I can’t qualify my name with anything else because I’m really not sure I belong. I’m really not sure I have that big a problem with drink. Or at least, not a problem I can’t fix by myself.
“Welcome!” the group chimes in. “Keep coming back.”
Riiiiight. I give them all the smiles they seem to expect, then shrink back into my seat, grateful for the reassuring rub on my arm from Jason. I turn to look at him, and he smiles and nods, as if he’s really proud of me.
God, he’s just yummy, I think, and suddenly I’m pleased that I’m here, and I settle back to listen.
It seems this is a “step meeting,” and today is step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
A thin blue book is passed around, and we move around the circle, reading step 2, and I think, once again, that I am definitely not in the right place, because all this talk about a Higher Power just seems ridiculous.
Perhaps I should not be admitting this, but I have never really understood the whole God thing. My mother, in her distant past, was apparently Episcopalian. She went to church with her parents, but Aunt Judith was completely antireligion and wiped out whatever my mother had had. And my Dad … Well. I can’t really call him that anymore, except I don’t know what else to call him. Richard. My mother’s husband. The man I thought was my father. He was Catholic, which was enough to put me off for life. Because he went to Mass, I refused, and even though he forced my mother and me, once the depression hit she didn’t have to go, and although he made me go with him for a while, the older I got the less I went.
I am definitely not a huge fan of organized religion, and as for God? I’m not entirely sure. I do remember feeling terrified on holiday when I was young. In a strange bed, in a strange villa in Portugal, I would lie in bed screwing my eyes shut, desperate not to look at the window, which had no curtains, and all I could see when I pictured that big black window was a face, a rictus of horror pressed against the glass, about to come in and carry me off, the changeling, taken back to where she belongs.
The only thing that helped me deal with that terror, which was so all-consuming I remember actually being paralyzed with fear, unable to even jump out of bed and go and find my mother, the only thing that made me feel a little better was God.
I pictured him then as a big old man with a huge white beard. Presumably Charlton Heston was my inspiration. He had twinkly eyes and a kindly smile, and he loved me. I would lie in bed, my eyes screwed up, reciting made-up prayers that incorporated snatches of proper prayers I had heard over the years.
“Our father, who art in heaven, hollowed be thy name, please protect me and look after me. Please keep me safe and keep the monsters away from me. Deliver me from evil and badness and monsters. Look after me and protect me and keep me safe in this room, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Amen. Please. Thank you, God.”
And I suppose, during times in my life that have felt particularly hard, or frightening, I have whispered a prayer, or asked whoever might be watching from above for help.
But to ask for help with my drinking? That seems ever so slightly ridiculous.
We finish reading and the leader starts to speak.
“I’m Grant, alcoholic,” he says, and I look at him and think, he doesn’t look like an alcoholic. Neither does Jason, for that matter. And then I wonder what I think an alcoholic looks like. When I was growing up in Gerrards Cross we had a neighbor who was an alcoholic. I only know this because my parents used to talk about it. Everyone used to talk about it. His name was Terence Miller, and he was forever being driven home by the police, having been found asleep in the car park after hours.
I always remember him as being very nice, but he definitely looked like an alcoholic, especially when I’d see him stagger out of the police car, shouting at the very policemen who had been looking after him. Then you’d smell the booze