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Source: DICOBE-00358 – Charles J – AUTHOR-LOST WEEKEND – 1962-06-23.mp3 File: dicobe-00358-charles-j-author-lost-weekend-1962-06-23.mp3 Duration: 00:52:16
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Thank you, Woody. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to say, first of all, that it's a great pleasure for me to be here in Vicksburg tonight. It's my first time in Mississippi, my first time really in the South, and I wouldn't have missed it for anything. It's an honor and a privilege that I won't forget. And I want to thank the Vicksburg group and this convention committee for inviting me to come here and share this experience with you. And I particularly want to thank Catherine Ellis and John Evans for asking me through letters to come. Well, my name is Charles J., and I'm an alcoholic.
When we speak at these meetings, we always hope that we will be able to say something that will interest the newcomer, something that the newcomer may identify with and see himself as a potential member of this group. But I like to think when I speak at these meetings, I hope that I also can reach the old-timer, or at least the not-new member, who has been giving himself a hard time in the program, who is struggling with it, who is trying and not making it, as I did for so long. And I would like to try to explain a little of how that happened. I began to drink relatively late. I've heard many people in AA speak of drinking as early as 12 and 13 and 15 and so forth. I was 26 before I began to drink. But already by the time I was 27, I was needing the morning drink.
My alcoholism progressed that fast. And by the time I was 28, I was already familiar with delirium treatment. I had no control over alcoholism when I started, and I saw that I was affected by alcohol in a way different from my friends. I was living in Europe at the time. I'd gone to Switzerland because I had tuberculosis. I went to Europe, a tuberculosis case, and came back an alcoholic. I drank very heavily in Switzerland with my European friends, and my first indication that my drinking was different from theirs was when I would meet them the next morning after a heavy drinking party, and I would say, come on, let's have a drink. And they'd say, oh no, my God, I don't want to think of it even until tonight.
And I thought this was odd because this was when I needed it most, the morning drink. I realized that my drinking now was not for pleasure. It was narcotic drinking. It was medicinal drinking. I needed it. I wasn't doing it for fun. And I kept this fact to myself. I realized it was different and that I was probably going to have trouble, but I did keep the fact to myself. But already, as I say, in the next year, I was having DT.
I came back from Europe in the early 30s, in the middle of the Depression, and by now I was a helpless alcoholic. I didn't like being this way. I couldn't understand why I couldn't drink like other people. I was living with my brother in an apartment on the Upper East Side, and I couldn't understand why I couldn't drink the way he did. I would go on the wagon and recover, as we do in a very short time, and then I would say, okay, I'm alright now. Now I will drink the way he does. I will take two or three and drink normally. And always I got drunk. I couldn't understand why this was so. I didn't like being a problem to myself. I didn't like being a problem to my family and a nuisance and a bore to people. I went to a psychiatrist for some months. This didn't work. It didn't help my alcoholism. I was already hospitalized several times. And finally, in a kind of desperation, I decided to stop on my own. There seemed to be no other answer. There was no AA at the time. This was in 1936. I was 33, and I meant business. I wanted to stop drinking, and I thought, okay, you just stop and work at it. So I disappeared from the neighborhood in which I lived with my brother, telling nobody what I was going to do, because I knew people do not believe the alcoholic when he says he's going to stop.
He means it, but he usually can't. So I disappeared from this neighborhood and went to the west side of the city and holed up in a very cheap rooming house and decided to stay there until I got this drinking behind me. I was a periodic drinker, and I thought usually every four or five weeks, and then a heavy bender. And I thought that if I stayed there long enough and broke this cycle of drinking enough times, I would have my alcoholic problem behind me.
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I stayed eight months, going out very seldom in the daytime, reading a great deal, studying,
[00:05:06]
and was convinced now that I was through drinking. And I returned then to my neighborhood on the east side with my brother, told my brother that I was through drinking, and I was through drinking forever, and I absolutely meant it and absolutely believed it and thought I had every reason to believe it. I told my girl this, the girl I later married, and a year and a half later, we did get married. I got a very good job at the Columbia Broadcasting System, the first job I'd had in ten years. We married, as I said. Two years later, we had a child. Two years later, we had another child. I was writing. I was selling my work.
I was teaching at NYU. I was having a very useful and productive life, and I was sober. Now, I've heard many people say that when they went on the wagon on their own or stopped drinking on their own, it was the most miserable period of their lives, that they were under tension all the time, hating it. This wasn't so with me. I absolutely loved it. I was very happy. I knew I was an alcoholic. I had accepted the fact that I was an alcoholic, and I didn't intend to drink again, and I was free of it. I felt no stigma about being an alcoholic.
I knew that liquor affected me this way, and it wasn't my fault. It was something like an allergy. I was pretty public on this point. I told everybody I couldn't drink, that liquor made a fool out of me, and in this way, it was a help. Of course, it was nothing like AA, but this thing did work, in a way, and worked for quite a long time. One of the reasons why it worked for so long on my own was this. I accepted the fact that I was an alcoholic, and the other thing was that I knew that as an alcoholic, I didn't need liquor if I didn't already have some in me. If I had some in me, then I needed thirty or fifty or a hundred, or I had to go right on the downward course to the end of the bender. But if I didn't have any in me, I didn't need it. It was the staying away from the first drink in my own peculiar way, and it worked for a long time.
About 1943, it was 1943 in fact, the beginning of that year, I thought that was a hell of an experience to have gone through. I was now sober seven years. People didn't understand what the alcoholic was like. I knew that he wasn't to blame. I knew that he was a sick man. The alcoholic was always considered a comic, somebody to laugh at. People think he's just raising hell, that he's having fun, that he's doing this deliberately. I knew otherwise. I knew it was a compulsion, that he was not having fun, that he was troubled and very disturbed, and that he was sick. And I thought I would try to write about this problem, writing about myself as an alcoholic, drawing entirely on my own experience, the psychology of the alcoholic, why he does what he does, sparing myself nothing and sparing the alcoholic nothing, being absolutely honest about it, but at the same time trying to draw an objective, compassionate picture of the alcoholic so that I would understand and so that other people might understand the alcoholic. This wasn't propaganda by any means. It was merely a kind of self-declaration, not unlike the kind of things we do here at these meetings. So I wrote this book in my spare time, and it was published in January 1944, and as most of you know, it was the last weekend. Now let me digress here a minute.
I see in the program it says, the speaker for tonight will be Charles Jay, Arthur of the Lost Weekend. I'm sure that's a misprint for Arthur. There is no Arthur as a character in the book. The character in the book is named Don, and that was me through and through. The book was published in January 1944 and was an enormous success right away, and almost at once, almost overnight, my life was turned upside down. I became, in spite of myself, a kind of public figure, an object of intense curiosity to the press, to the public, and wherever I went. At parties people would say, Mr. J. did you have to do much research to write that book? And I would say, why don't you say what you really mean? And I was always being interviewed and asked if I was the character who carried the typewriter up Third Avenue on Yom Kippur and so forth. And I began to get tired of this, this personal interest in my own life. I thought it was none of their business. I was a writer, I was a novelist, and I began to withdraw from this, although it was an intensely personal story and absolutely about myself. I began to withdraw from this. I didn't like it. I began to pretend it wasn't so. And I think I got tired of being my own hero. But we'll
[00:10:05]
go back to that in a minute. It caused me a lot of trouble eventually, but I didn't realize at first that the kind of success that I was having, that I'd always looked forward to, one of the prerequisites of a lot of success, was this personal interest. And it was something I didn't like when it did happen to me. A few months after, in April of that year, the telephone rang one morning in our apartment in Washington Square.
And a man, there was a man on the telephone that I knew very slightly. All I knew about him was that he was the proprietor of the Washington Square Bookshop. That I knew because I was a customer of his, and also they sold my book. And the other thing that I knew about him was that he was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. This I knew because every time I went into the store, he would sound off to me about Alcoholics Anonymous, and I thought he was a bloody bore. I'd heard by now about AA along about 1941 or 2, and I thought, well that's handy for those people who can't do it my way, but they're an awful talkative bunch and they're always boasting about their past and so forth. And I thought this man was a terrible bore on the subject. But this one morning he called me and he said, Mr. J. I read in the paper today that you're going to Hollywood. I said, yes. And he said, I wish you'd do yourself a favor. I wish you'd take down a telephone number and address I'd like to give you. It's the telephone number and address in Beverly Hills of Alcoholics Anonymous. I said, you so and so. If you don't think I know what I'm doing by now, after eight years of sobriety on my own, and you don't understand very much, that's the trouble with you guys, always butting in. Go and talk to those people who need it and hung up on it. I did go to Hollywood that summer on a picture and I had no trouble. And I went again the next summer, another contract, and again no trouble. And I went again the third year, five months in Hollywood, and again no trouble. But three years after that phone call, I was in Bermuda. I'd just finished another book. I'd given myself a little holiday of a month. I was down there alone. And I began playing with that dangerous idea, the experiment. I said, well, you've been sober 11 years now. Absolutely sober, not a drink of beer, but absolutely nothing for 11 years. I knew I was an alcoholic. This I did know.
And I thought, if I try it and get into trouble, which may well happen right away, I'll at least be here long enough to recover and nobody will be hurt but me. But I also thought, and here was the fallacy of my thinking, I thought perhaps liquor might affect me differently this time. I'm no longer a frustrated writer working in the dark. I'm a successful man. I have money. I have a certain reputation. Perhaps I won't need liquor in the same way.
Perhaps it won't affect me the same. I'll try it. Well, of course, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. This is something I really knew but didn't quite think it applied to me. I began to drink again. I drank beer. And for the month in Bermuda, limited myself to beer. But of course, being an alcoholic, I drank an awful lot of beer. I had no trouble. And I came back at the end of the month, and my wife met me at the airport. And as we were driving into the city, I said, what do you know? I'm drinking again. She said, you are?
What are you drinking? I said, I'm drinking beer. And she said, well, Charlie, I think that's great if you can. And I said, well, apparently I can. I had a secretary who came every day at 10 o'clock until 4. This is for dictation. I held off my beer drinking until 5 in the afternoon. And afternoons, after lunch, I'd be walking back and forth in my study, sounding off. And I kept glancing at my watch. And I think, my gosh, three hours before I can have that glass of beer. Or two hours before I can have the glass of beer.
And I thought then, you have to glance at your watch to see when you can have a glass of beer. Already it's become too important to you, and you better watch out. Well, in a very short time, I don't know how long or what the reason was. There never is any real reason for these things. The beer wasn't enough, and I went off into hard liquor, gin preferably. And for the next six years, I was gone. Now when I began to drink again, it was just exactly as if those 11 years of sobriety had never been at all. One might think that 11 years of sobriety might give you the springboard to build up to being an alcoholic again. It doesn't do anything of the kind. You pick up right where you left off. Even worse, you pick up just exactly as if you've been drinking 11 years, because alcoholism is a progressive disease, whether you are drinking or not.
And I might just as well have been drinking all those 11 years for all the benefits that the 11 years of sobriety had given me. Here's all the benefits that the 11 years of sobriety had given me, at least for starting again.
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And if I thought that the first period of my drinking, the period that I wrote about, was bad, it was nothing. Absolutely nothing thought the second period was like. During the second period, I was obsessed by the fact that I'd lost 11 years. And I could never get it back. I never thought of just starting over again. I thought of those 11 years, and it was a matter of intense pride to me. But I couldn't stop drinking this time.
I was older. I'd had a terrible blow to my ego. Very important, very necessary to me, but I didn't recognize the value of it. And during the next six years, I was hospitalized 22 times for alcoholism. I'm going to take an idea that life in the country, a change of scene, will help the alcoholic. We moved to New Hampshire, from New York. We had a country place in New Hampshire, which we used only in the summer.
It was a very beautiful house, a house I had coveted, and that is the word, for many years, and had finally been able to buy. A very beautiful house near Hanover. And we used it summertime. But now I decided, we decided, to live there the year round, and this quiet country life would help the alcoholic. We did no such thing. We took the children out of school in New York and lived in New Hampshire the year round, in this beautiful house in this tiny town.
And there I went to hell. When I think of the years in New Hampshire now, I don't think of the fire, the nights in jail after two drunken driving accidents, the hospitals, hospitals, hospitals, the timidity of my own children in my own house. I think of, and the never knowing anything about money, and the constant fears about nothing. When I think of those years in New Hampshire now, I think of how it seems to me almost every single day, in that house, I looked forward to night.
Because at night, I could be alone in my room, and not have to look at anybody. I was a self-absorbed, self-infatuated, self-interested alcoholic, who was at war with himself all the time, who was imprisoned in himself. And I would be in my room alone at night, and think there I could get away from everything. And at night, alone in bed, I used to think of the neighbors in their little frame houses down on the street, and how they envied me, because I used to hear this often, and all I could think of was how I envied them, because they had something in their lives that I didn't have at all, and that was love.
Now I lived in the midst of a family that loved me, but I had no love at all, because I couldn't ever get outside of myself to think about other people, to care about anyone else but myself, to love. And if we can't love, it doesn't do us any good, no matter how much people might love us. I used to tell my wife that I must have been born guilty. I was guilty all the time, but what I was guilty about, I don't know.
This is the alcoholic. This is the self-imprisoned man. I heard a very good little anecdote this morning, that Watt Lindsey told me. It was a funny joke, and it was an absolutely sound psychological point about the alcoholic. He said, the alcoholic is a man who is self-infatuated and can't stand the object of his affection. And that was certainly me. I'm going to move ahead now to 1953, when one beautiful morning in July, my wife told me that she was leaving.
She had to leave for the sake of the children. There was no way to live any longer, and she was leaving. Now, she'd threatened this many times, and I'd always been able to talk her out of it, but this time she was through, and she was serious. And the moment she mentioned it, I thought, well, in a little while they'll be gone, and I'll feel badly about this some other time. I'll be able to drink as soon as they're gone.
I'll feel badly some other time. So I refused to think of it then. I thought, in half an hour they'll be gone, and the policeman who is my wife, or my wife who is a policeman, won't be around to interfere, and I can drink and do as I please. And I stood in the living room, waiting for them to go, and I kept looking out of the window at the children who were filling up the car with the things they were taking away.
And all they took away with them were armloads and armloads across the lawn of books when they left. And each time I saw this, I'd look away and think, well, they'll be gone soon. And then they were gone. I knew where they'd gone. They'd gone to my brother's house, which was 500 miles away, down on Delaware Bay. And after they'd gone, I went into the library to find the checks that my wife had left for me.
I had long since turned over all my affairs to her, my royalties, my agent's work, and everything else, to my wife, knowing that I was not responsible to handle money. She handled everything, because I knew I was not responsible in this department. And she left me plenty of money to have whatever kind of a vendor I want.
[00:20:02]
And I found the money, and I thought, this is great. And I began to drink. And I've heard many an alcoholic in the A.A. say that they reach a time when alcohol does them no good at all, when they can't get drunk, when they can't get anything out of it. And this was what happened to me that week. I couldn't get anything out of it. I did get drunk, but I had no pleasure, I had no fun, I had no… I didn't enter into any other world, which I think is one of the reasons why I drank, the world of unreality.
And I was nagged by the fact that I'd lost my family. And each night, drunk, I telephoned my wife and pounded on the desk and made like a husband and father and said, you've got to come home. We promised the children summer camp, and you can't do this to them. And she hung up on me. I did this for five nights in a row. And on the next day, I went into Hanover, New Hampshire, without a hat or a coat or toothbrush or anything else, on a plane from Hanover to Boston to New York to Philadelphia, and from there, a cab nearly 50 miles into the country to where they were staying at my brother's house to bring back my family.
And I'm telling this part of the story in some detail because this, for me, was a turning point. One of them. When I came into my brother's house, the children left at once. My wife refused to speak to me, and all at once, almost instantly, I realized that I hadn't the leg to stand on. I had no moral authority, whatever. I had arrived drunk, and how the hell could I talk anybody into anything? I realized this was all a fool's errand, a mistake.
The thing to do was go back home to New Hampshire to my favorite hospital in Hanover, where I prescribed my own treatment, unlimited paraldehyde on my chart, then sober up the easy way, and then recover my family. So I asked my brother to drive me back to Philadelphia to the airplane, and he did. And as we were driving back to Philadelphia, something happened. I must have had one last little grasp on reality because I suddenly realized that I was definitely out of control and there was no telling what would happen in the next few hours.
I was afraid of the trip to New Hampshire. Anything might happen in the New York airport. I might be dead tonight. I might wind up in Chicago. It was absolutely unpredictable from now on, and I knew that. And I said to my brother, I'm afraid of this trip to New Hampshire. I'll get on the plane, but what will happen after that, I don't know. Do you know of a hospital in Philadelphia? He said, no, I don't, but let's stop in this next town and ask a doctor.
We stopped in the next town, which was Newcastle, Delaware, found this doctor's office in the public square. I told my brother, you go in and find out. A few minutes later, the doctor appeared beside the car, and I remember his first words to me. He said, say, you need a shave. I said, what I need is a drink. He said, well, all right, go to the corner and get one, and then come on in and talk to me.
So my brother and the doctor went into their office, his office. I went to the corner to this tavern, ordered a double scotch and a glass of beer, and drank the double scotch as fast as I could. I stood there holding the glass of beer in case my brother and the doctor came in, and of course they didn't. And then I drank that, and then I went to the doctor's office. When I came in, the doctor said, you're very lucky.
He said, I've called the Saul Clinic of St. Luke's Hospital in Philadelphia. It's a place for alcoholics. They have 17 beds only, and they have one left. You're very lucky. They're expecting you. Your brother will drive you in. And it's a very good place. But I must warn you of one thing. He said, it's not the rich childhood. It's pretty rough. But it'll be good for you. And he tells me now that I said this, and I don't doubt at all that I said it.
He tells me that I said, well, you understand, doctor, I have to be among my intellectual equals. And he said, what are you talking about? I'm a better man than you are right now. And I said, oh, yeah? How do you figure that? He said, because I'm sober, and you're drunk. I must have done a lot of other talking to him, telling him what I needed in the way of medication, second all, and maybe it's all peraltide and all that, all the kind of thing I was used to, because when I got to this hospital, there was no medication prescribed for me of any kind.
And it was the first time I'd ever sobered up in a hospital without sedatives. And it was an indescribably terrifying night. I really didn't think, and I mean this quite literally, I didn't really think I would survive it. I didn't know what would happen, but I didn't think I would really survive it. And my fear, panic, the shakes, everything. But during this night of extreme despair, this night of extremity, and this is when things happen to us, things that are so good for us, during this night something happened that I'll never forget.
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I can't explain it, but it was a sudden realization of something that was long overdue. It was this. I suddenly thought, my gosh, this is your natural home, this place. This is where you belong. This is your spiritual home. If you land in a place like this once, or twice, or four times, it might be accident. But after 18 times when this was the 18th, it's no accident, it's a definitely established pattern, and this is the way it's going to be from now on.
You'll get out of here five days from now, but you'll come back, and you'll get out again, and you'll come back, and you'll get out again, and you'll come back, and that's the way it's going to be. No more family, no more career, just this. This is your future. It was a terrible thought, and I couldn't understand why it had never occurred to me before. Always before, when I was in a place like this, and this is often, I told myself, when I get out of this time, I'll be clever, I'll be careful, I won't go so far, I'll handle it intelligently.
Now, for some reason, I knew that I never would be clever, that I wouldn't be careful, that I couldn't handle it intelligently once I took that first drink. It was a kind of acceptance and surrender of a fact that I should have done before. The next morning, the doctor came around and he said, Well, Charlie, what are we going to do about it? I said, There is nothing to do about it. I'm absolutely licked.
There isn't any answer to this problem. I was sober 11 years on my own. I've been hospitalized 18 times. I've been psychoanalyzed. I was two years with a psychiatrist. I know everything there is to know about the alcoholic, but the answer, and there isn't any such thing. I'm absolutely through. And he said, Well, good. Now, maybe we can do something. Did you ever try Alcoholics Anonymous? I said, No, really, Doc.
Don't give me that. You're a medical man, a man of science. How can you talk such rubbish? Are you a member of A.I. Aspen? He said, No, I'm not. But I do know that Alcoholics Anonymous is doing for the alcoholic what the medical profession can't do. What have you got against A.I.? I said, Well, I don't know much about it. I've heard the usual things. They're always talking about God in the program.
Heavy emphasis on the spiritual. They say the Lord's Prayer at their meetings. I'm an agnostic. I haven't got an ounce of the spiritual in my makeup. This sort of thing wouldn't work for me. It's great for those people who respond to that sort of thing, but it wouldn't work for me. It's like the Salvation Army without music. He said, You love your children, don't you? And I said, Yes. He said, You believe in doing what's right when you can, don't you?
And I said, Yes. He said, Well, isn't that spiritual? It's not material. He said, Tomorrow morning there's a meeting of A.A. here in the hospital. Will you go and sit in on it? You don't have to stay. He said, If it offends you, get blown back to your bed, but try it. And I thought, This man is trying to do something for me. The least I can do out of ordinary courtesy is to go and sit in on the meeting.
So the next morning, in my paper slippers and bathrobe that had once been carried across, passing with a safety pin, I shuffled down the hall with the other bums, so self-conscious I thought I would die, looking neither to right nor to left. And the first speaker on the platform was the doctor in Newcastle, Delaware who had sent me there. He was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was enormously struck by this coincidence at the time, but as the months passed, it made a greater and greater impression on me.
The fact that out of all the doctors on the Eastern Seaboard I had turned to by accident, from New Hampshire to Delaware, I chose, by coincidence, by those famous coincidences, a member of AA without even knowing it. When I saw these three people on the platform, I was sitting there. I wasn't belligerent about it, but I thought this was ridiculous. So what the hell can they tell me about alcoholism?
Look, we haven't got a thing in common. I'm not like they. Them, they're not like me. We have nothing in common. But when they began to speak, I realized that we had everything in common. That as alcoholics, we were exactly alike. These people talk about alcoholism as I had never heard it talked about before. Talked about alcoholism as I had never heard it talked about before. They didn't speak of it academically or scientifically.
[00:30:00]
They spoke about it the way I knew it to be. They spoke my language. It was intensely personal. And I knew that these people had been where I had been. And they had recovered. And they had something I wanted. And even if these three people hadn't represented more than 200,000 others, as I heard that day, they did. Here at least were three before my eyes who had recovered. And I couldn't but be impressed by this.
That night, again sleepless in bed, I thought it over. And I thought of that telephone call nine years before, when the proprietor of the Washington Square Bookshop had called me and told me to take down the telephone number and address in Beverly Hills of Alcoholics Anonymous, and how I'd called him an SOB. And I thought, my gosh, it's taken me nine years to understand what that man was trying to say on the telephone.
He was only trying to be helpful. He was only trying to be kind. Now it's true that maybe he did butt in. But it might have happened. I might have gone off that summer, and I did three years later, and needed to do three years later. What difference does it make in the time element here? But the thing that impressed me most of all about that recollection was this. I thought, you're the guy who always thought you knew yourself so well.
Well, if I'd known myself half as well as I thought I had, why hadn't my reaction of anger at the time told me that my sobriety was by no means as secure as I thought it had been? If I'd been really secure in my sobriety, I'd have said to him, thank you, I may need that address and phone number, and I may not, but thank you. But no, I got angry. And it should have been a tip-off to me that there was danger ahead.
Well, I left the hospital in Philadelphia at the end of five days, and for the next three weeks, stayed in Philadelphia, stayed at my brother's, in fact. And every night, went to a meeting with this doctor, who became my sponsor at once, and is still my dear friend. We went to Wild Wing, we went to Atlantic City, we went to Wilmington, Newcastle, Philadelphia, all these meetings. And at the end of three weeks, I'm happy to say that my family, my wife and children, returned with me to New Hampshire, and then I came in to AA, up in Berry, Vermont.
Now, I learned a lot right away in AA, right away. I was intensely interested right straight off. I had to be, for one thing, but we are like that. When we take to a thing, we take to it headlong. And I did to AA at once. One of the things I learned straight off, or very early, was what had been wrong with the eleven years of sobriety on my own. One of the things that had been wrong with it, was that it had been on my own.
It was my own doing entirely, so I thought. And because it was that kind of performance, it was highly fallible. As a recovered alcoholic, recovered my own way at that time, I wasn't the least bit interested in anybody else. I wasn't interested in any other alcoholic, and I attracted alcoholics. And when people would ask me for help, or what did I do, I'd say, look, that's your business. That's your funeral.
I had nothing to do with them. This is quite different from AA. And the other thing that was wrong with that eleven year period on my own, was that it had been on a forever basis. I had always told myself that I was through drinking forever. In AA, I heard straight off something I'd never heard of. A simple idea of 24 hours at a time. Promise nothing about the future. Don't subject yourself to any strain like that, about the future.
Stay sober for today only. Don't worry about New Year's Eve, or your daughter's wedding, or whatever. Stay sober one day at a time. It made so much more sense than the way I had done it. I'm Mr. Gretz here to tell a little story that happened shortly after I was in AA. It's very significant. I was driving with my 13 year old daughter, Sarah, to Hanover one morning, shortly after I was in AA. And as we were driving along in the car, I thought, this child remembers all of the past.
She remembers the strain in the household. There had never been any secrets in our house about my condition, or about anything really. These children knew all about it, knew all the facts of life in that department, and I thought they should know something about this. So as we were driving along, I said, Sarah, you've never said, you've never asked, where I go every Tuesday night, and where Mom and I go together every Saturday night.
She says, I know you go to Berry-Vermont, which is 40 miles away. I said, yes, but do you know what we do there? She said, no. I said, we go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I go alone on Tuesday, and Mom goes with me on Saturday. Do you know what Alcoholics Anonymous is? She said, no. I said, well, it's a group of men and women like myself who've had an alcoholic problem by getting together, and in as simple as I could explain it, sharing our experience, strengths, and hopes, we manage to stay sober.
Why don't we help one another do this? And Sarah, this has been three months now. And she didn't say anything. And I said, and Mom is happier, and I'm certainly happier. She said, nothing.
[00:35:01]
And I said, Kate's happier, and I know you're happier, Sarah. She said, nothing. And I said, I don't land in the hospitals anymore, Sarah. She said, nothing. And I said, well, Sarah, it's been three months now. Don't you think that's pretty good? And she said, don't you think it's too soon to tell? She had her feet on the ground. She was irrealistic. I was asking her to tell, and she was right. Three months later, I had my first slip, and landed in the hospital.
And then I had a number after that. And one of the reasons I had them was this. I was able, I didn't learn early in AA about the danger to my sobriety, my health, my sanity, and eventually my very life of an addiction of mine that ran concurrently with alcoholism, but certainly increased after I stopped drinking, and that was the barbiturate habit, which I took up just about the time that I started to drink again.
I took this up in Hollywood, and I would do it to sleep, but it soon took me over in every other way. I became an addict to barbiturates, as I had been to alcoholism, to alcohol. I used it in the same way. If one drink made me feel good, two drinks would make me feel twice as good, I always reasoned, and so it was with the pills. If one pill gave me relief, two would give me twice that relief. I got to depend on them for absolutely everything.
I was an AA, and I was doing all the things that I thought I thought I was doing all the things that I should, but I was special. I was also sensitive. I was extra this and that. I was fine for other people, but I needed the pills, and I kept this fact to myself. I couldn't do a single thing without pills. I couldn't meet a friend for lunch. I couldn't keep a business appointment. I couldn't write a single line.
I couldn't go to an AA meeting, and I couldn't speak at an AA meeting without the help of the pills, and this raised hell with me. The physical damage in the long run was very severe, but I think the moral damage was far worse because all the time, I felt like a fraud, behaving one way and acting another, and when I moved to an AA meeting and came down from the platform afterwards and somebody would come up and say, Charlie, that was a good talk you gave, I felt awful because I knew inside I had been a fake, and this would have to go.
I knew that I couldn't live with it, but I also couldn't give them up. And far from decreasing, they increased, just as my drinking did. I was not able to taper off with them any more than I was ever able to taper off with a drink, and in 1957, only five years ago, I was hospitalized four times that year for overdoses of pills, and the last time was in July, 1957, when I was taken to Bellevue. It was my third time in Bellevue, and in Bellevue, I just went to pieces.
I was withdrawn from these things, it was a nine-year addiction, and I was given no substitute at the time. And I'm not trying to tell a horror story here, I'm merely trying to give an illustration of the kind of things that some of us have to go through to get this sobriety that we really want all along underneath these struggles of ours. I began to deteriorate very badly with hallucinations and so forth, and I knew what was happening to me, and I asked for help, and they said, oh, well, you'll be all right.
And on the fifth night, or sixth night, on a Friday night in Bellevue, I suddenly took leave of myself. I just went, and was gone for three days. I was taken from this ward and I was kept there three days, and I didn't even know I was there. I was in another world, I was insane. And on the third night, a Sunday night, a priest friend of mine called on me, I recognized his face, and I came out of it a little, he told me where I was and what had happened, and the next morning I was sent back down to the other ward where I was originally, and then I was kept, the worst was over, and I was kept for some more, another period of time, while they decided what to do with me, what disposition they would make of my case.
And just before the end, I was there two more weeks. In Bellevue, all you do, if anybody's ever been to a place like this, you will know, all you do is sit on a bench. You're not allowed to lie in bed. You have to get up, and you sit on a bench. And for the next two weeks, I sat on a bench in the hot summer of 1957, and had plenty of time to think. Now, I didn't need to ask myself why I was there. I had plenty of time to ask myself what are you going to do about it this time?
This was the 22nd hospital. And just before the end,
[00:40:00]
a young man, a psychologist there, asked if I would come to his office if he wanted to talk to me, and I went to his office, and he said, Mr. J. your case is being, you're being let go on Friday, and I want to tell you something off the record. He said, this is not official. The psychiatrist here won't tell you this when you go, but I know you pretty well by now. We've done the Rorschach together and the other colored charts and games, and I think you should know this, and I think you can take it.
He said, look, you're an addict by nature, and you always will be. There isn't much chance for you. Chances are that when you go out of here, you'll return to the pills, if not the liquor. It's very easy to get away with. My only suggestion and hope for you is that you'll ally yourself with a good sympathetic psychiatrist, not deep Freudian therapy, because you've had that. Just a sympathetic, kindly man, and to whom you can go and talk two or three times a week, and this may help you over the years, but I doubt it.
I went back to my bench, and I thought that was a pretty grim picture he had painted, but I wasn't the least bit surprised. It was that serious, and the chances of my lapsing again into the addiction was almost, as he said it would be, almost certain, but I thought there's certain things this man is not taking into consideration. Now, I'd been around AA by now four years. I'd been fairly regular in my attendance at the meetings.
I'd been fairly active, and I'd been listening in spite of myself. It's true that I hadn't been entirely sober, and I hadn't been drunk either. I had been coming to the meetings, and in spite of my peculiar way of doing this thing, I'd heard things in spite of myself. It's as John Henderson of our group says, keep on bringing the body around, and eventually the mind will take hold. I thought what this man is not taking into consideration is the tremendous will we have to survive that raises us up so many times after these descents of self-destruction.
And he was not taking into consideration faith. I'm happy to say that by now I was a man of faith. And he was discounting love. And I mean family love. And the kind of love we have in this group. The kind of love that Hazel spoke about here this morning. And certainly he was discounting entirely Alcoholics Anonymous. And I thought when I leave here I've got to go back to AA and really see what it is.
See what I've missed. Listen. Give myself up to this. And listen. Stop performing. Stop patronizing the group. See what it is these people have that you've missed entirely. It was just then at this time when I returned to Lenox Hill that my friend Dick Anderson of our group said to me one of those wonderfully tough but sympathetic things I'm unable to tell you this. Your family doesn't. Psychiatrist doesn't.
But an AA friend will tell you a thing like this. And you'll understand one another. He said Charlie the trouble with you is you've run out of kicks. Alcohol was a kick. Drugs were a kick. AA was a kick. The church was a kick. And when he said this I was so angry I could have hit him. But in the very instant of my anger I knew he was right. That was it. Everything had been kicked. Everything had been on a superficial level and I had to recast the whole thing and see who I was and see what AA was.
During the next two years I went to AA meetings six nights a week. I now go four nights a week. And some people might think this is excessive. They might even think it's panic. Fear. It isn't anything of the kind I don't believe. It's something I enjoy doing. It's something that makes me feel alive. It keeps me happy. It keeps me well. And I think it keeps me good. I'm utterly convinced now that AA is nothing if it's not a spiritual program.
And I don't mean by that religiously. I mean the fact that perfect strangers will get together and help one another without any thought of personal return. If this isn't spiritual I don't know what it is. I'm also firmly convinced that if all AA gave us was merely physical sobriety we wouldn't last six months. There's something more that we get here than just physical sobriety. I'm sober. You're sober.
But you come back night after night year after year for something more. I've always thought of myself as a well-read man. But it's true that I've learned more about myself and who I am. AA than I've ever learned through any other agency or medium.
[00:45:02]
I think our suffering, and it was suffering, has been our gift. It is this that enables us to understand not only ourselves but other people and reach other people and help other people. I don't think it's possible for a thinking, feeling person to expose himself to AA for any length of time without growing, without getting this thing, without being better for it, without getting sober. I think there are only two things that are really essential, only two essential to growth and progress in AA, and one of them is honesty and the other is gratitude.
By honesty I mean absolute and total honesty with yourself about being an alcoholic, honest about being an alcoholic, that we cannot have that one beer, that we cannot have that barbiturate. When I can't sleep now or when I'm anxious now, and we are anxiety-ridden at times, which is a normal state for many people, I think, well, gosh, why can't I take things the way other people, hundreds of thousands of people, go through life without taking these things and why can't I be like them?
And I try to be. I'm honest with myself at last about being an alcoholic. And the other thing, as I said, is gratitude, and I mean by gratitude taking part in the program, attending the meetings, trying to give back a little of what has been given us. I've been given so much by AA when absolutely everything else failed, but everything else failed, and I've gotten it all in AA for nothing. And I think it would not only be dangerous for me, I've been sober now five years, and I know many people do get sober and they think, well, okay, now I know all about it, I know what to do, and so forth, and I can drop out.
And we do hear of them leaving the program, and we do hear of some of them staying sober, that is really true. Most of them don't, but some do. But I think, I hope, that this will never happen to me. I hope that I will stay, and want to stay always, with AA, and I want to for this reason. I've gotten so much from AA that I think it would be not only dangerous for me not to keep up my regular contact with AA, but I also think it would be just plain crummy for all that I've gotten, to turn my back on AA would be just plain bad manners, cheap, not very nice.
Well, I've had many benefits from AA, as we all have. One that I thought was never possible for me was to get outside of myself, as I thought I never would during those days in New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, as I said, I was entirely self-interested and had nothing else. I didn't really care about the children, they were sort of accessories. They were like my house, like my career, they were things that I was a little proud of, but I didn't really know them, or care about them.
I didn't think it was possible for me to get outside of myself. I thought that that's the way I was, that that was my temperament, and I was cursed with this sort of thing, and it may have been what made me a writer, I kept thinking. Maybe that's it, and I'll never be any different. Well, I had been sober, finally, in AA, two or three years before it occurred to me one day, not long ago, a couple of years ago, that my gosh, the thing that you never thought was possible for you has happened without your even knowing it.
You are outside of yourself, you do care about other people, you belong once again in the human race. We often hear how we rejoin the human race in AA, and it's no idle phrase. Well, this has happened to me, and it's something I'm enormously grateful for. Now when I tell this story, I have thought lately, what is the point of telling the whole story, telling the business about Bellevue and all that sort of thing?
The point is not that those things happened to me. The point is that they were all so unnecessary, they needn't have happened had I been open-minded about AA, had I listened, had I given myself up to them. We hear of many tragedies in life, and we hear of alcoholic tragedies, and every time I hear of one of the drunken driving deaths, or the sleeping pill death in a lonely hotel, which was not suicide, but accident at the time, when I hear these things, I think, it was so unnecessary, it needn't have happened.
When we hear of other tragedies in life, many of them were inevitable and couldn't have been avoided. But the alcoholic tragedies could be avoided by him giving himself up to this marvelous program and way of life and therapy. These are the benefits that I've gotten, and many others. But I must remember, and I must remember every single day, that one drink and the whole thing would go. Thank you. Thank you very, very much for sharing your experiences and your strength and hope with
[00:50:06]
this group of people. And I can look around and know that over 300 people will go back to where they came from with their medication, to use this AC-5. And this little infinite something that we get out of going and being a part of a convention has been exemplified here in this talk tonight. Again, thank you very much. I have a couple of announcements. Shortly after this breaks up, there will be dancing in the choral room in the Hotel Vicksburg.
Now, this is another extra that the group arranged when John was out of town, so we're getting a lot of those. And then, too, we've got so many fine A.A.s and lovely people, I don't know which is which there, from Louisiana, with us, that I'd like to mention their convention. It seems like Mississippi people and Louisiana people flock to each other, and we certainly have a wonderful time at both places.
This is July 14th and 15th in Baton Rouge, and here is a resume or a rundown on your speakers. Dr. Jim R. from Comfort, Texas, Anna M. from New York, Mary P. from Lexington, and Dave R. from Maryville, Tennessee, and Richie B. from Baton Rouge, and L.S. West Palm Beach, and the Al-Anon Family Group, Helen W. Charlotte, North Carolina, and Elizabeth W. Hammond, Louisiana. Let's make that one, too, and get a little more of this infinite something that's a little extra and beyond.
Dr. McCall, will you lead us in the Lord's Prayer to close, please?