Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [59]
The speaker was introduced as Lenore B. Much rowdy applause. She was known to the members.
Lenore B. was a wiry little black woman in her fifties or sixties who told a story that could have made anyone’s hair stand on end: a battering husband, a son shot on the streets of Harlem, a daughter with breast cancer, a mother with lung cancer, a brother with AIDS. Some people have more than their share of afflictions, and Lenore was one of these. In AA, I’d finally come to understand the story of Job and why God reserves the right to strip us in order to punish us for our hubris and self-absorption. It was a good lesson, a lesson I could often grasp during meetings but that would float right out of my head when I wasn’t at meetings. Now, hearing Lenore, I was reminded of it again. I wondered what Rivka thought. Never mind. I wondered what I thought.
Lenore spoke about her life, and my mind wandered. I looked at the scroll listing the Twelve Steps and realized you could spend your whole life on any one of them. I could do a conceptual piece on AA scrolls—but wouldn’t risk it for fear of tampering with the magic.
Allowing the steps to drift through my mind, I focused on the sixth—something about being “entirely ready” to have God remove one’s “defects of character”—which was the subject of tonight’s meeting. What did “entirely ready” mean? It meant you were ready to open your heart to God. It meant you really wanted to get better. It meant you were through with self-pity. It meant you were entirely ready to listen to your own sane mind.
Was I? Absolutely not. I was too attached to my pain and self-pity, too attached to Dart, too attached to the me that was just like Dart, too attached to my own willfulness.
As so often happens at meetings, the speaker and I collided thought waves.
Lenore B. said: “Watchin’ my brother die of AIDS, I axed myself: Does you really believe in spirit, or is you only pretendin’ to? Because he lost his faith in his final sickness, an’ I almos’ did myseff. He was a terrble sight: tumors comin’ out of his tongue, a sickenin’ smell, a wasted body. I nursed him, an’ many’s the time I wanted to drink, but even more often I wanted to curse God for his afflictions. And for mine. It was the sixth step that save me. Specially two words of the sixth step. The words ‘entirely ready.’ Was I entirely ready to give up the flesh? I wasn’t—not till I saw my brother’s flesh rottin’ and fallin’ off. We don’ like death. We don’ like disease. We think we be too big for death and disease. We think we be beyond the flesh. But flesh is mostly there as a lesson. Once we learn it, we pass on.
“I bless the day God took my brother Harold. I bless the day I saw him lyin’ there, a heap of bones and stinkin’ flesh. Till that day, I didn’t believe I was mortal. But now I believes it. I am entirely ready. And whenever I become unready, God sends me another reminder. . . .”
There is a strange wheezing sound in the back of the room. Several of us turn and look back, to see an old bum in the back row grab his chest and double over.
Propelled by a force I don’t understand, I rush to his side.
The man’s face turns stony blue, then he falls forward, hitting his head on the chair in front of him with a thunk. He crumples on the floor, reeking of sweat, piss, dung—the smell of destitution. His head turned to one side, his eyelids flutter, and I can see that what’s left of his one visible eye is cloudy blue. His mouth moves—toothlessly. A thin rivulet of saliva slimes out of one corner of his mouth onto the floor. I think of Dart, who always loved the bums, identified with them, wanted, in fact, to go around the city putting blankets on all of them like some crazed catcher in the rye. And I try to pretend that this heavy lump of decaying flesh is my beautiful Dart. For it is.
The red hole of a mouth speaks. “I tole ’im it was no good goin’ to the center of the lake . . . but would he lissen? No, siree. Never. I told ’im the raft wouldn’t hole ’im, but would he lissen? No, siree. Gone . . . all gone