The lights were out. The room was dark. I could hear music through the door coming from inside John‘s ‘apartment‘. U2 I believe. Certainly Bono, “Uno. Dose. Tres. Catorce . . . ”.
"Do you hear that" I said in my Irish whisper to my nine year old daughter, Kristen. She shakes her head back and forth.
"Shhh. Listen . . . . He's in there. I can hear music playing".
This was not her first encounter with locked doors today. The reason she was even with me on this call stemmed from a harrowing experience less than half and hour before. Harrowing at least from her perspective. I had tried leaving her home but just three minutes from the house on the way to John's my cell phone rang. It was Kristen.
“Daddy some one is knocking on the door” she said.
“So? ” Something was wrong. Her voice was too quivery for everything to be OK. This was the first time that she had ever been home alone for a real live ‘door knocking’
“I told you . . don’t answer it. Who is it?”
“I don’t know. I ran upstairs and I am hiding in your bedroom.” locked in. In our bed. under the covers with her new Nokia I got her last month. “I’m scared” was all she could say, too upset to answer my question and she went quickly from quiver to a full out cry. That's all a daddy ever needs to hear to shake the world from the ground up. I think I left about twenty dollars worth of Michelin Man on Route 28 making a very Bronxy U-turn and headed back home.
She has never seen me drunk. I stopped drinking and was fully recovered three years before she was born. But she has seen a few others as shitfaced as shitfaced can be.
Now she is with daddy and instead of an imaginary monster on the outside of the door trying to get in to her - there is a real alien creature inside - a hideous monster - cunning, baffling and powerful, waiting for us - and we are trying to get in at it.
Almost immediately John opens the the door. He lets us in right away. John likes me, so there really isn’t much r
esistance to me ever. That is always a good thing. He is in his PJs and for a second they look like Dr. Dentons, then I realize its just because of the matching colors’ of hi s top and bottom.He is drunk of course. Not slobbering, falling down drunk piss and crap the pants blitzed like a college frat amateur but in an EtOH diluted state of what I call "physically level drunk” the kind of drunk that functional alcoholics learn to reach so they can continue to work at their job and buy food - maybe even pickup the kids from school and drive them to soccer practice.
Meanwhile the mental arrogance, know-it-all-istic twisted thinking and manipulative freak can operate not like a real human being but more like a greasy over lubricated metal clockwork removed from its casing - cranking away at itself, busy and purposeful to look at but still not really getting anywhere because it isn’t hooked up to anything - like an aberration of human nature. Like an alcoholic.
All real alcoholics are freaks.
“Thanks for coming over” he says
“Well thanks for having me.” I say.
“You know, Danny, I wish I wasn’t in this position again like this. I really thought that I was going to be able to do this on my own.”
“John, we spoke about the obsession and the craving. You and your brainiac mind told me that you understood it.”
“I do. I do understand it.” he said.
"If you did you - if you truly did and if you thought that it applied to you then you would not have said what you just have". I told him and it was true.
How could someone truly admit powerlessness and still think that they could stay sober without divine help?Either my prior work with John did not include the successful taking of Step One and I had failed him or Johns failure to complete his housecleaning - his inventories - simply shot his alcoholic ass straight back to Step Zero.
He made a decision. He said he would turn his life and his will over to God and began setting pen to paper to make a beginning.The problem was that he wasn't very "strenuous" about it. He tried to pawn off on me an old inventory he had written some time in the past for another sponsor. Where was his effort then? There was none. Then he simply ran out of steam altogether. That decision, as vital as it was, was not worth Jack's crap and had hardy any lasting effect.
“John so far you have had all these fucking “epiphanies” and all you have done so far is misuse the information and the process. I don’t think you have had any revelations at all - not in a spiritual sense anyway. You know John, we aren’t suffering from an illness that only an intellectual awakening can conquer . . . . . We are suffering from an illness that only a spiritual awakening can conquer. You keep getting smarted and smarter - - and sicker and sicker.”
The look on John’s face is two parts grin and one part wince. My words are a rather a clever way of putting it and John knows it. He admires my way with words - I’m a writer ferchrysakes - but if the meaning of my words are wasted on him then that means that they are not worth shit.
Hey let's all remember those clever things that guy said from the podium. You know those things that he pulled up and out of his solar plexus - from his heart - from his experience bank? Then we can repeat them and sound cleaver and pithy in meetings. It’ll sound like we too have had those experiences even though we haven’t. Just like quoting the Big Book without having any experience with the Twelve Steps - except new material - good for laughs, uh huhs and “Hey that’s a good one”s. “I’ll have to remembers that one.” Yeah. That’s the ticket!
