suggesting that the glare I found myself so uncomfortably caught in was none but my own.
“I think you already live on a desert island,” he said. “I think you need more of the real world, not less.”
He was right of course. Over a span of twenty years I’d virtually never listened to a news story all the way through. I’d never given thought to my religious upbringing (except to quit Sunday School out of a boredom I couldn’t even disguise as moral disagreement because it didn’t occur to me to morally disagree with conservative Judaism). When called upon to give my views on the “Israel/Palestinian problem” I recused myself by calling the topic “too heated” (though I didn’t know why it was heated, I’d only surmised it from the fact that people felt compelled to ask me, a Jew, about it). Certainly I had never voted, and though I could name who was on the ticket, I could not discuss what was at stake nor did I care. No, over the span of my twenty years I had done little besides chronicle, in a succession of carefully chosen lined and unlined blank books, the mostly miniscule moments of my existence. Bad tennis days were dissected, but there is no mention of the Manson family murders. Trips to the Chattahoochee River on horseback were recounted, but nothing about the young black boys (13 of them by the time Wayne Williams was convicted) who were being abducted and murdered, including one whose body was dumped in—yes—the Chattahoochee River. At college in 1979 I meticulously noted my ever-changing moods, even describing how seeing the chalk phrase “Free The Hostages” on the street fueled my sadness about a world whose machinations terrified me, but my compassion did not extend to the actual men and women being held hostage in Iran. Mine was an insular world where everything that happened boomeranged back to me for the sole purpose of inflaming or frightening me. There is a joke about a man who hears that the hostess of a party he was supposed to attend has died tragically, which forces him to cancel his plans.
Bemoans the man, “Why does everything have to happen to me?”
This was me.
And so my first lesson this first day at Bridgeway is a basic one. Isolation-as-cure, while dreamy, is dangerous, and flies directly in the face of the actual mission of halfway houses, Bridgeway notwithstanding. Their purpose is to stop the addict’s flight from society (through alcohol, drugs and geography), and to serve as a stepping stone (a bridge if you will) between the world of addiction and the world of everything else. Bridgeway clients, having been through the requisite detoxing and 21-day treatment, are in the slippery emotional terrain between “treatment” and “recovery” whereby they haven’t yet learned the coping skills that will