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Source: DICOBE-00339 – Clancy I – INTERGROUP 36TH – 1978-05-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00339-clancy-i-intergroup-36th-1978-05-15.mp3 Duration: 01:14:08
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My name is Clancy Imuslund and I'm an alcoholic. I'd like to ask what happened, what the hell happened to the serenity prayer we were supposed to say before you introduced the speaker? I'm just sick about it. I like to go by the book. I'm very pleased to be here tonight, a distinguished gathering when I see men such as Buck D in their ruffled blue dress shirts and it makes me know it's really a fast track. Editor of the Reporter in his black tie, Dr. Hal M.
from the State Department making a personal visit. Not from the State Department, from heaven, that's where he visits from. I want to say something if I may because it's kind of an amusing story. You may enjoy it, you may not. It isn't as good as the one you told about the guy peeing his pants. We had that instead of the serenity prayer, think about it. The committee or a portion of the committee was gracious enough last night, I was coming down with the flu, but they came to the hotel, Gordon and Sally and Joe and Margaret and our MC tonight came to the hotel and we had dinner in the Cheshire Cheese room over there. There was a piano player playing, he was a well-known pianist, he was playing and he'd keep dropping and we were the only live ones in the place, so he'd drop in and see if we had any requests. I requested him to stay out of our room actually. But we got talking, a nice guy, and he says, gee, I'm surprised I haven't seen any of you people drink. And after much bad Nash, I don't care, I live out of town, so I said, we're members of Alcoholics Anonymous and we're getting ready for a banquet tomorrow night. He said, no. I said, yes. And then he started telling us about it, he said, you know, I used to drink, I don't drink anymore, and he said, but I have a sister, unfortunately, and she's an alcoholic, and we were sad, and she said, but he has gone, she has gone to that A&A, she just started going, pardon me, to that A&A in Baltimore. I said, good, and we got talking. So by the time the evening was over, he had told us about his newcomer sister that none of us had ever seen. So we invited her here this evening, told him to go home and bring her tonight when he came to work. So he went home and brought his mother, who is sitting here, and brought his sister, the talkative newcomer from Baltimore, who is my escort tonight, Maria. In the old days, when I was new, nobody took me to any banquets.
Told me to read the book. But I hope this is a memory that you will always cherish. You may be the only newcomer in history that ever beat this committee on a $20. I do want to thank you for your invitation. It's a pleasure to be here tonight. I want to express my appreciation of the Sheraton Park Hotel, if I may. They've been most gracious. I came in Thursday, and as of Saturday afternoon, this afternoon, they still had no record that I was registered here. And they kept telling people they'd never heard of me, and many big business deals went down the drain. I don't mind anonymity, but that's a bit much.
And then they were gracious enough, however, to put me on a floor surrounded by a convention of drunken young people, where they all night long, I mean, until five in the morning, I reasoned with them. About three in the morning, I put my head out the door, and in my best AA manner, I said, but I said it! And they called me testy. But whatever. Here we are.
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There's one other thing I want to say. I want to slip in. I used to drink alcohol. I seem to have forgotten that in my opening remarks. I used to drink alcohol, and I drank it for some time for reasons that I used to think were indigenous only to me, but I've come to believe are rather widespread. I know that it's kind of a widespread disease. Wednesday night I was at a meeting, and I was talking with the guy next to me, and he didn't even have a drinking problem, and it turned out he was just a secret serviceman for the lady on the other side of him. And so we're getting a pretty wide representation at those meetings, except don't get smart. Don't try to read this stuff to a secret serviceman. I'll tell you that. They don't want to hear it. But I drank, and it made me feel better. I don't know why some people drink. A lot of people, I hear people say things like they just, alcohol is terrible. Wonderful for me, because I was raised in a milieu where we didn't drink. I was raised in a little town up in northern Wisconsin, and it's a small town. It's one of those towns you look like in a Andy Hardy movie. Two little rivers come together there and form another river, which goes to the Mississippi, and when I was a boy, we used to go out on rafts, and in the summertime, it's all green and lovely, and there's a regular tunnel of trees that you go down the street, and in the autumn, it all turns golden and crisp and crimson. In the wintertime, the snow falls. There's no big industry, so it stays white. It looks like a Christmas card. In the springtime, it all starts to turn green and lovely. About this time of year, you get to smell lilacs, which are the indication of spring. It's the kind of town you see in movies, and I just couldn't wait to get out of that damn place. I knew they were holding me back, and I had a pretty good knowledge of the world because I had spent most of my youth going Saturday and Sunday to the movies at the Badger and State Theaters in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and early in the Second World War, there's a war on, and I was afraid I was going to miss it. I was 15 years old, and the war just started, and I wanted to be out there. I'd seen Life magazine, and I knew that there was heroism available, and so one weekend, I told my mother I was going to go to Superior, Wisconsin to visit my aunt, and instead, I hitchhiked to San Francisco. I'm certainly glad I got one ride most of the way because it was a lot bigger than it looked like on my Rand McNally, I'll tell you, and I got to San Francisco, and I ran across a guy who showed me how to falsify identification to prove I was 16, which doesn't seem like much, but with a 16-year-old identification, I went to the Coast Guard office on Market Street, and they were dying for merchant semen early in the war, and I had to get permission from my parents, so I took the form and went around the corner and signed their names in proxy and brought it back and got semen's papers, and they referred me to the National Maritime Union, which is down Montgomery Street, and I went down there with my semen's papers. I didn't know anything. I hadn't even been to Milwaukee yet, and here I was, and they gave me a membership on spec to be paid 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, something struck me. This is not quite it either.
I said, man, that land was going out of sight, and they told me to get to my foc'sle, and that sounded ominous to me. Turned out a foc'sle is a room where men sleep or people sleep on a ship, and I was small and skinny. I had a face full of pimples and had a fast mouth, one of the fastest mouths in the junior class or no closer to senior high school, and they stuck me in here with three of the worst type of people that a smart punk can ever be stuck with. They're bad people. They're called men, and they were not amused by my cute sayings that used to kill them in homeroom, and they told me to dummy up, and I knew what that meant. Then over the first night out of port, I was lying in that bunk, and the ship was going all around, and I was getting sick, and these guys were some kind of evil men. They were talking about their last night ashore in San
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Francisco and the things they had done, and I'd never heard of such things. I was a Christian boy, and I never dreamed such things went on. I was just staggered. I thought I must be with a bunch of Catholics. Well, that's what they told us in the Lutheran church for the Catholic. It's all different now, Father. Today, some of my best friends are priests. Of course, I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one, but these guys were talking, and I was just sick. I really was physically sick by their conversation. Don't misunderstand me. Even at the age of 15 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, as naive as I was, I'd had sex, but I'd been apprehensive, and I'd been afraid, and I'd always been alone. I didn't know things like this. I didn't know those pictures came to life, and on that same night, a guy, one of those big mopes, went to his sea bag and took out a bottle of whiskey, and he went to one of those guys and said, You want a little snort? I said, Yeah. You want a little snort? I said, Yeah. He turned to me with a singularly unpleasant look.
I could not identify it. I wasn't sophisticated. Later in life, I would have called it a patronizing look, but at that time, it was just an unpleasant look. He said, How about you, junior? You think you're man enough for a little snort? And I looked right up at him with my watery blue eyes blazing. I didn't say anything, but I thought, I guess you've never seen a Lutheran before, have you? You big turkey. Lutherans don't drink whiskey. Even if they did, I promised my mother and grandmother that I would never drink whiskey, ever, and even if I hadn't promised them I wouldn't drink whiskey, I wouldn't drink whiskey, because what knowledge I had of the world was from the movies, I guess, I saw in those years, and to the best of my knowledge, good guys never drank. Errol Flynn never drank, as far as I knew. Basil Rathbone drinks because he tries to get the secrets from the Queen Elizabeth and send a King Philip or somebody.
To the best of my knowledge, Buck Jones never had a drink in his life. Rustlers named Slade drink whiskey. And that guy stuck that bottle in my face, if you could imagine that, and said, Do you think you're man enough for a little snort? And I looked right up at him without batting an eye, and I said, God damn right. Because I've always been a little weak under peer pressure, too. And that day I had my first drink, and it burned my mouth, and it burned my throat, and it burned my stomach, and then it turned around and burned my stomach, and burned my throat, and burned my, burned his shirt, really.
And my memory of that moment is the most important memory, is the sneering laughter. Just, ha ha ha, I don't like getting killed in a bottle, ha ha, you know. And I had no tools to deal with it. I remember all the way across the Pacific, Central Pacific, I used to sneak in that guy's sea bag when nobody was around every day, and take a drink of that. Not because I liked it, I thought it stunk, it was terrible, it was rotten.
But then I felt that once I can drink and not throw up and act like a baby, they'll think I'm a man. That's it. As the years went by, there was always something that was going to make me feel better. As I got older and more sophisticated, one time it was, once I get that job, that'll do it. Once I get that woman, or that woman, that'll do it. Once I get that car, once I get my name in the paper, once I get my picture in the paper, once I get that power, there's always something. Then I was very, quite unsophisticated. It was just, once I can hold a drink down without vomiting, it'll be all right.
And I snuck in there, I threw up every day, and I remember a day out of Pearl Harbor, I took a drink of that stinking bottle that burned my throat and burned my mouth and my stomach, and stayed down. And I thought, now if I could just do it without making a face. Terrible. And about that, at that moment in time and space, alcohol did for me, for the first time, what it seems to Alcohol did for me for the first time what it seems to do for a lot of people, if you're a special person, one of those 7% of special people, I started to get that feeling, I don't know how to explain it, but you start to get warm from the inside out for the first time, and I wouldn't have known the word then, because I was really a dumb kid, but I've come to identify that feeling as the feeling of momentary omnipotence, just…
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and I remember thinking, what do I care what these turkeys think, and I just felt good, then I got sick and threw up and it all went away, but for a few moments, I felt the way they looked, and that's all I ever wanted out of life, is to feel the way they look, and I drank after that, I didn't stay drunk by any means, I drank, tried to learn what to drink so I wouldn't be sick, and tried to learn things that make me, to drink things that would make me look sophisticated as I got older, and learned to drink things that wouldn't make me drunk and get in trouble, and later in the war, I went in the Navy, and when I was in the Navy, I took some examinations through the Armed Forces Institute, that they said I had a high enough intelligence so I wouldn't have to go back to school, to high school, even though I was a beginning junior, and so after the war, I went to the college, and I got married in college, and I had a couple kids, and I was editor of the year book, and I was a member of a championship team, and went out in the world, I became a sports writer, and then I got into sales correspondence, worked for a corporation, I got into advertising work, and advertising agency work, and I drank all the time, I drank all this time, I don't mean I drank all the time, but to me, that's what I say, people sometimes say alcohol is dreadful, alcohol to me is the best friend I ever had, I'll tell you, your best friends come and go in this cruel world, they move away or you have a difference of opinion, the only woman you ever loved, the love may not last till Wednesday sometimes, jobs come and go, cities come and go, states come and go, but by God, a drink that goes boom, you can get that anywhere, and it does it, and it eases you off, that's what I drank, I don't mean to imply that I didn't have problems in these years, because I have always had problems, but they weren't due to alcohol, they were due to, the world is kind of a crappy place actually, I don't mean we in AA don't judge, we just report, one of the things that bothered me a great deal, when I was young, it seemed like it was a great aid to me, but as I got older, it got to be a deterrent, and that is that I've been blessed by some power with the ability to spot crap heads, and when you're young, it really gives you a leg up, because you know who to avoid, but as you get older, you realize almost everybody is a crap head, and it gets tougher and tougher to live in the world, because the world is full of people who get ahead by brown nosing, while they hold back talented people because they have integrity, and won't sell out, or can't find out how to, one of my main problems in my life, I would not judge this, I know a lot more about how I felt then than I did then, I think about that, you know one of the things that I, when I was growing up, my dad was a teacher, and when I was a boy, he taught history, I used to read a lot of history books, just for pleasure, I got to be kind of a civil war buff, and whenever I come to this part of the country, I would spend one day or two, tromping over some new civil war battlefield, yesterday, I had the flu, and I was, almost became the last casualty of the battle of Antietam, but here I was, tromping over a battlefield of Antietam, I thought again that same old thing, I thought this many times, it's an interesting thing, I know more about the battle of Antietam than anybody who fought in it, true story, I know more than General McClellan knew, he had no idea what the south had there, I do, not because I'm brilliant, because I read the books, anybody who reads the books on Antietam knows more about the battle of Antietam than the people who fought in it, because when you fought in it, all you know is, here comes a son of a bitch with a bayonet, when you read about it later, it's very easy to get a philosophical viewpoint, and that's often the way it is with our stories in Alcoholics Anonymous, I've come to believe, we sometimes have a tendency to imbue our previous days with knowledge we've acquired since then, as though we somehow knew about things, like when you hear people say, and then one day, I knew I wanted sobriety on an all time basis,
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and I called Alcoholics Anonymous knowing that their recovery program would fit me, and it sounds so nice, but I've never had anybody tell me that at the time, my wife says if I don't go to a meeting she's going to stop supporting me, that's the reason usually, but I know a lot about the 1950s more than I did then, because then I was going through it, I was kind of weary, but I look back and I can see that among the things that have bothered me in my life, for instance, is that somehow or other, although I couldn't identify it or pinpoint it, I've spent most of my life with the feeling that somehow or other, I seem to be more sensitive to things than other people seem to be, they just seem to be, well, that's the way it is, and I have a tendency to be easily hurt, it seems to me, I've spent most of my life with the feeling, although I couldn't identify it, that I suffer more from anxiety than other people seem to feel, as far as I can tell by looking at them, other people just say, well, just accept it, and I have a tendency, my stomach grinds, because I'm a fighter for truth, I'm not a babbit, I'm not a crap head, young people today think they're the first ones who ever fought for justice, some of us fought for justice before it was in to fight for justice, I remember, in a manner of speaking, standing on the barricades in those years and saying, justice, give us justice, as you get older and wiser, I'll tell you this, young people, you come to realize, your cry will diminish considerably as you start getting more and more justice, the cry becomes, mercy for Christ's sake, mercy, you know, I, justice for people like me usually means, give me my way, they think that's justice, justice is very unfair, I have spent most of my life with the feeling that my lonelinesses are more poignant than other people's lonelinesses, I'm sitting in offices and hear people say things like, well, I was kind of lonely last night, and I called up Herb when we went to the show, and I'd think, you superficial babbit, crap head, I wish I were so superficial that my lonelinesses could be assuaged by going to a show with some goof named Herb, but I get into deep, introspective, metaphysical insights that really, it may be Michigan Boulevard in Chicago, all the people I'm going by, but it's the battlements of Elsinore to me, baby, and I just, oh, and I just know that people are saying, did you see that lonely, tragic figure, what a terrible load he must carry, far beyond our petty understandings, so I was in shock years later, and you know, what they've really been saying is, did you see that turkey, one of my problems in my life has always been because of my anxieties and so on, I have a, I'm troubled a lot with resentments, I have an intense personality, once upon a time a psychiatrist, he told me a lot of things, I remember that I had an intense burning white flame inside of me that I would have to learn to control, every time somebody screamed me again, I thought, here comes the intense burning white flame, and I resent authority figures, I resent those goofs who have the power to alter my life on their whims, I resent people who treat me like some sort of a cretin who doesn't know how to act, I resent people pushing me around, now it's a funny thing, I've never had that feeling towards my subordinates, for them I kind of have contempt, because they're sheep, it's just those goofs up there, and these, I've had a lot of emotions, and when you have emotions like that, at least you, you know, I could go on all night about emotions, but I suppose that if I were to put an umbrella over my emotions, how to describe it, I'd say most of my life was characterized by a sense of unease, sometimes intense, sometimes light, but a sense of unease, you know, always not quite there, occasionally there,
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but not always, just something missing somewhere, and if I, like most people, or more than most people I suppose, because my day was not quite as common as it is now, when I was still a young man, an executive, I took some of my early dollars and went into analysis, to find an answer, and a lot of people may put down analysis, but I never put it down, I loved it, because that was the first time I understood it wasn't my fault, I was the victim, I've been victimized by the depression, I didn't even know there was a depression until I found out from him, I remember the doctor saying one day, you mean Mr. Emerson is a boy, you didn't have a bicycle?
I got thinking about that about two nights later, can you imagine that, a little tousled haired boy, all he ever asked is decency, and he can't even have a bicycle, what kind of stinking lousy world is this, I just drank up a storm, took me a month to remember, nobody else in my neighborhood had a bicycle, one kid did and we beat him up, but I think most people like me are very easily made to feel like victims, I can feel victimized on the basis of almost very little, and the only thing wrong with analysis as it came out was that you get to know a great deal about what's causing these emotions, but nothing changes, you still have them and it feels terrible, but now at least you know why, it's like being on the deck of the Titanic and knowing what happened, I can tell you the answer, everybody else is rowing away and you're the only one that knows and you drown, what kind of justice is that?
I later in another area got into metaphysics and today there's a metaphysician on every street corner, it seems like, in my day you had to be a seeker, I sought, I got to a point where 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, you know just, it was kind of cold and lonely at the top there, it was almost a relief when they finally put me in the Texas nuthouse, I read a lot of philosophy, I was like Nietzsche, because Nietzsche had the proper cynicism that I enjoyed, that I felt like, but you read too much of Nietzsche and you discover he died in the nuthouse and you got to say well I'll try Kant, you know, and I got to be a terrible depressive, terrible depressive because when you're sensitive and cursed with intelligence, and the ability to spot crap heads and you work for crap heads, it's kind of a thwarting experience, I'd made a, I married a, I'd married a catholic girl, and I, she practiced the rhythm system and we had a rapidly growing family, and all in all I felt like Prometheus tied to a rock, everywhere I went it was just terrible, but I tried to do what's right, but I'll tell you nothing seems to help much, except one thing in my life may be different from other people, but to me nothing ever helps quite as much as a few drinks, that's all, I don't drink because I'm some crazy alcoholic, I drink just to ease off, just to relax, to get rid of the sharp corners for a little while, you know, I go to, once in a while I'd go to an A&A meeting, and this is almost 30 years ago, and I'm not like those people, I had a glass of beer, then I leaped out of a bush and then, I'm not like that, I'm a sensitive, intelligent man who is unfortunately surrounded by emotional little putians, I'm not against them, I just, they drive me crazy, and from time to time with the pressures on me I had a tendency sometimes to drink too much, I didn't mean to, because I'm not a drinker, but when the heat's on you gotta do something, and sometimes I've drank to the point where I was, got drunky poop, and then comes the most ultimate indignity of all mankind, the very same crap heads that drive you to drink are the first ones who get on your case.
The first ones who get on your case about your drinking, and there's such an imbalance there, you just, I have a tendency to brood, and when I brood, bizarre things have happened to me, that have interrupted the orderly progress of my life, for instance, one spring, I was Junior Chamber of Commerce Young Man of the Year in a suburb of Chicago, I had a wife and a couple children, and I
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lived in a home, with a big lawn and dogs, and unfortunately, it turned out that the entire area was full of crap heads, and by the end of that same year, through no fault of mine, through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings, the end of the same year, I was playing piano at a whorehouse in San Francisco, well, I uh, I'm not putting that down, different strokes for different folks, we say, but it's very hard to work that sort of experience into an advertising resume, I'll tell you, that's why most AAs have resumes where there's holes that say self-employed during this period, and the worst part about it is, I guess it's due to my Christian upbringing, I never have been able to enjoy evil very long, you know, I can't, I was trained to be good, I was educated to be good, I was catechized to be good, and through some inherent weakness, I've never been able to sustain being good, the longer I try to be good, there's a growing need to be rotten, I don't know what it is, so you go, and I never had any training to be rotten, but I had a natural flair, and I don't mind being rotten, but the longer I'm rotten, there's a growing need to be good, and so there's never any rest wherever you go, there's an old guy in Los Angeles who says, remember this, boys, when one door closes, another door opens, that sounds so nice, except I used to want to say to him, what do you do when the doors aren't in sync, I spend most of my life in the hall here, the doors keep closing, but the doors that open are worse, you know, and I don't mind being rotten, but the longer I'm rotten, there's a growing need to be good, and so there's never any rest wherever you go, there's an old guy in Los Angeles who says, remember this, boys, when one door closes, another door opens, that sounds so nice, except I used to want to say to him, what do you do when the doors aren't in sync, I spend most of my life in the hall here, the doors keep closing, but the doors that open are worse, you know, but I reformed, I always reformed, and I always reformed, another year, in the spring of the year, I was on the faculty of the University of Texas at El Paso, directing a grand opera at night, in the daytime, I was copy chief for an advertising agency, I was writing a weekly thing for the El Paso Times, I brought my family together again, we had another child, we always had a child when we reunited, there was about a week of rapture, then it all went down to hell after that, and I was going to make my move for the big time, except unfortunately, it turned out, El Paso was full of crap heads, if it weren't for Juarez, El Paso would be untenable, so I used to spend a lot of time in Juarez, just to ease off the pressure, I'm not a bad man, I'm basically a good man, but, well friend, the dean of the university called me and said, we're getting some reports on your actions in Juarez, that I'm lending credence to, you know, that you're not adding to our image, I realized there was no sense to even try to argue with a guy, he wouldn't understand that for some people, sensitive, trained, educated people, that at three o'clock in the morning, when I go to Juarez, and stand on the Chinese Palace Bar, on one foot, and hold a glass of tequila in this hand, and put some salt on the back of this hand, and hold a lime, and sing my little song, Yo soy el maestro de los locos en Chihuahua, that eases me off, that eases me off, so they insisted I go on the wagon, well my wife was pregnant, so I went on the wagon, when I go on the wagon, that's no help to me, because my problem is my alcohol, alcohol is one of the few answers I got, and I go on the wagon long enough, the heat is on, and everybody's grinding me,
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and one day I just went in the garage, and turned on the motor in the car, and went to sleep, but died, and some guy pulled me out, and beat on my heart, and they committed me to the Texas Nuthouse as a depressive schizophrenic, now I'll tell you, I thought I'd been depressed before, but I woke up in that big spring nuthouse, that's depressing, that was depressing, and I might have been there yet, except some big redneck came along, told me never try to run away, because that's an escape proof place, I thought really, and I could hear my heart start, and it took me two weeks, I found a way to get through a door, down a corridor, through another door, across the yard, over the fence, and the fox was loose in West Texas, the only sad thing is that what the guy said is true, you don't know until you get out, but it really is an escape proof nuthouse, the one in big spring Texas, I don't know if you've ever been to West Texas, but after you get out, you realize they can see you running for three days in any direction, and you feel like such a simpleton in your white bathrobe, and you know it's just a matter of time until the field glasses pick you up, well there goes that little Yankee son of a bitch now, and they snatched me back and gave me an autumn of electric shocks, well, the next year I thought, there must be some other way out of here, this could interfere with my career, because I was there until I got well, and I'm glad I found a way around that, I'll tell you, and the next year they put in their first alcoholic ward in the state of Texas, at the big spring state hospital, and I had been to A&A off and on for several years, because people, when you drink too much, they don't ever know why, they just think your problem is drinking too much, so you can always get a two week cop out by pretending an interest in AA, whoever it is, you come home and say, well Charlotte, I've decided to go back to A&A, wonderful, it's going to be better now, they want me to taper off, that was before Al-Anon came along and screwed it up for everybody, but A&A is a two week cushion anywhere you go, you can always simulate an interest for two weeks, and so I went in and pretended to be in A&A, I didn't tell them I'd been around A&A, I just asked the right question, I said, I'm here because my drinking drove me to suicide, and I don't know anything about your program, but do you have any literature I could read, is there anything I could do, if I could just somehow regain my lost faith, and I know I wouldn't have to drink if I had some structure that would help me not do it, could you help me, and their eyes went bang, and I knew I had that old fool, and about a couple of months later I was out of that nut house, and the funny thing is, I never had another drink, until I ran out of Thorazine, but when you run out of Thorazine, you can't drink anymore, until I ran out of Thorazine, but when you run out of Thorazine, you get irritable, the crap heads really appear then, another year in the spring time, I was working at Tracy Lock, the largest advertising agency in the south, I was writing for Elsie Nelmer, the board and cows, and I was really doing good, except unfortunately, Dallas is chock full of crap heads, and my wife by this time had been converted, by them apparently, and my children, I had four little girls, and they were nice, but they didn't act like other people's little children, and my wife, there was a new program on TV, I used to watch that thing, because I ran away from home when I was a kid, maybe I missed the family nuance, there's something called father knows best, I used to watch that thing, maybe I get some tips, and something struck me that was wrong, that these things screaming through the house here, none of them are princess or kitten or bud, and that old dragon in the kitchen ain't Jane Wyatt, I'll tell you that, and it's almost impossible to be Robert Young alone in Dallas, Texas, and through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings, I woke up that autumn in the Phoenix Arizona drunk tank, and a guy had just kicked my front teeth out, because I vomited on his bunk, and that was one of the few times analysis ever came in handy in my life, because as sick as I was, I couldn't even move my head, I was able to identify his problem, I was able to look up at him, this man is overreacting, but I didn't want to say anything and threaten our friendship,
[00:40:01]
by that time my family had gone, my wife had taken 400 girls, moved into a post office box in Dallas, and it was okay, because they'd chained me down too long, and something struck me, I didn't have any clothes, someone had taken my luggage, I'd lost two matched Safeway shopping bags that I'd brought, and my awards and my plaques, and I thought I'd better go to Seattle, that seemed cool, it was 118 in Phoenix and a jail, I got as far as Los Angeles, I couldn't get out of that stinking town, I went up to the A&A club, that's one of the few places in the world you can go when you look rotten, you can't go to the Junior Chamber of Commerce and say, I see a young man a year, it's kind of hard to go to the ad club and say, I'll show you my awards, I left them under a Safeway shopping bag in the Phoenix jail, but you can go to A&A, because there's the only place in the world where the worse you look, the better you look, I'm the newcomer, I want help, how about a five, and I hung around the A&A club, and I got banned out of there for a moment of desperation, they caught me stealing the coffee money out of a meeting, it's an embarrassment to have alcoholics catch you, those simpletons, and I went on the beach, and I wound up I was going to write a book on Skid Row, but I was down on Skid Row and I didn't have any pencils, so I couldn't write my book on Skid Row, and one day I realized I was dying, because they told me that my blood had now fallen below the level I couldn't sell a pint of blood on the Skid Row blood bank on East 4th Street, because the iron content in my blood was too low, and I knew I was dying, and I didn't know what the hell to do, and I remember thinking, by this time I wish I weren't an alcoholic, I wish I weren't a narcotics addict, I wish I weren't anything, that I could stop doing and feel better, instead of being cursed with sensitivities and emotions and memories that other people don't seem to have, we're stopping at nothing, where people don't seem to have, where stopping drinking doesn't make it better, stopping drinking makes it better for a while, but then it gets worse, because the indignities and injustices are now just more apparent, and I didn't know what to do, and that morning I walked 71 blocks after that stinking AA club, just to get off the street, I said I'll get a sponsor and hit him over the head and get some money and get to Seattle, but I've got to do something, and the guy said you're banned, you can't come in, and I slipped, so I went in the back room, and I laid down, and I bumped on the sofa, and I thought my God what's wrong with me, and I remember thinking briefly, it may sound funny, and it wasn't funny that morning, I thought maybe my suicide in El Paso was successful, and this is what hell is, because it couldn't be any worse, it couldn't be any worse, and really what am I going to do, go out there to that AA club again that night, and have another one of those old goofs come over, and give me a little plug in the jug, you know, I'm starving, what do I do, live and let live, you know, have one of these old white tennis shoe bags, come up and say, sonny I just had to see you fight God at the meetings, and you answer that as you do, you'll never see me fight God again man, now you'll just hear it, now you'll just hear it, there's no help for people like me, and that's why I had no idea that morning, or that afternoon, or the next morning, or the next week, or the next month, I had no idea then, I haven't had any alcohol in my body since then, I haven't been seduced by any of those well intentioned, but lethally misinformed members of the medical profession, who still believe that alcoholism is caused by a valium deficiency, I, I have not been bemused by the little groups of turkeys, who occasionally show up in AA, and say things like, the book doesn't mention pot baby, nothing Melbourne mentions turkeys like you, why don't you just move along, if you're new tonight, I'll say this to the token newcomer, I would suggest to you from my experience, that you stay away from people, who take medications for their emotions, or smoke marijuana, please, not because they're bad people, it's not like I'm being intolerant, it isn't that at all, some of them are more exciting than the straight ones, but they aren't going to be around in two or three months anyway, then you'll have to make new friends then, so why not make lasting friends now, and make friends with people who are staying sober, in my opinion, I don't know if it's popular or not, to take that stand, I don't know if it's popular or not to take that stand, but when you've been to enough funerals of people who didn't believe it, you don't care if it's popular anymore or not.
[00:45:01]
And I've come here tonight now, at almost 20 years sobriety, at tremendous expense, no little inconvenience, and to top it off, a dreadful cold, to talk to you new people and say, why can't you find the program the way we did in the old days? We were sincere back then. Tell you something funny, they weren't any more sincere then than they are now. I remember when I went to my first AA meeting in 1949, I don't know if it really happened, but I always remember it.
I was in jail over the weekend for some youthful exuberance, and my cellmate was the town drunk. So the AAs came and took him to a meeting, and they said, do you want to go along, kid? I said, sure. So we went over Luby's Meat Market, to this terrible room full of burned out old fools in their 30s and 40s, and some old lugubrious goof stood at the end, and as I recall, he said, all my life my problem has been alcohol.
I stayed drunk night and day for many years, and then one day I walked through that door, and they showed me how to put the plug in the junk, and I did, and I've just never been so goddamn happy. That just makes me salivate, baby. I tried to get that AA guy to buy me a beer on the way back to jail that night. AA is all right if you've got a drinking problem, but it isn't all right for people with an intelligence or sensitivity problem, or memories, or what might have been, or if only.
It's good for these goofs who just, oh, I stopped drinking. You're just gooder and gooder. That really doesn't capture it. There's only one thing worse than the lugubrious speaker I used to feel. Those are the worst ones, even. I was down and out, and now I put the plug in the jug, and now I have three million dollars, a fleet of automobiles, several different families have returned to me, and I don't own the one thing.
I just don't drink alcohol no more. And when you're sick and suicidal, that doesn't capture you. It really doesn't. Through some bad breach of misunderstanding, I got thrown into that lousy AA again. And as I say, the funny thing I know about my life is that for almost 20 years, the only therapy I've had since 1958, things got so bad, the only therapy I've had is Alcoholics Anonymous since that morning.
I've had nothing more. I would have enjoyed other forms of therapy, but when I was new, they wouldn't do it on credit, and by the time I'd done the things that would have enabled me to get some money, I didn't need it. I haven't had any medications, as I say. It's really remarkable. I can give you a nice success story. By the time I was a year sober, I'd emotionally got myself in shape to hold a job as a busboy.
It doesn't sound like much, but I'd been fired off eight jobs already for my attitude, you know, because there's something demeaning about being a furniture mover. When you're… that's sensitivities. I don't mind it now, but then I had sensitivities. I remember coming through a doorway one first noon, I was a furniture mover. The guy said to me, hey, you without any teeth, you bumped my lamp. And I said, no, you're mistaken, sir.
I broke your goddamn lamp. I got a job as a dishwasher at the Gaty Delicatessen, and I would hate to defend this tonight intellectually, but at the time, when I was six months sober, it looked to me like the busboys were bringing in dishes from other restaurants. Now, I've always been able to spot those kind of injustices. By the time I was a year sober, I held a job as a busboy. When I was two years sober, I was working in a little advertising agency wrapping mats.
When I was two and a half years sober, I got a little job in a medical corporation. By the time I was five years sober, I was director of advertising and public relations at that corporation. When I was seven years sober, I'd become hip and slick, and they brought me into Hollywood, and we created the number one rock radio station in the world, Boss Radio, baby, and I'm just slick. When I was ten years sober, I was downtown doing public relations for oil companies, and they sure needed them.
When I was 15 years sober, I was marketing director for a publishing firm in Beverly Hills, owned a home out by the ocean. When I was five years sober, the wife and four daughters had heard the crisp green in my pocket and leaped out of their post office box with a horse cry, fled to my side.
[00:50:04]
A wife and four lamprey fish who affixed themselves into my side. We reunited. We now have a little boy, 13. And I can say, baby, that's what Annie's done. I got it together and you haven't, to hell with ya. Except all this is very nice, but if you're kind of new, if you're a token newcomer, you know, there's always a little thing missing in this kind of a talk. That's all very interesting, that you were down and now you're up, but how do you get from there to there?
How does it help you to go to A&A meetings and hear those people tell their stories of how they made it, but it doesn't help me? What good does it do to hang on when there's no need to, when you can't stand it anymore? My problem is not alcohol, not really. It got to be alcohol hundreds of times, but it isn't really alcohol. There's something else and neither I nor anyone I've ever talked to can identify it accurately.
What in the world can you do about something like that? I remember when I was about three months sober, I was living in an abandoned car in the A&E Club parking lot. I wanted to be close to meetings at all times. And some people from UCLA came in and they found an answer to the drinking problem. They'd isolated, they didn't isolate, but they got a hold of a chemical that helps alcoholics recover. And they came in and got volunteers from A&E to take this.
And I volunteered, even though my problem wasn't alcohol, I thought I'd take whatever help I can get. And they turned me down because I had front teeth and I weighed 110 pounds and I was dirty. And they thought I wouldn't give their damn old drug a fair shake. And so I missed being part of the early 1959 big test at UCLA where they gave 30 known alcoholics LSD and none of them survived. I'm glad I was looking sick that day, I'll tell you.
But no one had heard of LSD then. But I'll tell you, the most important thing I have said tonight, or I will say before I sit down, is not any of these things that I've just said. The most important thing I've said, or I'll say, is I said, my name is Clancy Imuslin and I am an alcoholic. Because I literally bet my life I wasn't. I could accept it sometimes, but in moments of crisis, when you just know, it's just like an athlete, the hand comes out of the shirt and just a choke is on you.
But alcohol isn't my problem. What good does it do me to listen to people who talk about their drinking and say when they stopped their drinking, everything got off all right. Because it doesn't change anything. Sometimes. It makes it better. There's a novelty in not vomiting, but you know, really it's, all you do is take away whatever, whatever happy blur there is in life and you see every sharp corner that ever happened.
And that's why for just a few minutes tonight, I don't want to interfere. I know they paid a lot for the band and I don't want to keep them waiting. I want to just take a couple of minutes if I may and explain to you something that I have come to believe that's a hallmark, and that's this. Some of you are new tonight. Those who aren't new, they'll make it without it. Maybe, but I want to tell you something.
How can you hang around here when you know, once a novelty of it's worn off, it can't help you. Now, what's an alcoholic? Everybody knows what an alcoholic is. There's a, you know, an alcoholic who is a person whose problem is alcohol. And they, when they drink it, they drink it indefinitely. Correct? I'll tell you, if I continued to believe that, I would have been dead 19 years ago. One of the saddest things that I know about what troubles people like us is a lot of people die because they think an alcoholic is a person whose problem is alcohol.
In my opinion, and what I've come to learn here, if your problem is alcohol, you're in the wrong place. For two reasons. AA has no tools to deal with an alcohol problem, and even if they did, you don't need it. There's a, you know, if your life is okay except when you drink, then it goes to hell. I've got a solution that's going to cure you without ever having another AA meeting. Don't drink. Just leave it be all right.
That's all you have to do with an alcohol problem. You don't have to get embarrassed and humiliated and get a sponsor. You do this. You do that. You do that. Ridiculous. If your problem is alcohol, I hereby heal you, baby.
[00:55:02]
Don't drink and you're home free. But if it turns out you suffer from what I suffer from, you're in deep trouble. It is not alcohol. It is something that sounds like alcohol, and we talk a lot about drinking and AA, and it confuses a lot of people, and some people die from it, that confusion. But it's something called alcoholism. And the difference between alcohol and alcoholism is something more than a three-letter suffix.
It's an entire approach to the rest of your life. If your problem is alcohol, when you get sober, no further treatment or therapy is required. You may have some residual physical damage you can get rid of. But that's all there is to it. But if your problem is alcoholism, when you get sober, it turns out, unfortunately for you and me and countless others, it looks exactly the same to the patient. It looks exactly the same to the loved ones of the patient.
And only too often it looks exactly the same to the person treating the patient. Because what nobody ever seems to know in that situation is, what makes alcoholism dreadful is that it continues on into sobriety. Only invisibly, you can't smell it. You know, it's easy to measure drinking, but in sobriety they don't have balloons to blow up so they can measure your anxiety and tension. And they don't have white lines to walk to measure a need for affection or someone who cares.
They can't take a drop of blood out of your ear and measure fear and secret feelings of inadequacy that just grabbed your throat and the feelings of injustice that these people are doing to me! All they can do is, by the time you drink over it, they can say, you had a drinking problem, Slim. Now, alcoholism, it seems to me, the deadly aspect of alcoholism is not being able to stop drinking, because, you know, that's the other thing.
You keep thinking alcoholics are people who stay drunk all the time. I'll tell you a physiological fact. It is physically impossible for a human body to stay intoxicated 14 straight days and nights. That's one of the rottenest parts about being a drinker, you can't stay drunk. If you could stay drunk, you'd have a much smaller membership in AA, I think. I might still be the toaster Juarez if I didn't have to keep sobered up.
Your body takes care of it for you. Your body will do, helps you. Your body fights for survival. Your body will set up for you, highly toxified by alcohol, will set up a series of involuntary physiologically conditioned reflexes to reduce toxicity by inducing a procedure called reverse peristalsis. In our circle that's known as vomiting. But you always get sober, it's rotten. The problem is that after you get sober, sobriety, alcoholism in sobriety makes sobriety untenable sooner or later.
And the result is that people like you and me, without ever usually knowing why, must drink, or take pills, or smoke marijuana, or sniff cocaine, or shoot heroin, or do something! Because you get to a point where you just can't do it anymore. Alcohol being a problem, in fact I've come to understand that alcohol, far from being a problem, the fact that it's not a problem is what makes it such a terrible problem.
What does alcohol do to every alcoholic? How can you spot an alcoholic? What does alcohol do to people that makes them an alcoholic? Gets them heavily drunk? I don't think so. I've watched alcoholics die who never got as drunk as my uncle gets once a year on New Year's Eve. Makes them lose their families? Some people don't lose their families. Some people like to lose their families and can't lose them.
Some people, I've been, maybe in the last 18, 17 years, I guess I've heard 175 fifth steps. I've never heard of anything that alcohol does to everybody the same. You wonder what the hell is it that makes an alcoholic? It's something much more complex I've come to understand from my betters. The thing that makes you and me different, not what alcohol does to us at all, it's what alcohol does for us.
Alcohol does something different for you and me than it does for 93% of the people who drink. And the problem is, I never knew it and I never knew anybody who knew it. But alcohol literally, Alcohol literally changes facts. The facts stay there, but they look different. They alter my approach to reality.
[01:00:00]
You know, when I was about two years old, we were in this little advertising agency. I remember one of our accounts was a thing called Kamchatka Vodka. And I was wrapping my match, and I heard these writers talking, saying, Why don't we put on the billboard for Kamchatka Vodka? And I tried to be nice. I got an idea. I didn't have any front teeth yet. I learned to talk funny. I said, Why don't you put on the billboard, Kamchatka Vodka really goes boom! Better than all the vodkas everywhere.
And they all gave me that same old stupid crap head look. And it suddenly struck me. Just like my sponsor said, he lucked out and was right again. Vodka does not go boom! to those turkeys. It goes blblblblbl. They don't know what the hell I'm talking about. The next time you wish you'd have been a social drinker, you might think about that. Would you like to face all the cares of your life with just a blblblblbl?
Those people will never know what we take for granted. When you're bashed to the wall and a hound is at your throat, those people take a drink of it. Oh God! And it goes blblblblbl. Nobody here, when you're bashed to the wall and a hound is at your throat, you take a drink. It doesn't go blblblbl. It goes boom! Bring on your goddamn hound, Mrs. Baskerville. Nothing has changed, but it looks different.
One time in El Paso, we were waiting to see if the household was going to call. They're supposed to call at ten o'clock to see if they're going to repossess our furniture. That leaves a little tension around ten to ten, I'll tell you. And my wife, I said to my wife, I always tried to be nice to her. I said, you want a little drink, Shirley? She gave me that same pre-Al-Anon nonsense, or post-Al-Anon later.
What's wrong with you? You're drinking in this situation. You want me to be like you? I said, shut up! I took a drink. And by the time the phone rang, I was the only one who was able to answer it. You keep up this shit, I ain't going to borrow from you anymore. Nothing changes things. I think if we wanted to put it technically, we could say that the effect of alcohol on the alcoholic is to alter his relationship to reality without changing either he or reality.
Nothing changes, just the way it looks. And it looks, you get a momentary feeling of omnipotence. Sometimes you spend three days trying to recapture what you had for fifteen seconds, and you're there for a while. And the only thing wrong with that is if you got that, you don't have to learn to make these tedious compromises when sobriety. Because you can, if you don't like the situation, I'll change it.
There's only one thing wrong with that. By the time drinking gets to be a problem, sobriety has become untenable on a continuing basis. And the curse of the disease of alcoholism is not that you get drunk, but that after you get sober, you must eventually, sooner or later, drink again next time to stand it. And that's why you've got to remember very carefully, AA is not a place where you go to quit drinking.
If you think you're here to quit drinking, you'll die drunk, I think. A few years ago, I taped the book Alcoholics Anonymous for some blind groups. Unfortunately, when you tape something, you can't skim. You have to read every word. So you can't read in your own ideas anymore. But I can tell you this from experience. There's not one paragraph in the book Alcoholics Anonymous that describes how to get sober.
Yet there are people who keep telling each other here, we're here to get sober. I came here to get sober, and now it's time to go on to something else, to work on my emotions. AA has nothing to do with getting sober. Toilet bowls get you sober. Detox centers get you sober. Lying under your bed barking like a fox at passing ankles gets you sober. Hitting in a bridge abutment gets you sober. The problem that we all face in AA that we've got to come to realize, and some of us, a lot of us will die without ever learning it, is that AA is not designed to help you get sober.
AA is designed to, after you are sober, somehow, to little by little, change your perspective of reality. But how can you change reality? It's real!
[01:05:01]
I don't know how you change it, but you do certain things that are embarrassing and chagrinning, full of chagrin. Remember my sponsor swore that I was going to write an inventory, and I didn't, and I wouldn't, and I wouldn't until one day I was going to commit suicide, and I gave him a chance. Do these dumb things, and come to understand that, if you're new, I just want to leave this idea with you.
The purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous, to the best of my knowledge, because it happened to me, and I didn't believe it would, and when it happened to me, I questioned it. But little by little, it literally alters your perception of reality. Life, sobriety becomes tenable, and then bearable. You may get a flash of comfort. What was that? Who was that masked man? Who was the Indian? Yeah. But eventually, something changes that enables people like you and me not to have to desire to drink that day.
I would have bet my life that day would never have come, but it did come. I, uh, that's why I'm a firm believer in AA, not because I'm a good man, because I'm not a good man by nature. Not because I'm a wonderful example of AA, because I'm not. I believe in AA, because when it got so painful and desperate that I did it, it worked. That's why I believe in AA. That's why to this day I believe in AA and go to meetings and, uh, enjoy many aspects of it.
And I still feel sad when I watch people like me sitting in meetings with their supercilious, pseudo-intellectual little sneer explaining why they're different, why this wouldn't work for them. And I, I hate them because I see a part of me in them. That's what I hate about it. I see my own deficiencies, my weaknesses. It's very, uh, but the whole point I wanted to say is, the whole point of Alcoholics Anonymous, to the best of my knowledge, is to, believe it or not, to make you feel comfortable.
You're not always going to be comfortable because, uh, the world is not always full of comfort. I tell you one thing AA has done, it has killed off most of the crap heads. I, uh, I see them once in a while, but they, they just slinking around now. Yeah. I ain't working for them anymore, I'll tell you that. My wife, uh, I've given her another chance. She's shaped up, for the most part. My children are grown up now.
It's kind of funny, by the time I got to learn to be a father, now I have a little granddaughter, ten years old, and just, I, I'm working on my grandfatherly image to get that sedateness. Every Saturday morning about 150 guys come to my house in Los Angeles, and women, AA's, we play volleyball and softball, and I have a big volleyball court in the backyard, and a big soft, uh, park across the street.
And sometimes I'm out there in the summer, it's a hot sun baking down, I'm pitching, it's my bat and ball, so I pitch, just to, it's only fair, it's only fair, I was, I never had a bicycle. And, uh, I just, I just feel so young in my shorts and my tennies, and my fat stomach wriggling, and I think, Man, I'm young and I'm alive! And I hear a little voice say, Strike them out, Grandpa! Get that kid out of here!
But you can have all the nice stories you want, the nice story is that, uh, tonight I was up in the, having a cup of coffee with Marge, who got sober a year before the first banquet here. And usually when I see old-timers who are still active, they all look the same. They're happy and talking, and made me feel welcome, much more welcome than some of the newer people who were still busy being important.
And I was, those are the kind of lectures to me. My sponsor now, who's thirty-some years, right, he tells me more with his eyes than the, than the pseudo-intellectuals can tell me in ten hours with their mouth. The only reason I believe the program works is because the program works. It works for people who do it. There's only one problem. You have to be careful after you get feeling comfortable you don't get carried away with your own nonsense.
People then want to get into spooky things. They can't believe anything this simple can work. Sometimes people become so highly religious and spiritual they float right off the top. And sooner or later, who they conceive to be God leans over and says, Why don't you have a beer, kid? Then you see them when they come back through the bottom. Sometimes people have deep insights.
[01:10:01]
A friend of mine, an ex-friend of mine who a year ago was a very, very successful man and told me that AA was fine for his early sobriety but now had to have deeper insights last Monday took a shotgun and blew off his head in a hotel in Las Vegas. I don't believe it's because anything spiritual or magnificent it's just that he hadn't been to meetings for a long time because he thought he had secret answers.
It seems that people like us have a tendency to forget. We are not here to improve our minds or to learn data. We are here to work on emotions that warp and destroy those minds. I can handle things I can think about. It's the things that come up from the inside that condition reflections. The old nasty little feelings of easily rejected and revenge and getting even and hurt and I'll show them and I'll prove to them and all the little petty, tiddly things.
And if you can somehow find a way at least to dissipate them before they destroy you you'll have comfortable days. And someday, talk to a newcomer you'll have to stay sober during the day when there is no reason that day to stay sober. But you can do it anyway. Some days you have to keep going when there's no reason to keep going. And I suppose, in closing that the reason for that is not to be good.
Good never held that much of an incentive to me. I know that I'm getting better every Sunday morning. I'm the one that gets up and makes sure everybody gets to mass on time. I have a daughter who's in the convent going to become a missionary nun and I'm proud of her. It's kind of a strange thing that all these that I should become a kindly father to a nun. But she's the apple of my eyes as my son. My wife continues to think my son is going to be the first American pope.
I continue to think he's going to play third base for the Dodgers. It's going to nip and tuck at the moment. But the point remains this. The purpose we're here what we're celebrating is 36 years of this banquet years of the inner group years of AA, but it all boils down to one thing. People like you and me find reality and its frictions untenable because unlike most people I can temporarily induce a change in the world.
And if I can't do that I must change drastically my perception of the world. So that's what I suggest to you. If you're an AA and it's not working for you well it isn't that I don't think you ought to find additional therapeutics you ought to try working what's here first before you try something else. Don't try to start applauding. I'm not going to quit. I think you've got to do what's here not because it's good or wonderful not because it's going to be magnificent but for a much better reason.
So I can walk out on that street down here in the corner and I don't care if it's Connecticut Avenue or if it's Michigan Boulevard in Chicago or Market Street in San Francisco or Hervey Street in Dallas or Bridge Street in El Paso or Biscayne Boulevard in Miami or Barstow Street in Eau Claire, Wisconsin I don't care what that street is out there I know if I take care of myself and walk out there there ain't going to be any crap heads.
And I can make it. So if you have no other reason to keep going let me say this join our movement help stamp out crap heads live happily ever after. Thank you.