Mitchell Jackson - The Residue Years

Hello, I’m an addict and my name is Randy, he says. Welcome to the Learning to Live chapter of Narcotics Anonymous. I’d like to open this meeting with a moment of silence for the addict who still suffers. This settles us. Randy hops off the table and pads near a portable chalkboard.

Is there anyone attending their first meeting? he says. If so, welcome. You are the most important people here. All we ask is that everyone present follow one law: Never attend a meeting with drugs or paraphernalia on your person. If you’re carrying, please take it outside and leave it and we’ll welcome you back. This protects our meeting place and the NA fellowship as a whole. Randy moves near the first row of seats. He’s short and soft, a mix that usually gives grown men a complex, but somehow commanding. You have to make five years or more to lead a group, which means for us — or at least those of us know who’ve been in this place, those who’ve tried and failed, who’ve quit and joined — Randy is an apostle. If you’ve used today, please seek out a fellow member at the break or after the meeting, he says. It costs nothing to belong. You are a member when you say you are.

As is my habit, I scan the shoes of the members in my row — it ain’t a clean pair among them — then off to my sides. My neighbor’s arm is sprent with needle pricks, his thumbnail discolored. No way to justify this life, my life, but slamming a needle is a whole other harm. Randy leads us in the we version of the Serenity Prayer: God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference .

We finish and members volunteer — everyone’s always so eager to submit — to read from the basic text.

Who is an addict?

What is the program?

Why are we here?

How does it work?

The twelve traditions.

The meetings begin the same. So goes a theory of resurrection.

An addict, any addict, can stop using, lose the desire to use, and learn a new way of life , they say.

They say and they say and it sounds so easy, as if living clean is no more than hitting the right switch, as if it takes something less than heroics to face history dead-on, to accept the life we’ve earned. The meetings are meant to be havens, but not everyone comes for safety. Last week. I wasn’t but few blocks away last meeting when this guy approached me — breath smelling like the worst breath — claiming he had what I need. I’d seen him in the meeting, reciting the steps, even stuffing money in the seventh principle basket, seen him running his glazed eyes up and down the rows. No, I think I got what you need, I said, and offered him a handful of mints.

We make fearless and searching inventories.

Hello, I’m an addict and my name is Mark. My drug of choice is meth. I used to deal it, then, bam , my first hit. Couldn’t breathe without the shit after that. Every day spent chasing the next score. The next hit and nothing else. Up for a friggin week straight sometimes, getting high, no food, a sip of water when I remembered. A real addict too. Would piss myself if the dope wasn’t finished and a trip to the bathroom meant missing a hit. It wasn’t long before people I’d known all my life turned their heads when they saw me coming, seen someone resembling the old me, with the way, on a good run, I’d shrink down to a percent of myself, skin with a few sharp sticks inside. Got so bad I couldn’t friggin stand to walk past a mirror. The dope dropped me so low that I broke in my mom’s place and stole her wedding ring. Worthless man, no other way to put it. Scum who didn’t deserve to live.

We make fearless and searching inventories and tell the fearful to keep coming back. Keep coming back and it works. We can stand up and testify when we so choose. But what would I tell them? That the first time I took my eldest. That Dawn, my best friend, promised I’d feel better and forget. That I’ve been waiting for that to happen ever since. Though when we tell our story, a bit of our trouble becomes another’s, there will be no fearless and searching inventory for me. Not today. My business is my business until it isn’t.

Randy announces Cleaniversaries, and awardees stroll up to accept their tags. It makes me think of the time I earned a tag, years ago, my first stint in NA. Was proud of it too, but not proud enough to show it. Too afraid of what people might think, or, worse, what they might say. The awardees palm their foil-scripted color tags and stroll back to their seats while the rest of us boom our hands together. Honest, it makes me jealous seeing them. Makes me anxious for my time to come. And when it arrives this time, who cares who sees? When it comes this time, let them all see.

We pass around the seventh-principle basket. We search for something to give, singles mostly, a few fives and tens, an odd twenty. I scrounge for dollars, the best I can do. We read up to the twelfth tradition, the first one I learned by heart: Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities .

* * *

The other night I watched a show on drugs. It talked about this study where they rigged rats to a machine that shot them with cocaine every time they pressed a bar. The man on the show explained that the rats pressed the bar at the expense of food, sex, sleep, pressed even when it meant they’d suffer electric shock, kept right on pressing for hits until they fell out dead.

Ain’t a spot to squeeze in nowhere in sight, which shouldn’t really be no big old surprise, since most days, meaning a day like today, finding a place to park near campus is like defying physics or catching a lightning bolt or slapping bullets out of midair. Been so bad, twice I wrote a letter (didn’t send either one of them, though) to our crater-face school president beseeching him to increase the meter count or better yet build a new garage so fools don’t have to wander miles upon miles trying to find a spot for their ride. By the time I find a spot, by my kick around watch, I’ve missed almost half of Professor Haskins’s Advanced Speech class. With no change for the meter and no time to get none, I leave the car parked on a prayer, meter blinking expired, leave it paralleled, throw on my backpack, and zip down Broadway, hustling around the tennis courts to the canopied park blocks and the pebble-paved pathway where last winter I slipped on a patch of ice and busted my ass.

And here’s the cold part about being late to Haskins’s class: The room is too small to sneak in unnoticed, not a chance of it, so I burst into a dead sprint. Okay, okay (there goes the hype again), something close to a dead sprint is more like it, what with leaves on the ground and the ache of bruising my ass-cheeks months back is still fresh on my mind. My legs kicking and my arms pumping so fast they blur the words of the dude with the Santa Claus beard proselytizing from an overturned bucket. Legs kicking and arms pumping past nerds plowing through notes, past pretty young things lap-balancing encyclopedia-thick texts, past jocks strolling with knotted tenny shoes looped over their shoulders, past huddles of exchange students, all the while the smell of roasted lamb, roasted chicken, and seasoned ground beef taunting my empty gut. But ain’t no time for snacking. Pow! I duck into one building, blast through another and another with that juiced-up Olympian speed, me zagging through clogs of striving Einsteins till I reach Haskins’s room, stoop to catch my breath, fix my laces, and pull my shirt from where it’s stuck to my skin from sweat.