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The meeting was held in a room in the back of a local church, with dim lighting and a bunch of rat colored folding chairs formed in a circle. It was the same room where old people played bingo on Friday nights, where the young kids had their catechism classes on Sunday mornings, and where the drunks came to get sober on various nights throughout the week. With a group of well over fifty people, Silvia assumed that she picked a popular meeting. There were a few formalities in the beginning, including an opportunity for any newcomers to announce to the group that he or she had never before attended a meeting, at which time, Frank elected to stay silent.
Silvia had no expectations of him speaking up. She knew that, as far as he was concerned, he should not even be at this meeting. He wasn’t an alcoholic. He was just someone who liked to have a good time. He would not have come to the meeting had it not been for his desire to please his good brother. Frank claimed to be an extrovert, needing to have people constantly around him, which went along with his choice to drink. He was a highly sociable person who liked to have fun, and Silvia was an introverted weirdo who could stay by herself painting happily for hours. Her diagnosis of him as an alcoholic was also due to her own abnormality, which was undoubtedly the fault of Donna’s bad genes. She could sense Frank sitting there next to her as an observer, not a participant of this group of defective people to which he didn’t belong. But at least he was there.
A few people spoke for only a few minutes each giving brief updates of their week. One man was having a very bad week.
“A huge tree fell on my car this week,” said the man through his big seventies mustache. “Lucky I wasn’t in it. But maybe it would have been better if I had been in it. I got pink slipped this week at work, and my ex is bringing me back to court to get an extension on her alimony.”
A skinny woman with dark, almost black, lipstick, spoke up in a cigarette voice. In addition to her bad week involving a cheating boyfriend, it seemed that her entire life consisted of nothing but problems. She spoke quickly as if to squeeze all of her problems into the short amount of time that she was given to share. Most of what she said was an indecipherable blur with certain select phrases like “cheating-no-good-mother-fucker” and “some-crazy-bitch-at-work” popping out. The poor lady had been to three other meetings this week alone, including Narcotics Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, and Love and Sex Addicts Anonymous.
Next, a guy who looked like an over-aged high school burnout, talked briefly about how he had recently traded in his addiction to pot, or as he called it, his TCH maintenance, for drinking. He never liked the taste of alcohol too much, so he figured it would not be so dangerously addictive for him, but he was wrong.
“And before I knew it, I was a boozer,” he said with the laugh of a simpleton.
Next, a very hunched over tall lady spoke. As she spoke, her eyes grew big and filled with fire. “I’m feeling like I’m going to do something scary. Really scary. I don’t know what it is yet.” Her hands were shaking, and she was moving back and forth in her seat, making her stringy hair move through the air like strands of hay blowing in the wind.
After each person spoke, no matter how grave or sad or lighthearted their story was, no one else in the group commented. They all just sat there listening with blank faces and stiff bodies. They remained this way for the entire duration of the main speaker’s long sad story, which lasted for about a half an hour. The speaker was a thin, older man with white hair, a face full of worry lines, and a navy blue suit that looked as worn out as the rest of him. His tired eyes and broken smile spoke loud and clear of the many hardships through which he had stumbled. But not as loud and clear as his story that had a marked similarity to Silvia’s story. Despite the man’s soft-spoken voice, his words blasted in her ears. This man had her same proclivity to move from state to state and city to city, and he referred to himself as a “geographic.” With each move, he had conveniently erased his past mistakes only to make new ones. He stopped moving once he got sober, but sobriety took years. Meanwhile, he lived in denial of his alcoholism and his inability to stay in one place. Each new place was more than a clean slate. It was an opportunity to be a new person. A person who might magically lose his desire to drink. A person without pain.
Silvia was sitting forward with her shoulders back and her head straight up, as she listened intently to the speaker. He too had grown up in a household with a drunk for a parent. His mother started drinking when his father left her and their three children for a shot as a film star in Hollywood. As her drinking progressed, so did her erratic behavior towards her children, who didn’t know what to expect from her and, eventually, from the world. They remained in a constant state of fear, always on guard. The speaker grew to hate his home and left it as soon as he could at the age of eighteen. He wanted to get as far away as he could, but he had very little money, so he hitchhiked to Los Angeles. He said that he may have secretly wanted to find his dad, but that he had never found him. Instead, he found a group of free loving acidheads who encouraged him to come with them up to San Francisco. “And that’s when it all started,” he said, as if he was exhausted merely by the act of talking about his past.
There began his twenty-year career of drugging, drinking, and moving. He started over more times than he could remember. He lived in twenty-five different cities in ten different states, many of which he had moved back to repeatedly. Every move brought with it a set of high hopes, which he knew, somewhere in the back of his head, would soon be shattered. With each new move, he drank more and more, and quitting seemed more and more hopeless. Eventually he gave up on trying to quit, and one night, he ended up passed out on a sidewalk in the lower east side of New York, where he had just moved back to for the third time. It was on this night that some homeless guy stabbed him in his right leg. “I thought I knew what bottom was until then. This was truly bottom, though,” he said. He was rushed to a hospital, where his doctor urged him to join Alcoholics Anonymous. He took the doctor’s advice and he had been sober ever since that night. His move to South Jersey in 1985 was his last.
Silvia felt that the speaker may have been there to warn her to change her ways or she too would be going down the same tragic trail. But her story could never possibly be that tragic. For one thing, she wasn’t an alcoholic and had no intention of becoming one. For another thing, this move to Portland would very well be her last move. And her habit of moving wasn’t a compulsion. It was bohemian. Gypsy. It was just something that she needed to get out of her system. It was just a coincidence that both the speaker and Silvia grew up in alcoholic households, and grew into people who liked to move from place to place on a very frequent basis. She would not end up as some broken down person telling a room full of people about her regrets and mistakes and how AA had saved her life.
Frank wanted to leave right after the meeting had finished, and Silvia, feeling weak from trying to differentiate herself from the speaker and convince herself that she would not end up anything like him, didn’t have the energy to make her father stay and try to socialize with the others. She wanted to get out of there herself, away from the speaker, away from the doomed version of what she might become.