It was good to see Don, the ex-state trooper, sitting at the table of our noon AA meeting that day; good that he had gotten through his worst hours of alcohol starvation, good too that I was there to hear him talk about it during the meeting, reminding me that I was not alone and that this remains a desperately earnest business, no matter how much time in the program one gets under their belt. The drunk has distilled into the brain, burned into one’s destructive synapses; time for this dark Presence is a less cohesive strategem than for the waking mind, history eclipses in one night, and many long years of slow steady work evaporate in the first shot. There’s never any second or third drink or bottle, only the next, always the one we reach for thinking we’ll get there this time, this next greedy sip. This work of sobriety never stops, although it usually labors beneath the surface of the day, in its blue interior.
A woman named Shay who’s been a member of the group about a year now told some more of her story, how she linked with criminal boyfriends of every stripe with their easy access to opiates, dope-pushing bikers and and fraudulent investment bankers, traders in booted freight and chop-chop auto parts and meth-addict identity thieves. They all had larcenous smiles and fat wallets, keeping her on wild display at backwoods parties where the girls wrested in coleslaw and out on yachts careening over dazzling waters.
She drank them all under the table, stole their drugs and fucked their best friends, heisted jewelry from their mother’s houses and pocketed their silverware. Every night got wilder and meaner, candescent with the bulb of her body burning too brightly, flaring out. Every waking was a death, coming to the raw exhaustion and finitude of the same incarceration in self. A ruin so loud in her heart that she couldn’t bear to look in the mirror. Then the downward spiral from that bottom into bottomlessness, dancing partner to partner through a change of less and less winning men, still free in the wallet -- that was the absolute condition -- but more wounded, crueller, airless: Tandem shadows of that tidal bole she’d become as her life sucked down its drain.
One guy beat her badly, breaking her jaw and tearing off one of her nipples; another forced her to gang bang his boys. Then she was aboard a party boat for what seemed like weeks in an almost total blackout, fed whatever by a handsome man who proved to be the true abyssal Lucifer of them all, a hitman whose specialty was the knife and who kept a side trade in arms and babies and whose hobby was slowly poisoning women. This bottom feeder of the heart’s night was her darkest lover, the one her addiction was desperately seeking, and fell swoonly into him, shakier and paler each day from the doses of arsenic he mixed in her tumblers of Myer’s rum and pineapple juice.
Had she not fallen overboard one night in a near-death stupor and been left behind to drown, she would probably have not lived past the dawn; as it was, she floundered a few moments and then just gave up, praying to her childhood’s God to take her home. And bumped into some mass heavy in the water which proved to be a rogue bale of dope. Strange vehicle of grace, but she took it as a divinely offered hand and held on with all that was left in her. The next morning she was found by a Coast Guard cutter that was rounding up the bales, sent to the hospital where she slowly recovered from the poison and then entered a three-month rehab where she grabbed onto AA with all the fertile desperation of those one door short of doom. Sober three years now, she’s in law school and sponsors a lot of women from the same treatment program.
“You know, I never thought of going any other way, once I tasted the booze,” Shay finished. It was always Out There, toward the darkest region, into the arms fo the wildest men. It was like a thirst for something that turned out to be at the bottom of all that, beyond even the bottle itself. Who would have figured that at the bottom of the bottle was a door that opened into here, revealing all the treasure I always wanted. Strange gold, hmmm.” She thanked the group for allowing her to share and shut up. We nodded quietly. Discussion moved on through the room.
