Look Back But Don't Stare by Marie Cartier

    Jill Robidoux CC




LOOK BACK BUT DON’T STARE


Christi looked around the room. It was like so many of the rooms she had looked around, searching for what...? Hope? Friends? Love? She’d found all of those, even if briefly. The friends she’d met she’d mostly kept. Christi was a good friend and she attracted good friends, good drinking friends. The hope she’d often lost, and the love…well, there was always more of that, she’d never lacked for love. Security? Yes. But love, no. At the end of every meeting everyone said, keep coming back, it works if you work it. And you’re worth it. 

Well, she’d kept coming back in so many places all over Los Angeles. She sighed, drinking the coffee. The faces were different, but the coffee was the same. Why can’t they ever figure out coffee? No wonder we all drink. She’d been a waitress her whole life. If she stayed at this meeting, she’d take over that service—coffee. She briefly remembered that one meeting in Brentwood, where the coffee had been great, but she hadn’t made any friends, so she didn’t go back. 

That’s why she liked the Venice Beach meetings best. That’s where she met so many friends, even if briefly. Except for Wanda, her best friend from grade school. They had bonded over everything from parents and boyfriends and drugs to kids. But she hadn’t met Wanda at an AA meeting. Wanda was her ride-or-die. And she wasn’t an alcoholic.

The sober friends dropped away anyway. Christi came and went from meetings. And here she was at another meeting, but not at the beach. And she might meet new friends—but she was never sure about sober. And that’s when the new sober friends left. So, did it work… if you kept coming back? Because here she was, living not in Venice anymore, but in Northridge, for God’s sakes, Northridge. Because why…drinking. That’s why. 

Why am I here? she thought.

It was quiet in the room, and she realized the voices that had circled were now still. She looked up. “Are there any newcomers to the meeting tonight?” said the beautiful woman with the paisley scarf wrapped around her locks sitting at what now seemed like the top of the circle. “This is the time for newcomers to briefly introduce themselves.” She paused, looking around the room.
Christi took a sip of the bad coffee and breathed in and out hard, “Hi, I’m Christi and this is my first time at this meeting. I mean, I’ve been to other meetings, but yeah, still a newcomer.”

“Welcome, Christi,” she heard people say in a random, bumpy chorus.

She half smiled, people at AA meetings were so not exactly welcoming, but honest. And that is one reason she kept trying. She stayed listening to the people who shared in their three-minute timed shares. She teared up, she got bored, she got scared and she kept drinking coffee for the next forty-five minutes.

Then the woman in the paisley scarf asked if anyone had “any burning desires?”

“I’m Christi. I’m an alcoholic,” Christi paused, “Jesus, how many times have I said that?” She looked down at her feet, but kept talking, “I had my first drink when I was thirteen. It’s because I’d been having nightmares. And they wouldn’t stop. My father was raging, and my mother was always focused on him, trying to get him to stop—beating us, drinking, whatever. I started to have dreams of drowning when I was twelve…I don’t know why except I felt like that awake—that I was drowning.”

She stared at the trees through the skylight, took a deep breath and continued, “After my thirteenth birthday where the one friend I had left in tears because my father threw his and my mother’s cake on the floor and my mother started crying …I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid of the nightmares more than ever. I was in the kitchen eating leftover cake and my mother came in and saw me, really saw me and it felt so good. She gave me a shot of my father’s Four Roses and told me it would help me sleep. It did help me sleep. It helped me sleep for thirty years, and it’s still …helping me.

“At some point it’s my fault, not her fault I know, but Kentucky Four Roses is my best nightcap, sometimes day cap…. it helped me sleep through a lot. A car crash, losing my license, my kid almost being taken away. I know I’m unlucky-lucky. I’ve lost a lot but I could lose more.” Christi stopped.  “Can we smoke in here?” No one said anything, and she answered her own question, “No of course not.” 

She exhaled hard and the person next to her, shifted and said, “One minute.”

Christi murmured, “Thanks.” Then she looked around, “I moved to Northridge six months ago for this guy. Another guy. He left a few weeks ago, to go back to where—Arkansas? I never saw that coming—but I don’t see a lot coming. I didn’t see that my daughter who I dragged up here would hate it. She’s twelve. And I mean—hate it. No offense to those of you who live here, I think Northridge’s…interesting, a lot of trees, fruit trees, right?  It seems like everyone here has a lemon tree, or an orange tree. 

“Anyway, I don’t know what I thought but she is skipping school, smoking cigarettes… having nightmares,” Christi almost started to cry. Then pulled herself back. “I can’t move us again. I can’t.” 

She exhaled hard, “Why did I think it was a good idea? Because I always think things are good ideas that aren’t good ideas when I’m drinking. So, sure it’s a good idea to follow some guy, make my daughter change schools to The Valley, and the guy ends up leaving almost when I get here. Great idea.”

Christi surprised herself because then she did start to cry. She didn’t cry at meetings. “I don’t know why I’m here,” she took the tissue box passed to her.  “I was thinking of that phrase—keep coming back. It works if you work it.” Christi drank more of the coffee and made a face, “This coffee is awful.” That made some of the folks in the room smile, but no one said anything. 

“I guess it’s still my time?” said Christi into the silence. “Los Angeles is a big city. You can start over again and again. Which I have. And… my kid, too. But that’s not happening this time. She ran away, and she’s come back…and this time we are staying put.”

She cried harder and the person next to her said, “Time.”

Christi looked at the faces, so unfamiliar and at the same time, so familiar. “I’ve never moved away from the city-city. I’ll finish up. I lived everywhere—but not The Valley, not till now. I don’t know how many times I thought, you know, a glass of wine? A beer?  One drink.” She stopped, “I love drinking. But…I love my kid more. There has to be a reason for why we are here. In The Valley.” She whispered, “Maybe this is the reason? How many times-- the court ordered times. The driving times. I’m lucky—”

“That’s time, Christi,” interrupted the same voice as before, and put a hand on her knee this time.

Christi said, “Thanks. I haven’t had a sponsor …for a bit. If there’s someone willing to sponsor me, I’d be grateful.” She stopped. I am grateful. “Thank you for letting me share.”

There was the sound of pecking out the window in the silence before the next person spoke and Christi remembered that phrase in a burst of feeling, that beautiful phrase, a descent of woodpeckers, that had been in the poem her best friend Wanda read at that golden poetry space in Venice, Beyond Baroque, where the cream-colored walls bounced with art and music and the lilting voices of poets. 

This Alano Club she sat in now was basic folding chairs and linoleum, but it was surrounded by trees, not fruit trees she didn’t think, but trees. The Valley. There were birds out there. Maybe they were woodpeckers. What was that line Wanda had said? Christi couldn’t remember, but she had never forgotten the phrase “a descent” of woodpeckers.

Wanda–who never gave up on her. Wanda who knew about collective nouns and who Christi was eternally also grateful to. Christi kept tearing up as someone else began to talk, and then someone else and she thought about Wanda. Wanda who rarely drank around Christi. 

How had they kept being best friends since childhood? A descent of woodpeckers is a group of woodpeckers, Wanda had explained. Venice Beach gave them a history and maybe a future, too. That’s what it would take for Christi to get sober--believing in the future, as well as seeing the past.

As they said, here, look back, but don’t stare. A future without alcohol? Woodpeckers descending and not letting up. This time, this time, this time…may there be that descent of woodpeckers, she chanted the phrase to herself again. How was she going to do it? One day at a time. And here, in The Valley. 

She then thought about the fact that she had, driving here, for a minute, visualized the meeting ending, and going to the liquor store she had passed on Nordhoff and Rosecrans. She had imagined getting wine to go with her leftover spaghetti from the diner. Just a glass. A nice Chianti, a soft red….

Who plans to get wine after an AA meeting?

She laughed out loud, and then whispered, “Sorry.” She turned her face to listen to the person speaking. 

This time, she told herself. This time is the time.

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Marie Cartier is a scholar, visual /performance artist, queer activist, poet and theologian who has been active in many movements for social change. She teaches at Univ. Calif. Irvine in Film and Media Studies , and at California State University Northridge in Gender and Women's Studies.
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