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Source: DICOBE-00332 – Clancy I – CORNHUSKER RNDP I – 1978-08-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00332-clancy-i-cornhusker-rndp-i-1978-08-15.mp3 Duration: 00:58:59
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My name is Clancy Imusland, and I'm an alcoholic. And to all you folks clustered in the back there, who cannot see me, maybe not hear me, you'll be glad to know that there's been a lot of seats reserved up in the front row for big shots who couldn't make it. So just do the best you can back there. God love you. I was very interested in the announcements about the tape. Max, I've known Max for many years. He's been a taper for a long time.
I went over to him before the meeting, and I said, I don't know, I've heard all the speakers before, but I was wondering if I could get a copy of the tape of the announcements. And he said that would cost $14. And I said, $14? My God, the talks only cost $7. He said, well, the announcements run twice as long. I really should wait till I get my transportation money before I start talking. This is one of the few places where a program is a redundancy.
But I am happy to be here tonight, safe and sane and sober. I've had a very pleasant trip here, some of you know. My son and I, who's with me tonight, sitting down there, very ill at ease because he can't wear his tennies. When I was your age, I was in juvenile hall. But we came on the train every year. Once a year we take a ride on the train somewhere. And this year we came to Omaha. We had to fly to Reno to catch the train. Because you can't come from Los Angeles to Omaha. You have to come from Oakland to Omaha or from Los Angeles to Kansas City.
And so we stopped in Reno, and we looked at all the gambling hells, and I pointed out what not to do. I showed him. And then we caught the train and came here. And it's nice. Traveling with a lively 13-year-old boy in a bedroom on the Zephyr is very similar to traveling third class on the Bulgarian State Railway. It is many things, but it's not boring. And I had called the Shet… I don't want to give away their anonymity. I'd called the Shetlers, the S's, up in B.
And now they won't know which Shetler it is. It's up in B. Bermuda. And told them not to have anybody meet us because the train gets in at 5 o'clock in the morning. There's no sense having anybody meet you. And the train came in, and we had just been rousted out by the porter, and we were tired. And I got off that train, and the station that I remembered was closed down, and they had a little Quonset hut or something. It was the Amtrak station. It was dark and cold.
I thought, oh, Jesus, this is just beyond belief. And the kid says, what are we going to do now, Dad? I said, shut up. Shut up, I explained. And I was most glad to see an old friend of mine, Click W., the well-known Sioux City Dairy King, had come down to… Thank you. Come down to… I didn't bother you when you were interjecting your personal remarks among Chapter 3. But a lot of warmth in this program, I'll tell you that.
But he came down and met us, and was very gracious to drive us out here. I was so glad, boy. It was bad that we got here, and they had no reservation for me. And I was going to call the shuttlers up in B. But they finally found it. I guess the room clerk's downers wore off momentarily.
[00:05:15]
Oh, here's your card. I said, gee, Tom, will you get me some coffee? Because he explained to me that when he first moved to North Platte, he played my tape a lot. So I thought I'd strike while the iron was hot. I said, gee, Tom, will you get me some coffee with cream and sugar? And by the time he got there, he'd forgotten what I ordered. He came back with, I forgot the cream. I said, Tom, if you could please go back and get it. And he said, no, I'm going to… I've always wanted to say no, screw you, to a circuit speaker.
But I don't bear any grudges, Tom. God bless you. I hope, as we Quakers say, when thee gets back to thy kennel tonight, I hope thy mother bites thee. It's been a very good convention. I think for a first roundup, you've done a fantastic job. I think all the speakers I have heard have been very good. And I very much enjoyed Sybil. I've listened to her for years. Sybil was in charge of the central office in Los Angeles when I got sober, and she was already kind of a legendary figure. And she was kind of controversial. And it's been my experience in AA, if you're not controversial, you ain't doing nothing.
And she's been a gracious lady. And this morning, the desk, in their continuing efforts to make me feel at home, forgot to call me. So I inadvertently slept through Blanche's talk. I'd hate to do that, because I'd planned to make a critique of it tonight. If you can't attack the Al-Anons, who can you attack? I can't attack the one in my home, I'll tell you that. One time, Blanche and I were talking together in Louisville, Kentucky a couple years ago. And she always accuses me of having a sharp tongue, and I'm really very gentle and warm and gracious.
She went up to me and said, now Clancy, I have to catch a plane, and I have to leave right in the middle of your talk. But I'm going to stay as long as I can now. Don't say anything if I have to get up and leave. Blanche, are you kidding? So just about the time I started getting her things together, I said, you know, there's one thing wrong with Al-Anons in the middle of my talk. I said, they sometimes get so bored with A.A. that they don't even cover it up. They just get up and leave meetings. It's just the goddamnedest thing I ever saw.
And then old Blanche, I go, oh, Jesus. So you can see how bad it makes me feel not to be able to critique her tonight. But she's an excellent speaker, and I very much enjoyed Bob this afternoon, who I have heard many times while I've spoken in our group recently in West Los Angeles, which I guess now is the, according to New York, the largest and most successful weekly A.A. meeting in the world. You get about half this many every Wednesday night at 8.30. And it really is a great experience. I founded it, but it was very small when I was running it, and now it's built up because they've got good secretaries.
And I stand in the back and give signals as the founder here. Nobody ever pays me attention, but it makes me feel good. But Bob is a fine speaker, and Eloise, the A.A. turned Al-Anon this afternoon. I don't mean that critically at all. I respect Al-Anon. I think that it must be as good as Alcoholics Victorious.
[00:10:17]
There's going to be a meeting, I mean a convention, I understand, of Alcoholics Victorious in Omaha this autumn. I hope none of you have progressed to the point where you're able to attend. Alcoholics Victorious is, it's people who are now ex-alcoholics, and don't go for all that A.A. crap of staying sick. You are an ex-alcoholic, and you are now recovered. And you don't have to go to meetings. You don't have to do anything. You're well.
And I think that's wonderful. I understand they keep changing their letterhead. The presiding officers keep changing for some reason. I don't know why, but I don't judge. By God, we… I don't judge, I just report. I don't know what made me think of this, but let me tell you something. This is the first time I've ever told such a thing at the podium. But when we were on the train coming here today, or the other night, at dusk, the guy in the next compartment gave the porter $20. He says, we're going to get into McCook, Nebraska in the middle of the night. And he says, I'm a very bad sleeper. I sleep terribly. He says, I want you to get me off this train in McCook, Nebraska.
Now, I'm going to fight you and kick you. I hope not, but maybe. I want you to just, if necessary, pick me up out of my bunk and throw me on the platform and throw my suitcases after me. And about 3 o'clock this morning, we were… that morning, we were awakened by a terrible hubbub in the hall. And this guy, he said, damn you! We were in McCook, Nebraska, and here I am on this damn train, and you didn't get me off, like Mr. Business.
And just cursing, I tried to cover my little boy's ears, and just… Oh, I said, son. And finally the guy, I was going to kill him, but finally he went in, slammed his door in his compartment. I tried to be nice to the porter. I said, gee, that guy was pretty mad, wasn't he? Hey, you should see the guy I put off at McCook. I, uh… I think in all my years in A, that's the first time I've ever told a joke from the podium, a formal joke, and I want to thank you all for listening to it.
I'm glad to see my friend Wilma here, who's been in our group many times, now in Sioux City, a great many people. But primarily, I am most glad to see me here, because if I weren't here, that would be meaning to me that I was not someplace where I was supposed to be, and in A, that's not a good thing to do, to not be someplace you're supposed to be. They always say it's a terrible thing to be someplace you're not supposed to be, but a worse thing than that, and that's to not be where you're supposed to be.
I, uh… I come from a town somewhat smaller than, uh… Omaha, a little town up in northern Wisconsin. Some of you have heard about it. I try to make it famous, if I can. And, uh… I know I've really achieved fame, because I've been invited to speak next spring at their 20th annual banquet, and when you can come home, it's… Well, I told you folks, I'd be the tops at something. I'm the top think.
But I grew up in this little town, and when I was a boy, I, uh… It's the kind of town you read, you know, you see in Andy Hardy movies. Like Omaha, only much smaller. The trees come together to make a kind of a tunnel of trees. In the summertime, as I was explaining to my son, we live in California where they don't have all these crickets and cicadas and all these things making noise, and he asked me what they were today, and I was trying to explain to him as we walked around the building.
And, uh… In the summertime, we'd get together, and there were two little rivers came together there, and they made another river, which went to the Mississippi, and we'd get together and make rafts and go out in the water and have fun, and in the fall… I guess it's that way in Omaha. It's that way in California. It got cold. Crisp. Not cold, but crisp, and all the trees turned up and way up north like that. It turned gold and crimson and chestnut.
North like that, it turned gold and crimson and just beautiful, a smell I've never smelled, the smell of burning leaves in an autumn, the only time you can smell that smell now is at a rock concert, but for a long time it was a lovely smell, in the winter time the snow falls and since there's, you know, not much industry there, there's no dirt, it's just like a Christmas card, little, little chimneys with a smoke
[00:15:27]
coming off and churches and just wonderful, in the springtime the snow melts and to me the first sign of spring for years and years, still is kind of down deep, is that when you smell lilacs you know spring is here, that's the first flower of spring, and you know you're going to fall in love any minute and just hope it's someone you like this year, you know, it's the kind of town that you just dream about, and I grew up in that kind of a town, get out of the goddamn place, I wanted to go where there were big buildings and gangsters and Jimmy Cagney and tar and dirt, and early in the World, Second World War, I was about 15 and I was just beginning my junior year of high school and the war had been on about a year and I thought I knew all about the world, cause every Saturday and Sunday I went to the state on Saturday into the Badger theatres on Sunday and saw all the movies and I read Life Magazine, and I was thrilled by the war and all these things and I, early in 1943, very early, I told my mother I was going to go to Superior on my vacation and visit my aunt and instead I hitchhiked to San Francisco and thank God I got one ride most of the way cause I never would have made it.
It was considerably farther than anything I'd ever dreamed of, you know, on the map it was about a page and a half, but I got to San Francisco with my usual style, I immediately ran across a guy who showed me how to prove I was older than I was. I could prove I was 16 rather than 15, and when I was 16 I had this thing, I could prove I was 16, he sent me to the Coast Guard office on Market Street and there I, they were crying for merchant seamen, I took the proof I was 16, they gave me a form for my parents to sign, I took it around the corner, had them sign it, brought it back, and I got issued temporary seamen's papers, and with those temporary seamen's papers I was assigned to the National Maritime Union, down on Montgomery Street, and I went down there and they were crying for merchant seamen, and they had my seamen's papers and they made me sign a form saying they could assign my dues out of my first salary, and they assigned me to a ship, and that night I was on a load of torpedo warheads going to the South Pacific.
And about two hours out of port it suddenly struck me, this is not quite it either, and I, I told, I sidled up to the captain and I, the land was just going out of sight, and I told the captain I really appreciate this opportunity but we had a big English test Monday and I really should get back. And he, he directed me to my folk soul, and I didn't know what a folk soul was but it sounded ominous, turns out to be in a ship a folk soul is a place where people sleep, and I was stuck in there a small and skinny and a face full of pimples and just a mess, and they stuck me in there with three of the worst type of people that a small skinny pimply faced kid can ever be stuck with, and those people are called men.
And God I used all the things that used to make them laugh in homeroom and it didn't amuse these guys at all. Why don't you get in your god damn bunk and dummy up. And I lay in my bunk and I just quivered, I just shocked, I just, I realized I'd made a terrible mistake and I didn't know what to do about it, I had that feeling many times in my life. And these guys were talking about their last night in San Francisco and the things they had done and I just was appalled, I had, I'd never heard of anything like this and if it went on in Eau Claire, Wisconsin I never heard about it.
And I started to get seasick and these guys were talking and it was just dreadful, these guys were talking about experiences they'd had with the opposite sex of various types and I knew that Lutherans didn't do that, I didn't know about it, I felt I must be amidst of a bunch of Catholics. And don't misunderstand me, even at the age of 15 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin I'd had sex, but I'd been afraid and I'd been apprehensive and I'd been alone.
I wasn't aware these things were going on and I didn't know those pictures came to life, you know, and I just was at, I hit my bottom.
[00:20:19]
And one of these guys, one of these big mopes went to his suitcase, or his sea bag in his locker and took out a bottle of whiskey, something I'd never seen close up in my life at that time. And I remember he took off the top and said to one of his friends, you want a little snort? I said, yeah. He said, you want a little snort? I said, yeah. I remember he had turned to me with a very unpleasant look, now that I'm older and more sophisticated I would call it a patronizing look, but at the time it was just an unpleasant look.
He said, how about you, junior? You think you're a man enough for a little snort? And I looked up at him and my watery blue eyes blazing. And I thought to myself, now I know you're a Catholic. I didn't say anything, but I knew it. Lutherans don't drink whiskey. Norwegian Lutherans. You know, it's a funny thing. Some of you aren't familiar, probably, with Norwegian Lutherans. That's kind of an isolated little sect up where Nordics live, but I hear a lot of people in the A.A. say things like, the rigors of the Catholic Church and its strictness drove me to alcohol.
In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, if you're a Norwegian Lutheran, and you can't cut it, it's too tough for you, and you're looking for an easier, softer way, you become a Catholic. If you don't mind your minister wearing a black dress. I don't judge him, I just tell him. But that guy, and even if I weren't a Lutheran, I wouldn't drink whiskey because I promised both my mother and my grandmother I would never drink whiskey.
And even if I hadn't promised them I wouldn't drink whiskey, I wouldn't drink whiskey because what I knew of life was from the State and Badger Theaters in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, pretty much. And in my era, good guys on the screen didn't drink. Bad guys drank. Errol Flynn never drank, seemed to me, as far as I could judge. Guys like Basil Rathbone drank all the time. Buck Jones never had a drink in his whole life.
Wrestlers named Slade drank. Let's go kill Buck Jones' horse. Let's go kill Buck Jones' horse, ha, ha, ha. There's no conditions under which I can drink whiskey. And that big, strange guy stuck that bottle in my face and said, You think you're man enough for a little snort? And I just looked up at him and I told him, God damn right. Because I've always been a little weak under pressure, too. And I had my first drink of whiskey and it burned my mouth and it burned my throat and it burned my stomach and then it turned around and it burned my stomach and it burned my throat and it burned his shirt, last I saw it.
And, uh, Give the bottle a whip and the damn kid is bumming into it. And it was just dreadful and, uh, that made me feel even worse. I remember all the way across the Central Pacific, when nobody was around, I'd sneak into that guy's locker to get that bottle out and take a sip. And I hated it, I despised it, but I had the feeling, if I, if I could hold a drink down, they'll think I'm a man. All of my life has been spent in the next thing is going to make it all right.
Later, as I became more worldly-wise, there were things like, once I get that woman, or that woman, once I get that degree, once I get that job, once I get my name in letters of gold on that door, once I get my name in the paper, once I get my picture in the paper, once I get to be something. But then my life, then my life was much more, less complicated. Then, once I hold a drink down, it'll be all right, they'll like me then.
And all the way across Central Pacific, I took a drink of that rotten slop, and I threw it up and wiped it up so they wouldn't know. I remember a day out of Pearl Harbor about, I took a drink and it burned my throat and burned my mouth and burned my stomach and stayed down. And I remember thinking, now if I could just do it and not make a face. Just do it. And as I was thinking about that, for the first of thousands of miracles that have happened in my life
[00:25:00]
through alcohol happened that morning. And I've searched for that, a word to describe that feeling, and I never have been able to find it, really. Some people say, when alcohol throws the switch, or when alcohol transforms something. The closest I could come, I'm sure most everybody here might understand this. That feeling of temporary omnipotence, just a boom. The switch goes on. Some guys have it the first time they drink, some guys drink for years before it happens.
But when it happens, you know it. And my pimples fell off, and I gained in stature and wisdom instantly. If I'd have known a sea chanty, I'd have sang it, you know. Yo-ho-ho, Jim. And then I threw up and the pimples leaked. But for a few moments in time and space, that was the first time I could remember, I felt the way they looked. And I don't mean they, those three guys on the ship. I mean they. Anybody here knows who they are?
You can always spot an imposter in AA, because they say things like, who's this they they're talking about? I'll tell you who it is, it's them. And I drank from then on. I don't mean that I became an assiduous drinker, because I didn't like to be sick. But I tried to learn over a period of years to drink what would not make me sick, which would make me feel good, which would help me along, which would make me look sophisticated or manly or whatever it was.
Later in the war, I went in the Navy. And when I was at the end of the war, I was in a naval hospital up at Shoemaker, California, and they were sewing up my stomach, and they gave me some tests to pass the time from the Armed Forces Institute, and it turned out that I was, they said, in the top two percentile of intelligence in the whole United States Navy, which was pretty good for a seaman first, trying to hold on to his rate.
And that didn't ever do much for me, except it got me a high school equivalency diploma. So after the war, I went back, and I didn't have to go back to be a junior in Eau Claire Senior High School. I used that, and I went to college. And I got, went to college, and I got, I met a girl in college who I loved, intended, what a pretty girl like that saw in me, and we got married and had a couple children.
And I was a member of a championship team, which was nice, and I was editor of the year book, and went out in the world. I became a sports writer. Then I got into sales correspondence work for a corporation, and I got into advertising work in advertising agencies, and became… Now I've lost my place. My name is Clancy Emerson, and I… And I did pretty well. And I'll tell you something. And I'll tell you something.
Drinking… Drinking helped it all come about. I hear people sometimes say, drinking is terrible, that damn alcohol ruined it. In my life, I never had a friend as good as alcohol, ever. The best friends you have come and go as you get across with them, or they move, or you move. The woman that you fall in love with forever, you may not remember her name next Wednesday. Cities come and go. Jobs come and go.
States come and go. But by God, a drink is a drink But by God, a drink is a drink wherever it comes. And drinking to me was a great help, especially since I had a lot of emotions that other people didn't seem to have. And I… I drank and became rather successful. Now, I don't want to imply that my life was a rosebud, because it really wasn't. Because I had, as I say, I had a lot of emotions. Emotions that, as far as I could tell by looking at people, they didn't have.
You know, that's one of the great curses that every human being is afflicted with. And I don't know of very many places other than AA where you can come upon the knowledge of it. And that is this. Human beings go through their life secretly many times, without being aware of it, comparing themselves against others. Naturally. But without ever realizing without ever realizing I must… But without ever realizing I must compare my insides against their outsides.
Which is an invalid comparative. Because I have to look behind the scenery in me and look at this outside of the painted scenery on them. But most of us have to look at people that way and think, well, they don't feel the way I do. But most of us have to look at people that way But most of us have to look at people that way and think, well, they don't feel the way I do, because I'm not looking at their feelings, I'm looking at their disguises.
[00:30:04]
But I've gone through most of my life with a feeling, for instance, that somehow or other, for some reason I couldn't understand and couldn't always identify the feeling, but I could feel it. That somehow or other, I seem to be more sensitive to things than other people seem to be, as far as I could tell by looking at it. Other people just kind of took things in stride, and I have a tendency to be easily hurt, to be easily rejected, to be easily upset.
I remember joking once, I guess it turned out to be true, telling someone, it felt like somehow or other, the layer of insulation over my emotions was left out. Coming off the assembly line in heaven, when I got to the insulation department, somebody said, hey God, and I said, yeah, and one got by. Oh, well, he's a Norwegian, screw him. And it seemed to me that I overreacted to things. Another feeling I had a lot in my life, although I never really identified it, but I could feel it, and I can see it in retrospect.
Most of my life, I have been more troubled by anxiety than other people. Other people just take negative decisions and say, well, that's the way it is, let's continue. And I have a tendency to find my gut going, ah, because I fight for truth. A lot of young people today think they're the first ones who ever fought for truth and justice. I hear a lot of young people today say things like, give us justice, and make marches.
In my day, I fought for justice and it wasn't in. It's nice to be a young person and cry, justice, justice. When you get older and wiser, you find yourself not crying that so much. The cry becomes, mercy, mercy. I had enough justice to last me forever. That's one of the things that's wrong with the world, it's damn full of justice. But I've always had a lot of anxieties, and I've always felt I was cursed with the imagination to see what was going to happen, and other people just, dumb.
It always seemed to me that my loneliness, when they came, I had some severe depressed loneliness, much worse than any I ever saw in anybody else. I, you know, other people had them, but I didn't get to their room under their bed to see them. And I had terrible lonelinesses and depressions. I used to, I remember walking down the street, just knowing that I was a tragic figure, just. I know that people going by would say things like, did you see that Hamlet-like figure?
What a terrible load he must carry. And it really is a shock later when you find out what they're saying is, what's wrong with that turkey? I've always been cursed a lot with resentments. God, I have a lot of resentments. Once upon a time a psychiatrist told me I had an intense burning white flame inside of me. And when you have an intense burning white flame and you're kind of weird, it causes a lot of friction.
And I resent, I have always resented authority. I resent authority. I resent people who, without any, hardly any merit, have the right to alter my life by a stroke of their stinking pen or their whim. I resent people I work for, who have the power to promote no-talent crap heads, brown nosers, and hold back men of integrity. I resent them. Now I look back over my life, I don't resent my subordinates.
I have a basic feeling of contempt for them. Because they're sheep. Most of my life has been spent resenting people to whom I feel inferior and feeling contempt toward people to whom I feel superior. The only thing I have a shortage of is people I feel equal to. I've had a lot of feelings. One of the worst feelings of my life I never identified until after a sober long time is the feeling of no feelings, like an emptiness.
The only way I've ever thought to describe it is it's like there's a hole through your gut. Painless, but the wind blows through. And you can have a $500 suit on or you can have a 10-cent t-shirt and that wind blows exactly the same speed.
[00:35:03]
And when you have these kind of emotions, together with an uncanny ability to spot crap heads, which I was a great advantage of my youth, turned bad later, you have a tendency to find some emotional imbalances. And I did a lot of things for them. I went to an analysis, as I mentioned, years before it was in. I went to an analysis and I was a young advertising executive on the way up and I was slick and I…
A lot of people put down analysis in AA. I never do. I think analysis is great. It was in analysis that I discovered that it wasn't my fault. That I'd been victimized by the depression, by my parents' divorce, by running away to see too young, by a lot of things. And it's funny, and I think most alcoholics have a victim streak about six feet wide and two feet bodies. And it doesn't take much to make us feel victimized.
I remember him saying to me, You mean to say, Mr. Emerson, at that time in your life you didn't even have a bicycle? And I thought about that for months. I'd sit at a bar and just drink. And I had a mental picture of myself. Just a tousled haired boy with rosy cheeks and a few freckles on his nose saying, Daddy, couldn't I just have a bicycle? No! That never happened, but I could believe it happened.
Took me three months to remember nobody else in our neighborhood had a bicycle. That was the depression. One kid didn't, we beat him up. When you're feeling victimized, you can… I discovered a lot of things that happened to me and left social and psychic scars, and I felt sad over every one of them. But there's only one thing wrong with analysis for people like me. I wouldn't say for you, but for myself.
It takes such a long time to realize that as you learn more and more about yourself, it isn't changing anything. It's still rotten and you feel bad. But now you know. Why? The best analysis I know of that is it's like being on the deck of the Titanic after hitting the iceberg. And everybody else rows away at top speed, and you go around the ship examining exactly what happened. And you may be the only one with the answer eventually.
I found out what happened. It doesn't do any good to know what's happening when you're going down. Now, this is the applause signal. I've got my shills spotted around here, and they're all from North Platte. Keep coming back, Tom. Thank you. I finally got out of analysis. Later I got into metaphysics. Bob was talking today about self-help books. I wouldn't stop at self-help. I wanted to get in deep metaphysical insights.
And I'll tell you how to discover metaphysics. Meaningful metaphysics, if you understand it when you read it the first time, it's second rate. You have to really grind. But you work at it. I got to a point where at one time, to the best of my knowledge, I was one of six people in the whole state of Texas who knew truth. And the other five were… They got very cold and lonely at the top, I'll tell you.
Later on I read philosophy. I did a lot of things. I got into philosophy. I took metaphysics. I was into things and all sorts of things, spooky religions and incense-burning self-meditation and all that horse manure. But I never had any therapy in my life that was as good as three drinks. Drinking just happens to do better than… I don't want to discourage you, but I think you'll find that three months of analysis will not make you feel as good as three martinis.
Three years of analysis won't make you feel as good. Thirty years of analysis, you're too late for martinis. I sound as though I'm putting down analysis. I am not. I am nothing at all against psychiatrists. I've sponsored a couple of them and they seem all right to me. Except when they look at me as though they're wondering, what do I really mean?
[00:40:02]
And I say, I really mean what I mean. You know, shut up, get to a meeting. I explain. Nothing has ever helped me quite so much as drinking. Just a few drinks to relax. That's the only reason I ever drank. I'm one of those alcoholics who grows berserk and, you know, takes a glass of beer and leaps out of bushes on passing nuns. I'm a sensitive, intelligent guy who has had a lot of bad breaks. Now, I did very good sometimes, but unfortunately sometimes I get into town and with this ability to spot crap heads and being held back and like Prometheus to a rock with my family, I have sometimes had a tendency, when you're upset, then you have a few drinks and sometimes you get so upset you drink just a little more than you should, just to relax.
And then comes the ultimate irony of life. The very same crap heads that make you drink are the very same ones that talk to you about your drinking. Aren't you drinking too much? Then the indignity of that is so great that you're just nothing to do but brood. That's caused some ups and downs in my life. For instance, in early 1950s, in the suburb of Chicago, I was one of the Junior Chamber of Commerce Young Men of the Year.
I was working in an advertising agency. I was on my way up. I had a wife and a couple of kids and a lawn and a dog. And just about that time I began to realize the whole town was full of crap heads. I worked for the wooden position and the place and show lived on either side of me. And through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings to capsule this, by the end of that same year I was playing piano in a whorehouse in San Francisco.
I'm not putting that down, you know. Different strokes for different folks, we say. It's very hard to work that sort of experience into an advertising resume later. That's why most advertising resumes have big holes that say self-employed during this period. But I always reformed again. I always blamed my church for that because I'd been ingrained so strongly to be good that I never seemed to be able to sustain any enjoyment in evil.
And I don't mind being evil, but I can't sustain enjoyment. And I can't stay good and I can't stay bad. And it just makes for a very unpleasant life. The harder I try to be good, the greater the need to be bad. And the more I try to be bad, the greater the need to be good. There's an old guy in Los Angeles named Matt Campion who says things like, well, he says, every time one door closes, another door opens.
And it's very beautiful, but I've told him, Matt, what do you do when you're just in the hall and you're not sinking with any of these doors? Oh, I missed that one, yeah. So I always reformed. My wife and children were stuck on a farm in Wisconsin, my little girls. And I ran into a guy who was hitchhiking to Texas that I'd been in the Navy with in San Francisco and we wasn't in Texas. And I got there and I put on a burst of reform and I got the job at the El Paso Times.
Then I got a job in an advertising agency there. In a year and a half, I had my family in, my wife and two kids had come down. We had another little girl. One thing about my family, every time we reunite, there's a baby born nine months and 16 seconds later. And a year and a half later, I was on the faculty of the University of Texas at El Paso. That was my moonlight job. In the daytime, I was writing, writing a weekly thing for the El Paso Times and doing great, except that unfortunately, El Paso's full of crap heads.
And through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings, I'll tell you, if it weren't for Juarez, El Paso would be untenable. And one day as it must, these old square, fuddy-duddy, goof deans called me in and accused me of being bizarre in Juarez and giving the college a bad name. And I hadn't been bizarre by any standards now, but bizarre then. And I just realized there's no sense to try to explain to these kind of people because after a while, you get to identify.
Squares are squares. There's no sense trying to explain nothing to them. Our squares, there's no sense trying to explain nothing to them, because they're just, uh-huh. But there's no way to explain to us, we were talking to Jim and Bernie yesterday, we were
[00:45:00]
joking about it, you know, there's no way to tell a dean of the University of Texas that somehow, when it's three o'clock in the morning, and I'm balancing on one foot on the bar of the Chinese Palace in downtown Juarez, and I have a glass of tequila and some salt on the back of my hand and a limon, and I'm singing my little song, Yo Soy El Maestro De Los Locos In Chihuahua, that relaxes me, and uh, they insisted I go on the wagon to hold my job, and since my wife was pregnant, or just over being pregnant, and she had a little baby at home, I couldn't do anything about that, so I went on the wagon, and through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings, the next autumn I was in the Texas State Insane Asylum in Big Spring, Texas, and I was not there as an alcoholic, I'm glad to say, I hadn't sunk that low, I was there as a, I was there as a suicide. If you can't drink, there's no buffer, you just, oh, Jesus. I like to talk about that, I thought I'd been, I was in there as a depressive, and I had never plumbed depression like I knew when I, like I knew when I woke up where I was, and I was in a Texas nut house, and that was the first time I ever really knew what a depression was, it was far beyond what I'd been committed, and I thought, my God, what am I, I thought, how I, what did I ever do, it's just, oh God, I might have been there yet, because I had, I was there in an indefinite commitment, up to and including the rest of my life, until I got well, and I might have been there now, except some guy came along and says, you know, told me, you could not run away from that nut house, so never to try, and I just thought, oh, and I felt my heart start, and it took me two weeks to find a way through a door and down a corridor and through another door and across the yard and over the fence, and the fox was loose in West Texas, the only sad thing about that, what the guy said is true, but you don't know until you get out, I don't know if you've ever been in West Texas, but you get over there and you suddenly realize they can see you running for three days in any direction, and you feel like such a boob in your white bathrobe, you know, and it's just a matter of time until those field glasses pick you up, you know, well, there goes that little Yankee son of a bitch now, and, they snatched me back and gave me an autumn of electric shock for that, and once you've had an autumn of electric shock, you never run away again, you just, everything's fine. In fact, that Christmas, I started to make my comeback, they saw on my record that I had, what I had done at the University of Texas, I had directed a grand opera, Mephistopheles, in the original Italian, not the musical conducting, but the staging and direction, and they saw that in my record, and that Christmas, since I was in the Nuthouse, they allowed me to direct the Christmas pageant at the Big Spring Nuthouse, which was a little less complex than Mephistopheles, not quite the nuances of performance, but a second grade level so the entire student body could understand it. The director's main job was just trying to hold the three wise men off the Virgin Mary to get the curtain open. It's not easy being a Norwegian in Texas, I'll tell you that, and I might never get out of there, but the next year they started an alcoholic war there, the first one in the state of Texas, they put it Big Spring, and a man named Les Ross was in charge of it. By that time, most of my memory was back, and I knew how to handle alcoholics because I'd been in and out of AA meetings for six or seven years, because when people don't understand your emotions and they see you drink, they think drinking is your problem.
They have no idea what lurks beneath it. You ought to do something about your drinking. As soon as they say that, you know they don't understand. Yeah, but you go to AA, and that's drearier yet, you know, I went to my first AA meeting like Bob in 1949. I wasn't an alcoholic, my cellmate wasn't alcoholic, and I was just in there over the weekend for fighting the cob, youthful exuberance, but the guy said, I've been reading about you in the paper, kid, you want to come with us to an AA meeting? We went to an AA meeting upstairs at Luby's Meat Market somewhere, and as I remember, a room, it looked this full, but it couldn't have been more than 30 people of grubby old fools in their late
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30s and 40s and tedious, and some old clown got up and just dreadfully, as I recall, he didn't say, but what I always remember him saying was, I stayed drunk night and day for many years, and then one day I walked through that door, and they told me to put the plug in the jug, and I did, and I've just never been so goddamn happy. I tried to get that AA guy to buy me a beer on the way back to jail. AA's are great guys if you like people whose problem is drinking, but they have no sensitivity or anything. Well, you put the plug in the jug, and you keep coming back. That's very nice when you post my bail. No, we don't do that in A&A. We'll take your A&A and move it on out. But I went to AA every once in a while because the heat was on, you know, and you can always get the, in those days, you get the heat off by going, I remember coming home from jobs and telling my wife, well, I, I lost my job, Charlotte, but I, I'm gonna go back to A&A. Wonderful. They, they want me to taper off.
Wonderful. They didn't have any allen on them to screw it up for everybody. Man had a reasonable chance. They hadn't founded that church where, where the allenons meet, you know, meets in every city in the country in the same church. Our Lady of the Perpetual Revenge. That's what I thought at that time. I'm not allowed to say it now. But I joined their stinking little AA group, and they were all in there for 30 days. I was in there forever. So I had to be more sincere than they did, and they were going to go home anyway. They just committed by their families, you know, sit next to a guy in the ward and say, what are you gonna do when you get out, Fred? I'm gonna kill that bitch. But they all came and went, and I stayed, and I got to be secretary of the group.
And, you know, old Mr. Ross would give us an hour on the 12th step. Just drove everybody crazy. Almost wanted to hear 12 minutes on the 12th step. And then in step 7, boys, we, hmm. And you get all done. You say, are there any questions? And nobody had any questions. But I had to look. I have a question, Mr. Ross. I was so fasted by what you said in the fourth step, how we can reach down and get that garbage out on paper and, and finally for the first time understand our, what's causing the patterns that's destroying us. Could you tell us more about how we actually do that? And he'd smile, say, yes I can, Clancy. And the rest of the room would say, oh shit. But I wasn't trying to convince them. I had to have that old fool, and I got him. And pretty soon I was going out to little towns around there, Midland and Odessa, where Blanche comes from, and give little talks on behalf of the hospital. To this day, when I hear inmates talk at AA conventions, I have a little, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. Just, just a little, I know they're sincere, but. But I give little talks like, friends, I'm just happy to be here tonight on behalf of my fellow patients at Big Springs State Hospital. Thank each and every one of you for carrying a message of faith and hope for each of us who have, seems as though we had lost our way in the vast desert of alcoholism. But people such as yourself, without any thoughts of self, brought a message to us. And so we found the tall green hills of sobriety. They were too steep for our weary legs, but folks such as yourself pointed out twelve golden stairs that we could climb one after another, and climb high atop the hill of sobriety, find a new life. And now we can look back at other lost wayfarers in that endless desert and say, over here, over here. Now you can laugh, but that got me out of a Texas nuthouse. And the funny thing is, I never had another drink, till I ran out of Thorazine. But when you run out of Thorazine, you have a tendency to get irritable. But I put on a drive and I reformed again. I reformed beyond anything I'd seen before. And then a few months later, I was in Dallas working for Tracy Locke, the largest advertising agency in the South. My wife was
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pregnant again, she came into town. And we had a nice home out in Highland Park, and mortgage to the hilt. New blue Buick convertible, bought on time. I used to drive to work in the morning, down Turtle Creek Road, and just everything was fine. I was writing copy for, you got to be old to remember this, but the Elsie and Elmer, the Borden cows, and I was really doing good. And I'd have been fine, except it turns out, Dallas is full of crap heads. It really is. I was there two weeks ago. And through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings, about a few months later, I woke up one morning and I was on the floor of the Phoenix drunk tank. And a guy had just kicked my front teeth down my throat, because I'd vomited on his bunk. Now that was one of the few times in my life that analysis really came in handy, you know. I hadn't had it for years, but you'd remember it.
Once you get analyzed, you'd remember the facts. And I was lying on the floor, and the guy was kicking my mouth, and I was too sick to move my head, but I was still able to identify his problem. I remember thinking, this man is overreacting. But I didn't want to say anything and threaten our friendship. And I got out of that jail. It was 115 degrees on the streets of Phoenix, and I'd lost my clothes. I remember last having two match Safeway shopping bags full of my things, and they were gone. And my wife and children had moved into a post office box in Dallas, machine rather small, but to hell with them. And I realized things were not going my way. Now if I'll go to Seattle, and I weighed very little, and I had no teeth, and I had not any clothes. I went, got as far as Los Angeles, couldn't get out of that town. Went to the AA club, hung around there, the same old AA crap heads that are, infest AA everywhere. Well, you hang in there, work stops, keep coming back. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Hang on. Then they'd drive away in their Lincoln Continentals. Guys would wag their finger at my face. Now you don't want to be like this, do you?
If I had teeth, you son of a bitch, I'd bite off your finger. But I'm not going to give you the pleasure of gumming it. I, um, an old lady in that AA club was working the desk, and she, she caught me stealing money out of the coffee kitty one day, and I got banned out of the AA club. I didn't do it for malice, I was doing it in desperation. I went up on a beach, something called a Tender Loving Care Club, run by a strange man, and he, uh, he was selling AA out there. He just took out God and put himself in the place of it. That seemed reasonable. I'm not an alcoholic anyway. And, uh, the AA central office are always screwing, Sybil was in charge of the central office, and they put some heat on this poor man to, that, about his calling himself AA, and he got cross and threw all the AAs out. One non-alcoholic, several alcoholics, all the AA literature. And he started to work with narcotics addicts. I said to him, Jesus, you never had any narcotics. He says, I, I know, but they're going to write me in old letters, and, uh, he says, I can make myself a million dollars if I run this right.
I can make myself a million dollars if I run this right.