Full Transcript

Jerry J. from Cleveland, Ohio. Good morning, everybody. Not really. I think I stole that from Water and Swayze Company. I used to go up and down one of the main streets in Cleveland and they put little sayings or phrases on the outside of their building. One day it finally struck me after being sober for a week or a month or something like that, the sign said, say good morning like you really mean it.

And from that day, I think I’ve been saying good morning like I really mean it because it has so much meaning to me, you know, good morning. Instead of good God is good morning. That’s the difference. I’m going to have problems unless I have some help getting through this thing, so if you’ll help me by helping me with the serenity prayer, please. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.

That’s quite a prayer, too. And little did I know what it would really mean to me. And really, I didn’t really know what it really meant to be free, even momentarily. But I found that in that prayer, in that prayer alone, I found a little bit of freedom. And I find a little bit of freedom every once in a while. I’m talking about that freedom of the mind. I can remember, though, two and a half years ago, or I guess it’s two years, nine months ago, and I may as well say it now, my anniversary or my birthday is Thanksgiving Day.

I claim Thanksgiving Day because that’s the day that I decided that I had enough. That was two years and nine months ago, on the 25th of November. So to me, good morning and God grant me the serenity mean a lot to me. But like I said, two and a half years ago, it wasn’t that simple. Two and a half years ago, I was in bondage. I was in prison, self-prison, self-initiated prison. I was within the confines of me.

I like to think today that at last I repossessed me. I think we as alcoholics know what repossession means. I am Jerry Johnson, and thank God I’m an alcoholic. Today I like me, and today I’m slowly but surely reclaiming me. I think this is the name of the game, getting to know me, and it’s interesting, the things that I’m finding out daily. I had visions of bringing three or four carloads up here, but tonight they’re having an anniversary in Cleveland of one of the older groups, and I just didn’t have the heart to ask people to come up here with me, knowing that they wanted to hear Esther Robertson, who is a beautiful person.

But as I was on my way up here, I thought and I said to myself, I’ve got two of the most beautiful people in the world with me, my son and a new man. My son wanted to come with me. At the last minute I said, you want to go? He says, yeah, I want to go. Amazing. Two and a half years ago, he wouldn’t have gone nowhere with me. Two and a half years ago, I wouldn’t have asked him to go with me. He might have wanted to spend some of that money on booze.

It’s a different story today. And then the new man. The new man in itself presents a real situation. It’s a story in itself, and if he doesn’t mind, I hope he doesn’t, Jim’s mother and I worked together two and a half years, three years ago. She told me she had a son because she’d seen me straighten up. And she told me she had a son that had problems. She didn’t know what she was going to do with him.

And this was two and a half years ago, a little better. She asked me if I would bring her some literature.

[00:05:01]

And I told her yes, and I did deliver this literature. But it took two and a half years for him to have enough. Two and a half years of getting knocked down until he surrendered and he finally called for help. And ironically, it comes back. I wasn’t the man that made the initial call. But you see, I run a halfway house. I’m the manager of a halfway house. And the man that went to service him is a counselor from our halfway house.

And Jim has been with us for about two weeks. So when I say I’m Jerry Johnson, I don’t want to be anonymous anymore. I wasn’t when I was drinking. I don’t know why I should be now. I never know who I can help, and I never know how I can be helped. I think he has helped me this day. But like I said, two and a half years ago, it wasn’t like that. Two years and nine months ago, it wasn’t like that. Because you see, then I found out that I was one of them things.

You know what I’m talking about, stumbling, fumbling, drunks. And you people beautified it and said I was an alcoholic. Even though I didn’t think that I was an alcoholic. You showed me that I was an alcoholic. You brought me to the point where I am glad that I’m an alcoholic. I don’t talk a lot anymore about my drinking. Because I think each and every one of us knows how to drink. I can tell you some stories that could remind you, and this is the only thing that I really want to do, is to remind you that it’s better in here than it is out there.

And when I say in here, I’m talking about within the fellowship, within this thing called sobriety, and I hope it’s a good sobriety. Mine’s a good sobriety. I can tell that because of the fact that I can smile some part of the day. But I can remember the many days when I may have been smiling on the outside, but I was crying on the inside. I don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t ever have to live like I used to live no more.

Simply by trying to live my life one day at a time, and following the example that you have set forth, many of you have set forth. And that’s my message to the person that is new, or the person who is having problems, or the person who hasn’t found any peace of mind or contentment within himself. He has to let go, and he has to let God. If that term, God, frightens anybody or scares anybody, just stick with us long enough, and you’ll understand what we mean.

I had problems there too. Two and a half years ago when you got me, I was living in a Swap House Hotel, the King Hotel at 55th and Cedar. It was a den of iniquity. It had everything. It was all-encompassing. It had everything. It had all your vices. You had your prostitution, you had your homos, you had your pills, you had whatever you wanted, it was there. And there was a bar downstairs, and there was a restaurant downstairs.

And this is where I lived. This is where you got me from. I like to think that because of my God, I found AA, and because of AA, I found my God. But it was in that particular Swap House, and it was on a particular Saturday in November, when something told me, after drinking most of the day, to go and lay your head down and get you a fresh start and come back out later on that night. And it was on that night that I overslept.

And the following Sunday was the day that I think my God went to work on me. Apparently, I listened for a change. I’m not talking about a bolt of lightning. I’m just talking about something that had been telling me something for a long time. I had warnings, I guess, from the first day I picked up a shot of booze, that booze wasn’t my shot, that I didn’t need it, that I couldn’t handle it. But this particular warning, I guess I got it.

This particular morning, something told me to go to church. And this particular morning, I found every excuse not to go to church. For instance, I didn’t have a decent suit. I had two suits at that time. I had one suit with no pockets and one with some pockets. I pulled the one out with the some pockets, and I tried it on, it didn’t fit. And my next thought was, I don’t have a decent shirt to wear.

For some godly reason, I had hung up the one white shirt that I had.

[00:10:05]

And I put some Vaseline on my shoes and my coffee-stained tie, and I went to the first church available. I had to go back later to find out where that church was, and what the name of the church was, and all I knew was that it was built rather peculiarly. I still have that suit. I still have that tie. I still have that shirt. I still have those shoes. And I still have those thoughts. But the one nice thing about it, on that day, I found out that I didn’t have to live that way.

It was on that day that I did get a fresh start. I walked into a place called Fresh Start, and I got a fresh start. Suddenly, I found something I’d been looking for all my life. People, real people. People that I didn’t have to offer anything to. People who accepted me at face value. People who realized, even though I didn’t realize, that I had a place to call home. People who realized, even though I didn’t realize, that I had a problem, and took me under their wing, and protected me until I realized that I had a problem.

So my message, again, to the new man, is, you know you need it. Stick with us until you want it. It’s a beautiful way of living. I don’t have to wear that suit no more. I got lots of clothes now. I got lots of shoes now. And I’ve got a full-length mirror in my house, and I go to my full-length mirror every once in a while, and I stretch out, and I get just as clean as I want to get, and I tell myself, hey dude, you ain’t nothing.

But I always say, too, that I’m better than I was yesterday. Just as progressively as I went downhill, I’m trying to come uphill. I think my God knocked me down to where I could listen to him. I think this is what he had to do. And I depend on him now. I depend on him. And how did it happen? Well, it happened very simply. I listened for a change. You know, I shut up and paid attention. As one man says, shut up and pay attention sometimes.

Take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth. Well, I did this, I think. I took it out of my ears, but I pushed it to one side of my mouth, so I could still talk partly. Fortunately for me, it has worked. It doesn’t work for everybody. But I heard the 12 Steps work read, and to me, we leave out part of the saying when we read only the 12 Steps. Because I was in this program, I guess, a year and a half before I realized that, hey, you don’t know how it works.

I was reading in these meetings, and I thought I was doing a bang-up job reading how it works. And the people were telling me I was reading how it works real well. But I was reading a lot of words. And I want to take a minute, just a minute, to give you what I think is important to me and should be important to the alcoholic. And as one man said, it works just fine. He says, rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.

I was a very dishonest man when I was reading it because I wasn’t part of the we, nor did I have any part of that path I could claim, because I didn’t know anything. I was just dry. I wasn’t drinking, but my thinking was still stinking. But I came in, and finally I realized after a year and a half or two years that I wasn’t part of the we, that I was doing AA and I was not being AA. I found out, too, that I had to start getting busy and laying part of the path.

So I read what I thought. I started with First Things First. And when I hear people say First Things First, it reminds me of a young lady who had about a month or two in the program, and I asked her, I said, what does First Things First mean to you? What does it mean to you? And she said to me, putting First Things First is getting up in the morning and saying hello to my God. So this is what I had to do.

I had to put First Things First, and the first thing that came up was the big book. I had to learn how Bill and Bob wanted me to lay the path. I had to learn how Bill and Bob wanted me to become part of. How Bill and Bob Wanted Me to Become Part of AA.

[00:15:01]

So no longer do I feel that I’m doing AA, I like to think that I am part of a vast seaside. To those who do not recover, people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, this made a lot of sense to me too. Because from my vantage point, being around a social center where we have drop-in, people who drop-in daily, and this is from people with 25, 20, even Orrin Chisholm Senior, you probably heard of him, 35 years, he drops in occasionally and gives me a good lesson on how it works, and for him it’s been working just fine.

But he is constantly telling me that I have to give of myself, and this program can be very simple. So I had to let go, I had to let God. One of the first things they told me that I had to understand when I came into this program, and this was a big fellow that told me this, he said, you got to learn how to kiss baby, and I looked at this big fellow and I didn’t know how to take him, you know. But he broke it down to me.

And he says, it’s simple baby, kiss only means keep it simple, stupid. That was the first thing I had to learn, because I was a brain, see I was intelligent when I came to you people. I found out since then that you can be too smart, but you can’t be too dumb. So I like to be just as stupid as I can. But it’s the program is very simple, if you don’t complicate it by trying to be selfish. You’ve got to be selfish to the extent, at least I have to be selfish to the extent that I have to protect my sobriety, and I have to do the things that my sobriety calls for.

My sobriety calls for me to give. In order for me to get I have to give, it’s as simple as that. It wasn’t always that way though, because you see I go back to that little hotel again when I was running, stinking, drinking. I remember my oldest sister came down and visited me when she brought me some of my nephew’s clothes. I’m constantly running into this clothes problem. Maybe that’s the reason why I’m a fanatic now.

I like to think that I can dress myself today. She brought me some of my nephew’s clothes down, and I had the nerve to stand there and say, you want a drink honey? Insanity. And I politely went upstairs and put these clothes on, no bath, no shower, I put them on. I came back down to take some more and try to take some more, but all I was taking was punishment. There again, it wasn’t always that way.

And it goes on to say, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. Now there, I’m going to give you three words that are important to me, and that’s try activity and honesty. I don’t care how you shake it up and it comes out, if you try each day to be active, and you try to honestly be active in a constructive way, you don’t have no problems. But there again, I can remember the time, when everything I did, all my activity was destructive.

It says, there are those unfortunate, they are not at fault. They seem to have been born that way. They’re naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living, which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover. They have the capacity to be honest, and I like to think I’m recovering.

I’m getting honest with me though, so I’m recovering. I remember my wife saying to me once, that I was crazy, and I challenged her. I told her, I says, I tell you what, I’ll make the appointment down at Fair Hill Mental Institution, and we’ll have it checked out. We’ll have a test, see who’s insane and who’s crazy. Thank God, I didn’t go through with it, because you know what, they would probably block me up.

I had to be insane. Our story is disclosed in a general way, what we used to be like, what happened, and what we’re like now. And I say to you, that if you like what you used to be like, hey, you better go back to number one and start all over again. If you’ve decided you want what we have, and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you’re ready to take certain steps, and some of these we bought.

We thought we could find an easier, softer way, but we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas, and the result was nil, until we let go absolutely. It’s just like that cat in the well.

[00:20:01]

The old curious cat that went near the well, and he fell in, but he was lucky enough to grab hold of a ledge, and he hollered in desperation, and the old farmer came by and surveyed the situation and lowered the bucket. The cat looked at the bucket, looked at the water, and looked at the farmer, and he didn’t know who to trust, but out of desperation, he had to jump in the bucket, and this is what I had to do.

I had to jump in the bucket. I had to let go. I had to let God, if I was to survive, and lo and behold, I found out that there was safety in that bucket, and that’s my AA bucket. Remember that we deal with alcohol, cunning, baffling, and powerful. Without help, it is too much for us, but there is one who has all power. That one is God. May you find him now. It goes on to say that half measures availed us nothing.

We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection with complete abandon. I think I’ve done that, and that’s how it works. How did I work prior to my learning this? Let me tell you a story about me and my drinking. You see, I used to be an athlete, a pretty good one at that. In my neighborhood, you grew up and you played all the sports that you played with the girls, and they didn’t play with the girls like they play with them now.

That time they were playing tiddlywinks. That time they were playing jacks on the sidewalks in plain view, so the boys would go to the corner and play basketball and football. So I became an athlete, and lo and behold, I found out that this little scared fellow could find security in being one of the better ballplayers. You were looked up to. Yes, I was full of insecurity, I was full of fear, I was insecure.

As one man says, most alcoholics are egotistical maniacs with an inferiority complex, and this is what I was. I was no different, but I found out that all I had to do was struggle and fight to get near the top, to be the best, or close to the best, and I didn’t have to worry about the people. Wasn’t long before I got through high school, then I got through, went into service, and one of those big challenging glamorous jobs came along that would bring me back from Japan any number of times, and this just wasn’t heard of in my neighborhood.

The people said, once you got overseas, you had to stay overseas, and I got overseas and I came back six times, simply because I accepted this job of ferrying aircraft back as a crew chief. That’s when it all started. I’m not going to tell you that that’s my first, that’s when my drinking started, but that’s when my serious drinking started, because it was there that the loneliness started setting in, and what do you do when you get lonely?

You look for friends, and where are your friends? So I went out at the club, and look, all I needed was for the alcohol to wet whatever this little rascal was in me to stir him up and defeat him, and once I woke him up, I had to keep him fed, and the more I fed him, the more he wanted, and the more he wanted, the sicker I got, and the faster I traveled, the farther back I’d go. When I felt that I was really climbing the ladder to success, I was really slipping backwards, because it’s cunning, it’s baffling, and it’s powerful.

Alcohol was only building me up to let me down. I had some pretty good experiences in service, and those little warnings as I was speaking up, little warnings of, hey, turn me loose because you can’t handle me, I can remember one Christmas I left just to go downtown and have a friendly drink with my friends, but I promised I’d be back for midnight mass, and I made it back for midnight mass. Of course, I brought two friends with me, too, and AP on each arm, they were dragging me in.

That was one of those warnings, and at this point, I’d like to tell you, too, that I’m not a connoisseur of fine wines. I had a couple examples where I didn’t, you know, it turned me against wine. One was when I was a kid, I lived in an integrated neighborhood, and the Italians always made wine every year, and they’d call us kids off the street, and you’d run in there, and they’d say, okay, get ready to wash your feet, and they said, no, no, just take off whatever you had on, your sock tops, or your no shoes, or whatever, get in the tub, squash the grapes, and they’d talk about wine driving people crazy, crying out loud, behind my feet, anybody would go crazy.

So I wasn’t a wine drinker. I know what MD 2020 tastes like, I know what man taste tastes like, but I saw another example of that. I saw a man jumping on a woman behind that Mad Dog 2020, MD 2020, and I kept looking

[00:25:03]

for that woman, and I haven’t seen her yet, but he really did a job on it. There was no woman, it’s all in his mind, and I said, never will I become one of those winos. It’s alcohol, baby, beer’s all right, whiskey’s all right. Well in the service thing, I got to the point where I got to be slick. I was now a part of management at the club. I was daring any of the Japanese helpers or servants to drop any whiskey or spill any whiskey because that was to be taken downtown and sold on the black market.

Needless to say, it never got to the black market, it always got to my friends and my stomach, but I got out of service alive with a good record. I came out as an instructor, and I came out as a staff sergeant, and I had one other experience. One of the cheapest drunks I ever had was in Homewood, Pennsylvania. You see up there, I was running with some old soldiers in the Air Force, and they were using me.

I had a car, and they were using me, and they kept drinking this clear stuff, just about like this, and I wouldn’t drink it, and they kept calling me baby son. Finally they baby sonned me once too often, and I drank a whole pint jar, and it felt pretty good. Got a little high, but I went to work that Monday and drank a cold glass of water and got high all over again. Tuesday I had to go back to the water fountain and got high all over again.

Finally they put me on charges for drinking on duty, and I hadn’t had a drink since Friday night. Pennsylvania did me a lot of favors. They taught me how to drink the Boilermaker up there too, a man’s drink, a sign of masculinity. More ounces, you know, the shot in the beer, two-fisted drinker, one in each hand, on the barstool. The barstool became my home. If you wanted to find me, just find the local bar.

I had my pets. As a matter of fact, my son right here, I used to take him to the bowl, he used to bowl on the machines while I was drinking. Having fun. You remember how you used to have fun, but the morning after the night before. This is the reason why it’s a good morning to me now, but I finally came out of service and came into this cruel old world. Had to go to work for a living. I wasn’t very disciplined either.

I hadn’t learned how to take orders from people. One of the first jobs I had at Dine Out Chemical Art was a place that made transfer, this table top imitation green and this type of thing. I went there as a maintenance man or machinery builder, apprentice, and the first thing they did was give me a cross. You know what a cross is, don’t you? That’s that broom you push, you know, in reverse. I didn’t appreciate that one.

I almost got fired the first day, but I stuck it out and I became a maintenance man. Now my drinking is moderate. I’m only drinking on the weekends, a few beers, but I’m a lonely man still, and I go back and find my friends in the bar. The night lights, the bright lights just attracted me, and drinking in the alleys and drinking in the cars and drinking out of the bottle, you could beat me drinking out of the bottle because I didn’t want to drink after you, after you had done what you wanted to do with the bottle.

I don’t want to. So if I couldn’t be first, you didn’t get my money. That meant I had to go get the liquor most of the time. Then you got me because I couldn’t drink but a little bit at a time. By the time the bottle went around, it was all gone. But that was me. The bar stools, the bar, and on this job at Dianaut Chemical, I found out that all the maintenance men were bringing orange juice to work, and he told me it was because of the solvents and the thinners in the air to keep the throat moist.

And I could understand that. We were working up on the ladders, up on the scaffold, 30 foot in the air, and they’d come down and get him a swig of orange juice, and they’d go on back up there and drop some more tools down on my head, but we were allowed to go out and get some fresh air, and I used to tell them, hey man, maybe you better get some fresh air. You might be getting dizzy or lightly, so I still had to go start going up on the ladder.

I’d get up there, and sure enough, I’d get high. So I started bringing me some orange juice to work, and I found out what else they were doing to that orange juice. They had a 55-gallon drum of alcohol down there that they were tapping. So I’d go up on the ladder and get high, and come down the ladder and get high. So it became not just a weekend, payday-type drink. It was drinking all the time, and I was all over it.

I was drinking all the time and I was off and running and that same little scared fella

[00:30:00]

was running just as he always did. I had to excel. I had to be looked up to. Little did I know that all I had to do was to stop. Stop running. Who was I running from? Good old Jerry. Nice thing about this program. He told me that the only fear I’ve got is me. It’s the only fear that I had. It’s me. I was scared to live with me. I wanted to live with everybody else. Living everybody else’s skin. I wanted to be everybody else. A world of fantasy.

Well, it wasn’t long before I couldn’t take that job any longer because the next position available for me was the boss’s job and he wasn’t about to quit. So I had to go find me another and I went to school and for the first class I could make it all right. Second class I had to run out and get me, we didn’t have a 10-minute break between classes, I had to run out and get me a beer right quick. The third class I was out of it. So I didn’t get too much out of that.

Off to another job and my resume reads like the who’s who and up until the time that the booze really took its toll where I lost a couple of years of gainful employment. I went down down the courts after I got sober for a while. I had to go to domestic court. You know, my wife was trying to get some money from me, you know, and there’s a judge. I’m working every day and the judge hasn’t ever enough to look down at me and tell me to get some gainful employment.

I told him I’m working every day. He said, I said gainful employment. Took me a while to understand what he was talking about. Well, this is the way it went and my resume as I said runs like who’s who. I drove cab for a while and I was a door-to-door salesman for a while. No, sorry about that. I was a bar-to-bar salesman for a while. I tried those doors one day behind the half a fifth of gin, you see, and it worked out just fine. I sold, I really sold. I tried the next day. First door slammed and the face of the dog got after me in the second door. I gave it up as a bad job, but I’d used up all the bar trade and I was losing money on that anyway because I’d get a three dollar sale and spend five dollars over the bar.

So I was in trouble there. Then as I said, I was a cab driver and I was really enjoying this because all you drunks used to get in my cab. I keep saying I’m gonna stop telling this story because one of you drunks gonna realize, remember me, because you see what I used to do is I get them in the cab and they’d flash like most alcoholics, show you how much money they got. They’d say take me for a ride. I would. Roll up the window, turn on the heater, put them to sleep.

My sister lives in one of those dark neighborhoods by the railroad track. Right, there’s a bin there and it’s about a two-foot curb, you see, and it was just convenient, just made for pulling a man out of the cab and sitting him on the curb, you see. He’d wake up to the train, you know, why can’t you just imagine a drunk waking up and see and hear the train right behind? Well, there’s one guy there I never want to meet because I took him to jail for non-payment. Believe it or not, he had over four hundred dollars in his pocket, but he wouldn’t, he was too big for me to drag out of that cab. I just took him to the police station, hey, he won’t pay his bill. And then it finally hit me that I was wasting my time and I should go into industry and lo and behold, I really climbed the ladder then.

Like I said, alcohol only builds you up to let you down. I climbed the ladder, I went into a factory and I don’t know, I imagine some of you have experienced some things and you just can’t explain it. You wonder whether you did dream the thing or there was a vision or were you just in a blackout or what? But I went into this plant, I’d never been in that plant before in my life that I knew about, but yet I knew where the bathroom was. And it wasn’t one that you just see a big neon sign out there, it was hidden. I knew where it was already. I went in that plant for a dollar, at a dollar and 45 cents an hour. It’s a bench hand. Told the man I just wanted a job.

18 months later, I was lead man of the inspection department. It wasn’t long after that, I was the big-time supervisor. Alcohol was building me up to let me down. By now, I really think I am it. I’ve seen it in the newspapers, I’ve seen it in everywhere you look. You see the man, you’ve seen the man with his scotch and his soda. The big-time executive, I’m wearing suits to work, good suits to work. Bought me a Cadillac car.

I was living the life, taking customers out. I see my boss was the quality control manager,

[00:35:03]

but he had the gout and about every six, eight weeks he’s got to be off. I got to take his place. I got to take these big executives from General Electric and Orinda Aircraft out to lunch. Personnels and the big, the big restaurants around Cleveland. Yeah, then it got to the point where, hey, when they weren’t in town, we were going to lunch. Martinis, whiskey sours, just like they do in the movies.

But then alcohol told me I no longer needed that job, that the people were picking on me. You don’t need this job. Alcohol at this time was still, it told me too, that my wife was nagging too much. So I decided that, well, I’m going to quit this job and I quit and they begged me to go. And they begged me to stay, you know. I had one of those religious bosses, he wouldn’t hurt a fly and he’s begging me to stay in the same sense, saying, I hope this headache goes away.

But I quit that job and on the way home I decided that if my wife opened up her mouth to me, I was going to leave town. And I went in and I laid across, back across the bed and she came in from her job and she says, what are you doing home so early? And that was enough. I’d already packed my car up and off I went. Just roaming the highways, me and my Cadillac. The one thing that I forgot was I had to take me no matter where I went. You see, I didn’t know me, a complete stranger, but everywhere I went, I went with me. And all the stinking thinking was with me.

I came back, my wife talked to me and I came on back to this city and I thought everything was going to be lovey-dovey and I came back and she fixed me my favorite dinner and she petted me and she loved me and she tucked me in on the couch and she called the police on me. But there again, there again, you see, that’s that act of God again, because you see, he’s maneuvering me now into position for the last head-cracking scene.

Because I went on to the workhouse and finally the bad, the funny part about that was that I knew the judge. So I’m not worried, really worried about it. And I had been in, I talked to the probation officer, this is what they wanted to report, probation officer, and I’d been in and talked to him already and I explained the situation. How she just nagged me to, you know, to drink and all of this and he was buying every bit of it and then he talked to her and she came down, my little bitty daughter, you know, cried on his, on his lap and naturally I came out to lose it.

And I come out of that room at probation office department and then in front of the judge and I’m not laughing at justice, but this is what he said I was doing because I was smiling. But I was still laughing at what she was saying in that room. Yeah, so consequently I did some time in the workhouse and I laid out there and I said to myself, I’m gonna, I think this was inventory time. I think for the first time I realized that there was something wrong, but there was nothing that I couldn’t control. There was nothing that I couldn’t manage. So I got out there and me with my pride, false pride, with my arrogant self. Today I don’t call it arrogance, today I call it confidence. Because the difference is today I know that when I get up in the morning I ask my God to protect me and and to let me do what he wants me to do for this particular day. Allow me this opportunity. So I don’t worry about it now, so I can go with a sureness. But I went out to that workhouse and I said to myself, now hey Jerry, get it together now in order for you to get your self-respect back. And when I meant self-respect I’m talking about material things only. I’m talking about I want the people on Cedar Avenue to say, hey there’s Big Jerry again. I wasn’t there, me wasn’t involved. Loving me, liking me, and it was never involved.

But you see, it finally came down to, why don’t you quit drinking for a short period and regain, work two jobs and regain your status. And this is what I was going to set out to do. But while I was in that workhouse though, and while I was too full of pride to call back to the city and ask one of my friends to bring me some cigarettes, I asked my one of my relatives to bring me some money for shaving equipment or lotion or soap. Instead I’d roll cigarettes all day because I wasn’t going to

[00:40:01]

work. I’d roll cigarettes all day for the fellas who were out working and for every pack that I package I’d roll for them, I would take some cigarettes for me. And then someone told me if you go to those AA meetings, they’ll give you some cigarettes. So that Friday rolled around I was laying up and I told the man, don’t you dare let me sleep past 8 o’clock because I want to go down to this AAA meeting. I went down there and looked at those poor sick people, but I endured it. I sat there and I went through it. And sure enough the guy said something about if you want to stay dry you stay in dry places. Didn’t ring a bell, but at the end of the meeting he came around and gave me five cigarettes. I took those five cigarettes and parlayed those into many more, playing Pinochle. Do you know how to cheat at Pinochle? I can do it, just come to me and I’ll tell you how to cheat at Pinochle. This was how I was getting my cigarettes, and of course the cigarettes would act as money, you could get your shaving equipment. Like I said, but you know the funny thing, I go to Revco drugstore now and I can’t resist buying some razor blades or some perfume or something, you know, just in case I had to go back to one of those joints, I’ll have it. But I went back to the next week, same AA meeting. This guy, this time the guy gets up and he says, if you want to stay sober, stay with sober people, and the AA people have the way to do it, and it made sense. The AA people thing didn’t make no sense, but if I wanted to be, regain what I’d lost, I’d better do this. Wind up was is that I went back for the third meeting, and after the meeting they came around and they gave me five books of matches, and I sat there till everybody just about had gone, waiting for my five cigarettes. They didn’t come up with no cigarettes, and I was still with AA. You know what I called you, but they planted the seed. I knew then that there was some people that they were willing to help, but I still, it still didn’t make sense to me. Well, to make a long story short, I went through a few more flop houses, and I wound up at the King Hotel. I had many more problems after that, but I wound up at the King Hotel. Remember this big-time supervisor was now working for our man, a spot labor place. Now he had been introduced to scrubbing floors and cleaning urinals and whatever the maintenance, the housekeeping department wanted him to do, but this again, I think God was manipulating me. He was moving me into position for a good head cracking. You see, it was also here, too, that my wife and I got back together, and one night we had our last fight, and my wife’s only about this tall, and for some ungodly reason, I’ve never, for some godly reason, I never hit her. The last fight was the one that took me to Pittsburgh to see a long-lost sister that I hadn’t seen in 12, 15 years, just to show you how God works. I went into one bar, and I almost got kicked out.

I went into the second bar, and they ate up my story, because the whole side of my face is scratched up. I’ve been boozing it all night, and hey, I’m in this bar, almost broke, and I don’t even know where my sister lives. I don’t even know her married name. I used a few last dimes to call my older brother. Finally, he came up with a street address, a street and an address, and I asked him, who knows where the street is? The bartender says, I don’t know.

I asked the guy next to you. Remember, this is a city of 600,000 people. This guy says, yes, I know where the street is. Who do you know on it? I told him. He says, oh yes, her husband’s a policeman, but then he turned to me, and he laughed at me, and he made me mad. Now the devil’s getting ready to go to work now, because I’m getting ready to bust him upside the head with this beer bottle, but he went to the restroom, and he came back, and he says, well, just hang loose, man. I’ll get you there. Then he says, have a smile. I didn’t know what he’s talking about. He was talking about that booze, that whiskey. God knows, at that point, I needed another one, because you see, booze, I felt, would relieve this pressure. Booze, I thought, would get me back into, you know, living with a human, get rid of this hangover, this headache. This man bought me about three or four shots of CC, a couple more Duquesne beers, and fired me off, and took me to the drugstore.

And We Both Cried, Excuse Me, We Both Cried, Hugged Each Other, And I Felt Safe and Secure,

[00:45:06]

And I Asked Her, Where’s the Scotch Baby, Give Me Some Water, She Said Me and My Husband Quit Drinking 30 Days Ago, Another Warning, I Hated Her, She Also Had a House Full of Religious People, And You Know What We Think About Religious People, Don’t We?, At That Point Anyway, Did You Ever Try to Eat Peas With a Fork, With the Shakes?, It’s a Physical Impossibility, I’m Sorry About That, I Got Through That and I Came Back to Cleveland and I Told You About the King Hotel, There Were Many Things in Between, But As I Said Now I’m an Employee of Cleveland State University and I’m Sweeping Floors and I’m Scrubbing Floors, I’m Doing Whatever I’m Asked to Do, But It’s Also There at the Halls of CSU that I Found This Wonderful Program, It’s Also There at the Halls of CSU that My Program Fell in Line, And Here Again I Don’t Know How and Why, I Won’t Even Try to Reason Why, One of My Problems I Found When I Was Out There in the Street Was That I Was Constantly Searching for Answers, But Hey, I Never Really Understood the Question, I Never Really Understood What I Was Looking For, I Came Into This Fellowship and Things Started Falling in Place for Me, I Came Into This Fellowship and Suddenly My Program Fell in Place, You See When I Was a Big Time Supervisor, Every Piece of Material that Went, Every Memo that Went Out of My Office Had ASAP on it, As Soon as Possible, As Long as It Wasn’t Worked for Me, I Wanted It Right Now, Suddenly There It Was, ASAP, You Know What I Saw, Alcoholic Stupid Ass Person, Excuse My Language, Then I Saw ASAP and That’s What I Was, A Big Sap, ASAP, Then Suddenly My Program Formulated, You See I Took That First Day and Found That I Had to Never Drink Again, Not to Keep Me, I Found That In Accepting It I Had to Change My Attitude, Because It’s Through Changing My Attitude That I Can Change Myself, So I Had to Accept and I Had to Change My Attitude and I Had to Surrender, That’s My S, I Had to Surrender to Survive, I Had to Surrender to Your Way of Thinking, A New Way of Thinking, I Was Still Smart Enough at That Time to Know That You Can’t Mix the Old with the New and Come Out with a Good Product, You Can’t Mix Oil with Water, It Just Won’t Mix, So I Had to Try, There’s That Word Again, Try, I Had to Attempt to Shut Off the Old and Pick Up the New and It Wasn’t Complete, I Couldn’t Do It Just Like That, So I Had to Surrender to Survive, I Had to Surrender to What You Told Me, Get Yourself a Higher Power, You See I Didn’t Have a Sponsor as Some People Have, Nobody Called Me Their Baby, Nobody Wanted Me, I Wasn’t Offering, But I Kept Listening, I Kept an Open Mind, I Kept Reading the Literature That Was Placed Around, And In That Literature It Told Me Just to Hang Loose, It Also Told Me I Had to Find a Higher Power of My Understanding, And I Didn’t Have to Put It in the Form of a Personal Being or a Human Being, I Could Choose a Door Knob if It Made Sense to Me, But I Had to Exchange the Faith, I Had to Take the Booze Away and That’s What I Had My Faith in and Exchange that for Something Greater, The Power I Like to Call Today My God, That’s My Higher Power, But I Had to Surrender to Survive it, That Doesn’t Mean That I’m a Religious Fanatic Now, No, I Just Believe, It Just Means That I am Part of This Program and This Program is Spiritual, There’s No Getting Around It, I Had to Surrender to Survive, I Had to Accept It, I Had to Change My Attitude, And Then Someone Told Me, Says Hey Dude, You Got to Get Active, Without Activity You’re Not Going Nowhere, But They Also Told Me It Has to be a Constructive Activity, It Told Me That I Have to Work to the Positive, It Told Me I Can Find a Negative Anywhere, But I Have to Go Out and Seek the Positive, I Have to Look for the Good in People, I Have to Learn to Love People, All of This

[00:50:00]

is Activity, They Told Me to Beware of That Rocking Chair Type of Activity, You Know, You Sit There and You Get a Whole Lot of Action out of a Rocking Chair, But You Ain’t Going Nowhere, Simple as That, You Have to Give of Yourself to This Simple Program, So I Had to Get Active, And Also in Getting Active, Naturally I Had to Admit that I was Powerless over Alcohol, My Life was Unmanageable, I Had to Come to Believe that a Power Greater than Myself could Restore Me to Sanity, And I Had to Make a Decision, All of These are Action Steps and You Got to Take Them All, But I Sort of Got Around That, Because Somebody Else Told Me, He Says, Hey Man, There’s a Simpler Way of Doing It, And Yet You Can Get a Degree of Contentment and Peace of Mind, He Says, There’s Four Things Called the Absolutes, He Says, Get A Hold of Those and See What You Can Do With Them, He Says, See If You Can Practice a Little Honesty with Yourself, See If You Can Get Unselfish, See If You Can Do Things for the Sake of Doing Them, Because They Have to be Done, And I Found that it Works, You Know, You Can Put a Cup in the Middle of This Floor Out Here and If You Got to Walk that Path of that Cup, Every Time You Come to that Cup, It’s Going to Bother You, It’s Going to Distract You, But If You Take that Cup and Deposit it Where it Belongs, It Ain’t Going to Bother You No More, Same Way with My Life Now, Unselfishly, I Try to Give Unselfishly, I Try to Do Things Constructively, Then There’s That Love Thing, Love to Me Was a Sign of Weakness, Do You Believe That I Love Each and Every One of You Today, There’s Some People That I Don’t Particularly Care for Their Attitude or Their Personality, But If They Needed Help, I’d Be One of the First to Try to Help Them, Because I Love Me Today, When I Love Me, I Can Love You, But First I Had to Do It Step-By-Step, I Had to Learn to Like Me, I Had to Start Washing Me on the Inside, Today I’m Kind of Comfortable on the Inside and I Take Care of the Outside, It’s as Simple as That, And That Purity Thing, I’m Still Working with That One, I Can’t Still Understand That Part of It, So I’m Going to Leave That One Alone, But You See, The Steps are Still the Most Important Part, Because These are the Steps that Bill and Bob Laid Down for Us, and I Believe It’s a God-Given Program, I Want to Say Too, That Last Part of My Program is the P, and That’s Patience with Prayer, I Can Pray, But I Have to Have Patience, I Have to Watch What I Pray for, Main Thing I Want to Do is to Pray Unselfishly, I Don’t No Longer Pray for Me, I Pray to Do God’s Will, The Three Steps that are Most Important with Me is the 9th, the 10th, the 11th and the 12th, and I’ve Been Through the Other Nine, But You See, I’ve Got to Keep That Running Inventory, I Have to Keep That Conscious Contact with God, and I Have to Carry These Principles in All My Affairs, It Works for Me, This is About the Way I Am, and Like They Say, When You Get What You Want, You Struggle for Self, and The World Makes You King for a Day, Just Go to the Mirror and Look at Yourself, and See What That Man Has to Say, For It Isn’t Your Father, Your Mother, or Wife, Whose Judgment Upon You Must Pass, The Verdict That Counts Most in Your Life is the One Staring Back from the Glass, That’s Me, I Have to Feel Comfortable with Me, and Every Time I Say, God Grant Me the Serenity to Accept the Things I Can’t Change, I’m Getting Comfortable with Me, Courage to Change the Things that I Can, and the Wisdom to Know the Difference, I Can Change Me, I Have to Change Me Daily, I Have to Take My Inventory Daily, When I Came Man, They Told Me, Man I Know You Don’t Know How to Pray, But Make It Simple, and Keep It Simple Stupid, Just Say God Help Me, and A Simple Thank You, and He Says, If God Hangs You Up, Just Say Help Me, and Thank You, Now I Get Up and I Say Like The Game We Used to Play When We Were Kids, Mother May I, and She’d Tell You to Take So Many Steps, But Now If You Forgot to Say May I, You Had to Go All The Way Back and Start All Over Again, and I Don’t Ever

[00:55:00]

Want to Go Back and Start All Over Again, Because I Don’t, I Haven’t Forgotten, See I’ll Just Go On Down The Sliding Boy That Much Faster, So I Want to Say Every Morning, and When I Don’t Say It, I Feel It, and I Have to Stop No Matter Where I Am, and Say Father May I Have This Day to Do Your Will, Not Mine, and When I Get in Trouble It’s Because I’m Forcing My Will. Our Description of the Alcoholics, Chapter 2 of the Agnostic, Our Personal Adventures Before and After Make Clear Three Pertinent Ideas, A. That We Were Alcoholic and Could Not Manage Our Own Lives, B. That Probably No Human Power Could Have Relieved Our Alcoholism, C. That God Could and Would If He Was Soft. Thank You.