I make it to an AA meeting every noon, a few miles inland, on the frayed south end of a small town called Woodbine. The club is located in a cheap storefront of a strip mall that is mostly deserted now, a Chinese takeout on one end and a laundromat toward the other. Most of the other businesses tanked when the Wal-Mart opened a ways to the north. Our storefront was previously an x-rated video mart; we still get the occasional furtive video voyeur walk in the door looking for trade, often drunk or stoned. They never stick around when someone welcomes them in. Not the party they were looking for.
We’re a small group and a mixed lot, run-of-the-mill drunks from every life stripe, bankrupt salesmen, retirees and bikers, housewives with bad perms and guilty young men drying out their consciences and probations before climbing back on their bottled Ninjas, nice cleaned-up church-going types and cross-addicted ex-cons with more ruinous baggage than anyone can shoulder. And there’s me, the recently-settled man of means whose wealth is haunted with lead vapors making all thought of it repugnant, living large at last by the sea with its emptiness his housemate and lover and muse. My three years of sobriety are thin walls against the sort of cold winds blowing inside my house these days, so I keep close to AA, staying alive not so much for myself as for them, the newcomers so desperate for help. Whatever good person distills in me through AA I see as the one working a legitimate way toward Jan and Brendan in their ghost suburb far away.
Today it’s a small gathering, maybe ten or so. A beefy guy around 60 whose been coming to our meeting for a few weeks is beginning to open up, uncorking his story. He says he’d been sober about six months now, coming to his first meeting in Leesburg as part of his probation. As he talks he stares into his coffee, avoiding eye contact with the group.
“It was another of those rock-bottom nights in the last months of my drinking,” he says in gruff voice. “I had closed down my usual watering home and was driving home in a blackout. I must ran a stop sign and come to in the intersection, because I veered wildly and then was up over the curb and careening onto the front porch of a neighbor. There was a loud crash. I crawled out of the wreckage and fled home on foot. The next morning when I stumbled up out of bed, my face all bruised and my right thumb broken. I didn’t remember the accident at first but knew I had done something.I peeked out the front window to check out the damage. Blackout drinkers do that, you know, always fearing what they might find on the front bumper. The car wasn’t even there.”
He paused to look out the window with that faraway gaze we all know. “Then I got the call from the station. You can’t know the shame and remorse I felt as I stood there in the bathroom, trying to button up my state trooper’s uniform.”
His eyes teared up for a moment and he took a sip of coffee. “You would think after all the things I had seen as a result of drunk driving that I would be its worst enemy. I’ve seen teens who were friends of my daughter hurled through windshields and split in trees, children cut dead from the wreckage, their mothers still holding them in their laps. One night I came across a guy walking down a country road with a bleeding stump where his right arm was. He had spun out and crashed into a tree, walked up to the road, collapsed there, and had been run over by another drunk driver, severing his arm. While we were getting him into the ambulance he was begging the parameds for a drink. Another night we found a car up in the trees one Saturday night that had spun off an I-4 bypass. The guy up there was hollering that if we didn’t get him down right away he would sue us or kick our asses when he was freed. And I turned out no different.”
He paused again to sip his coffee, big blunt ex-Marine fingers holding the styrofoam cup like a chalice, gentle, still. His voice almost a whisper. “Well, I’m here. I still can’t look myself in the mirror, but my head isn’t hanging lower every time I approach it.”
***
After the meeting I shake his hand and tell him to keep coming back. We stand outside somewhat awkwardly, bound by dark deep tides, the surface rhythms of our lives almost incomprehensible to the other. He lights up a cigarette and we talk about small stuff. Traffic on US-1 slogs ever-heavier sludgy wan sun of Over-Developing Florida, rigs and SUVs and Harleys vying for the best lane in a vast arterial juice, still on the make, on the go, still trying to grab the gold ring.
Don -- that’s his name -- says he’s just doing odd jobs after being discharged from the force, figuring he’ll work forever with all the staggering credit card debt he’s amassed. Lately he’s been helping a salvage crew that’s been hunting for a Spanish fleet that went down a few miles offshore in the 16th century, doing maintenance and cleanup mostly on the boat while it’s at dock. Apparently they’ve been pulling stuff up of late that suggests they’re close, bits of iron, a glass bottle, a couple of coins. I briefly tell him my story and that I’m living now on the beach, but I don’t mention the doubloon. Give him my phone number and tell him to call whenever he likes. He palms my card, slips it into his shirt pocket and grunts a thank you or a farewell, shuffling heavily off towards his car. I hope we’ll see him again but sometimes cats like him just flow on through, never finding enough hope to leave the past behind. Or maybe sometimes the past takes a long time to walk from. Don’t I know it.
