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Source: Dave B – AA World Service and Personal Recovery – Two Addresses – Date Unknown.mp3 File: dave-b-aa-world-service-and-personal-recovery-two-addresses-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:28:09
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B. from Montreal, Alfred. Please. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here with you good people. I suppose I can bring you, in fact I know I can bring you the congratulations and the good wishes of AA worldwide and particularly from the General Service Board. I can also do a little more than that I think. I can bring you the good wishes of AA in Canada. And that to me is one of the tremendous things to see the growth of AA in Canada.
We have about 10% of the population I think of the United States and we also have about 10% of the population of Alcoholics Anonymous. So we're keeping up with the rest of them. It's a wonderful, wonderful experience for me to be out here. It's a wonderful experience to see Alcoholics Anonymous at work. Less than two weeks ago I was on the Atlantic Coast in Boston. About a month before that I was in Charlottetown at the Atlantic Provinces Convention.
It's really something that you can't believe until you see it all. I often express it or it seems to me to be that we are a society under the fatherhood of God and we represent perhaps better than most in all humility the brotherhood of man. I'm going to try and tell you tonight Vancouver has some very special memories of it. I know I'm not in Vancouver now. For me because I left here in disgrace just about 30 years ago and I was really beaten and hopeless, defiant and all the rest.
Here I am back here. Bill talks about AA as a wholesale miracle. If you look back to those days and I was thinking as I came out here on the plane believe me it really is true and I'm very, very happy to be here and thank you very much. I'm in the position of the fifth speaker who had all the things that he was going to say said by the other four speakers. It seems to me really that all of the three legacies of Alcoholics Anonymous are interrelated.
If I'm to speak on service on a worldwide basis I can't very well speak of that without coming into the unity of AA on a worldwide and on a local basis. And of course all of the services and all of the unity are directed at one principle thing and that is carrying the message to the sick alcoholic who wishes to recover. It's a message of hope and really that is what keeps us going because if the new people coming into AA were to dry up I'm very much afraid that AA itself would wither on the vine.
[00:05:22]
It seems to me to be a question of what my favorite Saint Paul says that it is in giving that we receive. And so if I'm to talk about world services perhaps I would start off by talking about myself because I am a product of world service. The days when I came into AA there weren't any other AA members within miles and miles and hundreds and hundreds of miles of me. And one of the world services of AA is to publish the big book.
My sister who lives down in Connecticut near the general service office brought me up that big book when I was locked up in a place not for the treatment of drunks but for the treatment of insane people let's put it that way. That's all the places they had to put people. I didn't take it right at that time but really that was the first act of world service that ever came to my notice. And then it was a few years after that that I was really in desperate straits not knowing what to do or where to turn or how to turn there.
I finally phoned down to what was then the world service office and a girl answered the phone and this was 500 miles away from where I was and she said the words that I hope I always remember to say to anybody that comes into AA and it is part of world service. If you want help we'll help you. We're alcoholics down here too and that's the understanding that comes into this thing. And that girl, God bless her, wrote me day after day after day after day for nearly a whole year until we could get some more members and she sent me another big book and she sent me another plot of literature and she gave me the encouragement which helped us to get a group formed in Montreal.
And that's the service that nowadays they give to loners and you have many loners up in the interior of your part of our continent. We have a good many in the province where I come from in Quebec and that is one of the world services of Alcoholics Anonymous. One of my favorite chapters in that big book is A Vision For You and I remember the tremendous encouragement that it gave me. It said that no doubt you would be lonely and afraid and what were you going to do?
And the book said you forget that you've just now tapped a source of power so much stronger than yourself. Someday you'll have friends galore and someday our paths may cross. And that's the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous at the world level. Here am I now, I don't know how many thousands of miles away from home and I was the person that phoned, first got the book and then phoned down there and that to me is what world services are.
In the early days of AA we didn't have the need because there were only so few when I first came into AA if I remember rightly. There were about 5,000 members of AA all over this entire continent and I don't think there were any anywhere else.
[00:10:05]
And if you look now at all the, they give our figures, membership figures of some 300,000 people. But if you look at all the people that have come to AA and gone on through and not come back I don't altogether agree with that. In fact I don't agree with it at all because it doesn't seem to me you're putting back or repaying what has been given to you. But if you look at them all I don't know how many hundreds of thousands and thousands and thousands of people must have recovered through world services and from the individual work that it did then.
Through the founders then who did most of that stuff in that little world office in New York, Bill and Dr. Bob. The day came and I can remember it well in 1949 I guess it was and they were beginning to talk about well we're not infallible, we're not going to live forever, we're going to have to turn this thing over to you drunks to look after for yourself. And there was a great deal of hassle about this.
They didn't really want to turn it over to us, maybe we wouldn't be able to run the thing, maybe we weren't mature enough at what was going to happen. But then Dr. Bob took ill and he came to the point where they knew he had an incurable illness and he wouldn't live long and that hustled things up. And if I remember rightly it was 1951 that we had the first general service conference of Alcoholics Anonymous.
This was to replace the founders. This was going to be the group conscience really speaking. I don't think ever in my life I was so impressed with the feeling. You could feel the unseen presence of God of each of our understanding in that room. There seemed to be, there was no feeling of this section against that section. It was something new, everybody was watching us. Is this thing going to work or isn't it?
It was a couple of years or three after that in St. Louis that they knew it would work. And that's when the traditions were accepted and that's when the idea of a world conference to guide and lead and direct AA really was born. And that's gone on and gone on and gone on and grown stronger and stronger over the years until I was down again there this year. There were some pretty big problems that came up this year.
Problems of organization, problems of our structure, problems of other things which I'm going to go into tomorrow. But don't let anybody ever tell you really that AA hasn't come to maturity. Don't let people say that in the, I don't mean as individuals, but as a whole in the aggregate we are able to run our own affairs. You see kind of miracles there, people not working for sections of the country and if one or other section of the country attempts to dominate, they don't last too long.
Because we still are able to remember to place principles before personalities. I like to think of AA as the opposite really to a corporation or a corporation administration let's say. In a corporation administration the various directors and the branches do what they're told by the head office. But in AA it works the other way. The other way, the General Service Office, World Services, do what they're told by AAs as a whole through the GSRs, the various state and provincial committees, and through the conference. Those are really the ones who guide Alcoholics Anonymous.
[00:15:24]
Then there's some really tremendous incidents that have happened, it seems to me, since I've been in AA. In 1949, Bill came up to Montreal, and there it was where he first found out that AA would work in languages and personalities and emotional types of people other than the English-speaking, that it would work just as well. If you remember in AA Comes of Age, he mentions being up there, and it was there that he first heard the Lord's Prayer and the Twelve Steps in French.
That was the start, really, of what he calls now speaking to the world about us, outside this continent and inside, because there are 5,000 French-speaking people on this continent. I worked out for the 1965 convention. You heard Joe read out some translations in Greek. They don't get anything out of it except a tremendous lot of work, and probably one of the greatest twelve-step jobs on a wholesale basis that's been done since the English big book was written.
That's coming out within a couple of months, the French-speaking big book. There are all kinds of other ways I could tell you stories. My glasses just broke so I can't read the things I've written down here. But the Spanish are just really beginning to come alive, all down through South America and even in Spain where they speak Castilian Spanish and they don't quite understand what is used in South America.
But they've got their own big book, and they're getting sober at a tremendous rate. They're getting sober and staying sober. If I had long enough arms, I'd be able to see these. There's the Dutch. There are the Belgians. There are the people in Switzerland who use our French. There's the Japanese. They're translating the Twelve Steps, and they're also translating other parts of the big book. Some of the Baltic states are translating and using the literature and have small groups.
I don't know whether there are any other Muslims in AA. I have really begun to feel about half Muslim because I have three Mohammedan pigeons, as they call them in New York, or babies, or sponsees.
[00:20:06]
It all started out, and this is part of world service, with a sheik who lives in a country on the Gulf of Arabia. All their money comes from the Texas Oil Company. He's a brother of the king, and he was the chief man in the army. Muslim religion, as I'm sure you must know, alcohol is completely taboo. After a while, he was banished from the kingdom because he was a real lush. He got sober some way or another, and he came back.
But like many of us who try to do this thing our own way, he fell again. There happened to be a Canadian missionary from Toronto in that country, and she told him about Alcoholics Anonymous. She got him the literature, she got him people to write, and he was a very well-educated man. He'd been to Oxford and so on and so forth, and he got sober. Well then, you know, we sometimes have a kind of a wanderlust, people like us.
And he told the people in this country that he wanted to come over to the States and Canada and see how this thing worked. And so when the missionary came over, he came first to New York and then to Toronto. One day I got a call from Bert S. in Toronto. It was an old, old timer down there. Another one from Lib S. in New York, and she said, the sheik has vanished. He started off from Montreal to find out how AA worked in languages other than English.
Well, but he'd been gone two weeks and nobody'd heard from him. So they said, would you look for him? So where would you start to go and look for a sheik of Araby who's on a drunk in Montreal? There's a hotel in Montreal where all the drunks seem to go. I've been there myself with my time. And so for the first place I phoned was there, and where do you think he was? There he was. And I went down to see him.
And whether he was a sheik with all the millions and all the rest, it didn't make any difference. First thing he did was borrow $5 from me. And the next thing he did was to put on his prayer robes and so on and so forth. And it came the appointed hour and he faced the east and he said his prayers. And I can remember that so well. I said, well, it doesn't matter really very much if it's Allah or if it's God or who it is you're praying to.
You know, I don't think he's going to pay too much attention as long as you've got that bottle there on the table. Anyway, I had to go and with the $5 I went back afterwards. I had to go to a meeting and give somebody a medallion. And when I came back, he was gone. But the next day he called me again. And he went back to Toronto. And he writes me. Oh, about once a month I get a letter from that man.
There's another Mohammedan from North Africa, a Frenchman, who got in since then. There's another Mohammedan or Muslim from Turkey, a doctor, who's been in Montreal at the military hospital on an exchange. He is now in AA. And three of them are in correspondence. This is the part of world service that is the most tremendous thing to me. It seems to me it's what Bill spoke of when he spoke of the language of the heart, the language of love, the giving which is so foreign to our nature instead of taking,
[00:25:00]
the selfish or self-centeredness, not always selfish, but the self-centeredness that's always filled us. We're beginning to learn of the rewards of giving. And in actuality, in world service, it's just exactly the same as the individual who goes out and you see somebody lying on the bed. And your heart goes out to them and you want to help them. The only way really you can is by your example and to give them what kind of hope you can.
As far as I can understand, that's just exactly the way world service works. We're out trying to give hope to all the world and every alcoholic everywhere, no matter what his language, no matter what his race, and to all the tremendous number that still don't know right on this continent of ours who speak English well enough that they could know. That's the part of general service that, or world service, that really interests me.
And all the other parts, I'll try and tell you tomorrow when I get on to the 12 concepts, but in the meantime, world service isn't something far away in New York. World service is that language of love. It's giving freely of what we have found. Thank you. Applause Dave B. from Montreal, please. Applause Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be with you good people here tonight. One of the tremendous rewards that have come to me through Alcoholics Anonymous or my membership in Alcoholics Anonymous are the number of friends that I have found.
I think like most of us in AA, when I first came in, or before I first came in, I felt that I didn't have a single friend in this whole world. Here tonight and in this room, 3,000 miles from home, I run into a number of people, people that I knew. And even the people that you didn't know before, you meet them in this place and that place, and immediately you feel that they're friends. And that to me is one of the tremendous rewards that Alcoholics Anonymous has to give.
You know, for me to come back to British Columbia opens up a floodgate of memories. It was just about 30 years ago that I left here. I left the city of Vancouver broken and in disgrace and ashamed and hurt. I felt that there was nothing left for me in life. I didn't see any way that I could get out of the mess that I was in. Joe told me I was supposed to tell my story tonight, but it's going to lead up to that really.
And so I'll start in the old traditional way. I'm an alcoholic, and my name is Dave B.. I suppose to some people, particularly those outside of AA and those who don't know us, this would seem like a joke.
[00:30:07]
It was St. Paul who said, out of defeat comes victory. It was my old friend Ralph Waldo Emerson who said there are no failures in this life because each of us is what he has worked hardest to be. And certainly no one ever worked harder than I did to end up in the places that I ended in, which you will hear about. He also said something else, which makes me really glad that I am an alcoholic, glad that I'm an alcoholic who found Alcoholics Anonymous, because he said man is the product of all his experiences.
And I suppose if I hadn't had the experiences that I had as an active alcoholic, I couldn't have the tremendous life full of satisfaction and love that I have now. I suppose that I always had all the characteristics of the alcoholic. They say there are two kinds of alcoholic, the ones who are always alcoholics, the ones who just grow that way by absorption. I think I was the kind that was an alcoholic from the start.
I had the fears on the inside, and on the outside I had that arrogance and pride and defiance which wouldn't let anybody know what was going on inside me. I can remember even as a very small boy, when I was I suppose ten or twelve, there has been a bankrupt in the Bank of Montreal since 1817, the day it opened its doors and this was drummed into me ever since I can remember. I can remember my father taking me up to the head office in Montreal and introducing me to the general manager and to the president and saying, this is my son, he's going to follow in my footsteps.
And I can remember then just feeling I'll never be able to do the things that they expect me to do. I won't be able to measure up to all of these things. I suppose you could call it the will to fail. I was still at school when I learned a great secret. I came in one day to town, a little away from the school, a few miles, with some of the older boys and somebody said, let's go in and have a beer. I'd never had a drink, not for any particular reason, but really I think there had been drinks in our house, I had never been forbidden to take it.
I don't know why I had never had one. But there was a feeling inside me that this was something I shouldn't do. But then again, I didn't want to look small or look afraid in the eyes of these older boys and so I went in and I had a drink. You know, a whole new world opened up for me then. I became all the things that I'd always wanted to be. I never had been too good at sports, I was too small, never been too much good in my studies.
But none of these things seemed to matter anymore. I was a brilliant conversationalist and what did it matter? These guys were kind of oafs and I was something a little above them. And I can remember when I went back to school, all the younger boys running around saying, did you smell B.? He's been drinking. And that made me the center of attraction and that was something I'd never been before.
And I loved it, I really loved it. I suppose that's when the old man of the sea climbed on my back. He was very light then and I had managed just to keep on that kind of drinking. And I suppose I never would have landed where I did. But alcoholism is a progressive disease, as I understand it. And that old man got heavier and heavier and heavier. I started to work that fall in the bank in the city of Quebec where my father was stationed.
[00:35:05]
And it wasn't too long until I began to get into scrapes. Oh, they weren't bad scrapes, but they were lots of kinds of the thing that caused attention and got into the papers and got arrested and did all of these things that embarrassed my father terribly. And about a year after I started, I was transferred down to the maritime provinces right out of the Quebec division. I started out in St. John where my grandmother lived.
And I hadn't been there too long when I was transferred again to Halifax. And I hadn't been there too long when I was transferred again to Bridgewater. And I went from one place to another like that. And there was always one answer or one reason. He's getting in with bad companions. It never really struck me, you know, until I got into AA, that there was only one thing constant in all of these places.
And that was me. And there couldn't really have been bad companions in all of these places. By this time, alcohol had become very important to me in my life. I needed it really. And I got pretty defiant when people would tell me, you're drinking too much, why don't you cut it down? I used to say, I've never missed a day's work in my life. I've never been late. And it's my business if I drink. You look after your affairs and I'll look after mine.
And then I was transferred to Hamilton. I arrived in Hamilton. I can remember being shaken in the berth by the porter. I had on a fur coat and I had two bottles and I had no memory of how I got there. He said, you better get up, you're here, and I'll get off. And instead of going to the bank, as I should have, I went and got a room in the YMCA right across the street from the bank. And I just kept right on drinking.
And I kept on drinking for a couple of days when the accountant came over and got me. There were many, many times after that that I said alcohol didn't interfere with my life. But I had begun that sort of self-deceit, the dishonesty with self that alcoholics have. I didn't want to see the things that weren't nice or weren't honest or weren't true about myself. And you can be awfully blind about those things.
But deep in my heart I knew they were there. And many times after that I said alcohol doesn't interfere with my life. It's my business. But I knew it did. I left there after about a year and a half. And I went to Winnipeg. I developed quite a reputation by this time and I loved that reputation. But the fear was still there inside. When you have a reputation you have to kind of live up to it. And always you have to do bigger things and better things.
I flew over Winnipeg yesterday. And I was thinking of many things. I was at their roundup two or three years ago. And we were walking around before the banquet started. You know sometimes in the Middle West they have a little feeling about the Easterners. We're kind of sissies or something. I don't know why. This man came up to me and he said, There's one story you'll never beat. They're still talking about it here.
There was a man one time, came out from the east. He stood up on the parapet of the Bank of Montreal right on the corner of 40th and Main. Didn't have a stitch of clothes on except a fur coat. A bottle in each pocket. And finally they got the extension ladder from the fire department. They got the police. They got everybody up there. And eventually he came down. I didn't really say a word at that moment.
But when I got up to tell my story, I told that story. Many things have happened since then. When I was in Winnipeg that time, I guess we must have some advertising men or newspaper men in the Brotherhood in Winnipeg.
[00:40:05]
Because there was a little two column headline that came out and said, All AA founder. In 20 years, not one sober breath. This wasn't really quite true because there had been a few sober breaths. But I suppose it looked good. I happened to be looking through the phone book. And I came across the name of a man who had lived in a room with me in Hamilton. And he was the superintendent of Manitoba branches.
And I phoned him on and off chance. He and I have been very good friends. He said, I saw your notice in the paper. And he said, the general manager of the bank was just through here a few days ago. And strangely enough, we were talking about you. You know, here were the three men. The three of us had lived in a room. One was the general manager, the other superintendent. Nearly got a headline, in 20 years, not one sober breath.
But I'll tell you something. I wouldn't have changed places. I wouldn't have changed places with either one of them. That defiance and that arrogance really began to take form and become very definite when I was in Winnipeg. I was 21 years old then. And as boys 21 years old do, I fell violently in love with a young lady. And she was 15. And then, one day, out of the blue, I got a transfer to Vancouver.
You know, they talk about alcoholics being self-centered. The world revolves around ourselves. I had a picture of those people in head office in Montreal with all their thousands of employees, looking down the list of employees and saying, there's Joe D., he doesn't want to go, let's leave him there. There's Bill S., he'd love to go to Vancouver, won't send him. There's Tom D., yes. Here's Dave B., he just wants to stay in Winnipeg, let's send him.
Of course, it wasn't really like that. And the upshot of that was, we're creatures of impulse, really. Before I left, we got married. We didn't tell anybody. And I got out here to Vancouver. And when I got here, you know, you begin, you have to sober up sometime. And you begin to think of what you've done. I was making $800 a year. I was married. I was 21, and I'd married a girl 15. I knew if I went to the bank and told them, I'd be fired immediately.
And so I did something that I had always done, and perhaps that was a contributing factor. I never really had to pay the price for any of the things that happened to me. My father had always got me out of the jams. My mother died when I was young. My aunts and my grandmother and the rest of them had always protected me. So I never really had to face things. And here was something I couldn't get out of.
I had to face this one. But I wrote my father, and I told him the story. And he telephoned me back, and he said just those words, I can't do this for you. This is something you've got to face yourself. You'd better go down to the superintendent's department and tell him. And so I did, and I was immediately suspended. And Dory's father got the news, no. And he took action against me for marrying his 15-year-old daughter without permission.
And there was talk of having the marriage annulled. And I was in very serious trouble, or so I felt. But in the end, my father did come through, and I got taken back on the temporary staff. And he arranged things with Dory's father. And she came out here. She came out here in December. She came out here in December, and when she got here the $500 that my father had sent us to get the furniture and get things started was gone.
[00:45:07]
I was in the hospital, I'd been in an elevator in the branch that I was in, an elevator accident. I'd lost the toes on one foot, I'd fractured my skull, and I was in a terrible mess. That was a pretty sad start for a marriage. You know, somebody was saying today, that was down the old Carroll and Hastings branch when I was there in Vancouver, and somebody was saying to me, or I asked them, if the Rainier Hotel was still going.
And that made me think of something else. And this just shows you the irresponsibility of the alcoholic. I can remember one morning waking up in the terrible fog, and I'd lost my keys. Well, the keys to a bank, really, they mean something. I couldn't get in, I couldn't get in the door, I couldn't open my cage, or lock my cage, because I couldn't get back in again. Fortunately, the cash in the safe downstairs was on the combination, and I remembered that.
But after a couple of days, people began to notice that I was waiting for somebody to open the door, and I was leaving the snap of my lock in the cage, and so on and so forth. They said, where are your keys? Oh, I forgot them at home. The next day, well, where are they today? God, I forgot to pick them up. And so on and so forth, until finally they said, well, you better produce those keys, because we don't really believe you've got them, otherwise we'll have to change all the locks in the building, and you'll have to pay for it.
And I felt very much afraid and worried and upset, and I had an answer for all of those things now. And I went into that Rainier Hotel, or Rainier Hotel next door, and the man said, what's the matter? And I was telling him this long story, and he says, well, where's that five bucks? Don't you remember you gave me the keys for security, and I let you have five bucks? I often wonder what the state-old Bank of Montreal would have thought if they'd known.
I hope they never do find out. I have my first blackout, first real scary blackout here in Vancouver. I came to one morning, apparently fairly rational and fairly reasonable, not that the police lieutenant that I was sitting opposite was listening to me and paying attention and telling me why he couldn't give me a permit to carry a revolver. I had no reason. I didn't know why I was there or how I got there or what had happened, and what did I want a permit to carry a revolver for.
I had one to carry one while I was on the bank's business, and I made some kind of excuse, and I got out of there, and I made a sincere attempt after that to stop drinking. And in the meantime, they were moving me around from this branch to that branch, and always with the same story, the thing they do to every alcoholic or so it seems, give him more responsibility, give him more work to do, and soon then he won't have time to drink.
So they, and of course responsibility was exactly what I was running away from, and they sent me up to the old Hotel Vancouver, the one on Granville Street, and it was just a little wee branch, myself and a girl and another man, and I was supposed to be in there all the time, but most of the time I was downstairs in the tavern, and they were, the girl and the other youngster were running the branch.
And it was one night in there that a party started up in one of the rooms, and I went up. Long, late in the evening, the liquor ran out. Somebody knew a bootlegger. And in the morning, I woke up in the bathtub of the little one-room apartment we had fully closed,
[00:50:00]
and I had something I learned to know of a great deal later. Later, I had that funny little sense of fear. I think all alcoholics know that. A feeling of something terrible is going to happen. You don't know what it is exactly, but you're afraid, a feeling of impending doom, let's say. But I had the answer. There was some beer in the icebox, and by this time, this had become the answer to every problem or anything that might happen in my life.
And I managed to get out of the bath and into the kitchen, and I got the beer. But that feeling of fear kept getting worse and worse, and there was good reason for it. And I had a headache, and that was something that I rarely had. I got awfully sick sometimes, but I didn't very often have a headache. And then all of a sudden, I felt my face all pulled over to one side, my arm and my leg and my side go numb, and a feeling of pins and needles in it.
I was very confused, and I was terrified, and I called my wife, Doris, and I asked her to call a doctor, and she did. And he took a look, and he took a smell, and he was quite right. He said, alcoholic ureitis. You know, these drunks, they drink and drink, and they never eat. And he gave me a shot of some kind of vitamins and some tonic or pills or something to take, and he'll be all right in a couple of days.
Feed him well, and just don't let him drink anymore. Well, I wasn't better in a couple of days. A couple of days, I was delirious, and my wife called the bank doctor, and it turned out that I had had a cerebral hemorrhage, a stroke from whatever it might have been that I was drinking or we were drinking that night. You see, now this wasn't anymore the sowing his wild oats, the boyish pranks or whatever you wanted to call it.
This was getting to be serious business. This was more than people were going to take. And as you can well imagine, the finances were pretty low, and being in a position where I could put checks in the envelope for San Francisco or Montreal or London, England or wherever I might feel I had checks out all over this world, really, wherever we had agents. I had loans at all the loan companies. And as I lay there in bed unable to get up, all of these things started to come in.
I left Vancouver some four months later when I was able to travel in disgrace. I went back to Montreal. I went back on crutches. I don't suppose there was ever a person who felt more bitter, who felt more resentful, who felt more lonely, who felt more hatred of a world who could treat a person like this, who felt that if there was a God, how could he be a loving God? How did he ever do a thing like that to me?
I never did really anybody any harm or so I thought. Those were the feelings I had. And I withdrew again like most alcoholics do. Instead of being the kind of person that loved to be around at parties and do a lot of talking and all this and all that, I withdrew within myself. And I hardly talked to anybody. And I'd just sit and brood, and they gave me a miserable job in the main office in Montreal when I could get there.
I can remember them taking me up to the head office later and saying something which to me describes an alcoholic perfectly. They said, Dave, you have ability, but you have ability without stability. We can't depend on you. And we could do with a lot more stability and a little less ability. I hadn't drunk for those four months because I'd been afraid. They told me that if I drank again that perhaps I would be paralyzed and bedridden for the rest of my life or perhaps I would die.
But you know, I don't really believe that you can scare alcoholics because it wasn't too long. And this is that terrific capacity for self-delusion that we have.
[00:55:04]
Pretty soon I had convinced myself that they were only telling me this to try and make me stop drinking. And it became an obsession with me that nobody was going to make me stop drinking. Drinking was the only thing I had left in this world. Humanity had left me flat. I didn't have a friend. Everybody had let me down. You never look at it the other way, that you'd let everybody else down or I'd let everybody else down.
But that's the way I felt. And one day I was going past one of the old taverns in Montreal that I knew. And I walked in and I sat down and I had a beer. And I didn't become paralyzed and I didn't die. And that just made me begin to think that everybody was against me even more than ever. They'd just been trying to make me stop drinking. And after that, though I could never drink quite as much again, I didn't stop for a long time.
Eventually they gave me one more chance. They sent me up to a branch uptown. I just discarded my crutches and I was walking with a cane. I hadn't learned yet to write with my left hand. You know, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the man, the accountant, who was in there. Because I can remember how terrifically I was hurt when I first walked in there. He said, what are they sending up here now, a bunch of cripples?
And I remember the feeling that welled up inside me. And this is all, I suppose, again, part of that alcoholic personality. I'll show him. I'll show him if it's the very last thing I ever do in all my life, I'll show it. That I can do as well as the next person. And they put me in the third receiving teller's cage. And I can remember the first day I listed down all my checks and deposits and so on on the adding machine because I couldn't do it by hand.
But I spent hours and hours and hours and hours practicing and soon I could make figures that I could read, at least if nobody else could. I didn't last too long there. The branch was right beside the Mount Royal Hotel. And I didn't go too long. And then there was another thing. By this time I think I had the feeling I didn't want to stop drinking. I wanted to find some way that I could drink without hurting myself.
I found a little medallion at home. A little tiny medallion. Brother Andre's from a shrine in Montreal. And we used to live on a street near there. And I must have wanted to stop drinking because I went up to thousands upon thousands upon thousands of steps to talk to this man to see if he could help me. But he couldn't help me. I remember it was about that time that the great idea came that if we only had a child, this was going to be the answer.
There were just the two of us. Maybe what I needed first was more responsibility. A family was the thing. I can remember the night that my son Bill was born. And I don't remember it with pride, believe me. I'd managed by tremendous force of will to keep about that much in a bottle. This was going to be for the night when Dory was going to say it's time to go. So I surely couldn't face that thing without a drink.
And she, the night came. And while I'm fumbling around for the bottle, she telephoned the doctor. And then I had to stop down at the Ritz on the way to the hospital to go in and get a package of cigarettes, and it was late. I didn't come out for a long time, and we barely got up to the hospital. I can remember the shame of the doctor asking me to leave because I was in no condition to be there. I was in no condition to be there.
And you know that strange, hurt feeling alcoholics have? Well, the hell with them. I wouldn't go home at all. I went down and I stayed in the old Ford Hotel.
[01:00:05]
Two or three days later, not shaved, not changed, dirty, messy. You feel, well, I'd better go up and see my son, my wife. No money, of course, but charge up a grandiose bunch of flowers like you see on Dominion Square on Arts This Day. And then there's a picture that Dory remembers better than I do. There's a picture of me walking down the hall looking like that and dragging this great thing of flowers behind.
But there's one picture I remember. And I hope if there's ever a glass in front of me that I have any intention whatsoever of picking up that that is the kind of thing that I'll remember. Not the times when things were good. Not the times when things were good. Because when I got there and I got up this flowers and I gave them to Dory, looked at her, she looked at me, and she burst into tears. Because those are the real and true things about alcoholism, not the delusions which we give ourselves or the tremendous hurts that we do to other people as well as to ourselves.
I could go on really for hours and hours like this of all the things that I've done, the places I've gone, the things that have happened. I can remember going to the psychiatrist the first time I went. I only went because I had to go. Because the bank insisted that I go to see if he couldn't do anything to help me. And I can remember sitting there defiant and resentful. I'm paying him, I don't know how much, I can't remember, but it probably was plenty.
But I am paying him to help me and I'm sitting there with a feeling inside me, I won't tell you anything. You'll never get anything out of me. And, you know, it's just so ridiculous. And then started to turn in and out of the hospital. In and out and in and out. And all this time, of course, I was getting in worse favor with the bank and with my wife. As the years progressed, it got pretty hopeless.
And the day came, that old western hospital in Montreal, and I said to Dory, Dory, I've got to get out of this place alone because she'd always come down to meet me. I've got to be able to say to myself that I can get home from here. A man's not a man if he can't even get home by himself. And I had every intention in my heart and mind and soul that I was going to leave there and I was going to go home and it was a determination.
Before I had gone one block, I had told the taxi driver to stop. I'm just going in to have a couple of beers. And so we started off again for home. But, you know, again, like most alcoholics, it's not the same person that speaks after there's any alcohol in me. It's something else that speaks. There was a few dollars in one of the branches of the bank and I stopped there to get cash a check. And I got just about home.
And I said, turn around and take me down to the Bluebird Club. At two o'clock that morning, I was banging on the hospital door, frightened, terrified, frightened, terrified, knowing that I was powerless over this thing and what could I do? I'm begging them to take me back in. It wasn't too long after that. By this time, I was put on a temporary suspension by the bank and seeing if I could recover from something.
I began to have the hallucinations that alcoholics have. I began to see the things that weren't there and all the various visions. And those fears that I spoke of before had got so bad and so strange that there was a fear of something that was going to happen. I wouldn't take off my clothes all night. I'd sit in a chair and wait. You can imagine what this was doing to my wife.
[01:05:01]
It was driving her frantic. And this was having a reaction on the boy. I had a tremendous friend, a man who tried to help me for years and years and years. He was an Anglican minister. He was a padre in the war and he was the kind of a man who could talk to you. And who did talk to me in no uncertain terms on some occasions, I might say. And one day he appeared up at the house. He said, Dave, nobody can stand this anymore.
Nobody can sleep. Nobody can rest. They never know what's going to happen to you. And for your own safety and for the well-being of your family, we want you to go down and take what is called a voluntary interdiction. You know, at this point, what else was I going to do? Where was I going to go? What was there left? And I did go down. I hope I never forget to my dying day. And this is another thing I hope I remember if there's ever a glass in front of me and I have any intention of picking it up.
Because I can remember standing, that's what they call a family council, standing in front of a judge. All my family behind me. And hearing him read out this big long paper which took away all my civil rights. It made me like a little child and put me in the care and keeping of my sister. But that wasn't the worst of it all because it said why at the end of that. It said because I was a chronic drunkard and a vagabond.
And do you know why that hurt so much? Because it was true and I knew it. And I went down to the Verdun Protestant Hospital for the Insane, it used to be in those days. And I can remember the fear there was attached to this. As soon as I got in there, I wondered if they were going to think that I was the same as these other people. Maybe they'd think I was insane too. You know, I'm very glad of that little term of riscarus, the sanity in the steps.
Little term of riscarus, the sanity in the steps. Because I hate to think of any of the things I ever did. That I did when I was in my right mind. I got out of there, great ideas that I was going to come out here again where the interdiction wasn't valid. And that was going to be the end of it and I'd never see any of them again. Imagine doing that to me, their own brother. But I didn't, because I started drinking again.
Very shortly I was back in again. And then I was out again and then came another one of the old stories. Put him out in the country where he won't have to face the problems of life. Dave can't take responsibility. He's got to go his own easy way and then it's going to be all right. At least it's worth a try. And so I was out in the country. And I didn't drink for a little while. We've got a very old family house there.
Been for hundreds of years in this little village in the eastern township. One day I'm down in the cellar and I don't know why and I saw a bottle up in a beam. And this bottle looked like those pictures you see of the old French castles. With all cobwebs and everything else all hanging down onto the bottle. And I thought boy that's it. And I reached up to look at it. It wasn't exactly what I thought it was.
It was Dr. Somebody's bovine bronchial syrup. But it also said 40% alcohol. So it wasn't too long until there was no more bovine bronchial syrup in the village at all. You know there's some of the things they're kind of funny but I'm really ashamed of them. I have a stepmother who was living there at that time. Years ago she lost a leg. She has an artificial leg and she uses rubbing alcohol on the stump of that leg.
There was a period during that time that she was complaining about the terrible quality of the rubbing alcohol. She was getting blisters and all kinds of things on her leg. I just told her a few years ago that really what she was putting on there was about 90% water. And these are the kind of, you know really that's a despicable thing to do.
[01:10:00]
I went back for the third time to Verdun. After that, the three time loser. I can remember the defiance that was in me for some unknown reason. You don't really have anything to be defiant with. The doctor there, the head doctor was a wonderful man. He'd been terrifically kind to me. And I walked into his room for no reason whatsoever and I said you'll never make me stop drinking. I said you'll never make me stop drinking.
You can keep me here a thousand years and you won't make me stop drinking. But it wasn't too long until these things began revolving around in my mind. Craven kind of cowards that alcoholics are. Finally when I could get to a telephone which you weren't allowed to use, I called Dory and I said you can't do this to me, Dory. You can't put me in a three time loser and have me locked up in the lunatic asylum for the rest of my life.
Remember the good years. There never really were any good years for her. But she, God bless her, did come down. And she got me out. And there's another picture then that I'd like to remember. It's a picture of my wife and myself and our little boy sitting on the other side of a desk from Dr. P.. And the doctor is saying Dave is an alcoholic of a type of whom we've had very little success. There's nothing more that we can do for him.
You'll have to earn the wages or the money for the family. He'll probably have to have custodial care for the rest of his life. It's like a sentence of death, really. And then started two years. Two years when Dory went to live with her sister and went to work in that same bank that I had left. And I went to live where and when and how I could. The bank gave me a very tiny pension which would last me for a few days and then it would be gone.
I learned to drink all of the various kinds of substitutes for alcohol that people can drink. I'm not proud of these things. It's just really I'm telling you to show the terrible compulsion there is in us. I'm telling you to show the terrible compulsion there is in us. I think at that time I was drinking just so that I wouldn't have to look at myself and see what had happened to that young fellow that years before I started out whose father had thought that someday he was going to follow in his footsteps.
That terrible sense of failure and guilt. And then look at yourself and you can't bear to look at it and so you drink, whatever you can but you just don't have to see what you're looking like. And then there were two years of that. And then came a day, a day in 1944, April the 7th I know it was, because it was Good Friday. And I was in the bullpen in number one police station. It was a place that I had been many times before.
I remember that day there was something different. I like to think sometimes we see a lot of Christmas cards with a picture of a spire pointing up to the sky. And this is the finger of God. But I like to think maybe there's another way. Maybe it's a loving God who looks down and instead of the spire pointing up it's God who looks down and says, this poor fellow's had enough. There's something still good left in him.
There is some more chance and I'm going to give it to him. I don't think that I ever felt more alone than I did that day. There was nobody that I could turn to. Nobody that I could ask for help. Who could understand the things that had happened to you and why you did these things to yourself. And the fear that filled you. What was going to happen? Where were you going to end up? And then that's when I think that finger looked down.
I remember that day. I remember that day. Then the last one, I think that finger looked down, I pointed down, I remembered a book, a book that had been given to me, brought up to me, in 1941 by my sister, who lived down in Connecticut, and she had read about it in the Saturday Evening Post, and it was a book called Alcoholics Anonymous, and Gene, my sister, had thought that maybe this would help me, and I
[01:15:15]
remember, and she tells me, that I looked at it, and I threw it on the bed, because it spoke about God, and I remember one particular little phrase it spoke about, it said, Father of Lights, and it seemed to me like some kind of something I didn't want to have anything to do with, I was above all that in those days, and I know it's ridiculous when you think about it, here you are, locked up in a place like that, everybody else who does believe those things is walking around, free, happy, lives full of love, and being useful people, and helping others, but I knew better than they did, but not this time, this time I was ready and willing to do anything whatsoever I had to do, to be able to get out of this mess that I was in, and this is where the part comes in, I think, that I meant at the first when I said, out of defeat comes victory, because I was defeated this time, I got out of there on the Tuesday morning, I got out to my father's place, and I asked him if I could stay there, he said, yes, you can stay here, if you don't drink, I asked him if I could get in touch with these Alcoholics Anonymous people, and he said, what have you got to lose, and I phoned down there, I got in touch with a girl named Bobby, Bobby later became my sponsor, but you know, I thought nobody cared if I lived or if I died, and I thought nobody possibly could understand the things that went around, but these are the people that understand, and now we are the people that understand, because Bobby said just exactly the right thing, she said, I'm an alcoholic too, there are a lot of us down here, and if you want help, we'll help you, and what a tremendous impression that made on me, here were these strange people 500 miles away in another country, and they were willing to help me, and within the next day or two, I got the big book, again, I got some pamphlets, and I got letters, you know that girl, this is the real humanity, the love of one human being for another, I got a letter, day after day after day after day, for nearly a year, and I lived on those letters, I read the book, I read it and read it and re-read it and read it I don't know how many hundreds of times, and then I began to read it like people read those 24 hours a day book, a little piece each day, it wasn't too long that Dory and I got back into Montreal, I can remember the old grandiosity coming back, saying to Dory, well, here we are now, I'm right back on the beam, you can give up your job, and I'm going to take over the running and keeping of the family, but she was a lot more sensible, and still is, a lot more sensible than I was, she said, oh no Dave, you've told me this a thousand times before, I'm going to keep on working, I'm going to keep on working for a year, and you're going on out saving drunks, it seems to do you so much good, and you know really, that's exactly what I was doing in those days, I was out trying to save the world from alcohol and every drunk that I could find everywhere, I had them in the house and I was telling them the story, and all this, and they ate all the food, and they drank all Dory's perfume, and everything they possibly could do, but I stayed sober, maybe it was for the first time in my life, I found out that in giving, we receive, I don't know for what reason it was, but I did,
[01:20:05]
I can remember I learned very early, people used to say this is a matter of life and death, there was a friend of mine who worked in the bank with me, he came up with all this motley crew, and one day he took a drink, and then he went over to his house or the place where his wife lived, the flat, and he blew the top of his head off with a gun, I knew then that they weren't fooling when they talked about this thing being a matter of life and death, and there were several things of that kind, perhaps now I should look to the philosophy, I've talked probably far longer than I should, I always do, we can look to the philosophy just a very tiny bit of it, I'm a great person to pick little pieces out of context and use them for myself, it seems to me that as I take these 12 steps now, after being around for a little while, it seems to me that there are particular phrases in them that mean more to me than anything else and seem to me, and it's my opinion, to be the meat and the substance, there are four little phrases, this came to believe and made a decision, I was entirely ready and humbly asked him, that last little one where it says humbly asked him, I've heard Bill describe that as the step which separated or divided the men from the boys, in AA, I like it another way, I like the way they have it in the end of the chapter called a vision for you, it seems to have all the things that are necessary to make AA work at least for me, it says abandon yourself to God as you understand God, admit your faults to him and to your fellows, clear away the wreckage of the past, give freely of what you find and follow us, you know the rewards of AA, I kissed that same Dory goodbye before I came out here, I kissed my two little AA dividends, there's little Paul, he's 8 and there's Mary, she's 13, they don't know anything about drinking really but they know about AA, I said goodbye to that other little boy that was born back in those bad years and he drove off in his own car and he's got a pretty fair job and he's got a girl and he's going to get married next spring or so he says, but he said that before, I'm very proud of him, we don't have a house where we live, always before I came to AA we just had houses or flats or something, we don't have that anymore and now we have a home, it's a place where love is, you know my father before he died I spent every cent that he had really or he spent it on me, he said you've been a good boy Dave and I'm proud of you, that bank, the bank that I let down so badly and it did so much for me and were so kind so many times, a couple of years ago I was looking over our financial situation and things weren't too good, it was just a little while before Christmas and the postman rang the bell and I went up and opened the door and there was a letter in the long blue envelope of the head office and I thought what have I done now and I opened it, it was from that man who was the general manager that I had been speaking of and it said dear Dave, in view of all the circumstances since you left our active service, we've decided to give you an annual grant of $400 a year for as long as you may live,
[01:25:06]
I suppose to some people that isn't very much money but if it was only 40 cents it isn't a question of money at all, it's what those people think, the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of friends that I have, the feeling that I'm never too far from a tremendous source of strength and that I'm safe and this is the God of my understanding, and this is what it seems to me anyway to give the peace and tranquility if you like to call it that that we find in this AA program, all of these things are tremendous rewards that Alcoholics Anonymous has given me and that's why at the beginning I said that I was glad that I was an alcoholic, there's a little piece that I usually close these things off with, I heard it a long time ago even while I was still drinking I think, it was written by an American poetess named Minnie Louise Haskins, and I first heard it over the radio and I'm sure a great many of you did, it was quoted by the King of England one time in his Christmas message, and now since I've been in AA it seems to me to give the answer to this thing as far as I'm concerned, it says I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown, and he replied, go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God, for that shall be to you better than a light, and safer than a known way, I always thought that that was the end of it, my son as boys do takes great objection to the terrible misquotations and things that I do, make when I'm speaking or talking or everything else, and this Christmas he gave me a copy of Sparkless Quotations, I always thought that that was the end of that little talk, but there's more, and I think really that this is a part that applies mostly to us who've been in AA for a while, it says, so I went forth, and finding the hand of God, trod gladly into the night, and he led me towards the hills, and the breaking of the day in the far east, thank you.