Don Lee - The Collective

We said amen, and then there were introductions, and then Tim announced the topic for discussion that night — Self-Acceptance — and several members went to the podium to speak, sharing their drunkalogues, the stories familiar yet affecting. An ex — Navy SEAL used to sneak into bathhouses and public restrooms, blind drunk, and have anonymous sex with men and then beat them up, all the while in the closet in the military. A doctor started drinking and taking Benzedrine in med school, which progressed to injecting Demerol and Pentothal and losing his medical license, his wife, his kids, and his house. A man whose partner had died of AIDS found himself going to bars and picking up men and having unprotected sex with them and becoming HIV-positive himself.

The meeting was wrapping up. They handed out baskets for the Seventh Tradition, asking for contributions, and Tim was about to close with the Lord’s Prayer when Joshua, who had been silent and respectful all evening, raised his hand without warning. “Could I come up and speak?” he asked.

Tim squinted at him, disconcerted. “Well, this is a little unorthodox, but I suppose it’d be all right.”

Joshua rose out of his chair, and I grabbed his arm. “Don’t do this,” I said.

“Don’t worry, this will be great,” he said, and walked to the head of the room.

“What’s he up to?” Mirielle whispered.

“Nothing good, I’m sure,” I told her.

At the podium, he said, “My name is Joshua.”

“Hi, Joshua,” everyone said.

“I’ve been listening very carefully to the testimonials this evening — they’ve been truly inspiring and courageous. But I have to admit discomfort standing here, in the basement of a Christian church. I’m Jewish, you see. Call me cynical, but I have difficulty putting much stock in Christianity, when the entirety of the religion was built upon believing an unmarried fifteen-year-old girl’s explanation for how she got pregnant.”

The audience crowed.

“I was born on Cheju Island, off the southwestern tip of the Korean Peninsula. I was abandoned when I was four days old and sent to an orphanage on the mainland, in the port city of Pusan. I know nothing about my parents. It could be that my mother was an unmarried fifteen-year-old girl who couldn’t manufacture a clever explanation for how she got pregnant. When I was five, one of the teachers at the orphanage molested me. I told the administrators, but no one would believe me. They took me into the courtyard, where they’d assembled all the kids, and made me proclaim that I had been lying and then shaved off all the hair from my head.

“I ran away the next year. I stowed away on a cargo container ship and ended up in Hawaii, where I begged on the streets and worked the sugar plantation fields. An old Chinese hooker got me drunk one night and absolved me of my virginity when I was seven. Thereafter, sex and alcohol were forever enjoined for me. After a few years, I got into a bit of trouble with the law and had to decamp. I hitched a ride on a tanker to San Francisco and picked Brussels sprouts and artichokes in a small town called Rosarita Bay.”

“Goddamn him,” I muttered. “Goddamn him.”

“A family of Mexican migrant workers took me in, sort of as their mascot, and I followed them down the San Joaquin Valley and through Arizona to Brownsville, Texas. Oddly, in the Lone Star State, I found myself discriminated against more than the wetbacks.”

He recounted the Southie pier story, only he changed his age to ten and the setting to Port Isabel, on the edge of Laguna Madre. In the church basement, when he got to the climax about the duct tape, there were gasps and soughs of sympathy.

“I became a syrup head. I’d steal prescription cough medicine and mix it with Sprite and drink it by the gallon. Texas tea, it was called. I was also a compulsive masturbator. I’d create these ornate fantasies with which to beat off, using a variety of props: gym socks, milk bottles, and, once, a big piece of liver that was sitting in the refrigerator. I got addicted to porn. I literally wanted to fuck anything that walked.”

“Um, the profanity?” Tim cautioned from the front row.

“Sorry. I’d have sex with anything ambulatory, including — I regret to say — three times with the family dog, a rat terrier named Pepe. I started snorting coke and smack, and I became a street hustler — men, women, whatever. I’d do anything for money. I had this beautiful blond girlfriend in junior high school, Leigh Anne Wiatt.”

“Just first names, please,” Tim said.

“Leigh Anne, Leigh Anne — a tasty little majorette with a bad-girl streak. I took her across the border and got her doped up and sold her to some cholos for a donkey show. She couldn’t pee straight for a year.”

Now there were guttural protests, not laughter. Some men looked at each other, bewildered, angry. Beside me, Mirielle was furious. Joshua had gone too far. He was enjoying himself too much. People were beginning to catch on that he was playing an elaborate hoax on them, constructing a grand tour of misfortune and debauchery. He was ad-libbing, slapping his narrative together by tapping into a few raunchy movies and dysfunctional memoirs of the day, as well as Portnoy’s Complaint , sparing no one (Mirielle, me, my parents, Kathryn Newey), and, worst of all, lampooning the earnest speeches that had been shared earlier that night. He was making a mockery of the entire program. Once the rest of the crowd figured it out, there’d be mayhem. They would lynch him. And I would let them. It was unpardonable, what he was doing.

“The Mexican family eventually kicked me out. I made my way to Detroit to join the hip-hop scene there, and I got jumped by two laid-off autoworkers with baseball bats. I was in a coma for three weeks. I still get seizures, can’t hear out of my left ear. By the time I got out of the hospital, I was hooked on painkillers: roxis, percs, Captain Codys, vikes, Miss Emmas, I’d take whatever I could get my hands on, and do whatever I had to in order to get zombed. I kited checks. I robbed johns. I jacked cars. I scammed a bunch of Hmongs with a pyramid scheme.

“I got sent to juvie, where for a while I was a regular dick cushion. What saved me was a counselor, a girl from Massachusetts just out of college. Her name was Didi. She said while I was incarcerated, I might as well make use of my time and get an education. She figured out I was dyslexic and tutored me. I started keeping a journal and writing letters — long, intimate letters — to imaginary relatives. I’d actually mail them, picking out addresses at random from an atlas: Uncle Dae-hyung in Kittery, Maine, Grandma Soo-bong in Weeki Wachee, Florida.

“Didi and I fell in love. She was a sweet, modest girl who’d never done anything wrong, born and raised in Lowell, where her family owned a bakery store renowned for its sourdough bread. I moved with her to Lawrence, got my GED and a job at the New Balance factory, and went straight. For the first time in my life, I was happy. But her family, this large Irish clan, wouldn’t accept me — they said they never would, not this degenerate ex-junkie gook — and eventually Didi couldn’t take the pressure anymore and left me.

“I started drinking and pharming again. I felt so alone. I wanted to die so many times. Just shut everything down. Why—” Joshua’s voice cracked, and he closed his eyes. “Why did everyone I ever care about leave me?”

He clutched the edges of the podium, stared down at the microphone, and didn’t speak again for more than a minute. The crowd, which had become increasingly agitated and hostile, quieted. They all knew by now that his entire monologue had been a fabrication, but they could sense, as I did, a subtle change — that inadvertently Joshua had stumbled upon a cavity of undisguised emotion.