Page 7 of Assassin Anonymous

Kenji gestures toward the door. “We still have to get the donuts.”

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The church basement is sparse, but large enough to fit a few dozen people for a mixer or a fund-raiser. The coffeepot is gurgling next to an open box of donuts on the folding table in the corner. The walls are robin’s-egg blue and the floor is a black-and-white-checkered pattern. It looks frozen in time, and that time is 1982.

Kenji leans forward, placing down a silver lipstick-sized device on the small table in front of him, which will prevent us from being heard or recorded outside this room. Next to that, his copy of the Big Book, even more tattered than mine. His is held together with a thick blue rubber band so the pages don’t spill out.

“Welcome to Assassins Anonymous,” he says. “My name is Kenji, and I am a killer.”

Kenji looks around the room, regarding each one of us in turn. There are five of us in total, seated on brown metal folding chairs under the buzzing fluorescent lights.

Valencia is wearing a red flannel and jeans. Her jet-black hair is cut short and tousled like she just got out of bed. She has the same look she always has on her face: like she smells something terrible.

Booker is every inch the jarhead—bald, black tribal tattoos decorating his russet skin, combat boots, and fatigue pants. Eyes darting back and forth, waiting for something to happen so he has an excuse to explode.

Stuart is the youngest of the bunch by at least a decade, and dresses even younger than that—swimming in an oversize black sweatshirt and baggy cargo pants. He perches on his seat like an animal who steals food from larger predators.

“Assassins Anonymous,” Kenji says, “is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other, that they may solve their common problem and help each other to recover. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop. We are not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution; our primary purpose is to stop killing and to help others achieve the same.

“We do not bring weapons into Assassins Anonymous, nor prior political affiliations. If any of us were known by any particular handle or nickname, we do not use it here. We share our stories, but we obscure details as best we can. If any of us seek to bring in new fellows, we agree to have them properly vetted. This is to protect us, not just from prying ears, but from each other.”

He’s not kidding. The story goes, there was a meeting in Los Angeles a few years ago where two professional hitman revealed their stage names and inadvertently discovered they’d spent decades locked in a game of cat and mouse. By the time the meeting was over, four people were dead.

Anonymity is an important component of any recovery process, and it’s especially important here.

“Valencia,” Kenji says, “could you read the steps?”

Valencia shifts in her seat and closes her eyes, taking a moment to recall the words. In a regular AA meeting, there would be a handout you could read from; here, we prefer not to put things in writing.

“We really gotta do this every time?” Booker asks.

Kenji isn’t chuffed. That’s just Booker. “Remember,” Kenji says, “we have steps to keep us from killing ourselves, and traditions to keep us from killing each other. Valencia?”

Booker exhales sharply, taking the wooden rosary beads from around his neck and wrapping them around his left hand, like he does at the start of every meeting. I want to point out the irony of that, but now is not the time. Valencia begins:

“One, we admitted we were powerless—that our lives had become unmanageable.

“Two, we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

“Three, we made a decision to turn our will over to the care of a higher power, as we understood it.

“Four, we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

“Five, we admitted to our higher power, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

“Six, we were ready to have our higher power remove all these defects of character.

“Seven, we humbly asked it to remove our shortcomings.

“Eight, we made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

“Nine, we made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

“Ten, we continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

“Eleven, we sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with our higher power as we understood it, praying only for knowledge of its will for us and the power to carry that out.

“Twelve, having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others like us, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

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