Despite its flaws, alcohol education was uniquely successful at shaming me, at making me feel like a total fucking loser. Everyone who shows up to a DUI class thinks that they don’t belong there and that they’re better than everyone else in the room. It’s like walking into an OTB parlor by accident. These people are degenerates. I’m the anomaly. That’s the standard alkie train of thought. But down in my guts, I knew that I belonged in that class. I wasn’t there by accident. I was just as stupid and irresponsible as the rest of them. And it’s never comforting to feel like a stupid person. You wanna die from embarrassment. That’s the real deterrent to a second DUI arrest. Not the money. Not the inconvenience. It’s the self-ridicule.
The alcohol education course also required students to attend AA once a week for eight weeks. The teacher handed me a green booklet of meetings that took place around the area, and I perused it like a college student going over a course catalog. There were AA classes for people of all stripes: vegans, dog owners, evangelicals, pastry chefs, you name it. I chose one called “We Agnostics” because it promised a secular approach to sobriety, and I wanted to avoid prayer circles if I could. The meetings were held in a church, which kinda defeated the purpose of the enterprise, but I went anyway.
My first night there was in August. There was no air-conditioning and the opening speaker was an elderly man who wore open-toed shoes despite having hideous, gnarled old-man feet. I tried desperately to avoid staring at them, but they reached into my line of vision, following me everywhere I went. For reasons I didn’t understand, he spent half an hour talking about his wife nearly getting hit by a bus. And while I sympathized with him for having a wife who nearly got hit by a bus, I really wanted him to get to the fucking point. I began to worry that AA was less a refuge for alcoholics than for lonely people. Is this all people do here? They come here to bore other people with tedious bullshit?
But then he began to talk about his addiction. His intervention was on a beach. His wife and daughter were the only attendees. Whenever he traveled, he had to look up the nearest meeting because he didn’t want to fall back into the hole, to ruin the effort his family had put into saving him by the ocean. Other people soon chimed in, and everything about AA began to make sense. Many of the alcohol education students despised the AA requirement because it further inconvenienced them, and I saw more than a few of them sign the attendance sheet passed around in every AA meeting and then get up to leave halfway through. But I didn’t because it seemed like a huge insult to the people who CHOSE to be there, the people who went to AA because they knew they would die if they didn’t.
One night, after a woman in the meeting asked me who I was and why I was there, I told everyone about my arrest. I told them about the nights when I would get loaded and happily drive home.
“I don’t know why I liked doing that,” I told them.
There was another old man in our meetings, a man who came to each meeting wearing a finely tailored business suit. He turned to me and spoke slowly, in small sips.
“I’m glad you’re here tonight, Drew,” he said. “Because you’re not alone. I’ve been an alcoholic for forty years. My parents were alcoholics. My grandparents were alcoholics. My four brothers are alcoholics. I have a disease. And I know that, one day, this disease will kill me.” The way he said that last sentence, I didn’t doubt him in the slightest. “And I loved drinking and driving. Adored it. Lived for it. I can’t drive by a liquor store on the way home now because if I do, I’ll pull over and drink and drive on the way home. I know I will. I want to do it as much as I ever have. This meeting . . . this is what’s keeping me alive, keeping me breathing. So I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’m not gonna lie to you,” I told him. “When I’ve done the required amount of AA meetings, I don’t know that I’ll be back here. I’m not ready to brand myself an alcoholic, even if I know that’s a typical sign of denial. I made a terrible mistake and I want to learn from it. And I promise you, if it happens again, I will be here, and it won’t be because the court ordered me here. It’ll be because I know. I’ll be ready to say to you that I’m definitely an alcoholic, and that I don’t have the power to stop it.”
“Well, good luck to you, Drew,” he said. “I hope you never have to come back. I hope you don’t have what I have.”