The Living Well - originally published 2018
James has scars on his arm and tattoos on his hands and legs. He’s from Maine but has
been at the VA hospital in White River Junction, Vermont for the past six weeks. Before that, the
“looney bin up North.” He points upward with his eyes and tilts his chin. He talks out of the
corner of his mouth, moving his lips apart just enough to get sound out. Around us, people are
cleaning up from the meeting: putting away pamphlets and trays of cookies and turning off the
coffee maker.
He freaked out and tried to hurt himself. His brother had to physically restrain him,
wrestle him to the ground so he couldn’t cut himself. He gestures to the scars on his left arm. I
wonder what he means by “freak out.” PTSD? He’s an alcoholic, was he drinking? Both? He
doesn’t say. I don’t ask. I ask about the tattoos he has on both his hands, starting on his wrists
and extending to the space between his forefinger and thumb. Odd place for a tattoo, I think. The
tats are molecules, crisp, black hexagons and pentagons with lines protruding from the corners.
A couple short straight ones with the letters “HO” at the end and a longer zig-zag ending in
“NH2.”
Dopamine and serotonin.
He got them when he showed up for a court date a few hours early. His brother suggested
they go to the bar and pound a few while they waited. He thought that was “fucking retarded.”
So, he went to a tattoo artist he knew pretty well and got them done. “They’re the only ones I
have that make sense,” he says. He lifts his cargo shorts up a little, revealing a hand with
forefinger and thumb linked in a ring, the other three fingers fanning outwards. I recognize it as
the gesture adolescent dudes try to catch each other with. The rule is if you get someone to look,
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you get to punch them on the shoulder. James rolls his eyes. “Stupid shit.” He shifts back to
talking about the neurotransmitters, examining his forearms like he’s just noticing them for the
first time. He looks up, looks me in the eye.
“I figured if I want happiness, I gotta have it on my hands.”
--------
The meeting is for Celebrate Recovery, a 12-Step program based on the Christian faith.
There have been meetings at Riverbank Church down the road since 2015. They just started
having meetings at the VA hospital three weeks ago. But because patients stay at the hospital for
short stints, the ensemble of meetings-goers (almost all vets) is in constant flux. People go home.
James is one of them. Today is his last meeting before heading back to Maine.
Some people come to every meeting. Like Kevin. He doesn’t stay at the hospital, but he
is a vet from the area. He was in Vietnam. Kevin, the follower of Jesus Christ, the alcoholic, the
heroin addict, the compulsive gambler. “I’ve pretty much run the gamut when it comes to
addictive behavior,” he often says. “The whole nine yards.” His voice is strained, charred at the
edges by fifty-two years of cigarettes, the only thing he still does. He’s been clean from heroin
for ten years. Stopped drinking four years ago (and started going to church again). And two and
a half months ago, he quit gambling.
Kevin’s face is heart-shaped, coming to a point in a gray beard. He reminds me of Sean
Penn, with the weathered, wrinkled, crow’s feet face. He often inserts little quips into
conversation, which he calls “corkers.”
He strolls into today’s meeting a few minutes after six o’clock, toting a black canvas bag,
notebook and pen in one hand and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in the other.
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“There he is!’ someone says.
“’There who is?” Kevin says. He looks around, twisting his whole body right and left and
right in feigned surprise. He stops and grins.
Someone else chimes in: “Looking stylin’ with that haircut.”
“Yeah, I put a comb through it.”
He runs his fingers through his hair.
“Kevin’s got a thing with time,” says Todd, the leader of the group, half-jokingly. He is
holding his notes in his right hand. He was just about to launch into his opening monologue.
Kevin does have a thing with time. When he gambled, he would disappear for days into
the windowless casino.
Kevin’s best time gambling was at the dollar table. Two o’clock in the morning. With a
bunch of people. And him showing them how to play the game.
“I had more fun doing that than I did anything else. I was like the emcee. I had the whole
table betting how I wanted them to bet so we could all win. Even if the stakes were low, that was
my most fun time at the end.”
It’s not about the money.
Towards the end, before he decided he couldn’t stop gambling and checked into a
treatment center in Ohio, he ended most “sessions” at the dollar table, fifty or sixty dollars left,
“just scabbing it as long as he could.” One time, he spent twenty hours at the dollar table with
twelve bucks, riding it back and forth all night.
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“By now, I’m starting to go like this.” He tucks his arms in slightly, makes them twitch.
Tweaking after having been on his feet for twenty-five hours straight. Afterwards, he’d come
home and sleep for two days. “Depressed and just really beaten up.”
“When you lose in gambling, there’s no yield. If you’re a dope fiend, at least you get
high. If you’re a drunk, you get drunk. If you’re a gambler, you’re all alone with that nakedness
of loss.”
Kevin tells me a story about a guy he knew once. He won the lottery for over a million
dollars. Twice. By the time he got to Gambler’s Anonymous, he was 600,000 dollars in debt.
It’s not about the money.
We sit in a Starbucks with black wooden tables. People in sundresses and ripped jeans
stroll in. The din of mugs clanking, machines whirring and baristas shouting out orders drowns
out his voice at times.
“What is it about?” I ask.
“I...” He pauses. “I knew you were gonna ask me that and I don’t know.” He brings his
open palm to the table. “It’s juice, that’s all I can tell ya.”
“Juice,” I repeat. Skeptical, half-smiling.
Kevin doesn’t mention it again, “juice.” What he mentions is guilt. When he looks back
at his gambling days. he realizes he was gambling “at himself.”
“A guilt kind of thing. But very, very subconscious. In retrospect, looking at a lot of
times in my life, even before I started gambling acutely, I would have this penchant for fouling
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things up at a critical point. And I think that’s ‘at yourself’ somehow? I don’t know how to
rephrase that any better than that.”
He pauses, takes a deep breath.
“If you got something inside of you that’s dormant or that you hate yourself for, it has to
manifest itself somehow. You know what I mean? That’s you, that’s me, that’s anybody. It may
be more subtle with somebody that doesn’t have the propensity for nasty stuff that I got into, but
it still manifests itself.”
Gambling is one way it manifests. Another is PTSD.
His PTSD used to be a razor-sharp saw. In the ‘90s, he owned a business that cleaned
gasoline-contaminated dirt. They’d take the soil out, put it back in with a liner—machinations to
keep the soil together—and then vacuum most of the gasoline out and add aerobic bacteria to eat
the lighter stuff. He worked on the business end, wearing suits and giving presentation to
engineers. But he’d also get dirty in the “trenches.” One time in 1995, they were prepping to get
a big job done. Tanks were setup to store the extract. Kevin stood in a hole dug in the ground
with about two feet of water. A kid standing on one of the tanks fifty feet away threw a rock and
yelled “Incoming!”
“I musta chased that kid for six miles,” Kevin said. “I swear to God something broke
inside of me. And it’s a good thing I didn’t catch him.”
He had been making eye contact with me for most of our conversation. Everything he
said he said with intent, focus. Now he was staring out the window. “It’s a good thing I didn’t
catch him.”
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Shortly afterwards, he was in his home in New Hampshire one night when he heard
voices outside. Kid’s voices. When he looked outside, he saw ten or twelve Cambodian and
Vietnamese children, he says. Playing, chattering in their native language. “I just freaked out, I
don’t know what happened. It was just way overpowering.”
“We collectively killed a lot of children and maimed a lot of children, you just can’t even
believe it.”
That sentence structure. A lot, a lot. You just can’t even believe it. The rasping voice,
even the accent which drops the word-final r’s. When I first heard his voice, it reminded me of
someone’s, someone famous. I realized now who it was.
Kevin’s voice is not Trump’s. “The United States is evil,” he says. He hates its war-
mongering, the business of war. He believes that for many Muslim people, the only thing they
know about us is that we’ve killed their son, their father their grandfather, their aunts and uncle.
He’s not surprised they hate us, because we’re grooming them for it. And we’re going to have to
pay the piper for it. We’re going down, baby. We’re going down.
And unlike Trump, Kevin went to Vietnam. Shipped off when he was a teenager.
Returned with a duffle bag of horror stories. And when he talks about the scores of children they
killed and maimed, I get the sense that those aren’t abstractions, not in the sense of Trump saying
we created “a lot a lot of jobs” this past quarter. So many jobs you can’t even believe it. So many
kids you can’t even believe it. And he can’t. I can’t. But he was there, they were real.
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“Whatever you can find on the internet, a hundred times worse when you see it and you
smell it and you see kids eight years old, they got one arm one leg and their face looks like pizza
from napalm, it’s just fucking, it’s just crazy.”
“War is insanity,” he says. And so is gambling. He uses the same language for both.
Forty-hour blackjack sessions are crazy. Day trading is psychotic. “It blows my mind.”
Another thing in the duffel bag: a look.
“This look that the civilians used to look at us with, when we’d be in convoys and stuff. It
was not a look of disdain, it was beyond disdain. It was like looking right through us or
something.”
There’s a look to gambling, too. He tells me about guys who work at the VA hospital,
pretty high up, who spend at least half their money monthly on scratch tickets. He can tell
they’re trapped, they have a look. A bug-eyed look.
He tells me that if you go to the gas station in West Leb 7, 8, 9 o’clock on a Friday or
Saturday, you can see that look. Everybody filing in, buying lotto tickets and cigarettes. It’s like
a show or a zoo. Entertainment. If you stick around til 11:30, you see everybody trying to get
beer before the store closes. With that look on their faces, that bug-eyed look.
“It’s insane. It’s insane.”
___
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A couple weeks later, I go to the gas station at around 8:30 on a Saturday night. The first
person who comes in is a bald, bearded middle-aged man wearing glasses and a shirt that says,
“Lord Calvert Canadian Whiskey.” In a deep, quiet voice, he asks for a 99-pack of Camels.
Another man, similar age. He wears a flannel shirt and plaid cargo shorts. The patterns
don’t quite match up. He stares blankly at the back wall and asks for something. The attendant, a
28-year old woman with dyed red hair and gauges in her ears, flips up the Marlboro Special
Blend sign but there’s nothing behind it. The man stares for a second and then shuffles off.
More people come in. It isn’t quite how Kevin described it. I don’t see the look he
described. No one’s buying lotto tickets, just cigarettes. I’m not at a zoo, I’m at a gas station
standing around and pretending to read the Valley News sometimes. I begin to stare off into
space. I feel like the bug eyed one.
Then a man comes in, sort of limping along the aisles, but quickly. He’s in a rush. I don’t
write down anything about his appearance. I notice his eyes first. I recognize them immediately.
He has the look. His eyes are wide, and they dart wildly around to the shelves of chips, to the
rows of cigarette behind the counter, to the cash register, to the cashier. He buys a pack of
Marlboro Golds and leaves.
I’m standing by the chilled sandwiches and salads and I can only catch bits and pieces of
what customers are saying over the refrigerator hum. The scene begins to feel like watching a
sitcom on mute. The gas station is a set. The bricks above the door are wallpaper.
A twenty-something woman in a Five Guys shirt enters stage left. Pale skin, gauges. She
asks for a pack of Black and Milds. After she orders, she leaves, goes to her car, comes back puts
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down a dollar bill and some coins. The cashier says something, she goes back to her car again,
gets more coins, throws them down on the counter. And a third time: back to car, more coins on
the counter. Her eyes aren’t bugged, they’re just dead.
A burly, 40-year old man with brown skin and black beard enters (stage right). He shakes
hands with the cashier (“Nice to meet you”) and they start talking about heavy metal. The sun is
setting. Activity picks up. People come in, buy cigarettes, booze. From the left, the right, from
the other end of the store. Then they leave. A worried looking older woman asks for turquoise
American Spirit loose leaf. But which one? “Oh, I didn’t know there were so many.” A man with
a shock of strawberry blonde hair, looking, peering, buys Juul pods.
The cashier and the man are still talking about metal. “Just between the three of us,” the
cashier says to me and the man, eyeing her boss stocking vitamin water on the other end of the
store. “I was tripping balls on acid at a Tool concert once. The lights were insane.”
The man asks what she’s doing after work and she says she’s going home.
“What are ya married or something?”
“I have a boyfriend.”
“Oh, sorry.”
And then: “I’m gonna go get drunk. Well, drunker.”
The sun is all the way down now. I notice a short man in a pink button-down shirt and
cargo shorts. He’s standing at the end of one of the shelves, opposite me. He’s been there for a
while, staring intently at something on the shelf below. He wrings his hands, rubs them together.
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I look at eyes and realize he’s not looking down. He’s looking up. At me. His body facing one
way, his eyes another, so that they seem like they have a mind of their own. I glance back at the
Valley News for a bit. Then back up again. His eyes are in the same place.
He wanders to the back of the store and looks at something else. His jaw hangs open. He
scratches his head. He lets his arm fling down, hitting his thighs over and over, but by the rules
of no rhythm. He starts looking in my direction again.
I get out of that zoo.
---
Kevin and I sit at a corner table in the McDonald’s in White River Junction. It’s around
eight and the late spring sun is just setting. Kevin places fries on the patty of his burger one by
one, slowly constructing a neat row, as he talks about the families at church. He started going to
church again four years ago, right around the time he started recovery from drug addiction,
alcoholism, and compulsive gambling. He can’t get over how beautiful and wholesome the
experience of going to church is, even four years in. The families, the kids, people waving and
singing and getting excited. “It blows my mind,” he says, bringing his hands to his temples and
then out again, palms open, fingers stretched. “It’s refreshing.” Refreshing. A change of pace
from divorce and addiction and war. He has a big grin on his face, and his hands moving all over
the place so fast, they’re almost blurs. His excitement reminds me of something he’d mentioned
before.
“What’s ‘juice’ exactly? You were talking about if before...”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “Juice. It means when I get excited about something, I’m jammin’
over it.” When somebody normal encounters something exciting, they might get a little kick out
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of it. He moves his hand, palm down, through the air like it’s the head of a snake and makes it do
a little bump. But for him? He raises his hand up and up and up.
“Here’s something they don’t tell you about addiction,” he says. He leans in a little bit.
“As a rule, for heroin and coke, maybe not so much for weed because it doesn’t work like that
but getting it where you actually have to go somewhere illegal to get it---that’s juice.” When
you’re in an alleyway or a Puerto Rican dope seller’s house in Stratham and you might get
stabbed or shot or picked up by the cops, that’s juice. “They say it’s like the couple minutes
before a robbery or a crime.”
People who tend to get addicted, they feel it more. The excitement. A little bump for
most becomes a huge spike, a mountain. “That’s just what I think,” he says.
“Now juice for me is the Word or when I hear a rippin’ sermon from a preacher.” He
pumps his fist a little. He’s grinning again.
---
There’s a theory of addiction called the incentive sensitization theory. When the brain
learns associations between cues and their rewards, it learns to attribute the motivational value,
called “incentive stimulus” in the literature, that comes with the reward to the cue itself. This
means that previously neutral cues become attractive and “wanted” objects themselves. It is
thought that the incentive motivational properties of drug-associated cues (and places) lend them
their powerful ability to incite drug seeking, even in periods of abstinence. That is why a first
diagnosis of addiction is associated with a 90% chance of relapse. That’s why I think Kevin says
he got a kick sneaking around in dark alleys trying to score heroin. At a certain point, going to a
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place where you’ve scored before, sitting in a room where you’ve gotten high, seeing a needle,
becomes just like getting high itself, from a motivational perspective.
The psychological process of transferring incentive salience from the reward to the cue
reflects the neural process of transferring dopamine spikes in the same way. When animals first
starting learning to do an action, something that gets a reward, dopamine spikes when the reward
is received. Over time, as the animal performs the action over and over and over, dopamine starts
to spike with the cue, and not the reward. When you take drugs, these neural systems become
hypersensitive. What was once a small dopamine response to a cue becomes massive. Stimuli
and contexts related to drugs become motivators themselves.
Another thing about dopamine is that it’s regarded in the popular consciousness as the
“pleasure chemical.” This idea comes from early experiments with dopamine in which
electrically stimulating a certain are of the brain which releases dopamine causes animals to keep
doing a given activity. And because they keep doing it, it must be pleasurable. Then came the
anhedonia hypothesis, based on the finding that people with clinical depression tend to have low
levels of dopamine in their brain. The idea was that a lack of dopamine must be responsible for
the inability to feel pleasure seen in depression.
So, dopamine became the pleasure chemical. And that’s why James got the molecule
tattooed on his hands.
But dopamine is now thought of as motivational. If you destroy dopamine cells, rats still
like getting sugar squirted in their mouths. You can tell from their facial expressions that it gives
them pleasure. But what these dopamine-depleted rats won’t do is make any effort to acquire this
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sugar. Dopamine isn’t the chemical that makes you like something, it makes you want it. It’s
incentive salience. It’s juice.
Serotonin might be a better candidate for the “pleasure” or “happiness” chemical, if there
is such a thing. It has many disparate functions in the brain and body, and one of them appears to
be regulating mood. Lower serotonin receptor function was associated with lower mood in one
study, and better mood was associated with higher blood levels of serotonin. One of the most
popular classes of antidepressants, SSRIs or Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, increases
levels of serotonin in the connections between neurons. And the relationship might be
bidirectional. Studies have found that self-induced changes in mood, as in meditation, improved
serotonin synthesis. Serotonin controls mood, mood controls serotonin.
And mood influences social behavior. A lack of social support is associated with a host of
bad mental states: stress, depression. And posttraumatic stress disorder.
---
For as long as I can remember, I’ve gotten this fuzzy feeling in my face sometimes. It’s
not the numbness from when you hit the corner of your elbow on something or when your leg
falls asleep. It’s warmer than that. It’s like the feeling when you’re about to cry, the tears welling
up, the skin below your cheekbones getting heavier. Or like the feeling right before you go to
sleep after you’ve taken a melatonin. And although it feels like falling asleep, the feeling is just
as powerful in the morning. Those mornings, I get up from bed to turn off my alarm and then get
back in and sit there and just sort of feel the feeling in my face. I can’t get up. The starting signal
in my head to get the motions going, my limbs moving, pushing me up, up and out simply never
happens.
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And it’s been happening a lot lately. On a good day, I check my phone for texts and
emails. Good news, bad news, it doesn’t matter. The fuzz drowns out any emotional reaction I
have. Something I’ve been anticipating for weeks becomes meaningless. It is a feeling of
purposelessness. It is the sound of a shovel clanking on bedrock.
There are two contexts in which I think of the Ledyard Bridge which connects Hanover,
New Hampshire, where I live, and Norwich, Vermont across the Connecticut River. One is
when, every week or so, the fuzz creeps down to my chest, grabs the base of my trachea, right
between my lungs, and pulls inward and down, making everything tighter. It spreads across my
chest and over the tops of my arms and into my fingers. When that happens, I feel that I would
like to get rid of this sensation somehow. And the best way I can think of to do that would be to
go to the Ledyard Bridge at night and jump into the Connecticut and let the icy water wash it
away. The deeper I plunge into the water, the darker the water gets, the faster the feeling gets
sucked from my body until it’s all gone and floats away into the atmosphere like smoke.
---
“You got stuff going on inside, I can feel it,” Kevin says to me in the Starbucks. “That’s
okay. Keep doing this.”
He means keep going to meetings. I’d been to one, the Tuesday meeting at Riverbank,
which is where I met Kevin. He tells me to pick one (there’s three now, Sunday nights at the
church, Tuesday nights at the church, Wednesday nights at the VA) and stick with it.
“If you can scratch out Wednesday night, marry the VA for a while. It’ll do good for your
writing and for your own self. So, come.”
“Yeah I might.”
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“And you’ll like it too. When you see guys like that on that kind of level, you don’t see
that often. That’s just not happening.” He laughs.
“No, it doesn’t.” I laugh along.
“It’s pretty cool. It’s really, really cool.”
That Wednesday, I went to my first Celebrate Recovery meeting at the VA in White
River Junction, the meeting where I met James and the one that Kevin came late to.
Once Kevin sits down at the “fart smellers’ table—I mean smart fellers table” and lays
out all his things, Todd resumes his introduction. He reads a daily reading from a Christian
website called Ransomed Heart. The title of the reading is “What is Your Role in the Story?”
The idea of the passage is that God tells a story which proclaims some truths.
One of the truths is this: “We are at war. This is a love Story, set in the midst of a life-
and-death battle. Just look around you. Look at all the casualties strewn across the field. The lost
souls, the broken hearts, the captives. We must take this battle seriously.” The reading says that
we have a role to play in this war.
It concludes: “This is our most desperate hour. You are needed.”
I am struck by the vocabulary of war that permeates discussions in recovery. Kevin uses
it too. One time, he was talking about his experiences in the Vietnam War and how, when he got
back, he didn’t have so much as a de-brief. They just plopped him on the street. And thankfully,
we as a society have recognized that we can’t do that anymore. He talks about how after battles,
the Zulus would send their warriors to recover somewhere for a month before being sent to the
frontlines again. And after Iraq and Afghanistan the government is doing a better job of
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providing mental health care to veterans. But, he concludes, “We gotta figure out a different way
to come about things. We really need to stop making war.”
Then he started talking about how we’re embroiled in end times.
It’s show time. It is show time,” he said. “Every day I have to put my armor on for God.
Put my armor on, suit up, and make sure nothing that’s evil gets inside of me.” It’s something he
must do every day. Guard against the evil.
Another person in the group who talks war is Dale, a pastor at Riverbank, a vet, and a
recovering alcoholic. He talks about how one obstacle on the road to recovery is the “spiritual
warfare all around us.” And fear. “The enemy uses fear,” he says.
Armor. Guards. Casualties. Captives. The enemy. Life and death. War.
---
For a while, Dale’s purpose was war. Serving his country was his life. He was
exceptionally good at it too. He enlisted when he was seventeen and worked his way up to
become a sergeant first class, a rank that is extremely difficult for a non-commissioned officer to
attain. He could quote pages of regulations. For the last year and a half of his career, he served as
the acting first sergeant, at the top of his company’s enlisted ranks.
Dale sits with perfect posture. He wears blue plaid shirt tucked into khakis. A trimmed,
graying beard and neatly combed hair. Phone clipped to his belt. Chipmunk cheeks. We’re in a
large room in the back of the church with a few round plastic tables one might find at a catered
dinner and some orange beanbags. The lights are off, so most of the light in the room comes
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from the late afternoon sun. We sit at one of the tables. He talks about how dedication to the
military took its toll on his family.
“Anything else that has to suffer gets left behind. Family, relationships. My family had
suffered all those years, right? My kids suffered ‘cause I was—Dad was focused on the army and
the mission. And so marriage, divorce, kind of stuff. So, the kids were caught in that, all the
issues that occur because of a divorce. And my son especially really, really struggled with it, and
consequently...” He pauses. “Consequently, ended up in behavior schools...” his voice trails off.
At the height of the War on Terror, he didn’t deploy with his unit to Kuwait and stayed
home to take care of his son. And when the next deployment rolled around, and his son was still
not in a good place, he stayed home again. But his relationship with his kids worsened. He felt
like a failure, failing not only his family, but leaving his troops at a critical time. After twenty
years of putting on the same uniform morning after morning, he could barely dress himself for
civilian life.
He had lost his purpose. “When it ended, I got to the end of me,” he says. And the laser
focus, mission-oriented mentality he had in the military now zeroed in on alcohol. A false idol. A
new purpose.
“I quickly caught on that I could drink enough to not feel it. And not think about it.
Because I could pass out. That works really well.” He laughs.
He drank for seven years straight. He drank through four marriages, through failing
relationships with his kids. He drank through the loss of everything valuable to him until there
was nothing left. His fourth wife kicked him out. He was homeless. No car.
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“I was done. Completely done. I was literally going to kill myself,” he says. He thought
about jumping off the Quechee Gorge Bridge.
He got sober on March 8th, 2014. He says the date as if it were all one word. It is the date
that God stepped in and saved him. And during his recovery, the question on his mind was
“Why?” He prayed and prayed and read scripture, trying to understand why God saved him.
“What’s the purpose of that? What’s the purpose?” Purpose is everything for Dale.
Now he’s a pastor at a thriving church. He goes to the VA every week to serve as a peer
support specialist, helping vets get through addictions, mental illness, or just “life’s junk,” junk
that almost killed him less than half a decade ago. He is now in school to become an addiction
counselor. But those are all the manifestations, as they occur in Dale’s world, of his new
overarching purpose: “The higher calling of following Jesus.” If God told him to be a truck
driver, and, in conversation with God, he understood that to be his true purpose, then Dale would
commence his journey to become a truck driver the very next day.
Dale’s relationship with faith hasn’t always been as straightforward as it is now. When he
was a kid, his mother told him: “You damn well better believe in God, but don’t you dare have a
thing to do with religion.” Still, his grandmother slipped him a small New Testament, which he
read in hiding. One time he got caught. His mother screamed and cursed at him. “What the hell
are you doing?!” He still recoils at the word “religion.” When he was 22 and back home in New
Hampshire working for the National Guard, he met his friend’s brother, a pastor. They talked for
hours. The pastor quoted the Bible, showed Dale passages. Finally, he asked, “Do you believe in
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?” And Dale said, “I do.” He was baptized in a river. While he
was still soaking wet, he felt the call to be a pastor.
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He joined a small family church of maybe a dozen people and sent away for a
correspondence course in the Bible. But people got in the way. The grandmother of the family,
the matriarch, caught wind of Dale’s plans. She rejected him. And so, Dale walked away. God’s
calling wiped away by this person’s words. He learned to rely on himself again and forget about
faith. But God stayed with him and reappeared in 2014 when Dale hit rock bottom.
“Why do you think God chose to wait until the last moment to step in?” I ask.
“I don’t think it was so much that he chose to. I think he did. Because I was in such a
crisis state if you will that I was beyond my own ability.” But the answer comes down to free
will. Dale says he could’ve turned to God at any point, and He would have accepted him. “That’s
how I can say I know he was always there, because as I look back, I can see moments in time
where that opportunity was there, y’know, but I chose through my, the use of my free will to try
to be...to continue to run the show.”
I pause, trying to understand. “Yeah, that makes sense to me,” I say eventually. But the
answer doesn’t make sense to me. It never has.
---
After Todd finishes the passage, we say a prayer that I don’t know, but I read along from
an orange bookmark Dale gave to me before the meeting. Then we start delving into the
questions in a booklet. It’s the official Celebrate Recovery booklet, the first of four, entitled
“Stepping Out of Denial Into God’s Grace.”
The first question: “List some of the ways that your pride has stopped you from asking
for and getting the help you need to overcome your hurts, hang-ups, and habits.”
20
I find myself talking about how, in the fall, my girlfriend begged me with tears in her
eyes to get help. “I never know which version of you I’m gonna get on a given day,” she said. I
signed up for counseling on the website of my school’s health service. I didn’t hear back at first
and I didn’t call. My girlfriend asked me to call to make an appointment and so I did. I went to
one meeting. Then another. Then the term ended, and I stopped.
The second question: “What in your past has caused you to have the ‘if onlys’?
I talk about how ‘if onlys’ dominate my headspace. A daily dose of daydreams about
alternate realities. If only I had writing music earlier, skipped college, and toured the country. If
only I stuck with baseball. If only I wrote for that music zine sophomore winter instead of going
back to Hanover.
It’s something that had been festering in my brain for years, but I’d never said it out loud.
My voice was quivering at this point, but damn, it felt good. I saw vigorous nods, heard
“Amens.” The guys at the table felt it too. That felt even better.
Another question: “In what ways have you tried to escape your past pain?”
I talk about how I did acid the previous Friday. The thing about LSD is that it acts like
serotonin in the brain, binding to most serotonin receptors, creating feelings of well-being and
peacefulness. Unlike most psychedelics, it also binds to dopamine receptors. I thought it would
obliterate that fuzzy feeling. And it did, for a solid nine hours. But then shit happened. I was
hanging out with an old friend all day, and it felt like old times. Until the ugly reasons why we
don’t talk much anymore reared their heads. Then my ex (we’d split up two weeks before) drunk
texted me. “I do sometimes wish we didn’t have to break up but it kind of felt like the only
solution to everything.” More ‘if onlys.’ The acid was wearing off and the feeling was creeping
21
back. I felt like going for a walk, a walk that would end up at the Ledyard Bridge. I was on my
way out of the house when I ran into my friend Josh. Maybe it was the drugs, but he looked like
an angel.
After the meeting ends, and the adrenaline from telling stories wears off, I notice my
breathing. It’s deeper, easier. That feeling has released its grip on my lungs. And my face feels
solid. I talk to James, Kevin, Dale, Todd. Chatter away like I’ve been going for years. Like I’m a
veteran.
I take 91 home and get off the Norwich exit, right by the river. I usually never see the
bridge from this side, going from Vermont to New Hampshire. It looks different. It’s springtime
and still light out. I don’t feel the fuzzy feeling in my eyes or face or chest or arms. I play the
folk songs I used to love but got bored of a little bit too loud over the stereo. They tickle my
brain again.
I haven’t missed a meeting since. Between driving to White River Junction and the
meeting and talk afterwards they take up two and a half hours of my day, and time is hard to
come by with three hard classes and thesis work. But I make time. I went the night before my
thesis presentation. I went during final exams. I love how I feel afterwards. I love the group.
And I know everyone else feels the same way. Going to meetings becomes a kind of
compulsion itself. One guy, Steve, goes to some kind of meeting every day. It doesn’t matter if
it’s Celebrate Recovery or a secular meeting or which step they’re on. He just goes. Every single
night of the week.
Kevin has been through the twelve steps more times than he can count. And Todd along
with him. At one meeting, Kevin told a story about how he used to sneak cigarettes and beer to
22
his mom when he was a teenager. She died when he was 18, and for the rest of his life he thought
he killed her. Until he found out as an adult that she died of a congenital heart disease.
He’d never told that story out loud before. And he did one Wednesday. Todd remarked
that he’d never heard it before. Recovery isn’t a line, it’s a circle. You do your first twelve steps
and figure some stuff out and then you do another twelve and more comes to bear and then the
cycle repeats. Something new every time.
---
Dale tells me a story from the Gospel of John. Jesus and the disciples were travelling
through Samaria, and Jesus stopped and sat by a well. It was around noon. A Samaritan woman
comes to get water from the well and Jesus asks her for a drink. The woman is startled; Jews
don’t interact with Samaritans. And besides, he doesn’t have a vessel to put the water in. Jesus
starts talking about something called Living Water. One drink and you will thirst again. The
woman asks for the water, but Jesus says “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman
answers “I have no husband.” And Jesus replies: “You are right in saying, ‘I have no
husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.”
(“And now you know why the story kinda hit home with me” says Dale). The woman realizes
she is talking to a prophet of God and spends the rest of her life spreading the Word of the Lord.
In some traditions, she is a Saint called Photine.
The idea of the story, says Dale, is this:
“You can keep coming back to the well and just keep drinking and drinking and drinking
and you’re just gonna keep being thirsty. But if you come to God, you’re gonna drink of that
well, that Living Well. You’re going to be full forever.”
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___
They say that addiction is about filling a void. So much that it’s become a cliché. But it’s
a cliché for a reason. Dale filled the loss of his purpose with alcohol. And then serving God and
counseling others. Kevin filled the hole in his heart that was ripped open in Vietnam with drugs,
money, gambling, and alcohol. And then meetings and God and love for his unborn grandchild.
Recovery isn’t a line it’s a cycle.
Wars in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan become holy wars waged every day in souls.
Idols like the bottle and the needle and the dollar table become Gods and scripture.
Addictions to poisons become addictions to meetings and vulnerability and sharing.
The well of the Samaritan woman becomes the Living Well. Becomes living well.
---
Before one of the last meetings I went to, something felt wrong. I didn’t feel the draw
like I usually do. I felt a tightness in my chest.
As soon as the meeting started, my anxiety was confirmed. We were on the higher power
step. The booklet chapter began with this: “How do we find hope? By faith in our Higher Power,
Jesus Christ.” I’d hinted that I didn’t believe in God in past meetings, but never said it outright.
Only Kevin and Dale really knew.
One of the questions was: “What do you believe about God? What are some of His
characteristics?”
I passed on that question.
I expected someone to ask, “If you don’t believe in God, then what the hell are you doing
in a Christ-centered recovery program?’
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And it’d be a good question. I thought about my answer. The title of the lesson was
“Hope.”
People find hope in God, where once they’d found hope in alcohol, drugs, meaningless
relationships, and anger and fear.
I find hope in the group. I find hope in going to meetings and sharing my stories,
listening to other people’s stories. Sharing feelings. And chatting after meetings. And I find hope
in the drive back home over the Ledyard bridge.
But they never asked. They wouldn’t.
