First Meeting R. T. Smith (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Gene Royer [End Page 144] Hey there. My name is Connie Aderholt, and I'm an alcoholic. From way back. About the time I changed from Conrad to Connie after a baseball player, that was when I got hooked on hooch. All kinds, canned brew to cinnamon schnapps, Mateus to single-barrel scotch. Fifteen, just barely, brought to it in a shed behind the Starfest Café by Ellie Winston, who was stripped to heels, hose and a choker ribbon with a quart of Beam raised high in each hand. Not my only addiction, whiskey. I have indulged in dark hobbies and [End Page 145] habits and relished them. I've died three times—lightning, crank overdose and gunshot—brought back from every one by somebody who didn't know my story. I have scars, staples, pins and a stent and can witness hard how a sip leads to swimming till you're flat-out whiskey-boarding yourself, which is no treat even if a plate in your skull now gets you FM radio you can't control—jabber-jabber-jabber. But I don't mean to offend. We all have our weaknesses. Oh, yeah, and I have not taken a drink in four months and two days, excluding communion. That's the drill, right? Gave up Wild Turkey for cold turkey, no longer stumbling three sheets to the wind. That's windmill terms, you know, and I acknowledge and plead responsible for my lifelong under the power of the grape, the grain and even the potato and apple and peach when in the spirit form. But I have welcomed a Higher Power who leads me beside the still waters to restore my soul one day at a time, as I now know I am not the meanest son of a bitch in the valley but just a mere cricket of a man, chirping to no constructive end yet but at least finally dry. Is it rude to testify this much your first time? Rudeness is more like old Connie's upside, as my nature can run to much worse. I have treated my baby girls not better than a dog until Doris just bundled them up and skedaddled. I have rode a horse to death and grown loco weed, forged, extorted, snitched for cops, broke and entered, skimmed and scammed. I have lied and conspired to do mischief, committed acts of terror on the weak—but really now, who among us hasn't?—raised funds for a bogus cancer charity, but now I have made my list of innocents and otherwise who have suffered under my hand and tongue when I was under the influence, under the radar and at the worst times underwritten by organized crime. Only in the most minor way, you understand. They say the fiddle is the devil's instrument, and having a bow hand like a bona fide demon I have fiddled my way into lots of mischief, mostly skunk-drunk, chiefly perpetrated upon the fairer sex. I cannot speak with authority upon the number or nature of my woodscolt offspring, but I have at least done them the favor of my absence, which in the juiced-up times they would thank me for if they could, if they have been raised right by the women and girls I have wronged. And though I regret their rough lives and deprivations, I can never regret the actual getting of a single one. More than once I went teetotal in my own best interest to stop me being impaired as I raided and assaulted and swarmed all over people with malice aforethought. It is the human tendency. More than once I wised up and said, "Connie, you want to walk away from your misdeeds, you want to enjoy impunity, you got to make your name more about control artist [End Page 146] than just con artist." I mean, I'd get on the wagon because it was the fastest-moving opportunity for extraction. I always had my rules for wily wickedness, including stealth and thrift and swiftness, and the last law on...