Meetings

I’ve been down this road before. Back the 1980s there was an organization formed to deal with the special needs of cocaine addicts who were perched upon the crest of the wave of white powder that the tide rolled into the U.S. during the Reagan administration. The organization was Cocaine Anonymous. I had entered the CA ranks in the summer of 1985. I left a good job, career and friends in Las Vegas and sought cleaner pastures in Arizona in the hope that I could escape my dealer and drugging friends. It didn’t work. Within a month I had located ever source in town and was more strung-out than ever before. I spent 90 days going to meetings noon and night until I simply couldn’t take it anymore. When you enter a 12-step program they will tell you that you’ve got to do “90 in 90” which means ninety meetings in ninety days. The net result for me was that I never, ever did cocaine again. I abstained not because of the program, but merely because I knew, in my heart, that if I continued to do cocaine that I would have to spend the rest of my life with these people and with the program. It was a very good motivator. Unfortunately, Oxy was something I could not deal with quite so smoothly.
 
A lot of things have changed since the good old 80s. Now, NA is a big phenomenon, or at least bigger than it was. When I was in CA I would occasionally go to a small NA meeting, and as I recall there was only one a week, conducted in a small park around a tree. Now that I was faced with going to meetings again, I was surprised to see that there were NA meetings scheduled at least five times a day, seven days a week in my city.
 
My first meeting was dismal. I had failed. I had failed to realize the first step of any 12 step program: I was an addict and my life had become unmanageable. All of my attempts to keep my addiction a secret had failed. All of the hard work I had put into getting high had landed me here. I gazed across the room at homeless people, harpooners, meth freaks, parolees, white trash, brown trash, black trash, wierdos, freaks, and outcasts. I was now one of them. I was there because of my wife, but it became rapidly clear that I needed to be there because of someone else: me.
 
My name is Gus. I am an addict.