get fired from SSI; your hours couldn’t get cut. “SSI always come,” she said. Until one day it didn’t. She had been approved for SSI as a minor, but her adult reevaluation found her ineligible. Now Crystal’s only source of income came from food stamps.4 She tried donating plasma but her veins were too small. She asked her spiritual, foster, and even biological mothers for money, but what they could give her didn’t go very far. She didn’t ask anything from her church because “it always led to conflict.” Because she didn’t know what else to do, Crystal went “on the stroll” and began selling sex. She had never been a morning person but soon learned that it was the best time to turn tricks, catching men on their way to work.
“Is Momma okay?” the pastor asked. She was looking at an older woman being held up by two people.
“No.”
“Then we gonna stop everything and pray for her.” The pastor knelt down in front of the woman. A dozen or so churchgoers surrounded her, some standing on chairs, some with their hands on the old woman’s head. “Reach out your hands this way and pray!” the pastor commanded, and her congregation obeyed, even the children. “Oh, Jesus!” the pastor yelled into the microphone. “Oh, by the blood, oh you death spirit, you stroke spirit, come out!”
Crystal was bouncing and moving her hands from shoulders to hips, chanting, “By your stripes, Lord, by your stripes.”
“By the blood,” prayed the pastor. “The blood! ShabbabmaSHOTtala! I bind you. Come back, Momma. Come back!”
The music simmered low, waiting. The clutch of people surrounding the older woman parted, revealing her limp and blood-drained face. She looked to be asleep or dead. Then the huddle closed in again. After a few minutes, the people encircling the woman grew louder and stepped outward to show the pastor kissing the woman about her face and hands. People began clapping as the woman rose to her feet.
“Praise God!” the pastor said. She let out a triumphant scream into the microphone and collapsed to her knees, praying. The piano and drums kicked up, and the church exploded. People began running up and down the aisle, shouting and singing. Someone found a tambourine and started pounding it. The drummer crashed the cymbals, and the pianist lingered on the high notes. A woman yelled and sprinted in place, sweat streaming down her face. “We ain’t trying to have no funeral up in here!” the pastor boasted.
And there was Crystal, hands raised, fingers spread, beaming and dancing. “God got me,” she cried. “God got me!”
23.
THE SERENITY CLUB
Scott had been eight days sober when he went to the Serenity Club, a smoke-filled, wood-paneled AA bar that served stale coffee and root-beer floats. “They’re addictive,” one regular with a rap sheet said about the floats. “But I don’t do robberies for them.” When it was time for the speakers, a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman in a black bandanna and vinyl jacket took the podium. This was Anna Aldea, an acid-dropping, coke-snorting, cowhide-tough biker lady turned high priestess of AA. A few months shy of her ten-year chip, Anna had helped dozens of addicts through the program. During her speech, she pointed to her newest project.
“I love you, Scott,” she said. “Keep coming back. It works—”
“If you work it,” the room finished.
A week prior, Scott had woken up from his three-day bender, broke and hungover. To still his nerves, he dressed and left his apartment. It was early Saturday morning, and Scott walked as the city slept. He made it all the way to Pito’s house and got him out of bed. Two years sober himself, Pito knew what to do with a detoxing junkie who wanted to get clean: plenty of water, coffee, vitamins, cigarettes, food, and, above all, constant monitoring. Pito stayed with Scott all day and that evening took him to meet his brother, David (fourteen years sober), and his wife, Anna. Anna lit a fire in their backyard pit and sat up with Scott until the bars closed at two a.m. It was a nauseating, painful, stretched-out day—Scott’s first drug-free in years.
Day five was miserable in a different way. Scott passed it sobbing at Pito’s house. “I can feel my body getting better,” he said, “but when you have years and years and years of not feeling anything from drinking and dope, then it kind of hits you.”
AA had its own binge for people starting to get sober: ninety meetings in ninety
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