Shop Keeps Customers on the Straight and Narrow

Sometimes, when the feeling is hopeless, the words on the wall come through:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The words are from Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian-philosopher. The message forms the meat of most “12-step” programs, almost all of which are modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

Wendy is in Narcotics Anonymous, hoping to free herself from a dizzying compulsion to drugs.

“Cocaine is glamorous,” she said with a smile, “but I didn’t do cocaine. I did everything else. At least, it seemed that way.”

Wendy, who is like most 12-step walkers in that she will talk about recovery only on condition that her last name not be used, was in the Serenity Shop looking for answers.

Or rather aphorisms.

Or maybe both.

“These things are wonderful,” she said, looking at a rack of greeting cards. “When you get off track, when you feel the fear building, you can flip open one of these books, or look at a pithy saying, and all of a sudden, you’re right back in step.”

Don Vigneault is helping a lot of folks stay in step. Vigneault identifies himself as a recovering alcoholic--the button on his shirt proudly proclaims him as one.

Vigneault and his wife own the Serenity Shop, specializing in curios for the followers of 12-step recovery. The shop is in the Mission Village area, not far from San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium. It opened in 1984.

All of a sudden, business is booming. With what Vigneault calls the recent rise in 12-step consciousness, with everyone from rock stars to jocks getting clean, sober or free of a need to gamble, the Serenity Shop keeps the cash register jingling. Vigneault and his wife opened a second shop in Oceanside in January last year. It too is cashing in on the movement.

Vigneault admits that much of his clientele is invested in 12-step recovery. Another patron on a recent weekday works in a battered women’s clinic. Lisa, who suffers from eating disorders, says she comes in for the “sunny atmosphere” and “good karma” of Vigneault’s little store.

“I feel alive in this place,” she said, “as though there’s hope. And these people are very nice.”

Customers can buy books and pamphlets on eating disorders, compulsive gambling, sexual addiction, women who love too much, death and dying, incest, AIDS and child abuse. Vigneault points out that not all of these problems are the target of 12-step recovery. But all, he said, translate in some way to healing.

“Take death and dying,” he said. “Grieving people go through steps in bridging their own kind of recovery. Recovery spans many different emotions, many different problems.”

Vigneault, 50, is the son of a French-Canadian Indian and a mother, who, as a full-blooded Indian, was a member of the Diegueno tribe of Santa Ysabel. He was born and grew up in San Diego, where he learned to drink.

Vigneault served in the Navy, where the boozing got worse. He decided to get sober when, as a tree trimmer, he started falling out of trees and hurting himself. He had also become absurdly combative, picking fights with just about everybody, in creepy bars all over town. A felony conviction for hit-and-run driving--while drunk--sobered him even further.

Loves to Hug

Vigneault is a friendly man with a laugh to match. He wears western shirts, western ties, cowboy boots and jeans.

“You a hugger?” he asked a customer.

He passes out little pink cards to prospective huggers.

“Hugging is putting yourself out there,” he said with complete seriousness. “It’s taking the kind of risk you need to take to let somebody get close to you. It’s a very personal thing.”

Jean Vigneault decided on the concept of the shop after passing out AA literature to patients at a hospital. She noticed that the victims of drinking, eager to recover, couldn’t get enough of the words and pictures that seemed to remind them that they have a problem.

The shop would not have made it, Vigneault said, had it opened sooner.

“Had it opened four to five years earlier, we would not have survived,” he said. “No way. The need wasn’t there. The alcohol and drug problem really got out into the open around ‘84, and it’s stayed that way ever since. Few treatment centers were even open at the time. Now they’re all over the place, with more opening up all the time.”

The headlines are full of recovery. David Crosby, the rock star once addicted to cocaine, gets out of prison to rave about the virtues of 12-step recovery. Professional football quarterback Art Schlichter salutes Gamblers Anonymous. Liza Minnelli leaves a treatment program to proclaim herself “a new woman.” Songwriter Jackson Browne changes the lyrics to an old blues tune--”Cocaine”--to herald his own cocaine-free recovery.

The books and slogans in Vigneault’s shop remind recoverers that the thorny troubles still exist--”12-stepping” is a day-by-day process, he said. But the feeling of crunching them head-on can lay claim to a natural high.

As he puts it:

Progress, not perfection.

“These slogans are a daily affirmation that people like me have a problem,” Vigneault said. “There are coffee cups (bearing the AA motto, ‘Take It Easy’). There are plaques and reminders. Always, we’ve got to remind ourselves.

“Drinking is no longer my problem, my daily struggle. Living is my problem. Feelings. Coping. But now I endure the stresses, the disappointments, without booze. I knew a guy once who started drinking again because his shoelace broke.

“Sometimes, it’s the very trivial, any excuse, that starts a person back. What if one of these slogans can save them from that?”