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Source: DICOBE-00338 – Clancy I – TARHEEL MIDWINTER CONF – 1980-01-12.mp3 File: dicobe-00338-clancy-i-tarheel-midwinter-conf-1980-01-12.mp3 Duration: 01:23:56
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My name is Millie, and I am an alcoholic. Hi, everybody. Hi, everybody. Now that I have all my instructions from Dave and my husband Isaac, I just hope I don't mess up. It's a real privilege to be your chairman tonight. It's always a privilege to do anything in Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.
The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for A.A. membership. We are self-supporting through our own contributions. A.A. is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution. It does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses or opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.
Whether this has anything to do with my age or not, but you notice today when they had the alcoholic lady speaker, they surrounded the chair lady with all women. Tonight they surrounded me with all men. And this is a great privilege to me to have that many brothers in this world. As speaker, I do not know, I did not know until this weekend, I have heard about Clancy for many, many years, and I've wanted to meet him, but California's a long way.
And I didn't think that I ever would. And when Dave called and told us that Clancy was coming, I was thrilled to death. I'm not going to try to kid around with this man, because he's a little smarter than I am. I hate to admit that. But I can tell you this. He puts on a good front. He's soft as mud inside. And he's got a great deal of love. And this, the young lady said it today, that's what AA is all about, as far as I'm concerned.
He has such compassion and love for the alcoholic. This is all I have to know about him. And it's with great love that I give you Clancy from Venice, California. My name is Clancy Imusland, and I'm an alcoholic. And I want to thank the chairlady for that charming introduction. She's not much of one to talk about putting up big fronts, though, I'll tell you. Ah. From the angle that I'm standing, I haven't seen such a sight since I was weaned.
I, ah. But I'm very glad to be here this evening. I want to thank the committee, each member of the committee, for asking me to come. It's been a very pleasant experience up till now. My only connection with Winston-Salem is when I wake up in the morning, and I rip open my first package of Vantages, trying to get a fire stick in my mouth, and it says Winston-Salem. So it's nice of you to come so I could leave some of my phlegm here that you brought me.
I, ah. I think this is just a splendid place. This hotel, it's more fun to ride up and down that elevator than most anything. I look down and see that crazed organist playing away, and people eating, and people lurking behind the bushes on the mezzanine. And I've met a number of people here whom I've had the privilege of meeting earlier. A number of people here from Greensboro that I met a few years ago in Greensboro.
Some people that I were just with the other day in Washington. There's two or three people here tonight who, ah. We were at a meeting at the State Department Thursday noon, an AA meeting in the State Department. It was kind of funny. I, ah. Dr. Hal M.
[00:05:03]
The man with the funny vests. Ah. Asked me to come by, and I talked at their meeting, and ah. It's kind of funny. All these people came in. You could see they were heavily burdened with cares about Iran and Afghanistan. And they came to the meeting, and afterwards a guy came up to me and says, you know, for the last few weeks we've just been worried sick about Iran and Afghanistan. He said, but after today we're worried about America.
I guess that was a compliment of some sort. I just couldn't make it out. There are a few people here who, ah. A couple, at least, ah. Ladies who I met in California who got sober in California for one reason or another are here tonight. And living in North Carolina. I'm always, I'm always a little nervous. I just noticed Sue P. sitting down here in front of the podium. Just a second. Ah. The last time I talked, and she was sitting there, was in Memphis, Tennessee.
And she finally, in a moment of desperation, held up a little envelope upon which was lettered, your fly is open. That would be dangerous for some guys. They could probably get arrested for indecent exposure. But in my case, I think I could plead insufficient evidence. And this has also been a very pleasant conference for me to attend. I just noticed this evening. I saw when I was in here yesterday afternoon, all these things marked reserved up here.
And I thought it was for special people. And I've been sitting in the back with the enlisted men. And here are all the other speakers sitting up here. It's all for the speakers. And I, oh, oh. But they deserve a front seat. I think it's been an excellent conference. I enjoyed Chuck last night, the bemused advertising man from Michigan and New York and Atlanta and other places. And I enjoyed the Al-Anon speaker this morning.
I sat last night at dinner with Chuck on one side and our charming Al-Anon speaker Martha on the other side. And they were very pleasant to have dinner with. And they were pleasant to listen to. And this afternoon, I was very pleased to hear Bunny's talk and touching. I'll tell you one thing, Bunny. And I hope you won't take this as a matter of personal anger or anything. But I've been sober a little bit longer than you have.
And I feel, after listening to your story, I want to tell you something. A person like you really shouldn't drink. And I'm looking forward to hearing our speaker tomorrow morning. I've never, usually when you go to a conference, you hear speakers, you know, they seem to have the same speakers at all the conferences sometimes. So I go to conferences and I hear the same speakers. And I heard all new speakers this weekend.
And I just loved them. And I enjoyed being here. This seems to be kind of a departure. I've looked over your previous speakers that you had in years gone by. And you've had a rather cosmopolitan crew. And for some reason or another, you seem to have almost an all Scandinavian group of speakers tonight. Last night was a Swede. This afternoon was a Swede. And tonight is a Norwegian. And it may not seem like much difference to you what's the difference between Sweden and Norway.
In Norway, Sweden is kind of like our South Carolina. They're like us, but not much. They're not as pure. And I also came from a little town in the Midwest. And I grew up, as most of you know, and I grew up in the Midwest. And like Chuck, I went in the Navy in World War II. Before I went in the Navy, I went in the merchant service. I couldn't get in the Navy at 15. And so I went in the merchant service at 15.
I had my first drink there. I later went in the Navy. And after the war, I went to college and went out in the world. And I went into newspaper work, became a sports writer. And then I got into advertising work, advertising agencies. And I, like most people in this room, found alcohol to be an excellent friend. I like to say that because I think it's really true. In my life, alcohol is the best friend I ever had.
[00:10:02]
I never had a better friend than alcohol. Women come and go. Jobs come and go. States come and go. But a drink is a drink, no matter where you are. And it was a great help. My first drink was very helpful to me. I took it. I was, as I said, 15 years old. I had told my mother I was going to Superior, Wisconsin to visit my aunt. The Second World War was just on, and I wanted to see what was going on in the world.
So I hitchhiked to San Francisco. And I didn't know anything. I was small and skinny and had a face full of pimples. But I was one of the slickest people in our study hall, so I thought I was ready. And I got to San Francisco. I went to the Coast Guard office. They were crying for merchant seaman, apparently. And I filled out a form, and they had asked me to have my parents sign it. I took it around the block, had my parents sign it, brought it back.
They gave me some seaman's papers, temporary seaman's papers, referred me to the National Maritime Union down Montgomery Street. I went down there. They had me sign a waiver, said they could take my union dues out of my first check. They referred me to the Embarcadero. And that night, I was on a load of torpedo warheads going to the South Pacific. And I remember thinking, as land slowly disappeared in the fog, that I may have made a terrible mistake.
I told the captain I wanted to go home, and he wouldn't turn around. He sent me to my foc'sle. I didn't know what a foc'sle was, but it's a little room where people sleep on ships. And I was just small and dumb, and oh, this makes me a coward to think about it. And I was stuck in there with three of the worst type of people that a dumb kid can be stuck with. And these kind of people are called men.
And they didn't think I was precious or cute or anything. I told them some funny stories that used to just kill them in study hall, and they just, I should shut up. Jump in your bunk. And I lay in my bunk. And as I've said many times, these guys start talking, and I was just appalled. I was raised in a very strict religious home, something called the Norwegian Lutheran Church. Most of you have never heard of Norwegian Lutherans.
But in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, if you were a Norwegian Lutheran and couldn't make it, you could always become a Baptist or a Catholic or a Methodist, one of those quitter religions. Smiling was evidence of wrongdoing, as a rule. And I hadn't been exposed much to anything, and these guys got talking about what they'd been doing in San Francisco while the ship had been in port. And I was just flabbergasted.
I'd never heard that kind of talk. And it suddenly struck me, I'm with sinners in this room. These are sinners. And again, I often say this, but I don't want to leave the wrong impression. Even at the age of 15 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I'd had sex. I wasn't total naivete, but when I'd had sex, I'd been apprehensive and I'd been afraid and I'd been alone. And I had never heard this kind of talk, I'll tell you.
I, uh… Well… The first lady just left. But I got better later. So does I needed bifocals. And one of those guys had a bottle in his sea bag, and he offered his friends a drink, and he offered me a drink, and I shouldn't have taken it, because I hated the whole idea, but I took it, and it made me sick. And they all laughed at me, and that's all I remember about it, really. And every day, all the way across the Central Pacific, I stuck in that guy's sea bag every day to try to hold down a drink.
Not because I hated it and I detested it, but it seemed to me that the reason they thought I was a goof was because I'd vomited up that whiskey. I didn't realize they thought I was a goof because I was a goof. That's why they thought I was a goof. And I remember a day out of Pearl Harbor, and I remember how staggered I was. I'm a day out of Pearl Harbor, and I hadn't even got to Milwaukee yet, and here I am.
I hadn't even got to Milwaukee yet, and here I am, and I took a drink of that slop, and it stayed down, and I hated it, but right about then I had the first phenomena, phenomenon, that came to be a much sought after adjunct to my life, and that was the feeling that alcohol gave me when it stayed in my body, and I didn't know it was a special feeling, I didn't know that it didn't do that to everybody,
[00:15:26]
I had no idea that alcohol had a special effect on my body that it didn't have on other people's bodies, and I didn't know it until after I was sober in A.A. for some time, I just thought everybody got that out of alcohol, and people who didn't drink were just square, or didn't need it, but I remember, I've heard that feeling described many, many times in A.A., you can sit and discuss when you're talking about what drinking did, or when speakers talk about what drinking did, and people grow up, it's very hard to intellectually verbalize an emotional feeling, but it gets down to something like, you hear young guys say things like, I don't know, when I drank, I was able to go ask a girl to dance, or when I drank, I was able to go talk to the boss about things, or I was, you know, something special, girls, you hear a lot, a lot of girls grope for that, they say things like, when I drank, I felt prettier, I felt as pretty as the other girls whom I envied, or I felt desirable, or I didn't feel so shy.
Now, you know, this, when this book was written in 1939, it, they were dealing primarily with people, apparently, who had drunk for some time before alcohol began to do something special in their body, and then that something, alcohol began doing something special, and then their drinking patterns changed according to these stories. Now, they had no way to describe it, they didn't have enough observed data to go by, so I guess they used a phrase that we all, we didn't want, I tell you, I did that so the people in the front row could see me.
I begged Dave to take it down, he wouldn't. Well, get rid of it. Well, I'll be known here now, either of one of two things. Is that the same Clancy that talks with his pants down and pushes the flowers over? Well, the, but Bill, in writing this book, with the help of the other people who were sober, trying to isolate this feeling of when the body begins handling alcohol in a special way, put down the phrase, and I guess it would be valid today, somehow or other, they crossed an invisible line.
And nobody knows where that invisible line is, except maybe in retrospect, you sometimes get an idea, but as I say, when this book was written, most of the guys had drank for years, and they finally crossed that invisible line, and since this book was written, AA has been inundated by people who didn't drink anywhere near as long before they crossed an invisible line. And some have drank for two or three years. And there's also a number of people in AA, of which I guess I'm one, who seem to have crossed the invisible line the first time they took a drink. You say, what do you have, at what age do you get to be an alcoholic? That's like saying, at what age do you get to be a diabetic? When you get to be a diabetic, that's what age you get to be a diabetic.
And same with alcoholics. Alcoholics are people, apparently, who have a different effect from alcohol, and when that effect begins to take place, that's when they begin to be alcoholic, although they never know it. But alcohol, I look back on that day, and I have tried to isolate the feeling that alcohol gave to me as best as I can remember, and I suppose that what I could say about what effect alcohol had on me that day was that that was the first time in my life that I remember feeling the way men looked.
And that was a feeling much to be sought of. Then I got sick and threw up, and it all went away. But I had a brief moment there when I felt the way they looked. And a great number of years later, after many vicissitudes and traveling around and being here and being there and doing things and doing a lot of reading and working and writing, I took my last drink, and I think it would be safe to say that I never would have identified it at the moment, but I suppose it would be safe to say that I took my last drink for exactly the same reason I took my first drink, without knowing it either time.
[00:20:25]
I was drinking to feel the way men looked. My perception of men had changed, but my need to feel that way apparently was still there. And I used alcohol. I was trying to mention this at the State Department. I don't know if I can describe it very well. But to me, alcohol was just like atomic fission is to the human race. If you can make it work, it really is great. But every once in a while, a small mushroom-shaped cloud forms over your head, and boom! And you check the gauges and say, I better check that next time.
There's a lot of three-mile islands in my life, but in between, the machine really ran well. Boy, I'll tell you this. I was going to make that baby work. I used to feel when I was young that my emotions were different than other people's. I guess a lot of people have had that feeling. As I got older and read more self-help books and more pseudo-intellectual psychology books and studied myself incessantly, I came to believe that my emotions weren't different, but they were more exposed than other people's.
In other words, it seemed to me that somehow a coating of insulation had been left off my emotions. And the emotions per se weren't different, but they were right on top. The slightest breeze triggered them. And I remember sitting in a bar one time years ago and telling a guy, you know, I said, my problem is this, that when I came off the assembly line, I got to the operation where they do the insulation, and somebody said, hey, God.
And God said, yeah? And I just went by. Oh, he's a Norwegian. Screw him. And as a result of that, I spent most of my life comparing, without being aware of it, comparing how I felt against how other people looked. And that is a bum comparison, but everyone who is insecure does it. And people like us apparently do it a lot because we have more veins of insecurity that we fall into from time to time.
And I look back over my life, and it's not surprising that my alienation grew and grew because I don't remember ever seeing anybody who looked as sensitive as I felt. I don't recall seeing anybody who looked as though they felt rejection as strongly as I felt. I don't recall seeing anybody who hated to be patronized as much as I hated to be patronized. There's nothing in the world that's more distressing to a person who secretly feels inadequate than to be treated as though he were secretly inadequate.
Man, that's almost worth a fist fight. I don't recall seeing people who looked as lonely as I felt sometimes. I don't recall people who looked as though they resented injustice as much as I felt. And one other advantage I felt I had as a young man, that it was great help to me, I felt when I was young. It seemed that to compensate me for my emotional sensitivities, I'd been given one great boon. I was almost instantly able to spot crap heads.
I could just, one handshake, and I knew who were the crap heads and who weren't. I could spot them across the room after a while, on the other side of the street, walking the other way. The trouble is, as you get older, they multiply. And pretty soon you're just looking for one non-crap head to get you through the day, and they're all crap heads. And they live in their little lives. I drank because psychoanalysis did not help me.
Psychoanalysis, I loved psychoanalysis. Chuck was mentioning psychoanalysis last night, he said psychoanalysis made him feel better, made me feel better.
[00:25:03]
Because I first understood, I was a young advertising executive, and I was seeking a resolution of the conflicts that I felt that apparently other people didn't. And I began to understand from my psychiatrist that my problems weren't my fault. That's one of the great advantages of going to analysis, to discover you've just been a piece of flotsam and jetsam, floated on the maltreatment of others who didn't understand.
He said he was raised during the Depression, I identify that. I remember my psychiatrist pointing out to me how the Depression had left me emotionally hungry. I didn't even know there'd been a Depression. I remember him saying one time, you mean to say, Mr. Emerson, at this time when you were seven and eight, you didn't even have a bicycle? I thought about that for two months. I remember getting into my car and going to my home and pouring a martini in tears of self-pity.
I just had a mental picture of a little tousled-haired, blonde-haired boy on the streets of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, watching all the kids on their bicycles whip by. I'll be alright, I'll get some analysis later. It took me almost two months to remember that nobody in Eau Claire had a bicycle. In 1935, one kid did, we thought he was a fag and beat him up. Well, but one thing psychoanalysis does, it really can push a button of self-pity.
It really, you could just prove that nothing was ever your fault, and it's just, you've just been hurt so much. There's only one thing wrong with psychoanalysis, at least for people like me. You get to learn so much about what caused you to feel this way, that you never notice you're not getting any better. And it's the best analogy I've ever been able to think of. It's like being on the deck of the Titanic and hitting an iceberg, and everybody else rows away, and people like me want to stay there and examine exactly what happened.
And you may get the answer, you could say, I've got the answer! Oh, damn it. It really doesn't do any good to have the answer to anything if you can't get off the boat. It really means nothing. I got into metaphysics another time. At that time, today there seem to be metaphysicians behind every bush, but in my day you had to be a seeker, and you had to be a sensitive, intelligent seeker. And I worked very hard on it because I needed to redress the emotional imbalances I felt.
And I worked very hard, and I'm compulsive and obsessive. When I work at something, I work at it. And I got to a point where I, to the best of my knowledge, I was one of six people in the whole state of Texas who knew truth. And the other five, unfortunately, were crap heads. And it got very cold and lonely at the top, and it was almost a relief finally when they put me away. I read philosophy. I loved Nietzsche. Nietzsche was such a cynical, nasty goof.
I just ate him up. I just loved Nietzsche. Remember one of his works, there's a great thing, very good for Norwegian Lutherans who are sinful. One of his characters in one of his works, he says, why do you believe in God? God is dead. God, if he ever did exist, God is dead. A lot of people thought that theory came out of Berkeley in 1965, but Nietzsche said it in 1884. In fact, there's a very famous plaque that says, God is dead, signed Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1884.
And beneath it, it says, Nietzsche is dead, signed God, 1906. I loved Nietzsche, and I really thought I'd found my answer, then I found out he died in the insane asylum. But I knew it was from syphilis, so it didn't interfere with the body of his writings, it was just trying to find the dividing point where he went bad. I just liked the end of his writings more than the beginning. I tried a lot of things, but nothing ever worked.
I tried a lot of things, but nothing ever has been as effective to me, when I look back over my life, nothing has ever been as effective to me as a few drinks, just a few drinks.
[00:30:07]
That's why I drink. I'm not a drinker. I'm not one of these crazed old fools in overcoats without any front teeth who shamble along skid row. My, my. I've been cursed with sensitivity and intelligence. Well, it's probably funny to you, you don't know what it's like. I didn't want to be invited back here anyways, too. Just wanted to get out of the flood in Southern California this weekend, that's all.
But I drank. And sometimes because of pressures I felt and insecurities I felt, I have been known to drink more than I had intended. Sometimes I had to have fun. Sometimes I needed to be, I felt like Prometheus chained to a rock. Sometimes, man, I just, let me get off of here. Just let me get somewhere. I want to find, I want to be with the munchkins just for tonight, you know. I'll take on the Wicked Witch of the West when I get home in the morning. And go out and look for her.
I had married a charming young girl, but I had violated a long-term family admonition when I did it. I had done something that Lutherans should never do, my grandmother said. I had married a Catholic. Now, they seem all right on the surface, but after a while they turn nasty. And not only that, but we, uh, what has caused me some other concerns because the other bad thing about marrying Catholics is that you become the head of a progressively larger family. It's just, there's no end to it.
And I used to talk to my wife about birth control that wasn't much spoken of in the late 1940s. I'd say, you know, could we use birth control like the other people do? Could I just get something down at the, there's, in the washroom at the bar, there's something to be sold just for the prevention of disease. Could I just try that? And she gave me a long talk on practicing Catholics didn't do that. And she had the priest come over and talk to me. They gave me two days on the rhythm system.
I don't know if you know what the rhythm system is, but that's when you, that's how you keep from having children if you're married to a Catholic girl. And I listened, but I couldn't pick up the beat. I just, uh, Yes, yes. I got, I got to feel like a national distributor of small Catholics. Man, and I had to work and I had to take this baloney. I never had a chance for a sabbatical. I always was under pressure.
And I, uh, sometimes I drank too much. But I, it's all I had because I had to drink just enough to compensate for my emotional reactions to the crap heads around me, but not too much. And that's a thin line, as we all know. And sometimes you fall off. And, uh, eventually you get to a point where, again we were talking about this the other day, where people start talking to you for your own good. And that's really dreary because you can always spot them. They all got little thin blue lips.
And they say things, they vary what they say, but they say things like, uh, Do you think your children would be proud to see you like this? Or sometimes they say, uh, I don't know how you could expect to be part of the corporate team if you're going to act so bizarrely. Or the one that everybody's heard, but you have such potential. And as a result of this, when you hear that kind of talk, you might as well start loading your briefcase, folks, because it ain't going to be long after that.
And as a result of this, I always, I was always making a comeback, it seemed like. One spring I was nominated to be Junior Chamber of Commerce Young Man of the Year in a suburb of Chicago. By the end of the same year, 11 months later, I was playing piano in a whorehouse in San Francisco. I'm not putting that down. That's a broadening experience. But it's hard to work that into an advertising resume.
That's why most AA resumes have big holes that say, self-employed during this period.
[00:35:05]
I reformed with a vengeance. I ran across the guy I'd been in the Navy with. We went to Texas. I worked very hard. In a year and a half, I was working daytime as a copy chief of an advertising agency. At night, I was on the faculty of the University of Texas at El Paso. Writing a weekly thing for the local paper. I was a spotter for the college football team. I was directing a grand opera in the music department. It was my moonlight job.
And unfortunately, El Paso is full of crap heads. Don't fall to mine. If it weren't for Juarez, it would be untenable down there. And I used to go to Juarez just to relax, and I had a lot of pressures. I had another baby nine months and ten seconds after our reunion. And finally, one of these goofs from the college called me and said, we understand you've been acting up in Juarez. And I just wanted to scream at him. I didn't say anything, because I knew he wouldn't understand.
He was a dusty old fool. But I just wanted to shout at him. I didn't say anything, but I just wanted to shout, damn it, I'm not acting up. Do you understand that not everybody is a square idiot like you and your goofy friends here? Some people have feelings and sensitivities and emotions and creativity. And somehow, when I get overburdened and I go to Juarez at three in the morning, and I go in the Chinese palace, and I stand on the bar, and I balance on one foot, and I sing my little song, holding my vodka and my lime and my salt.
I sing, yo soy el maestro de los locos en Chihuahua. That relaxes me, by God. Well, he made me go on the wagon. And only one thing happens to people like me when they go on the wagon too long. One day, I just walked into my garage. My wife and family were there. I walked into my garage, fixed up the car, turned on the motor, went to sleep, and died. And a guy next door, listening to the motor running, he came over and kicked the door down and pulled me out and beat on my chest.
And they sent me to the psych ward for examination and classified me as a schizoid depressive and sent me for an indefinite to life at the Big Spring State Mental Hospital in Big Spring, Texas. That's another resume buster. Took me a while to get out of there. I wasn't in there as an alcoholic. I had to simulate being an alcoholic to get out. They started the first AA program in Texas at that hospital.
Well, I was there, and I pretended to be one of them, because I'd been to AA meetings off and on for seven years by that time, but I'm not an alcoholic. Alcoholics are people whose problem is alcohol. I stayed drunk for 40 years, night and day. Not people who are just looking for the place, the spot, the niche. And I talked to the guy. I gave him a story. I knew old-timers in AA are really so easy to hustle if they really want to help you.
I caught Mr. Ross in the hall. I said, Mr. Ross, I'm here on a suicide commitment from El Paso, and I understand you people have something to do with drinking over in Ward 9. Do you have any literature I could read? Is there any meetings? Because it seems my life has been so wonderful, except somehow I have a compulsion to drink, and when I do, I lose track of everything. If I could only return to my lost God, or if I could just find some way not to have to drink, I'd go to any length. Is there anything you could do to help me?
And his eyes went… I just… Pretty soon I was secretary of the group. Pretty soon they were taking me around to little towns around there, giving talks. Midland and Odessa, Big Spring. I'd give little talks to friends. I'm here on behalf of my fellow patients from the Big Spring State Hospital to thank each and every one of you for bringing a message of faith and hope to us who are lost on the vast desert of alcoholism.
It seems that we're going across the vast desert of alcoholism. Our legs were tired. We came to the tall green hills of sobriety. Our legs were too weary, but folks such as you pointed out, over here are 12 golden steps that you can climb one after another and find the height of sobriety. As we have climbed those steps, now we in the hospital are getting ready to go home to share this message with others, to help others find a God that they thought had long ago gone, and it's all due to the kindness and love of people such as yourself.
[00:40:03]
Old ladies would cry, Isn't that wonderful? To this day, when I hear an inmate who's been brought out to speak at an AA meeting, there's a small glaze that drops over my eyes. He may be sincere. Now, you can laugh at that kind, but it got me out of the nuthouse. And a funny thing is, I never had another drink. Never had another drink, until I ran out of Thorazine. But when you run out of Thorazine, you get under some kind of a pressure.
And I was reformed again, and I had some people convinced I was reformed. I was working in the largest advertising agency in the South, a firm called Tracy Lock in Dallas, and I was working on the Borden account, which was a big account. And I was doing fine. When I got out of the nuthouse, nine months and ten seconds later, the mimeograph spewed forth another one. And I loved them all, but God, it's just hard to keep them separate.
Which one are you? Are you from El Paso or Dallas? And I… Dallas turned out to be full of crap heads. And through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings, one morning I woke up and I was the Phoenix, Arizona drunk tank. Now, that's a thousand miles away. And the guy had just got done kicking my front teeth out, because I'd vomited on his bunk. I remember that morning, I was so glad I'd had psychoanalysis, because once you had psychoanalysis, you always have a little more insight to things than most people.
I remember I was so sick on the floor, I couldn't move my head out of the way of the guy's shoe, but I was almost instantly able to identify his problem. This sumbitch is overreacting. But I… I didn't want to say anything and threaten our friendship. By that time, when I got out of that jail, I remembered my wife had taken all the children and left me. And I had lost my clothing somewhere and I…
I was assigned out of the nut house to my wife. That's how they did it in Texas in those days. Your wife would come down and sign for you. And if she didn't like how you acted, all she ever had to do was pick up the phone and you were gone. And that makes for a little tension around the house. Don't you think you better get the garbage out? Yes, I do. And I didn't want to go back to Texas. I knew she'd blown the whistle on me.
So I thought I'd go to Seattle. I got as far as Los Angeles and couldn't get out of that stinking town. I hung around the AA Club for a while and… I found an old woman named Janet turned me in for stealing the coffee money on the Tuesday night coffee cup discussion meeting. Got me banned out of the AA Club. Went down to the beach, something called the Tender Loving Care Club, and lurked around there for a while.
And this guy had a kind of a form of AA set up. He was an AA and he'd… AA was no longer up to his standards, so he had his own form. He became the higher power. And he… he helped alcoholics, except that… AA, Spidey's son, said, you can't call that AA because not all of us in AA recognize you as the higher power. And so he threw all the alcoholics out. One non-alcoholic, unfortunately, took in narcotics addicts.
I remember I said to him, you never took any narcotics. What the hell are you going to tell them? He said, I'm going to… I'm not going to get any letters from anybody. And I thought he was crazy, but the next year he changed his name to Synanon and made himself a million dollars. If I'd have stuck with him, I could have been something tonight. I'd come here and get these hurtful introductions from this…
I'd just whip out my rattlesnake and… And then I went down, I was going to write a book about Skid Row, but I didn't seem to have any pen… Ever wanted to be is a good guy in a good world. And I was dying on the streets and nowhere to turn. And by that time, I wish I were an alcoholic. I wish I were so un-complex that I could be an alcoholic. I wish I were a narcotic addict. I wish I were anything identifiable.
So I could just say that's what I am and work on it instead of being this variegated one day this and one day feeling another way and determining to go this way and after a week saying no, that's the way I want to go and just a whole life of… of slowly sinking into the quicksand and wondering how the hell do I get out? And one
[00:45:00]
morning they wouldn't take my blood over at the blood bank, because my iron in my blood had dropped below the acceptable levels. And I weighed about 110 pounds. I had no front teeth, and I had nothing going for me. And I couldn't go on the midnight mission because I got in a fight in there with a guy. I couldn't go. When you can't go on the missions, you can't go to the blood bank, but it does leave you a hell of a lot left. I walked 71 blocks that morning back out to that stinking AA club, and I pretended to simulate interest.
And the guy told me I was phony, and I agreed. I added his name to my list of people I was going to punch out. And I went and slept. He said, Get in the back room, an old guy named Tom Jones. He said, Get in the back room, and shut the door, and don't let anybody know I let you in. And I went back there, and I laid there, and I thought, You dirty, rotten, lousy, hypocritical, fink. You know, someday I'm going to get back something, and I'm going to get you and about a thousand other people. And I had no idea that morning or the next morning, because my plot was this. I'm going to get to Seattle and make a score.
But to get to Seattle, I'm going to have to hustle these idiots. So I'll play their sick little game for a little while, and I'll go through the motions. And once I get my score, it's adios. And I had no idea that morning or the next morning or the next week or the next month that through an error in my computations, I played their sick little game too long. And they warped me. And so now it's been something over 21 years since I've had a drink of alcohol since that morning I lay in the club. It's been something over 21 years since I've had any medications for my emotions. You know, I hear a lot of people in AA's to this day keep saying, Well, but my doctor wants me to take these. And we don't judge in AA. But let me give you a report for a while. And I got to know a lot of doctors.
By the time I was very active in AA. And I've known a lot of doctors since then. And I'm going to tell you a secret. I don't make any judgment on it. I just tell you the fact. The reason doctors give medications to people like me, and I assume like you, the Valium, the Librium, the various whole school of downers, is this is the type of medication that doctors give to neurotics to keep them quiet so they have time to take care of people who are really sick. Now, and every one of them who seems to get it says, But my doctor says I should take these. And all your doctors say, Stay away from me, because you're a goof.
But we don't judge. You can do what you want. But I don't know anybody in AA who from time to time might have had a thought. But my emotions aren't like their emotions. If they understood, it would be all, I'm not drinking. And you see them get to a point someday where they're saying things like, I'm going to get my birthday cake tonight if I can find the podium. I am glad that I've had to take nothing like that. When I was new, I couldn't afford it. I volunteered for one program. In the fall of the year I got sober, they were looking for volunteers to go to UCLA because they had isolated, they had located a new drug that cured alcoholics.
Now I had, I wasn't even really an alcoholic, but I figured I'd get some peripheral benefit. And I volunteered and they turned me down because I wasn't up to their standards, if you can imagine. Not up to the standards of an alcoholic cure, that's some kind of a drag. I was living in the back seat of an abandoned car and I needed shelter badly. And so I missed out on this UCLA program where they brought these alcoholics in from all over and gave them the new miracle drug, LSD. And nearly all of them died, so they wrote off that experiment.
I thought I had that LSD, I ought to have been something today. But that's the kind of cure sometimes people get under the guise of scientific research. To them it's just research, to me it's my life. So you'd be very careful that you don't use your life for someone else's research. I haven't smoked any marijuana. A lot of people on this road
[00:50:03]
of happy destiny, you see little clots of weeds grow up along here, and they say things like, the book doesn't mention pot, baby. But it mentions people who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves, same thing. And much to my surprise, after many years at AA, I found out the book does mention it. And very few people know it. And you ought to be glad you're here tonight because I'm going to read you a quotation about pot from the book Alcoholics Anonymous. It's in chapter one, Bill's story. First paragraph talks about he was young in the army, using alcohol to feel good, went overseas. Second paragraph. We landed in England. I visited Winchester Cathedral. Much moved, I wandered outside. My attention was caught by an inscription on an old tombstone. Here lies a Hampshire grenadier who caught his death drinking cold, small beer. A good soldier is ne'er forgot whether he dieth by musket or by pot. Well, I don't interpret them, I just read them.
And probably the strangest phenomenon of my life, I would say, is that in the past twenty-one years and odd months, I have had no therapy except the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Inflicted upon me at first by a cruel sponsor, surrounded by peers who I had to impress by doing it, by going to a lot of meetings, by never getting too well for AA, thank heaven. And the only thing I've had since 1958 is Alcoholics Anonymous. So I find myself in a strange position of having to tell you that I did not, I was not an alcoholic until I was sober a while. It's amazing, there are a lot of people like that, but it seems kind of bad to talk about it, you know. As has been said earlier today, I don't put it down at all, but I have never had the opportunity. I've taken a lot of new people to meetings, I have to surround myself with lower companions, like the book says. But you know, I have never taken anyone to a meeting when we've sat down, they've said, I'm home, I'm home. They say things like, you mean tomorrow night again? But I didn't feel I was home in AA, but I was trying to adopt some form of protective coloration. If there's anything that's more distressing than the concept of AA, it's the specifics of AA. I know of nothing more discouraging than the 12 Steps. They're just absolutely hideous, second-rate therapeutics. When you're sick and desperate and crazy and you've tried everything, and have some old fool come up Well, keep coming back. Surrender. Just admit your problem is alcohol. Got $110 in hot checks out? Turn it over to God. You know what God says? He says, refer to Sheriff Peter Pitchess.
Write an inventory. I've spent thousands of dollars to forget things, now I'm supposed to try to remember them, so I can enthrall some plumber. I wouldn't tell these things to a psychiatrist, because I wouldn't want to risk his disfavor. I wouldn't want to be in a psychiatrist's office telling him how I really felt and have him say, get out of my office, you fool, you're dirty. Write things that I wouldn't tell anybody. Read them. Do you still like me, Fred? Yes, I do. Wait till you hear this. Ask God to remove all your defects of character, so you can get little thin blue lips like those people you've always used. I don't smoke and I don't chew and I don't go to girls that do. Make amends to people who've been hurting you for 25 years. That's funny, isn't it? Here's $10 for calling the police on me that time. More inventory. Meditation. That's a great step for suicidal, schizoid depressives. Next time you're really feeling the depression, just go in your closet
[00:55:05]
and sit in the dark and think about things and what they mean. Have your pistol right along with you. AA is really not the sort of thing that fits thinkers. It fits drinkers. It fits people who drank for 40 years, came through that door, they told them to put the plug in the jug and they did, and now they've never been so happy. It doesn't fill people with doubts. It doesn't help when you know that if God exists, you're damned, so you desperately try to disbelieve in God and have some old lady come shuffling up saying, we hate to see you fight God, sonny. So all I could do to keep from saying, well, ma'am, you'll never see me fight God again. You'll just hear it now. And that's why it's amazing when I look back is that the only therapy I have had in the last 21 years are those steps and their adjoining integration of the human body and spirit and mind and emotions.
And so I'm in a kind of a peculiar position. I bet in my life I wasn't an alcoholic, and as a result of very nearly losing that bet for my life, I'm in a position now of having to remember that it once was that bad. And I've had a, once I'm the greatest, I remember how nice it was when I was kind of new to have friends. There's one sitting down there, Lou H., which stands for Houston, and his sponsor, a man named Larry Thor, and they were very kind to me. They were so belonging to us. We'd go to lunch and we'd do things.
I didn't have any front teeth all the time. They wouldn't order, they wouldn't eat apples in front of me, no. And it's a funny thing. His sponsor, Larry, he was a great example to us, because he was a kindly, good AA man, young, talented, dynamic. And after about 15 or 16 or 17 years, he realized he wasn't active in AA anymore. And he realized he needed some psychoanalysis, unlike regular alcoholics who got by on the steps. And by the time he was 18 years sober, he got drunk, and by the time he was 20 years, after a sobriety date, he was dead. And it's a funny thing. Lou and I, who listened to him, are sober, and the man that taught us is dead. My sponsor, who saved my life after many years of being sober, stopped doing the things and got drunk and died. And people came up to me and said, that must, you know, you're none too best, you're none too good at best. Doesn't it make you unsettled at two years to find your sponsor's drunk? And I had to tell him, no, it's just what he said. He said, if you don't do these things, you get drunk. And he didn't do them, and he got drunk. I did what he said, but he didn't, which was a great object lesson to me. But probably the greatest single breakthrough I have made in Alcoholics Anonymous is the simple thing I said, and I started speaking tonight. And if you're kind of new, it just sounds so dumb, but maybe if you last while, you'll understand it. I said, my name is Clancy Imusland, and I am an alcoholic. And that was the single most, one of two most important moments of my life, when I came to believe that. Because, as I say, I bet my life I wasn't, and I could not be an alcoholic based on nine years of being in and out of AA and listening to the, what I thought was the drivel from these well-meaning, but terribly simple people.
And I remember that in 1958, I, how could I be an alcoholic? I thought, my problem is not alcohol. It looks like it, and it smells like it to people who don't understand me. But it isn't alcohol. I do this as a relief. I do this because I need, I need to reduce the pressure. A few years ago, I was, I had a little thing in my ear. It got progressively more painful, which I immediately identified as advanced cancer of the ear. So I did not go to the doctor with it. I wanted to have my last few weeks of I'd go to the doctor with it. I wanted to have my last few weeks of fun.
I was only sober 14 years at that time. I wasn't really in possession of my faculties yet. And I finally went to the doctor to get the bad news, because it just hurt like hell.
[01:00:04]
And the doctor looked at me and said, he took a big long thing, and he went, and it was all gone. And I'd been sitting in the waiting room just about to, fighting not to run down the hall. And I said, what was it? He says, you just had a little wax build up in your inner ear. And what, I said, why should that be painful? He says, because it prevents your ear from equalizing the pressure in between the inside of your head and outside of your head.
That's one of the things you have in your inner ear, something that equalizes pressure. And I remember walking out of there, looking at the people cowering in the waiting room, and I wanted to say, be a man for God's sake. And I thought about that later, and I was talking to a newcomer one day, and I was trying to explain how I felt sometimes, and it suddenly struck me. That's the feeling of my life. Sometimes, in some spiritual or non-material at any rate, area of my psyche, from time to time all of my life, there's been a small wax build up.
And it seems to prevent the equalizing of pressures between my inside and my outside. And the pain gets intense. And the only thing I've ever found that could help it, is a few drinks, because that takes away the pain. And somehow in AA, they had to tell me, and we've got to tell you, and we all have to tell each other. Somehow or other, what we have to do is find a way not to let the wax build up, and if it does build up, do not drink it away, because you're going to kill yourself.
But that's really the whole thing, because you can have it all together. It's easy to be a great AA when everything's going your way. I got a promotion. Got my new car out there. Betty's been very nice lately. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Our program works, bubby! But you really don't know if the program works or not until it's two o'clock in the morning sometime, and the walls are coming in and everybody looks funny.
And everyone you can think of looks funny. And they're all selfish snot. And it's just rotten. And you're being used! And AA is nice, but what do you do when you really feel bad? That's when you find out whether or not AA works. That's whether or not you find out whether you can subordinate your judgment long enough to pick up a telephone. One of the great cop-outs on that one is, Oh, I wouldn't want to bother him at this time of night.
But I'll tell you, you don't mind bothering him after you get drunk, do you? I'm drunk! I'm drunk! I just didn't want to bother him when I was sober. And each of us have, I suppose, our own occasional Gethsemane because we all are human beings. We have two mortal diseases. One is alcoholism, one is being a human being. And sometimes they make, when they work together, it's really dreadful. But the greatest thing I had to come to understand to deal with any of this is, How can I be an alcoholic when my problem isn't alcohol?
And I had to, thank God I got so goofy that I allowed myself to surrender enough involuntarily. You know, that's one of the things in AA that's still kind of funny to me. And it may happen, but I've just never seen it personally, where people say, I came to this program, and I threw in the towel, and now it's just been pretty much happiness since then. And I want to go up and touch the hem of their garment, you know, get rid of my cold sores anyway.
And I've come to believe, and I've been active in AA, I guess, every day since I've been sober with somebody. Someone said, you want to talk to one alcoholic every day? I guess that was money. If I could get it down to that, I'd be a lot happier. But it turns out that as human beings, what we have a tendency to do, at least people like me, is we throw in the towel, and as soon as the heat's off, you snatch it back.
Then you spend the rest of your life tearing off small strips and see if that'll satisfy the dirty bastards. By the time you get the towel in, you can go sneer at newcomers and say, why can't you be sincere the way we were in the old days? But I'll tell you something that sounds a little strange, but I don't know any better way to describe it.
[01:05:02]
It's now 21 years since I got sober, not a world's record here by any means, but it's a long time for Norwegians. I am 21 more years more convinced that alcohol was never my problem. It was intermittently, once in a while, but not my problem. I am of the opinion, from the study of this book and from the study of my betters and Alcoholics Anonymous, that if your problem is alcohol, you shouldn't be here.
You're wasting your time. You could be home watching reruns of Bowling for Dollars tonight, and really see if that lady from Arcadia makes the split. Because the problem here is not coping with alcohol. I'll tell you how you beat an alcohol problem. Go to a detox. If you can afford it, go to a treatment center and get a few days off your feet. If you can't afford a treatment center and don't know where to detox, just, eventually you'll go to your bathroom.
Alcohol will bring you to your knees. In front of the toilet, as a rule. There aren't very many people who haven't knelt in front of the old white porcelain altar in the morning and gazed into those shimmering waters and said your morning prayer, Oh God! Some mornings when you get sick enough, your body will reject alcohol from both ends at once, which is good for your body, but it's hard on your soul.
Not only are you terribly sick, but you're called upon to make a series of split-second decisions. And every answer must be correct. And if you guess wrong, and by that time if you have any loved ones left, they've gotten to a point of encouraging you to the bathroom door. Good enough for you! Good enough for you! Why don't you go over to her house and crap on the floor? God! But an alcohol problem is easy to beat, because your body always gets you sober.
That's what's rotten about being a drinker. You always get sober. Now if your problem is alcohol, and the rest of your life is okay except when you drink, I've got a solution for you that's going to revolutionize your life. Don't drink! But if it turns out that you suffer from what I suffer from, and people written about in this book suffer from, you may go to your grave stumbling from one crisis to a high hope, followed by a disillusionment, followed by success, followed by failure, followed by frustration, followed by anger, followed by resentment, and never have the slightest guess of what the hell was wrong.
And you can prove it isn't alcohol, so what can it be? It isn't alcohol. We talk a lot about drinking in AA, and so we think it's alcohol. But it isn't. It's something called alcoholism. And the difference between alcohol and alcoholism is just this. If your problem is alcohol, when you get sober, no further treatment is required. You may have to bandage up some wounds, but that's about all. You just say, hey man, that stuff has eaten me up. I ain't going to drink it anymore.
But if you suffer from alcoholism, unfortunately, when you get sober, it looks exactly the same. It looks the same to your family. It looks the same to your employer. It looks the same to your friends. It looks the same to the police. It looks the same to your doctor, usually. But most lethally, it looks the same to the patient. And what no one ever seems to know at that juncture is that the difference is alcoholism continues on after you're sober.
Only nobody recognizes it because you don't slur your words anymore, and you don't stumble and fall down. You're supposed to be all together. And it seems to manifest itself somehow in the perceptive emotions. It seems to manifest itself in ultra-sensitivities. It seems to manifest. There are many ways to say it. You might say it's an ultra-sensitivity.
[01:10:00]
You might say it's an acute neurotic condition. Another phrase that I just hate, but I think is very accurate. Your emotions get very childish. And you wind up with a grown-up body and a grown-up brain and a grown-up intellect and a grown-up vocabulary and a grown-up rationalization and childish emotions that just rip it all apart. But you wind up in a situation where little by little, your perceptions of things are not the same as other people's, so they don't understand you.
Things look different. The best example I know, that book up there and that piece of artwork. It all depends on what I see as to what I believe it is. Truth to me is as I see it, not as you see it. Now to me, if that book, if to me that looks orange, all of you telling me it's blue won't change my mind. All that will tell me is you're seeing it wrong or you're playing a joke on me or some kind of scam or you're dumb.
But unfortunately for me, most of my life, the color blindness, the color misperceptions in my life cannot, I could redress that by taking a color chip up against it. But the things that have affected me in my life in my later years were not measured by colors of walls or books. They were measured by colors of situations. The colors of, what are they doing to me? The color of, what did he mean by that?
The color of, she's using me. The color of, they're against me. The color of, why are they rejecting me? The color of, I'll show them. The color of, doesn't anybody love me the way I want to love them? The color of, how did I get in this stinkin' lousy situation with these stinkin' lousy people while everybody else has got something going for them? And these are not misconceptions caused by drinking.
They are misconceptions cured by drinking. Now you get to that situation where you get alienated for your emotions and you know you're different, that doesn't make you an alcoholic. That makes you an acute neurotic. There are millions of people like that in the world who are not alcoholics. They get to a point where they just get kind of funny. If they can't find any answer, eventually some of them go over the edge into psychosis.
And psychosis is kind of a bad situation. Psychosis, to ultra-simplify it, is where the brain makes things look different so you can stand them, makes reality look different. This hardly ever happens to alcoholics. They talk about psychosis in alcoholics, that's caused by brain damage from drinking too much. Alcoholics very rarely ever snap because when it gets bad enough, long enough, the second parley of alcoholics must be there.
To drink alcohol to have a special effect, and what is that special effect? It alters my perception of reality. And it becomes absolutely necessary. When I get to that point, scientists who study alcoholics say things like, Alcoholics, when they go on the wagon, sometimes have to drink to preserve their sanity. And that's why it doesn't really do much good to say, I'm not going to drink anymore, because when the time comes you're going to drink or snap, you're going to drink.
That's what alcoholism is. It isn't what alcohol does to you that makes you an alcoholic. You keep measuring out how many times you've been in jail. It's something much more subliminal. You measure an alcoholic by what alcohol does for you. It does something special for people like you and me that it doesn't do for something like 93% of the population. And we don't know it, and they don't know it. And they can't understand us, and we can't understand them, but all I know…
And we can't understand them, but all I know is that sometimes I, I need a drink, and alcohol alters my perceptions, it changes things, I remember when I was about a, maybe a year and a quarter sober, I don't know if Lou remembers this or not, but I was working at a little firm called Weinberg Advertising, a couple blocks from the A-Club, and I got a job finally wrapping packages after a year, wasn't that smashing?
[01:15:14]
Rocket to stardom, I call it, and one of our accounts was a firm called Kamchatka Vodka, and they've used the same dismal billboard for thirty years, it said, vodka is pronounced Kamchatka, different colors, and I remember I was wrapping packages, I wasn't on the account, I was just a dummy, no front teeth, but I thought, I'm going to let these people know that I'm kind of bright, and I'm going to tell them something, so I was going by the writers one day, I said, I got an idea, instead of saying Kamchatka Vodka is pronounced Kamchatka, why don't you just put it on the board, Kamchatka Vodka goes boom, better than all vodkas everywhere, and they looked up at me, and I thought, here's my moment, I said, why don't you get out of here, go back and wrap your packages, and I, whether they liked, whether it was a good slogan or not, they owed me the courtesy to listen to it, because I had something, and I went to the AA club that night, 6300 club, and I talked to my sponsor, I said, my God, you said it's going to get gooder and gooder, and it's over a year and a quarter, I'm just living in a lousy one room apartment, I've got no friends, nobody cares for me, I give this guy this slogan, he wouldn't even listen to it, because I don't have good front teeth, I've got a dirty shirt, and he puts it, and he had me tell him what happened, and he says, no, you misunderstand, he says, now listen, and he had a want to wave his finger under my nose, and one of the few times I really missed my front teeth, I just, but I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of gumming it, but he says, get this through your head, they're not putting you down, they don't know what the hell you're talking about, Camp Chadka Vodka doesn't go boom to them, to them, Camp Chadka Vodka goes, bluh, that's why you're in the meeting, and they're not, he says, the next time that you're, he says, the next time that you're worried about that, the next time you want to be a social drinker, think, would you like to spend your whole life taking drinks that go, bluh, but the one thing that I guess I have to come to realize, alcohol can become addictive, but primarily it is, it changes the perception of reality, alcohol to me is inducing temporary psychosis, that's exactly what it does, and I love it, I gotta have it, and sobriety is eventual anxiety and neurosis, now what is the point of AA, to get you sober, if you're new tonight, you might get the impression, AA is not to get you sober, getting sober is the doorway to AA, the purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous and its steps, and its sponsors, and its subordination of your will, and its giving up of your judgments in moments of crisis, all of these things are designed for one thing, to gradually alter your perceptions of the colors of reality, to change the world without anything changing, now alcohol can do it in 5 minutes, AA, you may have to go for months to get the feeling to get out of one mickey of wine, but you don't have to vomit up chapter 5 every morning, you're not liable to be arrested for serene on sidewalk here, those are joke reasons, the number one reason I think AA, the reason it works for people like us, is that if you can stay long enough to realize, all that you know about it isn't worth anything, it is what you do, because in the actions prescribed by AA, somehow they are designed to alter how things look, and I never seem to get much better, but the world shapes up around me, and thank God, I have killed off thousands of crap heads just by the steps, just boom, boom, boom, and that's why I'm active today, not because I'm a good man, I'm not dedicated or sincere, but they know when I'm not going to meetings, and they say, he's not going to meetings, everybody act weird, he didn't get enough sleep last night, block the freeway, I'm very glad that I'm close to my parents again, I didn't talk to my parents at one time for almost 10 years, I'm going to see them Monday, I'll be there tomorrow night for dinner with my mother,
[01:20:09]
I'm very glad that my family came back, and we had, added another California Catholic, this year, however, he was the starting left tackle for the dreaded St. Monica's freshman football team, and I was very glad I was a schizoid, because when they played the Lutheran school, I had a difficult time, get them kid, get them Catholics, get them kid, get them, I'm very glad that I've had a somewhat degree of success in my life, not as much financial success as I used to have when I was drinking sometimes, but more, much more, as much as I want, I am glad that six years ago, AA had worked me so much that I found myself resigning as a marketing director at Beverly Hills, and for the last six years, what I've been doing is running the mission that threw me out in 1958 on Skid Row, and my friends were just staggered, they said, why would you do that?
And I told them, I told that guy I'd be back, but now I can't find him, and now I'm stuck, but I don't want to give you the wrong impression, even if you get a sponsor and go to meetings and all these things, we can't guarantee you that in 15 years, you'll have your own mission, it's not even a treatment center, we just feed guys and bed them down, I'm not even qualified to become a counselor, all the time I was in AA, I was working all the time, never had a chance to take the course, but we try to help people, as we all are trying to help people, and the only thing I know that works is Alcoholics Anonymous, I hear this talk all over the country, treatment centers make this, Tom Bee and I were talking tonight, before he left, but about the concept of various treatment centers, our group is AA oriented, the very success of any treatment center is how close it is to AA, and even then it isn't worth anything unless it tells the patient, you must be in AA after you get out of here, treatment centers don't recover anybody from alcoholism, it recovers them from alcohol, and somewhere in the world, where the stimuli lurk, and the problems exist, you and I must share our experience, strength and hope, hopefully to come to believe in a power greater than ourselves, to whom we can subordinate our judgment, and in moments when that's too abstract to find friends to do it with, we walk into the world, not as wonderful people who are above these clowns, but even a more difficult goal, to walk into the world and believe somehow that you're equal to them, that is almost impossible, but that's what it's about, so I'm glad to be here tonight, that's why I'm glad to be, the committee asked me, I'm glad to be anywhere where the activists in AA and Al-Anon show up, there's the people I run with, I don't want to run with a yes butters, I don't want to run with if only's, I want to run with the people who are trying, whether they're 20 minutes sober or 20 years, don't make a hell of a lot of difference, because between us, we can do something that nobody in the world could do, I can make the world a good place to live, and if you can do that, it's worth everything it took, thank you.
APPLAUSE.