I grew up in a very large house (actually a converted cow barn) on a street that is suburban today but that, back in the early ‘70s, was closer to being outright rural. My mother and I were often alone in this house, and in the evenings I’d look out at the lights of our neighbors – wavering behind a green curtain of summer leaves or bright and bare through winter branches – and wonder why it was that people lived this way: close enough to know that others were out there somewhere, yet too far away for the fact to make much difference.
I watched a lot of TV during my years in that big converted cow barn, and the shows I liked best -- from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Mayberry RFD to MASH -- were always those that featured a community of one kind or another.
Far and away my favorite of these shows was Hogan’s Heroes. With their secret radio messages, underground tunnels, and endless late-night excursions into the German countryside to blow up bridges or secure some all-important roll of microfilm, Hogan and his men inhabited what was, to my mind, a supremely enviable world. Unlike the safe yet subtly insecure semi-suburban limbo I lived in, Hogan’s world was one where all apparent dangers and discomforts were mere camouflage. Truth be told, Stalag 13 was a place both comfortable, and comforting, in the extreme. A place where people were always coming and going, where something was always happening, and where (despite all the endless times Colonel Clink threatened Hogan with a spell in the cooler) no one was ever really alone.
Why couldn’t my own life be more like that?
Hogan’s Heroes didn’t enter my thinking for many years. Then, in the summer of 1995, I went off to rehab -- and suddenly found myself being reminded of it constantly. Like Stalag 13, rehab wasn’t supposed to be a fun place. In fact, prior to my ending up there, it would have been on my list of top-ten places in the world I’d do anything to avoid. But after only a few days there, I realized that this Spartan, three-people-to-a-room zoo – this place where constant dramas were going on, where one rarely had a moment to oneself, and where one was constantly being taken to task for just about everything one said, was in truth a strangely comfortable, and comforting, place as well.
“All alcoholics crave community,” my counselor remarked, in his usual to-the-point way, when I brought up this strange fact of my feeling so at home there. “You’ve probably been looking for a community your entire drinking life.”
He was right of course. At high school and later at college, I was one of those people who never left a party at the right time – the sensible time. There was always a part of me that was incensed at the idea that any party should EVER have to end. And the funny thing was, this was really not because I was all that much more lazy or hedonistic than other people; it was because there was a part of me that was searching for a real-life Stalag 13. A place where activity, interaction, CONNECTION, never came to an end, but just went on and on, forever.
Much as I enjoyed the atmosphere of rehab, it took me a while to sufficiently enter into the spirit of things that I was able to sit down and actually give the Big Book a try. When I finally did, one of the first passages that stopped me was the part at the end of Bill’s Story where Bill says the following:
“Most of us feel we need look no further for Utopia. We have it with us right here and now. Each day my friend’s simple talk in our kitchen multiplies itself in a widening circle of peace on earth and good will toward men.”
There was something in that image of talk between two people multiplying itself in an ever-widening circle that caught what I’d been experiencing so far at rehab. For years, I’d taken advantage of the fact that when I drank – in particular, when I drank amid large groups of people – my actual experience of the world changed. Drinking at parties, I often used to get a feeling of being transparent – that there wasn’t really a clear place where the world ended and I began. Small, crowded bars provided this feeling as well. Places that should have felt chaotic and threatening often felt – provided I drank enough – positively womb-like. And on those occasions when I’d tried to stop drinking on my own, one of the first things -- perhaps THE first thing -- I missed to the point of distraction was that sense of plugging into the secret grid of connection that lay hiding beneath the isolation and separation of the ordinary world, just the way all those secret tunnels and passageways did on Hogan's Heroes.
When you get right down to it, the world really IS kind of like Stalag 13. There's a surface layer of distance and disconnection in ordinary existence that can drive one mad if one can't penetrate beyond it. But there's another world beneath that one. A world not characterized by separation and distance, but by a kind of endless openness. A world of spirit. A world I'd once convinced myself was reachable only through alcohol, but that, wonder of wonders, turned out to be reachable by entirely other means altogether.
Means as simple, even, as two people talking in a kitchen.