If there’s one thing I’ve found in life it’s that everyone loves it when a New Yorker shows up to tell everyone how much better everything is in The City. To that end, I wanted to share my story of moving to Portland, Oregon, after getting sober in New York City—and the three years I spent vainly trying to inform the AA community there of just how far off the mark they were.
I moved to Portland in the fall of 2009, seduced by her siren song of minimally employed café culture and artisanal unicycles. Not to mention, I’d fallen in love with one of her residents that spring, and we had plans to marry and breed.
Not only was I thrilled to get the chance to teach these folks how to get and stay sober, I was sanguine about the opportunity to learn more about myself, stripped of aspects of New York AA that I felt maybe I’d taken for granted after five years in one recovery community. I’ll let you guess which undertaking was more successful.
AA meetings in Portland are run all kinds of wrong. They call the speaker the “chair” and the chair is called the “secretary.” (I never got this straight.)
It sucks being the new guy. I don’t mean being a newcomer, which is awesome. With 27 days sober you’re the much-ballyhooed Most Important Person in the Room. No, I’m talking about being The New Guy. Five years sober and new to town and no one gives a crap. New Guy syndrome is, of course, universal, but a few things about Portland made it particularly difficult.
First, all social activity is based around cars. As much as people sing the praises of Portland as a bike-friendly town, it is remarkably pedestrian-unfriendly. In New York people walk everywhere, so it’s extremely easy to just tag along to dinner or coffee after the meeting. In Portland you have to get a ride or have an inside tip on where people are headed. Even being an extremely extroverted person—which I am—I was still amazed at how many times I went home alone directly after the big social Friday night meeting.
Portlanders are also quite socially awkward. It is true they are very polite and outwardly friendly, but each Portlander has built a tiny reclaimed wood fence around his or her heart that makes it very difficult to get to know them. New Yorkers are neurotic, brash and rude—but they also are open books, and are extremely good at getting to know people.
AA meetings in Portland are run all kinds of wrong. They call the speaker the “chair” and the chair is called the “secretary.” (I never got this straight.) The speaker typically only shares for about five minutes and rarely talks about what it was like to be an active addict. Wrong. I need to hear a qualification or I generally won’t listen to you. You might as well be a shrink. There are a few meetings where the speaker speaks for a good 20 minutes and tells a real story. These they call “speaker meetings.” (In New York we call these “meetings.”)
In Portland no one ever raises their hand to share. Instead, people are picked by the speaker to share, because we totally want to hear from a) the speaker’s entourage or b) the sullen day-counter in the corner who’s hoping desperately not to be picked.
In Portland they call sober anniversaries “birthdays.” Virtually everyone does this, to the point where one often has to go out of their way to differentiate a sober “birthday” from the insufferably twee “bellybutton birthday.” Born-again Christians don’t even engage in this level of nonsense.
Portland AA is remarkably gender-segregated. And while I certainly agree with the wisdom of trying to make AA a safe place for recovery, I find that in practice—especially for men—it’s rather arbitrary and just another way of creating exclusivity. And I personally hate men’s meetings. To me, they mostly have the feel of a locker room or a monkey house. Co-ed meetings, which I greatly prefer, feel more balanced.
I was recently talking about this with a female friend. She imagined that—like her women’s meetings—men’s meetings must be full of a special kind of emotional vulnerability and openness that you would never see from dudes in co-ed meetings.
In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. If you’re paying any kind of attention you’ll see that every meeting that is not a women’s meeting is a men’s meeting. The only differences I’ve noticed at men’s meetings is the increased likelihood of hearing the word “bitch.”
Further evidence: Men’s meetings in Portland are especially notable for their swag. It seems that no men’s meeting is complete without a line of black hoodies emblazoned with skulls, malt-liquor bottles and ominous, insider-ish sayings like, “No one cares what your day was like.”
As for the notion of making AA a safe space, sexually speaking, this didn’t seem to concern many people in Portland. For men and women, nailing dewy-eyed newcomers seems about as common as saying the Serenity Prayer. I’m not judging, mind you. While I appreciate the intention behind it, I think the suggestion of not dating in your first year is unrealistic and has become dangerously dogmatic.
And yet bizarrely, all of the above seems in Portland to exist in an environment of old-school Big Book doctrine and orthodoxy. I couldn’t possibly count the number of conversations I had that contained some version of “back in my day” or “these kids are ruining AA”—and all this from people with single-digit sobriety.
New York certainly has its Atlantic Group-ers, the conservative, uptown, suit-and-tie, Big Book–thumpers. But you know where not to go to avoid them, whereas Portland was like being in a whole city of tradition Nazis, camouflaged in vegan tattoos.
Of course, anyone who’s been in AA for some time knows there are many regional flavors of the program. Hell, I’d say every New York neighborhood has a distinct feel to its meetings. But that’s just the thing: In New York, if you don’t like something about a meeting you can just find another one. But after NYC AA, everything else feels like a small town, especially a place as insular as Portland.
All this added up to a profound sense of disconnection. So I did exactly what they tell you not to do: I stopped going to meetings.
Despite its reputation as a capital of cultural and epicurean sophistication, Portland is a remarkably small town. This isn’t a criticism in and of itself, and Portland rightly prides itself on its small-town charms—but small towns also come with pitfalls.
The most obvious is the incestuousness: You’re never more than a degree or two away from someone who has fucked you, either literally or figuratively. Because of this, you’d think small-town folks would be on their best behavior, but they tend not to be; they just get used to ignoring painfully awkward situations.
At one point, because of a long and stupid series of misunderstandings, I had a skinhead threaten me with physical violence. Now, I’m in my late thirties and would have thought that such schoolyard shenanigans were part of my past—yet there I was, being forced (so to speak) to sit in meetings with this person while stink-waves of antipathy wafted across the church basement.
Less obvious but far more consequential is small towns’ gatekeeper mentality. When I lived in a small, charming artists’ community in West Virginia in the 1990s, a friend observed that everyone wants to be the last to discover any particular bastion—and, once they get there, they want to lock the door behind them.
If you’ve ever browsed the stupid T-shirts for sale on the tourist drag of St. Mark’s Place in New York’s East Village, you’ll recognize the phrase, “Welcome to New York. Now go home!” No one embodies this attitude like a small town’s self-appointed gatekeepers.
What all this added up to was a profound sense of disconnection for me—a desperate kind of existential loneliness that was not unlike what I felt the first day I walked into an AA meeting and it scared the shit out of me. But the most frightening part was that my usual refuge from such loneliness—meetings—seemed to be the very cause of it.
So I did exactly what they tell you not to do: I stopped going to meetings.
Yet I didn’t disconnect from AA. In fact, I made a concerted effort to reach out to the handful of fellows with whom I’d made a connection. I also focused on my 10th, 11th and 12th steps, and relied heavily on meditation. And I sought professional help in the form of a wonderful and patient nurse practitioner who guided me through the difficult process of taking medicine for my anxiety and depression.
After a few months I began to feel whole again. I cherished my new friendships and felt the connectedness that I craved.
Eventually, I made it back to meetings through rather unlikely circumstances. A story by the writer Clancy Martin called “The Drunk’s Club: AA, the Cult that Cures” was published in Harper’s Magazine. (Ironically, it was brought to my attention by some frothing Portland tradition-Nazi as an example of an infraction of the 11th and 12th traditions concerning anonymity.)
I read a warts-and-all depiction of life in AA that seemed to mirror what I was going through. Martin described nasty run-ins with personalities masquerading as principles and spoke of having to turn a blind eye to a lot of stupidity in order to arrive at the part that worked.
But mostly I was reminded that, despite its faults, AA works. Grace comes from the strangest places. That story got me to dip my toe back into meetings—and eventually I made my way back fully and with a new enthusiasm for recovery.
My focus shifted to working with newcomers, and my nourishment came from my more intimate interactions. It wasn’t that I stopped hating all the things there were to hate; I just learned a little bit better to take only what worked for me and, as they say, leave the rest.
After three years, I moved back to New York. My return has provided more evidence that Portland and Portland AA were not for me. I am at home here. Yet I deeply value my time spent in Oregon—and I certainly got my wish of seeing myself stripped of New York AA’s comforting aspects. The net result is a self-possession and confidence that I’ve never had before.
Of course, I cherish the many fond memories I made out there, and I miss some very special friendships. And the coffee. Portland really does have better coffee.
John Gordon is a freelance web designer and pub trivia host who is delighted to be living in Brooklyn again.