CHAPTER 8

The Slippery Place

GARY

The Tuesday meeting is in the basement of a Methodist church that has never, as far as I can tell, held a Methodist. We have the room by grace and a small monthly check — us, and a Scout troop, and a quilting circle whose banner we fold up and set on the piano every week and unfold and put back when we’re done, because you leave a room the way you found it, that’s practically a step.

I have been coming to this room for nine years.

Not eleven. That is a distinction I make now, quietly, only to myself, and it is the reason I am the man I am tonight instead of the man I was. Eleven years since my last drink, more or less — the more or less is doing a lot of work, and I’ve stopped pretending it isn’t. Nine years in this room, with these people, doing it the way it actually works instead of the way I spent the first two years doing it, which was white-knuckled and alone and certain I was the exception. I got sober by myself the first time. I stayed sober when I finally admitted I couldn’t.

We read the readings. We hold the hands. A woman named Cathy, who has been coming as long as I have and has watched me lie to this room in a hundred elegant ways, shares about how the hiding always comes before the drinking for her — how the first drink is never the first thing, the first thing is telling somebody you’re fine when you’re not. I’ve heard her say a version of it two hundred times. It lands different tonight, because tonight I am sitting on a secret, and the secret is that in nine days I am getting on a cruise ship, alone, on purpose, and I have not fully told the room why.

So when it comes to me I tell them.

“My name’s Gary, I’m an alcoholic.” The room says my name back, that low warm rumble, the sound I would have crossed a desert for on certain nights of my life. “Eleven years, on and off, and I’m going to talk about the on and off because I’m about to do something either very healthy or very stupid and I genuinely can’t tell which, which is usually my sign to say it out loud in here and let smarter people look at it.”

And I tell them. The milestone — that this month is a number I didn’t think I’d see, a number my first sponsor, dead now, once bet me I’d never hit. And the ship. I tell them I booked a cruise. Ten days. A floating city with, at last count on the deck plan, eleven bars, a casino that comps you drinks to keep you at the table, a champagne toast on the first night that they hand you whether you asked for it or not, and midnight buffets where the theme is excess and nobody is watching what anybody does.

“That sounds,” says a kid named Marcus, six months in, with the beautiful bluntness of six months in, “like a relapse with a pool.”

The room laughs. I laugh. He’s not wrong, and the fact that he’s not wrong is the whole point.

“Here’s the thing,” I say, when it settles. “For eleven years I have stayed sober, mostly, by staying away. I don’t go to the bar. I don’t go to the wedding. I left a woman once — a good woman, the best I ever — partly because loving her felt like standing near an edge, and standing near edges is a thing I’ve trained myself never to do. I have built a very safe, very small life out of not going places. And a while back it occurred to me that I don’t actually know if I’m sober or just hidden. Whether I’ve got eleven years of recovery or eleven years of a very careful cage.”

Nobody says anything. That’s the room at its best — it knows when a man is talking his way toward something and it gets out of the way.

“So I’m going to go stand in the slipperiest place I can find,” I say, “and find out which one it is. On purpose. Sober. Not to prove anything to anybody. To prove it to me. Because if my sobriety only works in a church basement, it isn’t sobriety. It’s just geography.”

Cathy nods slowly. “Bring your tools,” she says. “Don’t go up there thinking you’re strong. Go up there thinking you’re an alcoholic on a boat full of booze, and act accordingly.”

“Meeting a day,” says someone in the back. “They have them. Look for the ‘Friends of Bill W.’ in the daily program. Every ship’s got one.”

“Call your sponsor,” says three people at once, and the room laughs again, because that is always the answer, it is the answer to every question anyone has ever brought into that basement, and it is always, annoyingly, correct.

I see my sponsor the next night.

His name is Walt. He is seventy-six years old, thirty-one years sober, a retired high school shop teacher with hands like catcher’s mitts and a way of listening that makes you understand nobody ever really listened to you before him. We meet at a diner because Walt does not believe in meetings that don’t have pie in them. He orders the pie. I order coffee. This is our whole relationship in one sentence: he has the pie, and I have the thing I’m not saying, and he waits me out every single time.

I tell him about the cruise. He already knows — I told him the day I booked it — but he lets me tell it again, because he knows the second telling is the true one.

“Why are you really going, Gary?” he says.

“To test my sobriety in a—“

“No.” He says it gently, around a bite of pie. “That’s the brochure. Why are you really going?”

And this is the thing about Walt, the thing I both need and cannot stand: he will not let me hand him a paragraph. Eleven years and I can talk about my recovery beautifully, I can run a meeting, I can sponsor other men, I can say all the right shapes of all the right words — and Walt sits there with his pie and waits for the one sentence underneath the paragraph, and he can wait longer than I can.

“…The ship’s where I met her,” I say finally. “Five years ago.  I’ve never been back on a ship since. And I think if I’m ever going to be a whole man I have to be able to stand in the exact kind of room where I did the worst thing I ever did sober, and not be running, and not be drinking, and just — be there. Be the man I couldn’t be then.”

Walt chews. Swallows. Points his fork at me, not unkindly.

“Now that,” he says, “is why you’re going. Not to test the booze. To face the ghost. The booze is just the thing you’re bringing along to make it sound like a program and not a pilgrimage.” He sets the fork down. “Let me tell you what I think, and then you’re going to argue with me, and then in about a week you’re going to decide I was right, so we might as well skip ahead.”

“That’s usually how it goes.”

“You’re not going to find her.” He says it flat, so it can’t be a hope I hang anything on. “It’s a big ocean and a lot of ships and you don’t get to run away from a woman for five years and then have the universe hand her back to you as a prize for booking a cruise. That’s not how amends work. You don’t get her. You might not ever get her. Make your peace with that before you get on the boat, or don’t get on the boat.”

It lands hard, because it’s true, and because some liar in the back of my heart had been quietly hoping exactly the thing he just took away from me.

“Then why go at all?”

“Because the amends isn’t to her, son. She’s not there. The amends is to you.” He leans back. “You wronged her, yes, and if you ever get the chance you’ll make it right to her face and it’ll cost you and you’ll do it anyway. But that’s not this trip. This trip is you making an amends to the man you abandoned when you abandoned her — the one who could’ve stayed, who was standing right there capable of staying, and who you drowned in fear instead. You go back on the water sober and present and staying — even if the only thing you’re staying present for is a sunset and a room full of strangers — and you show that man he exists. That’s the ninth step nobody writes down. Sometimes the person you owe the living amends is the one in the mirror.”

I don’t say anything. The diner hums. Somebody’s kid drops a fork two booths down.

“One more thing,” Walt says, “and then I want you to eat something, you look like a coat rack.” He pushes the second fork across the table at me, the one the waitress always brings him because after thirty years she knows he’ll try to make his sponsees eat his pie. “When you’re up there, in the slippery place — you’re going to want to white-knuckle it. Grip down, count the days, survive to the gangway. Don’t. That’s the old sobriety, the geography kind. Try something harder. Try to actually be happy up there. Sober and happy in the exact place you think you don’t deserve to be. That’s the real edge, Gary. Not the bar. The joy. You’ve always been able to say no to a drink. Let’s find out if you can say yes to a good day.”

I take the fork. I eat the pie. It’s cherry, and it’s too sweet, and I am, for reasons I could not explain to anyone who has not sat across from a man like Walt, close to tears over a slice of diner pie nine days before a cruise I am now, finally, honestly ready to take.

“Call me from the ship,” Walt says. “Every couple days. And Gary.” He waits until I look up. “I’m proud of you. Eleven years, on and off. Mostly on. That counts. That counts for everything.”

I get on the plane nine days later with a chip in my pocket worn smooth from handling, a meeting schedule I’ve already looked up, and no expectation whatsoever of seeing the woman I ran from — which is exactly why, three nights into the sail, when I walk past a poker table and my whole life stops, I will have no idea what to do, and will do the only thing eleven years in the rooms ever taught me that’s worth a damn.

I will sit down, and I will tell the truth.