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Source: DICOBE-00400 – Joe L – MIDWINTER CONF – 1971-01-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00400-joe-l-midwinter-conf-1971-01-15.mp3 Duration: 00:57:12
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Listen to me, and go get drunk, and listen to Jack, and get sober, and that's impossible. But that's the way it happens, and that's the way it always will be. You see, each has his own contribution. That's the wonder of AA. And nobody can make your contribution but you. And nobody can make my contribution but me. And if we don't make it, it won't be made. Now the only reason that I ever get up here is to share me with anybody that wants me in love.
And I'm quite certain that that's the only reason that my boy Joe ever gets up here. To share Joe with anybody that wants him in love. I met Joe, I think, for the first time, as I remember, in about 1954 or 56, in Little Rock, Arkansas. And we have met all over the country since, time after time. But it hasn't been enough. I came all the way down here from California at my own expense. Let me say that again, I don't think you heard me.
All the way down here at my own expense, just to do what I'm doing right now, introducing my boy Joe. He is unique in the annals of our society. We had a guy up here last night for a little while and this afternoon for a little while that's unique also. There's just one Clancy on earth. And that's almost too many. No it isn't, is it? We're very happy to have Clancy in our area. Anybody that won't listen to me will listen to Clancy.
So we're glad to have him. But this next one is unique also. In that there isn't anybody that I've ever heard talk about Alfonso Anonymous that can express himself so uniquely as Joe. I don't care that he's serious or funny or just straight down the middle of the road or around with the cat. He laughs. I love to hear him and I know you're going to love to hear him. I give you Joe from Texas. Joe the wino from Tyler, Texas.
My name is Joe and I'm an alcoholic. And I'd love to take that introduction and have it imprinted upon my tombstone in one long sentence. Tired pigeon could stop there and… And as he relieved himself he could punctuate it where it needed.
[00:05:08]
This has been a wonderful conference. As Chuck so graphically pointed out, it's been a little unbalanced, I think. We got five noble Californians and me and super Jews. Do you have anything we can hold F.I. in? To say the least, I'm underwhelmed. Boy, that's not right. Clancy will check me. But we've had some… This has been one of the greatest experiences in my life, really. And this is not table talk.
I don't know how you could put a thing together with as much power and momentum as this has been. To sit and enjoy seeing the things that the rest of society possibly will never see. And as Chuck said the other night, we may be the last stronghold of reasoning in a society that seems to be falling apart at our shoulders. And to say the least, we can see a thing nobody else gets to see. And that's the efficacy of God's handiwork in the fellows that don't deserve it.
And for this I'm indeed grateful. Now, everybody preceding me told a beautiful and cherishing story about their recovery. And I think if we ever leave this pattern in Alcoholics Anonymous, we'd be dead. No wonder if you could remember a little with me about the first fellow that ever told his story to another man. Do you know that he had to ask permission to tell it? And very frequently I hear people get up there and say, I don't want to talk about my drinking.
And this is what I must talk about. The book reads in the little doctor and the doctor's opinion in our book of experience. And it tells in his experience, and I don't think there's a greater piece of writing on paper today. And I'm an English major too. I've read all the writings of 1 K. Ferris. Read about the meanderings of an itinerant fisherman named Simon Peters. All the greatest works of Plato and Aristotle.
And if you're in the business of saving your own life, you'll never read nothing like the book Alcoholics Anonymous. To show you how brilliant I am, so that there won't be any doubt when you leave tonight, let me tell you a little about this book. It was written with a given purpose. We who live in this day and age, and not for long I'm afraid, some of us have had the privilege of knowing the author of Plato.
And he told me one day why this book was written. When they discovered that they had the thing, and I left a call of the thing, that it would work.
[00:10:09]
Up until the little doctor saw Bill with his first experience. He was the first Al-Anon, if you ask me. And he was a man that worked diligently with alcoholics, many thousands of them, and never saw a recovery. Don't you know this was a lonesome and futile thing that the little doctor saw? Never a recovery. Every time he treated the man, he could say to himself, I'll fix you up so you can come back again.
Mary, they got half anxious. And then one day it happened. And he had the privilege of being the first one of us. Over us. And if you take these two pages in the book of Al-Anon, which he mentions in there, a thing that some of us don't ever talk about. And that's the phenomenon of craving. He mentions it five times in three pages. The phenomenon of craving. And he tells what he thinks from observation.
He gives the greatest dissertation that's ever been known about the true nature of our desires. And he does, in two paragraphs, the whole story about Alcoholics Anonymous from the beginning to the end. Bill takes 186 pages, but the little doctor took two paragraphs in his summarization. Now the book has 186 pages, 11 chapters. It's written backwards. They tell you about the solution before they tell you about the problem.
You know that? And when he gets nearly through writing the book, he admits in the 11th chapter he don't know a whole lot about what he talks. If this is not the essence of humility, I don't know. He says that we know very little, but we hope that God will reveal more to us. And it brings me to the point that I have to say that I'm sick of experts. But we don't have to worry about them people with that $398 million.
But we don't have to watch these nuts we've got in there. Hey, not the ones out of it. With all of their extraneous good birth. With all of their extraneous and extracurricular activities. They've got group 3A and pie in the sky. I belong to a group down in Tyler. We call it under 85 group. And we had to pull an old fellow out the other day. We couldn't force him into AA menopause. I give up. And as we pushed him out the door, he steadily maintained that his disease was the same after 85 as it was before.
These are the things that frighten me. Is when I run into an expert. I don't have all this. So that's the reason I'm here tonight. So you can hear an expert. Now I'm kidding. I know it's a very limited amount. But I've heard so many people say from the podium that you can't put any price tag on AA. Ain't nothing you can put. Ain't nothin' you can put on it. Let's see if we can't. Take a figure somewhere. Let's take $398 million.
[00:15:13]
I wonder if you could spend that money in any way on earth. Who has seen what we've seen here since Saturday night? Uh-uh. And pity the poor folks that have to use it because they're gonna, there's an old myth that says that if you would destroy a man, give him everything he wants. And sooner or later in their study of us, they're gonna run into a thing called God, inevitably, and to study about God without having an experience is a horrible thing.
So you see, the old prophet in the Testament was quite right when he said that if what they do is of the Lord, you can't destroy it. But if what they do is not of the Lord, they will destroy themselves. There's also another old Hebrew saying that if the camel gets his head in the tent, his body is soon to follow. I found some of Homer's leftover notes. Let's don't be serious too much longer. Mary told us this evening that AA gave us privilege of laughing and crying and shedding tears.
And I think that it never seemed that AA, somewhere within the scope of his old makeup, was not a laughing spirit. It was tied down and never let go until he found a way of expression in AA's mouth. So let's don't mourn the past. Let's laugh a little, if we can, at me. Because if it was a thing that he couldn't do until he found AA, he couldn't laugh at me. But it seems to me that everywhere I go or run into it, people want us to conform. They say to me, why don't you drink like he does? And I say, well, why don't he drink like I do?
That makes just as much sense. I used a little, I think I talked about it here last year, a little preparation called Preparation 8. None of you know what that is. And I went into the drugstore the other day and I said to this very floozy young fellow behind the counter, he's a real prick. And I said, would you give me a package of Preparation 8? And he said, yes, walk this way. And I said, if he could walk that way, it wouldn't be.
But the CIA gives us the privilege of throwing away the sham of falsity in humanity. People say to me, what do you talk about in AA? Well, hell, everything. Anything we want to and we know nobody's going to laugh at us. Yesterday afternoon we sat over here in the Reluctant Cockroach.
[00:20:07]
Hey, that's the place, boy. We've been laying over there listening to the clubbing gurgle. And whoever painted it did the painting right over the cockroaches when that plaster starts walking off and leaving you in a hell of a state. Well, we talk about many things. We stood over there yesterday and Johnny told us a beautiful story about his pet turtle. Well, he couldn't tell that to anybody but a bunch of drunks started laughing at him.
And he had us all on his side. It was a beautiful story. This is what it takes to make AA. And we sit and talk about Chuck and I were driving out to Terminal Island one night out in California, sitting there talking. And I left to aggravate him for some reason or other. And I asked him, I said, Chuck, did you ever get so nervous that you laid out on a bed and you could hear your hair grow? Well, the average lay crowd wouldn't laugh at that, you know. Nothing funny about it. But we do. Now, have you ever had the roof of your mouth sunburned?
Let that roll around. Goddamn, yes. Yes. Have you ever been run over by your own car while driving? Have you ever been locked up out of jail? I have. A man up in Roseville, California, the chief of police, I got in there late in the afternoon and they had those beautiful clean sheets. And as they shook me down, the little sergeant, and he's taking his stuff out of my pocket, in came the chief. And he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm putting him in jail. He said, no, you're not. He said, he's too untidy.
These are the things that we talk about. We know nobody won't laugh at them. Because it's happened to you. And I think that the thing that makes it easy to talk about is the fact that we can laugh about it now. We couldn't do it before. I guess now is a good time, isn't it? Everybody wants me to tell about them damn cats of Mary. And this, I'll tell you what was the purpose. Icky Sheridan, one of our loving trustees back in New York, who's dead now, bless his heart. Some of you old members remember Icky. And Icky used to say that if you can smell yourself, other folks have been smelling you three days.
And I tell you this purely and simply for the purpose that the little doctor says in here about an alcoholic. He said men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. And them goddamn psychiatrists had me convinced that it was because my mama put me on the pot back then. That's what it says in the book. I've heard all experts in there have dented psyche and this. This fella puts it so simple. Men and women drink. That's unique. Essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. Ain't nothing hard about that, is it?
[00:25:16]
I told the guy one time, I said the reason I don't think much of you fellas, you won't get honest with me and tell me in a language I can understand. And it kind of hurt the fella's feelings. He said, well, let's see if you can understand this. Mr. Luke, you have some deep-seated tendencies to become a horse's ass. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And if left unattended, you'll become full-grown. We can understand that, can't we? But the little doctor says here men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol.
Then it begins to get into a little deeper water and he says the sensation is so elusive that while they see others drinking with impunity, after a time, it's kind of like it says in the scripture, and it came to pass, you know. That after a time, they cannot differentiate the truth from the false. Hell, that was my problem. Couldn't tell the truth from the false. And the next sentence is where it takes you britches off. It says the alcoholic gets to thinking. And this is dangerous as hell. Can't you see what it's done to Kansas?
That he gets to thinking that his alcoholic life is the normal one. How about that? And then the first thing we want to do when we get to AA is educate ourselves away from him. And he don't know the truth from the false. He thinks his life's the normal one. And this I believe. And when you put your arm around one of them stinking old drunks like Mary did, he don't know how it felt. And he's not aware how he smelled either.
So I'll tell you about the cats. We've always had cats, Mary and I. Some pretty good cats and some not so good cats. We had some real expensive cats and then a few cheaper cats that had come in on us at one time or another. But we loved them very dearly. Years ago I worked in a place called Goose Creek, Texas. And Mary had to go up into Illinois. One of her sisters was having a baby up there and needed a little help. And she left me and the cats at home.
And while she was gone I got fired. And I had to load up and go home to mama. This was always headquarters just after being fired. So I loaded the cats, two cats, in the back of the car and I headed from Goose Creek to Ty. And I got to Houston. And there was a sign up there that said three pints for the price of two. Not being one to ever pass a bargain at. I bought the three pints for the price of two.
And as I remember it, it was a cool night and the wonders were frosted up. Just a pleasant evening. And as I drove along, I drank and sang a little. Oh, promise me, you know, this great feeling of well-being that was driving along. None of you ever done that, I'm joking.
[00:30:23]
And I got to Little Town up in Cleveland, Texas, and got out to get a chaser for one of these three pairs. One of the damn cats got out. And the mule didn't dare show up at home to marry without them cats. So here I am, half drunk, and I run all over this little town in the rain and the mud, and finally threw that cat up under a cotton jam down there. And I picked him up by one of his hind legs, and I whipped him all the way back to the cot.
And I threw him in the back seat, and he did a thing in that back seat. Wasn't nice. Sort of, kind of like one of Picasso's studies in Brown. Didn't bother me. Crawled right in, drove right on, took another, took another honk on that jug, sang a little more. Oh, promise me, you know. About three o'clock in the morning, I threw her up in the corn field. Never stopped a thing. And as it was breaking day, drove into a little town called Alto, Texas, one long main street. Couple of dim streetlights burning there, and I pulled over to the side to get the cap off of this jug and take a little honk there.
And there was a town clown, a constable I think he was, a sheriff or something, and it must have been his first chance to make an arrest in years. And he came walking up to the side to the car, and walked on that glass, and he said, let that window down. And as I let the window down, he said, what do you think? Oh, my God. And he slowly walked away. And I would say to you, that when you put your arm around his neck, tell him you love him and you want to help him. He don't really know, I see. Doesn't. He can't tell the truth from the false.
[00:35:16]
He thinks that his life is only normal one. So let's not grow away from him with intellect. See if we can separate the truth from the false. I drank, it's been rumored here that I was one of them things that they make out in California, they call them a wino. This is a rather delicate thing, I don't like to talk about it too much. Particularly this close to home. But you can't cut that wine too much. It's a wonderful thing, wine is. I think it has some wonderful medicinal purposes, wine does.
It will absolutely cure hay fever. If you drink it like I did, you ain't gonna cough. Oops. Not even a little sneeze, you ain't gonna cough. Now if you folks any of you here are studying me tonight, don't look too close. You'll find hidden beneath, I didn't use enough polygraph tonight. You'll find beneath this arrogant facade the very intelligent individual. Well he used to call him Mr. Police Specialist. And I appreciated what Mary said and heard Chuck say it many times before.
And we sit around A.A. and console ourselves about the keen alcoholic mind. And this is the only place you ever hear about it. I never have been to a seminar on keen alcoholic minds anywhere. Outside. Not so long ago I attended a sailing meeting and we had for our guest this gal, what's her name, Ann Landers who writes Dear Abby, is that what it is? And she was doing a little answering question thing.
When it was over we was all having a rather informal meeting and she told a very amusing letter that she had received. And it went something like this, Dear Ann, me and my husband have been married for 26 years. And said on our anniversary I was hoping that he would buy me a Sanger sewing machine and said he helped and bought me a cemetery clock. What would you do? She didn't know what to answer for the letter and she thought in a moment of whimsy to send it to the Sanger sewing machine people. And they took it and this is the letter that they wrote back to the old woman.
And said Dear Miss Sewing Club, we understand that your husband bought you a cemetery clock instead of that Sanger sewing machine and said we have gladly traded it to you. We'll give you the sewing machine for your cemetery clock because we suspect that we have a dead sailsman in your area. Well I'll tell you a little about my drinking just to qualify myself if I haven't already. But I drank at the tender age of 17. Not first case. Because I essentially liked the effect produced by alcohol.
[00:40:00]
And with my first drink it was an alcohol. I grew up. I got drunk the first time I drank alcohol. And 18 and a half years later I got drunk with the last drink of alcohol. And with all the drinks in between I got drunk. Now you can call that whatever you want to. I just never did have any luck with drinking. They say that the practice makes perfect. But I practiced the art and never gained any proficiency at it at all. So I continued to improve worse. I did.
And it came to my mind suddenly, the first time it ever bothered me, I had migrated to Southern California and had moved to Hollywood. An East Texas country boy and chose for all the professions on the face of the earth to go into designing ladies' lingerie. Now this is a very nice profession. You work with models and it's a lot of fun. We have a step in AA called the second step and it refers to our sanity. Kind of infers there that we drunks may have a gopher in the garden. And the drunks don't like that. We don't like to be unsmart.
But let me tell you something. My business was cutting brassieres. And if you cut a bunch of brassieres with three of them places in them, you're nuts. I told a psychiatrist about that and he said it was just wishful thinking. But needless to say, I cut myself out of that profession. Came out, worked for a Jewish fellow, a nice fellow there, and he was a highly compassionate man. He didn't understand why he could drink and I couldn't. He was the first man that brought my diseased face to face with me.
And he said, Joe, you can't drink. In those few words. And I remember how mad it made me, how I got upset. I was kind of delicate anyway. You can't drink. And he said, I'm going to have to get rid of you. You're costing us too much money. And then in the last hour his face lit up and he said, I've got one thing to be thankful for. He said, I'm glad that you weren't a rabbi because the way you handle them scissors, you would have destroyed our whole race.
Charlie, I'd like to say to you today, for whatever it was to any of you folks coming in today, I'd like to hear you guys come today and say, hey, I've got to quit drinking or I'm going to lose my job. Well, if it's bothering you drinking, you need to quit it. I'm going to have to quit drinking and my wife's going to leave me. Well, quit her. Don't leave the drinking. She's getting in your way. Getting in your way. So I got another job down in the shipyard, in those days the war was going on, and I was not one of the fellas that helped win it.
[00:45:07]
And I went down and literally bought a plumber's license out the back door of a union hall in San Pedro, and I went into the shipyard as a master plumber. This is a fella that had never picked up anything heavier than a pair of scissors, and I was a master plumber. And in those days, if some of you can remember this, and I'm sure America, you were frozen to your jaw. Oh, my. But I thawed out. I have a little piece of paper that hangs in my bed now, a little pink bonnet and all, and it's signed by the United States Department of War Labor, and it prohibits me from working within 25 miles of the city of Los Angeles.
This is where the executive comes out, and we say for a while, you better go get a job because I can't. This is a built-in thing, man. Mary was very proficient at a lot of things. We went through these years of making excuses. The sickness is beginning to show. And we moved up into northern California and didn't have a choice of a lot of things to do, and I went to work, of all things, for the railroad up there.
And it must show here there was a narrow-mindedest bunch of folks I ever saw in my life. They had a rule against drinking, and the rule read that if you were seen coming out of an establishment to dispense alcoholic beverages, you could be fired. Well, I never came out very often. And if I did, it was under duress, of course. But then the excuse. This is where the poor Al-Anon comes in. And you hear the fellas stand up behind these podiums and beat their gums and say, I wonder how I live long enough to give you a day of aid. I wonder how they live that long, chiseling away at you and chipping at you all the time.
Hitting the bed with that goddamn vacuum cleaner. And I guess one of the most horrible questions that's been ever asked around. I believe we could get a hundred percent vote on this. The most horrible and painful question that a man could be asked early in the morning. Do you know what you did last night? Oh, God. And you don't. And it has to come out piecemeal, you know, piecemeal. Oh, that's the lady that you wet in her flower pot. You know what that is.
Strings out over days before we get the true picture. And the goddamn Al-Anon lets you suffer. Do you know what you did last night? Then it begins to show all over. We had one old lady, said to my wife, said, why do you live with a man like that? And in her loving reflex, she comes back and says, well, you don't know him when he's sober. This old biddy says, tell me when he's sober, will you? The reflex of making excuses when you don't know what for. Automatically. The built-in loving reflex.
[00:50:20]
And I would love to say here, not in levity, far from it, that when I see a guy come in the area with a jowl on his arm, for a more unselfish reason than he comes, he's happy. I'm going to give him a little bit better chance to make it. I owe him a lot. I owe these gals a whole lot. And let's don't get arrogant enough in this society of ours to think that we have a patent on everything good. There's some other folks on this planet, too. And unfortunately, there are more of them than there is of us. And this is the first lesson in giving you a learning edge.
Well, the railroads were, oh, they're just a hell of a bunch of folks to work for. They didn't understand me, and they had this rule, you know, and I guess they were justified in having it. They run more than one train on a track, and I guess they felt that if a man was a little bit adamant, he might mix them up, you know. And that's what it did. At the top of the Sierras, from Sacramento to Reno, you get to El Aves. Maybe some of you will understand this parlance, this vernacular of the railroads.
There's a few of you who will. But we went up to the top of the Sierras with many engines on the train. They had to have a lot of helper engines to push it up. And when you got to the top of this mountain, you had to cut off all the helper engines and send them back. You didn't need but one going down the other side. And the railroads made the mistake of building this fine electronic system up in the top of the mountain that we used to make this big switching shuffle up there to get the helpers off.
And they didn't have any better sense than to hang a bullet now where everybody could see it, that it was physically impossible to make a mistake up there. And I say that that's a challenge to any drunk. Physically impossible to make a mistake up there. And by some quirk of alcoholic circumstance, I suppose, I got two engines going towards one another with four cars between them, carrots, apples, lettuce, and celery, and made the biggest God damn fruit salad in history.
And them folks wanted to stop. And they had an investigation, and they had another alcoholic representing me, and he proved some of the most atrocious lies. And he said, they'll give me 60 days. But in the terminology it means nothing. It's kind of like sending our governor to the penitentiary, and he ain't going. Ain't you been reading the paper? Well, you folks are backward out here. And the old man, I never will forget him, he is a kind, compassionate man. He followed me out of the investigation procedure, and he pointed his finger at me, and he said, you should be arrested for even walking on our right-of-way.
And I'll get you if it's the last thing to do. And do you know that our disease has got its own built-in penalty? He and that fire fired me first.
[00:55:10]
They finally fired me eventually, and I'm getting ahead of my story, for an obscure rule, number 18, which reads that if you don't report for service after 6 months, you can be fired. And I can assure you that the day the 6 months is up, they had an investigation there. This began the most hellish procedure of my entire life, making excuses, feeling like everybody at this conference has had to tell us ourselves. This little, indescribable feeling.
I believe the book says that absolutely no defense. Absolutely no defense. Going further into the shed, always on the defense. I drank in a bar next door to our old friend Floyd's place. He passed away not long ago. The only place that I had credit in. And I was living during the war years with my wife's sister. This was a beautiful, pleasant relationship. If you ain't tried it, don't do it. But I remember this day, I had been asleep in the bar all day, off and on, you know, in this semi-stratospheric state of being drunk, you know, awake and asleep. The experts call it semi-lucid. But I know it was about 4 o'clock in the evening, I got up and staggered out of there.