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Source: DICOBE-00093 – Sandy B – 11TH MASSACHUSETTS CONV – 1974-01-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00093-sandy-b-11th-massachusetts-conv-1974-01-15.mp3 Duration: 01:12:22
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Hello. We're very unique people. I'm an alcoholic, and that's enough said for me. Tonight, we have a fellow to speak to us today, who I've met today, and I think a number of you have met him, and I think we're going to enjoy him very, very much. So, without further ado, I'd just like to introduce our speaker for the evening, Sandy Duke. Sandy, want to take over, please? Okay, thank you. Good evening. My name is Sandy B., and I'm an alcoholic, and I'm very, very delighted that you asked me to come up here for this weekend. I've had a marvelous time, and I know I'm going to continue to have a marvelous time.
I hope that out here tonight are some people who are at their first convention type of weekend, some people who are new to the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, because even though I've been around a few years, I still don't feel qualified to talk to anybody except somebody new. And I do this for great psychological reasons on my part, because it makes me feel comfortable to talk to somebody new, because I make one assumption when I do that, and that is that I know more than you do about you, which may seem presumptuous on my part, but I really don't think it is, based on my past experience with people in the program who, for years, knew more about me than I did.
I've been in AA almost ten years, just another month, and haven't been drunk since my first meeting back in 1964, and I've attended a lot of closed meetings, a lot of open meetings, done a lot of listening, and I'm convinced deep in my heart that the reason I haven't been drunk is because I haven't been doing any drinking during this period of time. That came across very loud and clear in my basic training in Alcoholics Anonymous, that the not-drinking part of the program is a very vital and lively part.
It contributes greatly to the working of the staff, to showing up at meetings, and as my sponsor put it, to staying alive so that you can appreciate the great benefits of Alcoholics Anonymous. So I hate to, a lot of times, I forget to mention the not-drinking part, and people go away wondering if that's how I stay sober, and I like to mention it, get it out of the way. Sometimes it gets slighted. I realize that's not all there is, as I think Milton pointed out this afternoon, that not drinking is not, you know, the whole game.
And I've thought about that, and I realize that's absolutely true, in my opinion, and of course anything I say is just my opinion, that not drinking is sort of the same as breathing is to living. It's not all there is to life, and if life consisted only of breathing, I might choose to stop breathing, because it would be kind of boring. In the same way, if life consisted of just not drinking, then I might quit that too, but both of them are absolutely essential functions in order to have all of the rest of the AA program work.
As a great friend of mine, sort of a lawyer from the Washington area, says, he was asked one night, what's the best way to work the steps, and I'll never forget, he says, when all else fails, don't drink. And I seem to relate to that very well, because I have days when the serenity prayer upsets me, and when you have a day like that, you're not going to go forward. But the secret is you don't want to go backwards, and so that's when you go back to the basics, and you just don't drink that day.
You don't get anything else done, but you wake up the next day and you wonder what the hell you were so upset about. So I like to get that out of the way. I realize that by bringing that particular subject up, if somebody is brand new to AA, I may have made you into a nervous wreck right now, because I remember being new in AA, and I liked hearing about various aspects of the program, but when they mentioned not drinking, I didn't like that at all.
[00:05:17]
I liked it, but my body didn't like it. I'd only been sober about six hours when I attended my first meeting, and that was by default. I didn't want to be there. It was a terrible situation, and when I heard about not drinking, my body was just sitting there, and all it wanted to do was drink. It was sitting there timing the seconds until we got out of there so that I could take care of the problem that I had, which was a separation of the nerves and the body and the muscles that was going on, and this was a very important matter that had to be solved, and Step 11 wasn't going to do anything about that.
Well, I had a chemical problem, and I knew what the answer was, and I wanted to get the hell out of there, so I heard those people talking about not drinking. It was very uncomfortable to hear about that, so if you are new, just relax. It's going to be bad for a while. There's no way to get through the first month in a comfortable fashion, but it is the critical period, and that's what I like to talk about.
It is that critical period when we are evaluating whether or not we belong in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I call that, for lack of a better name, I'm always making up little labels. When I was in that condition, I called myself a temporary member of Alcoholics Anonymous, which meant that I was here until I figured out what the problem was, and then I was leaving, because I was a great believer, as Father Hickey pointed out, that we are self-sufficient, and that was the great American philosophy, and I believe that I was talked at by somebody, and I like to find them, but that philosophy almost killed me and quite a few other people, but I had that, so I figured I'm here under duress.
It wasn't my idea to be here at the meeting and all that, so I relate to that temporary feeling, but it is the most critical period in your life. If you are in that moment when you are going to meetings and you're not drinking, and you've been told to come to a lot of meetings and then make your mind up, that means you're approaching that critical day when you are going to make your mind up about yourself, and that I remember so well, the temporary stage, that going to the meetings almost like a penance, just got to get this over with, and I didn't want to be there in that horrible feeling, and as a temporary member, there were certain procedures that I developed, because since I was not going to be around here long, one of the things I wasn't going to do was listen, because that would be a total waste of time, and I would do things to kill the hour, such as count the audience, that was one thing I would do, and being a college graduate, I wouldn't just go into the room like that.
I would take the number of rows and count them, and then I would count the number of people in each row, and then I would just multiply the two, and then I would know how many people were there, and if you remember when you were brand new, and you were multiplying 17 times 19, you would take the whole hour to do your estimate on the number of people in each row. The estimate on the number, because that brain just wasn't working with those numbers, I remember up in the nut ward, one of the things the psychiatrist did the first week I was in there was come around and say, how about counting backwards from 100 by 7?
And I can remember going, oh, right, 93, and he stood there, and I broke out in a sweat, and he said he'd be back tomorrow, and then he came back tomorrow, and I said, I had it, but I forgot what it was.
[00:10:06]
So that brain really was not functioning too well, and it does take a while to get working, so if you're in this great temporary stage, please stay with your sponsors, stay with your group, give yourself the most precious gift that a new person can give himself, and that is time. Give yourself another day. Every day it seems like you're not going to be able to wait, just wait another day, another day, another day, and then you'll start seeing what AA has to offer for you, your body will calm down long enough for you to see what's going on, to hear what's going on, to relate to what's going on, and then you'll get what you are entitled to, which is all of the wonderful benefits of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Best customer, I guess, when you're telling your story, talk a little bit about how it was, how you got into AA, what it's like since you've been in, but you know, it's a funny thing, every time I do that, I always end up with no time to talk about what happened after I got into AA, because I get talking about what was going on when I was drinking, and a lot of it is that I'm hearing it for the first time.
Things are coming back to me that go, wow, I forgot all about that, and I'm up here listening, and all of a sudden the time is all up, and then I say, well, I certainly enjoyed being in AA. The theme of your conference really attracted me and reached me as I sat out there this afternoon and saw it written up there, and it does pertain to me, it's extremely timely that it should be that, and I'd like to touch on that a little bit, and then I'll make sure that I do get to talk about it, because I am very, very interested in it.
I, as you will hear, I did most of my drinking in the Marine Corps as a pilot, and then I got flown out after I got locked up in the nut ward and so on down, this was back before we had a good alcoholism program in the military, and I just, you know, was out, and I had about eight miles to feed, and I had this rather urgent need for money, and since I wasn't getting it from Uncle Sam anymore, I went into where I thought I could get the fastest money, which was in real estate, and I've been in real estate for, oh, I guess six or so years, seven years I guess now, and I like it, but I don't like it.
And somewhere, oh, I guess the first five years I was in AA, I was probably one of the, I would love to, if there was ever any tapes made of talks I might have given little anniversaries five years ago, I'd love to destroy them, because I've so changed my mind, and of course that's one of our prerogatives in AA is to change our opinions, you know, we don't have to stick with convictions. It's not a coincidence that conviction has two meanings. It's just not a coincidence at all. I think you are really stuck when you have a conviction. You are stuck with a closed mind, and that's a dangerous situation as an alcoholic, to have a closed mind on any subject, but I was a great advocate of standing up here and just going AA's the only answer, and I had a frustrated desire to be a stand-up comedian anyway, and I had eleven doctor jokes that are one-liners, and I've seen, you know, the psychiatry, and seen their whole medical profession, and really went after them and said I would only go there after I was dead.
That was my thing. They could do an autopsy because they really couldn't mess that up. But as time went along I realized, you know, what am I doing? I'm dealing from total ignorance, and I guess it's sort of a great personality change started in the last couple of years when I found myself treading more into an area that was forbidden by my mind, which was a question that begins with the word, why, and you know, I had a sponsor that told me never ask that question, which may be true in the beginning, but eventually your curiosity gets the best of you, and you start asking that question, and I started reading a pamphlet like Members' Eye View of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I'm sure that the man who wrote that pamphlet would be absolutely ecstatic at the theme of this conference, and I suggest everyone here go home and re-read that pamphlet of Members' Eye View of Alcoholics Anonymous because he had a great deal to say.
of Alcoholics Anonymous because he had a great deal of foresight, that was his great contention
[00:15:04]
that Alcoholics Anonymous had perhaps sailed off into a few areas that they could reconsider, and it was, his great dreams were such things as, let's take another look at the word earth person. I love the word earth person, or civilian or whatever, it made me feel important when I first came in AA, it gave me great identity, but it just wasn't true, and his dream in Alcoholics Anonymous was that it's only half fulfilled here in the program, in that after a number of years of learning to love one another and to relate to other human beings and accept help, there finally comes a day when we can be seated in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and be totally unaware of whether the person in front of us to our left or right is a man or a woman or black or white or old or young or of the same religious persuasion as we are or not, totally ignorant, all we know is we're sitting next to another alcoholic whom we love and is a member of AA and the author's dream in his pamphlet is that there come a day when we grow enough to be sitting in the outside world totally unaware of whether the person next to us is a man or a woman or black or white or old or young or non AA or NAA and then we will have finally come full circle in learning what love is all about, and it's a wonderful message in there and this point was being instigated a good ten years ago and it seems to be reaching fruition now we've got a great deal to say about the professional people and how we were making love, a few needles here and there that maybe weren't necessary, criticized the expression, utilize don't analyze, which I was a great advocate of by pointing out that the person who thought that up did a great deal of analyzing to come up with the sentence and so I found I had to eat a little crow on that one, you know, and it's not a pamphlet that you read with great comfort it's one that is quite distressing inside, you feel your blood pressure coming up a little bit and you sit there going, well it's always been this way, what the hell are they trying to do?
this is going to mess everything up, anyway I did get swept up in this reconsideration of my position and being an alcoholic I naturally went overboard in the opposite direction and I found thoughts coming into my head like, well if we in AA don't take the initiative to bridge the gap between us and the professionals we're going to wait for them to bridge the gap coming towards us, what the hell kind of a deal is that?
the guy who makes the first move is going to be the one in a better position and I got thoughts that crossed through my mind whenever I heard the first two or three pages of chapter 5 read about the 25% that are psychologically incapable of being honest with themselves what about those people? why couldn't cooperation of AA and the professionals make a big dent in getting them? what are they being written off for? all these thoughts were coming through my mind that there was a great necessity to start this overlapping of help and so lo and behold I found myself, of all things, now enrolled in George Washington University with my goal of becoming a clinical psychologist and I'll tell you this is a hell of an undertaking that I've started but I really feel delighted that I'm moving in that direction and the courses I've had for about a year I have studied with one point in view and this is the last thing I'm going to mention on this and that was I said I'm going to read every book that I'm given on psychoanalysis and psychology and all the personality theories with one criteria I'm going to try and find an area where it disagrees with the big book and I'm a great student of the big book I love to read it and cross reference it and study it and study it I have yet to find one area of dissonance I have yet to find one significant thing I stand up here and go ha ha look at these guys they really are so far off base it's ridiculous and I have not found that yet which says a great deal about the miraculous wisdom of that big book it's just incredible how that could all have come together as it did
[00:20:03]
and it reinforces my belief that that had to be something on the order of a miracle I mean if there's anything that was a miracle it was the assembly of all of those steps in that book at the end of the year by a hundred drinks you know what I mean well they put this whole thing together that never needs changing and seems to be so universal and so applicable to every type of person I think it's fantastic so I'm so happy to be here and share in this great theme of your convention I started drinking through my mouth ha ha and uh and I've analyzed why I started drinking I love to I'm an analyst now right um I was a natural born follower as a little kid and greatly influenced by my peer group you know and they would say hey we're going to start smoking and I would say oh I don't know if I want to do that and they'd say yes you do and I'd go yeah that's right I was just thinking about that I really I really want to smoke and then uh and then I'd go home you remember all the coughing and that and practice out behind the barn or somewhere until you could smoke and then you'd go and be around just showing off you know and they'd say well we're going to wear crew cuts and I'd go oh that's terrible to not have a crew cut wide tie little tie whatever you know um and I used to think that was being an individual I don't know where I am somehow that's all tied in um I'm very happy that I'm an alcoholic and I'm really mean that I'm happy I'm an alcoholic because in my opinion I wasn't going anywhere before I started drinking um I now a lot of people get up here and tell you about what alcohol took away from them and they had life going and this and that and uh you know I don't see that that's just not the way it was with me I had um I had a few personality problems I like to try and blame my alcoholism on things you know what the hell um it doesn't do any harm I mean you know I still have to not drink and so it's all the same the same thing so I blame it on my neighborhood um I blame it on my friends I blame it on my family and most of all I blame it on the Catholic Church which is um they're big they can stand uh ha ha ha they can stand a little bit more blame I got it um and what we have you know whenever you have communication you have a transmitter and then you have a receiver and as I look back on it it wasn't the church it was the receiver was broken up here uh if I can remember all the little boys you know however the heck old we were sitting there in the third pew and the nun with the finger and um I swear they had flips and everything back then uh I wasn't comfortable up there um I had a lot of insecurity about the world and was sort of a nervous little skinny kid and uh went in there and found out about original sins and uh and that scared the hell out of me and I found everything that I heard about you know was frightening, frightening, frightening and I was greatly fear oriented and I really got to um an earful in the first few years and took it all personally you know I can just see it now there was probably 50 little boys sitting up there the rest of them were playing with yo-yos and you know messing around, itchy, waiting to get out of there and then there was me with those big eyes just going oh I don't want to hear anymore about that oh oh I was an absolute nervous wreck and um I kept making great mental notes of all the various classifications of the sins and uh what was entailed with them and uh I
[00:25:00]
I know that I would spend some nights not being able to sleep at around age 8 or 9 because I realized that according to my calculations I had 65,000 years of doing purgatory on uh on uh on stuff I had just thought about doing I don't know I haven't even done it yet and so what I'm trying to get across is that I was um I was very uncomfortable thinking about God because uh God was the person who was going to pass judgment on me and I already knew what the judgment was going to be and I was walking around trying to pretend to all the other people that I was alright and uh whenever I'd hear words like and then someday you'll meet God I would go oh no I don't I don't want to do that let's hold off on that I'm going to try and straighten my life out and do that so I relate so well to the guilt that Father Hickey talked about and the tremendous impact that it had on me so what we had here was a teeny little nervous kid from a nice conservative New England family and I thought my basic mission in being brought up and sent to a nice private school was to be a snob and I figured that was basically it and it's very difficult to be the snob at the same time that I had all these years to do in the future it was a tremendous conflict there and so somewhere along I made it through the teenage years and got into the university in my hometown in New Haven and I was there with all these sophisticated people from around the country and they said geez we notice you don't drink and why don't you join us oh no no no that's not for me I'm not going to get involved in that and then after a few months the pressure of the peer group was so great on me that it made no sense to hold off any longer and I attended a function where people were there maybe 50 people all dressed up in suits and it was a very nice cocktail party type of affair and I had my normal feeling when I walked in there this was my world I walked in the room and I felt immediately that all people looked at me and were saying what's he doing here I mean that was that was my feeling I had the feeling that a person could come up to me on the sidewalk and go that's my spot oh you know I wasn't too secure sort of a bad self image nervous little guy wandering around but pretending that everything was alright so I entered this room and I had my first drink of alcohol and it had no effect on me as a person whatsoever but it had a fantastic effect on the rest of the people in that room I personally felt no change but I saw a fantastic change sweep over the room the hostility disappeared from everyone's eyes and it was replaced by a look of warmth and genuine concern and another drink and the room suddenly radiated a great warmth and people wanted me to talk to them they wanted me to be included in their world and there was a great sense of peace of mind and the first time I really remember being at peace with myself and with my fellow human beings and with God and with the universe and the whole thing it was a changing of my world that's what the chemical did and I'd only been drinking for about 15 minutes and I mean my God it was just a fantastic event this was tremendously significant what this alcohol did to me and my whole world it was monumental
[00:30:22]
and the throwing up went on all night, and the sickness, and the room spinning, and so on, and then I was in class the next day, in a large auditorium, and I like to talk about this first day of drinking, because this was so, so significant, everything seemed to be established that day, I am what they call a primary alcoholic, you know, I crossed the line, I drank socially 5-10 minutes, like I mentioned, and then, phew, I was into the, into the alcoholic drinking, and my story doesn't have any control drinking, or I drank socially for so many years, it all happened in one day, in my opinion, I was an alcoholic waiting to happen, the only thing missing was the booze, and then, bang, it was in, and I was on my way, and it was never did I drink successfully, the day was spent recovering, with the hangover, and the terrible allergic reaction to my first contact with the chemical alcohol, and I spent the day sitting in the classroom, the temperature seemed to go up to 120, and down to minus 50, I was sweating, I had chills, my skin was itching, I didn't know what I was feeling, it lasted all day long, 5-30, the guys are back, and they go, Sandy, we're going to go out, we're going to drink again, just like last night, what do you say?
And I can remember my body said, no, don't go with them, forget it, I'm divided mentally and physically, and I have conversations with my body and brain, so if this seems absurd, well, you'll have to bear with me, but that's the way I remember it, and I can remember at that particular moment in time, my brain was in charge of the package deal, and it said to the body, just a minute now, let's not make a snap decision on whether we're going to, whether we're going to drink or not, let's take back here, and we're going to get a little intellectual thinking behind this decision, it's not going to be a physical decision, and we sat back and objectively look at the situation, and whenever an alcoholic says, and we sat back and objectively look at the situation, we're in for a snow job, and I sat back and I came up with the following assessment of the situation, it said, yeah, we had a small little blowing up last night, Sandy felt a little ill today, but when you really look at it, that is a small price indeed for the hour that you had last night, and that was the basic lie that I told until I got into AA, and I think if there's a basic lie or rationalization that alcoholists tell, it has to be close to that one, that one right there, where you say, getting locked up for a week and losing the job really was a small price to pay for the weekend in Tijuana, you know, those things, and how those scales balance, you never know, you can always get another family, but how can you be sure of having a good time, and this type of rationalization just was there the first day, I mean, I was ready to go now, it didn't matter what I did for the rest of my life, I had the pattern set right there, and whatever I chose to do was incidental, it's like background music to talk about what I did to earn money and so on, that stuff is like violin music, the real action is going inside the alcoholic's head when he's making all these decisions and these weird thought processes justifying the continued pouring in of the chemical alcohol, and so there it was in the initial day, I'm justifying, rationalizing the one hour against the sickness that I had, and as the disease progressed year after year, and it progresses just like the aging process a day at a time, you can't see it happening, you don't look any older the next day than you did yesterday, and you don't look any more alcoholic than you did the day before, it's an imperceptible little change, it's so sneaky the way it's coming in and getting us from all directions, and taking over our entire being until it has absolute control, and this was what was happening, I mean, that's the real alcoholic story, and then the rest of it is kind of makes it sort of public interest or whatever you want to call it, well, what did you do during the movie to keep this thing going, and then you tell, well, I was the bank president, you know, I was this,
[00:35:04]
and whatever the speaker's story is, that's sort of his hobby, you know, I don't care what the hell you were, school teacher, the principal, the mayor of the town, that was your hobby being the mayor of the town, being an alcoholic was your full-time job, because a hobby gets about two hours a day of your attention, and that's about what we're able to give through this great thing we call our career or whatever other ridiculous name, we choose to give that, but as the years went along, the hour got shorter, you know, just a minute here, and a minute there, and a minute here, and a minute there, and then there came a day, not too many years into my drinking, when that hour was down to one of these type of situations, where you walk into a bar, and you get in that drink, and you're going to recapture that hour, and you're going to get that magic glow feeling, and you take the drink, and you pour it down, and you're waiting for this feeling, because this is the reason for your whole existence, and then you go into a coughing attack, and you miss the feeling for that day, it occurred during that second that you were coughing, and you're beyond it, you're into a resentment about something, you know, and it starts to press you a little bit, and then you're going, well, tomorrow when I come in here, I'm going to recapture that, and you have to recapture, because this is the explanation for all the trouble that we're in, so it's essential that we be having a good time, and I carried it to such an extreme, that when the blackouts came in, I do remember coming back from some weekend, I ended up in the Marine Corps, and in flight school, jet pilot, very nice hobby for a drunk, but I do remember coming back from three days down in Mexico, and all drunk up, and put in jail, $300 gone, my teeth had been knocked out again, these caps up here keep coming off, for a Marine, I have an 0-10 fight record, which is very bad, I constantly would turn around, and there would be a fist coming into, hello there, back to the dentist, so I had my teeth in my pocket coming back from that, coming back from Mexico, and I didn't remember the whole weekend, I remember drinking on the way going down there, about 10 guys and so on, and I had this terrible conscience, all alcoholics have this voice inside their, damn that voice, I could have drank about three more years if it wasn't for that voice, I could have drunk about three more years if it wasn't for that voice, and it's in their, blah blah blah, even if your wife wasn't around, blah blah blah, so this voice had gotten tired over the years, and it would just say one word, and we'd just go, well, and I'm going, just calm down, I don't want to discuss it now, this is me, you know, on the dirt road down in Mexico, blah blah blah, don't worry, I don't want to talk about it now, I can just see somebody looking down there, what's the matter with that guy, and I'm telling him, when we get back, and we find those guys that came down here with me, and we're going to discuss this weekend, we'll see whether all this trouble was worth it, and I can remember going back, and you know how you engage people in conversations to try and recapture the weekend without admitting that you don't remember anything about the weekend, you get those leading questions, and you finally get them to go through the whole thing of jumping on tables and swinging around, and finally I said, well then, in essence, you would say I had a good time, and they said, yes, you had a marvelous time, and I can remember inside going, thank God, because I paid a hell of a time, or a hell of a price for that time, and here we had the absolute ludicrous situation of a grown man balancing the equation with a rumor that he had a good time, now this is, if you've ever done that, and you're having trouble with step two, you're having trouble with step two, I'll tell you that, my disease progressed right on schedule, after I read Marty Mann, it was rather embarrassing to find out that they had written all about me and told me how I would feel in each five year increment, and I was a routine drunk, had the various stages and so on down, and ended up going quickly to my last year of drinking while flying, which was in Cherry Point, North Carolina, and I had gotten to the stage now where I could no longer remain a drinker who didn't start drinking until 4.30,
[00:40:20]
now you know when you make the switch from drinking at 4.30 to drinking in the morning, you've got to explain this to yourself, I mean you just can't switch, especially in the Marine Corps it's very difficult to explain why you have a vodka bottle at the breakfast table when you're going along with the food, it just doesn't fit in, and drinking while flying was just out of the question, but the body year after year was taking control from the brain and making decisions affecting my life, and alcohol was more and more becoming an absolute necessity to keep the body functioning, and what I'm trying to say is there would be times like I'd be sitting at my desk, it would be 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and the body would send a little message up like, quit work now and get a drink, did you ever get that message, you're sitting up there, get up from your desk now, tell the Colonel a lie, and leave, and I would go, you can't do that, this is the US Marine Corps, this is a very important thing, I can't be lying and doing all that, and the body would go, why don't you take a look at your right hand, and I would look down at my right hand and just about then there would be a spasm, and it would go like that, and my body said, that's just a warning, I'm alerting you of bigger and better things to come, if you don't start putting booze in here, you aren't going to make it through the day, and this pressure was coming on, those shakes were starting, those raw nerve endings were getting so they couldn't last until 4.30 in the afternoon, we had to start shortening the day, this was not an intellectual decision, this was a physical necessity, this was the body taking control of everything that was going to take place, the body took charge of what social functions you went through, you didn't go to social functions where there wasn't booze, the body took care of whether you had to have some in the car, the body took care of stacking up for the weekend, the body, the body was in charge of all this stuff, the physical part of the disease of alcoholism, and eventually it took over complete control, absolute complete control, I found that my body one time said, eject from the plane now, do not continue on this mission, parachute down to the nearest package store and you get some booze, and I said, no, I've got an hour and a half more to go on this thing, and boy, I'll tell you, the body said, I don't care what you're in, a million dollar plane or anything, watch this, and that's when they started, boy, the old withdrawal symptoms and the loss of peripheral vision and the heart palpitations and the blood pressure jumping up and down, oh, wow, it was coming across loud and clear, and it got so bad finally that I went to see a flight surgeon, and as I told you, I only did that when I thought death was very, very close, and I was sent before a special board of flight surgeons, they evaluated me for two weeks and agreed that I had a terrible problem, anxiety type attacks in airplanes, and no physical problem could be found, it was left up to the laws, The, um, was, and of course this was, um, helped by my lying about the situation, the childhood fear of airplanes. That, that was the problem, and, uh, if I didn't fly anymore, so after
[00:45:07]
roughly 12 years of flying, they pulled the wings away. Well, yeah, there's a good excuse to drink for 30 or 40 years, so, oh, they took away my manhood, you know. Power and, uh, the ultimate disgrace for a human being, and what has happened now, and all of this, um, and you know, I, I didn't even have the self-confidence to argue with them. I just, oh, okay, well, that's too bad, and you know, just going along. I didn't have any way of, um, asserting myself. I was sort of just, whatever bad thing happens today, I hope it isn't too bad, you know, that's a great outlook on life, and, uh, and I was, uh, retrained. This is sure they really had missed the diagnosis of alcoholism. I was retrained in an FAA, um, school in Georgia, in air traffic control, which is bringing planes in in bad weather, and, uh, on the runway, so if there's any pilots here, I'm sure you're having a small tremor just thinking, just thinking about that one, but, um, that's where I got into my last year drinking. I was overseas in charge of one of these little units, and I had, um, realized that I shouldn't be near a radar scope because I had gotten into daily drinking. Now I wasn't flying anymore. It made sense to have a drink in the morning, and vodka entered my life and became the mainstay of my existence, and, uh, during that year, I lost about 55 pounds. I had malnutrition. I could not eat food again. The body said, forget it. I don't want anything down there. Occasionally, I would forget who I was and what the situation. I'd go moseying into a restaurant. I'd smell a steak being charcoaled, and I'd sit down and have this big steak and all this stuff there, and all of a sudden, my stomach would go, you're not planning on eating that, are you? Yeah.
I was planning on eating this. I haven't had any solid food in a couple of months. Well, forget it. We'll call that waitress over here and see if they'll give you some chicken soup, and we'll try and handle that for you. I mean, it was just, um, no way was I getting any solid food to stay down. I spent a great deal of time, um, dry heaving and trying to get vodka and orange juice down, hiding the drinking from the, uh, other guys in this Quonset hut. I had developed a shake so bad, I couldn't sign my name. Payday was a nightmare. I'd get paid in cash. I'd get in the pay line. I'd estimate how long the line was. I'd say, let's see, that's about two ounces of vodka, and I'll get that in, check my hand to make sure I could write my name. I'd practice it in the room with nobody looking, and even then it was difficult to not shake. I'd get in that line and walk up, and they'd want you to put your ID card down and then match your signature on a very small line. Then they'd give you the money, and a couple of times I can remember getting up there, and the guy in front of me would take an extra 10 minutes doing some stupid thing, and that alcohol level dropped off a little in the body, and the guy said, yes, and I'd go, I don't need any money, and I'd run away, um, and I'd go back and start again, and life was quite a nightmare under those circumstances, and I'd go back and start again and get some vodka, and I can remember one day I went back and there was no vodka left, and there was a note right next to the bottle that said, don't run out of vodka. I would leave little notes to myself. I had to borrow some money from a guy to go buy a bottle of vodka so that I could drink it in order to get in the pay line and sign my name to give him the money back that I just borrowed, and when you are having your life, the small things in life are the bad ones. Shaving was an absolute nightmare. I should have chickened out and bought an electric razor.
It was the obvious answer to the shaking, violent shaking hand, but that would have been cop out. That would have been chickening out of the role of a real man, and so I would grab the razor with both hands, put my elbows on the shelf in front of the mirror, and if you apply pressure one arm against the other, you can, you shakers know, you can stop those shakes, and I'd move my face up and down. Toothbrushing was a thing of the past. Occasionally I'd forget that I couldn't brush my teeth and I'd end up with a damn toothbrush. I'd already dry him for 20 minutes just getting
[00:50:01]
ready to start the day. I think I threw up in the morning because it was such a state of shock that everything was still the same. I would wake up and go, oh no, I'm still me, and I'm still here, and that was enough to make anybody throw up, and I just went, oh, still the same thing, and I'd finally get the drink to stay down, and I'd get a damn toothbrush. About once a month, I'd forget about it, and it was all right brushing those front teeth, but boy, when I went after those back ones, there was something back there that that brush would touch, and it would just start the whole morning over again. Back down there, watch out, the whole thing. If I, really, if I left the throwing up out of my story, I could have sat down a long time ago because it took a tremendous amount of it. Somehow I got through that year and was sent back to Virginia. That's how I ended up in Virginia to become the next commandant of the Marine Corps. I was at a career school down there. I don't know what the hell they were doing, but I was there, and I was having trouble finding the school on a day-to-day basis, and one day my body stood up in class just to ask a question. I was just going along for the ride at the time, and had a convulsion, uh, which, uh, you know, that sort of, that changes the whole lifestyle when you have a convulsion because that's very difficult to hide, conceal, and all that stuff.
Now even the Marine Corps had to admit that I had a problem, and I was sent up to Bethesda Naval Hospital, up into the tower where the presidents and all the good guys go, and, uh, to figure out what could have caused this person to have a convulsion, because you can't have seizures for other things with alcoholism, and I was there about 12 hours under observation when I went into the PT. Now, that explained the convulsion to, to everyone's satisfaction, and when I came to, I guess three or four days later, I, um, was in a bed with, uh, sides on it like a crib. Somebody had wet the bed, I don't know who it was, and, uh, the little blue pajamas, and, uh, and two or three other moaning figures back in this maximum security area, and, uh, you all, anybody's been back there, you know all the games, the, uh, no razor blades, no belt buckles, no sharp objects, and no matches, and, uh, three guys keep a cigarette going 24 hours a day.
You know that, yeah, some of you have been back there, I guess. Anyway, this was, uh, agony. I mean, that was the first time I'd been off booze, and I don't have to go through what it feels like to come off a booze. It was terrible, you know, just sickening, but I finally was let out into the rest of the, uh, where the rest of the patients were, and I, I didn't know where I was. I was totally confused, and I can remember going up and asking a kind old man, a blue bastard, I said, who are you? He said, I'm Commander Brown, United States Navy. He said, well, what are you doing in here? He looked perfectly normal to me, and he said, oh, I have, uh, schizophrenic tendencies with paranoiac overtones and a very big disease. He said, what about you?
And I said, oh, I've been, uh, been drunk, and, uh, he looked at me like I wasn't even there, and never spoke to me again. He just turned and walked away, and I was beginning to get the feeling of, uh, the pecking order up in the nut ward, um, you know, as to where I stood. So I, I remember back on my bed was a little metal card. It didn't say drunk on there. It had a big long name, and I went back and studied it and had it ready for the next guy who was a much younger fella, and he told me what the hell he was in there for, and then I said, well, I have chronic alcoholic syndrome, and he said, oh, a drunk guy, and, uh, and bam.
The message got home to me all of a sudden that this 33-year-old father of six children, graduate of Yale University, had just skyrocketed to low man in the nut ward.
[00:55:05]
A new piece in life, uh, and I can remember my brain automatically shifted into gear and went, but it's a small price to pay for all the fun you're having. Hey, I don't want to hear that story anymore. I don't believe that, and, um, my health started returning and the vitamins and so on down, and one day a corpsman came in and he said, all you drunks fall in. Um, right face, forward march, and bam, I was at an AA meeting, and so, uh, I'm, I'm sort of an advocate of marching people, and, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and, people into AA meetings, uh, I mean I resented the hell out of it, but it worked later on, so, um, you know, you can't knock that system, put the body in there, and who the hell knows what's going to happen. It may not take that day, but I had never heard of AA. I didn't know anything about AA. I thought it was a government organization. I thought that, uh, that they assigned somebody to follow you around, they turned you in, and that's the end of the free food.
Um, anyway, I hated the AA meeting, and I just hated being there, and I went up afterwards and told the leader of the meeting, intellectually, I bought the program, and I said, gee, this is very nice. You've got a wonderful answer to alcoholism. If I ever run into a guy with a problem, I like to send him around to see you, and he'd say, wait a minute, let me ask you a question, the little redheaded guy, and he liked to poke people in the chest and call them buddy.
Hey, buddy. He didn't know I was a captain. Hey, buddy, let me ask you, he said, um, which one of us is going to put his overcoat on and go on out the door, get in the parking lot, drive on home to his family, and which one of us is going to put his little blue bathrobe on and go over in that elevator and go upstairs to get locked up like an animal? Now, which one of you? And, uh, that was my first contact with AA and the troops, and, uh, and, uh, the truth, and I felt that the truth could only be used in some courtroom or something. I mean, boy, to be using it right out here between two human beings was, uh, cruel and inhuman punishment to be confronting the guy with the truth. What a terrible thing, and I resented him for months until I got out of there on an outpatient basis and, um, decided that I could not watch a football game without a beer. Uh, there's no way I could do it. I was home for a Sunday. I had to have the beer. The doctor said, if you ever had another drink, that's the end of your career. I got home and my mind said, that doctor's very young. He just got out of medical school.
What the hell does he know about this problem, about the Marine Corps? He's only been in the military about a year. What he meant to say was, if you ever get drunk, there's the big difference. He didn't mean to say, if you ever have another drink. He meant to say, if you get drunk, that's the end of your career, and the interesting thing is, I had a beer and watched that game, and probably the most dangerous thing in the world happened. Nothing, nothing happened when I drank the beer, and I was very comfortable. I went up and slept like a baby that night, and I got in the car on Monday morning to drive back over, about 40 miles to go back to Bethesda, outpatient, had to be there all day, and I'm thinking in the car how I had the beer, and none of those things they told me about in that meeting came true. The first drink gets you drunk, and you're going to have a drink, and the compulsion sets in, all these terrible things happen, and I'm thinking about that drink and how it had no effect on me whatsoever, and I thought about it all the way up to the nut ward, and I sat around all morning during basket weaving, and play class.
I wasn't even paying attention to the big playoff that they were having, and all I could think about, all I could think about was the fact that I had had a beer, and it had had no effect on my life whatsoever. It had just been nothing. It was absolutely insignificant as far as I was concerned. I got home that night. I was so excited about the fact that that beer meant nothing to me, that I couldn't sleep. I stayed awake all night thinking about that beer, and how it came into my life, and was meaningless as far as I was concerned. Take it or leave it. Look at the, look at this, this freedom from alcohol, this, um, this fantastic thing. For three days I couldn't even eat or sleep with this, with this newfound freedom from, from alcohol, and suddenly I was From, from alcohol, and suddenly I was presented with the option, a decision had to be made, could I return to social drinking, or not return to social drinking?
[01:00:00]
And over on this side of the scale, all I had was, thirteen years of misery, getting locked up, the teeth going out, getting locked up in the nut works, convulsions, DTs, a career ending, but on this side of the scale, I had just beer. And, it doesn't take anybody to figure that out, boy. But beer is now, that stuff's in the past, that's gone, water over the dam, vomit over the dam, it's gone. And so I got a year's supply of vodka, and you know the rest, and fortunately, it only lasted about two days.
I mean, God, it was horrible, I was smuggling it into the nut warden, it was a terrible situation. Around the clock drinking, the shakes were back, I knew they were going to catch me, I couldn't stop. And one Saturday morning, Pearl Harbor Day, I called up intergroup, and a huge figure appeared at my door, commonly known as Monster. And he was another Marine, and he was monstrous, and he filled the whole doorway.
And he came in and he said, hey you, pour that drink down the sink. I didn't even get his name, I didn't get any of the formalities, and he just went right into this, down the sink. And my name's Phil, we're going to a meeting tonight at 7.30, I'll pick you up. I may not pick you up, I'll stay here till 7.30 to make sure you don't drink. And we're going to go to the meeting, and blah blah, and I'm going, hey, wait a minute, I've changed my mind since I made that call.
I don't have a problem anymore, I don't need you. And he stayed there, and he went to the meeting, and that's what I told you about, I'd been sober for six hours, and then I got home from the meeting, I'd been sober about ten hours, and I needed a drink real bad, and I knew he was finally going to go home, and I had some vodka on the back porch, hidden, where nobody could find it. There was about 60 Coke, empty Coke bottles out there, and occasionally rain water would come through the screen and put about a sixteenth of an inch in the bottom of each bottle, and it wasn't rain water, it was vodka.
It took me hours to put a sixteenth of an inch in each Coke bottle, but nobody knew that was there, and I wanted him to go away, and then I could go out and drink 60 Coke bottles. And he said, okay, you get out, don't drink, I'll be back here tomorrow night at 7.30. Bam, and he drove off, and I didn't have any choice, I was going to explain to him I couldn't go, and I got inside the house, I got inside the house and I was torn between these two forces.
One was the fear of my body and what it would do if I didn't drink, and the other one was fear of what this guy would do if I did drink. And just to show you the impression he made on me, I didn't drink. I decided to wait another day until he came back, and then tell him I wouldn't be able to go to AA anymore. And it seemed like 30 nights went by so fast with him pulling up in front of my house, going, get out, don't drink, I'll pick you up tomorrow night.
Come on, bye, bye, bye. So all of a sudden I'd been sober a month, and things were starting to change inside my body. I was staying sober, I was going to meetings, I wasn't listening, wasn't doing anything right. And somewhere around the third month in Alcoholics Anonymous, I had what I guess is a miracle or whatever you want to call it, a spiritual awakening, personality change. It was the beginning of this little change, and it happened to me.
And I know now the reason it happened was that in spite of the resistance that I was offering to this program, it was getting through to me. In spite of the fact I didn't want to listen, I thought you listened with your eyes, and you waited for the person's mouth to stop, and then you told them what the real message was, and you didn't need your ears at all to listen. But somehow this was coming through to me, and I related to people who seemed to exhibit and exude the real joy of living, the fear in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And without exception, every single one of them talked about the steps, the steps, the steps. And I got this change in the steps, and I got this change in the steps. And so I said, well, I want to know what the hell they're talking about. You know, I've been in three months, and I haven't even opened any of the books yet because I wasn't going to be around that long. I didn't feel I could turn them back in new and get a bigger refund.
So I went home and decided to take all the steps that night. And I opened the 12 and 12 and raced through them all in 45 minutes.
[01:05:03]
I was going to finish the steps, and obviously I didn't. But I became familiar with the words that were there. I sort of had touched the pages that the steps were on. I had put myself in contact with what these people were talking about. I had begun a change in direction. I was now getting involved. I had opened a book. You know, I had done something about being in Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's what happened.
That's when the things started happening to me. And I'll share with you the third step because this is the big turning point in my life. I got through the first and second. I came to the third where it said something about turning my life over to the care of a higher power. And I went, higher power? Now that higher power is God. And it suddenly dawned on me that at this point in time, I must have close to 200,000, 300,000 years to do in purgatory.
And I said, oh, we've got a problem here. We're going to turn my life over. That's the wrong person to turn my life over. And I got my sponsor and confided. And I said, I've got a little problem with this third step. We're going to have to bypass this. I can't turn my life over. He said, why? I said, well, I'm a little afraid to turn my life over. What's going to take it? What would happen? And he said, you're worried about turning your life over?
And I said, yes. And he broke into hysterical laughter. It was amusing to him. And I said, what is so funny? He said, let me ask you a question. I said, what's that? He said, who can do a worse job than you do? He said, Sandy, you're still an outpatient from a nut ward. We could go out in the street and stop the first bus coming along and ask the driver to run your life for a year. And we'd have a better deal than if you keep running it.
You don't have to understand who God is to work this step. God has to understand who God is. You don't have to understand. You can turn your life over to whatever will take it. And then he hit me with the miracle of the third step. He said, Sandy, if you will turn your life over to the AA, to all the people here, to whatever you want, we will accomplish one miracle. We will remove the management of your life from the hands of an idiot.
And I say to anybody brand new in AA who is reluctant to do this, the reason you should try AA is because your ways sink. And if it doesn't sink, what are you doing here? If it's so good, write a book. That's the miracle there. That was the turning point. I sit back sort of like a smart aleck, and I say, you guys want to run this? You want to be in charge? Take it. And that was the greatest feeling I've ever had.
That was a weight off my back. It was a throwing in of the old way. It was a symbolic thing. But it was fantastically important to me. And if you're new and you can get to this point as soon as possible, you will see some changes you won't believe. The people around you will probably see them first. They'll see you suddenly showing up at a meeting with a sparkle in your eye that wasn't there before.
They'll hear your vocabulary change from negative to positive. Yes, I can do this. Oh, of course I can do that. A whole new personality suddenly appears and very often the facts don't support that you should be so damn happy. Your health may be borderline. Your family, you don't know where they are, and you don't have a job, and you're walking around going, yeah, I can do that. Wow! What kind of an organization is this that can produce such a strange reaction in a human being?
How can we account for a reaction as unusual as this? And you know why this is possible. You know why that smile produces itself on our faces. I think I know why it happens. It's because for the first time in all these years, you will know one day that you have finally finished the trip down and you're going back up. When that happens to you, and you have been an alcoholic, you're going to smile. You are going to smile.
You're going to want to run down the street
[01:10:00]
and start telling people, hey, I'm finished. The trip is over. I'm going the other way. And they're going, hey, you better lock that guy up. This is one of the most joyful days that ever happens is when you realize that trip down is over and you're going back up. You realistically know it's a long way up. You're looking up there, that's a long way to go back up. But you're going in the other direction, and it's the direction that's important.
You never get there. It's which direction you're traveling. And when you make the reversal and start going the other way, you've made the turn. That's the turn. That's the change. That's when the whole personality blossoms forth. And the second thing that makes that thing blossom forth and brings out the real, to me, the strength of AA is the knowledge deep down inside of you that you took that journey of alcoholism down all by yourself.
You took the most lonesome journey a human being has ever been recorded as taking, and that is the journey of the lonesome alcoholic. And now you break all the traditions, you break all of the things you've been taught about not being manly to accept help, and you suddenly realize that the trip back up will be made in the hands of all of the people in this room, that you will share the trip back up, that you will finally learn what a wonderful feeling it is to accept help knowing that it's being given with just love.
And if you stay in the middle of AA, you cannot slip off the edge. If you stay in the center of everything that's happening, you have to be swept along with all of the rest of the people. And these people have been through all of the rough waters that you're going to go through. And when you come to some of these rough spots, they'll stick their hand out, if you will stick yours out, and they will say, oh, I've been through that.
Let me show you how to get through there. You never have to be alone again as long as you live. And if you think about that, I hope it makes you smile. Thank you very much. Thank you.