He didn’t expect a warm welcome, but he was still shocked by what he discovered. Things were uncomfortable from the start. Charlie was sitting in a church basement on a Wednesday night. There were only two reasons why someone might do that. The Bible study was in the pastor’s office across the hall so that wasn’t the reason. This was an AA meeting. And despite having never been much of a drinker or ever having entered this place before, he felt like everyone else knew him and already hated him.
The room was a function hall. Tables were folded on either side and a service counter like in a school cafeteria stood behind the lectern. Charlie sat in the back row of folding metal chairs. Every now and then one of the two dozen or so attendees, mostly gray hairs his age, glanced back to check that he was still there. They tried to make it discreet, but the problem with trying to make a discreet check for the continued existence of someone without showing your disgust for this existence is that it can’t be done. You can try, but you’d be a fool for it.
It didn’t take Charlie long to figure out the reason for this furtive animosity. That very reason presented itself soon enough in the form of a woman taking the lectern. She was in her early sixties but looked a decade younger. The hard life she’d led didn’t show on her. If anything, she looked more poised and self assured and filled with energy than Charlie had remembered from a good stretch of her middle years.
“I’m Sharon.” she said. “And I’ve been sober for ten years.”
The audience mumbled a greeting. There was a pause and Charlie heard a noise from across the hall, from the Bible study. The voices were muffled, but it sounded as though the pastor were saying, “now calm down, Edward.” If Sharon had noticed this, she didn’t show it. Who was Edward and what in holy hell could be happening in a reading of the Second Epistle to Timothy that might make him excited enough to solicit a warning? Oh well, Sharon spoke again.
“I have found that along the road to my recovery, there have been people I had to distance myself from or else risk letting them slow my progress. This has been harder than I thought, because all of those people are ones I love. Giving up drinking has required its sacrifices but never did I expect I would have to sacrifice relationships. Had my therapist not suggested it then I might have never come to this realization on my own.”
That shed more light on the wave of disapproving looks that had washed about the room. It was pretty clear that somehow he was one of these people who’d stood in the way of her recovery. He wondered what stories these people had heard, and how many were creative fiction. For a moment, Charlie considered standing up and shouting at this woman, his sister. But before she could finish her speech, the ruckus from the Bible study got too loud to ignore. Edward, the man having difficulty staying calm, began screaming. It sounded as though he’d busted free from the study and was wondering the hall that separated the two groups.
“Satan is in me!” he shouted. “Satan is in me!”
The function room door burst open and Edward came tumbling in. He looked kind of normal. His eyes were squinty and obscured by the glare of fluorescent light off his big round glasses. He was balding on the top but had retained a carpet of short coarse red hair above each ear. He was dressed in a crew neck shirt tucked into khaki pants, all rounded out by a pair of loafers with those silly tassels. In one hand he held a Bible. Meanwhile, he was waving the other over his head. If you’d taken a photo and showed it to someone, he would look a little excitable but otherwise sane. It was in motion that it was clear he’d lost his goddam mind.
Edward plowed into a collection of empty chairs and tumbled over them. Two women and a man came to help, but when they got to him, he leapt to his feet as if part frog and shouted once more,
“The devil is in me!”
The other people from the Bible study were gathered at the door, but reluctant to enter. Then a man pushed through them. He was probably the pastor, Charlie guessed. This guy was huge, probably some former military guy given the close cropped hair and the way he carried himself. Charlie walked over. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but this just didn’t seem to him like the thing you walk away from. He and Captain Pastor reached Eddie at about the same time. That was when Edward, back on his feet and making a nervous scan of the room, its occupants, and its probable exits, glanced at Charlie. “Glance” probably wasn’t the right word. The phrase locked his eyes entered Charlie’s head, but to him that sounded like some kind of love story, as if music should start playing while the entire room besides the two of them went dark. Hey, Edward did look ready to dance after all. Regardless, this self-described demon possessed man was looking at Charlie and he wasn’t looking away.
Charlie didn’t make any gestures toward him, no sudden moves. All he did was speak.
“Are you feeling a little calmer, Edward? Can I come closer?”
Edward nodded. Charlie came close enough to smell the other man’s breath, which stank of booze. Case solved, he supposed. That didn’t mean this was going to be easy. Charlie exchanged a look with the preacher, and the preacher nodded. It seemed that somehow Edward was going to let Charlie approach and Charlie alone, so it was best he was the one to do so. He put a slow hand on the man’s shoulder and with his eyes gestured to the back of the room. They both went there and Charlie pulled a couple chairs back with him, but then he paused, shot a look over his shoulder, and realized that there was no safe place in this room. He led his charge out the door while both the AA and Bible study people kept their distance.
There was a storage area with some lockers and a steel desk pushed against a wall. They sat here and Charlie watched Eddie shiver and watch the floor for a few minutes.
“Listen,” said Charlie. “Can I ask you a question that you don’t have to answer? Do you want to be here?”
Edward’s eyes rose slowly. He shook his head.
Charlie said, “Neither do I.” He smiled and shrugged. “Somehow I thought coming would make things better. I thought it would make someone happy to show up at something she thought was important. But it turns out it’s important because it’s a place where she gets to tell other people what she wants about her life. When I came here I messed it up.”
Edward hugged himself and returned his gaze to the floor, saying, “My mother makes me come.”
He suspected as much. This was a grown man, but even intoxicated he displayed signs of childishness that Charlie recognized. He’d seen them in his own brother, a man their mother had abused for being slow.
“She’s hoping it will help you?” said Charlie.
The other man nodded.
More to himself than anyone else, Charlie said, “I guess you picked the easy way out. I don’t blame you.” He took a long sigh. “Would you like to stay with me for a while if your mother would allow that? I don’t know if you really think the devil’s in you or not, but either way it’s okay with me. Maybe it’s a safer place for you to be.”
He didn’t know why he should expect a complete stranger to accept this offer, and yet he did. This wasn’t the first time he’d brought home a friend. Charlie was the kind of guy strangers would strike up a conversation with while waiting for the crosswalk. Most of these strangers were the kinds of people who were looking for someone like him, and somehow he broadcast that in ways even he didn’t understand himself. But he knew when it was happening. He knew the moment Edward’s body changed in that function all that this was another stranger at the crosswalk. Edward accepted and Charlie stood, promising to return in a moment. The preacher was waiting outside.
“Edward has some mental problems.” he said. “And I think…”
“He’s been drinking, I know. I’m going to let him sleep it off at my place. I’ve got a sense that if he goes home like this it’s not going to be good for him. Do you know his mother? Can you ask her?”
“You don’t have to…”
Charlie laughed, “Of course I don’t.”
There was silence between them and Charlie glanced down the hall. Sharon hadn’t come out. Maybe she was waiting to see if he’d return. He thought about it and decided against it. There was no denying that every part of him had been angry that she’d used AA as her private theater in which to spin stories with him as the villain. He’d never be himself to all those people in there. He’d only ever be the character she’d created. Charlie could admit to himself that he’d never been perfect, but he didn’t deserve that.
He decided it didn’t matter. He didn’t know those people. There was never any reason to appease them, to make them know who he really was. That was hopeless and pointless besides. And Sharon obviously needed this. Sure, it was just a crutch. So what? That was her business. Charlie turned and helped Edward stand up. The two of them walked into the night without turning back.
image courtesy of pixabay
