States of Grace by Mandy Miller (great novels of all time .TXT) 📗

circle the bottle under my nose, indulging in the syrupy aroma, the same scent that used to permeate my father’s study in Greenwich.

I pour the contents into the sink, wash the empty bottle out with dish soap, and toss it into a plastic shopping bag bearing the name XYZ Fine Wines and Spirits.

I walk two blocks from The Hurricane to St. Anthony’s Catholic Church. A lapsed Presbyterian, I was drawn to St. Anthony’s not by doctrine, but by obligation. While couples dine downtown in trendy bistros, and suburbanites help their kids with homework every night, I am on my way to announce, for the umpteenth time, “My name is Grace, and I am alcoholic and an addict.”

St. Anthony’s opens the doors of its fellowship hall every night to those in need of support to kick habits borne of biology or circumstance. Some come because they have to by court order, others to repair tattered lives, relationships, or simply because they have nowhere else to go. Maybe I fall into every category. Or none, perhaps. I’ve never been certain. Except for the IED crushing my leg, who knows? Maybe I would never have taken a pain pill. And the booze? Well, I drank before the war, but the real drinking only started after I came home as empty as a spent shell but plagued with memories like live grenades.

The actual truth as to what I am has become irrelevant. An alcoholic? Addict? Both? Neither? No matter. The meetings control the unknown, control my fear of what could have been last year. How I could have killed someone driving two times over the legal limit. And this weekly booze test? This is my insurance that I’m on the right track, that I’ll never want a drink so badly again that I’ll be willing to risk my life and others’. One of many variables. A waitress on her way home from work. A father driving his kid home from soccer practice. Myself. “But for the grace of God” was what I would think if I believed in God. But I don’t. At least not anymore.

I do find humor, however, in the fact that the so-called Bar mandates I attend a meeting of Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous twice a week until a committee of lawyers, a morality star chamber of sorts, says I can stop. That the Florida Bar has undertaken to keep me out of bars so I can rejoin the Bar, might be the only amusing thing about my situation.

When I appeared in front of the buttoned-up Department of Lawyer Regulation over a year ago, they suspended my law license and issued a public reprimand via an announcement in the Florida Bar Journal saying I’d been a bad girl. As if that could have been any more humiliating than my mugshot on the front of the Sun Sentinel the morning after my arrest. When I made my mea culpa to save whatever might remain of my career, I wondered how many of the earnest panel, each one a blue-suited carbon copy of the next, would end the day with a stiff drink.

At first, I resisted going to meetings, secure in my belief that it all comes down to willpower and I’ve got plenty of that. I told Vinnie I wasn’t “like those people,” that I didn’t need the goddamned meetings, or the Twelve Steps, or whatever other hocus pocus The Program has to offer. Vinnie held his tongue. Instead, he took me by the hand and led me down the street to my first meeting at St. Anthony’s. After a while, coming became a habit, one I’m now afraid to give up.

Tonight, the place is packed. Father O’Donnell would never admit as much, but St. Anthony’s is better attended by NA members than parishioners, although the zeal of the former group for showing up may be somewhat less enthusiastic. While the end game of religious faith is to attain eternal life, the goal of NA and AA is to prolong our earthly existence, those of us for whom drugs or alcohol, or in my case, both plus a daily meeting, have become religion. Apparently, in my universe, anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.

I take a seat in the back row as the crowd filters in. Men, women, old, young, all shades and sizes. Some wear suits, others shorts and flip-flops. Some with hundred-dollar haircuts, others look like their last haircut was perpetrated by a blind man wielding blunt garden shears.

Seated between a young man wearing a faded Nirvana T-shirt, and a middle-aged man in a pinstriped suit who looks to belong more at the University Club than a church hall with a bunch of junkies, I survey tonight’s crowd. Who among us has robbed their grandmother of her Social Security money? Who has sold their body for a fix? Who has excused themselves from a business meeting to do a line of cocaine from a toilet seat lid with a hundred-dollar bill? Who has killed? Who will die soon?

On any given night, there are more than fifty AA or NA meetings in Fort Lauderdale. They happen in churches like St. Anthony’s, but also in back rooms of car dealerships, the library, high school gyms, and even one on the beach conveniently located in front of the Elbo Room, the oldest dive bar on The Strip. I come to St. Anthony’s because of its proximity to The Hurricane, but also because I like the anonymity of the large crowd. Absolute equality in mutual affliction. From time to time, I recognize an attendee and nod, but mostly I keep to myself. Here, I’m nobody. Not the one who took her life well-lived as a conscientious student, soldier, lawyer, wife, and threw it in the trash like junk mail. At St. Anthony’s I’m just like everyone else—trying to get by, one day at a time.

Every now and again, I go to an AA meeting at the community college downtown, but I mostly stick