The Residue Years by Mitchell Jackson

ever since. Though when we tell our story, a bit of our trouble becomes another’s, there will be no fearless and searching inventory for me. Not today. My business is my business until it isn’t.
    Randy announces Cleaniversaries, and awardees stroll up to accept their tags. It makes me think of the time I earned a tag, years ago, my first stint in NA. Was proud of it too, but not proud enough to show it. Too afraid of what people might think, or, worse, what they might say. The awardees palm their foil-scripted color tags and stroll back to their seats while the rest of us boom our hands together. Honest, it makes me jealous seeing them. Makes me anxious for my time to come. And when it arrives this time, who cares who sees? When it comes this time, let them all see.
    We pass around the seventh-principle basket. We search for something to give, singles mostly, a few fives and tens, an odd twenty. I scrounge for dollars, the best I can do. We read up to the twelfth tradition, the first one I learned by heart:
Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities
.
    * * *
    The other night I watched a show on drugs. It talked about this study where they rigged rats to a machine that shot them with cocaine every time they pressed a bar. The man on the show explained that the rats pressed the bar at the expense of food, sex, sleep, pressed even when it meant they’d suffer electric shock, kept right on pressing for hits until they fell out dead.

Chapter 10
    â€œBut what if this is?”
—Champ
    Ain’t a spot to squeeze in nowhere in sight, which shouldn’t really be no big old surprise, since most days, meaning a day like today, finding a place to park near campus is like defying physics or catching a lightning bolt or slapping bullets out of midair. Been so bad, twice I wrote a letter (didn’t send either one of them, though) to our crater-face school president beseeching him to increase the meter count or better yet build a new garage so fools don’t have to wander miles upon miles trying to find a spot for their ride. By the time I find a spot, by my kick around watch, I’ve missed almost half of Professor Haskins’s Advanced Speech class. With no change for the meter and no time to get none, I leave the car parked on a prayer, meter blinking expired, leave it paralleled, throw on my backpack, and zip down Broadway, hustling around the tennis courts to the canopied park blocks and the pebble-paved pathway where last winter I slipped on a patch of ice and busted my ass.
    And here’s the cold part about being late to Haskins’s class: The room is too small to sneak in unnoticed, not a chance of it, so I burst into a dead sprint. Okay, okay (there goes the hype again), something close to a dead sprint is more like it, what withleaves on the ground and the ache of bruising my ass-cheeks months back is still fresh on my mind. My legs kicking and my arms pumping so fast they blur the words of the dude with the Santa Claus beard proselytizing from an overturned bucket. Legs kicking and arms pumping past nerds plowing through notes, past pretty young things lap-balancing encyclopedia-thick texts, past jocks strolling with knotted tenny shoes looped over their shoulders, past huddles of exchange students, all the while the smell of roasted lamb, roasted chicken, and seasoned ground beef taunting my empty gut. But ain’t no time for snacking.
Pow!
I duck into one building, blast through another and another with that juiced-up Olympian speed, me zagging through clogs of striving Einsteins till I reach Haskins’s room, stoop to catch my breath, fix my laces, and pull my shirt from where it’s stuck to my skin from sweat.
    A head or two twist around when I walk in. Haskins pauses long enough for me to find a seat. Mr. Thomas, he says, his voice deep and scratchy. (Imagine an old blues singer: a B.B. this or