86'd: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,75
I wrote was mostly made up, things like being a molested child and being beaten as a kid, and going deaf. But so what. I’d be okay. I could hack it. No more County Jail.
Question Three: What people do you resent, and why?
I began with David Koffman and listed every employer that I could remember going back as far as I could, and the reason why I disliked the pricks. It was easy.
An hour and a half later I’d answered all ten questions and I was done. The relief was palpable.
In the cafeteria I congratulated myself with three unsweetened jelly doughnuts and another cup of their best swill herbal tea. I could make it work. One day at a time. Fake it ’til you make it.
thirty-three
The death of my brain came two weeks later. By accident. There were only seven of us left from the original group and we were van-driven four hours north for a weekend retreat at a place called San Antonio Seminary in the hills, thirty miles inland from Santa Barbara. Rolling horse-ranch country.
What I learned about San Antonio was that for a long time it had been a training compound for novitiate Franciscan brothers in long brown robes. Polished concrete floors and twenty stark, single rooms, with Jesus photos and religious statues and God paraphernalia everywhere. The place turned into an AA retreat house by accident when one of the senior brothers needed help with his booze problem. The guy who drove up from L.A. to get him and deliver him to an inpatient treatment program in L.A., where he got sober, was looking for a weekend facility for himself and his AA buddies to go over the steps and talk about recovery and hang out. Now, ten years later, San Antonio had become an AA oasis for recovering drunks. Their only business now was holding retreats two weekends a month. A bare-bones staff of brothers remained to oversee the place.
The guy leading our thirty-man retreat was named Bob Anderson. He was seventy years old. A former biker and barroom pugilist with a huge belly and a bad temper, turned AA guru.
For the first two hours in front of the group that Friday afternoon, in the small library hall with folding chairs, old Bob talked only about himself and his alcohol history. He talked about what it was like to be his kind of drunk and juicehead. But he also talked about pulling guys out of their cars on the freeway, even after years sober, to punch them out. About his ex-wives and lost jobs and brutal life. Sober. I’d never heard this kind of AA recovery story before. The party line was, you get sober then tiptoe through the tulips for the rest of your days. This guy was very different.
In a way what Anderson said sounded like pretty standard stuff, but there was an honesty about him and a deliberate effort not to impress anyone. He wasn’t ranting about higher powers or being saved by AA from booze and a past life of destruction. He was talking about something different. He was talking about his life sober, about still being crazy after years off booze. That got my attention.
But the other thing that impressed me about Anderson was what one of his friends—a guy named TJ—told me when we finally had a break: Seven years before Anderson had been given a death sentence from cancer after a five-hour surgery to remove his esophagus. He’d been told he had a 3 percent chance of living out the year with his stomach now attached to his throat. Time went by but Anderson didn’t die. Instead, he began leading AA retreats and speaking at meetings all over L.A. He always talked about the same thing: how to apply the steps to treat what he called the Disease of Alcoholism.
He did this twice a month. The old guy stood in front of the room smiling and talking about himself while strapped with a chemo pack to his waist. The thing loudly hissed a dose of Drano into his system every two minutes, 24–7. And Anderson wasn’t selling Jesus, he just talked about himself and how he had changed his life.
According to what TJ told me, Bob would speak on the AA steps, on his feet, for eight hours today, Friday, then twelve hours on Saturday, then another five on Sunday. The guy was such a medical oddity that a team of filmmakers had even done a TV documentary