Drew Smith - Arcade

“Welcome, welcome,” a guy with a clipboard said to everyone. “Please get coffee and a donut and find a seat.”

I stood by Greg while he got a cup of coffee, then we found two chairs next to one another. The man with the clipboard said, “Hello, everyone. I’m Dave, and I’m a sex addict.”

“Hi, Dave,” we all said.

“Hi. First I want to say welcome to all these new faces. We’re very glad to see you today. Thank you for coming. If you have any questions or need help, please reach out to me or Bob after the meeting.”

Bob raised his hand.

“Many of you knew coming in today that this is a special meeting. A fifth step meeting. Which is when a single individual undertakes the completion of his or her fifth step.”

Reading from his clipboard: “In which we admit to God, ourselves, and other human beings the exact nature of our wrongdoing.”

“As you might imagine, the fifth step can only take place after the completion of the fourth step, in which the addict”—again reading from the clipboard—“makes a searching and fearless moral inventory of himself or herself.”

The leader spoke for a moment longer while my attention was drawn to the anxious-looking man sitting next to him. He was a handsome guy with a good haircut in his early forties, wearing fitted black jeans and an expensive-looking button-up shirt. While Dave wrapped up his introduction, the man removed a few stapled-together pages from a worn backpack at his feet.

“Now I’ll pass the floor to Don.”

The handsome man with the pages said, “Hi, everyone, my name is Don, and I’m a sex addict.”

In chorus: “Hi, Don.”

Looking at the pages in his hands, we could all see how badly Don’s hands were shaking.

It wasn’t until he began to speak that I understood what we were witnessing. Essentially, it was to be an extended, public confession of all his sexual sins.

“When I was eleven, I had the family dog lick my penis until I reached orgasm. I don’t know how many times I did that. Several times.

“When I was twelve, I began taking my mother’s underwear from the laundry hamper and masturbating with them. Soon after that, I started doing the same thing with my sister’s underwear. Sometimes I smelled and licked them. Sometimes I just used them for masturbation.

“That same year, I convinced my twelve-year-old friend, who was also a male, to put his mouth on my penis. After that, we traded oral sex several times, sometimes more than once a day.”

The list droned on and on. It seemed like ages before Don even arrived at the depravities of his actual adulthood. When he did, he didn’t mention sexual encounters he’d had with his girlfriends or his wives. He talked about all the women he’d had sex with outside of those relationships. He talked about picking women up at bars and having sex with one of his cousins when she was drunk and possibly blacked out. He talked about being a musician and how women sometimes threw themselves at him. He said the reason he got into music in the first place was that in high school, he realized it would help him get laid. He talked about having sex with unattractive women and women he knew to be carriers of one or another social disease when he was at his most desperate. He talked about all the times he’d had gonorrhea and syphilis and how many times a girl had called and told him he had given her chlamydia. He talked about how often he had had sex with women knowing he had an STL He talked about the occasions when he had sex with men, though he was straight.

I had tagged along with alcoholic friends to a few AA meetings in the past, so I had imagined I knew what to expect. This was something very different. There was an electricity in the air, and it grew more and more intense as the man spoke. Everyone in the room was so rapt, I couldn’t help wondering if there was a voyeuristic dimension to it for everyone, or if I was the only one sick enough to have a prurient curiosity about what the man might confess to next. I wondered if the men in the room were concealing erections. Don, still reading his list, was obviously ashamed and desperately regretful. I couldn’t imagine how he was doing what he was doing. It seemed unbearably courageous and unbearable in general.

As a kid, I had a particular vision of Judgment Day that I worried about all the time. I still envisioned it even in adulthood. I thought that God reserved judgment until everyone was dead, and that we all arrived in the afterlife at the same moment. I imagined all of mankind together in one place and that we’d take turns being judged. When it was my turn, all the people I had ever known would come to the front of the crowd, with the other members of humanity behind them. I would stand on a platform facing them, with God beside me. Then He would call out every sin I had ever committed for everyone to hear.

I’d have to admit to each transgression and then repent in front of everyone. It would last for months, except that the concept of months wouldn’t exist in eternity. I had the idea that it wouldn’t be enough merely to say I was sorry. I would have to mean it. I would have to honestly believe that, given a chance to revisit the moment of sin, I would make a different choice, to live differently, in absolute purity of spirit, completely free of immorality. Of course, God would be able to see my heart. There was no way He was going to let me move on to the next item on the list unless my regret was complete and heartfelt. And if I couldn’t repent in earnest, then I’d have to go to hell. There, standing before me, would be everyone I had ever loved and hated and met once at a party, and even Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Hitchens and the cop who was my first love and his teenage boyfriend. And I would have to change everything I had ever done.

I worried about the sins that led me to meet some of them and how those people would recede into the crowd once I gave up the sins that had brought us together, all the loves and friendships and days and nights of excitement and pleasure and giddy fear. I thought about all the memories that would fade and then vanish. I wondered if I’d be able to do it. I didn’t see how I could. It seemed like too much to ask, to take so much of it back.

And here was this guy trying to do it all by himself in this room full of sex addicts and me, a spectator as always. You had to give him credit. You have to give the whole recovery culture credit, I swear. I’m sure there are all sorts of things I wouldn’t like about it if I was immersed in it myself, but I do admire it. Where else in the world are people taking “searching and fearless moral inventories”?

At the end of the meeting, Don turned the last page in his sheaf and said, “Okay, that’s it. Thank you for listening.”

“Thank you, Don,” everyone said.

Whatever ambivalence I felt about the process, I was glad to have been there for it, to be an audience for his redemption. Before we left, the leader of the group, who had introduced the fifth stepper said, “Does anyone have anything they need to say before we call it a day?”

It seemed that no one was going to speak, but then a man in his late 60s in a purple golfing shirt and tan shorts stood up. He looked like someone’s grandfather, a retiree who would give you preachy advice about buying American-made cars and have a pool table at his house. As soon as he was on his feet, he was sobbing.

“My name is Larry. And I might be a sex addict. I don’t really know.”

“Hi, Larry.”

The man stood there barely able to speak. Finally he said, “Last night, my wife and my family found out who I really am. I don’t know where I’m sleeping tonight. They all hate me. I didn’t know where to go. I hope you can help me. I need help. I need you to help me however you can.”