Murder and Mayhem
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| 5/29/2008 |
by Ames S.
amess@sober24.com
A friend of mine called me at work the other day, a friend I’ve known
in recovery for over 25 years. Basically, she called to complain about
the flood of bad news that seemed to have overtaken her life in the
previous few days.
It was the kind of complaining we’ve done with each other over the years, where neither of us makes any attempt to fix or ameliorate the situations being described; no advice is dispensed, no inference taken. It’s more like a listening service we provide for each other, a sympathetic ear.
“And then my brother may have cancer,” she said, concluding a string of difficult health situations facing a number of people she was close to.
“Everything seems to happen at once,” I said, citing the unwritten law in sobriety that bad news comes in multiples. “It’s tough enough one at a time,” I said, “but everything at once?”
We both agreed it was clearly an overload. There was no realistic distribution of pain, no manageable apportionment of emotional distress. Essentially, it just wasn’t fair.
Having reached that conclusion, we both felt a little better.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get all the bad news that’s coming to us in a lifetime in advance,” I said. “You know, if it could all be stored up in one of those plastic containers that hold coffee beans in the supermarket with the little door that you lift up to let the beans drop out. That way we could control it. Let it out just a little bit at a time.”
As we pondered this image, both of us chuckled.
“Yeah,” she said. “And no doubt the door would get stuck.”
The image of coffee beans spilling out uncontrollably, bouncing all over the supermarket floor, made us both laugh.
“Oh, well…” she said, with the kind of resignation and acceptance that sobriety brings to situations that are beyond our control, “So be it.”
After we hung up, I decided to go to a lunchtime meeting near where I work. I was feeling grateful that I wasn’t in the same boat as my friend, but a little unsettled with the sensation that at virtually any moment a tidal wave of bad news could flood into my life, as it had into hers, upsetting the sense of order I have been trying to maintain. I don’t usually worry about things like this, but every so often I start to feel myself drawing up into a shell, a protective walnut shell.
In the meeting, a fellow described how he had just been away for Memorial Day weekend at a family event. There was a fair amount of drinking going on and he discovered that the icebox in the kitchen was totally jammed with bottles of Corona and every time he went to get something to eat or drink, the beer was calling out to him.
He didn’t drink, but he said it really started getting on his nerves. As he spoke, I remembered my friend Scott, a guy I got sober with 30 years ago.
When Scott reached the end of his drinking, there happened to be two bottles of beer left in his refrigerator. He didn’t know exactly what to do with them – he didn’t want to throw them out and he didn’t want to drink them – so he just left them there, languishing in the chilly depths along with the changing cast of characters that often inhabit the shelves of a recovering alcoholic’s refrigerator: containers of old Chinese food, boxes of Entenmen’s chocolate donuts, a few obligatory vegetables, some ketchup. As the months passed and Scott – and his refrigerator – got healthier, the more powerful, symbolically, the beer bottles became. He named them: Murder and Mayhem.
When Scott and I talked, there was a horizontal communication between us, the same kind of communication that happened when I talked to other alcoholics. All my life, I had been used to a vertical kind of communication when it came to my drinking, usually with someone up above me – a policeman, a therapist, a concerned friend – saying things like, “You shouldn’t be drinking,” or “Can’t you see what it’s doing to you?” All the communication was up and down.
But in AA, things moved from side to side, from one suffering alcoholic to another, and I completely understood why Scott held on to Murder and Mayhem.
I felt much better after the meeting. I realized there wasn’t anything I had to do to “protect” myself from the unseen hordes of potential misfortune that might or might not be waiting for me around the corner; that if bad things did start to come my way, I would deal with them as effectively as I could, if necessary, on a moment by moment basis. And, if I felt overwhelmed, there were people I could talk to.
But mostly I realized that so long as I don’t drink, I can, like my friend, keep Murder and Mayhem at bay.
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