I Don’t Think Those People Were Real Alcoholics.
When the AA meeting was over, I ran out the door as fast as my young legs would carry me. The lady had stopped talking and everyone stood up and I needed to get out of there before anyone else tried to shake my hand or talk to me or even look randomly in my direction.
While that meeting had been the most wonderful thing I’d ever experienced, I had no idea how to actually converse in a roomful of people. So I skedaddled out of the church to the car.
Gregg, my ever faithful puppy, was right behind me. We hopped into the car, safely away from the crowd of laughing, happy people.
But I’d noticed that Gregg didn’t laugh at the AA meeting.
“Didn’t you think it was funny?” I asked him.
“Not really,” he said. “My dad’s an alcoholic.” Oh right, I thought. I had forgotten.
I’d only met Gregg’s dad once; he seemed old and angry. He lived in a very dark house. Gregg’s mom had died when Gregg was 14, so I assumed that was Gregg’s main problem.
Gregg’s Dad was a “real” alcoholic. He was old and sad and nonfunctional. I hadn’t yet equated “real” alcoholism with what I was doing.
“I don’t think those people were real alcoholics,” I told him. “I didn’t see anyone who was even drinking.”
“I guess,” Gregg said. He didn’t seem to care. “Ya wanna smoke this joint now?”
“Let’s wait,” I said. Gregg didn’t wait.
I didn’t smoke it; I couldn’t stop thinking about the meeting. The AA meeting was not the boardroom I’d expected.
If I’d only been allowed one word to describe AA, I would have said it was fun.
It was a roomful of laughter. The lady and her stories were funny. Not funny like whirling-around-in-a-dark-bar-and-tripping-over-your-own-barstool funny, but really, actually, deep-in-the-gut, relatably funny.
And others in that room thought it was funny, just like I did.
Plus I didn’t have to do anything, or talk to anyone, or even drink the stupid coffee.
So I went back the following Monday. This time, Gregg and I went inside at 8:28. And this time, a guy was up at the podium talking. He wasn’t as funny as the lady, but he was funny, too. He talked about getting fired from his job and people laughed. And he talked about passing out in the backseat of his car and waking up with his hand in a bag full of cold fries and eating the fries for breakfast. And people laughed again.
Not Gregg. But I laughed. We laughed.
I wondered if this was how people got sober. I’d heard that laughter is the best medicine. I wondered if people just laughed themselves sober every Monday and then they felt better. I didn’t know.
I continued to drink and get high.
But I went back the next Monday. And someone else was speaking, and she was also funny, and I thought, I want to go to this meeting every Monday for the rest of my life.
I believed this was the only AA meeting in the world, and that those people were the only AA people in the world, and Monday was the only day anybody went to meetings.
So I went to three meetings – three Mondays in a row – and never spoke to a soul. But I laughed a lot.
The following Monday was Memorial Day. During Memorial Day weekend, I discovered something else.
I didn’t go to another AA meeting for a very long time.