I sat across the table staring at him. He developed a frog in his throat and lost track of what he was saying and played it off like he was sad. The room grew quiet with their phony ass moment of silence for the deceased. I stood up, made no eye contact, grabbed a couple of cookies out of the basket on the table and walked out.
I abandoned the fantasy. I told the two best friends I had met in AA exactly what I thought of the processes, rigidity and hypocrisy that was the soul of their washed out version of Christianity. The only difference I could see between the society of Alcoholics Anonymous and church based Christianity was the required reading. That and as far as God went, Christians were supplied one, Alcoholics were encouraged to create their own Higher Power. Christ died on the cross. One of the co-founders of AA, Bill Wilson, died of emphysema with a drink in his hand. A ladies man with dozens of mistresses; he had crash pads across the nation and a wife who expired in the shadows.
I recalled a conversation with a reborn sex-offender as I exited a meeting . I saw his face and remembered my vulnerability at the time.
“How do you imagine your higher power Dave?”
At the time the question made me feel naked and alone. When he told me that I could borrow his God until I found my own I felt embarrassed but said nothing. I stood there like a pussy. As I made my way home the rage took hold. A registered pedophile offering me his pickled brain until I was able to find my own. His Higher Power? A ten year old boy with a four inch dick? My thinking sickened me.
This subhuman had gotten his sticky fingers into me when my guard was at its lowest. I saw him a year later riding his bike while I was out buying a pack of smokes. He didn’t remember. He was spun out of his mind.
“Hey buddy do you think I could get one of those?” he asked.
I knew he smoked and didn’t have shit. I purposely lit up in from of him.
I silently dug one out, handed it to him, lit the fucking thing and said,
“You don’t remember me? I used to live next door to you in Rancho-damn what was the name of that fuckin’ street?”
I looked to him for the answer then continued,
“I must have been about 12.”
The back of his brain began itching. He scratched at the back of his skull and his face told me that he wanted to bolt. God made the light turn green; I stepped off the curb and walked. He hauled ass past me standing on the pedals of his beat to shit girls ten speed and muttered “Thanks for the cigarette.”
Having burned the disease contract I felt adrift and proud but as always their was doubt. Could it be my disease talking to me? Was my malformed brain being operated by a tiny alien that hated prosperity and blew a load every time I fell in the gutter or fucked a cow? The doubt was undeniable. I knew I wouldn’t stand on my own. I would go back to their meetings. A fear based life is a motherfucker. I would go back but it would never be like the first time. That was a given in any facet of experience.
I was stuck in my head without direction or any point of reference. I was a miserable hermit with nothing to balance myself out with. I lived in a tiny room in the back of my sister’s house with a bed that took up ¾ of the floor space and a ceiling that was slung so low that I could stand on my toes and push my head into the ceiling. Life was shit. The longer I didn’t drink the more I realized why I did. I was programmed to self destruct with or without alcohol. I had five people of my immediate family in the ground from their rotted brains and heroin. As a little boy I would listen to my father for hours as he drank coffee with his vodka drenched mother and talk about how life was nothing but a goddamn nightmare. Dad would look at me, then back at grandma lush and tell us that there wasn’t going to be a goddamn world in 20 years. When a boy hears this from his father it is taken as the word of God. I had been armed with too much information at to early of an age. I had decided that I was going to be nothing in life before I could remember as my peers fantasized of growing up to be cowboys, astronauts, and princesses. My father told me, that by the age of 16, that he knew that the world was a pile of shit. I knew life was a raw deal before I entered Kindergarten. was a pile shit the day I was born.
David Burdett
2004
David Burdett 