Excerpts from The Mee Street Chronicles: "Scotch on the Rocks"

Copyright 2007-All Rights Reserved

Introduction to "Scotch on the Rocks"


"What’s Goin On?" is a scene from the story, "Scotch on the Rocks" which is in my memoir,The Mee Street Chronicles. This story is about the first time I was confronted by an alcohol counselor about my drinking. Alcoholism is a serious disease. Most people are like I was. They don't know or understand that it is a disease. Before the drinker can get help to treat it, the drinker has to first acknowledge that alcohol is a problem. Then she or he has to be willing to get help. This story is about my attitude toward my drinking at that time of my life. And what happened after I was confronted about it.



"What's Goin On?"


The five o'clock crew at Allen's Lounge was off and running. The place buzzed like a busy hive. What's goin on? I heard Marvin Gaye ask over the chattering hum of the crowd. Home free! That's what's goin on, I answered in my head while situating myself on a barstool. No alcohol counselor and his stupid questions around here! I nodded hello to the regulars lining the bar like pigeons waiting for bread crusts. Behind the bar, Allen, tall as an ostrich and dark as bitter chocolate, counted bills and change to balance the cash register. Jay iced down the beer while Les, looking like a sad-eyed, basset hound, poured up half-dozen drink orders as Katie, the waitress, reeled them off.

I lit a cigarette and glanced up at the huge, lighted mirror in front of me. Scattered at tables, men in blue or gray work uniforms, just getting off from work at Whirlpool or Alcoa, drank quarts of Budweiser or shots of whiskey, smoked cigarettes, traded lies, hawked the women, and speculated on which one might want a just-for-tonight lover. The women, in bright colors, sat in groups of two's and three's, cutting their eyes at each other, whispering behind their hands, or throwing their heads back in noisy laughter. Most of them sipped pretty drinks—the kind I never had much use for—like Tom Collins or Tequila Sunrise, although some toyed with a glass of beer.

I caught Jay's eye and winked. He was a beauty. An x-rated honey-dripper. Cinnamon skin, thick eyelashes, naturally arched eyebrows, sculpted, full lips. And so good in bed that I could pretend my woman-jones didn't exist. Sometimes, all his sexiness and beauty triggered my inferiority complexes. At other times, my ego swelled with the idea that a sugah-lump like him had picked me to be his woman.

"What's up?" I asked as he came toward me

He shrugged, slapping a napkin on the counter. "Gonna be jumpin in here tonight. Allen's got me working the night shift, so I won't get by your place until 2:30. You want your usual? It's on me."

"Yeah, scotch on the—"

He finished it. "Rocks, lemon slice, water back."

"What else?" I smiled.

He grinned at me and started to pour. As he did, a voice hollered out.

"Give her another!" It was Sylvester sitting at the other end of the bar; he slammed two quarters down for Jay. I waved at Syl and nodded my thanks. He, in turn, lifted his shot glass ceremoniously in salute.

Jay put two drinks in front of me, went down the bar to collect for it, rang up the order, and trotted off to the john.

I shifted my sight to the mirror behind the bar. It ran the length of the wall. The bottles, in front of it, artfully arranged in stair-step fashion, caught my eye. Like ladies of the night displaying their wares to the highest bidder, the shimmering liquor winked and promised good times: Scotch in emerald green bottles, whiskey in topaz brown bottles, vodka and gin in diamond-clear bottles. I picked up my glass and sipped. Nothing like the first scotch of the day, I told myself while savoring the bitter, slightly oily taste of J & B.

A good feeling began to settle over me. But before the good feeling could make itself at home, out of nowhere, I heard the counselor ask: Do you want to quit?

Spooked, I glanced over my shoulder, frowning as I scanned the crowd. Was that asshole of an alcohol counselor in here? Did he follow me to Allen's? But, no. There were only Black folks here, getting down to some serious partying. I stared into the golden liquid in my glass. Do you want to quit? He’d asked me. An icy tremor passed through me. How could I give it up? My palms felt clammy and I wiped them together.

There'd been times when I'd thought about it. Especially when I'd come into Allen’s, and somebody at the bar would ask me if I remembered what I'd done the night before. I hated that question. It shamed me. They knew what I'd done, but I didn't. It was unnerving because a big, black hood had dropped down over my brain. What I'd done the night before was gone. Wiped clean. When someone asked me, I'd drop my eyes, afraid that I'd made a fool of myself. Afraid that somebody was going to rib me for it and I wouldn’t be able to, couldn’t play it off. How could I when last night was a bunch of empty pages scrolling in my head?

I pulled on my cigarette. Why couldn't I remember? What was happening? Maybe I should seriously consider quitting. But when that line of thought came to mind, I had to have a drink since thinking about quitting was unnerving. By the time I'd finished drinking and thinking, mother scotch had moved the whole idea to the back burner.

What's goin on? Marvin asked me, his voice fading on the last notes of the song. I took a long swallow of scotch, almost draining the glass as The Isley's kicked "Love the One You With" into high gear. It was then that the door swung open so hard that the hinges squeaked and sang. I turned my head to see who was coming in. There at the entrance stood Jay's wife—a harmless-looking, brown terrier with the soul of a war dog. For a millisecond, she was motionless; then, she swooped in.

Thank God, Jay was in the john. If she had come in a few minutes earlier, she'd have caught me sitting here carrying on with him. But she didn't need to catch me to know I was guilty. When Jay was here, nine times out of ten, I was, too. Marsha knew, like everybody else in Evansville, that I was Jay's sideline woman. It was a common practice. Husbands took lovers; wives looked the other way. Marsha didn't frequent the bars, so ordinarily Allen's Lounge was safe territory for me and Jay. But not, it seemed, today. In the mirror, I watched her double-timing it straight to me, her jaws tighter than Dick's hatband. She stomped up beside me and stopped, hand on her hip, glaring. Without looking at her, I lifted my glass to drink, weighing the threat of danger her presence signaled while cold sweat inched down my stomach.

"What the hell," she addressed me in ringing tones, loud enough for everyone to take notice, "do you think you're doin in here with Jay?"

At the sound of her voice, the bar's noisy crowd suddenly came to attention, slipping into the I-was-a-witness mode, drinks forgotten as eyes turned to watch local drama.

Marsha moved a step closer. "Ain't I tole you bout this shit before?"

Survival instinct screamed for me to get the hell out of the bar, but my feet had turned to concrete. Careful not to look her in the face, I took a drag on my Pell Mell and tapped some ashes off the tip.

She took the drama up a notch, playing to every person in the room. "I hope," she proclaimed, "you don't think I'ma jus sit back in some corner while you fuck around with my husband."

I could feel her breath on my neck. Was she going to jump me? My heart was thumping in time with the record's beat. Since I'd never been a fighter, I had zero confidence about myself when it came to fisty-cuffs, but if she made a move to beat my ass, would I just sit here and let her?

The crowd hung with bated breath on every word. She huffed and puffed for them. "I'ma tell you one more time to leave Jay alone."

I kept silent, gambling that she'd interpret my silence as browbeaten humiliation and leave me be.

She pronounced her final threat with a flourish. "Don't let me have to tell you bout this shit no more!" A dramatic pause, and then: "You hear me?"

The challenge hung in the air. Despite the fact that I was shivering in my boots, the smart-ass in me finally reared its head, ready to deliver me to the hangman's noose. I opened my mouth with the intention of sarcastically assuring Marsha that I had, indeed, heard her. But Jay glided up before I could say a word, and quickly steered her out of the bar.

(end)

Order my book at Amazon or Borders Bookstores or at my publisher’s website under the book title or under my name, Frankie Lennon, at
www.Amazon.com< www.Borders.com
www.Kerlak.com

Meditations VI: Twenty Years Sober

Copyright 2008 - All Rights Reserved


Twenty years ago, on June 14, 1988, I walked into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and I was terrified.

Every night and morning and afternoon, before I’d walked in, I had prayed feverishly that A.A. would work for me. Prayed. Because I knew that it was the “last stop” for me. Knew it was the last house on the block. The last one that I’d ever see before I tumbled over the cliff and took that long, long fall to the rocks waiting below.

I looked around at the room I was standing in. People were everywhere. Sober people living without the bottle. Now that I was here, in 12-step recovery, I had to be without it. Without my crutch…my lifeline…my alcohol.

How would I do it? I didn’t know.

Didn’t know how I could get through. Couldn’t see my going through more than twenty-four hours without drinking. For the bottle was—I thought then—the light, the lamp that always had showed me where the path was. Showed me a way to get to the place where I could be safe. Where I wouldn’t have to feel….anything.

Beginning that June day twenty years ago, my constant companion for many months to follow was a kind of low-level terror. I was terrified of the sun rising on each new day. Terrified of its slow ride into the west each evening. Terrified because I couldn’t drink each day into night. Couldn’t drink each night into dawn. Terrified because, in my mind’s eye, all I could see those first sober months, was me standing at the entrance to a black-as-night tunnel. What lay ahead in that tunnel waiting for me? Darkness hid the path that would lead me to wherever it was that I’d have to go. And I was afraid of having to go there without my crutch.

I stood at the mouth of the tunnel and wondered: What was going to happen to me now? How was I going to be able to walk this journey?

I didn’t know.

What I did know was that I’d been drinking for 27 years. And though I’d tried so many times and so many ways, I couldn’t stop drinking on my own. I had, finally, come to the place where I desperately wanted to stop, but the fear of living without my crutch was so great that it paralyzed me…subverted every effort…showed me smoke and mirrors tricks that beguiled and persuaded me to stop thinking about stopping. So I had stopped because I’d thought it was shielding me from every emotion that had left me at the well of despair: abandonment, shame, guilt, loneliness, derailed expectations that cause the deepest, gut-wrenching kind of pain, hurt, anger and resentment.

The bottle had always said to me: Just pour the liquor and pick up the glass.

You can depend on me, it had faithfully whispered. I’ll protect you and you won’t have to feel the feelings you’re terrified of feeling.

But, finally, I came to realize that it was lying. Knew long before the court ordered me to A.A. meetings. Still, I clung to the delusion of the bottle as I stepped inside the rooms of A.A. Because I wanted life to be easy. The bottle kept promising me it would. And although I had long ago realized it never really kept its promise, every time I took a drink, I kept hoping it would.

In A.A. meetings, I listened. And when the other alcoholics talked about how you have to live without the bottle… have to step out every day on that smooth-looking stretch of land, hiding any hint of possible danger or misfortune ahead…how you have to keep struggling to climb those kick-ass hills planted in your path at every turn in the road…how—when life drops you into valleys so endlessly deep that you think you’ll never be able to climb out—you just have to keep going instead of running straight for the bottle, I shuddered.

How could I do that? How?

The only way out is through, they said. Whatever it is that you’re going through won’t last forever, they said. This, too, will pass.

The tunnel, which turned out to be my life, terrified me. The thought of taking the risk, of stepping forward blindly, without my shield—the bottle—of leaving myself entirely open, naked and vulnerable…how could I do it?

The only way out is through, they said.

No other choice. I’d have to take the first step. And the next and the next and go on walking through the tunnel. Go on through one day at a time. Go through. Sober.

I did as my days of sobriety turned into weeks, then months, then a year. A year became two, then six, then eleven, fifteen. And now, twenty.

So many things were revealed over the years. Like the fact that I’d spent my life, not living, but running. Or the fact that I habitually future-trip, believing that I can peep around corners to see the worst that is surely coming, and prompting the paint brush in my head to always draw scenarios of bloody disaster on the canvass of my mind.

So many tests have been presented to me over time. And the tests, not the lessons, would always come first, I came to understand. Furthermore, a test was always about the lesson. Did I see the lesson within? Did I understand it? If not, the test would inevitably be presented again. For sure, a whole lot of times, I flunked the test. Had to retake it again and again until I saw what I needed to learn. As time, as sobriety, went on, sometimes, I’d pass a test or two the first time because I discerned and understood the lesson.

How did I get through twenty years? I’ll give you the short version. Honesty. (Admitted to myself deep within that I am alcoholic and that I’d made a wreck of my life.) Open-mindedness. (Acknowledged that A.A. had the answers I needed.) Willingness. (Tried a new, changed way of living that A.A. proposed.)

I had to do house cleaning using the steps, the fourth step in particular, so that I could find out why I had done what I had done. So that I would not repeat it expecting different results. So that I would not live in pain, resisting change.

I had to give up my secrets because secrets will take you back out. And because secrets make you sick, make your life heavy and dark, and make you want the bottle.

I learned how to connect. Connect with other alcoholics at meetings. At meetings where their voices mirrored my feelings and fears and hopes. Where they gave me messages of witness about what a changed life might lead to. Where they told me to try relying on Something Greater Than Myself to get me through. Sometimes, I didn’t understand the messages. They sounded like garbled words coming in through static. Sometimes, they were bright revelations. At those times, a light went on for me…a mystery was solved.

Twenty years ago, I started a journey with fear as my companion. Through all of it, the fear began to lessen as the void within me slowly began to close. The void that I’d tried to fill with alcohol. In time, I began to feel a Presence within where the void had lived. In time, I risked trusting it.

Sobriety, I heard early on, is not a destination, but a journey. My goal—progress as I journey, not perfection. Today, though I have twenty years sober, I acknowledge that I’m going to make mistakes. What I hope is to learn from them. Twenty years has taught me that each time I reach a plateau, there will surely be another ass-kicking mountain around the bend to challenge me to reach higher, go further, climb to the next level. As my partner says: “It’s always one thing after another.” She’s right. What I must keep reminding myself is that I’m grateful to be meeting the next thing, whatever it is, sober.

Meditations V: April 1st

Copyright 2008- All Rights Reserved

10:30 am. April 1, 2008

Soon, I hope to celebrate a birthday....not a natal one, but a 12-step one with Alcoholics Anonymous. I've written here before about A.A.--what it has done for my life, why I go to meetings. Still, I'm compelled this morning to reflect on my recovery again. Perhaps because years ago--- twenty-eight, to be exact, I was in great pain on April first. Death had come by and put me in pain. As usual, my solution to coping with pain was to run. Straight to the bottle.

Today, I know I don't have to do that. Back then, I didn't. For me, drinking was the universal solution to everything, to every problem, to every feeling that scared me, exhilirated me, pained me, puzzled and confused me. I wanted to change those moods, those feelings with alcohol. I later learned, in recovery, that the drive to drink is about mood change. About changing feelings that a person can't harness and control. Control is the operative word here. Nine times out of ten, an alcoholic is a control freak, fearful of feelings that don't "feel good."

Instead of running from them, feelings are something I am learning from, today. They help me know who I am, how I see things, what is important to me.

Alcoholism is also a disease that--it's been said--can make you well if you work for recovery. Which is to say, if you're willing to change, to grow, to be open to other ideas, and to listen to somebody else instead of the "off the chain" thoughts in your head that always take you to the bottle if you're addicted to alcohol.

Pain is still pain. Happiness is still happiness. Loneliness is still loneliness. They are all feelings. Today, I choose to regard feelings as different colors that paint my canvass, that make up the rainbow of me. On the canvass of me, I need all the colors, not just one or two. All the feelings, all the colors make up me. And I don't have to be scared of that.

On the canvass of me, I feel all the colors...the difficult ones, the easy ones, the scary ones. Live them without a drink, one day at a time.

Meditations IV: Why I Have to/Want to Go to A.A. Meetings

The meetings are a gathering…a place I go to see and hear and talk to people like me. That they are like me connects us because we all suffer from an illness that’s about brokenness, not being whole and healthy. It’s an illness that’s physical (the craving that starts when you practice whatever the addiction because you put the thing you’re “allergic” to into your body); it’s mental (your mind is obsessed with the desire to change your mood with whatever substance or means you use to get the mood change) and it’s spiritual (because you haven’t or don’t know how to connect to something greater than you and so there’s a void/emptiness that you try to fill with the addiction). This illness, ironically, connects us. We all have the disease that can make you well, so to speak.

If you are in recovery and working the program, the illness can put you on a path to wellness. That path requires that I do certain things: work the steps, go to meetings which is the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, be “of service” to others, find someone to talk to that I can trust and respect (a friend or friends in the program or a sponsor who have ethical standards and healthy moral values; for newcomers that person is your sponsor who takes you through the steps and listens to your craziness with a sense of empathy and helps you find balance).

Going to a meeting is putting yourself in a gathering (around a campfire, so to speak) where you hear stories (from the podium or around the table and after the meeting) that keep you courageous enough to live your life without picking up. Where you hear stories that give you hope and faith because you see others living a changed life, approaching life in a different way w/o alcohol (doing things like…. letting go of the need/urge to control and letting God do things in God’s time, or like…relying on a power greater than ourselves to get us through whatever the trouble is or the problem might be). Where you hear stories that teach you, by example, that you can use different ways/coping skills or “tools of the program” (the steps are the basic tools) to keep going w/o drinking …whether times are good (because we drank when times were good) or whether times are bad (and for sure we drank over the bad times).

Going to meetings reminds us that we are bonded…a family of sorts, ragtag as we may be. We are bonded because sobriety is a journey, a process, something never ending. Something that all of us walk in/toward/through every day. When we go and feel that bonding taking place through the stories we hear, we stop wanting to hide, to be secretive, to isolate, to listen to and follow the ideas that come from the craziness of our disease (the committee, the monkeys, etc.). When we go, we feel safe and secure. We know we’re in a place where we are not judged. Where there are others who’ve done the same things or worse than we’ve done (and still do them sometimes). So we don’t feel that debilitating sense of shame anymore that sent us right back to the bottle and that drunk/drinking cycle.

AA is much more, at bottom, than staying stopped from drinking; it’s really about change. Which boils down to a shift in your values, attitudes and behaviors…how you do it differently, that is, approach the bumps in life’s road, the obstacles, the disappointments, the happy times, successes, all of the things life throws at you. And because I want to embrace change and not run from it anymore, I go because I can find out from other people sharing how to do that. I go there and I hear people like me talk about how to grow up, how to live without a crutch, how to make peace with who I am, how to be a better me. We help each other learn how to live. We’re not alone and struggling or suffering anymore.

And so, I go to learn how to live. I go to learn how to put away my old coping skills that are of no use now and are, in fact, toxic. I go to learn how to use new coping tools (the steps) in my every day life. I go to learn how to change for a happier, healthy, better life. I go there because I’ve earned my seat and nobody can put me out. It’s my place. It’s where I belong. And all my life I’ve looked for a place to belong, for a sense of belonging. A place where I’m accepted with all my flaws—because of my flaws, in fact. I go there because it’s a sanctuary. A respite from a crazed world that seeks to make me as crazy and confused as it is.

I go because God gave me back my life and since I have been graced with recovery, I go and tell my stories to I give back.

Meditations III: Sappho's Daughter

Copyright 2007

I can’t say that my being aware of my Lesbianism was the sole cause of my drinking…that being a Lesbian propelled me into alcoholism. I cannot because it wouldn’t be entirely accurate. There are no simple answers here.

I am Sappho’s daughter. And I knew it early on. Inside me, for years, a fierce struggle between fear, desire, and shame had bound me. Had strangled me. Their ceaseless struggle for domination tortured me. Tasked me. I was their prisoner.

Then came alcohol, holding out a promise, a false promise, but a promise, nevertheless: If I would drink of its soothing liquid, I could have peace. If I would but drink, relief from this anguished struggle would cease. And, perhaps, I could forget who I was. My fears had made me a traitor to who I was. My fears had helped drive me into alcohol’s velvet arms.

But soon, I began a new and different kind of struggle: to break free of alcohol’s treacherous currents. For it had betrayed me, finally…had trapped yet another of Sappho’s daughters. Trapped this daughter for twenty-seven years.

In my book, The Mee Street Chronicles, you'll find stories of me and my struggles with alcohol, as well as stories of recovery. Order it from amazon.com, barnes & noble.com, or borders.com.

Meditations II: College & the Bottle

Copyright 2007

My freshman year was pivotal in starting me on the road to alcoholism. I began because I wanted to belong. Because I wanted to be seen as a sophisticate. Not a neophyte, a little southern girl from “the sticks” who really was not hip, slick and cool. I lied when an important date asked me if I drank. I didn’t. But after that night, I did. Rum and coke did me in that night and I ended up passed out in the john with my arms wrapped around the base of the toilet stool. At some point during the week that followed, I vowed to myself that I would “learn” how to drink without passing out. Which, eventually, I did. It took a while before I could get high without getting sick and passing out, but I managed to do it, thanks to those college weekends when my college buddies and I spent our Saturday nights devoted to rum and coke, seven and seven, boiler makers, and the like.


Cut to my sophomore year. The second semester I started drinking during the week on a regular basis. I cut classes, too, so my grades dropped way down from the three-point, B average, that I’d worked so hard to get during my freshman year. Up til then, I’d confined my partying to weekends and ONLY after I’d done all my studying and class assignments. Until that semester, I’d been solicitous of my grades and grade point average. But all that changed. I knew what I was doing when I began to drink like that. I knew I was screwing up, but I couldn’t pull out of screwing up.


When the semester was over and I went home for the summer, I was mortified to face my parents who were sacrificing to send me to a Big Ten college, Indiana University, so far away from home (Knoxville, Tennessee). They didn’t fuss at me or punish me and that made me feel that the two D’s and two C’s on my record were pasted on my forehead like some shameful brand for all the world to see. One of the D’s was in a class that was an introduction to what I thought would be my major, Journalism. What a disaster that semester was!


I think back now and remember a little bit of what was going on inside of me: the conflicts and pain and terror that I was choking back over my same sex attraction. I was trying to use alcohol to cover them, drown them, kill them off.


Anyway, I was so horrified and ashamed about my grades and that I’d let my parents down in their expectations for me to succeed that, from my junior year through my senior year, I rigorously disciplined myself to only drink to excess—“party”—on the weekends or during holidays away from school. I did drink a little bit sometimes during the week, but I never let myself go over the top because I had set a goal to get my grade point average back up to a three-point. Though I succeeded with my disciplined drinking, it only left me yearning for the weekends, for holidays, so I could drink all I wanted. My grades did go up, but the bottle was getting the better of me. Of course, that was a red flag, but I chose to ignore it. Besides, though I didn’t know it, I was already at the point that I couldn’t stop. Will power, I would learn later, was no match for alcohol.


By the time I was a senior, I had my grades way up. My last semester as an undergrad, I scored straight A’s in all my courses. I remember that Joann and some other girls in my dorm marveled at how I could make such good grades and “party” (read “drink to excess”) as much as I did. I was a functioning alcoholic already. But they didn’t know it and neither did I. After graduation, I went right into grad school. One of the benefits of having a single room was the privacy to stash my drink in the closet. The bottle was a fifth. And I never let it go below one-third empty before I dashed out to buy another. That was axiomatic.
----------------------------------------------------

Meditations 1

Copyright 2007


I have an Alcoholics Anonymous birthday coming soon. It’s a birthday celebration because I stopped drinking June 14, 1988. By my count, that means as of June 14, I will have lived in sweet sobriety for 19 years.


My journals say that I’d got a Driving Under the Influence ticket on the last Friday in April of 1988 and had to appear in a Los Angeles court to answer for it the following month, on May 26. The whole ordeal was shaming and before I appeared in court, I had moments of seriously considering running away. I fantasized about just taking off for parts unknown, working as a waitress, or whatever half-assed job I could get, living a nomadic life on the run from the law. Just disappearing off the radar of all family and friends. A blip that no longer blips on the satellite camera. My shame was driving those fantasies. And that’s all they were because I was way too chicken to do something like that.


Though I didn’t think so at the time, I was lucky I got arrested. Lucky because I hadn’t killed or injured anybody, or myself. Lucky because I was sentenced, among other things, to go to 12 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I had anticipated that part of the sentencing because I’d consulted with a lawyer and she told me to expect it. I was also sentenced to do 300 hours of community service and to complete a fee-based Alcohol and Drug program for 12 very long and boring weeks.


I didn’t know what to expect from the AA meetings and I was nervous about having to go. The only information I had about it was a hazy memory of a scene at an AA meeting in the old movie, “Days of Wine and Roses.” Still, with all those conflicting feelings churning in my gut—shame, guilt, fear, desperation, hope—I saw AA as a remote chance for me—just maybe. For even before I’d been sentenced, I’d said to a friend that I was glad I was going to have to go because I hoped it would help me. That remark came from a revelation I’d had earlier which I’d confided to a friend from high school, one that had known me through all the twenty-eight years of drinking I’d done.


“I hope it does me some good to go to AA,” I’d said, “because I don’t know how to control it. I can’t stop. I’ve tried but I don’t know how.”


That was the first time I’d said to myself and to another person, aloud and with utter certainty, that there was something terribly wrong with me and alcohol. Aloud is the key word here. Because years prior, I’d know deep inside that there was something wrong. I just wouldn’t admit it. Couldn’t face it. I figured that if I didn’t say it aloud, everything would turn out okay.


But, years later, at the AA meetings, when I said aloud that I was and am an alcoholic, when I admitted to it, and believed that admission, I laid the foundation that I’ve built my sobriety on for all of these years. How ironic. Once I admitted aloud that alcohol had the power over me, it was the beginning of a new life, of things really turning out okay for me.

The shame, guilt, fear, desperation melted away. They were replaced with hope, with faith. And with the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I am grateful.


You can read stories about me and the bottle in Parts 2 and 3 of The Mee Street Chronicles. Go to www.amazon.com or www.kerlak.com or www.barnes&noble.com to order your copy now.