Scene 181: mikey aa speaker

Summary

A five-minute round-robin AA share, transcribed whole: Mikey — "alcoholic and addict and a sick fuck, you know what I'm saying?" — recounts how "some of the old Mikey come back out yesterday." A court order requires his sister's or Ma's consent for him even to see his kid, who has just gotten a cast off (from an unspecified "sick fucking little like stunt" Mikey and "that bimbo" pulled); when his sister demands a thank-you and hangs up on him, he drives over, parks on the lawn, calls her a cunt through the screen door, and grabs his crotch at both women on the way out. Then, praying in the truck mid-rage, he sees that "irregarding of their fucked-up attitude" he has to go back and apologize anyway, for his own sobriety's sake — and does, and is refused, and never gets to see whether the cast is even off. What he came to share is that he scared himself: "I scared me, you know what I'm saying?" The crowd laughs and Vinnie readies the gong; the scene is watched, blurred, through Joelle's linen veil.

What to notice

The share runs on its tic — "you know what I'm saying?", a dozen-plus times — and the tic is AA's whole mechanism of identification compressed into a reflex: every few clauses Mikey checks that the room is still with him, and the room's very first answer to his ritual self-abasement is not comfort but glad confirmation, "You definitely are". Listen to how the program's vocabulary has colonized his syntax without upgrading it: the refrain "And I, what, accept that" grafts capital-A Acceptance onto street grammar, and the prayer that actually works arrives as a doubled malapropism — "irregarding", then "irregardless" — grace operating in his own broken idiom, no correction required. The sentence that turns the story turns on conjunctions alone: "But and so and but so" — six words of pure yaw before the wheel comes around toward the apology. His real discovery is grammatical too: "it scared me. I scared me" — the podium revision from it to I splitting him into subject and object, old Mikey and new. And notice that the story's whole object stays offstage: the kid never appears, the "stunt" that caused the cast is never named, and the share ends with its one verifiable fact unverified — he "don't even know for sure if the cast is even off."

Themes in this scene

• Addiction and Recovery: working program at street grain — the share as exorcism ("renting space"), prayer that actually interrupts rage mid-drive, the amend made for the maker's sake and refused; sobriety as behavior-management with no promise of reconciliation.
• Irony and Sincerity: the diction is all profanity and tic ("you know what I'm saying?"), yet the content is single-entendre moral self-accounting; the banal AA machinery — gong and all — processes the genuinely terrifying. Placed right before scene 182, it's the low-style twin of the A.D.A.'s high-style identical struggle.
• Fathers and Sons: a father's whole spiritual condition hangs on supervised access to a kid whose cast he caused; he ends not even knowing if the cast is off — love mediated entirely by consent forms and screen doors.