Andrew W. resumes Church Basements, his tales from the world of Alcoholics Anonymous:
Cookie was distraught, so when the leader asked, “Before we begin, did anyone have a problem staying sober today ?” she raised a manicured finger.
“Yesterday when I got up at 10 in the morning and looked outside I realized the gardener, who was supposed to be trimming the hedges, failed to come.”
Cookie was serious and taken as so by the large Alcoholic Anonymous contingent at the 9 a.m. meeting at the old Unitarian Church on Waspocket Inlet’s Shore Street.
The others had heard it before. Cookie, they knew, was so involved with her gardens that when anything went wrong she spun into a tissy, and thought about a morning pick-me-up.
She shared in quavering voice, felt better for it, and then the meeting began with a talk by Ted, who was suited up for work. It was was not a basic drunkalogue. Rather Ted shared his thoughts about the psychological underpinnings of his addiction, what his doctors had believed, how much he appreciated the fellowship of Alcoholic Anonymous.
There are many roads to the rooms of AA. Inlet’s members, for the most part, were drawn to Inlet’s morning meeting from New York City’s affluent precincts .
None had wandered the dangerous underground of New York, home to so many who hit bottom. More likely they had gone from imported beer and hash at college, to far too many highballs at the clubs and lounges in the city.
Even for the well-heeled and -bred, addiction, whether fed by Thunderbird wine or Black Label scotch, is a personal and family disaster. There may be a safety net and polite acceptance of peers at the Inlet, but the pain, progression and hopelessness are the same for executives or their cloistered wives as for dusty bums mumbling to themselves on park benches.
A visitor from a meeting with working class majority was tempted to feel superior, as if the well-groomed alcoholics could not be like himself and his chums upstate.
But as sharing progressed, the similarities, common feelings, and precipitous slides had the same common truths the visitor had heard so many times in more modest settings.
Still when the basket was passed, filled with five and tens and even a few fifties, he withheld his carefully folded buck.
They may need me and my experiences but not my money, he thought, slipping his offering back into a shirt pocket.
