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Source: Lee M – AA Share at Bill W 32nd Anniversary Dinner – 1966-10-29.mp3 File: lee-m-aa-share-at-bill-w-32nd-anniversary-dinner-1966-10-29.mp3 Duration: 00:19:51
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Our next speaker is a gal whom I've heard many times over the past years, and she's always tremendous to hear. It gives me a great deal of pleasure now to give you from the Rhinelander Group, Lee. Applause Wow. Isn't it wonderful to come in here all polished and perfumed and pompadoured and know you're going to go home the same way, with your shoes still on? It's a long place from the gutter to here, and in a few minutes I get to that.
First I wanted to say thank you to Bill, and first because I'm an alcoholic, I think I got a little grand, I did get grand, I got terribly grand about it, and I thought, well I want to say thank you very differently. And I got all four volumes of Henry Menken out to look up the word thank you. And I could only come up with thank you. I thought about being very grand in the way of saying God bless you Bill, for my life, and I came up with only God bless you Bill, for my life.
Because by direction and indirection I am here only because of this man. It never occurred to me twelve years ago when I was at my first dinner that I would have the opportunity to say it in such an extraordinary manner. Him sitting on my left, and his wife on his left. To 3500 people. It's a remarkable experience. You should be up here. When Bill came in, 32 years ago, I want you mathematicians to get out your pencils, I had my first nip and I was seven years from the legal age of drinking.
When Bill was 21 years old, I came in with not 20 years of suffering behind me, only about 14. I wasn't able to make the 20. My first nip was a very exciting and necessary introduction into what I was going to do. Drink a lot. My first drunk came three years later and I went on the wagon. So I didn't really start in until I made a very brilliant discovery, I could drink if I was away from home and there was a war on, and I went into the Marines.
And had my introduction to white lightning. Any of you boys from North Carolina, I just assume there's no ladies here from the Marines, but I had a 180 proof hangover the next morning, and I never had another piece of white lightning. But I learned about all the other saucers. And I learned you carried them in shoeboxes past the probo marshal. And I learned to drink hot beer and sit on the floor in the slop shoes.
And sing anything. And I got into a little enough trouble really because I was young and healthy, and already having made one failure by joining, had learned to keep my mouth shut. First and last time. I stopped because I suddenly realized, so much for me, communication is laughter. And I suddenly had an idea, in order for me to get started rolling here, I had wanted to tell you a joke. And it's gone, not the joke, but the moment to tell it, because I got rolling anyway.
Because I'm talking to my kind of people and you don't need much push. There's an awful lot of love in this room tonight. And all it waves, it's in a vibration thing. Maybe that's the way one says thank you to Bill. By an extra hot beat with a sobriety in it. That's probably what he would like anyway to say. So when I got on to the drinking in the seriousness of, the war was over and I had moved around to about three stories away from Third Avenue.
And the Irish bars became my home away from home. One in particular. I rolled in there one day with about 50 cents in my pocket, it was the day before payday.
[00:05:00]
And left five hours later, bombed out of my mind with a dollar change. And I would say that for a smart alcoholic like myself, that would be headquarters. And so it became headquarters for about eight or nine years. Where I lived and died many times. I had rationales while I was in that dirty bar. They were all pretty chic reasons. I was looking for material to write. I became one of the subjects of my own material actually.
I didn't write, I wasn't a writer. But I went in there to get material to write. We all fancied ourselves any number of things except that which we were. Which made it okay for us to be in that Third Avenue place. And the drinking very rapidly progressed into very drunk and awful things happening to me. In which I had to put forth booze and money and a few other things. Had to become a periodic. Of course possibly chemistry too.
But I did become one. A three month on and a three month off girl. And therefore this delayed my coming in. Because obviously I could handle it. Anybody who could quit like I could at a midnight on a given night was able to control their drinking. Were they not? Yes I was. And so I became a local god to myself. I could quit when I wanted. So I was okay. I began to be a little ashamed. I had some very bad things happen as one does.
You're out in the jungle there in saloon life. I have a little girl that curtsied and believed in Santa Claus until she was eight. I didn't go to school until I was eight. I was taught at home. I was very, very, very protected. And very fancy. And I became one of the toughest frauds on Third Avenue. That's not easy to do from a curtsy. In order to protect those who protected me, better known as family.
I did not let them know too much. Once in a while a 3 a.m. phone call clued them in. But I stayed away for my sake. I was not very brave. Not for theirs. For mine. I didn't want to hear about it. I do not have a story of loss. Of minks. Husbands. Cadillacs. The material things. I don't even have a story of gain in them since I got sober. But I'll tell you what I lost. Everything that's inside a person that makes life worth living.
I cannot describe myself as a person who had zest for life. Someone else did. And I had lost it. I cannot describe myself as somebody who had humor. Someone else did. And I had lost that. I could tell the meanest joke in town to sing for my supper. Which I did. And I learned that that was one way to do it. And I did it in San Francisco where I had fled. I had worked in the airlines and I found this was my other place that I could hide.
The other place that I could function. Just at function level. No more. And get by. And when I was out in San Francisco where I fled to get away from drinking. That town is a good town to go to to get away from drinking. They got the stuff in little bottles in drug stores. And right away because I'm tuned in I found the places where they stay open immediately after closing. And the guys to buy the stuff.
But for the first week in my new found morality I was eating tuna fish sandwiches in the park. I felt that I owed it to the tuna fish company because I used to call in full sticks from Tomain from their tuna so many times. It just seemed right that I should eat some once in a while. I ran out of excuses once. I told them they said they had the nerve to ask me why I wasn't coming in. And that came as a surprise.
They'd never done that to me before. And I thought well I had just slain a dragon. I thought at the time I was very gay and very witty. And then the next day it didn't seem very clever and I didn't dare go in to face it. And so life went on and got terrible and I had my mother wire me out there that she had died. And I fled back to New York and got canned anyway. I worked at so many airlines if I ever went into the luggage business from the luggage they have I could open up a store.
Because I could hide in this job as I say. And I had shifts. I worked every shift they had. 5 a.m. to 2. I figured you know I don't have to even tell you how I figured.
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Well I would stop drinking earlier and get to bed and I could stop drinking at 3. And if I got drunk etc. Oh you know the computerized went on in my head. If I got drunk I'd be out by 7. I'd be in bed by 9. Well of course what happened is I went right around the clock and met myself going to work. And would pass out. Fall asleep we say. Pass out at the airline job. And so I went from TCA to Société Française to KLM to BOAC.
You name it. And always tried to pick up the language of that airline. And when I got drunk it seemed that I could speak it. And there was a lot of fun in there somewhere. And I was not searching for happiness. I was looking for something. Something that I never found until I got in here. And even that is not the word happiness whatever it is. I did not know I had limitations when I drank. And it's only when I found I had them.
That I had been able to realize infinite possibilities. The last three years of my drinking were what I call my winding sheet years. That's when I climbed into my winding sheet and started to die. And there was no fun and there was no laughter and there sure as hell was no zest for life. I did not know what it was and because I didn't I knew that I knew everything there was to know. And that there was nothing anybody could tell me.
And I would say that dead drunks, passed out, hungovers. One of the coldest nights in the history of New York when it was probably five below and even the other drunks had gone home. I was starting around third in a spring coat because in my wardrobe my winter clothes were my summer clothes with the sleeves rolled down. And I was running around third avenue in a spring coat looking for this something that kept eluding me from the time it seemed I was a child.
And I couldn't find it. And I do not mean that the day I came in huzzah into Astoria I found it. But I have slowly found it. Because I don't know what it is that I found but I've got it. That thing that I was looking for. And I remember that night in particular because I probably was never as lonely in my life as that particular night because I suddenly knew that I was out searching. That I wanted and that I needed and oh God I did not know what in hell it was.
And I kept trying to find it in the glass and in the bottle and a scene in the hangover that would be close to it and then came an Easter Sunday and I knew I would do it again. Now all the things, the punches in the face, the insults, the awful morality that's at large when I was drinking suddenly were impossible for me to grapple with any longer. My 3rd Avenue safari had netted me nothing. And I stood up and looked out a window and saw a little girl with her parents in a blue hat and coat and patent leather shoes and it was Easter Sunday.
And I thought what has happened to me since I was that little girl at Curtin. And I didn't know that the word was alcoholism. I didn't know vaguely I drank too much. Can you believe that kind of not knowing? I drank a little too much. A smart girl like me who knew all the answers. I thought I knew all the answers. I had to to survive out in that jungle. And I had not one answer to life. Not one piece of know-how about what I should do tomorrow.
There was only one thing I knew that I would do it again. And this piece of knowledge was far worse than anything I'd ever come to. That I would do this drinking again and I may not be able to come out of it. Because I was dying of drink and I was under 35 and it was very fast. And I was finished and I said those terrible words that so many of us are alien to when we first come round. God help me. And I did not, like our founder, have a flash.
I had only a thing that I knew I would do. Go home and sleep and call in to take my usual routine. But I knew something. I don't know what it was. But I'd be here by noon and I was going to try. I'd already approached, the lady had approached me in the teletype room at Air France. And the reason she had is that she had never… And the reason she had is that she had never been able to read my cables in the morning,
[00:15:02]
but in the afternoon they were very liquid clear. And so she got wise to me, and we had had a couple of talks before. Her husband had been in AA. I thought that was interesting, he was Irish. I figured, I drank in the Irish bar. He chased her across the roof with a knife. I thought, how very quaint. Nothing, nothing disturbed me when I first came in. I mean, the most extraordinary violence that occurred did not disturb me.
I expected them. And so when I came in, I was home immediately. There's no question. I was terribly excited. I was as excited when I came into AA in Astoria and heard someone say, My name is, and I'm an alcoholic, as I was the first time I took my first excited drink and knew I was going to do that. Because I thought, now I'm going to do this. And I was very excited and very thrilled and had a short slip of months later one night.
And I have had help and I have had friends and I have had terrible times over. Extraordinary times, fights with myself. But I climbed out of that winding sheet, man. I climbed out of it. And I got something I decided I would do in my life sober, which I was doing drunk. I was the late, late show on Glennon's for years. So I decided to try to be the early, early show legit. And I got into a couple of shows.
I'm studying. I hope it doesn't show tonight. Tonight I talk to my people. I never want these should be anything else for me. And I just finished one. And it's like I want to do this. As I say, if it doesn't, you know, work, it won't. But the marvelous thing, I have all those things behind me. The steps and a certain kind of those vibrations of love that you get in the room. And the AA way of life, which makes it possible.
And I want to close with a story that I particularly like. Maybe a couple of them. They're short. It's frightening. He doesn't want to close. They're going to tell you a story. But this was in a book about an Indian named Ishi out in Northern California who wandered into a town having no other way to survive any longer out in the wild. And he was cold. He was hungry. He was afraid. He was frightened of death.
He no longer knew how to survive out there. He did not speak the language. And he arrived in his town and actually because this is the way things are. They spot them in jail, but a couple of very good anthropologists got a hold of him and they went down a list of words trying to find out what brand he belonged to of Indian and they finally came across a very hardly known dialect called Yahi and they said a word and his excitement when he heard something that he could communicate with was unbounded.
And he did live four years and had a good life and there was a great deal. They learned from each other. There was a mutual sound shared in that moment. And this is what happened with me in LA. I came into Asia as Ishi did. Cold, really, and hungry, certainly undernourished, and frightened, and unable to communicate in a language my own anymore with anyone and someone tapped out the word welcome and I said, you kidding man?
I haven't been welcome anywhere in a long time, even unto myself in my heart. So what do you mean welcome? But I knew they meant it. And so it was a truth for me as it was for that Indian. And so one other thing, there was a book review just recently I read in which a grandmother, a very grateful grandmother, said to a southern school teacher because her granddaughter was the first to ever receive a diploma or be educated in this family and she said in gratitude, if you ever need me, the night will never be too dark.
And I think that that is the message of the love that's for all of us. And thank you Bill and God bless you. Lee, thank you very, very much. That was terrific.