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Source: DICOBE-00538 – Ed S – GOPHER STATE RNDP VII – 1980-05-25.mp3 File: dicobe-00538-ed-s-gopher-state-rndp-vii-1980-05-25.mp3 Duration: 01:05:20
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Thank you very much. Good morning. My name is Ed S. and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Ed. Hello there. I met Julian earlier this weekend and just a few minutes ago over at the other end of the dais and he said, I have to introduce you and I don't know anything about you. And he said, that might be a very good idea. I think as it turned out, it was a very good idea, but I'm not quite sure why. I'm absolutely delighted and privileged to be here.
And the first thing I want to do before I get talking, being very alcoholic and forgetting my manners and where I am, is thank the committee for the Gulf Estate Roundup who invited me to be here and, more importantly, did all the work that enabled all of us to have such a marvelous time this weekend. I especially want to thank Lorne and Marguerite, you know, as symbols of the committee, the chair and the co-chair.
I met Marguerite some years back. I don't know where she got my name and how it happened, but she invited me out to the Twin City area to speak. And when I was leaving, I said, I have a funny feeling that we'll be meeting again. She was just so enthusiastic about it. She was my hostess that weekend and she was chairing the event. And she was so enthusiastic about everything she was doing that I just couldn't imagine her not staying in service work.
And I knew that unless the higher power had some plans for me that didn't fit with the way I felt a few years back, I was still going to be in service work. And that's just the way it's worked out. And I think it'll happen again. You know, the marvelous thing about Alcoholics Anonymous, since I've been in AA, I come from a very, very Irish background. Now, this is not particularly a, shall we say, part of the country where you probably have a lot of Irish Americans running around the way New England is and the way New York City is.
And AA changes, you know, regionally. When you go from region to region, certain groups take over in AA and you think they founded it. And in my part of the country, they like to say that the Irish did not invent AA, but they sure knew a good thing when they found it and they just took it over. And I come from the type of background and the type of family that I come from, people drink. Now, anybody else but an Irishman got up here and told stories about drinking Irish, they'd be in trouble.
You know, in AA, we have a lot of wonderful traditions that we've written down on paper and we study them and we go to service meetings and we discuss them and we're guided by them. And we have a lot of unwritten traditions in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I think the unwritten traditions in AA are more interesting sometimes to me than the written ones. And one of the unwritten ones is that you never call anybody but yourself an alcoholic.
And that can be very maddening to the new person coming in, the rebel, the person who's not a joiner, the person who swears they don't want anybody telling them what to do. And then they spend the first year trying to get their sponsor to tell them precisely what to do and trying to get AA to lay down all kinds of laws that they really won't lay down for them. One of these things is we don't call people alcoholics.
So I can't stand up here in front of a couple of thousand people, since we in AA don't believe in doing this and we also don't necessarily believe that alcoholism is inherited, and tell you that the people in my family are alcoholic. But I can tell you that the Irish people that I spring from believe very heavily in drunkenness as a way of life. When I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I had a lot of learning to do and I had a lot of unlearning to do.
I had to unlearn certain things, and one of the things I had to unlearn was the idea I had that alcoholism was a desirable way of life. I thought that alcoholism was a gracious, manly, womanly, whatever you are, you know, we fit it in, the women could drink too, sort of thing that was to be done and to be mastered. Anything you could do with the drink in your hand, you did, as long as you got up and you went to work the next day.
That's the type of background I came from.
[00:04:59]
There were other things that I have since come to feel were more harmful that had to be shredded out of my life after I got into Alcoholics Anonymous, but it really was very difficult for me and startling, absolutely startling when I got here and somebody told me that you don't drink, you stay away from one drink one day at a time and that this thing is some sort of an illness that we don't quite understand yet, and that we have to deal with it.
[00:05:19]
And somebody told me that you don't drink, you stay away from one drink one day at a time and that this thing is some sort of an illness that we don't quite understand yet, and that if you stay away from it, you will proceed to get better. And that involved, in many ways, leaving the family and leaving the environment and leaving the type of background that I came from, because these people simply were not going to change to suit me when I came into AA.
I spent a lot of time my first couple of years in AA trying to change them because I thought I was the theme of this weekend is I am responsible. I thought a responsible AA member should run around trying to get everybody in the family sober, and I had to learn that very valuable lesson in AA that you can't do that. The only one you can really work on is yourself. I had an old Irish uncle from a particular part of Ireland, Uncle Pat, believe it or not.
And Uncle Pat was my favorite uncle, and I was his favorite nephew. I was his godchild, and we used to drink together. And when I joined Alcoholics Anonymous, Uncle Pat stopped speaking to me, just like that. And he said to me, you know, Ed, you're a very young man. You're a very young man indeed. And he said, you're liable to change. Well, I was 32 when I came in AA, and that was considered young in the New York area when I came in.
And he said to me, you're liable to change your mind about all this as the years go on. Now, this is not a nice thing to happen to a newborn AA member, to have somebody they love in their family attacking them on this level. And I said, because AA starts giving you the smart answers right away, I may change my mind tomorrow, Uncle Pat. But for this 24 hours, this is the way I'm going to live. That's when he stopped talking to me.
Before that, I hadn't given him answers like that. Now, I want to tell you about one more relative, a little Irish lady. I think every family has somebody like her, a family eccentric. In some cases, they earn the label. In some cases, you wonder how they get the reputation of being eccentric. You just kind of know that there's something odd about them, but you're never quite sure what it is, you know.
In my family, it was Aunt Nora. And Aunt Nora, I was brought up to believe, was a very strange woman. And she was to be avoided for unspecified reasons. And her children, my cousins, whom I always liked when I saw them, but I would get away from them very quickly, we all would, were to be avoided because it was a very strange part of the family. Now, 32 years went by with my thinking Aunt Nora was some sort of nut.
And I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, and I was in AA about a year or eight months, I don't know. As I said to Mac Cheater when I was having dinner last night, if I knew I'd be standing up in front of thousands of people bragging about this, I would have kept records, you know. And if my Irish family heard me, that's just what they'd think I was doing. But anyway, I was in the program a short while, and in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson advises us, if we're having trouble tying into the spiritual part of the program, and that's a saying that always amuses me because the longer I stay sober, the more I see the entire program as spiritual.
But at that time, I was trying to find out something about the spiritual bit, as we used to call it. I even think Bill refers to it as that in some of his writings, the spiritual bit. And I didn't want to have anything to do with this, but it was in the literature and it was in the steps, and I had reached a point in my sobriety where I was frantic and I was uncomfortable. I did not want to drink, and I simply could not afford to walk around this spiritual treasure that Bill seemed to be describing in all the literature.
And he says, if you're having trouble with that, go back for a beginning to the religion or the church of your childhood. That's the easiest thing for some of us. It's God as you understand him, and we have no one particular way of doing this in Alcoholics Anonymous. So I started going back to a Catholic church, much to my regret. I was very angry at that time. I was very bitter. Everything I had against spirituality and God was tied up in that resentment.
[00:10:02]
And I went there and I worked the program. I'd sit there and the priest would be talking and the organ would be playing and the choir would be singing, and I'd be saying, easy does it and live and let live, and they're not that bad, Ed, you know. If I was sponsoring somebody today, I think I'd tell them, you're not ready for it. But one thing that happened is I met Aunt Nora, see. I met Aunt Nora and I said, she was all dressed in black with plain hair and no makeup and a little pillbox hat on, and I said, there's my crazy aunt, you know.
And she saw me and she jumped on me after the Mass and she was very charming. And she said some very amusing, funny, witty little things, you know, the kind of stuff that you read about Irish people doing, you know, like Barry Fitzgerald and people like that. It was all blarney and charm. And she was a bright lady. And I looked at her and I, you know, I was very leery of her. And I went back the following week and I met Aunt Nora again.
And she was even nicer and funnier and wittier and invited me over and said, your Uncle Joe would love to see you. And I couldn't get over this. I said, what's going on here? And I went home and I called up my mother and I said, Mom, I want to know something. And she said, what's that? And I said, Aunt Nora, you remember her? And she said, yeah. I said, what was it about Aunt Nora that was so peculiar?
And my mother said, well, she was always a little bit different from the rest of us. And it suddenly dawned on me, she never drank. So I understood Al-Anon's problem immediately. And I've been a great fan of Al-Anon ever since. They isolated that poor woman totally in the family because she saw what alcohol was doing to this family. And she stopped the drinking. And it did not make her crazy. She was an absolute delight and still is to this day.
Anyway, when you come from a background like that, you're growing up in a world that's a little lopsided. That's the way I feel about it. One of the things that I did as a young man. Now, some of the younger people in the room must remember that I come from an era where radio was king. And your imagination worked all the time when you listened to radio. It was all up to you. And when you went to the movies, honestly, all the men were handsome and all the women were gorgeous.
Now, leading men and leading ladies don't have to be handsome and gorgeous today. But it seems to me that they all were just super people to look at in those days. And I would go to those movies the way people look at TV today, I guess. Five and six and seven times. And I just loved the movies. I bring that out because I want you to know that this was very much a part of my education. The Hollywood dream factory.
I'd go to the movies and some wonderful looking guy and some gorgeous looking woman would meet for the very first time at the beginning of the movie. And they would fall in love instantly. At once, they would fall madly in love. And four or five minutes later, they would have a little fight. And they would spend the rest of the movie fighting with each other and quibbling with each other and singing and dancing in the meantime.
And telling funny stories. And at the end of the movie, somebody like Edward Everett Horton would get them back together again. And they would go dancing off into some gorgeous place to live happily ever after. And the end would be written on the screen. Remember the movies like that? Okay? They were 90 minutes long. It all happened in 90 minutes. And that's what I wanted life to be like. That's what I wanted life to be like.
I went to see movies like The Wizard of Oz and I saw a bunch of make-believe people dancing down the yellow brick road. And I wanted to go down that yellow brick road. You know, I didn't drink to become an alcoholic. I didn't drink to get arrested, to spend a night in jail. I didn't drink to get fired from my job. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be the President of the United States. I wanted to be lots of things, but I did not want to be an alcoholic.
I didn't plan to spend the rest of my life in service in Alcoholics Anonymous. I am very delighted that that's the way it turned out. I'm very delighted that that's the way it turned out, but that's not quite what I had in mind when all this began.
[00:15:03]
I'd listen to Judy sing, and I'd watch these people go down the yellow brick road, and then the movie would end, and everybody would have everything they wanted. And remember the movies where everybody got discovered? It seemed to me that every other week I was going to see a movie where somebody with not too much talent was being picked out of the chorus line or out of Nothingsville, and some producer or some director was saying, The star is sick. You're going on tomorrow night.
And they became a star without having to work very hard. Now, I have just told you that I come from an Irish Catholic background, and I went to parochial school all my life, and I don't want to offend anybody, but in the days that I went to parochial school, I don't think they equipped you for the real world particularly. Some people maybe, but certainly not I. I didn't pick it up. So between the movies and the parochial school, when I went out into the world, I got clobbered, and I was a setup for alcoholism.
Now, when I came out of the Army, I went into the United States Army. I was in the Korean War. I didn't get drunk all the time. I got drunk every time the opportunity presented itself, but I didn't get drunk all the time. There was a little guy in my outfit I've never been able to forget since I've been in Alcoholics Anonymous. There were 240 men in the company. We were on the 39th parallel on the front lines for seven straight months.
And Joe, little Joe, would disappear quite regularly. He was 42 or 43. I was 19. We were the best of friends. He had been in World War II. He was in the Korean War, and he was a private E1. Now, you know, if I told that to another group, they wouldn't understand it. You can't go through two wars and live and stay a private E1 and not be an alcoholic. Now, little Joe would disappear every now and then because he was older, and he was further along in the progression of his alcoholism than I was.
And I would go with him a couple of years later, but I didn't know what was going on. He'd disappear. He'd say, I'm going over the hill. He'd find a still. He'd come back, and there was a war going on. I mean, a shooting war. You realize people didn't run away to Canada in those days. You went over there, and you got killed, and if you deserted, they shot you. It was all very simple, you know. And little Joe would come back about three or four days later, and there was a lot of quiet time in the Korean War.
There were some nights that would be quiet. You'd sit up all night in a trench from the top of a mountain, looking over at them on the top of a mountain, and you'd scream obscenities back and forth at each other. And little Joe invariably came back off his toots at three or four o'clock in the morning, and it was very quiet. And little Joe would come all hungover and shaken and trembling and needing a shave down the trenches, saying, S., Ed S., where are you?
And I'd say, why is this guy coming back to me? I'm not his mother. I was very embarrassed by this. Now, I think that I'm absolutely convinced that that man knew something about me that I wasn't to know till I came through the door of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting many years later. That man knew that I was an alcoholic. He had drank with me. He knew that I would understand his need for a drink, and he knew that I would not harp on him or ask him any embarrassing questions.
Now, I got out of the Army, and I came back to New York City. I love being introduced as a New York intellectual, Julian. It's taken me a long time. That's never happened anywhere but in AA. They don't call me that in New York. I came out of the Army, and I came back to New York City, and I was a high school dropout, and I didn't know what to do with myself. All I knew was that I wanted to get discovered, and I wanted life to be pretty, and I wanted everybody to go around saying nice, loving, easy things to each other.
And I was tired of families that fought and hollered about inconsequential things, and I was cut off from my God. I was cut off from my church. I thought that spiritual guidelines, I thought that codes of ethics, and I thought that organized religion were all fine for other people, but they did not apply to me. I could sit and listen to the most marvelous preacher in the world talk, and I would say, what he's saying applies to everybody in the room but me.
I was unique. I was different, and I felt that way with a very little amount of alcoholism in my life,
[00:20:01]
a very little amount of drinking, unless you're willing to accept the fact that, as I feel, that I was alcoholic before I ever picked up that first drink. And I came back, and I said, now, how am I going to get discovered? How am I going to find the jet set? How am I going to find the gorgeous people, the cynical people, the funny people who run around making fun of everybody in the world? They're the people who must have it.
If they run around making fun of everybody, they must know something I don't know. And I looked in the papers, because when I came back to this Irish Catholic family, all they really wanted to know was when I was going to go to work. And I had a little money from the Army, very little, and I was spending a lot of time drinking and going to the movies. I'd go to the movies two and three times a day.
And I'd come home at night, and I was living with the family at that time, and they'd look at me, and they'd say, when are you going to go to work? And I'd say, well, I think I'm going to go to school on the GI Bill of Rights. I am a veteran, and I am entitled to certain things. And I'd learned to talk by then, somewhat. And I said, I think I'll go and study this thing called journalism. And they would look at me, and they'd say, when are you going to go to work?
And they kept asking that question. See, they didn't know much about journalism, and they didn't know much about academia, but they knew an awful lot about a bum when they saw one. So I decided that I would start my climb to fame in journalism or in industry, my climb to riches and fame, by getting myself a job driving a bread truck. Which is what I did. I looked in the paper. There was an advertisement for a Ralph salesman for a bakery.
I went down. I interviewed. I was hired. They told me to come in on Monday morning. I was on the way out of the garage. And the sales manager said to me, young man, do you mind if I ask you a question? I said, no, what is it, sir? And he said, why does a young man like you want to spend the rest of his life getting up at 3 o'clock in the morning? And I said, well, why would I do that? And he said, well, that's what time we get up around here.
We start work around here. And I said, but I just came back from Korea, and there was a shooting war going on, and we didn't get up that early over there. And this foolish man hired me anyway. And I started drinking right away. It was a lot more fun than working. It made everything okay. I started, I was 20, 21. I started drinking in the morning right away. I didn't want to take this great big horrible looking.
I didn't like the work. I didn't like it immediately. And I went into work sick every morning. I went into work feeling absolutely terrible. If I in my sobriety now woke up one morning feeling the way I felt every morning for 11 years prior to coming to AA, I would check into the emergency room of a hospital at once. And I got up feeling that way and went to work every day. And you know, alcoholics, as everybody in this room knows, we think like corkscrews.
I devised a very complicated system for staying drunk for 11 years. It wasn't the usual kind of drinking. I had a system. I would stop off at liquor stores and buy little, these little miniature bottles of brandy. You know those little nips? Hold about an ounce and a half, an ounce and three quarters. I drank an awful lot of those things in 11 years. I'd stop off at liquor stores all over the route where this bread was to be delivered.
The route got served according to the location of the liquor stores. And I would buy them little brown paper bags filled with them. And the liquor store owners were always trying to talk me into buying this stuff by the gallon. Or the quart, or the half pint. They said it's costing more that way. But I didn't do it. I didn't do it because I thought, and how I had this knowledge at 20 or 21 is absolutely beyond me.
I said, it's very difficult to get rid of large bottles. The little ones will be easy to dispose of. But you know what I did. I didn't throw them away. So I left them in the little brown paper bags all over the bread truck. All over the truck, under the seat, under the merchandise, over the engine, where you were supposed to have stuff to sell. I had all these little brown paper bags full of bottles.
When that truck hit a bump, it sounded like jingle bells. Everything jangled and jingled. Now, this was not what I had started out in life to do. And all this riotous social drinking had to come to an end. I drank with a lot of Polish people along the Brooklyn waterfront. That's where the bars near the bakery were.
[00:25:00]
And I don't know. When I came in AA and they said that some people seem to be able to drink a lot and handle it and then not necessarily be alcoholic, I thought maybe that applied to all the Poles that I drank with. Because my God, they always seem to be throwing me over their shoulders and taking me home at night. And they'd be singing and laughing and playing pokers and eating kielbasa the next morning.
I couldn't eat. I couldn't look at anything, you know. I found it absolutely devastating. But one day the sales manager for the bakery called me in. And he said to me, I cannot emphasize that for 11 years this is what I did with my life. I mean, for 11 years, I put 12 and 14 hours a day in on that bread truck and I stayed drunk. And I topped it off by getting drunker in a Polish bar near the bakery.
And somebody took me home. I thought it was never going to end. I felt like I was in prison. I felt like I was in Devil's Island. I thought it was never going to end. I thought I was never going to see the outside of that bread truck. You know, people in New York talk about, I never was on the Bowery, but I brought the Bowery into my own home. I brought the Bowery onto that bread truck. It was absolutely filthy.
Everything an active alcoholic can do when he's sick, I did on that truck. It had roaches. It was the only bread truck in the bakery that was infested with roaches. And the only thing I was worried about, the only thing I was worried about was that I was going to die on that truck. That's all. I thought it would be very embarrassing because I weighed 270 pounds in those days and I wasn't eating. I thought it would be terribly embarrassing when I had a stroke for people to see me being carted off the truck because it had a long, narrow aisle and I was not long and narrow.
And I thought they would have to carve part of me off to get me out of the truck. And you know, it's no end of amazement to me, the nonsense that I worried about when I was drinking. And here I was on the verge of dying from alcoholism. Now, anybody out there who may be newish and somebody said, go to the Gulf Estate Roundup, you'll hear some interesting speakers. You may be sitting there wondering how I could not know this.
Well, I knew something was wrong. Of course, I knew something was wrong because I wasn't getting discovered. So I started reading abnormal psychology textbooks to find out why. Now, abnormal psychology textbooks 16 or 17 years ago were thinner. I mean, they were bigger, they were fatter. There were illnesses in there that aren't in there today. Now, you heard a psychiatrist speak Friday night. Bob and I have talked about this.
I didn't know in those days that they vote on what goes in there as an illness and what doesn't go in there as an illness, you know. If I'd known that they were sitting around voting whether these things were diseases, I'd have never read the books. So I'd sit there and I'd read these books. I'd be drunk already, of course. I'd pick the books up in the library. I'd be drunk from working all day. And I'd sit there with the abnormal psychology textbook and I'd switch from brandy to Canadian Club.
Now, I figured the way you drink, Ed, you've got to drink good stuff or you'll be dead in no time. Never occurred to me that meant you were an alcoholic. And I'm reading the abnormal psychology textbooks and I'm drinking and I have a water chaser that would last me all night long. And I'm drinking and I'm trying to find out why I shake and why I'm miserable and why I'm not becoming famous and rich and why I'm not doing anything.
And I read and I read and I read. And you know what happens when you read those books. You start identifying. And I finally realized what my problem was. I finally realized that I had everything in those books. I was everything except a lesbian and an alcoholic. And it didn't bother me too much either. Have another drink and forget about it. Now, what happened is the sales manager called me in one day and he said, Ed, you know, this is after 11 years of looking at me killing myself like this.
He calls me in and gives me 30 seconds of his time. He said, Ed, we want you to resign. And I said, I'm not going to resign. I have an investment in this company. It's taken me years to learn how to become a good bread man. I'm a good union member. I didn't know the union member. I'm a good union member. I didn't know the union was in cahoots with them. They said get rid of them. We've had it.
[00:30:01]
He said, well, Ed, he said, you're fired. I said, OK, I'll resign. And I don't know what happened, you know, but at 32 years of age, I suddenly, through this dim fog, came the realization that something had to happen. First of all, I didn't have the money to drink all the time anymore. I was dead broke. And what does a 32-year-old adult male, middle-class American, independent guy who wouldn't take advice from anybody for 32 years because he was smarter than everybody, what does he do when he gets fired from his job? He knows he has no money to drink. He knows he's going to need medical attention.
What does he do? He goes home to Mama. That's what he does. He goes home to Mama and Dada. The same Mama and Dada, he's going to waste two years knocking at AA meetings when he gets to AA on account that they were so possessive, you know. He's going to go to closed meetings until a woman from the South smartens him up one night about it. Sure, you go home. You go home to the parents that you have so much against when you get in therapy.
You know, you're always trying to analyze what they did to you. You're going to go home to these immigrants who came out from Ireland in the middle of a depression and brought you up in an orphanage and could have done it to send you to medical school when you were a kid. But you were too busy going to the movies and daydreaming and becoming an alcoholic to take advantage of it. So you go home to them, you know, and you let them save your life again, which is what they did.
Only they didn't know anything about alcoholism and they said, you stay here and we'll take care of you. And their version of taking care of me was taping me off. Give me one little shot of whiskey every few hours. Only I fooled them. I went into the DTs. They had a green and a beige rug in their living room. And I went into it on New Year's Eve, 15 and a half years ago. And right in the middle of the floor, there was a little beige and a green mouse.
And I looked at the mouse and I said, there is no such thing in the world as a technicolor mouse. But all those movies were not for nothing. I had seen The Lost Weekend and I knew what was coming. And they said, who are you talking to in there? And I said, I'm talking to a friend and he's coming back with other friends. And I think I'd still be there with that loving family doing their best for me if I hadn't fooled them and gone into a series of alcoholic convulsions, at which point they panicked and called the New York City Police Department.
And a New York City cop took one look at me and said, we've got to get this guy into the alcoholism unit of the downstate medical center. And my life began. It was the beginning of a whole new life for me. That guy got me into the hospital and he got me into the hands of a psychiatrist who made the mistake, God bless him, of asking me that foolish question. Because I readied for it, that nobody in Alcoholics Anonymous has ever asked me in 15 and a half years.
He said, why do you think you drink? And I'd been studying that subject. And I let him have it, to the best of my recollection, for about two hours, I told him. And he didn't register anything. You know those non-directive type therapists? No matter what I told him, no matter how horrible it got. You see, I was fishing for a hyphenated diagnosis. I was fishing for something very sophisticated and unique and different.
And when I was all through, he said to me, I think you have to stop drinking. And I said to him, what? I was really quite crestfallen. I remember it as if it were three hours ago. I said, after all the filthy things I've just told you about me, you, a professional person? That tickles me today. I don't know what I thought he was supposed to say. A professional person, I guess, as opposed to an amateur person.
And he… And he said, I want you to go to a meeting of people we have who bring a meeting into this hospital every Sunday morning. It was New Year's Day the next day. And he said, they used to drink like you, and they don't anymore. And he said, the way they don't is they talk to each other about it all the time and drink coffee. Now, I think if his description of Alcoholics Anonymous had been any more complicated than that, I would not have been able to handle it.
[00:35:02]
You know? I think it was the perfect description of Alcoholics Anonymous for me at that time. I, of course, did not want to go. I made no plans to go. I went back to the violent ward. There was a young man in the violent ward that I had buddied up with. He was a heroin addict. And he said to me, what did the shrink say to you? And I said, he said, I'm an alcoholic. He wants me to go to an AA meeting.
Ridiculous. He said, you ought to go to that AA meeting. That's what the heroin addict said. And I said, why? I was very interested in why he said that. He said, because you're an alcoholic. And I said, that was twice in one morning now. After 32 years of nobody saying it. I said, why do you say I'm an alcoholic? How do you know that? He said, you, he says, you twitch in your sleep. And I said, how do you know that?
And he said, I watched you all last night. And that scared me. I suddenly realized I was in a place where some pretty funny people were watching me. All night while I slept. And I decided to go to that AA meeting. Just on the chance that there might be some different kinds of people in there. And I went into the room. And you know the room, I've gone back to it since once or twice. I can't handle going back there a lot.
I can go to hospitals and I can go to institutions. But for some strange reason, not the one where I got sober. I don't know why. But it looked like this ballroom. It looked to me like I had gone to heaven. It was shining. It was bright. The walls were gorgeous. The floors were shining. It looked to me like it had chandeliers. I went back six months later to that meeting as an AA volunteer. And the place was dreadful.
It was just dreadful. The plaster was coming off the wall. The floors were filthy. You talk about cigarette butts on the floor. They had everything on the floor. It was a dreadful place. Apropos of what you said about going first class smack to hold an AA meeting. But it looked just fine to me that morning. It looked just gorgeous. And the people looked wonderful. And they looked so calm. I don't know if you people in the room know, but when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I shook so badly I couldn't sign my name for six months.
I wanted so bad to stop shaking. You know the things that people want to acquire? John told us last night about a girl and a car and a home and living like the white man and all that. I just wanted to stop trembling. I wanted to stop trembling so badly. I haven't seen anybody shook that badly. I don't know. Maybe they're coming in out of treatment centers and they're in better shape. Because they hurled me out of that place the next day and I started going to AA meetings right away.
That was the end of the treatment. That was the end of my involvement with a psychiatrist. He told me to go to AA. He gave me the name of an AA group. I went to a group. They fell on me. I mean, they just fell on me. I joined a group in Brooklyn, New York, where they didn't ask you too many questions. You walk through the door. I remember my first sponsor. I've had a few marvelous sponsors. The right sponsor at the right time.
We talk a lot about sponsors, but they seem to be handed to me on a silver platter. Service sponsors, AA sponsors, beginning sponsors, job sponsors. I mean, the right person always seems to come right out of the crowd, you know, as if they had a sign around their neck saying, I am your new sponsor for this phase of your life. Now, I ran into a guy that I sense have come to refer to as Adolf Hitler.
And that's what I needed when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous. He was a little man. He was a short guy. And I'm 6'2". And I weighed 270. He liked pushing big people around. And I was eminently pushable. And I walked through the door of the meeting room. And he looked up at me with a funny, crooked little Jimmy Cagney smile. And he said to me, how long do you think you've had the problem? And I said, well, I said, I think I've had the problem with alcohol for about three months.
And he smiled and he said, well, you stick around. You're in the right place. You're making coffee here tomorrow night. I could have killed him the next day, two hands. He gave me a key to the place. I came into a little club in Brooklyn. Gave me the key to the club, you know. As I look back on it now, John talked last night about asking a woman to marry him. And he said, that's okay. We can get to know each other in the next five miles.
I mean, I don't give keys to the place to people who are one day out of treatment. But he did with me, you know. And it was the right thing to do because I needed some place to go. I needed a home away from home.
[00:40:00]
And I needed one right away. Because I had to start learning how to walk, how to talk, how to wash my face and hands, how to work, how to feel good when you got up in the morning, how to shave. I mean, I'm not ashamed to admit it. I had to learn how to become the man in Alcoholics Anonymous that I had wanted to be all my life. And I made up my mind when I got to AA real quick that I was tired of wondering what it would be like if.
That I was going to go and do those things. And if I didn't succeed, that would be okay. Because when I got to be 98 or 102, and that's how old I plan on living to one day at a time in Alcoholics Anonymous, I'm not going to look back and say, I wonder what it would have been like if. I will have done all those things, or at least tried them. And I know that they weren't for me. Dick got hold of me and he said to me, Sunday, now I'm in Brooklyn.
I've been driving a bread truck. I've been living. I've been a prisoner in Brooklyn for all these years. And he said, the group has got a commitment in Stamford, Connecticut Sunday. You're going with us. And I went home to the family and I said, I'm going to Stamford, Connecticut Sunday. I felt as if I were going to the Riviera. I felt as if somebody had invited me to Paris all of a sudden. That was the big time.
We were going up to a clubhouse to speak in Stamford. You see, you don't know what's happening to you when you come in. It's always very easy to stand up 15 years later and give a little talk and say this is the way it should be and this is the way it was. This guy, I'm going to tell you a secret now because I'm getting ready to rotate off the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous on August 1st, so I can say this now, but I kept it to myself for 15 years.
In my third week in AA, this guy Dick explained service to me. And he explained that you have to, one of the secrets of Alcoholics Anonymous is you have to give it away. You cannot keep it if you don't give it away. You cannot live like a drunk and stay sober. You cannot stay bottled up and egocentric and be comfortable. He was a very blunt Brooklyn type. Out in Brooklyn, we call it eyeball to eyeball AA or barefoot AA.
They don't mince words. He'd tell you your sobriety wasn't worth a damn if you weren't reaching out of yourself and giving it away to somebody. And he explained the whole service structure to me, and he said, at the top of this thing, I have this thing called a Board of Trustees. And I said, what's that? And he explained the General Service Board of Trustees to me, and I was three weeks sober, and I said, that's what I'll do.
I'll become a trustee. And I did. But I didn't tell him that. I kept that to myself. My introduction to service in Alcoholics Anonymous was to come in the beginning. As far as I'm concerned, my spiritual growth in AA has always developed the same way that my service work has developed. To me, service for my fellow drunk is where it's all at, where it is all at for me. That's where the excitement's at.
That's where the beautiful people are. That's where the jet-set people are. That's where the, as they say today, the happening people are, for me. I know it's not for everybody, but that's really the way it has worked for me. And this is an incredible conversion of thought for Ed. It really is quite a conversion for me, because when I came here, I was not a joiner. I did not believe in organizations.
I certainly didn't believe in politicking. The way I got introduced to it all, as well as all the jobs in my group, was through the intergroup in New York, through the central office. I started volunteering on the phones over there. I got involved on the steering committee at intergroup. At first, I couldn't understand what all that fighting was about. We had intergroup steering committee meetings where people would rush up from the floor and grab the microphone from the chairman of the intergroup and say, you're fired.
And he was a volunteer. And I used to sit there and say to myself, what am I doing here? And somehow or another, something inside told me to stay. And do you know what it was? I always felt, ever since I've been in Alcoholics Anonymous, I've had a secret weapon. And I feel it here this morning with you, and I know I'll take it back with me. I know I'll feel it on the plane. I know I'll feel it all next week.
I just feel a presence in this room that I cannot feel necessarily as well and as easily when I'm alone. As Well and As Easily When I'm Alone, You Know? Individually, we can make some pretty bad mistakes, but together, collectively, we make
[00:45:01]
very few mistakes, and if we make them, we right them right away. There's a presence moving through us that's guiding us, and it's guiding me right now, and it's guiding everything I say. And I'm not nervous. I can't do anything wrong up here, because this presence has taken over this meeting and is working through me. And that was true at those intergroup steering committee meetings, where all hell was breaking loose, you know?
And people were throwing things at each other, and everybody wanted to know how much the secretary was making. They seemed to be inordinately worried about what the secretary was making, and I knew what she was making. And I know the reason she didn't want to tell people is she was ashamed that everybody in AA would find out she worked for so little. I sent a letter to the editor of The Grapevine, our very own international magazine, when I was in AA about a year.
You know, I couldn't do anything right when I was drinking. One of the nice things after I got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, even when you're right, you're wrong when you're drunk. You know, you can't be wrong all the time, you know? You just cannot be wrong all the time, no matter how badly you drink. And I would say something, and I'd be wrong because I was drinking. But the day after I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, when I tried things, suddenly they seemed to work for me.
I sent a letter to the editor of The Grapevine, and they published it. And I started writing a whole series of articles for The Grapevine, and I still do. I still do. And I want to say that I hope you all come to visit us at the Grapevine workshops in New Orleans. I was talking to Kevin, one of the young men from Don's group. He told me that he's the GVR for his group. And then at our service meeting in the other room yesterday, I forgot to tell people that we now have 4,800 Grapevine representatives in 83 areas throughout the United States telling people about The Grapevine.
So I've got to remember, because there's always a Kevin in the room who's going to correct me if I don't, to say that every time I speak from now on. But The Grapevine has been a very important part of my sobriety. It's been a quiet time part of my sobriety. I'm never happier than when I'm spending a weekend preparing something for The Grapevine. In Alcoholics Anonymous, I started to find out about spirituality in strange ways.
This is a Sunday morning meeting, and I asked Ginny when I called her from New York last week, what are you supposed to talk about? She says, just talk about your story and what you're doing in AA, and spirituality will come out as you go along, because I've heard some marvelous Sunday morning speakers that sent me out of the room on an absolute high. And I can't think of anything more important to talk about than the traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous that keep us anonymous, keep our egos in line, keep us non-affiliated.
Isn't it marvelous? And I think you're doing it in Minnesota. I know we are in New York. How we can work with these outside agencies and cooperate with them and get the people from those agencies into Alcoholics Anonymous and watch them become AA members without affiliating with them, without signing contracts with them, without money-changing hands. I think it's an absolutely marvelous thing, and you must remember that Alcoholics Anonymous is only 45 years old, and all of this was worried about and thought about years ago, and we're living it now at a faster rate all the time.
You know, our records tell us we have a million people sober in AA around the world today, and we are notoriously bad record keepers. Some of the people at GSO tell me that they think it's more like two million. And ever since I've been involved in service, I've gotten terribly interested in the 12 concepts of Alcoholics Anonymous. And, you know, the only type of leader that I'm capable of being anyway, I really do believe this, is the only type of leadership that can survive in Alcoholics Anonymous, and that type of leader is called a servant.
And isn't that a marvelous concept? People who serve, the people who will not ask you to do something they haven't done a hundred times themselves, and will probably do again and again and again themselves. And if you don't have credibility because you're a good servant in Alcoholics Anonymous, first of all, you're probably not going to get elected to the job, and second of all, if you do, you're in for big trouble because nobody's going to pay the slightest bit of attention to you.
I found out, don't you think the world at large that we live in today would be a lot better off if the leaders all over the world thought of themselves as servants of the people that they were working for? I really do. I found out about it real quick in my group, the Park Slope group out in Brooklyn.
[00:50:06]
I became a wheeler dealer. I became Mr. Alcoholics Anonymous. I had it all down pat. I had the message. I was sponsoring people when I was sober six weeks. None of them got drunk. There was one old-timer in my group who used to say I had frantic sobriety, and I thought he was crazy. I couldn't understand what was wrong with my sobriety. I'd memorized the steps. I could talk on the steps in my eighth month.
And I wanted to do something at one of my business meetings. I decided that I was going to be in a leadership position in Alcoholics Anonymous, that they would let me. And I engineered at one of our business meetings a bylaw. The bylaw involved a big Saturday night meeting in my group took place at nine o'clock. If the visiting speakers did not get there at a quarter to nine, they did not speak. That was my rule.
I thought it was too confusing to the newcomer. I had become an expert in my eighth month on what was good for the newcomer. And I engineered this and talked to friends, and I politicked, and I talked to some of the old-timers. And I brought it up at the business meeting, and they voted it in. They voted it in. They agreed with me. And I was triumphant. And I said this is the way to accomplish things in Alcoholics Anonymous.
You politic and work behind scenes and talk to people before the vote is taken. Two weeks later on Saturday night, the speakers showed up at five minutes after nine, and they put them on. They had forgotten all about the new bylaw. And I sat there humiliated. I turned red. I had smoke coming out of my ears, and I learned a lesson I never forgot. I never forgot. If you don't have the group with you, sincerely and honestly, all the engineering and politicking in the world is just going to make for very bad AA.
Forget it, Ed. Sit back and enjoy the speakers, even if you're going to have 22 of them. Now I'm going to say something very radical in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I don't believe it will ever happen for a second. But I'm going to talk about changing the steps. See? Bob Bizant says, I'm glad Ed came here to say that. I got to live with this when he goes back. Can't change the steps without all the groups agreeing.
But if I could, okay, there's only one thing I would do to change something that's already perfect and make it more perfect. I'd put the word humble in there. I'd put the word humble in every single one of the 12 steps, because I had a lot of trouble with that word when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous. It stood between God and myself. It stood between my fellow man and myself. I couldn't trust anybody, and I didn't know I couldn't trust anybody.
I didn't start trusting until I was in Alcoholics Anonymous a year, and then it was with a young guy that I was sponsoring, and I checked him out, and I tested him, and I laid traps for him, and that damn guy never lied to me once. It was from somebody that I had the privilege of sponsoring, somebody that needed me, and I now realize I need it more than he needed me. I needed him, who taught me how to trust.
And I want to warn anybody in the room who doesn't know this, that trusting is very baffling, cunning, insidious, and progressive. Once you learn how to trust one human being, you're on your way to trusting all mankind, and you're on your way to loving God, because that's the way it worked for me. So the word humility, Bill describes it in the book as simply honesty, tolerance, and love of your fellow man, and the minute I read that, and I had read it and not read it for a couple of years, but when I finally read it and read it and saw it and understood what I was reading, all sorts of lights went off in my head and wheels started spinning around.
I've had a little trouble with humility on and off ever since. Whenever I'm in trouble with the program, whenever I'm having any sort of agitation, it's usually because I'm out of line in this area, and all I have to do is start praying and meditating, which is written right throughout the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's right in the core of the program, and still I can tend to get caught up and too busy and stop praying and meditating.
Bill relates it in the big book directly to mental stability. He doesn't mince words with it, so I must arrive at the conclusion that if I'm not praying and meditating, if I'm not working the program one day at a time, if I'm not getting up and making a contract for another day's sobriety with my higher power in a humble fashion,
[00:55:05]
that I am off the program and that I am mentally unstable because the reverse must be true. I am really asking for trouble. That's a very lovely and a very beautiful word for me. Now, I talked before a little bit about the traditions. I'd like to say just a couple of things about the men whose pictures we have up here, very lovely pictures. I'm always comfortable in any AA room where I see the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and a picture of Bill and Bob.
We don't go in for a lot of decorations, but they sure mean a lot to me. And I'd like to quote, if you will permit me, very briefly from both of these guys, because I cannot say it any better, and I think it is terribly important. It says so much of the way I feel and the way I live right now. Dr. Bob, when he was dying on July 3, 1950, at our first international AA convention in Cleveland, Ohio, got up and made a very brief statement to the group.
And I want to quote directly just a few lines from him. He said, there are two or three things that flashed into my mind on which it would be fitting to lay a little emphasis. One is the simplicity of our program. Let's not louse it all up with Freudian complexes and things that are interesting to the scientific mind, but have very little to do with our actual AA work. Our 12 steps, when simmered down to the last, resolve themselves into the words love and service.
We understand what love is and we understand what service is, so let's bear those two things in mind. Let us also remember to God that I remember the tongue. And if we must use it, let's use it with kindness and consideration and tolerance. Pardon me. And one more thing. None of us would be here today if somebody hadn't taken time to explain things to us, to give us a little pat on the back, to take us to a meeting or two, to do numerous little kind and thoughtful acts in our behalf.
So let us never get such a degree of smug complacency that we're not willing to extend or attempt to extend to our less fortunate brothers that help which has been so beneficial to us all. Thank you very much, Dr. Bob. I think that's just absolutely gorgeous. I mean, you know, that's what some people consider our spiritual father in Alcoholics Anonymous, the man who taught us everything we know today about 12-step work.
And I don't think I've ever heard it more succinctly done. And I want, you know, in New York City, we have what we call the Bill W. Dinner. Bill used to celebrate his anniversary at the New York Intergroup Dinner in New York every year, and we still have Lois there every year. The last year of Bill's life, he was too sick to come, but he sent us a message, and you can buy it. It's for sale in the back of the room.
I know you've read it, many of you. I want a quote from it today, because I know a lot of people in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I know a lot of people in the field of alcoholism who, as far as I'm concerned, do not really understand the importance of the anonymity tradition, and do not understand how spiritually invaluable it is to us. So I read Bill's last message about anonymity a lot, and I'm delighted that in New York, as long as she's with us, we have Lois to read it every year after year after year since Bill went on to us.
And here's what he said, because I don't think I can hear it enough. This was read by Lois at the New York Intergroup Bill W. Dinner, October 10, 1970. He says, My dear friends, recently an AA member sent me an unusual greeting, which I would like to extend to you. He told me it was an ancient Arabian salutation. Perhaps we have no Arabian groups, but it still seems a fitting expression of how I feel for each of you.
It says, I salute you and thank you for your life. My thoughts are much occupied these days with gratitude to our fellowship and for the myriad blessings bestowed upon us by God's grace. If I were asked which of these blessings I felt was most responsible for our growth as a fellowship, was most responsible for our growth as a fellowship and most vital to our continuity, I would say the concept of anonymity. Anonymity has two attributes essential to our individual and
[01:00:00]
collective survival, the spiritual and the practical. On the spiritual level, anonymity demands the greatest discipline of which we are capable. On the practical level, anonymity has brought protection for the newcomer, respect and support of the world outside, and security from those of us who would use AA for sick and selfish purposes. AA must and will continue to change with the passing years. We cannot, nor should we, turn back the clock. However, I deeply believe that the principle of anonymity must remain our primary and enduring safeguard.
As long as we accept our sobriety in our traditional spirit of anonymity, we will continue to receive God's grace. And so, once more, I salute you in that spirit, and again I thank you for your lives. May God bless us all, now and forever. Ever yours, Bill. I don't think anybody can say it better than that. Well, I want to tell you that it's been absolutely marvelous being here with you. It's Sunday morning and I was brought up to believe that on Sunday morning you go to a church and you act in communion and receive communion with your fellow believers. And I feel like I'm plugged into communion with every single person that's been here this weekend. And I want you to know that your enthusiasm has been absolutely marvelous. I want you to know that I feel that since I've been an Alcoholics Anonymous, I have been discovered, you see.
And when I go back on that U.S. air flight this afternoon, then I'm going to feel like I'm on the yellow brick road, but I'm going away from ours. But I may come back. I may be back. I want to talk to the newer person, or the person who thinks we're all too happy, maybe, and too positive, and maybe that we believe in God Almighty a little too much this morning. I want to talk to that person for a minute, because I was that person for a couple of years. I just want to say that in the last year and a half or two years that I was driving around in New York on that red truck, drunk as a hoot owl, I started looking around that truck one morning and I saw a little yellow bug. I saw a little yellow bug, bright yellow bug, and it landed on the dashboard of the truck. And I didn't know what it was.
I'd never seen a bug that was bright yellow like that, no other marking on it. And I went like that and I looked and there was nothing there. And I thought, oh well. And I just, I just, you know, forgot all about it. And the only problem was that bug came back and it brought other bugs with it. They would fly all over the truck and I gave up trying to catch these little yellow bugs. And I never asked any of the other drivers in the bakery about those yellow bugs. Something told me not to ask anybody about them or I might have ended up in Alcoholics Anonymous a couple of years sooner. I don't know. And I started going to AA meetings and I was an eager beaver, as I've already told you. And I was running around at meetings, drinking black coffee, doing 12-step work, reading the AA literature, smoking regular cigarettes. And I was sober about, I think, 11 or 12 months.
And a speaker at a meeting one night, I really thought, as I said, that I was Mr. AA, that I had it all knocked up, you know, everything was wonderful. And a speaker at a meeting one night said something about bugs. And I remembered those yellow bugs. And I thought, oh my God. I was driving around, working, taxpaying, and those bugs were up here for two years. They weren't real. Now, the important message here for me and for the person in the room who may be suffering from negativity this morning or a little new, who think we're all a little too happy, because no such thing as too happy and there's no such thing as too positive. The important thing is that you must keep coming to these meetings. You must keep listening to a variety of the speakers. You must keep following the spiritual guidelines
[01:05:02]
in Alcoholics Anonymous. And after a while, it's an absolute guarantee, I promise you, that you'll get rid of your yellow bread bugs, too. Thank you. God love you.