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Source: DICOBE-00082 – Monty S – CETA GLEN CONF – 1974-04-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00082-monty-s-ceta-glen-conf-1974-04-15.mp3 Duration: 01:03:21
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Okay. Marnie, I love Marnie. She is warm and she's honest, and I am looking forward to hearing what she has to say. I cannot wait. Marnie's from California. Hi, everybody. My name's Marnie and I'm an alcoholic. And where do you begin? I have been crying solidly since I have arrived here. They said something would happen to me, too, and it has certainly happened and it's happening. And following such people as Frank last night, who told my story. I don't have a woman's story.
Then this morning my roommate, Bab, told the story of my life drunk and what I had done to my family, and that made me cry. Because I have a daughter that is 30 years old and she's been in Al-Anon for like 12 or 13 years now. She's married to another alcoholic, but he's sober and alcoholic synonymous for 12 years. I am deeply honored to be here. I have never spoken here. In fact, I have only spoken at one convention and I've spoken in front of 2,500 people that were all my enemies that night.
And if you've ever had 5,000 eyeballs looking at you and saying, Hi, Marnie, it psychs you out. Speaking of psyching out, I have been thoroughly brainwashed for this evening's talk. You are very loving people, but you also have a masochistic sense of humor. Or sadistic. They told me Saturday night is the lousiest night to talk because everybody's tired, nobody wants to hear you. They don't dress up, they pay so they want to hear a good speaker, and if you're not good they'll walk out. Oh, and unlike Frank, they told us in the club that day there was going to be rattlesnakes all over the place. We were ready to turn around and go back, but I am deeply honored to be here. I really am.
I want to thank Harris for asking me before I forget it. I get wound up and I forget my manners. And I want to thank Jack and everybody that has anything to do with this conference. I am dressed in this gown this evening not because I am comfortable in it. I assure you that I am not. I like to wear cowboy clothes and jeans, but when my mother found out I was coming down here, she bought the gown for me because she said that she was very, very proud of me.
My mother is 71 now and she cannot believe that I have been sober for 16 years. I can't either, of course. It's a little worse for mom because she was the one that sat by the telephone and waited for the call from the police department or the ambulance. They never knew what the hell was coming over. They never slept very well at night for 19 years. And when I got sober, my whole family got well. I loathed my father. I loathed and loved at the same time. And when I got sober, he got well and he gentled down.
And I remember on my second birthday cake, my dad came to the meeting and we had the big cake there and I didn't think they were coming. I didn't really expect it. But my father got up after the meeting and of course he cried like a baby when I got the damn cake. And he got up and cut the cake and he passed it around to everybody in the meeting. And I don't think I've ever seen anybody's father do that in a meeting. He was like a little boy. I've never seen a grown man so happy because the fact was that dad and I were very close all those years.
Closely fighting, hating and loving and scared all together for about 19 years. So it was only fitting that he should do that. But it was a miracle to me. I mean I was so happy to see daddy doing the thing he was doing that wiped me out.
[00:05:18]
But you know I got a hell of a drunk-a-log. I was a bar drinker. And thank you. Not by choice. I only drank in bars because they wouldn't let me drink at home. I was 14. You're not going to let a 14 year old kid get slopped up in your living room. And I was big for my age and I look older. I've always looked mature in my face. But thank you. Man you do dry up. So instead of a drunk-a-log, which I'll get in there once in a while and give you a shot at it, but what concerns me now is the feelings of an alcoholic and what we did and why we did them and why I did them and what I felt like while I was going through it.
You see I was born in Kansas. I was born in Wichita, Kansas. And I can't believe that I'm so close to my home state here. I really can't. But of course they named me Montana. And I've had to fight for that damn name all my life because of course kids are very cruel and they will make fun of you and so on and so forth. But when I was young my father was a traveling salesman. He set up offices all over the country. So I was in 26 schools before I was in the 6th grade where I moved to Seattle. Now the way I looked as a kid was what I was hung up behind I think. We don't care anymore what the hell the reasons are. I was a premature baby. That may have done it. I don't know.
I only weighed 5 pounds when I was born. Maybe my nerve endings weren't complete. I don't have any idea. Right now it doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference. But to me my first recollection of being a little weird or a little different from my fellow men or my girlfriends was that I was ugly. I had an egg shaped head. They used to call me old egg head. I wore my hair in a Dutch bob shingled up the back. I had granulated eyelids. And if you've ever had granulated you scratch them all the time. They get red and the eyeballs are red. Your eyelashes leave. Everything goes. I was flat chested. I had long legs and knobby knees and big feet like this. My hands were huge. I'm part Indian.
What time? I'm going to be like Frank. Got to watch that clock. So I didn't have friends for any longevity because I moved a lot. I always wanted a girlfriend. I always wanted to be settled down but I never got to do that. So that may have contributed to it too. So when I got, we left Kansas in 1936. I went to Seattle. See I'm already talking Kansas. I've been around you too long here. But I went to Seattle in the 6th grade and the teacher said will the little new girl, which I wasn't little, but she said will the new girl in the back please stand and give us her name. And I stood up with my little beanie on and my homemade coat and my little fur collar which nobody wore in Seattle.
And I said my name is Montana Marshall. And they all chittered. And I became a cowboy. Immediately I became western and the Marshall of Montana and they were shooting guns at me. I beat up three boys at recess on my first day in school. That started the image. And I'm sorry that's the story of my life. But I was always looking. I wanted to get in with the kids and I wasn't very accepted. I was very shy. I was shy around boys. I was shy because my eyes were so lousy looking and I was so, you know, really weird. I had a pimple once a month right here on the end of my nose that would turn green and purple and I would go to school looking like that. I always looked at the floor, never would look you in the face.
So what happened was the personality that I was to become started to develop. I became a comedian. What else for a clown or an ugly clown but to be a funny. So I became very funny and I did Joan Davis things down the hall in school and I was very funny.
[00:10:08]
I was always asked to be in little parties because I was always aghast to be around. But I had no boyfriend. Nobody asked me out. And this was like when I was 14, 13, 14 years old. But I had buddies. I always had buddies. That's the loneliest god damn place you can be is to have all buddies and no lovers. That's me. I was stuck. And I was ashamed of my body. When I was 14 and 15, I was going with girls that had boobies like this and could fix their hair and I was running around like Alice the Goon. When you look that funny, you gotta be funny, you know.
So when I had my first drink, I got into the wrong company. And I had an attraction repulsion from these people. I didn't like anybody that swore. I didn't like people that told dirty stories. And I didn't like people that smoked or drank. I was raised bang, bang, bang. You don't swear at home. You don't say darn because that's slang. My father's German. My mother's Cherokee Indian. So I was raised for the finer things in life. And I really did get some very good training and very good upbringing. I loved beautiful things. I loved beautiful music. I wanted to be a movie actress more than anything else in the world when I was small.
And I used to go to a lot of movies because my home life was screwy. My father was drunk and my mother was stoic. And so I escaped into the world of make-believe where, you know, when you went to see a movie, you got married and the man adored you. And you lived happily ever after. You know, you walk off into the sunset, no fights, no arguments. You paid the bills. You had insurance. You raised your children through a white frock. And you woke up every morning with the make-up on and black.
And I'll tell you, if I wasn't on tape, I'd say something right now. So I was hung up behind these opinions. Now these opinions grew as I grew older. I didn't know that. I used to wake up in the morning with butterflies in my stomach looking forward to the day. And I used to think, what am I going to play today? We're going to play Ranch or Cowboy or we're going to climb trees or play Tarzan or something. But I always had the butterflies. I was always nervous. I was always excitable. I was dramatic. I was funny and I was nervous.
I was different from my brother. My mother used to say, why don't you just say things straight? Why don't you talk normally? Why are you so dramatic? Everything was big. I'd go out and see a dandelion and cry. And I thought that was wrong. When you're living around people that are telling you that's wrong, that's wrong. So my sensitivity, I started to feel guilty because of the sensitivity. I loved when I was young. I wanted to be loved, but I didn't know how to go about it. My folks were very embarrassed to put their arms around me. God wasn't mentioned in the house because we were embarrassed to talk about God.
Dad sent me to Sunday school, but he laid on his back smelling like garlic and booze every Sunday morning. But I had to go to Sunday school. So when I started my first go around, I met a girl who used to lie out on the grass about a block from me and read true story magazines and smoke cigarettes. Now I didn't like her, but there was an attraction there. And so I tried to get in with these kids. So I did. And I went to my first party. When I was 14 years old, I got plastered, absolutely plastered on wine. Incidentally, I never drank wine again as long as I drank. Couldn't stand it. I laid and puked straight up in the bar the next morning. And the floor tilted like this. It was horrifying to me.
Now you would think that I would have stopped right there. But I found something in the booze that let go, that let me go, let me go free. I had big boobies. My eyelashes grew. I was a wonderful dancer. I was sexy and the boys liked me. They weren't boys either. Like me, they weren't boys either, and I started out 14 in an older crowd, which is kind of awful, because I was still playing paper dolls and taking tap dancing lessons when I started to drink.
[00:15:11]
So within a year I was cussing and smoking and drinking, but I wasn't doing that one other thing yet. You see, I wanted to be a good girl. I really wanted to be good, but I didn't know what was to follow, and I didn't know who I was and who I was going to turn into, because every chance I got I got drunk, because I liked it. I liked the feeling. I was loose and free and I could talk, and I didn't care if they were making fun of me, because when you're stoned, who cares? You don't even hear them, and besides, you're doing most of the talking anyway. It didn't matter.
So the mental part of my neuroses, or whatever you want to call it, I'm neurotic, I'm still neurotic, but it started to grow, and I started to build up defenses against the booze. I started making excuses for myself, why I was drinking. I started hiding and coming in, and my dad, the first time I got drunk, my dad beat me all over the walls and tore off all my clothes, and he embarrassed me terribly. I didn't really realize what was happening to me, but I got even with him, I guess, and I'm only knowing this in retrospect.
I drank to hurt the man. I drank to get attention, maybe. I didn't… I had to have attention even if you had to hit me. You had to love me even if you hit me, and this is the way I was raised, this is the only thing I knew about love, is that I had to have something, and I didn't know how to do this. Now, when you start drinking at 14, this is the crucial period when you're supposed to be learning how to get along with other people. This is the age of puberty. Well, I passed, I bypassed that stage, because I could see other children getting along together, having fights, getting back together, making up. I didn't do that.
If a person hurt my feelings, I'd go get smashed. If I got too happy, I couldn't stand that either. I was too nervous to stand that, so I'd get smashed. Then if I got sad, or if my dad was mean to me, I would get drunk, knowing that I was going to get another beating. I got drunk on top of beatings, and I knew I was going to get them, but I couldn't stop it, and I didn't know what was happening. I just didn't.
Now, here's where I stopped growing. I stopped growing emotionally the moment that I took the drink. I know that. At 14, I stopped growing emotionally. I was a very good student. In fact, school was damn boring to me. I was out for fun. You see, the tickles in the stomach, the physical part of my disease is that I get excited in the middle, and I had to have something going on. Well, this thing grew monstrous proportions. It went from little butterflies into great big bats, and it went from just being an obstreperous child into a vicious, sadistic son of a bitch when I got drunk.
All because of what? I don't know, alcoholism, or because I drank too much, or because my mind was going, and because I didn't fit. I've tried so hard to fit out there. I've tried so hard to like women. I've tried so hard to fit in PTA and brownies and all that crap, and I couldn't do it. I just simply couldn't do it. When I got married early, I was pregnant immediately. The one blessing I had along the way of my alcoholism was that I gave birth to a little girl, and I adored her. The only person in my life I ever loved until I came to this program was my daughter, and not even that could stop me from drinking. Not even that, that love that I had for that little child.
It was like a child burying a child, and I could not take care of her. I didn't know how to handle it, and so I lived with my folks during the war and let them take care of her, and I went out and drank on First Avenue in Seattle. Night after night, I've drank with the Fifth Fleet. It seemed to me like all the girls that were my age were talking about something very ridiculous. They always bored me. I was always bored with ordinary conversations. They would talk about writing letters to their husbands overseas and washing those damn diapers, and they mailed a letter off every day overseas, and I thought that was so corny. I was down there having fun with the sailors.
[00:20:04]
I didn't think that was my husband was overseas. I thought they were square. They talked about recipes. They talked about clothing, and I wanted to talk about something important. I was always looking for that nebulous thing about something that I wanted to talk about, and I never found out what it was, so I started drinking in bars, and my talking in bars was very maudlin. My talking in bars started out maybe an hour or two. I was pretty coherent, and then I would start talking about Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, and my great-grandfather was a sheriff of Dodge City for a while under Bat Masterson, and that kind of conversation isn't very important, and then I started lying about myself, and I made up wild stories in the bars.
Just turn everybody on, and then I progressed into a fighting drunk, and I used to carry a knife in my pocket, and then I graduated from a knife into an ice pick, and then if you said, can I buy you a drink, honey, I'd knock you right off the stool, or shall we go? I didn't want to go. When I got in a bar, I never left, and they couldn't get me in a motel. They couldn't do anything with me except fight with me. I had been down in the Garden of Allah in Seattle where the bottles and the war were flying over my head and loving every minute of it, and they were fighting. Big masses of males were fighting, and I jumped right on top of them, and I adored every moment of it.
My degradation was not fighting. It was not fighting with policemen who I loved to fight with and rip off badges and tear off their hats and get beat up myself. It was, that isn't degradation, that's action, you know, that's fun, that's living, man, that's getting out there and getting in it, you know. But in my secret heart where I lived, my degradation was that I broke my own heart. I broke my mother's heart, I broke my father's heart, and I was neglecting my daughter. There was where it lied, because I didn't consider men to be my friends.
Having a father that I had, I was beaten up until I was 29 years old, and I hit him back on my 29th year, and I kicked him in the gut and stepped on him because I had a hangover and I needed a drink, and I died because I hit my own dad. You don't hit your father. Well, anyway, it's a pretty messy story. But the messiest part was that I lost control of who I was and what the world was all about. I have often said that I was never afraid to get drunk, and I wasn't. I knew exactly what I was going to do when I got drunk.
I was going to get drunk, I was going to get beat up, I was going to get in jail, or I was going to come home and then get beat up, plus getting beat up in a bar or something, but that was all planned. It was kind of Russian roulette, but I knew what to expect. The thing that frightened me the most all my life was being sober. I couldn't stand it anymore. After about my 18th year, I was afraid of this world. I was afraid. I was a funny caricature of a woman. I was a funny, comic, insane, sick, lonely person who did not know how to function in this world.
And to give you an example, I went to a PTA meeting one time. One time was enough. They served tea or coffee, I forget which, on little china plates about this big with a little heart-shaped sandwich that you could eat with one bite, right? One bite, and they were all nibbling on these little sandwiches. And they had their little teacups and stuff, and so I picked up the cup and I took a slug of the stuff, and I got my finger caught in the cup, and I spilled all the stuff all over her Persian rugs, and I got so upset that I left the house and I got drunk that afternoon.
This was my attempt to be with other women. I hated them because I was jealous. I hated them because I had to drink. They didn't have to drink. I had to. I used to watch them go into supermarkets, and I'd hide behind the curtain, and I was getting ready to go down to some bar to spend the rest of my day and my night.
[00:25:05]
I have left my child alone for three days at a time in a house with no lights, no heat, and I'd come home at midnight or one or two or three or whatever, and she was huddled up in his chair, and I said, honey, why are you sitting here in the dark? And she said, because I didn't want to turn the lights on. The neighbors might know that you were gone, and I didn't want anybody to know where you were.
That'll kill you. I'm not crazy. I was neurotic. If I'd been crazy, it wouldn't have bothered me. I knew everything I did. I knew every pain that I caused everybody in my life, and when they would say, why don't you quit drinking? You're so nice when you're sober. Why don't you quit drinking? How can you tell your father or your mother, I'm inadequate, Dad? I'm funny looking. I'm not appealing to anybody. I don't know how to go to the grocery store alone when I'm sober. I don't know how to stand in line without getting panicky. I don't know how to go in a bank line without getting scared and running out of it. How can you tell anybody this? So you lock in. I locked in.
Then it was defense time. Then I become a tough broad, and you don't tell me nothing, because I have set opinions. I was hung behind my opinions when I got here. I had opinions about church. I had opinions about men, women, politics, myself, everything, but I didn't have any idea how to get along. I could not function, and I tried. I had a nervous breakdown when I was 24, and I went to a psychiatrist, and they put me away at a place for a week, gave me sodium amytal, and found out all about me, I suppose. I don't remember.
But I stayed in that sanitarium, and after I got out of the sanitarium, I did not leave my house for one solid year. I was afraid out there. I think that my mind was just about ready to go into an unreal world and stay there, and my doctor kept pulling it back in and pulling it back in. I would leave the house once a week in a cab to go to the psychiatrist, and that's it. At the end of the year, when I was about 25, I made it downtown in Seattle by myself on the bus, and it was a nightmare. I loathed being sober. I was afraid. My body was tightening up. My legs were limp. I was dizzy. I was panicky.
If I had to stay sober like that, I'd kill myself. If I had to go through that again, I would kill myself rather than to live like that. I used to get temper tantrums, and I'd act like an ape. I'd jump up on the seat and draw my family around me and tell them how much I hated all of them. And then finally the end came, and I went from Seattle to Fresno, and when I got in Fresno, now I hadn't drank for two years sober, and I was completely insane, completely insane sober.
And I liked what, what's her name, Bob said. She didn't know the pain that her husband was going through, and my family didn't either, and I couldn't tell them. I couldn't tell them that I was a wonderful person and that I loved them. I couldn't tell them because if I had to drink, within one hour, everybody around me just loathed me. So when I got back down, we moved to Fresno, and I'm on my second husband by now, and I'm in Fresno, California, and when I got off the plane, I got drunk on, I started out with a martini, the ladies drink.
Now, I'm a beer drinker. Olympia 3.2, man, and it took me right into Alcoholics Anonymous. So if you think you can't be an Alki on beer, you're crazy, because you most assuredly can. Anyway, I got drunk, and within a week, I was in jail, I was in a straitjacket, and I was being beat up again by policemen, and I was back living normal. They found me, they kicked me out of a store window, a storeway, what the hell they call them, in the doorway of a store building.
I didn't have any underwear on, I'm thinking about Bob. It was completely unnecessary, but it had been shuffled off of me in a fight, I think, that evening, but I had my dress on inside out, my purse was gone, and my shoes were gone, and they took me to jail that night, and they put me in the matron's office, and she said, They put me in the matron's office, and she said, you don't look like you really belong here, she said, we'll just set you in here, and she said, I want to pull up that rip in your dress,
[00:30:03]
so she started pulling the rip in my dress, and I took my hand, I buck-handed her, clear across the, clear across her office, so they marched me into a cell, right, out, and I knocked the girl off on the top cell, and that, you know, that bunk is very precious, you have to have time to get that top bunk, but I got the top bunk that night. Now, I'm no alcoholic synonymous for the first time, about when I was thirty years old, I had met a man, and I was always meeting men, of course, and I was looking for love, I was looking for a friend, or whatever, I was looking for somebody to like me, maybe, I don't know, but I found this man in Smiling Joe's in Pasadena, a raunchy neighborhood you will never find anywhere, but he was an ex-policeman, and he turned bookmaker, and he was out on bail, ready to go to jail, and if there was anybody going to fight him, it was going to be me, of course, but he looked like Paul Newman, and up I went, right, plopped down by him, and we got acquainted, and eventually we got married, but he went to jail, and he found alcoholic synonymous in Cascade up there, and when he got out in six months, I had my little house, I was living in East Pasadena, and that's Skid Row in Pasadena, and it was the wino section, and I had fixed this little house all up, getting ready for him to come home, and I've got to tell you one incident before I go on.
To tell you the story of an alcoholic, now, we used to write letters when he was in jail, and I used to write him poems, because I'm very sensitive, right, and he was very sensitive, he copied a poem out of a book, probably, and wrote it back to me, but I carried this poem until it was threadbare, and crying maudlinly, every time I'd get drunk, I'd cry and read this poem, so one night I was in a circle bar reading this poem to a bartender.
I said, I want you to read this, it's absolutely beautiful, and he goes, oh, bullshit, he's kidding. I said, you all like my poem? And he said, you've got to be kidding, you're nothing but a damn lush, and I shoved that son of a bee right through the back bar, and broke out a whole section of all his nice, pretty, shiny glasses, and I went to jail. But anyway, after this man got out of jail, and he came home, and I had my little house all fixed up, we got in a fight the first night he was home, because we had to drink to celebrate his getting out of jail, and I got into a fight with him, kicked the television set out, and I burnt the inside of the house up, because I fell asleep on a cigarette that night, so the police, the fire department, the county sheriff came out, and they filled my house with water, I was stomping around in water about two feet, and my daughter, I don't know where she was.
You never know where your child is, and after a few drinks, you don't give a damn, and then when you start getting sober, then you're panic stricken, because what have you done with your daughter, where is she? And it's a nightmare, but anyway, he said, you've got to do something about yourself, you know, you're a real mess, and I said, I'm neurotic, I'm different than other women, I'm sorry, if you don't like it, get out.
I said, I'm not going to stop drinking, if that's what you're talking about, because I don't know how to stop drinking, and I'm not going to live soberly, because it's a bummer. So he says, well, I met some people called Alcoholics Anonymous up there, and they seem to be pretty nice, why don't you give them a call? Now, I called him because of this man, get him off my back, because I really was enamored with this man, he was very good looking, didn't want to let go of him, so I went to my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, because two women came over and made the call, I mean, I want to tell you, I loathed them on sight, they were pasty faced, no makeup, no, nothing, you know, little cracked lips, that little holier-than-thou look on the eyeballs, you know, and they said, you never have to be alone again, I've never been alone in 30 years, never, I never even took a bath alone, for God's sake, afraid I might drown, then they quoted the Serenity Prayer to me, and I said, that's so beautiful, and I gave a few tears, you know, because it was lovely,
[00:35:00]
but you see, in my mind, I could do anything if I wanted to, my father raised me to be strong, if I wanted to stop drinking, all I had to do was just stop drinking, I didn't need anybody, any organization, so I was just putting them on, but I went to the meeting, now, a very funny thing happened, I dressed that night, put a dress on, it was full of lint, high heels with a run in them, and stockings with a run in them, and the heels were all run over, and I walked into that meeting sober, I'd been puking all day, but I walked in fairly sober, and I walked into this room full of old fogies, and I looked around, and I felt as uncomfortable as I was when I was 14 years old, as though you had stripped me of all my defenses, and my hands grew and dragged the floor, my feet were this big, they felt like skis, my knees not together, I got stiff, I was frightened, and I said, uh-uh, and I left that meeting, and I got drunk, and I moved to Van Nuys, and I went to a few AA meetings, got drunk, and then we moved to Phoenix, I started running, of course, I've always run, I've been all over the United States drinking, but I went to Phoenix, and I went to the Arab club in Phoenix, and I used the people in Phoenix to take care of me, and you know, they're soft-hearted, alcoholics get gullible after they get sober, they're not looking for the big con, you know, so I borrowed money, and I had guys move me, and a few other things, and one day I got drunk, and I couldn't get sober, and I couldn't get drunk, and I was hung in midair, and I was having hallucinations all over the place, and I have hallucinations like Frank, only I see white lights instead of red, just big, bright white lights, and I saw June bugs all over the dresser drawers, and on top of the dresser drawers, and I thought my neighbors hated me, because they were trying to psych me out with a June bug, and it was real, and I called this woman in alcoholics, and I went to Phoenix, and she says, don't call me anymore, we're not coming out, get lost, Frank said, that's not very nice, so I moved from Phoenix to Cleveland, and I almost got murdered in Cleveland, I had a knife right here, West Virginians are pretty mean back there, but I was saved by a colored man that night, he saved my life, pulled me out of the middle of those men, and I ran, I went back up to Seattle to my psychiatrist, and from there I ran back down to Pasadena, nobody wanted me, my dad wasn't glad to see me, nobody wanted me, so I moved back out to Van Nuys, and I lived in a shack, now by the time I got to Van Nuys, I had nothing left, thank God, if I had had one more dollar, if I had one more pair of earrings, or another cowboy shirt, or another cowboy pair of pants, or my bull whip, I'd have never made the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, with my arrogance, and my ego, and my inferiority complex, all that mass of insanity, I'd have never made it, but I had no pans left, pans, F-P-A-N-S, I had no sheets, pillowcases, nothing, I had a bunch of junk, I'd given away everything, I gave away my clothes, I gave away hot things, I sold them, I left them in storage, every place, so I came in with absolutely nothing, and it was March 7th, 1958, I had married the bookmaker, my daughter was 14 years old, she was asthmatic, she was frightened of me, my husband was frightened of me, my father was afraid of me, my mother was afraid, they were afraid to start anything with me, because I was very, very cruel, but inside, you and I know, I was dying, I was lonely, but I wouldn't let anybody know, because I'd been hurt, I'd been preached to, I'd been talked down to, I'd been treated harshly for my drinking, so, what do you do?
If you have to drink and you can't tell them why, you close in, but I went to my meeting that night, with two women, and by this time, I had no defense left, I was wiped out, my little girl looked at me that morning, and she says, Mom, you look 85 years old, and I was sitting there, I'd been talking to myself the night before, I'm a mumbling drunk, fallen down, puking, staggering mumbler, and I had white stuff pouring out my mouth, my eyes were all filled with gunk, I was fat, I weighed 185 pounds, a beer bloat, I had blonde hair with dark roots,
[00:40:01]
I looked like a truck driver, I couldn't comb my hair, I didn't know how, I just had it cut short and brushed back, and that's it, hadn't taken a bath in days, days, my feet were dirty, I was bruised all over, the night before I had either jumped or been thrown out of a car, I'm not sure which, it doesn't really matter, but these women picked me up, and I sat between them, this one woman said, My God, you stink, and she smelled like Chanel No. 5, you know, she didn't know where I was at, but I'm glad, because I didn't hit her, I didn't do anything to her, I just drove to the meeting, and I was out of it, I had no intellect left, I had no fight left, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, I was tired of being, I was bored with drinking, I was bored with it, I was, What are we going to do today?
We're going to get drunk again, we're going to get in jail again, that kind of thing, but most of all, I walked into that meeting for my daughter, because I never stopped loving my daughter, and I felt so damn sorry for her, living with a person like me, because she had no father really, I was father, mother, everything, and I was the only one she could lean on, and I was gone most of the time, so that's why I came to Alcoholics Normal, and I never thought I would get sober, had no idea, didn't intend to, didn't believe I could, because I'm different, I'm different than you other women, I'm sorry, you know, I'm neurotic, but, you know, if I stop drinking, I'll be alright, I walked into this meeting, and I sat down, and I was shaking, sitting on my hands, and I was dying, and I was talking like a stevedore, and when I get nervous, I talk, and, I sat there, and there was a man on that podium that night, I'm raised on speaker meetings incidentally, that's why I love them so, because I did not get a chance to talk, for a year, I shut my mouth and listened, and I identified, and all of a sudden this blue eyed man, with white hair, he looked like an angel to me, now, why hadn't anyone else looked like that to me, that we know is God, or, I wasn't ready, or, I hadn't finished my drinking, or I didn't believe the good life was for me, good life was for good people, God was for goodness, certainly it had nothing to do with me, but all of a sudden the man started talking, and I got this, stomach going, and I got the butterflies going, and I started coming up, and I'm hearing the music of Alcoholics Anonymous, and all of a sudden I said, that's what I wanted to talk about all my life, they're talking about me, they're talking about my soul, my feelings, this is what I couldn't tell anybody about, this is why I had to lock in, and I cried, and I laughed that night, and I looked around and I saw Guy Frank's eyes, crying like a baby, it's okay to cry, yeah, it's okay to cry, it's okay to laugh, and I was home, I felt at ease there, so, what happened to me was, I went home, I was in love, my first real love affair, was Alcoholics Anonymous, and I fell hard, you know, a bastard like me, when you go, you really go, and I come home and I told my husband, I said, you know, they liked me, they liked me, he said, bullshit, I said, no, I said, that man on the podium was an angel, and they're talking about universal love, they're talking about the kind of love I always dreamed about, he said, they still wear pants just like everybody else, don't they?
I found out, that I had to bypass that opinion, I always got drunk around that man, he always had a tremendous effect on me, but, Alcoholics Anonymous is a very powerful thing, and the name is love, and it, it started to pull me away from, that nasty thinking that I had around that man, and I used to get my inventory played back nightly by him, because, like, god damn it, Babs, like Babs explained, you know, when they lose their drinking partner, they start trying to fight you out, and I was getting the full treatment, and he was stepping out on me, going out with other women, and I was, I would get dressed all up every Wednesday night, and go to the AA meeting, he'd get all dressed up and go out with the girls, now that's a, I get all dressed up and go out with the girls.
Now that's a hard way to go for a woman newcomer because we are so dependent on those men.
[00:45:00]
But I transferred that love to the Alcoholics Anonymous group and really my hatred of men paid off because I was not interested in the men in the meeting. I did not go to Alcoholics Anonymous to find a man. I went there because I fell in love with the feelings in the room. I fell in love with the thought that maybe I might become somebody. I fell in love with the respect that I had for my elders in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I was insane for three years. I was so happy I was nuts. I was smiling at strangers on the street. I couldn't believe that I was not drinking. And I said, they said, it's a disease. You weren't a moral leper. You had a damn disease. Would you have done that if you'd been sober? Would you have left your daughter in a hotel room at one year old with nobody to take care of her, lock her in, if you'd been sober?
No. So I owed plenty. I owed plenty. I went home and I'm like Frank. I got down and I said, dear God, if there is a God, please remove this obsession to drink because I got one that if I had one right now, I'd walk right through your body to get a drink. And I haven't had an obsession since 1958. I haven't had a drink of anything or a pill since 1958. And that is a miracle. There is no other way. There was a miracle handed to me free.
Not all that free, but free by you because I walked into a dumb little room with a bunch of nuts and I heard the music I'd always wanted to hear. I heard the songs and the sounds of the Spirit. The spiritual unrest, I think that's what Chuck talks about. That's what was wrong with me. I didn't know that. I didn't know that I was ill at ease because I had no letter to guide me. I had nothing to hang on to.
I didn't know all those things, but I've learned them in 16 years and the things that have happened to me are phenomenal. I have screwed up in AA, I'll tell you. I've done everything wrong in Alcoholics Anonymous but drink. And that's the only requirement, I guess. But of my love, you see, I've had an overpowering gratitude for being sober. And I want to tell you about my daughter. It's going to be hard.
She was very thin and sickly when I got sober. She was afraid of me. And right after I got sober, she was running with a bunch of kids I didn't approve of, right? Now I'm trying to tell her to stay away from those people because they're not good for her and here I'm drinking my beer at the same time. I had good intentions, but I couldn't do it. So when I got sober, my father bought her a saxophone and she started to play the sax.
And within one year, she was playing first chair in her school. And another year, she was playing first chair in a Sepulveda youth band of a hundred kids. And she led the section of seven saxes and I became a band mother. And I was in love with life, you understand. And I still am, actually. One of the main ingredients that I think you have to have is a great curiosity about life. And if you've been dead for 19 years, and if you don't have it, you must be still dead.
Because I never knew what grass or trees or anything. Sunshine? I was a mole. I lived in a bar for 19 years. And when I came out of that shell, man, I was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I just gathered up everybody. It was absolutely marvelous. But the daughter I would take every Monday to her music class. And to show you the difference between me and an ordinary woman, which I always wondered what the hell it was, but they would sit and they'd watch their watch, you know, and they'd hear these kids practicing their music.
And they'd say, oh, hurry up and get through with this. I got to get home to the husband or… God, every Monday we got to come down here. It takes so much time out of my schedule, you know. And I'm down there with my nose pressed up against the glass, and I'm listening to a big black boy up there playing a trumpet with that vein coming out in his face. And he's going like this. And I'm looking at my daughter playing a sax down like this, and I'm crying like a baby.
The drum is going right through my heart. The sax is tearing me to pieces. Everything is ripping me to pieces. And I turn around and say, isn't it beautiful?
[00:50:00]
And they look at you like, really? And I got home one night and I got thinking about that, and I thought, that's what I wanted to be? I am different. I am not mundane. I am not a bolding woman. I am sensitive. I am too sensitive. I'm too dramatic. And so be it. Because when I enjoy something, it's right to the hilt. When I'm in pain, I die a thousand deaths. I'm extremely dramatic about my depression.
But when I'm happy, there is no stopping me. And when I'm happy, you've all got to be happy, or I'm not happy at all. But I found out that I didn't care if they saw me cry. I didn't care if they saw that sensitivity and the feelings pouring out of me. I didn't care anymore, because I had you back of me. I had you back of me. Thank God for Alcoholics Anonymous, because if it wasn't for you, I would be in a madhouse by now, because I could not accept the fact that I was sensitive and I felt and I wanted to love so bad I was dying.
And I had such a wall. And Alcoholics Anonymous, one day at a time, tipped away at that wall, tipped away, and finally I became vulnerable. And I was first vulnerable to my daughter, of course, because I loved her. I have never broken a promise since I've been sober to my daughter. Then one night, she was playing in a father-son banquet. I'm the only woman that ever attended a father-son banquet. Anyway, she was playing first lead solo sax for this combo, a boys' combo.
And she has long, flowing blonde hair and the gold sax. And I had made her, which is very mundane to make a dress, but I made her a little eyelet, white eyelet dress for this occasion. And so Mother, who is me, I'm running around the school ground. It was over at the school, tiptoeing around, me and the janitor, he's cleaning up the trash. And I got an old rag around my head with curlers, no makeup, jeans, shirts, all this.
And I'm sneaking around just so I can get a listen to this girl because I know she's going to do Peter Gunn that night. And that's a wild sax solo. And also, she did a strip thing. I forget the name of it. But anyway, I heard Peter Gunn playing and I was standing right by the door. And all of a sudden, some son of a bitch had to go to the bathroom, I guess, and he opened the doors and they stuck. And here's the old lady standing right here in the doorway, like this, smoking a cigarette, listen.
And my daughter is up there playing Peter Gunn, you know, like this. And she saw me standing over at the door on her right. And she was facing the front. And all of a sudden, she just turned around and she's playing Peter Gunn right to her dirty old mother. That's quite a tribute for a drunk, right? Well, there are thousands of those happening. It was magic living with my daughter. Magic. She got married when I was five.
I hated that, of course. I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready for her to get married. I didn't want to lose her. Especially to a damned alcoholic. I had done enough to her, you know. Lord knows what he was going to do to her. And then there was other things that happened, like my father. My father and I became very good friends. Now, really, I'm not supposed to ever be able to have a relationship with a man because of the relationship between my father and I.
My father was very cruel to me, you might say. But today, I understand it completely. I understand him very, very thoroughly. And I did the moment I got sober. And Daddy and I became just like this. That was another fringe benefit. We opened our own paint business together, out in Chatsworth, and we ran it for five years together. He dropped dead eight years ago of a massive heart attack, and he was gone just like that.
I did not drink. I did not think about drinking. I did not want to drink. I wanted to kill somebody, but I didn't drink. I didn't know whether I really wanted to live or not, but I made it through. And the way I made it through was that I picked up a newcomer, and I talked to AA when I didn't believe it anymore. I lost my contact with God. I had believed so thoroughly in God before that, and my dad was taken away.
[00:55:00]
I forgot all about God. I hated him for removing my father from… I hated the thought that God had more power than me. You know, I wanted my dad to live for a hundred years. And I talked to this newcomer when I didn't believe in AA myself. I wrote, AA is marvelous. Come in one day at a time. And God damn it, if you have any problems, don't run away from Alcoholics Anonymous. Stay there and face your problems.
Make amends to that family that you hurt. If you lose your wife, don't get drunk. If you lose your husband, don't get drunk. Then you look back and say, God, I made it through that. You make it through one bump, and you'll say, gee, it worked. The program actually worked. I didn't get drunk. It might be a broken coat hanger, but you didn't get drunk. It might be losing a car or a house, but you didn't get drunk.
And all of a sudden I was… I didn't pitch either for a while there. I said, I cannot tell people how to be happy and live if I want to die, so I didn't pitch for about seven months. And I went to a sanitarium one day, and I was talking up on this podium. And my now husband was sitting there with me. Incidentally, the bookmaker ran away after I got sober a year. You ought to see him now. He looks horrible.
Absolutely horrible. I'm getting younger. He's getting older. I wouldn't have a thing to do with him anyway. I said, what the hell was I talking about? I lost it. It's a complete train of thought. Whenever I get on that… Oh, that's right. So I was at Glendale talking to these poor, poor unfortunate people that I was going to save that morning. And I stood up there and I started to talk about Alcoholics Anonymous for the first time since my father had passed away.
And all of a sudden I felt my father's presence. And I saw that big grin. And I looked down at this man I was with that was to become my husband. And I said, Dale, I said, he's here, man. There's no problem. He's right with me. I'm never going to lose him. And the people that were listening to me thought I was a little batty. But you see, you give a talk for yourself. You don't give a talk… You're not going to save anybody.
You're just giving… I saved my life up there that day on that podium. So I've been telling everybody I've lived ever since, but… Now I have two grandchildren. One's five and one's eight. They don't ever have to see their grandmother drunk if I stay sober. They think I'm a hell of a person. They just love the hell out of me. And they'll never see me staggering down East Pasadena with my head down.
They'll never see me in a bar with guys flipping coins for me to see who was going to get me that night. And you know, I'm still in awe of this because I don't know what the hell I'm doing up here in lace gown even because it is not logical. Nothing we do here at Alcoholics Anonymous is logical. It's all nebulous. It's all feelings. It's all sensations. It's all… It's all sensitivity. And we all identify.
And if there's anybody here hating themselves for being sensitive, for heaven's sake, it's your best asset. Everything you thought you drank for, use it. You can use it now to the best advantage. I'm dramatic. And I've never had anybody in Alcoholics Anonymous make fun of that. And I got put down all my life for it. My name is Montana and people in Alcoholics Anonymous say it's pretty. They don't make fun of it.
And if I cry on a podium, they don't say I'm weak. If men cry on a podium, they're not weak. They're not John Wayne's at all. They're just real human beings. And we're all just growing up together. And I could talk for three more hours. I'm like Frank. I wondered how in hell I was going to get up here and how I don't want to get down, but… Right now, I'm… I'm in acting. I've done it for two years.
And I've been in a workshop for about six months now. And I'm knocking the ass out of all of them. And I'm almost 50 years old. And I did an alcoholic scene the other day with a cold reading on a script. And you have to act as you're reading. And it's very hard. You're not memorizing it. You're reading it. But it was a woman who was on a hangover. My director looks at my husband and says, where did she come from?
[01:00:00]
So I finally told him where I came from. And when I came to this conference, the class, talk about love in AA, there's love outside of AA too, and I'm beginning to find that now. And Bill was so happy, and my director just blew my anonymity. He's a very outgoing son of a bitch, he's fantastic. And he says, honey, how long have you been sober now? I said 15, 15, I said 16 years. And the whole class clapped for me, which you don't expect from normal neurotics, you know.
So he gets to go to Texas to talk at a conference with other alcoholics, and they clapped again. And so you know what he made me do? He made me walk across the stage drunk. And he put me on a real spot, because how do you act drunk when you've been a drunk? And it was not funny, it was not funny. He expected a staggering, laughing, ho-ho drunk, and he got a real one. And he didn't know quite how to handle that.
But what I'm really trying to say, I'm not really trying to brag, although I know I am, I'm a hell of a good actress. I worked for this space, man. I've been stepped on and spit out all my life, and I got a hell of a face for an actress. But anyway, what I'm really trying to say is I could have never done it. It's a lifelong childhood dream. If I never get on TV or never in a motion picture, I don't give a damn.
The fact is that I'm up there exposing myself in a motion picture acting school, and you gave me the discipline and the strength and the courage and the ability to let it all hang out and just be me. And I thank you for listening. Thank you. Just remain standing. Let's join hands and close with the praying the Lord's Prayer together. And there will be snacks after the meeting where we were last night.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. Beautiful.