I'll Be You(12)

I sat in the back row and sniffed gingerly at my coffee as the two dozen or so attendees stood up and shared their tales of woe: custody lost, finances fallen to pieces, mysterious bruises and broken noses and swaths of lost time. I liked these stories, I always had. They made me feel less alone, yes. But I particularly liked how they almost ended with a note of hope; because you had to have some hope in order to end up at one of these meetings. Otherwise, you’d already be dead.

You might say it’s naive to hope, to feint toward optimism instead of cynicism. Just look at the world we live in now, at the pain and despair, at the fools running the place who dig us deeper into a hole each day. And yet without hope, there is no reason to live at all. Even if you’re only hoping for small things—a nice meal to share with a friend, a mild summer, a day at the beach—this can be the difference between waking up to face the world and taking that second sleeping pill and staying in bed. Believe me, if you want to know how vital hope is, ask a recovered addict; they are the most hopeful people in the world, because they know what it means to be so low that there are only two viable paths left: up, or death. If you’re at a meeting, you’ve chosen up. And what is hope but this: the blind, naive belief that things might someday be a tiny bit better than they are now.

Most days, hope still felt foreign to me. Maybe that’s why I was so drawn to the meetings and the people who spoke so fervently and optimistically, despite their missing teeth and regrettable face tattoos and permanently damaged livers. One day, maybe all that hope would rub off on me, and my life would improve because of it.

After a stringy-haired folk music guitarist finished speaking (nineteen months sober, he’d just reconciled with his dying mother, which brought the room to tears), the meeting leader surveyed the rows of seats and caught my eye.

“Looks like we have someone new today. You interested in telling your story?”

I brushed cookie crumbs from my jeans and stood.

“Hi, I’m Sam.” I looked out at the group, who gazed back at me with mild curiosity. Mostly middle-aged and life-worn, per usual; but Santa Barbara’s conservative affluence made for a more clean-cut group of addicts than your average Hollywood AA meeting. In the second row, a blue-eyed man about my age stared at me keenly through tortoiseshell glasses. He was nondescript, just a wiry guy in a plain white T-shirt, although his curly hair was choppy and uneven, as if he’d cut it himself in the mirror with a pair of garden shears. He smiled encouragingly at me.

“I’m three-hundred-seventy-nine days sober and I’m in town visiting my parents for a few days. I’m not going to go into my long and sordid history here today—I’ve done that plenty at my regular meeting in Los Angeles. I’ll just say that I’m aware that staying with them is a trigger. My mother—” I didn’t even have to finish the sentence as heads around me started to nod vigorously.

“I haven’t actually slept under the same roof as my parents in about five years and it’s making me think a lot about my childhood. Wondering where things went so wrong, you know?” More nodding. “Anyway. Maybe it’s not such a great idea for me to be here, dwelling on all this. But the thing is—my parents asked me to come and help them out with something, and that’s the first time they’ve done that in…decades? And so, even though I know that stepping out of my regular routine in Los Angeles is a recipe for falling off the wagon, I’m trying to hold on to this: that my family is counting on me for once. And I’m not going to let them down.”

I took my seat again and let the applause wash over me. That little hit of dopamine that I got from public approval—the same lift of joy that I’d chased all those years as an actress, and then later tried to replicate with a shot of vodka or a line of coke—was the other thing that kept me coming to these meetings and standing up to speak.

I’d lost a lot, but I had this, at least; this, and caffeine; so I sipped at my second cup of watery Nespresso and smiled happily at the faces that smiled back at me.



* * *



—

After the last speaker had finished and we’d folded up all the chairs and moved them against the wall, the tortoiseshell-glasses man found me. Up close, he was more attractive than I’d first thought. He looked like a character from a movie about a midcentury boys’ boarding school: the kid who’s the beleaguered misfit but grows into his body and returns triumphantly to his high school reunion as a bestselling novelist.

There was something about him that compelled me despite myself, something about the deep lines around his eyes, the wiry muscles under his T-shirt, and the flush of a tan that suggested he spent a lot of time running on the beach. He held out a hand for me to shake and I grasped it without thinking, finding his grip pleasantly strong.

“Sam Logan, right?”

I braced myself. Fifteen years after On the Double was canceled, I still got recognized on occasion, but it was usually only by obsessives and oddballs, people who had encyclopedic knowledge of vintage television or who spent a lot of time on Reddit. Sometimes I’d get a sharp-eyed young woman with a good memory of her childhood idols. The men who recognized me were typically the worst: Often it was because they’d fetishized my sister and me as teens, masturbating to our Nickelodeon sitcom. Now they wanted to fuck me just so they could tell their friends, Hey, remember that actress from that old show about the twins? She gave me a blow job. Boy, she really screwed up her life.