My Misogyny by Mary Miriam

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the time. I need something easy to occupy my extra waking hours. So I'm starting these reminiscences. I'm sixty-four-years old. My name is Robert Clayton. I use a variety of psychotropic medicines. That's the most difficult part of living in Mexico, where drugs are not cheaper. I have to go to the United States every year and bring a huge bundle of pills, a year's supply, back across the border. I don't declare the drugs because the duty would be prohibitive and the paperwork enormous. I could end up in jail. I take the risk. Lots of people here in Ajijic, a Gringo retirement community near Guadalajara, must be in the same fix. They all bring illegal things back from the United States. We don't talk about it. The Gringo community is relatively small, so we have to get along. That requires a certain amount of reserve, especially for me in AA, where several members disapprove of the use of drugs, prescribed or not. I have my AA reputation to consider. AA involves a lot of status metrics: how long you have been
sober, whether you work the AA program properly, how many people you sponsor, and other, smaller things like whether or not you take psychotropic medications. Every day I take ten pills of five different kinds in various dosages. It's not like I'm high. I just don't want to kill myself all the time. I want to kill myself only some of the time, which is better, and even when I want to kill myself I'm not unhappy. I also diminish my schizophrenia and am able to avoid the depression and the murderous rages that terrify me once they are over. Many of my fellow AAs would tell me that if I feel that way I should

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just work a better program, not take drugs. Some would tell me I'm not really sober. I want to hang on to my claim of 32 years sobriety. So I don't tell most of them about the drugs. It keeps them from picking on me. They respect me, and that allows me to intervene when they start treating newcomers to "tough love." Although I'm only half in the AA world, I spend a lot of time in meetings. I think it's helpful to have someone like me around. Some of the other AAs are beginning to disagree. My program is different than theirs. Mine is the AA program. Theirs isn't Two days ago a fellow AA attacked me when I said I did not care what others did but I didn't want to hug men. I said that an AA friend of mine, one who strangely refused to say the AA greeting, "Hi! I'm so-and-so and I'm an alcoholic," when he spoke at meetings, was traveling through California and had wandered into a large men's AA group. There he found otherwise manly men greeting each other with mouth-to-mouth kisses. I said my feelings about hug
s were like my friend's feelings about those kisses; he had left the building. I surmised that he could not have been coaxed into mouth-to-mouth, male-to-male kissing even if subjected to prolonged critical psychobabble, e.g. "You're insecure in your masculinity." I said this in good humor and some of those present in the meeting laughed. However, a man stood up (standing up to speak is not common AA practice) and began attacking me with similar psychobabble ("You're afraid of intimacy") for my resistance to hugging men. He mentioned that his brother, a Jesuit, always hugged and kissed people mouth-to-mouth when he greeted them. When he finished I mentioned a fact he had made known at an earlier meeting; I asked, "Doesn't your brother have AIDS?" He said he did and added, "What of it." I ignored the question and pointed out that it was

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neither AA opinion nor an ethical norm to hold someone to be morally or spiritually inferior for not following fashion. When I was through he said in an unmistakably menacing manner "If you had said those things about my brother when I was drinking there would be blood." I think he was borrowing from the movie title, "There Will Be Blood." I didn't see it. He was a very large, athletic man and no doubt could have hurt me. Before my first AA meeting, at which I was too shy to respond to the repeated invitation to say my first name, I'd already been in my third mental health facility. This facility was the Pima County Mental Health Association, a halfway house full of uncertified hippy counselors who preached responsibility. They claimed you chose everything that affected your life from your emotions to your parents. You chose your parents in the afterlife when you were in the process of either achieving nirvana or being born again. As you drifted through the nether world being frightened by monsters that wer
e really your personified sins, you eventually had a vision of two people fucking. If you stared, captivated by the vision, then those two people turned out to be your parents in the next incarnation and the scene you witnessed was your own conception. If you didn't stare, but were indifferent, you got nirvana. All this was part of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a hell of a thing to be teaching crazies in a state financed mental institution. I believe there is a tendency in each human being to reflexively blame himself whenever he is in serious emotional pain. I know the tendency was strong in me before my awakening. I still need to resist it from time to time. I remember a Buddhist scholar expressing puzzlement at the appeal Buddhism had for westerners. He tried to explain that "nirvana" did not 5