Dread welled up in the back of my throat and I tried to swallow it down.
“Well, what is it?”
“I spent hours online last night trying to find something to help me understand why I’m the way I am.”
“And?”
“I stumbled on some information that well, it resonated with me.”
I had no idea what it could be. I almost didn’t want to know. It was never anything good in the past. It was always something that had a terrible influence on me, though I knew I had to take responsibility for my own choices.
“So what was it? And what do you want to ask me?”
“Okay. I want to know if you’ll go to a sex and love addiction meeting with me tonight. I need to go. But I can’t go myself. I just can’t.”
“Mama? Where you are, Mama?”
“Hold on, Jill.” I ran out to the living room, realizing I should have peeked in on him sooner. He was sitting with a pair of scissors that I thought I had left out of his reach, trying to cut through a placemat on the dining room table.
“No, Jack! Put those down! Where did you get them?” I set the phone down and ripped them out of his hands. He shrieked.
“I’m sorry, Jack, I just don’t want you to hurt yourself. Those scissors are sharp. I thought you were watching TV.” He hissed at me like an angry kitten.
“I don’t want TV! Why you no play with me till I has to go to school? Play with me, Mama!”
The guilt and shame unleashed a tidal wave just beneath my solar plexus.
“Okay, Jack, yes, of course. I want to play with you. I love you so much sweetie.” I kissed his head, his cheeks, his nose, and his mouth. “Just one second, ‘k?”
“Jill, you still there?”
“Yeah.”
“I definitely want to go to that meeting with you.”
THE DINGY CHURCH BASEMENT
smelled like strong coffee and glue. Searching for the sources of these aromas, I spotted an extra-large percolating silver contraption and a small table in a corner, covered with arts and crafts supplies that seemed to be left behind by children.
“Let’s get some coffee,” I said, needing something to hold.
“In a minute. I think that’s Anita, the one I talked to earlier.”
I followed Jill over to a group of what seemed like perfectly normal men and women huddled together chatting.
“Are you Anita?” Jill asked a woman with a pale complexion, long, dark hair and full, bright red lips.
They all stopped talking and turned to both of us.
“You must be Jill. We’re all so glad you made it.”
She turned back to the crowd. “This is Jill, everyone.”
Now they were all looking at me. I wanted to run.
Jill touched my shoulder and announced, “This is my friend, Beth. She’s just here to support me.”
Anita fixed her warm brown eyes on me. “And that support will be very important as Jill begins recovery. Thanks for coming, Beth. You’re welcome to attend as many meetings as you like with Jill.”
Anita seemed certain that Jill was a sex and love addict. I knew they had a long phone call, but didn’t know if that was enough time for an official diagnosis. It did seem a plausible explanation for Jill’s troubles.
After coffee and small talk, people started to fill in the forty or so chairs arranged in a circle in the middle of the room. Jill and I followed their lead and sat down.
I showed no reaction when I recognized the man sitting directly across from me, but I felt my heart rate soar from the shock of it. He was a famous sitcom star. Rick and I had watched his show many times. I wanted to keep looking at him and forced myself not to. During the car ride to the church, Jill told me that anonymity is paramount to twelve step programs like this one. Now I knew how true that was. I had never heard a negative thing about this celebrity. In fact, the media painted him as a loving husband, father and generous philanthropist.
Maybe he still is
, I reassured myself.
When the meeting leader announced the rules, I found myself impressed by the order and simplicity of it all. After opening business, the main speaker would share his or her story for twenty minutes. Then the floor would open up for people to speak for three minutes at a time. A smart phone alarm chime ensured that no one went over the limit. There would also be chips awarded to those who had achieved thirty days, ninety days, and so on, of sobriety.
I hadn’t thought to bring tissues, but others anticipated the need, so a small, square box of Kleenex was passed around the circle when my emotions finally got the better of me.
At first I was sucked in by how articulate Malcolm was. Then, this clean-cut man in the same kind of sporty, lightweight, blue-and-gray North Face jacket that Rick always wore, destroyed me with his narrative. He was a high school AP math and science teacher, an Eagle Scout, a marathon runner, a Magna Cum Laude college graduate. He was a leader in the Big Brothers program, working to match inner-city kids raised by single moms with upstanding business owners who could serve as mentors and role models. He had everything—a gorgeous wife dedicated to her family and to her career as a social worker, a daughter who was captain of her award-winning high school drill team, the University of Southern California’s most successful linebacker for a son.
Malcolm’s list of accomplishments and accolades put mine to shame. And then he talked about how he lost it all because of his addiction. Everything. Initially, his wife tried to forgive him each time she caught him masturbating to a live naked woman on his computer screen. His principal even gave him a second chance the first time he was caught with a female student’s underwear in his desk drawer, but not the next. I didn’t know an Eagle Scout badge could be revoked, but apparently it can, if the infraction is grave enough. A statutory rape conviction took care of that.
“She swore she was eighteen,” he said, imploring us not to brand him a pedophile in addition to everything else, “and it was completely consensual, but her parents didn’t believe us. They prosecuted to the full extent of the law. That’s when my daughter stopped speaking to me. The girl was a friend of hers.”
There was so much remorse in his eyes, in his voice. His heavy heart consumed the space and enveloped us all. I kept thinking I should despise him but all I felt for him was great sorrow. As he shared one catastrophic choice after another, it seemed as though a demon possessed his body and made him do things the real Malcolm would never do.
“With a criminal record, I can’t get a job. I’ve been sleeping on my brother’s couch for a few months now and his wife says I can stay as long as I keep bringing my chips. I have nothing left except this program.”
As he spoke, my mind kept going back to one of my worst food binges. It had been some time ago, so I couldn’t remember what triggered it, but I saw myself staring down a full tray of brownies, begging myself to stop. I had already eaten several packages of potato chips, crackers, and cookies. I was split in two, knowing that my ego, who wanted me to eat the tray of brownies, was more powerful in that moment than the real me, who wanted the toxic behavior to end. Though I already felt close to regurgitating what must have been thousands of excess calories, I could not stop myself. I ate the entire tray. I hated myself after. Malcolm screwed a seventeen-year-old who was friends with his daughter. He hated himself after.
When it was time for open sharing, I was captivated by everyone who spoke, and I wished they could all have more than three minutes. One woman was an alcoholic, overeater, and love addict. I could relate to her in many ways, though somehow I had always been able to stop myself before taking any of it as far as she had. I wondered if I too had the potential to be a love addict, an alcoholic, a morbidly obese compulsive eater. Where were the lines drawn? Were there lines, or did we all fall somewhere on a mental health spectrum that determined how well we could hide our vices and pretend we were fully functional, free of addictions and afflictions?
My musings were interrupted when I saw Jill raise her hand. The leader approved her request, and despite my years of teaching public speaking, I was nervous for her. This was a kind of self-disclosure like nothing else I had ever witnessed.
Her bottom lip disappeared as she tried to compose herself before starting. It was a new side of her, this woman who had previously been such a foreign creature to me.
She turned to me and I offered a smile of encouragement. Her expression confused me. It seemed to be an apology.
“My father raped me when I was seven.”
It shook me to the core. But as I looked around at others’ responses, I saw no surprise.
She went on as I worked to wrap my mind around it. I felt awful for not recalling anything she had ever told me about her parents.
“I’m sure some of you have similar stories. And some of you might wonder how that could even happen. When you look at a seven-year-old girl, so small, you can’t imagine…” She had to stop and catch her breath.
I tried to hand her a tissue from the box in my lap, but she waved my hand away. She had no tears. I wondered if maybe she had already used up her lifetime allotment.
“Well, yes, I was very small, I always have been. So he had to start prepping me when I was five. A patient man he was, to wait two whole years, don’t you think?”
Waves of nausea rose up and swelled my insides.
“It took a lot of lubrication and hard work to open things up enough for me to be ready, and then we had to do it all over again when he was preparing to sodomize me. That didn’t happen until I was nine.”
I didn’t know if I could take any more.
“I told my mother when I was ten and she called me a filthy liar. The good thing about her thinking I was a delusional and evil child was that she sent me to live with my grandmother across the country. But my father visited as often as possible and snuck into my room late at night every time.”
I realized I had been looking at the sitcom celebrity across the circle for too long, having so lost myself in what Jill was saying. But he only looked back at me with pity and appeared to know the real reason for my blank stare.
“He’s in jail now. When I was failing most of my classes in eleventh grade, I told one of my teachers, hoping she might help me figure out how I could still graduate. She reported him and everything came out. I realized I had plenty of evidence, including all the pictures and videos he had taken of the two of us having sex. So I decided to do all I could to have him put away for as long as possible. My mother never went to the trial and never spoke to me again.”
How could something like this happen? It didn’t compute in any way. My chest was throbbing. My eyes were burning. My reality was crumbling. I swore to myself I would never, ever again assume anything about anyone.
“I had my first boyfriend when I was twelve. He was fifteen and very impressed by my skills, though he never asked where I learned them. I thought I was in love. He said we’d be together forever. I believed him. And the one after him, and the one after that, all the way through to the last one, Kent. I cheated on my husband with Kent because I was certain that he was actually the one, even after all the rest. I was still in denial of the extent of my disease.”
The word disease distracted me. Is this a disease? Is there a cure?
“And then recently I had an encounter with a woman and I thought I was falling in love with her. But I’m starting to see that I don’t know what love is. How could I? I don’t. Not even with my husband. He’s a cameraman in the porn industry. He watches people who barely know each other have sex all day. He doesn’t care what I do with other people. We were swingers for a while and I loved it. But now… it all seems… different, you know? So I know my marriage is over. Maybe I’ll never be able to have a healthy relationship.”
I had been holding my breath and exhaled louder than I meant to. Jill turned to me.
“I’ve been a terrible influence on people around me, including you, especially you.” She looked out at the group. “I read the whole twelve step book today.” Looking back at me she said, “When I get to step nine, which will take a while, I’m sure, I’ll do my best to make amends to you, Beth.” I remembered when she used to call me all the time to check if I had plans to have sex with Dave yet. I didn’t blame her though. I couldn’t. It was my life. I shook my head, trying to convey that no amends would be necessary, at least not for me.
She was speaking to the crowd again. “But that’s way down the road, right? First, I’ll start by admitting my powerlessness over this addiction.”
My perception of Jill was completely transformed in a matter of three minutes. I felt like a sheltered, ignorant, privileged imbecile. My problems seemed miniscule compared to what all these people had suffered. And here they were, leaving their dignity at the door to try to heal themselves and put the pieces of their wrecked lives back together.
As we clapped for those receiving chips, I reflected on what I had heard and learned. It was not the first time I considered the possibility of being an addict myself. In my more honest moments of therapy, I confessed to fears of being an alcoholic, being addicted to food, to romance, to sexual fantasies about Dave. But Carly knew better. She read to me from her Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I didn’t meet nearly enough of the criteria to count myself among true addicts. Still, I shared a good deal of their self-destructive tendencies. Carly explained that though I was guilty of alcohol abuse on many occasions, I did not fit the profile for alcohol dependence. And while I had a history of binge eating on occasion to avoid unpleasant feelings, my patterns suggested more typical emotional eating behavior than compulsive, uncontrollable overeating.
I had thought I’d want to leave right after the meeting, but when it was actually over, it was clear that Jill and I both wanted to stay and mingle.
I sought out a young woman appearing to be no older than sixteen, who had told us about her experiences as a recovering drug and sex addict. I had to tell her that as a mother, her story broke my heart and that she helped me see how many temptations exist for teenagers. I wanted her to know that because of what she said about how easy it was to hide everything from her parents, I would watch my kids more closely and refuse to ignore any signs of trouble.
As the buzz of noise in the room died down, I saw that only a sprinkling of other people besides Jill and me were still there. One of them was the sitcom celebrity. Only now, after all we had heard and seen in that room together, I was no longer intimidated by his fame. I walked right up to him.
“I’m so sorry about… before. It must have seemed like I was…”
He grinned with the exact same look he gives on his show when he’s about to deliver a well-scripted line.
“No worries. Happens all the time with newcomers. If you started to show up regularly, you’d be amazed how many of us you see.”
The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. Again, I felt clueless. “Yeah, I’m sure I would. Listen…”
He cut me off. “You don’t have to say it. I know. You don’t have to promise that you didn’t take pictures with your cell phone and won’t sell the story to the Enquirer.”
He laughed and I did too. My shoulders dropped.
“I’ve been coming to these meetings for a long time. It’s a risk I have to take each time. But having to start all over if I lose my five years of sobriety would be worse. So I have to come to meetings. I never really know if some new person is here to get the scoop on me. Funny thing is, no one has outed me in all this time. Must be something about the spirit of integrity you can feel here. That and all our talk about Karma. It really can be a bitch.”
“Yes, it can. I’ve learned that the hard way,” I said, wishing I had a witty scriptwriter to craft something better for me.