Mutiny

“My name is Brian and I’m an alcoholic.”

I can’t recall how many times I’ve said that publicly. It must be in the hundreds. Maybe even the thousands by now. I have shuffled myself into small, poorly lit rooms that smell of stale coffee and stiff pastries for twelve years to say them in front of groups of strangers who have said it to me in turn, substituting my name for theirs.

The meetings can either be good or bad depending upon what neighborhood you go to. What time of year. The wealthier neighborhoods actually have good coffee and lay out a pretty decent spread around Christmastime, with fancy charcuterie boards and homemade pastries. But the people, I find, aren’t particularly friendly. I have found that the LGBTQ+ meetings devolve into little more than preludes to a hook-up, filled with people looking to find their next relationship, their next addiction. So, I avoid them like cracks in the sidewalk because I am one of those people. The Black meetings are all about the Bible, with people quoting verses, reading from scripture, holding clammy hands clenched, heads bowed in prayer. Attributing their six days, seven years, eight months, twenty years sober to Jesus while blaming their falls from Grace, their mistakes, on Satan. They want me to accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior. But honestly, I’ve got enough people nosing around in my business and adding a deity to the list seems excessive. I am bad at religion. It has never appealed to me. I am a sinner. A transgressor. A backslider. Plus, I know better. I know now that whether I succeed in sobriety or not is all on me. Not angels. Not demons. Just me.

So I am fully proud of these twelve years. But that also means that I’m fully ashamed of the many years before them.

This is a story about mutiny on the ship that is me. When I drink, different versions of myself storm the deck, determined to take over. There is 8-year-old me still reeling with anger from the first time a white boy called me a nigger. There is 14-year-old me, still hurt from when his first crush on a boy resulted in that boy calling him a “faggot”. There is 21-year-old me who learned that sex was the only way he could show that he was a worthwhile human being. 22-year-old me who learned through the power of cocaine that being “edgy” was a way to gain power over people. They all have mutiny on their minds and wait for the sweet taste of liquor to weaken my defenses.

And now that my brain is “repairing itself”, I am forced to remember each incident so clearly. As if they’re happening in real time. And now I experience shame after shame. I feel the embarrassment that I should have felt then but washed away in a river of bourbon. The shame has become my Higher Power. And the memories are like prayers.

When I went to rehab at the Greenbriar Recovery Center twelve years ago, I was only there to get a few days off work. I didn’t think I had a problem. But, after several ultimatums and one intervention held after a particularly ruinous binge, I decided to just go. To humor everyone. And I hated my job so much that I thought hiding out in a rehab would be like having a little vacation. And maybe I had been hitting the bottle a little hard lately. Besides, my insurance paid for it.

_{Image Credit Umm-e-Hani Ali via Unsplash}

At the time, I worked in a call center dispatching roadside assistance to angry and irritated people. Each day, I would walk in with head hung low, dreading the next eight hours under florescent lighting being screamed at over the phone by people stuck on the side of the highway and a boss who elevated snarky micromanagement to virtuoso levels. I sat there hoping for a hurricane, tornado or tsunami that was strong enough to knock out all the power so that I could be sent home. I kept a small bottle of bourbon in my desk drawer and took secret swigs by pretending to tie my shoes. I “tied my shoes” often to numb the misery. I took a small expertly folded envelope of cocaine with me to the men’s room during my fifteen-minute breaks. Just to stay sharp.

The “library” at Greenbriar Recovery Center was always empty. It wasn’t really much of a library, really. Just a small room full of books and no people. No one used it except for me and Doug. During my first nights at Greenbriar, I sat in that room alone, never really reading a book, just mostly getting away from all the crazy people in the facility that I was sure I wasn’t one of. And, one night, I walked in and Doug was sitting there alone. He is a white man. Older. You can still smell the Summer of Love on him. His hair is gray and making a failed attempt at dreadlocks like a mop that someone just refuses to throw away. He still dresses like it’s 1965 in a tie-dyed shirt with all manner of braided things around his neck. He still gives the peace sign as a hello. Doug looks like he may have been a good-looking man at one time. But the Summer of Love took its toll and turned into the Fall of Dismay and the Winter of Discontent. He fell victim to the brown acid and every drug that came after it.

He greets me with a “Hey, dude” when I walk in. His peace sign still hanging in the air as I sit down. He’s not reading. He’s coloring in a book of Highlights for Children that must have been in this library since they broke ground on the place. I know from our group therapy sessions that Doug has been in rehab several times, getting clean for a bit and then relapsing over and over again. In group I have learned that he has children that don’t speak to him and a few ex-wives who can’t stand the sight of him.

“Doing some coloring?” I say because I can’t think of anything else.

“Yep.”

We sit in silence for a while until I ask him about something he said in group the previous day.

“So you said you were clean for ten years. How can you be clean for ten years and then just go back to it?”

Doug looks up at me for a brief moment before he picks up the blue colored pencil to fill in the sky. He speaks like a Southern California surfer boy even though he’s from Kittanning. “It’s easier than you think, dude,” he says.

At that time, I was still in the headspace of thinking that no one really has a drug and alcohol problem— that it was just a matter of regulating how much you use. So I say, “Maybe you don’t really have a problem. Maybe you just need to use like a normal person.”

He laughs at this. Not a prolonged laugh. Just a loud “HA!” before he goes back to his coloring, and we sit in silence again. He takes a deep breath before he speaks again, still feverishly coloring.

“You know what the worst part of getting sober is?” he asks.

“No. What’s the worst part of getting sober?”

“The remembering.”

I don’t know what he means. “What remembering?”

He sits back in his chair and rests the yellow pencil between his index finger and thumb, giving it a break from coloring in the sun which he has made a supernova with reds and purples. But he keeps his eyes trained on his artwork as he speaks.

“When you get sober, your brain starts to fix itself. The neurons that you broke start to heal and make connections and they start to fire and then they start reminding you. When you least expect it, they’ll remind you.”

“Remind you of what?”

“Of everything,” he shrugs as he colors in his doomsday sun, wearing the yellow lead down to a nub. “And when they remind you, you better get ready. Because that’s when you relapse.”

I had heard so much of what I thought was bullshit at rehab. Counselors talking about “accountability” and “gratitude” and the quotidian stream of useless platitudes they trotted out every day. I watched him color for a while before I just stood up and left. I didn’t even respond to him. The sound of my chair scraping against the floor and me saying “good night” didn’t stir him from his coloring, where he was now filling in the sky with grays and blacks as if a storm was rolling in. I left him there, and in the following weeks learned that I am like him, an alcoholic and a drug addict. Something in rehab took hold and I saw the truth. I learned that my reliance on substances was a problem for me and everyone around me. And I learned that some of those platitudes hold a great deal of truth. It is indeed sometimes darkest before the dawn, what doesn’t kill you does makes you stronger, and most importantly, this too shall pass. But I completely forgot what Doug said when I left rehab. His words of warning had faded out into the ether of my time of denial.

I don’t remember how long I had been sober before it came true. I just know that the memories began to overtake me when I least expected it. I would be doing something completely unrelated when a group of brain cells would gather to repair themselves just enough to form crystal-clear memories playing inside my brain in high definition. I could remember a specific time and place, a space, an incident all as if I was an interloper in my own body.

When the memories come back, it’s as though I am sitting in the passenger seat of my body bound and gagged as my captor controls my speech and movements. He looks like me. He sounds like me. No one can tell that he isn’t. A Mutineer. I am forced to watch as he lays waste to everything in his path.

One memory came to me recently as I was ironing.

I watch with curiosity at first as The Mutineer makes his way up the shifting and swaying sidewalk toward a house that I recognize. It is early evening and the lights from the well-appointed residences on the street glow invitingly. The air is chilly with autumn. I remember this house. It belongs to my friend Leslie and her boyfriend. I have been here before. I remember this night. It’s around Thanksgiving time and Leslie’s boyfriend, Chris is having a Friendsgiving. He does it every year and, since he and Leslie are a new couple, this is the first time I’ve been invited. He is a nice guy who works for the university. I remember this party but I don’t remember the sidewalk swaying so very much. I don’t remember mumbling curses to myself as I walked up it. It becomes apparent to me now that I am fully drunk even before I arrived. I try to tell The Mutineer to turn back, go home, sleep it off. But I have been rendered mute and can do absolutely nothing but watch as he rings the doorbell.

The door opens wide and a beaming Chris is on the other side of it. He is a short, stocky, white man with black-framed glasses and a lot of tattoos. He loves to cook. Every year, he invites his best friends to his house where he prepares any number of delicacies for their enjoyment. He cures meats and makes sauces. He juliennes vegetables and buys cases of wine and beer and liquor. The smell of Thanksgiving wafts out of the door from behind him and makes The Mutineer nauseous. Chris smiles and says some words but just off to the left, on top of the dining room credenza behind him, there are gleaming bottles of liquor. Each one more colorful than the next. The Mutineer mouths some unintelligible words back to him and a look of concern scurries across his face before he quickly replaces it with a less sincere smile. As I watch from my place of captivity, he steps aside, opens his arms, and welcomes The Mutineer into his home.

The Mutineer steers my body straight to the booze, filling a rocks glass to the brim with bourbon. When it’s fully drained, he feels loose enough to socialize. The party is full of 30-something white people. All stylish in their own way. The Mutineer sees them as a threat and walks around, inserting himself into other people’s conversations. A woman with an asymmetrical haircut stands talking to another man full of tattoos. The Mutineer butts in after she mentions her girlfriend.

“Oh, so you like pussy, do you?” I hear someone say to her before I realize it was my voice. The Mutineer thinks it’s funny and laughs uproariously but I can see now the look of disgust on her face, the bewilderment and offense. I can feel her urge to get away. The Mutineer makes his way over to another group of people who are taking pictures at the makeshift photobooth that has been set up for guests to commemorate the evening and makes a series of inappropriate gestures behind their backs. He makes his way around the party bumming smokes from people that he then shoves into his pocket and breaks in half before immediately asking for another one. His speech is so slurred that it’s not even speech anymore. Just a serious of noises that sound like whale calls. He staggers around the house bumping into things. Knocking things over and offering half-hearted apologies before pouring himself another tumbler of whiskey. He is in the middle of insulting yet another guest and just about to cause an argument when a man walks up beside him and stands there without looking in his direction.

“Hey,” he says in a placid and calming voice, “do you need a ride home?” He is young and handsome. I cannot tell if he’s gay or not but, these days, who can tell? The Mutineer has no such question and fully believes that this man wants to fuck him. The man places his hand on The Mutineer’s back. His words are kind and soothing. “I’d hate for you to try to get home on your own tonight.”

The Mutineer takes him in for a moment and then looks back at the party guests he was just talking to. They are all waiting expectantly for his answer which The Mutineer misreads as them wanting a front row seat to a hookup. The Mutineer decides to play along and accept his offer of a ride back to his messy apartment for sex. But the real me, the one that’s experiencing what really happened that night, the one that is now remembering while ironing a shirt, knows what this was about. I can see it clearly now with a few years of sobriety behind me, awash in humiliation. But The Mutineer was oblivious; he had control over my body, my actions, my words. I watch as the nice man escorts a stumbling imposter to his car. The Mutineer licks his lips lasciviously.

In religious recovery meetings, they tell you that no other can help you but God. They tell you to relinquish yourself to Him. They tell you that you, on your own, are powerless, and in order to succeed in recovery, you have to give yourself over to the Higher Power. I have gone to many meetings in those dank rooms and stood off to the side while the other members of the group held hands in prayer. One night, a woman approached me afterward as I was stealing treats from the cookie table and stashing them in my backpack to take home. She didn’t seem to mind that I was doing that and was more concerned with the fact that I hadn’t joined in on the prayer.

“Don’t you believe in God?” she asked.

I don’t remember anyone ever asking me that question out loud. But it’s one that I’ve asked myself many times. And, to my surprise, I told her the truth.

“I want to,” I said. “I really want to. I want to believe that there’s a being out there who loves me unconditionally and without judging me. But when I look around this room at you all praying, it seems to me that you’re all praying to a different entity. All praying for something different. Everybody believes in their own God. They only think they’re worshipping the same one.” I don’t want anyone’s god to steer my ship any more than I want the Mutineer to. I want to be the captain seeking help from only the shipmates I can see and touch. I want my recovery to be based in that.

She didn’t like my answer and fixed me with a look of pity, concern, and a little disgust. The same look that a long-forgotten nice young man who offered to give me a ride home from a Thanksgiving party gave to me years before.

I don’t remember much about the car ride back to my apartment that night. The details are buried too deep down a barrel of bourbon for even the sober version of myself to dig out. But I do remember talking a lot of nonsense and that he nodded and responded in ways that were placating. I remember flirting inappropriately, saying awful things, and that he took my salacious comments on the chin and kept his eyes on the road. I remember there was some sort of kerfuffle borne of me not being able to remember how to get to my building. He drove me around for a lot longer than he needed to because of that. I remember the streetlights floating by in my drunken haze and really believing that, after the car stopped in front of my apartment, he was going to get out with me and I was going to get laid. So when we finally ended up out front, I lingered. I lingered and babbled for an uncomfortably long time in his passenger seat. Until, having finally had enough, he said flatly, in no uncertain terms, “It’s time for you to get out of my car now.”

And even then, I didn’t have a clue. I had no idea that I had almost ruined what was supposed to have been a lovely evening for a group of nice people. I didn’t understand that my presence and my presence alone was a blight. I didn’t know that, while I was busy making a fool of myself over and over again, conversations were happening about “getting that guy out of here.” I didn’t know that words like “asshole” and “drunk” and “creep” were being bandied about to describe me. I didn’t know that people were moving themselves around the house like chess pieces in efforts to avoid me.

I got out of the nice man’s car and staggered toward my door. He didn’t wait for me to get inside before he sped away. Floored it. As he did, I cursed him under my breath for leading me on, not even recognizing that he was, in the end, doing what was best for me. There is nothing that stings more to me now than the knowing what a pestilence I was.

And I also know now that there is no mutineer. There is only me. The anger, the entitlement, the vulgarity, they are all ugly sides of me. And it is only my shame that keeps them at bay. That’s what keeps me sober. That, and the desire to do right from now on. Because, as long as I live, I never want to be that version of myself again. Sometimes, shame is good.

The idea of a mutineer is an invention designed by me to protect me from accountability. He is merely the past personified. It is far easier to deal with him as if he were an entirely different person and not a series of interconnected events, all of which have a deep and intricate story unto themselves, and all of which brought out the worst in me. If you turn the past into a person, it’s easier to fight it, to blame it, to love it, hate it, to run from it, to run towards it.

I have apologized to Chris for ruining his party. One must make amends. He graciously accepted. He doesn’t seem to think I’m a horrible person and I am humbled by that. I am learning to forgive myself as well. And I have realized over the past few years that worshipping at the altars of Shame and Embarrassment isn’t enough. That’s when the real work starts. The work of having to consider myself worthy. The work that helps me to realize that I am not the person I once was, nor am I fully the person that I’m going to be. I dream of him. This better version of myself. He is kind and loving and laughs easily. He apologizes when he is wrong. He will be someone that I don’t mind spending time with. I am not fully there. But I can feel him emerging, excited to greet the world. I’m trying to steer my ship towards him.

I’d like very much to believe that the Mutineer is gone forever. That I’ve forced him into a steamer trunk secured with rattling chains, tossed him overboard and watched him sink to the bottom of the ocean. But I know that he can breathe underwater. So I have to remain vigilant. Because I also know he’s waiting patiently for my shame to recede so that he can steer the ship once more.