Commitment Issues by Wynn Wagner

meeting and the eight p.m. meeting. I was about to explode from an overdose of sobriety. It's one thing if you are just trying to get sober when you need to go to as many meetings as possible. I had been sober for a couple of years, and I had heard all the stories before. There were new faces, but they always had the same things to say, even if they thought they were somehow unique.
    I grabbed a quick hamburger at a Whataburger and dashed back to the AA group. It wasn't that I needed to be there, but I sure was hoping that, you know....
    How many cups of bad coffee can one guy put away? By the time it got close to time for the eleven p.m. meeting, I was buzzed from caffeine.
    I used my phone to type “THNX” and pressed the green button to send the text message to Chico. “UBECHA” was the quick reply.
    Chairs in the AA group were a lot harder than I remembered from just the day before. My ass was going to take a few days to recover. Chico was the gift that kept on giving. He was so much fun, but it wasn't Chico that captured my mind that evening. My head kept going back to Wyatt like the kid had captured me in some kind of bungee netting. The minute I remembered the wild fuck with Chico, I imagined Wyatt's tender green eyes capturing my imagination. Where Chico was a total animal, Wyatt would be tender and wonderful.
    It was like I wanted to write poetry about the curls in his hair, how they were wispy like springtime clouds. I wanted to create a sonnet about how lovely his ears were, even though his hair covered his ears, hiding them completely. I wanted to write verse for him, but I don't even like poetry. This guy was making me nuts.
    The meeting started, and Wyatt wasn't there. Great. Just great.
    First, I get an angel named Rafa who pops up on a fence but disappears right after he made love to me. Then my talent agent is good as a fuck buddy, but I have to go onto the Injured Reserve every time we get together. Now the guy with the curly blond hair came to one AA meeting, got a desire chip, and vanished just as completely as my angel. I never even got to touch the AA guy.
    I was busy feeling sorry for myself and reminding myself that I went to AA for the program, not for the eye-candy, when I heard his voice.
    "I'm Wyatt, and I just want to listen."
    He had come in at the last moment, and he was sitting across the room by the door. He did the same as the night before: stare at the floor and shake and cry. His hair danced every time he cried.
    Knowing that Wyatt was in pain made me sad. There was little that I could do to comfort him because it hurts to get sober. I wanted to be there for him and to tell him that it did get better, but he was across the room from me. Maybe I could talk to Wyatt after the meeting. Talk to him? Silly boy, I would just drool and make baby noises. Wyatt was way out of my league.
    So pretty. His blond hair was curly but not frizzy. It was tossed in a kind of shag that hid his neck and ears. What little I could see of Wyatt's skin was pale and delicate. I was sitting a few rows back and on the far side of the room. That was two meetings in a row where I was too far away to pick up any details. There was his obvious glow—Wyatt was my shining sun—but I wanted to see more. I needed to have more details for my imagination. It would only take me a few seconds to memorize every feature of his face, but I couldn't do that from where I was sitting.
    I saw several others staring too, and I wanted to scream at the others to get their lecherous eyeballs back onto the meeting leader. I wanted to protect him from all the other gawkers at the meeting. Plenty of guys were looking at Wyatt, and I would make sure they kept their hands to themselves. Though I could barely see his face, I could see the kid was right out of a Hollywood movie. I could have sat there for hours just soaking in the vision of Wyatt sitting across the room, but the kid was a newcomer at Alcoholic Anonymous, and that meant he was