Still Standing. Bucky Sinister

who, no matter how wasted he gets, seems to stay upright and get more energetic as he goes. Now take one of those guys out of all the social groups you know and make them hang out with each other. That's the Dog Patch Winos.

      I always knew when I walked into a bar in the Mission District and saw the DPW patches on the backs of those jackets that sooner or later, all hell would break loose. It didn't matter the time of day or the day of the week. More than three of them together, and things would get raw in no time.

      I was genuinely surprised when I saw Dannyboy in a meeting. It wasn't that I didn't know he drank too much; it was that I didn't think he would ever stop. Looking back on it now, it's hard to picture him drinking anymore, as his sobriety is as serious as his partying was. Remembering him drinking is weird, like he was playing a character or something.

      Around the time I ran into 12-Step Dannyboy, I wasn't doing that well in my sobriety. I had no sponsor, no sponsees, no homegroup, and I wasn't through the steps. I was coming off a nasty breakup, and I was white knuckling as bad as I had since I came in. I was hating being sober, but I didn't want to go back to being a drunk; then again, I did like the idea of going to Reno and getting drunk for a week and not telling anyone. But while I wasn't yet through all the steps, I was hanging on to the first three as if my life depended on it.

      I knew I was powerless over alcohol, and I knew that even drinking for a week would set me off in a dangerous downward spiral. The idea that I wasn't looking to go out and get wasted for one night was a big warning sign to me. My idea of getting drunk once lasts for a week. I was sober enough to see the insanity there.

      I did believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. Like, maybe in another fifteen, twenty years. It was going to take some time. There's no way that it would happen any sooner, right?

      Now, I thought I had done Step Three, but I hadn't. I thought I had turned my will over, but I was really holding back. Looking back on it, I can see that as long as I didn't trust the group process and the community of drunks and addicts, I was still holding on to my will. I was tooling around with the Fourth Step, but without the surrender of will, you're probably not going to get something like that done.

      I had this mindset that when people started to notice me in meetings, miss me if I wasn't there, or asked me to do a commitment, I picked another meeting and didn't go back. There are so many meetings in San Francisco, it was easy for me to get away with this for years. Dannyboy was a big part of why I stopped acting this way.

      Dannyboy was at the meeting that is now my homegroup. Everyone seemed to know him already and like him. I was jealous of that. As much as I disliked the mob mentality and as much as I distrusted groups, I had that lonely part of me that wanted to belong to something. It was definitely a case of wanting what he had but not being willing to go to any lengths to get it.

      My idea of getting drunk once lasts for a week. I was sober enough to see the insanity there.

      When Dannyboy became the secretary, he called on me first for every discussion. I had to say my name. I had to talk. I had to put up my thoughts for other people to judge. I knew they were judging me because I was judging the hell out of them, and they weren't any better than me, I judged.

      Soon, people knew me. They said “Hi” to me at the meeting. They asked what other meetings I went to. They wanted to know how my life was going. Even after several years of sobriety, this was still very suspicious behavior to me. But it forced me to break my old habits.

      I wanted to keep going to the meeting, but I also wanted to keep my isolated life. There was the conflict. Which part did I want more? Is one worth giving up the other? In this case, it has to be.

      There was a really deep part of me that did want to belong to a group. I did want to be a part of a group consciousness. Whether it was a church group, cult members, cokeheads, punks, whiskey drinkers, art majors, acid freaks, or poets, I had given them all a try. They had all been a part of my life and let me down. Was this the one that wouldn't let me down?

      In the end, the isolating me is the drunk me, and the group me is the real me. I want a community. I want people united by a cause or an idea that I also believe in. I think that's why the group won.

      As soon as Dannyboy left the secretary position, I was voted in. I didn't want it. I became secretary with all the will of a tipped cow. It's like they waited till I was asleep in a field and then they pushed me over into a position of service. But that's another story.

      I caught up with Dannyboy in my living room. We talked about his life tattooing as he got sober.

      “Right when I got sober, an older tattoo artist—I think he was sober too—were talking about tattooing, and I was talking about tips, all the crazy shit people want to give you for tips.

      “He told me, ‘You got a vice man, you gotta keep that shit in check cuz this job will fucking pull your ass down; if you got a vice, you got a problem with a vice, this job has a tendency that people will exploit it.’

      “It's funny because I don't remember who it was; I just remember the conversation and how true it rang. Later on, looking back, it's like, holy shit that guy was right. I think it was right when I got sober. He was just giving me a little schooling; that's how it went down.

      “People want to tip you in drugs, or girls want to give you a blowjob; they'll find what you like, and they will grab on to that to get cheaper work . . . ‘Hey, bro, I want to do this tattoo, but I only got 200 bucks. But I got some cocaine.' . . .'Oh, yeah? Let's do the cocaine now, and then I'll tattoo you faster, which will make up for the time . . . .’

      “In the beginning, when I was home tattooing, I totally exploited it. I was like, ‘I'll do that for a six pack, some weed, and a little bit of blow.’ People would be like, ‘I don't have that much money, but I brought you this and this.’ We'd be halfway through the tattoo, start partying, and then say ‘fuck it.’ There were a couple of tattoos I botched because I couldn't wait to start drinking or smoking weed halfway through the tattoo. ‘Hey, let's start smoking that weed now,’ and then I'm like ‘what the fuck am I doing? I had this worked out in my head, and now I don't even know where I'm going. What the fuck?’

      “Tattooers have to be really social to drum up work. I know a guy who's shot up in the tattoo world twice as fast as me. He goes to bars every night and has one or two drinks and passes out a stack of business cards, and then it's on to the next bar. He does this night after night. It's because of the social aspect of it.

      “The bar scene is where a lot of tattoos spawn out of. That's where there's a little hindrance for me. I don't hang out in bars. I spend most of my time working, working on drawings. The difference between me and them is they might shoot up a little faster, but I'm banking on good old-fashioned hard work.

      “You go to conventions; you hang out in the bars afterward with the other artists. That's where you go do your networking and make your connections. Sometimes I go to the bars and there's out of control tattooers. It's like bike messengers. They work really hard, and when it comes time to play, they're out of control. I'm attracted to that lifestyle; I liked to bust my balls, but when the time came to blow off steam, I'm setting myself on fire, jumping through windows.”

      Dannyboy's general advice:

      “Keep it simple. I really believe in the Buddhist stuff when they say, ‘When shit gets hard, keep it simple.’ The harder it gets, the simpler you keep it. If you're going through hard shit, simplify your life.