Pots of Gold

Rainbows.

The beams from God’s benevolent eye watching us over, the visiting Chaplain would say. I used to sit outside after the rain and wait for them, when they stood out the most. After the rain, when the colours of their parabolas fronted low hanging greys and the last mist of droplets, and they didn’t taper off to nothing in the air like they did when it was clear.

I asked the Chaplain what he meant, and why they were shaped that way. He said I asked too many questions. The paradise God provided us was to be enjoyed: to scrutinise was to eschew its heavenly glory. He said faith would be easier if I accepted His guidance without question, and submit to the higher power above, like the 12 Steps were asking.

I’d made a pact before coming here that I’d follow the program, but no way was I turning skywards for help. God and me, we parted ways way back in primary school. And us alcoholics and addicts in recovery have plenty enough integrity to withstand those kinds of dogmas when they're up against our convictions.

The Chaplain was proven wrong by a big margin in the end. The rainbows falling nearest the rehab started falling all the time, and things got pretty weird after that. After this bizarre cavalcade of characters showed up. Our eyes could barely register what we were seeing, at first. They weren’t much like the tales we were told, or remotely Irish, and it was only the sparkling pots of gold and the eccentric, jocund attitudes that made clear what their nature was.

Weirder were the appropriations they’d made from previous visits elsewhere. I’d never met a more dedicated group of Keith Urban fans in all my life. They each had a size 15XL t-shirt specially made with Urban's pronounced mug on the front, worn so much that long straws of green hair poked through rips on their chest.

Me and the boys who found them hesitated telling management for a while. None of us except for me had much issue with weed, but the whole point of the community was full abstinence from everything while we built better habits, and our new Urban-loving friends had so much chronic kush they could’ve gotten the whole Navy high.

When they offered an ounce in exchange for prints of Urban's latest stadium tour to decorate their mobile homes with, I decided enough was enough. The younger guys were close to caving and I could tell by the smell that it’d take a week before their eyes were right again if they smoked any.

The fellas didn’t object, and next day I told management everything I knew. Which sounded more straightforward in my head than it turned out to be. Part and parcel of rehab is the comorbidity of mental health issues with whatever addiction; most residents took some kind of medication in addition to the therapies they partook in. So when a senior resident knocks on the door and proceeds to explain the appearance of giant leprechauns in Keith Urban t-shirts trying to sell top-grade marijuana, it’s possible to see Occam’s Razor take place on the manager’s face right in front of you. Especially with Kim, who was sensible but thankfully super chill, and sceptical without being a dick about it. I figured it best just to show her.

She followed me along the line of pine trees to the back of the oval where the barbed-wire fenceline began and when we got there her disbelief turned to annoyance after realising how serious I was. We'd become friends since I got there and she wasn’t fond of someone in the program’s later stages having hallucinations out of nowhere. I liked how much she cared even though she saw so many leave, and was surely well-seasoned by then. So I wanted to show her there was nothing to worry about except for the giant leprechauns trying to sell us drugs.

They weren’t in their usual spot though, and when I looked around the back of the sheds I couldn’t see them in the paddocks either. There was however a rainbow in the clear, and after some convincing, Kim followed me over the fence and we walked side by side and I made her smile by telling a lame joke that I’d made up that morning.

The scene we walked into was in a lot of ways stranger than the one I'd described. The way the leprechauns explained it later was that shrinking themselves was sometimes necessary when their position had been compromised, and one of them had been shrewd enough to recognise my intention to tell management about them. They were absolutely tiny and neither of us could hear them without getting on our knees and bending our heads close to the ground. One thing still the same was the smell, and when the wind changed, Kim looked at me in a way that said Holy shit more clearly than I’ve ever heard it spoken.

After pleasantries had passed and Kim could see how good-natured they were in spite the threat posed to our recovery, we let them be, and she pulled me aside and we deliberated about what to do, which was a big thing in my world as it'd been ages and ages since I’d had much say in anything of consequence to someone beside myself. She said it best we kept it between us and the other guys and didn’t let the owners know as they were far too religious and conservative to understand.

She told me to head back to the fence so she could speak to the leprechauns alone and she was there for a while before she walked back. We both lent against the wire and watched as the base of the rainbow brightened before it pulled upward into the sky and I figured Kim must have said something compelling that made them go seek their customers some other place.

He body language was more upbeat on the way back. Whenever I looked over she gave me a smile, but it was more like the exaggerated smile of a proud mother than the simple friendly smile I was familiar with. When we approached the building she grabbed my hand, and we both stopped walking. She looked up with tears in her eyes and told me this was the day that she finally knew I was going to be okay. That the past was behind me now; all I needed to do, was keep moving forward, and never forget that even the friendliest faces become dangerous when they offer a step back.

I gave her a big, big hug and thanked her for caring so much. And after she went up the steps I turned around and saw a rainbow in the valley between the trees, just before it faded away as the sunlight came.