Mean Boys by Geoffrey Mak

Author:Geoffrey Mak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

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In California, recovery is a booming business. While Alcoholics Anonymous was born in Akron, Ohio, it carries a distinctly homegrown iteration in Los Angeles, which I’ve heard referred to as “the Mecca for recovery programs.” It was, for me, the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. At my family’s imploring, I decided I needed to get clean. At the outset, Alcoholics Anonymous offers itself as a book or a method, though its participants will stress that it is a community. Even in the earliest meetings I attended, I found it hard not to be impressed by the fellowship I observed. What I was looking for was grit and character, and I sensed as much in some of the men in these AA meetings—“the rooms” they call it—which I attended with the reluctance of a teenager enrolled in traffic school. (Thankfully, we still met masked and in person.) Some of these men I encountered were Crips members, ex-convicts, Mexican drug slingers, compulsive liars, privileged scions cut off from their trust funds, chemsex addicts, gay-porn stars. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous states: “We are people who normally would not mix. But there exists among us a fellowship, a friendliness, and an understanding which is indescribably wonderful.” It was hard to shortchange this. Because this was L.A., I saw the occasional movie star or cable news pundit come through, though they were not the ones who showed up week after week. The dedicated regulars were the desperate and destitute, who, at the end of the meeting, “prayed out” the Serenity Prayer and repeated, in unison, “It works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it.”

“Goofy and archaic” is how one friend described his impression of AA, after I’d told him I started going. “Goofy” had its charms. But “archaic” retained a deeper allure. I bored easily with other programs, which were either New Age–inflected or had a cognitive behavioral therapy bent. AA was so incontrovertibly the real thing. Austere, and as thorough as a colonoscopy. I may not be off the mark in saying that the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous is the single most influential work of American wisdom literature of the last one hundred years.

Still, most actual meetings felt grating to me, like church. I rarely shared. Antisocial and made awkward by social distancing, I didn’t approach others, and instead waited for people to approach me. The man who would become my sponsor was one of those people. Bald, with a mustache, he had on a checkered shirt with a red bandanna around his neck, and his beady eyes bore affectionate crow’s feet. By way of introduction, he dropped, in our first conversation, that he was gay and Christian, which was apparent from the cross necklace resting on wisps of chest hair and his straight-fit leather pants, which were like the ones all the fetish daddies wore in Berlin. Often, he showed up to meetings on his motorcycle, wearing a leather Harrington, and I could

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