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Source: DICOBE-00617 – Paul W – AA HISTORY – 1961-01-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00617-paul-w-aa-history-1961-01-15.mp3 Duration: 00:51:44
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Thank you, Bill. My name is Carl W.. I'm an alcoholic. I go to God to help with every way of life and help and tell us here that people like yourself have been serving for 25 years and 2 months and 8 days. One day at a time that a centralist comedian is not taking the first drink. This is Gratitude Month traditionally in AA. It's the month that we give thanks as a nation, as a people. And it has been suggested for a number of years that we talk about gratitude and traditions in this month, but I don't think that I'm going to inflict the traditions on you because I might want to talk to you again.
I don't know. Actually, I never know. Bill asked me what I was going to talk about and I told him about 55 minutes. I guess each one of us in his own way has the gratitude. We have a reason for the gratitude and all of us who are sober know what those reasons are. I'm going to do the talking. I'm going to tell you what my reasons are. Personally, I need to be grateful that God or this high power that I'm now called by has kept me alive long enough to let me get there.
I just barely did. I was more dead than alive when I got here. I'm grateful that I was born at the time that I was because ever since history has been recorded there hasn't been any way out for the alcoholic. We've been the thrives of every civilization that we've been a part of. We've always been lost. We've been cursed. Alcohol isn't nothing to us. Just a few years ago it was not recognized medically or psychiatrically as a disease.
If I'd have been born 50 years earlier, I wouldn't have been here. I wouldn't have been in a place for me to go. I never would have had my 28th birthday part again. I'm glad I was born in this country. When I was born there was about 120 million people here. About 500 million Chinese. If I was there I could have been born a Chinaman. I'm glad that the port train, the 7th and 6th, it's got a line that runs straight from San Antonio down here because I was porting it when I started looking for AA.
There was a water tower right next to where I happened to be and them port trains always had to stop at them water towers in San Antonio to take you. In 1934 I found him. Bill who wrote the big book. He was saying that just about what I was doing in 1934. He was a lot older but he was a hopeless alcoholic. He went in his last drink and he went just about as far as he could go and somebody had found, every doctor who's dead now had found in the hospital group a way to stay sober.
When everyone drank their beer in college and knew all about Bill's drinking and knew how hopeless Bill was and they had been drunk together many times, before everyone was enthusiastic, and not in the sense that we do carousel work now because they didn't know about carousel work then.
[00:05:02]
Hopefully they weren't old, they weren't in a group that met just for the alcoholics. These people in the hospital group were mostly not alcoholics, they were just people that wanted to better themselves. I don't know how old the Oxford movement is really, but everyone had found a way to stay sober. So he invested a dime and went over to see Bill in November of 1934. Bill went to town hospital and now missed this day to get over this last drink. Dr. Sheltworth had told Lewis that he had reached that point where there was no alcohol, it was insanity or death. If he'd lived he would be in confinement.
And the boy couldn't make that bargain for one more drink with Dr. Sheltworth several thousand times and Dr. Sheltworth said, well Bill I'm going to tell you what I'll do. He said, I've got a young guy downstairs that's just starting on that road that you're just about to wind up. So if you go down there and just let him look at you and see what's going to happen to him if he doesn't quit, then I'll give you a drink. You see where I get that expression that many of you have heard me use that nobody's absolutely useless, you can always serve as a horrible example.
And that's what Bill was going to do, was a horrible example. And he went down there and something happened. He doesn't know how to describe it, I heard him cough over time, but whatever it was he thought he was nuts. And he talked to this young guy for a while and went back up there and told Dr. Sheltworth he knew he wouldn't have that drink. For six months he just went around talking to other drinks. He joined this oxford group and he stayed sober.
And maybe at the end of that time he didn't know just exactly why or how or what was happening, but he was sober. And finally they surveilled him to go back to work for the first project he got him by the business, doing an oxford. In May, May the 8th of 19, well actually May the 7th of 1935, Bill was in the Mayflower Hotel, his business venture had completely flopped. He was looking towards the box, there was a bar back there, and just like so many of us he didn't know what to do with himself and he decided to go back home to Sedlock and meet some people.
And then he said if he went back there he would cure me drunk. And he was taking back and forth from the library and there was a soccer ball with a piece or whatever you call it with a list of pieces. And so he started calling these pieces, he said he stayed sober for six months talking to drunks and maybe he could find him a drink to talk to. Just about this time I got out of the Riverside County Jail for my second BWI in California. So I had gotten pretty far down the road in this drunk business too.
I had paid one BWI, I had beaten an assault attempt to murder rat through political tools. I had gotten out of another assault with a deadly weapon rat that somebody else had killed. So I had a lot of trouble with alcohol but I didn't want to quit. Then I got a hold of a man off the heart who was a member of this Oxford group and he told me his story and she was flamboyant and she said come on down, I got one I want to talk to.
So we went out to Ann's family in Ann's mansion and she called Dr. Bob and Ann, Dr. Bob's wife, asked her and she insisted that Dr. Bob come over and talk to this guy from New York. He had a question and Dr. Bob needed it.
[00:10:05]
The man finally chided her and he said he passed out on his kitchen table. So the next day she said I'll have him over there tomorrow. So the next day she did. I heard Dr. Bob say I went over to give him 15 minutes of my time to prove that I was not an alcoholic or not high with over alcohol and they start talking about 5 in the afternoon and they all left in by 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning. And so the first test that Paul paid off, the first one that paid off happened in the 8th of May of 1935.
I talked to a lot of people and worked with a lot of people and finally another one showed up. I like to hear, I heard Dr. Bob say that Bill had been in the Oxford group for 6 months and had been sober for 6 months. So that went on for 2 and a half years and they told me to pray and I prayed. They told me to go to church and I went to church. They told me to confess my sins and I confessed my sins.
They told me to help my fellow man and I helped my fellow man and I got drunk every night. So in 1935 the first 2 members were sober and lying about half sober that year. They got another one, they got the first hiccup and a half hiccup. And then later that year I found out that the first drink was what got me drunk. I didn't know I found this out but I know it now. When I found that out I was hard rock mounted out in California then and we worked 12 days out in the desert and went to town and got drunk for 2 days.
And I went in so much trouble in there and it took about 12 days for my eyes to get unblocked and the eye to go back on my nose and I'd go in there and get it healed again. And I was getting tired of it and so I just, I stayed sober about 6 or 8 weeks on purpose that time. And I stayed sober so I didn't go into town, I just stayed out there on purpose for that 6 or 8 weeks. And so November of 35 I went into town to let those people, I went to go out and touch them. And you know it seems to me that I drank all the time so people would like me.
I would do the things that I thought they wanted me to do so they would like me and I'd wind up getting drunk and doing things that nobody liked, me neither. And I went into all these jams that I had been periodically tearing up and told all these people that I wasn't drinking now and they would all like me, they would all stick to the deal. And I was thinking this yesterday, I'll never forget, you know I was really embarrassed for it. And there was a girl that had gone in one of these jams that I had been in some bars in and her mother was a bartender.
And I just feel that she was a fine high class type of big girl and I don't know what she would, how she would classify her I don't know but she would always want me to buy her a drink you know and buy me one. And I had about ten eggs there but I couldn't figure out how she'd take such a little bit you know and she always got one that cost a dollar and I'd get one that cost two bits or thirty cents. But I loved her.
I got it. And I go in there and she's telling me how hot blooded she is that I ain't drinking anymore. And how nice it is to see them. And I ain't seen them since then. And everybody, it turns out the same thing that happens when they come in here and help me and take me that day. Which is on the 16th of November 1935. It was my 21st birthday. And my boo said we got six or eight weeks and I was boohooed. And I just ran around and reached out to her.
And I was just going around in these places and just eating this crazy ass.
[00:15:04]
But then, you know what happened, one of my old drinking buddies wanted me to come to Texas with him, and I didn't have any reason to come to Texas. I'd left here before we were coming. There wasn't any place here for me. Look, we got right where we came to Texas, and I said, what, what I want to go back to? This was in 1930. The time was tight. So I'm the one who decided, here, I'm making $5.50 a day.
I had banks closed against me, I was making that in Texas. What I want to come back here for? But he was smart, he just stepped around and finally got me to take a drink. And I'll never forget, I hope as long as I live, I lived in the same bar with this same beautiful girl, and I love her so much. She doesn't even find out because I keep basically telling her that I love her passionately, or devotedly, I can put it like that.
Because the women I love passionately, they work very hard. We don't get any less than that, good God. Anyhow, I'm sitting in there, and I haven't treated this thing as yet. I've just been working a little while, you know. And I'm sitting in the middle, and somebody grabs my shoulder. Of course, that's unforgivable. I mean, you've got to fight when they do that to you. And so I was working my arm and leg and kicking and everything, and about that time she came back.
And the disappointment, I can remember, I don't remember what she looked like, but I can remember the disappointment that she felt, that she showed me that face. And she said, I'm so disappointed, I thought she really missed it, she was in a straight face. Well, it's the month of May, I'm still in Charlotte, I don't want to let you come on back to Texas. And Bill went back to New York and started a group back there, Dr. Bob kept the group going in Oxford.
The group in Oxford stayed in the Oxford movement, and they also had a section out of the Oxford movement in New York, so she and I were getting dressed. And Bill would have this blinding spiritual experience, and he thought that everybody had to have one to face over, and every once in a while somebody would have one, and they'd face over it, and face over it a while. While he was doing that, I started crying myself, my mother thought maybe you know that I'd get married, that would stop this dancing.
But the whole idea of contemplating that as a cure for alcohol, let me tell you something, it wouldn't work. And that's the answer. I never loved the first decent woman that I'd ever known. And I loved her just as much as a selfish, self-centered, egotistical, alcoholic, stupid woman who knew about everything herself. And I couldn't go there for her. This is the year that I found out that I no longer had something in me when I drank it.
I no longer did have something in me what happened after I drank, but from this time on I didn't have something in me when I drank. And so, while I'm living with a bad guy, and I know they tell you that you don't love them, that you love them, you wouldn't drink like that. And I don't know that deep down inside you just die with love, son. And every time you sober up and see what this drinking is doing to you, you've got to get drunk to live.
If you didn't love them, it wouldn't bother you so much. You wouldn't have to get drunk to live with it. If you love them so much, you see them wearing the dresses that their sisters wore out in Guilford and the hot robes, and they're living in the little apartments that they can afford on West Island. You know, I was a real conservative, typical alcoholic. The client accidentally was going to take my car, and I turned the radio out of it.
Because that was my home. Now this was money that did not belong to the family. Nobody would work for this money. This was too much. This was too long.
[00:20:01]
And I gave her two and a half of it out of the goodness of my heart. And she thought I should have given her more. And so I had to get drunk with my car. This is the kind of an alcoholic I was. The only thing is to keep drinking. And then I went around getting some of these drunks to have these spiritual experiences, and they went around and they stayed sober a while, and they get drunk. And they don't have any false steps. They don't have any big books.
They don't have any alcoholics around unless they've got six steps that they pass on word of mouth. And then Jim came in, and he said he ain't going to go for any of this God business, this spiritual experience business, and he wants to stay sober, but not that well. And so they start gathering around in various rooms. They were told it was the night. Bill would wake up in the morning, and Jim would tell them, and they would sit around around 8 or 10 or 12, and they would ask questions at one or two o'clock in the morning like we do sometimes, and Bill would answer the questions.
And so they found out that these people that were meeting them were staying sober, and the one that was having these spiritual experiences and sobering up and not doing anything about it was getting drunk again. And so the idea of deep therapy was born. And then Bill had to have everybody having the idea how this thing should be run, and so Bill and Dr. Bob got together in late 1937 and decided that this thing had to be written down in some way so that people could try to find out.
They had some kind of continuity, or coherence here in the culture. And so Bill sat right in the big book. Dr. Bob didn't participate in writing the big book. Dr. Ashton Duke didn't write the big book. It was written in New York, and Dr. Ashton was written there. It would be sent out to Ashton and let him look it over. Of course, you know, he used to have something in here and pass it around and everyone would have been saying something in it.
Just like I wanted to change the big book when I got here. So Bill started writing this big book in late 1938. Well, that whole thing was going on fine. Bill wrote the experiment. Chapter 2 and 3 decided he had to have it. And I was the first to do it if it was needed. And then I said, you know, we've got to have something more than that. And so he went from chapter to the right last week, chapter 4.
For Bill and those like me, and me, because I would imagine that they didn't know I was coming if they wrote that chapter for me. And then it got down to this, how it works, really. And Bill, when he started this out, he said, well, you know, we should have had some paper, and he said, sure, we thought about paper. He said if there was one word that he would change in that big book, it would be, well, he would change that to know.
But when that big book was written, that year in 1938, there were eight people with one year or more of sobriety. There was a hundred people staying sober on these principles, but they didn't have one. That's right. How can anybody read that big book anyway? It was written by Blunt, Carl Blunt, and it was written to eliminate the loopholes, and if you read it pretty closely, you'll find out that they did a terrible job of eliminating.
They closed all of those in a sense. And remember, they did this. There were just eight people in over a year's sobriety. Forty people were sober in New York when that was written. So I heard Dr. Bob in the last talk that he made, I didn't hear him, I heard the tape of it.
[00:25:02]
He said that he had been sober since 1935 until 1939, and this book was published. And since that time, hundreds of thousands of people had stayed sober by these principles, these 12 steps. So he must have been doing what these 12 steps said, and so some of these people must have been doing it. And then he got two steps, and remember they had at that time six steps, and God wasn't making them any of them.
And boy, I was watching those for three or four days, and boy, I was watching mine about that time too. I never will forget, that was the year that the Rangers had kicked me out of the gambling business, and I went in and had that mining going on in San Antonio. It wasn't safe for me to get on the street. There was a lot of things bad happening to me that year. I know one time I got real bad shit that I can remember.
I had already, by this time I had been paralyzed for six weeks, I had been partially blinded, and I had been in some terrible, spiritual agony, mental, emotional, and that's the one particular time I had reached the end of the road. And a man got a doctor up there, and he sat there and he didn't touch me. That was the first time that anybody with any compulsion told me to be in the drunk. And he spent about 30 minutes explaining away the hallucinations, telling me I needed rest.
And the reason I needed rest was because for three days and nights, every time I shut my eyes, my heart would kick beating, and I could feel it kick beating. And so I'd have to open my eyes, and when I did, the wallpaper started marching around the room. And my hearing got so acute that I could hear the gears munching in my wristwatch. And I'd push the alarm clock way over on the other side of the room, and it was jumping up and down every time it kicked, and I'd cut the toothpick in the back of the wrist to stop that flywheel from coming.
You know, things were getting out of hand, my senses were very acute. The call back came across town, and I just knew somebody had got me. But a flywheel, I wish I could hold one for you now. So this is why I think, well, if that doctor had known about AA then, instead of just knowing that I was a sick person, I think that would have been a good time. Now, I still had a sense of that last December AA then.
I still had, oh, I had not much critical strength left because my brain wasn't completely out of it yet. I had moments of sobriety, you know, and still was feeling, and still thought my wife wasn't dying any either. But we didn't know about AA, so I didn't stay sober. And there were days that Bill slept and worried about these steps, and finally he just went home, and he had one of these imaginary horror types that laid down and was laying there all feverish and worried and threatening.
And he was laying there, and he had one of these long legal stress pads on the bedspan, and he said in less than 25 minutes these stress tests were written, almost exactly as we had them. After he got there and got back to the group with him, everybody was waiting in front, so they brought God in here and a bunch of stress, a bunch of stress, and then that third step that made him decree that he'd turn our will and our lives over to the Spirit of God.
And Jim Hayes and that friend, they took God as we understand him, and they took God as we understand him in the 11th step. And it would be that stress that was written that really started to carry the message to others that didn't care, they're alcoholics. They were going to sober up the world whether they were drunk or not. It's typical. That's the way we think. The only way to drink was probably a glass of wine.
When we were in the books with the public, they always started pulling up, they were going to sober up the world, whether they were drunk or not, typically, not the way we think.
[00:30:13]
When we were in the books with the public, they always started pulling up around, they had a group in Philadelphia, and one in New York, one in Baltimore, one in Washington, D.C., and John Lee Rockefeller endorsed this thing. It started early in school, so I was always looking for somebody to hold, so they decided that they were going to find out what the limit was and if there was business, and this was in the year of 1940, the latter part of the year.
Maybe this started in May, because that's the month that me and my wife, I told them somewhere on the street the other night, I got married, came loose in the rain, got caught in a divorce, and remarried to another woman, I always claimed justice was cheap. He was telling me about this picture of him. So anyway, they started doing this, they decided that they were going to find out what the limit was, and so they put Jock on the ground, and all he was a stand-up boy, had a job, and he was just as cool as the two fat boys down there, and he had a whole thing called putting them to rest.
He said about two of them were on the old alcoholic foundation, funny boys, and a lot of them didn't have a job, so they had a lot of time to show him what was going on, and he came out with an article that you probably got to read some of it, Barcelona Literature Fair. He posted last year, published article in Alcoholics Anonymous, several, in all of history, and he came here to Louisiana the last week in January of 1941, and I hit some kind of a bottom that month, about the same time.
I don't know exactly what happened, I had left San Antonio and got to where it wasn't safe for me to be up there anymore, and like I said, well actually I had a job to go to in Corpus, but I wasn't thinking much about work, I wanted to get away from things. I bought a little old farm down in Gonzales County, and I made it 32 miles, and I hit the Sabine jail, I said my first day was Christmas in Sabine jail, and from the time I was about 5 or 6 years old, when I was 25 years, and I don't know what happened to me.
I don't know what happened in the month of January, I know New Year's Day they brought me to the city limits and begged me to come back, and they came and hooded me off in this direction, and I wound up down there on this farm. I know I stayed in this farm for about 10 days, and I don't know how I remember it was 10 days, I don't know, I know that I was down there because it was dark, and there was just one little bitty door, and it was down in the ground, and there was very big timbers on the top of it, and I could guard that door pretty good, and there was some things that were after me.
If I ever got out of that place, someone would pick me, and after 10 days, and I'm saying that because that's the way I remember it, and I don't know how because I don't know how long it's been since I've had a drink. When I came out of the hole that day, I had a huge, huge conversion and went into alcoholic apoplexy, and came out of it with a relatively clear mind. That would be the first time that I'd been able to think rationally for a month, and my dad had saved this article for me to read.
And you see, I had to go through all of these things that had to happen, just at the time they did, just the ways that they did, and I wouldn't be up here tonight.
[00:35:01]
When I went back there in the early 40s, they would have had to hire some parlor boys to carry me off the bed, because there wasn't anybody left that knew me that would have done it. It went back a little bit in 1939, and a lot of part of it they'd covered up in old newspaper, man, in Cleveland. So when they appeared in the news, they got a job down here on the Euston Terrace, and they picked up a collection, bought him a bus ticket, and came down here and wrote a series of articles on the Euston Terrace.
If you go back in the 5s along back in November and December of 39, you can find them, if you can find the 5th and 4th down there. And then January, the 20th of January of 1940, they had their first AA meeting in Euston, and Jack kind of joined and wrote this article, and he kind of really mentioned that there was a group of alcoholics in Euston. I think it was just five or six things that he mentioned, and there was nothing to draw attention to, but they stood out to me that day when I read that article.
My mind was in the state that I got from that article that I wasn't sorry, I was sick. I never did, being sick, was like being called an alcoholic. And if you heard some of the things that people did, you'd know they were calling me, you'd know why, an alcoholic was a nice thing to be called. And I knew from that minute that I was an alcoholic, there was never any doubt in my mind, and I knew that I could go to AA and they'd fix me up.
I didn't know how, I didn't know, I didn't get enough from that article to figure out just how they'd fix me up, and I knew that they'd fix me up if I went. But I also knew that if you were an alcoholic you shouldn't have a drink again, and so I dodged them for a year and a half. But my friends were used to them where they were, and started dodging them here instead of going to Corpus and working down there and dodging down there, it would have been a whole lot easier to dodge them down there because there wasn't any in Corpus until 45.
But I wouldn't have been here if I'd have gone to Corpus, I wouldn't have made it to 45. By the time I got here to AA, and this is why I know that these things happen like this, the police do, Larry had gotten mad at the group, asked to send me in and Larry said there wouldn't be no women in this business, this was going to be free. There were no alcoholic women, they was drunk. There was a moral issue there.
And Larry had to dodge, to goad him down, and not only that, he elected his secretary of the group, and what could he do but quit? He did, that was all when he came back. So if you quit, don't worry, you'll be here if you live long enough to get back. But these things just weren't that good, life turned up to them, and by this time I had reached such an early stage, I mean my station was down, so everything that I did was by instinct.
And everything that I did called for a drink, I was no longer a periodic drunk except when I was in jail. I no longer choked over for a period of time to accumulate money so I could get in a good room, I no longer choked over because I wanted to, I had no control whatsoever, I just drank. And I don't know how to tell you about this guilt that I lived with all my life unless you've felt it, but I must have been born guilty because I don't remember a time when I didn't feel guilty about something.
And at one time I was already in jail, and I already knew how long I was going to be there, and I knew that they couldn't put me any more for that because I didn't know any more of Judge Price. And the judge said, well, did he understand that I was going to be in jail?
[00:40:02]
And I knew that they couldn't put me any more for that because I didn't know any more of Judge Price. And the judge said, well, did he understand that I was going to be in jail? And I started thinking immediately, now what have we got, what have we found out? And I said to the gentlemen, you can't be mercilessly jailed like the way they have us out there, there ain't much you can do to get because of it.
So I was guilty all the time, but I also believe that in some ways that this job that they taught me about, this negative, black, white, and black business, I mean, it had such limitations on it. You should go ahead and do these things that I felt not for a certain period of time and repent and be accepted back in the cold, and I was always going to come back one of these days. But then after you go past a certain limit, well, you just cast into outer darkness, and so I was already in this outer darkness and had been, so I didn't feel like that there was any way back to me, to God.
And then I read this article and it says there is a way back, but I couldn't control my conscience anymore, but the remorse was terrible. You know, I think some of the worst hangovers and where I can tell you about some business that I've had, I think one of them anytime, over the remorse for some of the things that I've done when I was working up, just working up that I could still remember. And so I don't know anyway, I kept working until 1922 and realized by this time the OA in Houston's got a clubhouse, they've got a secretary and they've got a steering committee, the Alcoholic Foundation is doing good, they've decided that the group ought to help support it if they're going to get all the help from there.
And if you were wondering how come this thing was here and you need it, well, that's how come, because they were there to make it possible to move it from, and then some of us came in and we kept it here until you got ready. And so all of these things are necessary, when they ask you for $3 a year, you can get more than four bucks a year, then they want you for a dollar, then they want you for $2, then they want you for $3, you know, I'd sell this for a month.
I don't run that, I used to run that for business, coming home from work, just one day. So that's why OA is here, because they were there. And anyway, this day I got ready, and then after that happened, they just kept telling me again and again what we were like and what happened and what we're like now. I was pretty much what I was like, not just from my viewpoint, but from what everybody else thought about me.
A lot of you heard me talk about, I was one of the three, sorry, I went to the local 84th, I went in for a little time, a few weeks ago, usually back there, he didn't know me then, now he doesn't, until I told him who I was. But I found out that I was one of the three, three of the three sellers, I sobered up in 1932 in AA, and then three days later I sobered up in some other manner, 15 years ago, 17 years ago, and died sober two years ago, in Slim County, going back to North Carolina and got respectable.
And there was a whole lot of them guys that were pointing the finger at us that still don't know what we're about. But who knows? They would never give up on me, never. So while it was, it was time to come into AA then, and I did, and for the first time in my life I began to leave with fear, I began to leave with guilty feelings. Now I think that we say a little bit guilty all the time, well I do, I think that I have a, I think that I have a tolerance level for guilt.
Not very much.
[00:45:01]
But I have found out that I'm gonna do some things now, and I'm gonna have to forgive myself, and I'm gonna feel a little guilty about them, so if I'm gonna be guilty over here and run this tolerance level up to here, I got to work awful hard over in Cornell area to keep that area clean, so if I get a little messed up over here and a little messed up over there, too, I'm gonna get my tolerance level for guilt.
And so I have to learn all these things by feeling sober and finding them out. And the way I found them out was being around you people. And when I fell in, they told me if I wanted to stay sober, to stick around people that were staying sober. They told me not to go around bars, but I was different. You know, everybody else made me 12 steps, and I could get by in five, and nobody else could go around bars without getting drunk, but as I could, but I didn't.
I got drunk just like that, all of a sudden, and went around the bars, and got some pain in the hip. They had a beautiful thing that used to work down there at Freddy's Parlor. Tall, beautiful, thick uniforms, and that long, silky hair. I went down there about two months after I sobered up, and he didn't look the same. That uniform was a doozy, Joe. And that hair wasn't long and silky, it was strange.
And I'd say that's not sour. So things change when we sober up, and we change. And this is the thing I guess that we resist the most is change, and this is the thing that we've got to do. I know when they told me I had to change, it made me real mad. So if you get mad, don't worry about it. You'll change, and you'll get drunk. When little old boy Donnie and I was busy being sober 21 years, never done anything but the first step.
I also think that I was as sour as I was 25 years ago. Some people think I'm pretty sour now, but they didn't know me 25 years ago. So this made me real grateful. And I know what the freedom from fear is. You know, I was always afraid. I used to want to die, but I killed him. So if I die drunk, I go to hell here, and when I sober, I didn't have the courage to do it. And I've always been a bitch. You know what I mean?
Come on. It's not that I was going to sober up. And one time I was sleeping, and one of them clock hires would be talking about it. And they got a cardboard. They got a partition about so high, it comes about that close to the floor between the rooms. And they got about this much distance between the bed and the wall. And they got an orange box in there for a dresser. And I'm laying in there about, oh, maybe 25 or 30 hours after this last drink, not shaking, jumping.
And some idiot right across from me starts shooting a pistol. So I'm telling myself, I wish I was dead. And I know Don has one of them bullets with that cardboard. It's going to kill me. You know, it wasn't a pistol. I wound up in the master. So I know what fear is. But all of you and most of you know that October a year ago, I was facing one that I couldn't help. And it looked like I really had it this time.
And I was laying out there in the grass. So I was rolling in this grass pile. It was fire all over. And I was trying to roll this pile up. When you get grass about that high in October, it don't put out much fire. And so I laid there. I don't think I laid there very long. I wasn't watching my watch, but I laid there and I felt that I had it.
[00:50:06]
And I was very grateful that I had to get it this way. But I could do. I could think. I thought of a lot of you people, a lot of you in this room. I don't think I spent much time thinking about each one of you. I think I think pretty fast. I don't know. But I wasn't afraid. It was a very peaceful feeling. And then I got to thinking about how I had to be here. I didn't know what was over there. I wasn't afraid of it.
But I liked it here pretty good. And I thought about it a bit sooner or later. I knew where it was. I wasn't just in it. But I know now that if I continue to live and think like I was then and think I am now, that when the time comes for the home of the fallen, I'll be ready. It won't be like that still without the Lord. And just because all these things happen, just when they happen and just like they happen, that's how come I'm here.
And I think that I'm just about the only thing that I learned in all this 25 years is that I can't do it by myself, but I don't have to. Thank you.