An oldtimer, well-known in the neighborhood, tells this story where he’d called his sponsor just before he left the city.  (These were the days before cell phones.)  He wanted to drink.  Sponsor talks him out of it.  He gets on the train for home.  Changes his mind on the ride.  As soon as he gets off, he’s gonna drink.  When he gets to his stop, a guy is waitin for him.  The guy says to him, “I got a call about you.  Get in the car.”

Oh, boy.  I knew how that worked.  I’m walkin down the mainstreet, hatin everything about recovery.  I was done with it.  What had it done for me?  Stupid job, same stupid town, nothin was changed, nothin was better.  I am gonna get somethin for my head—I don’t care what.  Bar on the corner, dealers down the side street; I was a block or two away.

Car pulls up…like it was some guys comin to tune me up for somethin I did.  Only no.  Driver whips to the curb, passenger rolls down the window—these were guys I knew, alright—“Hey, get in!  We’re goin to the meeting!”

That was my moment.  I coulda told em to piss off.  I donno if it was the way they pulled up on me, or the timing outta the blue, or what.  Shock.  I got in the car.  I mean, what were the chances that just as I’m about to cash out in the next block or two, I get cut off? 

Found out, I had to get used to shocks like that.  These whackos in recovery talked about “gettin a God in your life,” like it was somethin you could actually tell was there.  I knew it was just words.

Until it wasn’t.

Stuff like this started to happen.  It was real.  I was part of it.  Other folks might just see it as coincidence, but when that starts to happen too often….  After a while, these kinda moments were plain: here we are: are you in or out?

We had a detox in the neighborhood for a long while.  Old rundown place run on a shoestring, but it was time off for a lot of us.  Meetings were held there, meetings outsiders could attend.  I went to em often.  I’d talk with the re-treads: What happened?  How’d you end up back here?  It wasn’t altruism: I didn’t wanna end up like them.  After many months and stories, a theme developed.  My sponsor had told me the same thing.  It wasn’t a big, complicated deal.

Some folks like to say, “It’s a simple program for complicated people.”  That was a tough sell.  A lotta days, it seemed like we were all morons, and the only thing savin us from ourselves and life at large was the unknowable magic of the program.  But these guys at the detox told me the same, simple story over and over: “I just wanted to be a non-addict-head.”  I wanted to do the things “normal” people do: have a beer at the ballpark, a cocktail at dinner, half-a-joint in front of the tv.  So they did.

A moment or two of hey-look-at-me, followed by days, weeks, months of crash and burn, and hello again, my old friend, detox.

It was the pickle-cucumber, one-way transformation thing my sponsor had told me about.  Now, you’re an addict-head.  There’s no undoing that.  But it simplifies your life.  Now, everyday, you can only go one of two ways: the way of your addiction, or the way of your recovery.  If you don’t take one, you automatically take the other.  There is no third way.

When those “magic moments” showed up, I knew I had just two choices.  It wasn’t just simple, sometimes, it was easy.  Get in the car.