A thin blue book is passed around, and we move around the circle, reading step 2, and I think, once again, that I am definitely not in the right place, because all this talk about a Higher Power just seems ridiculous.
Perhaps I should not be admitting this, but I have never really understood the whole God thing. My mother, in her distant past, was apparently Episcopalian. She went to church with her parents, but Aunt Judith was completely antireligion and wiped out whatever my mother had had. And my Dad … Well. I can’t really call him that anymore, except I don’t know what else to call him. Richard. My mother’s husband. The man I thought was my father. He was Catholic, which was enough to put me off for life. Because he went to Mass, I refused, and even though he forced my mother and me, once the depression hit she didn’t have to go, and although he made me go with him for a while, the older I got the less I went.
I am definitely not a huge fan of organized religion, and as for God? I’m not entirely sure. I do remember feeling terrified on holiday when I was young. In a strange bed, in a strange villa in Portugal, I would lie in bed screwing my eyes shut, desperate not to look at the window, which had no curtains, and all I could see when I pictured that big black window was a face, a rictus of horror pressed against the glass, about to come in and carry me off, the changeling, taken back to where she belongs.
The only thing that helped me deal with that terror, which was so all-consuming I remember actually being paralyzed with fear, unable to even jump out of bed and go and find my mother, the only thing that made me feel a little better was God.
I pictured him then as a big old man with a huge white beard. Presumably Charlton Heston was my inspiration. He had twinkly eyes and a kindly smile, and he loved me. I would lie in bed, my eyes screwed up, reciting made-up prayers that incorporated snatches of proper prayers I had heard over the years.
“Our father, who art in heaven, hollowed be thy name, please protect me and look after me. Please keep me safe and keep the monsters away from me. Deliver me from evil and badness and monsters. Look after me and protect me and keep me safe in this room, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Amen. Please. Thank you, God.”
And I suppose, during times in my life that have felt particularly hard, or frightening, I have whispered a prayer, or asked whoever might be watching from above for help.
But to ask for help with my drinking? That seems ever so slightly ridiculous.
We finish reading and the leader starts to speak.
“I’m Grant, alcoholic,” he says, and I look at him and think, he doesn’t look like an alcoholic. Neither does Jason, for that matter. And then I wonder what I think an alcoholic looks like. When I was growing up in Gerrards Cross we had a neighbor who was an alcoholic. I only know this because my parents used to talk about it. Everyone used to talk about it. His name was Terence Miller, and he was forever being driven home by the police, having been found asleep in the car park after hours.
I always remember him as being very nice, but he definitely looked like an alcoholic, especially when I’d see him stagger out of the police car, shouting at the very policemen who had been looking after him. Then you’d smell the booze from about a mile away. If you got up close you’d see his face was always red, broken blood vessels all over his nose and cheeks. His eyes would be glazed and watery, and he couldn’t focus on anything, would blink at you slowly, slurring his words and hiccupping.
That’s what an alcoholic looks like, I thought. Not like Grant, who is the yuppiest of yuppies ever, in his Ralph Lauren polo shirt and cashmere sweater, with a great big Rolex on one wrist. There’s no way he’s an alcoholic.
“Wow,” he continues, shaking his head. “I always get exactly what I need to hear when I come to a meeting, and I really needed to hear about turning things over to a Higher Power. My meetings have been dropping off recently, things just got really hard at work…”
Jason leans over to me and whispers, “He’s a huge merchant banker. Huge!” I look at him, and we both exchange impressed glances, as if, how can a huge merchant banker also be an alcoholic, and I really want to just sneak out of here with Jason and gossip with him about it, but I force my attention back to Grant-the-merchant-banker.
“… haven’t been to as many meetings. And every time I do this, because this is not the first time”—everyone laughs in acknowledgment, as if they too do this all the time—“I start to take back my will, and when I take back my will, that’s the beginning of a very slippery slope.”
There is a murmur round the room, and I notice a number of people nodding, and I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
“I tried for years to stop drinking. My wife threatened to leave me, I almost lost my job, and every time I thought I could do it myself, because I was a master of the universe; I could do everything myself. The things I tried!” He laughs a little. “I always decided that the best way for me to stop drinking was to go to a health farm. I figured a week of drinking lemon water and broth, massages every day, and I would miraculously come home and be dried out. The first time I went to Grayshott I left on day two to find the nearest pub and hid bottles of vodka under my bed. And still I thought I could do it. I went to Champneys two months later and it was the same story. I’d stagger into the massages, then pass out in the lounge. And this went on for years, but still I thought that it was just about finding the right amount of willpower. My ego was so huge, I thought I was in control of everything. I had a huge house in Regent’s Park, a wife with a wardrobe full of beautiful clothes; my kids went to the best schools, and I couldn’t understand how I could have achieved all of this, this beautiful life, but I couldn’t stop drinking. My ego ran everything, and I had to get humbled to understand I couldn’t do it.” He shakes his head at what looks like an uncomfortable memory, and I sit forward slightly in my chair.
I didn’t like the Higher Power stuff, didn’t understand it, but I’m always up for a good story, and so far this is turning out to be a good story.
“My wife used to issue ultimatums all the time. Sometimes she’d scream at me, other times she’d cry, and most of the time she’d say she would divorce me if I carried on, and I never believed her. And she didn’t know the half of it.” He shook his head, as if in disgust at himself. “I was a terrible husband. I was unfaithful, and with the worst kind of women. I thought nothing of paying for sex. I spent fortunes in the kind of clubs I’m now ashamed to admit I went to. My wife didn’t know, until I gave her a sexually transmitted infection.” He says all this without emotion, while my mouth has practically hit the floor in shock. This handsome, beautifully dressed, rich guy slept with hookers? And admits it? And what’s more, not a single person in the room appears to be shocked. Except me. They’re all nodding their heads as if they too have all slept with hookers and given their partners STDs. I feel like I’m in a parallel universe in which everything is completely and utterly bonkers. I turn my head and look at Jason, thinking he’ll catch my eye and we’ll exchange one of those mutual looks, that he will be as stunned as I am, and I see him nodding, just like the others, and now I really do know I’m in Bizarro World.
“It all came out,” he says. “The women. The drugs. The booze.” Wait. Did he say drugs? What drugs? Did I miss something? I try to picture him shooting up heroin, but no, it doesn’t quite compute. Maybe he’ll say more. By this time I am not only riveted, I am also curious as hell. If this guy is a huge merchant banker, this would make a fantastic story. Not that I would, obviously, go off and write something about him without his permission, but imagine if I could? I could freelance it out, because frankly it deserves a bigger audience than the Daily Gazette. The Daily Mail would go into raptures.
Maybe he would want to tell his story, I think, picturing myself chatting to him after the meeting, and him agreeing, wanting to help others going through the same thing, which would be, in fact, exactly how I’d pitch it.
“She divorced me and took everything I had.”
> Oh, this just gets better and better.
“I ended up sleeping on a friend’s sofa, until even he had enough of my drinking, and stealing, and lying. I lost my job, my children wouldn’t have anything to do with me, and I ended up in a hostel in Waterloo.”
Are you kidding me? I need to come to AA meetings more often. This is like Storytime on steroids. I want this guy to keep on speaking for hours. I want to hear all their stories. I am completely and utterly rapt.
“That’s where I got sober. I hit bottom. I just couldn’t carry on anymore. I remember the night I fell to my knees, quite literally fell to my knees, and I was not a religious man, I never gave God a second thought, but I fell to my knees and cried out, ‘If there is a God, you need to help me. I need you to change my life.’ And I swear to God”—he laughs, and rolls his eyes as the room joins in—“I swear to God I felt, suddenly, an enormous peace come over me, and I knew, beyond any measure of doubt, that I wasn’t alone. And I also knew that he would help me, and if I took the right steps, and asked for help, it would always be provided. My first meeting was the next day, and I have been sober since then.” There is a round of applause from everyone in the room, with a couple of whoops.
“I didn’t do it,” he says. “I couldn’t do it. I tried to do it for years, and nothing worked. My sobriety is due to my Higher Power. And more than that, the phrase ‘could restore me to sanity.’ When I was drinking, I had no idea that my life was insane. I was a mass of neurosis, insecurity, inadequacy, self-righteous indignation, anger. I would fly off the handle at everything, was permanently angry, critical, judgmental. Everything in my life was confusion and chaos, and I thought that was normal.” He shrugs. “My dad was an alcoholic. It was all I knew. I spent my childhood vowing that things would be different when I was a grown-up, that I would never do to my children what my father did to me, and here I was, re-creating the hell of my childhood almost down to the letter, the only difference being that I never laid a hand on my kids, and because of that, I congratulated myself on being such a good father. Now…” He takes a deep breath. “I have been restored to sanity. I occasionally lose my temper, but it doesn’t last long, and I immediately make amends. I have a wonderful relationship with a woman who is in Al-Anon and works her own program, and I am seeing my kids again. Not as much as I would like, because they’re still skeptical about my change. But I take it a day at a time. I have a career again, and my life is good.” He looks around the room, choosing, embarrassingly, to fix his gaze on me. “My life is good,” he says again, nodding to punctuate it. “This program changes lives, and if you’re new here”—God! I wish he’d stop looking at me—“if you’re new, know that miracles happen in these rooms. Don’t leave before the miracle happens.”
Finally he looks away, as the room starts to applaud.
“It’s your meeting,” he says. “For a topic, I’m asking what are the miracles that have happened in your life as a result of getting sober. But feel free to share about anything you’d like. Thank you.”
I sit back, exhausted from the concentration, exhilarated by the story, the only fly in the ointment being that although I heard him say he couldn’t do it by himself, that only a Higher Power could do it for him, I know that’s not the case for me.
I understand this program clearly works for some people, but I also know that I can do this by myself. After all, that’s how I have done everything else.
* * *
We go for lunch after the meeting, Jason and I, and I think how nice this is, having lunch with someone. I am so used to being single, to phoning up Jamie for sex when I feel like it, to going out with the girls or, of late, given that all the girls are now in cozy relationships, to doing things by myself, I had forgotten what it feels like to be in a relationship.
Not that I’m in a relationship! My God! I can’t even believe I just said that. Obviously I’m not in a relationship, but as we sit in Raoul’s, our paninis in front of us, with fresh orange juice and salads, I am aware that looking at us from the outside we do indeed look like a couple, and what a delicious, perfect feeling that is.
Because along with that sense of never quite fitting in, I have always felt lonely. Not that this has ever particularly made sense. I have never been short of friends, I lead an active life, but I have always felt this tremendous sense of loneliness, of being alone, of having to be self-sufficient because of that aloneness.
I have had moments of not feeling quite so alone, and those always happen with men. At university I met my first love. Dave Reynolds. We were together most of the freshman year, and I remember sitting with him in pubs and thinking, oh! This is what it feels like! To be normal!
I feel that way now. With Jason. Even though, obviously, I don’t actually know him, but there is, I am sure, a connection. There is something about him, and he would never have asked me to have lunch if he wasn’t interested. In fact, he didn’t actually ask, he just seemed to assume, which is absolutely fine with me.
“So what did you think?”
“I’m fascinated by Grant!” I say. “What a story! I would never have believed it from looking at him!”
“I know! We’re not really supposed to talk about what people share in meetings or who we saw. But I won’t tell anyone.” He grins. “Did you hear anything you related to?”
“Absolutely!” I nod my head vigorously, lying. “So much.”
“So, do you think you’re interested in getting sober?”
“Absolutely!”
“You need to get a sponsor,” he says. “And the best way of doing it, the way I did it after rehab, is to do ninety in ninety. That’s ninety meetings in ninety days. It will change your life.”
“Okay.” I’m not quite sure how that would possibly work in my life, but I don’t need to say that out loud. “So, a sponsor. Would you be my sponsor?” I’m slightly embarrassed asking him that, but who else am I supposed to ask, given that I don’t know anyone else there.
“I can’t.” He frowns. “Two reasons. First, they recommend you have a sponsor of the same sex. Otherwise it can get complicated.” I hope to God he doesn’t see my face fall. What does that mean? That it would be complicated if we got involved with each other? That he’s not interested in me? I feel a wave of disappointment, which will undoubtedly turn into depression, wash over me, followed by a wave of disgust with myself: Why did I create this fantasy of a perfect life with this perfect man? What the hell was I thinking?
“Secondly,” he says, “I want us to be friends, and I can’t be your friend if I sponsor you.”
Great. Friends. Fan-fucking-tastic.
“Actually”—he leans forward sheepishly—“I’d much rather be more than friends. But if you’re going to get sober, they recommend no new relationships for the first year.”
A year? I can wait a year! My heart is soaring so high, I don’t even realize I have a huge, soppy grin on my face.
“Friends?” I say, reaching out my hand, and he takes it, as I wonder just how long it will take me to persuade him otherwise.
* * *
We leave Raoul’s and walk along the canal and into Regent’s Park. Neither of us can stop talking, and I’m aware both of us have been smiling all day. Nothing has happened, and clearly, if I’m to get sober, which I now have to do, nothing will happen, but still, it feels like the most perfect romantic day imaginable, like something out of a Richard Curtis film, like the kind of day that only happens on a big screen or to other people.
It is such a perfect day, the earth-shattering news that my father is not my father doesn’t even feel quite so important. I tell Jason all about it, because it is one of those days where the laughter and fun devolve into something deeper, more meaningful, and I realize I want him to know everything about me.
“That’s pretty big stuff,” he says, when I have finished and we are sitting on the grass by the bandstand. “You’re going to get in touch with him, presumably?”
“Yes. My mum wanted to writ
e and let him know, and hopefully he’ll write back. I suppose I have this fantasy of going over there and finding out I have this amazing family who all welcome me with open arms. It probably wouldn’t be like that, but I have to believe I’d have more in common with him than I did with the man I always thought was my father.”
“Do you have siblings?”
“I don’t know. It’s a lot to process.” I turn to him. “My whole entire life I wanted brothers and sisters and I can’t quite get my head round the fact that I may have them, that I may finally have everything I’ve ever wanted.”
“It sounds like this could make an amazing book. Depending on what happens, of course, but I could see you writing a memoir.”
I sit back, a light going on in my head. I have never thought of writing a book, but isn’t that every journalist’s dream? Gina ghostwrote a book for a pop star a couple of years back, although I’m not sure that counts, and Jackie has cowritten a couple of self-help books, but I never really thought about it.
I could see myself writing a book, though. And I could write a memoir, now that my father is no longer. I drift off into a fantasy of Nantucket, of finding the perfect family who welcome me into their heart, of writing about the hell of my childhood, and the joy of finding this new, improved family.
It’s a brilliant idea, and soon Jason and I are planning the logistics of my new, improved life.
* * *
I am dropped home just after nine. We spent the afternoon in Regent’s Park, before walking down to Baker Street to watch a film. Everything about the day had been perfect, and after the film, Jason phoned a friend “from program” and asked her to sponsor me.
Not that I need it, but I will do it for Jason. He’s already said that although he won’t sponsor me, he will be my “friend,” and that the primary purpose of anyone in AA is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.
I’m not an alcoholic, but I do believe that today may mark the beginning of a whole new world.