Mr. SponsorPants: The Scariest Sponsee on Earth -- Or -- The Only Valid Reason To Let Go of ("Fire") a Sponsee

Physically he was all angles and long lines.
Square head, sharp cheekbones and what would have once been called a lantern jaw.
Shoulders so wide it looked as though he might have to turn sideways to get through a door. But lean. And tall. On a good self esteem day when I stand up straight I'm over six feet, and he had a good bit on me. From across a room you might have thought, "Hmmm, leading man type." Up close though, he read as ... off. That ineffable something that the animal part of us picks up on -- that instinct that says, in short, "Uh oh. Careful here."

He materialized in one of my meetings, vibrating like a tuning fork. I had never seen him before. Nothing about the meeting itself stands out in my mind, and I recall very clearly that I just sat -- didn't read anything, share, speak... nothing. Put a dollar in the basket when it went around, listened, that was it -- no different than the 30 or so other alcoholics in the room, really. But after the meeting, he walked right over to me. "Hello. Will you sponsor me?"

"What? I ... Uh, yeah, we can talk about -- I mean, yes. Sure. Sure, right, absolutely. Yes." I was a little flustered, but I got my feet under me and landed squarely on "Never say no to an AA request," even if I didn't quite "stick the landing" as the gymnasts put it. To be fair, I was more used to "how are you" as the follow up to "hello." Plus, he was really in my space. Almost nose-to-nose. I have a big personal space -- I like everyone to be no closer than about a hoop-skirt's distance away from me on all sides at all times (I've not taken to wearing one to enforce this, yet. Don't think it hasn't occurred to me though -- probably serve to keep people at a distance a lot farther than a hoop-skirt's width, now that I think of it -- and cut down on the sponsor requests too. Hmmm...) So the sudden literal in-my-face also rattled me some. But the reason you say something a zillion times is so that when you're thrown you don't screw your line up, and I'd been well trained in "Never say no to an AA request" by years of meetings, several terrific sponsors and countless repetitions to my own sponsees up till then. So I stumbled for a moment, but I did not falter.

"Why don't we go out for coffee and talk?" I suggested. "What's your name?"

He told me. I introduced myself and we shook. He had a hand like a shovel with fingers.

"I don't have any money for coffee."

"My treat, no problem." I picked someplace close that I was familiar with. Off the beaten path and no table service, so we could sit for as long as we needed and not take up anyone's station.

Thus began my sponsorial relationship with The Scariest Sponsee on Earth.

We walked to the cafe, and I made with the small talk to get us there. Long before I'd learned the secret to small talk, and so we had a pleasant enough stroll, though I did the majority of the talking, and eventually I found myself sitting at a table with what could only be described as a somewhat intimidating almost-stranger.

I got a muffin so that if he hadn't eaten he could have something to eat (I couldn't get a read if he currently was homeless or not -- he was clean, and the clothes fit and matched, but as I said in the beginning, there was something "off"). I put the muffin between us on the table. "Help yourself." I offered. I remember this very clearly: He looked at the muffin for a minute. Then he looked at me, and I got the distinct impression he was evaluating the sincerity of the offer. He made up his mind. "Thank you." he said, and picked up the muffin and put it whole into his jacket pocket.

Blackout alcoholics -- and I am most definitely one -- "come to" in some strange places and in the middle of some strange scenes. In my case I might "come to" in the middle of a conversation, or an execution, boarding a plane, or assisting an exorcism -- in fact I'd already "come to" in the middle of a terrible beating, singing on a stage and having sex with, um, several very unlikely candidates for such an activity -- not all at the same time of course -- but when you're my kind of drinker you just never know where you'll wind up, so I had mastered the lack-of-reaction as a survival skill, till you could figure out what was going on. In the grand alcoholic scheme his muffin pocketing wasn't that bizarre, anyway, so my only response was to say, "Napkin?" and offer him one from the pile I'd grabbed when I got the muffin. "Thank you." He took one, and placed it in the muffin pocket.

"If you don't mind my asking, why did you ask me to sponsor you?"

"I knew you'd say yes."

"Have we met at a meeting, or, I mean, I'm sorry, I can be terrible with names and stuff sometimes..." I knew I'd remember if I met him, but I was trying to make sense of this.

"No."

"Then how..."

He shrugged, and looked at me. "Just knew."

I'm not trying to make him sound simple or the exchange spooky -- it's how I remember it. And him.

We talked some more, I suggested that we start going through the book "Alcoholics Anonymous" together and he was very eager to start. Turned out he'd been sober once before.

"Oh? When?"

"A while ago."

"Oh. What, um ... how did you relapse?"

"I want to get to the 4th Step fast."

"Well, okay, it's actually in Chapter Five -- you probably knew that and we can..."

"There are some people I hate" he leaned in very close across the small table -- not big with physical boundaries, this guy, "I HATE them and I want to work on that."

"Uh ... okay. Well, the 4th Step will..."

"What time is it? I have a curfew. I have to go." And up and out he went, like a shot. I had to chase him down.

"Wait! Do you want to exchange phone numbers or ..."

"What's your number?"

"Do you want to write it down?"

"What is it? I'll remember."

I told him. He did.

He called a lot. Sometimes he called and didn't say anything -- took me a couple of those to figure out it was him though. (This was long before Caller ID or Cell Phones, kids). I'd listen to the silence on the line and I'd ask, "Scary? Is that you?" Nothing. I have no idea what prompted me to do it, but I started to fill the silence with encouraging words. Not big soliloquies or anything ("Really, Mr. SponsorPants?" I hear you ask. "Are you sure about that? 'Cause I would have thought, you..." "In the back there! Quiet you! Usher, check their ticket please. Usher!") I would just say things like "Scary, it's all okay. It's going to be okay. You're going to be allright. Easy does it, Scary. Just remember, easy does it."

But that first night, after going out to coffee with him, I called my sponsor and started laying the groundwork for getting out of this. (I prefer a hasty retreat, followed either by excuses or recriminations, but I'm perfectly capable of playing the long game if I have to.)

"Not too sure about this one." I said. "Might be more than I can, you know, handle."

"That's okay, Mr. SponsorPants," my wise Sponsor said. "God gives us what we need, and just last night, if I recall, you said 'I'll do anything' -- and here's your anything."

"Right. Right -- I'm just not sure I'm the right sponsor for him ... " After receiving miracles I have been known to try and weasel out of whatever I'd promised God, too.

"Oh, Mr. SponsorPants, there's really only one valid reason you ever let go of a sponsee," my sponsor chuckled, all warm and knowing, like I was in on this great jolly secret with him.

"Oooh, yeah. Right. Right." I said, playing along. Bluffing. Had no idea what he meant. What this 'one reason' might be.

Scary Sponsee and I met once or twice a week. I always arranged to meet him at the same cafe, I never offered to have him over to my apartment -- what can I say? He scared me. He never made mention of it, and it didn't seem to phase him at all. And strangely, I never mentioned the silent phone calls.

I learned his story. It humbled and frightened me and shook my newly refound faith in God. He was raised by animals, is the most I will say about it. Strangely (to me at the time) though, he held no anger towards his family.

That night I called my sponsor, "You know, he has all this stuff in his childhood and I don't -- I mean, not like that -- he should have a sponsor who ... "

"Oh, Mr. SponsorPants," came the now irritating chuckle. "You know having a similar childhood isn't that important in the grand scheme -- it might be helpful, but there's really only one valid reason to stop working with a sponsee."

"Right. Right. Of course." When I start a bluff I see it all the way through.

Scary Sponsee was not good with boundaries. Or impulse control. Or people. Once, while we were working on his much-anticipated 4th Step, while talking about one of the people he HATED he picked up his pencil and shouted, "I want to ... to... to stab him in the eye!" And plunged the pencil forward, stopping an inch or so in front of my face. God was right there, since I didn't flinch or move -- and let me tell you, that was DEFINITELY God working, that's not my typical reaction to something like that, I assure you. I just drank my coffee and he lowered the pencil and I said, "Scary, that's not good. When you do things like that it frightens people." "Did I scare you?" "Yes." "I'm sorry." "It's okay."

Over the years I have discovered that often, when you sponsor people, you grow to care for them very much -- to love them, in a way -- and I'm afraid Scary Sponsee was no exception. Even as he indeed frightened and intimidated me, even as I was trying to find a "legitimate" AA reason to stop meeting with him, I grew to care very much about this broken-winged bird. (Though he was more ostrich than sparrow, as that imagery tends to go.)

He'd been homeless twice ("I haven't been homeless, not really" I told my sponsor "But that's not the reason to stop working with someone, Mr. SponsorPants, is it?" "Oh, right -- no, no, it's not.")

Scary had worked himself all the way up from a childhood that gave him nothing -- nothing -- to a real career, then lost it all to drinking and drugging, and wound up living in the park. Got sober, and rebuilt his life -- relapsed, and wound up back in the park. I was sponsoring him on his second trip back in and up from the depths. Sadly, during his relapse he had clearly done something to his brain. I had nothing to compare it to, but he was legitimately not quite "right."

"He's a really, really low bottom, and not right in the head and..." I told my sponsor, "maybe I ... "

"There's only one real reason..."

"Right."

And all this time, I was getting the silent phone calls, and I kept whispering encouragement into the quiet on the line. "Scary, it's all okay. It's going to be okay. You're going to be allright. Easy does it, Scary. Just remember, easy does it." I've never -- until writing about it right now -- told anyone that part before -- even my sponsor, when I was madly trying to find a way to get out of working with the Scary Sponsee. For some reason I kept it to myself, and so it became this strange, sacred, precious, intimate thing, these calls in which I was moved to try and pour all the love and support I had gotten from AA over the years into this blank, silent line.

And then one day, he didn't show up, and the calls stopped. I went to the cafe at our regular time for several weeks afterwards, just in case, but he ghosted. AA is strange, (in a lot of ways, actually) in that you can develop intense, powerful, intimate connections with people and share deep, personal information with each other -- but have no real connection outside of that, and depending on how you bond, no way to reach someone if they ghost. We'd been meeting for almost ten months, and had made it through the 11th Step, and ... he was gone.

You get closure in stories -- in life sometimes all you get is the dot dot dot . . .

Finally I cracked, and after resigning myself to the fact that I was unlikely to hear from him again, I broke down and asked my sponsor what the "real reason" was that would have made it okay for me to stop meeting with The Scary Sponsee.

"Oh, Mr. SponsorPants," he clucked his tongue, "let me ask you something. Do you need to have similar backgrounds, or the same using patterns, or have had the same problems and hardships to sponsor someone?"

Trick question, I'm good at spotting those, "Oh no." I said, even though that was a nice summary of all the reasons I'd tried to get out of sponsoring Scary.

"And do you think you should stop sponsoring someone if they don't do what you suggest, or you don't like them, or they frighten you, or they're not the kind of person you'd hang out with?"

I was uncomfortable with the potential inference there, but I was on a roll with the first question, and I'm enough of an ass kisser sometimes to want my pat on the head. "Oh no."

"And let me ask you, do you think, over the course of the ten months, that you helped The Scary Sponsee? And did you feel differently too?"

"Yes. Yes, but ..."

He waited, and I folded my hand and showed my cards.

"But what is it? What is the reason you think is the only valid reason to stop sponsoring someone?"

"All that other stuff is window dressing people use as excuses, Mr. SponsorPants. The only real, valid reason to stop working with someone is if you honestly, deep down, don't believe you can be of any help to them. That you cannot in any way help them get and stay sober. That's the only valid reason."

"But..."

"No. I'm sorry, the 'But What About' Window is closed today." He said, not unkindly, and ended the call.

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If you are new to AA, please believe this, and if you are not new, and are afraid to ask for help, always remember: We are happy to help you, and I believe our help is valuable because it will really work -- but you owe us nothing -- nothing -- for that help, because we are infinitely healed in ways we ourselves don't always know in the act of helping you.

So by all means, please, let us in, and let us help.

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One last thing, in an already perhaps too long post -- but I have to share this with you:

Not long ago, last year, I had a very scary day. It was unexpected, and it was medical, and I was scared in a way I hadn't been for a long, long time. For some reason I flashed back 12 years ago to The Scary Sponsee, and those silent phone calls. And in the midst of my fear, I opened my cell phone, and I said into the silence of the unconnected cell, "Mr. SponsorPants, it's all okay. It's going to be okay. You're going to be allright. Easy does it, Mr. SponsorPants. Just remember, easy does it."

And I thought about Scary, and how far he'd come, and I wondered what happened to him, and I wished him well with all my heart. I was full of gratitude for the 10 months I'd had the privilege of knowing him and working the Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous with him. And as I thought of all that I knew that no matter the outcome, it was going to be okay. I was going to be allright. And I felt so, so much better.

Comments

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Thank you so much.

Posted by: Suzanne | May 22, 2009 at 06:34 AM

Lovely post - I've had similar experiences: "What am I DOING here...?"
...only to get the same answer - I'm sober today and sometimes I see the miracle of being useful...

Posted by: Ed G. | May 22, 2009 at 09:05 AM