Hardware Not Included

Clinically proven. I lived between rivers of drinking and islands of insanity. There were lots of reasons for it. But I bet you’ve heard them all before. It’s hard to beat a drunk for the lies he’ll tell you. I’ve taken my turn. Before it became gentrified and we got moved on, sat dapper as an undertaker, at the top table of an AA meeting in the borough hall. When the cry when out for order, where there was none, before we even had sandwiches and sometimes a nice bit of cake at the end, I can still here  wee Hugh shouting ‘Fergus’. 

I’m already standing and giving my usual spiel. Like a blind man tapping his cane I run through the high points of my life: beautiful wife, beautiful daughters, ugly sons- they take after me (usually that gets a laugh). Then wipe the chalk dust clean. Tell them how I lost it all because I’m an alcoholic. One day at a time. Polite applause.

Somebody else take a turn in dismembering their life. Funny guys like Mick live for this moment. How they’d sold the baby and the bathwater and drunk horse piss to get that kick. And how their mother was down on her knees, pulling at his sleeve crying ‘Michael I prayed for you to the Blessed Virgin. You know I did. A dozen rosaries.’ And how she wouldn’t let him go, but he sneaked out the window. And later with a busted arm and leg broken in two places, ankle black and the size of Rottweiler’s head, but with more bite, how he crawled back into the house and stole his mum’s purse to get another drink. He didn’t mean to. It was just lying there, but it had took him fifteen minutes of slug-like crawling about the sticky rat runs of the linoleum before he was able to find it, jammed between the space between sink and cupboard at the wall. A poxy sixpence in it. His mum treating him like a stranger. That it was more insult than robbery. It would take a lot more to go to hell than she was offering.

Back then we hung about outside the halls waiting for the door to open like the big book. Not the bible. That other one. The AA’s 12 steps to heaven. You’ve heard it all before. How you admit to yourself and others that you are powerless and need something or someone to step in and help you take control of your life. Metal ringing against metal, the background noise of our lives. Day and night. Everybody smoking the bejesus out of the place. Smoking every kind of cigarette. It kills you. We knew that even then. Not drinking. Never drinking. Drinking beats the shit out of you, before it kills you. Men scattered like loose change on the pavement. Lots of guys from the yards, but you know you get them all. Doctors, dentists, priests. But we didn’t have women at our meetings. Not like now. Or what I remember.

The first time I went to a meeting I was scared, not so much what was inside the hall, but what was inside me. But I’d a sponsor, big Tommy from the Drum. Laughing and smoking, using the world as an ashtray, larger than life. Dead now, of course.

‘Don’t be a fuckin eejit,’ he said, when I told him I was leaving.

I was shaking like a troop train. He handed me a fag. Then when he saw I couldn’t manage, lit one for me and stuck it between my lips. The smoke calmed me a bit.

‘Whit’s the worse that can happen?’ Tommy said. ‘You’re already here.’

An older guy, pouchy eyed and tight lipped slapped me on the back. ‘Don’t worry about it kid,’ he said, ‘we’ve all been there’.

The door opened and we trailed inside. On the left of the vestibule discoloured wooden tiles set out in an octagonal patterns. I followed my feet, could hardly raise my head. The hallways space to our right was high and narrow, murky light. Panels of frosted glass. The stink of something dying, which I realised was coming from my body, my breath. Tommy dropped back, as if to block my escape. The narrow stairs, ribs of metal tacked to each lip to prevent wear. Men shuffling up to the room above. Plaster walls the colour of piss. Sepulchral gloom. There was a squashed battered bin shaped like a hat, overflowing with douts, spilling onto the floor, outside the double doors on my right, but inside the meeting rooms it was high ceilings and plenty of light. I was saved. That’s how it goes, isn’t it.

Sober -you are their saviour and they are yours. The moment you set eyes on them, it doesn’t matter what day or week, or where you are or what you’ve done, you recognise mortality and these people— these fellow drunks— as yourself. It’s a democracy of the fallen. Pulled back from the edge.

Everybody one step from dissolution and a sharp return to the life they had. But sometimes that doesn’t sound so bad. It’s that old Dean Martin line, in sobriety that's as good as you’re going to feel all day. And it’s not that you’re craving for a drink, but that certainly helps. Or you’re testing yourself. One drink, and no more. F Scott Fitzgerald. He did that. One drink, as proof of god- knows what. That ticks all the boxes too. The truth is you get nostalgic for a past that never existed. Drink takes you straight down that rabbit hole.

It helps when you get bored with the whole AA thing. You don’t need a pencil moustache, or to invade Poland or even Possipark, there was a Hitler in every group. Infighting. Putsches. Kids being told that no they can’t go and visit their mum in hospital because they need to go to a meeting. That would be the best way to help her. Some folk crave power in the same way other folk crave drink. Cultism.

Let me tell you what I did do, or didn’t do. And I’m not blaming Harriet, not really. You need to take a moral inventory. That means being honest. You don’t need god for that, but it helps. But go on, try it at home before you start condemning me.

Falling off the wagon is easy. The hard part is picking yourself up. Harriet picked me up. That was her mistake. Mine too I guess.