Read Online Recovery by John Berryman - Free Book Online

actually having its feet planted firmly in mid-air, as one of the counsellors had once said about somebody. Atrociously written too, and that mattered.
    â€˜This is my last chance,’ he said grimly to Ruth that Saturday evening. ‘If I don’t make it this time, I’ll just relax and drink myself to death. There’s no better treatment available, I couldn’t be in better condition. That would be it. ’ Fanatical determination.
    â€˜I don’t agree.’ She looked solidly at him. ‘There’s hope until you’re dead.’ And he didn’t buy that either, but it made him feel better, and after she left, when the gong went for visitors out, he slaved on.
    At half past ten he jotted down, ‘I seem to be moving with the speed of light but I also seem to be standing stockstill,’ and went off to the Snack Room for coffee. Eddie was jittering by the freezer, Jeree looked softly up, Jasper and Mike were arguing. Eddie had come in about
four o’clock, in frightful shape, and driven everybody crazy by trying to hold conversations when he could hardly stand up or jabber intelligibly. His white face was spectral and lopsided, thin lips working, shoulders shaking in a torn light blue dressing-gown, hands twitching, knees tottering. He was not in DT’s but otherwise he reminded Severance of a cadaverous lawyer he had seen on the locked ward at Werewolf Hills, jiggling back and forth along an imaginary tenfoot runway gibbering to his imaginary wife. Asking the orderly about him, with dismay, he was told carelessly, ‘Oh he comes in two or three times a year like this. In three days he’ll be back in his office giving orders.’ It was hard to see Eddie back anywhere in three days. Somebody had gathered, and reported at dinner, that Eddie had drunk most of a case of Scotch since Tuesday. Charley Boyle, in whose room he had been put, came in now and persuaded him back. Everybody sighed.
    â€˜Still, it doesn’t seem to be the amount you drink,’ said Mike. ‘A woman in my Group was minimizing as usual, yesterday, and Sandy couldn’t get through to her. She thought: no bottle-a-day, no Skid Row: no alcoholic, she. It’s pathetic. But what is the story?’
    â€˜Intake has nothing to do with it,’ Severance declared out of his lore acquired from a hundred and twenty lectures at Howarden and Northeast, and much dogged reading, ‘so far as they can tell. It seems to be Loss of Control. That’s the only pinpoint difference between your heavy social drinker, as I thought I was until a year ago, and the alcoholic, like me and I suppose all of you. There’s a marvellous Churchill story to this effect.’ He was happy not to be slogging away at the goddamned First Step. Truth in wit. ‘The great man was introduced to a big audience over here, after the War, as a great brandy-man. “Yes,” the jerk concluded, indicating with his arm a point halfway up the sidewall of the auditorium, “it is estimated that if all the brandy bottles Sir Winston has emptied were collected in
this hall, they would fill it halfway full!” Churchill rolled to the lectern—his son’s biography says he had a natural sailor’s gait that made him look intoxicated, along with his slur—anyway, he studied the audience, then shifted his gaze to the indicated point on the wall, studied it, lifted his eyes slowly to the juncture of the wall and the ceiling, and rumbled into the mike: “So much to do. So little time left to do it in.” ’
    But in the midst of their laughter—even Jeree smiled —a strange thought came to him. Or did it? What was it? He steadied and looked. It was lack of control. That characterized the alcoholic. As an alcoholic he had no control over the First Step. He had been wasting his time, without ever even reaching the Step itself. Put-ons, nailed by himself a day or so afterward. Three of