by Cyndy Etler
Anyway.
If I had to live with him after that? Nuh-uh. I would’ve fucked up my sobriety so quick, they’d have overnight expressed me back to Straight. I wouldn’t even care how hellish it was, starting the program over. I just would not live with him again. But I don’t have to worry about that, because he’s gone.
There is something great in my life, though: my recovery meetings. They’re what I live for. I started out going to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Trumbull, the next town over. And I still go to them, because it’s all older people who feel like substitute parents. But I’ve discovered a whole other world of meetings too. Meetings you would not believe.
Down in the rich towns, like Fairfield and Westport, they mainly have CoDa meetings—Codependents Anonymous. They’re my favorite because they’re held in this triangular side hall at a big, modern church that’s all windows with views of pine trees. The people at CoDa, they’re different. They talk about actual life, their jobs and friendships, instead of only saying, “It works if you work it” and “One day at a time.” A lot of them do art or music, and they wear scarves and boots and purple. And they drive cool cars! For example, this one guy—he looks exactly like Molly Ringwald’s boyfriend in Sixteen Candles, with even the werewolf V of hair on his forehead—drives a Porsche. And this other lady, who smiles so much you think she’ll tee-hee! like the Pillsbury Doughboy if you push her tummy, drives a beat-up Jeep. She’s got a Martha Washington hairdo and skirts to her ankles, and she drives a topless Jeep. I frigging love CoDa. It’s like hanging out with the cool kids.
Then, totally different, are the meetings in Bridgeport. They’ve got NA, Narcotics Anonymous, and CA, Cocaine Anonymous. Those meetings are held in fluorescent-bulb-lit hospital rooms, which is kind of a weird place to be. Somehow the guy sitting next to me—it’s always a guy—is wearing a plastic garbage bag for a raincoat. Or a seafoam hospital dress and paper shoes.
At CA and NA, they don’t talk about art or serenity. They talk about drugs. Drugs like pollution, like a river on fire. When I sit in a CA meeting and hear about their drugs, I’m like, Damn. The drugs us Straightlings did were dipped in rainbow sprinkles. Nobody at Straight talked about the smell of the shit they hacked up on their concrete bed, like these guys. Nobody mentioned the DTs or buggy face scabs or pulling the trigger of a loaded gun to kill the feeling of coming down. Holy crap, Bridgeport.
So yeah. It can get pretty creepy, sitting in a tidy row of Masuk desks, sunbeams streaming down on me and the rest of the deodorized fifteen-year-olds. It’s just too…civilized. I’m more comfortable holding hands with dirt-nailed junkies for the closing NA prayer. The junkies, they don’t have curly blond hair that’s way prettier than mine. Plus, you can tell they mean it when they say, “Nice fucking Dunkin’ mug you got there.”
4
JUNE 1987
THREE MONTHS OUT
Most meetings in my AA booklet have a secret code next to them, like NC or O or BB. The code tells you what the meeting will be like. NC means it’s for newcomers. O means it’s an open meeting, so you could bring your nonaddict friends, if you had any. BB means they talk about the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is totally yawn. Only like every fiftieth meeting has my secret code, YP. My heart’s still stupid enough to trampoline when it sees YP, but my brain isn’t. There are no real “young people” in recovery. I’m the only freak. The next youngest are like in their twenties.
That’s okay though. People in their twenties have cars, which they’ll sometimes use to pick me up for the cool meetings. I would love to have actual teenagers to talk to about sobriety and making amends and stuff, but that’s almost greedy. I have my sobriety. That’s God’s greatest gift. And I’m gonna tell Him that He needs to give me more? That’s disgusting. That makes me want to slap my face.
It’s actually really rare that any of the meeting people in their twenties come out to Monroe to pick me up. Because then they’d have to drive me back too. A single meeting could turn into a six-hour field trip. So mostly I live at the Trumbull meetings, because AA grownups will totally come get me.
But I signed up for driver’s ed, which means someday, I’ll have a license! Which means I can blackmail my mother into letting me use her car! Seriously. This free-babysitting-Saturday situation is out of control. But what am I gonna say? It’s not like I have anywhere else I’ve gotta be. When I can drive, though? Then I’ll have places to be. I’ll hang out with the cool Westport meeting people. I’ll go back and hang out at Straight.
If you’re a Straight graduate who lives in the same city as a Straight building, you get to still hang out there. If you’re on a slippery slope and your sobriety’s at risk, you can just go be with all the Straightlings. And since all the Straights are in actual cities, if you live near one, you’ve got frigging cable TV and probably a subway to take you to meetings. I’ve got three staticky channels, a sister in diapers, and a five-mile walk to the closest store. I can’t even call any Straightlings because we can’t afford long distance.
When I have my license, though, I’ll be able to say to my mother, “You let me use your car tonight or I won’t babysit Saturday.” She’ll be forced to say yes, because she needs me to stay with my baby sister. Because she lives for going out with her boyfriends. You should see her all fired up, singing and putting on that blue mascara.
And like, me? I’m pretty into locking a bathroom door, ‘cause for my first ten months at Straight, I had an oldcomer staring at me every time I used a toilet. Not my mother, though. She makes me frigging talk to her while she’s on the pot. Her job in life is to make sure everyone is paying attention to her at all times, in all places. When she finally leaves and it’s quiet, the whole house goes ahhhh.
• • •
Today’s Saturday. Which means (a) I’m babysitting, and (b) I’m bored out of my skull. So I’m going through the stuff on my mother’s bed, where I find this book that’s like, the bible of Straight, Inc. It’s called Tough Love: A Self-Help Manual for Kids in Trouble. The cover is a picture of a heart getting crushed by a fist. This book explains everything about me and my recovery.
It starts by telling kids how to get help for their addiction, and it is balls-out honest, telling the reader she’s a manipulative sleaze who makes people feel sorry for her, so she can keep drinking and drugging. I swear this book knew me in my past, before Straight, when I was all, “Somebody help me! My stepfather is mean!”
Then it says you have to tell your parents exactly what scummy stuff you’ve done, so you can get the help you really need. Which is exactly what we did at Straight. We told our parents about our druggie pasts in microscopic detail. So what if we hadn’t done actual drugs? Tough Love says that stealing and lying count too. I stole candy bars from my stepsister’s Halloween bag nonstop when I was little. That’s 100 percent proof I’m an addict.
And when Tough Love talks about “group,” I could swear I’m back at Straight. I can almost feel the spit land on my face. This book is the greatest discovery of my life. This book gets me. I need to strap it to my chest like armor before school. It’s gonna help me reach my new life goal: to stop thinking I’m a victim.
My mother gave me that same feedback last week. She got home early from work, so she heard me in my bedroom, crying about…just, everything—sitting alone at lunch, having no father, knowing I could lose my sobriety any second… She rapped her knuckles on my door three times and said, “You have a really good life. I hope you know that.”
It took me a while to quit hiccupping and snuffing, but when I finally shut up, I had my solution. It was so obvious even my mother could see it: I need to quit this whining and stinkin’ thinkin’ or no one’s ever going to like me. God! I make myself sick.
5
JULY 1987
FOUR MONTHS OUT
I figured out why I never get in trouble with teachers. It’s because I’m their shinin
g hero, their dweeb among dopers. Sober Teen! They see me with, like, a cape rippling out behind me, even though I hide in the bathroom instead of going to class. Even though there’s a dunce cap on my head. No wonder all the Masuk kids want to brain me.
And they don’t even know how fucking pampered I am: fucking Masuk is letting me skip my freshman year. I missed school the whole sixteen months I was in Straight, but Masuk’s like, “Never mind. Do summer school for three weeks, and we’ll start you in the fall as a sophomore.”
I actually tried to go to school when I was in Straight. Twice. When I first hit third phase, which is when you can leave the building for school or work, I moved into a host home with this doll-faced girl named Patsy. Her house was normal, but in her garage was a fucking Rolls-Royce. A Rolls-Royce. For exactly one day, her big, soft dad drove us to North Attleboro High School in that Rolls. That car was so smooth it was like riding a stick of butter. But that night I got assigned to a new host home, and Patsy disappeared from group.
The host home I went to next wasn’t a home, exactly. It was a trailer with no wheels and a concrete building glued onto the back. Sam Lancer lived there. Sam literally scared the shit outta me my third day in, when she attacked this fat punk-rock girl in group for having a druggie hairstyle. Sam was, like, the only girl in Straight with brown skin. She was also the meanest girl there. Staff put me as her host sister so I could learn humility.
Sam and her dad were like the ≠ sign. Out of all the host dads, he was the nicest. He had gray hair and a beard he kept all perfect, like a British hedge; his face was more tan than brown. Every single night while I was Sam’s host sister, I told him, “You look like Gary Gnu from The Great Space Coaster. ‘No gnus is good gnus without Gary Gnu!’” He would laugh, and then he would go in his room and close the door all gentle, as if he was sad. And me and Sam would go to their thin metal kitchen, and she would tell me my nightly moral inventory was really lazy, and I had to redo it or else she’d report me.
I started at Sam’s druggie high school, Worcester High, the day after my first night at Sam’s. It was right up the street from Sam’s trailer, so I got to walk back after school. Like, outside. For the twelve months it took me to get from first phase to third phase, I hadn’t once been outside during daylight. How could I? For first and second phase, I was in the building from 9:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m., or 10:00 p.m., or midnight. Even on third phase, kids aren’t supposed to be outside; Straightlings are only allowed to be out of the building for school or work. So after a year of not seeing the sun, that walk from school to Sam’s was a frigging miracle. I had to walk outside because the bus didn’t run by Sam’s. I had no choice but to walk, so she couldn’t even report me for it. That day was the best.
But school itself was not the best. School was the anti-best. It was worse than swallowing fire. Seriously, you try walking into a giant school you’ve never been to before with the five zillion kids wearing Guess jeans and lightning wash and huge, florescent earrings. You try doing that in your humble clothes of orange high-water corduroys with no-name sneakers, and a buttoned-to-the-top brown shirt. You do that with no earrings, no makeup, and a barrette too close to your forehead. See if you don’t drop your head and wing it to the guidance office, report yourself as a recovering druggie, and hide for the rest of the day. Try that, and I guarantee you’ll join me and Sam in choosing work instead of school for your third phase activity. There’s no way you’d be the only Straightling in a school full of druggies.
But work was actually killer. That concrete room on the back of Sam’s trailer turned out to be Dad Lancer’s business: a hair pick packaging factory. Not kidding. There were a trillion hair picks—five different sizes, twelve different colors—and stacks of flattened black-and-yellow display boxes. Our job was to fit the right size picks in the right size display box, then run the box through the shrink wrap machine. It was like packaging rainbows.
We played the Top 40 station and made up sober lyrics—the singer would be like …and drink some cherry wine, uh-huh! but we were all …and drink some cherry COKE, uh-huh!
It was so fun. We danced around and stacked rainbows, and Sam forgot that she was mean and I was soft. As soon as we crossed through the doorway back into her trailer, Sam had to put back on her horns and tail and become a Straightling again. But for those eight hours every weekday, we had fun.
So yeah. In sixteen months, I went to school for two days, total. And Masuk’s counting that as my whole ninth grade. Because I Just Say No to Drugs!
Still, I have to go to Masuk every day for summer school. Mr. Littberger, the sub, is the teacher. If your name was almost identical to cheese that smells like farts, wouldn’t you stay away from a career with teenagers? But he does okay. He really does. When kids yell out, “Hey, Limburger! I mean, Littberger!” he laughs right along with them. And if you go up to his desk and ask him, he’ll tell you what it was like at Woodstock. He saw fucking Jimi Hendrix.
Everyone knows Mr. Littberger smokes pot. I mean, he drives a custom van. So I really shouldn’t like him. And I try not to. But I can’t help it. He gives kids As just for showing up. I’m not one of his disciples, dragging a chair up to his desk and camping out, but still. I can’t help hearing him when he talks. And the thing he talks most about is music.
In Straight, once I got to third phase and was allowed to have music, the only safe music to listen to was Top 40. That stuff is brand-new, so it wasn’t part of my druggie past. But now that I’m out, and I don’t have group around to hold me accountable, I’m getting weak. I haven’t slipped to the level of the Stones or Pink Floyd, but I’ve definitely been listening to classic rock stations. I turn it off when my druggie bands come on, but I don’t have an off switch for Mr. Littberger.
Lucky for me, I do have a magic trick. I figured it out when Sam seven-stepped and graduated Straight while I was still on fifth phase, which meant I couldn’t work at the pick factory anymore. I wanted to stay in group instead of going to school or work, but staff said I needed to develop independence. So they made me runner for the building. I had to sit in the front office all day, waiting to bring intake forms to executive staff for signatures. Which meant I was alone with my brain all day. So dangerous.
That’s why I came up with the magic trick: I played The Odd Couple theme song in my head. Anytime I thought of druggie music, I smothered it with The Odd Couple. So now, when Mr. Littberger talks about stuff I shouldn’t hear, I look out the window and mentally hit play, same as I did when I was runner.
I wonder if Mr. Littberger knows how much he’s helping us kids. Even besides the second chance at better grades and the shot of hope when we finally see a 100% on our papers, he does other stuff, like playing the Grateful Dead. For some Straightlings, the Dead would be druggie ties. But not me. The Dead are like Top 40 for me; they’re brand new. I wasn’t cool enough to listen to them in my past.
The other day, Mr. Littberger comes in and clicks a cassette into a boom box. Then he goes, “Put your heads down. Just listen.” And holy shit. Packaging hair picks may be like stacking rainbows, but listening to the Grateful Dead is like swimming in them. It’s a whole playground of sound, with instruments swinging high and low, swooping and sliding around, with notes popping out like little kids on the playground shouting, “Look, Mom!” and jumping off the swing. Dead songs sound like kindergarten recess.
But the Dead aren’t just a music thing; they’re also a cool kid thing. No, they’re the cool kid thing. If your shirt has a dancing bear on it or a skull with a lightning bolt through it, you have immunity from the popular kids. You’re not one of them, but you don’t wanna be one either. Which magically makes them want you.
Like, look at Mack. He’s Masuk’s one true Deadhead, with his hacky sack, his hundred Dead shirts, and his Ronald McDonald–red hair. Everybody’s fine with Mack because…because he’s fine with himself, or something. He’s always smiling, he never has his
homework, and he doesn’t give a shit if he’s eating lunch alone. So the popular kids don’t make fun of him. Because he doesn’t care.
I don’t have a crush on Mack; I want to be Mack. But now, thanks to Mr. Littberger, I’m a teeny bit closer. I’m turned onto the Dead, which means I have the right to wear Steal Your Face, too. I can buy immunity for the price of a T-shirt.
The only question is, when summer school ends and I’m back in school-school, will the Dead be strong enough to beat the cheerleaders? Blanca can be okay, but the rest of the cheerleaders, I totally need protection from. Because it’s not enough for them to be models straight off God’s runway, in their miniature skirts and sweaters. They have to make sure the whole school knows how un-cheerleader-y I am too.
It’s like my name is their favorite bubble gum. CyndyEtlerrr. It’s always coming out of their mouth long and slow like that. But it’s never when we’re alone in the girls’ room or something. There, they ignore me and blot their lipstick. For CyndyEtlerrr, they wait until everyone’s in the room, then make it the start of some horrible question. Like, “CyndyEtlerrr. What did you do Friday after the game?” This is when every single other kid in class is talking about Ty-the-legend’s giant keg party.
Or, my God, when that one sub was taking attendance, but she couldn’t read the teacher’s handwriting. She goes, “Cyndy…Hitler?” A football player actually fell on the floor laughing, and Tiffani Malta shook her pompoms and did the ultra-CyndyEtlerrrrrr, extra loud. At least I swallowed my barf. So we’ll see about the power of the Grateful Dead. If a Dead shirt can make the other cheerleaders talk to me like Blanca did about my Dunkin mug? I’ll sell my soul to that band.