Free Recovery by John Berryman

hell.’
    â€˜That’s another thing—the wives. Wives come to meetings. They don’t speak to the Chapter—it’s big, by the way, maybe 150, and twice a week, not once, and everyone comes unless travelling—well, the wives sit around the wall and talk to each other. Nobody gets away with anything at Whitney. I don’t mean drinking, of course, but the hang-ups that lead to it. Watch out for the root.’
    Severance stepped over, hating the word ‘hang-ups’ and ‘up-tight’ and ‘get the garbage out’:‘I buy that too. My whole idea is not to be able to get away with anything whatever. Not that I can imagine concealing a slip. Oddly enough, I never did that, though of course I used to lie like the next jerk before I went into treatment. It’s slips I’m afraid of, not serious drinking. That’s out.’
    â€˜How do you know?’
    â€˜Well, I don’t know. Just trumpeting, as usual,’ said Severance lightly, though he hadn’t been wholly pleased by Mike’s friendly but realistic and stopping question. He was willing to laugh at himself, slightly; God help anyone else who did. ‘I wonder if they’d take me.’
    â€˜Two of the men come to see me, I could tell them you’re interested, they could look you up. Only remember, they’ve been dry since the Flood, they’ll be suspicious.’

    Severance did not like the idea of being suspected, or in fact looked over. With his determination? Still, he was impressed almost out of his mind with records of decades of sobriety. Anything that would improve his chances. Ruth might like it too, give her confidence. She was familiar with his polar positions: rebellion, awe. Both seemed built in, he was ready to defend both to the death. You had to have both. He saw damned little of either in most other Americans at the moment: just cop-out or sheephood, no independence or emulation. Hyperdemocracy, the sovereignty of the unqualified individual, added into a mass. He did sympathize with the young militants, enough to have addressed six thousand of them on Moratorium morning, but he saw them as incompetent, a threat to their own causes in abler hands: deluded by Thoreau’s hostility to the lessons of history, unable to use tradition modified. Even their bloody bombs were so inefficient that they went off too early and killed people. What he approved, what inspired him even, was their hopefulness, which he did not share, and their hatred of technology, which he did.
    Turned back now toward the hospital, he and Mike waited for the rest to straggle up. My word, Hasty’s was just two blocks north of here, the slowest liquor store in the city, ‘two quarts of Jack Daniel’s green, please—Dr Severance,’ Ruth once reckoned he spent over a thousand dollars a year there alone—well, he could afford it, except physically mentally morally and spiritually. ‘How are you, sexpot?’ He patted Delores’ sloping shoulder. ‘Stroll languorous enough for you? I like to walk. ’
    â€˜EXTENDED CARE’ came into view, so labelled in stone over the big glass doors. Everybody slowed down, if that was possible, except Severance keen to get back to work.
    â€˜When I first arrived in London,’ he said to her and Mike, ‘the sign “FAMILY BUTCHER” over shops alarmed me. That portico ought to read: “RECOVERING ALCOHOLICS’
SLAUGHTER-HOUSE” and under it “DEFENCES PENETRATED, DELUSIONS VAPORIZED.” ’ He did not feel witty.
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    Sunday was Dull Day for most of the forty-one patients on Ward W of Northeast Hospital, C——, Ohio, founded two years before, the first alcoholic rehabilitation center in the United States, or anywhere, with an out-patient family programme (estimated average degree of in-patient recovery: fifteen percent, the rest to be dealt with over two years of weekly