week on and thousands of miles north, on the outskirts of Port Angeles, I’d watch bald eagles fishing in a river and clouds of violet swallows swarming above a gorge. But the red cardinal was the first purely American bird of my trip and it heartened me. Whatever happens, happens here, in the populated earth. I was grateful for the science lesson, but I didn’t want to divorce the neural drama of alcoholism from the world, the quick and grubby world in which it takes place.
No chance of that at AA. I sat at the back, with an old-timer, Andi, who’d offered to show me around. People were drifting in, clutching coffees, in baseball caps and suits. It seemed at first glance almost comically New York, right down to the couple in the front row who looked like rock stars, one in enormous sunglasses and leather shorts, the other swaddled in a floor-length fur coat.
There was a sign on the wall that displayed the Twelve Steps, next to one that read ‘No spitting. No eating food on shared computers.’ The combination would no doubt have amused John Cheever, who struggled for a long time with the democracy of these dingy rooms, though in his last years he softened in his loathing of AA, becoming vocally grateful for its role in his sobriety. I read through them, step by step, for the hundredth time.
1.We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
2.Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3.Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4.Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5.Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6.Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7.Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8.Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9.Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10.Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11.Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12.Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
No one knows for sure how AA works. It was from the very beginning a gamble, a shot in the dark. It was established in the 1930s by a doctor and a failed stockbroker, Dr. Bob and Bill W., both of whom suffered from alcoholism themselves. Among its central tenets are the beliefs that recovery depends upon a spiritual awakening, and that alcoholics can help one another by sharing their experiences: a kind of bearing witness that proved from the outset astonishingly powerful. As a statement by AA World Services puts it: ‘Together, we can do what none of us could accomplish alone. We can serve as a source of personal experience and be an ongoing support system for recovering alcoholics.’
I’d come to an open meeting. We all joined hands in the little room to singsong our way through the Serenity Prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. I had a flash of that tiresomely English reluctance to join in, the suspicion of group identities.
The speaker was a man in his forties, with fine dark hair and a beautiful, ravaged face. He spoke in a meandering, elegant way. Alcohol was the family disease. His father pushed him to succeed. He was gay, attempted suicide as an adolescent and at a late stage in his drinking stopped going out entirely, barricading himself in his apartment with crates of red wine. He used to suffer from blackouts and as he explained this period of vanishing from society he used another of those images that lodged itself painfully in my mind. He said: ‘It was like my life was a piece of cloth that I had shredded down to lace and then I tore the connections away until there was nothing left.’ Eventually he checked into a recovery programme and after that he stayed sober, even when – and here, for just a minute, he looked exhausted – his partner killed himself. No alcoholic ever dies in vain, he said then, because their story might be the one thing that catalyses someone else’s recovery.
After he’d finished speaking, which might have been half an hour, the group gave their responses. Each person began by saying their first name, the nature of their addiction and the length of their sobriety, with the rest chanting back in unison, ‘Hi Angela, Hi Joseph . . .’ At first it seemed theatrical. There was evidently a clique at the front, and their responses were annoying a man beside me. ‘Oh GROSS,’ he kept saying. ‘Oh fuckin’ love, love, love.’
I had some sympathy for him, but the next stage made me change my mind entirely. People were asked to put up their hands if they were celebrating a sobriety birthday that month. Some hadn’t touched alcohol for years; some for decades. An Indian man stood up and said: ‘I can’t believe my son is eighteen this week and that he’s never seen me or my wife drunk.’ It hadn’t really dawned on me before how much of a fellowship AA is, or how powerfully it depends on people wishing to pass on the help and friendship that’s been offered to them. By the time the closing prayer began I was close to tears. ‘Right?’ Andi said, nudging me, and I nodded back. Right.
We said goodbye at the kerb and I walked to the subway alone. I’d forgotten my coat but it didn’t matter. The air was almost warm and the moon was very high in the sky, bright as a nickel, ripe as a peach. On the corner I passed a little girl of eight or so roller-skating outside an apartment building. She was hanging on to the hands of a Puerto Rican woman I assumed must be her nanny and whirling in circles, calling out in an imperious voice: ‘Again! Again! I’ll just do one more!’ One more. It must at some time or other have been the rallying cry of every man and woman in that meeting. As I turned down towards the Elysée I could still hear her shouting ‘Seven! Eight! Ten!’ as she completed each triumphant, greedy circuit.
I’d made these two small pilgrimages as a way of immersing myself in the subject of alcoholism (an approach, now I came to think about it, not dissimilar to John Cheever’s preferred method of swimming in cold water: leap in, preferably buck naked, no namby pamby fiddling about on the side). What hadn’t occurred to me, foolishly, was that spending a day listening to people talk about drinking might trigger corresponding memories of my own.
My room at the hotel was very plush. The Italian influences of the lobby had given way to a French chateau (later, when I went down to breakfast, I found an English country house library, complete with hunting prints and a piano). There was a painting of smugglers huddled around a bonfire above my bed, and I slumped beneath it and tried to order my thoughts. I had ducks on the brain. I knew why, too. When my mother’s partner was in treatment she sent me a card. She must have been somewhere between Step Eight, which requires one to make ‘a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them’, and Step Nine, which is to make ‘direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others’.
What I remembered, lying on the overstuffed bed, was sitting by the bookshelves in my mother’s study, reading a card with a duck on it. It wasn’t a cartoon. It was a serious, sporting drawing of a mallard or pintail, its feathers marked with immaculate gradations of colour. I remembered the duck and I remembered that both sides of the card were filled with small dense writing in black ballpoint pen, but I had no idea now, beyond the vaguest sense of an apology,
