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Source: DICOBE-00487 – Sam S – GEORGIA STATE CONV – 1980-10-17.mp3 File: dicobe-00487-sam-s-georgia-state-conv-1980-10-17.mp3 Duration: 00:55:28
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I'm an alcoholic. That thing really jumped back at me. What a crowd for opening night. I figured I'd get off with just a small crowd. And it's just delightful to be in the state of Georgia. It's the first time I've attended a state convention in Georgia. I've been to a lot of other functions here in the state of Georgia, regional forums, southeasterns, but never a state. And you know, I wore this white suit to prove to everybody that I learned about purity in AA. Everybody that knows me knows how pure I am, and the absolutes we learn about. But in spite of the fact that I'm so pure, the people in Miami don't trust me. Even after a few years of sobriety, they sent a man with over thirty years of sobriety to follow me up here. He came on the train all the way from Miami and sat right down there in the front row to go back and tell how many lies I'm going to tell you tonight.
When I came to AA, it was very reluctantly, like most people. And I wasn't one of those who came and felt at home right away. A lot of people I've heard from the podium say, I went to my first meeting and saw all those happy faces, and I knew I was home. Well, I didn't. I came to AA and went to my first meeting and wanted to hide in the back where nobody could see me, and I didn't feel at home, and I didn't feel comfortable, and I was ashamed, and I would have rather been almost anywhere else in the world but at an AA meeting. I'm glad I felt that way because I think it indicated that I was willing to go the place that I had tried so hard not to go. I was willing to go to an AA meeting that I had tried to avoid and felt that would contaminate me and that was something to be avoided at all costs. Only weaklings and people with no self-respect go to AA. No strong-minded individual like I was needs to go to AA. Despite the fact that five of my drinking buddies had gone to AA before me, gotten sober, and changed their lives, it wasn't for me. It had been seven years between the time my first friend went to AA and the time that I went. He went in 1958, and he said something to me shortly after he went to AA that didn't make sense. He told me I had a good time in AA. He said, Why don't you come to a meeting with me? We have a lot of fun.
And I just knew that his brain, when he dried out too fast, his brain didn't handle that right. One guy, he really did me dirty. He went to AA, and after ninety days of sobriety, he dropped dead of a heart attack. And that just shows what happens when you stop cold turkey. Anybody ask me to go to AA, I'd say, Look, if you just stop dead like that, your heart can't take it. Look at Charlie, he died of a heart attack. But that guy that told me that he had a good time, I knew he was nuts. And I couldn't figure out why he went to AA anyhow, because he drank exactly the same way I did, and he wasn't an alcoholic. There was no difference in his drinking pattern and mine.
The only difference was he was ten or fifteen years older, and I couldn't understand why he needed to go to AA. And another man went off to AA, and after a year or so of sobriety, he moved to New Orleans. And then he used to come back on business trips and take me aside and ask me why I didn't go to AA, or tell me that if I needed to, if I felt the need just to slip off, nobody would know, you know. And I hated him for saying that. I didn't want to be around him. I didn't want to
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be near him. It was all right for him, but not for me. And another friend of mine, the man that finally, two other friends had gone to AA and stopped drinking. And the next friend, the guy that I called upon when I was finally ready to stop drinking, got out of jail one day, and he came to my office. Now let me tell you, when I came to AA, I was an attorney, I was a lawyer, and had been for a long time. But I was not an attorney, and I hadn't been an attorney for a couple of years. And I'll tell you what the difference is. A lawyer is someone who has graduated from law school and is licensed by the state to practice law. But you're not an attorney unless you have a client. But when this friend of mine came to my office about three years before I was to go to AA, I was still working. And he'd gotten out of jail. His wife had been put in a jail for non-support. And he came to my office for help. He wanted to borrow money because he had no place to live and no place to work, and he was down and out. And I was a very, you know, I had this feeling all these years how important I was. I was a very important attorney at that time. So important that I didn't even have $10 to lend to this man. And I did the only thing I knew to do. I took him to a bar where I had a tab. Always had to have a tab with a bartender. Now I drink that stuff tabbed. In those days it was something that was much more vital than to have a tab with a bar. And I took him there to get him a drink. And he made what appeared to be a profound statement. He said, I'm never going to drink again as long as I live. Now that wasn't profound to me because I heard him say it many, many, many times before. And he never did it. He always went back to drink. Once he'd been sober a year and on a Labor Day picnic took a drink of scotch. And then went back worse and worse and worse. And I didn't know anything much about alcoholism. But he made this statement that day and I naturally didn't believe it. And that was in 1962, the day before Thanksgiving. And he hasn't had a drink since that day. So something happened to him that was a little different. And I didn't know what to do with him in that bar. And he made a phone call and a guy came and took him away. He called AA. And it was like the man in the little white coat coming to get him. And he went away and I didn't see him again. But I heard about him. And his wife took him back. The AA people took care of him like we used to do in those days. Incidentally, you know, we don't do that too much anymore. We don't have to dig into our pockets as much as we used to when there's some poor sick drunk sitting around with no place to live and no money for food. We used to do that. When I came into AA, we did. But there's all kinds of places that they can go now.
It's easier for them. They don't have to worry as much where their next meal has come from. I don't know whether that's good or bad. But anyhow, when I was new, there wasn't a week went by that we didn't out of the Coral Gables group take three or four people and find them a room and dig in our pockets and give them money for food. That's what they did to this guy. AA took him in. And they looked after him. And they let him cut the turkey on their Thanksgiving Day dinner in their AA room.
At least that's what they tell me happened. I wasn't there. I was drunk somewhere. But finally, I heard he was back with his wife and he had a job and things were going well for him. And one day when I was coming off a binge, that's the type of drunk I was, a binge, a daily drinker with binges, he found me in a bar. He was in that sobering up the world period that we all go through. And he was going to sober me up and he took me home. He didn't tell me what he had in mind. He took me home, bribed me with some beer. I knew his family and he fed me a little. I remember that. And I drank this beer and probably got a little drunker. And on a Sunday night it was, he took me. It was the end of a long weekend of drinking when I hadn't gone home and I'd been flop house somewhere and was really miserable. That's when I used to get suicidal. So he took
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me home and I felt a little bit of security being with him. And Sunday night after dark, he took me for a ride into Coral Gables. And he parked his truck and he said, come on in here with me a minute. I got to see somebody. And we walked into a little room and there was a bar in the back. And I went back and ordered a bottle of Schlitz and it was the AA room. And was I mad. I wouldn't have gone in there with a team of mules had I known where he was going to take me. But I was miserable and I had nowhere to go and there was no meeting. It was their club room. And I sat around there and began to come out of that alcoholic haze. And people talked to me and I could identify with what they were telling me. And I can remember when I went home that night, finally got home, thinking maybe, maybe I ought to do this. The next morning, the ego reasserted itself and things weren't quite as bad as I thought. And that night I got a phone call from someone else in AA that I knew. They asked me to go to a meeting and I hung up. I was afraid somebody in my family would hear it. And I kept on drinking. When I finally came to AA, I had only worked for two and a half years of the five years that I, proceeding. Now it wasn't a solid two and a half years I'd get a job. Some law firm that never heard of me would give me a job and I'd work for one time a year, another time three months, another time six months.
But I hadn't held a job for a long time and I'd been in jail seven times and I was penniless and I had no material possessions of any kind. And I was sick and miserable. But the day before I came to AA, I was still very important. And I'd like to point out to anybody here that if you feel you're important, you ought to reassess your thinking process because that got me in a lot of trouble and it kept me, the false pride kept me from AA. When I finally came, it had been 21 years between my first drink and my last. I started to drink in Pennsylvania when I was in high school.
I drank through high school, went to Florida immediately afterwards to go to college and stayed there ever since. And I developed the disease of alcoholism in Florida with a little time out in the service and a year in Paris. That's a great place for an alcoholic. But I did graduate from law school. I often wonder how. The escapades I went through in college would take an hour to tell. I didn't become a daily drinker until I got out of law school because I didn't have the money. When I was in high school, I only drank a couple times a week because I had very little money. When I was in college, it increased to three or four nights a week, maybe five if I had the money because I worked besides going to school.
My binges started when I was sober five years. I began to realize then that alcohol was causing me trouble because that's when the blackouts started. Four or five years, 19 or 20, I don't remember. The first binge only lasted a day and a half, maybe only a day, and the blackout only lasted four hours. I was ready to come to AA, the binges were lasting four to five days and were occurring a couple of times a month. I could never tell when they were going to happen.
I never planned them like I don't think anybody plans them. Once in a while you hear somebody plans a drink. That's a periodic drink usually, and I wasn't that. I was a daily drunk. I wouldn't consider quitting. If you quit drinking, that's an admission that you've got a problem. The only person I would secretly admit it to was me. I had the knowledge that I was an alcoholic, but I certainly was not unable to manage my life.
I went on this way after I got out of college, and then I began a daily drinker except for the time I was in the service, two years. I started a law firm with two other lawyers. Part of the law firm was two other lawyers, and after a few years, five years, 1960 it
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was, they threw me out. Well, I resigned, really. I went on a drunk, and when I came back, I met a friend of mine in a bar, and he said, your partners are going to throw you out. So I rushed to the office in the middle of the night and left a letter of resignation. They weren't going to do that to me. And I told them, you know, that far better things lay ahead for me than being hooked up with a couple of small-time operators like they were.
They soon found out who was the small-time operator after I left them, because I only worked in the next two and a half years out of five. And in the next period of time, I went through four or five law firms, always getting thrown out for drinking or drink-related things. One time I got canned because I hadn't paid my income tax for about three years, and the Internal Revenue agents came and grabbed my pay, and they thought that was irresponsible, so they fired me from that job.
And all of these years, when things kept getting worse and worse and the arrests began, the drunk driving charges, the wrecks, the bum checks, when all of those things began to happen, I became more and more convinced and more strong-willed that I was going to straighten out my life and I was going to be able to drink and be respectable and practice my profession and earn money, and it just kept getting worse.
And I kept telling the world that I was not going to let this get me down. And I wouldn't go to a doctor when I was so sick. I see people getting taken to detox centers today that aren't near as sick as I used to be sometimes, but I wouldn't have gone even if they had them, because you don't go to detox centers unless you've got a drinking problem. What I would do was find a flophouse or a cheap motel or some other drunk's home, and I would go there and I would lay and dry myself out.
It usually took three days after a bout of drinking, and these binges, as I said, became more and more frequent. Most of the time I lived with my mother and father, and I put them through a lot of misery. They never knew where I was or when I was coming home when I walked out the front door. I might be back and I might not. They never knew. I was married a couple of those years, but my wife took a dim view of my drinking and that didn't last very long.
Although I had gone with this woman for five years before we got married, for some reason or other, people think that when they marry an outie that they can straighten them out. It just doesn't work. And I used to go on these binges, and I can tell you the type of drunk I was. I'll give you a few examples. I used to go to Daytona Beach and get drunk. I can remember one time coming back from Daytona, and I was there with two fellows and we'd been up there for about four days on a drunk.
We left Miami on a Sunday morning when I was hungover, and we drank all the way up. It's a four-hour drive, and we got there and checked in a motel, and then we started to drink some more, and we drank into the late night, early morning. And when we came home in a joking manner, I ran across the room in a drunken manner and dove into the bed, and a picture fell off the wall and hit me on the head. That made me mad, so I jumped up and grabbed the picture, smashed it all to bits and made a lot of racket.
And my two friends were afraid we were going to get thrown out, and the people in the next room, it was in the middle of the winter, started banging on the wooden adjoining door to shut up. And so I began telling them in no uncertain terms who they were and what they were, and you snowbirds go back home, we don't need you in Florida. And I started kicking on the door in return. And I forgot a very important part of this story.
When we checked in to that motel, I used my pseudonym. I always went around, and when I checked into these hotels, I was Henry Bedoniak. My real name is Sam S., and who believed that? So I became Henry Bedoniak. Sometimes I'm afraid that there's still some bum checks floating around somewhere signed by Henry, because I used to use his name on checks, too. But anyhow, I had checked into that motel as Henry Bedoniak, and I caused all this ruckus
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and noise, and finally I passed out and went to sleep, and the next morning I got up early with a whiskey hangover, and I went to the front desk in the motel in a pair of Bermuda shorts to get a newspaper. And I got the newspaper, and then I had no money with me, and so I told the lady to charge it to my room. And she said, What's your name and room number? And I forgot all about Henry, and I said, I'm Sam S..
I'm in room 412, or whatever room I was in. She looked down the register, and she said, Oh, no, that's that awful Mr. Bedoniak's room. And I had to confess as to what had happened. Well, we didn't get thrown out, but we finally got back to Miami. I was too sick to drive my car. I was laying in the back seat, and we pulled into a gas station where we were both well-known, or three of us were well-known, and the one fellow that was driving my car ordered the tank of gas filled, and the guy that knew us was washing the windows of the car, and he looked into the back seat, and he saw me, and he said, What happened to Mr. Sam?
He done deteriorated. He could recognize there was something wrong with me, and that was one of the trips when I checked into a motel and laid for three days trying to get well. Couldn't pick up anything to drink, you know, I was shaked so bad. Some of those jobs, just before I got fired, I wouldn't be able to sign my name. I got so that when cars would pull up in front of the house, I was afraid to look out the window for fear it was the police.
I always liked rainy days. The harder the rain, the better, because I figured sheriffs weren't serving arrest warrants in the rain, and I'd always have these bum checks out, and I figured they'd be after me. I had the impression all those years that money was the answer to the problem. If only I had enough money, I could do things. Self-respect I could buy. People wouldn't know that I was in such terrible shape.
If I could open an office, they wouldn't know that I didn't have a client, because I could have a secretary there. I could hire a chauffeur so I wouldn't get arrested for drunken driving, because I thought that's what causes me all this misery, the arrest and the getting fired and those kind of things. I wouldn't have to write bum checks and worry what the mailman was bringing and who was coming to the house.
I wouldn't need to be suicidal anymore. I used to pray that I wouldn't wake up in the morning when I was on these binges. I had this impression about money, and in 1964 I got the chance to prove it. I inherited $11,000, which was a fortune to me at that time. I was holding down a job with a law firm that had hired me in spite of the fact that they knew about my drinking, and I'd been with them about three months and I wasn't doing too badly.
I was determined, because I knew that my string was running out, and I was determined that I was going to hold on to this. I was doing well enough, they were going to send me to Orlando from Miami to open a sub-office. They said, go to Orlando and look around, take two or three days and find an apartment. I had this money that I'd gotten, and I started to Orlando from Miami, but I had to stop in a bar for a drink.
I knew the barmaid, and she knew about the money, and she decided she'd just quit her job and come along to Orlando with me, which she did, just walked right off. She drank a bit, too, and still does. We got to Orlando and we drank a little more, and I don't remember a whole lot about Orlando, but the next morning, you know, Orlando is only an hour from Daytona Beach, and I forgot all about the apartment and everything else, and I said, let's go to Daytona Beach.
I know a lot of people there. So we went to Daytona Beach, and the three-day trip lasted three weeks. The reason it lasted so long is that we couldn't get sober together to get home. Either I was drunk and she was sober, or she was drunk and I was sober, and we couldn't get out of there. We ended up, I was tending bar in a place called Max Famous Bar, for nothing, you know, because I would be there.
I knew the man from earlier trips, and he would find me waiting at his door at seven o'clock when he opened the package store and the bar, and he'd wait on customers, and he'd said to me after a day or two, why don't you do me a favor and help out, you know, serve some of my customers while I'm working in the package store. And so I did, and that was great, because it was free booze and I handed out, I got to know all the people, and he was losing a lot of money, me giving away those free
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drinks. And then I got my girlfriend to come down and be the cocktail waitress, and so that went on for a while, but finally I ran out of money and the checks were going to bounce. I had to get home and put some money into my checking account. And again, once more, I was too sick to drive. Finally my friend drove me home in the backseat of that car from Daytona Beach. I didn't go to where my folks lived.
I was divorced and living with them again, and they lived in the south end of Miami. My girlfriend lived in the north end, and I went to her place, and she had been planning a trip to London, and she was going with an older woman, and this woman came by the house and was very perturbed with her and said, if you run off and disappear with a man here in the United States, what's going to happen to you in Europe?
I'm not going. And I said, well, don't worry, I'll go, and the next thing I knew I was in Europe. I was in London, and nobody knew where I was. And I spent a week in London, and then we went to Paris. And I had lived for a year in Paris some years earlier, and I knew Paris like a book. And we checked in this hotel, and right next to it was a bar, and we never even went to the room. We just threw the luggage in and ran to the bar.
It was on a Sunday. And sitting there drinking, we were drunk from the night before in London, and I looked at the bar. There was a very attractive lady sitting at the bar, and she looked at me, and I looked at her, and I knew what her profession was. Most of the ladies like her worked at night, but she happened to be on day shift that week. And so a little while later, we finally went to the hotel, and my friend said, I'm going to take a nap.
Now from this point on, I remember nothing. It's all put together for me. And I have little vague, shadowy recollections, but I said, well, I think I'll go back to the bar. And my girlfriend said, bring me back a ham sandwich. And three days later, I came back with a ham sandwich named Marianne. And that didn't go over very big. And there was a big fight in the lobby of the hotel, and my friend chased Marianne down the street.
One of the bartenders next door spoke English, and he reconstructed part of it, and later on my girlfriend reconstructed the rest. And I woke up in the hotel room all alone, broke. Now I had money in the States, but I had to wander around Paris for about three days without any money. I wired the States for money, and I finally got a phone call, and it was for my girlfriend, and she was in Amsterdam, and she wanted to know if I was over my little spree yet.
And I said, yeah. And she met me. We finally joined forces again in Madrid, Spain, and spent a week there, and went back to New York, and went to the World's Fair, and finally got back to Miami, and I went to her place again in North Miami. And after two days more drinking, she threw me out. I guess she thought the money was going to run out or something. We're still good friends, even though she drinks.
But I started from my folks' house, and I got partway, and I stopped in a bar again. And here were a bunch of gals in the middle of the afternoon with the jukebox playing, everybody having a good time. And so I checked in a motel across the street and started to drink. And two days later, I had a year's lease with an option to buy that motel, and I was in the motel business. And there went the rest of my money.
It was almost gone by that time anyhow. It lasted from the first of April to the fourth of July. And so I found out that I needed more money than I thought. And I was in that motel from the early part of June until between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And I never drew a sober breath, and I never paid a bill. I didn't pay the light bill, I didn't pay the water bill, I didn't pay the linen bill, I didn't pay the sales tax, because I miscalculated in the way to run a business.
There was a bar, the bar door was right across the street from my room in that motel. And I would go to bed at night, and I would say, I'm not going to that bar tonight no matter what happens, because I need the money. And I would get into bed, and I would try and go to sleep, and somebody would open the bar door, and I'd hear music and female voices. And I never made one night without going to that bar.
And every nickel I collected, it was an expensive motel, because the rooms were 15-by-7.
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struck it down the ground and he turned off the water, and he left, and there was a fellow there living who worked on a, I don't know what he did, but in the back of a truck he had, there was a long pair of pliers, and he turned it down and he turned on, put it in the ground and turned on the water, and everything was fine for about 10 days, and then the water went off again, so I got another pair of pliers and I went out and opened the thing, and there was nothing there but a hole in the ground, they took the whole meter, and I went down to the water company, floated a bum check to turn the water on, and some guy yelled out that I should be arrested for stealing water, and being a lawyer I knew he was right, it was larceny, but they didn't, I got by with it, and when I came into AA, an old-timer in my group said you'd have been some alcoholic arrested for stealing water, you know, but anyhow, after a while, I knew it was going to happen, and I used to open my eye every morning to see if the fans were still going, because I knew they were going to shut off the electricity, and finally they did.
You know, when I checked into this motel, I had a brand new 1964 Ford that was paid for, and when I left, I had a 51 Plymouth with one fender. Anyhow, the electricity went off, and I knew that I could not face those people that were living in that motel. Why? I don't know, they all belonged in AA. People would disappear, and never come back, and be arrested for drugs, it was just a great place. But anyhow, I couldn't face the people, and so I told a fellow that was there, that had sort of gotten me involved in the place, who was an Alki too, poor guy is now in a mental hospital in Virginia, because he wouldn't do what I did, and go to AA.
But anyhow, I said I'm going to go to Daytona Beach to borrow money, I don't know why, he just threw that name. I got in the car, and I went across the Tamiami Trail about a half a block up, there was a motel row along there, and I pulled around behind another motel, and I checked in, and I stayed there for three days drying out, so I could go down and get the money to get the lights turned on, borrow it from somebody.
By that time, all the money was gone, and every night I would look out the window of that motel, across the street, and I would see candles going back and forth in that motel. Finally, I got the money, I went down and I borrowed the money from a lawyer, the guy had to wait until I was sober a year to get it back, or a year and a half. I got the lights turned on, and when I went back, I found that people had food, it rotted in their refrigerator, and it was in September or October, beastly hot in Miami, and not one person had moved.
They were all still there waiting for me. They needed me as bad as I needed them. That $15 a week that they were paying me kept me drunk, and they didn't have any more money to live in another place that cost more, so they stayed. Finally, I found myself hiding in the shower stall from the lady who owned the motel when she came around to collect the rent for the month for the whole motel. I was like a little kid, hiding from somebody.
I had my hands up, but I was with my face hidden away in a shower curtain pulled. This one friend of mine, Al, who later on, after I was in the program, came in and got nine years of sobriety, and then passed away of natural causes, a sober death. Good friend of mine, but at least he got to nine years, and happy that he died. He went out to tell her I was gone, and I heard him say that I wasn't there, and then I heard dead silence, and I didn't hear another thing.
I was cowering. I don't know what I was afraid of, humility, I mean, humiliation, and I was cowering, and then all of a sudden a hand reached through the shower curtain and touched me on the shoulder, and my nerves were so bad I just screamed at the top of my voice, and it was Al, and he screamed at the top of his voice because his nerves were shot too. With that, I got in that 51 Plymouth with the one fender, and I drove to my mother and father's house, and I said, here I am, take me back, because I had nowhere else to go.
I moved in, and I stayed, and I didn't have a nickel, and so I lived on charity from that time until I came into AA, except for about a three-week period my original law partner let me come back into his office and, almost like an errand boy, run errands for him. And he bought me an old car, and I promptly wrecked it, hit and run from the rear and
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took off, and they caught me, and I had six charges against me, and it was my fourth DWI, and I was sure I was going to jail for a long while, and it was Memorial Day of 1965, but that didn't stop me. I hid that wreck, covered it up, hid the car, and kept on going. My partner, my old law partner, finally gave up on me, and he just said, you're too irresponsible because these binges were going on. What he didn't know is I was stealing checks from the back of his checkbook and forging his name.
I think when he finally found out there was about six hundred bucks gone, I knew he wouldn't put me in jail, because he was almost like a relative, we were so close, but he knew I couldn't work. And at that point, about a month after that accident, well, it was in July by this time, early July, my father came to me and he said, you've got to do something. This was the first time anybody ever put it to me.
I'd been expecting him to throw me out for years. He finally put it to me and he said, you've got to do something. You've got to go to AA or Avon Park, and Avon Park was and is the state hospital for alcoholism. And I wanted to go to Avon Park. Anything but go to court and go to jail, and I'd rather have gone to jail, I think, in some ways, than AA, but the next day he came to me and he said, wait a minute, I can't afford to send you to the hospital.
Call your friend Jim. He knew about him. This was two years after I'd been in that Coral Gables AA room and ordered a bottle of slits, and he said, call him and tell him you want to go to AA. Well, I wasn't about to go to AA. That was for failures. That was for people that were done for, that were washed up, and I was still an important person and I was going to be able to handle this. It was only a temporary thing.
You know, I was convinced that despite all these suicides. When I used to get locked in these rooms when I was coming off these binges, I really wanted to die. I was just fed up. I never had, thank God, enough nerve to try suicide, but I faked a phone call and I told him that my friend Jim was on vacation and that when he came home I would go to AA, and of course I accomplished what I started out to do.
I didn't drink for a month, and it was the first time that I had ever tried to stop drinking in my life. There were periods when I stopped for two or three or four days because I was too sick, and during those periods of time when I would come off those binges and get dried out for three or four days, something would happen to me afterwards, even when I was flat broke. My mind would say to me, you have to drink, and I would have to cash these bum checks.
I used to go to banks and get checks when I had counterchecks and make them payable to me and sign Henry Bedoniak's name and take them to a liquor store or go to a grocery store and buy, you know, a $20 check and buy $3 worth of groceries and then throw the groceries out the window just to get the money and the $17 or $15 to drink with. My mind would tell me, I didn't have that hangover craving where you had to have a drink physically, it wasn't a physical thing, it wasn't that awful when you got the shakes and you're sick and you've got to have a drink.
This was up here, a mental compulsion over and over and over again. Of course, I never intended to stop drinking anyhow, but my mind would tell me when that time came. It would tell me when I had a drink. And I stopped this month, and the funny thing was that didn't happen, because I knew that down the road I was going to be able to, I knew that if I drank, I would have to go to AA. And down the road, I would be able to drink if I waited a while.
And so I waited. At the end of the month, a friend of mine from out of town, from Pennsylvania, who I had taken my first drink with, came to Miami on a vacation. He was staying over on Miami Beach, and I went to see him. And I was penniless, so I sold a pint of blood, and I think I got $7. And I went over to visit him, and I had that $7, so he wouldn't know what kind of shape I was in. I wasn't going to drink.
And when he offered me a drink in his room, I told him that I had stomach trouble. But after an hour of talking over old times, my stomach got better. And I had two cans of beer, and I went home. And I had dinner with my family, and I watched television, and I went to bed. And nobody knew I had a drink. And I got up the next morning, and I was a social drinker for the first time in my life.
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I actually had two drinks, and it didn't cause me any problem. So I decided I'd go over and spend the weekend with my old friend, and I took what little money I had left from that blood, and I got a case of beer, and I rode with it across the bay to Miami Beach on a bus with a case of beer on my lap. And I carried it into that hotel and up to his room and started to drink it. And the next morning at eleven o'clock, the bartender called him and woke him up out of a drunken stupor, because he's an alky, too.
And he said, You'd better get down here. There's a guy down here at the beach bar setting everybody up and charging it to your room. So he went running down and promptly threw me out. And that was the end of our friendship, we thought, as it turned out we're better friends than ever today, even though he still drinks. But I ended up a week later in a shack behind the bar, across the street from the motel that I'd had that option to buy a year earlier.
And I was living in a wooden shack with one bed, one bathroom and a stove, with three skid-row bums. And I was with them because I could look down on them and feel important, because I wasn't going to go to AA, and I needed somebody to feel important about. And these guys were cooking in hamburger joints, and I thought they were skid-row bums. They were earning a living. They really were skid-row bums, but so was I.
The only thing is I had a family to live with, but if I went to them I had to go to AA, and I wasn't about to go to AA. No way. Not as long as I had something to hold on to. But I must have been drinking too much of their booze, because on Saturday morning, August 20, 1965, two of those three guys threw me out the back door of that wooden shack, off a little back porch, into the grass. And they said, get out of here, you drunken bum.
And I remember thinking when I got up, when I was wet from the grass, it wasn't daylight yet. I remember thinking, you know, if drunken bums call me a drunken bum, where am I? What's that make me? And this guy that I knew in AA that had taken me to that Coral Gables group some years earlier, I used to call him after that. And I used to call him to come and get me out of a bar when I was in a jam, pay the bar tab, drive me home when I was too drunk, and he would come and he would tell me about AA, and I wouldn't listen.
And finally, after three or four times, he said to me, don't ever call me again until you're ready to stop drinking. And I never did. But that morning I called him. And about daybreak he came and found me. I thought I was sitting on a bus bench, but a few years ago he said it was the curb, so I don't know. But he came and got me, and I wanted to buy me a drink before I did whatever I had to do. And he said, no, if you want a drink, I'll take you to a bar and give you a couple of dollars.
But if you want to stop drinking, you're going to go home, and tonight you're going to a meeting. And that was the first time since I took that first drink in high school that anybody ever told me when I could take a drink and when I couldn't, when I had the opportunity to do it if I wanted it. And I had the opportunity because he would have given me the money. And so I gave up and did what he told me.
And I went home, and that night he took me to a meeting. And I never got that beer, and I hope I never do. But I wasn't comfortable like I told you at the beginning. I went to that meeting, and I'd have rather been anywhere else in the world than AA. But I went. I was willing to go. And then I went to a meeting the following Monday. That was a Saturday night. And I saw a couple of friends of mine at that meeting.
And one of them, who had been my dean of men in college, drove me down there where my family lived and showed me where there was a meeting about a mile and a half from my house. And there was a meeting room that was open every night. No, that's not right. We only had four meetings a week in those days. But for the next six months, and I did that, and I still do, and I say to you, and I mean it, and I believe it, although it doesn't say it exactly this way in our literature or in the book, I believe that daily prayer is an indispensable part of comfortable and contended sobriety.
If you don't pray daily, I suggest you try it. If I don't, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and try and remember it, and I forget. of the night and try to remember, did I forget? And he told me to go to a minimum of three meetings a week, and I did that, and I still do. And he told me to listen to people that
[00:45:06]
are sober, that were sober a long time, and I sure did that. But I wasn't glad I was there. I began to do all those things immediately, and for the next six months, my father, who had helped me out of a lot of jams, drove me to pay. I didn't go to jail on that last thing. After I was in AA, he paid a $500 fine. I got sentenced to 40 days in jail, but he paid the fine to keep me out. But he drove me to three meetings a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and he gave me 50 cents to put in a collection. And I always want to remember hearing that change jingle. Oh, I hated to hear those two quarters jingle together. He'd get his car keys, and then he'd reach in his pocket and get the quarters. And I used to cheat, and I'd cash that quarter at one of them, and you could get a Coke for a dime, and I'd drink a Coke. But I did that for six months. And some things happened to me pretty quickly. First, I lost the fear. That terrible fear went away almost overnight.
Never have had it since. I began to sleep well. I wasn't afraid of what the future was going to bring, although I really didn't think it was going to bring anything. I wasn't afraid to go into jail for the first time. Turned out I didn't either. I think what happened for me was that I really surrendered after that long, long fight that I had put up against this program and against ALCA, fought to be able to drink and to keep away from AA. And believe me, I tried. Oh, did I try. And I was willing to do what I was told, and I had faith that this program worked at least for other people, and I hoped that it would work for me. And after about sixty days, I found out that that mental compulsion that had made me drink before, when I was dry, hadn't come back. Those times when I went and cashed the bum checks when I was just finishing up a binge and sobered up, dried out for three days and then my mind would say, it's time you have to drink again, didn't happen again.
And all I was doing were these things that they told me in AA. And I realized there was some kind of power working in my life that they talked about in the second step, and so I came to believe that there was a power greater than myself that could enable me to live without that urge to drink. And I can honestly stand here and tell you that that has never come back to me since I went to my first meeting. I have never had an urge to drink physically nor mentally. I've had envy and I've had wonder what would happen if, but I've never really wanted to. And that was enough for my second step until I was sober a couple of years, and I finally came to believe that a power greater than myself could heal my sick emotions, would heal my sick emotions. And then I went on to the third step, and I couldn't do it. That's where I said, what an order. I can't go through with it.
How do you do this? How do you turn your will and your life over? It's too much. And I went to old timers and they told me, just make a decision. Make a decision to get it all. You don't turn it over in the third step. Say the third step prayer, make the decision, and then take the rest of the steps, and then you'll turn it over. And then you've got to be prepared to accept God's care. If you do your will, it's likely to be bad if it isn't in line with God's will. And then I waited, and I didn't take a fourth step for a long time, and at the end of 18 months I took it, not knowing why. Certainly didn't think I needed it. Everything was great. I was back to work. I was making money. I was happy. Everything was going well for me, but I took it because I was told to. I took it because you said I ought to take it. And I took it believing it was necessary, but not knowing why. And after I took it and then went to the fifth step, I went on, and when I began to consider the sixth step, I found out why I did those other two. Because the first two years in AA, all I did was work on my recovery. I hadn't done many things.
AA was all. There wasn't anything else in my life. After a couple of years, I began to make financial commitments. I began to get involved again with the opposite sex. I began to do things that all kinds of non-alcoholics do that complicate our lives, and my character
[00:50:03]
defects started pushing on me and bending me out of shape. And if I hadn't taken steps four and five, I wouldn't have known how to keep myself emotionally comfortable, spiritually fit. And I went on and did the rest of the steps, and I found out that I'm as powerless over my character defects as I am over alcohol. And that's what the seventh step means to me when I have to humbly ask God to remove these shortcomings. I'm powerless over them.
They'll tear me to pieces. They'll drive me back to drinking. And if I hadn't taken four and five, I'd have never known that. And eight and nine were necessary because I owed everybody money in town. So I made those amends and made the list, and then I got into the last three steps. And I'm one that, I go along with some of the old-timers that I have heard say that they took the first nine steps and didn't take them again, because I believe that I do them again in ten, eleven, and twelve. And I try and do that on a daily basis. And there came a time when I had a spiritual awakening. I don't know when it was, but the step says I did it because I did those things, and I got a conscious contact with God. I was aware of that. And I pray and meditate like it says in that step. And I've been very comfortable in my AA life. And at the end of, back there when I was sober three months, all of a sudden I began to enjoy AA, and I've enjoyed it more as the years go on. And I still enjoy it.
And I hope I always do. And I got into service, and I'm going to close with a few words about continued sobriety. When you get through the twelfth step and you've had your spiritual awakening, you can't just quit. But I've observed something in this program that there's an awful lot of people that get that spiritual awakening, and at the end of five or six years of active participation in the program, they stay home. They quit giving it away. They don't all get drunk. They quit giving it away. They don't come around anymore. Go to your groups and stick around for five, six, seven, eight years, and see how many of the old faces don't come anymore. I've seen it in my group. I've seen about four turnovers, and that's all. And you know, just people, six years and they don't come anymore. Five years and they don't come anymore. Four years and they don't come anymore. And I often wonder what drove me on. How come I'm still here and still going to meetings? You know what I think it was. I got active in service. I became a GSR for my group, and I got involved.
First I became a secretary in my group, and I did that two terms, and then I was GSR. And then I began going to the general service area meetings, and there was something there that I liked, and what it was was people that were sober a long time. Twenty-five years, thirty years, fifteen years, eighteen years. There they were. Those were the ones that were still active after all those years. And so I've continued to do that, and I believe that it's helped me sustain the interest that I have in this program and in the recovering alcoholic. Because one of the greatest thrills, in my opinion, of my life, and I think of any sober alcoholic's life, is the joy of seeing someone else come back to life. You can see the strength of character come back into people's faces, people who look like they're almost dead. And I think that's part of God's ongoing miracle. And if you want to be one of the ones, if you're only sober three years or four years, and you want to keep going, get active in service. Do yourself a favor and you'll be around at fifteen years and eighteen years and twenty years. Keep active.
And I'm going to close with a prayer that I think says a little bit of what I just said in a different way. It says, Dear God, I have no idea where I'm going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end, nor do I really know myself. And the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe this. I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. I hope I have that desire in everything I do. I hope I never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though
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I may know nothing about it at the time. Therefore, I will trust you always, for though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not be afraid, because I know you will never leave me to face my troubles alone. God bless everybody, and I love you all.