Читать книгу September Remember - Eliot Taintor - Страница 5

I remember the dashboard in the boy’s truck when he came to pick me up. There was maybe a rubber crocodile mascot on that dashboard. Or there was something funny and cute dangling from the rearview mirror, maybe that rubber crocodile; I was so drunk. Maybe it was a lobster.

The boy didn’t drink and he told me that the reason he was so boringly sober was because he was an alcoholic and he was going to Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.). A few weeks later, I asked him to take me to my first A.A. meeting. It was exactly like what you see in movies—men and women in a basement of a church, talking about being drunk or about not being drunk. One guy wore paint-splattered coveralls; one woman in a power suit looked like a famous blonde actress. Outside, after the meeting, the night was fully resigned into winter; it was February, frost. I felt delicate like an infant and like an infant I also felt hysterical.

An alcoholic on awakening is much like a newborn baby—fragile and without any defense against a very sober world. September Remember begins with a terrifying—and darkly funny blackout—the sort of a blackout that pulls you right into the mind of a drunk on the loose. Reading it, I was reminded of my AA friend picking me up in his truck, the uncertainty of that boozy hazy evening. The blackout is not the story of September Remember, but it’s that darkness that will suck you into this story.

When published, September Remember was a best seller, and the first known novel that put A.A. into literary consciousness. It’s been out of print now for over 60 years.

The book is full of language and prejudices that are reflective of its time. That was the time of America between the two world wars: more than twenty years before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, years before women made it out of the kitchen into the living room, and years before new immigrants were only recognizable by the derogatory terms used to describe them. In that way, September Remember can be treated as a historical document that mentions Alcoholics Anonymous, but it is much more than that: its mythology is essentially A.A.’s, a story of rebirth and redemption.

In the beginning, a non-drinking alcoholic is completely unprepared to face the very sober world and all the responsibilities it takes to live in it. Not only that—there are people who have been hurt by alcoholics in blackouts, often the people who are most dear to those same alcoholics. For an alcoholic, remorse is like a heavy mattress, and nothing can get you out from underneath its constant weight unless it’s booze, which you drink to forget whatever it is that is making you feel the guilt. But, occasionally, guilt and remorse is what wakes you up. For Avery “Rick” Rick-ham, the hero of September Remember, the guilt and remorse were what woke him up after a bender inspired by his violent quarrel with his only daughter. An old friend takes him to his first A.A. meeting and it’s all men and women in a church basement just like it is in the movies, just like it was for me decades after the book came out.

A.A.’s program has barely changed since its inception in 1934. It’s hard to know how many people it has kept sober for the past 80 years—its strict confidentiality prevents the keeping of records—but it’s safe to guess the number is in the millions. For a modern member of A.A., it is an illuminating experience to read this book and realize that the language of recovery hasn’t changed either and that the principles are the same: alcoholics helping other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. Rick being taken to his first meeting by a friend in A.A., newly sober Rick being teased by some of the old-timers, Rick trying to help someone else get sober, Rick being tempted by booze, or dealing with a friend’s relapse—all of that is par for the course for the modern member of A.A., too. As are more difficult situations, such as infidelity or those really tragic ones such as suicide, or death—both topics that the book deals with, both of which are familiar to this alcoholic. (There was another A.A. boy—not the first boy—who once serenaded me terribly, embarrassingly, at a summer barbecue. He died of vodka in the fall.)

Although not exclusive to alcoholics, grim experiences tend to congregate around addicts. It’s a strange kind of specialness. I remember on joining AA, someone said to me: “prepare to have your heart broken,” when I mentioned the friendships I was making in the program. I have had it broken a few times since then—mostly because people, even sober, relapse, just as I did, and almost killed myself in the process. When I came to A.A. for the second time, I was desperate, like all the alkies in September Remember. One such character, Bill Griffith (a fictional Bill Wilson, the founder of A.A.), says, “I am willing to do anything. Anything. If there is a God, will He show Himself?“ Griffith has a sense of light and ecstasy, as he says, followed by great peace, which then brings him to sobriety.

Today, A.A. is only one of the options on the addiction treatment menu. For me it was the only way I knew. The rigorousness of the program, the simplistic adages like “Easy Does It” are what helped me to simplify everything in the beginning of my sobriety—twice. Twice, in A.A., I was a newborn baby, except I already had a life and it was a big confusing mess when I came to from my many blackouts. With the help of A.A., the mess became a little smaller and easier to understand. I have never found God and I have never stuck with the traditional A.A., the way it is described in the book, but I credit my life to it—with its many bumps and all its messiness.

There’s a saying in A.A., “The program is not a way of life but the way to life.” I’ve used A.A. as a springboard to my own sobriety and till this day I use most of its principles in helping me maintain that sobriety. In September Remember the reader will have a unique opportunity to see how the earliest member of Alcoholics Anonymous used the program to come to and maintain theirs. It’s a view well worth the time to experience.

—Jowita Bydlowska,

author of Drunk Mom