AA
Around Christmas one year I was
hired for a domestic
case. I went to an AA meeting to locate the guy. I don't
normally do domestic,
but a friend asked me to do the job and I needed the money. I
had to go
to a bar first to see if my guy would show up there before going
to the
meeting. I looked around a bit, but I didn't see anybody who
looked like
my subject. I felt so out of place that I didn't even order a
beer.
The meeting was at a church in an expensive Silicon Valley
suburb. The cars
were expensive, the homes were expensive, and the people looked
and smelled
expensive, expensive leather and good perfume leaving a wake as
they passed
me on the street. The crowd at the AA meeting looked less
prosperous than
the people on the streets of this town, but the audience was not
poor.
Going to an AA meeting if you're not "in recovery" is pretty
strange.
It's like a Protestant at a Catholic Mass. You have a general
idea what's
going on but you don't know what to say when, and you find
yourself following
the motions and speech of the people next to you although you're
not sure
why.
The theme of the evening was gratitude. One man, a graphic
artist, spoke
of going to see a performance of "A Christmas Carol" in San
Francisco.
He spoke of walking to the theater, and of how much he wanted to
give his
wallet to one of the people sleeping in the doorways. He said
that he was
grateful not to be one of the people sleeping on the street, and
how grateful
he and all the people at the AA meeting should be, that without
AA the people
at the meeting could be sleeping in the street.
After the meeting broke up, people were chatting in the church
courtyard.
I noticed that a man from the meeting was doing something behind
a bench.
I wasn't certain, but I thought that I knew what he was doing. I
stepped
behind a wall where I could watch him without him seeing me.
Nobody spoke
to him. As far as I could tell nobody else even saw him.
He was neatly dressed, with clean clothes and recently cut hair.
He had
laid down a large piece of cardboard in the grass behind the
bench, and
was reaching into a large blue duffel bag for a sleeping bag.
There he was
in the church plaza, with others just a few feet away, but
nobody else seemed
to see him. He was apparently invisible to those around him, who
were thankful
that none of the people at the meeting were homeless.