Road to Recovery

Down the road from me, there’s a community center with a dedicated room that’s essentially a revolving door and shared space for a number of different anonymous twelve-step recovery programs and fellowships—alcoholics, gamblers, narcotics, workaholics, you name it.  The other day, I was walking by the community bulletin board, and something caught my eye on that room’s calendar.  It read: Undutiful Husbands Anonymous.  Needless to say, I was intrigued, so I decided that I would attend.  In hindsight, I can see how that may be frowned upon, seen as inconsiderate, given that I’m not a husband—not even in a relationship; not even relationship material, as Al and Desdemona have been saying lately, whatever that means?—but I promise, I went in with good intentions, with the desire to learn, to observe, to listen to the afflictions of the husbands in my surrounding area, the duties they’d shirked.  And, in keeping with the spirit of anonymity, I’ll use fake names for everyone.

So, I showed up at the scheduled time.  In the center of the room, about a dozen foldable chairs had been arranged in a circle.  A few clusters of men had pocketed themselves in separate corners, talking and laughing among themselves.  Longtime friends, probably.  Or the usual suspects, the regulars, the serially undutiful husbands, choppin’ it up with one another.  A couple others had already taken their seats, lost in their own thoughts, scrolling their phones.  All of a sudden, I became strongly aware of my status as a newcomer—an interloper, even—so I took a seat, joining the loners, and waited for the meeting to start.  Which didn’t take long.  A man in a short sleeve button down and a comically long necktie broke himself off from one of the corner clusters and made his way to the middle and took a seat.  No lie, I thought the bastard might trip over it on his way there.  The chatter died down immediately, all regimented and businesslike, and the rest of the men followed suit and took their seats. 

The first several minutes of the meeting were fairly procedural.  The man in the tie—we’ll call him Walter—clearly the leader, the chair, he gave a very brief greeting to everyone, welcoming us all, and then he read a couple excerpts from what he referred to as “the literature.”  He’d adopted this casual demeanor, almost too casual, all hunched over, leaning forward, the tip of his tie brushing the floor when he shifted.  Then a couple of other guys recited some stuff, there was a creed of some sort that everyone said together, and then one guy—we’ll call him Rick—he was introduced and asked to share his experience.  Rick stood up, looking like he’d just disembarked from a dads-only cruise ship that had been lost at sea since the early ‘90s, sporting a white T-shirt a size too big, the sleaves nearly swallowing his elbows, tucked into even baggier khaki cargo shorts, which were cinched and held up by a brown braided belt, onto which he’d fastened a holster for a cell phone or a beeper.  I was honestly surprised he wasn’t holding a camcorder.  Rick coughed and mumbled something unintelligible as he shuffled his feet, which was when I noticed the white socks and the faded house slippers.  Then he removed his transition lenses, held them behind his back, and began.  “Ahh, well, howdy again everybody.”  Hi, Rick, the rest responded.  “Where do I even begin?”

We’d recently been blasted by a freak winter storm.  Blasted, bombarded, bombed, barraged.  Over a foot of snow, which, for down here, is a lot.  It’s one thing that, in our city’s How to Effectively and Efficiently Run a City manual, the entire chapter on winter weather was ripped out and has been missing for decades—perhaps never even written at all—but it’s another thing entirely when all that snow is followed by over a week’s worth of sub-zero temperatures.  So, after the first day or two of folks driving around, stocking up on all the bottled water they could find, predicting (accurately) that several of the city’s water mains would bust, all that snow quickly turned into a thick sheet of ice, rendering nearly all of the city’s other services inoperable and closed for business—trash, recycling, etc.  Well, this is the start of Rick’s story. 

Trash pickup in Rick’s neighborhood falls on a Thursday—normally.  The week of the snowstorm, though, we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which, per the city manual, pushed trash collection back one day, but the snow started dumping on us on Tuesday and, while the trucks were still managing their routes through Thursday, by Friday, it’d all been called off.  So, poor Rick had been double boned, spit-roasted, Eifel-towered—by the city’s holiday calendar and by the weather.  A tag team of epic proportions for Rick, a father of three and head of a household that produces multiple bins of trash each and every week.  Well, by the middle of the next week, things were finally up and running again, and you’d be a bloody fool if you didn’t think Rick was on top of it, his having spent the last several days watching and rewatching the news, checking and refreshing the city website, hounding his local district representative on the phone, to discover and then confirm and then reconfirm that, yes, Rick, fucking hell, the trash would be collected that Friday.  So, it was with extreme vigor that Rick readied himself and his family for Friday.  The last of the perishables were consumed and disposed of, the trash bags were combined and knotted up and taken outside, and the bins were loaded and wheeled to the back gate, but, alas, it was as if in all that preparation for that one, big thing, Rick had neglected one, small thing, namely, setting his morning alarm, and so it was to the metallic crashes and bangs, the pressurized screeches of the hydraulics system, and the retreating rumbling of the fat, rubber tires that Rick awoke that Friday morning.  He threw off the bed covers in a mad frenzy and dashed downstairs and outside onto the street, where he fell to his knees in a crumpled mess as he watched the truck crest the hill and turn the corner, his bins still sitting behind the fence, uncollected.

“I just feel like I failed them, you know?” Rick said.

Walter was quick to add: “But this failure won’t define you.” 

 “Right,” another man chimed in, “and you’re here to talk about it.”

“That’s half the battle,” said another.

Rick said that, as he pulled himself off the pavement that morning, he vowed he would never again miss another collection day, that he would learn from this mistake and better himself, go back to the fundamentals and polish his skills—look for studies on whether it’s more efficient to push or pull the bins; set two alarms instead of one; maybe even organize a readiness program with the other neighbors, a Byzantine beacon system, to alert one another to when the trucks were in the area.

“I’m just looking forward to this Thursday,” he finished.  “Excited to get back into it and do them proud.”

Walter thanked Rick and then asked if there was anyone else who would like to share something with the group.  Several other men volunteered.  One guy—eh, Tony—had let himself get carried away when changing the recessed light bulbs in his living room.  One of them had burned out, and, since they hadn’t been touched since he and his wife had bought the place, Tony said don’t worry honey, I’ll take care of it.  In fact, Tony had decided he’d go ahead and replace all eight of them, get a new lease on light-life in the living room.  Well, in his excitement to tackle one of the easier home improvement projects—check it out, Sharon! I’m handy and capable! your parents were wrong about me, Sharon!—Tony bought a box of 100-watt bulbs, not knowing that the current ones were only 40.  After he’d screwed in the eighth and final bulb and folded up the step ladder, he asked his wife to do the honors, the poor fools blissfully unaware that they were about to get eye-fucked by 12,800 lumens of incandescence. 

“It was just so bright,” Tony said, tearing up—or at least he would have been had his ducts not been fried.  “It was like an operating room.  My wife’s been in bed with an eye mask and her jade roller for the last forty-eight hours.”

This went on for the remainder of the meeting, the group comforting a dejected husband after he’d finished recounting his tale of shame—there was a jar of pickles that had been thrown away due to an irrevocably stuck lid; a sit-down family dinner that had been ruined by the nonuniformity in the doneness of the steaks, the culprits being unevenly clogged grill grates and, more blameworthy, a steel brush that hadn’t been used (or, perhaps the most blameworthy, the man who hadn’t used it); a punchline to a joke that had been forgotten.  I was so caught up in the moment, feeling sorry for this group of miserable men—their wives, their families—that I didn’t hear Walter when he called me out, noting that I was a fresh face and asking me if I had anything to share with the group.  I was paralyzed, and all I could do was shake my head No, and, as they had done for every other man who had already spoken—those men who had so courageously bared their souls, their failures, their shame—the men, ignorant of my true bachelorhood, must have assumed that I was still overwrought with my own shame, unable to share it that day, because they collectively assured me that there was always next week.  This assurance of the seemingly perpetual gloom attached to husbandhood seemed to flip a switch inside me, turned shut the steam valves that lead to the pistons of my ordinarily aching, hungry heart, because it was right then and there, besieged by the everyday burdens that these men bear, I promised myself that I would continue being single—to make an honest effort to enjoy it, at least—because you can’t be a hopeless romantic, hopelessly single, if you’re single by your own choosing, right?