You could let yourself get down with the weather if you weren’t careful out here. Worse in the late fall and winter but spring could be tough for the long patches of rain too, the dreariness. Maybe that’s why Seattle had so many cool independent movie theaters and pop-up espresso stands in the ‘90s, used book stores and record shops. We were all forced inwards, after all.

We went to a private screening of a documentary about an orphanage in Tibet. It was in a part of town that used to be high brow but was now littered with pot shops. There must have been four or five on the same block. We stood by a couple homeless people with a boombox settling in for the night under an overhang, my wife and I feeling old and suburban with our phones, trying to find the app for the on-street parking payment and to enter the right code for our spot.

I went into the agency where I used to work to meet a friend for lunch. Whenever we meet it’s never light, always heavy, in a good way. We hugged when we said goodbye and he said I love you man. It was just him and me and the IT guy Kumar in the office, everyone else was gone. His first name’s Amit but everyone calls him by his last. Kumar said are you coming back and I said I wasn’t planning on it but maybe I’ll be meeting you by the elevator for a laptop again soon. It all starts and ends with the laptop. When you leave they just wipe it and give it to someone else.

I finally took the first step to attend a local AA meeting right around the corner from our house. I’d been thinking about it since Christmastime but putting it off. I lay there in bed at 1900h thinking this is asinine, getting into bed this early; the meeting starts in just an hour, get your ass out of bed. I lay there imagining how it would go the way you might try to recall the details of a dream. It was not like how I imagined it but better. They all asked me to come back and I will.

When we were in town for the film screening my wife and I went to a used book store and I got our daughter, who turns 21 this weekend, a Bukowski title. It was on that Black Sparrow Press publication with the nice paper and print, same as the ones I had when I was her age. I reread the first half of the book to see what I could remember. Most all he writes about is whoring, drinking, and fighting. The best way to describe his writing is lewd. She’s read him before but I hoped she’d like this one, Factotum, written in 1975.

I shaved my beard off clean with a razor, witch hazel, the whole nine yards. I felt like a teenager again. For the people at that AA meeting that’s how they’d know me now, looking like that. On my walks I’m visibly colder around the jaws and wear a neck gaiter to trap my body heat in with my breath. It sounds like the chatter of people crowding into an auditorium the way the birdsong gradually builds, this time of year.

As I reread these stories by Bukowski it takes me back to the shit bars in Philadelphia I frequented with names like McGlinchey’s, Sugar Mama’s, or Dirty Frank’s. Or the apartment on Fifth Street by the art museum, the first place I lived after college. How I typed by the light of the street lamps, listening to Tom Waits, and read this crap. Henry Miller too. What is it about the alcoholic mind that pulls you through the window and dangles you over the streets by your ankles like that. Why all this magical thinking.

We sat in a circle of maybe thirty on foldout chairs saying our first name and then the word “alcoholic.” It had a rhythm to it with all the names and the word alcoholic, a weird song or chant. One person said addict. But we were all that too. And it broke my heart in a good way, if you can imagine that.

Categories: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Bukowski, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest, recovery, Seattle