BY SEAN WALSH
In Season 3 of Breaking Bad, two low-level, sci-fi-obsessed and endearingly hapless addicts and meth dealers, Badger and Skinny Pete (not their real names), infiltrate a 12-Step recovery group, intending to use the “share time” to promote their uniquely pure, trademark-blue “product”.
The scheme is misconceived, not least because the healing space generated and curated by 12-Step groups is not controllable. Certainly not by two dopeheads who can’t even agree on the merits of Babylon 5 versus Next Generation.
Gradually, these wannabe drug lords become integrated into the group and – for a time anyway – disavow the criminal life in favour of a kind of white-knuckle sobriety.
It’s the mark of a great series that a subplot merits a spin-off of its own. It’s probably churlish to wish that the show’s writer, Vince Gilligan, had done more with this genius narrative, which is both richly comical and psychologically astute. I wish it, nevertheless.
I first came into “the rooms” in 2016, in Salisbury, a small city gifted with abundant supernatural resources. I sat and listened (or affected to) as Bill, an “Old Timer” with 20 years’ sobriety told this gathering of unlikely friends, united in a strange communion of sickness, about the morning he woke up in a police cell in Chippenham following yet another blackout. Bill assumed he must have been caught drink-driving again. Turned out he’d murdered his wife who had, he emphasised, done very little to deserve it. He was quite insistent on that last detail.
I then listened (with more attention now) as one drunk after another congratulated him on his “lovely share”. This struck me as being like that bit in the Mass when after listening to a reading from your standard Old Testament rollcall of incest, murder, slaughter and excessive retribution, the congregants respond by saying “thanks be to God”.
We are advised, in meetings, always to listen out for the similarities, not the differences. My own fake god was alcohol, not crystal meth. But I get that people are drawn into recovery by contingencies working beyond the narrow scope of their own intentions. Badger and Skinny Pete find the rooms through crime. In my case it was somewhere to be for an hour before dossing down in the Sainsbury’s car park.
We articulate reasons for trying to get sober when reason has left us. We say we are lucky to have found the rooms when the truth is that we are not lucky but blessed. We tell ourselves that we have decided on a Higher Power when in fact He has chosen us.
I have a friend in the Fellowship who started going to meetings to get laid. This box was ticked before she could claim her “24-hour chip”. She picked up her 12-year sobriety medal last week, having worked the programme without intending to. As a newcomer, she had been drinking two bottles of vodka a day; it never occurred to her that this was sub-optimal.
Such is the beauty of these spiritual practices, she didn’t even have to row back on the promiscuity (she’s in another Fellowship dealing with sex addiction, not for recovery, it’s kind of her dating agency).
Truth is that addiction is a spiritual disease requiring a spiritual remedy. This is not to assert or claim absolution for those caught up in it. The addict doesn’t get a pass for prior transgressions. A cure is available if he is prepared to work on it, to take responsibility daily for choices made past and present. We stay clean and sober only if we practise certain principles “in all our affairs”. Forever.
Recovery, of this sort at least, conforms to a high mathematics of grace, the axioms of which can be discerned – at least to start with – only through a glass darkly or, to borrow the phrase Aquinas uses in connection with our knowledge of God, by the via negativa.
One such axiom can be imperfectly expressed as follows. A necessary condition of recovery is that we undertake a slow-motion process of metanoia. We become actively sober so that every 24 hours spent in service to fellow sufferers – be they addicts or not – repurposes and reinterprets some of the crap we dealt out in active drinking or using.
Thereby we prove what philosophers call the thesis of retrocausation – the idea that the present can causally influence the past. Unthinkable in the dull mechanistic worldview of the casual secularist; self-evident in the magical language of recovery.
So much more to say, but we gather on a Fight Club protocol. Like the Mafia, or the much-missed homosexual subculture, we communicate in euphemisms. Not because we are a “cult”, but just in case one of us fucks up.
I can tell you that I have seen magic in those meetings. Even to the point of miracle when (as occasionally happens, if miracles can “occasionally” happen) the drunk and angry atheist blossoms into the sober and calm agnostic. Some get even further down that path, connecting the dots, and concluding that if what’s happening in the rooms is near as dammit like the work of the Holy Spirit then, well, perhaps that’s exactly what’s going on?
The singer and Catholic revert Dion DiMucci, clean and sober since 1968, has likened the practice of our programme to the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola. There is truth in this. There is more wisdom in the pre-Enlightenment Catholic writers than in the aggressively pagan mega-library of “self-help” books. In addiction the self cannot help itself, any more than the eye can see itself. I suspect that this is true more generally, that the recovering addict is working a process of psychological recalibration which speaks to universal and essential qualities of the human soul. In the 12-Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous, drink is mentioned just once, right at the start.
It works if we work it. Badger and Skinny Pete didn’t. Relapse was therefore inevitable. They were last seen clutching laser pens and claiming to be the “two best hitmen west of the Mississippi”. Tragic.