head and look at Jason, thinking he’ll catch my eye and we’ll exchange one of those mutual looks, that he will be as stunned as I am, and I see him nodding, just like the others, and now I really do know I’m in Bizarro World.
“It all came out,” he says. “The women. The drugs. The booze.” Wait. Did he say drugs? What drugs? Did I miss something? I try to picture him shooting up heroin, but no, it doesn’t quite compute. Maybe he’ll say more. By this time I am not only riveted, I am also curious as hell. If this guy is a huge merchant banker, this would make a fantastic story. Not that I would, obviously, go off and write something about him without his permission, but imagine if I could? I could freelance it out, because frankly it deserves a bigger audience than the Daily Gazette. The Daily Mail would go into raptures.
Maybe he would want to tell his story, I think, picturing myself chatting to him after the meeting, and him agreeing, wanting to help others going through the same thing, which would be, in fact, exactly how I’d pitch it.
“She divorced me and took everything I had.”
Oh, this just gets better and better.
“I ended up sleeping on a friend’s sofa, until even he had enough of my drinking, and stealing, and lying. I lost my job, my children wouldn’t have anything to do with me, and I ended up in a hostel in Waterloo.”
Are you kidding me? I need to come to AA meetings more often. This is like Storytime on steroids. I want this guy to keep on speaking for hours. I want to hear all their stories. I am completely and utterly rapt.
“That’s where I got sober. I hit bottom. I just couldn’t carry on anymore. I remember the night I fell to my knees, quite literally fell to my knees, and I was not a religious man, I never gave God a second thought, but I fell to my knees and cried out, ‘If there is a God, you need to help me. I need you to change my life.’ And I swear to God”—he laughs, and rolls his eyes as the room joins in—“I swear to God I felt, suddenly, an enormous peace come over me, and I knew, beyond any measure of doubt, that I wasn’t alone. And I also knew that he would help me, and if I took the right steps, and asked for help, it would always be provided. My first meeting was the next day, and I have been sober since then.” There is a round of applause from everyone in the room, with a couple of whoops.
“I didn’t do it,” he says. “I couldn’t do it. I tried to do it for years, and nothing worked. My sobriety is due to my Higher Power. And more than that, the phrase ‘could restore me to sanity.’ When I was drinking, I had no idea that my life was insane. I was a mass of neurosis, insecurity, inadequacy, self-righteous indignation, anger. I would fly off the handle at everything, was permanently angry, critical, judgmental. Everything in my life was confusion and chaos, and I thought that was normal.” He shrugs. “My dad was an alcoholic. It was all I knew. I spent my childhood vowing that things would be different when I was a grown-up, that I would never do to my children what my father did to me, and here I was, re-creating the hell of my childhood almost down to the letter, the only difference being that I never laid a hand on my kids, and because of that, I congratulated myself on being such a good father. Now…” He takes a deep breath. “I have been restored to sanity. I occasionally lose my temper, but it doesn’t last long, and I immediately make amends. I have a wonderful relationship with a woman who is in Al-Anon and works her own program, and I am seeing my kids again. Not as much as I would like, because they’re still skeptical about my change. But I take it a day at a time. I have a career again, and my life is good.” He looks around the room, choosing, embarrassingly, to fix his gaze on me. “My life is good,” he says again, nodding to punctuate it. “This program changes lives, and if you’re new here”—God! I wish he’d stop looking at me—“if you’re new,