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Source: DICOBE-00540 – Bob S – GOPHER STATE RNDP VII – 1980-05-23.mp3 File: dicobe-00540-bob-s-gopher-state-rndp-vii-1980-05-23.mp3 Duration: 00:51:31
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My name is Bob and I'm an alcoholic. I want to thank you for this great reception. I'm glad to be in what seems to be the capital of recovery in the United States. My wife sends her greetings. She said, forget all that fancy speech and just tell them that when you go to meetings you're not as crazy. I was raised an Alabama Baptist. I don't remember seeing a bottle until I was in high school. As a matter of fact, I don't remember seeing a deck of cards. You see, for an Alabama Baptist, everything that is fun is sinful.
Do you know why an Alabama Baptist won't make love standing up? They're afraid somebody will accuse them of dancing. So there was no fun. I was an only child. I had glasses by the time I was nine months old. My name was Stinky Stucky. I didn't have any friends. I remember very definitely being the last little boy that they picked on the side to play softball. I remember I just couldn't make it in sports. The first time I went fishing, I threw the entire rod and reel in the lake. And I didn't fare any better with the girls.
They always seemed to know how badly I wanted them. What I do remember was sitting alone on the curb looking up in the stars and feeling very lonely and feeling a certain closeness to God, my Father. I had a feeling that I was special, unfortunately. I had, however, a kind of strength in my spiritual life. I was struck with time and space and always had a prayer life. I didn't buy what they taught in the church. There was kind of a hole in the roof for me. I could communicate with God from an earliest age, and it gave me a great strength. I was known as an optimistic kid.
I used to feel other people were close to each other. My parents were close and my grandparents were close, but I always felt outside the boys and outside my family and outside every circle and very much alone. But in that, I developed a way of life, and I remember it like this. About age five, I went out in the backyard and walked on top of a sawhorse that a carpenter had left there. And after I was proficient at walking on it, I went in my house, brought my mother out, and asked her to teach me. Whereupon, I jumped up on the sawhorse, walked back and forth, and my mother remarked, My, isn't he wonderful? And that started the entire pattern of my life. I, from then on, sought closeness by getting merit badges. I had very little in my life from then on except getting merit badges. I was the youngest Eagle Scout in the state of Alabama, and the pictures show me about four feet tall with a big World War I hat falling down over my glasses, with a merit badge strap hanging down to the floor. And so I began my life, stinky-stucky, a lonely, restless
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kid who couldn't sit down, who couldn't stop and look anybody in the eye. I had sweaty palms, and I
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was prone to anxiety attacks. I was never comfortable. The only thing I knew how to do was pray and get another merit badge. So I became proficient in violin, where they called me the Snake Charmer. I then got recognition in photography and painting, and I got a pilot's license. And the first thing you know, I ended up in Columbia University Medical School. And I still had no manners. I still didn't know how to get along in social situations. I was still anxious. The first day at Columbia Medical School, I remember going into an amphitheater of a hundred and fifty people, and they were all dressed identically. They all had on a striped regimental tie, a blue blazer.
They had on khaki pants, white buck shoes. Everyone looked the same, the Ivy League uniform. And I sat on the front seat with an Aloha shirt on. My transition to New York City from Alabama was very painful, and I never really adjusted to New York. I went on through medical school, and at age 24, I had my life all together. I was finishing medical school. I was married. We were a very smart-looking young couple with a baby. And I had my whole life before me with a degree of medicine, and there seemed to be nothing could stop me. The only thing was I couldn't sit still. I still had no ability to be comfortable in a social setting. And it all came to a head. The crisis and being uncomfortable occurred on a summer night in a penthouse Park Avenue apartment. A cocktail party was being given there for the graduating class, and it was a crowded room. There was too much silverware on the table. I knew I didn't know how to use it. I didn't know how to talk to people in those close quarters. As the room became more and more crowded, I panicked. And at that point, the hostess handed me a full water glass of something. It turned out that it was a tumbler full of martini. My first drink was a water glass of martini. They rang the dinner bell after I had guzzled this down, and I stood up, pitched forward, and rolled over and over in the living room.
But the situation reversed itself. Now everybody else was uncomfortable. I lay there and looked up from the floor, and for the first time in 24 years, I was comfortable. I became a daily drinker after that. I went on to internship. We went to Charlottesville, Virginia. I remember it was not the Thomas Jefferson town you hear of. We managed to get an apartment over a madam that kept burning up mattresses and singing rock all night or something.
It was a seedy environment I lived in in Charlottesville, and I became a seedy person during those days. I had to scrub for surgery one morning, and I knew I couldn't get up on time. And a little flaky nurse handed me a very special pill. It was called Daprosal. Now Daprosal is a pill for menstrual cramps, but it has amphetamine or speed in it, and I got a buzz off of that. And here I am at age 26 on speed, dexamyl, secanols. I began around that time taking at bedtime and drinking on weekends. My life already at age 26 was an example of better
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living through chemistry. I don't know that I regret those years, and they got better. I did experience a lot of anxiety as a child, and I had a hell of a fine time the first few years I started drinking and taking pills. I was a young doctor. I then became the base surgeon of a small air base in Japan, and I had a fantastic time. I truly had it made. I drank at the Officer's Club every night, and those days I drank Ramy Martin cognac. That was something I was never able to afford later on in my drinking career. I had a driver and a housekeeper and my young family, and I could finish my sick call in the morning by 11 o'clock, and I had the rest of the day to drink and play golf. And for two years, I really caught up on everything that a Southern Baptist is behind on. And I remember those as very good years. I remember having a lot of fun, and I wouldn't be without them except for one thing. In my childhood, with my discomfort, I had always been known as an optimistic kid. I'd always seen that the world is a good place, that God is good, that there's just something wrong with me. I'd always felt inadequate, but I'd always felt the world was a good place, so people knew me as an optimistic and curious and hopeful and positive person. But the first sign of my alcoholism, as I look back now, occurred while I was having such a ball in Japan, because at the end of those two years in Japan, I saw the movie Wine and Roses. I remember walking home with my wife, who later became alcoholic. We realized that we were hooked at that point, and that tragedy was probably ahead for us. So that I came back to the States and gave up drinking. I remember coming back to the States and having lost all belief in God, I had become a cynic, and I had lost my optimism. The first sign of my alcoholism is clearly a loss of optimism and a loss of spirit. I traded the spirit of my childhood for the spirits, and when I gave up the spirits, I had nothing left. And I went to New York really with no belief in God, with no belief in myself. I had no booze. I was no longer practicing medicine in the active sense. I had enjoyed the years in Japan of delivering babies and doing medicine in its active type. Now, believe it or not, I did the one thing that anybody would have known I couldn't do. I took on psychoanalysis. I went back to New York to become a psychoanalyst.
Now, that requires sitting still, for one thing, which I was never able to do. And it requires listening to people tell their woes all day long, which is boring as hell. And it requires believing in a certain theory of psychoanalysis of man's basic nature, which is very anti-everything I'd been taught in life. And the people that I studied with all seemed to believe in all the theory of psychoanalysis, and I didn't believe in it. I didn't believe in anything. Now, I'll give you a classic example. I had the full professor of psychiatry. He had written a textbook of psychiatry.
He was the president of the American Psychiatric Association, and he was my preceptor. There were six of us in little teaching sessions every afternoon, and I couldn't believe in any of the theories they taught. It came to a head on a particular day where everybody there seemed caught up believing… Everybody there seemed caught up believing and interested in why a patient lay on a couch
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with his hands folded on his chest, and their deep concern was why would he lay with his hands folded on his chest. They spent an hour and a half with deep sexual and aggressive concepts about why a man would lie in that position. And you've got to understand, now, I'm sitting there for an hour and a half right after lunch, I don't drink anymore, I've got nothing in my life, I don't believe in anything anymore, and I'm sitting with all these guys discussing such a benign thing as that.
Now I looked at them in their white coats and I had learned a great deal from Columbia University about medicine, and I believed in Columbia University. And I asked myself, do these men have some sixth sense? Can they penetrate deep into human nature where I cannot follow? Or is it possible they're full of shit? I went back to daily drinking after that. I became the director of three mental health clinics and a suicide prevention service.
I used to take dexamyl all day long, dexedrine in the afternoon, slip home and go into the garage where I would do a physical exam on myself, or at least in my fantasy it was. You see, I believed that if I could hold my breath long enough to drink twenty-five swallows of gin without breathing, you understand, then that was proof that my heart and lungs were in good condition. So I took speed all day, I drank all night.
My wife used to say I had two speeds, too fast and off. Late in the night I would begin to wake up, and along around 2 a.m. I would disguise my voice and call up my own suicide prevention service. I had a beautiful rosewood office with Scandinavian lights. There was a chemist in the office next to me, and on occasion I would hear a thunderous crash against the wall. I would go look into his window and see him lying on the floor comatose with an empty bottle beside him.
It was clear to me that Paul had a problem with alcohol, and I used to fall comatose on my side of the wall, get up, put the bottle in the trash can, sit back up at my big black desk, get out my psychiatric textbook, read all the 119 diagnostic labels, and come up with the unalterable belief that my diagnosis was inadequate personality.
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I believed that the only way that I got by in life at that time, and I sincerely believe this, the only way that I got by was by using alcohol and pills. I saw alcohol as Paul's problem and alcohol as my answer. For some seven years I lived that way. My children had very little attention for me. I became more and more wrapped up in myself. I became more and more striving for success, for some kind of merit badge, for something where my mother would say, my, isn't he wonderful?
But I believed no longer in anything, and my life was, through those years, just one long bony blur. I thought of suicide often, and I went to a psychiatrist. As a matter of fact, I have figured out that I spent at least $50,000 in psychiatric hospitals and on psychoanalytic couches. I spent three years going into Manhattan for psychoanalysis where you lie on a couch and talk about yourself for an hour for $50.
My analyst diagnosis of me was that I was a latent homosexual. I kept having this dream that I was getting screwed. Anybody that spends $50,000 talking about himself lying on a couch is getting screwed. I gave up psychiatry, and the dream went away. My ability to make money kept me drinking. I got down to drinking Wolfschmidt's vodka around the clock, but I got one final merit badge. It was the greatest of my life.
I wrote a federal grant for a community mental health center back in 1966, and I was the first psychiatrist in the state of New Jersey to get millions of dollars of federal aid to build a brand-new community mental health center in our community, and it made me famous overnight and I had my picture made with the governor and incidentally came home and urinated in the closet the same night. These were very uneven times.
But nonetheless, I received the highest recognition so far in my life, and there were many people who wanted to write these grants and obtain this federal money, so they scheduled me to be the featured speaker at a statewide meeting of psychiatrists and legislators, and they set the meeting on January the 27th. They scheduled also to open a brand-new psychiatric wing. The visitors were to hear me speak, and then there was an open house on the psychiatric wing, and the state psychiatrist would visit that psychiatric wing.
Well, I wrote my speech during the Christmas holiday and went into a blackout. I spent the month of January apparently drinking more and more in my basement, and finally they rolled me up into a little ball and admitted me to the hospital. All that I remember is waking up after writing my speech, waking up in a nurse's arms. She explained that they were doing a brain scan on me, that I had had convulsions again, and she promptly took me back and locked me up on the psychiatric ward.
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I asked where I was, and I was in Hackensack Hospital. This was the location where I was to be the featured speaker. I stood there in that locked ward with one of those blue, silly little gowns that opens down the back and realized that all of my colleagues were going to be coming through because this was the day of January the 27th. This was the day that I was to speak, and they were to tour the ward, and now I'm instead locked up on the ward.
If I could have just gotten out of there, got a little toot, I could have made that speech. Nonetheless they kept me locked up, and I realized I was soon going to be humiliated in front of all my colleagues. What would you do in that circumstance? Locked up, walking up and down the hall, all your buddies going to come through and laugh at you pretty soon. Well, I rolled up in a blanket and got under the bed.
My roommate had taken rat poison on the Saturday night before. He was a little shopkeeper from Rutherford, New Jersey. He didn't say anything for a long time. He just sat there on his bed. After a while, his curiosity got the best of him, and he struck up a social conversation with me. And he asked me, what do you do? And I explained from under the bed, I'm a psychiatrist. He combed his hair and left that hospital as cured.
That is the only miracle I ever performed in my 25 years. The ward attendant would not leave me alone. He had me pegged. He kept coming back, and I talked to his sandals all day long. I kept explaining to him, I am the featured speaker. And he kept saying, sure, kid. But you know, you know sitting here, that I truly would have given that speech that day if they had just given me one drink and let me out of there.
But it didn't end that way. The psychiatrist there, I overheard him telling my wife that she should sell our house to pay his bill a year in advance. True story. And I am not kindly in my feelings about psychiatrists to this day. As a matter of fact, I was in AA three years before I told anybody I was a psychiatrist. I have not been able to integrate my own personal experience with my efforts to practice.
In any case, my belief in doctors went. Prior to that time, I had hoped they might fix me, maybe. I hadn't had a great deal of hope, but I'd had no hope in anything else. I had no ability now to see any future, and things came to a quick close. My mother would no longer talk to me. A school principal in town, my last drinking buddy, would no longer talk to me. Even the dog, Max, pulled away from me.
I had long nights where I thought about suicide. Then it came where I couldn't work anymore. My wife went to work. We were borrowing money. We were down to where she couldn't tolerate me anymore. I learned just this week of another hospital I was in. I must have been in eight hospitals. Hospital I was in, I must have been in 8 hospitals, I always thought I was only in 7.
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But my life was one long blur of trying to stay high on chemicals and try to survive, believing that I was inadequate and that life was just going to ease out on me sometime in my late 30s. And it all came to a head on a Sunday. Our family went for their last trip on a Sunday, knowing we were going to split up. My wife had gotten a job in Florida, packed the car and was leaving. Now I had no caretaker, I had no job.
We went for one final trip to our former babysitter. She was graduating from nursing school and everything in my childhood came flooding back to me that day. That family touched each other. They were affectionate. There was a sparkle in their eye, there was warmth, there was everything that I realized I'd always felt outside of as a child and I felt outside of it again here. We got in the car to go home and my children screamed and I huddled in the back seat and cried and everybody was enraged and frightened and we got home and I took another belt on the Gordon's gin and then went to the master bedroom where the big color television set was and there I shoved my oldest daughter, a junior high girl, dressed in a quilted nightgown, I shoved her from in front of the television set and took the favorite place to sit down.
And I saw her eyes at that moment and something began to happen. I realized that other family had children who were happy and I realized that my daughter was like a caged animal. She was too young to look after herself and she was indeed paralyzed trying to follow any guidance from me. Her life was that of a slave to a crazy man and I looked beyond her around that room. The mattress and springs were lying on the floor where they'd been for months.
My wife now was alcoholic also. There was a window pane out, the yard was grown up, leaves had blown through, plaster off the wall, there were cigarette burns in the carpet, there was dog hair everywhere and there was the faint smell of urine in several inappropriate places. That was the master bedroom of a former psychiatrist, New York psychiatrist in Teaneck, New Jersey. And I identified for the first time with my daughter.
I saw her pain and I cried. For the former 38 years, I believe that I had been almost totally wrapped up in myself. I think that I felt I was special and that I had to do something great and I'd spent so much time trying to live out some fantasy and now I truly identified with my daughter. And a Christmas card blew off the television set. It was so important to me that I carried it in my back pocket for the next three years.
It said, for one child's sake, may life ever be a land of wonder and awe and may each child
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on earth be free. And I cried for myself and I cried for my daughter, we were both slaves, and I cried for the days that I'd felt free and optimistic and I cried for the days that I'd looked into the sky and felt wonder and awe and known how great the world was and how great God was. And I went downstairs and found everything that I could to drink. And as the night wore on, I realized the one last thing in my life was not going to support me any longer.
Prior to that, I'd had no God, I had no family, and now I realized I couldn't drink anymore. And it was all very clear, kind of crudely, I say it, it was like being flushed down a toilet. I just knew my life was over. I hate to take away, but that was a feeling I had, I just had the feeling it was all over, that I'd played every trick that I could play in life and I was now a failure. There's a strange way in which, as long as you're going to doctors, you can be designating responsibility to them.
When I gave up on doctors and when I finally gave up on booze, lying there that night, there's a quiet way in which in less than a minute, I understood that I was disabled. It was a feeling of being dismembered. And I understood that I was going to always be disabled. I understood that I couldn't drink, and I understood that I couldn't quit drinking. And in that state, I took full responsibility for myself.
In a certain true sense, I recognized my limitations and yet took responsibility for myself in a way that I never had going to doctors. And the paradox of that is that I immediately asked God's help. And I had a sudden comfort, a sudden sense of hope that I do not know how to describe in private or from a platform. But from that minute to this, I have understood that I had to let other people run my life, that the power was not within me to stay off of alcohol.
And I called Paul. You remember Paul? Paul was the man in the office next to me. Well, I had sent Paul to AA seven years ago. I called Paul, and he borrowed money and put me in a drunk tank in New Jersey. It had no program, and I was by this time psychotic. I began seeing people who weren't there. I began chasing people with guns, and I went in and out of consciousness. I had to be tied down in the drunk tank and given shots all night long.
And as I came to, I saw all these kindergarten slogans on the wall. Through all the smoke, I had already decided that I was going to do whatever I was told. And this is a true story. The first few slogans really got confused in my mind. You've got to understand that I'm crazy at this point. I was identifying with the space shot. The astronauts were out in space at this time. And I was just going in and out of it.
I came to, and the first slogan I saw actually wasn't a slogan. It was a sign on the cigarette machine that said, Kitty. Well, Kitty was a girl I knew in that town. And I honestly believe this. I hope it doesn't sound too crude, but I honestly believe it. My first thought is, if you do all these other signs around here, then the reward is Kitty. Kitty was what you put your money in to get cigarettes.
Later I came clear enough to start studying the slogans, but the nurse gave me shots while I was studying the slogans. This literally happened. When I was looking at the sign, first things first, they bared my rear end to give me a shot. And I got it all tied up. You've got to understand that. I was chasing a Dr. Pearson who I thought was after me with a gun. Then first things first shines in my mind, and I get my pants pulled down, and the next thing it says, Let go!
And I get… Well, that's really how it happened.
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Really how it happened to me. But I had already had a kind of willingness to follow directions, and I had this childhood memory. I saw the slogan on the floor, it said, But for the Grace of God, and that brought back the old song. I'd remember it as the Southern Baptists of Amazing Grace, and I had the sense that… And I can tell you this here, in all of my craziness, this is what my sobriety started out on.
It didn't start out on all of my psychiatric training. It started out on my childhood spirituality. I just believed in God all of a sudden, and I hadn't for years. And I understood that somehow power is going to come to me. And the next thing that happened was there was a picture on the wall I'd remembered as a child in church, and it was a picture of Jesus knocking on a cottage door, and the cottage door did not have any knob, and it didn't have any latch.
You couldn't pull it open from the outside, and I remembered my childhood training about that. The truth of the message in that picture is that if you want help, you have to open the door up from inside, and you have to keep the door wide open. Help comes to you, and this is the truth that I still live by. Help comes always from outside if you stay open. I understood that you've got to get honest and don't have any secret compartments in the back of your house.
So in my crazy state, I already had the beliefs that my new hope was in God, the grace of God, which means that you'll get help in spite of yourself, not because of yourself. I had the great belief that my only part was to stay open with no secrets. And the next thing that happened, I got up the following morning after being belted down and given shots all night long, and we had breakfast, three of us drunks who had been in the same room all night.
One guy had been in the gutter all night, and his head was flat. Another guy was beat up, a bald-headed stockbroker, and we sat down at the breakfast table, and you've got to remember that I'm psychotic and coming off of Sequinol, Dexamyl, Darvon, Librium, Valium, alcohol, and so forth. I was indeed a garbage can, and I had something called myoclonic jerks. When you come off of Barbitur H, you don't just have that fine little trimmer of the hands that a lot of people have in withdrawal.
When you come off of Barbitur H, you have convulsions, you have jerks, you have twists, and you flop, and people don't know they're embarrassed. Some of them wave back. I poured my milk all over the table, and I couldn't hit my glass, and the man across from me came alive, picked up the pitcher, and poured my milk, and the stockbroker reached over and poured his milk, and somehow, instinctively, I picked up the pitcher and poured the stockbroker's milk without spilling it.
In my psychotic mind, I chose to make sense out of that. I understood the power in me to pour that milk did not come from within me. It didn't come from either one of those people. It came when we met each other's needs. My childhood spirituality came back to me. When we meet each other's needs and care about each other, strength comes to the group. It doesn't come from an individual. It comes through the group as people share.
Now, I didn't quite get on to that at that time. I really got amuck. I got sober, and I never really had a craving after that. For those of you that are new, I may have gone a little askew in my talk. Let me tell you that for 14 years, I was a daily drinker, and I was suicidal because I never believed that I could get by one day without drinking. When everybody else was quitting drinking, and I would tell my wife I'm going to quit drinking, I told my income tax man, don't you let go of me because I know I will never quit, and I know somebody's going to have to help my family.
I never had any hopes, and now my point is after learning a few things and totally surrendering, I did not have any great desire to drink ever again up to this point. Now, the last point I want to make is about a mistake I made in my first five years of sobriety. I did everything I was told. I wrote a fourth step.
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They told me to eat cheese. I ate cheese every two hours. I prayed every morning. I prayed every night. I went to four AA meetings a week. And I had three sponsors. I did everything. I went back to being that little boy getting merit badges. And I went back to being that little boy who prayed my father who art in heaven. I had a personal relationship with my God. And I went back to doing AA in a way of a perfectionist. And after five years, I was miserable.
And people who knew me well one night took my inventory. Summarized, I will quote one who said, You are a self-righteous son of a bitch. That's just about where it was. Now, I want you to know that in my prayers, daily, I had not only asked for the power to carry out God's will. I had read the mystic literature and knew what I was supposed to pray for. I had prayed for humility. Well, at five years of sobriety, I was fired. I became hypertensive. I was divorced. And my hearing went bad in one year.
I never prayed for humility after that to this day. On one night, I stood in Princeton, New Jersey, without a place to sleep and without a job. And that was after doing the program by praying my father. I had never discovered the fellowship. But when all of this came around, I truly surrendered in the deepest sense of the word. Not just my alcoholism, but as a person, I realized that I needed some kind of support from my brothers and sisters and that I didn't need any more merit badges.
And I reached out in a very special way. It just so happened that I went up to Manchester, Vermont, to visit Bill Wilson's grave. It was New Year's Day, and it was snowing, and I was the only one in the graveyard, in the cemetery. And I looked for some distinguished mark to mark this man that I worshipped. And when I finally found his tombstone, it was only about the size of a small attache case, and it just said, William Wilson, 1895-1971. It had no distinguishing characteristics to show what a special man he was.
And I realized what a commitment he had to be not special. And I realized how all my life I'd tried to be special. And I really have lived my life in the AA meetings in an authentic way. I am still prone to the same mistakes that I made in early sobriety. But I'm now reaching out, and I see you. I was comfortable here tonight. I could not have been comfortable standing here five years ago. I still had anxiety attacks.
I was still sweaty-palmed. But since I've agreed how I just need brothers and sisters a day at a time to stay comfortable, I've learned how to pray the prayer different. Prior to that time, I wanted the fatherhood of God without the brotherhood. I wanted to be a son of God without being a brother. And I am now working on my inventory to maintain my prayer life, but to develop myself in the fellowship.
And I have a home group, and I have a sponsor, and when I have any pain now, I don't just get on my knees and pray. I go to my group, and I talk about it. And when I am most depressed, or crazy as my wife would say, obsessed, when my mind is running on problems for three or four days on end, and I just can't stop my mind from running, there is absolutely nothing that will give me such a surge of gratitude and a sense of God's power as being around brand-new, recovering alcoholics.
The most reliable source of strength for me today is to be around wide-open, struggling, newly-recovering alcoholics.
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Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.