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

to NA and at St. A’s. I prefer NA over AA. The NA crowd’s harder core, more authentic, although the idea that someone who jams needles into her arm, foot, groin, is more authentic than someone who drinks a fifth of firewater every night, does seem perverted. Maybe I just enjoy NA’s no-holds-barred gallows humor about how it takes much longer to drink oneself to death than it does to OD and thus, drunks think they’ve got more time to cheat.

Not long after I started coming to St. A’s, Hachi, my soon-to-be sponsor, tried to lighten my mood with a well-worn NA joke. “You know the difference between drunks and junkies? The drunk steals your stuff, but the junkie steals your stuff then helps you look for it.”

So here I am. Still coming. Still sober. Scared shitless of losing it again. Of losing what’s left of my life.

A hand cups my ear. “Traffic sucks. Sorry I’m late.”

The hand belongs to Hachi. She’s a diminutive Seminole woman with cinnamon skin and a ready smile which belies the trouble she and her people have seen. She’s from Sugar Bay, a one-stoplight town on the banks of Lake Okeechobee, where addiction is as common as undocumented pickers. Hachi drives sixty miles east across Alligator Alley to attend meetings because there are no meetings in Sugar Bay. She says her people prefer stay loaded than get sober because all that would mean is they’d have to face what little’s been left to the descendants of the great Chief Osceola. She may be exaggerating a little, but if that’s what gets her here, I’ll let it slide.

A skinny woman shuffles up front to face the crowd. Even from the back row, I can see she’s short on teeth and long on nerves, body and voice trembling, a barely breathing live wire.

“My name is Beth, and I am an addict.”

“Hi, Beth,” the crowd replies.

Beth tells the story of how she used to be a second-grade teacher with a husband, two kids, and a home. Now she lives under the Third Avenue bridge, because she was raped at a homeless shelter—it’s safer to sleep on the streets. Beth describes having had back surgery two years ago, after which her doctor prescribed painkillers. When the prescription ran out, she asked for more, and then more again, and again after that. Eventually, the doctor refused, and Beth moved on to another doctor at a pain clinic, a place she’d seen advertised on the back of a free local rag. And then on to another clinic, and another, each one giving Beth what she thought she wanted. “They were prescription drugs, so I thought it was okay,” she says. But as with all things that seem too good to be true, she was wrong.

Hachi grasps my hand and squeezes tight.

“It was easy,” Beth says. “I kept showing them my old MRI from before the surgery. I said my back still hurt. I’d get three hundred and sixty blues, you know, Oxy, and a hundred and twenty Xanax every monthly visit at every clinic. Nobody checks how much you’re getting. But the more I took, the more I wanted. I started to sell half my stash to buy the next. Before I knew it, I was shooting up heroin in the public bathroom at the bus station. And then I got arrested. When I got out of jail, my husband was tired of believing my promises to quit, so he moved the kids out of state, and I moved in under the bridge.”

From my days prosecuting drug crimes, I know all about pill mills. So-called pain clinics are one-stop shops for junkies like Beth. Like me. For a couple of hundred dollars, a “patient” can see a doctor and spin tales about the pain she’s in that would make a soap-opera writer proud. A few chart notes later, the doctor hands over a prescription for 240 thirty-milligram tablets of OxyContin, and throws in prescriptions for Xanax and Adderall for good measure. The unholy trinity―one painkiller, one tranquilizer, and one stimulant―the addict’s version of heaven on earth, courtesy of Big Pharma. One hundred percent legal. Often one hundred percent lethal.

After Beth’s brutal testimonial, the moderator suggests a break which, in NA speak means “time for a cigarette.” I’m no longer a smoker, but a time-out from the despair seems like a good idea, so Hachi and I troop out to the parking lot with the band of not so merry-makers.

“Grace, sooner or later you’re going to have to get up there,” Hachi says.

I pretend I haven’t heard her, routing around in my bag for a piece of Nicorette.

“I know you said they could make you come here, but they couldn’t make you say the words. But haven’t you been stubborn long enough?”

I start to walk away, but she grabs my shoulder.

“Come on, you’ve come a long way on the Twelve Steps. It would do you good to share.”

“I can’t,” I say. “I’ve never missed a meeting since I got out of jail. But it’s not my way to wear my heart on my sleeve.”

“That’s not what sharing is, and you know it. It’s about facing up.”

I stare up the inky night sky perforated by thousands of stars.

“Not that I think it’s a great idea, but if you can buy a bottle of booze every week, look at it for the entire seven days, and never take a sip, I’d say you’re strong enough to stand up there and share your story.”

“H, please, not tonight.”

“What was your poison this week?” She points at the plastic bag.

I feel my nostrils flare.

“Okay, okay, I’ll shut up,” she says, and leans against the wall beside me to watch the crowd milling around the parking lot, a captive audience for drug dealers. I’m glad to see a police cruiser across the street, its blue lights a reminder of the high cost of failure for all of us, no matter our vice.

She puts an arm around my shoulder.