“Hi My Name Is Amber And”

I turned the doorknob, half hoping that it would be locked. Looking back at it now, I’m sure there are hundreds of people who hoped the same thing, walking in for the first time. It turned and unleashed at least twenty glares aimed at me. There was no open seat around the table, so I quietly sat in a plastic chair behind the rest of the group. An older man had also followed me in, taking a seat beside me outside the group. The leader was asking for a topic, and the woman next to him brought up honesty. She began her story with, “Hi my name’s Margaret and I’m an alcoholic.”

The room was small, which is what initiated my hesitation. In all the movies I’d seen these things were in places like high school gyms, or churches. They were simply fifteen or twenty metal chairs sitting around in a circle with people occupying them. Here, this room was a single building behind a church, looking like a trailer home from the outside. It was even smaller on the inside with sixteen people crowded around a rectangular table. Some had coffee in front of them, and others had nothing. The twelve steps were printed on a large banner hanging on the wall.

My mom told me that she used to go to AA meetings. She wasn’t too invested, because it made her want to drink more. I wanted to drink, sitting there, even though the man next to me had skin that was somewhere between white and yellow, premature wrinkles, and a five-minute long speech about how he finally found a way to be honest with himself. I was only there undercover exploring for a nonfiction piece, but he didn’t know that. He smiled brightly in my direction as I sat down, and when we joined hands to say the Lord’s Prayer, his were cold.

Margaret looked like any other person. The man to her left looked like a soccer dad, and the girl next to him looked like me. They all said their introduction as if it had turned into one word: “himyname’sJasonandI’manalcoholic,” “himyname’sStephanieandI’manalcoholic,” in the cliché Alcoholics Anonymous way. Eventually, the older man that was seated next to me stood up and left, without allowing the forty-five minute meeting to end. He was ushered out by saddened looks from people around the table.

Honesty. What did I, Amber, think about honesty? At that moment, I didn’t think about my own experiences with honesty, although they were kind of abysmal. I was listening intently, with my legs crossed in front of me, bobbing one foot. Every person around the table got the chance to talk about honesty, but being outside the circle, I was skipped. When it came around to the leader once again he said, “I want to hear from the young lady in the back.” He said it gruffly, with arms crossed. Everyone snapped their heads in my direction, and I was glad I was in a town full of people I didn’t know. I can’t imagine my mom going to AA in her hometown where most everyone in her graduating class were alcoholics.

I said, “Hi my name’s Amber and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi Amber,” everyone said in unison, the cliché way.

“I’d like to just keep listening, thanks.”

My drunken canter down the darkened street of Grand Rapids in my senior year of college brought me back to when I was in elementary school. As I ran past the few houses left until my own, praying that I didn’t pee my pants, I remembered a certain bus ride home. That day my bladder was unbelievably full, and a water fight was going on in that small, tin can of a bus. When I stepped off the bus, I questioned if I should let it go, letting my warm urine blend in with my already-soaked pants. I resolved to run for it. Every step impacted my bladder with so much pain, but I actually made it. Now, as I’m older, my off-balanced jog around the fluffy dog that is pursuing me (“Oh my god I’m so sorry I would so pet you right now but I’m going to pee my pants. I’ll come back!”) toward my house inflicts me with just as much pain. The only difference between twenty-one-year-old me and the me from elementary school is the alcohol on my breath.

That’s the funny thing about alcohol—it can easily bring back childlike functions. When you’re a kid you cry about dumb stuff, like your parents holding your hand back when you try to fully grab dog poop, or not letting you eat playdough. When I’m drunk I cry about pretty girls, borrowing money, losing my keys. When you’re a child you oftentimes pee your pants.

It also inspires life lessons, like the ones you learn when you’re a kid. Don’t grab the dog shit because it’s full of germs. Don’t set down your keys because you’ll lose them. But there’s really nothing to be done with the bladder thing; “breaking the seal” is real and my self-control is in the negatives when I’m drunk.

Once in our sophomore year, my friends and I were sitting, talking about some of our favorite drunk stories. Laughing, I asked, “what am I like when I’m drunk?”

Thinking they’d say funny, sexual, or talkative—the normal drunk-girl personality traits—I was a tad surprised when they looked at each other and one said, “Hmmmm… emotional.”

Of course I’m not emotional when I’m drunk. I’ve only cried every single time I’ve drank for the last six months. I’ve only tried texting my ex about six times, and my friends have only had to call my mom to calm me down three.

My mom really liked Heineken. Sometimes when I buy bottles of wine, she asks to smell it, and when she does, I’m sure she’s wishing it was a beer and there was a way she could sneak it. I bet she thinks, “just one beer couldn’t hurt” almost every day. Every day that she’s been sober for the last ten years.

The last time my mom ever got drunk I was about twelve. My dad had to go get her from wherever she was, and she came home with a face covered in tears. My dad put her to bed, looking angry, and she laid there crying harder than I had ever seen. I slipped into her room, and crawled to her side of the bed, giving her a note that said, “I love you mommy.” She keeps that note on her mirror right beside her head as she sleeps, even though I’m twenty-one now.

She started drinking when she was twelve. She got suspended from school for trying to bring alcohol on a field trip to a skating rink was she was in sixth grade. It’s kind of a funny story, honestly, thirty years later. What isn’t as funny are the stories about her ripping my uncle’s shirt when she was angry, or her slapping a Band-Aid on a cut on my head that clearly needed stitches because she was drinking.

“Hi my name’s Amber and I’m an alcoholic.”

Although cliché, the constant repetition made sense after I’d heard it twenty times. There was something strangely powerful in that thirteen-syllable utterance. Like step one of the twelve-step program says: “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” It was the act of constantly reaffirming the illness over and over. Not only to the people around you, but to yourself, which is the most important.

It felt strange saying it. I had a shy smile on my face, and I felt like I was betraying their trust. I was simply learning what alcoholics other than my mom were like, or what I had in common with them. Some things I did, and some things I didn’t. A common theme when discussing honesty with them was stealing. Many of them mentioned the almost involuntary thought: if I could get away with it, I would steal that. Some talked about how their entire lifestyle was in jeopardy when this thought grappled into their minds, hooking them in. Something as seemingly unrelated to alcoholism like stealing could possibly bring back their all-consuming desire to drink.

I had never stolen anything, except my roommate’s batteries once —so I’m in the clear. Phew, I think, as I mentally wipe the sweat off my face.

They oftentimes talked about alcohol drowning their thoughts of self-hatred, too. One man said, “I didn’t have to think because I was either drunk or passed out. That was how I dealt with my life.”

There was nodding from around the room, and the woman to my right with heavy black eyeliner and obviously dyed black hair caught my eye. She was very different from the woman on her right, who was wearing a dress and makeup that was subtle, like she had just gotten off work.  This woman, like myself, said, “Hi my name’s Kate and I’m an alcoholic (“Hi, Kate”) and I would like to just keep listening, thanks.” I followed her notion when it became my turn.

“The more you do dumb shit the more you drink, and the more you drink the more you do dumb shit,” my uncle said, without looking at me. He was chopping onions. It seemed like all he did was chop onions; I had seen him standing at the kitchen counter with a knife in his hand cutting onions, cheese, sausages, most of the time he’d been living with us. And he’d been living with us for over a year.

I was crying, and I think he knew why. All he knew was that now in my junior year, I called home crying for my mom a lot, and whatever my mom told him behind my back. He didn’t know that recently I’d been waking up with hangovers that made me feel like my head was sewn to my pillow.

All he knew was that he needed onions chopped, and onions aren’t going to chop themselves. In addition to this trivial chore, he knew what it was like to use things that drown out life.

I guess both my uncle and I could check that off the list: the “sometimes drinks to forget that you’ve been living this long and still have longer to live and guess what’s worse you have to be yourself too” right under the empty “sometimes likes to steal things” category.

“Just don’t make it a lifetime choice,” he said, waving the knife in my direction.

My uncle drinks at my grandma’s almost every weekend. It’s kind of funny, alcohol. It’s easy to pick up, yet so hard to put down. He drinks to forget how long he’s been living, how much longer there is to go, and that he must do it as himself.

My family and I moved from Lansing to Muskegon when I was nine. We were going from a three-hour trip to grandma’s house, down to a one hour trip, and my mother was ecstatic. Although my dad, a nurse, was transferring from nursing at one state prison to another, my mom didn’t yet have a job.

She was a busy body. Every time I’m home I’m seated in a stool behind the island because for some reason it’s way more comfortable than the normal chair, watching her flit around the kitchen trying to talk to her when her head is in my direction. She seems to always be cooking dinner, and while doing this she cleans off the counters, makes other things, or does the dishes. More often than not this results in burnt food. Once, when my dad got home and spotted the burnt blueberry muffins, he said, “that’s my woman,” with a sly smile on his face.

I could tell that being idle was hard for her. She was grateful when she began working again. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mom had put on some weight. Looking back at pictures she was the heaviest she had ever been in that small, white, rental house in Whitehall. Her cheeks became more rounded and she stopped exercising. She told me it was because her drinking began to get out of control from the stress of the move.

One day, I caught her smoking cigarettes, which was devastating to my nine-year-old self. I went down the stairs of my grandmother’s house to find her smoking with my aunt. My aunt had just left, and mom was finishing the cigarette. The look on her face when she saw me staring at her was funny—except not at the time. After being caught, she did it all the time. In front of my dad, in the front of the house. She had been smoking all along, even when we lived in Lansing, pretending she was nicotine-free, lying.

When I was eighteen I resolved to never try drinking. Not only was I never going to get drunk or party, I was never even going to try it. Never. That lasted until I was nineteen, in my freshmen year, when my roommate and I shared a bottle of wine in our beds. It was a lot different than I thought it was going to be. I walked to the bathroom through the empty corridor of our traditional-style dorms, giggling to myself because everything was slightly crooked. The hallway was curving slightly, and the lines on the walls were taking me with them, guiding the way, making me dizzy. I went to bed laughing and woke up without a hangover.

If only every night of drinking could be like that, maybe all the nights I spent questioning why I couldn’t be a normal, happy, drunk wouldn’t have plagued my every morning. I wonder if my mom had those thoughts too.

Amber Kelley is a graduate from Grand Valley State University, having studied English Literature and Writing. She frequently practices creative nonfiction and has a special interest in balancing creative and poetic language with everyday life experiences.