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Source: DICOBE-00409 – John P – FOUNDERS DAY – 1978-06-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00409-john-p-founders-day-1978-06-15.mp3 Duration: 00:40:38
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Our speaker tonight, or tonight, this afternoon, there's a lot of, lot of you have read his story in the book, second edition of the Big Book, The Professor and the Paradox, so, without saying any more from me, I'll let our speaker tell it, John P. Thank you, Don, for that introduction. My name is John P. I suppose every AA group does need two Johns. And I'm a recovering alcoholic. As Don has mentioned, my story, or part of it, is in the Big Book, in the second edition, the 1955 edition of the Big Book.
It was taken out of the recent 1976 edition. Why, I don't know. I think the New York office thinks I'm dead. Now, there is one disadvantage in having one story in the Big Book. You know, most of us in AA have basically only one story. And that one in the Big Book is mine. And I had delivered it many times in my own state and a few times in some of the nearby states before that second edition came out.
And one time when I was on the program of the state AA convention in Arkansas, in fact, it was Little Rock, where I was virtually unknown, I delivered the same talk very much word for word. And then after the speech was over and I was standing in the crowd out in the auditorium lobby, I overheard one man talking to another one about me. And he said, that last speaker was a fake, a liar, and a thief. He stole every word he said right out of a story in the Big Book.
I read it last night. In the rush of the crowd, I never saw him again. I got a chance to straighten him out as to my character. Now, I'm not only a recovering alcoholic, but I'm also a university professor. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where I grew up a very shy, anxious, resentful person. Having characteristics of the sort that made me develop into an independent and defiant personality. You know the type, a man who always wants to do everything my way.
Now, such determination is an admirable quality, even a practical quality to have. But when you mix whiskey with it, it can cut you almost to pieces. At least that's what it did to me. Now, some people have trouble with alcohol from the very first drink. I did not. I began as a social drinker, whatever that is, when I was in my early twenties. And drinking constituted no problem for me until I was into my early thirties. I could, and I did for some years, take it or leave it alone.
[00:05:11]
But then as the tensions and the anxieties of my life began to increase, I finally slipped over the line between social drinking and alcoholism. And once having crossed that line, I went down fast, as if I had fallen off a cliff. And then it looked as if I were going to ride this toboggan of destruction to the bitter end. And some of you know the bitter end is not a very pleasant place. I admit I didn't get as bad as some I have heard. I was one of those who stopped in time. I never lost a job. I never quit a job to keep from getting fired.
I never went to one of my classes drinking or drunk. Oh, I had been there awfully hungover many a morning because those mornings were rough. I never got a DWI. I never killed anybody. I never raped anybody. And in all my life I have never fallen in love with another man. But I assure you I drank enough whiskey to get into much more trouble than I care to admit. Now there are all kinds of drunks. There are slap-happy and stupid drunks, and there are melancholy drunks, and there are weeping drunks, and there are traveling drunks, disappearing drunks.
I knew one who could disappear while you were looking right at him. And perhaps a number of other varieties. I was a self-centered and occasionally violent drunk. You wouldn't think that a little fellow like me could do much damage, but when I was drunk I was pure dynamite. And I'm not going to divulge any of the details of that sort in this talk this afternoon. After all, the university can't fire me yet.
Now, you would think that a man who's got three college degrees would have had sense enough not to become a drunk, but here I am, perhaps just as much a drunk as any of you. I mention this to you only to emphasize the fact that education hasn't got anything to do with whether or not your body becomes alcoholic. There was certainly a time when my education far exceeded my intelligence. In fact, I've sometimes thought that back in those days my Ph.D. stood for perfectly horrible drunk. In any case, I began being a college professor at the University of Alabama, where I was on the faculty for 21 years.
And my only claim to fame is that I went to school with Babrout, and later on I taught freshman English to Gomer Powell. You know, is Jack Bailey here? I hope he'll tell Jim Nabors that I said that if I had known he was going to make all that money, I would have sat in his seat and let him teach. Well, in any case, in 1962, 16 years ago, I moved to Ohio, where I am now on the faculty as a senior professor at Kent State University.
And there I teach Shakespeare with a southern accent. Used to laugh more than that about it until that accent started coming out of the White House. Maybe I should have stayed in Atlanta and got to be buddies with Jimmy.
[00:10:07]
Now, while I was down there in the Southland, I came to believe that life was not worth living unless I could drink. And I was utterly miserable. I was sometimes desperate. I was living always in a state of tension, perhaps fear. And to cure that, I would try a little more drinking. And by this time, I drank with the inevitable result. That is, I acquired that irresistible and uncontrollable urge to take another one and another one and another and another until I was down and drunk and hungover and usually in some kind of trouble.
Now, I was a dated drinker. I drank every afternoon and every night. And in that hangover stage, I would get up in the morning and vow to never touch another drop and then be drunk again that night. And I did that again and again and again, punishing myself and my family in that way. Well, I knew at least there had to be some changes made. And so I set out to change things, and I tried to change the time of my drinking, the place of my drinking. I tried to change the amount of my drinking.
I even entertained the idea of changing wives. Now, you haven't done anything drinking till you try that. I didn't, but I entertained the idea. I tried hard to change everything and everybody except myself, which I now know is the only thing I can change. I was ignorant of alcoholism. I didn't know that it had become physically impossible for me to drink socially or moderately. I didn't know that my body's drinking machinery had worn out and that the parts could not be repaired or replaced. I didn't know that it was that first drink that threw me on my face.
I always thought it was number 15 or 17. Subsequently, I've learned it's the first. I didn't know that I was powerless over alcohol, and I think that my family and my close friends knew this about me before I did. Well, I'm not going to go through a series of drunken episodes. I'll just tell you about one, my last one. Finally, as with most of us in AA, there came a crisis. After a terrific drunken affair in which I became violently insane, I landed in Chief Billingsley's Plaza, commonly known as the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, city jail.
Now, I don't know exactly what happened to me on this, my last bender, but here are some things that did happen that I was told about subsequently. It was in February, during the first week of February, and it was about midnight, and after breaking up a number of things in my home, I was running up and down my front and my side yard with my pajamas flapping in the wind, daring all the neighbors to come out and fight.
Now, the neighbors had done nothing to provoke anything like that, but there I was. Well, there wasn't anything to do but to lock me up. And when the police came out to my house, they looked around and they decided that they didn't want to take me in, but I insisted. Now, that'll show you're crazy right there. Not only that, but I insisted that they, uh, sit down in the living room while I went back to the bedroom and changed into my best and my newest suit, uh, with socks and tie to match, uh, so that I'd look nice in jail.
[00:15:15]
Can you imagine anything more stupid? I don't remember the ride downtown in the squad car, but, uh, I seemed to come to about the time they were shoving me into this little cage. And I didn't like the looks of that place at all, and I took issue about it with three policemen. In fact, uh, they tell me I tried to indulge in some fisty cuffs with, uh, these three big birdie policemen, each one twice my size and armed with a gun and a blackjack.
What kind of acting and thinking is that? If that isn't some sort of insanity or some sort of mental aberration, what is it? Well, they put me in, all right, and then I yelled so loud and beat on the bars that I disturbed the other guests of the plaza. And, uh, they came up to get me. You know, I was stupid enough to think they were letting me out. Instead, two of them led me downstairs by the sergeant's desk and on down some more stairs under the concrete where they put me in a place called solitary.
Isn't that a fine place for a university professor to spend the night? But there I spent it. Now, two days after that, I was willing to join Alcoholics Anonymous, which I had only vaguely heard about about two months before. As I look back, something must have happened to me during those two days. Some forces must have been at work, which, quite frankly, I do not understand. But certainly almost two days between jail and A.A., something happened to me that had never happened to me before. And I repeat, I don't know what it was.
At one time, I thought I had simply made a decision instead of an alcoholic promise. A decision. But I discarded that idea in favor of assigning the cause to the guiding hand of God. I actually think that God gave me a shove into Alcoholics Anonymous. And then that was followed by my own attempt to make those twelve steps to recovery that they showed me about as soon as I got in the group. Well, whatever it was that brought me in, I have been in, and I have not had a drink since that time. And that time was in February 1949. So I have been around a while.
I would like to tell you one or two things about that little group in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I joined A.A. The group was new. A.A. was new, at least in Alabama at that time. This little group was only two years old. And there were only six groups in the entire state of Alabama. I checked the directory the other day. I discovered there are 119 groups in the state of Alabama now. But there were only six back then when I got in, and we didn't know much. We had the big book and a pamphlet or two. And we had made the first step, or part of it, and a part of the twelfth step, and disregarded all the other steps in between, which was a mistake.
And so we set out to sober up everybody in West Alabama. And on meeting nights, we had a little club room in the basement of the courthouse. On meeting nights, nobody drinking. Dad would show his head on the streets. We'd go out, and we'd forcibly bring him back into the meeting whether he wanted to come or not. And, you know, we never sobered up a single one that way, not one. And then we had a phone, and if a drunk called, a few of us got in the car, went out to his house, armed with a pint and a bottle of pills. Now, we were sympathetic. We wanted to help him make it through the night. And if he weren't drunk when we got there, you can bet he was stoned when we left. We fixed him up good.
[00:20:24]
Now, this was our round two. It was even dangerous, you see. We could have killed somebody. And once we thought we had killed a man, we had given him a heavy dose of Peraldehyde. Now, some of you know that when that stuff hits you, when it hits you, you just about freeze. You just clamp down. And we had given him this Peraldehyde, and as he lurched forward, I guess it's horrible to tell about this, but as he lurched forward, his false teeth were half in and half out of his mouth.
Just as the stuff hit him, and he froze, and he clamped down on these, and they lay. Well, we thought we had killed him because his wife called up at three o'clock the next afternoon, and she couldn't wake him up. And this taught us a lesson. Well, after this kind of thing, doing a lot of this, a number of us in the group managed to stay sober because we were out there trying to help somebody else.
And this is one of the secrets, as many of you know, that when you're out there trying to help somebody else, somehow you manage to stay sober. Now, I've often wondered why. That is precisely and exactly why men and women get themselves into this horrible alcoholic condition. And actually, nobody knows why, because the basic cause, the basic cause of alcoholism is still unknown. I suggested once, however, that the alcoholic simply does not know what he really wants, or he always wants something that he doesn't have. And there's a very humorous definition of him that fits this theory rather nicely.
It's a definition of him I stole from a goody from Dallas, Texas, many years ago. An alcoholic is a fellow who, when he's poor, he wants to be rich. When he's rich, he wants to be poor. When he's married, he wants to be single. When he's single, he wants to be married. When he goes to a wedding, he wants to be the bride. When he goes to the dinner table, he wants to make love. When he goes to bed, he wants a sandwich. He doesn't know what the hell he wants, you see.
Now, all of you, I think, probably have heard that Christopher Columbus was probably an alcoholic. I heard it 20 years ago down in South Georgia. You see, when Christopher Columbus started out, he didn't know where he was going. And when he got there, he didn't know where he was. When he got back home, he didn't know where he had been. And to top it all, he had conned a woman, Queen Isabella, into getting up the money to finance the trip. Typical al-Ghali.
You know, recently, I haven't been too sure about George Washington. You remember that picture of him crossing the river? How many of you, while cold sober, would try to cross the Delaware River standing up in a rowboat? You take another look at that picture, and you'll notice that George's coat is bulging out over here on the side. Just big enough bulge to hide a jug. Well, now, more seriously, alcoholism is recognized now partly as a symptom, as a symptom of some deep-seated maladjustment of one's personality.
[00:25:08]
Or it's a symptom of some emotional conflict which a person has been unable to solve. Now, for example, in my case, I won't go into your case, but this is my case, I was a very self-centered person, egotistical, and quite unreasonable in my demands upon other people, either actually or in my own mind. And then I was emotionally immature, or at least my emotions frequently run away with my common sense.
And by emotional immaturity, I mean that I am extremely susceptible to things like resentment, envy, anxiety, grandiose daydreaming, and that sort of thing. And then I tried hard to be a perfectionist, and when things weren't quite perfect for me, why, I took more and more to the bottle. And fourth, I was running away. I was running away from the reality of my situation. Now those, those self-centeredness, emotional immaturity, striving for perfection, and running away from reality, those, I think, are the chief personality defects which play havoc with the alcoholic's way of living.
And they are hard to get rid of. I haven't completely got rid of mine yet, but I have improved. I have improved to the extent that I no longer have to take a drink to cope with things like that. Now, of course, there are other detrimental characteristics that we have. There's anger and there's pride, two of the seven deadly sins. There's intolerance, there is self-pity, occasionally there's lust, and a number of other things that we must get rid of.
I don't think any of us can hold on to those characteristics and not go back to drinking. Those things must be removed, or at least adjusted. You know, in our drinking careers, we were not very good people. We were not honest. We were not unselfish. We sometimes weren't even decent people. And so, in AA, we try to improve ourselves by making those 12 steps, because these things must change, these characteristics in us must change, and that's why the 12 steps are there for us who need them so bad.
Now, the AA program and its procedures seem to have worked very well for a tremendous number of people. We get a lot of help from the continual association we make in our groups. We get a lot of help from the observations that we can make there. We benefit from associating with excessive drinkers or alcoholics who stay sober. And this seems to have some sort of favorable psychological effect on us, that if Joe can do it, I can, if Sally can do it, I can, that sort of thing.
Then we benefit also by associating with excessive drinkers who do not stay sober. And we can observe a great deal from them, too. I sometimes wonder whether I learn just as much from the losers as I did from the winners. Those losers certainly told me what not to do. Then we'd sit around in our groups and we'd take everybody else's inventory.
[00:30:02]
Maybe you don't in your group, but we do in mine. I always felt that was okay because eventually, you see, if you take everybody else's inventory, eventually you get around, what about taking your own? And when that happens, you seem to be on the way to sobriety. Then in our groups, we learn to eliminate alcoholism by improving ourselves. We learn to change our self-centeredness. We learn to stop running away from things we do not like.
We learn to eliminate or adjust to our personal shortcomings. And we do all these things by taking honestly and sincerely, and I emphasize those two words, honestly and sincerely, our twelve steps to recovery. Because they are the nearest thing to a cure for alcoholism anybody has discovered yet. Because we know, in AA, we know that taking those twelve steps over a sufficient period of time will improve us.
It will change our attitude, our way of thinking. It will change the inner man or woman into something that it had not been before. And it will allow us to acquire a way of living that we had not enjoyed in the past. And then, I think, sometimes when we least expect it, we discover that we are reasonably happy people. We are contented, and best of all, we are full of thanksgiving. Full of thanksgiving.
Something I once knew, or thought I knew, that I could never be without drinking. Now, AA does not function in a way which people normally expect it to. For example, instead of using our willpower, as almost everybody outside AA thinks we do, we give up our wills. We place our wills and our lives in the hands, invisible hands, of someone much stronger than we. And then, when twenty or so of us real drunks get together downtown in a club room, away from home, the normal opinion is that most of us won't come home at all.
We'll get roaring drunk, and it doesn't work that way. What I'm trying to lead up to is that our program and our procedures in Alcoholics Anonymous seem to be, in many ways, contrary to normal opinion. And in this connection, I'd like to pass on to you what I consider to be the four paradoxes of how AA works. Not why, I don't know why AA works, but how AA works. Now, a paradox, as you may already know, is a statement which is self-contradictory.
Like, up is down. Hot is cold. Wet is dry. And that sort of thing, a statement that is self-contradictory. But a true paradox, a true paradox is a statement that appears to be false, but upon careful examination proves to be true. Now, I don't have time to discuss each of these four paradoxes with you, but I will list them for you to consider. And here they are. The first one is that we surrender to win.
We surrender to win.
[00:35:00]
Now, on the face of it, in a war-torn world, surrendering certainly does not seem like winning. But it is in AA. It seems that only after we have come to the end of our road, only after we have hit a stone wall in some aspect of our lives beyond which we could go no further, it's only when we give up and surrender in despair, it's only then that we can achieve the sobriety that we could never achieve before.
And so, in Alcoholics Anonymous, we surrender to win. Then paradox number two, which I know you must have heard, we must give away to keep. Give away to keep. Now, that seems absurd and untrue. How can you keep anything if you give it away? Well, in order to keep whatever it is we get in AA, we must go about giving it away to others. For no fees, no rewards of any kind. And what do we give away? We give away the message.
And what is the message? It is so simple. The message is so simple. There's a better way of living instead of being drunk. It's just that simple. The third paradox is that we suffer to get well. We suffer to get well. Now, there is no way to escape the terrible suffering of remorse and regret and shame and embarrassment, to say nothing of those hangovers, which starts us on the road to getting well from our affliction.
There is no new and easy way to shake out a hangover. It's painful. And I don't care whether you do it at home, cold turkey, or whether you do it strapped down in a hospital bed. It's painful. And for us in AA, I think necessarily so. Because when we haven't suffered sufficiently, I don't think we have it in us to make those 12 steps to recovery. And so, we suffer to get well. The fourth and the last paradox is we die to live.
Now, that is a beautiful paradox straight out of the biblical idea of being born again. Or in losing one's life, one shall find it. You see, I think that each one of us has two lives. Two lives. And when we make at, nobody makes them perfectly, but when we make at our 12 steps, one life of us, the old life of guzzling and fuzzy thinking and all that goes along with it, gradually dies. And we acquire a new and a better way of life.
As our shortcomings are removed, are adjusted, one life of us dies and another life of us lives. And so, in AA, we die to live. Now, I'm through, except I would like to say I certainly appreciate Don and his committee for asking me to speak at this Founders Day. And I certainly thank you in the audience, each and every one of you who have listened so intently as you have. I also want to say that AA is the best thing that I ever joined.
And I'm going to remain in it for the rest of my days.
[00:40:04]
Because you see, AA and God have been very good to me. And I certainly hope that those two, AA and God, will continue to be good to each and every one of you. So, God be with you.