What do Alcoholics Anoymous, Philadelphia Tattoos, and Romanian girls have in common?
I used to like to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for a brief period in the early nineties. I didn’t go to get cured of alcoholism; I went to hear the stories. I also checked out Narcotics Anonymous, wondering if the war stories of addicts, junkies and crack-heads, speed-freaks and street walkers would be any more intense, but the people seemed too stupid and too low (or maybe they started low, I don’t know) and the meeting places were more sordid. All the romance had been taken out for me and replaced by a kind of dumb suffering. I went back to my AA meetings. Over time I moved from East to West across the island of Manhattan, in the downtown part, so that I ended up in the gay heart of the West Village, at another Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, griping my seat while listening to queers telling hair-raising tales. A typical speaker on the other side of town might tell a story something like this: “I lost my job and then I got kicked out of my house. I got arrested a few times befor
