Free House of Sand and Fog by André Dubus III Page B

after the program, whenever I saw one I felt a kind of sad attraction for whatever it had to say: Live and Let Live, Let Go and Let God, One Day at a Time, Take It Easy, Keep it Simple. Nick’s the one who got me to stop going to meetings. In the program they let you try both ways: AA, that says we’re powerless over our addiction and have to give it up to something higher, and RR, which is based on The Small Book , which has only been around a few years and says we’re not powerless, and thinking this just makes it easier to fail; all you have to do is recognize the Beast in you, the addict, the Enemy Voice that wants to use, accuse it of malice against you, remind yourself what a worthwhile person you are and that you treasure your sobriety, and then it’s not so hard to use all this against the Beast and not let it get what it wants. And they spelled B.E.A.S.T. in capital letters:
    B=Boozing opportunity
    E=Enemy Voice recognition
    A=Accuse the voice of malice
    S=Self-control reminders
    T=Treasure your sobriety
    This all left me cold, like a foreign language I’d never be able to learn. It’s where Nick went though, so I went too. But I missed the few AA meetings I’d been to, everyone sitting in a cloud of their own smoke, telling their stories and backing each other up, nobody any wiser or more together than anyone else.
    Nick loved the part about Enemy Voice recognition. On that five-day drive west in our new car, hauling a tiny U-haul trailer, he drank thermos after thermos of coffee and he’d go on and on about how there’s a part of all of us that wants to kill ourselves, K, even when things are going well, especially when things are going well. And the only way to beat it is with reason and ratonality. Like a mother or father with a young kid. And he’d smile and slap the steering wheel with both hands, looking over at me, his cheeks and chin bluish with whiskers. He was so sure about it I wanted to believe it, too. But there was always that nagging pull inside me. I’d look back out at the rushing white lines of the highway, or else put the passenger seat back and close my eyes; it wasn’t a problem for me to hear an enemy voice in my head and accuse it of malice; it was the next part, drawing on all this self-love everybody’s supposed to have deep down, then telling yourself that life without getting high is better. That’s what I could never do. And after the program, as I sat next to Nick at our weekly Rational Recovery groups in Cambridge, no one talked about being powerless and living life one day at a time, which was really more how I felt. Instead, we were powerful and rational—powerful because we were rational—and we talked about living life one life at a time. A lot of RR people had even given up smoking that way, so there was hardly an ashtray in the room, though there was coffee and we all seemed to drink a lot of it.
    I always left these meetings feeling like a fake. Nick didn’t though; we’d walk down the sidewalk across from the high brick walls of Harvard and he’d grab my hand and then kiss my neck, pulling me along, telling me there was a little voice in his pants he could only accuse of love. Sometimes we’d walk down to Harvard Square to eat or see a movie. I always wanted to do both, eat something heavy and delicious like lasagna or prime rib, then go to the small theater past the newsstand and all the teenagers in loose pants to snuggle down into the red seats in the dark with a large Coke and about ten chocolate peanut butter cups, just let the flickering light of the story shut up my rational, reasonable voice for a couple of hours. But then the lights would always come up and I’d blink to see Nick sitting beside me in a funk. Very few of the movie characters had control of any of their impulses and problems, and Nick said it was too depressing and exhausting for him to watch. So we stopped going to movies on RR nights. Soon we left the East Coast.
    So many nights