Day 90, Tuesday June 4, 2024: Fayetteville, Arkansas to Belleville, Illinois

Carnegie libraries visited: Belleville, Illinois

Days sober: 348

The Preacher was on fire this morning at the gathering of alcoholics. The meeting was lightly attended (did fewer people need support today, or was it just a Tuesday?) and we sat in silence for about ten minutes before the Preacher got wound up. His monologues are filled with wit, wisdom, and fucks. A young woman, new to sobriety, talked about how difficult her first sober vacation trip to Chicago was. Everywhere, it seemed, people were drinking. Beers at the Bavarian Biergarten. Margaritas at La Mariachi. As difficult as the trip was, she made it through without drinking. Tad, one of the regulars who rarely speaks, spoke at length. Best quote? “We may be on the road, yet we need to remember that the ditch is just inches away.”

Ace has been good the past couple of days; more conversational than usual, and he even laughed a time or two. He talked about his days in the Boy Scouts, and that he remembered fondly attending the National Jamboree, in 1934, on the site in Washington, DC where the Pentagon now sits. He pointed proudly to a frame on his wall, which contains the Eagle Scout pins earned by him, my brother Curt, and me. Before I leave, he invariably tells me how proud he is of me, how glad he is that his children all get along, and how he admires my adventurous spirit. This time, while saying farewell, his eyes teared up…

Like the adventurer that I am, I didn’t prolong the farewells. My destination was Belleville, Illinois, just east of St. Louis. Rather than retrace my steps, I took the long way around, driving through Branson (home to the largest Christian cross monument in the country, as well as country music venues including Dolly Parton’s Stampede) and Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The first couple of hours were a welcome change of pace, as I had left the corn and soybean fields of the midwest for the rolling hills of the Ozarks. By midafternoon, Goldfinger was again surrounded by the rapidly growing fields of corn. The libraries – mostly small, mainly unremarkable in appearance – in the towns I passed were quiet, on the outside, anyway: Rogersville, Cabool, Winona, Van Buren, Elsinore, Chester, Evansville, Red Bud, and Smithton. Unless you have a specific reason to drive this route, you’ll probably never visit the towns between Branson and Cape Girardeau, as this strip of southern Missouri is not exactly on the “Places You Must Visit Before You Die” roster.

Branson Public Library

Rogersville Public Library

Cabool Public Library

Winona Public LIbrary

Van Buren Public Library

Elsinore Public Library

Chester Public LIbrary

Evansville Public LIbrary

Smithton Public Library

Red Bud Public LIbrary

Belleville Carnegie Library

I listened to books all day, finishing Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and Mary Karr’s Lit: A Memoir. They are on the lists of my summer’s main themes: democracy’s precariousness and also writers who are lushes before they sober up.

Before It Can’t Happen Here I listened to The Handmaid’s Tale, which left me cold, which might have been Margaret Atwood’s intent. Sinclair Lewis is savage and cynical, and I like the way he writes, which is cynical and savage. In It Can’t Happen Here, Lewis spins a tale of a 1930s America besotted with a cornpone Trump who campaigns on the theme of remembering the “forgotten man.” Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, the dictator-to-be, runs on an attractive and insane fifteen point platform whose economic theme is “everyone will be rich and work less, while prices will be lower” and whose social planks strip Blacks, Jews, and women of their rights and dignity. Immediately after he is elected, Breselius becomes dictator, and not just for a day. Spoiler alert: no one but Breselius’ cronies become rich, and the suppressions, imprisonments, and executions are even more far reaching than promised. As in all dictatorships, the paranoid leaders kill or are killed by members of the court. It’s Sinclair Lewis, so don’t expect a happy ending. Maybe the most frightening aspect of the book is that Breselius’s rise to power is propelled not just by the fanatics, but by those who simply want cheaper cars.

Lit is Karr’s third memoir; she’s led a rollicking life and is a skilled storyteller. The book is roughly divided into four parts: the time before, her drinking days, her efforts to recover, and her coming to faith in God. Her drinking days are not marked by bar fights or back alley blow jobs. Instead, they are the sad tale of a person’s slow decline into alcoholism, as the drinking becomes more frequent, hidden, and desperate. I identified most with her attempts to recover. She, like me, initially thought that 12 step programs were stupid. Really, what could one learn from a group of drunks meeting in dank church basements?

I was first exposed to 12 step recovery courtesy of the magisterial power of the federal government. Part of my sentence for my tipsy tour of the CIA was the requirement to attend recovery meetings. Lesson 1, for me: recovery programs are punishment. Like Karr, I thought “I’m not that bad.” In the eyes of recovering alcoholics, this was a sure sign that I was in denial. The idea that I was in denial infuriated me. Not being a complete idiot, I knew that I had a drinking problem. My resistance was conceptual, as I thought that the question “Are you an alcoholic?” was a trap. Two answers were possible. Behind Door One, the answer is “Yes.” Behind Door Two is the answer “No.” Whichever door you opened was proof of your addiction. Either you admitted it, or you were in denial about it. I refused to be a contestant in that game. 

I believed that members of recovery groups were losers, and I wanted to hang with the winners. Why, I would ask, would I want to go to a doctor who had flunked out of medical school, or a coach whose team finished last? What I didn’t realize until much, much, later was that I was entirely wrong. Those devoted to recovery programs are, in the game of addiction, the true winners. They were the (not always metaphorical) doctors who, after being booted from school, came back to finish it. They were the coaches who got up, sometimes again and again, after getting knocked down. I now prefer the reborn doctor because of their likely greater empathy for the sick and suffering, the Coach Phoenix who knows that losses are learning experiences and not final failures. My attitude toward the Alcoholics’ Quiz Show evolved into the view that it is only alcoholics who are in denial by saying No, as normal drinkers are unlikely even to be asked that question.