Page 23 of Blue Umbrella Sky
Here’s the thing. She looks like somebody’s sweet old grandma. We never really know people from what we see on the outside, do we? I’ll never judge someone again by the surface.
Silence. Billy was about ready to accept that they’d do whatever ablutions they did at the close of an AA meeting when Stan said, “We got time for one more share.”
Like a classroom full of kids where no one has the answer to the teacher’s questions, gazes darted away from Stan, down at the floor, at each other, wondering, “Will you be the one? Will you break the silence?”
Billy was stunned to find himself raising his hand. It was almost as though his arm and hand had developed a mind of their own. Everyone peered at him, and a rush of fire rose to his cheeks. He looked over at Jon, who nodded.
He tried to swallow but had no spit, so he just put some breath behind words and said them. “Hi. I’m Billy… and I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hi, Billy!”
Shit. They say that to everybody. So why do I wanna cry?Billy choked down his sobs and his fears and just started talking. Those first words he’d just said were, really, the most important. Billy even thought for a second of that old cliché, the one about the journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step.
Everyone saying “Hi, Billy” was standard, the voices tired, practiced, rote. But the moment wasn’t standard. Not for him. It was an opening of arms. It was an explosion of release and relief. It was being seen, really seen, and not judged.
It was a moment Billy knew he’d never forget.
He grinned, knew it came out sheepish. His mind went blank, but damn it, he’d make himself speak even if he only uttered gibberish. He had to trust that the words would come.
The clock ticked down.
“I don’t know what I wanna say. Idoknow what I wanna say. I just said it. I’m an alcoholic. A fucking alcoholic, just like my daddy and his daddy before him. Admitting that’s more of athingthan I could have ever realized.
“I’ve denied it all my life, pretty much.
“I should have known when I took that first stolen beer with my cousins at age eight.
“I should have known when I was sneaking my parents’ vodka before classes started in high school, watering it down so they wouldn’t know. And finally, just pitching the bottle out when it was empty. What to do then? I was fourteen. How could I buy another bottle? Oh yeah, the answer came to me. Smile at the obviously gay guy coming out of the liquor store on Halsted. Maybe do a little more than smile.”
Billy hung his head, then forced it back up, though he would look no one in the eye. Not yet….
“Replacing that bottle became a routine, one that started my signature move of mixing alcohol and sex. I was kind of a prostitute, huh? No, Iwasone. Booze instead of cash.” Billy let out a long, shuddering sigh. He’d never told anyone any of this before.
“Gradually, I grew up. Didn’t need to offer up myself for a bottle. I could buy my own. And I did. But the pattern of drinking and sleeping with strangers continued. I even mixed it up with an alphabet soup of party drugs too. As I got older, I started hanging out in the clubs—there was T, G, X, all, of course, part of PNP.” Billy shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if you know what those letters mean—you get the gist. They all boil down to the same—running away from myself. Dulling the feelings. But here’s the thing: I dulled everything, not just the bad shit, like low self-esteem and self-loathing, but the good stuff too, my compassion, my kindness, my simple joy.
“All of it went away. I drank myself through college at Loyola. Theater and voice major. Amazing that I managed to graduate.
“And I could sing! I didn’t tell you that. I sang at open mics in coffeehouses and bars all over the north side. At one point, after I graduated and hooked up with a band, very briefly, I even had an agent interested.
“They said I sang a good song. They said I had a style.” Billy smiled, wondering if anyone got the paraphrasing. He looked over at Claire and she winked, smiled back.
“It all went to shit. Even the singing. And yet it was the singing, the singing that led me here to you.” He looked over at Jon. “You came to see me in my last gig, huh?”
Jon, arms folded across his chest, nodded. He didn’t say anything, maybe because of the prohibition against cross talk Stan mentioned at the beginning of the meeting. Or maybe simply because silence really was one of the best ways of getting someone to talk.
Billy waved as though batting at a fly. Scratched the back of his neck. “I had the reverse Midas touch. EverythingItouched turned to crap. That agent? I missed meeting up with him one too many times because I was loaded. That backup gig at Davenport’s? Got fired my first night because I was too drunk to stand up.” He laughed bitterly. “At least the show was over when that happened. Ah! I have a whole novel full of sad stories, all of them ending in tragedy.
“Poor me.”
He glanced at the clock, wondered if the meeting should be ending at the top of the hour, thought he should wrap it up.
Somehow.
“Butnotpoor me. Because I’m here. Because I’m Billy, and I’m an alcoholic. And I need help. Because my own will sure as shit hasn’t done me any favors.” He looked around the room, forcing himself to make eye contact with each person in that little circle. He thought he’d see those faces in his dreams, always. “And I’ll be here tomorrow, or somewhere like this, and the next day and the next.”
He hung his head low, staring down at the floor, and whispered, “Because I can’t get better alone.”
Chapter 10
