February 1998
It’s a Sunday morning, and I’m in Jack’s apartment for my monthly check-in. I have 15 months sober, and Jack is on his second run as my sponsor, taking on a role he also briefly held in 1993–94.
I always visit Jack on Sundays. The television is always on some sporting event; today, we’re watching college basketball.
“We’ll have to make it quick,” Jack says, “the Irish are on at 11:30.” Jack went to Notre Dame more than 50 years ago, planning to be a priest; he left with a teaching credential, a drinking problem, and a wife.
He still has the wife, and 28 years sober.
When I come to Jack’s, he makes me various herbal teas, and feeds me sweets. Brownies, cookies, and my favorite, jelly beans. Jack has an excellent theory that sober alcoholics desperately miss sugar, and that one way to prevent relapse is to keep the sober person pumped full of candy.
He only half-believes the theory, but I like it a lot. I share it in part to this day.
On this day in 1998, Jack has bags of jelly beans. As my mother would say, oh blissikins!
I am visiting today because I am making my way through my fifth step, the sharing of a personal inventory with a sponsor. Today, we’re talking about the sex and relationships part of the inventory, but Jack has more questions about how I’m handling those things now.
Jack has a gentle voice, with a slight Irish accent, and it’s always a shock when he asks questions like this:
“Hugo, are you still fucking the cripples?”
I stare, jelly beans halfway to my mouth.
“Uh… uh… what cripples?”
“I mean your students, boy. Compared to you they’re cripples.”
I protest that isn’t fair, he doesn’t know them, these are bright young women with their own agency, legal adults, they approach me first, really…
Jack smiles. “And you just sacrifice yourself by letting them live out a fantasy? Such a martyr.”
My words come out too rehearsed. “But I think for a lot of young women, there is a fantasy about sleeping with a college professor. I think it makes them feel powerful when they live it out.”
My sponsor studies the ceiling. “You’re even worse than I thought. Have another jelly bean,” Jack says, offering me the bowl. I take 20.
I ask why he calls them cripples.
“Because they aren’t on your level. Oh, most of them already have more sense than you and they’ll probably be richer than you, but right now, they are in awe of you and your handsome face and your tight pants and above all your sweet, sad, bullshit-soaked words. They are crippled by the difference between you and them and you are too lazy or too scared to go fuck a real woman who doesn’t think you’re half a God.”
No one has spoken like this to me on this topic.
“Jesus, Jack, I don’t think that’s fair.”
Jack shrugs. “I’m sure you don’t. It doesn’t have to be fair. It’s just true.”
There’s a pause. “How many jellybeans have you eaten?”
I am chewing a huge quantity, more in my hands. I shrug my ignorance. My mouth is full.
Jack studies me, and his voice grows even gentler and more Irish as he hones in on me like a leprechaun with a switchblade. “Do you fuck them like you eat my jellybeans? As many as you can, as fast as you can?”
I look away.
“How many since Thanksgiving?” (I had been a fortunate guest at one of Jack and Doreen’s famous post-Thanksgiving sober brunches.)
I think of the number, cut it in half, round down. “Just three.”
Jack looks at me hard. “If you keep lying to me it’s a waste of your gas to drive down here. They do sell jellybeans in Pasadena, prob’ly right next to the cripples, no?”
I do what addicts often do when they are confronted: I stonewall, I lie, and then caught out, I break down and ask for help.
“I don’t know how to stop, Jack.”
Jack shrugs. “Well, don’t be silly. You’re not going to stop yet. You don’t want to stop. Maybe you’ll stop when they fire you. Or maybe you’ll fall in love with one of these cripples and she’ll cut your heart out for you and you’ll come crying to me that you’ve changed.”
(I will fall in love and get my heart cut out within two months. I will hold my job another 15 years, until the reckoning comes.)
I tell Jack that I quit drinking because alcohol and drugs were sure to kill me. “I had certainty about drinking,” I say. “I know if I use again I might die. But sleeping with students doesn’t seem as life-threatening. I mean even if they fire me, I’ll likely live, unless some jealous boyfriend stabs me or something.”
I hear my fondness for melodrama in my voice and I hate it. Not enough to change anything, but I hate it for the record.
Jack looks at the clock. It is nearly 11:30.
“Baby, my boy,” (he always calls me this when he’s getting gentle after a rebuke; AA sponsees are sometimes called “babies”), “certainty doesn’t always work like that. It’s a decision. You could decide today to take a month or two away from dating cripples. No flirtation, no intrigue. You could decide today that you would start to become the man who would attract a good woman. And the way you know you’re ready for the right woman is when you can give up all the other things even before she appears.”
This sounds heavy on the woo and I frown.
The Notre Dame game comes on, and Jack turns his attention to the television.
“If that’s too difficult, baby, maybe just stop treating women like jellybeans. You grab as many of both as you can, it’s a wonder you’re not sicker than you are.”
I agree it is so.
Jack motions me to switch to the couch. “Now, even though you’re a very sick man, come watch with me, and tell me Pat Garrity doesn’t bear a reasonable resemblance to the second coming of Our Lord and Savior.”
An earlier, truncated version of this post appeared on Medium in 2017.