Page Three of Hitting Bottom
As I rounded the corner at the foot of the steps, I found myself facing a doorway leading to a narrow room with a long table surrounded by folding metal chairs. At one end of the room a man in a business suit was making coffee and opening boxes of Cheez-its and chocolate chip cookies, which he arranged on paper plates down the middle of the table. At the other end, a grandmotherly woman with a tight, grey-haired perm and bags under her kind-looking eyes was knitting what seemed to be a sweater. She looked up at me over the top of her half-moon glasses and smiled. A much younger, tough-looking man seated at the head of the table was arranging some books and papers in front of him. He had a bushy moustache and a graying pony-tail and wore a knitted woolen watch cap, in spite of the August heat in that stuffy, smoky room.
Noticing my hesitation in the doorway, the old lady smiled again and said, “Hello. My name’s Helen. Want a cookie?” She slid one of the paper plates across the table in my direction. I felt a flood of relief, even joy, at this nurturing act. She reminded me of my mother, dead from a self-administered overdose of pills and vodka twelve years earlier.
“I’d love one, Helen, thanks. My name’s John.” Munching a chocolate chip cookie, I began to relax. Apparently, I was in the right place.
One by one, the others introduced themselves as more people filed into the little room and found places at the table or in the rows of chairs lining the walls. Soon the room was full of mostly happy people exchanging greetings and news as they opened brown paper bags containing their lunches and waited for the meeting to begin. A few of the people looked haggard and sick, some even frightened like me. But, for the most part, the “High Noon” group of Alcoholics Anonymous was a happy, healthy, well-dressed mix of genders, ages, races and lifestyles that bore little resemblance to the usual “wino” stereotype of an alcoholic, but resembled rather more a random sample of ordinary downtown D.C. bureaucrats and office workers enjoying their lunch hour. How wrong my preconceptions had been!
At exactly noon, the young man glanced at his watch and announced, “Hi, everybody, let’s have an AA meeting… Welcome to the High Noon meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. My name’s Wally and I am a grateful, recovering alcoholic.” A loud response came from the entire room, “Hi, Wally!”
He went on, “I’ll read the Preamble…” He read a short statement defining AA and its purpose and method, inviting two others to read “How it Works” from “The Big Book” and a daily meditation from “Twenty-four Hours.” He then launched into a brief introduction, covering his own drinking history, what brought him into AA and what his life was like since then. He said one thing which I shall never forget: “I was surprised to discover that I still had a lot of problems after I got sober. But they were a better class of problems than the ones I had before. And without the booze in my system, I was able for the first time to work on solving them.”
The rest of the hour was devoted to comments from the others in the room, either on the suggested topic of their “better class of problems” or on anything else they chose to share with the group. A few of the newer folks preferred to “pass” or “just listen” when their turns came to speak. I think I simply blurted, “H-hello. My name’s John, I’m… an alcoholic, and this is my first meeting.” I was greeted by a loud chorus, “Hi, John! Welcome!” Somebody brought me a copy of “Where and When”, a monthly booklet which listed all fifteen hundred AA meetings in the Washington area. At the end of the hour we stood and held hands for the Lord’s Prayer, ending with “Keep coming back! It works if you work it.” Then, before I could get out the door, I was surrounded by friendly people offering me their telephone numbers and help if I needed it. Helen, the “High Noon” matriarch and cookie-pusher, advised me sotto voce to find a sponsor from within the group but to wait and listen carefully for a few meetings before choosing whom to approach.
I did “keep coming back,” worked with a series of sponsors over the years and, miraculously, was able to stop drinking to this day. Like Wally, I discovered that I still had a lot of problems after I quit. After all, I came within a hair’s breadth of losing my family, health and career, and I had to work long and hard on my Twelve Steps to earn back people’s confidence and respect. I needed to re-invent myself completely. If I was no longer John the Drunk, then who the hell was I? I had no idea!
Part of my twelve-step program of recovery was making amends to all the people I injured during my drinking days. My wife and our kids came first, but also high on the list was my father, seventy-eight, who lived in Boca Raton, Florida with Ruth, his second wife of eleven years. They met two months after my mother’s suicide and married only eight months later. Both my sisters, who blamed him for our mother’s death, were furious that he did this, and I was rather estranged from the old man also, although, unlike my sisters, I continued to visit him and Ruth occasionally. There was always a lot of drinking during those visits.
Sometime in October I got enough courage to call my father to make my amends. My AA sponsor told me not to worry if he didn’t accept them; they were for my own good, not his. I was nonetheless sweating and nervous as I listened to the ring tone at his end of the phone line.
“Hello?” He sounded perky.
“It’s me, Pop, how are you, and how is Ruth?”
