What a shabby, ragtag bunch they are! Some of the men have no teeth, and one talks to himself in the back row of the battered little wooden chairs. The women could be hookers, homeless maniacs, the sick, the half dead. New York has increasingly become a city of poverty and great wealth. Here in Hogarth’s London, the great lady in her designer dress disdains the beggar who importunes her from the street. But in the Program we are all leveled.
The meeting has not yet started, and people mill about, drinking coffee and greeting one another. All strangers, but bound together by kindness and an agreement to
try
to be honest. I love AA’s reprieve from the standards that hold sway in the rest of our society. Elsewhere greed and falsehood and egotism are the rule. Here, generosity, truth, humility. I am nervous because I drank tonight and I will have to say so, but there is something healing about just being here in this room. The love in the room is palpable. Somewhere, here, my same mind is waiting.
Someone comes up to me and taps me on the shoulder.
At first I recoil. It seems to be a bag lady, face swimming in fat, eyes buried in wrinkles. On her head she wears a red knitted cap with dangling sequins, on her body a tent of red polyester.
“Louise?” she says tentatively. “Louise?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Rivka Landesman, remember? Music and Art?”
I look at her in disbelief. This huge wallowing-in-fat bag lady is a classmate of mine from high school—a talented painter, someone who had a gallery before I did, someone I was once envious of because she seemed to have it made, when I was still struggling for my first recognition as a painter. Rivka was a prodigy even in high school. She used to hang out with Andy Warhol, did movies with him, sold her work to important collectors, was written up everywhere—then vanished. I hadn’t heard of her in years.
“How
are
you?” I asked. The question was ridiculous. I could see how she was. Worse off than I.
My kindness released something in her: a flood of self-pity.
“Well,” she said, “when my fourth marriage—to the Italian—broke up and he absconded with my entire life savings, I really hit bottom. You won’t believe this, but in the last year I’ve lost everything. My daughter’s left for college, my boyfriend vanished to Italy with a million dollars of mine and three of Andy’s paintings, I’ve had a partial hysterectomy, my hormones are all fucked up, I’ve gained eighty pounds, my mother died. . . . I’m hoping AA can help me. I don’t know where else to go. I’m as close to suicide as I’ve ever been.”
Something in me recoils at the self-pity. I feel that Rivka is about to get her hooks into me and not let go. I feel trapped, claustrophobic. But when somebody reaches out for help, you have to help.
“Louise,” she says, “what gallery are you with now? Do you think they’d look at my work?”
“I don’t know,” I say, suddenly feeling my pocket being picked. “I’m not here to be your agent. I’m here because I’m a drunk.”
“Of course,” says Rivka, “but you’re so fortunate. You’ve always had more success than me. Always been in the right place at the right time. Always on the crest of the wave of the moment.”
I look at her in disbelief. She’s insulting me and guilt-tripping me at the same time. “Networking” at a meeting! Is there any
lower
a person can sink!
“You’re so pretty. You always have men. You always have the critics in the palm of your hand. You’ve no idea how hard it’s been for me. . . .”
Now she’s really pushing my buttons. I want to scream at her, to denounce her for her kvetching and self-absorption, tell her that she’s probably driven away everyone who’s ever tried to help her, but then I realize that this reaction is exactly why I was meant to come to this meeting: to see myself reflected in this woman—to see what I could become if I don’t pull myself together and get tough with myself, to see an example of a woman squandering her life by playing the victim.
“Rivka,” I say gently, “if you want me to help you get sober, I’ll try. I’m not having an easy time myself. Perhaps I can help you in some way—but please don’t insult me by trying to guilt-trip me into selling your work. That’s not what the Program’s about, and all you’re doing is driving me away.”
She looks at me, uncomprehending.
“Don’t you want to help me?”
“I do, I want to help you, but I don’t want you to insult me and manipulate me. I’m struggling too. I drank tonight after not drinking for a month, and feeling better than I’ve ever felt in my life. I am still trying to take things one step at a time. I am still trying to learn how to lead my life. All my success led me to pressures of a
different
sort from the ones you’ve had—but they are pressures just the same. There’s no competition between us. We’re all stumbling human beings. The Program led me to see my life in spiritual terms, and I blew it—maybe because I couldn’t
take
my life actually getting better. I wanted the pain back. I made a little bargain with God that I would get sober if I could have my lover back, and I got him back for a while, and that misled me. But God doesn’t play by our rules. And we can’t be like petulant little kids and say, ‘Well, if God doesn’t play by my rules, I’m not playing, I’ll destroy myself—so
there!
’ We really haven’t
got
that option. We can choose to live or choose to die—but we can’t straddle the fence. And if we want to live we have no choice but to
submit
—not to our own will, to God’s.”
“Oh, Her,” said Rivka.
“Right,” I said. “Her. Or Him. It doesn’t even matter; it’s a sort of vanity even to argue about the sex of God. We’re talking about spirit here, the gift of life—and whether you choose to affirm it or deny it. That’s all this is about.”
Was I trying to convince Rivka—or myself?
Rivka’s eyes blinked. A flicker of intuition.
“I almost see,” she said.
“Of course you do; you’re a painter.” I hugged her. I couldn’t even get my arms around her, but I hugged her.
Isadora: My skin gets crawly when our heroine launches into sermons about drink and drugs. She’s barely sober, after all.
Leila: It’s those of us who are barely sober who preach the hardest. When you’re
really
beyond addiction, you don’t
need
to preach.
Isadora: And I don’t know where you’re going with this chapter. I sniff an epiphany at hand. Epiphany on the Bowery. God—I
hate
epiphanies.
Leila: You’ve gotten so
cynical
in your old age. What became of the old Isadora, who was afraid but flew anyway?
Isadora: Don’t ask. It would take another book to tell you.
The meeting was called to order by the secretary, who looked like a street hooker in her black leather micro-mini, red halter top, huge red hair bow, and red spike-heeled sandals. It was difficult to tell how old she was. Anywhere between eighteen and thirty, I guessed. But she had a hard look, the look that a life on the streets leaves you with. I knew that compared with mine, her life was tough. Just seeing her spirited, cocky little body and hearing her jaunty reading of the preamble made me cry. I was so glad to be back here, in the meeting, so glad to have a meeting to go to.
The speaker was introduced as Lenore B. Much rowdy applause. She was known to the members.
Lenore B. was a wiry little black woman in her fifties or sixties who told a story that could have made anyone’s hair stand on end: a battering husband, a son shot on the streets of Harlem, a daughter with breast cancer, a mother with lung cancer, a brother with AIDS. Some people have more than their share of afflictions, and Lenore was one of these. In AA, I’d finally come to understand the story of Job and why God reserves the right to strip us in order to punish us for our hubris and self-absorption. It was a good lesson, a lesson I could often grasp during meetings but that would float right out of my head when I wasn’t at meetings. Now, hearing Lenore, I was reminded of it again. I wondered what Rivka thought. Never mind. I wondered what
I
thought.
Lenore spoke about her life, and my mind wandered. I looked at the scroll listing the Twelve Steps and realized you could spend your whole life on any one of them. I could do a conceptual piece on AA scrolls—but wouldn’t risk it for fear of tampering with the magic.
Allowing the steps to drift through my mind, I focused on the sixth—something about being “entirely ready” to have God remove one’s “defects of character”—which was the subject of tonight’s meeting. What did “entirely ready” mean? It meant you were ready to open your heart to God. It meant you really wanted to get better. It meant you were through with self-pity. It meant you were
entirely ready
to listen to your own sane mind.
Was I? Absolutely not. I was too attached to my pain and self-pity, too attached to Dart, too attached to the me that was just
like
Dart, too attached to my own willfulness.
As so often happens at meetings, the speaker and I collided thought waves.
Lenore B. said: “Watchin’ my brother die of AIDS, I axed myself: Does you really believe in spirit, or is you only pretendin’ to? Because he lost his faith in his final sickness, an’ I almos’ did myseff. He was a
terr
ble sight: tumors comin’ out of his tongue, a sickenin’ smell, a wasted body. I nursed him, an’ many’s the time I wanted to drink, but even more often I wanted to curse God for his afflictions. And for mine. It was the sixth step that save me. Specially two words of the sixth step. The words ‘entirely ready.’ Was I entirely ready to give up the flesh? I wasn’t—not till I saw my brother’s flesh rottin’ and fallin’ off. We don’ like death. We don’ like disease. We think we be too big for death and disease. We think we be
beyond
the flesh. But flesh is mostly there as a lesson. Once we learn it, we pass on.
“I
bless
the day God took my brother Harold. I bless the day I saw him lyin’ there, a heap of bones and stinkin’ flesh. Till that day, I didn’t
believe
I was mortal. But now I believes it. I am
entirely ready.
And whenever I become unready, God sends me another reminder. . . .”
There is a strange wheezing sound in the back of the room. Several of us turn and look back, to see an old bum in the back row grab his chest and double over.
Propelled by a force I don’t understand, I rush to his side.
The man’s face turns stony blue, then he falls forward, hitting his head on the chair in front of him with a
thunk.
He crumples on the floor, reeking of sweat, piss, dung—the smell of destitution. His head turned to one side, his eyelids flutter, and I can see that what’s left of his one visible eye is cloudy blue. His mouth moves—toothlessly. A thin rivulet of saliva slimes out of one corner of his mouth onto the floor. I think of Dart, who always loved the bums, identified with them, wanted, in fact, to go around the city putting blankets on all of them like some crazed catcher in the rye. And I try to pretend that this heavy lump of decaying flesh is my beautiful Dart. For it is.
The red hole of a mouth speaks. “I tole ’im it was no good goin’ to the center of the lake . . . but would he lissen? No, siree. Never. I told ’im the raft wouldn’t hole ’im, but would he lissen? No, siree. Gone . . . all gone . . . summer gone . . . and winter . . . and the good booze. . . . I told ’im, I tried to tell ’im. . . .”
His slate-colored face takes on an utterly peaceful expression, and he is gone into some forgotten summer on some forgotten lake, with some never to be forgotten companion. Perhaps they are together now. Then all the muscles in his face relax. He is entirely ready. And then his bladder lets go, and I am kneeling in a pool of piss that spreads from his reeking trousers.
The calm in his bluish face as the urine spreads around him, wetting even my knees and calves, makes me think I am watching a tiny baby returning to Mama. Life is so hard for some people. They never can get the hang of taking care of themselves. Death must be such a relief. No more pretense. No more holding on. The warm pool of pee in the bed turning cool and sticky on the legs. Back to Mommy, back to the big breast.
The members of the meeting are standing around us now.
In astonishment at the rapidity with which life passes to death, I can only say: “God, God.”
“Amen,” says Lenore, coming up behind me.
Several members of the meeting are crying. Someone has gone to call the ambulance (although it is clear that our friend is beyond ambulances now). And Rivka has fled. She is not entirely ready. Perhaps someday she will be.
10
Blue Blues
When I get home
I gonna change
my lock and key.
S
o I changed the locks. I had no choice, really. I didn’t do it gleefully. When the locksmith came, I cried. But there was no way I was letting the bimbo into my bed again. It was insupportable. I had lost Leila somewhere between New York and Connecticut, and I had to get her back. Changing the locks was the first step.
It wasn’t easy. I would think about Dart all the time. His cock. His sweet half-crooked smile. His beautiful calf muscles. His tight buns. His cock.
I would lie in bed at night missing him viscerally, missing him in my gut, my heart, my fingertips. When I loved Dart, I loved him so hard that often my fingertips ached, and now my fingertips missed him. They could still feel the texture of his skin. And my nostrils. My nostrils could still smell him.
It’s no easy thing to give up booze and a lover at the same time. One addiction is hard enough. But what choice did I have? There was nothing left in the bottle for me. Nothing but depression and sadness and pain. I couldn’t kid myself that drinking would make anything better. It always made everything worse.