Saint of Sixth

saint of sixth; prose; writing

The Tyranny of the Past

“All of the numbers in this phone are people from AA.”

Joe still remembers the smile on the man’s face as he proudly displayed his cellphone while saying those words. 

See, Joe had been drinking since he was 14, and now, at 22, it had reached a point of diminishing returns. One too many blacked out nights of phone calls to exes and driving to places he shouldn’t have driven had pushed him to the conclusion that his love affair with being someone else had to end. 

Hyde was overtaking Jekyll, and he didn’t want the same ending. 

First, he went to therapy. He doesn’t remember much of those sessions now except one comment his counselor made. Because it was the first time that someone had validated how he had felt deep inside since he was a child. 

“Wow, you really haven’t had a good life.”

Those words were so freeing in that moment that it was like being two-day drunk on the finest bourbon and having no obligations. 

For the first time, he didn’t feel crazy. 

Chasing that high of self-realization, he sought out local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. After all, it was the most well-known program for drying out. Even if you were unaware of where they came from you’d probably at least heard of the 12 Steps.

So he chose to check out a group called The Outcasts. The name appealed to him. It matched how he felt, and he was still young enough to think that was a sign. 

However, upon entering the easy-to-miss bar tucked near an overpass at the corner of 63rd Street and 14th Avenue in Kenosha, he knew very well that the name had another meaning entirely. 

The Outcasts was a motorcycle club. They held AA meetings almost exclusively for bikers. 

Joe, a hipster in his early 20s who had never been on a motorcycle in his entire life, was clearly not that. However, he was now standing in their “bar” — where they offered coffee, soda and snacks. 

Thankfully, the group couldn’t have been more gracious, and warmly welcomed him into their meeting. And after that first night, Joe really liked AA. 

Again, he felt validated in how he had felt as an addict while listening to other people share similar struggles to his. He had finally found his people. 

To the outside observer, Joe had finally turned his life around. 

He was in counseling. He was sober. He faithfully read the Big Book. 

He was finally acting like himself again. 

But beneath the surface, an uncomfortable epiphany started to take form. It started bubbling, releasing little bits of its full conclusion into the forefront of his mind. 

Story continues below

Guilt – Saint of Sixth

This episode is about a story that I was told in Kimball, Nebraska, more than a decade ago that still haunts me in my quiet moments. 
  1. Guilt
  2. The First Time I Met a Monster

After about a month of going to The Outcasts group faithfully, he decided to branch out to other meetings on other nights. And it was at one particular meeting that he felt the beginning of a shift in his being concerning the program and the people in it. 

That meeting took place in the downtown area, in a building he had never been in before. There, a larger black man with visible scars on his face led the meeting, which went just as usual with the same routine as every other meeting. 

But this time instead of immediately leaving, Joe stuck around afterward to listen while some other people lingered and talked. 

While Joe sat there, the man who had run the meeting said something in his low and somewhat pacifying voice that sent a pulse through Joe. 

“I go to like four or five meetings a day when I can.”

Joe felt his eyes narrow as he scanned the man’s conversational partner for any signs of having the same reaction he felt. But it wasn’t there. There was no twinge of finding fault in that statement. There was only agreement and a nod as if they were accustomed to the same practice. 

And that was when the first shoe dropped. 

Joe shook it off, though. After all, things had been going so well, and this was probably just an isolated incident within the larger group of AA members. Surely, not all of them were treating it with such obsession.

So he decided to just stop branching out to other meetings and simply focus on his “home” group. 

That worked for a little while. Counseling had kind of stagnated and that honeymoon phase glow had faded, but everybody told him he was still on the right path so he chose to believe them. 

Then, the time came for him to finally select a sponsor and start climbing the 12 Steps. 

There were some rules to this. For instance, people were not allowed to have a sponsor of the opposite sex. As much as members hate to talk about it, yes, there are people who prey on recently clean addicts’ emotional vulnerabilities for sex. Those people exist. They’re the lowest of predators. 

Beyond that, it came down to who people clicked with, who they believed could really help them. 

So Joe started talking to the different men in the group, using a process of elimination to pick a sponsor. 

Finally, in the end, he talked to an older man with short hair and a goatee who had been sober for nearly 20 years. The man smiled much of the time, and he had a certain kind of kindness about the way he interacted with other members.

In conversation, he had the energy of a middle school teacher that had been in his building for 12 years — still some enthusiasm, but definitely toned down with the repetition of time. 

And right when Joe was just about to ask the man to be his sponsor, the man did something that would change Joe’s entire perspective on addiction and recovery forever.

With a fervent flourish of his right arm, the man reached into his pocket and produced his cellphone ⏤ a flip phone that was even far outdated back then in the 2010s. 

Nevertheless, he proudly held it up like a winning lottery ticket and told Joe: “All of the numbers in this phone are people from AA.”

And the other shoe that Joe’s big toe had desperately tried to cling to finally fell alongside its partner. 

Because that was … crazy.

And Joe wasn’t crazy anymore. 

At that moment, Joe realized the truth behind the routine of AA and programs like it. He saw the thing peeking behind the curtain of addiction recovery as everyone was caught up focusing on simply abstaining. 

Addiction still had them, it had just put on a mask. 

Instead of emptying a bottle into themselves, they had willingly crawled inside its hollow shell. And that was the view, the confined space from which they looked out at the world.

Because recovery had become their drug of choice. Every meeting was a hit or a shot or a syringe full of black tar heroin. 

It was simply transference. 

But Joe could see the chains still hanging from their wrists now. None of them were really free; they just had a longer leash. 

Because they were still defined by the tyranny of the past. Their whole lives had become rejecting everything they used to be. Their paths had no purpose unto themselves except avoidance. 

It wasn’t freedom. 

It wasn’t living. 

It was existing in the shadow of the broken “before”, adjusting the light in their life to let it stretch to follow them into the “after”. 

Because, Joe believed, if someone hasn’t drank for 20 years, they’re not an alcoholic anymore. That’s not what defines them — unless they let it. And Joe thought it was madness for anyone to define themselves via negativa to warp that simple conclusion.

But, in his car after the meeting, Joe still cried before heading home as the dots of his simmering epiphany finally connected themselves and revealed its complete shape ⏤ exposing all of the things he had seen incorrectly while looking through the rose-colored glasses of other people’s perspectives.

In the end, he had gotten the clarity he wanted when he started coming to AA; so, in a way, it really did its job.

The people he’d met were also genuinely kind-hearted, well-meaning folks who wanted to truly be better than they used to be. And he knew that in his heart. He cherished that.

But he also knew that, after that night, he’d never go “home” again. 

And he never did. 

He wanted to live. 

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