randy

It's a tough thing to wind up in prison, the result of too much alcohol and a run of bad luck with the cops. In Oklahoma, though, where prisons are chock full of dopers and drunks, getting out on pre-release is fast and easy. Just mind your manners and get to some of those AA meetings inside. The concept of born again in this state isn't limited to the churchy types.

When I met Randy, he was a born again drunk, fired up about AA, excited to be able to go to "real" meetings, non-con meetings, in the real world at Mt. Zion Baptist Church. The Mt. Zion meeting was for hard cases and our rooms were always filled with folks needing a signature on the judge's slip, not wanting to quit, but in trouble with the law and looking for the easy way out.

Randy was different. He was bright eyed, engaged, he paid attention. He got to meetings early from the pre-release prison a few blocks from the church. He reached out his hand to others. He separated himself from the back rows, where his compatriots huddled in resentful masses, their anger directed at us, the AA people, as if we'd sent them there.

He started following me in the various rooms, this man. When I chaired the beginner's meeting, he was there. When I spoke at Friday night open meeting, he got a special pass to come. He talked to me between meetings, he asked me to be his sponsor. I introduced him to Mike instead.

Randy was my ever present shadow. He was so happy, so excited, so full of hope about his life, and he regularly told me how my story inspired him, how much it meant to him to hear of someone not drinking and happy about it. Like most people, I am not immune to compliments and I am drawn to people who think well of me. Lord knows, I've spent half of my adult life dealing with hostility and anger dumped squarely in my lap as a representative of authoritarian unpleasantness: child welfare, juvenile parole. And so I appreciate it when people like me. I liked him back and was happy that he was finding hope in the rooms of AA.

I was on fire with AA back then, living each moment in the glowing warmth of spiritual awareness. I'd worked the steps with such intensity and so many times that I felt as if they buoyed me up, floating through life on a wonderful raft of joy and love, friendship and spiritual connection. I told myself that was what Randy was hearing: a message of hope, that he was finding inspiration in meeting people who were sober and happy about it. He seemed to really want it for the entire year that he was in pre-release. He joined our group, he attended every meeting, he was, as we say, "doing the deal."

And then he vanished. I heard from the other inmates that he'd been paroled, that he left the prison and was free out in the world. Every week, I expected to see him standing at the door, hand outstretched, welcoming people to the group. I was disappointed when he didn't show up, but it happens. I wished him well.

* * * * * *

The case on my desk at the justice center came in just before 5:00 on a Thursday afternoon. Two children, a 5 year old boy and a 7 year old girl, in the shelter with severe bruises and possible sexual abuse. I ran by the shelter on my way home to talk to the kids, to make contact, because ending up there is a frightening thing for most kids.

These little ones, though, they were different. The first thing the boy said was "Do I have to go home?" and the little girl's eyes grew huge as she looked at me and whispered "Do we?" No, not home today. I told them about the center where I worked, how we'd have a doctor take a look at them to be sure everything's okay, that I'd be talking to them some more the next day and they would sleep at the shelter this night and probably the next, at least. Their relief was evident in their smiles. Unusual. Most children are afraid of the shelter, even if home is a horror.

I picked them up the next day and we went for exams, for interviews. The physical abuse ~ the bruising, the scars ~ it was the least of what these kids had been going through. "Pawpaw" had been touching them, more than touching them. Pawpaw put his "thing" in her mouth, in his bottom. He tied her hands and left her in the closet alone for hours. He beat the boy with the buckle end of a belt because the five year old could not stop weeping the first time he was raped. These children were scarred, inside and out. Like many chronically abused children, they detailed the horrors visited upon their small bodies with little emotion, in monotone, as if recounting what they'd seen on television the night before.

It was no TV program, though, that gave these babies an adult's knowledge of sex, of the damage that can be done by a hard cock and no conscience. Their descriptions of Pawpaw's physical characteristics were detailed and both mentioned a mole on the side of his penis, the fact that his pubic hair was gray, that he had a scar on his lower belly. In separate interviews, they described the man in such vivid terms I could almost see him myself: enraged, inflamed with lust, thoughtlessly wounding with no thought for the pain of those tiny bodies.

It was Friday night late before we got done and it was apparent these kids were staying with us. There was a mom in the picture, according to the kids, but she was "afraid of PawPaw too."

I met her Monday morning, a petite, dark haired, lovely young woman with frightened eyes. She wanted her children back. She had gone through a divorce and moved back home with her mother. Everything went okay until her stepdad moved in. At that point, the abuse she had suffered at his hands, abuse for which he had gone to prison, started again.

He had begun molesting her when she was eight. He waited until the day after her 18th birthday to rape her, telling her as he forced her to fuck him that she was an adult now and nothing could happen to him.

Something did, though. She actually told someone, the cops got involved and he wound up doing time for a rape, but not for the 10 years of hell that preceded it. Sherry got married, had two babies, thought she was safe. She never thought he'd do it again. She never thought he'd do it to her children.

In the parlance of child welfare, the stepfather is a third party perpetrator if he doesn't live with the children. In those instances, the police take over the perpetrator interviews. If he is living with the kids, though, then he's a caretaker and subject to child welfare intervention.

He was mine. I called him up. Oh, he was charming, this man named R.L. He missed his babies so much, didn't know what that girl was saying about him, she was resentful and always had been about her mother marrying him. He'd just tried to do right by all the kids and she'd tell the most terrible lies, that girl, terrible.

Our appointment was at 2:00 and I was called from the front desk when he arrived. There are a thousand ways to say "Imagine my surprise," "Not in my wildest dreams," "Who would have thought," "Would you ever have believed" and none come close to the feeling I experienced when my 2:00 appointment ~ R.L. ~ was my Randy.

My Randy. The man I believed in, the one I had such hopes for, the one I laughed with, prayed with, invited into our lives. Randy the drunk. Randy the child rapist. Randy the persistent, repetitive, violent sex offender. After almost two years, Randy again.

I have never claimed to be an excellent judge of character as I've heard so many people proudly insist about themselves. In fact, the grave doubts I've held about the judgment of others have usually arisen out of someone's insistence that I am this great thing or another. Utterly convinced they could ferret out the truth about me, they've no room for doubt.

Those ferreting abilities, though? They've never been a match for my skill in deception, in covering up, in hiding the truth about me, especially when I was using and drinking. I do have character strengths, more evident in the last 25 years, but I would never claim the excellent character others have attributed to me, and I've never really imagined myself a top notch judge of others. I'm pretty good at hiding, it's a skill I've perfected.

And still . . . still, knowing what I know about myself, still I thought I could know someone, could see through the outside just a bit, into the truth of a man's soul. I thought he was a good man. I believed it. I would have told you then that I knew he was a good man.

I'm not sure what that all means or even why I've written this. It just strikes me anew sometimes how we can never really know another, not entirely, not 100%. My sweet man, my Mike, I'd tell you would never, could never do certain things and I believe it, I know it.

I know it.

And then there's Randy. Charming, happy, child fucking, woman raping, ex-con, alcoholic-in-recovery one-day-at-a-time Randy. I think of Randy and I realize I know nothing. I know no one. Not really, not 100%. It's just not possible. And that not knowing, that separation, it feels a little lonesome sometimes.

god's golden spotlight

I don't pray anymore. It was a shock to realize this, but just as the fact of prayer had become, after deliberate practice, an automatic behavior, the fact of not praying has become automatic and I am back where I started with this praying thing over 27 years ago.

It was not a habit I took up lightly. My early introduction to Alcoholics Anonymous did not go smoothly, in large part because of my rebellion against the idea of religion. That wasn't what AA was about, but it was what I heard when they said godasyouunderstandgod and I heard God, capital G, bold, religious Lutheran God.

Alcohol can kick some ass, though, and it kicked mine hard, into the gutter. Into a flophouse, actually, where I resided with a few dozen other down on their luck women, each of us angry and hostile and bitter, hating that place, hating each other, ourselves. Mrs. Niven's rooming house was an institution among female addicts and alcoholics in this town and a steady stream of her hard luck residents populated the AA clubhouse around the corner. They were welcomed there by goodhearted AA members, but also by a kind of man common to AA clubhouses, the kind who welcomes a fresh supply of vulnerable young women, no matter how roughed up they are by life, by chemicals.

I got out of Mrs. Niven's place quick. My anger was so intense I could not tolerate living with another, nor they with me. I hate that phrase ~ "my anger" ~ as if it's a possession, like my purse, my shoes, the antique desk I'm writing from. It was definitely a thing, though, and I owned it, could not get shed of it. My oldest AA friend tells me that the rage was palpable, that it was something he could feel as he sat down next to me. Wilbur, me, my fully loaded sack of fury and hate and despair.

I really am going to write about prayer, but it's hard to do that without explaining how thoroughly opposed I was to the idea. I came to the opposition after years of failure. Even as a five year old sitting in the pew at the Missouri Synod Lutheran church, I'd bow my head, clasp my hands, say the words and experience . . . nothing. I'd peek out beneath my lashes at the others and they seemed so intent, as if they truly felt something, some connection with the mysterious Other. I'd redouble my efforts. Nothing. I was a fake in church, in Sunday school, in the parochial school of my youth.

Given the opportunity, at 13, I left that church. What followed was 12 years of drinking and dope and an excess of men and wild living of every kind, not all of which I regret and a great portion of which was absolutely magnificent and tremendous fun. And then it wasn't, of course, but more about that shortly. My launch into the outlaw life was not connected to my departure from the church, because church was nothing to me. It was something I did, something I showed up for, but there was nothing real there, nothing that touched me, moved me, spoke to my heart. Nothing. Ever. Not once.

Ten years into the outlaw life, at 23, I was sick. I couldn't drink without blacking out and my blackouts were taking me to frightening, dangerous places. I couldn't have a drink without drinking it all and going for more. My complete lack of control was stunning. I got sick every time I drank. It was a natural reaction to the ingestion of enormous quantities of alcohol, my body's effort to prevent alcohol poisoning and I would fight against it, this poor abused body of mine trying its best to save my life. I would drink, throw up, drink, black out and God knows what would happen then but I continued to drink, that I know, because the blackouts sometimes lasted for days. I would drink and drink and drink. It was a constant.

My first AA meeting created one of those head-spinning moments when I saw the G word in those 12 steps on the wall. I sat down in my skin tight jeans, my braless self in a see through blouse, dangerous spiked heels, spiked purple hair, black-ringed eyes. Everything about me was hard and pointy and mean. I felt mean and angry, like a scream with skin on, but nothing like what would come later, after the alcohol was gone. I looked at the squares and the old people and knew there was no help for me in these rooms. Someone said "I was afraid to pray because then God would know where I was" and I was riveted by the G word on the wall and in the voices and my arms were tightly crossed and my mind was shrieking no no no no no anything but that, anything but God, no.

But where to go at 23 when the street life is no longer an option and my best efforts to give up drinking for even a day had failed utterly? Where to go? It is the last resort of drunks everywhere, the only place, in the end, that will not criticize or condemn or judge or say get out as I had heard from both parents and a sibling. Get out. Alcoholics Anonymous. The choice at that point was not to live or to die, it was to die or to go to AA where God hangs on the wall and floats through the air in the words of hopeless drunks.

I wasn't very good at dying; the resilience of this body is truly breathtaking. And so to AA where it took me years to hear what I needed to hear to take the last drink. Two years of meetings and drinking and periods of not drinking, nothing like sobriety, just days alcohol-free. The absence of alcohol does not produce sobriety. It can, in fact, make life much, much worse.

It is said in the rooms that alcoholism halts development, that the age at which you start to drink is where you will be developmentally when you get sober. I don't remember being so wretched at 12, when I sucked down that pint of bourbon and found what I'd been missing my entire life, but neither was I filled with joy. Alcohol gave me that, that missing piece in my life, the thing that made me whole, turned me into what everyone else seemed to be, only better.

My last drink was an accident, a moment after a period of sober days where I found myself drinking again. Unintentionally, not wanting to, drinking. This is what went through my atheist, agnostic, anti-religious head at the moment I put down the empty glass and realized what I'd done: Oh God, I can't do this.

I. Can't. Do. This. Oh God. I meant that I could not stay sober, I had no idea how to do it because my best efforts to that point brought me to another drink. I can't do this, are you listening God? I was asking God??? It is called the alcoholic's prayer in AA. In nearly every speaker's tale, it appears at the moment of surrender, in the same words or similar. God help. I can't do this.

Newly surrendered, I was receptive for a moment. It's hard to hear anything with a mind suffering the agony of self obsession, but momentarily quieted by my stunning defeat, I really could hear. This is what they said: Take the action and the result will follow. Act as if. Do it anyway. Just say the words. You don't have to believe anything. And most important, godasyou- understandgod godasyouunderstandgod god as you understand god.

With no other options, I did what they said. I said the words, I took the actions, I acted as if, I did it in rebellion, in surrender, in anger, and ultimately in gratitude and peace. This is not, though, a story of religious conversion. I remain unconverted and, it would seem of late, lapsed in even my rudimentary spiritual practice. It's just a story of something that I have come to believe is within most of us, a need, a longing, an emptiness, and the only thing I know to make that go away when alcohol and drugs and food and men and money and gambling no longer work.

The important thing for me, though, was that I had the latitude to figure out what was missing in me. The keys were given to me in the actions suggested. I wasn't assured of any outcome, though the secret of Alcoholics Anonymous is clearly stated in the 12th step where it's missed by too many for too long. We fool around trying to wrestle life into submission, making it complicated and difficult, when the only thing we're ever promised in AA is a spiritual awakening. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. All I was assured of was that things would change if I acted as if and they did.

The words eventually became something more than acting, than faking it. The process was long and marked by setbacks, but the end result was a connection with something else. I would say something outside of me because my Lutheran upbringing continues to place capital G God in the clouds somewhere, perched at the beginning of a rainbow. But the godasyouunderstandgod of AA was something else.

In Chapter 4, We Agnostics, the big book tells me that the power that will save my ass is within me. We found the Great Reality deep down within us. In the last analysis it is only there that He may be found. And in an appendix to the book, I'm told this: With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves. Again in Chapter 4, I'm told that I must choose my own conception of God for this thing to work. I must.

The more disciplined among us will read that and think "of course, you found self control," but that is not the case. One of my freight drivers told me this week that he "used to be an alcoholic," but when he had kids, he just looked at them and decided he was going to give them a better life and he made up his mind and so he quit. I appreciate that and I think it's grand, but no alcoholic just makes up his or her mind and quits. Heavy drinkers do it every day, but the alcoholic makes up her mind to quit and drinks again. And quits and drinks and quits and drinks and drinks and drinks and drinks. By definition, alcoholism is the inability to quit, no matter the power or strength of the made up mind.

But back to God and god, and finding that power. I've known people who wrote lengthy descriptions of what their conception of God was going to be, what s/he would be like, would do for them, how it would act, this imaginary spirit. That never worked for me, but with relatively clear eyes, I could see around me in the rooms of AA something greater than I was alone. In the laughter of people so recently hopeless, I could see that something positive was at work. Watching people get sober was the most amazing thing and the clearest evidence of the Great Reality I've ever come across. Actually seeing the physical transformation of the walking, shaking, reeking-of-alcohol dead turning into calm, content, sober citizens is hair-raising and chill inducing and as much a miracle as Lazarus rising up from his grave. There is God ~ or god ~ in that; it is otherwise inexplicable.

Through the process of acting as if and saying the words, I reached a point of such intense spiritual connection that I felt as if I were going through life bathed in a warm golden spotlight of love and joy and happiness and content. I was utterly at peace, long since freed of the rage that plagued my early years of sobriety. The sense of being clean and open and whole and healed and filled up with joy was remarkable and delicious and as fantastic as anything I've ever experienced in this life.

And so I quit praying. That is classic behavior for me, to do something that makes my life better and then quit. I didn't just quit. Mike got terribly sick and life became ridiculously stressful and the demands on my time were unbearable and unavoidable. Between my agency work and my business and caring for him and sponsoring a dozen women and going to five meetings a week, something had to go.

The spotlight winked out long before the busy-ness overtook my life, but I kept taking the actions I knew to take, sure that it would be okay and life would get better. In the midst of it all, even with the light gone, I had a profound, physical spiritual experience that was a comfort and was grateful for it, for the promise in that.

But there's no room even for godasyouunderstandgod in a life filled with too much and there was no way out of my life as it was and I fell back. I had to cut back on meetings with so much time at the hospital, and I couldn't do justice to the women I worked with, so encouraged them to get help elsewhere. And my prayer became sporadic. Mike and I spent our first eight years together hand in hand every morning, on our knees, each of us praying to the god we understood, that lifesaving gift of AA. With him semi-conscious and in bed most of the time, the morning ritual was impossible.

In truth, I was pissed, too. My perfect, charmed life, my precious husband, everything in ruins. My heart was broken and life seemed frightening and so uncertain. Maybe people of the Big G God redouble their efforts at prayer in times like that, but my prayer life just faded away. At my core, I'm still a drunk, inconsistent, a little unreliable, weak.

Not until I left my agency work to do my business full time, though, did the praying cease entirely. Now I pray about once a month, maybe. Less often, probably. I don't even know when I pray, and isn't that a sad thing for godasyouunderstandgod's golden spotlight girl? So much of life is habitual, and I don't like habits much, but the habit of rolling out of bed to my knees was a good one.

I'm not sure how to get it back, but I know it's worth the effort. I've been doing some meditation work, practicing mindfulness, and that helps too. It makes me sad to think I might have thrown away a once in a lifetime gift of grace. I read about the monks who meditate for years to reach that pinnacle of spiritual connection and I think that I nearly had that, or maybe I did have that, it certainly felt like it and now it's gone.

I want to find that state again where nothing else matters but that connection, because in that connection is absolutely everything. Everything. I miss it terribly. I am bereft this evening thinking of the loss of that gift. Do you pray?

25 years sober, dry as a bone

Today I have been sober for 25 years. At my first AA meetings, the old men would look me up and down and dismissively grumble "little girl, I spilled more than you ever drank." It took a while, but I finally learned to respond "well if you hadn't spilled so much, you might have got here sooner." At 23 when I hit the doors of AA I was a complete mess. At 25, having tried my version of the steps for two years, I was worse.

Alcoholics Anonymous. It saved my life. I learned how to live again, relearned all of the lessons I was taught as a child but abandoned in those hazy years of excess. Thirteen years of drugs, alcohol, men, crime. That kind of messy, dangerous, ugly living wrecks the conscience and the soul and the body. The happy thing about getting sober is that I've been able to live three lives in one: my life before chemicals, the addiction years, and then the gift of living sober.

I have been in the rooms long enough to see people come in and out and in and out and then go to their funerals. I have tried to pass on this amazing gift to folks who ultimately killed themselves. The disease of alcoholism and its near constant companion, drug addiction, kills. It's easy to forget that with twenty five clean years behind me, when the memory of my own efforts to die seem vague, as if belonging to someone else.

On the beach in Mexico, Mike asked me if I ever think about drinking. I do, of course. I don't know that any drunk never thinks about it. But it's the same way I think about going to Iceland or drilling for oil in my back garden. Passing thoughts, not going to happen. He thinks about it too, at 16 years of sobriety, just wondering what it would be like now, if it could be different this time.

That's probably the weakened voice of my disease, just a whisper, a question: what would it be like if I tried it again. Could it be different? I drank or smoked or snorted or shot up or swallowed something every single day for 11 years and for another two years I tried desperately to quit. Every day I meant it, absolutely, that this day would be the end. Every single day I succumbed to the obsession, the addiction, the craving for alcohol. It will never be different for me and I know that. Still the whisper, every now and then.

Walking on the beach at Mazatlan with the sun warming our shoulders, the waves washing new patterns into the sand before us, Mike and I laughed about the absurdity of imagining that either of us could ever have champagne at dawn on the beach (my fantasy) or a cold beer in hand watching the sun set over the Pacific (his). I'm not made for it. He's not either. I'm made for the funnel mouthed gulping of cheap vodka staggering throwing up three day blackout fucking some stranger waking in a seedy motel sick and hungover and craving more kind of drinking. Champagne on the beach is someone else's life and good for them.

To drink is to die and that's just a fact of my life. It's okay, better than okay. I wouldn't trade this life I have today for anything. I had my lifetime share of alcohol and probably most of yours between the ages of 12 and 25. To not drink is to live free and happy, at peace on the inside, able to experience life as it comes, to feel things honestly, to cry when I'm sad, to rage when I'm angry, to laugh till I'm breathless and to be fully present for those precious, pinnacle moments of exquisite, perfect joy.

Today I'm grateful for second chances, for the possibility of reclamation. I'm grateful to be blessed and best of all, to know that this life I live is purely a gift. Gratitude is the best feeling of all and I am grateful, today, for 25 years of a good life.