By Marcus
On Tuesday night, I’ll have ninety days clean.
At my home group, that means I walk up to the front of the room, somebody hands me a red key tag, and everybody claps. Before I take it, I’m supposed to say what we always say: “Hi, I’m ___, and I’m an addict.”
For eighty-nine days, I’ve filled that blank with the wrong name.
I’m Marcus. I’m 34, I’m a line cook in Baltimore, and I’m a trans man. Everybody at my job knows me as Marcus. My barber knows me as Marcus. My little cousin calls me Uncle Marc.
But the people who helped save my life only know me by the name my mother gave me.
The Kitchen
I’ve been cooking since I was nineteen. I started washing dishes at a crab house in Highlandtown, worked my way up to prep, then the line. Now I work sauté at a place in Remington that does brunch on weekends and a small-plates menu at night.
I love that kitchen. I love the noise, the heat, the tickets coming in so fast the printer can’t keep up. When the line is moving right, nobody has time to look at you. Nobody cares what you look like. They care if your plates go out hot and on time.
“Behind.” “Heard.” “Hands.” “Eighty-six the rockfish.” That’s all anybody needs to know about you on a Saturday night.
But kitchen culture is also where my using got serious.
It’s not a secret in this industry. Everybody’s tired, everybody’s hurting, and after service, everybody wants to come down. A shift drink turns into three. Somebody’s got pills for your back. Somebody’s got something stronger to get you through a double. Nobody asks questions, because nobody wants questions asked about them.
I’d started transitioning about two years before I got clean. Changed my name at work. Started binding. Cut my hair. I was saving up for testosterone, which takes longer than you’d think when half your paycheck is going somewhere else.
I thought transitioning would make me stop needing to get high. It didn’t. It just changed what I was running from.
How I Got to the Rooms
I’m not going to tell the whole story of my bottom. That’s mine to tell in meetings, not here.
What I’ll say is this: Baltimore loses a lot of people to overdose. I’ve known too many of them. Last winter, one of the dishwashers at my old job died in his car in the parking lot. He was twenty-six. He had a daughter.
A few weeks after that, I woke up on my bathroom floor with my roommate standing over me holding an empty Narcan box. She’d given me two doses. She was crying and screaming at me at the same time.
I’d never been that close. Two days later, I walked into my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting in a church basement in Waverly.
When it came time to introduce myself, I said my old name.
I didn’t plan to. It just came out. The meeting was full of people I didn’t know. I was shaking, still sick, and I couldn’t handle one more thing. My ID still said that name. My Medicaid card said that name. The detox paperwork said that name.
Saying “Marcus” would have meant explaining. I had nothing left to explain with.
So I said the old name. And then I kept coming back, and I kept saying it.
The Home Group
My home group meets Tuesday and Thursday nights. There are folding chairs in a circle, a coffee pot that’s older than me, the Just for Today book on the table, and a box of key tags in every color.
There are maybe twenty regulars. Old-timers with decades clean. Young folks fresh out of treatment. Nurses, a retired bus driver, a guy who sells cars on Route 40. Mostly Black, some white, all of us there for the same reason.
They see me as a masculine woman. That’s what they’ve decided, and I let them. Some of the guys call me “lil bro” sometimes, joking around. I never knew if they were joking or if some part of them saw it.
And then there’s Ms. Denise.
Ms. Denise has twenty-two years clean. She’s sixty-one, wears church hats on Sundays and a Ravens jersey every other day of the week. On my fourth day, she walked up to me after the meeting, handed me her number on a torn-off piece of a coffee filter, and said, “Call me before you use. Not after. Before.”
She became my sponsor. In NA, the suggestion is that sponsors are the same gender as the person they sponsor. Ms. Denise sponsors women.
She thinks she’s sponsoring a woman.
That’s the part that’s been keeping me up at night.
The Problem with Honesty
Recovery is built on honesty. That’s the whole program. You can’t stay clean if you’re keeping secrets, because secrets are where the disease lives. Everybody in the rooms says it.
So here I am, doing the steps, working with my sponsor, telling her things I’ve never told anybody. About my mother. About the money I stole. About the night with the Narcan.
And the whole time, I’m sitting there letting her call me by a name that isn’t mine.
I told myself it wasn’t really a lie. It’s my legal name. But every Tuesday, when I said it at the start of the meeting, it felt like I was standing a little outside myself. Like part of me was still hiding, and the program says hiding is dangerous.
Around day sixty, I started thinking about ninety days. It’s a big one. People make a fuss. They clap. They hug you. When you stand up and introduce yourself, the whole room says your name back to you.
Which name was I going to give them?
I could keep things the way they were. Pick up the tag, say the old name, smile through it. Nobody would know. Or I could stand up in front of twenty people who’d watched me shake and cry and come back to life, and tell them they’d been calling me the wrong thing the whole time.
Both choices scared me. Only one of them felt clean.
Telling Ms. Denise
I told her first. It didn’t feel right to let her find out in the meeting with everybody else.
We met at a lake trout spot on Pennsylvania Avenue, the one she likes, with the hot sauce in squeeze bottles and the line out the door. She got her fish sandwich and a half-and-half. I couldn’t eat.
I told her everything. Marcus. Work. The binder. The testosterone I’m saving for. The reason I’d said the other name that first night.
She didn’t say anything for a long time. She just ate her sandwich and looked out the window.
Then she said, “So you’ve been carrying this the whole ninety days?”
I said yeah.
“By yourself?”
Yeah.
She put her sandwich down. “Baby, that’s the most dangerous thing you could have done. Not being who you are. Carrying it by yourself.”
I started crying right there at the counter. She handed me a napkin and kept talking like we were discussing the weather.
She told me she didn’t know much about trans people. She said she had a nephew, or maybe a niece, who’d moved to Philly and stopped coming home for Thanksgiving. She always wondered if the family had pushed that child away.
“I’m not going to do that to you,” she said. “But I’m sixty-one, and I’m going to mess up. You correct me.”
Then she said something I didn’t expect.
“I sponsor women, Marcus. That’s the suggestion, and there’s a reason for it. So we’re going to find you a man to sponsor you. Somebody solid. But until we find him, I’m your sponsor. And after we find him, I’m still going to call you every week to make sure you ate.”
It was the first time she ever said my name.
Ninety Days
Tuesday came.
I almost didn’t go. I sat in my car outside the church for twenty minutes with the engine running, watching people walk in. I thought about driving off. I knew that was the disease talking.
I texted Ms. Denise. She texted back: “Get in here. Your seat’s getting cold.”
The meeting went the way it always does. The readings. Announcements. Then the chairperson said, “Is anyone celebrating clean time tonight?”
The thirty-day tag went to a young guy in a hoodie who couldn’t stop smiling. Then the chairperson said, “Anyone celebrating ninety days?”
I stood up. My legs were shaking.
I walked to the front of the room. The chairperson held out the red key tag. Everybody was already starting to clap, because they knew it was me. They’d been counting my days with me.
I took the key tag. I looked around the circle. Ms. Denise was in the second row, nodding at me.
“Hi,” I said. “My name is Marcus, and I’m an addict.”
The clapping kind of stopped halfway.
What Happened Next
For a second, nobody said anything. I heard somebody’s chair creak.
Then Ms. Denise said, loud enough for the whole room, “Hi, Marcus.”
And then, one at a time, the room said it back.
“Hi, Marcus.”
Not everybody. A couple of people just looked down at their coffee. One old-timer, who’s been clean since before I was born, looked confused and said my old name under his breath, like he was asking a question.
But most of them said it. The retired bus driver said it. The guy from the car lot said it. The young guy with thirty days, who’d known me for three weeks, said it like it was the most normal thing in the world.
I gave a short share. I said I’d been carrying a secret for ninety days and the program says secrets will kill you. I said I’d already almost died once, and I didn’t want to give the disease any more room. I said I was sorry I hadn’t told them sooner, and that I was grateful they’d kept me alive anyway.
After the meeting, there was cake that said “Happy 90 Days” in blue icing. Ms. Denise cut me the first piece and said, “You just keep coming back.”
Some people came up and hugged me. Some people told me they had a cousin, a kid, a friend who was trans. One woman told me she didn’t understand it, but she was glad I was still alive, and that was enough for her.
The old-timer didn’t come up to me that night. But Thursday, he was standing outside before the meeting, smoking. When I walked by, he said, “Marcus.” Not friendly, not unfriendly. Just my name.
I said, “Evening.” And we went inside.
The Name I Say
I keep the red key tag on my key ring, next to my apartment key and the bottle opener I don’t use anymore.
Every meeting starts the same way. You say your name, you say what you are, and the room says your name back. It sounds like a small thing. It’s not. It’s the first honest thing you do every time you walk in.
For eighty-nine days, I started every meeting with something that wasn’t true.
I used to think I had two names. One for the world I wanted, and one for the world I was scared of.
Now I know I only have one. It’s the one I’ll say next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that, for as long as I keep showing up.
My name is Marcus. I’m an addict. And today, I’m clean.
Editor’s note: Marcus is a composite character based on common experiences of trans men in recovery. It is not one person’s account. For free, confidential help, call the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357.
