret.
I wasn’t the most trusting person in the world. I was worried. Things didn’t feel up-and-up right. I didn’t want my relationship with my sponsor to end because she had decided it was time to introduce me to bondage sex utensils, when I wasn’t interested. I wanted her voice to sell me sobriety, nothing more.
We entered through that door into an old room that hadn’t seen paint in a while but was filled with light from the open window blinds. It looked like a damned library. And there, behind what looked like a library desk, sat a woman in her late 50s or early 60s who looked just like a librarian from a hack 60s television show with the librarian glasses and librarian expression. She gave me a startled, worried look, like she was ready to pick up the phone and call the police. Then she saw my sponsor and her face transitioned into a smile and she exulted hi where have you been, I haven’t seen you in a while. They knew each other well. They were talking weekend parties, and my sponsor was saying she hadn’t been able to make it to such-and-such party. My sponsor said she was going to chat a bit, and either she said why don’t you look around or I said I’ m going to look around. I don’t remember. Her eyes followed me as I went into the old library shelves. She watched me as I looked around.
Whose portrait was on the wall just inside the door? I don’t remember. But it was some author’s portrait and that had reassured me as whoever it was was a well-known author, and I thought, gee, wonder why I’ve never heard of this bookstore, because I knew them all at that time, every bookstore in the city and almost every weekend was searching through the stacks in the used bookstores.
There wasn’t a lot of choice of reading material actually. Curious, I thought, a bookstore without much of a choice of reading material. I was still kind of fuzzy at the edges and it slowly occurred to me there was a lot of Ayn Rand, lots of copies of Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged, the Fountainhead.
And some book on something called the tri-lateral commission. Book with a vaguely political cover. I picked it up and glanced through it. Hmmm, what was this. Names like William Buckley. I looked at the other political-looking books. Slim volumes.
Everything political I’d read to date had been mainly on fascism. I had spent several years reading almost every book on fascism and its rise and its workings Germany and Italy and in central and south america that I could get my hands on. Some books that never made their way back to the library as, being on the road, the previous few years I had been losing them left and right in motel rooms all across the southeast, arriving at gigs sober enough to read, and leaving several days later totally not sober and unaware I’d brought along any books at all and not remembering I had for a couple weeks.
These were little slim books with the kind of covers I would never have picked up. But that’s all there was and I browsed through.
And I realized.
At some point.
My sponsor had spirited me into a John Birch bookstore.
I looked back up at the portrait of the well-known author and realized, oh fuck, that’s a portrait of John Birch to the right of the author, 3 by 4 foot big on the wall.
My god, what in the hell was I doing in a John Birch bookstore.
I tried not to look surprised, my sponsor’s eyes on me, watching.
I thought over all our conversations and wondered just who my sponsor thought I was.
But she knew what my politics were or she wouldn’t have been eyeing me with such curiosity, watching for my reaction.
The librarian-bookshop keeper watching me out of the corner of her eye.
Betray no expression, I figured that was the thing to do. This was my sponsor, the woman I’d for several months been calling at 3 am in the morning saying, “Tell me what I need to do to stay sober”, and she had done it and I had stayed sober, except for one slip after the first month.
I had no fucking clue what was up.
They continued to chit-chat, eyeing me as I flipped through the books. My sponsor didn’t take a look at a single one. She only stood and spoke with the shopkeeper.
Well, I figured I would never in my life find myself in anther John Birch bookstore. So I chose out a couple of books that looked like they’d tell me a lot of what John Birchers thought. And when my sponsor said she was ready to leave I approached the librarian-bookkeeper with my books and she looked like she was trying to suppress some surprise, and my sponsor was smiling but looked like she had not expected things to go this swimmingly well, and I purchased the couple of books.
We didn’t say anything going back to the car. Then in the car she asked me, “So what did you think?” or something like that.
I said, “Interesting.”
She said something like she hadn’t expected me to buy anything.
I said something like I liked to know what people thought, so I read.
She said she knew I was the curious type.
That was all. She never said anything else about the bookstore. I never said anything about it. She never mentioned the words “John Birch”. I never mentioned them. I went home and read through the couple of Ayn Rand books (Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) that I’d picked up in college but had never been able to get through the first few pages. I read them thoroughly, despite the bad writing, her romance novels for free-capitalists, in light of having seen how John Birchers liked her.
My sponsor had already begun getting heavy-handed and I solved the situation as I was inclined to do in those and earlier days.
I made myself unavailable. I moved out of town. I thought it and one month later we were gone. Several hours away. I told myself it was for all kinds of other reasons. But deep down I felt I’d gotten myself in a fix. Here was this sponsor who had helped me get sober and I suddenly felt uneasy around her. It was a big thing to break up with a sponsor and I didn’t know what the hell I would have told everyone. Everyone close to me was saying it was too bad I wasn’t going to be around my sponsor and I smiled and agreed, and inside I was profoundly relieved. Moving cut the strings with ease. When I had my first AA birthday I pretended to be really excited when she drove all that way to visit, and felt guilty that I would have preferred if she’d not come.
We ended up moving back to town around nine months after we’d moved away and we’d been gone long enough I thought no one was going to think it odd if I didn’t have much to do with my sponsor or ex-sponsor, whatever she was. In order to not betray the break with my sponsor, that I was avoiding her, when she called and asked why I wasn’t calling her I gave excuses. We got together several times and each time she would look at the books I was carrying (philosophy) and now tell me I shouldn’t be reading those, and tell me I’d been sober long enough she could now start talking to me about the life I was living and it was wrong. Not good for me, wasn’t going to take me places either. I told her she had overstepped her boundaries and she had no business trying to tell me how to think and how to live. She replied that she had things to tell me a little bit about that I hadn’t been prepared to hear until sober for a certain length of time. We alcoholics, she said, had evolved to a higher spiritual plateau than the rest of humankind and were preparing the world for its transition to a higher state, politically and spiritually. We were connected, we could read minds, she said. She divulged that she was in a secret group of AA’s that was invitation only, for people who had been sober at least ten years, gave the impression that it was a kind of group that introduced to some kind of mysteries, for those who made choice cut. I thought what the fuck, there aren’t supposed to be any secret AA groups, goes totally against the principles, what did she think was she was doing. Well, it wasn’t really AA, instead it was made up of people from AA, so it was just fine, she said. Coy, she admitted she was telling me just enough to keep me interested, to string me along, knowing I was the curious type. I thought what the hell kind of group is she a part of and figuring I’d long since stopped listening to her for advice, I thought I would hang a little while longer and see if I could learn something about this, what in the hell it was.
I ended up not hanging around too much longer. Things were freaky. She was now carrying a gun with a pearl handle in her purse. Self-protection against society that she now said was falling into disarray. Some weird shit happened, so odd that I don’t remember the exact sequence of events. Serendipitously, I was going out of town. When I returned, I didn’t call, and when she called I didn’t call back.
Religious Science is very strong in some areas of AA, which had been fine, but we were now in the Reagan era and the Religious Science and Think Positive creed started to sound a lot more like Republican ideology. I had cut way back on the meetings and then stopped altogether. I had other things to work on. And there were also parts of AA and its trappings that were starting to work on me in ways I didn’t like and which did leave me confused for some time afterwards as far as what was essential for sobriety what was not.
But I was sober. And I was thinking about those things only because I’d managed to stay sober at that point for a while and wasn’t white-knuckling it. The first thing I thought of when I got up in the morning wasn’t alcohol, nor was it the last thing I thought of at night. Alcohol had ceased to be an issue.
Principles not people. I got sober in spite of it all. Which is the way it’s supposed to work. That you get sober in spite of.
