Читать книгу Beginner's Book - Группа авторов - Страница 11

Forty-five, fifty miles per hour. Three police cars in tow. Lights flashing. Sirens blaring. This old truck I bought for work is perfect—for work. As a getaway car, it leaves much to be desired. I think I’m going to jail. Yet my foggy logic tells me that if I keep on truckin’ like nothing’s wrong, those police officers may just give up and let me go on my merry way. (Fat chance!) At any rate, as long as I’m moving, they can’t get me.

The police seem to sense that this is my intention. Soon my old truck is surrounded by screaming, blinking police cars. Together, we bump and grind and screech to a halt. I am about to discover just how angry I have made them. Two of the six officers give me a real good, up-close look at their revolvers and “strongly suggest” I exit my vehicle. I answer them with the old “Who, me?” look. They don’t ask twice. One of them grabs hold of my hair and drags it out of the passenger-side door. Being the obliging fellow I am, I follow my hair. Now blades of grass are poking into my eyes and a long forgotten taste from my childhood returns—the taste of dirt. I have a vague sense that the hand pressing my face to the ground is my own. From this position and in my drunken state, it is impossible to put up any sort of resistance. Nevertheless, to put it mildly, they subdue me for good measure. Cold steel is clamped on my wrists and I’m back up on my feet. Silly me, I forget to duck as I am helped into the back of a cruiser. A bolt of pain shoots through my temple and I collapse on the seat. The door slams shut behind me. Yep, I’m definitely going to jail.

I don’t know it yet, but I am the fortunate one. Within the next two years, under similar circumstances, two drunks will be shot to death by police on this same stretch of highway. With those deaths in mind, I am able to look back on my own experience with a little levity and a lot of gratitude. My last drunk, the best day of my life. People raise their eyebrows when I say that, but had it not been for that horrible incident, I may never have found contented sobriety in the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. It takes what it takes, I’m told. Jail was where I needed to be at that point in my life. To the best of my knowledge, there is no good way to get there.

Those first few days in the police cells were no indication of what was about to happen to me. Miserable, yes, but oddly comforting. At least I was free to wallow in the puddle of bitterness and self-pity I had made for myself, convinced that my life was now officially worthless, equally convinced that the big, bad world was to blame for all of it.

Lucky for me, I had several weeks’ convalescence before I had to face the judge. Bail was out of the question, so I was remanded to a correctional facility. That gave me much needed time to come up with a plan—a plan to get my sorry butt out of jail in the shortest possible time, with the least possible effort. I had bounced around the courthouses enough to know that the judge would not be sympathetic when I informed him that my predicament was all someone else’s fault. Surely he would want to see some attempt, on my part, at rehabilitation. I would have to fake it. That meant doing the one thing I swore I’d never do again—attend AA.

I had been sentenced to AA some twelve years earlier after one of my many brushes with the law. I found those AAs to be the most sickeningly happy people I had ever met. I wanted no part of it. After all, every real drinker knows that AA meetings are nothing more than a bunch of long-faced, ex-drunks who sit around and whine about how they can’t drink any longer. They just pretend to be happy to sucker guys like me into enlisting. I attended two whole meetings and left, vowing never to return. Yet there I was, twelve years later, those two capital As my only ticket out of jail. What else could I do? I went to AA.

I had many desires when I walked into that meeting, but not drinking was not one of them. I had no honorable intentions whatever. A pleasant-looking man in street clothes introduced himself to me as Murray and asked me to take a seat. The circle of twenty or so chairs were gradually occupied by inmates who looked as miserable as I felt. I recall thinking to myself, Now this is AA. Murray opened the meeting and identified himself as an alcoholic. He didn’t look to me like the kind of guy who’d ever taken a drink in his life, but who would lie about such a shameful thing?

I heard some sad stories in that room that evening—“My girlfriend ratted me out…”; “My wife put me in jail, boo hoo hoo…”—and not a single storyteller accepted responsibility for his own fate. Worst of all, I began to understand that if I were to speak my mind, it wouldn’t sound a whole lot different. Suddenly, I didn’t want to whine. Then came Joe’s turn to share. As Joe looked up from his lap, I saw that besides Murray, he was the only non-miserable-looking person in the room. In fact, he smiled. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but he looked—dare I say it?—radiant. When he spoke, he spoke of himself, the wrongs he had committed, his own failings, but all with the unmistakable air of hope. Hope? In this place? I hardly believed my eyes or my ears, yet there it was, of all things—hope. I began to think, I’m in a room full of strangers. What could it hurt to say just a few words? Then, when Murray asked, “Greg, would you like to share?” I ratted myself out. “My name is Greg and I’m an alcoholic.” They were the first honest words to leave my lips in quite some time. Next came, “I don’t get this God thing.”

As AAs are wont to do, Murray gave me the Big Book definition of God, which I still remembered but didn’t accept, from those two meetings years earlier. Malarkey, I thought to myself. However, after the meeting, I walked back to my dormitory feeling no ill effects. Considering I’d just sold myself out in more ways than one, I felt better than I’d expected to feel.

Then one evening, a few days before the next meeting, I was sitting on my bunk doing what I did best—pouting, stewing, blaming. Just as those self-defeating thoughts consumed my mind, another inmate tuned his radio to the local FM station. He hung the headphones on his bedpost and sat down to a game of cards. Faint and tinny, the strains of a good, old, heavy metal song wafted across the dorm and penetrated my thick skill. I began to sing along in a whisper: “Nobody’s fault but mine/Nobody’s fault but—” Kapow! It hit me like a ton of irony. Nobody’s fault but my mine.

Have you ever been in a room full of criminals, when you’re the only one who gets the joke? I burst out laughing and rolled back on my bed. Nobody’s fault but mine! I thought it was hilarious, but when I finally came up for air, there were twenty-one pairs of eyes looking at me like maybe I was in the wrong kind of institution. The first sane notion I’d had in years was being mistaken for insanity. I knew instantly that any explanation would be futile. Better to have them think I was crazy than to open my mouth and remove all doubt. I left them all wondering.

I wondered, too, though. It was too real to be crazy. So personal. So profound. What was it? A quirk? Happenstance? Coincidence? None of the words I knew adequately described that eureka moment. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that AA’s good friend Carl Jung had studied this particular kind of spiritual experience and had given it a name—synchronicity. In short, there are no coincidences. Recognizing the difference, however, requires a measure of openmindedness. Therefore, I am convinced that, had I not wondered aloud about “the God thing,” I would not have been receptive to the response. The Higher Power of my understanding was given meaning that night. In my case, the god of mischief met me exactly where I was at, in a manner that I was willing and able to grasp.

As strange as it felt, things got better from that day on. Among other things, my desire to drink became a desire not to. And for some reason I couldn’t begin to explain, I became unafraid to face up to the numerous charges against me. When my court date finally arrived, I stood before the judge and pleaded guilty to every single charge. I told the judge, in all sincerity, that I wanted to change the course of my life. He agreed that that was a good idea and generously sentenced me to four more months in jail, which was a far cry from the two years my lawyer had prepared me for.

That sentence gave me much-needed time to come up with a plan. Not the ulterior sort of plan I’d concocted to get out of jail, rather a plan to stay out. At the top of the list: Alcoholics Anonymous. I went back to the same meeting room I’d shunned twelve years earlier and, boy oh boy, had they changed! No longer were they the sickeningly happy bunch I remembered. Nor were they long-faced whiners. Just a good bunch of people, happy to be free and alive. I am now pleased as nonalcoholic punch to call them my home group. They have given me their wisdom. They have given me their trust. It feels good to be trusted. I try to carry the message as it was carried to me by corresponding with an inmate and whenever possible, by attending meetings at a nearby penitentiary.

As this is a living program, I have also become active in serving my community. After so many years of being a hazard, a public nuisance at best, I feel obliged to do something positive. While I expect there will always be skeptics, I’ll continue to strive for respectability in my town. Miracles, it would seem, are not reserved for saints. Thanks to all you anonymous alcoholics, I’m sober and free.

GREG N.

NIPAWIN, SASKATCHEWAN

NOVEMBER 2003