A Drop of the Hard Stuff Read Free Page B

an unlikely person took him aside and told him some home truths.
    “A gay guy, Matt, and I mean gay as a jay. Obvious about it, you know? Grew up in a lah-de-dah suburb, went to an Ivy League college, and now he designs jewelry. Plus he’s more than ten years younger’n I am, and he looks like a wind of more than twenty miles an hour could pick him up and whisk him off to Oz. Just the type I’m gonna turn to for advice, right?
    “Well, he sat me down and told me I was using the program like a revolving door, and I’d just keep going out and keep coming back again, only each time I came back I’d have a little less of myself left. And the only way I was ever gonna break the pattern was if I read the Big Book every morning and the Twelve & Twelve every night, and got really serious with the steps. So I looked at him, this wispy little queen, this guy I got less in common with than a fucking Martian, and I asked him something I never asked anybody before. I asked him to be my sponsor. You know what he said?”
    “I’d guess he said yes.”
    “ ‘I’m willing to sponsor you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know if you’ll be able to stand it.’ Well, fuck, man. Come right down to it, what choice did I have?”
    So he went to a meeting every day, and sometimes two, and a three-meeting day wasn’t unheard of. And he called his sponsor every morning and every night, and the first thing he did when he got out of bed was hit his knees and ask God for one more sober day, and the last thing he did at night was get on his knees again and thank God for keeping him sober. And he read the Big Book and the Twelve & Twelve, and he worked his way through the steps with his sponsor, and he made ninety days, not for the first time, but he’d never made six months before, and nine months, and, incredibly, a year.
    For his Fourth Step, his sponsor made him write down every wrong thing he’d ever done in his life, and if he didn’t want to include something, that meant it had damn well better be there. “It was like allocuting,” he said, “to every goddamn thing I ever did.”
    Then the two of them sat down together and he read aloud what he’d written, with his sponsor interrupting now and then to comment, or ask for amplification. “And when we were done he asked me how I felt, and it’s not exactly an elegant way to put it, but what I told him was that I felt as though I’d just taken the biggest shit in the history of the world.”
    And now he had sixteen months, and it was time to start working on the amends. He’d made his Eighth Step list of the people he’d harmed, he’d become willing to take steps to set things right, but now it was Ninth Step time, which meant actually making the amends, and that wasn’t so easy.
    “But what choice do I have?” he said. And he shook his head and said, “Jesus, look at the time. You just heard my entire qualification. You sat through three speakers and now you had tolisten to me, and I went on almost as long as all three of them put together. But I guess it did something for me, talking to somebody from the old neighborhood. It’s gone, you know. The old neighborhood. They went and ran a fucking expressway through there.”
    “I know.”
    “It probably means more to me. The neighborhood, I mean. You were there what, two years?”
    “Something like that.”
    “For me it was my whole childhood. I used to be able to work up a pretty good drunk out of it. ‘Poor me, the house I grew up in is gone, the streets where I played stickball are gone, di dah di dah di dah.’ But my childhood wasn’t about the house and the streets. And it’s not gone. I’m still carrying it around, and I’ve still got to deal with it.” He picked up the check. “And that’s enough out of me, and I’m paying for this, and you can call it amends for talking your ear off.”
    When I got home I called Jim Faber, and we agreed that Jack’s sponsor sounded like a real Step Nazi, but that seemed