Published in Issue 63.3: Summer 2024
Come, poor babe:
I have heard, but not believed,
the spirits o’ the dead
May walk again: If such thing be, thy mother
Appear’d to me last night, for ne’er was dream
So like a waking.
—The Winter’s Tale
“I’ll have a club soda,” I told the waiter, working his way around the table, “with a slice of lime.”
“I’ll have the same,” the woman next to me said. Her name was Amy. We were part of a group of teachers who had just left the brightly lit stacks of the Folger Shakespeare Library in our nation’s capital where we were a few days into a month-long NEH residency to learn more about the Bard. “Are you a friend of Bill?” she asked.
“Bill . . .” I hesitated. “Shakespeare? Of course. Why else would I be here?”
She laughed and shook her long brown hair. “Never mind.”
“Bill who?” I persisted. It was July 1984. Talk at the table turned to the Democratic Convention about to begin in San Francisco.
“Mondale is a shoo-in,” said one of the other teachers.
“A friend of Bill,” Amy said, “it’s a way of asking if you go to meetings.” I had no idea what she was talking about.
“What kind of meetings?”
“A.A. meetings.”
“You mean the auto club?” I said, confused.
“That’s triple A,” she laughed again. Our club sodas arrived with slices of lemon instead of lime. They rarely get it right.
Amy looked at me . . . It was as if she were looking inside me. Then she said, “A.A. is Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Oh,” I said, getting it, shaking my head. “No. Why would you think I’m an alcoholic?”
“Just wondering,” she said. “And when you ordered a club soda, I thought I’d ask. Seriously though, you’ve never heard of A.A.?”
“Of course I have, but it didn’t occur to me that’s what you meant.” I poked my lemon with the straw. “Besides, I’m not an alcoholic.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“You didn’t offend me,” I said. “It’s just, I haven’t had a drink in twelve years.”
“Really? How old were you then?”
“Twenty-one.”
“You must have started early.”
“Fifteen, maybe fourteen.”
“So, when you quit, you were in college?”
“No, I flunked out of college. Actually I flunked out of several colleges.”
“Wow. Because you were drunk?”
I never talked about my drinking. I was ashamed of it, ashamed of myself. I lifted my club soda, taking my time, wondering how I was going to get out of this conversation.
“I guess.”
“I bet you know the day you stopped.”
“March 25, 1972,” I said, surprised. “How did you . . . ?”
“Most alcoholics know the day they quit,” she said. “It’s the most important day of their lives.”
“But I’m not an alcoholic,” I protested.
Someone at the table said Mondale should choose a woman for his running mate. Someone else argued that if he did, he’d never get elected.
“What did you do then?” she asked.
“I went to work at a bar.”
“That sounds like it was a good idea,” she laughed and sipped her club soda.
“I thought it was at the time,” I said.
“So then what happened?”
I lifted my glass again, but it was finished, just lemon on the rocks. I faked drinking it like I faked so many other things in my life as I tried to figure out what to say next.
“I’m glad that Jesse Jackson made it to the primary,” one of the other teachers said, “but he doesn’t have a chance in hell.” No one argued with her.
“How about you?” I said, switching the subject. “Were you an alcoholic?”
“No,” she said. “I am an alcoholic. I’ve been sober three years.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If you haven’t had a drink in three years, how are you an alcoholic?”
“What would happen if you had a drink right now?” she asked.
I knew what would happen. I’d probably be lying in a gutter, pissing myself again, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t go away when you stop drinking,” Amy said. “I’ll always be an alcoholic. A.A. saved my life. Not the auto club. Just so, you know, if you ever need it.”
Maybe I had been an alcoholic, but I wasn’t an alcoholic anymore. I haven’t had a drink in a dozen years. I had it under control. No problem. Piece of cake.
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Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York City. Author of eleven books and chapbooks, his prose and poetry have appeared in Guernica, Harpur Palate, Hippocampus, New Welsh Reader, Rattle, The Sun, and elsewhere. Drunken Fairy Tale: A Memoir of Ruin and Redemption is forthcoming from Toplight Books, an imprint of McFarland. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City. www.peteremurphy.com
