Treehouse Telephone by Chase McGuire - HTML preview

Barberton Monday Night

 

When alcoholics said they first came into the rooms for the free coffee and doughnuts it was supposed to be a joke, but Lucia never thought it was that funny because the coffee routinely tasted like shit. In different churches throughout Akron’s dissimilar neighborhoods, meetings unified with an incongruent familiarity of radiators, exposed piping, drop ceilings, linoleum tiles, metal folding chairs, and urns filled with coffee that routinely tasted like shit. Barberton Monday Night, held in the cafeteria of St. Augustine’s, was no different.

She pulled a Styrofoam cup from the top of its stack on the back counter. Fingerprint smudges on the coffee urn matted an oily halo over Lucia’s already distended reflection in its silver enamel. Granules of sugar and powdered creamer had crusted on the rims of their bulk canisters. Instead of stir straws, two spoons soaked in a cup of water filmy with spittle and motes. Not very sanitary, and Lucia always thought it was just asking for a breakout of herpes or hep C to run wild through members of AA yet uninfected.       

The free doughnuts part of the joke wasn’t funny either because the pastry selection at meetings had been equally disappointing. A homegroup member of The Place To Be worked for the Gardner Pie Company, and brought rejected pies to that meeting every Sunday. Lucia had no complaints there the previous night after she’d wolfed down a slice of cherry, apple, and peach. For Barberton Monday Night, all they had was a batch of homemade cookies on a Tupperware tray yellowed with age. A fear of intestinal parasites or something else gross and highly transmittable that a person in recovery may have picked up while still out using, made Lucia steer clear of anything homemade offered in AA meetings. Which could be interpreted as either healthy caution or hypocritical snobbery, since during the qualifying days of her not so distant past, she’d eaten food out of dumpsters.

To avoid using the spoon, Lucia had a technique where she added creamer first. Coffee streamed from the nozzle and swirled an umber mix in her cup. Undissolved flakes circled outward and clung to its Styrofoam side.

“Hi. John.”

She turned to the man she hadn’t noticed was at her side. His hand extended out in greeting. Lucia shook it. “Hi, I’m Lucia.”

Some were more disciplined at it than others, and made a point of shaking hands with everyone. Lucia didn’t. The ritual seemed repetitive and useless. At the start of the meeting, they’d go around the room and all state names Lucia wouldn’t remember. Besides, AA was filled with forgettable guys like John: creeping past middle age, leathery skin, balding, dressed in jeans and a Polo, their odor of body grease masked with a gamey scent of aerosol antiperspirant. All with common one syllable names like John or Chuck or Rob or Jeff or Scott or Mark or Will.

John pivoted at the waist in an expectant gesture to the young man standing beside him.

“Hi, my name’s Lucia.”

“Colton.”

His sinewy frame was thin past gaunt, but not quite skeletal. His sick complexion shaded even sicker by jaundiced patches in the hollows of his neck, and cheap ink that looked more like nasty bruises than it did tattoos dotted on his forearms.

They shook hands. After he’d loosened his grip, Colton sunk his front teeth into his lower lip, and vibrated a guttural drone through his throat. “Hmnrhhhmmmnnnrrrhmnr.”

The windows along the opposite wall, the kind with panels that latched in the frame and opened out at an angle, had been opened. Exterior air flowing in didn’t ventilate the cafeteria, but perfumed its stuffiness with mingling scents of cut grass and gasoline, dandelions and pothole scum, pollen and damp heaps of fast food wrappers. A noxiously pleasant bouquet Lucia associated with Rust Belt summers.

To accommodate the perpetual inundation of legally mandated attendance in 12 step meetings, a table had been set up at the bottom of the stairs. Two men with the welcoming briskness and authority of checkpoint guards sat behind it collecting court papers. A hard luck crew, each brandishing their dog-eared page, formed a line that ran up the stairs. Lucia maneuvered her way through it, against the flow. Her head down, eyes fixed on her coffee to avoid meeting someone’s gaze and thus be obligated to shake hands and introduce herself.

Once through the double doors, Lucia retreated to the strip of grass between St. Augustine’s and the sidewalk, and sat under the squat canopy of the lawn’s lone tree. Across the street was a row of bungalows. She lit her pre-meeting cigarette. Two homegroup members stood in front of the double doors. Their responsibility for the meeting, every Monday night, week after week, was to shake hands and introduce themselves to every person that entered. Lucia lowered her ass to the ground, pulled her thighs to her chest, wrapped her arms around her shins, and rested her chin in the nook of her knees. One hand curled around her cup of coffee, while the other hand pinched her lit cigarette. A cloud of cigarette smoke amassed over the clusters and semicircles of people that stood along the curb and sidewalk. Lucia caught what she could overhear of their floating conversations.

“Man, I don’t know what the fuck. The only time she wants to see them kids is when she needs money.”

“She got a job?”

“She says so. She’s not getting any hours she says. But hell, how you gonna get more hours if you don’t want to work.”

“Isn’t that some bullshit.”

“I know, and me paying the bills.”

The bungalows had dirt yards littered with cracked water pistols and naked Barbie dolls. A woman in a bathing suit top and spandex shorts sat on a collapsed front porch. The house next door was missing its porch, and a stoop had been improvised from an upside down milk crate under the front door. Someone nearby was singing and playing a song Lucia recognized on an acoustic guitar.

Summery dusk, cool but humid, soaked the evening with a gold that cast no shadows. Lucia squinted and the sunlight bent its rays to speckled flares and overexposures on the tips of her lashes. She’d heard the song on radios playing pop country in gas stations and doctors’ offices, but didn’t know the title. The lyrics had something to do with the longing and regret of a romance gone sour, a desire to reconnect and reconcile hampered by circumstance, fate, and nasty weather conditions. A white passenger van rattled over potholes, its signal blinking to indicate a turn into St. Augustine’s parking lot on the corner.

“So, how you been?”

“Good, I mean fine, I guess.”

“Staying sober?”

“Yeah. Coming up on a month.”

“Good. That’s a full time job in itself. As long as we stay sober, the rest will come.”

“Sure. I’ve been selling my plasma.”

 The last bungalow in the row seemed to be under a renovation stalled in indefinite hiatus. Pink insulation and plastic sheeting scarred above the window. A Tetrus pattern of aluminum siding hung along the door. In other areas the siding had been stripped to exposed slats flaking green paint.

“What?”

“That’s what I heard. He’s down in West Virginia.”

“That mother fucker still owes me money.”

“There’s a warrant out on him too.”

The van emptied its passengers. A dozen wayward women from IBH, bused out to the meeting as part of their in-patient addiction treatment. They stretched and blinked with the coy excitement of peasants crawling from dungeons into the freedom of pastoral churchyards.

Lucia took a drag of her cigarette and placed her coffee cup by her ankles. She was to be the main attraction that night. She’d stand at the podium in front of the crowd of alcoholics gathered on benches and chairs in the St. Augustine’s cafeteria and deliver her first lead. In a general way, she’d disclose what she was like, what happened, and what she’s like now. As if those phases of her development were really that different or, with or without alcohol, easy to distinguish from each other. She’d share her story of experience, strength, and hope. While her strengths may have been lacking, she had plenty of “experience.” And hope? Hope for who? Hope for what? Lucia still wasn’t sure on that one, even after 18 months of staying sober and “working a program.”  

A woman Lucia had met before, but forgot her name – maybe it was Becky or Sandy or Trudy or something like that – strode out the double doors with the mock force of someone insecure given marginal authority. “Keep it down,” she said with her palms pushing at the air. “Neighbors of this church have to work early, and they’ve asked time and again we keep the noise down.” She made a big show of squatting to the concrete, and duck walked to add emphasis to each word as she picked up cigarette butts. “And put your butts in the butt can.”

Conversations dulled to mutterings. The guitar playing stopped, followed by a ting of strings against fret board as the instrument was pulled off a lap and put in its case.

“If you can’t keep the noise down, and clean up after yourselves, we won’t be able to have this meeting.” It was an empty threat. Not only was attendance consistently high, but Barberton Monday Night was an institution for both the Akron Area, and AA as a whole. It’d been meeting regularly since 1944.

Lucia’s hope question became all the more rhetorical as women from the IBH van paraded past in groups of twos and threes. Getting off property, if only to attend an AA meeting, was a reprieve from the misery of early recovery exacerbated by in-patient treatment. Younger people, or those who “quit in time” and still had their looks (good looks were vital to enabling, for longer than is usually acceptable, the amount of destruction an addict could cause) treated the meetings like a night out on the town, and got as glitzed up as they could under the circumstances.

The summer weather gave an excuse to show some skin. It was unsettling to watch them pass propelled by such fragile limbs. Thin arms probed like flagellum when the girls checked their phones or took drags from their cigarettes. Wardrobes had been hobbled together from clothes out of the donation bin in a style that Lucia would best describe as “Corner Bar Ladies’ Night Formalwear.” One girl wore flip-flops to show off her painted toenails in an example of either narcissism or profound dignity in spite of it all. A hovering wasp zigzagged through the blades of grass. It circled the rim of her coffee cup. Lucia hated the girls from IBH. She hated their low standards. She hated the relativity of their struggles, where miniscule progress was praised as major life accomplishments. More than anything, she hated their innocent abandon. She hated and envied their blind faith in possibilities and potential.

Two guys spoke, shuffling their feet and edging ever closer to the tree. As they did, it became obvious to Lucia she was meant to overhear and eventually be included in their conversation. 

“Last I heard he was your roommate in Kenmore.”

“Yeah. I’m at my step-brother’s now. I’m serious about it this time.”

 A buzzing sound.

“Things’ll get better.

The buzzing sound was too organic, immediate and faint to be a lawnmower, but more sustained and resonant than an insect.

“They can’t get much worse. I had 8 months once before, white knuckling it.”

“You been to any NA?”

“There’s one I like in North Hill, but I can’t always find a ride.”

“hmnrhhhmmmnnnrrrhmnr.”

She cocked her head and saw only the shoes of the young men speaking. A pair of paint splattered work boots, a pair of garishly unblemished sneakers, and a pair of muddy running shoes.

“You got my number. Just get some numbers. Call me.”

“For sure man, for sure. We’ll hit some meetings, and I’m serious about it this time.”

The buzzing sound stopped.

She looked up, which was a mistake. Work Boots and Sneakers were eager to introduce themselves. She immediately forgot their names, but it was probably something like Paul and Jeff, or Mitch and Steve, or Jim and Sean.

“And this is our friend, Colton,” Work Boots said.

She stood and brushed the dirt off the seat of her pants.

 Colton sunk his front teeth into his lower lip. “hmnrhhhmmmnnnrrrhhhmmmnnnrrrhmnr.”

The sun had dropped below the horizon of bungalows. Waning light gelled a muted radiance. Through the filter of her eyelashes, Lucia saw the allergens, pollutants, and insects. Spermy pollen, diesel soot, aphids and gnats, all of it roiled everywhere.

Colton turned, took a few strides, and started banging his forehead, over and over, really hard, against the brick and mortar wall of St. Augustine’s. Work Boots and Sneakers made a move towards stopping him.

“C’mon Colton, what’s up, man.”

“I bet he just wanted a cigarette.”

“hmnrhhhmmmnnnrrrhhhmmmnnnrrrhhhmmmnnnrrrhmnr.”

The smell of dust and sweat inside the cafeteria, the scraping and squeaking sounds of chairs and shoes, made Lucia yearn for nostalgia of a childhood she was never nostalgic over. Colors all seemed leaden yellow as her eyes adjusted to the artificial light. Two thirds of the seats were occupied as a rush of stragglers trickled through the room looking for empty chairs. Lucia followed along the wall to the head table. The chairman stood at the podium, checking his watch. Grit under her footfalls on the sticky floor added a heaviness to her steps, like walking up a dune or plodding through a bog. She took her seat, careful to look at everything in the room except the settling crowd that would soon be her audience.

“Okay Lucia, your first lead.” The chairman said to her over his shoulder. “Thanks again for doing this.” His buzzcut stippled a flattop of gray spines over his head. “Nervous?”

She looked at his eyes, but not in them. “Nah.” Their droopey lower lids reminded her of tree frogs or iguanas.

He tapped against the microphone with his index finger. “Okay, its eight o’clock, time to get this meeting started. Hello. Hello and welcome to Barberton Monday Night.” 

The walls were ceramic tile of the fashion found in outdated, under funded, schools and hospitals, a shade of peapod green, glazed the moist texture of ferns, vomit, or praying mantises. Lucia rubbed her chin on her shoulder and looked to the window ledge.

“My name is Phil, and I’m your alcoholic chair for the month of August. Let us now go around the room and introduce ourselves, starting with the person on my left.”

“Hello Family. My name is Charlene, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hello Charlene,” the meeting answered in unison.

“Hi. Jason. Alcoholic.”

“Hello Jason.”

“Steve. Alcoholic, addict.”

“Hello Steve.”

“Tim, powerless.”

“Hello Tim.”

“Brenda, alcoholic.”

“Hello Brenda.”

“Hello. My name is Kevin, and I’m a real alcoholic.”

“Hello Kevin.”

“Luke, alcoholic and addict.”

“Hello Luke.”

A tiny hole, no bigger than a pinhead, had been burrowed in the caulk along the window ledge.

“Jerry, grateful recovering alcoholic.”

“Hello Jerry.”

“Judith, alcoholic.”

“Hello Judith.”

“Carl, alcoholic.”

“Hello Carl.”

“Kevin, powerless.”

“Hello Kevin.”

“Amy, alcoholic, addict.”

“Hello Amy.”

“Jim, powerless.”

“Hello Jim.”

An ant poked its head from the hole in the caulk.

“Kathy, alcoholic.”

“Hello Kathy.”

“Tony, alcoholic.”

“Hello, Tony.”

“Chris, alcoholic, addict.”

“Hello Chris.”

It looked like a blackhead, a carcinoma, or the blistered syringe prick over a vein.

“Adam, in recovery.”

“Hello Adam.”

“Corey, alcoholic.”

“Hello Corey.”

“Linda, powerless.”

“Hello Linda.”

“Jen, alcoholic.”

“Hello, Jen.”

“Ethan, alcoholic addict.”

“Hello, Ethan.”

The ant crawled out and crept along the caulk groove. Lucia imagined a pore dripping black sweat, or an abscessed vein, rimmed by gluey flesh, belching tar.

“Toby, alcoholic.”

“Hello Toby.”

“Dale, alcoholic.”

“Hello Dale.”

“Rachel, alcoholic.”

“Hello Rachel.”

“Hi, Sue, in Recovery.”

“Hello Sue.”

“Crystal, alcoholic, addict.”

“Hello Crystal.”

“Colin, alcoholic.”

“Hello Colin.”

“Hi, I’m Stan, and I’m a grateful recovering alcoholic.”

“Hello Sta –” 

– and over and over again, a sloppy roll call of people identifying themselves as a first name and substance abuser. After Stan there were at least another 40 people left. That wasn’t even so bad compared to Pilgrim up in Cuyahoga Falls, a meeting which drew close to 100 attendees every Saturday night. After over a year, Lucia had desensitized to the introductions, thought of them as filler, and was able to space out. Something she suspected others in recovery did too, which defeated the whole purpose of the repetition and ceremony.  

A paratrooper squadron of dandelion pods floated past the window.

“Is there anyone,” the chairman spoke again, “here for their first AA meeting or visiting this meeting for the first time?”

So many introductions. Introductions after introductions before introductions. Strange that AA meeting formats, routines Lucia sat through so many times, now seemed trivial minutes before she delivered her first lead.

“Hi, Joan, alcoholic, in visiting from Louisville.”

“Hello Joan.”

“Hi, I’m Ted, alcoholic, and this is my first time in this meeting.”

“Hello Ted.”

While walking out to deliver a State of the Union Address, did the President have secret doubts that he was an empty suit, representing an elaborate sham that masqueraded as society? Did the President ever feel that he was just going through the motions of pretending to work towards the greater good when it really all just amounted to whistling in the dark while falling through an abyss? That’s how Lucia felt.     

“Here at Barberton Monday Night, we celebrate lengths of sobriety with the chip system. I’ll step aside and let Becky tell us a little more about that.”

New members came in unexplained waves to just as mysteriously recede back into the white noise after a few months sober. A regular but nuanced ebb and flow of weather systems, animal migrations, and birthrates. With girls from IBH in the crowd, there were sure to be a lot of 24 hour, 1, 2, and 3 month chips passed out. 

 The chairman relinquished the podium to the woman who’d earlier scolded the smokers outside for being too loud and throwing their butts on the ground. It turned out her name was Becky, not Trudy or Sandy.

“Hello family. My name is Becky, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hello Becky.”

So the show began. Glory bestowed upon the once hopeless. A fleeting moment of praise graced over the woebegone amidst their wretchedness.

“Here at Barberton Monday Night, as proof that this really works, we like to award various lengths of sobriety with the chip system. First things first, is there anybody here celebrating 24 hours, or someone celebrating up to 29 days who hasn’t gotten a 24 hour chip yet and would like one?” Thick makeup lacquered over her eye sockets and cheekbones accentuated divots of her face to the shiny ridges of an exoskeleton.   

Lucia rested her elbows on the table. As she slouched, an abrupt pang in her loins alerted her she had to pee real bad.

“Hi, I’m Viv,” a voice chirped “I’m in IBH, and I’m powerle – ” she stood, egged on by an elbow to the ribs from the woman beside her. “I just had a week and I didn’t get a coin yet.” The applause. Hoots and cheers as she shuffled through the crowd up to the podium. Dried sweat and deodorant residue blotched stains under her armpits, visible when she reached for her coin.

Next, a young man. “Zach, alcoholic, addict.” He wore a Mossy Oak ballcap with its brim curled. “By the grace of god, last weekend, I had my first 24 hours.” Zak had come with a Boosters Committee. The others at his table shouted things like, ‘Alight, Zack,’ ‘Go Zack,’ and the more standard buzz phrases, ‘Keep coming back,’ ‘It works if you work it.’

“Hi, Kate,” she had three dates tattooed on her neck, “and last wee – I mean, Kate, alcoholic addict – and last week I celebrated four months.” The applause. The hoots and cheers.

Lucia straightened her posture, repositioning her throbbing bladder. She assumed the tattoos either commemorated drug related deaths, or birthdates of sons and daughters in the custody of someone other than Kate.

“Hello, my name’s Rachel,” she stood, waist thrust out to counter balance her pregnant belly.

Lucia guessed, based of the girl’s condition, she was celebrating a period of sobriety for less than seven, but more than three months.

“Alcoholic, addict,” she said as she waddled through the parting crowd, “and I just celebrated five months.” Her strawberry blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail bound by a pink scrunchie.

Lucia tried real hard not to roll her eyes. She’d surprised herself with the guess’s accuracy. 

“Jim, alcoholic, addict,” a glint flashed over the sweat on his forehead as he stood, “I just got out of the ADM, but by the grace of god and with the help of this program, I had 2 months on the level.”

Lucia crossed her legs, uncrossed them, and snapped her eyes in a hard blink to quell the rising sound of surf between her ears. The air in St. Augustine’s thickened to a reedy sharpness. The slimy smack of clapping hands distorted the applause to intermittent fuzz. Heavy bassline from a passing car thumped through the open windows.

“That’s great, just great,” Becky said from the podium, “to see so much new sobriety. Now, is there anyone here with a year or multiples of years?” 

“Ralph, alcoholic.” His sleeveless shirt provided and excellent view of fat rippling down his shoulders. “On the eleventh, I had two years.”

 Lucia crossed her legs again. A nauseas palpitation fluttered her eardrums.

“Terry, alcoholic, and last week I cele –”

Another passing car, this one without a muffler and moving too fast by the sounds of it, thunked over a pothole. Lucia repositioned with her legs open, feet flat on the floor. Not a very ladylike posture, but it eased her spasming bladder.

“Any more anniversaries?” A pause before Becky continued, and then, “okay, I have asked a friend to read how it works.”

Buttery dusk on the verge of twilight frothed through the windows. Crickets tuned up for their chirping prelude. 

“Hi, my name is Tosha, and I’m an alcoholic.” She swapped out with Becky, and assumed her position at the podium. Her hair, auburn and wooly like moth antennas, was styled in a botched perm. “This is how it works, taken from page 58 in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.” She read from a laminated sheet. “‘Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not give themselves over to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping a manner of living which de -’”

“Hmnrhhhmmmnnnrrrhmnr.”

“– mands rigorous honesty. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.”

The cricket choir bent their strident melodies in through the open windows. Lucia’s gnawing urge to urinate got worse at the prospect of holding it in for another hour while delivering a speech. Was that crickets she heard, or cicadas?

“‘At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold onto our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.’”

Maybe she didn’t hear crickets or cicadas. Maybe she wouldn’t have to hold it in during her lead. Maybe she heard through the open windows a throaty discord of tree frogs. Lucia would be standing behind the podium. The crowd couldn’t see her from the waist down.

“‘Remember that we deal with alcohol – cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power. That one is God. May you find him now.’”

Twelve laminated cards, each printed with one of the twelve steps, had been placed on empty chairs at the start of the meeting, meant to eventually be read by whoever occupied the chairs. Were there tree frogs in Ohio? Sure there were, and if Lucia remembered correctly from childhood zoology lessons at summer camp, they were most vocal during the mating season in late summer. Shielded behind the podium Lucia could piss herself, and no one in the crowd would be any the wiser.

“‘Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon. Here are the steps we took which are suggested as a program of recovery.’”

Alcoholics rose from their respective seats and read in tandem, each person reciting a step chronologically on down the line until all 12 had been covered.

“‘One. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.’”

“‘Two. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.’”

An unnatural interval of dead air passed. Only two steps in, and inattentiveness on someone’s part interrupted the flow.  Murmurs of ‘Step 3?’ and ‘Who has Step 3?’ rippled through the room. “Step 3?” Tosha asked into the microphone.

Left of center in the front row, a foursome of young men nodded out. Buried in the torpor of suboxone, their hyena faces alternately dipped and rose, as if taking turns at a watering hole. One of they guys had a laminated card sitting in his lap.

“Step 3?” Tosha reiterated. “Who has Step 3?”

“Wha?” His serene and foggy eyes popped open after a finger jab in his shoulder from behind. “Oh, yeah, umm . . .” With the easy ambivalence of only the chemically sedated after such a public bungle, he took a moment to grind his knuckles into his nostrils before he read. “Step 3. Made a decision. Made a decision to turn, to turn or will. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives. Over to god, over to god, to turn our will and our lives over to the care of . . . God as we understood Him.”

“‘Step 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.’”

“‘Step 5. Admitted to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.’”

“‘Step 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.’”

Ambient noise from outside had a fluttering quality too. Maybe it was bats. Bats that hung upside down under the corrugated steel roofs of dormant B&W and JR Wheel factories. Bats that were awakening to set out into the darkening twilight. Bats with their squeaks and pings of echo location. Bats gobbling up moths and mosquitoes over fetid shallows of the Erie Canal.

“‘Step 7. Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings.’”

“‘Step 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.’”

“‘Step 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.’”

“‘Step 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.’”

Why stop at just peeing her pants? What else could Lucia do between her legs when hidden behind a podium? Although vulgar, it didn’t seem too far fetched. She imagined thirteenth stepping Good Ol’ Timers, filled with God’s love and ready to fill God holes, had the same impulse. Maybe in a King’s School Meeting circa 1940, someone with a big old hard-on knocking against the lectern must’ve given themselves over, in more ways than one to this simple program.

“‘Step 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out.?