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Source: DICOBE-00413 – Bob P – 20TH NEBRASKA STATE REUNION – 1979-06-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00413-bob-p-20th-nebraska-state-reunion-1979-06-15.mp3 Duration: 01:14:42
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We are, I think, here in Nebraska extremely privileged to have, as this evening's speaker, the General Manager of the General Service Office in New York City to share his experience, his strength, and his hope with each one of us. And so, I take a great deal of pleasure to present to you, and I hope that you will give a good Corhusker greeting, to this evening's speaker, Bob Peay. Thank you, Jack, and good evening, friends. Boy, that is a Corhusker greeting! My name is Bob Peay, and I'm an alcoholic.
I'm a member of the Greenwich, Connecticut group of Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm also a member of the 468 meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, which meets every Thursday at 1115 at 468 Park Avenue South in New York City, which is the address of your General Service Office, of course. And that meeting is attended by the 15 or so of us who are members of AA who work at that office. And, of course, we meet for the same reason that we're meeting here tonight, and that is to maintain our own sobriety for another week or for another 24 hours.
But I want to issue you an invitation, as I always do whenever I speak to any of the people for whom I work, and that's you, to come and visit your General Service Office whenever you have a chance, if you're vacationing in that part of the country or have any reason to come there, why, be sure and stop in. We get over 2,000 visitors a year from all around the world. I'd say that one out of every four or five visitors that we get now is from overseas, believe it or not, from AA and other lands. It's a great thrill.
So if you're ever there, do come in and see us. We'll give you a tour and a cup of coffee, and you'll meet the gals of the General Service Office staff, and we'll try to make you feel at home. If you happen to be there on a Thursday, maybe you can come to our little meeting and share your experience and strength and hope with us. I sure do want to thank Jason and Les and Jack and all the other members of the committee that were responsible for inviting Betsy and myself to be with you this weekend.
It's just been a wonderful weekend for us. I just hope that all of you have had half as good a time here as we have and are continuing to have for this great weekend. Pat, I want to thank you. I've sat through an awful lot of greetings from representatives of mayors and governors at these kind of gatherings, and I think that's one of the best talks that I ever heard. It was really from the heart, and it said a lot about us, and I want to thank you.
And incidentally, as you probably know, AA has a long history of working with correctional institutions, and we have had for, I guess, ever since the General Service Board of Trustees of AA was started, we've always had an eminent representative of the correctional systems on our board of trustees. And now we have, as a Class A trustee, Jim Estelle, who heads the corrections department of the state of Texas, and he's a perfectly marvelous man, and we're ever grateful and indebted to him.
We are especially grateful to have a chance to come here because Betsy and I are both Kansans. She comes from Salina, and I come from Lawrence in Kansas City. So this is really like coming home to us, and we shamelessly took advantage of your invitation and your paying our way out here to take a little side trip on the way out and see some family that we wouldn't have otherwise gotten a chance to see, and so we're grateful for that, too.
As a matter of fact, this isn't the first time, of course, that I have been in Lincoln. The last time, I remember very, very vividly. I was in the University of Kansas, and it was in the football season of 1937. And Nebraska was having one of its typical years, beating everybody in sight. Kansas was, as usual, at the bottom of the Big Six, as it was in those days, or the Big Eight today. And we came up to play a football game up here, and somehow, by some miracle, Kansas eked out a tie with Nebraska. Well, that was the biggest thing that had happened to us all year.
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And we were scheduled to stay overnight here, and we were all down at the Cornhusker Hotel. They tell me that that's about to become a parking lot or something, and believe me, it breaks my heart, even though I only spent one night there, because it was one memorable night. We took this place apart brick by brick and put it together again. I'll tell you, what a thrill it was. And I remember now, in retrospect, going back to Lawrence and picking my spirits up with my horrible hangover.
And as I was living in Lawrence, Kansas at that time with my parents, and as I went down the street from where the bus had let me off, I kind of put my shoulders back and I tried to whistle and look a little bit jaunty as I went down the street. And I got into the house and my mother looked at me and she said, you look green. She was right. So, this is a heck of a lot better way to visit Lincoln, even though we did get a tie that day.
I guess that the main message, if I do have a message for you tonight, really goes back to something that I heard when I had been in NAA about two years. I was going on my first business trip. I was working in New York at the time for a big oil company, and I had to go down to Houston, Texas. It was my first trip out of town, so as soon as I got down there I contacted the AA number and found out there was a meeting out at a club.
So I beedled it on out to this club, and the meeting was already in progress when I got there. I went into this meeting and there was a good old-timer speaking, laying it on the line, kind of like Jerry was doing to us this afternoon. He was saying, AA doesn't teach us how to handle our drinking. My ears kind of perked up. I was only in the program a few months, you understand. He said, AA doesn't teach us how to handle our drinking. AA teaches us how to handle sobriety.
That's what none of us could handle in the first place, and that's why we drink. As I got to thinking about that, I thought, boy, this really hits me right in the middle of my forehead. This is exactly what my trouble has been. Because I knew, I guess, from the beginning that the way to handle my drinking was to quit. If I didn't know that, there were always a lot of people around in later years that were willing to tell me that.
As a matter of fact, on a number of occasions I did quit. Once I quit for ten months on my own. When I was in such a state that I wouldn't have believed that I could live an hour without drinking. And yet I went ten months without drinking and without AA on my own. And yet, during that time, I wasn't comfortable. I couldn't handle sobriety. And so I went back to drinking, and I went back to drinking every time.
And that was my problem, not quitting. It was staying quit. That's the problem. And the only way that I could stay quit was when I finally got to AA. And you people taught me how to handle sobriety. As a matter of fact, I think that this would help a lot of people in the outside world who are always wondering, you know, why do you continue to go to those meetings? Why do you go to a convention like this?
You haven't had a drink in 18 years. Well, the reason, of course, is that not because I've got a drinking problem. I don't have a drinking problem. I haven't had a drinking problem for 18 years. And I don't think most of the people in this room have a drinking problem anymore. So long as we stay away from a drink one day at a time and go to meetings, we don't have any drinking problem. But we've got the problem of living with sobriety every cotton-picking day of our lives.
And that's why we come to these meetings, and that's why we come to these conventions. And this is what AA is really all about for me. Well, as I say, I was born down here in Kansas. And the only thing notable about my childhood, I guess, other than the fact that I was an only child,
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I was interested to hear again, to hear Sherry say this, it's surprising how often you hear that from these platforms, you know it. But we certainly, I came from loving parents, neither of whom had an alcohol problem. The only thing that was unusual about my childhood was that we moved around a lot. And my parents would move almost every year. I moved every single year up until the time that I entered high school.
And the result of this, really, was that I had trouble feeling a part of the people around me, I guess. I was an introverted, skinny, shy kind of a kid anyway. And when we would move into a new home and a new location and I'd go to a new school, of course the kids in the school, the other kids in the school, would test me out, you know, which really means beat me up. And so I spent a good deal of time getting beat up, actually.
And I'm not implying that I had an unhappy childhood. Really, I didn't. But I would just find my way painfully into this little world that I lived in and I would eventually, of course, develop a friend or two so that I was really beginning to feel warm and comfortable with the persons around me. And then my father would pick up stakes and we'd move on to the next town and I'd go to the next school and they would test me out in the same way.
And this was sort of what went on. Now, I tell this because I think it's significant because a couple of things happened to me as a result. One was that I kind of retreated into a world of my own and I became a great daydreamer and I did a lot of reading. I sort of retreated into the world of books and of movies. Man, I was a great movie goer. I went to every movie there was. And I took my dreams and my fantasies right off of the silver screen and carried them with me clear up until the time that I came into AA, I think.
The other thing that happened to me was that I became a kind of an overachiever. I mean, I got my strokes from my family and all my relatives and so on from doing well in school. And so I did very well in school. And as a result of their praising me, I acquired very early a very exaggerated idea of my own worth and a very exaggerated idea of my own level of achievements. Now, I think that this unrealistic picture of myself contributed greatly to my being a sitting duck for alcoholism when it came along.
Well, in this overachieving, I'm a writer by trade and I wrote an article when I was still in college at about age 20 and sold it to a national magazine in New York. It was picked up by the Reader's Digest. It happened to be on a controversial subject and the newspapers picked it up and for a brief period I was a kind of a national celebrity. And this was very heady stuff for a kid 20, 21 years old.
And this combined with my fantasies that I had gotten from the silver screen made me think that New York was my apple and that I would head there as soon as I got out of school, which is exactly what I did. It was in the recession years and the only job that I could get was with this large oil company and I was editor of their company magazine, doing a very good job for a kid of my age. In fact, I thought that I was a sort of a boy wonder.
And I think really that that idea was shared by some of the people around me back there in those very early days. But this is very dangerous stuff for the potential alcoholic, let me tell you. Now, I had done some drinking in school, but when I got to New York, of course, I was thrown in with people who were older than I was. I was just 21 at the time and most of the people in the office were in their 30s or 40s.
So they would go down for their evening Manhattan at the bar and it seemed like if I was going to be this man about town and this sophisticated character that I pictured myself to be, I would go down and join them too. So I was very ready to do so. So I would go down and have my Manhattans and so what I'm saying is that at age 21, I became a daily drinker. And that was, of course, to be my pattern clear up until the time that I came into AA.
From that time on, with the exception of the war years, I don't think there was a day that I didn't have a drink. And I quickly began to see that this made me what I was a man. That this made me what I was imagining myself to be in my dreams.
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I was this sophisticated man about town in New York so that when I, my greatest values in life were based on the fact that I could go into a bar and the bartender would, before I could order it, would shove across my regular, your regular Mr. P. oh yes, this was the greatest thing that could absolutely happen in all this world. It was, it exceeded only the thrill of going into a restaurant and having the maitre d' recognize you and call you by name and lead you to a table. Of course, you had to pay kind of heavy for this, but it was worth every single penny of it. And to wear the best clothes that you could wear, whether you could afford them or not, and to be a gambler. I wasn't a semi-pro gambler, but I was just a gambler, always playing for higher stakes than I could possibly afford.
But this is building on this image that I had of myself. Well, the war came along a few years later and I went into the Navy. Thank you very much for getting me into the 2nd Navy here. I was a gunnery officer on a destroyer escort and on our ship we didn't drink, but when we got ashore we sure did make up for it. I got into the first disciplinary problems that I ever had with drinking in the Navy. This happened when we were on convoy duty and we stopped off in the Azores and we went ashore and we went sightseeing in the afternoon in a native open air taxi, waving the wine bottles around and drinking out of them as we cruised around the island doing the sightseeing.
We got back to the town of Horta that night and we really painted that town red. I was switched from the wine to the native brandy, which tasted exactly like kerosene. But it sure did the job and I was bent badly out of shape when I started back for the ship that night. It was the result that when I got there I got violent and sick and I just made a mess of myself and of the entire wardroom. I found myself up before the captain's mast and heard him saying, Pearson, you're a good officer but you drink too much three days in hack. Which meant that when I got to New York and I was dating Betsy at that time and I wanted to go out and have a good time with Betsy in New York, not this miserable little village of Horta, I was locked in my room with a Marine guard at the door. Not quite as bad as the local jail, but it was my first trouble with alcohol.
In the last year of the war, Betsy and I were married and I was on leave from the ship briefly. She liked to drink and I liked to drink, so most of our courtship was held in bars and nightclubs at the fancy night spots of New York and Norfolk, Virginia. When we were married we had a few days honeymoon while I was on leave. Just to show you how I tried to carry this fantasy world along with me, during the time that we were on our honeymoon down in the mountains near New York, I had an iced magnum bottle of champagne in a silver bucket by the bedside, day and night, for five days.
When the war was over and I came back to New York, we continued this kind of partying, but heck, everybody that we knew drank a lot. I switched to martinis and we used to mix up a little pitcher of those when I'd come home at night and finish them off, and sometimes the way it was going. But something was happening to my life. I wasn't really too aware of it at the time, but I was beginning to have troubles with my life. This was when I was about 29 years old, and what was happening was this. For one thing, I was having trouble handling criticism. I'm a writer and every writer has editors, and the job of an editor is to pick the writer's copy apart. This is just part of the game. But to me, this was agonizing, and every time that I ever was edited or criticized or reprimanded, it was something I just couldn't
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take. But I did find that if in my anger and my resentment and my self-pity, if I took a drink, it kind of made the whole thing a little more bearable, and I could handle this criticism a good deal better. So when this kind of thing happened, the first thing I'd do is reach for that bottle. Another thing that happened was that I found myself beginning to lie. Not terribly important lies, but just almost lie for the sake of lying, telling my wife and other people just untruths about where I had been or what I'd been doing. I think there's a good old boy, one of the first hundred people in A.A. who's still alive back in our part of the country, and he always says in his talk, he says, us alcoholics have a goosy conscience, and I'd buy that. I think we do have a goosy conscience, and that's one of the problems that we run into with this problem of guilt and remorse, it seems to saddle us so.
So I was having that trouble, and I had a lot, I don't know about you, but I had a lot of trouble with shakes and tremors, I mean real bad. I think a lot of it was due to drinking, but I think some of it was a genuine neurosis, because I got to where I not only couldn't sign my name if somebody was looking at me, I couldn't even eat soup. When I would start to reach for the soup, I would sprinkle it all over the room, and I got to the point that it wasn't just shakes, it was the leaps, and I couldn't reach for it. Somebody's hysterical over there, she's been through it too. And I couldn't reach for a drink and be sure that I was going to get there. So I did find that if I was troubled with these shakes, that if I took a drink, boy, it just moved right out, and I just didn't have any more trouble. I could eat soup or sign my name or any of those great things that all the rest of the world was doing. So from that moment, I was really hooked, because from that moment I could never be really not under the influence of alcohol, or I simply couldn't function in this world. So another problem that I was having at this time was with this image of my own importance and my own level of achievement, because I had these great expectations of myself of setting the world on fire, and I had a very good job, and I was doing fine, but somehow my career, which had started out this way, had really leveled off, no doubt, to this drinking pattern that was developing. But it was a painful thing, because I had these high expectations of myself and my performance wasn't quite living up to this, and so there was a gap in there. And I found very early that if I just had these couple of drinks or after two or three martinis, it really didn't seem to matter very much. Now, there's a great danger connected with this, because the more that you drink, the more unrealistic your expectations of yourself become, and the more that you drink, the poorer your performance becomes. And therefore, the bigger this psychic gap that we have, and therefore, the more that we have to drink to close that gap. And the more that we drink, the higher the expectations, the lower the performance, the more we have to drink, and the first thing you know, you are in this fatal kind of a snowballing situation that I found myself in. To give you an idea of how I was having trouble just coping with life generally, I'd like to tell you about something that happened. This happened actually somewhat later in my drinking career, but it was very typical of the way that I handled most of the crises in my life at this time. This happened to be when Betsy's parents were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, and though they lived out here in Salina, Kansas, they were coming back to celebrate it in our part of the country at our house. And all of Betsy's large family were gathering there for this family reunion. I was daily drunk and in pretty bad shape at this time, and Betsy said to me, she never did bug me about my drinking, never, in all the time that I drank.
She was dying, she was inside, she was desperate, but she never bugged me about my drinking. But on this particular day, she said, Dear, you know that tonight we're going to have the big
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night for Nana and Bumpa, and all the family's going to be here out in back on the patio when you come home tonight. And just as a favor to me, this time try not to have too big a lunch. That was a code, you understand, and I knew what she meant. That day I went off with my usual load on already, and through the day I had my usual drink. I had a very big lunch indeed, no food, but a very big lunch indeed. I got back on the commuter train that night and rode home in the bar car with the result that when I got off the train that night, my coat was buttoned up wrong, and I was staggering off the train and glazed eyed. I know it just broke her heart, but she was instinctively al-anon enough to know that there was nothing much she could do about that at the time, so we simply drove home. When we got to the house, everybody was indeed gathered out in back, and you understand, here I am, this little only child, and was surrounded by this great large loving family, and it was really something that was very hard for me to handle apparently, so of course I had to go in and get another drink, which I needed real badly, to go out and join the party. Well, I don't remember what happened too clearly for the next half hour or so, but I do know, and I do remember this fairly clearly, that a half hour later they dragged me out from under the grand piano, where I had taken refuge clutching my drink to my breast for fear that somebody was going to take it away from me, which they were. And as a result, the next thing I knew, I was sent to my room for the rest of the night. I was at this time 42 years old, so I was having a lot of trouble coping with life. At one point in here we moved down to the city of New Orleans for a year. Every time I go down to do the planning on your 1980 International Convention, boy, it sure does bring back, it plays a lot of tapes in my head of those days on Bourbon Street down there when I was drinking in these bars that opened in the war of 1812, and have been open 24 hours a day, seven days a week ever since, and smell like it. But it's a great town. You go to breakfast down there, and they hand you the menu, and it says up at the top, Ramos, Gin, Fizz, Sazerac. This is the first course of the New Orleans breakfast, and that's just the way it was. Man, that's my kind of town, I'll tell you. I went down there with a man-sized drinking problem, and a year later I came back a raving alcoholic, I kid you not. It was only a few years after this. We were living in Connecticut, I was working in New York, commuting back and forth, completely dependent on booze for making every move of my day and night. At this time I developed what I thought might be a tumor here in my abdomen. It was a great big lump hanging down here. It worried me. I was way overweight, and had a big, fat belly anyhow, but I could feel this thing in there, and that worried the heck out of me. Finally I screwed up my courage and I went to the family doctor, and he fell around in there and I was lying there. He asked me this to me rather foolish question. He said, he was a family friend of ours, and he partied with us, and he said, Bob, how much do you drink? Unlike the typical AA story, I didn't say a couple of beers or anything. I really totaled it up in my head the best I could. I said, oh, eight or nine drinks a day. I didn't tell him that each one of those really was a double. My drink at this time was vodka chased with Valentine's ale, which is a sort of a Russian boilermaker, an invention of my own, but it really does the job, too. I tell you, it killed me. So I said, eight or nine drinks a day.
Well, this doctor was a very abstemious kind of a guy. He would have a glass of white wine. of a guy who, you know, he would have a glass of white wine on Saturday night, and that was pretty big for him, so when I said eight or nine drinks a day, he'd have taken them back,
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you know, and he said, you mean every day? And I said, sure, every day. And he said, I think we know what's wrong with you. So he gave me a liver test, and of course, you know, it was a badly impaired liver. Well, he sat me down and he read the riot act to me and told me that for me booze was poison, I couldn't drink again, I had to quit from that moment on or I was going to die. And this was the time that, sure enough, I went home and I didn't drink, and I didn't go to AA, and at that time I was so dependent on booze that I, I used to have nightmares that I might end up going to a jail, or going to a hospital, where I might not be able to get a drink maybe for an hour or two. And I knew that I would absolutely go out of my skull if this happened to me. And yet, under the influence of this fear that the doctor had given me, somehow or other I was able to quit, and I quit for this ten-month period without any real trouble, except that, like Kerry was saying about his pledge times this afternoon, during that time I was, I was uncomfortable, and I was resentful of the people who were drinking around me. And worst of all, these problems of coping with life continued to happen. I, I still had trouble with my tremors, but no booze to help them out. I still had trouble with, with camming criticism, with meeting people, I still had to go out to social events where I'd always had to bolster myself with a couple of drinks and now I couldn't. I had to make business presentations where I always bolstered my courage with a couple of drinks and now I couldn't. And so life was very difficult for me to deal with without drinking, because like so many, for so many of us, for me, booze, alcohol, was not a problem. Hell, it was the solution to my problem. It was really what enabled me to live. So at the end of ten months, I had been going regularly to the doctor to get these check-ups, and at the end of the ten months, he said, really looks good. He said, your liver has recovered just about as much as it will ever recover. I was ready for him.
I said, as casually as I could, I said, John, does this mean, oh, you know, on a hot summer day when I've been out cutting the yard, maybe I could have a little cold beer? I said, when we're entertaining, it would sure be nice to have a fine wine with dinner, which was a crock. I had never drunk that way. But he was uneasy about this. He's learned a lot more about alcoholism since, but at that time he was just uneasy about this. He said to me the fatal words to the alcoholic, he said, well, Bob, one won't hurt you. One won't hurt you. So I left his office and I got on the train and I tore into town and I went down to the English Grill Bar in the concourse of the Rockefeller Center, which was the meeting place of my regular morning breakfast club. I went in and said, Sam, set them up, we're in business again. So he shoved over my regular Mr. P.
I had it, and sure enough, one didn't hurt me. You know the story, you've heard it a thousand times. Had another week or so later, and nothing happened. It became around the Christmas season, and whoever heard of going to a Christmas party without having a couple of drinks, and so I took a couple of drinks and nothing happened. After Christmas, after I had a few more of these Christmas parties, I went away on a business trip, and it was about two weeks, and I came back and I was drinking just as hard and just as desperately and just as insanely as I had been when I went to see the doctor. Worse, really, because now I had to go underground.
As I have intimated, I used to like to drink in the best restaurants and the best bars and the best clubs of New York City. Now, I couldn't go to those places because I wasn't supposed to be drinking, you understand. I had always hidden bottles, but now I had to really go underground, and where I had hidden small bottles, these 4-ounce nips of lemon-flavored vodka that they
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sell to get around the law in New York, which I had always bought and secreted in all the pockets of my raincoats and my suits, now I had to start carrying fifths or quarts of vodka. I carried them in my suitcase, in my briefcase that I went in to work with. I always had it with me. Instead of going into the fancy bars and the fancy restaurants, now when I went into the city in the morning, I would struggle in, sweating and miserable on the train, hoping that nobody would come in and speak to me. I couldn't have stood that. So I would just make it into town, and when I would get there, I would get out of the train and make it across the big waiting room of Grand Central Station and down the stairs into the grubby men's room and into one of the stalls in there and lock the door and take the bottle out of the briefcase, take the brown bag out and get the top off of the bottle and get it up, shaking to my lips with this vodka dripping down my chin, just so I could get something in me so that I could get those extra six blocks to the office. Of course, when I got there, I couldn't go down as was my usual pattern when everybody else went for a coffee break. I would simply go down in the elevator and down to the English Grill and have my little nip with my friends at the breakfast club down there.
But now I couldn't do that any longer. So I again had to resort to this bottle that I was carrying with me, and the only place that I could drink it safely was in the men's room, there, too. So every time that I went to the men's room, I had to take my briefcase with me. I sickened very badly during these two years. My doctor told me that if I went back to drinking this way, he said, what's going to happen to you, and he described it in vivid detail, was that my liver, which was now cirrhotic, I had cirrhosis of the liver, your liver will no longer allow the blood to pass through, the blood will seek passage through other veins in your body, that's too much strain on them, they will break and you will die of internal bleeding. Horrible as this was, I had no choice, I had to go on drinking, so I said, well, you know, I'm trying to eat, which I wasn't, I had completely given up eating by this time, I just simply couldn't face food, I was just getting along on almost nothing and eating, and yet getting fatter all the time. I was trying to take vitamins, I was trying to fool, I was trying to beat the system by filling my body with vitamins, but the booze was burning them away, so I was just getting sicker and sicker. And what was happening were all of the terrible symptoms of cirrhosis of the liver, which includes you do bleed a lot. I became an external bleeder, I got bad nosebleeds, I almost literally bled from the eyes, I developed spontaneous bruises all over my body. Some of these were because I kept stumbling over furniture and knocking in the walls, but part of it was because the capillaries, simply your blood loses the ability to coagulate, so you just bleed from your capillaries underneath your skin and you get these great big bruises all over you. My belly was swollen up like a great big basketball was in there, and my arms and legs had kind of shriveled, the desiccation, they call it, of your arms and leg muscles. I became very weak. I got to the point where there was a hot water faucet in our house that turned on pretty hard and turned on and off. I got so it couldn't turn on and off the hot water faucet in my house.
I was doing a lot of traveling at this time, mostly by train in those days, and I got to where I couldn't lift up my own bags to get them up on the train and down again, and I was just literally dragging around. I was a sick, sick person. One of the things that happens, of course, is that your sex life goes to pot, because your liver controls that, too. So things were in really, really bad shape. I remember at this time waking up in the middle of the night, and I wonder how many of you will relate to this. If you pass out in the regular early part of the evening and get
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a few hours' sleep, and then about 2 o'clock in the morning you wake up and you are filled with fears and you are filled with dread. There were things swimming in front of my eyes, all kinds of funny little shapes. I was dying for a drink, but I didn't dare get up. We sleep in a double bed and Betsy was there next to me, and I knew that I just couldn't get up and get a drink. I was just filled with terrible dread of what was going to happen in the morning and what was going to happen the next day. I had the feeling that something terrible was going to happen, but I didn't know what. I was just sort of spending my life fending off whatever terrible was going to happen to me. The way that I fended it off was mainly with the booze bottle.
Sometimes Betsy would be crying there in the bed next to me. She would be weeping, and I knew what she was being weeping. She was weeping about, she was thinking, whatever is going to become of us, what is going to become of me and the children? I knew that this was all my fault, but somehow or other at that stage I just had to shrug and say, well, that's just the way it is. I had no choice but to drink, and if this was what it was doing, that's just the way the ball bounces, that's all. So I was dragging along in this fashion for two years. Then I went on a business trip out to Chicago, and I was drinking pretty desperately, and I was helling around pretty desperately also. I was working all day and carousing all night, even without the booze, it would have nearly killed me, I guess. But with the booze, what the doctor had said would happen did happen. What happened was that I had a massive esophageal hemorrhage, and I lost half the blood in my body in about two hours, vomiting it, losing it rectally in every way. I remember sitting in a little park, this was in October, and it was a bleak time, a bad gray day, and I was sitting in my overcoat in a little park across from the Blackstone Hotel, which is where I was staying.
I was going behind the bushes to vomit blood every little while. I was really sort of in and out of consciousness by this time. This had been going on most of the day, and this was afternoon. What was on my mind was just wallowing in self-pity, really. I was feeling, Oh, my God, this is going to happen to me, and I deserve it, and it's just as well that I do go ahead and die. I was rationalizing it, thinking, Well, Betsy is young and pretty, and she can get another husband, and he'll be a better father to my children, and this kind of thinking.
But there I was, I was 1,300 miles from home, this lonely man I was talking about earlier, certainly setting in on me. I was in Chicago, and I kept thinking, Who wants to die in Chicago? I left the hotel, called our house doctor, and boy, he didn't have to take but one quick look at me to know what was wrong with me. The next thing I knew, the sirens were going and the ambulance had come, and the men were there with the stretchers, and they rolled me off my bed onto the stretcher, didn't even let me pick up my glasses or my wallet. I went with a pair of socks and a pair of shorts to the hospital, for God's sakes, and everything else left behind. They had bottles from hooks draining into my arms, and the lights were going, and off I went to the hospital.
I was there for 2 or 3 days, and I was getting somebody else's blood in me by the pint, pint after pint. After a few days the bleeding stopped and I got all this blood in me, and I began to feel noticeably better. The doctors really read the riot act to me. They told me that if I continued drinking, that it would be the end of me. Indeed, if I even had another drink, it might well be my last. And believe me, after this experience, I had learned my lesson. Right?
Yeah, you're right. I got back home and I didn't drink. I didn't drink for a couple of months, but just as I
[00:45:01]
said in the beginning, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that I couldn't quit drinking, couldn't stay quit drinking, because it was football season and it wasn't Nebraska, but it was a yo-yo game that we were going up to and a whole crowd of us were going up and everybody else was going to have a drink, and who ever heard of going to a football game without a drink? So I took that one drink. The progression was going on in spades, and within a few days I was drinking again in this mad, desperate way that I had before.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, I ended up having two more of these esophageal hemorrhages. The second one was even worse than the first one, but I was close to the hospital and got to the hospital immediately this time. And in the middle of the night, I must digress a little bit, because just the other day, just within the last two months, I went back to Greenwich Hospital and I was having a mole or something removed from my chest here the other day, absolutely nothing. But to be admitted to have this done, they had to take my name, and there was a nurse who was taking this information down. She looked at this name and said, Oh, Bob P., you're a friend of so-and-so's, aren't you?
Mentioning a man in AA or a man with a drinking problem. I said, Yeah, I'm a friend of his. She said, I remember you. And she said, You were in here for reading, weren't you? And I said, Yeah, I was. But how could you possibly remember me 20 years ago or so from all of the thousands of people that you see in and out of here? And she said, I remember you because I was a nurse on the 5th floor at that time, and I remember when they rang the code 500 on you, which means they sound this alarm that brings everybody, the oxygen and the doctors and the priests and everybody, comes running, because it means the patient is dying. And they rang a code 500 on me that night in Greenwich Hospital. And this nurse said to me the other day, and you fooled them. And I said, Yeah, amazing. Then she said to me, and this is her word, she said, You know, we get thousands of people in here with esophageal bleeding. She said, They all die. That's just the way she said it.
So on this particular occasion, after having my arms strapped down and intravenous feeding in one arm and blood transfusions in the other, again, after four or five days, they let me up and declared me what they call ambulatory. So I pulled on my pants and my shirt and my shoes, and I ambulated out of the hospital and down to the corner liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka and smuggled it back into the hospital and put it into the wastebasket in my room and took off my clothes and crawled back into bed. That afternoon, Betsy called me and immediately called the doctor, and she said, Pierce is drinking. And the doctor said, There, there, he couldn't possibly be drinking. He's in the hospital. And she said, I don't care, I know he's been drinking.
And of course, she could tell from 50 miles away from the first word on the phone that I'd been drinking any time, and particularly so in this case. So there's the insanity of this disease, my friends. I still have the bandages on my arm from the blood transfusions and was merrily sucking away on the vodka bottle in my bed. But it wasn't all laughter and fun and games. When I left the hospital that time, they took me down to the entrance in a wheelchair, and I remember sitting there and thinking, now here I was. My boss at work had given me a couple of warnings by this time. My children avoided me. I had three children at this time, young children.
They were avoiding me because I was tyrannical one minute and over-affectionate the next. Most of our friends had pretty much given up on us. Our social life had come to a halt. Betsy was desperate. What was I thinking about when I left the hospital? I was thinking, I wonder if she threw it all out. I wonder if she's put a lock on the cabinet. I wonder if I can get a drink as soon as I get home. That was all I was thinking about, because, my friends, I was an alcoholic, and that's all we can think about, is where that next drink is coming from. Well, I had one more esophageal
[00:50:06]
after this time, but my doctor at this time finally said, I cannot be responsible for your life any longer. He said, there's only one thing left for you to do, and that's go to a psychiatrist. Well, I fought this, but he insisted, and so I went to a psychiatrist. Here's where one of the miracles of my own experience and one of the greatest evidences of the higher power working in my life took place, because the psychiatrist that he sent me to, he sent me to him because he happened to practice in the same suite of offices as my doctor.
That's the only reason he sent me to him. But you know what his name was? Dr. Harry Thiebaud. Isn't that incredible? The one professional person in the whole world who knew more about alcoholism and, more importantly, more about AA than any other professional person in the world probably at that time, was the man to whom I was sent. And as a matter of fact, he was at that very time serving as a non-alcoholic trustee on the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous.
But of course, he didn't let me know that. He simply tried to get me to admit that I might possibly have a little problem with booze, something that I refused to admit. I certainly wasn't an alcoholic, and I was having a little tough luck because I happened to have cirrhosis of the liver, but I thought that must be because I was malnourished in some way and not because I drank. And so I was giving him a hard time. As a matter of fact, I only went to him for two visits, and after the second visit he asked Betsy to come in. She said to Betsy, I can't reach this man. He has an iron curtain drawn between himself and the real world.
He said the only thing that will help him is Alcoholics Anonymous. And so he persuaded me to let him call a friend of his who was to become my sponsor. At your General Service conference I've heard discussions at some length over whether it is right or wrong for us in AA to accept people where the doctor has done the calling, not the person himself. My God, if they hadn't accepted that call from Dr. Harry Thiebaud, I simply wouldn't be standing here tonight. So I went to AA, and I liked it. I heard some marvelous speakers.
I went to several meetings that first week, and I had this wonderful man who was taking me around. He was certainly full of the joy of living. He was a tremendous man. He was the town council of our town in Greenwich. He was an officer in the city government and black belt karate, and had a big guardsman's mustache that he twirled, and he drove a Porsche car. He was the absolute epitome of the joy of living in sobriety. This got through to me a little bit, and I began to perk up with some interest. I heard a few things, I guess, but there was only one problem. I didn't stop drinking. I was continuing to nip away during all of this while, and Betsy was getting more and more desperate. We are now in the first week of July of 1961. Toward the end of that first week, we come to the day of July 3rd, and in the little town of old Greenwich, Connecticut, they have a yearly fireworks display. In 1961, they happened to have their 4th of July fireworks on the 3rd of July. This is confusing to start with, but that's the way that it was.
We were scheduled to attend. We were supposed to go to a picnic with a bunch of other families, have the kids and wives and husbands. Of course, I wasn't supposed to be drinking, but I was sort of zonked out most of the time and most of that day, certainly. We got over to this picnic, and I located the vodka bottle about there in the kitchen, and it was pretty handy because everybody else was outside and the drinks were in the kitchen.
I hit that bottle pretty hard, and I was really in bad shape by the time that the picnic was over, and it was time to go down to the fireworks display. We were late, so we piled the family
[00:55:01]
in the car and drove down there. The fireworks display had already started and it was dark, and I let the family out. Then I went and parked the car, and I got back down to where everybody was out in this park, sitting on their camp stools and their blankets. I was confused. If we had made arrangements with Betsy as to where I was supposed to meet the family or where they were going to sit, I couldn't remember. So I started looking around for them, and as I say, it was dark and I was very unsteady on my feet, staggering and falling.
And so I would stagger along and look around for them in this sea of bodies, and I couldn't really see them. Then off would go this great blaze in the sky, and the fire would trickle down. In that light, I'd look down and I'd see these people looking up at me like this. Then it would be dark again, and I would stumble around some more, and I couldn't find the family. Then off would go another one of these big things blinding me. It was, to me, like a scene from Daddy's Inferno. It was absolutely hell. After just a few minutes of this, it went bam, bam, bam, and all these fireballs came down and the celebration was over.
The band stuck up Forest Bangle Banner, and everybody stood up and folded their blankets and put their kids in their carriages, and they went home. And there I was. In my fog, I thought, but Betsy and the kids, they must have gone back to where the cars parked. And I thought, no, because they don't know where the cars parked. And I thought, my God, I don't know where the cars parked. So I just went trailing off after the last of these people who were going up the hill, pushing their little perambulators. And I got about halfway up this hill, and something that you people had said to me in these few AA meetings that I had gone to, hit me like a ton of bricks. And that was, my life was unmanageable.
So I dealt with this in my usual manner for dealing with all crises. I sat down on a rock by the side of the road and cried. And it was thus that my sister-in-law came and found me and put her arm around me and said, There, there, dear boy. And she led me back to where, indeed, the family were, where the car was parked. And we went off home and went into the house, our grim little procession. And there in our kitchen was one of the classic sights of AA. That is to say, there was a friend of mine that I had drunk with for years, especially on the barcar on the train. And Old Don, who was a real drinking buddy of mine, was sitting there at our kitchen table with the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous open before him.
There was only one catch to this classic scene, and he was drunker than I was. He, too, had been coming to AA meetings, unbeknownst to me, for the last week or so. He, too, had been down at the fireworks demonstration, and he had seen the bad shape that I was in, so he had hurried home, and he was making his first full sip. Lecture 11 Justice and the Three Degrees of Grace 10 Actually, he didn't make it for another seven or eight years, and when he did, I was his sponsor. And he is sober today, thank God.
He's sober today, thank God. The next day I came down, this was before the days of what they call intervention or whatever they call it these days in professional alcoholism circles, but when I came down the stairs the next morning, there waiting for me at the bottom was my wife,
[01:00:04]
my doctor, they had been in touch with my minister, they had been in touch with my boss, and everybody was agreed that I was going to be committed. That was the word they used, committed. The only question was where? That was the only option that I had. And he said it! So they argued this over for a while, and finally they gave me a little ability to indicate an opinion. Somewhere in the week that I had attended AA, somebody had poked me in the chest and they had said, High Watch Farm is where you belong. High Watch Farm is the granddaddy of all of what they call now rehabilitation facilities or treatment centers, and in those days they called them drunk farms. It is located up in Kent, Connecticut, and you can read about it in AA comes of age, there's a lot about it in there. It was one of these places that turned out to be run completely along AA lines. I mean, but completely. That is the only program that they have.
So I knew nothing about this except that I knew that they had a compulsory stay of only 5 days. So the other places that my wife and my doctor were discussing had 30 days, 90 days, 6 months. So I opted for High Watch Farm. And they took me away, figuratively kicking and screaming, full of rage and anger and resentment and self-pity, but really mostly just full of absolute hopelessness and helplessness, and there was no future in this world for me.
But off I went to High Watch Farm, and it was up there that I really began to somehow or other come out of this shell that I had built around me, and this iron curtain that was between me and reality began to raise. I read my first grapevine article, I read the big book for the first time, the first 164 pages up there. And one morning I even did the steps, all the steps. You know, don't knock it, it's a beginning. Most of all, everybody up there were either guests, as they called them, like myself, or recovered alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I began to see that there was indeed hope to live a happy life, even though you didn't drink. And this was a tremendous discovery for me. As I said earlier at this meeting, a couple of days ago, I heard somebody say, You're not giving something up, you're getting rid of something. And when I accepted the truth of that, that really turned the key that changed the attitude within me toward acceptance of this disease. So when I left High Watch Farm, I went back to my home group in Greenwich and began to go to meetings, reluctantly at first, but there were some wonderful people who would keep calling me up and saying, Bob, I'm going over to the Tuesday night meeting tonight, would you like to go along? Oh, gee, I'm sorry, I'm tired. Well, I think you'd better go, I'll be there about 8 or 10, and I'd go.
And these wonderful people just kept bearing down on me, and I kept going to meetings, and I kept going to meetings until I began to want to go to meetings, and wanted to go to more meetings, and I became very active from the very beginning in AA. After just a few months, I went to my first state convention, which was up in Nudist, Connecticut, and I began to see that there was a world outside of my own home group. It was a tremendously exciting time in my life, and I began to just get sober one day at a time, one after another.
So the last drink that I had was on July 4th, which appropriately enough is Independence Day in 1961. At the time that I went to the High Watch farm, I thought this was one of the greatest ironies of the world, that this would be called Independence Day. Later on, my sponsor used to introduce me, and he always said, this is the man who started to get sober on Independence Day,
[01:05:04]
and it's an Independence Day, a wonderful day to start to be sober. That was my cue always to get up when he would introduce me, and I would say, Wes, any day is a wonderful day to start getting sober. So I began to enjoy the fruits of sobriety, which are far too numerous for me to tell you about today. I would like to say, however, that Betsy began going to Al-Anon at about this same time while I was up at High Watch farm. She had known nothing about alcoholism up to that point.
She liked to tell her Al-Anon story. She said that was the only time in her life that she got skinny. She didn't have any problem at all with weight. She got skinny in those days. That's what the worry and the desperation had done to her. So she began to go to Al-Anon and began to recover in Al-Anon at the same time that I was recovering in AA. It was the beginning of a whole beautiful new phase of our marriage. We have always had a good marriage, even through the drinking days, but we are now on an entirely different basis, as all of our lives are on an entirely different and really spiritual basis when we are following the joint program of AA and Al-Anon. I thank God that that this miracle happened when it happened, because my oldest child, our oldest son, was at that time just going into high school. So at the time of his life that he needed a father and that the other kids needed a father, through their teen years I was available to be a father to them.
And for this I'll be forever grateful. The benefits that have come to me in the intervening years are simply too many to enumerate, but I must say that of course one of the greatest now is to work for you. I, as a worker at your general service office, I work for AA. I love AA. It has all these years been the main thing in my life, and now to be able to make a living at the thing that you love best has got to be one of the greatest blessings of God that could possibly happen. But I think the greatest single benefit that came to me is to come back to just what that man in Texas said to me that day, that AA teaches us how to handle sobriety. And that's what happened when I came to AA and began to be exposed to the AA program and to you people. And again, it happens in so many ways that I can't begin to enumerate them all. But let me just pick off a few examples. One is that when we come here, we are told that we can't afford these resentments and self-pity, that these are the enemies of the alcoholic. And this I believe, because they were my enemies in my drinking days. And we are taught here how to get rid of these poisons out of our system and to replace them with positive thoughts. And we are freed from the guilt and the remorse that almost all of us come in here with. And of course, the way that this happens is through the practice of AA's twelve steps of recovery, particularly the inventory step and the fifth step in admitting to God and another human being, the sixth and the seventh step in which we attempt to have God remove our defects of character and our shortcomings, and the ninth step in which we right with the people that we have wronged, and so on. When we come to AA, we are shown how to get our lives off of this merry go-round that they are on, where you are up one minute, I was up way up here, or else I was way down here. And when I was way up here, there was, Whee! Let's have a drink.
And when I was way down here, there was, I may as well be drunk as the way I am. And in AA, we learn to put our lives on an even keel. And it's not the kind of boring, even keel that I pictured it to be before I got here, but it's a beautiful way of life.
[01:10:03]
Lecture 11 Justification and Sanctification 4 We are taught to differentiate between our wants and our needs. This was one of the great things that I learned in the early days with you people, because I guarantee you I was one of the greatest wanters that ever came down the pipe. There was no end to my appetites for the good things of this world. And every time that I would get one of them in a material sense, I would immediately want something else.
So a want was always replaced by a want. But when I came in here, you told me that my wants would perhaps, I would never get my wants, but that a loving God would always supply my needs. And that's what has been true for me for the last years that I've been in the program. And we are granted the serenity to accept the things that we cannot change. And what a blessing this is. It's the way that one is freed from the quickness to anger and the inability to handle criticism that was my great problem. And we are freed of the burdens of the past and the anxieties of the future by learning to live one day at a time. And this is just the distillation of the wisdom of the ages that we're blessed with here.
But I think of all of the ways that you taught me how to handle sobriety, the most important one was to free me of the need to fantasize and to live in an unreal world. This was the way that I dealt with everything in life while I was drinking. I remember once there was a time when due to my drinking that I was expecting a promotion. And instead of my getting the promotion, a man who was working for me got the promotion, and I found myself working for him. I went down to the English Grill and disappeared, and they wouldn't even find me to explain this for a couple of days. But the way that I dealt with this was to stand at the English Grill bar and picture in my mind how I was going to kill the SOB. I was going to smuggle a rifle in and tuck down my trousers.
When he had the habit of working late and when everybody else had left the office, I could see myself going down the corridor and into his office and pointing him and throwing the rifle out the window, and it would shatter on the street below, and they would never know who did it. This tape I played over and over and over in my head as I sat down at the English Grill while he was happily working upstairs and doing a great job, and I was sitting down there dealing with my crisis in this way. But this was the way that I dealt with everything in life, was in this fantasy world. When I came into AA, you taught me that I don't need to live in a fantasy world, that for the first time in my life I could live in a world of reality, and the incredible thing is that this world of reality turns out to be beautiful, absolutely beautiful. What could be more beautiful, I ask you, than this kind of a weekend, for example, with the love and the old friends and the concern and the inspiration and the laughter. What a great day this has been. I got up this morning, I who 18 years ago was lying with both arms strapped down to a table getting blood in my arms at this very time of day, this morning I got up and ran 4 miles, which I do every morning. I go skiing in the winter and sailing in the summer, and I can hear the birds singing, and it's just a beautiful, beautiful world of reality. And as it says in the promises of AA, we will know peace.
And I think that's true. I think that we can handle sobriety because perhaps for the first time in our whole lives we do know peace. We are at peace with ourselves and we are at peace with our fellow man, and we are at peace with God. Thank you.