Jake blew into the meeting house on Christmas day, running in from the cold and snow, through the outer lobby, into the meeting room, and threw himself onto a chair at the table. He smacked a pack of cigarettes against the palm of his hand and pulled one out, loudly snapping his lighter a few times before setting a flame to the tip. Spewing smoke into the air above him, his head turned up and cocked to one side, he settled into blank staring. I was watching him, and so was every one else. He was strikingly handsome, though kind of thin, with soft dark hair feathered back framing his sunken-cheeked face. He pursed his lips, and I watched the movement of his neck as he swallowed and took swift drags off the butt of his cigarette, pinching hard between his thumb and fingers. Except for subtle signs of grief, or something like it, maybe, he looked like a boy. A tough little boy, endearing and sweet.

When the chairperson asked if we had any newcomers, we expected him to speak, but he remained silent, smoking, staring, swallowing. He was jumpy, nervous. We all come in like that. I couldn't take my eyes off him.

The topic was gratitude, an appropriate topic for Christmas day. We went around the table speaking, grateful to be sober this holiday season, grateful to our families for staying with us, despite all we had put them through in holidays past, grateful to our own higher powers -- if it weren't for the fellowship, our brothers and sisters around the table, we'd surely be drunk through New Year's day.  And then he spoke --

"My name is Jake," his voice was raspy, but steady and certain, loud and clear. "And I'm a real alcoholic."

A real alcoholic.

He made no eye contact with anyone around the table, but looked down at the ashtray in front of him, tapping his cigarette repeatedly, stirring his ashes nervously, eyes darting to the right, to the left. "I've been in the program now, on and off, for the last twenty-five years. . . ." He'd been in and out of jail for drunk driving, had three failed marriages, hadn't been able to keep a job. He'd been drinking now for the last six days, drank until his money ran out, and now it was Christmas day. His family had given up on him a long time ago, he explained. He now had no job, no money, and no place to live.  It was the usual relapse story, the usual drunkalogue.

But unlike others I'd heard in the past, he told his story with an air of intelligence, like a professor lecturing to his class. He indicated very little, if any, of the guilt, shame, and remorse that others often expressed with their stories. That part was missing. He stated the facts, the reality of the situation, with a hard detached acceptance -- or something like it.  I was rather impressed.

What was it about him?  I'd only been going to meetings myself for the last four months, what they called a baby in the program. There were only a couple of other babies like me, people relatively new to Alcoholics Anonymous. Jake was one of them. I liked him well enough, just as every one came to like him.

One day, he asked me to be his euchre partner for the monthly tournament.  Then I started wanting him.

The meeting house was on the north side, the old industrial section of town in a sheet metal warehouse building painted puke yellow. As you walked through the heavy glass metal-framed door you'd see the sign that said, "Keep Coming Back." The place reeked of stale cigarette smoke. A long table covered with a green vinyl cloth sat in the center of the room where often several men, sometimes a few women, sat around and chain smoked, drank coffee, and played cards. Everyone liked the meeting house. It was our hang out, our place to meet new friends after letting go of old ones, a place to hide from family members or spouses who were driving us crazy. A place to stay sober.

The place needed fixing up yet. Some of the men volunteered their time and tools -- service work, they called it. The year before, they put on a new roof, and the previous summer they laid new carpeting and painted the walls. Some of the rest of us washed ashtrays after meetings or vacuumed the floors.

I liked watching the men. There was George, with dark wavy black hair and tight blue jeans covered in paint. He would smile and say, "How's Sarah today?" And Seth, handsome and suntanned with a measuring tape in his hands, always took time for a smoke with me. And Walter had been sober for twenty-two years. He had a full gray beard and twinkling eyes. I liked Walter a lot.

Watching them helped, and at least these men were sober. But in a twelve-step program like the one at the meeting house, you can't have sex and sobriety at the same time, not during your first year anyway.  It was one of the framed sayings on the wall of the meeting room. Along with Keep it Simple, and Let go and Let God, was: We suggest no new relationships in your first year of sobriety.  This often got interpreted differently. It didn't say no sex in your first year of sobriety. And what, exactly, did they mean by 'relationships' anyway? None of us seemed to know what that meant.

And then there was that step we were not supposed to take, a non-step, a bad move, the wrong thing to do --

It was called the thirteenth step.

There was no sign on the wall for that one, and, of course, it was not included in the list of steps. Technically, the thirteenth step took place when someone with a number of years in the program hit on a newcomer, usually under the guise of helping her out in recovery. It was referred to as jumping from step one to step twelve without doing the ones in between, without finding a higher power or taking a moral inventory, without making amends. We're all screwed up when it comes to sex and relationships, though we didn't talk about sex in meetings much. As Ralph, one of the old-timers, used to joke, "We should be out there having it, not in here talkin' about it!"  Ralph said the Lord's Prayer so loud after meetings he drowned out the rest of us. Maybe he thought the louder he prayed the better off he'd be.  Or the better off we'd all be. Needless to say, it all got confusing.

So? So what? Some of us enjoyed hanging out together and flirting and scooting around the edges of sex, getting as close to it as we could without getting anywhere near it. Maybe that kept us sober, kept us coming back, just like the sign over the door said: We'll love you 'til you love yourself, they told me. Yes. That was the hook. After the meetings we stood in a circle around the table and held on tight to each others' hands, partly to help us stay grounded, to give us a sense of belonging, partly to feel the warmth and firmness of human touch. We would say the Lord's Prayer, our voices drowned out by Ralph's:  ". . . lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil . . ."

Some of us meant it.

Louis, one of the old-timers, took Jake under his wing, giving him a room at his house and rides to and from meetings. Under Louis's guidance, Jake immersed himself in the program, seemingly hanging onto it for dear life. He became a popular figure, well-liked, an example of one of the down-and out who was working the program and making it.

I couldn't help it. I thought Jake was cute. And intelligent. One of the few intelligent, articulate individuals to walk into the meeting house. I loved to watch him across the table. I loved to watch him smoke and stir the ashes in the ashtray in front of him.  I loved it when he said, "I'm Jake, and I'm a real alcoholic," his voice strong and commanding.

One day, finally, he asked me to have coffee with him --

That's it --

I didn't give a hoot about the no-new-relationships thing anymore. I wanted him and wanted him bad. But I didn't tell anyone. Except Walter. "Be careful with that one," Walter warned me. "He's a bit fragile." Fragile? It never occurred to me that men could be fragile.

A few days later, at Big Boy, Jake sat across from me in a booth, both of us smoking and stirring our ashes. "Dig this," he said.  (Dig this?)  "The last time I hooked up with a woman in the program, we had coffee at her place, right?  She liked to get high anyway, and I was smoking a lot of dope back then too. So we're sittin' on the couch, right? And we're smokin' this dooby."

A forty-five-year old man says Dig this?  Smokin' a dooby?  I hadn't heard phrases like these since my older hippie brothers were teenagers. It made me wonder if he got stuck in his teenage years, never got out. It was cute.

He paused and glanced to one side, ". . . and she looks at me and says . . ." He lowered his voice to a whisper and darted his head around to see if anyone might hear. "Dig this . . ." he repeated and leaned forward, tapping on his cigarette ". . . she looks right at me and says 'so, we gonna do it or what?'"

"So did you?" I asked, more curious than I wanted to admit. (Would he?)

"Well, hell yeah!" he replied, as though it was none of his fault. (Hmmm.) "But I want you to know that's not what I'm up to now," he leaned back into his booth abruptly. "I'm in this program to stay sober. I'm not interested in getting involved with anyone. In the past what I've done is grabbed onto a woman, and instead of making a life of my own, I made my life with her. It never works." Then he repeated himself: "Never works."

He knew what could happen, and Louis faithfully reminded him. Louis took it upon himself to prevent any sort of relationship from happening, sometimes physically getting between us. It was all so much fun, so romantic, avoiding the doomed first-year-of-sobriety relationship stuff, avoiding thirteenth-stepping. My new obsession occupied my time, made my dull life interesting, made me feel less alone and less unloved. It was also maddening. We were watched over, warned constantly, reminded always to do the right thing.

So we kept our distance.

Then, he said he wanted to kiss me.

But he wouldn't. He couldn't.

"If I do, it'll be all over," he said.

He was killing me.

We'd look at each other across the table at the meetings and smile and my heart would flutter like mad. We had been talking for the last three weeks about his coming over to use my computer. He wanted to check out sober-living houses in the U. S. He'd been talking about it a lot lately, about how one day, he'd like to open a sober-living house, perhaps here in town. He wanted to come and use my computer. Soon. He'd been telling Louis about it, about the sober-living houses, about how he wanted to open one. Really. That's all.

One Saturday, he called me on the telephone.

"Can you pick me up? Afterward, we can go to the 5:30 meeting."

A meeting afterward would make it safe.

"But only to use the computer!" he said.

Sure, only to use the computer. Just to use the computer, nothing more. Yes.

We walked into my apartment. I ushered Jake back into my bedroom where my computer was, and grabbed another chair from the dining room. We sat side by side and surfed the net. I helped him maneuver from one site to the next, looking at sober-living houses in the U.S. Yes, there's a sober living house in Cleveland. Yes, and another one in Phoenix.

Yup.

I couldn't take it anymore.

I grabbed his arm and pulled him to my bed. Oh baby, no, he whispered. And then, Okay, but we're keeping our clothes on. He rested his weight on me and we held each other close and kissed. Kissing. Yes, he wanted to kiss me. We couldn't just kiss. Okay, he said, just this one thing. I'm only going to do this one thing and that's all. He pushed himself down, unzipped my jeans and pulled both my jeans and underwear down, then off. He pushed my legs apart and I felt his soft feathery hair brush against my thighs.

(and lead us not into temptation. . . . )

Oh Lord.

(but deliver us from evil . . . )

Oh!

And then I pulled him up and pushed at the waist of his pants with my bare feet, trying to push them down. No baby, he said.

(For thine is the kingdom. . . .)

"Yes!" I said. "Yes!"

(the power . . .)

And we connected. He moved hard and fast . . .

(and the glory forever . . .)

"Ahhh-Owww!" he yelled.  He leaped off the bed and onto his feet. "I have a cramp! Oh Jesus I have a cramp!" He stood up straight and held his side, twisting and turning in pain.

He grabbed his jeans and underwear and pulled them on quick, jerking and twisting and bending. He walked out, falling against the door jamb on the way, and went into the living room. I followed in my underpants and T-shirt. He lit a cigarette and paced, sucking smoke between his clenched teeth. He was smoking, clutching his side, standing and bending over, sitting and smoking.

"Baby, we weren't supposed to do that." He whispered sweetly and sucked in air. "What am I going to tell Louis?"

The next day I got a call at the meeting house. Someone called me out from the meeting.

"Hi." It was Jake.

"Hi."

"I'm drunk."

No.

No way.

It couldn't be that simple.

I remained silent. I could see Louis at the tables from where I sat in the outer lobby. I'd be caught soon. I'd be found out.

"Can I come by and get some coffee later?" he slurred into the phone.

"No." It was all I could think of saying. It can't happen just like that. You can't just have sex one day and get drunk the next.

"No." I said nothing else. I wanted to run out of the meeting house. I needed to get out of there before they found out. What would they think of me? They'd think I couldn't make it on my own, that I was using Jake for sex, that I wasn't working the program and I was breaking all the rules. Screw the sign over the door, I thought. I am not coming back!

"See what happens?" It was Louis on the telephone later that day.

"But . . ." I responded, defenseless.

"Sarah! I told you! And Jake knows this, but maybe not quite yet -- this disease is a matter of life or death!"

"I know, but . . ."

He raised his voice: "Sobriety isn't something to play with! You cannot play with this disease!"

"Yeah, I know, but . . ."

"Don't you realize," Louis's voice was pleading, softer now, "don't you know this could kill him?"

Walter and Ralph made the twelve step call. They picked him up from his motel and took him to the Pine River Recovery Center. I sat with the men the following morning around the vinyl covered table in the outer lobby, Walter joking about the trip to Pine River.

"So we're taking him to Pine River and he's in the back seat, drunk on his ass! The guy never shuts up all the way there. At one point he hollered out to Ralph, ‘Fuckin' Ralph, man! You say the fuckin' Lord's Prayer too fuckin' loud!'" All the men laughed.

 I felt so defeated, like they won and I lost. Like they were right and I was wrong. I felt so guilty. I did this, to this little-boy man, emotionally stunted, stuck somewhere at sixteen, or twelve, to a real alcoholic. I began to cry.

"No Sarah," Walter read my mind. "You didn't raise the bottle to his lips. You didn't pour booze down his throat.  Do you think you have the power to control someone else's alcoholism?  This isn't yours!"

"But . . ."

"Let it go, Sarah. You need to take care of yourself. All that matters is you. The only thing that matters is your own sobriety."

God knows we're screwed up when it comes to relationships. We feel unloved, unwanted, we cure it with sex. It's one of the reason we started drinking in the first place, aside from the fact that we're alcoholics. A lot of women walked through the doors of the meeting house, despondent, helpless, and in need. We were perfect targets for male predators who knew the ropes of the program; we were maidens in distress, irresistible to good men even, who simply wanted to be that knight in shining armor. The thirteenth step was something we were warned about, something to watch out for. Be careful, they said. Watch out for this one, watch out for that one. They only want one thing.

I never imagined I'd be the one that they warned about, the one to watch out for.