Archival note: Restored from an alternate transfer of the same recording. Source label: August 15, 1968; the exact date is not independently established from the speech. A few unclear words are marked in the transcript.
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Source: Lou H. – 24th Southeastern AA Conference (Source Label: August 15, 1968).mp3 File: lou-h-southeastern-conference-source-1968-08-15-restored-20260923.mp3 Duration: 01:15:36
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Several weeks ago, I wrote to our speaker of the evening, asking him for some general information on himself that I might perhaps better prepare some opening remarks in a way of introduction. I'd like to share with you just one or two paragraphs of his answering letter. Lou wrote me saying, your request for information about me is a reasonable one, and I want to be helpful and cooperative. At the same time, I don't know what any chairman could say about any AA speaker that would be relevant or meaningful, particularly if the information came from the speaker himself.
Now listen to this one closely. All the many good and splendid points of my character I shall enumerate and expand upon myself, lest the chairman omit or gloss over them. And as for the shoddy, mean, and outrageous acts of my life, it is not fitting that a minister of the gospel utter them in public. And his next line was plainly, we are in a bind. No, Lou, and no, friends, we are not in a bind. For I can tell you this, I haven't talked with Lou personally but just for about three or four minutes, but the very beautiful three-page letter which he wrote to me in answer to mine told me a great deal about him.
By reading behind the lines or between the lines of his letter, I found him to be very warm, to be witty, to be intelligent, to be able to express himself well, to be blessed with a sense of humor. And most important of all, I found him to be a man who has found his sobriety and wears it well. By profession, he is a TV script writer. We won't hold that against him. But by the grace of God and with the help of AA, he is an alcoholic who does not need to drink.
For ten and a half years, he has been active in AA, doing everything from washing the coffee cups, emptying ashtrays, picking up the tables and chairs after the meetings are over, to writing scripts of documentary films relating to the illness of alcoholism. I am pleased and I am privileged to introduce to you now Lou H. from North Hollywood, California. Lou. Thank you, Art. I'm Lou H.. I'm an alcoholic.
It's a wonderful thing to look out and see so many people. People, to use Marty's phrase, [unclear]. People. They told me not to scream in this. How's that for reasoning? Welcome to the all-star comedy hour. I love that introduction for the chairman tonight. The wonderful laugh that arose when the wrong man was introduced took me back to the moment when I became really grateful for what AA was doing.
I didn't have maybe a thousand people laughing at me, but I had all of the North Hollywood group of 200, and they were laughing themselves sick because I was doing something foolish. The kind of thing that would have sent me away to get drunk a few years before that. The kind of thing that I did in school, made a fool of myself unintentionally in public, and the little children laughed at me and I hated them.
And at the age of 44, I was standing in front of 200 fellow alcoholics, trying to lead a meeting. We have a birthday cake custom there, a lighted candle for each year of continuous sobriety. And all of the old timers had to have their birthdays on my first meeting night. And I was nervous, I prepared beautiful notes so I would get things in order and not stumble around like the other chairmen do.
[00:05:08]
My first meeting was going to be something for AA to remember. And I was right. I put my hand into the frosting on the cakes. I lit the candles, keeping up an eloquent flow of misinformation. Blew the candles out myself. And the audience kept laughing, and laughing at my clumsiness, my ineptness, my bafflement. And I blessed them. I didn't feel like running. I didn't feel like running. The only regret I had at that moment was I hope I am not spoiling one of these old timers' birthdays.
And one little guy, a little chubby guy that was an insurance agent, I thought he was going to roll on the floor and have a heart attack. And he was laughing at me because I was ridiculous and I didn't care. And I didn't care. The kind of thing that I would have been ashamed to show my face anywhere before. It wasn't important now. I wasn't that important. I could make a mistake and survive. Now, not everybody, if there are newcomers here, I hope I haven't given the impression that you have to make a fool of yourself in order to work the program.
But I do tell you this, it helps. Whatever you need to experience in the deflating of your ego, it will happen. It will happen to you sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, or if you don't like it that way, it will happen to you when you're drunk. You have your choice. And it really isn't painful this way. The pain isn't great at all. Now, this is the kind of crowd that I used to daydream at a bar. This is the kind of crowd that I should be talking to when I was drinking.
But nobody asked me. In those long years, 23 drinking years, when I was not an alcoholic, not even one person asked me to talk. Now that I am an alcoholic and no longer drink, I get such gratifying invitations as this. Not to hear me, but to hear about AA, about another miracle. I am a miracle. Those of you, I hope all of you, will have a chance to hear Marty M. sometime, as hundreds of us did this afternoon.
And she spoke of the miracle that is Alcoholics Anonymous, the miracle that is all of us who are sober. I'm saying these nice things about Marty because I am going to expose her later on in my talk. I am going to expose some inaccuracies in her talk and also in her book. Marty pointed out, and this I agree with her on, that alcoholism seems to be a sort of coming together of three forces or three conditions.
First, the unusual physical reaction to alcohol. If you have that, plus an emotional sensitivity that causes you to react more painfully to situations than other people do, and you drink to soothe out, to relax or relieve this tension or anxieties. And if on top of that you have this physical sensitivity, you can become an alcoholic. And if there exists in your society, the society you live in, work in, play in, encouragement in the form of example of drinking, plus a tension-building set of circumstances, you have alcoholism.
These three factors together. I would like to talk about the society in which I became an alcoholic. I evidently had the two other necessary factors. The physical factors such that once I began to drink, I needed more at that time. And I supplied myself with more. And I told myself I drank to relax, to ease the tensions, to have a good time,
[00:10:01]
which I did, and I gave a good time to others for a long time in my drinking. Not each time, but quite a bit of the time. And this encouraged me, of course, to turn again to alcohol. At that time, my drinking environment was excellent for me. I had good people to drink with. They were not alcoholic drinkers. They were not violent people. They didn't get into quarrels, into fights. They didn't get in trouble with the law.
They had fun. And I drank, as Marty did, more than they did. And like Marty, I felt proud when they would say that H. sure can hold his liquor. And I was one of the people, like many of us, who drove the rest of the crowd home. I later did it in both senses of the term. But at first, I was merely providing their transportation. That was the society, the friendly society, the warm society, that I felt comfortable with.
Only when I drank, however. I didn't feel comfortable with other people at all, unless I drank. But the rest of the society kept me from discovering I was an alcoholic. Not deliberately, of course. They were fooling themselves. But the society in which I was a part regarded the alcoholic, if they ever used the term, as a word of stigma, reproach, a condemnation, immoral behavior, stupidity, poverty, the skid row bum.
That was your alcoholic. And that was the picture that I grew up with. I didn't have to be sat down in a classroom and have documentary film shown to get this across to me. This is the kind of feeling I absorbed. Just as little children in France absorb certain impressions about their culture, about the society in which they live. How little children in Israel and China and South Carolina and North Dakota and Iowa, where I was born, all absorb the color, the speech patterns, the walking, moving patterns of the adults they see around them and hear around them.
And they don't know that they are gathering these impressions. And I gathered quickly, and permanently almost, that the alcoholic, the drunkard, the dipsomaniac, I read books. I used to read books at bars. While the rest of you people were falling down drunk and trying to pick each other up and fighting and quarreling, I was down at the end of the bar reading a good book. Well, I read trash too, but I did that at home where you couldn't see what I was reading.
And I found the stories of the dipsomaniacs dull. I like the story of the nuts, the lunatics, the dementia praecox cases, the schizophrenics, the paranoids. Oh, they were delightful. They did colorful, interesting things. But the dipsomaniacs, they were all very dull people, unimaginative and poor. They were terribly poor. They lived in rotten neighborhoods. And they did brutal things to each other, not fascinating things, but just brutal, disgusting things.
So I had no interest in those people, but I formed an impression of what an alcoholic was. Now, this is the same society, the same impressions exist today in society. It was in the society in which I grew up. Now, this same society that has in its mind the picture of a skid row bum as an alcoholic, also will read in its papers about conventions such as this, state conventions, regional conventions, international conventions of alcoholics anonymous, worldwide assemblages of ex-drunks who come together, say, in Long Beach, Toronto.
People fly there, drunk or ex-drunks fly there from Australia, from Europe, from various parts of the North and South American continent. The people in our society read all of this. They see pictures guarded for identity, of course, but at least pictures that establish what is happening. And we are so intelligent in our society, and we are such great thinkers, we who live in the age of the atomic bomb and television and radar, that we can simultaneously hold in our minds the picture of the skid row bum as the alcoholic and the conventions.
and the convention in which evidently skid row bums are flying from all parts of the world.
[00:15:08]
You can't help but admire a society like that. It's the kind of society that deserves me. Now, along about 1934-35, thanks to a doctor, I'm going to say some disgusting things about doctors in a moment. So before I do, I would like to pay tribute to at least one who saved my life indirectly through about 350,000 people. A chain reaction of sobriety that filtered down through the decades so I could be lifted out of whatever fate I was headed for using my own will, my own judgment.
This is Dr. Silkworth I'm talking about, who talked about the allergy as he phrased it, this physical susceptibility or unusual reaction to alcohol. He was telling this to Bill, Bill W., and the others that followed him. And they were getting sober and they were staying sober with their spiritual program with a firm recognition of their physical inability to drink. And years later, doctors in the American Medical Association publicly proclaimed this, that this is what alcoholism was, a disease with its physical reaction plus its mental obsession.
They described in the public press as well as in their own doctor-to-doctor communications that alcoholism was an incurable illness of unknown cause. And that the only possible treatment for it was absolute abstinence. And the most reliable source to maintain absolute abstinence was Alcoholics Anonymous. This was the tribute given by medical doctors and psychiatrists to this fellowship of laymen known as Alcoholics Anonymous.
And this was given fairly extensive distribution. But still, I hear these questions when I go out to talk about Alcoholics Anonymous. People ask me, how can you call yourself an alcoholic if you've not had a drink in ten and a half years? I hear the question, how much do you have to drink to be an alcoholic? Another question, in AA, how long does it take to be cured? This, to a society that has been told repeatedly by press, radio, television, eloquent speakers such as the one you're listening to now, that this is an incurable illness.
So described by doctors whose province is the treatment of illness. Now those questions that I read to you came not from stupid laymen. They came from doctors that I have talked to. They came from nurses, student nurses, who in a week or two will be out ministering to the ill. The same association, medical association, that tells us that alcoholism is rated as the number three public health problem in this country, listing as number one and two heart disease and cancer.
This is number three. A doctor said to me, after I caused him, I've never seen a professional man look more aghast. I'd taken an insurance exam and passed it, and he was obviously pleased at signing the form for the insurance company. It was the insurance company's doctor, not mine. And after it was all over, I said, I feel I should tell you, doctor, that I am an alcoholic. That I consider myself an alcoholic.
And this is when he gave this horrible look, this look of distress. It was as though I had said to him, on the way over here, doctor, I stopped to play with your children, and I have bubonic plague. His expression would have gone well with that announcement. So seeing that I had distressed this man, I said rather hurriedly that I was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and not had a drink in that many years.
And this is when he said, how can you call yourself an alcoholic if you have not had a drink in that length of time? Now, instantly, as a drinker, I was a very sarcastic person. You couldn't detect that today, I'm sure.
[00:20:06]
And what I wanted to say was, doctor, what test do you have that can tell me when I stop being an alcoholic? What blood test do you have? What chemical test? What spinal tap? What brain wave analyzer do you have that could tell me when I cease being an alcoholic? I didn't ask that. Instead, I said rather lamely, and I think of myself now, today, as a coward. For merely saying, well, we in AA have found that if we try to drink again, we revert back to the way we were when we stopped.
However, this is a gloating kind of statement, and it isn't meant as such. But I don't have to worry now how uninformed a doctor is. I know good and well that if I came to him with the slightest blemish on my skin or internal organs of a growth, that most of the resources of medicine and analysis and diagnosis and therapy would be applied to keep me, to cure me of my cancer, or whatever it was that was malignant.
That if I had something wrong with my heart, they would ask me a lot of questions, but they would strap me down and they would put things in me and measure various functionings of my body to find out exactly what was wrong with me. They wouldn't ask me, what's your blood pressure? What's your pulse rate? They would find out. But when I went to a doctor during the last year of my drinking for a complete physical and was given one, and I had complained of being unable to sleep, being unable to work as a writer.
I couldn't get anything written down on paper. I went complaining of these symptoms. He gave me a thorough test, including lab reports. When they were back, he called me in and he said, there is nothing organically wrong with you. And I said, why can't I work? Why can't I sleep? And he said, I don't know. An honest doctor really is. And then I brought up the subject. Good, old, honest, let's get to the bottom of this, H..
And I said in a light tone, indicating, of course, that it was a preposterous suggestion, but I wanted to leave no stone unturned. I thought, doctor, perhaps I was drinking a little too much. He thought about this. He says, how much do you drink in a week? So I lied to him. I lied to the man I was paying to be helped. And I told him a ridiculous amount. The amount, I'm pretty sure that I told him, was two quarts of beer a day and a fifth of vodka a week.
Now, it strikes me this is quite a bit to be drinking regularly, but it was a lot less than what I actually drank. It seems a small quantity to me. And it evidently did to the doctor, too, because he thought a while, and here I was standing before him weighing over 200 pounds, and had no, I remind you, his medical practice and the lab tests had showed no visible physical symptoms. I had no broken capillaries in my nose as a giveaway of a circulatory problem.
My liver was in good shape, as was established years later by other tests. My heart and lungs were in good shape. So he had every reason in the world to say that I had nothing organically wrong. But when I told him this amount of liquor that I drank, considering all the other factors, he said, well, obviously alcohol is not your problem. Now, I was very delighted to hear that. And I think I know what I did.
I don't remember what I did after leaving his office, but I will bet I went to a bar to celebrate not having a problem with alcohol. Well, two years later, I was in Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, that doctor was operating on the ridiculous premise that you can trust a patient. You would think after thousands of years of medicine
[00:25:01]
that they would have learned that. You know, human beings were chopping each other up and peeling each other and dissecting each other with axes, adzes, broad swords, and rats for thousands of years before somebody discovered the blood circulated. This is how bright the human race is. They didn't notice that little thing. I came across something the other day that's kind of interesting. I wondered why the doctors pass this stuff by.
This is part of our society. They are colored by it, too. They are part of our society, and they react just as the witch doctor does to the beliefs of the culture in which they are brought up. This is a statement of a medical doctor. I'm going to get off of the doctors after a moment. But this is so delightful. After you're sober, after you don't have to solve your problems at the liquor store or at the bar, and you don't have the hangovers and the throwing up and the humiliation and the fear of where is my car, and I hope its front end isn't bashed in, when you're over that, you can be amused by such quaint little items as this statement by a medical doctor who is in charge of a clinic back in Massachusetts.
They made a study of why doctors did and did not refer alcoholic patients, and they found out this, that the patients were not referred as alcoholics to the clinic if they had a job. If they were married. If they had symptoms of another illness. Or, this is the one I love, the patient's drinking pattern was like that of the doctor. Well, let's not laugh at that. We're all guilty of this syndrome, or whatever it is.
Bonnie and I were talking just before the meeting, and we agreed that the highest compliment one human being can pay another one is to say, you are just like me. Let's extend this, though. Let's say a patient comes to the doctor with oh, a pulse rate of, resting pulse rate of 150. And, the doctor takes his own pulse, and then the patient's, and he says, well, it's normal. Good shape. Or, the patient has badly swollen wrists and can't move his hands or his feet.
Are you employed? Or, are you married, says the doctor? Yes, I'm married, says the guy with the swollen wrists and joints. Can't be arthritis. You fainted three times last week, huh? Very, very weak, huh? Yes. Where did this happen? Oh, in front of my lathe at the plant. Oh, you're employed. Well, nothing to worry about there. Although, this gets pretty ridiculous when applied, say, to the first two major sicknesses.
But, applied to number three, it seems to be the normal way to treat it. By many doctors, not all, naturally. But, maybe this explains why, out of all of the six million alcoholics in the country, about one in 20 is doing something productive, effective about his alcoholism. And, this is why I say I am a miracle. In a society with these ridiculous ideas and conceptions and practices, I, an alcoholic who drank increasingly for 23 years, with more and more personal trouble and didn't stop because I was too stupid and egomaniacal to stop and to see what was wrong, I went on drinking.
Today, for over 10 years, I have been sober. I, who could not imagine living without alcohol, even though I didn't consider myself an alcoholic, I couldn't imagine living without alcohol, haven't wanted a drop to drink in all of that time. And, the answer? What else but Alcoholics Anonymous? I haven't been to a psychiatrist. And, if 99% of you in the room say, why in hell not? You have me. But, this program has done it.
This insane program. Insane Program. Marty said today that the illness was hopeless. There was nothing that could be done about it.
[00:30:04]
I'm telling you that the only therapy is insane. This thing will not work. Well, you heard the traditions, the main principles by which this fellowship operates. They will not work. Our common welfare should come first. Personal recovery depends upon AA unity. All right, that sounds good. To have unity, what do you need? You need some pretty intelligent people, people of goodwill. How do you find these people that are going to make up this fellowship? Well, let's have some membership requirements.
What are the requirements for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous? The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. Now, that lets in an awful lot of riff-raff. No educational requirements. You don't have to have finished even high school. You don't have to belong to the proper church, the proper race or religion, nationality, age group. No restrictions at all except the desire to stop drinking.
And they don't even make you prove that. If you stumble into a meeting, they just take it for granted that's why you're here. You can't get anywhere with little kids forming a club in a cave, you know no better than that. Number two, now this is sheer insanity. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority. Well, fine, that's good. Now we're getting somewhere. The authority principle. Who is this ultimate authority?
A loving God. Now how can you prove that? No one yet, the most brilliant scientists in the world haven't proved scientifically that there is a God loving or not. But this fat-headed fellowship is making this their ultimate authority, something nobody can prove. A loving God as he may express himself in our group conscience. Our group conscience. What kind of conscience has a group that's made up of people whose only reason for being together is a desire to stop drinking?
That they don't even have to demonstrate really. There's no test, no lie detector test. Even the breath test isn't accepted. Our leaders are but trusted servants. They do not govern. Well, how do you like that? Leaders of what? A bunch of drunks. With no principles. No recognized code of moral behavior. We'll have to turn to the steps to find out what kind of people that's in it. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Get a bunch of insane people. That's what we've got to have in this fellowship. That are still to be restored to sanity, you know. The fellowship doesn't start after they've passed the sanity test. The fellowship starts when people like this ex-stockbroker who was broke and the surgeon in Akron who would hardly keep himself in his profession. These two failures start poking around. Talking to bums lying in beds.
You know, it isn't going to work. I could have told Bill and Bob that. As an announcer in a little thousand watt station down in Long Beach in 1935, I could have told those two men they were just wasting their time. I would have too. I would have come right out with it. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole. At every meeting in our area in Southern California, we read the part of chapter 5 in the big book that contains the 12 steps.
And we also usually read the traditions as they were read here at this meeting.
[00:35:01]
And it is a rare meeting when the person who reads the traditions actually says the word autonomous. It usually comes out as some variety of anonymous. And no one corrects the fathead. And when he stumbles over the word for the 18th, he's been sober for 15 years maybe. Each group should remain anonymous except in matters and so forth. And that's my group, you know. I'm proud of them. And I'm telling you people this, 2,000 miles away, I tell you what fatheads we've got back there to prove to you this thing will not work.
Not once have I, except me, I do it because I am a pedantic swine. And when somebody sometimes at a discussion group, particularly in the Alateen group that I've been sponsoring the last several months, when they stumble over the word, I stop them and say, do you know what it means? And we discuss what it means. Something like self-governing. And we go on. But this, well, I don't need to read any more.
You can tell you're intelligent people. You proved that the last many years of your drinking, how intelligent you were. You can see that this thing is not going to work. And yet, what do the leaders of our society, the medical leaders and the psychiatric leaders and the judges now, they're getting into it. Where do the most intelligent lawyers, doctors and psychiatrists send the people they can't help?
To this fellowship. Boy, if you, if I, I'm a writer and if I wrote this kind of thing as a science fiction story, I wouldn't sell it anywhere. Star Trek would run me back to Petticoat Junction. But despite this, the newcomer isn't going to believe this. There are over 400,000 men and women who are sober today in Alcoholics Anonymous. Where we sit or stand tonight, what is this occasion? The 24th annual convention or conference, I forget which it is now, of the Southeast Eastern states, made up of people who no longer drink.
Again, the insanity shows, right in that. And besides that, it's the 21st annual North Carolina conference. For 24 and 21 years respectively, sober people have been coming here by automobile, by bus, by airplane, presumably by other conveyances, year after year. Isn't that amazing? So this thing on the face of it will not work. Where else would you see an assemblage of this many people who are here or any place simply because they no longer drink?
We wear badges out on the street. We talk in front of taxi drivers. They know why we're here. And the chambermaids know. And the waiters know. And the merchants know. This impossible, ridiculous program. Art mentioned that I worked on a documentary on alcoholism. This was for a civic group down in Los Angeles, the county, if you must know, Los Angeles County. And a lot of people had a say into what went into that script.
All of the various agencies that deal with alcoholism, either directly with the alcoholic or with aid to the family in some way, were represented. And in the course of it, Alcoholics Anonymous was included. And the Al-Anon family groups were included. And AA members were interviewed and Al-Anon members were interviewed and subsequently photographed at a simulated… We didn't use real to avoid anonymity breaks.
We had actors impersonate AA members and Al-Anon members so there was no actual members shown on the screen. But their stories disguised were there. And we had, in the making of this, the medical advice of some fine doctors and some psychologists and psychiatrists and the people who deal with the welfare problems of alcoholics and their families.
[00:40:06]
People with a religious approach to the problem also were included. It was sort of a representative effort of what goes on in our county and, of course, in many others all over the country. And I was called to task by one of the members of the commission whose job it was to present a reasonably accurate documentary. And they said, where did you get these statistics about how many alcoholics there are in the country?
This is where I'm going to reprimand Marty M. They said, you've got six million alcoholics here. And I said, yes. I went through many, many reports that you gave me, I said, to the person supplying me with the information. There were reports from all over. I did a lot of reading. And he said, well, these figures are that propaganda from the National Council of Alcoholism, that Marty M. outfit. And I said, well, I am just a layman and I am not a statistician.
I was merely going by what I read in the material you found. I said, if that is wrong, I said, the estimates of the number of alcoholics in the country ranged from, say, one million. You say that's right? He says, oh, no, there are more than that. I said, are there 12 million? I read that there were 12 million by one report. Oh, no, that's too many. I said, then six million is right down the middle, huh?
The discussion ended. And that propaganda from the National Council was included. Now, here is where Marty, I think, left things out in her book. I don't remember her exact recipe, but this is the general type of experiment she says to use to determine if you're an alcoholic. Take two drinks a night, just two, but two, for, say, a month. Every night you have two drinks. Not one, not three, but two.
And you don't skip any. That's controlled drinking, isn't it? You keep that up for 30 days or six weeks or whenever it was. As I say, I don't remember the exact figures, but that's the type of test. Regular but limited drinking. At the end of that time, says the book, if you are still doing this controlled job, then you are a controlled drinker and not an alcoholic. That isn't right. The test comes after you've closed the book.
You have gritted your teeth for 30 days or six weeks. We'll show that to him. Let's see, six o'clock is a good time to drink. Let's get the clock out. Let's get the bottle out. Let's save a little time tonight and take the cork out. I read of that trick in the story of a Catholic priest in Look Magazine a number of years ago. That is controlled drinking. The test begins after you have completed your 30th night.
The test begins when you go out to celebrate not being an alcoholic. Some of you may say, look, H., Marty was sober while you were still blubbering around the Los Angeles bars. While you were still having crying jags in public and hysterical laughing jags. While you were writing bum checks for $1.34. Yes, you're right, that's what I spent the $1.34. Half pints. That's all I needed to drink. Just enough to feel good and then I'd go back to work at the typewriter.
While I was doing all these things and having auto accidents and social humiliations, Marty was not only sober but she was helping other alcoholics. She was helping educate the public. Helping educate doctors and psychiatrists and policemen and lawyers and judges. And helping despairing wives and mothers. That's what she was doing while you were still blubbering. Why do you have to expose her good test?
Don't you suppose she's bright enough to know that? I can tell you the ending without any fear of ruining the test at all. Because if you are an alcoholic, you won't remember that part of it. Or you're making me a private little smug bet that you can beat it. You can make fools out of Marty and me, and those other people at the conference who laughed.
[00:45:00]
I know you will do that, because that's the kind of smarty I was. And that's the kind of smarty I am now, except with alcohol, so I've got to be very careful. I didn't come running to Alcoholics Anonymous on November 14, 1957, shouting, Oh, share with me your glad new way of life. I walked in sober, dignified, erect, with a suit of clothes on, I had shaved, I hadn't had a drink in nine days. That's how I was when I came to AA.
Marty made a fine group of points this afternoon, pointing out why many of you came here, most of you, nearly all of you, pressured, bullied, threatened by divorce, by an ungrateful, fiendish employer who was meddling in your life, to get people off your back, to submit to an injustice against your constitutional rights by some moron of a judge who said, Go to so many AA meetings, or to jail, and you took the humiliating out because it was quicker, and you came to AA, or some teetotaler doctor, some quack, religious fanatic, found a little pimple on your liver and diagnosed it as cirrhosis, tried to scare you.
Didn't scare you, scared your wife, your husband, or your children, or your dog. Didn't scare you, though, but come to AA, glare at the speaker with your hot little eyes, knowing he's lying, he didn't drink like that, or he drank worse. Either way, he's a liar, can't believe a word he says. Maybe he'll slip one night and tell you the secret of how to drink. You're not an alcoholic. I didn't come there for these shoddy reasons, but I didn't reason it out.
I didn't read the facts that I read later as a member of AA when I was doing the documentary. I didn't read the facts carefully and say, Well, things are pretty terrible in my life. I've gone through a marriage, a short-lived marriage. My wife divorced me. A heavy drinking wife divorced me for being a drunk. But she was long gone and no longer on my back. I have an indulgent landlord, indulgent almost to the point of insanity, I believe, who doesn't press me too much for the rent.
I was so far behind in my income tax payments that I think the government gave up in discouragement. Really, for one whole year, they never bothered me at all. I had nothing they wanted. Which shows you how hard up I was. They foreclosed on these little toy things they give to invalids, little sandboxes with ants that have built a village. They'll repossess one of those, but I didn't have anything they wanted.
Ant village. I sound kind of hateful, don't I? But I enjoy it. I had all of these terrible things in my life. I'd been in auto accidents. But that didn't indicate that I had a booze problem, you understand, even though I was drunk during all these accidents. I would have been hideously disfigured if it hadn't been for the skill of plastic surgeons and the alertness and promptness of firemen who saved my life after one accident.
They kept me from bleeding to death. But when I got out of the hospital, I had decided, this was early in November of 1957, that I better stop drinking for a while. Not because I had a booze problem, you understand, but because I had a concussion problem. I was my own diagnostician at this point. [Unclear statement about medical advice.] but I decided that I was having a little too many dizzy spells in the morning, and I would be drinking sometimes all night with no effect at all, and the next night one drink would make me sleepy.
[00:50:02]
So I diagnosed this as the effect of the concussions. So I would knock off booze for a while and then return to my joyous drinking. And the first two days, oh, they were dreadful. I had not only the severest hangover of my life, but the shakes and the anxieties and the fears and the tremblings. It was just hideous. Marty described it so beautifully, beautifully today. And I had these, but I was not an alcoholic, you understand.
This is just normal when you stop drinking for a while. But then I began to feel good. I recuperated rapidly, and I was nine days sober and felt great. And being very intelligent, as I have amply demonstrated tonight, did I think, well, now that you feel so good, each day of your sobriety you have felt better than the day before. You feel better mentally and physically. You have an appetite for food.
Since you stopped drinking, therefore, continue not to drink, and you will feel increasingly better. That's what a Bob would have thought. An intelligent person such as myself naturally thought, I am feeling so good now that pretty soon I can go back and have a couple of beers with the boys. That is what my brilliant brain came up with. And my brilliant brain believed what my brilliant brain came up with.
I didn't think then of the accidents and the bum checks and the social humiliations and the financial privation and the sickness and the shame. No, I thought of two beers with the boys. And here at this moment of sobriety, of feeling good, with nobody on my back, lawyer, tax assessor, policeman, judge, wife, landlord, employer, here is where I had the most tremendous realization of my life. An overwhelming, sudden, catastrophic realization that I could not drink again without disaster.
Not one drop could I drink without disaster. And I was doomed. Doomed because I would have no more fun ever again. Because I could not drink. I operated on the theory that booze equals fun. And if you take away one side of an equation, as every mathematician knows, every chemist knows, you take away the same thing on the other side of the equation. I was to have no more fun. But evidently I wanted to live, even without fun.
And at that moment of absolute surrender, and it was surrender for the wrong reasons, for ridiculous assumptions, but it was a surrender, at that moment of surrender came to me instantly, as came the realization, the answer. And the instant answer was what? Something I had ignored. I had hardly heard about. Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's when I went over to North Hollywood to turn myself in. I was not an alcoholic.
But they gave me that 20 questions test that Johns Hopkins puts out. There's some versions, the long form, run 35, I understand. But I passed on the 20 questions, answering 19 of them, yes. Any three would have gotten me the the award as an alcoholic. And I didn't argue with it. My answer was to chuckle after I read the results. A big fellow there at North Hollywood, a fellow named Vic, who passed on sober a couple of years ago, he chuckled too because he saw that I was not ridiculing the test, I was accepting it.
And he said something, I don't remember the rest of the conversation prior to that, but he said something I always remember, I hope. There's a meeting here tonight at 8.30. It's here if you want it. No high pressure selling. Take it or leave it. That was Vic. And evidently I wanted it because I was there. But I was there not to approve everything they said, not to be eager to do everything those people did who had remained sober over the months and years.
I was there to evaluate their sobriety. I was there to prove myself better than they. And I picked a good night for it because the guy that was the main speaker he was in show business, I am sure, Walter, that you'll be lucky enough to hear. If I ever get off, he'll be on in a night or so. He knows this man. And he told of falling downstairs drunk on wine time after time. He told of waking up in a strange hotel room with a strange woman in bed with him and an even stranger marriage license on the bureau.
And this thing, when I heard that, I shuddered.
[00:55:03]
I thought, how disgusting, how shameful. How gauche. But this blundering boob had done the same thing two or three times. He said he didn't know how many times this had happened to him. Getting married in a blackout over and over. I hadn't done that. I hadn't gone that far. And I sat there for many nights, different meetings in the Valley area, around Los Angeles, comparing my best to their worst. And I never thought of the reasons that I had come there.
I never thought of the bum checks and the heartbreak I had caused my mother on at least four or five occasions that I knew about. And the fright I had caused people, friends who rode with me and strangers who were coming toward me on the freeway. And the auto accidents and the silliness. I didn't think of that. I thought of all of my honesty, my heroism, my devotion. Anybody can think up little things like that.
And I was listening. What was I listening to? Some guy or woman up there pouring out all of the disgusting. They were compressing all of the crud of their lives into a few minutes. Was I wise and sane enough and intelligent enough to see that I, as a writer, something I should have seen, that they were making a point? They were saying, in effect, look what I was. I don't have to do that anymore. If I heard a man who had never finished high school talk his story with bad grammar and maybe filthy language.
And next night I would hear a college professor or a medical doctor or a priest or an attorney or a successful businessman tell his story of his excesses. Where was my intelligence? Why wasn't I thinking, this program is tremendous. It's an all-purpose program. It'll fit anybody of any age, any racial background, any skin color, any religion, any degree of education, any age. Why, this is tremendous and I am lucky enough to have come upon it for the wrong reasons, perhaps.
But I am here. Here is serendipity in action. Looking for something else, looking really for a miserable life. I stumbled into some people who could laugh. I never expected to laugh again. When I heard them laugh, did I take great heart? No, I sat there listening to all their garbage and holding it up to my jewels. Laughter Well, if I had come there to get somebody off of my back or to prove to somebody I was not an alcoholic, I am sure I would have gone out and drunk again.
That seems to be the pattern. But I had been given something. I didn't earn it. I didn't reason it out. I had been given it. The realization that I could not drink again, anything alcoholic without disaster. And that saved me, I think, to the point where enough of the program sunk in where I began to finally to be aware of what was really going on. And then they put me to action, this group, this group of misfits that I had come to feeling superior to.
Oh, I was an alcoholic, but I was a better kind of alcoholic than they are. And I think the thing that broke the lock for me was the night I got up at a jail meeting at Van Nuys feeling the need to participate and I said a phony thing. I got up in front of about 12 people, men and women, and I said, I am, for the first time, I am Lou H.. I'm an alcoholic. But I didn't say it the way I'm saying it tonight, knowing that I was admitting to a sickness and at the same time admitting to a recovery that I was grateful for.
Then I was saying, in effect, I, who am so wonderful, I, who am so wonderful, am using that dirty word, applying it to me, so that you will see how wonderful and noble I am. But those ignoramuses didn't understand that. Instead of jumping up and crying as one, oh, no, not you. Not you. Not you, you're too nice a guy. This is what I thought they would see, but they didn't. But I had uttered in public a truth that was true whether I believed it or not, and somehow or other after that I began to hear about this sickness that Marty told us about,
[01:00:04]
and about the mental obsession. And I began to identify. I began to see this was my sickness. It wasn't their sickness that I could sneer at. It was mine. It became a wonderful, fascinating thing. Like a little boy, eight or nine, examining his sore toe. It's a marvelous discovery. And I hoarded all sorts of wonderful little bits of information about it. And little old ladies would get up, and I would nod and smile and chuckle. I could see myself in them.
And great big guys who were real athletes would get up, and I would identify with their drinking and their sickness and their phony excuses and their alibis and their childishness. And I knew I was an alcoholic. And they sent me out on 12-step calls, and I stumbled around and I talked to others. I didn't think I helped anybody, but I never saw anything on a 12-step call that showed me I was missing anything by not drinking. And that helped me.
And they did other mean things to me, those people at North Hollywood. Recovery, unity, service. They put me to work, washing coffee cups. How humble I was. Now, if that is therapy for the third greatest sickness in the world, I'll make you a watch. I set up chairs and tables, and I put them away when the meeting was over, and I swept the floor. And I felt so righteous. But I no longer drank. I no longer wanted to drink.
And they gave me other little chores. I got eventually to [unclear] the meeting I told you about and was soundly laughed at, and could show up the next day and enjoy again. Why, they laughed. And I led dull meetings, and I led lively meetings, and I gave talks. And they put me on committees. And each time, with the great humility that shines from me now, I said, oh no, I'm not good enough for that. I've never done anything like that.
But they said, go ahead and do it. And I did it. And I got rewards that I wouldn't have understood if they had explained them to me. I wouldn't have believed them. Now, this is, this sounds silly, and maybe a newcomer might think, well sure, you're goofy like that, but I'm not. And that's a good sign that you're an alcoholic right there, just that kind of thing. I could do it, and I could fail, and AA didn't collapse.
And I saw other people try to get out of the work, and were successful at getting out of it, and many of them got drunk. Sometimes even the coffee cup washers got drunk. I never could quite figure that out. Maybe it was their attitude, I don't know. They left some of the lipstick. I guess that must have been it. But all of these things seemed to be part of it. I was helping somebody else. And I didn't understand, but the program worked.
And it soon became evident as I continued my reading that there are many things in this world that we do not understand, that scientists don't understand, but that work. Now, I never asked a bartender, why does this stuff work? Why does this martini make me feel so good? Explain this, or I won't drink it. I drank it even when the guy on the end of the bar got sloppy, disgusting drunk, and threw up.
I went on drinking. I didn't go to another bar where there were a better class of people. But I would see people come to AA and expect everybody to be spotless like they were. I saw the insanity in action. I suppose if there was a dog, say a German shepherd, like a lot of dog owners say, he doesn't know he's a dog, he thinks he's people. Well, this makes a dog neurotic, you know, or the dog is neurotic if he thinks that way.
[01:05:01]
Maybe he comes to a meeting. Here he is, a German shepherd, a rather handsome animal, but he's neurotic. And up gets a bloodhound on the podium, and the bloodhound says, My name is Tauser, and I am a dog. Well, the shepherd's got nice pointed ears, and, you know, he's very active, and this droopy bloodhound, you know, he looks terrible, his ears hang down. And the German shepherd knows that he's not a dog.
And then up comes, well, let's say a pointer. And the pointer says he's a dog, and the German shepherd doesn't see anything in that. And then a Mexican hairless gets up, a little tiny thing with no hair on it at all. And the German shepherd thinks, well, I haven't gone that far. And then a [unclear dog type] gets up. You can't tell what it is. It's got parts of everything in it. And the German shepherd is uneasy. Why is he at this place?
And the little [unclear dog type] says, My name is Fido, and I am a dog. And he said that he was pretty discouraged. He used to think he was human, but somehow he felt kind of strange. And as he went to bed, he turned around three times and lay down. And the German shepherd's ears go up. He turns around three times. Those two-legged nincompoops he lives with, they don't do that. They just get into bed.
And he knows what it is to be a dog. And he joins. And he shares with them his strength and his hope. And he gets over some of his neurosis. And he helps others. Poodles, bulldogs, goes on 12-step calls. And he works the program. And he doesn't know why this all happened. He only knows that it does, and he's grateful. This is part of the identification. We don't have to identify right down the line with every drunken escapade.
I think half of these demands are really excuses to continue drinking. But we don't find these things out just by sitting at meetings. I told about being put into jobs by my group and later by groups of groups to write things and to be on committees and set up bylaws and do all sorts of unrewarding kind of jobs in the ordinary sense. But then I saw something that kind of sickened me. There would be a group election and there would be a group representative needed to represent that particular group in a central office set up.
And somebody would say, who will we give it to? Let's give it to Charlie. It may keep him sober. What an incentive. Let's make so-and-so president. It'll keep him sober. Let's let Fred drive the school bus with our kids in it. Maybe it'll keep him sober. Our principle of attraction. How attractive do we make AA if we put in to offices that come in direct contact with the public people who can't stay sober?
How can we expect them to attend their regular committee meetings when they don't understand the principles? They're not sober long enough even for personal recovery, let alone unity or service. Now, what kind of respect can we believe a drunk would have for us if we think so little of the offices that we send him out? It reminds me of Groucho Marx's reply to an invitation from, I think it was an actor's club that wanted him to join.
And he said, I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me as a member. I think if we know what this program is, if we appreciate what it's done,
[01:10:06]
we'll have a little more respect for the offices of our servants who do serve and not govern. And if we believe in the traditions, and in the first part of the second tradition, about our group conscience, if our leaders only serve but not govern, then who does govern? We do. And if we don't know the program, if we don't know the steps and the traditions and the history of AA as it's been written out for us, and AA comes of age in other writings by Bill, if we don't know these, are we capable governors?
Do we know what to expect of our servants if we can't tell them what their jobs are, let them guess, let them flounder, and then if they make mistakes we rise up and say they're trying to run things or their clique is in charge. This isn't following the responsibility that Marty talked about this afternoon. Some stumbling block that many have is that God bit. I came across something pretty interesting not very long ago, a quotation of Einstein's.
People who really and sincerely, I'm not trying to make fun of anybody that does have a problem there, because many of us do if we have come up through drinking. But we think it is an expression of lack of intelligence or logic to believe in a higher power, to believe in God. And yet Einstein, when writing of his belief in a creative intelligence, not his creative intelligence, but that power that is responsible, what he says, for the incomprehensible universe, it is incomprehensible or was to Einstein.
He doesn't refer to his intellect or his intelligence or his reasoning when he talks of his belief. He talks about an emotion, a sensation, an appreciation of the mystical. This is what Einstein, the scientist, wrote about a belief in a higher power. He didn't refer to his intellect at all. So if we who are rejecting that part of the program because we don't think it's intelligent, we are applying a wrong principle to it, a useless principle perhaps, something that is, we have been barking up the wrong tree, so to say.
And certainly we're not getting much help from our avowed atheist scientists, and there are many of them, and equally good scientists probably, but they are not doing much for alcoholics. Just for the heck of it, I took our big thick yellow pages for Los Angeles area and I tried to, I found a lot of Catholic hospitals and Protestant hospitals and Seventh-day Adventist hospitals, but I didn't find any atheist hospitals.
Now this is an unfair thing because I will bet you anything that in some of those fine religious hospitals, religiously founded, that there are fine, wonderful atheist physicians and surgeons, psychiatrists, but they don't seem to get around to founding these things on this negative principle. And if you were to go to Bertrand Russell and say, I have a, somehow or other I can't control my drinking, what do you suggest?
He would probably give you some stupid answer like, why don't you stop drinking? The same kind of stupid answer you get from a minister or a doctor, or an AA. And you end up with this fat-headed organization that is founded on the most ridiculous principles in the world. The only thing wrong with my theory is that the program works. And we have all the help, all the help we can stand. Thank you. Applause Hello. Thank you very much.
I think the best tribute I can say is we're glad you came. [Unclear.] One belated announcement, just a reminder that in this hall at ten o'clock there will be a square dance. Now would you stand and join with me, if you care to, as we pray together the Lord's Prayer.
[01:15:04]
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.