Infinite Jest (68 page)

Boston AA is like AA nowhere else on this planet. Just like AA everyplace else, Boston
AA is divided into numerous individual AA Groups, and each Group has its particular
Group name like the Reality Group or the Allston Group or the Clean and Sober Group,
and each Group holds its regular meeting once a week. But almost all Boston Groups’
meetings are speaker meetings. That means that at the meetings there are recovering
alcoholic speakers who stand up in front of everybody at an amplified podium and ‘share
their experience, strength, and hope.’
¹³¹
And the singular thing is that these speakers are not ever members of the Group that’s
holding the meeting, in Boston. The speakers at one certain Group’s weekly speaker
meeting are always from some other certain Boston AA Group. The people from the other
Group who are here at like your Group speaking are here on something called a Commitment.
Commitments are where some members of one Group commit to hit the road and travel
to another Group’s meeting to speak publicly from the podium. Then a bunch of people
from the host Group hit the opposite lane of the same road on some other night and
go to the visiting Group’s meeting, to speak. Groups always trade Commitments: you
come speak to us and we’ll come speak to you. It can seem bizarre. You always go elsewhere
to speak. At your own Group’s meeting you’re a host; you just sit there and listen
as hard as you can, and you make coffee in 60-cup urns and stack polystyrene cups
in big ziggurats and sell raffle tickets and make sandwiches, and you empty ashtrays
and scrub out urns and sweep floors when the other Group’s speakers are through. You
never share your experience, strength, and hope on-stage behind a fiberboard podium
with its cheap nondigital PA system’s mike except in front of some
other
metro Boston Group.
¹³²
Every night in Boston, bumper-stickered cars full of totally sober people, wall-eyed
from caffeine and trying to read illegibly scrawled directions by the dashboard lights,
crisscross the city, heading for the church basements or bingo halls or nursing-home
cafeterias of other AA Groups, to put on Commitments. Being an active member of a
Boston AA Group is probably a little bit like being a serious musician or like athlete,
in terms of constant travel.

The White Flag Group of Enfield MA, in metropolitan Boston, meets Sundays in the cafeteria
of the Provident Nursing Home on Hanneman Street, off Commonwealth Avenue a couple
blocks west of Enfield Tennis Academy’s flat-topped hill. Tonight the White Flag Group
is hosting a Commitment from the Advanced Basics Group of Concord, a suburb of Boston.
The Advanced Basics people have driven almost an hour to get here, plus there’s always
the problem of signless urban streets and directions given over the phone. On this
coming Friday night, a small horde of White Flaggers will drive out to Concord to
put on a reciprocal Commitment for the Advanced Basics Group. Travelling long distances
on signless streets trying to parse directions like ‘Take the second left off the
rotary by the driveway to the chiropractor’s’ and getting lost and shooting your whole
evening after a long day just to speak for like six minutes at a plywood podium is
called ‘Getting Active With Your Group’; the speaking itself is known as ‘12th-Step
Work’ or ‘Giving It Away.’ Giving It Away is a cardinal Boston AA principle. The term’s
derived from an epigrammatic description of recovery in Boston AA: ‘You give it up
to get it back to give it away.’ Sobriety in Boston is regarded as less a gift than
a sort of cosmic loan. You can’t pay the loan back, but you can pay it
forward,
by spreading the message that despite all appearances AA works, spreading this message
to the next new guy who’s tottered in to a meeting and is sitting in the back row
unable to hold his cup of coffee. The only way to hang onto sobriety is to give it
away, and even just 24 hours of sobriety is worth doing anything for, a sober day
being nothing short of a daily miracle if you’ve got the Disease like he’s got the
Disease, says the Advanced Basics member who’s chairing this evening’s Commitment,
saying just a couple public words to the hall before he opens the meeting and retires
to a stool next to the podium and calls his Group’s speakers by random lot. The chairperson
says he didn’t used to be able to go 24 lousy
minutes
without a nip, before he Came In. ‘Coming In’ means admitting that your personal
ass is kicked and tottering into Boston AA, ready to go to any lengths to stop the
shit-storm. The Advanced Basics chairperson looks like a perfect cross between pictures
of Dick Cavett and Truman Capote
¹³³
except this guy’s also like totally, almost flamboyantly bald, and to top it off
he’s wearing a bright-black country-western shirt with baroque curlicues of white
Nodie-piping across the chest and shoulders, and a string tie, plus sharp-toed boots
of some sort of weirdly imbricate reptile skin, and overall he’s riveting to look
at, grotesque in that riveting way that flaunts its grotesquerie. There are more cheap
metal ashtrays and Styrofoam cups in this broad hall than you’ll see anywhere else
ever on earth. Gately’s sitting right up front in the first row, so close to the podium
he can see the tailor’s notch in the chairperson’s outsized incisors, but he enjoys
twisting around and watching everybody come in and mill around shaking water off their
outerwear, trying to find empty seats. Even on the night of the I.-Day holiday, the
Provident’s cafeteria is packed by 2000h. AA does not take holidays any more than
the Disease does. This is the big established Sunday
P.M.
meeting for AAs in Enfield and Allston and Brighton. Regulars come every week from
Watertown and East Newton, too, often, unless they’re out on Commitments with their
own Groups. The Provident cafeteria walls, painted an indecisive green, are tonight
bedecked with portable felt banners emblazoned with AA slogans in Cub-Scoutish blue
and gold. The slogans on them appear way too insipid even to mention what they are.
E.g. ‘ONE DAY AT A TIME,’ for one. The effete western-dressed guy concludes his opening
exhortation, leads the opening Moment of Silence, reads the AA Preamble, pulls a random
name out of the Crested Beaut cowboy hat he’s holding, makes a squinty show of reading
it, says he’d like to call Advanced Basics’ first random speaker of the evening, and
asks if his fellow Group-member John L. is in the house, here, tonight.

John L. gets up to the podium and says, ‘That is a question I did not used to be able
to answer.’ This gets a laugh, and everybody’s posture gets subtly more relaxed, because
it’s clear that John L. has some sober time in and isn’t going to be one of those
AA speakers who’s so wracked with self-conscious nerves he makes the empathetic audience
nervous too. Everybody in the audience is aiming for total empathy with the speaker;
that way they’ll be able to receive the AA message he’s here to carry. Empathy, in
Boston AA, is called Identification.

Then John L. says his first name and what he is, and everybody calls Hello.

White Flag is one of the area AA meetings Ennet House requires its residents to attend.
You have to be seen at a designated AA or NA meeting every single night of the week
or out you go, discharged. A House Staff member has to accompany the residents when
they go to the designated meetings, so they can be officially seen there.
¹³⁴
The residents’ House counselors suggest that they sit right up at the front of the
hall where they can see the pores in the speaker’s nose and try to Identify instead
of Compare. Again,
Identify
means empathize. Identifying, unless you’ve got a stake in Comparing, isn’t very
hard to do, here. Because if you sit up front and listen hard, all the speakers’ stories
of decline and fall and surrender are basically alike, and like your own: fun with
the Substance, then very gradually less fun, then significantly less fun because of
like blackouts you suddenly come out of on the highway going 145 kph with companions
you do not know, nights you awake from in unfamiliar bedding next to somebody who
doesn’t even resemble any known sort of mammal, three-day blackouts you come out of
and have to buy a newspaper to even know what town you’re in; yes gradually less and
less actual fun but with some physical need for the Substance, now, instead of the
former voluntary fun; then at some point suddenly just very little fun at all, combined
with terrible daily hand-trembling need, then dread, anxiety, irrational phobias,
dim siren-like memories of fun, trouble with assorted authorities, knee-buckling headaches,
mild seizures, and the litany of what Boston AA calls Losses—

‘Then come the day I lost my job to drinking.’ Concord’s John L. has a huge hanging
gut and just no ass at all, the way some big older guys’ asses seem to get sucked
into their body and reappear out front as gut. Gately, in sobriety, does nightly sit-ups
out of fear this’ll all of a sudden happen to him, as age thirty approaches. Gately
is so huge no one sits behind him for several rows. John L. has the biggest bunch
of keys Gately’s ever seen. They’re on one of those pull-outable-wire janitor’s keychains
that clips to a belt loop, and the speaker jangles them absently, unaware, his one
tip of the hat to public nerves. He’s also wearing gray janitor’s pants. ‘Lost my
damn job,’ he says. ‘I mean to say I still knew where it was and whatnot. I just went
in as usual one day and there was some other fellow doing it,’ which gets another
laugh.

—then more Losses, with the Substance seeming like the only consolation against the
pain of the mounting Losses, and of course you’re in Denial about it being the Substance
that’s causing the very Losses it’s consoling you about—

‘Alcohol destroys
slowly
but
thoroughly
is what a fellow said to me the first night I Come In, up in Concord, and that fellow
ended up becoming my sponsor.’

—then less mild seizures, D.T.s during attempts to taper off too fast, introduction
to subjective bugs and rodents, then one more binge and more formicative bugs; then
eventually a terrible acknowledgment that some line has been undeniably crossed, and
fist-at-the-sky, as-God-is-my-witness vows to buckle down and lick this thing for
good, to quit for all time, then maybe a few white-knuckled days of initial success,
then a slip, then more pledges, clock-watching, baroque self-regulations, repeated
slips back into the Substance’s relief after like two days’ abstinence, ghastly hangovers,
head-flattening guilt and self-disgust, superstructures of additional self-regulations
(e.g. not before 0900h. not on a worknight, only when the moon is waxing, only in
the company of Swedes) which also fail—

‘When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk,’
John L. says; ‘I lived that way for years, and I submit to you that’s not livin, that’s
a fuckin death-in-life.’

—then unbelievable psychic pain, a kind of peritonitis of the soul, psychic agony,
fear of impending insanity (why can’t I quit if I so want to quit, unless I’m insane?),
appearances at hospital detoxes and rehabs, domestic strife, financial free-fall,
eventual domestic Losses—

‘And then I lost my wife to drinking. I mean I still knew where she was and whatnot.
I just went in one day and there was some other fellow doing it,’ at which there’s
not all that much laughter, lots of pained nods: it’s often the same all over, in
terms of domestic Losses.

—then vocational ultimatums, unemployability, financial ruin, pancreatitis, overwhelming
guilt, bloody vomiting, cirrhotic neuralgia, incontinence, neuropathy, nephritis,
black depressions, searing pain, with the Substance affording increasingly brief periods
of relief; then, finally, no relief available anywhere at all; finally it’s impossible
to get high enough to freeze what you feel like, being this way; and now you hate
the Substance,
hate
it, but you still find yourself unable to stop doing it, the Substance, you find
you finally want to stop more than anything on earth and it’s no fun doing it anymore
and you can’t believe you ever liked doing it and but you
still
can’t stop, it’s like you’re totally fucking bats, it’s like there’s two yous; and
when you’d sell your own dear Mum to stop and still, you find, can’t stop, then the
last layer of jolly friendly mask comes off your old friend the Substance, it’s midnight
now and all masks come off, and you all of a sudden see the Substance as it really
is, for the first time you see the Disease as it really is, really has been all this
time, you look in the mirror at midnight and see what owns you, what’s become what
you are—

‘A fuckin livin death, I tell you it’s not being near alive, by the end I was undead,
not alive, and I tell you the idea of dyin was nothing compared to the idea of livin
like that for another five or ten years and only
then
dyin,’ with audience heads nodding in rows like a wind-swept meadow;
boy
can they ever Identify.

—and then you’re in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally,
deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend,
that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of
the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre,
has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw,
and canines down to here, it’s the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face
of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it’s
you,
the Substance has devoured or replaced and become
you,
and the puke-, drool-and Substance-crusted T-shirt you’ve both worn for weeks now
gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart
(given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest’s center and centerless
eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something
irresistible, and now you see you’ve been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked
and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you
land in. You see now that It’s your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the
trouble It’s gotten you into is undeniable and you
still
can’t stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can’t
stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished.
You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot
get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every
direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns
them around. You are at a fork in the road that Boston AA calls your
Bottom,
though the term is misleading, because everybody here agrees it’s more like someplace
very high and unsupported: you’re on the edge of something tall and leaning way out
forward….