AA - Alcoholics Anonymous
October 17, 2023
(0:01 – 0:41)
And the fellow directly responsible was gone to church, and we told him this year he
couldn’t go. But he said he wouldn’t miss Mass for us or anyone else, so tomorrow
morning at 7 o’clock there’ll be Mass in this room. For Jim and any of you other Catholics
who would like to attend.
(0:44 – 1:23)
I’m going to set, you can’t hear me? Yeah, but I’m howling. Did you hear what I said?
Mary, where are you? At 7 o’clock in the morning there will be Mass in this room due to a
mix-up in the breakfast last year. We’re having it especially for Jim.
(1:24 – 2:10)
Any of you other Catholics who would like to attend are more than welcome. Now, did
you hear the other announcement? Now, I’m going to sit down and shut up before I do,
Dina. Shall we bow our heads in a moment of silent meditation? And those who care to,
join me in praying the serenity prayer.
(2:11 – 2:42)
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change
the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Alcoholics Anonymous 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 to help others recover from
alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.
(2:42 – 3:01)
There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We are self-supporting through our own
contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or
institution, does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes
any causes.
(3:02 – 3:14)
Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. I’m
Dina, and I’m an alcoholic. Hi, folks, it’s sure good to see everybody.
(3:16 – 3:32)
When Deborah asked me to introduce Cora Louise, I felt it was an honor and a privilege.
Cora Louise and I have several things in common. We’re both female-type alcoholics.
(3:34 – 3:53)
We were both born and raised in Mississippi. I’m sorry, reared, and Lander says hogs are
raised and children are reared. It was in my drinking that I became hog-like, but I was
reared.
(3:55 – 4:30)
We both lived in the same town, Greenville, Mississippi, several years ago. She went
away and got sober in New York quite a while before I did, but I came back to Mississippi
many years later and got sober, but Wichita is now my home. Everybody that has met
Cora Louise already, I know, is anxiously awaiting to hear.
(4:31 – 4:57)
I’ve heard nothing but good about her, and she’s so sweet. She says she’s been sober
since 1957, and she’s worked in the GSO office in New York since 1955. I know she’s
done an awful lot of good work for us.
(4:58 – 5:21)
Now my group and the people that know me know that I’ve got a big mouth, and when I
get it open, I can’t shut it, so they said, Don’t disgrace me. Please shut up and sit down
and listen for once, would you, Dina? I said, Okay. I know you’re waiting.
(5:21 – 5:49)
I am Cora Louise Beach. Thank you, Dina, and hi, everyone. I am Cora Louise Belfort, and
I am a very grateful recovering alcoholic, and isn’t this incredible? Wall to wall alcoholics
for miles and miles.
(5:50 – 6:06)
I can’t believe what I’m seeing out there. I love the introduction I got from Dina. Several
years ago, I was introduced by a lady, and I think it is unlike any other introduction I ever
heard in my life in AA.
(6:07 – 7:03)
She had met me at the plane, and I was going to speak at the Sunday morning spiritual
meeting, and this is the way she introduced me. Before I begin, I should tell you that I
arrived in Tennessee for this meeting from Honolulu, where I had been visiting my
daughter, and I had on a dress that I had bought in Honolulu, flowery and bright and so
on. So at any rate, we’d had a marvelous weekend, and when she got ready to introduce
me at the Sunday morning meeting, she said that she had been asked a year before to
go to the airport and meet the lady speaker from New York, and she took a sort of dim
view of this New York floozy that was coming down, and the sweetest little lady you
would ever want to see in your life got off the plane, and everybody loved her, and that
was our beloved Hazel that we lost a year ago.
(7:03 – 7:37)
And she said, and then I went to the airport this year, and the floozy that I thought I was
going to meet last year got off the plane this year. I always wear a navy blue dress when
I travel on airplanes now. It’s wonderful to be here with you, and I think we’ve had a
perfectly marvelous weekend.
(7:37 – 8:16)
Once again, I’m so grateful for the fact that we don’t have to compete with one another
in AA, because after the speakers we had last night, Neal and Charles, and after the ones
we’ve had today, and the wonderful Al-Anon speaker that we had, if I had to be in
competition with these people, I would just have to say thank you and sit down. But I
don’t have to do that. I have my own story to tell, and I welcome the opportunity to do
this, because this is the story of the transforming experience of my life.
(8:17 – 9:08)
And I hope that some way in the process of telling you my story, I will be able to express
to you in any way at all the depth of my gratitude to AA for making it possible for me
even to begin the process of trying to become a different and, I hope, better kind of
person by way of the AA program, the 12 steps, the 12 traditions, and the concepts of
service. Because during the years that I drank, I became the kind of woman that I never
wanted to be, destructive, irrational, unpredictable. I have so many things to be grateful
for, as we all do.
(9:09 – 9:20)
I know each one of us, in our own separate ways, feels that we are the luckiest people in
the world. And I think that all of us are. All of us in this room are the luckiest people in
the world.
(9:21 – 9:38)
But what I can share with you are my own particular reasons for gratitude. I did come
into AA in 1957, September 6, 1957. So I have just recently celebrated my 15th
anniversary.
(9:39 – 9:46)
I can remember my first one, and I can remember thinking, this can’t be happening. It
can’t be me. It has to be somebody else.
(9:47 – 10:10)
And I felt that way every single year that’s rolled around. And this year, 15 years, I just
can’t believe it. I can remember when I was chairman of my group in New York, and the
first meeting that we were going to have after I became chairman was the 15th
anniversary of a woman, and she happened to be on the staff of the general service
office.
(10:10 – 10:18)
And I thought, just imagine, 15 years. But it’s not years. It’s days.
(10:19 – 10:30)
It’s just one day at a time, as somebody pointed out last night. Maybe it was Neil. As Wes
says, if we can count to one, we can make it.
(10:30 – 11:21)
One person for one day not taking one drink. And this is how it all came about. And
through the help and support of people like you in hundreds of places all over this
country, I can never speak about my gratitude without remembering the very deep
sense of gratefulness that I feel for the fact that Bill and Dr. Bob, through the grace of
God, met one another 37 years ago this past summer in Akron, Ohio, and began this
process, which is still going on all over the world, and for which none of us can foresee
an end, of one alcoholic speaking to another, talking in the language of the heart.
(11:22 – 11:48)
It has been my great privilege and pleasure to be a member of the staff of your general
service office in New York since 1965, and really second to finding sobriety in AA. This
has been the greatest experience of my life. The first two years I was at GSO were like
the first two years I was in AA.
(11:49 – 12:28)
I was on a pink cloud, and I was learning something brand new every day. And the more
I learned, the more I realized how little I knew. One thing that I learned that first year,
and I hope I never forget, was that I had a great deal more to learn from that office and
from the work there than I had to give to it, and that I hoped that I would be able to
remember this and to make the effort to the best of my ability, but to realize that I was
really the one who was on the receiving line.
(12:30 – 13:18)
I would like to be able to stand here for the whole evening and talk to you about the
office, but if you’re like me, that’s not the first thing that you want to hear from any AA.
You want to hear what I want to hear, I think, which is how it was, what happened, and
how it is now. When I went to that first meeting 15 years ago this past September, I
would not have believed that the day would ever come when I could look back on the
years that had preceded my arrival there and accept the fact that, for me, they were
probably the necessary preparation for the kind of thing that I found since coming into
AA.
(13:19 – 13:54)
As Dina and I were propped against the wall, nervously awaiting 8 o’clock a little while
ago, she said to me, you know, I’m glad I’m an alcoholic, and I said, you know, I am too,
because if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have this. Now, I didn’t know any of that when I
went to that meeting 15 years ago. I didn’t know that I probably was one of the people
who had to experience the painful and often humiliating experiences of those drinking
years.
(13:55 – 14:21)
If I was ever going to be able to take part in any kind of self-confrontation, a really good,
hard, honest look at me, me, just like I am. Charles talked about this, Neil talked about
this, Father John talked about this, Donna talked about this. This is what we all have to
do if we’re going to stay here.
(14:22 – 14:44)
And I don’t think that I would have been able to do it if it hadn’t been for the experiences
of those preceding years. I thought I already knew how to do this, and I thought I had
already done it. I had had many years of psychotherapy, and I thought that I was
capable of introspection and of looking at myself as I really was.
(14:44 – 15:06)
But it was only after I came to you and put myself in your care that you showed me how
to do this. You gave me steps, and you gave me traditions, and you shared your
experience, strength, and hope with me. And I began to learn, little by little, to face
some of these things that I really did not want to look at.
(15:06 – 15:29)
And some of them I’m not crazy about looking at even yet. Always in the weeks that
precede my anniversary, I try to take a kind of inventory, a fourth step. I work on the
tenth step daily, and I think of that as my daily housekeeping step.
(15:29 – 15:51)
But some days I’m in a hurry, and I have to shove things to the back of the drawer, put
things on a closet shelf, and say, well, I’ll open that package and put those things away
later. And then the time comes when I have to do a sort of general housecleaning in my
own house and in my own life. And this is the fourth step.
(15:52 – 16:10)
Well, this year, for the first time since 14 years ago, since my first fourth step in AA, I
tried to do it like it tells you in the book. I tried to write this down and take a look at
where I am now. And I was so surprised at what I found out.
(16:11 – 16:23)
I didn’t really learn anything new about myself. The things that I put down there were
things that I really knew. But I had learned to look at these things in a new way.
(16:23 – 16:45)
I had learned to see things in these character defects that I had not seen before. I had
seen the sort of far-reaching nature of some things that I had thought of as rather minor
flaws that didn’t need too much attention. And this came as a great surprise to me.
(16:46 – 16:56)
And in certain ways, I was quite humiliated by the whole thing. I thought I should have
made more progress than this. I thought I should be farther along the way than this.
(16:57 – 17:17)
And this one particular thing which I had thought of as being so minor was something
that I was really very embarrassed to admit even to myself. And I thought, if I’m this
embarrassed to admit this to myself and to God, I better admit this to another human
being, and I better do it quick. So I called up a friend.
(17:17 – 17:31)
I had to go out of town on an AA speaking date, and I asked if she would ride with me to
this town in New Jersey. And while we were in the car going out there, I tried to take my
fifth step with her. And it’s been a wonderful experience.
(17:32 – 17:48)
I’m so glad I did it. I’m still the same person that I was before I took that fifth step and
that fourth step. In many ways, I’m still the same person that walked through the door
and came into AA 15 years ago.
(17:49 – 18:02)
But the direction of my life has changed. The direction of the way I think has changed.
I’m able to cope with some of these things now in a way that I wasn’t.
(18:03 – 18:44)
And this is really all that I claim for myself is a change of direction and a change of
direction that is significant because I hope the change of direction is towards choosing
what God’s will for me is rather than choosing what my own will for me is. I’m not sure
that even yet I always know the difference, but I pray for the wisdom to know the
difference at any rate. When I first began this process with you of this self-confrontation,
I immediately learned a few things.
(18:45 – 19:09)
And when I say I learned them, I don’t mean that they were mine once and for all. I mean
that these are things that I became aware of that I still have to remind myself of every
single day. I learned that I not only don’t, but that I can’t control anything or anyone by
my efforts alone, not even myself.
(19:10 – 19:31)
I need help in this. And when I took this fifth step a couple of weeks ago with this friend, I
had the same sort of sinking feeling that I had when I took the fourth step the first time
that I cannot possibly cope with all of this. And the truth is I can’t.
(19:31 – 19:56)
But the truth also is that I don’t have to because I have help. And I can turn this over to
the power greater than myself that I call God. This is the kind of help I need, the kind of
help that I get from people in and outside of AA, and the kind of help that I get from a
power greater than myself that I call God.
(19:57 – 20:08)
I learned that I don’t have to be a winner. I always thought I had to win. If I didn’t think I
could win, I didn’t play.
(20:08 – 20:23)
It was as simple as that. I know now that maybe the only times in my life that I ever
really won were times when I seemed to be losing. For instance, when I lost the battle
with Booze, thanks be to God.
(20:25 – 20:33)
I learned that I had the right to be wrong. Several other people have mentioned that this
weekend. But this was something that I didn’t know before I came here.
(20:34 – 21:16)
I have the right to make mistakes and errors in judgment and poor choices. I have the
right to fail and to fail in things that matter deeply to me. And I believe that the only
thing that would really be fatal would be if I should cease to care, if I should cease to try
to practice the principles of this program, if I should cease to be fully committed and
truly concerned about the principles of this program and about the power greater than
myself that I call God, who’s seen me through this much, this far, along the way.
(21:17 – 21:29)
And I’ve learned to think of this road that I’m on as a journey, not a trip. I’m not on a trip
that has a beginning and an end. I’m on a journey.
(21:30 – 22:10)
It had a starting place, but as far as I know, there is no stopping place. And it’s not a
journey that I have to take alone, because I can take it hand in hand with all of you and
people like you everywhere, and with the help and support and guidance of the power
greater than myself that I call God. Now, I don’t give this impression necessarily, at least
I know I don’t to some people, but I really never have been a person who had very much
faith in my ability to accomplish anything worthwhile.
(22:11 – 22:53)
But I learned after coming to you that it’s not really very important whether I have faith
in myself or not, so long as I have faith in the power greater than myself that I call God,
and so long as I place my reliance in that power that’s greater than I am, so long as I
place my reliance there, where it always should have been. Now, I don’t know why I
happen to be one of the lucky ones who got here. I know that I did not do anything to
deserve all these blessings that have come to me.
(22:54 – 23:25)
I know that I’m no more worthy of all these things than any of those people who are still
out there and still suffering, but I do not pretend to understand the mind of divine
providence. I am only grateful beyond anything in my life that I found you when I did. I
began to drink with anything that you might call regularity, sort of late in life for an
alcoholic.
(23:26 – 23:51)
I was not a teenage drinker or a high school drinker or a college drinker. I was 26 years
old, married, and the mother of two little girls before drinking was anything but a very
occasional thing in my life. And while my husband was overseas during World War II, I
played my role of the tragic little war widow up to the hilt.
(23:52 – 24:05)
I acted like I was the only woman in the country whose husband was overseas. There
were millions of us, but I thought I was the only one. And I knew there were millions of
others, but somehow they were different.
(24:06 – 24:38)
There was one thing I found, though, that wasn’t different about some of these others.
They used to like to get together in the afternoon, and we would turn the children loose
in the sand piles and on the swings and sliding boards, and we would all sit on the porch
and share our experience, strength, and hope together over a few drinks. And I thought
this was wonderful, and I thought, well, has this been all my life? This is absolutely the
perfect way to nurse the children in the afternoon, and I loved it.
(24:39 – 24:57)
I loved the fact that I seemed to have a good head for booze. I loved the fact that I had
the reputation of being the one who could drive the car home from the picnic. I think
when they issued me a driver’s license, they expected me to be able to drive the car
home, but this seemed like some remarkable achievement to me.
(24:58 – 25:15)
I loved the fact that, you know, I could lead the conga chain around the mountain’s edge
without falling off, at least not very often. We didn’t fall very far. I loved the fact that I
was the one who could fish the ones who had rolled into the picnic fire out again and
douse them in the water.
(25:16 – 25:33)
All of this seemed great to me. When my husband came home from overseas, he noticed
that drinking had become a daily occurrence in my life, and he remarked on it, but not
necessarily with criticism. He just noticed it.
(25:34 – 25:59)
I thought when he got back that all the things that had been such a problem for me while
he was away would be solved, that the magic wand of the fairy godmother had been
waived, and that we would live happily ever after. We moved to New York within a very
short time after he came home from overseas, and things didn’t work out just exactly
like I thought they were going to. We had a few problems.
(25:59 – 26:08)
A lot of people have a few problems. Everybody has a few problems. It looked for a while
as though we might be war casualties.
(26:10 – 26:34)
Still, drinking was not the problem here. I was drinking more, true, but I was never drunk,
and this was never the cause of our difficulty, at this time at least. At any rate, after
about six or nine months of this, after he’d been home from overseas for about a year, it
was finally decided that I should have some psychotherapy, and I resented this very
much.
(26:34 – 26:47)
We had problems, but I had to go to the shrink. I didn’t think this was quite fair.
However, I really did want to solve our problems very much.
(26:47 – 26:54)
I wanted this marriage to work. I wanted to be a good wife. I wanted to be a good
mother.
(26:55 – 27:06)
I wanted to live a worthwhile life, and so I was willing to undertake this. Now, this was
tough going. I was about 27 or 8 at this time.
(27:06 – 27:19)
I began with this psychotherapist, and I went to see him three or four times a week for
about 18 months. Everything was going just fine, according to the therapist. It didn’t
seem fine to me, but he said it was going just fine.
(27:20 – 27:50)
And then one night, I went to a party, and I was drinking in the usual manner and in the
usual amounts, only this time something very strange happened. I got terribly drunk,
and I had a blackout, and I was completely unprepared for either one of these things. I
had always taken a rather superior attitude toward drinking, that if one couldn’t drink
well, that is, like I did, one simply shouldn’t drink at all.
(27:51 – 28:12)
You can see I had a long way to fall from my lofty perch. I had never even heard of a
blackout at this time. I had fallen down a flight of stone steps and landed on my head on
a stone terrace the night before, and I thought I must have a brain concussion, and that
was why I didn’t remember anything that happened.
(28:13 – 28:47)
I was too ashamed of the cause of this fall to go to a doctor, but I did discuss it with the
psychotherapist, and this was the first and the last time that I ever mentioned drinking
to this man. I continued to see him for seven and a half years after that, and we never
discussed drinking again. The only way I found out what he thought about alcoholism
was to discuss my brother’s case with him.
(28:50 – 29:19)
Some days when I would be in the taxi in rough shape, I never did show up drunk, not
actually drunk. I would show up, you know, the next morning after the night before.
Some days I would be in the taxi on the way to the psychotherapist, and I would have to
rack my brain about what I could make up to tell him that could have happened to get
me in the shape that I was in without having to tell him what really had happened, that I
had just drunk a fifth of whiskey or something like that, you know.
(29:20 – 29:37)
I never could discuss it after that, but I did discuss it with him this day, and he said to me
all the things that I wanted to hear. He said them in innocence, of course. He told me
that this thing that had happened to me was the kind of thing that could happen to
anyone occasionally.
(29:38 – 29:52)
That in my case, he thought it might even be a good sign. It might even mean that the
therapy was finally piercing this very tough armor and that we were going to open things
up and all was going to be grand. We opened things up, all right, but it wasn’t so good.
(29:53 – 30:18)
He also said that he thought it was indicative of a difficult period, phase that we were
going through in the treatment, and he suggested that until such time as we resolve
these difficulties, perhaps I should be extra careful about any drinking I did. Careful. How
that word careful came back to haunt me.
(30:19 – 30:28)
I tried so hard to be careful. I tried every way that I could think of to be careful. Every
way that anybody could suggest to me to be careful.
(30:29 – 30:46)
The trouble was that neither the therapist nor I knew it. I had already lost the ability to
be careful. Neither one of us knew that I had already crossed whatever that line is that
separates people who can drink from those who can’t.
(30:46 – 31:16)
Neither one of us knew that drinking had already become the most important factor in
my life. Now, I don’t mean by that that I ever was drunk every day or that I got drunk
every single time that I drank because this really never was the case. What I mean was
that from that time on, the question of to drink or not to drink motivated practically
everything that I did.
(31:16 – 31:46)
I couldn’t ever just do anything and just do it. I had to sit down and think, now, should I
drink or not? If so, should I drink before I go or should I wait until the end of the evening
when I won’t have time to have more than two drinks? I made all my plans in terms of if I
plan to do this then I can’t drink and some days that’s what I wanted and some days that
was not what I wanted. It really had me on the end of a stick.
(31:48 – 32:05)
Not only that, of course, from that time on I lost the ability to call the shots. I was no
longer able to be able to say with any certainty even to myself and I was the only one I
talked to about my drinking. I didn’t talk to anybody else about it.
(32:05 – 32:54)
I was no longer able to say that I would be able to be sober at a given time and a given
place. I could not, however, admit the fact that I had reached the point of no return as
far as drinking was concerned. I simply couldn’t believe this and I really did believe and
in this I had the support of the therapist and my family and a great many people who
knew me well that if I could only find the key that would unlock the door and emancipate
this person that was buried inside of me and free this creature the real me as we called it
I would be able to put some order in my life and that in this order drinking would fall into
its proper place.
(32:55 – 33:28)
Well, I began a search for this real me and my life became something straight out of
Alice in Wonderland. I had to be prepared to believe seven impossible things every
morning just like Alice did and I had to run faster and faster all the time just to stay
where I was. I was frightened I knew what was happening to me I didn’t know what to do
about it I thought I was doing the only thing there was to do about it.
(33:28 – 34:34)
I was still having treatment I’d found out he believed that if you could clear up the
symptoms resolve the personality conflicts that, you know alcoholism would go away
there was no such thing. I realized that I was shriveling up and drying up inside like a
leaf on the tree in the autumn. I was aware of this growing sense of emptiness and this
sense of isolation and alienation and the more frightened I got and the emptier I felt the
faster I ran and the only way that I knew to quiet these fears and to fill this emptiness
was with the contents of a bottle and so time after time knowing full well that this
oblivion this blotting it all out that I saw would not solve anything that when it wore off I
would be confronted the next day with all the same problems and that in addition I
would have to cope with the horrors of my remorse.
(34:36 – 35:16)
I don’t have to describe that to any of you I know because you know too well what I
mean about this terrible sense of self-contempt and self-loathing that is the inevitable
aftermath of the kind of drinking that we do. I searched for this creature this real me in
every likely and unlikely place that you can imagine and I endowed this search with
every ounce of energy and imagination and resourcefulness that I had and this was
considerable. I continued to look for it for another seven and a half years in
psychotherapy.
(35:17 – 35:43)
He could hardly be expected to help me with a problem that I categorically refused to
discuss with him. I looked for it in books and study. I was always running off to take a
course at NYU or the New School at Columbia University thinking if I could only learn the
wisdom of how other people had lived that maybe I could apply some of this to my own
life but I didn’t read any books about people like me.
(35:43 – 36:00)
There didn’t seem to be any situations like mine. I thought if I could lose myself in a
worthy cause in things, something that was bigger than I was that this would vanish and
fall into its proper place but I didn’t find anything that big. I looked.
(36:00 – 36:12)
I looked everywhere but I didn’t find it. I looked for it in domesticity and home life. I
couldn’t clean up anything inside of me it seemed.
(36:13 – 36:31)
So therefore everything outside had to be just exactly right. After all, I didn’t want
anybody to say well she’s full of booze all the time no wonder her house is such a wreck.
I would get up at three o’clock in the morning and go wash my hair so that nobody could
say I had let myself go to pieces because of drinking.
(36:32 – 36:53)
I never gave so many parties as such elaborate ones. A lot of times people would show
up at these parties that I wouldn’t remember having invited and every now and then
we’d have a little trouble getting the food up off the floor and onto the table but I had
them. I searched for it in my religion which I had turned my back on a number of years
before.
(36:54 – 37:03)
But I had it all wrong. I had it all backwards. I went to church trying to make sure that
God knew what my will for me was.
(37:04 – 37:18)
I had to come here to learn that it worked the other way around. I even searched for this
creature at Ebbets Field in the days when my beloved Dodgers was still in Brooklyn. And
there was a method in this madness.
(37:18 – 37:37)
My family all just thought I was a kook, which I was, but I did have a point in this. During
the summertime the children were away and this meant that the few controls that I did
allow to work in my life were gone. And the drinking got very much worse.
(37:38 – 38:06)
And I thought if I could get my family to give me a season ticket to all the Dodgers
games, if I had to get on the subway and go from New York to Brooklyn and back again,
maybe I wouldn’t drink so much. And so 77 times every summer I got on the subway and
I went to Brooklyn and I came back again and I discovered beer. Beer and baseball.
(38:07 – 38:36)
And the vendors at Ebbets Field discovered me. And when they used to come around
and the seventh inning on their last trip they used to leave three cans of beer with me
instead of the usual one that I got at the end of every other inning. Simultaneously,
always, inevitably, I was searching for my answers too in the contents of the bottle.
(38:37 – 38:53)
And here I really did always find the key. But the door that the key unlocked was not the
door I was looking for. Because it was the door to a Pandora’s box of destructive,
irrational, unpredictable behavior.
(38:55 – 39:19)
The chaos and confusion that I created in my own life and in the life of my husband and
children and all those people who were close to me by this attempt of mine to live two
separate lives, one on a fairly rational plane and the other on the dark, irrational side.
This finally brought me to the point of despair. Where nothing seemed worth the effort
anymore.
(39:19 – 39:55)
The gap was too wide between this person who made some attempts at least at
worthwhile living and this creature who was so beset by obsessive and compulsive
drinking that she poisoned or kicked over every good thing she did. This gap seemed to
me too wide ever to bridge, and I could not imagine that the bridge existed that would
span it. I concluded that I was some sort of no-good freak who had had every kind of
opportunity that a person could be given in life and still couldn’t make the scene.
(39:56 – 40:29)
And it was in this burnt-out and beat, despairing state of mind that I finally came to my
first AA meeting because in the midst of all this self-hatred, this despair, I had had a
moment of truth. I had called up the children’s pediatrician and asked him if he could
come over. He was a neighbor and a friend.
(40:30 – 40:38)
Asked if he and his wife could come over and spend the evening with my husband and
me. I had a problem with one of the children that I wanted to discuss with him. He came.
(40:39 – 40:49)
I was not drunk when he arrived. I was not sober, but I wasn’t drunk, and I was good
hosted, so I was pouring the whole time they were there. He listened to me.
(40:50 – 41:20)
He knew me well, been around us a lot. He listened to me, and after a few minutes, he
said, I’m going to interrupt you now, and I’m going to say something that’s going to
make you very angry, but I have to say it. He said, I don’t think that this is the cause of
the problem you are having with your child, but I don’t think you can solve the problem
you are having with your child or any other problem you are having unless you do
something about your drinking.
(41:21 – 41:31)
I think it’s out of control. I want you to let me call Dr. Ruth Fox, who’s a specialist in
alcoholism. She’s a good friend of mine, and I want you to go to see her.
(41:33 – 41:39)
He was right about how mad he made me. I was really mad. I was not mad at him.
(41:39 – 42:06)
I was mad at my husband because I thought my husband must have been talking to him.
I didn’t give the man credit for having eyes, ears, nose, any of those things. I said to him
that I would not go to see Dr. Fox, that no more money was going to be spent on me in
psychiatry, that I would have to find another way, and then I tried to get rid of him and
get him out of the house as fast as I could so I could give my husband hell, which I
proceeded to do.
(42:07 – 42:22)
And then I spent the worst week that I have ever spent in my life. The drinking took on a
desperation quality that it had not had before. My husband became not just furious with
me and disgusted with me, but downright frightened.
(42:22 – 42:28)
He was considering calling this pediatrician. We didn’t have a doctor of our own at this
point. I wouldn’t go to a doctor.
(42:28 – 42:44)
He might tell me something. We called the pediatrician when either one of us got sick.
So Lee was going to call the doctor and ask him what he could do for me, ask him if he
thought I should go to a hospital, if he could give me some sort of predation or
something because I was just out of hand.
(42:45 – 43:03)
I spent the worst week I’ve ever spent. The doctor had been there on a Thursday night.
The next Friday, Friday before Labor Day in 1957, at about four o’clock in the afternoon
when I’d postponed taking the first drink as long as I could.
(43:03 – 43:23)
When I came into AA and they told me to postpone, I already knew all about it. I had
been postponing for years and the latest that I could make it would be four or five
o’clock. I had postponed taking the first drink until about four and I started to drink as I
had on a thousand other days.
(43:24 – 43:53)
And with the very first drink I had known as I had on a thousand other days that this was
going to be one of those days when there just was not enough booze in the world to do
for me whatever it was that I seemed to need so desperately to have done. And all of a
sudden I had this sickening shock of recognition of the helplessness and hopelessness
and near despair of my situation. I really hated what alcohol did to me.
(43:54 – 44:11)
I had hated it for years. And I was so sick and tired of it all and I had been so sick and
tired of it for years. And all of it just seemed to come in on me all at once this particular
afternoon and I got up and I walked to the telephone without giving it a thought.
(44:11 – 44:28)
I had no plan whatever in my head. I just went to the phone and called my husband and
for the first time in my life said something to him that was appropriate about my
drinking. I said, I know I’ll be drunk when you get home tonight.
(44:29 – 44:46)
Please try not to be angry. Please try to bear with me this one more time because I hope
it may be the last. And then out of the blue I reached out and I found the words that
subsequently saved my life.
(44:47 – 45:04)
I said, if you’ll call AA and find out where their meetings are I’m willing to give it a try. I
said, I don’t even know whether I’m an alcoholic or not. I know if I am it isn’t my fault but
it most certainly will be my fault if I don’t try to find out and do something about it.
(45:05 – 45:41)
Besides, I said we know that AA has helped lots of people with a drinking problem and it
doesn’t cost a thing so what have I got to lose? What did I have to lose? Only those
things that had been weighing so heavily on my shoulders all those years that I’d almost
sunk from the weight of them. Things like anxiety and alienation and loneliness and
strange moods and disappointment and despair. And what did I have to find instead? All
those things I had been looking for in all those unlikely places.
(45:42 – 46:08)
Things like faith and friendship and meaning and purpose in my life. My husband was
absolutely dumbfounded by the telephone conversation. We hung up and as I put the
phone down it rang and it was the children’s pediatrician and he said to me, I want to
know whether you’ve been thinking about the conversation you and I had last week or
not.
(46:09 – 46:25)
And I sat down and I said this is uncanny that you should call me right now and I told him
what had just happened. And he said, my God, I wouldn’t have dared suggest it. That’s
the very best thing you can possibly do.
(46:26 – 46:45)
Then he proceeded to tell me about patients of his whose parents were in AA and how
wonderful it was and how this was exactly the right thing to do. And I said to him, Milton,
I’m scared to go alone. Do you think it would be too childish of me to ask Lee to go with
me? Lee is my husband.
(46:46 – 46:59)
He said, if Lee doesn’t want to go, you just call me up and I’ll take you. Just go. Well,
after that I felt just fine and so I had to have a couple of drinks to celebrate this big
decision.
(47:00 – 47:36)
And I always say I got to AA through the grace of God and through telephonitis because
after I had a couple of more drinks, I got on the telephone and I called up all my friends
to tell them my big news. And not one of them said, you don’t need that. They all said,
isn’t that wonderful? And the next day when I woke up, I really should say came to, and I
began to have second thoughts about this moment of truth I had.
(47:36 – 47:53)
And I was ready to back out and try again at least one more time. And the phone began
to ring and it was all my friends who knew my ways. They knew that I was apt to
telephone one night and forget all about it the next day.
(47:53 – 48:02)
So they called up to remind me about my decision and I was stuck with it. I had to do it.
And I was not alone.
(49:02 – 49:20)
This is the hardest thing that I have ever had to do in my life. I really have tried very
often to try to figure out why it was so terribly difficult for me. For one thing I know I was
one of the people who was guilty of contempt prior to investigations.
(49:21 – 49:36)
I thought it was fine for those poor souls. I don’t know what I thought I was but that’s
what I thought about it. I wasn’t even sure that I was an alcoholic in spite of all the things
that had happened.
(49:36 – 49:53)
A lot of things hadn’t happened that I thought had to happen in order to qualify you as
an alcoholic. I had never been hospitalized for alcoholism. I’d never even had to have a
doctor take care of me for drinking exactly.
(49:54 – 50:08)
I certainly had never been in any trouble with the law. I had never been a morning
drinker. I didn’t usually get up in the morning, I couldn’t, but I had been a postponer.
(50:08 – 50:21)
I had not, you know, I knew I had to eat. I was trying to protect my right to drink so I’d
stand in front of the icebox and eat a half pound of Swiss cheese before I had a drink. So
this meant that I didn’t drink first thing in the morning.
(50:21 – 50:40)
I avoided all these things that I thought would telltale. I always measured the drink and I
always put ice in the glass and I didn’t think alcoholics did that. So, oh, I hadn’t done a
lot of things that I thought you had to do and in tangible ways I hadn’t lost a lot.
(50:41 – 51:12)
I still had my health and my home and my family, most of the friends that I cared about,
and I still had the price of the next bottle. I think the reason that it was so terribly
difficult for me to admit that I was an alcoholic was that I wasn’t at all sure that I could
stop drinking and so therefore I was very reluctant to admit that there was any necessity
to try. So as the time approached for me to go to this meeting, I was literally scared to
death.
(51:13 – 51:27)
I was sick with shame and humiliation. I felt that I was permanently broken in spirit. I
found out later that this highly tooted spirit that I thought was broken was my will and
my pride.
(51:27 – 51:49)
That was what had been broken because they didn’t know how to bend and I hope they
never fully recover. But it was new to me then. I was bleeding and it hurt and as we
walked out the door to go to that meeting I can remember standing on the steps and
holding on to the rail saying to myself, boy you have really done it now.
(51:50 – 52:16)
You have really gone to the end of the line. You have lost your way. You’re about to take
a plunge into the darkness and little did I know that that darkness would turn out to be
better than light and that way that I had lost, the way that I found would turn out to be
better than any that I had ever known.
(52:17 – 52:30)
I’ll never forget that first AA meeting. I remember it better than I remember meetings
last week or even last night. I remember everyone that was there.
(52:30 – 53:09)
I remember every word that was said. I hadn’t had a drink for five days and this was the
moment as far as I was concerned when through the grace of God the screw was turned
in my head and the door began to open and I began to be able to listen and I began to
be able to suspend opinion and criticism and analysis and judgment and instead to listen
and consequently to learn a little bit. I will never forget the man who was leading the
beginners meeting.
(53:10 – 53:38)
He said one of those pithy little homie truths that you hear in AA and no place else and
these were the words that turned me on where thousands of dollars of psychiatry had
done nothing and where all the counseling that is available in a big city like New York
had left me untouched. These were the words that turned me on. He said you know
being alcoholic is a little bit like being pregnant.
(53:39 – 54:21)
You can’t be a little bit alcoholic any more than you can be a little bit pregnant and I
thought I’m a little bit alcoholic but I could see it I could see that once you were started
there was really no turning back and he went on to say that there was one difference
that alcoholics never did miscarry. They always went to turn. But when I think of the
serious and solemn efforts that had been made in my behalf and here were the words
that turned the screw and suddenly I heard.
(54:23 -1:00:39)
I was terrified I couldn’t say anything but I began to listen and this was a beginners
meeting and so the man finished and he asked my husband he asked if anybody had any
questions and my husband put his hand up and I thought oh god what’s he gonna say
what’s he gonna say so he said something about you know well what do you do when
you’re just so anxious and uptight and tense and nervous and feel as though your nerves
will break if you don’t have a drink and the man who was leading the beginners meeting
said what is your particular monsoon hour sir and I said in this tiny little voice he’s not
talking about himself he’s talking about me and I began to cry and I think I continued to
cry for months but mostly it was crying for joy after that. We went downstairs at this
meeting to the open meeting and unlike most meetings in New York there was no
women speakers that night this was a very rough bunch three men all of whom had sort
of Bowery background well my husband got terribly nervous and he was whispering to
me maybe I shouldn’t have brought you here you never did anything like this maybe you
don’t belong here and the wife of the man that was leading the beginners meeting that I
had just met said oh I do hope you’ll go to a meeting tomorrow night they’re not all like
this they really aren’t usually we have women speakers and usually they’re not this this
way really please try to go again tomorrow night well I was too polite to say anything to
her but I did say to my husband why don’t you shut up and let me listen to what they’re
saying now this was a miracle believe me my husband had every right knowing me to be
nervous because he had every right to expect that I would clobber him over the head
when we left there and say how dare you take me there amongst you know people and
so on but the screw had been turned the mind had been opened and instead what
occurred to me and I deserve no credit for this because it was totally unlike me instead
what occurred to me was if these people could have been so sick and could have had so
little to get well for if they could do it maybe I can do it I don’t think I would believe any
of the things that I saw I didn’t believe what you told me even I just believe what I saw I
wouldn’t have believed it in a book I believed what I saw I believe that you knew what
you were talking about I believe that you had been where I was and that you had
suffered what I was suffering and that if this had worked for you maybe it could work for
me and before a before long a a became for me and it still is a kind of school and
ironically after a lifetime of exposure in the academic community it’s been here in a a
among my own kind extra that I began the process of learning the things that I really
always wanted to know which were how to live a life that had meaning and purpose and
in all of this I found the tools from the experience of people like you I found the courage
from your unfailing strength and support and one day at a time a whole new world a
whole new and very much better world began to open up before me and I began little by
little to begin to face the realities of my own life and I wish I knew how to give thanks for
all these things but I don’t I don’t have the words I will never have the words so I have to
try to give partial evidence of my gratitude by loving service to this fellowship and to the
people in it who showed me the difference between despair and hope between utility
and a kind of fulfillment between slavery and freedom really now I have one story that
I’m going to tell you I tell it every time I speak at any AA meeting because it seems to
me to maybe put in a capsule what my life was like and what was expected of me in this
life and what I did with it is the result of alcoholic drinking I had buried this story I had
absolutely put it out of my mind and when I had to make my first talk in AA I had nothing
to say except that I drank too much too long couldn’t handle it got in trouble but I just
didn’t know how I could describe what I had gone through in all the circumstances of my
life that made my drinking so terrible and all of a sudden this story occurred to me and it
made me sick when it occurred to me but I knew I had to tell it because it did make me
sick and I’ve been telling it ever since not because it’s the worst thing I ever did not by
any means but simply because I believe it is it illustrates the total picture better than
any other my husband is an Episcopal clergyman he is also the chairman of the
Department of Religion at New York University he is a teaching clergyman in other words
several years two years before I came into AA he asked me if we could have a dinner
party for the faculty and staff from his department at NYU and I consented to do this of
course and I worked hard to make the party a success about three o ‘clock in the
afternoon I was all through my chores and I was tired and I thought I’d take a little nap
before the company came at seven o’clock and then I had one of those inspirations that
occurs with such depressing frequency to alcoholics I thought maybe I’ll have a little
glass of wine to help me become drowsy now
(1:00:41- 1:05:55)
I knew perfectly well that a little glass of
wine didn’t make me drowsy I knew it took a little bottle or two little bottles of wine to
make me drowsy and I also was one of the alcoholics who knew long before I came here
that it was the first drink that got me in all the trouble I didn’t know how you stay away
from the first drink I thought I was still capable of applying reason to this I applied reason
to it all the time and it never worked but I still thought that one could apply reason to it
so I said to myself the famous last words that I’d said on hundreds of other occasions
that any fool would know enough to be discreet at a time like this and I took the drink
and you know the rest I didn’t have the luck to pass out I never did I didn’t have sense
enough to leave home I never did do that either I showed up at this party and I showed
up almost falling down drunk near hysterics as I always was when I drank muttering
what I hope was incomprehensible gibberish I say this with feeling because what I had to
say was not very complimentary to my husband and it was not expressed in the
language that people normally associate with a clergyman’s wife now the people at this
party were total strangers to me I had met one or two of them but that was all we’re
Episcopalians and Episcopalians take a rather relaxed attitude towards social drinking
nobody took a relaxed attitude towards my drinking which was I guess antisocial but the
people at this party came from temperance type backgrounds these were these people
didn’t even smoke these were the kind of people that I called squares you talk about
arrogance here I was the boss’s wife clergyman’s wife drunk and disorderly and I had the
nerve to refer to these people in what I intended to be insulting terms and I must say
they behaved extremely well in what you will agree were rather difficult circumstances
one of the people at this party was a colleague of my husband’s that I had known for
many years he and my husband were working on their doctor’s degrees at the same
time and this man had written his doctoral study on alcoholism and his book became a
classic in the field of alcoholism so when I was dropping the ham and the turkey and the
shrimps all over the floor he came in to help my husband and me get it together and get
it on the table I’ve often wondered why he didn’t say anything they didn’t believe in
intervention in those days but he didn’t say a word just help me get the food up off the
floor and onto the table and help me to try to keep me out of the way and to quiet me
down and stop me from cursing so much the day after this party my remorse was
spectacular I wanted to pull the covers over my head and never come out again I simply
wanted to find a hole and crawl into it with the rest of the rats but I was so locked up in
this miserable little alcoholic trap I was so involved with my own agony and self hatred
that I wasn’t even able to tell my poor husband that I was sorry I thought he ought to
know I was sorry I thought he ought to know no one would behave this way if she could
help herself maybe he knew that I don’t know but I do know that after that party he knew
that I no longer drank because I had unresolved personality problems I drank now
because drinking had become my number one problem now you might imagine that a
stunt like I’ve just described would constitute a bottom for somebody in my life and
circumstances but I drew no such conclusion I just was not ready or willing to stop
drinking yet I did decide something had to be done about the drinking and I set about
doing it with some success and more than I deserved but I don’t recommend my system
to anyone who hadn’t already tried it because I learned some new things about
loneliness I had thought I knew what it was to be lonely and the fact that I had no reason
to be lonely with a fine husband and two wonderful children and what should have been
an interesting life the fact that I had these things and still felt as though I would die of
loneliness only convinced me that I was a freak and reinforced all my feelings of
inadequacy but after this party the loneliness became a really morbid thing because I
decided that
(1:05:55 – 1:10:56)
I wouldn’t do any drinking at all when other people were around and before
long I who have always been a gregarious kind of person no longer cared very much
about being with people I didn’t want to make plans to do things with my husband and
children in the evening and during the weekend I no longer even cared whether my
husband sat and talked with me after the children went to bed at night I just wanted
them all to get the hell out and leave me alone to drink and sleep only of course there
wasn’t any peace because there isn’t any peace in solitary confinement and booze had
made a prisoner of me I was really a lost soul in chains and even though my chains may
have been crepe paper ones in my opinion these are sometimes the very most difficult
ones to break now thanks to AA I’m no longer prisoner I have a choice I can take one
drink with all its consequences or I can do it the AA way and stay away from one drink
for one day I no longer feel like a lost soul because at long last my life does have some
shape and structure and direction to it some not very well-defined goals but the goals
don’t matter as long as I have those steps and those traditions this a program that lead
me wherever I’m supposed to go I can and often do fail miserably in the performance of
my various duties and responsibilities but I’ve learned here to get up and start all over
again practicing the principles of these programs of this program a day at a time they do
not let us down if we keep at it if we just keep on keeping on when I go into low spells
and I do sometimes and I get into the old negative ways of thinking and I get terribly
disappointed with myself and very critical of myself and everybody else and I find that
I’m beginning to kick the furniture and curse under my breath again and talk to myself
and say things like oh well maybe you sold yourself a bill of goods after all you work
awful hard and you haven’t got very much to show for it what’s so different about your
life really except that you’re sober except that I’m sober when I came here the only thing
in the world the only thing in the world that I was looking for or even hope to find with
sobriety everything else everything and there’s been so much that my cup runs over I
found new happiness in family life and in the well-being of my husband and my children I
found what it is to be a friend and to have a friend and to be able to look into the eyes of
another person and see that person and not just my own image reflected there I found
that I can hold a responsible job and I now have one that I really love working for all of us
in an AA job I found new joy in the practice of my religion and all of this is gravy because
the only thing that I was looking for was sobriety and if I want to know what it would be
like to lose that all I have to do is to remember how it was those last two years when I
drank alone late at night wandering through the house up and down the halls and up and
down the stairs always going down for that one last drink 25 trips a night for that one
last drink and I remember that I used to think even then that there must be some
purpose in this I must be looking for something that’s missing from my life and even in
my drunken confusion I was right about that one thing I really was looking for something
and thanks be to God I found it I was looking for AA I was looking for all of you I was
looking for the power greater than myself that I called God and when I look out at you
now and realize that all through that terrible time there were people like you in rooms
like this and that you always have a vacancy I see what a wasteland my pride and my
willfulness and my blindness is made of my life and I thank God I found you when I did
I’m not proud of these things that I’ve told you I spent years trying to forget these things
and others like them but I know now that I never must forget lest I forget to be grateful
to God for helping me to find AA lest I forget to be grateful to AA for helping me to find
my life. Thank you.
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