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Source: DICOBE-00401 – Joe L – MIDWINTER CONF – 1971-01-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00401-joe-l-midwinter-conf-1971-01-15.mp3 Duration: 00:48:36
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I woke up at about four o'clock in the evening, I got up and staggered out of this place, and went home, that is, to my wife's sister, to lay down. And my wife and her sister was in the next room, and ordinarily would have been asleep. Any other time I'd have been sound asleep. But this is the dialogue that went on in the next room, and I'm laying there listening to it. My wife in hysteria cried out to her sister and said, oh my God, what would you do if you were living with a man like that?
And her old sister didn't hesitate a moment. She said, I'd poison the son of a bitch. Let me tell you something. I was too poor to hire a food taster. But from then on, they ate first. Have any of you ever felt like that? That little, with absolutely no defense. Absolutely no defense. I think psychiatry calls it extreme paranoia. They're going to kill me. Well, the human body will take so much. I've gotten on wine quite by accident.
This makes good conversation. I befriended a little Irish bartender in Sacramento, and his name was James J. O'Farrell. You can't get no more Irish than he was. And he and I developed a very beautiful relationship. I loaned him $5 one day when he had the shape, and it was one of the best investments I ever made. I guess it drank over $4,000 off of that $5 loan. You remember me, don't you? I loaned you $5, and the poor little old fellow didn't cough up a dime, you know.
But one morning I went into his place at 6 when he was swamping out, and he was behind the bar. I don't know why a bar can't make you so benevolent. But they are. You know, you go talk to one of them, and he seems to understand. They were the only folks we could ever talk to. I think all bartenders should have been psychiatrists. I don't know what I think psychiatrists ought to be. Well, I told him, I said, Curly, I can't take my breakfast this morning.
And he knew what I meant. And he said, over behind the bar. You'll find a jug of port wine. And if you'll take a couple of drinks of that, you can go back to whiskey. And I'd like to say here, I've never been back to whiskey. I like what that stuff does for you. It's kind of like a closed umbrella going down, and then it opens up all of a sudden, right down. Look at this. Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol.
Goddamn, it made me feel good. Took away the pain. And I remember the first drink of it, I was so ashamed. Even more than I had been previously. Even more. And I was working from Sacramento to Reno, running a passenger train. Being entrusted with the lives of some 400 people in a truck, you know. I'd wake up in the clubhouse over and never remember making it. They say we don't suffer again. This is a living hell.
[00:05:01]
And I'd go to the far end of the street until I could look in the bar window and not see anybody in there so I could drink wine. I was ashamed that somebody would see me. But I got out. We can go so much. I ended up in a hotel in Sacramento with a few little hallucinations and a thing or two that I don't think we have to describe to one another. If you came out here tonight, you may know a little something about it.
Don't know how long it lasted, but I remember getting up out of this hotel and staggering my way home to Mary. I remember it as though it were 15 minutes ago. And I went into the room and I cried out in a voice that was not mine. And I said to Mary, I said, I think I'm sick. I think I'm real sick. And I think that she could see that something hellish had happened to me. Something different had happened to me.
I never had been sick before. Except this urban sick you get in the morning and I'm way alive with me. We used to rent a hotel room with twin beds in it. One to sleep in, one to throw up in. We didn't have any doctor. Had to call a little railroad physician. And I remember, you know, that rule they got. They'd fire you. We were very reluctant, but we had to. And they called this poor little old fellow down there.
And I know what he must have thought. And he came in and looked at the corpse. He looked at the corpse. Here comes the Al-Anons again. He said to her, does he drink? Uh-uh. And he gave me a shot of the happy medicine in the arm and gave a prescription for some of the most delightful pills I've ever had. One grain, seen the barbershop. And he said to her, the man's really sick and he needs to be in the hospital.
And she had the one grain thing he filled up, got me nearly a popcorn sack full of them. And they brought the ambulance to the door and I remember how dramatic the scene was. She followed the corpse out. Waved at me goodbye. And we went to San Francisco with the red lights on and the siren screaming. And I'm laying up in the back eating them pills. And I've always looked back on this trip with a feeling of irony.
Here's a guy that's been drunk 18 years and in the hell of the hell he'll do something about it. This is the non-alcoholic application. Sober him up now. If you don't work that way. And after all the fast trip down there, it was a day and a half before I saw a doctor. I guess they were out testing cigarettes. Breaking the lights that he had. I don't know. I couldn't see. And they put me through one of the most stringent clinics on the West Coast.
From the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. And the only thing I learned out of that was don't go to a proctologist with a hangover. That fellow had that gorgeous finger. I bet you. Beauty. And the result of it was that they couldn't find anything organically wrong with him. And this was before the day of the alcoholics. There's no more alcoholic wards like we've got today.
[00:10:03]
A place where we can deprive the alcoholic of his right to suffer. No, you didn't. The railroad hospital got a conductor in there that was responsible for the lives of 400 people. You think they're going to admit they had a drunk in there? And they put me in the nervous ward. By which I would say I certainly qualified. So nothing organically wrong with me. And this, oh, you know it causes me a little pleasure.
When the hospital's worse on the stairs, the man must have something wrong with him. Just can't say he's in here resting. And this was my introduction to psychiatry. And it left a very unbelievable making of observation. That of all the drunks I know who have had their alcoholism beaten out of them through their veins at very cheap. But they sent in this frustrated piano tuner. And he'd ask me some foolish questions and I'd give him brilliant answers.
If he's not a rummy now, it's not my fault. You know, little things like, did you ever suck your thumb? And I remember how he quivered when I told him. I said, yes, I still do. Yes, I do. Go around the corner and take a quick pill at it every now and then, I tell you. Yes. Little goodies like that. And even if they were ever effective, they couldn't work with us, because the truth ain't in them. And some of the prime requisites of their perfection is that they elicit the truth from one of their patients.
And it ain't in them. Now, you look like a very forthright and unprocrastinating group to me. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret. And that's how to get rid of a psychiatrist. You let two drunks lay up in bed one night and memorize the same dream to tell him in the morning. He gave me short strips. And they threw me out. And I went back to Sacramento. I thought I had my cake and I could eat it.
Had a disease I could brag about in the bar. Do you ever walk up to an old drunk in one of them bar rooms and punch him in the back and ask him a question right quick? And you know what he'll say? I've been sick. I've been sick. This made a good story in the bar. As well as my stay in the hospital, I had run the whole gamut from nervous anxiety to schizophrenia in bat. And I was discharged as an ambulatory schizophrenic.
This is a going Jesse with dual wheels. That's what it is. No regard. Looking them in the eye and lying down. I figured this thing out as a kid. One day a bartender called my wife. Said, Miss Lee said, you think your husband's sick. You think your husband's sick, that when you go to work every morning, he gets up and comes down here, that then he runs home at 11.30 and lets you go home and fix his meal and feed him, and then when you go back to work in the afternoon, which leads to, he comes back down here.
[00:15:25]
And he further adds that we don't want it. And when you've had it with him, fellas, you just about threw it. And the wife was exceedingly perturbed. And she called this skull jockey down in San Francisco, and I don't know what he told her, but this was when she left. And I say that without any rank or in my heart whatsoever, because I believe that you and me, with the disease we've got, will cling to any crutch in hand to perpetuate this thing.
And the absence of my wife was only the absence of another cousin. Had a few left. And I think that some of us, we were described this afternoon as old hard nosers or something like that, last gaspers. Did some of us have to lose every crutch before we'd sit down one day and cry for help? I hear from the protest, very frequently, the word eternity. And I looked it up in the dictionary, and eternity is an interminable length of time.
This is what those fellows are saying. Or attempting to. If you've ever woke up at three o'clock in the morning with brown whimpers, with every chromosome in your very being vibrating, needing a drink and not having one, having no way to get one until, say, six in the morning, and you spend those three hours, you know something about eternity. This is an interminable length of time. I see a head of you two nodding out there.
To die a thousand deaths. Then if we cry for help, we don't know where to get it. And to watch an alcoholic die is a slow and tedious thing. Because he does it a little bit at a time. And the dialogue goes something like this. Mr. John Q., non-alcoholic, exhibit A, is a misinformed, serves to the misunderstood, calls him by name, and he says, Drunk? If you don't quit drinking, you're going to die. This is the misinformed talking to the misunderstood.
And you get a little wise out of old Mr. Drunk. A little bit, not much, he comes up and he says, What do you mean, I'm going to die? We don't know what we mean by it really, we're just told to tell you that. That if you don't quit drinking, you're going to die. This is the dialogue. And old Drunk says, what do you mean? Do you mean like when I lost my baby? Is this what you mean? Do you mean when I saw him a little and taken away? Is this what you mean by that?
Well, we don't really know what we mean when we tell you that. We were just told to threaten you.
[00:20:03]
And the poor old Drunk said, don't know the truth from the far as he sits. When are you going to stop? And this is the reception we got. Until somebody did hear it. Until the fellow got well. And took the time to understand one of us. This is all we got. We were subjected to every cliche known to man and never worked. They used to say to me, you never heard this, straighten out, dear man. I did, just like that.
Haven't you learned your lesson? They'd say to me. Here's one that none of you have ever heard. Turn over a new leaf. I'd like to say here that the only guy I ever heard of that had any luck turning them leaves over was this Adam chap. The misinformed talking to the misunderstood. This is what we got. I go in the hospital, out of the hospital, one day they came to me and said, you got to get out of here.
I thought I'd be in for the winter. I had very near become an institutional bomb. And I remember how I hated and looked out there at that cold weather and didn't want to hit the streets. And he said, you're going to have to go and let some sick people come in this hospital. Then he said, where are your people? He knew about my history. And I said, well, my folks are down in Texas. Looked out there at that cold weather and didn't want to hit the streets.
But he said, you're going to have to go and let some sick people come in this hospital. Then he said, where are your people? He knew about my history. He said, well, my folks are down in Texas. And I think his eyes lit up. And he said, go down there by all means. So I came back to Texas to die. Didn't come back with any benevolent feeling of trying to civilize these people. Came back to die. Only place I knew.
And when I got out in Texas, I ran into a little small town psychiatrist down there. And he was a lonely little fellow. And he loved to talk. And I'd go and listen to him. And he'd give me a goose balls with a shoebox full. And one morning I was awakened from a peaceful slumber. And two deputy sheriffs were looking down at me and said, get up and come on and go with it. My mother had blown the whistle.
And I remember that I had a hard time lacing up one of my shoes. And I asked one of these sheriffs, I said, would you help me with one of my shoes? And he said, hell no. He said, we've got plenty of time. And I found out that they did. So they put me up in the jail. This is the smart elite, the arrogant guy, the intellectual, who's come home to roots. And I was up in this jail hating everybody, including my mother particularly, for having brought this great humiliation down upon me.
It wasn't my first jail. It wasn't my last one. But I remember how I felt. This same little no defense feeling that we had. Never having any defense. And I stayed up there three days. And one morning, a Monday morning, their cable fell in to my boot drawer with the vertical Venetian blind. And they asked for me by name. And I remember how humiliating it was.
[00:25:00]
Somebody couldn't take my eyes off of it. Didn't have to say a word. They could see that the man wasn't jumping. And this was the only thing that made me look at them. I was a jumper, drum beater. And he came unsolicited, if you could pronounce that word, to see me. And give me the pitch about 8-8. And sometimes grow weary of sitting around our fat, fleece-lined clubhouses and listen to some of these fat cats say, if he wants it, let him come get it.
You're looking at a man that is alive tonight because a fellow came unsolicited to talk to me about my problems. And I shuddered to think what would have happened if he'd have been a little bit too big. And he came up to me and, in essence, gave me what we chatter about around here is the message of Alkali Sanofi. What he said to me was in five words, and I'd never heard it before. He said, I know how you feel.
This was my message of Alkali Sanofi. And the only command that is in our big book of experience in chapter 7, that has an exclamation mark behind it, says in plain English, carry this message to the alcoholic. Alkali, by God, and I'll be thankful till the day I die, do it. This is the message of Alkali Sanofi. His message was, come in and take off your hat and go sit down in the right place. And he liked to mist it by hand.
That's why you don't ever have to take another drink again if you don't want to. That's his message. This message over here was, hang up the telephone, be quiet. And I wonder sometimes by what thin air of poverty what just damn near didn't matter. I couldn't give any loose chatter about gratitude. I couldn't talk about a way of life. I got to talk about life in its entirety, because this is what it got.
Life in its entirety. He said to me, I know how you feel. This was the first person that didn't make me feel like I wasn't what I was. And he outlawed all the necessities for any quality of care. And he took me to my first AA meeting. And I remember. In those days, most of them were all upstairs, and this was a dirty turn at the top of the stairs. These were cut a little bit on the back. I weighed 119 pounds, didn't have a tooth in my head, hadn't needed any for a year and a half.
And he shoved me up the stairs up there, and Mary talked about it this evening. Said, I don't remember anything you said. I remember the feeling I had. And this is the program without knowledge or not. This is the feeling that I had that night. I've learned the communication that I've never had before. Communication like I've never had before, and I remember it seemed like a great weight had been lifted from me, and I think that if it was the weight of anything explainable, it would have been the weight of loneliness.
[00:30:10]
What a lonely disease this is, that we can't tell anybody about. The only malady known to man is skepticism, and up there that night I got to celebrate, and I said to myself, here are some, and I said to myself, here are some people like me. This is what it's like. And the sickening loneliness, the sickening feeling of being in a world of the planet by yourself, left me that night, and thank God for your sake, it has never returned.
Never has returned, as long as I can look at you, as long as I can look at you, I ain't going to get lonely no more. And I got something I can use on Tuesday, got something I can use on Wednesday. Clancy puts it so beautifully when he says that anybody can stay sober in here. This is just kind of a pit stop place. We've got to get a hold of something that will take care of us on Tuesday, because that's where them tigers are.
We've got to learn to live the whole week. This is what they gave me in AA, for a moment of levity and a moment of sadness, and I'll sit down. One of the greatest enemies of our disease, I believe sincerely, is our ability to heal quickly. We heal too fast. If this thing left a scar on you like a, oh, hysterectomy, if you please, you can look down at it and pause about it and see it all the time. Not now, pause. All the scars are inside. And we heal too quickly.
And we say to ourselves, little while, by God, that wasn't so bad, let's try again. Thank God that didn't happen to me. I took the last one before I got here, and this is no credit to me. This is credit to those wise old people that I talked about here last year, the counseling of the fellows that went ahead. The credit there lies here and in a thousand other places. But I could see, to my own satisfaction, the efficacy of God's handiwork. I would have stayed out of curiosity to see what made that bastard tick. A grinning and a scratching and a winking at me.
But I healed quickly, got well in a hurry, learned all there was about it in about two weeks. I became an expert, a quick cussing, just, oh, I sailed off into the spiritual stratosphere. And I became what you might call God-like. Have you ever seen any AA members that are God-like? I got a call shortly after that, and I went to see this fellow. And he had gotten hung in this bar, and the fellow had taken his jug away from him, and really all he wanted was his jug back.
And he called us, and I went, and I felt so good. I got another buddy of mine to go with me in my nice new automobile, which was a product of Alcoholics Anonymous.
[00:35:05]
And we could go out and snare the drunk, get him out of the bar, get his jug back, and we put him between us. And I began to give him the pitch. And to say the least, it was a picture in sheer eloquence. And as I drove and slowly talked to the drunk, I remember how good I felt. And I looked over at him, and his eyes had begun to water, and I thought, I'm getting him. And after a few more of my very eloquent observations, he gently lay his head over on my shoulder, and I knew I had him.
Did you ever hear of anybody filling up silently? Any time I've ever gotten God-like with a drunk, he pukes out. Then I learned another little lesson in this society of ours, and that's when you give up on one. He ain't ready, we say. I don't know, the book doesn't really set a date on how long you're supposed to work with a drunk. I worked with one for four and a half years. The first time I saw him, my wife took the call, and I went. And he was a fellow, looked about like I did when I came, scurvy as hell, smelled like a goat, virgin on BP.
And I borrowed a goblet of whiskey and poured it down him, and it knocked him out, really. And when he kind of came unshuffled from his drink, he was in an AA club. I believe anybody can get in there good. And he got sober. And he stayed sober for three months. And he got drunk. And it was a blow to my ego. I said to myself, he can't help but get sober under my direction. And I went and got him again. Three months, and he's drunk again.
And he had a little affliction that I know none of you have ever had. He'd go to faraway places and call me Colette, just to tell me that he was drunk. And I prayed about him. I made him a sort of a side project, and I prayed about him. I'd say, God, you've been watching them stars too much to let me have this one. I love it. But he kept it going. And about nine years ago, he got on for him what I hope was his last drunk in one of our local motels.
And he called another fella from our club who's not half as smart as I am. And he went out and talked to that bastard ten minutes, and he's been sober ever since. And I hated his guts. And I'd sit in the club and look at him, and I'd think, you ought to be mine. And if I know anything of the treasure that God's given me, if I know anything about God's love at all from my experience in alcoholics and all, I know that I owe him more than he owes me.
He kept me sober for four and a half damn years. I don't know what to tell you. I'm not too highbrowed about God's work. I have to leave that to some of my veterans.
[00:40:18]
All I know is I've got to watch what I see. So before I sit down, I'll tell you a little story about a fella calling on a sick guy. It's the only way I know to do it. The only difference in the trip to see the sick fella, and one of our trips to see a sick fella, is that it happened 2,000 years ago. And this is the story that may or may not be well known in the scripture about the fella that they call the demoniac.
And it's written by a doctor very coldly and abstractly. He wrote what he saw. And they called this fella a maniac full of demons. This was their description in those days. He was a demoniac. For the lack of better verbiage. If some of these smart cats could analyze him today, he would have been a schizophrenic, a bedwetter, or something like that. But in those days, they weren't so intellectual. He was a demoniac. We let him go at that.
And he was sicker than hell. And it says in there, verbatim, that he was so wild that no man could tame him. Not like me and you. And it said that the manifestations of his disease, believe you, were such that they had to run him out of town. Not like me. And they ran him out on the riverbank, and he was out there eating with some pigs. A babbling idiot. Not like me and you. If you've got any imagination at all, you can see that picture.
You can smell it, and you can hear it. The babbling of a sick man. A sick man. And it seemed to have been at that time a little carpenter fellow who was going to and fro teaching a new philosophy of love. And the little carpenter fellow had a facility that you and I haven't quite acquired yet. He could see no ill in anyone, the little carpenter. So he goes to see this cat on the riverbank, and he says to him, say, fellow, are you having any trouble?
And this old boy just eat up the sad pig. And he said, yes, that's my name. They call me Legion, which means menace. I'm just eating up with trouble. And the little carpenter knew he needed some help. The little carpenter knew he needed some help. And he was willing to give. Because they asked him. And he went through a queer process of, it was a real strange manner in which he healed the demoniac.
It was a matter of getting some spirits out of him and into some pigs. The folks in those days understood it less than they understand ours today. How about that? And some stool pigeon ran into town and told these people, said, you're out of the pig business. But the old boy was getting wet. These people came out of town, you know, they heard this
[00:45:07]
out of the pig business, and they go out there, and here's what I like about the whole story. When he got to AA, the second one, it says something about returning to sanity, and it says when they got there, there he sat, fully clothed and in his right mind, fully clothed and in his right mind. And the people weren't interested in one fellow getting well, they was interested in the loss of the pig. Wasn't the least bit concerned with the one fellow getting well. By God, you and me better be interested in him and alcoholics and homos, because this ain't a wholesale business.
If you see one man sober in the back seat of an AA club, you better well be sure that another one man has sit with him for a lot of hours. We'll never do it wholesale, or it won't be as good as it is tonight. And all the folks that saw the man get well said, prevailed upon him to leave, get out of here, get out, get from here. And I could well see the little fellow who had come from one life into another, and didn't know how to act in the new.
He was filled with fright like I was the night when I came. I had to turn to my sponsor for everything I needed, and he turned to the little carpenter and he said in sheer fright, in sheer helplessness, will you let me go with you? And the little carpenter broke the roof. Everybody that he'd ever helped before that, he said to them, go on, don't say anything about this man, don't tell anybody, just keep it to yourself.
And he gave that fellow an admonishment that I would give to you, friend, when he said to him, no, I won't take you with me, stay here so that others can see what has happened to you. Thank you.