Name's Jimmy. 38. Line cook, sauté and fry mostly, at a restaurant in the French Quarter that you've probably eaten at if you've been down here, and that I'm not going to name, because Chef would skin me. I've been cooking in this city since I was nineteen. I've been sober since March 14, 1998. Before that I was a drunk who cooked. Now I'm a cook who doesn't drink, which in my business makes me about as rare as a Saints fan who isn't nervous.

I have a daughter, Ashley, 13, who lives with her mom in Metairie and who is, one day at a time, letting me back in.

My sponsor, Big Lou, said write it down. My handwriting looks like a ticket rail on a Saturday night, so my cousin sold me his old computer for a hundred bucks and showed me how to put this up.

A word on anonymity: I'm putting my own name on this page. That's between me and my Higher Power, and Lou and I have talked it over. I will never put anybody else's. Everybody in here from the rooms is a first name or a nickname, and that's how it stays.

Ashley came over Saturday. All day. Her idea.

She called Wednesday and asked if I'd teach her to make a gumbo, because her mom's birthday is next week and she wants to cook it herself and surprise her. I said yes before she finished the sentence. Then I hung up and stood in my kitchen and realized I don't own a pot big enough, so Thursday on my day off I went to the restaurant supply and bought a twelve-quart pot like I was buying an engagement ring.

Her mom dropped her off at ten. Renee stayed in the car. She waved. That's more than I'd earned a year ago.

We did chicken and andouille. I showed her the trinity, onion, celery, bell pepper, and she cut the onions and cried and said it was the onions. Then the roux. Flour and oil, equal parts, and you stir, and you stir, and you don't stop. Peanut butter, then a copper penny, then milk chocolate. I told her what the first chef I ever worked for told me when I was nineteen: you can't walk away from a roux. Not to answer the phone, not to go to the bathroom, not for nothing. You walk away thirty seconds and it burns and you start over.

She stirred for forty minutes. She did not walk away. Her arm got tired and she switched hands and kept going.

Around the chocolate stage she said, without looking up from the pot, "Is that what it's like? Not drinking? You can't walk away from it?"

Thirteen years old.

I said yeah, baby. That's about exactly what it's like. Except some days it's easy and you forget you're even stirring. And some days your arm's about to fall off.

She said, "I'm glad you're stirring."

I had to go check on something in the other room. There was nothing in the other room.

The gumbo came out right. She took it home in two margarine tubs. Renee called at nine to say it was good. It was good.

Sober days: 561. Lou says quit counting. I say let a man enjoy his arithmetic.

Bad night last night. I didn't drink. I'm writing this down so I remember both of those things are true.

Saturday was the worst service we've had since Jazz Fest. A convention in town, two hundred and some covers, the ticket printer spitting like it was mad at us. The walk-in was running warm and nobody caught it till five. We 86'd the trout at seven-thirty and the redfish at eight, and a table of twelve sent back three plates of étouffée for being "too spicy," in New Orleans, and Chef threw a sauté pan into the dish pit so hard Marcus, our dishwasher, ducked. I caught my forearm on the salamander. Not bad. Just enough to make me mean.

After close it was Tino's birthday. (Tino works sauté, the station next to mine.) Everybody went across the street like always. I went, because it was his birthday and because I've been going in there and drinking Coke for a year and a half and it's never been a problem.

It was a problem.

The bartender, who's known me since the bad days and means well, set one down in front of me. My old one. On the house, for Tino's birthday. Didn't say a word, just set it there. Everybody was laughing and singing and my arm was throbbing and I looked at that glass for what felt like an hour and was probably ten seconds.

I got up. I didn't say goodbye. I walked down to the river and called Lou from the pay phone by the ferry landing at a quarter to two in the morning. He picked up on the second ring. He always picks up. He said, "Where are you?" and I told him, and he said, "Good. Stay there. Tell me about your day." And I told him the whole stupid day, the fish and the pan and the arm, and by the time I was done I was just a tired man standing next to a river.

Then I walked to the all-night diner and ate a waffle and went home and went to bed.

Noon meeting today. I raised my hand and told it. A fella with thirty-one years said, "That's how it's supposed to work."

HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, tired. I was all four. Lou says that's when it comes for you. It came. I didn't go with it. That's all I got today, and it's plenty.

Sober days: 554.

Been watching the hurricane on the TV at Lou's all week. Floyd. First they had it pointed at Florida, then Georgia, then the Carolinas, and they said it was one of the biggest evacuations ever. The pictures of the interstate were something: every lane going the same way, nobody moving, people walking their dogs on the shoulder. It came ashore in North Carolina in the middle of the night and now it's the rain, the rivers coming up.

Here's the honest thing. I sat on Lou's couch and the first feeling I had was relief. Glad it's somebody else's turn. Last September it was Georges and it was us: plywood on the windows, Ashley and her mom driving to Renee's sister's in Baton Rouge, me at six months sober sitting in my apartment with a flashlight and a radio and a whole lot of thinking time.

Then I felt like dirt for feeling glad. Those are people. They got kids and dogs and grandmas too.

I said that to Lou. He was in his recliner with his coffee. He said, "That's called being a human being, Jimmy. You're allowed to be glad it ain't you. Now what are you gonna do about it?" So we each wrote a check to the Red Cross, twenty bucks apiece, and put them in the mail, and Lou said a prayer out loud for the people up there, which he doesn't do much in front of me, and then we watched the rest of the news.

Chef says if it had come here we'd have lost the walk-in and he'd have made us cook it all on the sidewalk. He would've, too.

Sober days: 551.

Eighteen months today.

Noon meeting. Church hall, folding chairs, the coffee that tastes like a burnt pot because it is one. They do chips at the beginning. When they called for eighteen months I went up and the chairperson handed me the chip and gave me a hug and everybody clapped, and I said what you say: "My name is Jimmy and I'm an alcoholic, and I didn't do this, y'all did, and God did, and I just showed up." It's what you say because it's true.

Lou was in the second row where he always sits, arms crossed, like he's watching a ballgame he's got money on. He didn't clap. He just nodded once. From Lou that's a parade.

I did the math on the bus on the way to work: five hundred and forty-nine days. Five hundred and forty-nine days in a row, after twenty years when I couldn't have told you what sober even felt like. I don't understand it. Lou says I don't have to understand it. I just have to not drink today.

Here's the part I'm going to remember, though.

I got home at eleven-thirty tonight and the light was blinking on the machine. It was Ashley. She said, "Hey, Dad. Mom said it was your anniversary thing today. So. Congratulations. I'm proud of you. Okay, bye."

I played it six times. I'm not erasing that tape. They'll have to bury me with the answering machine.

She called me Dad. Not Jimmy. She's been calling me Jimmy since the divorce, like I was a neighbor. Tonight: Dad.

Sober days: 549. Eighteen months. One day at a time, and today was a good one.

Double today. Prep to close. My feet hurt in places feet don't have. Four days to eighteen months. Lou says it's not about the chip. It's a little about the chip.

Too tired. More Tuesday.

Sober days: 545.

Labor Day. Everybody in America off work except us. Worked a double. It was ninety-something outside and on the line it was whatever comes after that. I go through three side towels a night just wiping my face.

After close the crew went across the street like always. In a kitchen, that's the whole social life. You work nights and weekends and holidays, so the people you unwind with are the people you sweat with. I did it for nineteen years. I was good at it. I knew the bartenders on six streets.

I went over tonight for a half hour and drank a Barq's and went home. Tino walked me out. Tino's a good man. Best sauté cook I ever worked next to. He said, "Man, you used to be fun." He wasn't being mean. He said it the way you'd say, you used to have a mustache.

I said, "I used to be a lot of things, podna."

He said, "Yeah. You're better now. I know that. I just miss you over there." And then he went back in.

I thought about that the whole way home. I miss me over there too, sometimes. Not the drinking. The being in the middle of everybody. That's the thing nobody tells you about getting sober in a kitchen. You don't lose the drink so much as you lose the room.

Noon meeting tomorrow. Lou'll say go find a new room. He's right. I found one. It's got folding chairs and bad coffee and it's saving my life.

Sober days: 541.

Ashley called me. On her own. Not because her mom told her to, not because it was my Saturday. She just called.

She wanted to know if I saw the Beanie Baby thing on the news today, how they're going to retire all of them at the end of the year. She has about sixty of them in a shoe organizer hanging on her closet door. She wanted to know if that makes hers worth more or less. I said I didn't know, baby, but I'd find out. So I got on the computer after she hung up and found about eleven people on the internet who all say different things. I called her back and told her that, and she laughed. She laughed at something I said. On purpose.

Eight months ago she wouldn't get on the phone. Renee would hold it out and I'd hear her in the background: "I don't want to." I don't blame her. I missed her tenth birthday, and her eleventh was worse because I was there. I'm not going to write about that. It's between me and her and the Ninth Step, and I'm working it slow, the way Lou says. You don't get to decide when you're forgiven. You just keep showing up clean and let the other person decide.

School started back. Eighth grade. She says her teachers are "fine." She says everything is "fine." I'll take fine. From a thirteen-year-old, fine is a whole paragraph.

Hurricane out off the Carolinas, Dennis, just sitting there like it can't make up its mind. Hurricane season always makes me itchy.

Sober days: 535.

Somebody e-mailed and asked what a meeting is actually like. So here goes, without breaking anybody's anonymity.

My home group meets at noon in a church hall a few blocks from the restaurant, which is perfect for a cook, because I can go before my shift. Folding chairs. A coffee urn older than me. Twenty, thirty people. Lawyers and bartenders and a fella who plays trumpet for tips on Royal Street and a lady who I'm pretty sure is a nun. At noon in the Quarter you get every kind of person there is.

It starts with the Serenity Prayer. Somebody reads "How It Works" out of the Big Book. Then there's a topic, and people raise their hands and talk, and nobody interrupts and nobody gives advice, which for people like us is harder than it sounds. At the end we hold hands and say the Lord's Prayer and "Keep coming back, it works if you work it." That's it. That's the whole secret. There isn't one.

Today's topic was amends. I've been on the Ninth Step since spring. That's where you go to the people you hurt and make it right where you can, except when doing it would hurt them worse. Ashley's at the top of my list. Renee's right under her.

I made mine to Renee in June, at a coffee shop in Metairie, with Lou waiting out in the car in case I needed him. I said what I did. I didn't say why. Lou says the why is between you and God; the other person just needs the what. She listened. She didn't forgive me and she didn't not forgive me. She said, "Okay, Jimmy. Show me."

That's what this last year and a half is. Showing her. Showing Ashley. Showing me.

Sober days: 526.

August on the line. It was 96 outside today and the heat index was whatever the weatherman says to scare people. Inside, between the fryers and the flattop and the salamander, I don't want to know. I keep a quart deli container of ice water with a straw on the shelf over my station and I go through it about every half hour. Chef calls it my sippy cup.

People ask how I can work in a kitchen full of drinking. Here's the truth: the kitchen isn't what's full of drinking. The kitchen's full of work. Tickets on the rail. "Ordering, two trout, one étouffée, one gumbo no rice." "Behind!" "Hot!" "Where's my fries on twelve?" There's no room in your head for anything else when it's rolling. The kitchen is the easiest place I am all day.

It's after. It's eleven-thirty when the rush is over and you're wound up tight as a guitar string, and your whole body wants something to bring it down, and the whole crew's heading across the street. That hour is what the phone numbers in my wallet are for. Lou's. The meeting list. The all-night diner.

Tonight I went home and ate a bowl of cereal standing up at the counter and watched the new quiz show with Regis. I got the first few questions and then got lost on one about opera. Then I went to bed. That's a win. Nobody's going to write a song about it, but it's a win.

Sober days: 520.

Saturday lunch with Ashley. First one in two months that her mom didn't have to make her go to. Well, Renee says she didn't have to make her. I'm choosing to believe it.

We went to a po-boy place in Metairie near her house, because she didn't want to come to the Quarter, which I understand. Too many of her memories of me down here are bad ones. She ordered a roast beef po-boy, dressed, and a Barq's, and she had her Walkman headphones around her neck the whole time like a doctor with a stethoscope, in case of emergency. She put them on once, for about a minute, when I asked about school. I let her. Lou says don't push on a rope.

She told me about the movie she saw with her friends Friday night, the one with the little boy who sees dead people. She told me the whole thing, and made me swear not to tell anybody the ending, which I won't. She says it's the best ending of any movie ever. I believe her. I'm just glad she wanted to tell me.

When I dropped her off she said, "Bye." Not "Bye, Jimmy." Just bye. Progress comes in very small portions around here. Like one of those fancy tasting menus.

Sober days: 514.