Month: April 2016

When you’re desperate, you’ll try anything once.  So there I was, sitting in a folding chair around a table in a church basement with a bunch of alcoholics.  I think every adult who’s been through the shitter and back has found themselves at an AA meeting at least once.  Most of us don’t stay.  We buck up, get jobs, pay our bills, and start drinking like adults again.  I was in quite a bind though so I was trying this on for size.  To ensure I sat through the whole meeting, I tagged along with a friend of mine who had been successful in the program.  She was my ride home.  I wasn’t going anywhere.

It seemed all right.  I was jubilantly conversing with the other losers around the table when a shimmery faced granola girl in cotton shorts sat down beside me. …

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Rush hour traffic grinds to a halt at Lake and Bryant. Cold rain pelts the stopped cars, bikers, leashed dogs and one unmoving body heaped in the intersection draped in a purple cape; legs bent unnaturally back, broken eye-glasses inches from still hands, and silver hair bloodied. The purple now yielding to streaks of red. The paramedics’ frantic movements give way to a methodical loading of a dead body.

An elderly man leans against the ever changing stop light facing the accident.  Rain floods his weary eyes, soaking his gray braided beard, his lips muttering “my other.”

“You OK? Looks like you’re sliding down the pole.”  A tattooed twenty-something with a skate-board tucked under an arm says. “Let’s get you to the bench. There you go.”…

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