An AA Meeting I was Never Meant to be At

I wake up to the sound of my alarm, the one that blares a revolving door of classic rock tunes every morning. Snooze, then realize that I need to get up for purposes and meanings yet to reveal themselves. A real magical sort of feeling. Or maybe a small part of me hates myself and wants to continue to see me suffer for some unknown, or lifetime, of trespasses. 

I'm a recovering alcoholic, though I hope that doesn’t sound too much like a boast. I go to work, therapy, and an AA meeting. In that order, most of the week.

I drag myself out of bed and into the shower. As the hot water hits my face, I try to clear my mind of all the noise that's been building up over the past few days. The dreams I've been having are getting weirder and more vivid, and it's starting to scare me. What is that psychologists say about dreams? I don’t know, and won’t look it up either.

I dress and make my way to work, a mundane office job that pays the mortgage. As I sit at my desk, I can feel the hours dragging on. I keep looking at the clock, counting down the minutes until I can leave and head to my therapy session.

Gawd, how pathetic does my life have to be that the highlight of the day is getting off work to go to therapy? I certainly didn’t imagine this would be how my life would turn out when I was a kid. Ms. Parker, my third grade teacher, assigned us an essay on what we wanted to be. I hadn’t put down cog. If I remember correctly, I think I wrote about wanting to be a baseball player back when steroids were still cool.

Therapy is a mixed bag for me. Sometimes it feels like it helps, but other times it just makes everything worse. But I know I need it, so I keep going. I know I certainly need the serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Today, Dr. Monroe probes into the details of the dreams I’ve been having when I told him they were strange.

Strange how? Strange like funny? Strange like unreal? Tell me, what sort of dreams have you been having?

I ignored his odd attempt to sound like Joe Pesci and tried to explain my dreams the best I could.

In my dreams I’m walking naked in a desert. This overwhelming sensation of drowning overcomes me, despite no water being present whatsoever. And at the same time I’m parched. More parched than I’ve ever been, as if my tongue is made out of sandpaper and I’m going to choke with this sensation of burning phosphates ripping my esophagus to shreds from spontaneous combustion. When all hope seems lost and I’m distressed, I spot in the distance a small oasis. I begin running. I’m not a runner, but in my dreams I’m faster than an Olympic runner. Long story short, the oasis ends up being a mirage. Before I discover what the mirage actually is, though, I wake up.

She suggests that they might be a manifestation of my fears about relapsing. I try to brush it off, but the idea lingers in the back of my mind.

After therapy, I head to the same AA meeting I always go to. The meeting is held in the basement of a Methodist church. The room feels cramped. A sweaty box of meat ripening on the sidewalk sort of smell lingers.

I grab a cup of stale coffee and a small plate of available snacks that were put out by one or several organizing volunteers of these meetings. Today the snack is a vegetable platter with hummus and ranch dipping sauces. I get the impression that at least one of the volunteers wants us recovering alcoholics to not only be sober but healthy as well. I’m sure they read some such medical reports that eating healthy snacks leads to a better, more sustainable recovery. I resent them. I have been using the AA meetings’ snacks as my dinner for some time now, and so whenever the snacks are not all that appetizing I feel the urge to relapse out of spite. But I suppose it’s not all that strong of an urge. I take my place in a back row seat that keeps me anonymous among an anonymous crowd. Others filter through languidly into the basement commiseration. 

An older gentleman with a handlebar mustache begins the meeting by introducing himself and how many years he’s been sober. He thanks everyone for coming in and says that it’s daily meetings like these that keep him going. Keeps him sober. Takes a village, or something like that. Then he opens the floor by inviting anyone else that wants to share something to feel free. 

In the seven months that I have been going to AA, I’ve never once gotten up to say anything. Nerves, I guess. Also an inexpressible desire to fully incorporate anonymity into everything I do, especially when it comes to these meetings.

But then something strange happens. A man bursts into the room, waving a gun and shouting something about a local brewery. It difficult to make out exactly what he’s saying. The man is overweight, clearly out of breath. It takes him a moment, but he does eventually compose himself. For the most part, at least. His face is still beet red. Beads of sweat dribble down the sides of his face.

Eventually, I’m able to make out that he is a villain, I guess. Of a sort, at least. The man is the head brewer at the local brewery, Brewin’ It Up, and he crashed this particular AA meeting to issue a threat. 

The next sad story about alcohol I hear from one of y’all, I’m going to blow this place sky high.

With explosives? I hear someone ask from behind me.

The brewer looks confused. He tries to find the person that asked the question, but the room and the people in it are shrouded in anonymity.  Yeah, explosives. I have the building rigged to blow. You understand? I’m tired of you people taking some of my best customers. You all are going to be the death of my business.

Have you thought about moving the brewery away from our AA meetings?

No, you know what, I’ve never thought of that. For fudge sake, of course I’ve contemplated moving. But do you know how long that would take? How long my operation would be out of commission and not making any money? I’m already in the red! I can barely afford to close a day, much less an entire week or so to move. 

Look, we’re sorry Peter, the older gentleman with the handlebar mustache says. He approaches the brewer as if he knows him, or maybe knew him. We didn’t mean to hurt your business. But now…now we’re trying to heal. We’ve hurt a lot of people, collectively. And in a way, I guess we’re still hurting people, people like you. But we’re trying to do better.

Then come back.

The brewer’s eyes bulge outward. His bright polo shirt is doused in sweat. He has a farmer’s tan, though a lack of muscle tone. The brewer doesn’t seem to be wearing middle age all too well.

We can’t do that.

I figured you all would say that. Well, it’s like I said, I’ve got this place rigged. No one in, no one out. Not even me!

What the hell, man! What do you want from us?

Revenge. This AA group has been stealing my customers for years. You all have nearly bankrupted me. My house is about to be foreclosed. My wife left me. She took our kids with her. The only thing I had left was that brewery. And now it’s about to be taken from me. I don’t have anything to live for.

A couple of the other group members spoke up about how it doesn’t make sense to kill us over this sad brewer’s life. But I knew from the wild arterial protrusions in his neck, the sweat beading down his face, his crooked, stiff posture, that this was not a man that was thinking logically. In fact, one might venture to suggest that he wasn’t thinking at all. He was on some auto-pilot mode, and a smaller piece of internal, artificial intelligence swimming around in the goo of his head was navigating his moves and decisions. For all intent and purpose, this was not a man to trifle with.

The request is simple, he says. I’m just asking for you all to recall a time when alcohol led to a great time. You have spent countless hours here in this room bashing the good name and reputation of alcohol and my livelihood for far too long. All I’m asking is to give me one….one good story about how alcohol improved your life. If you don’t, then I’m blowing this place to pieces.

No pressure.

I don’t do well under pressure. I never have. It’s probably one of the major contributing reasons to why I started drinking to begin with. There’s a lot of pressure in life. Too much, I would argue. But for whatever reason, knowing that I might die, that I might be the reason why everyone else dies at this AA meeting, I think of a story. 

Fresh out of college, I didn't have a care in the world. Except for what to do with the rest of my life. And an occasional debilitating depression that would set in randomly. And a lack of actionable job experience that barred me from most positions. And a rather bleak outlook on the world and my life that instilled a dire existential dilemma deep within. But other than that, I was pretty good.

I didn’t mention this, but I feel compelled to insert that at that point in my life, early twentysomething, I hadn’t yet developed any addictive personality traits. In fact, during my yearly physical with my general practitioner, I had filled out that I only drank once every month, at most, per year.

One night, though, I went out with some friends to celebrate something. Maybe one of us had landed a job. Maybe one of us moved out of our respective parents’ house. It didn’t really matter what the celebration was. We rarely needed a reason. I suppose it could have just been because we were young. We hit up a few bars, danced like crazy, and drank a lot of alcohol. I remember feeling so alive, so free.

As the night drew on, I got more and more drunk. But I still felt in control. At some point, my friends decided it was time to call it a night and go home. But I wasn't ready to end our libations. I wanted to keep the party going.

So, I decided to go to one more bar on my own. It was a seedy place, and I knew I probably shouldn't have been there, but I didn't care. I was having too much fun.

Despite being a relatively introverted personality, alcohol provided the necessary elixir alchemy to transform me into what Aristotle meant by a social animal. I found a group of fellow bar patrons and began a friendly, though somewhat competitive, game of darts.

At one point in the night, and I’m not sure who exactly it was that suggested this, because I had just met the group of drinking buddies, but someone threw out that we should start a fight club. The movie had come out the previous year, and a lot of us yungins were still hyped on the message and philosophy of the film. But, most importantly, everyone at the bar was incredibly drunk.

We filed out of the bar and into the alley behind. Each of us began to pair off into groups of two. If there was a system as to how we determined who would fight who and when, then I don’t remember it. Or at least, I wasn’t a part of that decision making process. 

When it was my turn to fight, I looked across from me and realized in the drizzle of halcyon lighting raining down in geometric abstraction that the person I was paired up to fight with had a good four inches on me and probably weighed some twenty or more pounds than I did at the time, most of which seemed to be from muscle. 

I feel as if it began to rain as we started to fight. But I can’t be certain. It could just be that I started to nervously sweat uncontrollably. 

As you all can imagine, I was not quite the Tyler Durden that I hoped I would be, especially given my liquid courage that night. But the alcohol did help. It helped quite a bit, I would say. The large, muscle man’s punches land with force into my face and torso. For whatever reason, I didn’t put up much of a defense. Nor a real offense, either. I want to say that I threw my fair share of punches back. But even if they ended up landing, then I doubt they had the effect I was going for. Random thoughts pile-drived into a conundrum of disenchanted synapses misfiring as my body took one punch after another. Despite the onslaught, I didn’t go down. In fact, that became something of a theme for me that night. I kept getting hit. I kept not holding up my hands to defend myself. Yet somehow I didn’t go down.

Eventually, another member of the drunk fight-club entourage had to intervene. My face was swollen, covered in blood. But despite how I imagined I looked, I felt nothing. Alcohol had acted as a panacea. I kept trying to fight the opposing muscular gentleman despite being held back. Despite looking like a horror movie victim.

One of the bar patrons that held me back was this nice, gorgeous, perfect woman named Victoria. While at night Victoria drank herself into a stupor with people such as myself in those days, she was an ER doctor by day. She patched me up the best she could in the bar’s bathroom.

We ended up making out in that same bathroom. I couldn’t really recall the sequence of events that led her from tending to my wounds to us somehow engaging in a sloppy, wet tryst in a dirty dive bar bathroom. But I can say that it was the most alive, the most open to life, the most enthralling experience that I had ever had at that point in my life. Adrenaline. Serotonin. Dopamine. A magical swirl of brain chemistry guiding this impulse within me that I had never had, never experienced, before.

Victoria and I ended up dating for some four years. We even discussed getting married. I know why we didn’t, though. She ended up quitting drinking. A coworker or a hospital administrator, I don’t know who exactly, but either way, someone at her hospital confronted her with the sobering news that her drinking was affecting her work. I get the feeling the hospital was trying to address the possibility that an ER doctor drinking heavily could lead to a serious malpractice lawsuit. She didn’t know how any of her coworkers found out. But she figured there’s more than enough busybodies in any given workplace. Despite the fact that Victoria never put any of her patients in harm’s way or done anything to suggest that she was a liability, the conversation freaked her enough to stop drinking altogether right then and there.

I, on the other hand, was unfortunately not at that point. Drinking was still fun. I mean, it probably still is pretty fun. It makes me feel as if I have superpowers. It gave me the ability to be social in awkward and embarrassing situations, and probably enhanced my life way more than it harmed it.

But, still, I lost the woman that I loved because of drinking…..

Was the last thing I said before a ball of fire engulfs everyone in the AA meeting. The brewer, I suppose, didn’t like my story. Just as well, I guess. I was tired of listening to myself talk, too.