There has been a turd under my therapist’s recliner for a month. Every time she leans back, there it is. This turd is the product of her teacup Yorkie, Sueño. I cannot take my eyes off it. Of course I do, but it doesn’t take much for my attention to drift away from her benign countenance and the matters at hand and drop to the silhouetted deposit below. What the fuck!? Should I confront this distraction? What does it mean? And how do I know it’s a turd?

It is a turd because I stepped on one a while ago and have had a mystical bond with Sueño’s knuckle-sized offerings ever since. I would know one anywhere. Dolores, my therapist, insists that her clientele remove their shoes upon entering. This has been the ritual since I began seeing her. When my right foot bore down on the canine waste unit, it rebounded as if repelled magnetically. The advantage of shoelessness is heightened sensitivity. The downside is increased vulnerability to dogshit. I glanced down. What I saw was unmistakably a turd, just lying there slightly smooshed, like an unwrapped caramel. A bum’s rush of associations hurtled into my brain. I tied my sneakers and left, muttering, “Jesus Christ, Dolores. Jesus Fucking Christ.” all the way to the elevator.

We go way back, Dolores and me. This is the fifth, no, sixth, of her ‘offices’ I’ve sat in. She works out of her apartment and they have all been filled with drama, but only this last one has had dogs. Dolores derives pleasure and comfort from Sueño, as she did from his predecessor, Skipper. The attention she lavishes upon this creature makes her happy, but Sueño wants more. I believe the dog is using flattery to ensure the reliability of his food source.

After acknowledging their essential sweetness of temperament, I have to say I don’t like dogs. They are needy, sloppy creatures prone to misinterpret all human activity and then hysterically overreact. I don’t like to be licked or nuzzled or jumped on and I hate being barked at. Don’t cram your nose into my crotch. “Pick on someone your own size, asshole,” I want to say, “Take your stupid saliva somewhere else.”

If I confront her on this rogue turd, I will be asked how it makes me feel. Piece of shit = feelings. Does the dogshit rip the scab off some childhood trauma? Is there something about the therapist/puppy relationship that threatens me? So far, I have chosen to not deal the ‘elephant’ in the living room. If there’s an elephant in the living room and only I see it, am I still crazy? Am I the only crazy one?

What I have come to appreciate about Dolores is that she lets her life intrude into her practice. Her refusal to maintain customary therapeutic boundaries often places me in a position where intimacy cannot be avoided. Scary. I can react in the moment to an uncomfortable situation, either confronting her directly or leap-frogging the confrontation and landing on shards of confusion. Or I can withhold. In any event, I act. The hour we share is always surprising and over the years I have untangled skeins and skeins of bullshit.

When Dolores’ door is closed and we are in session, if Sueño is on the other side, he will leap, splaying himself against the door until she opens it. Then the dog flies onto her lap, which, because of her recumbent position, consists of her entire body. I pretend Dolores is paying full attention to me. I could challenge her on this, claim it reminds of my upbringing. That would be the thing to do. Where would the little dog go? The bathroom? A smallish crate? Hell, this is my hour, my therapeutic forty-five-minute hour. If I banish the dog, or just state my case firmly, the repercussions are bound to bring on a jumble of conflicting ideas and emotions. I can’t let the little dog get under my skin. But he has left me a secret talisman, a seductive distraction for my eyes only.

I resent that some people see animals, dogs mostly, through a sentimental anthropomorphic lens. They fool themselves, those poor folks. I imagine they think they are getting their needs met. They can’t or won’t risk any kind of peer engagement. I want love I can articulate, accept, and reciprocate and I want it from human beings. At best, pet people seem to require a fluffy buffer.

Dogs are furniture. I grew up with a dog and, when my kids were young, we had one. They were both English Bulldogs. I loved Babyface and I loved Mercy. Those dogs shat in the backyard, farted under the breakfast table, and occasionally submitted demented antics for our approval. They were beloved, but mostly ignored.

I have a good shrink. Her generosity is without peer. Dealing with the dog gives me the opportunity to ask for respect, to take up space, to find my way. But, man, is she weird.

We lived in a large house of abundant womanhood, three females and a male: my wife, Trudi; our young daughter, Claire; our English bulldog, Mercy; and me. One summer, a fiesta of fecundity, the dog and the wife were discovered to be simultaneously pregnant. Mercy gave birth six months before Trudi was to come to term. As a consequence, much of the heavy lifting associated with canine midwifery and puppy nurture fell to me – the midnight and the 4am feedings and all Mercy haulage. I was a doggie doula.

Mercy was a sexy bulldog. She had a well-proportioned figure for an animal with such big shoulders and head and little legs, svelte in comparison to the hulking, pumpkin-headed males. Her large, damp, brown eyes were set wide in a blunt and wrinkly cranium. So enormous was her mouth that she could yawn and inhale the entire world. The wet drapery of her lips sent slobber flying like shrapnel when she shook her head. Her coat was short and pale with patches of a less pale beige. Where the skin of her face was exposed, it shone ebony and moist, except for her nose, which resembled a heavily calloused, black wall-socket or a burnt marshmallow punctured twice by a pencil. The dog reference book gave bulldogs an ‘A’ as guard dogs but flunked them as watchdogs, saying, in effect, “you had to wake them up and point them at the intruder.” Mercy was best at sleeping and farting. Still, she had a merry gaze and the sweetest temperament.

Breeding Mercy seemed like a good idea. Puppies, aw. We schlepped her back to the breeder for a weekend tryst with a handsome brute named Mister Orie. They parted without a backward glance and, two months later, Mercy was delivered of nine puppies. The vet was astonished. Customarily, bulldogs bear litters of four, and very gingerly, due to their extreme mutancy. Something about a y-shaped uterus and perilous ungainliness. The last two of her pups didn’t survive the first day.

To accommodate her brood, I constructed what canine manuals called a ‘whelping box.’ A four-foot by four-foot open crate with ten-inch sides, it would provide a home to the tiny, helpless critters. Possessing no innate carpentry skills, but endowed with a hare-brained faith in printed instructions, I set out to build my dog a nursery. I had the plywood cut, then assembled the whelping box on the driveway with a hammer and too many nails. I used ¾ inch plywood, instead of equally durable 3/8 inch. It weighed a goddamn ton, where it should have weighed a half a goddamn ton. I heaved the thing up the flagstone steps and into a downstairs room in the studio next to our big yellow house.

These brand new creatures were utterly enchanting. Blind and featureless at first, like seven balled-up pairs of warm, cashmere socks, they didn’t do much except eat and shit. Still, they could stop your breath just by twitching. Mercy was forbidden to remain in the whelping box after mealtime because of her clumsiness. “Bulldog young can be inadvertently crushed if left unattended, so it is incumbent upon caregivers to monitor feeding times closely. It is wise to remove the mother between feedings.” The newborn pups required Mercy’s battery of teats every four hours. This was practical information that one reads and registers, but cannot fully comprehend until the time comes – then comes again all too soon.

Mercy had to be roused from her slumber, coaxed outside, and then into the studio and hoisted like so much dead weight into the formidable whelping chamber, where she would lie inert while seven little parasites affixed themselves to her undercarriage. After drainage, removing her from the whelping box harkened back to stump removal in olden days, when teams of oxen exerted great and mindless strength until the earth groaned and released its captive stump. That accomplished, it was time for us (me) to try to catch forty winks, before the ungodly procedure began again.

The puppies’ room was monkishly small: in olden days it could fit a twin bed, a chest of drawers, and a very slight person. Even empty of furniture, there was not a lot of maneuverability with the whelping box claiming pride of place. The animals needed a toasty, draft-free environment in order to thrive. Mercy was not available to generate warmth, so an alternate had to be found. Though it was summer, I rigged a cheap photographer’s spotlight with a potent bulb and the room incandesced. PuppyLand became the epicenter for transcendent sweetness and a powerful and complex aroma.

The first Sunday postpartum, Mercy’s abdominal stitches gave way, resulting in several exciting hours of Family Bonding Time and Hyperawareness Theater. The four of us bundled into the old Oldsmobile and headed off in the direction of the only open animal emergency room, located in the opposite corner of the county. My wife drove with Claire in the front seat, while I held Mercy on my lap in the back, trying to keep her insides inside. “Oh, our dog is leaking.” was our doleful cry. We accepted our mission and it was accomplished. Mercy was resewn and domestic equilibrium restored.

The little beasts grew so fast. In a matter of days, they were gobbling up a slurry of pulverized kibble and water as well as mother’s milk. One Cuisinart blade was terminally blunted in the kibble grinding process and another grievously dulled. Poor Mercy became understandably reluctant to submit to the ravening mouths of her progeny. Tiny pointy teeth mauled the tender skin of her belly. Finally, the hungry creatures were weaned and she could withdraw, leaving the drama of her maternal trials behind.

The puppies all had different markings and each received a well-considered name – Gracie was funny, Red was named for a Fraggle (a specialized Muppet of the day), Whitey was snow white with a pink nose, Timothy fit his name for reasons obvious only to Claire, Dudley was the runt (but only at the beginning), Emma was girlie, and Finny had five brown patches (hence, a five spot, a five-dollar bill, a fin). A litter of doggies romping on the green, green grass may be the closest to honest joy I have ever experienced. Their sparking energy and the bounding pleasure that they took in their puppyhood remains an adhesive reverie for me.

The pups, source of so much enjoyment for all of us, soon posed a serious quandary. They needed homes. The daunting prospect of finding families for all that adorableness cast a pall over the late summer. We hadn’t really thought it through. We hadn’t anticipated that Mercy would be so extravagantly fertile or that there might be other, more important, things on our minds. A litter of three, four tops, that’s what we imagined. Not seven. After much discussion, we decided to give up the youngsters to Mercy’s breeder as she was in the finding-homes-for-puppies business. That was a sorrowful trip, but a clean break.

Then, two weeks after Halloween, our Katherine was born.

For nearly two years, I had been test-driving my sobriety under all kinds of conditions. So, when the opportunity presented itself to take it to the Bonneville Salt Flats of social gatherings – my fifteenth college reunion – and really open it up and see what it could do, I decided to go. I had unfinished business with that ‘fucking asshole’. Maybe it was ‘once a fucking asshole, always a fucking asshole’ and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I could put an overlay on the past, like acetate entrails on the skeleton of the Visible Man.

Throughout college, the hat I wore was The Drunken Idiot Hat. I was a shiftless drunk, oblivious to every academic or social pressure, just skating. I defaulted to the six-year plan, ultimately flunking out again in a protracted, sodden way. When I slunk away at last after my second senior year, it hadn’t been alcohol that brought me down; it was everything else.

Shame and misery coalesced into resentment and, while it lost its edge over time, it had never softened into true acceptance. My willingness to explore this mess of late-adolescent foolishness and waste, to consider revisiting the scene of the misdemeanor, was testimony to the influence of Alcoholics Anonymous galvanized by Wes’s death. His suicide awoke in me a sense of accountability. I had nothing to lose in confronting my haunted, unhappy past and might, just might, discover a way to take my eyes off the ground and face forward.

The feeling in my stomach as I drove up College Hill Road was what you usually felt going down a hill, a solid tug on your intestines from the vicinity of your tailbone. I went first to my old fraternity house, but the parking lot was empty. Just as well. I found my friends eventually or they found me. The rest of the day was a blur of how-ya-doin’ and remember-when until Pat and Tommy and Jim and Ronnie and I ended up at a bar called Prop’s Inn.

Prop’s was a local tavern for locals, far enough from school that it was spoken of only apocryphally. We knew where it was, but only fellow students who grew up in Utica had ever been there and then only to watch hockey. When we arrived, it was dark and smoky and the clock had tipped past midnight. My friends ordered a pitcher of Utica Club and I piped up, “I’ll have a Diet Coke.” “Is Diet Pepsi okay?” the waitress asked. “Uh-huh,” I said. As I swung my gaze back to them, they were all staring at me.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” said Ronnie.

I think I lit a cigarette.

I don’t remember the discussion. It couldn’t have lasted very long. Our bullshit joshing and carrying on might have been disturbed for about a minute, all furrowed brows and ‘those meetings’ questions, then my Diet Pepsi came and the pitcher of UC. Nothing happened. I didn’t drink. It didn’t matter that I didn’t drink. No confrontation. No weirdness. I knew I’d catch all manner of shit later in the weekend, but I didn’t care.

That was that.

The phone rang while I was changing an album on the stereo. It was Becky, wife of one of my most congenial drinking pals.

“V, Wesley is dead,” she said. “He died Tuesday.”

“Jesus, Beck.”

I paused. “You’re not kidding.”

“No, V. He hung himself. I found him in the backyard. Behind the backyard, actually. In the woods. I cut him down, but it was too late.”

“Oh, Becky,” I said, “I’m so sorry. I knew Wes wasn’t happy… You and the girls… Can I do anything? Is there going to be a service?”

Something bi-polarish had plagued Wes since college. He was the most studious person I knew, but if you were able to convince him to go get fucked up, a great good time was guaranteed. I could tell his temperament was unstable; it was unnerving how dark he could get sometimes, but I never knew exactly what troubled him. And, truthfully, I didn’t care. We were twenty: we were all moody. All I knew, there was no one more fun to drink with.

The two of us had been friends for fifteen years now. He got married around the same time I did and hanging out as two couples was easy and brilliant. The wives just seemed to go with the goofy, drunken flow. We visited regularly and sometimes shared vacations, like a rented cottage on the lake in Maine. By this time we both had small daughters.

I drove up to Massachusetts alone. Tru decided to stay home with Claire. I missed the funeral, but the interment was to be held immediately afterwards. The cemetery was not hard to find. From the parking lot, I could see the cluster of the stricken, a patch of black on the brown winter hillside. I made my way to the edge of the group. The afternoon was cold and late, with pinks and oranges tingeing the gunmetal overcast from a crack at the horizon. Moments after the minister stopped talking, the people scattered, needing to collect themselves, to comfort or be comforted. I found Becky. Her face brightened at seeing me. We held each other at the shoulders for a second, then we embraced and held tight.

“Good-bye, Wes,” I said over her shoulder.

“Yes,” she said, “Good-bye, Wes.”

I kissed her and walked back to the car.

The adhesive vacuum that had been Wes stuck to everything. I had never lost a friend before. I didn’t pick up a beer or search for pot. That never really crossed my mind, not as a solution anyway. I moped for a while. I took it to AA and I commiserated with our mutual friends and with Tru.

Time went by. I didn’t call Becky. She was on one side of the hole he left and I on the other.

I leaned an extension ladder against the great maple tree in the front yard, shinnied along a bough twenty feet off the ground, and rigged a rope swing to it. Pushing Claire through the dappled air enabled both of us to escape the gravitational pull of everything. A child’s contentment sprinkles pixie dust on the commonplace.

She had a bath routine that rarely varied. After a scrub-a-dub round of cleanliness, I would read to her, always from the same little book consisting of eight or ten puffy, waterproof pages. Entitled Ernie’s Bath Book, it described Ernie’s bath time, accompanied by a series of bubbly drawings. The book’s very, very minimal text took about ninety seconds to read aloud. The best we saved for last. I cleared my throat and started all over again, but from the final word, running it backwards, and closing solemnly – Book Bath Ernie’s. This exercise never failed to elicit squeals of pleasure from both of us.

And yet…

We got out the yellow wading pool one sweltering day and filled it with icy cold water from the garden hose. Claire stepped in with her pink and yellow plastic roller skates on. Instead of shooing her out or ignoring the wet, impervious skates, I laid into her. “Oh, sweetheart, look. You’re in water up to your big ol’, wobbly ankles.” Her expression crashed with the impact of a watermelon thrown off a roof. “Oh, honey. Oh, honey. It’s fine, fine, just fine, you there in the water.” I scrambled to backtrack and distract, but the imprint had been made.

She probably has no recollection, but I do. I do because I was fooling around with my brand-new, state-of-the-art, two-part videotape contraption; a camera the size of a small bazooka wired to an accompanying videocassette recorder with the heft of a phone book, which you toted along via an over-the-shoulder strap. My commentary, disembodied nastiness, its tone one of exaggerated cruelty, only heightened the impact of Claire’s dismay. The tape would get played every couple years, every time we searched for the one marked, Puppies.

The wallop of remorse all out of proportion to the transgression knocked the stuffing out of me. I was a fucking asshole. So what about the generous, compassionate, humorous guy, the guy who was trying. What happened to kicking self-loathing to the curb? In the final analysis – Fucking Asshole.

Living with contradiction was what sobriety was all about. But the flip side of Fucking Asshole – Okay Guy – was so easily obliterated. I had to learn to live with the balance inherent in contradiction, with uncertainty, and do the best I could with the materials at hand.

 One misty fall morning, I padded out to the driveway in my bathrobe and moccasins to pick up the Sunday New York Times. And then I padded back inside, evidently with a tiny arachnid affixed to a tender spot behind my right knee. Those critters are very small, and, when tucked out of sight like that, they are detectable only by touch or by somebody else with reason to peer into a cranny or nook. As luck would have it, I discovered the bloodsucker during an extra-thorough shower. “What the fuck is this?” I asked Tru, dropping my towel, twisting my leg behind me, arching my back, and looking down over my shoulder in the general direction of the rear of my knee.

Tick removal is an exercise fraught with motion and emotion.

“V, stop moving.”

“I’m not moving.”

“You’re bouncing up and down. Just stop it. I have to get close to its head with the goddamn tweezers.”

“Okay. There.”

“Oh, V, it would be better if you lay down.

I flopped on the bed and buried my head in a pillow.

“D’ow!” I hollered. “Jesus Christ, Trudi!”

“I got it. I got it.”

“You ripped my knee out.”

“Really?”

“Is there a lot of blood? Put alcohol on it. Let me see the fucker.”

“Uh-oh. It was here a second ago.”

This first aid melodrama vanished quickly in the household ebb and flow, then about three weeks later, I began to feel a peculiar achiness in my wrists and elbows. I had been going to the gym now like a good sober person, however, nothing I did would have been strenuous enough to engender non-specific joint pain. I was a staunterer of health club treadmills where Oprah could now be found dispensing puffery and the occasional newsworthy discussion. Newspapers and TV were just starting to give traction to Lyme disease. It was occurring in the suburbs more and more. A bacterium caused the disease and the deer tick was its primary vector, transporting the microbe to humans. I didn’t have the telltale rash, the bull’s eye of redness, but I figured – what the hell; I got aches. It could happen; we lived in a wooded, very Bambi-friendly area. Ipso facto – self-diagnosed Lyme disease.

General testing had recently been introduced and was performed only at Westchester Medical Center as part of a study. I went, had blood drawn, and waited the requisite week to ten days for the results. Yes, I had it. A two-week regimen of amoxicillin wiped out the infection and restored me to customary limberness. I felt proud to be in the vanguard of exotic suburban diseases.

Despite the many benefits of not drinking, my marriage felt precarious. One way I knew to distract from core unhappiness was to make big, expensive, logistically complex decisions. So, Tru and I, we consolidated our real estate, sold the weekend house at a depressing loss, and then sold the co-op, too. No loss there: we were fortunate to capitalize on New York’s first outbreak of gentrification. ‘The March of the Italian Shoe Stores’ up Columbus Avenue in the mid-’80s transformed a down-at-the-heels thoroughfare into a trendy boulevard more or less overnight. All of a sudden, my favorite saloon – the Tap-A-Keg bar, subtitled in neon, One Hell of a Joint – vanished. This was something even a sober person would notice. Especially a sober person would notice. Gone, replaced by some store, and then in mere weeks I forgot where it had been.

Truly, time to go.

We doubled our money and did the yuppie thing. We packed the minivan, drove an hour north, and pulled into the driveway of a spacious old farmhouse on an acre in Westchester County. Plenty of yard for Trudi to cultivate and Claire to frolic in. But for me, being a homeowner and a commuter felt like playing PacMan with a lawnmower, a series of noisy, repetitive ninety degree turns pursued by ravenous phantoms. Nevertheless, the novelty and the space were soothing. I tried going to AA meetings in neighboring towns after I got home from work, but getting back into the car and driving all over creation after the hour and a half on the train was for hardier souls. The lunchtime meeting suited me fine. It let me to stay connected to life in the city and keep my sobriety separate from my suburban existence.

One structural challenge for the newly sober is what to do with all that time, that ramshackle, creaking edifice that had been occupied with either drinking, recovering from drinking, plotting the next drink, or dealing with obstreperous reality. Those hours I filled with my delightful new hobby – genealogy. I fell under the spell of Trudi’s ancestors, whose lineage stretched back to 1635 in Gloucester, Mass. My own relations held no fascination. They were late 19^th century immigrants, new arrivals whose paper trails disappeared beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. I obsessed about arcane tidbits and harvested them with gusto. In practice, genealogy is truly a trivial pursuit; what the word ‘factoid’ was invented for.

With each new day not drinking, I fell more and more in love with stories, ones that bubbled up from the past, as well as the ones I heard spun every day at AA, and I began to believe there could be stories in the making. When I drank, I was always jumping out from behind a tree and scaring the bejesus out of myself. I never knew what the minutes or hours would bring. One could easily wake up fired or married or with blood on the fender and not know why. I plodded along, trying to pay attention, trying not to be an asshole. My life was an encyclopedia of unresolved issues, yet somehow they didn’t oppress the way they did when I was drunk all the time.

My attempt at sober living had thus far been brief, but to some people I would always and forever be ‘that fucking asshole.’ The memories of family, friends, and institutions were long. For the past ten years I had been a selfish bastard – unreliable, unkind, underwrought, and, all too often, unsanitary. That was historical fact, but it soon became apparent to those close in that I wasn’t making the same old mistakes. Honesty came easier to me. Well, maybe not actual honesty, but factual congruence. Through the miracle of speech, I could participate in homely conversation. I became a better husband and father. I became a better son to my parents, which in turn caused them to seem less creepy and controlling.

And there was Claire.

At home, life resumed. Trudi and I persevered and compromised. We got off the coffee table. We bought an expensive gizmo, an IBM PC, and upgraded from Atari to Zork. For an exorbitant amount of dollars, what you got turned out to be sort of a downgrade; instead of a joystick and colorful mayhem, silent green phrases scrolled down a twelve-inch screen you manipulated from a keyboard. Running programs required multiple insertions of 5¼-inch floppy disks, the technological equivalent of a handloom. We would put Claire to bed and sit exploring Zork’s Great Underground Empire, confronting mutant peril with exchanges like ‘Stab troll’, What do you want to stab the troll with? ‘Stab troll with sword’, You are not holding sword.

A ways down Columbus Avenue from our apartment, my college friend, Ray, tended bar at a new, upscale Mexican restaurant. He covered alternate Sundays. Stowing Claire in the stroller, I could catch the beginning of his shift before the dinner crowd poured in. The little one was usually asleep by the time I got there. Eight stools, all empty. Ray would crack a Heineken, slide it across the bar, and I’d pull on it as we speculated on the issues of the day.

This Sunday, I showed up and requested a Perrier. He reached for the usual green bottle and the double take nearly dislocated his neck.

“Perrier, V?” said Ray, “Perrier? What the fuck?”

“Yeah, adios cerveza. I’m not drinking. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to fuckin’ work anymore. Like it ever really did. It’s just now I sort of feel better.”

“You are the last person I could ever imagine without a drink in his hand.”

“I’m full of fucking surprises, man,” I said.

“Does Trudi know?”

“Oh, go fuck yourself, Ray.”

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” he said.

“Yup,” I said with a snort, “It’s come to this.”

Ray loves to tell this story. Not soon after, he stopped drinking. We are the lucky sons-of-bitches.

It is typically delusional to assert that sobriety is a virtue, that it ennobles all behavior and every motive. In truth, sobriety simply is an end in itself. It offers no Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, no absolution. Blaming alcohol, or more academically, alcoholism, for all assholic behavior may seem like a justifiable conclusion, but you stop drinking and the big surprise is you’re still you. The rediscovery of meanness or duplicity in one’s sober life is but a flicker of the human condition and not an excuse to find fault in the act of not drinking. Neurotic baggage is neurotic baggage. Even assholes can stay sober; this becomes apparent almost from the get-go. One must strive not to be one. Without my sense of humor, I would be doomed. I would be unable to appreciate my own personal absurdity. This inkling of absurdity allows for the wiggle room to develop the perspective to seek forgiveness and ask for help.

I was getting the ‘don’t drink and go to meetings’ thing down pretty good. Changing my behavior and my thinking, well, that would be a long slog down another muddy thoroughfare. I had glimmers, moments of clarity, which laid bare the absolute necessity for me to remain sober. It was a good thing, but it didn’t confer goodness upon me. Growing up was slow and complicated. What I really wanted in my heart was to be happy.

Trudi called from the country all upset. The tree surgeon she’d become involved with had gone psycho on her, she said. “I won’t let him come over, so then all he does is cry on the phone. He has a gun.”

“A gun. Jesus, Tru.”

“He says he’s going to use it.”

“Get the fuck out of there. Put Claire in the car seat and get the fuck out of there.”

“On himself, V. On himself.”

“Pack now. Go.”

So, five months after she abandoned New York, Trudi returned. A day or two later, I emptied the tin of marijuana into the bowl and flushed. With a shudder of self-preservation, I acted. Dealing with problems impulsively and unilaterally was my m.o., when I dealt with them at all. I just shut the bathroom door and flushed. Discussion and planning were luxuries or distractions, presupposing a level of intimacy incomprehensible to me. It was Tru’s pot too, I suppose, but, really, I was the one who bought it. I could chuck it down the sewer if I wanted. I’m sure we discussed it after the fact. Always, the discussion after the fact.

I never told my Smithers group, either that I had been smoking pot all along or that I stopped. I never told them I didn’t go to AA, but I kept exhorting my fellow patients to go – go take sobriety seriously.

Finally, I took my own advice. With the wife home and without weed, things were getting a little balled up. The meeting room buzzed with rec room/church basement glare and thrummed with self-pity. The bullshit made me squirm, all these unhappy people, cokeheads and actors mostly, with teeny tiny axes to grind. The experience went unrepeated until a few months later, as the Smithers program was winding down.

I straggled into a lunchtime meeting around the corner from my Wall Street office. It met weekdays on the third floor of the building directly behind Trinity Church. I found a seat in the middle, a suit among suits, and adapted my ‘hide-in-plain-sight’ tactic of social interaction to the dynamic of the AA meeting. I went back the next day and the next. I relaxed. Who were these good-looking, articulate, cranky people? They were just like me – people too good for this sorry planet brought low by booze and bad acting.

Promptly at 12:15, some seemingly self-selected person would sit facing the room and spend twenty minutes recounting the misery that liquor had subjected them to. A five-minute break for coffee followed, and then the floor opened to a show-of-hands, enabling others to relate their own boozy experiences or wax dramatic on their messy sober lives. These tales were alternately captivating and tedious. Women gaily recalled blowjobs in backseats for cocaine or rent money or whatnot and men sheepishly mentioned waking up in other boroughs dressed in unusual clothing or missing significant articles of same. Then there were the strenuously dull folks who could, as my friend Brigid would say, “…bore you to death while fuckin’ you.” Or those chirpy, little creatures who just sprang from tulip to daisy to daffodil, thanking the Lord and thinking only good thoughts. You wanted to smack them.

Not drinking was a good thing and, if all I had to do to not drink were sit still for an hour and listen to these clowns, well, I’d do it. Slowly I let myself be known. I raised my hand and complained about my brother-in-law backhandedly dissing me when I informed him that I no longer engaged in casual pot-dealing. “What do you mean?” he said. “I get it: What you mean is you just won’t sell to me.” Few things suck as uncomfortably as those first few acts of resistance to alcoholism and its slutty handmaiden, drug addiction. ‘The hell with you, Mac,’ felt delicious, actually. After it sucked.

Trinity Church, which owned the building, relegated our meeting to the basement. We took it as a demotion, but it was just one of those things. The new room was a yellowy, fluorescent space where rows of spindly chairs faced a table behind which that day’s speaker would sit. I always sat in the smoking section, on the right, puffing away on Merits. My first job in Alcoholics Anonymous was to distribute, and then collect and empty the crusty, pressed-metal ashtrays. Brigid told me to and Brigid was to be obeyed. Either obeyed, ignored, or told to go screw.

Brigid was formidable. She stood almost six foot. The other feature you noticed right away, besides her height, was those deep-set, intense black eyes. Her ferocity was arbitrary. She intimidated everyone, but had managed to earn the respect of most of the group with her singular ability to cut through bullshit. Once during a meeting, a middle-aged banker confessed to smacking his wife around and at the coffee break Brigid cornered him and told him to get “a fucking psychiatrist before you do something really fucking stupid you won’t live to regret.” She got his attention. He got a shrink.

She had the dazzling capacity to juggle as many as four trains of thought at the same time. A simple conversation might devolve into a breathtaking scramble up one side of the space/time continuum and down the other. You could find yourself entangled in an elaborate discussion of James Joyce (she called him ‘Jimmy’), Asian women’s alleged propensity for bossiness, and coleslaw, ingredients of. Some people couldn’t handle it, but those who could had access to her rough compassion, as well as a good laugh.

Ashtray distribution was the most exhilarating job I’d ever done. I glowed with gratitude. I showed up before the meeting to do my thing and to watch Brigid badger the people making the coffee. The laissez-faire sense of fellowship that filled the room helped me reattach myself to the planet. The obsession to drink went away; it simply backed out of the room. I don’t know how else to explain it. I don’t know where it went. I didn’t see it go. My sour, preemptive enthusiasm for alcohol dissolved. Existential fretting remained ever-present, but I didn’t miss the drink, a miracle considering the universal appeal of feeling deprived. Daily meetings, sixty minutes a day: that’s all. I took my seat and listened, keeping my mouth shut for the most part.

Here was a new way of living, but definitely not one of hands-folded-in-your-lap, teetotaling virtue. A new pageant unfolded every day at 12:15. One noon, a strapping fellow perched on the table in front of the group, spread his knees, and told his story as his testicles tumbled like putti out of his running shorts. We were riveted; the usual fidgeting, whispering, and wandering back and forth to the coffee ceased. “Thank you,” he said, grinned, and jumped up, the curtain falling on his baroque display. An audible exhalation and – thunderous applause.

A month or two later, we were all waiting on the speaker to take his seat; it was 12:16, for God’s sake. A rustle came from the back of the room prompting a flurry of turning heads, as a soft-spoken black man named Terrell swept out of the men’s room in a great, red taffeta dress and matching opera-length gloves. Lipstick, lashes, no wig, huge pumps. He had to celebrate the anniversary of his sobriety with every stitch of style at his command.

“My name … is Ms. Teri. And I am an Alcoholic … for Life!”

“Hi, Ms. Teri!” roared the room.

Joe P., a sharp-dressing money manager, complained endlessly about his wife. He’d been sober a long time, but at every meeting he had something brutal to say – She talks to her mother all the time; She’s a shitty parent; She fucks around; I know she’s drinking again. We cut him some slack because he would co-opt the meanness with self-deprecating humor. Then, all of sudden, he stopped showing up at 12:15. It turned out he had strangled the wife and stuffed her body in the trunk of the BMW. Then he settled the kids into the backseat, drove to some woods upstate, and buried her. A week later, he was wearing a bra and panties when the police arrested him. He went to trial and was convicted. Right before the sentencing hearing, he collapsed and died, evidently of AIDS. If a person judged guilty of a crime dies prior to being sentenced, his record is expunged. This tabloid saga kept the room in lively, if whispered, conversation for months.

Oh, and Bernie, poor thing. A day didn’t go by, Bernie didn’t threw his hand up. He would then cheerfully announce how many days it had been since his last drink, which was usually yesterday. We would mutter and clap and mutter some more.

There was no soap opera better – the boozy narratives, the sloganeering, the old jokes, the weepy admissions of recurrent drunkenness, the endless prattle, and the fury, the incandescent frustration inherent in learning from one’s mistakes. This circus offered a buffer from the daily vicissitudes, a place of consistency and connection. It was a terrible relief that my personal psychodrama could stay in the basement. The unspoken refrain to almost every anecdote or admission was “Me, too.” All the while, angry, deluded, and infuriating unfortunates came and went, lasting for a meeting or three. Settling into sobriety was not easy, that I could see. I wanted what those AA people had, the ability to withstand all the complex nonsense of life without pulling the blanket of alcoholic dependency back over my head.

After a fine weekend in the country sipping sheepishly, I bid Trudi and Claire, our three-year-old daughter, adieu at the Poughkeepsie station and boarded the evening train to Manhattan. In the snack bar car, I ordered a Miller Lite. It was warm, lukewarm. I lit a cigarette and jounced along as tongues of fire caromed off the Hudson River and set the train ablaze. That was Sunday. When I showed up at Smithers on Tuesday, I hadn’t had a drink since that lukewarm beer, a first for me. Beerlessness was something I never did, certainly not deliberately, not if I could help it.

I recall these circumstances as vivid and momentous, yet somehow weightless – a semi-distracted recollection. There I was, just me and my own devices, getting up every morning, going to work, coming home, watching TV, all the while not drinking. With no one around to interact with, no one to marvel or scoff, nothing happened. If I felt transformed or did any deep reflecting or had a revelation of some kind, it’s long forgotten. If a man gets sober in an empty apartment, does it make a noise?

Smithers was a semi-legendary alcoholism treatment center in New York City, part of boozy folklore, a last resort, like Chit Chat Farms in Pennsylvania. It had been established by a wealthy New Yorker, grateful for his sobriety and eager to return the favor. For years, its residential facility had been located in Billy Rose’s mansion on the Upper East Side. I’m told it was very grand, marble everything, but by the time I found myself backing into sobriety the chateau had been sold and the facility moved to a terribly ordinary building near Roosevelt Hospital on the West Side.

My fellow Smithers outpatients represented a motley cross section of alcoholics. The people I remember were the middle-aged, white professionals – a lawyer, a nurse, a bond trader – people like me with middle-class lives in place, for whom sobriety was new and uncomfortable, not exactly what they had planned. Trudi and Rhoda Schroeder were off my back. I was doing something indisputably right that got righter every day. The omnipresent crappy feeling, like my head was an ash pit filled with eels, dissipated. My body stopped resisting. It felt good not to drink.

Coaxing us into early sobriety must not have been easy. We were all willfully clueless, without the wherewithal to cast the net of self-awareness further than eighteen inches. Our primary concerns were superficial and our paranoia boundless. In group, it was easiest to talk about perceived threats to one’s job, because that’s where the last shreds of self-esteem lay. One confounding dilemma, for example: how does one contain the horrible alcoholic truth at the Human Resources level? The boss must never know, not the real circumstances behind your sabbatical.

The nurse was middle management, a supervisor, and so skittish at the prospect of being outted as an alcoholic that her conspiracy theories often held the group hostage. What if one of her colleagues found out and went to her director with the information? What if someone she knew saw her at a meeting or within a hundred feet of a church basement? What if some ‘sober’ person identified themselves as such at the hospital switchboard? On top of these persecution fantasies, she complained bitterly about the fascist overlords of AA, particularly at the special meeting for medical professionals, where the confidentiality of recovering alcoholics was strictly enforced. She would not countenance the idea that everyone at meetings applied the Golden Rule to the issue of personal privacy. The lengths she went to complicate the situation spooked everyone. Encouraging her to lighten up, to consider going to other meetings, any other meetings, became part of our routine. Go. Just go.

Did I go? No. I was still smoking reefer. The nonsense about alcohol being a drug and sobriety being incumbent on abstinence from the entire universe of intoxicants did not apply to me.