The "self-help" group the corporate media would like to tell us about
An imperfect form of social cohesion is better than none at all
Just after a low-key late-autumn sunset over the Flatirons, Tom walked into the same conference room at Boulder Community Hospital he’d sat in dozens of times in the past two years. As he breached the doorway, he saw the same eight or nine familiar faces—all male—that had made this room at times feel like an extension of his own home. It was also always far warmer here than in his trailer once winter arrived.
“Welcome to our usual Wednesday-night meeting of Alkies Anonymous,” Tom heard the voice of Jack, the meeting’s chairperson since the start of the year, telling the small group. Tom was a few minutes late. Jack’s words, as usual, were somewhat slurred, but in the oddly charismatic manner of an old ranch hand who is both tired of telling the same tale for the hundredth time and eager to repeat it anyway, always with fresh embellishments. He was wearing a Denver Broncos jersey with VOTE MUSK and the number “1” on both the front and the back and very short jorts. Fashion styles and heroes came and went.
As Tom took his usual spot at the long conference-room table, which could seat up to fourteen but never quite had to for this function, he placed the half-pint bottle of vodka he’d been carrying in his hand on the table and looked around. Tom had not been to the last two of these Wednesday meetings, and other regulars in the group hadn’t seen him at the other Boulder-area Alkies Anonymous, so he was aware that people might be suspecting him of having experienced a “slip.” Although Tom had picked up his two-year Alk-A chip sometime in March, he knew that people with far more time in the program had fallen by the wayside.
“Wassup Tom,” said Lenny, the lawyer and member of a federally overseen neighborhood spy program to Tom’s left. Lenny’s eyes were impressively bloodshot even for him, and tonight he reeked of sinsemilla weed.
“Are there any newcomers to the meeting? Anyone from outside this fuckin’ town?” Jack was grumbling, reading from the standard Alk-A meeting guidelines on the table in front of him. Someone passing by in the hallway let out a stentorian belch, followed by a delightfully mortified giggle. Probably one of the night-shirt nurses just arriving for the evening.
But the eyes of most of the bleary-eyed men in the room were on Tom. Ignoring this, he uncapped the bottle of vodka, lifted it to his lips and took three chugs, glug-glug-glug, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand in a manner he hoped looked casual, resolute, and sloppy at the same time.
He didn’t pull it off.
“Tom,” Jack growled as soon as his spiel ended. “We haven’t seen you around, and your sponsor, well, she hasn’t seen you around either, according to her cuck husband—” This drew laughter from the men hunched over the table, and a few of them sipped from their own beverage containers—40-ounce beer cans, half-gallon wine bottles, and one flagon filled almost to the top with industrial-level-purity grain ethanol.
Jack went on. “According to Lisa and others, we’re just wondering if everything is okay.”
“You know we don’t judge here, Tommy Boy,” piped up Lamont, who was eighty-five years old and, according to testimony given at a different local self-help group, newly Chinese. This was a ruse, as Lamont was a three-year veteran of one of many anti-anti-anti-censorship teams that had been quietly cobbled together by the U.S. Department of State and launched in 2026 through a variety of widely disseminated NGOs and front groups. Social Security retirement benefits had been entirely replaced by sinecures, most of them no-show law-enforcement sinecures and other posts easily accommodated by oldsters.
At the start of 2029, the average life expectancy in the U.S. stood at 66 or 67 years and apparently stabilizing, so there were fewer and fewer Americans even entering genuine old age for the government to worry about anyway. But still enough to serve as domestic spies. That everyone knew that this had become standard only made the plan more ingenious and effective.
“I’m fine,” Tom said, hoping to inflect a bit of a slur into his delivery, knowing he was already caught but playing every shitty card in his hand anyway.
“Tom, mind if I take a sniff of your ‘vodka’?” said the man to his right. Mike was a former professional triathlete who at the end of his career was sponsored by the briefly ascendant but now-bankrupt athletic apparel brand Lulu Le Men. Since retiring at 27, he had managed to drop from an already boned-out 140 pounds to 130 or so my existing on malt whiskey and goat-protein powder. He was in theory employed as an editor for Outside Three-Way, but coasting though life on a trust fund, even if he secretly believed—but could never say out loud—that being hammered everyday wasn’t what he really wanted.
Mike didn’t wait for an answer and leaned over and inhaled from the mouth of Tom’s half-pint bottle of Yooker’s. “Smells like water to me, fellas,” Mike announced, more resigned than angry. The group went through this regularly, and the important thing is that you came back.”
“Now it’s time to get honest!” snapped Lamont, punctuating this exhortation by leaning forward and delivering a suspiciously wet-sounding trombone-sound, weary but proud, from somewhere between the skinny shanks inside his piss-stained cargo shorts. Jack winced and waved his hand in front of his face, but grumbled a laugh, signaling that their “pestering” of the obviously sober and clear-eyed Tom was about love, not punishment. Someone passing by in the hallway, probably a nurse, laughed.
“Would someone recite the group’s Third Tradition, please?” Mike piped up in a cheerful falsetto.
“‘The only requirement for Alkies Anonymous membership is a desire to continue drinking.’” at least four voices rumbled, more or less in unison. Like sloppy fucking deacons, Tom thought.
“I get it, I get it,” Tom agreed. “I just found myself out hiking in Four Mile Canyon one day, drunk as a skunk, and I started getting the nagging idea I’d feel better if I stopped drinking. I was only going to do it for one day—”
“We get it, Tommy Boy,” Mike said, standing and drawing himself to his full six foot five, spindly but determined. “Fuck the rest of this meeting, fellas. We need to get Tom connected to his sponsor. Anyone have Lisa’s number?”
Alkies Anonymous, like the group whose name it had obviously stolen and minimally adapted, encouraged members to have a sponsor with more days, months, or years of continuous alcohol intoxication—or at least a nonzero blood-alcohol level—than they themselves had accumulated. The idea was for sponsees to call their sponsors whenever they were feeling antsy and inclined to “relapse.” One significant difference is that Alkies Anonymous not only didn’t discourage male-female sponsor-sponsee arrangements, but practically demanded them. Though the group was still new, early data suggested that more members were able to continue drinking if they were sexually attracted to their sponsors and sponsees and especially if they became sexually involved.
“She might be in Vail,” Jack growled.
“Jack, you numb fuck,” said Adam, who had attained four years of continuous drunkenness weeks earlier and, though laconic, was generally regarded as the group’s answers-man. He stayed up late processing data sets for the Department of Homeland Security on Coloradans in three counties suspected of being open and honest about the government’s seductive subjugation of its citizens. “They closed Vail to civilians last year. Every goddamn time you—”
“Enough,” Tom said. “Let’s stop fighting, get the fuck out of this hospital, and get this meeting really going!”
Tom was faking his enthusiasm, but he’d said the words he needed to say and was owning his mistake. Everyone in the room blurted out some version of “Huzzah!" and, except for the already standing Mike (standing, but mildly swaying, like a belly-dancer in extreme slow motion), gained their feet. Someone placed a call to Lisa’s cell phone, which her husband, a part-time remote NSA agent, answered and handed to his wife. Lisa had spent the afternoon sipping martinis and watching porn by herself.
The group arranged to meet Lisa and deliver Tom into her capable hands outside the God’s Knob Brewery, a Christian-run bar and spiritual center a mile west of downtown. The GKB had recently replaced the Barnes and Noble superstore that dominated the corner of Pearl and 30th for years before too many books had been manned to make the enterprise profitable, not just in Boulder but worldwide.
As the group filed outside the hospital’s main doors, trailing an almost palpable cloud of half-metabolized ethanol and stinky feet, they met Ricardo, one of the night-time security guards, enjoying a marijuana-cigarette break with one of the more attractive Brazilian cardiothoracic surgical residents.
“My fucking BROTHERS!” Ricardo said, his chemically induced Cheshire Cat grin threatening to rip his cheeks apart. A small old woman in a wheelchair on the outdoor walkway with an oxygen tank on her lap looked briefly at the group before returning to her iPad and her tracking of gun purchases by registered Libertarian “election” participants in the Interstate 25 corridor between Pueblo and Fort Collins. Basically nine-tenths of the state’s population of 5.6 million and dropping.
“How was your meeting, man?” Ricardo asked expansively but with some difficulty.
“This guy,” grumbled Jack and jerking a thumb at Tom. “Hasn’t had a drink in three days and though he could hide it because he never drinks enough to get the shakes when he stops anyway.”
This drew cackles of laughter, none of it mean-spirited, and then the group heard a massive metallic crunch from Arapahoe Avenue, a main east-west artery of Boulder about a hundred yards in front of them across the all-handicaps-spaces parking lot. They all looked that way, some of them squinting against watery-eyed double vision.
“Yo fellas,” Mike said in a quavering voice. “Isn’t that Lisa’s Tesla that just rear-ended that RTD bus?” They could hear yelling coming from stopped traffic on Arapahoe, and a small fire was sprouting from the side of either the bus or the Tesla.
“Try calling her!” Ricardo suggested dreamily.
“Or we could walk the fuck over there,” Jack growled. “Let’s go.” After everyone holding some kind of beverage container briefly raised it toward the center of the loose group in a bland yet chipper salute, they all made their way toward the wreck. They wound up moving just in time, as the noise of shattering glass thirty feet above the facade of the main hospital entrance was followed shortly by a portable defibrillator smashing into several pieces of nondescript plastic and metal on the walkway.
“I thought they moved the goddamn psych ward,” Lamont growled.
“I thought they had closed it,” replied Adam.
“Um.” Tom had paused next to a badly dented blue Nissan Pathfinder. with an “AOC 4 U and ME” bumper-sticker. Someone, probably Ricardo, had used primer paint to apply a standard penis-and-balls ensemble to one of the passenger doors.
The group paused, most of them swaying, their mouths open and their eyes partly focused on him.
“Anyone have a spare drink to get a relapser out of a rut before we get to the Boozeporium?”
“WOOOOOOOOOOT!…….”
Tom would remain drunk for the next 27 days, missing Lisa’s cremation service and a few other things. But the next time he skipped a day of drinking—he’s come down with covid again, probably from the trace amounts of Paxlovid he and few others knew were now in every brand of toothpaste sold in the U.S., and just wasn’t into it—he never got back on track again, and went the remaining 28 years of his life without taking a drink. He lost touch with his Alk-A friends, and after a few weeks, they stopped calling his phone at 3 a.m. and leaving angry, drunken messages imploring him that he was still wanted and worthwhile.
By the time the last regular member of the Wednesday Night Boulder Community Hospital Alk-A died in May 2032, everyone had long forgotten Tom’s name or what he even looked like.
Everyone has to live with his or her choices.