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The Art of War
(2001)
Dir: Christian Duguay
I haven’t watched this movie. I mean, I have watched bits of it. It’s directed by the same toad who’s responsible for Extreme Ops. Regardless, I’ve seen enough to tell me that I’d rather talk about therapy: Crumbling icebergs of powdered creamer sinking into scorched coffee, cigarette butts smoldering in little tin ashtrays, wild stories of unbridled debauchery and sordid confessions of intimate loss: all hallmarks of drug and alcohol abuse therapy sessions. For a long eight-month stretch following a rather sticky DWAI in my twenty-first year, I spent every Saturday morning in such therapy sessions. Each Saturday morning's fare, the polar opposite of the cartoons and other fluff I saturated the beloved day with growing up. Sitting opposite a jaundiced born-again Christian who devoured cigarettes like they were popcorn, and hearing him tell a huddle of relative strangers about the time he smoked crack with his cousin when they were twelve, I quickly ascertained that these Saturday mornings were the real shit. The people in this group had lives and problems that my white-bread ass had only seen on cable. We'd hang out for a couple of hours: talk, do interpersonal sharing exercises, watch movies like The Days of Wine and Roses and When a Man Loves a Woman, and stare longingly outside through the grimy basement-level windows of the abuse center.
In therapy, many people had found something other than booze or blow to bridge the yawning void in their lives. That something was Jesus. It was cool with me, I like Jesus. But many of them didn't seem to acknowledge the bait-and-switch that AA had played on them. They were just as fanatical about religion as their drunk former-selves would’ve been about a free shot of gin.
My peers in therapy had some situational lingo that transcended their narcotic differences and made things easier for everyone to understand. Dessert. That term was huge. Dessert wasn't any specific drug or drink, it referred to the yearning at the end of a long day to get high as fuck.
"When I get home, my baby's needing me and I got plenty of stuff to do," one girl in particular would always say, "but I just want a taste of dessert so bad! Just a taste ... but I'm still sober."
Throughout the therapy sessions, none of us were supposed to drink, and some Saturdays, there were tense little games of Russian roulette as a counselor would pass a breathalizer around the room.
"I can smell it." she'd say, herself a recovered alcoholic, "one of you had plenty of dessert last night. Every other person blow into the tube."
At these moments, there was more tension in that room than in Wesley Snipes’ taught bicep as he crushes a terrorist’s larynx. Who fucked up? Everyone was either dying to know or dying to be skipped. I remember one morning the loaded gun was three hops away from me, and I'd had gallons of dessert the night before. I was sweating and my perspiration probably smelled at least a quarter boozy as my breath. I was about to run wailing out of the room, when the lady two chairs to my left blew hot. She was forced to leave. I was safe.
There's nothing sexy about therapy. Except Wesley Snipes. Is he in AA? I’ll take him for dessert anytime.
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