Apparently he solicited an undercover cop.
I'm not sure of the gorey details much beyond that. Whether, he offered, shall we say, an exchange of goods for services, or was attempting to have sexual intercourse rather than social, in a setting designed for the latter and not the former... whatever it was, he got popped by the cops.
And he was in a committed relationship.
And he had to call his partner to get him out of jail.
Imagine that call.
"Hi honey. It's me. I'm going to be just a little late coming home. In fact, I need you to come get me. Hmmm? Oh, uh ... downtown. And honey? Bring your checkbook."
Eeesh.
The partner came down, bailed him out, and they are still together as of this writing, more than sixteen years later.
But this is still not a story about loyalty.
AA literature warns about "when boy meets girl on AA campus" in the context of being careful that romantic interests do not complicate spiritual ones. When new, our fledgling recovery is pretty easily overwhelmed by the crush groove, and if you're more interested in who your obsession sweetheart is sitting next to at the meeting than what the speaker is saying, that's a problem.
My very first sponsor used to quote his sponsor to me all the time on this: "You don't shop for a wife at Bellevue Mental Hospital; so why would you date in AA?" was his little joke. Good point, in general.
Yet to have the language of recovery in common, to be pursuing the same spiritual path, to have the resources and tools from the 12 Steps and the Fellowship available to build a romantic partnership with someone ... I have seen it work, and work beautifully.
My Sarcastic Sponsor who got arrested for lewd conduct was part of such a relationship. They were both 12 Steppers, so the whole "affair" (too significant a word for what he was likely engaged in) was, I'm afraid to say, somewhat unavoidably brought into the meetings. People are people, AA'ers no less so -- and some people love to gossip.
I feel compelled to add that not all discussion is gossip, however. I have talked "about" people with sponsors or friends over the years in a sincere effort to puzzle something out, or untangle the mess from the message. We maintain anonymity as a great equalizing force in AA, and "what we hear there stays there" to paraphrase a commonly held 12 Step tenent -- primarily so that meetings remain a safe place to bring problems and hear solutions -- but not all discussion of others is malicious.
Just sometimes.
Sarcastic Sponsor called me a day or two after he'd been arrested.
Me (surprised he called, he was a good call return-er, but never initiated a call to me): Oh! Hello. What's ... I mean, how are you?
Him: Have you heard that I was arrested?
He was always direct. Never liked to beat around the bush.
Oh. Perhaps that's a poor choice of phrase here.
Him: Are you lying?
Silence.
Silence again. I imagine he was taking a moment to put on his sponsorial crash helmet. I wear sponsor pants, but I fear that the men and women who worked with me in early sobriety likely needed some form of protective gear.
He was always catching me in these little lies, and asking me why I did them. It was something both excruciating and very valuable to me about his sponsorship. From his repeatedly asking if I was lying I had lost any sense of offense at the question, and in answering him began to see patterns in the little people-pleasing social lies that still permeated much of my life at the time. In this fashion I was getting amazing insight into what drove me. Or paralyzed me, depending.
Him: Okay.
Me: So, are you okay?
Him: Yes.
We chatted a bit more, but I don't remember the specifics. Confirmed our standing coffee date before the big Friday night meeting and ended the call.
When I told him that I'd heard about his arrest, and some of the circumstances surrounding it, I did not mention that I had gotten a call from one of the funniest -- and most twisted -- members of my sober posse.
Me: What are you talking about? Is this like the time you tried to convince me that your mother had multiple personality disorder, and when I met her I needed to call her Stan?
Mr. Twister: Better! It's true! Your sponsor got arrested for Lewd Conduct.
The way he said it you could hear the capital letters.
Mr. Twister didn't even let me finish. He jumped in and passed along, in the most unflattering terms possible -- which was the stock in trade for his humor -- what little he knew about the arrest and my sponsor being bailed out by his partner.
This caught me totally off guard.
Me: Shut up, Twist, that doesn't even make sense. I don't even know what that means.
Mr. Twister was always saying those kind of things, jokes with barbs in them, expert-sounding statements and judgments that were little more than posturing. It was like his Act. I both enjoyed his humor and felt kind of lousy after hanging out with him. A few years after this story takes place he began to nurse a huge resentment for the secretary of a meeting ... then for that whole meeting ... then for all the meetings, until at last he cursed me out and told me that he was "sick of all this AA bullshit." As you can imagine we sort of lost touch after that. I don't mean I shunned him, but ... without AA we had almost nothing in common.
A few years later I got a call from his mother (who I fortunately had never called Stan) asking me to write Mr. Twister in prison. Drunk Driving - Vehicular Homicide. I imagined that Mr. Twister's Act might not be going over so well in Cell Block 7, or wherever.
What makes me sad about that is not what happened to Mr. Twister so much -- it's that it is such a cliche.
He hated cliches.
The "big" Friday night meeting was a speaker/sharing meeting. Someone would speak, select a topic, and then people would step up to the lectern at the front of the room and share.
My sponsor and I had coffee before hand as per usual, and although I expected to be uncomfortable he was just his normal self for the most part, equally stern and direct with me about my working the 12 Steps. If I recall correctly I was back to wrestling the 3rd Step to the ground, as this was my second pass through all 12 Steps. I must have been doing somewhat better with the whole thing, since I think I only got one eyebrow raise out of him the entire time.
I had to get to the meeting early to make the coffee, and so we took separate cars. He usually showed up a little later.
The parking lot for the meeting was at the bottom of a little rise. In other words you could stand outside the meeting room, in the back, and look down on the parking lot below. I made the coffee and greeted people as they started to show up for the meeting. This was a tough group for me, and I was grateful for the stage business of fussing with the coffee urns and cups and creamers and three kinds of sweeteners -- it gave me a bit of a purpose and helped me not feel like such a freak. Looking at me straightening cups you would have no idea that inside my head was a constant drumbeat: You're a Freak. Loser. Freak. Loser. I could tell the drummer to lay off, but in early sobriety he often ignored me and kept right on drumming. The things I have said to myself in my head are far worse than the cruelest cut I've ever heard spoken to my face. AA eventually silenced that drum, one day at a time.
I stepped out the back to have a cigarette -- trying to savor it as I knew those were probably going to be sacrificed to the 12 Step Gods soon enough ... unfortunately the savoring was often lost in the self loathing of "still" being a smoker. As my first sponsor had said, "Smoke, if you like it. If you don't like it and you still smoke, then there's your problem -- but if that's the case, it's not a problem it's an addiction -- and you have tools for that."
My Sarcastic Sponsor had put it a bit differently: "Oh no, by all means, keep smoking. Somebody's got to 12th Step the other smokers in the cancer ward, might as well be you."
I looked down the rise and saw him, my Sarcastic Sponsor, sitting in his car. The engine was off, the headlights dark ... he was just sitting. (Remember, kids, this is years before cell phones, so today while you might assume someone was making a call, or breathlessly updating their Twitter: "I'm sitting! In my car!" back then there was not much to do alone in a parked car with the engine off but sit.) Some people wandered out from the meeting room behind me, I chatted with them, and tried to practice really listening to what they said, rather than being all trapped in my mind, plotting the next thing I was going to say and waiting for my turn to talk again -- just like Sarcastic Sponsor had been suggesting I do.
The meeting started and I looked down. He was still sitting in his car. I was torn. Should I go see if he's okay? Would he be mad if I didn't go into the meeting?
You know what my ego said? (God, this is so embarrassing.)
My ego said, "Go down, and then maybe he'll share in front of the whole meeting how you came and talked to him when he was lonely and afraid." At least by then in my sobriety I could recognize my ego's voice, and tell it to shut its sick, out-of-proportion mouth. Today I know that it's less the motive and more the action that matters, but it is still a terrible, disgusting thing, to find your ego reducing someone else's pain to nothing more than an opportunity for petty personal glory.
I turned and went into the meeting.
About five minutes later Sarcastic Sponsor came in and took a chair in the back.
I couldn't tell you about what the speaker said. I was too busy watching my sponsor out of the corner of my eye, to see if he was okay, or what was going on with him.
The speaker concluded, and the floor was open for sharing. My sponsor raised his hand. High. I remember that very clearly. He raised his hand as if the question the speaker asked was not "Who would like to begin the sharing?" as it said in the format, but rather "Who here is convinced they're going to die if they don't share right away?"
Most of the people had heard about his arrest by then, I'm sure. With Mr. Twister and his ilk on the case, how could they not have? But this was AA, and although we are skewered and slow roasted on the spit of our character defects as often as not, there is something special that happens in meetings. Thus, there was no whisper, no nervous titter, as my sponsor came to the front of the room and stepped to the lectern.
I started this whole story with an observation about when and why, over the years, I've changed sponsors.
People bring an extraordinary amount of baggage to the sponsor relationship -- from both sides. And in sorting through that it is not surprising that there are all kinds of expectations of what a sponsor "should" be. After all, we tell people that are new to find someone in the 12 Step world who "has what you want." (Though we mean that in spiritual terms, it has certainly on occasion been misinterpreted.)
And although Mr. Twister put it unkindly, it was a question I asked myself after news of my sponsor's arrest had eventually sunk in: Is that the kind of guy I want sponsoring me? Does he, "have what I want?" I don't think it would be too much to suggest that based on this mess, no, maybe he doesn't.
And then my sponsor shared at the Friday night meeting.
I told you this is not a story about loyalty. I didn't stay with my sponsor at that time out of some inappropriate sense of obligation, or a fear of confrontation, or rampant people pleasing. (I saved all that for when I started dating, later in sobriety.)
This is a story about the power of honesty, and humility, and surrender and sharing. This is a story about walking the talk, and how that saves lives. This is a story about how not only can you not save your ass and your face at the same time, when you stop trying to you inspire others to do the same.
He stood at the lectern and shared what happened. He was specific, but not salacious. He was calm and honest. The man, while sarcastic one-on-one, could be wickedly funny when speaking to a group, but he didn't "go there" that night, in that share. He didn't hide behind his ability to turn a phrase, or bluff his way through with attitude.
If I tried to recreate here exactly what he said I would barely do him justice. But I remember sitting transfixed by the experience of listening to an alcoholic with some good years sober talk about this fresh, deep pain and dysfunction. About his guilt and how it was trying to take him to shame (two different things -- I got that from him). About his powerlessness in this new area of his life, and his terror at how this occurred in his sobriety. And he talked about his ego, and how it was screaming at him to be quiet. About how this experience shattered his personal mythology of trying to be this "very" sober man in front of everyone, rather than the reality of being this messy sober man -- in front of everyone.
And he talked about the solution. He talked about doing the footwork, about going to an additional 12 Step Program rather than hiding behind his "time" in Alcoholics Anonymous, and his fear about being new all over again.
And he shared that he knew in his gut that if he didn't address this it had the power to make him drink again.
In some ways what he did was take his ego out and smash it in front of us.
And rather than that being a violent act what I learned that night is that it is a miraculous one.
And I wanted what he had.
The echo of my own ego's sick whisper was still fresh in my mind. "... he'll share in front of the whole meeting how you ..."
I wanted what he had because I knew that with his help I could learn to do the same thing when I eventually needed to. And at a few years sober I had no doubt at all that eventually, down the line, by my own hand most likely, I would most definitely need to.
And believe me, I have.
Later -- much later -- I asked him about when he was sitting down in his car before the meeting.
"I was praying." He said. "Praying for God to help me take my hand off the key in the ignition and not turn the car back on and drive away. Praying for the strength to come up the stairs and share."
And for some reason I asked him about when he raised his hand.
"Oh, Mr. SponsorPants," he said, "this," and he raised his hand low, about even with his head, "is drying your nails." Then he gave me one of his rare smiles, "And this" he raised his hand high, high above his head, "is I need to share!"
It works better with the visual -- I use that example with my sponsees to this day.
Hi again,
Now I am wondering about this:
"My very first sponsor used to quote his sponsor to me all the time on this: "You don't shop for a wife at Bellevue Mental Hospital; so why would you date in AA?" was his little joke. Good point, in general."
I have heard it many, many times. I don't understand what the speaker is actually saying about themselves when they say that. Does that mean that I am to think f myself as someone unworthy of love, defective, a mental patient? You see what I mean? Wondering ....
Posted by: mfore4 | June 18, 2009 at 09:56 AM
I can see why he was your sponsor. I would want what he had as well.
Posted by: Syd | June 18, 2009 at 11:26 AM
The ego is the thing. It's everywhere, tricky stuff. Thanks for the honesty and the examples.
Posted by: Always Carol | June 18, 2009 at 04:31 PM
What a wonderful man, and a wonderful sponsor. You are wonderful too, for sharing it so well. Thank you.
Posted by: Moi | November 04, 2010 at 08:27 PM