Okay, Let’s Do This.
I didn’t drink all day on Monday – which wasn’t hard since I’d slept until evening. Still I felt proud.
Gregg suggested that we take a joint to smoke on the way to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, but I declined. I wanted the AA people to see me at my best, and I knew “high” wasn’t my best. I knew “drunk” wasn’t my best.
I didn’t actually know what “my best” looked like; I only knew what it wasn’t.
So I was terrified. I didn’t know what AA was all about. I expected to walk into a board room – like the meetings my dad had at work. There would be old men sitting around a table, a white board maybe. Everyone would be very serious. And, I imagined, when I walked in, they would all look up and glare at me. I’d be wearing the wrong thing, and my hair would be wrong, and I wouldn’t be smoking but I knew I would stink.
I took Gregg with me because I couldn’t face these people alone.
And I held off as long as I could. The AA meeting started at 8:30 p.m. Gregg and I arrived at 8:12 and sat in the car until 8:29. We didn’t talk. I watched people walking toward a very large church – going in, not coming back out. Lots of people. I imagined the church was having some other kind of service, too, because these people didn’t look like old, judge-y men. There were people of all ages, dressed in all attires, going inside.
At 8:29 I said, “Okay let’s do this.”
Gregg looked genuinely surprised that I was actually getting out of the car. He got out of the car, too.
He tried to hold my hand but I shrugged him off. We walked toward the church where all the people had gone in, and walked inside.
The room was enormous, like a warehouse inside a church. It was nothing like the room I’d imagined. A guy with a mustache reached out his hand as I walked in and said, “Welcome!” He smiled and reached toward me. I shook his hand.
I didn’t want to talk to this man. I looked around at the room – dozens of tables, all with people sitting around them. So. Many. People.
I didn’t know what to do. I followed the people in front of me, who went to a long, rectangular table with cookies and coffee and cream and sugar.
I didn’t want cookies and coffee. I wanted to sit down and/or vanish from sight as quickly as possible. I saw two empty chairs far away from coffee, and raced toward them as the room started to quiet and a voice spoke over the din.
I looked toward the front of the room where all eyes were pointed, and there was someone talking. A woman. Blah blah blah, I heard. My stomach was in knots. Someone new stepped up to talk, another woman. Blah blah blah, I heard. And then, without even meaning to, I started to listen.
For the rest of the meeting, the woman told stories. She talked about puking in the bathroom in high school, and losing her car when it was a block from her house, and getting arrested for peeing in somebody’s garden, and spilling vodka into her cereal and eating it anyway.
And people laughed. I laughed. We laughed.
They were the funniest stories I’d ever heard. She talked and we laughed and I felt, for the first time in forever, that I fit in.
Just like that: I wasn’t alone anymore.