by Joan Opyr
“You probably got Jane in trouble. Now Eddie knows she told you. She’s going to stop calling to report on his acquisitions.”
“Nonsense,” my mother replied. “Jane hates your father. She’s got her house up for sale, you know. Says the old neighborhood has gone to hell in a hand basket. So, what did Eddie say? Did he have any explanation for the car?”
“He said he won it.”
She laughed grimly. “What was it this time, the lottery? Las Vegas?”
“Tenth caller on the Hot Ten at Ten. How should I know?”
“When we were living in Detroit, radio stations gave away certificates for free pizza. That lying sack of shit. What did Hunter say?”
“He said that since Eddie was so goddamn lucky, he had a bet for him. He said, ‘I’ll bet a pig turd against your chin, and if you win, I’ll roll it in.’”
“Ha! Serves him right.”
“He also offered to stomp a mud-hole in him and walk it dry. It was a colorful night. Unfortunately, he ruined the overall effect by winding up in tears, telling Eddie that he’d always loved him like a son. He said that if Eddie asked you, he was sure that even now you’d give him a second chance.”
My mother slammed her book down on the arm of the sofa. “I’ll kill him!”
“Don’t worry. I talked to Eddie before he hung up. He’s about as likely to remember that conversation as Hunter is. He was stoned out of his mind.”
“He’s as bad as your grandfather. They’re six of one and half a dozen of the other.”
“Hunter’s not so lucky,” I said, starting to work on my essay. “He told Eddie he’d never won anything, not so much as a goddamn piece of Eisenhower Ethiopian pewter.”
“I don’t know why he says that,” my grandmother observed from the kitchen. “He voted for Eisenhower.”
Hunter came home about an hour later. What’s more, he was sober. Of course, that was no guarantee that he’d actually go and get his fourth white chip. He’d announced his intention to go back to AA last night just before passing out. There was every chance that he’d forgotten all about it.
I was not a fan of Alcoholics Anonymous. I wasn’t sure I believed in God, so I was skeptical of the whole “surrendering one’s life to a higher power” thing. At AA, they said that it didn’t matter, that your higher power could be a Greyhound bus, but no one ever stood up in a meeting and thanked the old gray dog for the gift of sobriety.
My grandfather believed in a petty, cantankerous God, one who took a perverse interest in the minutiae of everyday life. God was to blame for everything from bouncing checks to athlete’s foot, and he had a sick sense of humor. It struck Him as funny when you stubbed your toe or lost your car keys. My grandfather’s favorite hymns, all of which he could play on the Wurlitzer, sketched out a bleak theology. Angel Band, I’ll Fly Away, and Rock of Ages were all about laying down your earthly burdens and trading in God’s schadenfreude for his eternal smothering affection. In AA, my grandfather’s thinking developed a grim, predestinational twist—if God had the power to make you quit drinking, then God was probably the one who made you start drinking in the first place. The gospel according to Hunter C. Bartholomew was that he’d already surrendered his life to a higher power. That was why he was knee-deep in the shit pile.
My grandmother, on the other hand, was a Freewill Baptist. She believed in volition and strength of character. Her favorite hymn was What a Friend We Have in Jesus. She was a regular attendee of Al-Anon, the spousal support group, and often led the meetings. Hunter alternated long spells of belligerent denial with occasional episodes of blubbering repentance, but Nana was a true believer. She maintained that if he could just get with the program, he could stop drinking.
He was sitting in the wing chair when I came in, reading the funny pages. My mother was on the sofa, still reading her book. I sat down next to her. No one spoke. I tried to catch Nana’s eye, but she was darting around nervously—bustling, as she called it. This involved picking things up at random and dropping them somewhere else for no apparent purpose. She sorted through stacks of magazines and then put them right back on the floor where she’d found them; she picked up full ashtrays and failed to empty them; she shifted the china figurines on the shelf above the television and then shifted them back. When she pulled all the coats out of the coat closet to get out the vacuum cleaner, my grandfather sighed, folded the funny pages in half, and tossed them onto the coffee table.
“Goddamn it, Myrtle, stop buzzing around like a blue-assed fly.”
“I can’t help it,” she replied. “My nerves are shot.”
“I’m going to shoot you if you don’t sit down.”
She glanced at her wristwatch and then at me.
“It must be about six-thirty,” I said, standing up and stretching. “Let’s get while the getting’s good.”
Hunter stared at his shoes.
“Would you hand me my pocketbook?” Nana said.
“Sure.” I picked it up off the coffee table and walked it over to her, passing in front of my grandfather. He didn’t look up.
Nana pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims and tapped it on the dining room table. When she wasn’t smoking, she seemed to have no idea what to do with her hands. She drummed her fingernails on the table or patted her hair, her fingers twitching restlessly. Her hands fluttered up to her face like moths to a porch light. We had fifteen minutes before we absolutely had to leave, time enough for three cigarettes.
I wasn’t looking forward to the night ahead, but neither did I dread it. Storytelling was the foundation of every AA meeting, and, at the very least, a drunk’s story has entertainment value. Most of the men in my grandfather’s group were old white Southerners who’d been born and bred on the tall tale. They knew how to milk misery for laughs.
I quickly learned that there was a fundamental structure to the Southern drunk story. It usually began with a disclaimer along the lines of “Mama didn’t approve of drinking” before moving on to the good part. I never knew why it was so important to establish Mama’s innocence, but, unless the storyteller was an orphan, that’s how the story began. Once Mama was in the clear, the budding young drunk was safe to start narrating his journey. Most began drinking beer and graduated to bourbon. At first, the drunk’s only problem is the old two-hands-but-only-one-mouth dilemma. Then—and no one’s ever really sure how this happens—the young drunk becomes an old drunk. He finds himself plastered every night and hung over every morning. He’s suddenly skipping work, or he’s drunk at work. He’s unemployed, he’s lost his driver’s license, and he can’t remember his kid’s names, his wife’s birthday, or where he parked that stolen car.
This might or might not constitute what AA calls rock bottom, the miserable nadir that forces a drunk to stop drinking. Usually, rock bottom involves a trip to jail, financial ruin, or a car wreck; in the best stories, it’s all three.
Finally, through some miracle of divine intervention, the drunk finds AA. He finds God. He surrenders his life to a higher power. He takes it one day at a time.
I hated one day at a time. It wasn’t a philosophy; it was a threat. One day at a time meant that sobriety wasn’t something you could count on. It meant the drunk in your life might start drinking again at any time. It meant signing on for a ceaseless vigil. You had to be more involved in a drunk’s sobriety than you ever were in his alcoholism.
And that, it seemed to me, was the point. Rock bottom might be the moral of the story, but the drunk’s favorite part, the one he told with the most relish, described those final moments just before rock bottom. His wife has emptied every bottle she can find and hidden his wallet and the car keys; he still manages to get drunk because he’s taped a bottle of booze inside the toilet tank. The drunk is locked up in jail. Somehow, he makes wine in the jail toilet out of canned peaches and bread mold. The drunk’s ingenuity is endless at this point. He’s on top of the world.
And then he’s not. His wife has left him. His friends and family
cut him dead. He doesn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. He is sorry now, just as sorry as he can be. Every drunk in AA is sorry. That’s when he finds the light. Hallelujah. His confession is done. Sorry is dropped on this amazing story of catastrophe and resilience like the cherry on top of an ice cream sundae. Sorry is an anti-climax. Thank God for one day at a time—it keeps the dramatic tension alive.
My mother wouldn’t go to AA or Al-Anon. She said it was a steaming load of bullshit. I went. My grandmother went. My grandfather went in a Jimmy Swaggart sort of way, only after a night of weeping and wailing and ‘I have sinned.’ He enjoyed the occasional whiff of the revival tent, as long as it didn’t interfere with his drinking.
My grandmother stubbed out cigarette number three, put the pack in her pocketbook, and snapped it shut. It was the moment of truth.
“All right,” Hunter said. “Let’s go.”
Nana and I followed him to the door. My mother continued to sit on the sofa with her legs tucked beneath her, reading.
“Are you coming?” Hunter said.
My mother didn’t look up, and she didn’t answer.
“In Al-Anon, they teach us that alcoholism is a disease,” Nana said. “A disease that affects the whole family.”
My mother turned the page in her book. “Cancer is a disease,” she said. “He doesn’t have cancer.”
Nana took a compact out of her purse and checked her lipstick. My mother had been to exactly one AA meeting during the four years we’d lived with my grandparents. That was the one at which Hunter collected his first white chip. When he started drinking again, she said she’d never go back.
Hunter ran a hand through his hair. “If I had some goddamn support,” he said. “I don’t ask for much.”
My mother looked up then, and I had to suppress a desire to laugh. She and Hunter looked so much alike—same nose, same eyes, same expression. Both of them had pronounced underbites and a tendency to lead with their chins.
“Support?” said my mother in a voice that could wilt lettuce. “You don’t want support; you want an audience. I’ve already seen this show. I give it two thumbs down.”
The AA meeting we attended was in the basement of the United Methodist Church. As the crow flies, it was about five miles across town from where we lived. There were AA meetings just down the street from us in the Baptist church Nana attended, but my grandparents wouldn’t have been caught dead at those. It reminded me of that old joke about the difference between Methodists and Baptists—Methodists say hello to each another when they meet in the liquor store.
The drive across town was quiet. Up Old Wake Forest Road, under the bridge, and left at the hotdog stand. A few more turns and up a winding road through an old neighborhood of cracker box houses, their front yards enclosed by chain link fences. The church was on a street Hunter called Varicose Vein Lane. It didn’t seem to have any residents under the age of seventy. We pulled into the parking lot and parked the van. Across the street, old people sat in lawn chairs and porch swings, watching us. We were clearly the Saturday night entertainment. I waved at them as we got out of the van.
“Here now,” Nana said, grabbing my arm. “What’s the matter with you?”
Hunter walked quickly into the building. We followed at a more leisurely pace. I’d heard him tell his AA story. The second time he quit drinking, he stayed sober for three months. He told his story as well as he told jokes, switching on like a neon sign. His eyes twinkled and his teeth flashed. He looked like the living embodiment of a damn good time.
Hunter picked a chair on the back row against the wall where he sat with his arms folded across his chest. I sat down next to him. Nana milled around for a few minutes, chatting with friends and acquaintances from Al-Anon. Of the thirty or so people in the room, I was by far the youngest. My grandmother must have noticed this at about the same time I did because she came over and whispered, “Are you sure you don’t want to go next door to Alateen?”
“No,” I said firmly.
“You’ll meet people your own age.”
“And the only thing I have in common with them is that we all live with a drunk. I’d rather pick my friends some other way.”
In order to put an end to the conversation, I stood up and made my way over to the coffee urn. Everyone drank coffee at AA. Everyone smoked. One vice at a time. I filled a Styrofoam cup, stirred in two packets of sugar, and sat down to watch the show.
The speaker was a tall, skinny man with a nose like a bloodshot cauliflower. His hair was curly and red and he’d attempted to comb it back and grease it into submission. He looked like Uncle Fred, right down to the zippered dress boots. Somewhere in the City of Raleigh, there must have been a Fashion Bug for drunks.
The speaker began by telling us he was Ronny and he was an alcoholic. “Hello, Ronny,” we all replied in unison. The bonhomie of AA always drove me crazy. I was prepared to be entertained; I wasn’t prepared to be friendly. I recognized many of the men from previous visits. There were only three women present—Nana and I and a woman named Margaret. Margaret was married to Bill, the only man in Nana’s Al-Anon meeting. The Al-Anon women all felt sorry for Bill, much sorrier, it seemed to me, than they felt for themselves. He was a soft-spoken man who looked like Mr. Rogers, and judging from the stories he told, his wife was a cross between Dean Martin and Yosemite Sam. They’d been married for thirty years. The Al-Anon women wondered aloud why he didn’t divorce her. It never seemed to occur to them that he might stay in his marriage for the same reasons they stayed in theirs.
Ronny was slow to warm up. He told a couple of stories about his teenage experiences with moonshine that might have been cribbed from The Dukes of Hazzard. Hunter suppressed a yawn, and several people shifted in their chairs. His narrative soon picked up steam, however. In his early twenties, he moved north to work in a ball-bearing plant in Cleveland. He got drunk after work one night with some of his co-workers, who made fun of his accent and called him a hillbilly. He beat the shit out of them so decisively that it led to a career as a bare-knuckles boxer. After seven years of this, he’d broken all of his ribs and most of the bones in his hands, and he’d destroyed the cartilage in his nose and ears. He drank to numb the pain, and he fought because he liked to hurt people. The end of the fighting came when he killed someone. He spent nine years in prison for manslaughter. That wasn’t the end of his drinking, of course.
“There’s nothing you can’t get in prison,” he said. “Nothing.”
Ronny was covered in tattoos, several of which he’d done himself with a razor blade and cigarette ash. Despite this, he didn’t look particularly menacing. Perhaps it was because of his hair—as his story progressed and he became more animated, his hair tonic began to fail. Red curls sprang up on the sides of his head. Between the hair and his nose, there was something cartoonish, clownlike about him.
One month after he was paroled, he got into a bar brawl and stabbed someone to death with a broken beer bottle. Altogether, he spent more than twenty years behind bars. He said he was fortynine. He looked ten years older than Hunter.
The other drunks shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Hunter checked his watch a couple of times. Time in jail on a DUI was not the same as two decades in prison. Ronny had killed two people. He talked about older prisoners sizing up new ones—they called them new fish—and he came perilously close to telling a prison rape story. Someone cleared his throat and Ronny paused and looked around the room. His eyes came to rest on me, and I found myself mesmerized, unable to look away. The contact wasn’t broken until he blinked. He’d stopped in mid-sentence with him and two of the other older prisoners cornering a new fish in his cell. Now he moved on smoothly to his first experience with AA.
His was a “Jesus saved me” story. He got out of prison and fell back into his old habits. He was drunk all the time, fighting, and unable to find work. The miracle happened one night at a bar when he found a flyer for AA taped to the door of a toilet stall. He�
��d been hearing voices for years, but this time he was sure it was God. He went to a meeting and surrendered his life to a higher power on the spot. He joined the local Baptist church and met a woman in Sunday school. They got married, moved back down South, and the first thing he did was find himself an AA meeting. He looked around the room again, raised his eyes to heaven, and lifted his hands as if he were about to pray.
That’s when he blew it. He said he’d been sober for a year and married for a month. He began talking about Jesus and his wife and his stepchildren, and it wasn’t ordinary talk, it was drunk talk, the sort of stuff Hunter said whenever he was three sheets to the wind. According to Ronny, his step-kids were angels sent from above. His wife was the Virgin Mary. I could have kicked myself for buying his story. I’d been swept up by the gritty tales of prison life, but I knew all about all that over-the-top praise and ‘Baby, I love you’ crap. It was only a matter of time before his kids began to disappoint him and his wife failed to be perfect. Then it would be back to the bottle for Ronny the Red Head.
At the end of the meeting, Hunter stepped forward to pick up his white chip. He grinned broadly when everyone clapped, but afterwards, he was out of there like a shot. No one said anything on the ride home. My grandmother stared out the window, and Hunter tapped out a tune with his wedding ring on the steering wheel. I knew what was coming long before we pulled into the driveway.
Nana and I got out of the van. Hunter stayed in with the engine running.
“Aren’t you coming in?” Nana asked.
“I’m out of cigarettes,” he said, looking anywhere but at the two of us. “I’m just going to run to the IGA and pick up a pack. I’ll be right back.”
Nana and I looked at each other. We needn’t have bothered. If speech wasn’t necessary for communication, neither was eye contact. He’d surrendered his life to a higher power, all right—Budweiser, the King of Beers.