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Chapter One

Mercy and Grace

Stories of sobriety—like stories of conversion—are all different, but they’re all the same. They’re stories of mercy.

I looked at the blue sweater—looked at it intensely. It was balled up on the orange throw that just barely covered the couch.

A blue, crew-neck sweater.

I couldn’t remember anything about it: how it got there, who it belonged to.

I couldn’t remember much about the party either—I had a vision of me welcoming some people at the door, and putting some wine coolers in the fridge, but that was it. Now my apartment was littered with bottles.

What did I say? What did I do?

I could have done something terrible; I must have done something terrible.

That was February 19, 1993, Chicago, Illinois.

Several months earlier, and it was a normal Friday for me.

I was a graduate student at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. I was about to go to a lecture and reception. I don’t remember what the lecture was supposed to be about—it could have been anything from the “Religious Symbolism of Automobiles” to “The Theology of Zoos.” The content wasn’t important—but attendance was. In fact, showing up for lectures and receptions was the surest way to success as a graduate student: it meant being seen and recognized.

I’d wear black jeans and polished black loafers, along with a black sweater over a white turtleneck, a kind of personal uniform that I thought would make me stand out in a serious, intellectual kind of way. I liked the feeling of the tight elastic collar; I liked the look of the white emerging from that buildup of black.

I probably shaved multiple times to make sure I looked neat and tried different kinds of after-shave and cologne. Whatever the reason, I managed to get going late—very late. I missed the lecture completely and made it to the reception only after it was well underway. The room had vaulted ceilings and rich wood paneling lining the walls, cavernous and claustrophobic at the same time.

I headed straight for the wine.

It had been set out in plastic jugs—one for red, one for white. There were cheeses too: brie and Swiss cut in wedges, white and yellow cheddar sliced in neat squares, toothpicks with red cellophane bows and ruffles—the napkins had the university seal of a phoenix rising from the ashes.

Gulping wine, I prepared for questions. What authors have you read? (I just finished a collection of essays by the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner.) What grants have you applied for? (I’m working on a Fulbright.) Have you published anything yet? (Yes, a book review on the Guru in Indian Catholicism.) What’s your dissertation about? (The interrelationship between Hinduism and Catholicism.) What languages can you speak? (Hindi and Urdu.)

I really hoped I would hear that last question—I could talk about the two years I’d spent in India and Pakistan as a student.

Looking around, I saw a lot of unfamiliar faces. I used to know people at the Divinity School, but most had left—or had been asked to leave. Aditya, my roommate for two years, was still in the program, but had gone to India for the year to do his doctoral research. My classmate Stan was at the reception, though, looking like a rock star in his suede boots and brown leather jacket—an outfit that worked well with his long blonde hair. Smart and socially adept, he may have nodded to me, but I didn’t want to piggyback on his chitchat.

Then there was Wendy, my adviser, who was an internationally known scholar of Hindu mythology. She was angry with me because I’d screwed up preparing the index of her latest book—I got drunk and left the index, partially done, in a bag by the door of her condo, past the publisher’s deadline. Wendy was easy to identify wearing her black dress and leggings with her red cowboy boots—she was talking to students on the other side of the room under a stern portrait of some sort of academic dignitary. Wendy was the forgiving type, but I wondered whether I should apologize or hide.

I kept gulping wine—glass after glass after glass—it was sickly sweet, warm, and definitely not as strong as I needed.

I left without having said a word to anyone, not even goodbye.

I walked through the shadows of spires and gargoyles on the enclosed campus lawns. Fluorescent blue lights glowed and flickered, signaling where emergency call boxes stood guard. Where the call boxes ended the South Side of Chicago began.

I made my way back to my apartment. I had recently moved beyond university-owned housing, uncharted territory for graduate students like me, a nice, one-bedroom setup. I paid a little extra out of my scholarship money to see a sliver of Lake Michigan and the distant lights of the Hancock Building so that I wouldn’t feel so confined by my graduate-school world.

After the last set of call boxes I ducked under a bridge for the commuter rail line. I noticed a man sitting on the curb on the block in front of me. He was wearing a knit cap—that’s all my memory shows me now, except that he was African-American. I vowed right then and there that I wasn’t going to be the typical white university student who’d look away. And I wasn’t going to turn around and run back to the emergency call boxes.

I went ahead.

The man looked up at me; I looked down at him.

“Hey, can you help me out? My car broke down.”

I smiled—I must have smiled. I was prepared. I said: “I know you really want a drink. I’ll give you some money, but we have to drink together.”

That’s what I said—it was matter-of-fact and to the point.

It also was staged.

I had been rehearsing the line ever since I had managed a homeless shelter a year before graduate school. I felt important with the homeless; I was bigger in their world, almost like Superman: a normal person on his home planet but able to leap tall buildings on the otherwise alien Earth.

Besides, I was buying the booze—I knew the homeless usually don’t reject that kind of mercy. My newfound friend and I walked deep into the South Side, where bookstores gave way to row homes and flats. We ended up at a liquor store with a long line—a security guard let in a couple of customers at a time. Nods, quick handshakes, and a “Hey, brother,” told me that my companion was a regular.

I asked what people wanted to drink: “Whiskey!” “Rum!” “Beer!” came in rapid sequence. But looking in my pocket, I discovered that I had less cash than I thought.

“It’s going to be Thunderbird,” my companion said as he saw my rumpled dollar bills.

I knew about Thunderbird—the cheapest wine there was, the kind that hadn’t even been introduced to a real grape.

“We need Kool-Aid,” someone else added. “It’ll take away the bite.”

But where were we going find that? No problem: first liquor store I’d ever seen that displayed Kool-Aid packages on the counter by the cash register—you could pick them up easily when you got your fifth of Thunderbird handed to you.

We got our supplies and about five of us walked into the night together. We put the Kool-Aid in the Thunderbird, and watched it swirl and dissolve. We passed it around, mouth to mouth—I thought it bad form to wipe down the bottle before taking a swig.

Our “church” was an empty lot with a chain-link fence and our “sacrament” tasted like cherries and oranges more than grapes. Maybe it wasn’t Communion, but it was a communion, I was sure of that—even when we started walking down the street together and I lost track of the group and had to hail a cab to get back to my apartment.

The next day, I realized that alcohol wasn’t exactly the universal solvent that could dissolve distinctions of race and class—after all, I woke up in a bed, with a blanket, and there was a roof over my head, even as terrible as I felt. But maybe, I thought, just maybe I had performed an act of mercy, beyond simply buying the booze.

I had shown the homeless that I cared, that I was willing to share.

It was the mercy that mattered—not the uncomfortable fact that I couldn’t remember anyone’s name.

I wasn’t the type attracted to the Polynesian novelty drinks, not at Ciral’s House of Tiki, not anyplace else, but I knew the House of Tiki was there for me. I never had a zombie—with its seven kinds of liquor—and didn’t feel the urge to stick my face into a flaming Scorpion bowl. I kept to Jack Daniels and chasers of Miller Draft—plunking down enough scholarship cash on the bar to keep the drinks coming.

When I loosened up, I’d even talk to the barman.

I think the barman and Ciral were actually the same person—but I never asked. In any case, it was the same barman every time I went in. He wore a floral Hawaiian shirt. His beard and mustache were well trimmed, and his brown-black hair was slicked back, curling midway down his neck.

One night, I asked whether it was true that Mayor Harold Washington used to stop by for a drink after hours. No such thing ever happened, the barman said. Another night, I tried laying the groundwork for an extended discussion:

“Wasn’t this the setting for a shootout filmed for the movie The Package? Gene Hackman, right?”

I thought of the spiky blowfish lamps exploding with gunshots and the air thick with flying bamboo splinters and spinning drink coasters.

“No,” the barman said, “we only appeared for a couple of minutes in the film.”

I quickly drained my beer glass and left.

But I would be back soon enough.

The best thing about the House of Tiki was that it had beer to go, and it was open till four in the morning. The beer would keep me going until five, which was when I started to feel hungry. I liked frying up steak and eggs at dawn’s light, even though I’d have to first wipe down the plates smeared with the mold growing in my kitchen sink.

I wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in my mouth—more like a book in my hand. I was an adopted child, christened to be an academic. The one thing I knew about my time in the orphanage attached to a Catholic home for unwed mothers is that the Sisters of Providence insisted that I be put into a family with a professor: evidently, my birth mother was particularly bright, and the sisters assumed that her intellect had been passed down to me. Although this meant that I had to wait longer to be adopted, it was intended as a mercy: even if I didn’t have a God-given birth family to take care of me, I would still find my God-given abilities nurtured.

And sure enough, here I was in graduate school.

But I didn’t cook high-end fusion cuisine; I didn’t frequent wine tastings; I didn’t go to French film festivals. I ate breakfast like a farmer, like a truck driver. At night, I went to dive bars like the House of Tiki and favored Everyman actors like Gene Hackman.

I had a double life, and the flip side of my bookish coin was rougher and grittier than my classmates and advisers could imagine when they saw me in those shiny black loafers. The homeless were a relief from all that graduate-school posturing and posing.

Maybe, I realized, the homeless were the ones who sensed where I was coming from.

Maybe they were the ones who showed me the mercy, not the other way around.

A couple weeks after drinking with the homeless, I made my usual visit to the all-night grocery store for my breakfast routine. I got London broil, a dozen eggs, a brick of American cheese, and put it all in a basket. I felt good—it was the kind of drunk when I didn’t feel quite drunk, just calm and collected. It was a surprise when I saw a security guard shadowing me. But no matter—like any normal customer, I engaged in some polite conversation with the woman at the cash register.

I tasted the stale beer and whiskey on my breath. My tongue was thick and my voice loud.

The woman at the cash register smiled and nodded.

But she wasn’t smiling and nodding to me—she was smiling and nodding to the security guard. They both wanted to make sure that I was going on my way.

Remembering that, I never went back.

Over the next month, I also got the sense that the barman at the House of Tiki wanted me on my way as well, probably fearing another awkward attempt at conversation involving half-remembered details and made-up facts.

One night, I nodded off between my whiskey and beer, and the barman loudly snapped his fingers next to my ear. It woke me up like a fire alarm, and I left whatever cash was on the bar and staggered out.

It took me a couple of weeks to get up the courage to go back to the House of Tiki for an early-morning beer run. I had been drinking alone, heating up my VCR by going through a stack of horror films and psychological thrillers. I had finished off two six packs of Colt 45 tallboys and was ready for more. The walk to the House of Tiki was uneventful, and I was looking forward to the comforting coolness of beer cans under my arm.

I entered the House of Tiki just as I had many times before—after 2:00 a.m., it was the only bar open, and it was packed.

I went up to the barman and asked for a six of Miller to go.

“Can I see your ID?” he asked.

This hadn’t happened before.

I handed over my Massachusetts driver’s license—I was twenty-eight years old but looked more like eighteen. That had to be the reason.

“What’s the name on the ID?”

I paused. I panicked.

“I don’t know,” I blurted. I couldn’t think.

The barman shook his head slightly as he pushed my driver’s license back to me over the bar.

Stumbling home, I realized my drinking options were becoming limited. “You’re becoming a shut-in,” I told myself, careful not to fall or walk into something.

I probably strung together a couple other sentences as well. “Mathew”—I’d always call myself Mathew—“Mathew, the fundamental problem is that everyone around us is such a lightweight.” I’m sure I focused on Peter—a new friend, a great guy, someone to speak Hindi to and watch Star Trek with. But he didn’t drink at all.

As I got closer to home, I had a moment of inspiration: change the context, stop all the sneaking around! Have a party!

It took over a week, but I worked purposefully.

I planned and I drank. I invited people and I drank. I cleaned and I drank. I was ready and I drank.

And the party happened.

That was February 18, 1993.

Back to the morning after. Trudging into the living room, I managed to find a corner of the carpet that wasn’t soaked with something. I sat, right on the floor, opened my address book, and started dialing the phone. I was going to ask about the blue sweater—that would be pretext enough for a call. But I really wanted to know what I might have done at the party, any clue at all to begin to create a memory of that night.

I called one acquaintance, then the next—I don’t remember whom. No, the sweater wasn’t theirs. Then another inspiration: Joyce. I’d find out from her! Joyce was actually a college friend of my sister—that’s how I’d gotten to know her. She was living up on the North Side and every week or so we’d go to Devon Street for a buffet lunch of tandoori chicken and vegetable curry. Joyce Richardson. At the very least the tone in her voice would tell me something—she was studying to be a therapist, but she hadn’t yet learned the neutral tone.

I called her. Rehearsed and wooden, I began: “Joyce, I’d like to thank you for coming to the party …”

She broke out in laughter. Several days earlier, we had talked about how nervous I was about the party, about how I expected that no one would actually come.

“You really are something,” Joyce said, with lighthearted sympathy.

“You really are something”—the words seemed to echo.

But I knew I was nothing.

Suddenly, I saw myself through the eyes of others. In the eyes of the homeless man, I saw my own grandiosity and racism reflected back; in the eyes of the security guard and the woman at the cash register, I saw my composure unraveling; and in the eyes of the barman, I saw the image of someone who had lost himself so completely that he couldn’t remember his own name.

Joyce didn’t see me in that way, she couldn’t—I wouldn’t let her. She merely thought she was showing mercy to an insecure graduate student, not to a blackout drinker.

After I hung up the phone with Joyce, I realized that no one knew who I really was, not even me.

And so, I sat there, alone, with bottles all around me.

St. Augustine’s Confessions is often passed around in recovery circles just as it is in Catholic ones: if you’re a Catholic in recovery—it’s required reading.

While everyone naturally focuses on Augustine’s story in Confessions, I’ve always found Monica, Augustine’s mother, to be the more interesting character. She’s best known for relentlessly praying for Augustine’s conversion—that’s “praying Monica.” But there’s also another Monica, too, or at least another aspect of her: “drinking Monica,” the patron saint of alcoholics. There’s a scene in Confessions when Monica goes down to her wine cellar. Her maidservant looks at her, and says:

“Boozer.”¹

In Confessions, it’s easy to see that Augustine is taken aback that a maidservant would speak to her mistress in that way; he observes that “boozer” was said not in a spirit of charity, but of condemnation.² But God, Augustine argues, was able to turn that ill will to good, and Monica never drank again. What Augustine was talking about is what Catholics call “actual grace,” a supernatural impulse that allows us to act, to respond to God’s call.

On that morning after the party, after sitting alone for a while, I went to the kitchen to get a phone book. I dialed the Alcoholism Helpline and said:

“I’m an alcoholic, and I need help.”

It was a mercy to be able to say that—to admit what I had tried so long to hide. As my sobriety developed over the years, I would learn words to describe that experience: “moment of clarity,” “jumping-off point,” “powerlessness.” Sometimes it’s not that we’re open to mercy as a conscious choice; it’s that we are opened to mercy by circumstances beyond our own power to control or grasp. Grace is not automatic, of course, but sometimes it takes hopelessness for us to see that hope has existed all along, albeit in different ways than we were capable of imagining.

Stories of sobriety—like stories of conversion—are all different, but they’re all the same. They’re stories of mercy—stories about love and hope entering into the seemingly most desperate situations after we finally surrender to ourselves and to God.

I never did find out who owned the blue sweater or how it got on my couch. My memory and experience of looking at it so intensely stands in for those memories and experiences forever lost to the darkness of my drinking days.

But, like Monica, I never drank again—she had her wine cellar and I had my South Side apartment. I suppose we’re all Monica in our own ways, with each of us having the metaphorical equivalent of a cellar where we hide and lock ourselves away.

But, like Augustine, I think I had a praying Monica, too: a person who understood my need in a sympathetic way, a praying Monica who noticed me, remembered me.

I believe we all have a praying Monica, even though she may be hidden from sight.

I’m sure that someone was praying for me: I had reached a place where only prayers could find me.

Suggested Questions for Discussion

1. What reaction do you have to the story? What feelings did you feel when reading it?

2. Is there a particular scene that stood out for you? Why did it stand out?

3. Mercy is mentioned at several junctures in the story—which is most interesting to you and why?

4. The end of the story mentions St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine. How is she connected to the theme of mercy?

Suggested Questions for Private Reflection

1. If you saw yourself through the eyes of others, what would you see?

2. Is there a place you go—physically, mentally, or emotionally—where only prayers can find you? What would mercy mean there?