Audio
Transcript
Source: Tom B. – AA Recovery and Service Share (Date Unknown).mp3 File: tom-b-aa-recovery-and-service-share-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:02:10
============================================================
Our speaker for tonight has come from Manitoba, Canada. He's a drunk who got sober and is sharing with us. He's a fellow who has served as a delegate and is now a trustee. In the fall of 1966 was the first time I met him over a telephone and we talked over certain AA things. And I remember that when we talked, I knew him as if I knew him all that life. And I didn't meet him again until last April of 67 when I went to the 17th conference.
And when I went into the hotel there and somebody mentioned his name and I turned around, I knew him then as if I always did. I had a wonderful experience with him for the week I spent. And I remember some of the fun and the good times we had, although we worked pretty hard at the conference. I remember one night sitting in the lobby with a bunch of the delegates and we were talking and different things.
And Tom said, I don't know whether to call the family up in Canada or go for ice cream. But he was able to make a decision. He went and called his family and then he had a big bowl of ice cream. He's a guy that I met again yesterday and we were together most of the evening and part of today. He's a fellow who's here tonight to share with us. And in a way, if you hear him, you'll feel like I do. He's a wonderful asset to this program.
And I feel privileged and honored that he's sharing with us this evening. And now I'd like to introduce Tom B., trustee from Manitoba, Canada. Thank you, Tom. Chairman George. Reverend Father. Fellow drunks. I venture to say I'm the only freeloader on the program tonight. I have before me the program for today's festivities. Up to this point, we have discussed the 12 steps, the 12 traditions, the intergroup, the general service conference, responsibility, the early part of AA, the spiritual part of the program, the attraction and the 12 concepts, and I fail to see what the hell I'm doing here.
Thank you very much. We're down to humility. Thank you. Well, I'd be most remiss for not thanking the committee and Tom and George for making it possible for me to be here because I am deeply grateful. It's been a wonderful day. You've had a fantastic conference. And I am most sincerely grateful to be a part of it. We better start at the beginning. I am Tom, and I am an alcoholic, and being from the West, when we do that, as you learned this afternoon, we say hi.
Hi. Thank you so much. I am, as Eve talked this afternoon, a recovering alcoholic because a few years ago in my sobriety, I was under the impression that I had recovered, and I discovered very abruptly that the only thing I had recovered from was drinking. I had not recovered from the illness of alcoholism in my life. On occasion, sober is as unmanageable and more so than I ever was drunk, I think.
I don't remember most of it drunk, which is probably a saving grace. I am an alcoholic who has been around a few years and been privileged to this day to be a servant of our fellowship, and I'm deeply grateful for that. I am, I think, what the experts in alcoholism, and as you know in alcoholism, we've got more experts than there is anywhere else in the world. We've got them coming out of the woodwork.
Some of them even know something. And it wounds you and I sometimes when the experts don't ask our opinion. We give it to them anyway, to hell with it. I'm sometimes amazed at the relationship that you and I, as members of AA, have with the professional people in the rest of the community, with some of the hanky-panky that goes on up in my country. They go to great lengths to tell a psychiatrist he doesn't know a darn thing about alcoholism, and then two days later drop a drunk off on his door and wonder why he doesn't meet him with open arms.
However, it's been good and things are happening. But I am, I think, what they call a primary.
[00:04:59]
I don't know what that is.
[00:05:01]
I suspect as I walk in AA and I stay sober longer and I learn more about alcoholism and my illness, that most of us were primary. That is, the people that had trouble in the business of living with booze from the very first drink. I have also discovered, I think many of us, when we first come to AA were under the impression, at least a few of them, to hear them talk, that their trouble started with alcohol 30 minutes before they got to their first AA meeting.
Mother threw a bottle at them and they decided to go to a meeting. But there's a great truth, I think, in Alcoholics Anonymous, and that is the longer we stay sober, the farther back we can look and see trouble. And I can look as far back as I can look and see trouble. I wouldn't know hell from start before I ever picked up a glass. And I think this is what is noted in the business of alcoholism because I have been in it as a primary.
I think this is what is noted in the business of alcoholism because I have been in it as a primary alcoholic, a person that has had trouble from the very first drink. And I started to drink, and I'm not going to give you a blow-by-blow description of my drinking, mostly because I don't remember it, and secondly, we haven't got enough time. At around 14 years of age, which is not a world record, and I don't say it for any other reason, and that's what happened, I took my first drink at 14.
Now, today, my goodness, we hear about alkies at 10, 11, and 12, don't you know? And I remember telling somebody somewhere from a place similar to this that I had started drinking at the age of 14. And up in our country we have, and I suppose you have down here, we have a very dangerous kind of meeting. It's called an at-random meeting, where if the chairman has been appointed about 30 seconds before the meeting starts and told to handle it, and he doesn't know what to do, he calls drunks up off the floor.
George, you say a few words, and Mary, and Barry, and Pete. And if the first drunk up, unsuspectingly, starts off by saying, my name is Pete, and I am an alcoholic, and I started drinking at the age of 12, instantly it becomes competitive. And the next guy, just to stay in the race, has got to start at 11, and 10, and 9, and if you don't run out of drunks, you wind up with a prenatal alcoholic. I was with dear Marty, who was sick and couldn't be here today, a couple of years ago, and I was telling that thing, and she got up the next day to give her pitch, and she said, I remember last night Tom was talking about prenatal alcoholics, and I want them to know that this is no joke, that there are apparently medical records today of babies being born of mothers who were, at the time of birth, were heavily under the influence of alcohol, and the babies went through withdrawal symptoms within three hours of being born.
Well, I don't think I was born half in the bag, but I got a fairly early start. And I think some of us, and that's why I believe this thing to be an illness, I think some of us, and probably all of us, I don't know, I'm not being an expert, but have all the components that it takes to make up an alcoholic before we ever picked up a glass, and all we had to do was add the sauce, and you got one. And I think that emotionally, and psychologically, and every other way, before I ever picked up a glass, I was in trouble in the business of living, because alcoholism is a living problem and not a drinking problem, I believe this as well.
So at the age of 14, I picked up my first glass, just with no great fanfare or production, I was with my father at the time, my dad was a guy about six foot two and a half, 260 pounds, he was a big bird, a very successful man, a very dynamic guy, he was one of these fathers that when he said something that was said, that was the end of the argument, and that doesn't sit too well with a 14 year old, I always felt like I was playing second fiddle to him, and at 14 that's what you're supposed to be playing, I discovered.
We were out together, I believe, shooting, or hunting, and there is a difference. I forget what it was. And with a warm day, we were out in the country,
[00:10:00]
and we'd stop beside the road, we'd run out of pop, and I remember I was nearly as big physically as I am now, I had a little more on the top, a little less around the middle, but I was built like a Mack truck, and I remember an old boy looking at me, kind of sizing me up, and he obviously came to the profound conclusion that I wasn't an idiot, he lived to eat those words shortly after, and he said, well, we haven't got any pop, soft drinks, would you like a bottle of beer?
And I said, sure. I'd always lived in awe of this man. It was a strange relationship. He was a person who, through no fault of his, I think, was completely incapable of demonstrating any kind of affection or love, but he was quite a guy. And I remember, he gave me a bottle of beer, I took a sip of it, I didn't like the taste, I thought, Lord, what did they see in that? But it quenched the thirst, and I drank it down, and you get to like it pretty quickly, I discovered.
I stole the second, right there. You learn very quickly, also, if you're an early alcoholic, and drank that. I walked up after drinking two bottles of beer, walked up around the automobile, and my father was standing beside it, remember? Six foot two and a half, 260 pounds. I had had two bottles of beer, to my knowledge, the first two drinks in my life, and I looked at my father, and a wonderful thing had happened to him.
He had shrunk. He didn't look near as big, and near as tough or smart, and I proceeded to tell him so, and that was my first mistake, as a practicing alcoholic. Because he told me, immediately after. But the next day, you know, even though you got, what for? For opening your big mouth at the wrong time, you have a very good memory, for a while, about the effects of alcohol. We got, about the good effects of alcohol.
We have a very poor memory about the bad effects of alcohol, but we have an excellent memory about what it does for us. And alcohol was an answer in my life for a long time. The next morning, I got up saying, well now, if that stuff will shrink that old boy of mine, it undoubtedly will handle mama and the people in the business of living that I am having trouble with. So every time I run into an awkward situation, or a human being that I can't handle, I'll just have a few beers and we'll be in business.
And by gosh, it's true. It's true. I think I've heard several AA's say that alcohol does give you something in return. It just, you know, we just don't take it because it's a social lubricant. I suppose the other people drink it for that reason. I've heard of some silly reasons for drinking booze since I quit drinking. Like for being thirsty. I never knew it was that simple. I don't ever recall having one because I was thirsty.
I was flying down here yesterday from Montreal and I was sitting thinking it was a few little bumps going down. I remember flying here and there when I was horribly hungover. And that is a ghastly experience. That was before they started serving free booze on airplanes. My timing has been lousy all the way through. Really. And I remember sitting on airplanes, you know, and if the weight was dropped a napkin, I'd leap out of the seat, you know.
And every time the plane would jump, I would jump higher than the plane would. I remember flying somewhere for some reason and I was in terrible shape. I was sitting with a guy who was kind of a normal person, I guess. And it wasn't a rough trip, but I was in rough shape. And I kept leaping all the time. Every time he'd be reading and I'd be jumping and he said, do you do this often? I said, what do you mean?
He said, fly. Well, I said, not anymore than I have to. But I'm not well today. He said, I can see that. He said, next time I would suggest that rather than buying a ticket, you get somebody at the airport just to scratch a match and you can fly there yourself. He nearly got it right in the teeth. You know, you would think that at the early discovery of where alcohol helped you handle people, cope with people, conditions, and circumstances,
[00:15:03]
like in my case, the first two beers got my father down where I could handle him. You would think that if two beers would get him to eyeball level, four beers would get him a little farther, and if you drank enough, he'd disappear. This doesn't work, though. I don't ever recall from that day on until I joined Alcoholics Anonymous a few years ago of ever getting him any smaller than he was the first two beers.
And it took a great deal more as time went by just to even get him down there. And of course, the time comes when you can drink it by the barrel full and nothing happens to him. And that, you're out of business. That's alcoholism. Well, as time went by, like everybody's life, I found that I depended more on it for circumstances and conditions. I have never been a periodic. I drank in the first few years because it was there when I was in an awkward situation, when I felt uncomfortable.
I am convinced that emotionally my growth was stopped the day I picked up a glass. I haven't grown a day until I joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and I think maybe a little since then. But I found that as time went by, alcohol became involved in more areas of my life, like all of us did. And it took more to get the same effect as time went by as well. I wasn't really very good at anything. I was a great starter, but a lousy finisher.
And I've met a lot of drunks with that problem. And we never start just little simple projects, do we? You know, we start real major operations. Anything, you know, don't do it simple. If there's an easier, softer way, forget it. And I was one of these birds that was going to change the world. If I did, the condition that it's in today, that wasn't too successful an exercise. I found a great comfort. I found a great solace in alcohol.
I found that it moved me from the fringe into the middle. It moved me from where I didn't want to be to where the action was. And I think this does to many people. I don't think this is a bad habit. I think that the person who gets this reaction from alcohol can be in trouble from the very first. Right from the very start. I think that's what's happening to a lot of the kids we see coming into AA today.
That they found this at 12, 13, 14, or 15. Because up there we got them 16 and 17, and they're really wheeling in this program. And they obviously had gone as far, as uncomfortably as you and I had, else they wouldn't be staying around this program. But they are, thank God. It's a thing as I look back where you can spot very early in your alcoholism that something is wrong. You don't want to admit it to yourself, and you certainly don't admit it to anybody else.
But there is a feeling very early in my alcoholism that I wasn't doing it quite the same as a lot of these birds were doing it. I remember after I came in, no I remember long before I came in, when I was 17 or 18 or 19, my mother used to say, if you wouldn't take the first one, you wouldn't take the second one. Well that's an idiotic statement. Anybody knows that. Except me. She used to throw that at me so often I would throw it back.
And I remember I was sober about six months in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I was sitting in a meeting, and some bird got up and talked about the people who had told him about the first drink. If you don't take the first, you can't get the second, and you'll be okay. And I always thought that this was a stupid thing to tell an intelligent person. I was the intelligent person. And this guy stood up and I nearly fell off my chair.
Because he told the story of hearing this and going in and getting two glasses and pouring the first drink and then pouring the second one and drinking the second. And I was scared to death to tell anybody that story because I thought they'd put me in a rubber room if I let anybody know that you think that way. You're out of your cotton-picking head. But there's a feeling way down deep in your tummy very early in alcoholism, I think.
At least it was in mine, that something was wrong.
[00:20:01]
That your timing slowly gets fouled up. That I became aware very early that if I didn't drink, there wasn't any danger of getting into too much difficulty. But if I didn't drink, I couldn't be comfortable in the business of living, and it was simple as that. And we are people, I've heard many AA's say this, we are people who cannot be uncomfortable for very long. We just don't function uncomfortably in the business of living.
I think this is why AA is so magnificently successful. That if we do these things to the best of our ability one day at a time, we eventually get comfortable in living without booze. And I think we either get comfortable living without alcohol or we're liable to get stiff again. I know that I cannot live in discomfort. I just don't like being uncomfortable. Now whether that's a weakness or not, I don't know, nor do I care less.
If AA wasn't comfortable, and I didn't have fun in AA, and I didn't enjoy life in AA, I doubt very much whether I would get sober. That was the great thing I found in AA, was the laughter. Never dawned on me that you'd enjoy not drinking. Everybody that I knew that didn't drink was, oh, guh. One of those chin-on-the-navel types. I felt like a bug with a pin in them every time I was with them. And they talked about sin and salvation, which I was an authority on.
And I didn't know anybody that didn't drink just because they didn't drink. I've met a lot of them since I came into Alcoholics Anonymous. I sit on airplanes now where that free booze is, and I hear people who enjoy a drink say, no, thank you. And I look at them and say, strange breed of cat. I feel like going over and saying, do you know it's free, sir? And he knows, it doesn't bother him. The whole world is sicker than I thought it was.
Well, I drank my way in and out of a few schools, and eventually into university and out of university. We had a unanimous decision on the going out. The school father and I all decided that the whole outfit would be better off if I was somewhere else. I went into my father's business, which was a good thing, or I'd have starved to death. He made me like, oh, you know, non-alcoholics who love us are wonderful people, but they nearly kill us.
He made me the vice president, dear God. Now, I didn't know what that was, even. And he gave me a nice salary and a big desk with vice president on it and nothing much to do. But, you know, we'll give him a little responsibility. And, you know, the people think if you give an alcoholic responsibility, he'll smarten up. You know, he'll straighten right up. And we straighten right out. Well, they thought, they nearly loved me to death that much.
And he made me the vice president, and I added and subtracted and divided and multiplied thousands of columns of figures. They'd come in this side, and I… I had also a signature on the checks of the company. I noticed that when they held those in, they never let them go, though. You held on to them while I signed them. As time went by, and I got a little worse. I didn't think I got worse, but I noticed the desk kept getting farther back in the building, and it was a very large building.
You could go a hell of a long way back. They would come in at first, and they would look at me and see what the sign said. Who's that? He says, the vice president, the boss's son. Is that right? Yeah. Intelligent-looking fellas. Oh, yeah, nice guy. And they'd get a little farther. They'd say, who's he? He says, the boss's son. And as time went by, they'd come in and say, what's that? We say, we're not too sure, because he's not here much.
He apparently is in charge of entertaining. He takes the customers out at 7.30 in the morning and gets them stiff so we can lubricate the business out of them. They sent me to Detroit. We were in the automobile business, or father was. He sent me to Detroit to go to school to one of these corporate things, and I went.
[00:25:04]
There was 11 of us on this deal. Ten of us were rummies. What a gang. And the other guy was the most wonderful person I have met in my whole life. I forget his last name. He was a lawyer, a Jewish lawyer from Chelsea, Massachusetts. He was the most wonderful person, and he was in with ten of the most obnoxious slobs that you ever saw in your life. Every one of us. Five of us are now in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Well, we're going to have a reunion. We decided we'd wait and go to the International in 70. We should have the rest of them by then if they don't die. I wound up in the local jail in Detroit, and the corporation isn't happy about that. They figure that's very poor public relations. When the people that are trying to learn to be the business and go back to home and carry the message, you know, they don't learn that down in the local tank.
It took me four days to figure out who to phone to get out of that place. You couldn't phone the corporation. They had to say, keep him. I remember we went for a trip one weekend, about five of us. We're all young guys, 20, 21. And we decided we'd go to Louisville from Detroit. Detroit, Toledo, and down to Louisville. And we missed Louisville. I think if you drew a line from Toledo to Nashville, you have to go through Louisville, you know.
But they moved it. And we missed it completely. And we got into Nashville. Well, I'm a Western Canadian meadowlark. And being a drunk in Western Canada, you do a lot of drinking to country music. It's the best drinking music that was ever invented. Everybody's either dying or something. And you're sad. It's terrible, you know. You can just sit there with a crock of whiskey and bawl like a baby. And, of course, Nashville in those days, today, I guess it's the music capital of the world, or one of them.
And then it was the country music capital, home of the Grand Old Opry. And I wanted to go to the Grand Old Opry, which I did, very drunk. And wound up that night in the hermitage and woke up the next morning feeling frightful and very sick and very scared. And I had a certificate about as big as this thing. And it had red ribbons on it and wax seals and signatures of governors. And, Lord, you never saw such a thing in your life.
And I wondered what it was. And after a little investigation, I discovered that the night before, I had invested either $200 or $300 in a 50% interest in a hillbilly singer that had been dead for 10 years. Went back to Detroit and finished the course. I went home, full of knowledge and other things. It could get worse, as it has to. I was a geographic alcoholic for a while. I decided that booze wasn't my trouble.
Winnipeg was. And in January, that's a real good reason. It's 40 below zero. You can't drink. You can't live in that country and not drink. There's an antifreeze factor involved. And we got them just freezing to death by the thousands up there. Alki's trying to prove that if you drink enough of that booze, you won't freeze to death. And it does not work. I'll tell you, you can be full as a tick and you're still going to right up like that.
I decided I would go to Vancouver. Those of you who have taken a geographic cure have made a discovery, as I have and all of us have, that when you decide that your problem isn't booze, it's New York, I'll go to Miami. On the way to Miami, you stop in Washington and you meet all the boys coming from Miami. I went to Vancouver, stopped off in Calgary. I met all the Alkis from Vancouver coming to Winnipeg to quit drinking.
We got in the pub together and got drunk, discussed our drinking problem. I went on to Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, where I went underground. New Orleans is a wonderful drinking town. I got thrown in the bucket there too. I was decorating Jackson Square for three days. I came up in Key West. You have to come up in Key West. That's the end of the line. I was 19 years of age when I took that junket. I had just been
[00:30:01]
declared and diagnosed by the medical and psychiatric profession of my community as a chronic alcoholic, whatever that is. And I suggested to those doctors that they go back to school, preferably not the one they graduated from, because they obviously had learned very little at that one. And I set about to prove that they were right. The lengths that you and I as alcoholics will go to to prove we're not what we are is astounding. We'll go to any length. I've never seen a social drinker trying to prove that they were a social drinker, have you?
Not one. All my family, I'm the only drunk in the B. family. I've never seen any member of my family switch drinks, just drink on weekends, to prove something. If they drink on weekends, that's when they want to drink. They've never had to switch drinks, they've never taken a geographic cure, they've never tried to convince me that they haven't got a drinking problem or anybody else, because they haven't got one. The only people I've ever seen going through those exercises are us.
And we do it with great dexterity. I had been away from home for quite a while. I am the only child. I stayed drunk on that one for three years, too. That's a beaut. People around you say, well, I can understand why you have a problem, you know, that old man of yours is nice. You're right, you know, away we go again. My family found me, my mother found me after disappearing. How she ever found me? A little bar in South Miami at 19 years of age, sitting on a bar stool, 10 o'clock in the morning drinking a whiskey sour. And like all people who love us, if you had some left, the first thing, why do they always ask you when they catch you after you've been away and you're half full and you're standing with a glass in your hand, they always come up to you and say, what are you doing?
I've never been able to figure it out. Here's the person I love the most in the world, the person who loved me the most in the world, without the doubt. And here he is, the prodigal. She hadn't seen him for three weeks, I guess, or a month or whatever it was, it doesn't matter. How she found me, I don't know. And I've always been afraid to ask. She comes up and what are you doing? And you know, well, you give some idiotic answer. She, what are you drinking? I said, a whiskey sour. She said, do you know what time it is? I said, no, I don't know what day it is. She said off the top of her head, for whatever reason, the people who love us say these things, because I'm sure they reach pretty deep when they see their loved ones falling apart and they're trying to say or do the right thing. She said, only alcoholics drink in the morning, and a whiskey sour is an alcoholic's drink. I've jolted a lot of my social drinking friends with that statement. From that second when I was 19, and I'm a little older than that now, to this second, I have never drank another whiskey sour. But for the next nine years, I drank everything that was too thin to chew. I have drank extracts, I have a shot of the rubbing alcohol on Sunday mornings, but you couldn't pour a whiskey sour down my throat.
Because only you drank whiskey sours. And she said, only alcoholics drink in the morning, and for three years, I believe it was, I never took a drink till noon. I would shake my liver out till noon. But at 12.01, I now fail to see the difference between being drunk at 1.30 or being drunk at 2, particularly if it's Wednesday and you're supposed to be working. But these are the lengths we go to. And you know way down deep. People talk to you sometimes, people who try to help, they talk about backbone. My old man was the greatest guy in backbone. We had long talks about backbone, mine. I remember one night we both got stiff, and I never remembered this till I was in Montreal in October, down at that, up at that bilingual conference they have. There's a bearcat.
That's a wonderful AA thing. And it suddenly came to me. Father and I, I remember, had sat up all night discussing my backbone. And I kept reaching around and saying, it's all right. I didn't suspect that backbone was the problem anyway. He was. And I remember, we discussed it till five in the morning. And the next day I get up, and I remember I went and had a little medicine, and I was about half full again, and I was walking down past an x-ray clinic, and it dawned on me that I'll fix that old boy. And I went in and paid five dollars to have an x-ray taken
[00:35:04]
of my backbone. And the next time the old boy got on that one, I snapped it out at him. I said, let's settle that once and for all, boy. Never mention my backbone again. People tried to help me, doctors, psychiatrists. Doctor said, Tom, once, this is when I was 19, and built like a Mack truck. You know, and like all elkies, if you've got to go to the doctor, you get well first. You stay sober. You stay sober for three days and get looking like an Olympic athlete. And you're not shaking, and you go in looking like gangbusters. And he said, do you drink much? You say, socially, a couple of beers. Yeah, a couple of beers. How often? Oh, whenever it's available, you know. But you know, no problem, no, you know. But this time, my timing got fouled up again, and I went in shaking like a leaf. And he said, you know, if you don't quit drinking, you're going to die. And they always seem to tell us that on the mornings we're afraid we weren't.
And you can't scare an alcoholic with the thought of death, because that booze has too much meaning in our life. We don't drink alcohol because of the reasons the other people do. I drank alcohol because it was the only thing in my life that made my life bearable. And if I couldn't have it, then let's die. We'll get it over with. The local nutcracker who examined me said that if you don't quit drinking, you'll go insane. I think if he hadn't used the word go, we'd have been all right. That gave me a little training time.
And after reading, you know, I have two clergymen in my family. I'm a Protestant, and I'm kind of trapped. I thought after reading the program, I was going to get up and talk on ecumenism, father. But these guys belong to, I belong to a church that is drier than anything. They're coming around though. They, uh, they're now coming to see it at the congregation on Sunday morning. Probably 80% of them have been out Saturday night having a few belts, and they're still pretty good Christians, you know. But these guys were narrow. They've broadened out a great deal since I joined AA, but they talked to me about sin and salvation, and they couldn't hell.
They give me, oh, that was a great one. I don't know, my conception of hell, a place, a condition, is one of hopelessness, loneliness, and fear. And what you can tell a drunk about hopelessness, loneliness, and fear, I'd like to hear it. But they tried, and they tried in love. I didn't think so at the time, but I know so now. My family tried in love, and we reject all the help, and we go on, and we go on, and we go on.
The last little while I, I didn't remember much. My life was falling apart. You, you run fresh out of human dignity and self-respect, and you start to think about taking your own life. And I think that any person who, as a result of drinking, regardless of the amount, who even thinks about taking their own life, has a problem with booze. The fact that we do it or don't do it, I don't think is important. I think the fact that it even enters our mind, that the only way I can help the people I love is to destroy myself, that is something. That is the insanity, maybe, of this thing.
I remember coming home after three or four weeks of alcoholic survey, and I was not well. I was, I was very full, and I had a four-day growth of beard, and I smelt like eight poor cats. My mother, who was a bridge addict, had the girls in for bridge. I have had a thing on bridge all my life. I hate it. I don't know why now. I used to when I was drinking, but I don't. It caused a lot of fights. I don't know why now. I used to when I was drinking, and I have never, but they're bridge addicts, and the girls were all wonderful ladies who I all, you know, called them all ants. We're not ants, but they were just the most wonderful people in the world. I've never played bridge, but I came home after four days and decided to go and give the girls a little advice, and I fell in the middle of the bridge, sir. Bang, right in the middle.
I was looking up, and they were looking down, and I remember every one of them now had tears in their eyes, and I
[00:40:00]
got the look, and you know what the look is, brethren and sister. It's a look that you and I think is a look of loathing, but it's a look of bewilderment, I think, in the eyes of the people who love us and who we love. There's somebody they love more than life itself is falling apart at the seams, and they can't do anything about it, and we get mad because we think it's a look of loathing, and my reaction was, well, that's a fine way to look at your only child. After all I've done for you, don't dwell on that too long. That's a short conversation, that's it.
Get upstairs, so up I went, and I was very mad. You know, that's the reaction. You either got to start fighting or start crying right away to get people off your back, and I went upstairs in my home, and I used to keep, you call them pints down here, we call them mickeys in Canada, and I used to keep them in varying degrees of emptiness or fullness, that depended on your condition, in my clothes, and I was, went in and very mad deceiving, and I went in and I went to my closet and shuffled around, found one, and had a belt, and walked through my room, and for some reason or other there's a balcony on the back of that house. To this day we don't know why it's there, but there it was. It was the 20th of November, it was 20 degrees below zero. I went out on the balcony just seething against the people I hated, who were the people I loved.
And I said, that's what I'll do, I'll fix them. I'll kill myself. I'll show them I'll kill me. Now there's sanity. All the normal people are coming up with that conclusion. So I went out and I looked, and there is a degree of antifreeze effect in this booze, you know, because it didn't feel like 20 below zero. As I walked back in, I went by a full-length mirror, I noticed I had my new suit on. I'd had it on for four days, but I thought, being rational, that well I don't want to get my suit dirty if I'm going to jump off the balcony. So I took off my new suit and I'm in my shorts, and I went back out and looked again, didn't look too bad, came back in and had a belt, just reveling in the fact they'll be sorry. This will fix them. Went out and had another look, went back in, had another belt, went back out, and it's November, 20 below zero, climbed, there was a railing around it, I climbed over the railing and thought about it a little bit, still sounded like a good idea, let myself down, hung an eave trough. And then it's too late.
You know, you can't really change your mind then. I hung an eave trough, must have been, it seemed like three minutes, probably three seconds. And then, thinking of the tragedy and how sorry they'll be, I let myself go and fell three feet into six feet of snow. I get up and I brush myself off in my shorts and rang the doorbell. I had forgotten my key. I don't know about your shorts, but mine don't have pockets.
It's any of your business. My mother came to the door and fell apart. She said, here's the prodigal standing out there just as blue as can be. She said, my God, what have you done? And just as I said, I just jumped off the balcony. She said, oh, you poor dear, and I had her. I went to bed and had a few drinks and got sober and thought about this and got scared to death. But I didn't want to die, but by a long shot. Stayed sober for 30 days, got drunk again, and stayed drunk for another year or so, and I don't remember 10% of it.
I remember getting sober at the place I live now, a town about 70 miles out of our city in the Lake Country, lovely spot. And I live there now, and this is where I get sober. And it was New Year's Day, and I was at a party. I'd lived there. I was born and brought up there practically. I've been pulled out of every ditch within a 50 mile radius of this town. I knew everybody in the town. I've fallen out of every pub in the place. We went to a party. I tripped over. It was New Year's Day reception. I tripped over the stoop and was slid into the party on my belt. Everybody said, there's Tom. I got up and, you know, there's a lot of drunks around there. That's normal. And I went in and there was a friend of mine who was younger than I was. I was 28, I guess, at the time. And this guy was younger, and I'd heard he had a lot of trouble with booze.
We didn't drink together, hardly at all. We had nothing in common. We had gone to school together for a year, but not in the same class.
[00:45:02]
We didn't mingle. We had a few belts together, but nothing, you know, we didn't drunk. This guy had lost his wife and kids and wound up in Skid Row in Toronto, and he joined something called AA, which I had seen in books, which I passed over very quickly. It had been suggested to me by my family, by my mother, by the nurse that I have, by my father, by the friends that I had left, and by people, why don't you do something, and AA, and I was the kind of guy that, well, we relate the inability to drink to weakness, don't we, you know, can't drink, you're not a man, so I wouldn't go.
Here was this guy, he was sober, he'd got his wife back, he'd been sober six months. Do you know what he was doing? He was tending bars, and every time I went on the wagon, which wasn't often, I did not tend bar. I didn't go and sit in a bar and drink seven up. I stayed away from booze. It was isolation for me. If I wasn't drinking, I wasn't in the human race. That's why going on the wagon was such a horrible experience.
But here was this guy, an outie, an admitted outie, and he was up to his eyeballs in booze and drunks. They were hanging on his shoulders, spitting in his face, and telling him how much willpower he had, and he was grinning at them. And I watched him, and he poured me a drink. I went in, took a drink, and I couldn't stand it. I went back in, leaned against the door to watch him and to keep standing.
I was very, very full. I went over and I tapped him on the shoulder. I watched him. He smiled. I said, Bernie, I want to talk to you. And he didn't know what I was talking about. He'd been sober six months. Well, I said, not here. I didn't want anybody to know I had a drinking problem. I just arrived at the party on my belt. He said, well, go downstairs. And he opened the door and they had stairs, like a lot of AA meetings have, those ones that go up like this.
We have an AA group in our city that if you can get to it, you deserve to get sober. And I looked at the stairs and I said, after you, I wanted to fall on him. He walked down. I had my hand on his shoulder. He put his foot on the bottom step of the basement, the furnace room. And I said, Bernie, I can't quit drinking. What did you do? And I'd asked a lot of people this the last year or so, my drinking, and every one of them give me that chin on the belt look and said, well, my boy, and we'd go into backbone willpower, standing up and being a man, turning over new leaves, pulling up our socks, in salvation and outward manifestations of inward frustrations.
Try that one on a rummy someday. He thinks it's physical. He turned around and laughed and he nearly got it. But he laughed differently than anybody I'd ever seen. He put his hand on my shoulder, smiling and said, sit down. Nobody had ever laughed when I said that before. You know, when I said to my family, I think I'll quit drinking. Oh, yeah. But nobody ever laughed. This guy laughed and he smiled.
And he smiled through his eyes and his face and his hands. And he started to talk. And it wasn't the backbone and willpower. He talked about, not about me, because if he talked about me, I had all the answers. But he didn't talk about me. He talked about him and he told me what he was like and what happened and what he's like now. He didn't talk about backbone willpower. He talked about hopelessness, loneliness and fear and futility and guilt and remorse.
And he built a bridge of understanding the lack of I've never experienced since and probably never will. And he smiled all the time. You are the damnedest people I ever saw in my life. The more horrible things get, the harder you grin at it. You know, some poor drunk coming in just full of troubles, he starts to spill them in the guys. That a boy. It's infectious. I know why I was laughing. This guy had been sober six months.
He wasn't within 100 miles of an AA meeting. There wasn't a day within 100 miles. He left his book at home and out of the woodwork comes a 12 step call to me. I wonder he laughed. He probably just asked God for a drunk and he got one. Let me tell you. Well, I went on and drank that day, but we talked and I said, sounds good. And I like the way he looked. And I think this is what sold me on you. I like the way you look.
You were relaxed, you were comfortable, you smiled, you had eyes the like of I've never seen before or since. And you have a belly laugh that you don't hear when you're drinking. I've sat with all those rummies and cackled.
[00:50:02]
But I don't know how to belly laugh. You know, the more horrible it gets, the deeper the laugh gets. So he said, come to a meeting Tuesday. I said, I'll do her. Well, I didn't make it Tuesday. I was very busy trying to stay alive. But I remember phoning him and saying, I've got a very business. I've got a very important business appointment. He said, oh, yes, see you Thursday. And he did. But, you know, even though I drank for the rest of the evening and I had two drinks the next day to keep from falling apart.
So I drank those drinks with a certainty upon me that I was through, that this was the end, that I was going to AA. It's a phenomenal thing. This is the surrender. I think this is the miracle. There's this surrender process. And he took me a meeting Thursday and it was a discussion meeting. There was about 10 drunks. They're all grinning like idiots. Nobody asked me my name, who I was, what I'd done, where I'd been, if I'd been in jail, what you had, if I'd done this or done that.
They didn't even ask me my name, which hurt a little because I'm a big wheel where I come from. You know, of course, the big wheel had shrunk slightly in the last five years. They'd say, Tom, who? That hurts. They didn't even ask my name. They said, sit down. They talked about honesty and open mindedness and willingness. And they shared themselves with me, and they allowed me to share me with them and get all this garbage off my chest.
And they talked about the serenity prayer. They accept the things I cannot change. I had two things with trouble there. I couldn't accept the fact that at 28 you could be an Alki and that I had to spend the rest of my life sober. But then they had the 24 hour program to kind of beat that one. And I had a lot of trouble accepting yesterday and all those yesterdays, the people I'd heard and the hearts I'd broken.
But you either learned to accept yesterday as part of getting here today or you get drunk, I guess. And they didn't push anything at me too much, but they kept the heat on, I noticed. Wanderer said, is that step four yet? I said, sure. Well, I said, yes, dear. What is it? I said, I don't know, but I did it. Well, how can you do it if you don't know what it is? So we sat down and he explained step four and he said, I want you to have it done tomorrow. I didn't know.
I was stupid enough not to know that there ain't a way you do it. You know, if he just said, well, when you get to it, I'd have got to it. Never. But he said, you'll have it done tomorrow. I had it done tomorrow. I didn't know then what I know now, which is probably just as well or I'd be drunk. The guy said, are you ready for step five? I said, no. He said, well, we'll make an appointment. I said, oh, dear.
But this is good because as you walk in this thing, you start to shed. You shed hopelessness and you shed loneliness and you start to feel a part of. I think every alcoholic goes to a feeling that nobody's done, said, felt or reacted the way that we have. And we walk in and the great identity is there, somebody calls it, that these people have done and thought and felt and acted and reacted. Exactly. There's a bond built called the language of the heart.
This is what it is. And they talked about these things and they shared with me and said, keep walking. I said, OK, how about this God deal? We said, don't worry about that, just do these things and see what happens. I did those things and it happened. It happens as the result of, doesn't it? The book says, having had a spiritual awakening, we had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. That's why. One to eleven and we had it.
What is it? I didn't want any spiritual awakenings. I read about Bill's and I believed it, but I couldn't see me on a mountaintop. I believed his and still do with every fiber of my being. But I didn't have no bells ringing or doves flying by. I didn't. And I couldn't. I believed that there was a power. I was I remember standing in the front lawn on a number of occasions trying to talk the sun into going down and coming up that way.
It never did. It just kept coming. I believed there was a power. I was not an atheist or an agnostic. I had no faith in anything except dollar bills and whiskey, period. None of faith in a because I could see you were sober and see you were drunk and see you were happy that that faces of yours destroyed me. They kept becoming bad. They should keep walking. So I walked.
[00:55:00]
And all of a sudden, I believed I believed I could stay sober and I believed I was getting help staying sober and I called it God. And as a result of those steps, I had a spiritual awakening defined in the twelve and twelve is the ability to do, feel and believe that which we could not do, feel and believe before on our own resources. And as a result of walking with you, I can now do, feel and believe the things that I could not do, feel and believe before.
That spiritual awakening is the result of these steps. I believe very deeply in this with every fiber of my being. We've got a few cardinals of our way in a who keep saying it ain't like it used to be. And I look around and indeed, it ain't. You can't get a seat in the joint now. When I came in, you could shoot a cannon off in that AA meeting and not get three drunks. Now you can't get in the door.
And I guess it isn't like it used to be. And then they say, you've got to be serious. I've never been more serious in my life about anything in my life. But I think God knew what he was doing when he gave you the sense of humor that you have and the smiles that you have. Because I always suspected that AA was a bunch of stiff necked slobs sitting around the corner feeling sorry for themselves with their chin on their navel that they couldn't drink. And I walked in and you were all laughing.
And I think God knew what he was doing because I think laughter and humor is the vehicle that he uses for you and I to communicate one with another. I believe this is I believe I'm here without the slightest doubt. And I thank God for that, because you're not stiff and you're not you're just the most tremendous people that I've ever had the privilege of walking with. And I'm here today as a result of walking with you.
No other reason at all. You know, I met a guy the other day. He said, what, you quit drinking? I said, yeah. So what'd you do? I said, I joined AA. Oh, he said, you just switch crutches. You know, the old bit. He was a psychologist, bless his heart. I think he's. They're worse than psychiatrists here. This guy is an alcoholic psychologist. He's not an alcoholic, he just drinks wine by the bucket. Well, he said, you just switch crutches, you switch dependencies.
Well, I said, maybe so, maybe so. I said, what do you got against dependency? What's the big beef these days on dependency? I think there's mature dependency and immature dependency. If I hang around an AA group and don't go out in the human race after five years, I'd suggest somewhere along the line, I missed the object of the exercise. I'm the most dependent person in the world today on you and the program and Almighty God, and out of that dependency has come a freedom of thought and action that I never dreamed possible.
Now, that kind of dependency gives me this kind of freedom I'm all for. And if I switch crutches, don't ever take those crutches away from me because they've kept me walking for a number of years. And only with those crutches are they going to keep me walking. And I'm not opposed to it one darn bit. Not a bit. Okay. We've talked about service. We've talked about unity. And I hear people today talking about AA and the terrible shape and the growth and the things that are happening, good, bad, and indifferent.
Some are fearful and some are confident. And I believe very deeply that you and I do not have a fear in the world of our fellowship. I believe the group conscience is the accumulated welfare, spiritual well-being of each individual. We've talked about the flow from recovery, unity, service, and back. You can't separate these legacies. They all flow into one. They're all part of the same picture. And yet we take them to pieces and try and put them, this is different, this is different. Why do we need this and that?
Service is as much a spiritual thing as recovery is a spiritual thing, because you and I are people who've lost the ability to feel necessary in the business of living. We're people who were convinced when we got here that we were useless and total loss. And all of a sudden, not only do we get sober, not only do we get back into the human race, not only do we Get a Little Self-Respect and Human Dignity, But All of a Sudden, Through the Privilege of Service to Our Society and to Almighty God and Our Fellow Man, We Find That Maybe
[01:00:04]
I Can Be of Use in the Business of Living, and That Is As Much a Gift of God as Sobriety Is, and I Believe This, As I Believe That I Am Here, Without the Slightest Doubt, and The Greatest Privilege of My Life Has Been the Privilege of Service in This Society, and I Thank You and I Thank God for the Ability to Be There, Not the Ability, but the Privilege to Serve in Any Way I Can, Because What I've Got, I've Got for Nothing, You Gave It to Me, and I Know I Can't Just Fill It Up and Turn the Switch Off, It's Got to be a Flow Through, and Service Gives Us the Flow Through, We Get, We Give, We Get, We Give, We Get, We Give, It's a Giving World, Not a Getting World, Without the Slightest Doubt, I Believe That If You and I Never Forget in Our Individual Lives, in the Life of Our Group, in the Life of Our Area, and in the Life of Our Fellowship, That There Is But One Ultimate Authority in Loving God, We Never Have Anything to Fear, For as a Result of What You Shared with Me, Through the Grace of God in This Program, I've Had Sobriety and Freedom, I've Had the Love and Affection of My Family, I've Had the Ability to Live Without the Necessity of a Drink, I've Had so Many Friends, I Don't, I Can't Count Them, and I'm So Grateful that I, I, I Can't Express Myself, but Above All, I've Found in My Life, the Thing I Have to Have the Most, a Dependency on God, the Father of Life, Thank You.
[Applause; closing audio indistinct.]