At AA, Survivors Tell of Lives Lost--and Won

“My name is Frank and I’m an alcoholic.”

The group, in a conference room at Ventura County Medical Center, responds as Alcoholics Anonymous groups have since 1935--in unison:

“Hi, Frank.”

A couple of women look like real estate agents on caravan, well-dressed and stylishly coiffed. A silent, disheveled man leans back in his chair, his hair leaping out like Einstein’s. A guy in his 20s stares hard into his coffee. There are older men with comfortable paunches and rutted faces, baseball caps and gray beards. A few couples chat with each other easily, friends and fellow sufferers who have been attending these meetings for years.

The two dozen people here are as democratically selected as a jury pool, randomly chosen to harbor a twisted gene, a speck of DNA bearing an ugly, unbelievable message: You’re not a social drinker, you’re not a heavy drinker, you’re not someone who drinks for the lovely taste of the booze.

Frank clears his throat and starts his story--just one more in a room filled with tales to be told over and over. Alcoholism is a disease, but it’s a saga too, with a million dismal and well-known plot twists: shattered marriages, ruined careers, lost days and nights, death.

“It’s been a couple of months since I’ve come to a meeting,” Frank says. “I was feeling pretty good. I thought maybe I don’t need meetings. Maybe I can do this on my own. But then along come the holidays. Damn Christmas! Damn New Year’s! Well, I made it through--but without drinking or smiling.”

The others nod. They have been there. Blacked out? Been there. Lost a job? Been there. Vomited, convulsed, hallucinated? Been there. The detox unit, the rehab center, the bottom of the bottle? Been there. Popped for DUI? Oh, yes.

Before the meeting, a lady expressed sympathy for Robert Bradley, who in these parts is alcoholism’s latest celebrity casualty.

“He must be in such pain,” she said. “It’s tragic.”

*

Nobody would disagree. Until recently the presiding judge of Ventura County Superior Court, Bradley has been arrested on suspicion of drunk driving twice in a month. Rehab didn’t do the trick. His job is on the line, his reputation is sinking, his life is in disarray. The folks in this room know all about it: Been there.

One after the other, those who wish to speak, do. Some offer harsh maxims for the benefit both of shaky newcomers and smug veterans. “For me, there’s only two choices,” a burly man says: “Sober or dead.”

Others give testimony to AA’s famed Twelve Steps, a process of seeking help through “a Power greater than ourselves.”

One man complained that over the holidays, little things his wife was doing had started to bug him. It’s a problem that once might have begged for a drink, and another, and then one more.

“But I just thought of the big picture,” he said. “I thought, ‘I adore this woman more than anyone else on earth.’ That was the bottom line. I backed off. I didn’t stroke out over it.”

*

People celebrated moments of startling clarity.

“I was walking my dog on the beach and I thought, this is so great,” one woman enthused. “It was New Year’s Day and I didn’t have a hangover. And Christmas was great too; I remembered where I put all the stocking stuffers, I remembered where I hid all the gifts. A lot of Christmases, I didn’t.”

That might sound like a small achievement, but to a remarkable number of people, it’s a milestone.

AA holds some 600 meetings a week in Ventura County alone. Groups meet in churches, community centers, homes and coffee bars called Alano Clubs. One group meets beneath the Ventura pier on Sunday afternoons. AA charges no dues and keeps no central membership list but estimates it has more than 1.1 million active members across the U.S. The groups also meet in places as far flung as Greenland and Zimbabwe.

It’s not for everyone. Some people bristle at the thought of appealing to God. Some call AA and its relentless meetings an addiction in itself. Some don’t like the rituals--the readings of the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions and the passages from the AA bible known as the Big Book.

*

But here in this room and in countless others, people in turmoil find some relief. Customs that might strike outsiders as unspeakably corny are freighted with meaning and hope.

A woman is excited about the “birthday cake” that will mark her 10th year of sobriety. “All the people that my drinking’s hurt over the years,” she sighs. “I wish my parents could be here for it.”

No, it’s not for everyone. But for chief judges and petty offenders and all the people whose drinking has screwed up their own lives and the lives of those around them, it offers at the very least a reassuring truth:

Been there. Don’t need to go back.

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer.