THE STORY OF Jon E

THE STORY OF Jon E

So today’s meeting turned into a celebration of Jon E’s eight years of sobriety. This was not just a time of noting (marking a landmark) but an acknowledgment of the way Jon E had gone from a gun toting cocaine addict to a much sought after community leader, in demand for his ubiquitous good works, speaking engagements as he was known in the past for his sloth and wasteful behaviors. The timbre of the meeting was that AA was the ballast that kept Jon E steady and the conduit that allowed him to conduct himself in a manner that he had always had within him but which had been sublimated by years of drug depleting decrepitude.

Having been born into a well known family, Jon E may have been rebelling against levels of expectations that his family may have had of him and so instead of growing gracefully into the role of community patron, he descended to that of community pervert and having succeeded beyond his wildest expectations he then ascended to the position of community hellion. The degree of forbearance by the community must have been great, since he had to have been excused for any number of misdemeanors, and even greater crimes. Only in a community as small as ours, in a family as notable as Jon E’s could this have occurred. It is remarkable how financial and social stature can shield people from the long arm of the law when, given different circumstances, skin color or social status, this would not have been tolerated in the same town.

But the time came when even his family could not turn the other cheek and had to ‘fire’ Jon E from the family’s business; his wife fired him from the family, and he was banished from the house. In fact he was exiled from the town and brought to a distant rehab facility to 'dry out' and then sent to another work facility to find out how to live a sober life. There he finally learned to live with the daily challenges that life throws at us, absorbing lessons most of us have long since integrated into our behaviors in childhood. And ever so slowly Jon E became a man, a father, a husband, a son and once again a valued partner in the family business.

We don’t come into AA hopeful. In fact we come hopeless, that is, completely devoid of hope. We have no expectation that we will ever become sober because every time we have tried to stay sober we have failed miserably. In the first and second steps of the 12 steps we learn that we are powerless over alcohol and we go over and over the history and the herstory of why we are drunks because no matter how we try to stop drinking, we always start again all the while desperate in the hope of trying to find out how this time we got here. We start again not because we want to. We start again because we don’t know why we started and failed to stay sober. We start again because we don’t know how we start again and we start because we often don’t remember the instances between the thought of thinking about picking up that first drink and waking up during or after that bout, which may be a day or more lasting hours or days or a week after that first drink.

We come into AA hopeless and fearful that we have finally reached the end of the road. How we mighty have fallen to have come through life (often through successful careers) only to find ourselves in a room full of drunks! But here is the mystery; because if you truly listen when you finally sit down in those first hours and days in AA, you will hear stories. And unlike the chaos and dissonance of experience that you feel in the world outside the rooms, in the rooms you will feel a kinship, a fellowship, a recognition that you have been here before. You will hear stories that are yours. You will feel feelings that are yours. You will hear thoughts that you have thought before. You will hear thoughts that you have thought but were afraid to express because you thought they sounded crazy enough to you ,let alone the rest of the world. Yet here, people were saying OUT LOUD the same crazy thoughts as you and they were not ashamed, not crying about them, in fact THEY WERE LAUGHING. THEY WERE LAUGHING AT THEIR OWN CRAZYNESS AND THEIR OWN THINKING KNOWING THE CRAZINESS OF THEIR OWN THINKING AND FINALLY APPRECIATING THE JOKE AS ONLY ONE ALCOHOLIC CAN APPRECIATE IT WITH ANOTHER.

We appreciate each others’ disability because we understand it at least to the point where we understand our complete powerlessness over it and our need to be ever vigilant in order to keep the temptation for the drink at bay one day at a time. We don’t pity each other, but we do empathize, for in our common narratives we have been through the depression, the fear, the mental and physical pain. We have been through the destruction of family, the economic destitution, the destruction of soul and the reintegration of the spirit in our lives.

We also finally understand that if we want to survive we must learn to trust other alcoholics to help us over the corrugations of life’s road. Why just other alcoholics? I can only speak for myself. I have friends both in and out of the program and my closest friends are not in the program. But when, for example, you need someone to get up to speed on a project they must come to the project with a lot of basic understanding so that when you start to describe the specific needs of your project there is a certain shared vocabulary that permits fluent communication.

That is what one AA does for another AA. We start by talking the same language which in this case is really experiential. It is based on emotional and psychopharmacological experiences that most friendships don’t share in the deep almost mystical sense that I talk about here. We sit and talk. We become supports, talk on the phone, sit in meetings together and organize our lives around certain principles of living. One of those principles is, of course, not to drink. But after that, what? We already know that just stopping hardly ever is a solution for us, for inevitably we will pick up again. So we have learned to change our lives from considerations of the material to the spiritual, from the property laden to abstract more principled and moral lives.

So the one basic principle of living for AA’s is not to drink any alcohol; we have come therefore to realize and understand that in order to live a truly sober life requires change on a truly grand scale, the requirement to change EVERYTHING in your life.

(But to keep it simple, we in AA like to say that you only have to change ONE thing in your life…EVERYTHING.)

Well that sounds daunting. But when you come to think about it, just how far did you get in life with your way of doing things? Waking up after days walking around in a blackout? Or did you wake up in your bed but not remember where you were the night before or whether waking up in bed today was really after last night’s debauch or was it days before? Where did you park your car? Or did you wake up in a hotel room wondering why the Eiffel Tower was dominating the scene out your window?

I have heard every one of those stories in the rooms, all of which were much more colorful than my own, but stories I was glad not to be able to tell. Those stories serve as a reminder that as colorful or complicated as my story got, there is a lot more writing that could go into the tale if I chose to do more experimentation with the grape.

So we have determined that working with others in the fellowship is the best way to stay sober. Everyone is an anchor for someone else if they want to be. There is, however, no written formula for these relationships, just the handed down wisdom of sponsor to sponsee.

And Jon E celebrates eight years today. He is fond of saying that he could not have done that without the help of the guys in the rooms and of AA in general. And if he is a model citizen today, it is at least due in a major part to the people in the rooms of AA, that happy group of drunks who give of themselves so that others can survive the ravages of alcoholism.

©May 9, 2010