Donny was thirty-six, nine years older than me. He was a millionaire, having inherited the fortune his parents had made in the antique business, but he always worked. When I met him, he had just begun teaching English in a Catholic school. As he drove around, he played Chaucer tapes on his car stereo. He was an active homosexual, which gave him an “outsider’s” viewpoint, something with which I could identify. He seemed absolutely confident, always friendly but firm about what I must do. “Go to the meetings. Read the book. Don’t drink.” I came to rely on him as a child relies on his father.
The program’s First Step, to admit that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageable, was easy. A paralyzed alcoholic gets a double dose of powerlessness. Every morning when my attendant shoved a gloved finger up my rectum, every time the seal of my urine bag leaked at a social event, every time I spent a day in bed because my chair had a flat tire, I was reminded in the most rudimentary way of my powerlessness.
Not that I was entirely helpless. The nuns and the monks had left their mark on me; I knew I was capable of hard intellectual work. My real parents, whoever they were, had left me with a creative instinct that had persisted, in spite of everything, since childhood.
But I had to face the fact that my best thinking thus far had brought me to the doors of this fellowship suicidal and pissing on myself. I hadn’t scored any victories over alcoholism, the disease that insists, “You have no disease.” I had merely stretched my rationale until it snapped. And I had no more idea how to live than does a newborn babe.
The Second Step was not so easy. It asked me to come to believe that a Power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.
I was, as many alcoholics say jokingly, a “recovering Catholic.” I choked on the word God. To me it implied a remote, implacable, white-bearded father figure who handed out intergalactic brownie points through cadres of black-robed bureaucrats. One wasn’t supposed to question why he allowed millions to starve or die in miserable wars.
But on the day I had stopped drinking, I had had a direct experience that shook my disbelief and undermined my intellectual pride. Now I was at least willing to come to believe that some sort of Power might be able to restore me to sanity.
The program emphatically stated that I didn’t have to choose any particular Higher Power. It didn’t have to be Jesus, or Buddha, or Vanna White. If I had wanted to, I could have chosen a doorknob, or Alex’s beard (I was counseled against choosing the genitalia of Raquel Welch by my sponsor). Donny, who always called his Higher Power Chuckie, taught me that the important thing was to start thinking about something outside yourself for a change, to recognize in some token way that you are not running the universe and that it would very likely continue in your absence. You can’t ask for help if you don’t think there’s anybody to give it.
But I was advised not to linger too long over the question of belief. The important thing was to jump in and get to work, to “trust in God and clean house.”
Donny and I were both attracted to Eastern thought. We read Lao-tzu together, and I was delighted by the practical, down-to-earth quality of his teaching. “It’s the void in the middle of the vase that makes it valuable,” he wrote. That spoke to the sense of loss that was at the center of my own life.
AA took a very broad view of spirituality. It had been founded, in the 1930s, by a surgeon and a stockbroker and about a hundred other ordinary drunks who discovered that by working with each other they could stay sober. Like many of them, I was hungry for tools and impatient with religious hocus-pocus. Once, ready to try anything, I made an appointment to see an Indian guru over on the other side of town. Heavy Metal Mike drove me over. The guru came out and we talked for a while. He said, “Listen, my son. You are fortunate.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are in an excellent position for spiritual growth.”
Fuck spiritual growth, I thought. I wanted to feel my own body, jump around, and be free of these crazy attendants.
Step Three required me to make a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understood him. But I had been indoctrinated with the Catholic idea of God, which I hated. How in the world, I thought, can I make such a decision? I decided to settle for being willing to make such a decision. God could come later.
Donny and I went out to the sunny blackberry patch behind my house and I made a short prayer, and with as much earnestness as I could summon I took Step Three.
Even to get this far was hard work. All through my first weeks in the program I remained prey to violent mood swings; my physical limitations frustrated me terribly. I’d reach for the phone and drop it. In my attempts to pick it back up, I’d knock over the fishbowl; as I fled across the room from the site of this humiliation, I’d hear the phone clanging along behind me. The cord would have gotten caught up in my wheels (things like this still happen to me). Once I smashed every dish in the house, literally, out of rage. I hated my body so much I would smash my hand against the wall and scream. It’s a miracle I never broke a bone.
AA has a phrase, “Sit still and hurt.” It means, Don’t run away from your feelings. I’d been sitting still, all right, but running far and fast from my feelings.
Once a week I spent a day in bed. I can remember looking at my body with loathing and thinking, Boy, if I ever get to heaven, I’m not going to ask for a new pair of legs like the average quad does. I’m going to ask for a dick I can feel. The idea promoted in rehab of the socially well-adjusted, happily married quad made me sick.
This was the cruelest thing of all. Always, I felt humiliated. Surely a man with any self-respect would pull the plug on himself. Razor blades were one obvious choice. Or I could hang myself from one of the straps on my bed’s overhead frame. I could set the chair in reverse and just let it back out from under me. Years later I drew a cartoon about that moment. It pictures a centaur with his human part dressed as a cowboy. He’s decided to end it all. He’s got a noose around his neck and the rope over the limb of a tree, and he’s hitting himself on the rump with his Stetson to spook himself into a gallop. At the time, though, I didn’t have a joke left in me. My face wet with tears of bitterness and despair, I thought, If you’re not there God, I’m fucked.
But there was a telephone next to my bed, and my sponsor was always at the other end of the line. I could call up at 3:00 A.M. and say, “Donny, I can’t move my legs. I’m going crazy.”
He’d always say, “What are the first Three Steps?” And I’d have to recite them. Then he’d say, “Well, since you admit that you’re powerless over your quadriplegia and believe that a Higher Power than yourself can restore you to sanity, wouldn’t you like to turn this over to Chuckie?” And I’d once again make a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of Chuckie where quadriplegia was concerned.
Donny was patient with me. I was asked several times to chair a meeting. But I had a terrible fear of speaking, or even appearing in front of large numbers of people. I remembered my high school graduation in a huge gymnasium filled with hundreds of people. I had marched in with Foley’s sister, both of us in blue satin caps and gowns, and I guided us, instinctively, to the back row of the section reserved for the seniors. I’d had a few hits from a bottle with the guys out on the playground. But as I sat there listening to the keynote speaker, imagining hundreds of eyes staring at me, I suddenly felt a terrible panic rise up, and I got up, with the excuse that I was going to the john, and walked out, in front of the whole crowd. I didn’t come back. They found me out on the playground later—Foley’s sister had to suffer the embarrassment of marching out alone. The family had come from all over the state to see me graduate and my father was furious. “You’re a goddamn coward!” he said. I hated him for saying it; it was just what I was thinking myself.
But when I couldn’t chair the AA meeting and I turned to Donny with tears of frustration, saying, “I wanted to do it, I wanted to do it!” he just patted me on the shoulder an
d said, “Next time.”
Another thing he did was to set up what he called a God Basket. He taped a medium-size brown paper shopping bag to the wall up near the ceiling like a little basketball hoop. He wrote “Chuckie” on it. When I had a problem, I’d write, for example, on a piece of paper: “I am worried about the rent. I don’t have the money! Who is going to pay the fucking rent?” I’d fold the paper up, and my attendant would toss it into the God Basket. Thus I acknowledged my powerlessness over things I could do nothing about and got rid of the frustration and the sense of injustice they engendered.
According to AA, self-pity was “like wetting your pants in the winter, a very warm feeling for a very short time.” I fought the feeling that I had a legitimate case for self-pity. There was nobody in the fellowship in a wheelchair at that time who could bust me down, who could say, “Listen, fuckface, I’m in a wheelchair too. How are you gonna take me on?” I told Donny that what I really needed was to be in a special group for handicapped alcoholics, because we had special problems.
He said, “Yeah, they could call it the Self-pity Group.”
So I simply relied on the authority of the program itself, which said that self-pity would lead me back to the bottle: “Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink.”
For a while I attended the meetings of a real hard-core group dominated by old-timers who could have passed for Zen masters. Reba was an old Irishwoman who used to chair some of the meetings. She was broad-shouldered, with owl glasses, a tiny pert mouth, and alert eyes, which darted back and forth. She reminded me of an old nun.
“When I first came to these meetings,” she frequently told us, “I was a big, fat, worthless cow! I worked these steps and I carved a life for myself.”
Jesus Christ, I thought, there’s something about this woman! She had the finesse of a drill sergeant. “This is the Scolley Group and we do not chat across the table in the Scolley Group, because some of us have incurred brain damage through our drinking and our attention spans are short!”
I imagined that she would take me out behind the woodshed and flog me to death with a switch on my nonfeeling buttocks if I broke the rule. Actually I got along fine with Reba, but she didn’t like Alex, who used to complain to her that he wanted to stop drinking but couldn’t. “It takes what it takes, my fine-feathered friend,” was all she would say.
Reba died of cancer of the heart five years later in the fall of 1983. I visited her regularly, and she became sweeter and sweeter as death approached. Her legacy to me included many tools, not the least of which was this thought:
“There’s nobody too stupid for this program, but there are a lot of people too damn smart for it.”
All those weeks Alex must have felt like a demon present at an exorcism. Many of my meetings took place in a big converted mansion that had been remodeled into a clubhouse. There was no wheelchair access at that time. Alex, with the help of whoever was present, had to drag me up the steps. Once inside, I was on a main floor devoted to lounges and a coffee shop. The meeting rooms were either up one big flight of stairs or down another. When he had muscled me into the room, Alex usually took off. But sometimes he stayed for the solid hour of testimonials, bellyaching, and prayer. If the chairperson made the mistake of closing the meeting by asking, “Does anyone have anything else to say before we join hands for the Lord’s Prayer?” Alex would raise his hand and get in his two bits worth.
“Well, now, I think you boys are being a little heavy-handed and obsessive about all this. I think just a moderate amount of churchgoing . . .” And the old-timers would begin to cough and shuffle their feet.
I made Alex nail up favorite sayings or slogans on my walls. Being reminded of them took the edge off my constant anxiety. To put “Thy Will Be Done” over the kitchen stove, he had to climb above the level of ambient pot smoke, which must have seemed frightening. When I got on his case about all the pot, he’d snap back, “Well of course I’m stoned!”
Alex’s addictions were threatening my recovery, and I knew I had to replace him. The fear of a new attendant was—and is—massive. Imagine that you are going to be utterly dependent on some weirdo for months. That you are going to submit to a repugnant intimacy with him several hours a day. That if he is five minutes late, you are going to look out the window and feel certain that your whole day has just been ruined because he’s quit, he’s sick, he’s had a car wreck, he’s been murdered by terrorists. Forget getting out of bed. Forget breakfast. The most you can do is pick up the telephone.
At this time my normal, everyday anxiety level was such that for a time I kept a kitchen timer on my lap as I rolled around. I had it set for five minutes, and every time it went off, I’d pray, “Thy will be done.” I was convinced I’d never find another attendant and I worried myself into a frenzy. Even today, whenever I begin the search, I know it’s hopeless. However, the program asks me to concentrate on doing the necessary footwork and let my Higher Power take care of the rest. I advertised and manned the phone. Each evening I gazed out over the city lights and speculated about this perfect person who was going to come and serve my needs.
Arthur looked like Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster, except not as suave. He had been a mental patient somewhere in the Midwest. He smoked three or four packs of cigarettes a day and got through at least a case of Coke. He carried a Bible around with him so that he could quote from it on each and every occasion.
One day I noticed that Arthur had brought the groceries home in a shopping cart. “Uh, don’t you think it goes a little against Christian tenets to steal a shopping cart?”
“No, John, the Lord led me to do it. The Lord told me to use it to haul the laundry down to the laundromat on Wednesdays.”
Sometimes my bedroom light would snap on and there he would be, standing in the doorway in his nightshirt in the middle of the night. “Sorry to wake you, John, but the Lord has led me to read you this passage. . . .”
With the kind of nights I was having, it was comforting to hear any kind of spiritual message, even one from a lunatic at 3:00 A.M.
The walls of the apartment were actually turning yellow from his cigarettes. He had quite a collection of Jesus rock ‘n’ roll, which sounded like Charles Manson backed up by the Dead Kennedys, but with biblical lyrics. And if I sent him out to buy eggs for an omelet, he was just as likely to come back with oatmeal or blueberry muffins. “The Lord led me to bring you this breakfast instead.”
I had gone back to college; at 2:00 A.M. one night I was up late in my chair, studying, when the phone rang. It was my landlord. Arthur, whom I had assumed to be sound asleep, had crawled out of his window, hailed a cab, and had himself driven forty miles to Damasch State Hospital, the local funny farm, where he had checked in.
Eventually the Lord led Arthur away from me.
THE HARDEST PART of the fellowship program had now begun: the action steps, designed to purge me of resentment and guilt and enable me to live my life honestly. The first chore, Step Four, was to write down a list of all the resentments I harbored, all the wrongs I had done, and all of my character defects. The first time I tried this, I had an acute anxiety attack and had to hide in bed for two days. Donny said, “Wait six months.” Having just had a short glance at my personal Medusa, I was happy to oblige. I could wait half a year to be turned to stone.
In the end I was able to recall such scenes as the time I’d gotten drunk in the nursing home, picked up the phone, dialed the head nun in the middle of the night, and called her every filthy name in the book. And the times or so years before, when I’d cornered my mother in the kitchen when everybody else was out and screamed in rage, taking everything out on her, knowing just where she was vulnerable and which buttons to push.
When I got to the parts where I goaded my father, pushing and provoking until he lashed out violently at me, I was on ground where I’d always felt myself to be, genuinely, the victim. I got on the phone to Donny and said, “Goddamn it, there are certain things that I am not resp
onsible for and that I’m not going to forgive!” But Donny always said, “There is no justification for resentment. You can’t have it.” Resentment leads quickly to self-pity, according to AA doctrine, and from there to booze.
Step Five required me to admit the exact nature of these wrongs to myself, to God, and to another human being. We went out to the blackberry patch again, and Donny did the listening. It took four hours, not counting time spent hyperventilating.
Step Six was the hardest of all for me. I had to become entirely ready to have my defects removed. But I didn’t want to let them go and I stalled for several months. The wheelchair was an ideal pity grabber and all-purpose manipulative tool, and I clung jealously to impatience and intolerance. Since I was paying special dues, I felt I should get special privileges. And I was unwilling to let go of the anger I harbored toward my father. It had become part of my very identity.
One biblical phrase with special meaning for Donny and me in those days was “Be still, and know that I am God.” I felt it had been driven into my heart and head with a sledgehammer. A quadriplegic cannot leap up and relieve his emotions by becoming frenetically active. I felt as if a huge hand had reached down out of the heavens and placed me firmly on my butt in a wheelchair while a voice said, “Just sit there and relax for fifty years. Don’t get up, ever.” The only chance of relief from grief, from anger, and from resentment I had was spiritual.
Slowly, slowly I began to feel some sort of presence. At last I was ready have these defects removed and (Step Seven) I asked God to do it. He is still doing it. This, like the rest of AA’s Twelve Steps, is not a single event, to be gotten over with once and for all, but a process that goes on for the rest of one’s life.
The Eighth Step was to draw up a list of every individual I had injured, and that turned out to be a lot of individuals. The Ninth was to apologize to them, alone, individually, face to face. I was amazed at the spiritual dynamics of this step. I’d be in the supermarket, thinking about somebody I’d fucked over in high school and sure enough, there he’d be at the end of the aisle shopping for Bisquick. I’d roll up and apologize, and the person would accept the apology. Each and every time I’d feel a surge of energy.
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