“Oh, it wasn’t any more difficult then. But, see, I more or less took it for granted that a year of sobriety was an impossible accomplishment. That nobody stayed sober that long. Now my sponsor’s sober almost six years, and there’s enough people in my home group with ten, fifteen, twenty years, and it’s not like I pegged them as liars. I just thought I was a different kind of animal, and for me it had to be impossible. Did your old man drink?”
“That was the other secret of his success.”
“Mine too. In fact he died of it. It was just a couple of years ago, and what gets me is he died alone. His liver went on him. My ma was gone already, she had cancer, so he was alone in the world, and I couldn’t be at his bedside where I belonged because I was upstate. So he died in a bed all by himself. Man, that’s gonna be one tough amends to make, you know?”
I didn’t want to think about the amends I’d have to make.
“You went on the cops, Matt. Or am I mixing you up with somebody else?”
“No, you got it right. That ended a few years ago, though.”
He lifted a hand, mimed knocking back a drink, and I nodded. He said, “I don’t know if you would have heard, but I went the other way.”
“I may have heard something.”
“When I say I was upstate, it was as a guest of the governor. I was at Green Haven. It wasn’t exactly up there with the Brinks Job and the Great Train Robbery. What I did, I picked up a gun and walked into a liquor store. And it’s not like it was the first time.”
I didn’t have a response to that, but he didn’t seem to require one. “I had a decent lawyer,” he said, “and he fixed it so I took a plea to one charge and they dropped the others. You know what was the hardest part? You got to do what they call allocute. You familiar with the term?”
“You have to stand up in court and say what you did.”
“And I hated the idea. Just flat-out hated it. I was looking for a way around it. ‘Can’t I just say
“Because it was over.”
He shook his head. “Because it was out there. Because I said it, I copped to it. There’s the Fifth Step in a nutshell, Matt. You own up in front of God and everybody and it’s a load off your mind. Oh, it wasn’t the last load, it was just one small part of it, but when the program came along and they told me what I was gonna have to do, it made sense to me right from the jump. I could see how it would work.”
AA’s twelve steps, Jim Faber had told me, weren’t there to keep you sober. Not drinking was what kept you sober. The steps were to make sobriety comfortable enough so that you didn’t feel the need to drink your way out of it, and I’d get to them in due course. So far I had admitted that I was powerless over alcohol, that it made my life unmanageable, and that was the First Step, and I could stay on that one as long as I had to.
And I was in no great rush to get past it. They began most of the meetings I went to with a reading of the steps, and even if they didn’t there’d be a list of them hanging on the wall where you couldn’t help reading it. The Fourth Step was a detailed personal inventory, and you sat down and wrote it out. The Fifth Step was confessional—you shared all that shit with another human being, most likely your sponsor.
Some people, Jim said, stayed sober for decades without ever doing the steps.
I thought about the steps and missed a few beats of what Jack was saying, but when I tuned in he was talking about Green Haven, saying it was probably the best thing that ever happened to him. It had introduced him to the program.
“I went to meetings because it was a chance to sit in a chair and zone out for an hour,” he said. “And it was easier to stay dry inside than it was to drink the awful shit cons brew up for themselves, or buy pills that the screws smuggled in. And, you know, I can’t say I blame alcohol for the turn my life took, because I chose it myself, but going to meetings it began to dawn on me that every time I got my ass in trouble, I was always high. I mean, like, invariably. It was me making the choice to do the crime, and it was me making the choice to take the drink or smoke the joint, but the two went together, you know, and I was seeing it for the first time.”
So he stayed sober in prison. Then they let him out and he came home to New York and got a room in an SRO hotel a couple of blocks from Penn Station, and by the third night he was drinking blended whiskey around the corner in a place called the Terminal Lounge.
“So called because of its location,” he said, “but the name would have fit the place even if it had been in the middle of Jackson Heights. Fucking joint was the end of the line.”
Except of course it wasn’t. The line ran its zigzag course for another couple of years, during which time he stayed out of trouble with the law but couldn’t stay out of the bars. He’d go to meetings and begin to put a little time together, and then he’d have one of those oh-what-the-hell moments, and the next thing he knew he’d be in a bar, or taking a long pull on a bottle. He hit a few detoxes, and his blackouts started lasting longer, and he knew what the future held and didn’t see how he could avoid it.
“You know, Matt,” he said, “when I was a kid, I decided what I was going to be when I grew up. Can you guess what it was? You give up? A cop. I was gonna be a cop. Wear the blue uniform, keep the public safe from crime.” He picked up his coffee but his cup was empty. “I guess you were dreaming the same dream, but you went and did it.”
I shook my head. “I fell into it,” I said. “What I wanted to be was Joe DiMaggio. And, but for a complete lack of athletic ability, I might have made that dream come true.”
“Well, my handicap was a complete lack of moral fiber, and you know what I fell into.”
He kept drinking, because he couldn’t seem to help it, and he kept coming back to AA, because where the hell else was there for him to go? And then one day after a meeting an unlikely person took him aside and told him some home truths.
“A gay guy, Matt, and I mean gay as a jay. Obvious about it, you know? Grew up in a lah-de-dah suburb, went
