todd of tacoma

Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.

A drunk who shares her story holds a finger near the hot legs of an electrical panel. Surprise her with advice and she’ll lunge two inches to her death. Soothe her with an aphorism and she’ll slump to the floor in a puddle of grateful healing. You must never be shocked by what she tells you. And if she values her newly sober life at all, she’ll never tell you anything shocking.

In every open meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, no surprise, there are about six near suicides. And everyone else might as well be.

If I take that first drink I die.

If I don’t 86 and 87 every morning and every night I’ll go right back out.

If I go back out, I don’t come back.

Today, I have the desperation of a drowning man.

It’s either kill myself or get help.

This is the last time I get sober.

My friend E says we’re all failures. That is, in the rooms we’re all alive having talked incessantly of killing ourselves, some of us for decades. And we didn’t.

D, for example, sobered up in a hospital bed after one such failure. When she tells us how she got to that bed she clouds the best parts with euphemisms. Almost no one is explicit in AA. If you are you’re an outcast or a mythical hero.

Not D. She’s neither outcast nor hero. Dropping tearlets through a wink she says she went to sleep and didn’t plan on waking up. She had her stomach pumped and when she recovered her family talked her into detox and tricked her into rehab. Eight somnambulant, nightmare months with nothing to read but Bill W.

Recovering from suicide is easy, but sobriety? Get thee to a nunnery.

I’m lucky to be alive.

Lucky D is almost thirteen months sober today and receiving her year coin.

This one’s heavy.

She wishes she would have gotten sober, or attempted suicide, a few days earlier so she could collect each month’s coin closer to her actual birthday and not wait another twenty-seven days or however many she has to tack on waiting for the next birthday meeting. It’s like sitting at home penniless the first week of a new job, waiting for payroll to catch up. But she doesn’t have to worry about the month problem now. Her next coin is eighteen. Then it’s a yearly cadence.

She goes on about this coin thing longer than the pills thing. Then she passes the coin around so we can all press our thumbs into it and send it good thoughts and encouragements and admonitions and prayers.

She concludes how she did it with something about steps one and two, and about how she’s tried to do this before but this time it’s different.

I just do everything my sponsor tells me and I get my butt to meetings. Oh, and step three, too. That’s so important.

Invoking two God steps for an added layer of protection.

That’s all I got, thanks.

It’s a tired story. But it’s not her fault. The story that defines your life is dull by definition. And even if your story, lucky you, is that rare thriller, it can still be topped. Everyone’s is topped in the rooms, topped and then forgotten.

You haven’t endured the most pain and haven’t done the worst thing. Shit, you’re not even the most boring. It’s not one-upsmanship, no, it’s just numbers. We’ve all been killing ourselves for years and have entire tomes of drowning man monologues, neglected on these dusty bookshelves in our minds. Until some drunk like D gets up and shares her pill tale, in all its monotony, and we remember: we got that one, too. And she tells it just like us. Nothing is new.

I tell D’s coin to take it one day at a time, everything happens for a reason.

Is she a plagiarist? Nah. A composite hallucination? Assembled of everyone here today and projected onto the whiteboard up front while we wait for the meeting to start, or finish? I can’t tell what she is, she’s painted herself in such broad strokes. But I like her. She’s cool. She dresses in all black and wears a choker but no makeup. She has tattoos that celebrate Satan, H.P. Lovecraft, Scheherazade, and some famous lepidopterists. I find her, despite every tedious thing she has told us about herself so far, interesting.

Why? With all the caveats and preamble, why?

Maybe let’s hear about something else. Something she told me outside the rooms. Instead of the pills she swallowed and the pills pumped out, let’s hear about the fact she’s responsible for someone’s death. How about that one? I don’t think it’s confidential, and I don’t think I’m blowing anyone’s anonymity. I’m using only the shortest abbreviations, for Christ’s sake.

Let’s travel with D to detox.

Edgewood, room 122, where this bitch K, a fentanyl addict who broke herself on the rack of over a hundred-fifty pills a day, she’s in D’s room passing gas day and night, relieving herself of that years-long opioid constipation. Just breaking wind in half-hour increments and moaning, moaning, moaning. Moaning that stinks more than her nutrient-poor flatulence, and keeps D up all night. And this fetid, pimply piece of garbage has yet to whimper so much as a hello or a good morning or a sorry you have to be in here with me. Even a fucking excuse me. Grounds for resentment.

You have to face your resentments, says the book.

So, D sits up two straight nights, in six-hour watches, facing this gas-bag, this farting cadaver as close to locked-in syndrome as they’ll allow in treatment. She sits with her and reads her apocalyptic bible passages. She describes the beast, the throne, the scrolls and seals, the seven trumpets and the seven angels, the whore of Babylon, the four horsemen, and four-faced creatures with four wings who sparkle like bronze. She reads till she’s hoarse. And when nurses make their rounds she whispers, One like unto the Son of Man is coming, and scurries to bed.

She tells her the righteous have ascended to heaven and outside these walls it’s the End of Days. Good luck in sobriety.

Each morning D sleeps like a baby.

If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps.

The morning of the third day, D gets up and puts the bible back in the little cafeteria room with all the other literature. She pumps a decaf coffee, lots of sugar, and eats a turkey sandwich. She hasn’t been this hungry in months. There are AA pamphlets and big books spread out on the table and D thinks about how she might try meetings when she’s set free. She has no idea yet she’ll be attending two mandated meetings a day in rehab thanks to her family’s intervention.

She checks out a DVD player at the front desk and hears a room door fly open. Hastily, abrupt, like a swinging ER door. She rubbernecks to see it’s 122, and passing through it, a flailing K held down by three nurses. Havoc on wheels. She hears words like no and ow and other alimentary moans. And finally: You have breaked my covenant!

It’s beautiful.

Sorry, you probably can’t tell me this. Where’s she going?

You’re right. I can’t.

It doesn’t matter. Recovery is a prolonged traumatic event that fuels the imagination. Sometimes you just need to watch the opening scene of someone else’s collapse and let your mind fill in the blanks.

D shares a smile with the desk nurse.

I don’t think it’s fully charged.

That’s okay.

Back in her room, D takes a victory lap. She plugs her player in at the head of her bed, sits at the foot, and watches a triple-feature without headphones. Mission: Impossible 4, Flight, The Shining. She stays in her room all day, drawing, writing, reading, humming, singing, standing on the radiator to gaze out the window, and at night she switches beds when she sweats through her assigned bed’s sheets.

Grapevine has it K died in a tent on J Street. Before she zipped herself in and smoked the last of her heroin and chewed her last damp percs, she ran a shopping cart up and down the Hilltop sidewalks, where every Sunday she shouted at the heretics and false prophets leaving St. John Church. She had become known for this. She had the fear of God and was living her best everlasting life.

In an online magazine article about tent cities in Hilltop, social worker R, who got K that bed in 122, is almost lost for words to describe this tragic demise. We need to take a hard look at the institutions that continue to fail vulnerable people like K.

D tells me these horrible little details through cigarette smoke in a park outside my home group. How to beat detox with manslaughter. It’s better than her suicide and I’m not afraid to say it. She’s a fucking recovering Iago. Or that vehement friend of Job’s. Curse God and die.

Is the story real? I don’t want to nitpick, but six hours is a long time to read aloud, especially when you’re still shaky and intermittently passing out from DTs, which D has shared at many meetings she had. But D, she’s as real as her one-year coin, and she’s sincere and truthful and can’t lie. She can’t because she grew up, like me, in an insular Christian community, a polyp on one of America’s butthole towns. Another reason I like her. She knows her bible, where to find the crazymaking rants, the juicy Ezekiel stuff and the phantasms of John, the island-cloistered one. And she apparently knows how to read them to make you go mad north-northwest: the way the youth pastor who tepidly assaulted her once read them.

Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now.

K is dead and D’s strange prank had something to do with it. That’s what’s real. A butterfly flapped its wings in Edgewood and a junky in Tacoma zipped up her tent and died. Case closed.

She has to share this in a meeting, has to, but she’s still hung up on killing herself.

I bore people to death with it, too. To death. Cue walk-off music, please, and do something about it. Big relief coming for everyone once I do, depending on the method. It’ll probably look something like CBT and talk therapy, microdosing AA and switching antipsychotics every six to eighteen months, under doctor supervision.

I promise not to bore you with the details.