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Source: DICOBE-00257 – Marguerite C – 20TH TENNESSEE STATE CONV – 1971-04-17.mp3 File: dicobe-00257-marguerite-c-20th-tennessee-state-conv-1971-04-17.mp3 Duration: 01:16:06
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It's about time for the mic to go out. It always happens to me when I stand up. My name is Marguerite, and I'm an alcoholic. And by the grace of God, and attempting to follow the AA program, and with a whole lot of help from people just like you, I haven't had a drink of alcohol since July 15th. 1954. But for whiskey, I'd have had 21 years because I came to this program in 1950. I'm very glad that I was asked to come here. It always is. Somebody asked me once, they said, do you think it's good for you being a speaker?
And I got to thinking about it, and I thought, something like this, of all things, is a very humbling experience. I'm always glad when I'm asked to talk, but when we get through talking, we feel like we haven't said what we intended to say, that we haven't, maybe we haven't really helped anybody. Rather than being an ego builder, in my opinion, it adds to our humility, because every time I get up to talk, if I didn't say a few words to my maker, I don't know if I could go through with it.
But I know that of myself, I cannot help anybody. I am a vessel. I am a voice. And I ask God, as I understand him, to put the words in my mouth that will benefit somebody, that will either help them identify or give a little, share a little strength to keep on one day at a time. I am not a speaker as such. I have one thing to say, and that's what AA has done for me. That's the only message I can carry. I don't know what the alcoholic is all about. I don't know about the disease of alcoholism, except as it applies to my own life.
Myself is all I have to give. I always feel like in every meeting there are a few women that probably are new and feel very separated from everybody and everything. And they're afraid to tell anybody really the problems they have, because they're afraid if they know, even in AA, if they know all about you, they won't love you. I think those women perhaps I have a message for, because we are all alike. We are not alone.
Our lives are different, certainly, but we all have that one big thing in common, that one drink isn't enough. And, I mean, one drink is too many and a thousand isn't enough. And with that to hold us together, so many thousands in AA have stayed together with no officers and no government and no rules and regulations. We stay here because if we don't live by certain principles, we eliminate assets. We get drunk and some of us die and never get back.
I started drinking when I was a very young woman. In fact, I was a child. It took me many, many years to be a woman. I was a late bloomer. I was nothing, so to speak, in the way that young girls start to grow up. I read a lot because I couldn't go with boys. It was an escape, reading, and I had been escaping from reality all my life, one way or another. I chose different routes until I found alcohol and that satisfied my needs for a long, long time.
I could never stand just everyday living. I don't know whether it was because I was born during the, I mean, I lived, I was young during the Depression or not, but life was not pretty. I say the Depression. I thought there had been others, but to me, back in the 20s or whatever it was, late 20s, that's when I was a young woman.
[00:05:03]
That's when I was a young girl. We had an old rickety house and bad furniture. It seemed like we always lived the wrong side of the tracks. I could never fit in with the other people in my school classes. I mean, I just grew up feeling inadequate and not pretty and not shapely, and that was another thing that kind of marred my life. All the girls that I knew were in their teens. They were sort of getting things I didn't have here and there.
I spent many hours with the mirror looking to see what was wrong with me, that I wasn't doing exactly like they did, and I just wasn't developing nothing. I thought I didn't know what was wrong, but I just knew I was different from the way they looked. I couldn't wait until I got grown and could look nice in my clothes like they did. Well, that's when I started reading those old Street and Smith love stories. They were beautiful people. The men were all handsome and the women had on those filmy garments, and I just pored over those things all the time.
When I got old enough, I started going to an old country dance. I learned to dance to an old country music out there in East Texas, but to me that was the height of my ambition, just to sneak off from home and go to that old dance. That's where I met that feller that ruined my life. A few years after I started drinking, I blamed everything on him. He was no good. He was this and that, and he just demolished me.
I was such a young innocent, and he had just taken advantage. Well, I can't come out in plain language and say any of my stories, so you just have to, because there is mixed company, and I don't like to use any four-letter words. I'm going to be a lady that kills me. Anyhow, you've all heard me tell it before, and if you've heard me before, well, just bear with me, because I'm talking to the new members. In fact, you can go get some coffee or go to the bathroom, which I should have done an hour ago.
Anyhow, it was the year that old song came out that she had to go and lose it at the after. Well, mine was in the old piney woods of East Texas, and I remember looking up through those pines and that big old full moon, and I had gone to church all my life, and I knew right from wrong, and I said, Marguerite, you are going to hell. But it is too late. And for years, until I came to AA, really, and got honest with myself, I remember that I had helped him take the back seat out of that old car.
And after that, well, I couldn't say I was a victim of circumstances, because I kind of collaborated. One by one, all of my excuses and reasons for drinking melted by the wayside. I blame my mother and my father, because they were small-town people, and I always said that they had small little folk minds. Of course, I was educated. I made A's through high school, but that didn't keep me from being in the gutter in San Francisco.
But I always thought that somebody must have put me on their doorstep and left me when I was a baby, because I couldn't see how I belonged to either one of them. I didn't look like them. And I would look real close and seem like there was nothing about me that was like them, and I felt so lonely, and I thought they adopted me and they wouldn't tell me about it. And then growing up, I was ashamed. I had false pride. And they would take me places in their old car, and well, Daddy drove a truck so long carrying up vegetables from the valley. And I was so ashamed when they'd let me out in front of school in that old truck.
[00:10:08]
And I just had that funny kind of pride that is very hurtful to parents, because I know I showed that I was ashamed. And if Mother took me somewhere, she took me to the employment agency one day, and I said, please let me out down the block and not in front of the police. I said, this old thing makes so much noise, this old Model A Ford. And I just grew up with a twisted sense of values. I know that alcohol is not a factor of persons, because I went to church from a very small girl until I was about 15 years old, religiously.
I never forget the day that I, as we said then, I guess they still say it, I was saved. They were playing the organ, and it was that old song, Just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood was spilled for me. And I got such a feeling inside my chest that I was compelled to go down and give my heart to God. I had such a feeling of wanting to give. I mean, I'd given my heart to anybody that asked.
I just had a feeling of wanting to do that thing, and that's why there was always a war going on inside of me, because I had that religious training, and I did have a terrible conscience all the time from drinking. Just the drinking itself made me feel guilty, not drinking to excess, but just drinking, because that's the way I was brought up. And also, I thought, had definite ideas about hellfire and damnation and all that that I had been preached to all my life.
That war didn't cease until I came to this program and made a decision to turn my life and my will over to the care of God as I understood him. I had been trying to live my Sunday school teacher's way of believing. I had been trying to believe like a preacher, like Mama and Aunt Lilla and Aunt Ali. They nearly ruined my life too, Mama and Aunt Lilla and Aunt Ali. I was raised around older people, because I didn't have any brothers and sisters for a long time. Anyhow, every time I'd get around them, they were always talking about some old woman, you know, and so I knew what they thought about it when I had made my little mistake back there.
They'd be talking about a woman and they'd say, she's ruined. And I'd listen to see what she'd done. And then they'd quit talking when I'd come up. And then when I found out what they meant when they said somebody was ruined, well, I was, and I knew what to expect, that there wouldn't be any future for me ever. And I had heard them say many times that no decent man would ever have her. So I knew that I was just sunk. I had had it and I was only 17. My life was over at 17 and I knew no way back.
I wish that there had been somebody I could have talked to with honesty that could have put me on the right track of God is love, God forgives, you're no different from anybody else. You're just as good, you can be as, your today can be as white and clean as you want to make it, and yesterday's forgotten. But I didn't have anybody like that or did not seek one. I was too timid. Every time Mama would tell me she wanted to talk to me about something, I would die a thousand deaths. I'd think, my God, she knows all about it.
I'd meet somebody on the street and they'd look at me funny and I'd think it shows somewhere and I'd go home to look to see if I looked different. So I grew up very miserably. My drinking began then, and it consistently got worse. I didn't have the occasions to drink, or the frequency of those occasions, but later on when I got out of school, it got much worse because I had more freedom.
[00:15:20]
And on the presumption that you can't get electrocuted twice for killing somebody, two people, I just relaxed and let nature take its course. I found out that in order to be popular, in order for people to ask me to go places, I was not the sort of person that makes easy conversation, and I felt like I had to give a little more and sort of buy friendships because I was so inadequate in myself. We moved to another town, and so many people were getting married in my age group, and I wanted a baby. And dirty and unworthy as I was, I decided I would just go on and marry.
And I chased that old boy because he was tall and built good, and I thought he'd make a good father. And I wanted a baby, and I thought, well, he's as good as any, so I kidded myself that that's what I wanted to do, and he was different. I always looked for the different ones. You know, I couldn't stand plain old clean-cut American men because I liked the ones that were real different. So he'd been in the same asylum ever since the baby was about six months old. I hadn't counted on him being that different.
I had my little baby, and then my husband started acting funnier than he had to start with. His peculiarities increased, and he went to bed one night with a butcher knife and a New Testament and a half-eaten apple under his pillow. It was symbolic for something, and then he told me he had found his number in Revelations. And for a while, I didn't know whether to believe him or not because I thought at first he was a genius, and I just didn't understand what he was talking about. I thought I had really gotten the genius, but then it turned out he was crazy, and he was just talking nonsense, you know.
But for a while, he said he found his number in Revelations, and I thought, well, maybe he did, and I'm just ignorant and don't know anything about it. Well, anyhow, they finally come and got him. His mother got scared he was going to kill himself one day, and she ran him around all those bushes around Oak Cliff Park and finally got him in jail, and he's been in jail ever since. For 20 years, I didn't go back to see him. I escaped then. I said I'll forget that this ever happened to me. I will not ever tell my child where his father is because it might affect his life. I won't let him know this insanity in the family, so I flat-flaked out, as these kids say, flaked off.
They found me after 20 years because his old mother thought she was dying, and ever since then, I have been going back and forth to see him about twice a year and carrying him nuts, fruits, and candy. That's about all you can do. And I thank God in my heart. I'm sorry for him, but I thank my Maker that my sickness, my insanity was alcoholism and not the irreversible kind like he had. There is a way back for us if we try just a little bit. Our insanity is something that we can deal with if we accept the fact that we are sick and rely on God as we understand him to help us refrain from taking that first drink every day, one minute at a time.
We can handle, with his help and the help of our group, our kind of insanity. After that happened, I blamed the drinking on him. He was a good excuse. My life was ruined. My husband and them seemed silent. I can't get a divorce. I have a small child. I can't take care of. I hated staying at home. We never had a home. We visited. Visited his place with all his mother, and then we'd come along to visit mine.
[00:20:13]
Anyhow, Greenville was the place where my parents lived. It's a very small country, cotton-raising town, and it got real small. I had built up quite a little reputation for myself to boot, and I thought, I will escape from this. I didn't think I would escape. I didn't say it in those words. I said, I'll go to Dallas where there's more opportunity and I can make my fortune. So I did. It was a big town, and nobody knew me, and I had perfect freedom to drink as I wanted, to come home as late as I pleased or not at all, and it sued me just fine because I couldn't stand rules. I hated any authority over me.
But many times when the police put me in jail, I hated them because I thought it's not right for one person to have this terrible authority over another human being. It was always in my mind, I've got to be free. I've got to be free. But my kind of freedom was bad for me because it certainly increased my illness. I did anything and everything that I felt like doing. I'd try to work and I'd get fired, and I'd sober up and try to get another job. I worked in factories because I wasn't really trained to do anything else. I was a button girl, and that was quite an experience sewing on the buttons on men's slides, and I thought they were trying to tell me something.
I got fired from the pants factory in Greenville the first time because I got drunk at the Christmas party and said things that I shouldn't. It was just sort of Katie barred the door after that. With a little alcohol in me, I could forget all of the things I had learned as a child that were good. I could let go of any principles I had once had. It became easier and easier, like steps going down, to do one more thing a little worse than the time before because I was powerless over alcohol.
And my life was unmanageable. I am alive today because I believed people and they told me alcoholism is an illness, that once I took a drink, I had no control over how many or how long or what would happen. They told me I was a sick woman, and it enabled me to latch on to the help that they had. I had always tried to treat myself for my disease as a moral issue. With all my church experience, I condemned myself every day of my life that I was no good, unprincipled, and all the rest. I would go back to church from time to time and rededicate my life, but in about a week when those neon signs started blinking very inbridingly and it was Saturday night, I just could not keep from taking a drink.
So my religious life was certainly no deterrent. Nothing ever worked for me until I found this program. And one of the things that helped was they said I could work it the way that I felt like working it as long as I went by the suggested steps. They said everybody works it different. The way I do it might get you drunk, and they gave me freedom. I didn't have to promise anybody anything. I had made so many promises to myself and to my mother and father that I'd never do that again, that I would straighten up and fly right, and every time I'd let people down.
And in AA, they didn't ask me to commit myself in any way. They told me the door's open and it swings both ways. If you want what we have, you're welcome, and we'll help you all we can. But if you want a drink, that's your business. So I really found the freedom I had been looking for in the bottle and in Strange Town in the AA program. They freed me to do exactly as I wanted to do. Nobody made me stay here. They said you come and stay in AA because you want to, not because anybody makes you do it.
[00:25:22]
They also said this is a program of attraction and not promotion, that AA is for people who want it, not for people who just need it, because I had needed AA or something similar for years and years. But until I wanted it, it was of no avail. I had to want to be sober more than anything else in this life or I'd have never made it. And the people that helped me in AA said I had to put this first. It came before family, children, everything, jobs, that sobriety would have to be my business, that it could only be done one day at a time. I couldn't worry about the next six months or the next year, that all I had in this world was this one day.
And many times I sat in that club and when I was trying to sober up, I sat in many clubs. That's why I know so many people. I poured into their groups in Texas. Somebody asked my family if so many people knew me. Well, I'd go to Austin and I called Joe from Chattanooga. He was in Austin then. I didn't call Joe. I was sitting in a joint there on Skid Row in Austin and two big strange fellows I had never seen before were sitting at a table.
They had old sawdust on the floor and I looked like death warmed over. I'd been hitchhiking for three days and filthy, dirty, and smelling to high heaven and I called AA because I had called before and stayed sober a little while. And he came to that old Skid Row dive and took one look at me and he said, are you ready to go? And I thought, sure, he was going to sit down and ask me if I needed one more drink, but he didn't. He just said, let's go. If you're ready, if you're not, well, you stay here because I'm on my way. And I really got up from the table and went with him and I thank God I did.
People in AA have gone above and beyond, a lot of them do. In my sobering up days, they have sat with me in shifts. The women would put me in a hotel room at their own expense and come in twos and sit two or three hours and give me the Kansas City treatment. I've forgotten exactly what it is. I thought I'd never forget it because it's so heartbreaking, that old whiskey and little honey and whatever they give you every four hours and then you slack off for longer than that. And I was just in torment. And sometimes they'd go to sleep and I'd find the bottle and they'd wake up and I was really tanked again.
They didn't give up on me, they gave out. They explained that to me, that they loved me and they wished they could help me, but they had just given out and they would turn me over to somebody else. That's why I have several sponsors. One would get sick of me and turn me over to somebody else that could help me. Finally, everybody I knew were leaving me alone for a while and I thought, they're trying to kill me. Before, I had been on that phone yelling, help, help, I'm dying and they would come and help me. Well, this time nobody would come and I thought, they don't care if I die.
So I started trying to stay sober by myself. I started reading the big book because I felt like they weren't going to help me. And I started going to meetings on my own. I quit calling people to pick me up. I got on that old city bus day or night and I'd go down to that club and sit all day and just glare at those women. I thought, I got a right to sit here just as much as you do. And I'm going to sit here and I'm going to sober up. I don't care what you think of me. So for a little while, I stayed sober on pure meanness. I was determined they were not going to kill me, that I was going to stay there and stay sober and show them.
Anyhow, one night, one of the ladies decided that each person should be given a sponsor. She'd be given a sponsor in her own financial bracket or in her own particular background of experience.
[00:30:04]
Well, they couldn't find one for me. And I was kind of getting kind of lonesome around there in Fort Worth because, you know, for a long time, there wasn't but one woman I knew that had been in jail. I found out later some of them had, they just had failed to mention it. But I was feeling kind of lonesome when she brought that up and I'm glad that that plan didn't follow through because I've known many, many professional men.
I have taken some to a meeting and there'd be some old guy stand up from the country and misuse the English language and not pronounce one word in that preamble. You know how they, what they can do to all kind of men and anonymity. And I thought, oh my Lord, he's not going to like us, you know. And then there'd be another educated person to get up to talk and I thought, now that's along his line. And guess who he liked after the meeting.
He said, I didn't get much out of that second man, but boy, that 24-hour read. He was something. It doesn't matter what our backgrounds are, we've got one thing in common and we can help one another regardless of our profession or our place in life or anything else. After a while, I got to where I couldn't work too good in the daytime. And in my condition of being married and I was not divorced and the child didn't take care of, well, I was in a fix anyway.
So I thought it didn't matter really what I did and I started getting night jobs. I was sick of my stomach all the time. I vomited all my drinking life. I had never known a time when I wasn't sick of my stomach when I was drinking. Nausea just overwhelmed me and that interfered a lot with my love life too. You can't vomit on somebody and expect them to kiss you goodnight. And I usually did before the night was over.
So I wasn't making out too well in that department. So I had heard about a taxi bank that was in Houston. In fact, I'd been there once. And I decided that's what I'd do. I had been on a magazine tour and gotten fired for drinking. I didn't sell no magazines but I was drunk every evening when they picked me up. We went to Detroit and Chicago and I thought I was really living. And then they fired me and I had to hitch out back to Texas.
That's when I found another valuable thing to my career. I knew I didn't need any money then. I could get out on the highway and put my thumb out. And I could get from Chicago to Houston in pretty record time. And after that I made many more trips from Texas to California. Didn't need any money from that time on. With the alcohol and the hitchhiking, I felt like I had the world by the string. I began then to accept a lot of things I couldn't change.
I knew that if somebody picked me up and took me a couple hundred miles, there was going to be a little beat to it. But I didn't frustrate. I just accepted whatever came and rolled with the punches. I learned to accept my lot then. I didn't like it but I learned to accept it. It was part of the phase. I worked metal taxidermy and it was all right. Except I was afraid Daddy would find out. That's the only thing that bugged me about it.
I was afraid my Daddy would find out. I knew he'd kill me. And it was the 10 cents in the summer, nickel in the winter, and you can see that didn't buy much whiskey. So I had to go out and kind of borrow money. You know, after they closed some people, I got no trouble there rolling people. I never took all they had. I just took some. I always said, I'm sorry to these drunk guys. I didn't mind stealing.
It was just that I hated having to wake up without a drink. So they'd go to sleep and I'd just borrow some of what they had. And I thought I had it coming. After that, it became a little easier to do a little worse and a little worse.
[00:35:01]
And I decided I'd be a B-girl because that didn't take much effort because I was so sick all the time. It wasn't that I was lazy, I was sick. I wasn't able to work, so that seemed like it wasn't too bad. And they fired me, though. Nobody wants to lush. I thought that I was doing people a favor because I had gone to Baptist Church all my life and I had made straight A's in high school and my parents were good people.
I thought that I wasn't like those other old bags down there. But I was the only one that ever got fired. It was a funny thing. I brought the police up there and endangered their license and all that. And I weighed 84 pounds soaking wet and how I could have caused so much havoc in my life, I don't know. But I brought disgrace and heartache and taking away licenses and all that all my life, all my drinking life.
So they fired me from the old Rose Land. And I got fired from the old night spot and the old bloody bucket and the old silver dollar and you name it. I couldn't be good and I couldn't be bad. I tried my best to be a hoodlum. I thought I've got to be something, everybody's got to be something and I couldn't go to church and do right and I couldn't go back home and live with my parents in peace. I couldn't stop drinking and I couldn't drink with safety.
I mean, I did all sorts of bad things when I was drinking. So there was no place for me. We talked about alcoholism is a lonely disease. It is, not only of the mental loneliness but people get sick of us and despise us because we act so bad in the throes of our worst symptoms of our disease. We act and smell so bad. I had a husband once that told me I smelled like wet goat all my life. And that was a crushing blow because I had thought I was so romantic.
Anyhow, when I came to AA, I'll never forget the baths that I took trying to get clean and smell good. I would bathe three or four times a day and that old wine would come out my pores again and I could smell myself. And I'd go and bathe again and when I had my first birthday, some of the ladies gave me that old rub-on cologne, you know, like sachet, cream sachet. And I'd have several bottles and I'd rub some on in front and I couldn't smell it.
You can't smell it on yourself. So I'd get another bottle and put some of a different kind behind and I would smell him coming and going. I was the sweetest smelling thing you ever smelled. Sometimes I'd get in the elevator and they'd kind of do like that. But after that I thought, well, that's all right. It's just Marguerite being grateful for her sobriety. I wanted to be clean because I had been dirty so many years and then someone said it's better to be clean inside than outside and there was a lot of cleaning up that I had to do.
It was a miracle to me. Some people don't believe in miracles. Some people say, oh, let's not talk like that. This is a disease. We come to AA. We have a practical program to follow and if we do certain things it's only natural that we stay sober. Well, you can call your sobriety what you like but my sobriety is a miracle to me. It was a being born again because I couldn't live any longer with myself the way that I was.
I hated me and everything I stood for. I hated the jail that I had been in. I hated the fact that I couldn't stay married or be a good wife. I hated the fact that I had let my parents down. I know Mama used to cry and cry over me and pray and then Daddy would get mad at me and call me bad names. And then, well, I liked his attitude really better than Mama's because it embarrassed me when she prayed for me.
Daddy said they ought to take all those damn alcoholics out there and line them up against the wall and shoot them down like dogs. And I thought, well, at least he had a positive attitude. I just couldn't stand that whining. Many, many nights she had stayed awake for me, waiting until I got home and I would get in in very bad shape.
[00:40:05]
And I know that as long as I live, I can never fully make amends to her except by loving her and letting her see me sober two or three times a year. And, you know, they tried to take my child one time in court, see, Mama and Daddy. And when I got sober, they brought that boy to me. I know so many, many women think that have lost their children, I'll never get them back. How can I go on living without my little kids?
Well, you'd be surprised. There's no guarantees in AA. But I certainly thought I would never be able to live with either one of mine. But in AA, staying sober one day at a time, my oldest boy was brought to me. Of course, he was a grown boy. But my mother brought him herself and said, it's about time you took a little responsibility. It was one of the happiest feelings I've ever had when I knew that my parents had forgiven me.
I think we long for forgiveness. We long to ask someone to please give us another chance. But there's a stubbornness in me I don't know about you. I wanted to do the things I should do for Johnny. I have to tell this because it was an important thing to me. Mother and Dad lived out on the farm, and I would come home hitchhiking every three or four weeks to see the baby. And in my mind, I thought every time I'd come and sober up, I'd get these big resolutions that I'm going to get a good job and a little house and take care of my child because I had cried bitter tears over him not being able to have it.
You know, old enough women love their babies just like you sober, nice ladies do. Because we're sick and dirty and filthy and do terrible things and that our hearts don't ache just as much as any other mother. I remember the way he felt because I think we live on feelings. And he'd be out on the back porch in that old farmhouse in his little old summer night gown, and I'd remember how soft he felt with his arms around him.
I'd rock him and tell him a little story about us coming to take care of him and we was going to live together. For a little while, we both were real happy believing the lie. The time came, though, when I had to realize that I would never, never be able to take that child and the only comfort that I had was something that I had heard in church of in my father's house or many mansions. If it were not so, I wouldn't have told you.
And I thought maybe God in his mercy would set aside one small white house for Johnny because I knew that his mother was incapable. I got married again and had another child, and I thought, well, this time it's going to work. This child is my salvation. It's been nine years between. Well, he got polio and was in the hospital out in L.A. Across the street from General Hospital, there was a hotel with a bar underneath, you know the type, the rooms upstairs.
And my mother came out all the way from Texas, as they say in that corny language, to be with me in my time of trial. I hate those things. Anyhow, she came out there and she stood there just as long as she could because I'd stumble over the iron lung and I'd vomit on the hospital floor and the nurses would run me off and the doctors would run me out. And when I came to A.A. and they said we drank at the very time, there is every indication we should not drink.
And that certainly made me identify because of all times in my life, I should have been sober when my child was dying. Mother stood it a while and then she yanked me out of the bar that night and took me upstairs and said, The good Lord is punishing you. You haven't been a lady. You haven't lived like the good book says. You have betrayed everything and everyone. You have betrayed everything and everybody, and he's punishing you, and your child is going to die if you don't straighten up.
[00:45:00]
Well, she said what she believed. But in my mind, I felt cut off and abandoned by any sort of higher power. It was then that I kept saying over and over to myself, I hope there is no God. I hope God's dead. I wish that I could just die and be nothing, if I could have been assured that I could quit breathing and be nothing, just a blank nothingness. I'm still sure I would have committed suicide. I never tried it because I was never sure of what was beyond.
I tried not to believe, but in my subconscious, I still had it implanted in me that there was a time afterward, and I didn't have the guts. I knew I couldn't live this life, and certainly I didn't want to taste any further torment. I started doing what I learned later was expressed in A Acons of Age by Father Dowling when he talked about the hound of heaven. 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 hid from any conception of God, and I lived my life as though there were no higher power. I had no rules, no deterrent. I did whatever came up. One way I was able to forgive myself, I knew I didn't deliberately, drinking, make a decision to do this or that or anything else. When I needed a drink of alcohol, I'll put it like this, I was perfectly willing to do anything that became necessary in order to get another drink.
And if I had, if I drank again, I would have the same pattern, I'm quite sure. Alcohol was my God, and anything that became necessary, regardless of what, I was quite willing to do. I never killed anybody, but then it never became necessary. My child didn't die, and it was then that I had gotten on the line. I was very crazy mentally. I came back home to Texas to die. I came hitchhiking over the mountain, as was my usual way with that child.
I had forgotten his coat, and if it hadn't been for truck drivers picking us up and putting their coats or whatever on that child, I guess he would be dead. It's only by the grace of God I'm not in the penitentiary for not treating children right, because I did, I'd forget their coat. I'd leave them in bus stations and forget I had them. I'd do all sorts of things, but it was the drinking that made me do it.
I didn't know that until I came to AA. That's why I had to have a drastic personality change. I had to have a spiritual awakening of some sort in order to continue living. When I first came to AA, and for a long time after, I'd hear people say if I wasn't happy in AA, I would be drunk. I thought about it a long time, and I remember the condition I was in when I came to this program. I was dying mentally and spiritually and physically.
My time had run out, and all I was looking for was a way to keep on living. And then when I was sober a while, I would sit up like some little parrot and say if I wasn't happy in AA, I'd be drunk. AA is survival to me. I don't have to be happy, happy every day in order to still want this one day at a time sobriety. It's life where nothing else but just breathing in and out, and feeling rain and wind, and hearing an old jackhammer on the city streets.
It gives you such a feeling of I am alive. I am so lucky to be alive. To be alive, if that's all I have, it would be worth it, worth everything, to be a vital living creature of God Almighty.
[00:50:10]
The simple things become so important to us in this day-to-day program. We have a new sense of values. Somebody said something once that helped me, and maybe it will help somebody else, because usually the things that help us strike a note with others. It's not because I'm trying to memorize something. But at a time when I needed it, I read that life is only given to me once, and I'll never have it again.
Where is it I have either heard or read that 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 the square yard of earth for a hundred years, a thousand 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.
And that's the way I feel about my sobriety in AA. As long as I am alive, and being alive means not taking that first strength and putting up with some of the normal human difficulties that happen to all of us one day at a time, to stay alive because tomorrow, being alive and sober, there is a possibility for all things. If I take one drink, there's no possibility of anything. I'm dead. So I don't have to be elated every day of my life or amused or entertained.
It is survival, and I want to live. I went to my first AA clubhouse in Dallas, Texas, in 1950. It was a Monday after Easter Sunday. I had been lost from home, and my husband and my child for a long time hitchhiking and drinking. And I ended up in Dallas, and by God's grace, my sister and her husband had gone to AA about three months before I landed drunk at her house that Easter Sunday. And she had all that literature around. She had that little blue book, A Way of Life.
And she handed it to me and said, Margarita, I don't know if this will help you, whether you like it or not, but just read it. And I did. When my eyes would focus, I read that little pamphlet, and it saved my life. Regardless of whatever happened before or whatever happened afterwards, that Sunday, Easter Sunday in 1950, was the most important day I will ever live. It told me I was not a tramp. I was a sick person. That I was not immoral.
That I had a disease that was baffling and cunning and powerful. That there was no cure. That as long as I lived, I would never be able to drink with safety. Because once I took alcohol in my system, it set up a physical allergy and a mental compulsion to drink more and more. It helped me to forgive myself, because it said that we were not responsible once we took a drink. We had no control. So I could forgive myself.
And they told me, when we're making amends to other people, put your name on the top of the list, because you've hurt yourself worse than anybody on this earth. They relieved me of my guilt. It all didn't happen from the little pamphlet. I mean, later on, when they talked about making an inventory and talking it over, admitting our faults to ourselves and another human being and to God, it relieved me of my guilt, because they said that I was sick and the only way that I could get well was to abstain from that first drink.
That it was not a moral problem. I guess I tried to emphasize that. If I repeat myself, I'm sorry, but when you get up here, you're sort of underhandicapped. You forget you said something five times. When you're trying to watch the clock and, well, I hadn't watched it too good. What time is it? It's twenty minutes to twelve. When'd I start?
[00:55:00]
When'd I start? It bugs me to think that when I see somebody squirming, I think, oh Lord, it's been an hour and a half. Anyhow, I went to AA that next day. I walked up those stairs and it seemed like around that part of the country, most of the groups were about three or four flights up. I guess that's a test of whether you're really sincere. I'd walk up a few steps and I'd have to stop and rest because I had heart trouble when I was drinking.
Every time I was coming off a drunk, my heart acted awful. It would stop and then it would go real fast and I'd break out in a sweat and then I would have these, I'd see things. I never had DTs, I don't think, but I would see things and I'd hear things that weren't there. And I got thinking I was crazy, but I really learned that it was withdrawal symptoms. I had had an education in AA. I never knew nothing until I'd come here.
But I knew when I went to that first clubhouse there in Dallas on Main Street upstairs, that that was the place that I belonged. I don't know what that feeling is unless it's the love of other people for each other, for me. They loved me just as I was. They didn't make any demands. I had been drinking a long time. My clothes were terrible. I had slept in one old silk jersey flower dress for I don't know how long because I slept in my clothes.
I was afraid to take them off. There might be a fire or I might have to make the run to the liquor store. And I wouldn't have on none of it, but I had on that old flowery jersey dress. I was safe as long as I had on my dress. So that was the shape I went to AA in and they said they loved me and I couldn't understand it. I thought, who could love me? They made me believe it though. There is a feeling in an AA club, an AA group, that's nowhere else in this world.
I have never known people who level with me before. The places I went, everybody was working some kind of angle. The cry of everything you did for somebody else was because you were trying to get something out of them. I don't know how many of you are familiar with this saying, but you know who said it. What's in it for me? That was the way I lived. What's in it for me? To hell with other people. Anything I ever did that was good for anyone else was because I was fixing to put the bomb on for something.
I learned that because I was treated the same way. I thought the whole world was like that. When I was put in jail and fingerprinted and mugged, I'm sure they don't do that now, but the fingerprint man would ask me where I was going to be a week from then and tell me where to be. I thought they put me in jail for doing the things that they did to me. I lost faith in the laws. I lost faith in the church.
The preacher that baptized me committed suicide. He who had preached about heaven and told me the way committed suicide. And I thought it was all just a phony deal. I lost faith in myself because I knew I was not capable of keeping my word or doing anything else. I was heartbroken. I guess hearts don't break, but that's the way I felt. I came to AA and everything has been different ever since. They talked about, but for the grace of God.
They had big signs in that room, the first one I was ever in. But for the grace of God, Roselle was arrested. And I think about it and what it meant and all that. And I kept worrying. and all that. And I kept worrying about what this grace of God, what it felt like. I didn't know I was already in it. I heard one time, they explained it like this, that when we are
[01:00:04]
in great pain and restlessness, when we feel more separated than usual, when we walk down the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life, sometimes when we are so disgusted with our own lack of direction, our own irresponsibility, 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. I felt thin. I knew what the grace of God was because the people in AA accepted me as dirty as I was. They loved me in spite of myself. I felt that I was forgiven because they told me I was. My life was made over with love. Sooner or later in AA, I realized I had been taken, taken, taken from everybody ever since I'd been in this program. And I decided it's time I got on the other end of the thing and started giving a little something myself because they had implanted it in my mind. We only keep this thing by giving it away. And I had such a feeling of urgency to tell somebody else what AA had done for me. And I still feel that way. I have to tell it over and over and over in order to help myself. I help, I'm here to help myself first. They say this is a selfish program and that's true. I'm here to help me first and help you second if I can. I am not an evangelist or a do-gooder or a reformer just like all the rest of the people in AA. We are not trying to save anybody's souls.
I thought they were at first. And when they talked about God in AA, I thought they were saints and could do no wrong. I idolized the old timers. I worshipped success in AA. I would hang on every word that they said and for a long time I needed that. But I came to know we cannot depend on another AA member for our sobriety. We need each other to share our experience, strength, and hope. But my help comes from a power greater than myself through the people in AA. I have to take home something with me when I leave that AA meeting at night because those people can't go home and sleep with me and live with me. I have to find something that would live out the night. And I found a faith in God that is meaningful to me. I trust him to keep me sober one day at a time because I can't keep myself sober. I can't take credit for any of the days I have been sober because I never did it before and it's only through other people's help and this higher power that I have found the little sobriety, the day by day, that I have. I've been through all the stages, I guess, that anybody else goes through. I got on a religious kick one time in AA and I don't mean that disrespectfully, but I am an all or nothing person. I'll get too high and too low and it's hard to find the middle road. And my husband joined the church, the husband I had been. I had so many I forget. I never got married for the right reasons, you know. I had five and at least, well, we had a piece of paper. I said I was no judge of character and I'm still not, so that's why I'm single and going to stay that way one day at a time. Mom said one sign of a gun happens to every woman but five? Anyhow, like I said, the first one went crazy and the second one was about 30 years older than I am and he started helping me with my work down on the waterfront down in Galveston. He was sort of a business agent. And that didn't last. He went out to sea when the cops got too hot in
[01:05:07]
Galveston. And then the third one was in the Navy. He turned out to be an ollie picker from California. And the fourth one was a singer, a great singer. He could sing but he couldn't work. I sort of supported him. He had a beautiful Irish tenor and I was, you know, getting feeling kind of old then and he made me feel young again. So he'd sing to me after I'd get off from work, I'll take you home again Kathleen.
Well, it lasted five years and I got tired and he got tired and he just wandered off down to Mexico. Didn't see him, well, the last time I saw him he was sleeping in the car at an intersection about five blocks from home. Been drunk, gone three weeks. He was right there in the middle of the road and about 8 o'clock in the morning I was on my way to work. And you know, I didn't stop. It bothered me a while. But I had stopped so many times and I wasn't helping Mike. I was just cleaning him up to get drunk again. And somebody at the club said, Ma'am, you're hurting him, Marguerite. So I just went on by.
He died three years later in Atlanta in delirium treatments in the Veterans Hospital. My sister, who helped me that first day to find the program of aid by handing me the little book, stayed sober about seven years and started having periodic slips and died last year of chronic alcoholism. She started drinking, had been gone from home a while and was taking pills on top of the alcohol. She didn't commit suicide. She just forgot how many pills she'd taken. And she just went to sleep all over. All of her went to sleep and they couldn't wake her up. And she died.
I thank God every day I wake up I have been given one more 24-hour reprieve from death. And I'm not talking just about spiritual death. I'm talking about physical. We found a woman in Houston not long ago who had returned to the happy life. She'd been dead three days. She had died standing on top of her head. Poor thing had gone to the bathroom, just ready to sit down, and fell over in the corner between the commode and the bathtub. And she died that way.
They had to break her arms and legs to get her on the stretcher. Well, that's what this going back to the happy life does, I know, and it's what would happen to me. And I don't want to die on top of my head in the bathroom by the commode. I would rather, if I have to go when I have to go, be a little more dignified. But since I've got so much accident insurance, you know, my boy said one time, I can't help how you go, you're going to end up in an automobile. It's double indemnity. I can just see him taking this old dead body out and sticking it in the car and running it off a cliff.
Anyhow, we get all these problems and we get sober about insurance. I had never had no insurance in my life before. Now I've got all sorts of insurance and worry about it sometimes. And I lost three rings on one of those old airplane trips, and I brooded over that, and I got to licensing myself. I thought, boy, I came to AA. I had lost every wedding set I'd ever had, or somebody had taken it off of me.
I'd drive taxi cabs without the fare, and if I had just recently been married, I'd still have them. And they'd take them for the fare, and I'd never see them again. And then one time, some guy just took them off, decided he wanted them, and he was bigger than I was, so I just let him go. I never could keep any rings. And then when I get married and get sober, I get all sick because I lose three little old costumes, jewelry things that don't amount to a hill of beans. Sometimes we get so rehabilitated, we stink, you know. I like to remember how it was because that way, it don't make any difference whether it's sunshining or raining today. It's a good day.
[01:10:10]
I'm alive, I'm sober, and I have the love of other people, and I can love you, which is more important. I needed to love to get out of my shell, to care something about somebody else. And then I found a whole bunch of people that's the most lovable people in this world once they get sober. We're terrible drunk, and sitting with one isn't too pleasant, but when somebody vomits on me, I remember, ooh, I did it too late, so I'm just carrying it along. And one day at a time now, it's over 16 years. I know we're not supposed to pay too much attention to our length of sobriety because it's true.
I mean, sometimes a guy with a month's sobriety has a better brand that day, a better quality of sobriety for that day than some of us older ones. So length of time doesn't mean anything that way, but it's insurance to me. Now I would have to go out of my way to get drunk. It has become habit, which is good to be sober. In that way, length of time has helped me. It's no guarantee, but it helps. And I need all that insurance that I can get.
And I have a hundred times as much to lose today as I did back then in the beginning when I was slipping around. I have love that I might lose. You know, my little boy, he used to watch TV programs, and if they were about alcoholism, he'd reach over and tap my knee and say, my mama don't drink no more. Like he was afraid, you know, I might, but he was sort of encouraging me, my mama don't drink no more, and just look up at me. And I thought when you get the respect of people back, it's not something that you likely would toss aside. The respect of my parents. And I can make a decent living today with the help of that.
By being sober, I learned to type good, and I'm a legal secretary today, and I never thought that I would be. I'm saying that because a lot of women, when they come to AA in such bad shape, they think nobody will ever hire them or they're unemployable, and certainly I was unemployable. But by staying sober a day at a time, we can train ourselves and get a respectable job. I mean, not that you all had not respectable ones. I'm talking about me. But it means a whole lot to me that I can earn my daily bread and don't have to pay them or borrow or steal or worse.
I sold everything that I ever had for another drink of whiskey or another dollar to get more. There was nothing that I had not been willing to give up. And just to the extent that I abandoned my body and soul to drinking, to that same extent, I have to throw my life into this program and live it and love it and everybody in it. I have to be just as much now to abandoning myself. My own little desires or wants are not important. The big thing is that we are members of AA. We're members of a family, and for the first time in my life, I really belong to something.
It's time to close. I never know how to finish, but I do remember something that made me feel good, and it was I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you for helping me make of this lumber of my life not a tavern, but a temple, and the work of my every day not a reproach, but a song. Thank you. Thank you, Margarita. That was terrific. We have another meeting that starts at 1 o'clock.
[01:15:05]
I'd like to invite each and every one of you back. There's nothing I can add to this beautiful morning. I would like to say this. Tell someone you love them today. We will close in the usual manner. And those who care to join me in the Lord's Prayer, take the hand next to you and have a real good day. Heavenly Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.