That was June. In July I began going to meetings with other alcoholics. From day one it seemed important for obvious reasons to submerge myself in the buzzing yellow overhead lights in all those church basements and to think seriously about what the people in front seemed to be saying, so I drank their coffee and I sat on their hard chairs and I watched their once-wild girls with their cigarettes and their nails bitten down to the quick. I was happy and anxious each time one of them spoke. There was one, Betsey, a beautiful girl who had been locked out of her house by her stepmother and forced to turn tricks at fourteen. One night she invited me out along with the rest of them after the meeting to a diner where she told me that when you first stop drinking you should substitute cigarettes or ice cream or sex. Her voice when she told me was deep and had a rough edge to it and her laugh was like a motor.