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Source: DICOBE-00256 – Marguerite C – GOPHER STATE RNDP II – 1975-05-09.mp3 File: dicobe-00256-marguerite-c-gopher-state-rndp-ii-1975-05-09.mp3 Duration: 01:24:24
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When we were announcing the names of all the delegates, we missed one. I want you to meet Bill Davis from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Over on that side is the hospitality room. And we want you all to participate in the hospitality there and spend some time talking, getting to know each other. It's a big room, hold a lot of people. Now I'm going to do something a little different. I'm going to ask my sponsor Cecil to come up here because I've got a little job to do.
Come on up here. As you know in the program, Cecil's going to chair the next meeting. And part of the duty of the chairman is to present the speakers with their plaques. Now how the hell is Cecil going to present himself with his own plaque? So take my word for it, he's going to do a job. And on behalf of everybody, Cecil, I want to present you with a plaque. How's that, Cecil? Well, you get to introduce yourself.
Our speaker had to make a quick call. And by the looks of the people that are wandering around, she wasn't the only one. And all of you who feel like you'd make a quick little run, away you go. Just get back here in about two minutes. I want you all to stand up and take a little stretch. Go ahead and stand up, everybody. You'll be all right. This meeting, with your permission, if you want to talk to each other, you can talk after the meeting's over.
We're having a little microphone trouble, but the engineers are working on it. But we need to be real quiet because some of the people are having trouble hearing. I first met our next speaker about 13 years ago. And I heard her speak at the opening meeting of our General Service Conference in New York. And I've heard her several times since. And I know that you're going to get a real thrill out of Marguerite.
Marguerite has done a tremendous job in Alcoholics Anonymous. As you know, she's a past delegate. And she's done a lot of things that are just extra things. She put out a bulletin called A Silent Rostrum for many years. I used to get that bulletin until I quit sending her money, and I guess she ran out of stamps. She quit sending it to me.
[00:05:00]
She's a real hard worker. And it's with great pleasure that I now introduce Marguerite, another Texan. I didn't cut him off the list. His envelope come back because he moved. I could explain all that, but I'm not here. Suppose you get me off the track for it. My name is Marguerite, and I'm an alcoholic. And by the grace of God, and I can't thank the Father for this AA program, there's a whole lot of help from people just like you.
I haven't had a drink but alcohol in 20 years and some months. I had my last drink July 15, 1954. I've been sober now in AA longer than I drank, so I really have a second chance. I'm so glad to be invited up here. I'm always, by the time I get, they say my name and I stand up. You've heard that? Excuse me. I'm sorry. About that one? No, this is the one that featured the sound. Happens every time. They've got a lot of that stuff on TV now.
You know, I stood up but my pantyhose was still sitting down. That's just about the way I condition I'm in by the time I get ready to talk. Anything I've got glued on starts coming loose, you know. One eyelash falls off. And some of the foam rubber starts slipping here and there. Just a nerve-wracking business. I don't have anything to give you all except what they told me when I first came to AA. They said when we talk, we tell what it was like and what happened and what it's like now.
Because I'm not a great orator of any sort. I'm just an old country drunk from East Texas that has felt the mercy of God through this program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I started drinking when I was in my teens because, oh, I really don't know why. Except that it was kind of risqué, you know, and you just weren't supposed to do it. And at that time, those kind of things had begun to attract me. It seemed like the things that were fun to do were a big vaccine.
And the girls that I went with in school, we'd start splitting the cigarette between three of us in the automobile at night when we'd get out to go to Honor Society. And it just seemed like growing up was a difficult business to start with. When I was little, I'll tell you this, and then those that don't want to listen can have something to do trying to figure out how old I am. When I grew up, it was during the Depression, and it was a bad one.
And we lived on biscuits and gravy for breakfast and a lot of red beans and meat once a week if they were lucky enough to have a quarter. Can you imagine meat being 25 cents a pound? So my life wasn't turning out the way it did in the books that I was reading.
[00:10:00]
I was an avid reader, and I could escape from my environment and from the times by reading books and getting into the lives of other people. Besides, I couldn't function around the people I was with at that time anyway. I was real little and skinny. That's the drawback to a woman, you know. And I'd look at the girls in school. I just looked fine. And they were getting things on them here and there.
And that's when I started taking a searching and fearless physical inventory. We had no outdoor toilet because we weren't able to have one in the house. And I got my little mirror, and away I went. And I wasn't getting nothing. So I started out life sort of inadequate. I thought the good Lord had just left something off of me that he was putting on those others. And another thing, I hated boys. Couldn't stand the little things.
And then I started reading the wrong kind of literature. And in my day, we had old Street and Smith love story magazines. And I started reading those all the time. And the women were beautiful, and the men were gallant. And I got to having funny feelings, you know. Like what it would feel like to kiss a boy. And I just slept on that too long. Well, skinny as I was, from the back you couldn't tell if I was a girl or a boy if it hadn't been the long hair.
I was just straight up and down, and my legs were so skinny. Somebody told me once I was real brave, and I thought they was paying me a compliment. And they said to get out on them legs. But I was thinking about that big R romance. Well, there was a little country dance out in Marshall in East Texas. They called it Green Acres. And the guy ran it was a bootlegger. And it was one of those places where you have to go out in the car and you take a drink.
And then you go back inside and dance. And it was the first time I had really been to a party like thing in my life. Because I was always so little. Nobody would ask me. And I know my aunt told me I could have dates when I was 14. And I waited and waited and waited. Nothing was happening to me at all. Well, that's where the unfortunate incident occurred at Green Acres. This fellow that ran this place had some sons.
And one of them was older than I was. And he was a blonde. And blonde-headed men always, well, I liked them better than the others. So, we'd go out to the car. And I felt so honored that he would ask me out to have a drink with him out in the car. And then, well, one night he asked me a very embarrassing question. And I cried a while. And I got to thinking, you know, well, if I don't back drive, he might not come back.
And he was the only seller I had ever had. And I sure didn't want to lose him. And that big old East Texas moon was full that night. And, well, there ain't no nice way to tell it. I can kind of tell you, but like the song, she had to go and lose it at the Astor. Well, it was in the piney woods of East Texas. And I remember looking up at that big old full moon. And I said, Marguerite, you are going to hell.
But it's too late to stop then. I had gone to the Baptist church all of my life. I am not from a good Christian family, like so many alcoholics are. Family Like So Many Alcoholics Are. Most of them I have heard say they are from a good Christian family. Well, Mama never had a good enough dress to wear to church. She was willing. She just didn't have a good enough dress. And Daddy didn't go because he just didn't want to. I had a Sunday school teacher who took an interest in me, and she saw that I got to church and Sunday school. And I said,
[00:15:27]
I certainly thought that I was a Christian person, up until I found alcohol. I remember very vividly, it was an old brownstone church, and the vines were climbing up the wall, old-timey church, and they had a beautiful organ, and the music just would tear your heart away, you know, that organ music? And they played that song especially, and I said, just as I am without one plea but that thy blood was spilled for me, I come, I come. And I never will forget the day that I just ran down to that altar. I was so eager to give my heart to God or anybody that wanted it. I just had a feeling like that. And I thought after that, that there could never be anything wrong in my life.
But we never know. We say alcohol is no respect to a person. It doesn't matter about our education or our religious training, our money, or anything else. And certainly that's true because it only took about five years for me to get from the Sunday school room to the skid row. I fell into alcoholism. It seemed to me the first time I really took a drink on purpose. I had had hot toddies before because my daddy drank. He was a truck driver, and he carried vegetables up from the winter garden, and he would get in home and roll that old truck up on the yard, and he'd be dead drunk.
And my mama and I would have to go in and help him pull him and lift him into the house. And I thought then, if whiskey did that to me, I'd never touch another drop. And certainly I meant it. Nobody intends to be an alcoholic because certainly I did not want to be like daddy. But when I took my first drink in my teens, it opened up a whole new world to me. Seems like before that time I had been just a big, flat nothing. But like the guys tell you, it made them ten feet tall. Well, it made me beautiful and shapely. I wasn't even skinny no more when I had enough alcohol in me.
And I was sort of a cross between Salome and Matta Harry and Joanne Crawford. You name it, I was it. We say that one of the symptoms of alcoholism is that it causes a drastic personality change. And certainly that happened to me. I was one thing sober, and I was quite another drunk. After the full moon under the pine trees, I felt like a very dirty, dirty person. And I was ashamed to face my mother or anybody else. I just knew that it must show somewhere. I hid myself as much as possible. And I wondered what in the world I would do with my life.
I had been reared around adults, and I would come up when my mother and my aunts were talking, and they'd be saying that some old woman was ruined. And I'd wonder in my childishness what in the world she did to get that way. And then when I found out, well, I knew what to expect for the rest of my life, because they'd always end their conversations with, and no decent man will ever have her. So I thought, well, what the heck, I've ruined my life. I'll never amount to anything.
So, on the premise that you can't get electrocuted twice for the same crime, I just started relaxed and let nature take its course. I liked that booze, and it was sort of a package deal. I never had any money to spend to buy it myself, so my life sort of narrowed down to a triple deal, a man, a bottle, and a motel. It was just that simple.
[00:20:18]
I have no compunction about telling you this. Through the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I don't have to be ashamed of those things anymore. The guilt of something that I didn't understand was lifted from my shoulders when I took this program seriously, and the people in it told me alcoholism is not a moral issue. Alcoholism is an illness that will kill us. It's a baffling disease. Had I not believed with all my heart that alcoholism is an illness, I'd be six feet under, because all my life until then, I thought that I was just no good, weak-willed.
There was nothing to me. No one could have called me any names that I didn't call myself worse, because I had known right from wrong since I was a little girl, and a war started up inside of me that never ceased until I came to this program. Marguerite was one of the people inside, and she was a very correct little person, and certainly she wouldn't do all the things that this other girl did inside of me. I was two people, and a drink of alcohol let the other one loose.
I never understood that, really, until I came to AA. What made me like two different people, two different days? I didn't know that it was that first drink that was doing the dirty work. Later on in my life, I named that other woman. The other one was Dora Ferguson. I got in jail one time, and they asked me my name, and I was afraid Mother and Daddy would find out I'd been in jail. Before that, though, the way I got the name Dora, I wandered down a little too far on Deep Bound in Dallas one time. None of y'all know what Deep Bound is.
They had a lot of ladies behind the windows, laced curtains, who sort of beckoned to company passing. Anyhow, this woman said, I'm going to name you Dumb Dora because you don't know too much about your business. Then when I got in jail and they wanted another name, well, I remembered some old governors we'd had in Texas, and I said my name's Dora Ferguson. I thought it'd serve them right. So Dora Ferguson got in a lot of jails around Texas. You know, we can stay out of jail for so many years, and then once we start getting in, it seems like we can't stay out. At least I found it so.
Well, I had a whipping voice. See, I blamed poor old R.A., the guy under the full moon in the pine trees, for everything that ever happened to me. I said he made me what I am today. When I came to A.A. and they suggested I take the written inventory and search out these things and get honest with myself, I remembered something that I had been forgetting for all those many years, and that was that I had helped him take the back seat out of that car.
So I had to quit blaming anybody but myself. I may have spent life. It's sort of like steps going down, you know. I wanted a baby. All of my friends were having babies, and I would hold them, their kids, and love them, and oh, I just couldn't wait. I just had to have a baby, and I thought, well, I'll do it right. I'll get married first. So I was looking for a husband. Well, at that time, I was working in a pants factory. I was the button girl, and all day long, all I did was put the button in the machine and sew them down the fronts of the men's flys on the bridges, and I thought, how cruel, you know. All we had to think about all day.
[00:25:21]
Well, anyway, the manager of this factory was a real nice built, you know. He was tall and well built, and I was looking for good father material, not husband material. And I thought, well, then he would really be a fine father for a boy. So I ran after that poor devil, you know, until I got him, as women do. You let them think they're chasing you and stop real sudden. Well, Paul started acting kind of funny. I thought he was a genius because I couldn't understand anything he was talking about. He talked about big business and what they were doing and all that kind of stuff.
And one night he went to bed with the New Testament under his pillow, and he was eating an apple, and he just stuck it under there, and he had a big old knife that he always slept with. He put that under the pillow, and I began to think something was a little peculiar with Paul. I knew I was just a country girl and didn't understand all these big business talks and all that, and I would listen to every word for years, but, I mean, for the time that we went together. But then he said he found his number in Revelations, and I didn't know if we really had one or not.
But anyhow, the poor thing was crazy. And that's how I've been picking husbands ever since. They're either neurotic, psychotic, or just out and out nuts, you know. So that's another thing that I take along with my alcoholism. One day at a time, I don't have to marry another one. Five's enough. I know Mom used to say, Marguerite, in every woman's life, there's usually one son of a bitch, but five? So I kind of got thinking there must be something a little crazy in me that attracts them, you know.
Well, my little baby came, and I loved that child more than I ever loved anything in my life. About six months later, Paul went to the insane asylum, and he's been there ever since. I couldn't accept the duties of motherhood. I loved to play with it and sing it songs when it was sweet and clean, you know. But when the dirty part came about taking care of a child, I couldn't take it, and I'd give him to Mama.
Mama, you do it. So Mama raised Johnny. I was in a living, I had a living problem, too, at that time, because my husband was in asylum. I had a husband, and yet I didn't. I had a child that I couldn't take care of, that I loved, but not the maturity to be a mother. I didn't have a home. We visited each other. He'd come over and visit with my people, and I'd go and visit with his. So I really didn't know what to do with myself then, and my drinking was getting worse. Mother was beginning to cry all the time. Every time I'd come in late at night, because I started going out, I thought I was young, and I wanted to, I deserved to have a good time.
So I tried my best to forget that that man in the enslaved asylum ever lived. I shut him out of my mind as best I could and tried to run away from that situation. Mother would pray and cry every time I'd come in drunk, and Daddy would come in drunk. Come in drunk, and Daddy would cuss. Every time I'd get two phone calls a night, that was too, too many. He said it looked like to him there was a bunch of dogs after a bitch in heat. And that crushed me. There were so many things that hurt us when we were in our alcoholism. We didn't do all of the hurting, but I had to forgive people that I even
[00:30:24]
thought had hurt me in order to live. I didn't forgive, have to forgive because I wanted to be a do-gooder or any of those things. People in AA said you have to get rid of these resentments and you've got to forgive people for your own sake, not theirs. And that's the only way I learned how to do it. The little hurts that we do suffer over the years, even though we're, we're drunk, we're out of line and we hurt everything in sight around us. There are times when we are hurt awfully bad too. And I have often said, when I was loving my child the most, I was performing the worst. There was something about us we could not show love. We were so tied up in knots. I had to get out of there. I was going to get out of Greenville because I was getting quite… Greenville is a little country town.
I forget y'all are in Minnesota and you don't know what Greenville is all about. Well, Greenville is a little one-horse town that raised… a lot of cotton is raised around there. Everybody knows everybody else's business. You can't do anything without the grapevine having it all around the next morning. Well, I decided I'd better go to a city where nobody would care much what I did. And I did that. And that's when the drinking got worse. I went to Dallas and there was nobody there to tell me when to come home and when to drink and not to drink. And my drinking progressed very, very rapidly. I had no self-discipline whatsoever.
And once I took a drink, I had no way of knowing when I would stop or what I would do while I was in that condition. I decided maybe it was those… that pants button sewing that was causing a lot of my trouble. So I changed ends. I started making hats, but it didn't get any better. I got fired from the hat factories and I got fired from the old pants factory for getting drunk at the Christmas party. And one of the floor ladies said I said something untoward, something forward to the manager out of Dallas. I can't imagine what it was, but it could have been anything. Well, I left the pants factory in disgrace, as I did any other place I worked for. I either got fired or just never showed up anymore. I have been like every other alcoholic, a jack of all trades and master of none. I've tried waiting tables and I've spilled stuff all over everybody. I have tried typing when I was drunk and that certainly didn't work. I couldn't type worth a darn. I have tried to sell magazines and I did go up north and join a… up this way and join a magazine tour and I never sold one magazine, not one. They put up with it for a few months and every evening we'd come in and I'd be drunk. They'd find me sitting on a curb. I'd go in a bar and nobody wanted to buy my magazine, but they'd buy me a drink and I'd just stay with them all day. So they fired me in Chicago up in the magazine tour because I'd got drunk and didn't sell no magazine.
So that's when I learned another very valuable thing in my drinking and that was how to hitchhike. I walked nearly to Joliet and then I started getting rides and it was at that time that I first found out about accepting the things I could not change because somebody had taken me a couple of hundred miles, you know, and drinking all the time. There's going to be a little detour and I just started accepting that as part of the thing. We must be awfully…
some of us must be awfully tough some way physically because I realize now that I survived a lot of things that would have driven another woman crazy. There must have been something
[00:35:06]
inside of me even then that wanted to live. You know, I got interested in doing prison work after I got into AA and somebody… I was talking about this one girl that I thought had such a wonderful chance and this fellow made the mistake of saying, well, Marguerite, says, I think you're kind of whipping a dead horse. After all, you've got to have a little something to work with. And I think… I thought that was a terrible thing to say. I think every alcoholic that ever lived has a little, tiny, shiny piece of the Almighty deep down in them and all it takes is the love in AA and the understanding to bring out that little spark. I don't think there's any such thing as a helpless… a hopeless alcoholic. I got to the place where I couldn't work in the daytime. I had terrific hangovers. I spent most of my drinking life being a half double. I had vomited on nearly everybody I knew.
I had certainly ruined a lot of… run off a lot of boyfriends when I was growing up because I'd vomit on them and then want them to kiss me goodnight. And it just kind of wrecks a lot of wonderful friendships. I have also tried to open the car door so I wouldn't get it on their door and the door has been knocked off. Of course the car was still going. And I've heard so many of you start crying and say, what's my dad going to do to me?
They had borrowed the car and I had opened it and knocked… pulled clear off the car. There's nothing that ever got better in my drinking. One year was a little bit better and a little worse than the one before. I was becoming more and more confused because I didn't really know what was happening to me. And I'd have flashbacks all the time. I never could get that little brownstone church out of my mind. Sometimes I'd wake up in jail and I would remember what it looked like and what the organ music sounded like. I would remember a cleaner, sweeter time. And it hit me suddenly. How could this happen to me?
I really didn't know. I had gone against every conviction that I had ever held to be true, to be right, all over a drink of booze. I had a compulsion, an obsession. People in IA tell me when I first came here, the first person you have to forgive is yourself. They said all the tears in this world can't undo one minute of the past, so let it be. They said tomorrow isn't here yet, so they narrowed my life down to something I could handle one day at a time. I couldn't change yesterday, and there was nothing I could do about tomorrow.
But they said this day you can do something about your drinking. One day at a time. You don't have to take that first drink. And that's how it worked. When I got so sick I couldn't work in the daytime, I had heard of a place in Houston called the Old Rose Land. I had been there. We were slumming the night that we went to the Old Rose Land. Had a big sign out in front, 50 Pretty Girls, and the music was loud and the trumpets blew and the windows were all open, and it was a taxi dance. So I thought, well, I could always survive if I got to where I couldn't work in the daytime, I could be a taxi dancer, and that's where I headed when I got so sick. They hired me, but I didn't work there too long. You know, one part of me was horrified to think that I had wound up in a place like an Old Rose Land. But this other woman inside every once in a while thought it's not so bad, it's not so bad. I got fired from being a taxi dancer, and that was the
[00:40:00]
beginning of my getting fired from some mighty peculiar professions. I used to think, people, you just couldn't get fired from some things, but you can. After leaving the Rose Land, I had heard about girls that got a commission for drinking drinks, you know, B-Girl. So I thought, well, now I could do that and not have to get too sober. So I pranced down to the old Silver Dollar and some of those places around Dallas and asked for a job and was hired as a B-Girl. And I wasn't there over two weeks, I guess, in one place when I got canned again. Nobody wanted a lush. I couldn't go back to church, I had no place there, I couldn't stay sober. I couldn't go back to my family to live. I just couldn't. I was so uncomfortable at home. I tried my best to be a hoodlum, and I couldn't even do that. I know while I was working at the old Rose Land, there was this little bald-headed waiter, and he was very knowledgeable about how to make easy money. So he instructed me on how, if I just got out and walked down LeBranch Street, and someone would stop. So I got broke enough and wanting to drink awfully bad one night, so I got out on LeBranch Street and walked up and down, and a car stopped. And guess who it was? The Vice Squad. My first attempt at being a Lady of the Evening, I spent in jail. That should have stopped me, but it didn't. I got drunk enough, by that time I had to have alcohol. And I got drunk enough to have alcohol to live. I had to have a drink the next morning. I had been introduced to Yellow Jackets, and Redbirds, and Benzedrine, and I loved those bennies you could sing to high heaven, and when you could talk to people, those bennies were really powerful stuff, Benzedrine. And people around orchestras and at work nights, they always had a big bottle full, and I got high on those all the time, and then with my booze, I was rapidly getting in a very terrible mental state. I didn't much care, at times, what happened to me.
So I finally wandered down to Galveston, which was an open city at that time, in those days there was gambling, and I didn't know it at the time, but there was a syndicate that operated, and I was one small speck. I was only drunk, and just wandered down, and stayed a while, and every day I said I was coming back, going to go home. But I was so drunk, too drunk, too broke, or vomiting from a hangover. I didn't stay too many months, and I didn't stay, it seems like, longer than that, but that was the bitter end for me. I had, once we do a thing that we say we'll never do, it gets a little easier to go one step lower.
John Martinez, Jr., called home for an emergency message. He said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I can't do it. You get the name? John Martinez, Jr. There was no feelings of self-disgust, hatred for myself, as I felt at that time. I was always saying to myself, I'm going home to Greenville, because I would remember the cotton fields, and how good everything was back there, and how clean, and I longed to go home. I read something in later years that was what I really meant, though. This guy, he said, I'm sorry, I can't do it. I'm sorry, I can't do it. I'm sorry, I can't do it. I'm sorry, I can't do it. I'm sorry, I can't do That was what I really meant, though. This guy said, my light has gone out, and there's nothing blacker than a wig. I said to myself, I want to go home. No, not home, but to the other side of home, where the lights are given. That's what I really wanted.
[00:45:15]
My whole self yearned to go to the other side of home, because my light was out. I got fired from the Uptown Hotel in Galveston. They said that I brought trouble to them, and they wanted to get rid of me because I talked too much when I get drunk. I was talking about things people in that environment weren't supposed to talk about. About police chaos. About women that disappeared and never showed up again, but some knew what happened to them.
About some of the criminals in that area. I talked too much. I was whipped with straps like a dog. I got away. I got back to Greenville some way. I still don't know how, but by God's grace. The only words that I had then were things I had heard in church. I didn't know anything about alcoholism, and I said to myself, I will atone for what I've done. So I had a very negative program of sobriety at that time. I did not take a drink. I did not have a date with a fellow, and I stayed out of Dallas. That was my program of sobriety. A very negative, do not think.
I wasn't happy, but I felt better about myself that I was trying, and I'd go out to see my child on weekends. I was so glad to be able to see him because before, you know, everybody in Greenville said I didn't care anything about Johnny. They said if I did, I'd straighten up and make a home for the little fellow. That was my little baby, but they didn't know what I would have taken him into had I taken him with me, and I thank God, even though I hated my mother.
It got to where I hated her because I said she had robbed me of his love. She took my responsibility, and he loved her instead of me, but when I got to AA and took a look at myself and all the things that had happened, I thank God almighty that I had a mother that would take my child and protect him from me because he'd have been dead if I had had him. But how I suffered loving him and wanting him and not being able to have him because when I would wake up sick from booze and sometimes in jail, I would remember how soft he felt.
You know, you remember those things about the soft little arms around your neck, and we'd play a game sometimes when I'd go home. I'd tell him a story, and he believed it, and then I would believe it while I was telling it. I'd tell him someday I'd come to get him, and I'd say, Johnny, pack your suitcase, and he'd just squirm. He was so delighted with the fact Mama was coming to get him, and I told him we'd get on a train and ride and find a house, and we'd live together forever, and he would want me to tell it again and again.
And while I was telling it, I was happy kidding myself that that day would come, but then I gave up. I finally faced the fact I would never go and get Johnny with his suitcase. The only comfort I had again was something I had heard in church. They said in my father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I wouldn't have told you, and in my drunken stupor, I thought maybe God in his mercy will set aside one small white house for Johnny because I knew I never could.
The war came along, and the drinking got worse. Even after I stayed off of it for that year in Greenville, the first time I took one drink again started the whole thing rolling. I got fired from the Army Service Forces. I worked for a quartermaster corps in Washington and got fired. At that time, I met a sailor up there and decided we would get married and followed him out to California, and we did get married.
[00:50:11]
He was a fighter instead of a lover. I started losing teeth. I don't know if y'all ever had tooth trouble or not, but I had regularly lost my two front teeth. I was a cusser when I got drunk. I learned a lot of curse words. You could string them together, and it gave you so much relief to call somebody all of it together. But when I'd say that, somebody would hit me right in the kisser. Out with all my two front teeth. They had been on a bridge.
While Holt and I were married, he would try to kill me with his Jap knife, and I would try to kill him with the grubbing hoe. We had bought a house, a new house, and we got new furniture in the foothills of San Fernando, California, because we heard that song, I'm going to make San Fernando Valley my home. So we went to do that out there. But it just didn't work too good. We fought like cats and dogs, physically. It's a wonder we didn't kill each other. But we didn't stay mad all the time. We had another baby.
I decided I would straighten up for that. I said, I've got another chance, a new house, a new baby, and I'm going to stay sober this time. So I did try. He got polio when he was ten months old, and I thought the world had come to an end. He had never walked, and we took him to L.A. General Hospital, and he was in an iron lung. I couldn't stay sober for that. When somebody in AA said an alcoholic is someone who, at the very time when everything points to their staying sober, they need desperately to be sober, it's the very time they take a drink and get drunk again.
And that's what I did. My baby was dying, I thought, and I couldn't stay sober to watch the little thing die. I got a room in a hotel up across the street from the hospital, and there was a bar underneath, and I spent most of my time when I wasn't in the hospital down in the bar. I fell over the wires in the hospital, bleeding to the iron lung, and they'd run me off, and I'd vomit on the floor, and the doctors and the nurses would look at me like I was dirt under their feet, and I can't blame them.
My mother came out there. She said to be with me in my time of trial, and I thought, trial? Hell, what does she mean, my time of trial? Well, one night she told me. She got tired of my staying drunk, and she said, I'm going to tell you something I've been needing to tell you for years. She said, the good Lord is punishing you, Marguerite, because you hadn't done right, and I wouldn't be surprised if your little baby died because you hadn't lived right, and the good Lord is punishing you, and that's when I fell out with God.
I had never said there wasn't one, and I had always prayed desperately when I was in jail to get me out, and I never did again. Any trouble I have prayed, I have prayed to God, but after that, I told myself, I hope there is no God, because if he was that way that he would kill a little child to get even with its mother, I didn't want to have anything to do with that kind of a God, and my life from then on was a living hell.
And my life from then on was what I lived as if there were no God, and over and over in my drunken stupors, I'd say I hoped if I could die and turn ISIS to ISIS, if there would be nothing ever after, if I could really believe it, what a blessing it would be. I hoped with everything in me there was no God. It was all a big joke. I read something in AA after I got here. This man brought in this thing about the hand of heaven, and that AA comes of age, and he said, I fled him down the days and down the nights. I fled him down the arches of the years. I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind, and in the midst of tears, I hid from him.
I tried my best to hide from God as I had ever thought about him. I was so alone. You know, somebody said, used to say all the time, if I wasn't happy, I'd get drunk, and I said it over and over. If I wasn't happy, I said what they'd say.
[00:55:20]
Well, you know, I'm not happy every day. I'm living life for the first time. I experience the sorrow and the joy, too. It's not all peaches and cream, but I don't want to take a drink, and I quit saying that a long time ago because I want to live, and some days my life boils down just to survival. Maybe everything goes wrong some days when we're going to work or something, but I don't want to take a drink. My worst, best day drunk, I wouldn't exchange for the worst one sober. I want to live, and they told me in AA, to drink is to die, and thank God I believed them.
I read something that helped me. Here's the reason I repeat it. Anytime I get to thinking that a drink might make things better, or I'm not happy as I think I ought to be every day, that elated kind of happiness, a guy said, life is only given to me once, and I'll never have it again. A man condemned to death an hour before his death either thinks or says that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd have only room to stand, and the ocean everlasting darkness, everlasting tempest all around him, it would be better to live on a square yard of earth a hundred years or for eternity.
It would be better to live so than to die at once, only to live, to live life whatever it may be. I don't think that we give ourselves this intense desire to live. I think we have it or we'd never get to AA. I think in my case, I don't know about you, I'm the only one I know about, but I think God, as I understand him, gave me a gift of a burning desire to live. That's what frightens me when I hear people having slips, especially after years of sobriety.
I have no assurance that I would ever have a strong desire to live again, and I would die in my drunkenness. One day at a time, if I don't take the first drink, things are going to get better, even the worst days. I've got a chance. I've got a fighting chance as long as I don't take that drink. I don't care what happens, but once I take it, there's no hope for anything. It wasn't too long ago that a woman we knew started back to drinking. She had enjoyed sobriety.
They found her after she'd been dead several days. She died alone in a little apartment. She had returned to the happy life. They found her upside down. She had started to go to the potty, and she had died. She keeled over. Her head was lodged between the commode and the side of the bathroom wall. She died upside down. She had turned black. They had to break her arms and legs to get her on the stretcher, and I thought, that's what that first drink, that's what these, when people give in to these old thoughts of the way it used to be.
We remember sometimes the good things in our drinking and try to forget the bad, and Kedar says that maybe this time, surely after this time, it's not going to hurt just one drink. I want to live. I don't care if I didn't have a job, if I had no kids, if there was nothing on earth that I hold good right now. If it was just me. To feel the wind in your face. To feel hot sand on a beach under your bare feet. To see a sunset or hear a song.
To see a sunset or hear a song, to feel velvet, there are a thousand and one things that make being alive so good and so precious, and as the years get more and more, the days are
[01:00:05]
more precious as they go along, because there's not so many ahead as there is behind. To drink is to die, and I want to live. I had to make a decision to do something. I hitchhiked back over the mountain with my little polio boy in braces. My husband and I had had a spat. I got back to Texas hitchhiking. Had it not been for the kindness of the people that gave us rides, in my haste I had forgotten the child's coat, and it was cold snow going over that mountain on our way back to Texas, and he would have been dead.
God has been so good to me because so many things that could have happened didn't. I got back home, and my mother told me when I got back that my sister and her husband didn't drink anymore. Well, I asked her. I knew that they had drunk as much as I did, and she said, They have joined the A-A-A. And I said, Well, she said, A-A-A. I said, Well, what did they do? She said, They drank soup. And I thought, Well, my God.
And sure enough, after I finally got to the club that she was talking about, they did have a soup line for indigents and people getting out of jail and broke and hungry, you know, trying to get something on their stomachs. And that's where the soup came in. And then she said, Well, and they're drinking an awful lot of coffee. So Mama and I kind of looked at each other and got to thinking about that.
And we remembered that old salt peter that people used to get during the war. And we thought, That's what they do. They give them something in the coffee so they won't want any. So that's what I knew about A-A before I went. Well, we say this is a program of attraction and not promotion. Well, that didn't attract me so much that I immediately quit drinking. I had some more drinking to do, but not too much.
And someone said it was near the end. I had gotten on wine. My hair was coming out. I was a terrible sight. My skin looked like something unearthly. And when I put on makeup, I hit my nose instead. I was a mess. And, you know, that's how I came to think about God. I had to find a new God. I had to let go of Mama's and Aunt Ali's God because he killed babies to get even with the mamas. I had to find a God that I could love in this program.
And I figured it out. He loves an old, dirty, drunk woman that has kind of vomited on herself and hasn't taken a bath in two or three weeks. He didn't care how I smelled. He had mercy on a woman that was helpless and helpless. He cared for me when I didn't care for myself. Like that old hand to heaven, he would not let me go. I tried to get rid of him. I know when we was little, you know, we couldn't sew on Sunday or we couldn't cut out anything with scissors.
They said, Mama used to say, if you do that, you're sticking scissors in the flesh of Jesus. And I just, she scared me to death. I could see blood going everywhere. And I thought I had scissored him up long ago, you know. I was bankrupt in every area of my life when I found this program. There was nothing to look forward to doing. There was nothing, I guess, I hadn't done. I guess some of us are, always try to do something we've never done before.
There are thrill sensation drinkers and I guess I've been everything. I've been a married drunk and a single drunk. And Mama and Daddy used to say, if it wasn't for those men, those husbands, Marguerite could stay sober. Well, I'd get rid of one and get drunker, you know. And there was always something about those bars with the lights and liquor made me pretty, like I told you. And there was always somebody in there drunker than I was.
And they'd buy me a drink and then tell me about his problems and I'd tell him about mine. I'd cry over him a while and he'd cry over me. And then we'd end up getting married.
[01:05:01]
We'd fall desperately in love. And there's no love like that, when you just fall suddenly in love with this wonderful creature on the bar stool next to you. And wake up the next day and not recognize him. AA was my last chance. I had tried going back to church and it never worked. I would stay sober a while, but I'd get drunk. I went to my first AA meeting the Monday after Easter Sunday in 1950. So you can see I didn't stay sober continuously from my first contact.
I was a slipper. My husband forgave me and come back to Texas. And he was still drinking. And every time he'd get drunk, he would kid me and ask me if I didn't want a drink. Only he didn't say it that nice. He'd say, you're an alcoholic. And I learned to hate that word, alcoholic. And he'd say, don't you want a drink? And he'd run it under my nose. And I'd stand there a while and then I'd just join him.
I had nothing to fight with, really. I had gone to AA and loved it. I had gone in there and drank their soup and drank their coffee. And they welcomed me with open arms and I couldn't understand why. Because I hadn't been welcomed anywhere in such a long time. I was surprised when my sister let me. She was living there in Dallas. And she let me come to her house before Easter when I got on the traveling drunk.
And she and her husband had all that AA literature. You know how young AA members are. They've got literature scattered in the bathroom. Every time you sit in a chair, there's another leaflet. And she said, Marguerite, go on in the bathroom and take clean up first. And I did, because a lot of people wouldn't let me in the bathrooms about that time. Because Mama wouldn't like it much. Because every time I'd go home she'd get out her Lysol disinfectant and every time I'd get up out of a chair she'd go and wipe it off with her little Lysol.
And people just didn't let me willingly go in their bathrooms anymore. But Lizzy did. Then she put this little pamphlet in my hand and said, I don't know whether you'll like this or not, Marguerite, but you might understand it. And she didn't push it. She forced it on me. So I was looking around for something to occupy my thoughts besides the hell I was going through. Because I couldn't stand those.
I had run away from home before Easter and was lacking my little polio child out of the hospital where he had gone again. And Mama, me, had not died the Easter eggs. Or the bunny would not visit that Easter. And I was feeling the remorse. You know what it is when you neglect your kids. And there I was over in Dallas drunk. I went to AA that next day. The day I saw the pamphlet was the most important day in my entire life.
Before or after. Because it told me I was not weak-willed. I was not just a degenerate. I was not a sinful, sinful woman. I was none of the things that I thought that I was. It said that I was sick. And even when I read it I started getting a little self-respect. Because it said there is a way out. We are sick people. We have an obsession and a physical allergy to alcohol. And I never understood it till then.
That there's something different with my body. And that's another way I could forgive myself. I didn't bring on this thing on purpose. There's something different about my physical makeup. It's not all spiritual. There's something about this body of mine that can't throw off the poison of alcohol. So I could forgive myself. I had to, to live. We have to forgive ourselves. I want to tell you something.
The reason I tell my story when I came to AA I was so ashamed. I was so afraid to let another woman know what the past had been like. Even women in AA I was scared to death of. And then one time I heard a woman get up and she said something about being in jail. And I loved her desperately. I thought, thank God somebody has been where I am. People in AA said, Marguerite, don't shut the door in that way.
Don't waste all those miserable rotten years. Use them.
[01:10:01]
They said, take the heartbreak the heartache, the despair of yesterday and use it to help some other woman. And that's why I tell my story. If I could relieve the guilt of one woman, and I know there's somebody here. There's always somebody in every group of people this big. You feel different from other women. You feel more separated. You feel like maybe you went just one long mile too far. Don't be fooled.
You are not alone. There's nothing to feel guilty about. Truly believe when they say alcoholism is an illness. We had no control over becoming one We had no control over our actions once a drink was taken. We have to forgive ourselves to live. That's what I want to do. And I can't rest until I do it. So I keep on doing it. It certainly doesn't make me feel good to bring up the past. There is a purpose.
Somebody needs to identify with somebody. They say if you don't hear your story the first time you come here, keep coming back. There is hope for everybody that ever gets to these AA doors. It has meant my life. People talked about the grace of God and I never, we said but for the grace of God and I really didn't truly understand it until I read something that helped me to understand it. It said when we are in great pain and restlessness when we walk down the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life when our disgust for our own selves our lack of direction are too much for us when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades when our separation seems deeper than usual when despair destroys all joy sometimes at that moment a light breaks into our darkness and it is as if a voice were saying you are accepted you are accepted by that which is greater than you we may not be different than before we may not believe more but from that day everything is transformed that to me was the grace of God in my first contact with AA the fact that they took me like I was and loved me and welcomed me that was the grace of God I was accepted I thought I was nothing I thought I was lost and miserable and so alone and they loved me in spite of myself and said it was the place that I belong and they've been loving me ever since I got real on a religious kick once in AA my husband started the course he said come back to Broadway Baptist and we'll just be a lot happier so I went back to Broadway Baptist Church there's nothing wrong with the church it was the way I took it I reverted back to the old hellfire and damnation the preacher would preach and I would think and I got to criticizing my AA group I used to love it when the fellas would tell jokes I just laid my head off cause it was so good to life again I didn't care if there was a little risk it was so good to just life after so many years but then I started going back to Broadway Baptist and I got awfully good I worried about the people in my group I thought well now they're all sober that's true but they're all going to hell because I had started watching and if a woman let a man take her home from the meeting I really kept my eye on them I said there's more there than meets the eye and I didn't stand for any jokes I couldn't listen to any funny jokes anymore because I had gotten real good well like they say we can get so heavenly we're just no damn earthly good to anybody and that's what happened That's what happened. St. Marguerite got drunk.
And all those old sinners kept staying sober day after day. I learned something then that saved my life. I found out I couldn't be perfect.
[01:15:01]
I knew that as long as I lived I was going to do things and think things from time to time that I wasn't proud of. So I had to accept myself for the fallible human being, the weak creature that I really am, but not take a drink over it. It wasn't easy to do, to make peace with myself, come to terms with myself, and a life that wasn't perfect. But again, I want to live. And one day at a time, in AA, we can do it, with the help of everybody in it.
And God is my understanding, knowing it's the first drink and not the last. I never know how to end, and I've talked too long, but I can't help it. So I'll end by saying something somebody else said, but it's what I feel. I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you for bringing out all the unseen, beautiful things in me that no one else looks quite close enough to find.
I love you for helping me to make of the lumber of my life, not a tavern, but a temple, and the works of my every day, not a reproach, but a song. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Marguerite, there are few people in this fellowship that have the courage to do what you've just done. And on behalf of everybody here, I just want to say thank you so much. Thank you. The committee have notified me that they've registered over 2,000 people so far.
Thank you. And now would you rise and join me, if you will. And at the request of the committee, would you all hold hands. And we'll close this meeting with the Lord's Prayer. 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, the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program. Usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault, they seem to have been born that way.
They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of life, or a way of life, which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest. Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now.
If you have decided you want what we have, and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you are ready to follow directions. At some of these you may balk. You may think you can find an easier, softer way. We doubt if you can. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start.
[01:20:02]
Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas, and the result was nil until we let go absolutely. Remember that you are dealing with alcohol. Cunning, baffling, and powerful. Without help it is too much for you. But there is one who has all power. That one is God. You must find him now. Half measures will avail you nothing. You stand at the turning point, throw yourself under his protection and care with complete abandon.
Now we think you can take it. Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as your program of recovery. Number one, admitted we were proudest over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. Number two, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Number three, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care and direction of God as we understood him.
Number four, made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Number five, admitted to God to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Number six, were entirely willing that God remove all these defects of character. Number seven, humbly on our knees, asked him to remove our shortcomings, holding nothing back. Number eight, made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
Number nine, made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Number ten, continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. Number eleven, sought through prayer and meditation to improve our contact with God, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out. Number twelve, having had a spiritual experience.
As the result of this course of action, we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. You may explain, what an order, I can't go through with it. Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines.
The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection. Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after have been designed to sell you three pertinent ideas. A, that you are alcoholic and cannot manage your own life. B, that probably no human power can relieve your alcoholism. C, that God can and will.
If you are not convinced on these vital issues, you ought to re-read the book to this point or else throw it away. I'm sorry they ever changed it. Joe, how do you want to close this meeting? Tomorrow morning now we're going to start getting sober. Thank you, Charlie and Joe. As the basket goes around, we normally say that we pass the basket to pay for a meeting place and refreshments. Tonight we also want to pay for the gentleman's trip from Arkansas.
Does anyone have any announcements? Okay, tomorrow morning with coffee and donuts down here at ten o'clock and we'll run from ten until twelve and then Charlie and Joe will go back to Arkansas. Let's have a big hand for Charlie.