For Whom the Phone Rings

I’m grateful for a meeting with sponsees. I’m grateful for a really rainy day. I’m grateful for a pretty swanky umbrella. I’m grateful for quiet mornings. I’m grateful for the pink hue on the horizon. I’m grateful for the coffee on my desk. I’m grateful for the newspaper at my door. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Things are popping, like always, over here at Sober HQ. Last night was the latest installment of what I’m calling the “Tour de AA.” My sponsees and I are dabbling in meeting tourism these days; on Thursday nights we venture forth (always in the rain so far) to go to different meetings around this fair city. Last night’s soggy stop was in Midtown and next Thursday, who knows. We have decided for sure that we’ll be doing meetings in all five boroughs, but think we might wait for nicer weather for the Staten Island adventure. I have decreed that our travels should be ferry-centric. So, if you have leads on good meetings that are conveniently located near NYC Ferry stops—please let me know.

In other news, I got a new phone. Here is the question I am asked most in my life:

Wait, do you not have a case for your phone?

No—I did not. I read an essay by the eminent astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, where he persuasively argued that putting an inelegant, clunky, plastic covering on the very sleekly designed iPhone was an abomination. All to save it from damage when dropped? Rather than covering up a thing of true beauty,¹ wouldn’t the better answer be to just not drop the phone? Turns out not dropping the phone was a bit like stopping drinking for me: not really possible. It was dropped more than a few times and it showed. I had activated my shiny new phone the other day and was syncing everything up, I went to put my old phone in the mailer so I could collect a little extra cash and actually felt a little sad and nostalgic. That phone served me pretty loyally for a couple of very eventful years.

That phone was the first thing I purchased when I got here to NYC in September of 2020. The day before I got that phone was maybe one of the epic no good, very bad days in my personal history. It was the day I moved to New York. To set the stage, the pandemic was in full force, it was a weird, crazy, unsettling paranoid time. The near nuclear detonation of a highly incendiary relationship had me trying to figure out some pretty basic questions: Where was I going to live? What was I going to do? I had about nine or ten months of white-knuckled, Antabuse-fueled sobriety. I wasn’t doing anything Program-related, I wasn’t drinking because I couldn’t. I was on a strictly observed, doctor-supervised Antabuse regimen.²

I had moved my possessions into a storage facility near the PBI airport and decamped to a specialty treatment center in LA for a ten-day “touch-up,” as I liked to call it.³ In a “why the f*** not” moment, I decided to give in to my long-held dream of living in New York. I was headed to a sober house on the Upper East Side to get my footing in New York and then I’d figure out what came next. My plan was to leave LA, fly to PBI, collect my belongings and my car, deal with them and then board an evening flight to LGA, putting my arrival at the Sober House around 10 pm on the Sunday night of Labor Day Weekend, 2020.

Well, a lot happened. Flights were delayed, I lost my car keys and I dropped my phone for pretty much the last time. It had already been cracked and now there was a big chunk missing from the bottom right corner and it looked like the whole bottom part could fall out. It affected the operation of the phone significantly. I learned that from turn-on, I had about 5 minutes before the screen started doing weird stuff and making it unusable. My car had been parked in the long-term garage at the PBI airport and was now marooned there because I no longer had keys. The process of getting new car keys is not instantaneous and requires showing up in person with ID and such. Which meant that getting new car keys would require me to stay in PBI for several more days.

My brand new therapist, a miracle that we met, by the way, was very, very concerned about this—even offering to help resolve the car issue. I think we all knew that about 15 more minutes in Florida was all it was going to take to push me back over the ledge. I used the badly-battle scarred phone to find a tow truck operator willing and able to come to the airport to and tow my car out to the dealership. I would deal it with later. It did take two separate tow-truck visits to accomplish this, owing to the height of the parking garage ceiling. I got a cab to my storage facility, breathlessly packed my belongings and then zipped back to the airport to make my flight to LGA. Here was the last photo I took with that phone—the cracked, damaged beyond repair phone:

I landed in New York, went through the weird, dystopian, mask-borne, Covid screening process that was then in effect and used the last five minutes of my phone’s life to get the Uber to take me to the Sober House. I had been communicating with J., who ran the House and he assured me that they knew I was arriving late and that everything was set. I got to the Sober House around 10:30pm or so, struggled my luggage up to the top step and rang the bell. A large, heavily muscled, former addict and Marine opened the door and literally growled at me,

I nervously stammered my introduction, told him I was new and moving in. He looked at me for a long couple of seconds and said, “I don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about.” Welcome to New York. The next morning I went to the Apple store on Madison Avenue and got a new phone. Here are some of the pictures I took that first week:

That’s also roughly when the Program took hold in me. I realized one sleepy night that first week things were just going to be ok—that was all it took for me to make my beginning: the belief that things would be ok. That new phone was with me for the entire ride. That phone was with me while I crawled out from the wreckage I had created and began a new life.

I have photos of really lovely moments that I took with that phone. I wrote my first gratitude list on that phone. I used that phone to take almost all of the pictures I’ve posted since then. I’ve sent and received zillions of texts from people I loved, some still in my life, some not. I used that phone to find meetings, chart my course around an unfamiliar city, keep a never-ending stream of music coursing through my airpods, to keep me moving and not thinking too much. That phone was critical to keeping my life afloat while I worked to rebuild it from the waterline up. That phone was a witness to a really remarkable, sometimes-pretty-difficult, a little-no-good, very miraculous couple of years. I guess it was natural to feel a bit of that as I was slipping that trusty pal of a phone into the AT&T-branded cardboard phone coffin. We went through a lot together.

Ask not for whom this phone rings, it rings for thee.

Vaya con Dios, Old Friend

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. That might be a bit much.

2. Why this isn’t prescribed for more alcoholics, I don’t know.

3. I think it’s literally next door to the one President Trump rented.