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Source: DICOBE-00326 – Clancy I – ARIZONA STATE CONV – 1975-01-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00326-clancy-i-arizona-state-conv-1975-01-15.mp3 Duration: 01:22:58
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My name is Clancy Emerson, and I'm an alcoholic. I'm glad to be here tonight, safe and sane and sober. I'm, I think this has been a fine convention. It's been exciting. Most exciting meeting I'm sure some of you didn't attend was yesterday afternoon. Four o'clock, uh, on that stage there was a fine panel talking about whether AA has changed. And then they made a mistake. They threw a microphone open to the inmates.
And then it started to get exciting. And, uh, some nice Al-Anon lady was really concerned whether or not, uh, AA should take Valium. And I, God, it made my mouth water just to hear it. Uh, somebody asked if, some young lady who asked if, uh, why they had all these old fools on the podium, 25 years sober, no young people. And I, I thought the leader did a good job. He, he mentioned that if you're new you can't really tell if AA is changing.
You have to have some time on the program to get any sort of a perspective. But it was a good meeting, and it was a fine meeting last night. I hope all of you had a chance to attend it. The charming and, uh, lovely representative of the general service offices in New York who, uh, I've heard speak before, and she is always, I'm always interested in what she says. And the, uh, fine meetings today, excellent institutional meeting today, good meeting this afternoon, in which the, uh, young lady, well, she's not young, she said she started drinking 48 years ago.
I heard her say that, but I, she looks young from where I sat. I got a problem? No, I, uh, well, can't call bad eyes a problem. But she gave an excellent talk. I think it's been a fine commission. I'm sure we're going to have a fine, some fine meetings tomorrow, because I know all of the speakers. I know them personally, away from the podium. Uh, Rosa, who is kind of a, has been in AA long enough now to say anything she damn well wants to say, and get away with it.
And, uh, the fine Al-Anon speaker from Oklahoma, who I had dinner with tonight, and I've met her many, many times, and Harry from San Diego. But we are here, uh, primarily, uh, not really to just call the role of meetings, but to remember, I'm here to remember why I'm here. I'm here, uh, as I said, because I'm glad to be here tonight, safe and sane and sober. Because I didn't used to be, and as I like to say, I may not be sober again sometime, because the streets are full of people who used to be safe and sane and sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, and aren't anymore.
The indispensable members of groups, who the group couldn't exist without them. Somehow, the group exists without them. People sometimes stay sober as long as six months. If you're new, can you imagine someone staying sober six months and getting along well and then drinking? And sometimes they stay sober as long as a year, sometimes longer than that. I think one of the more poignant things I ever ran across was the 1970th International Convention in Miami Beach.
I ran across a little old Irish lady, and she was crying, and she had come home from Ireland. She had lived in the United States and gone back to Ireland. She came back to the International Convention to see her sponsor. And she was 29 years sober, and she got to Miami Beach, and she asked somebody from Cleveland about him, and he had gotten drunk the week before, after 33 years of sobriety. He had gotten sober in 1937, and got drunk.
And it's a funny thing. AA loses a lot of people to drinking. In fact, that's an interesting thought, I think. We get so immersed, are we getting enough of the new people in? I've had the hearties in Arizona, but in my state, I haven't been to a meeting in literally years, but there haven't been new people at the meeting. We're getting an awful lot of new people. I think the problem that we sometimes forget is we lose them out the top, because we somehow feel that if we get them sober, somehow they're going to be all right.
And it is incumbent upon me to remember for myself that being sober does not mean that I'm going to be sober. Or the fact that I'm at this meeting tonight will not mean that I'm going to be sober. Or the fact that I'm attempting to work the principles of AA does not indicate I'm going to be sober. Because people get out of AA little by little. They don't just jump out when they've been sober a while.
They ease out. They get out a little. By the way, the year after I got Miami Beach, I was up in Cleveland talking at some anniversary for Sister Ignatia or something and commemorating her death or something, and I made a point of looking up this guy.
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And he had just died without ever getting back.
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And I asked about him, and it turned out he hadn't been to a meeting for four years before he got drunk. But his reason was pretty good. Hey, baby, I have to write that book. What do I have to do to keep sitting in them damn meetings? You know, he stopped smoking, and that smoke bothered his eyes. And what's there to tell him? What some dummy gets up and says, I used to drink, and now I stay sober.
Well, you've heard it for 30 years. You shouldn't have to keep sitting in there, should you? But apparently, yes, you have to do. Because that's what happens. There's another. Yesterday, the leader mentioned that, or someone mentioned, on that panel and yesterday afternoon, I remember the word, it struck me in a different way, that Alcoholics Anonymous is a paradox. And it certainly is a paradox in another way.
That paradox is, I don't think there's anybody in this room who's been sober very long who would question the fact that Alcoholics Anonymous is a spiritual program. It certainly is a non-material program, a thing of the spirit. And one of the funny ways that people get out of AA is that somehow they come here and find some spiritual values, and the next thing you know, they glow right out the other side.
They become too spiritual for AA. They're just wonderful. And there was a woman who said hell at a meeting last week, and I can't go there. And one of the classic lines is, I now walk alone with God. And it's pretty hard to debate that, you know. But I'll tell you something else that's kind of funny. People who become too spiritual to do the things that alcoholics have to do to stay sober, and who walk alone with God, in my experience, apparently every so often God leans over and says, why don't you have a beer, kid?
And away they go. People come here sometimes so spiritually starved that when they get some spiritual value, they think that they've got something nobody else ever had. And people drift away little by little. And people have a difficult time sometimes in maintaining interest in them same damn old 12 sects and them damn 12 traditions, and still another goofy newcomer to deal with tonight at the meeting.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, Jesus, come on. We're here to find love, not to listen to you. Damn. And it's understandable. I don't suppose anybody maintains a consistent interest. If they would, they'd be something more than human. But I'm glad that I'm here tonight safe and sane and sober, and I hope I remember that. I didn't always know that, and I might forget it sometime in the future. There was one other thing I wanted to mention tonight, and I did want to get it in before I forgot it, because I think it should be part of any talk.
I used to drink alcohol. I think I kind of slid over that in my sermon tonight. But I'm here because I used to drink alcohol, and I drank alcohol not because I was an alcoholic, but because I had certain emotional dislocations that most people don't understand. Laugh if you want to, but it goddamn near killed me. I had my first drink of alcohol. I remember it very well. I had my first drink when I was 15 years old, just coming up to 16.
And that was in the spring of 1943. I grew up in a… I always like to give this town a little juice. It's the only juice I get. I grew up in a little town in northern Wisconsin called Eau Claire. It's a lovely little town. It's the type of town you see in Andy Hardy movies. It's just two-story houses, and the streets are just tunnels of green trees, and there's lawns you don't have to water because it rains and things like that.
And two little rivers come together there and form another river, which lends its way down to the Mississippi. As boys, we used to have rafts and go out and be like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. And in the summertime, you go to sleep at night to the crickets chirping, and it's lovely in the soft, warm air. In the autumn, everything just turns to gold and crimson, and the trees are beautiful. And I think one of the most poignant smells of all is smelling the smell of burning leaves in that kind of a climate.
It smells very much like marijuana, actually. But you haven't smelled any marijuana. It smells like burning leaves is what it smells like. And in the wintertime, the snow falls, and the whole town is like a Christmas card.
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There's little wrists of smoke coming out. There's little steeples coming out of the snow, and there's kids with sleds and rosy cheeks and snowsuits. In the springtime, the snow melts and the flowers. I always remember spring because that's when you start to smell lilacs. When you smell lilacs, you know spring is here. You know at that time of year when you're a boy that you know you're going to fall in love and you just hope it's with somebody you'll like this year.
Some dullard that's been sitting in front of you for four years. This year, you'll love her. And it's just a wonderful town. It's the kind of town that everybody dreams of. And I'll tell you, I just couldn't wait to get out of that goddamn place. I just couldn't stand it. Even then, I was weird. I wanted to be out where the lights were going, and I wanted to have fun and excitement and things. And in the spring of my junior year of high school, I was 15, I didn't know much about the world.
What I knew about the world was there was a war on and it seemed romantic. I learned about the war by reading Life magazine and seeing exotic places like the palm trees on Guadalcanal and the colorful gurnooses in North Africa. Really exciting. And what I knew about the world, I'd seen at the state or badger theaters in downtown Eau Claire and learned about the world from the movies. And I just wanted to get out there.
In some sort of hideous fit of go, on an Easter vacation in 1943, I told my mother I was going to go up to Superior and visit my aunt and uncle. And instead, I just hitchhiked all the way to San Francisco. And I found, I always run across bad guys immediately. I'm lucky to do that. And he showed me how to get some phony identification showing I was older than I was. And with that, I got some seamen's papers.
They were crying for merchant seamen. And the day after I was in San Francisco, I was on a load of torpedo warheads going to the South Pacific. And about one day out of port, I suddenly realized, oh, Jesus. This isn't it either, really. And I went and told the captain that I wanted to go home. I really wanted my mother, but I didn't want to say that. And I was short and skinny, and I had a face full of pimples.
I was very hip in Eau Claire, but out here I was really something less. And the captain told me he, in not these words, he told me that he could not turn back because of my request. And he suggested I continue with my duties of chipping the paint. And he said words I'd never heard in Eau Claire. And that day, I was assigned to a foxhole. A foxhole is a room on a ship where people sleep. And in there, there were four people, I and three others.
And these other three were the worst type, the type of people I've always either, I always had envied or resented. It's the type you just can't do anything with. Men. Grown-up men. And the type of man you don't see in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Men with black hair. Italians. Mexicans. Funny things, not Norwegians. And I, uh, I was really a little sick about that. And the first day out in this foxhole, I remember this because it happened, I always try to remember it.
I remember the guy reaching into a sea bag and taking out a bottle of whiskey and saying to one of these other boobs, You want a little snort? The guy said, yeah. How about you, you want a little snort? The guy said, yeah. And he turned to me and he said, how about you, junior? Do you think you're man enough to take a little snort? And he stuck that bottle in my face. And I looked up at him and I gave him the mini-ray with my watery blue eyes.
And I thought, you big fool. Ask me if I'm going to drink whiskey in the first place. Lutherans don't drink whiskey. Baptists may, Catholics do, but Lutherans don't. And even if Lutherans did drink whiskey, I wouldn't because I promised my mother I wouldn't. And besides that, good guys don't drink whiskey, bad guys drink whiskey, Buck Jones doesn't drink whiskey, rustlers named Slade drink whiskey.
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They get together, come on, let's go get Buck Jones. Errol Flynn doesn't drink whiskey, turns out he did later, but Robin Hood doesn't drink whiskey, Basil Rathbone, the sheriff of Nottingham drinks whiskey. And that guy stuck that bottle in my face, a clean cup, he looked at me, who knows better, he says, are you man enough? And I looked right up at him and I said, goddamn right. I've always been very bad with peer pressure.
So that day I had my first drink of whiskey and I, oh, bad news, baby, burned my mouth, burned my throat, burned my stomach, turned around, burned my stomach, burned my throat, burned my mouth, burned my nose, my ears, my hair. And I remember being sick, but something I remember much more than that, I can hear it almost as though it were yesterday, their scornful, sneering laughter. Ha ha ha ha ha, what's the matter, junior, you're not man enough? Ha ha ha.
There's nothing you can do, I thought later I might get one of them to lean over, hey, here, lean over, buddy, I got something for you. Shoot him a blackhead in the eye, see, that slowed him down. But I didn't, thank heaven. And I really felt bad, I felt inadequate and weak anyway and that made it all the worse. And as with most things in my life, it's always the next thing, if I can do the next thing, I'll be all right. And the next thing it seemed to me to be, was I wonder if I could hold down a drink of that slop.
And all the way across the Central Pacific, in the hot, in the heat of late April and May of 1943, I snuck into that guy's sea bag every day when somebody wasn't around and took a drink to try to hold one down. And it'd come back up. And I took another drink to hold one down and it'd come back up. I hated the taste of it, I hated how it tasted, I hated everything about it, but I had just become obsessed.
Those guys are never going to know that I'm really equal until I can have a drink. And a day out of Pearl Harbor, I took a drink one day, that day, and it went down, made me sick, tasted terrible, I started to throw up, and I didn't. It stayed down. And it just about killed me, hot, stinking, lousy, rotten stuff. But I got thinking, now, now I'll somehow get one of those guys to offer me a drink and I'll pretend I like it. I'll go, mmm, that's good, this boy that hit the spot. They'll say, hey, that kid's all right. I can just get them to, what do they think, will that sell them on the idea? And as I was thinking about what they were thinking, the first of the maybe 10,000 miracles that AA did in my life transpired that morning.
As I was standing there thinking about that, I noticed my stomach, my stomach started to get warm. And my fingertips went tingly poo. And my toes tingled, and I gained about six inches in height. And my pimples fell off. And then all of a sudden I found myself thinking, who cares what those dummies think? And then I got sick and threw up again. But for a brief moment, maybe a minute and a half or two minutes, I had found a feeling that it looked to me like everybody else had naturally, the feeling of being something.
And from then on I drank. I didn't get drunk a lot, especially when I was a kid. I didn't drink a great deal. I learned to drink like every other kid learns to drink. I drank more than I should sometimes. It made me feel, but it always did the job for me a little bit. And later in the war I went in the Navy when I got old enough. And when I was in the Navy I took some examinations through the Armed Forces Institute so I didn't have to go back and be a junior in Eau Claire High School.
And I got out of the Navy in the spring of 1946. I started college at the University of California on the GI Bill. And I was, I still was the dumbest kid in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. And I really didn't get along there well at all. And I drank too much trying to be a man to prove I was a veteran. I got expelled. And right after that, I just, going to go see the world. I wound up in Tucson, Arizona of all places.
I lived downtown the YMCA. My diet got to be one thing. I learned my first word of Spanish. Dame un perro caliente. I ate some goddamn hot dogs continually because that's all I could eat. And I hung, and I, at that time in 1946 the American Legion Hall was right around the corner from the YMCA down an alley. And I went over there and played piano and the good guys would buy me drinks. And it really was a dummy thing.
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And finally, on Easter morning of 1946, I ran across, or the day before that, I ran across a guy who said, I live in Pennsylvania. Come over to my house. And so he, I said, how are we going to get there? He said, I know how to ride freight trains. Haven't you ever ridden freight trains? I said, no, I never rode a freight train. He said, you're going to learn today, baby. And Easter morning, 1946, he and I left Tucson on a freight train. And we finally got to Pennsylvania. I never got back to Tucson until yesterday. I still got some change coming from one of my hot dogs, that's why I'm here. And, but I went to his house. Now it's silly, but finally I got myself together and the fall of 19, I went to college in the GI Bill. I went back and I became a, I put my efforts to work to become something.
And I drank all this time. And I, I did become something in college. I, in Wisconsin, I, I got married in college and I had a couple little kids and I discovered something I, I didn't know I could do as well as the coach thought I could. And I got good coaching and I became a member of a national intercollegiate championship team. And I was active in, I edited the yearbook. I did all the things that you do in college to be kind of a big man on campus. And after the war, after I got out of college enough, I became a sports writer on newspapers. And then I got into corporate work, into writing and then advertising and advertising agencies. And I became kind of successful. I got into some big agencies at one time.
I was teaching in a college at night, working in an advertising agency in the daytime and writing a weekly column besides and had more kids and drank all this time. And I'll tell you a secret, to the best of my ability to judge, alcohol was the best friend I ever had and it made it possible. I really felt that. Alcohol gave me the edge I needed to go out in that world and reduce my inhibitions that held me, reduce my fear and so on. And I do feel, you know, alcohol was the best friend I ever had, I felt. Women come and go. Jobs come and go. Cities come and go. But a double shot is always a double shot.
Or a martini. Or a glass of wine. Or whatever it may be. And I, some years later, I took my last drink. About a year ago, I was talking to some dummy newcomer one day, and I get referrals from around the country, people say, you're too sick for us, go to Los Angeles, go to Patsy. But I really got a nice crap. And I try to explain to this guy, he was telling me about his emotions and I was telling him about my emotions and I found myself saying something that I had never thought of all the time I drank and all the time after I was sober for years and years. But suddenly I heard myself saying it's really true.
I took my last drink, as far as I can look at it now, for exactly the same reason I took my first drink. To feel grown up in a grown up world and to be able to fill that hole in my gut. I had much better reasons to describe it by the time I took my last drink. I'd been in analysis for some time, I'd had medications, I'd had deep psychoanalytical progress, I'd been into metaphysics, I got into philosophy.
Man, when you read philosophy, you become, you know truth. If you're dissatisfied with life, read Nietzsche and you'll feel better because to me Nietzsche was just wonderful. I enjoyed what he said. He has some wonderful things out, such as, Nietzsche in 1884 wrote a treatise proving that God was dead. And by the time I read it, I was glad to hear it. Because if he wasn't, I was screwed. And that's a long, beautiful treatise. In fact, there's a very famous plaque in the Union Theological Seminary in Chicago that says, God is dead, signed Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche, 1884. And beneath it, it says, Nietzsche is dead, signed God, 1906.
But anyway, you don't, uh, but I never could conceive that I was thinking, you know, it's okay to feel, drink to feel grown up when you're 15 and your face is full of pimples and you're a dummy punk. But after you're grown up and getting bald and wrinkled and you got four kids growing up and you're sitting behind a door with your name and letters of gold on it that people have to knock on before they come in, Mr. Immesler, you shouldn't have to drink to feel grown up then.
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But I drank to feel grown up and it did the job for me. And I, uh, I tell you that, uh, in a real sense, my drinking was always for the same reason. I suppose I could phrase it a little bit differently because it would say the same thing but it would cover it a little more expansively. I could say, for instance, that I drank to redress the imbalance I felt between myself and my environment. And that would be, that's accurate because that really is what it boils down to. And I succeeded relatively well all these years, didn't I?
And there was no problem with drinking except once in a while and then it wasn't really a problem with drinking. I had some problems and I had problems as far back as I can remember. But my problems were not that of alcohol. In fact, I went to my, some guy took me to my first AA meeting in 1949. And I knew that I wasn't like those old fools. You know, they were old fools in their 30s and 40s, burnt out old fools.
And the guy said, I stayed drunk on alcohol for 25 years and then I am sober today. I'm just so glad. Well, that's easy. Certainly glad you got a place to go, you old fool. But it's got nothing to do with me because I got my life ahead of me and I did it. And as the years went by, the reason I went into analysis, the reason I went into metaphysics, before metaphysics were big, at that time there were only six of us who knew truth in Dallas. Before I went into philosophy. And the only reason I went into it was for this reason.
Because I had some emotional imbalances that made me feel bad a lot of the time. And these emotional imbalances were nothing to do with anything that I could find identifiable. They dealt with emotions that apparently, as far as I could see, other people didn't seem to have. For instance, how do you explain to somebody, I often get the feeling that I don't really fit in like other people do. Now that isn't much of a thing to say. What's your problem? Oh, I don't feel I fit in. Oh, really?
I sometimes have gnawing feelings of, secret feelings, carefully hidden, but feelings of inadequacy sometimes. Just inadequacy. And about the only way I ever found to beat that feeling is to take he or she or them to who I feel inadequate and find ways to tear them down in my mind and criticize them until I can make myself feel superior to them. That's why people always put down a lot of things they don't understand because they're afraid of it. In fact, that's one of the strange things about my life. I look over my life and maybe some of you have had this feeling. I remember most of my life, all of my life just about, I felt either beneath or above. Beneath or above.
One thing I never have any memory of feeling was, is equal. Equal on a continuing basis. And I have feelings of inadequacy. I get afraid sometimes and I can't even identify what it is. This is kind of a, Dodie said to me, she had a lot of free-floating anxieties. That's what they are, free-floating anxieties. You just, somehow you feel something's going to happen and you're afraid of it and you don't know what it is.
And those are the sort of things you can't tell people about. I used to kind of chuckle sardonically to myself and think, because I went to A.A. meetings every once in a while for year after year because the heat was on. A lot of people thought I had a drinking problem, but I knew I didn't. But you know, what if I went down to one of them A.N.A. meetings and one of them old silver-haired boobs came over to me.
How are you doing, son? Oh, I have a secret feeling of inadequacy. How are you getting along? Oh, I'm afraid. What are you afraid of? Beat the shit out of me. I'm not afraid of anything. They would, they'd get an eleven foot pole to touch you with, baby. These are secret emotions. What is it that you don't fit in? When other people seem to instinctively know how to get along and I can for a while. I don't know how to get along, and I can for a while, but it comes and goes.
To not really know how to act, I felt sometimes in my life as though,
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when I was old and supposed to be wise and had some degree of respect, that I felt almost sometimes in situations as, as unversed in what to do as I did when I got on that ship and trying to watch what those guys were doing to act grown up. You know, when you get kids and you take them to the park and you have to kind of look out of the corner of your eye at other fathers to see what fathers do with kids, because you're not certain, but your feelings are right.
When your little girl eats a dead bird, should you offer to help her, or bite it, or slap her, or what the hell to do? You know. But I became kind of successful, because these problems and anxiety and loneliness and not fitting in and fear are the feelings that I equate with prolonged sobriety. And I, they, they weren't caused in my life by drinking. They were healed by drinking. And when it gets bad enough, you take a few drinks, and it eases them off.
And you can go in and do what you gotta do, and even if you can't do it, you feel like you can do it. And sometimes that fools people right there. That's just one of the, you know, it always, always is kind of amazing to me now, I didn't know it then, but one of the great cries you hear around AA every once in a while from some beleaguered soulless, I'm not really an alcoholic. I'm a social drinker.
Why have I been cursed with this illness? Social, if I could have been a social drinker. There's such a demand around here to be a social drinker sometimes. You just don't know what's happening. If you want to be a social drinker, you're just not aware. Can you imagine what it must be like to be a social drinker? When you feel bad and take a drink, you still feel bad. Is that what you want out of life?
It's hard for us to know. We're among the very lucky 6 or 7% that alcohol changes. You could be, that's why those fools can leave a half empty glass on a bar and walk out. Oh, that's all I want. Whereas most of us can hear from two rooms away a little voice saying, I'm in here on the piano. But I knew, I knew this all those years. My problem is not alcohol and when I use alcohol wisely, I can overcome my problems and become something.
Unfortunately, however, sometimes the pressures are too great and the pharisees are too intense and sometimes there's too much injustice. I've always been a great believer in justice. That's one of the hallmarks of being young is that you want justice. I demand justice. Justice for the whole world. If you haven't got enough for everybody, give me mine. As you get older and wiser, you begin to realize that's the last thing in the world you want.
There's any more justice and I'm wiped out, baby. The cry becomes mercy, good breaks. There's something, no more justice. But I wanted justice. And sometimes the intensities of my emotions were such and they didn't all come in nice little packages. They just come in bloop, bloop. You never know where to look for the damn thing. You could be feeling good and just have somebody look at you funny and it just makes you wonder, hmm, what do they mean by that?
But sometimes I drank too much and sometimes I got drunk. With the sensitivities I had, it's no wonder I got drunk. And then well-meaning people look at me and say, you have a problem with alcohol. Now if you just quit drinking, everything will be all right. And when they say that, you immediately know they don't know. My problem is not drinking. My problem is perhaps call it moods, call it injustice, call it lousy stinking breaks, call it rotten, stinking, cheap, hypocritical society.
But if I… It isn't alcohol, but these moods sometimes got me and I had funny things happen to me.
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Like in the spring of 1954, I was a young up-and-coming guy in the Midwest. I was man of the year for my writing and I was some kind of brilliant young advertising executive, I'll tell you. In July of 1954, I got an award as the man of the year. But unfortunately, some of my moods got a hold of me. And by December of 1954, I was playing piano in a whorehouse in San Francisco. Now… Don't misunderstand me, I'm not putting that down.
But it's very hard to work into your resume later, I'll tell you that. That's why… That's why most people like me have big areas in their resume where it says self-employed or freelance. And finally, I ran into that guy that taught me how to run freight trains, ride freight trains. He was in San Francisco. And I ran into him in January of 1955. He said, hey baby, I'm going to El Paso. I graduated from Texas Western College.
And I'm going down to take some graduate work. Come on along, we'll hitchhike. And I had a wife and kids stuck away in the Midwest. But I figured they probably couldn't send me any money. So we hitchhiked. And I got to El Paso. We hitchhiked to El Paso in January of 1956 or 55. And I'm going to tell you something. I was full of zeal to make a new start. And I got a job in the El Paso Times as a reporter.
And then after that, I got into an agency, advertising agency, called Midhoff Advertising Agency in El Paso. And by May of 1956, I had my wife and family in there. Had another kid. I was at the faculty of Texas Western at night, working in an advertising agency in the daytime and writing a weekly column for the El Paso Times. Now that isn't bad for hitchhiking in in your t-shirt a year and a half before.
And I really had it together. Except, unfortunately, I had an attack to one of my moods. Now, I had been drinking successfully all the time I was there. But when these moods come, I get weird. And a month and a half later, I was no longer on the faculty of Texas El Paso. I was in the Texas State Insane Asylum at Big Spring, Texas. And I was not in there for an alcohol problem. I was in there as a suicide.
Because one of my moods got me into a suicidal depression. And I had promised not to drink. Because if I drank, I was going to lose all three of my jobs. So I couldn't drink, and I stayed sober too long. And when I stay sober too long with my moods, I kill myself. And that's a terrible place to be in the Big Spring. You know, we had a speaker on the panel a couple, one of the meetings ago, a guy who moved out here from Odessa, which is just a few miles from the Big Spring.
That's a terrible nuthouse to be in. And it's bad enough to have to go to Texas to work, you know. But I… And I was supposed to be in this nuthouse until I got cured. And I could see that this was going to be a long pull. And they told me, this is an escape-proof hospital. And that's all I need to do to get motivated. It is? I just forgot that a few weeks before killing myself. And it took me two weeks to break out of the nuthouse at Big Spring, Texas.
How to get through a door, and down a corridor, and through another door, and across the yard, and over the fence. And the fox was loose. But the sad thing is, it isn't until you get out that you realize it really is an escape-proof nuthouse, but you don't know until you get out. I don't know if you've ever been to West Texas, but you suddenly look around and realize I can see you running for three days.
And you feel like such a dummy in your white bathrobe. And you know it's just a matter of time until those field grasses pick you up. Well, there goes that little Yankee son of a bitch now! And they pulled me back, and they blew me the electroshot cord, and I never tried to run away again. It took me a long time to get out of that institution. A long time. I probably never would have got out. But I finally found one day, after I'd been there a number of months, I'd had some jobs in the hospital, I'd been…
They saw my record, I'd directed a grand opera at the Texas Westerns, so they had me direct the Christmas pageant in the nuthouse. About a second-grade level, so the entire student body could get each nuance of the performance. The director's main job on that show was to try to keep the three wise men off the Virgin Mary,
[00:40:01]
and he got the curtain open. No, no, Lamar, you're supposed to worship her! No, no. Uh… And I started a hospital newspaper, and I was the campus mailman, and I was doing everything. I almost got out, except every time I was just about ready to get out, I got upset. That moved me back a class or two. I was in that Ward 9 for God knows how long. And I, what I discovered, they set up the first alcoholic ward in the state of Texas, the big Spring State hospital, that year.
And I heard about that, and there were alcoholics coming in, and those AMAs were running it. And all these guys were coming in for a 30-day commitment and going home. And I asked about maybe going over there because I needed help. And they said, no, we don't accept psychiatric commitments. You have to be here at the alcoholic commitment program. And I thought, if I can only hustle at this. I'd been in Ronda A means for seven years by now, whenever the heat was on.
People had a drinking problem. I discovered during those years that alcoholic elements has one great function. The only place I know where you can look as though you're reforming without having to reform for a while. You know, you can come home and say, I'm back. I went back to an AA meeting, Madge. Oh, wonderful. That's wonderful. Madge, they told me to tape her off. But I, this old guy, Mr. Ross, used to cut through our ward.
I was in kind of a country club ward by then. And I thought, maybe I can hustle that old fool. And he cut through our ward one night and said, Mr. Ross, my name is Clancy Emerson. And I understand that you people have some sort of program to help alcoholics. And alcohol has really been the root of my problem all these years. And I understand it now. And if I could just get some help. Do you have any kind of literature I could read or any actions I could take?
I'd like to find some spiritual help so I could return to my family in a better spiritual condition. And his eyes just went… That old man had never seen a sincere newcomer before. Man, I just reeled him right in. I'd get the hook on him. And he went to Austin and I became the pilot study in the state of Texas. I was the first psychiatric commitment to be allowed to attend AA meetings in the Texas State Alcoholic Program.
And they couldn't have found a better patient because everybody around me was there for 30 days, win, lose, or draw. And they were not burdened with insincerity. And I was the only one who had to look good to get out. And I became the best patient they could have had. Old Mr. Ross would give us a lecture for an hour on the steps. And nobody in the room wanted to hear it. You know, not some more of them steps, Mr. Ross.
And he'd get all done. I'd say, are there any questions? And nobody had any questions. But I raised my hand. I have a question, Mr. Ross. Could you tell us some more about the freedom you find in taking this fourth step and getting rid of this garbage of the past and getting it out on paper? And he'd smile and say, yes, I can, Clancy. I'm glad you asked about that. And everybody around me would say, oh, gee.
But I wasn't concerned about them. I had to impress that old fool. And people came and went and came and went. And I stayed. I got to be secretary of the group. They started taking me out to talk. You know, talk at conventions like this. I always feel a little nervous when I hear institutional inmates speaking at conventions. Not that they're bad, but I read myself into them. I remember over in Midland, talking, giving those talks on friends.
I'm just so proud to be here today on behalf of my fellow patients from the state hospital to thank each and every one of you for bringing a message of God. We were traveling across the desert of alcoholism and we came to the cool green hills of sobriety. They were too steep for our weary legs, but you showed us where 12 golden stairs were etched into the side of those hills. And we climbed them one minute.
Now, you could laugh, but it got me out of the nut house. And by that time, I needed a drink desperately. But I had some people thought I was reformed. And before you know it, I was in Dallas and I was working for Tracy Lott, the largest advertising agency in the southern United States, working on some ads that young people today never heard of. But if you're old, you remember them. They were hip in their day, those old Elsie and Elmer ads where them cows all talked to each other and talked about the value of Borden's milk and the twins and, oh God.
And I had a nice home in Highland Park and I determined I'd learn my lesson because I was on probation from the nut house. Signed out to my wife. Boy, that makes it exciting around the house. All she ever has to do is pick up that phone and I'm gone. Don't you think you'd better get that garbage out? Yes, I do. That's a good idea.
[00:45:03]
But, uh, I got into one of my moods, unfortunately. I realized I'd made a bad marriage, actually, is what it was. And I, uh, one morning I woke up and I wasn't in Dallas, you know where I was? Third floor, second or third floor, the Phoenix jail. And I didn't know, I mean, I knew where I was, I asked the guy where I was, he told me. And at that, I don't know if it's still there, but it used to be above the city hall.
The courts were in the same buildings, up in the second or third floor. There was no air conditioning, there was 117 on the street. And up on that third floor it was bad. And when I woke up, a guy had just kicked my teeth down my throat, because I'd vomited on his bunk. Now that really is, that's a bit of overreaction, wouldn't you say? I almost said that, geez, that's overreaction, buddy. But I didn't say anything, I'm glad to report.
And I, uh, now I lay there, remember who I was? And the guy told me, suddenly I remember, yeah, I lost my job at Tracy Lock, and I remember my family and four kids leaving me. They moved to a post office box in Dallas, and I, uh, didn't know what the hell to do except I had to stay out of Texas, because if I went back there, they'd snatch me, just as sure as hell. So I got out of jail the next morning, and I had a jacket and an old shirt and a pair of pants and a T-shirt, or a pair of shoes, and I went over.
I looked so bad, I'd vomited on me, and I had no front teeth, and I was sick and shaky. And there's only one place you can look up there, and you look up Alcoholics Anonymous, because you sure can't go to the Junior Chamber of Commerce and say, hey, baby, how's man of the year in 54? You can't go to the Masons and say, I'm with it. You look up the Mayonnaise, because they're dummies. And I saw something called the Arid Club on North 3rd Street, and it just opened recently, I understood.
I found out later, and I tried to saunter over there, looking like a wealthy eccentric, if I could, so I didn't get bagged on the way. And I got in there, and I sat in that club for a day and a half, and I couldn't get any help. At that time, the only books in their little library, somebody had donated an entire set of Horatio Alger books. And I read Sink or Swim, and Fill the Fiddler, and Clock and Luck, and Jesus, I almost confessed twice, just anything.
And I couldn't get anybody interested in that. I tried to look my newcomer look, and I sat right by the door, but I must have smelled bad. Finally, some old lady came over, and I was thinking as she came over, God, what kind of a terrible, what's wrong with me? I can't go back to Texas, I'm dead there. I can't go back to San Francisco, I'm hotter than a pistol there, because I made off with some tourist's wallet, this guy, and I didn't want to do it, he made me.
I can't go back to the Midwest, the city I lived in, because I caused my best friend to commit suicide there, and if I go back there, it'll drive me crazy. Maybe I could call up my father. He hadn't talked to me for eight years, and I was his only child. The last time he talked to me, he came to my jail cell at six o'clock in the morning in 1915, and said, son, did you have a good time drinking last night?
And I said, no, I didn't, Dad, but I'm going to do better. He says, I hope you did, because while you were out drinking, your little son died in his crib, and I never want to see you again. So I didn't have much sense calling him. And my mother, she was not allowed to send me money, but occasionally she'd sneak in Bible verses, and I didn't have much sense trying to get little John 316 for bus fare, because they don't take us to the bus depot.
All I knew was there's something terribly wrong with me, and everything I touch, I do well, and then it goes to hell, and I don't know what's wrong with me. I wish I weren't an alcoholic. I wish I weren't a narcotic addict. I wish I could blame my troubles on something, so when I stop doing it, it'll get better. He had this craziness, intensity in the fellow in me. The same intensity I felt that made me succeed made me fail.
I didn't know how to split it. And this nice little lady came over and said, are you sick, young man? I looked up at her and thought, what a nice old lady. She said, I'm not going to hustle her. I'll get a referral. And she said a line that I'd heard a number of times before, and it just turned me around. She said, it's so wonderful that you younger people are getting to AA before you have to go all the way.
And I thought, you old bag. So I borrowed $2.50 from her. I'd have gotten more, but that's all she had with her. She was so easy, I almost sent her home for more. All the ladies that try to help young men are easy, just for going in. But I got over there, and I got to Los Angeles. My new plan was I'll go to Seattle. I'll start a new life. I'll shape up, and I'll go back and make amends. I'll make amends.
I'll look good to my dad. I'll find my kids, and I'll send them presents, whether I see them again or not. And I'll become something. And I got to Los Angeles. I went up to the AA club, because I thought I'd made a little score here, might make a little score there. And I hung around there for a few days, and nobody was buying my action. And I finally got banned out of the AA club in Los Angeles, because I stole the coffee kitty money one night, and somebody caught me.
[00:50:00]
So I went to the beach. I heard about this yesterday. I think it was Friday. I think the fellow maybe had some bad information. I lived in something called the Tender Loving Care Club on the beach. It was started by a group of AAs. And this one guy, they wanted to charge for his services. And the central office wrote him a letter, and he put on some heat about you can't charge for AA. So he threw his fellow board members, who'd put up the money, he threw them out of the operation, and he said, OK, I'll work with narcotics addicts.
Screw you. And he threw us all out. And changed his name to Synanon, made himself a million dollars. If I'd have stuck with him, I could have been something. But I went downtown, and I wound up on Skid Row. And a man with my intelligence and perception and sensitivity can't be on Skid Row. And I found myself being strung out on a midnight mission, and selling blood and living in an all-night theater.
I remember standing outside of the blood bank one morning, cordial six. We used to call it the dance hall, because you kind of danced waiting for that baby to open. And thinking, God, what's wrong with me? If I could find my plaques and show these people, if I could find my awards, then I could be something. And here I am. And that morning they told me my blood was no longer good enough to be purchased on Skid Row.
The iron content had fallen below the acceptable Skid Row level. And I was 108 pounds, and I'd lost my jacket. And I was down to a t-shirt and a pair of pants and a pair of tennies, and no front teeth. And I didn't have the slightest clue of what was wrong with me. And that morning I was so sick, I went out back to that stinking AA club where I was banned, because I knew I had to get off the street or die.
And I told the guy I wanted to make a new start, and he said, he told me, you're phony. And I said, yeah, that's right. So let me get off the street, will you? And he said, go in the back room and stay out of sight, because we don't want anybody to see you in our AA club. And I lay on his sofa and I puked on it, and I thought, there's got to be somebody here who I can hit over the head to get some money.
If I can just get to Seattle, just that one thing, I'll be all right. And I had no premonition or knowledge or insight or intuition. But that would be my sobriety date. But that was my sobriety date. And that was this month, 17 years ago. And since then, I haven't had a drink of alcohol. I haven't had a mind-affecting drug, whether medically prescribed by a hung-up doctor or not. I thought about that yesterday.
Again, I don't want to interject because it's my opinion. It's only my opinion. But Friday there was some talk saying, we're not doctors. We can't tell you not to take mind-affecting drugs. Well, I'll tell you. If you were at the International Convention in 1960, you heard a very fine doctor named Hal S. Too bad you weren't around to be with us while he died from his mind-affecting drugs. He never did drink.
But he was one of those who said, you should be a doctor to know whether you should take it. And he died from it. The streets are full of people. And it seems in my conception, we didn't come here, as the young lady said, to take our alcohol and pills for him. No one's telling you not to take nitroglycerin pills if you've got a heart trouble. No one's telling you not to take insulin pills if you're diabetic.
All I think what they suggest here is, don't wipe out your head with something else that'll leave you in the same condition that alcohol will. Because if you can do that, you're going to go again. There's probably as many people hung up on pills today as there is on alcohol. And it's frightful because they don't know it. Because people say, we're not doctors. We can't tell you not to take it. But where I live, they tell you not to take it.
And if you do take it, they change your sobriety date. That's cruel. But anyway, I haven't had any marijuana since 1958. I haven't had any chemical in my body stronger than aspirin. And I've come here tonight at, as I said, tremendous expense and no little inconvenience to talk to you newer people and ask you this important question. Why can't you be sincere the way we were in the old days? I, uh…
My watch must have stopped. It only says quarter after seven. I've got a lot of time. I, uh… I'll tell you, if you think I'm keeping you here too long in this heat, I must be tough in those, in those shirts fanning yourself. You ought to be wearing a tie. But anyway, I, uh… I stayed sober, although I didn't intend to. And I didn't stay sober because I felt I was an alcoholic because I knew I wasn't.
And that's why it's one of the most important things I said tonight. Probably the most important thing
[00:55:00]
I will ever say. Is when I got to this podium tonight, I said, my name is Clancy Imusland and I'm an alcoholic. Because if I ever received anything that changed my life, it was in the coming months when I was too sick and weird to run away, somehow they got to me with what was wrong with me. But if I tell you one thing, if I would have continued thinking what I thought I used to think, I would have never been around.
Now, let me… I think this is probably the most important thing that most people ever get hung up on in their age. How can you really believe you're an alcoholic when your problem really isn't alcohol like the real alcoholic's problem is alcohol? I'll tell you something. I, uh… I am of this belief. Let me say this. In 1958, they said if I did all those cockamamie things and hung around, hung in there, kept coming back, one day at a time, living that way, first things first, the age doesn't have to make you…
drive you sane. But they said, all of your values and perspectives will change. Remember a guy saying that one time, if you hang around here, all of your values and perspectives will eventually change. And I didn't believe it. But I'll tell you, it's been 17 years, and I can tell you that in the last 17 years, just about every one of my values and perspectives have changed to one degree or another, whether I want them to or not.
They just… things with a different perspective little by little. The one thing that I knew I had to change first if I was going to be an alcoholic is it turned out was the only value or perspective I have never had to change. In fact, I feel more strongly tonight than I did in 1958 that my problem is not and ever nor ever was alcohol. Now, that sounds pretty heretical. I'll tell you something else, what I believe, since it's my opinion, I believe that if your problem is alcohol, you're in the wrong place.
I was right. If your problem is alcohol, you're in the wrong place because AA has no answer to an alcoholic problem, a problem of alcohol, for several reasons. But one main reason is if your problem is alcohol, you don't need help. Because I'll tell you how you beat an alcoholic problem. And, you know, you hear it from podiums all the time. It just makes me wonder. I want to ask this question. I want to ask this question.
They say, my life was pretty well, went along fine, except when I drank alcohol. Then everything went to hell. Then I got sober and went along fine. People say, you're such a wonderful man when you're sober, Norm. But then I drank and everything went to hell. That's why the question is, if it's all that good when you're sober, what do you drink for? And if your problem is alcohol, I've got an answer for you that'll save you.
You don't need any steps. You don't need any traditions. You don't need hot, sticky banquet halls. You don't need nothing. Just don't drink the slop. You're home free. If your problem is alcohol, here's the answer. Don't drink it. Now, there are people who say that they can't seem to get sober. I'll tell you a worse secret than that. Because it seems, you ought to seem to be real alcoholic for those guys that, I didn't draw a sober breath from 19 and 26 till 19 and 51.
And I drank a lot of, I drew a lot of sober breaths. In fact, it seemed to me in my last few months of drinking, every time I went to a meeting to try to make a score, they always had the same speaker. I knew it couldn't be, but he said the same things that appeared to me. I'd be there sick and desperate and hopeless and afraid, and I'd look up and there's another one of those golden examples. Silvery gray hair, a $350 suit, rosy cheeks.
Friends, I stayed drunk night and day for 41 years, and then one day I walked through that door, and the desire to drink left me instantly. And I now haven't had a bad thought since 1946. I now have $3 million. Right there in my pockets. I have a fleet of automobiles. Several different families have returned to me. And I owe it all to one thing. I put the plug in the jug. And all I can say to that is, hey baby, that ain't me.
That ain't me. I wish it were. I wish I were an alcoholic. I wish I could be one of these people who could say, I'd rather drink anymore, and people would stumble over one another to offer them jobs back in the old corporation at a supervisor's level, and checks would come in the mail, and people would say, I wish I were an alcoholic. I knew A.A. didn't have the answer. He had to hear people say, turn your problems over to God.
[01:00:03]
Try that with a hundred and five dollars in hot checks some morning. You know what God does with them? He turns them over to Sheriff Peter Pitcher. These steps are okay if you're straight, but if you're in trouble, you're screwed. But it took me a while, and I had to have it explained to me. That my problem wasn't the alcohol, and A.A. is not designed to help people get sober. Because nobody needs any help to get sober.
You get sober without anything. That's one of the rottenest parts about being a drinker. You keep getting sober all the time. And again, and again. If you'd have stayed drunk, I'm sure we'd have a much smaller membership in this hall tonight. You'd have a different speaker, I'll tell you that. I might still be the toast of the Avenida de Juarez, the lovely downtown Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Standing on a bar and singing my little song.
Yo soy el maestro de los locos en Chihuahua. It's just that sobering up in a wire is jail all the time, isn't it? And sometimes you think real alcoholics stay drunk all the time. They don't. Nobody can stay drunk. Some years after I was sober, I was working in a medical corporation, and I ran across the startling medical fact that is absolutely correct. There isn't a human body that can stay intoxicated 14 straight days and nights in a row.
You can't stay drunk. You get sober again and again. That's that medical book described. When the body, for instance, there are many techniques, the body, when it becomes sufficiently toxified through induction of alcohol, when alcohol becomes toxic to the system, the body will set up a series of involuntary physiological conditioned reflexes to reduce such toxicity by the induction of a procedure called reverse peristalsis.
In our area, we call this puking a lot. Now I bet there aren't very many people in this room who haven't knelt in front of the old porcelain altar in the morning. Gazed into those shimmering waters. Said your morning prayer. Oh, God! You hardly ever realize your body's helping you. Stop helping me. Some mornings when you get sick enough, your body will help you more. It will reject toxicity from both ends at once.
Now, that's excellent for your body, but it's very hard on your soul, actually. Not only are you terribly sick, but you're called upon to make a series of split-second decisions. And every answer must be correct. And if you guess wrong just once, then you've got another problem right behind you. And by the time you're that sick, if you have any loved ones left, they're outside the bathroom door saying things like, Good enough for you, you son of a bitch!
If I live through this, you won't. But I'll tell you, there's one thing I can guarantee you. If your problem is alcohol, you'll eventually get sober. And after you get sober, don't drink it. That's all. You know, if you eat oranges every day and you just love them, but after 30 years of eating them, they become toxic to your system, and they make you sick, and you go to a doctor, Every time I eat an orange now, my nose falls off.
Does this mean something? Because you can't eat oranges anymore. You have now become toxic. Oranges have become toxic to you. You know, that guy will eat one more orange just to make sure, but he'll never eat any more. He doesn't have to get a sponsor. He doesn't call up in the middle and I say, Could I just lick a skoom? Could I just go down to the food stand and eat grapes and watch other guys eat oranges?
He just don't eat oranges. If his problem is oranges, he's got it whipped. If your problem is alcohol, you've got it whipped. What kills people like me and most people like us, I guess, as it turns out, is because a lot of us go to our grave thinking our problem is alcohol, and we can prove it isn't. But the problem is not alcohol, and our book specifically declaims that, and all of our entire approach declaims it, but you have to be taught it hard because my natural preconceptions are stronger than what I'm taught.
The reason I have a difficulty with it is because it sounds like alcohol, and I keep mixing it up with alcohol, but it's something entirely different, and it just has one suffix that changes it. It's not alcohol, it's alcoholism.
[01:05:00]
And the difference between alcohol and alcoholism is the difference between dying and living for people like us. If your problem is, when you get sober, I'll guarantee you, you have overcome your problem with alcohol. You are recovered. But in alcoholism, when you get sober, you apparently recover and think you recover, but you move into the subliminal or subconscious or conditioned areas that eventually create conflicts that will make it eventually necessary for me to begin drinking next time to resolve these conflicts.
The curse of alcoholism is, the deadly part comes after you're apparently recovered. And that's what kills people like us year after year. That's what I'm talking about, you know. It's hard to remember. Only six or seven percent of all the drinkers in the world can resolve their conflicts with alcohol the way we all take for granted. We just do it. We think other people, the reason they don't drink much, they ain't got much conflicts.
Like I said, who wants to be a social drinker? Can you imagine what that must be like to have your back to the wall and the hounds of fate at your throat, and you take a big drink, and it goes… Now you've still got your back to the wall, the hounds of fate at your throat, and now you're getting dizzy and you better not drive. That's one of the ways you can outspot a social drinker. They take out their car keys and say, You better drive, Madge.
Alcoholics say, Never trust anybody who gives up their car keys when they're drinking. There's something strange about them. They're straight. But those people, just think, ninety-three percent of people will never know what everybody in this room takes for granted. When your back's to the wall, and the hounds of fate are at your throat, and you take a big drink, it doesn't go… It goes… It isn't very long before you say, Come on, you household finance son of a bitch, I'm ready for you.
I'll get you a job. Now, if that does that for you, that's great. It's instant psychoanalysis. I've had thousands of dollars worth of psychoanalysis, much philosophy, much metaphysics, a great deal of religion, and I never found any therapy that works as fast as a single double shot. It does it. I know of no therapy that can take a suicidal, depressed, broken man, and in twenty minutes, he can be leaning on a bar with an inscrutable smile playing around his lips, saying things like, You with anybody, granny?
Now that's, that's redressing an imbalance between you and your environment, I'll tell you that. And the reason that's important to remember is, AA concerns itself with an area of this disease which we can't see and often can't identify, and that is why it is necessary to do things that in your and my judgment sometimes are not required. Sometimes people think, If I can only get faith! But I'll tell you, a couple years ago I spoke at a big home outside of Detroit where the church sends their priests from all over the world for alcoholics, anonymous members, to teach them how to stay sober.
And every one of those guys drunk had more faith than anybody in this room's got sober. Faith is not the magic word. Maybe if I can just find love! But you gotta stay sober when you haven't got love! Or when you got too much, which is equally bad. Love is not the magic word. The magic word, as our book describes, is action. Action is the magic word. And for people like us, it's kind of a difficult thing because it's easier to sit around and discuss it and wait for answers than it is to take the answers you got and do them when they're unpleasant and do not agree with my judgments.
And I think it's most imperative to remember to those who are new or those who are old, alcoholism will get you if you don't do something else to redress the imbalance that builds up when you don't drink alcohol and you're thrown back into the same emotional patterns that every single time before have made you drink or take medicating or some tranquilizing drugs. So it isn't a matter of,
[01:10:00]
you're not going to meetings to help the newcomer. Sure you can help the newcomer, but that's what they mean about a selfish program. We take these actions to redress the imbalance within ourselves. I had a very difficult early sobriety because I had a very bad attitude and I declined to be taught. By my first birthday, I had risen to the unprecedented level I was holding a job as a busboy on Sunset Boulevard.
Now that isn't much for a guy, but I was used to bad breaks. When I was two years sober, I was working in this little advertising agency wrapping packages, the same kind of job I'd had in high school. When I was five years sober, I was the director of advertising for a big medical corporation. When I was seven years sober, I was in television and radio in Hollywood. And then I got into corporate advertising, so I had a very successful life.
I became as successful as I chose to be. And when I was five years sober, the same old family came stumbling out of Texas, post office in Texas, and there they were. These four little girls were four big girls now, and the youngest one was, I forgot she was born and raised in Texas, and they said, Hi, Daddy. Hi, Daddy. Hi, Daddy. Hi, Daddy. I had a whip hurt. But you know, I became very nice. I stayed sober.
We now live in a house out by the ocean. We have cars, big yard. I'm very close to my father. I'm the support of him in his declining years. He and I are very close. I'll be seeing him again in a couple weeks. I spend more time with him now than I did when I lived three blocks away from him. My mother and I are very close. My daughters have grown up, and they got daughters. In fact, that's one of the things that bothers me sometimes.
Every Saturday, a bunch of AAs get together and we play softball in the park across the street from my house, and I feel young and alive, and I'm pitching, and it's my ball and bat, so I can pitch. And I just get going good, and I feel vital, and I hear a little voice say, Strike him out, Grandpa. It's all very funny. Look what I got out of sobriety. I got a home, car, family, job, friends, bucks. There's only one thing wrong.
I had all these things the day I committed suicide, no passive, just as sober as I am right now. I had all these things the day I hitchhiked out of Chicago in the middle of the night because I felt so bad. I had all these things the day I ducked out of Minneapolis. I had all these things a lot of times. They are not the gifts of AA. Don't misunderstand me. I would rather have a house to live in than stand outside that blood bank, all things being equal.
I would… I've had it both ways, and I'd rather have it comfortable if I can get it. But this is not the point of AA. The point of AA is something considerably more buried than that. It's a hell of a lot easier to get a house than it is to get a care head. It's a hell of a lot easier to hold a job for a while than it is to get rid of that hole in the pit of your gut where the wind blows through after you get the job.
I think that probably the greatest gift of AA is that it has enabled me, little by little, to redress the imbalances between myself and my environment over a slowly and over a period of time that I have always had to depend upon alcohol or medications to redress. I, uh… I… There's an analogy that I sometimes use, and I can't think of a better one. I think it's this way. Because AA is an upside-down therapy.
Everybody else says, think right, and then it'll turn out all right. And here you haven't got time to think right. It's as though we were all born with a scale, perhaps, in our hearts. And that scale, when it's even you feel pretty good, and when it's uneven you don't feel good. And most people that I have ever seen come here wind up here with two things in common. I've listened to maybe 165 steps in the last 14 years, and the one thing that everybody that I've ever heard has, comes in common, they always are suffering from a lack of self-worth, sometimes buried under a pseudo-arrogance.
And the other thing is a guilt. And I've… A few months ago, on Creative of Week, I heard the fifth step of a woman whose father was one of the most… three or four best-known men in the world in the 20th century. And she, in her fifth step, said her feelings of unworthiness and guilt came because her father was so wonderful and famous all over the globe that she never had any empathy. And about a week later, I heard a fifth step from a Mexican guy who was born under the bridge in El Paso.
Mexican guy who was born under the bridge in El Paso, now lives in Los Angeles. His problem was he never knew who his father was. That's why he had a lack of self-worth. And those are the two extremes. Everybody in between. We all got the reasons and we can show it why. But it boils down to a lack of self-worth and a guilt.
[01:15:03]
And the thing that makes it wrong with that is that that guilt and lack of self-worth makes a growing black blob on one side of that scale. And little by little, the scale goes out of whack and you can't bring it back. And you try things and no tool I've ever seen in any therapy chips away that black thing. When it's there, it stays there. And I'm looking back on my life to continue this analogy. When I drink, I remove the scale for a while.
But when I get sober, the scale is back on. It's a little bit worse. And I go to find out what causes it and spend thousands of dollars. What causes it? And after they tell me what causes it, it still doesn't help. It's still there. I cannot describe it. Maybe I can find some other way, but it gets worse and worse. And when you're sufficiently out of balance, it isn't. You are almost continually uncomfortable at one level inside you.
And AA's therapy, these actions and the meetings and getting a sponsor and doing these things are hanging in there. They have the dumbest therapy in the world. They say, ignore that side of the scale. Ignore that side of the scale! You're crazy! They say, we're going to ignore that side of the scale. We're going to turn that over. Ha ha ha ha! What we're going to do is give you a bucket of sand called action and a little spoon.
We're going to start feeding the other side. Oh, and one day you're back in balance. I guess that's the day that the desire to drink goes away and it starts to feel good. And you know, you're right. There's only one thing wrong with me. Through some inscrutable celestial jest, there's a tiny hole in the pan on this side. And every time you get that baby in balance, you wait very long and God damn it!
And it seemed like the fall of life for me. I can feel comfortable if I want to. I can keep that thing going. And I've watched old timers who have stopped filling their pan long enough and they go back and they become absolutely indistinguishable from when they came. The same big black thing was there all along that kept AA kept it in balance. And I suppose that's the gift of AA. Little by little, doing things I don't believe in until I believe in them.
Doing actions that I can't see apply to me until after they've already applied to me. Keeping my phone number listed so even sick alcoholics can call me if they need to, who I haven't given my number to. Going and sitting in my meetings, even when I'm not speaking. One thing my sponsor all said to me, he says, all you have to do, nobody cares about your motives. You just take the actions and you'll be all right.
That's the nice thing. After this meeting in West Los Angeles, I, a guy, one of these goofs from the veterans hospital comes up to me, sick and shaky, he says, hey buddy, I don't know who you are. Could you give me a ride home? And I can look at him and I can think whatever I want and I can say, give you a ride home? Do you know who I am? I started this meeting. Every secretary's been a baby of mine.
I'm Clancy I from up in the sky. I'm something. There's 250 people in this room that would be glad who need the action. Why signal me out? I need to provide spiritual counseling to these people. I can think anything I want to, as long as I say, okay. And when I drive home from the hospital, I think I did it voluntarily. But in the last analysis, and in closing, I want to say this one fact. I suppose that in the last essence, the bottom line, Alcoholics Anonymous is really designed to do what alcohol is designed to do.
It is to enable me little by little to live in the world. To find spiritual values little by little. You know, that's the 1970s. That's the one thing that, one of the great lessons I learned. I was so pleased I was asked to speak at that convention in Miami Beach and I speak a lot, so it doesn't make me a big deal for speaking, but it seemed like such a long time slipper, nine year slipper, and failure, and controversial boob, and hardhead.
It was a touching thing to be asked to speak by the New York office of AA. And the first speaker that morning I discovered was the guy that made the first call on me in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1949. And the last speaker that night is my current sponsor, and I spoke at noon. And I came back from there, and I had a spiritual breakthrough, and I found I no longer need to be burdened by the crass emotions of my life.
And I got home and I was glowing with sun, and glowing with spiritual love, and glowing with the knowledge
[01:20:01]
that at last I have achieved the level of beauty that I've sought. And I got on the freeway to drive to downtown Los Angeles Monday morning, and I had my rear view mirror kind of set so I could see the road and me a little bit, because I had never seen myself with an aura before. And I came across the San Diego freeway, and just as I got across, a little old lady in a Toyota came off the San Diego freeway onto the Santa Monica, and just missed me.
Couldn't have been more than an inch. She just… And a new spiritual leader of the West, without even blinking an eye, had that window down saying, You can't hear me! You're a stupid little brat! And about all you can do after that is drive one more mile and say, God love you. What it means is I can get my scale in tune, but it ain't gonna stay in tune. And it's gonna come out of tune, and I gotta feed it from time to time.
And so to me, in the last analysis, what's the thing about AA is this. Tomorrow afternoon I'm gonna come out of this motel. I'm gonna go out in that street. I don't have to look at the street signs. I don't care if this is Tucson, Arizona, or if that street out there is Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, or if it's 52nd Street in Manhattan, or if it's Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, or Clark Street in Chicago, or O'Farrell Street in San Francisco, or Barrage Street in Vancouver, or Barstow Street in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, or Hervey Street in Dallas.
It really doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference. If I continue to take the actions that my betters have been teaching me for year after year, I can walk into that street and not even have to see what the street is to get the knowledge. The chances are I will have no secret feelings of inadequacy or fear today. I will not have to redress the imbalance chemically. The greatest gift of all of AA is not that I have become wonderful, because I haven't become wonderful.
I wasn't a wonderful guy before I drank, and I never became wonderful afterwards. I hear guys at podiums who became wonderful. I want to just touch the hem of their garment. I'm an emotional guy, and I'm a long way from what I hope I will become. But as long as I can say this honestly, I'm all right. To the best of my knowledge, I'm the best Clancy Emerson I've ever been so far. And that's all I can ask, if I can continue to say that.
And the gift is that I will walk into the streets of Tucson Sunday afternoon, and I will feel that for God's sakes, I belong here too. Thank you.