They were just getting started when I walked in. There were three tables set up in a U, with people seated on either sides of the tables and perhaps a dozen other chairs arranged at the back. Another table off to the side held refreshments. I got a Styrofoam cup and drew coffee from the urn, then took a chair at the rear. A couple of people nodded to me and I nodded back.

The speaker was a fellow about my age. He was wearing a herringbone tweed jacket over a plaid flannel shirt. He told the story of his life from his first drink in his early teens until he came into the program and got sober four years ago. He was married and divorced a few times, cracked up several cars, lost jobs, hit a few hospitals. Then he stopped drinking and started going to meetings and things got better. “Things didn’t get better,” he said, correcting himself. “I got better.”

They say that a lot. They say a lot of things a lot and you get to hear the same phrases over and over. The stories are pretty interesting, though. People sit up there in front of God and everybody and tell you the goddamnedest things.

He spoke for half an hour. Then they took a ten-minute break and passed the basket for expenses. I put in a dollar, then helped myself to another cup of coffee and a couple of oatmeal cookies. A fellow in an old army jacket greeted me by name. I remembered his name was Jim and returned the greeting. He asked me how things were going and I told him they were going all right.

“You’re here and you’re sober,” he said. “That’s the important thing.”

“I suppose.”

“Any day I don’t take a drink is a good day. You’re staying sober a day at a time. The hardest thing in the world is for an alcoholic to not drink and you’re doing it.”

Except I wasn’t. I’d been out of the hospital for nine or ten days. I would stay sober for two or three days and then I would pick up a drink. Mostly it was a drink or two drinks or three drinks and it stayed under control, but Sunday night I’d been bad drunk, drinking bourbon at a Blarney Stone on Sixth Avenue where I didn’t figure to run into anybody I knew. I couldn’t remember leaving the bar and didn’t know how I got home, and Monday morning I had the shakes and a dry mouth and felt like walking death.

I didn’t tell him any of this.