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Source: Joe L. (Wino) – From Tyler, Texas – Date Unknown.mp3 File: joe-l-wino-from-tyler-texas-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:34:03
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Hi. It's hot in here, isn't it? Let's don't growl about it too much, because this is going to be short. I am reminded of the story of the young nun who was taking the orders, one of the most severe of all orders, and they lived in utter silence. And for their release each year, they were allowed to say two words. And this young sister, at the end of the first year, when they asked her to speak her first two words, she said, Food's bad. And another year of complete silence, and they permitted her to speak her second two words, and she said, The bed's hard. And another year, and they came to her, and they asked her for her two words, and she said, I quit.
And the mother superior said, Well, I'm glad you are. You haven't done nothing but bitch ever since you've been here. My name's Joe. I'm a wino. And by the miracle of AA, I've been sober since August the 12th, 1950. And I've seen a lot of drunks since I sobered up, but today I stand before you with a mixture of emotions, because there's a guy sitting in this room who was my first… We've got a fella hired in our club to do that when we have a new man.
The night I came, some rascal knocked over an ashtray, and I jumped like a ballet dancer. But I've been wondering, how do we find it? Who do we see? Where does it come from when we need it? And the guys here today, bless his heart, who was my first actual knowledge, the first guy I ever saw who was an AA member. And I was in the most destitute part of my suffering at that particular time in a little town, Roseville, California, and my life was a complete shambles.
You know, in a little town, how the gossip goes, the women know everything. The men don't seem to, but the women find it out. There was a guy in this town who had sobered up through the facility of Alcoholics Anonymous, and all the women in town knew about it. It was a hush-hush thing. He had a law practice in this little town, and I, my wife, found out about it. And these are the words that she said to me, this man is sober, why don't you be like him?
And I hated his guts. Because it so happened that he practiced law in an office next door to the only bar where my credit was good. I was forced to go to this bar to drink, and I had to sit there, and this character would come in and stand at the end of the bar and drink that horrible Coca-Cola. And I looked at him and wondered. And I've often thought of those words that my wife said, why don't you be like him? God bless his heart.
[00:05:04]
Well, about 12 years later I ran into him and I said, you dirty rascal, I've been like you for 10 years now. And it's pretty good. I don't know, I drank like you did. Too much, too long, and too often. There was really no reason for me being an alcoholic. I had all the facilities offered me in my youth that anybody else has had. I came from a fine religious family. All of my people, none of them were alcoholics.
And I've often asked myself the question, why were you the drunk in the family? But it so happened. And I started drinking pretty early, way early. And with my first drink, constituted as I was, I went back again and again to it for relief. I like to think of the things that most of the drunks talk about when they come to AA. They all complain of a number of things, but it seems to me that all of us complain of one thing in common, and that's being tired.
Did you ever hear a drunk talk and say, I'm tired of my employer doing me like he does? Tired of my wife clouting me in and around the ears with a blunt object or something? I'm tired. I ran into an undertaker out in Cottonwood, Arizona. He said he was tired of falling in the graves while he was serving. But this seems to be an affliction with us. We're tired. We're tired. And thank God for the facility of Alcoholics Anonymous where we can get a little rest.
I'm always good at being able to lay down. And when I drank, I was subjected to all the cliches that you've heard that they used to say to me, straighten out and be a man. And I did, just like that. Other misunderstanding society would say, haven't you learned your lesson? You ever heard that? My wife used to say to me, this is a good one, turn over a new leaf. I'd like to say here that the only guy I've ever heard of had any luck turning over these leaves was this Adam chap we talked about.
It seems to me that all the applications of a misunderstanding society were to no avail. And I drank because I had to drink. Continuously. The physical end of it got me sooner or later, I guess. My life was a shambles. We went through these years that I think every alcoholic family has to go through. And that's the years of making excuses, one for another. This would be a comparatively mild disease if we could only hurt ourselves. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
It seems to be that everything that a drunk touches starts to decay. My wife was hurt, and everybody I touched was hurt. And we made excuses, one for another. I remember one of the ladies in Roseville one time, I asked my wife, very pathetically, she said, why do you live with a man like that? And with her loving reflex, she said, you don't know him when he's sober. And this old heifer said, when is he sober? No compassion for the poor drunk. I'm living in Roseville, I don't have a place to live. The war's gone on, I'm living with my sister-in-law.
[00:10:18]
Beautiful relation it was. And one day I had sat in Bruno's bar all day long, sort of in a semi-state. We slept a lot down there. Bruno's got sleeping facilities, I don't know whether he's gotten rid of them lately. But I got up one afternoon about four and staggered home, down on Main Street in Roseville, and lay down. And my wife and her sister thought I was asleep. And this is the conversation that went on in the next room.
My wife, in hysteria, cried out to her sister and she said, oh, what would you do if you were living with a man like that? And her sister didn't hesitate a moment. She said, I would poison the son of a bitch. I was too poor to hire a food taster. But let me tell you something, they ate first. God damn, I smelled of the soup. What is this insidious, eating, crawling little thing that eats on us, that makes us the people that we are? What is it? We don't fit anywhere.
And I got on wine. I don't know whether you got any winos up in Canada or not, have you? Out in California, they raise the grapes out there. And they crush them and let them ferment. And you can go and lay behind one of those places and live forever. It's a hellish thing. I remember with my first drink of wine, I had a little bartender in Sacramento whom I had befriended. And I went in his bar early one morning revolting. I couldn't hold a drink. This is being real sick.
And I went into Curly's bar this morning and I said to him, Curly, I can't take my breakfast. And he was swamping out. It was six in the morning and those bartenders can be so benevolent. And he said, over behind the bar you will find a jug of pork wine and you can take a couple of drinks of that and go back to whiskey. And I would like to say here, my friends, that I have never been back to whiskey.
I like what that stuff does to you. It's kind of like a closed umbrella going down and it opens up all of a sudden. There is no description of the hallucinations that are derived from drinking gallo. And I'm ashamed of this. I have stumbled over winos going from my hotel to work. And I had looked at them in a rather objective manner. Poor guy. You don't have the price of a drink. If I had any compassion within me at all, I suppose it was for the fact that he didn't have the price of another drink. But I knew that there was a stigma attached to it. And I didn't want to be a wino.
And I bought a beautiful wicker jug and poured whatever was in it out and poured this cheap gallo in the wicker jug and sipped it therefrom. So as not to be a wino. How badly can you kid yourself? Well, there's no reason to tell the ultimate horror. The ultimate horror of that, I think in AA sometimes we're too busy trying to explain the obvious.
[00:15:08]
Let's don't do it. Alcoholism is definitely a disease. Let's don't try to explain the obvious. And when we cry out for God's help and quit calling things a coincidence, we don't need to try to explain the obvious. We know that, you and I, in here. Well, I made a few hospitals and a few psychiatrists. Ah, I just thought of that. I knew a tree doctor that fell out of one of his, wasn't there? They threw me out of the hospital in San Francisco after a lot of months of psychiatric treatment and sent me back to my hometown in Texas.
Literally, I was supposed to die. I was the port of last call. Here's the smart guy coming home. Didn't want to go, but I had to. And I get to my hometown and they didn't quite appreciate my return. And my own mother had me locked up down there in the local pokey. And I think that when we talk in Alcoholics Anonymous about suffering, maybe our minds trend to thinking of the physical effects of suffering.
The medical man will tell you that if you could remember pain, you would still be in it. Is that not true? The things I remember are the humiliations and the indignities that befell me. And I couldn't answer the question, why is this happening to me? This is suffering. I'm in jail in my own hometown by my mother's direction, hating everyone. I suppose, and my mother in particular, for having brought this great humiliation down on me.
It wasn't my first jail, nor was it my last. But there was something particularly cutting about it. And I was there three or four days and these pills I had gotten were wiring off. I couldn't focus, my eyes had come uncrossed. There was a guy, came up to this boudoir with the vertical Venetian blinds. And he called for me by name. I don't remember to this day any of the verbatim remarks that he made, but I remember looking at him and seeing within him a peaceful feeling.
The indescribable thing that we drink to get. This guy had it. Never saw him before in my life. And he talked to me through those bars, and I'm humiliated like the dickens. One of the things that I asked him more than once was, who sent you to see me? That's who I particularly wanted to hate. I went to see an old boy down in Texas not so long ago, and he rolled over on that dirty bed and looked up at me and said, who turned me in to that object?
And this guy stands there and gives me what we've come to know as the AA pitch. And then he dropped that crowning blow. He said, I believe maybe you're having some trouble with your drinking. And he hurt my feelings. And he went back to my people and told them that I wasn't quite ready for the program. You know, these non-alcoholics, they're funny people. Well, aren't they? My mother said to him, is he all right now?
And he said, no, I'm afraid that he's not ready.
[00:20:00]
And she said, being the wise woman that she is, that if we let him out, he'll get drunk. And he said something there that follows around our compulsion to drink. He said, yes, he will. I believe it will be necessary for him to get drunk. And with that, he left. And my people paid two deputy sheriffs a sizable fee to load me into a police car and take me 200 miles to Houston, Texas, and sit with me until the train went west.
And that's kind of been the treatment for the drunk until the advent of our society. Out of sight, out of mind, you know, in the back room. My old uncle told me, go in the back room and stay out of sight. Hadn't that been the treatment for the drunk until the advent of our society? And I got on that train that night and got off in San Antonio and filled a bag up with the only thing I know to fill a bag up with.
And they carried me off in a wheelchair in Los Angeles. Some smart aleck said, we use this car all the time. You can't live in it. I had kind of set up shop in there. And they took me and three dirty old bags that I had tenaciously clung to on this wheelchair and rolled me through the ammend station out to the front foyer and dumped me very unceremonious. And with all the jocular remarks I might make, all the fun, all the levity, I went through the next five months of living hell.
I wandered up and down the west coast, mooching wine and a few pills from some of my railroad buddies, and I ended up in a flophouse in Sacramento. And I never think of this place there where I was unless I think of the sign that grace is the walls of our society but for the grace of God. Because it's the only answer that I can find for the reason of getting out. It wasn't a coincidence. And I staggered out of there and started back to Texas looking for the guy that had come to see me in that pokey.
A drunk's got to do it the hard way. There was an AA club one block from where I started. I got to go 2,600 miles to find this guy. Because I was T-I-R-D. I was tired and I didn't like me. And I thought maybe if he's got a solution to this thing, he'll let me have a little part of it. And this trip I went looking for him. And this is one of the most amazing things that has ever come to me, is the fact that a guy would make the second trip.
God almighty, how long do you work with a drunk? He could have well said to himself, I went to see that arrogant stinker in jail. But he don't want it. This guy is the sole operation of the public school system in our city. And he locked his office on Monday morning and come to see me. And for that, I'll forever be grateful. I didn't deserve it. Oh, I got sober. Hell yes, I did. And they took me to my first A.A. meeting.
Why are they all upstairs? They shoved me up these dirty old stairs. They're kind of cut on the bias there. And I got up there that night and they gave me this horrible treatment of sugar donuts
[00:25:05]
and coffee. I didn't have no handkerchief. Have one pair of pants. Eat the donuts, wipe my hands in my pocket. I was two weeks sober and I could taste the inside of my pocket and tell you the last A.A. meeting I've been to. And I don't remember any of the things that they said up there that night by any of the elder statesmen, any of the erudite philosophy that we hear in A.A. I don't remember any of that.
You know what I remember? I remember experiencing a communication of sorts that here are some people like me. This is what I found. That night, I'll tell you this, there were two guys at that meeting and I think that we owe a great deal to the new man by the example that we set in A.A. The sheriff who had locked me up 12 years prior to that time for felonious drunk driving came up to me that night and he'd been sober two years.
And he put his thing, his arms around me and gave me the gift that we all get, I guess, in A.A. And he said, I've been sober two years now and I believe you can stay sober too. What is the gift of love that we receive? I think our capacity for expressing it is so limited when we drink. A drunk loves as much as anybody and he has no way of getting rid of it. And he further added, this guy, the old common sheriff, the guy I hated, he said, I love you.
And I believe you can make it. No, I think that the phenomenon, the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is indescribable. That a drunk has got to see it. This is the only thing that we haven't heard about, we see it. There was another guy sitting over to one side that night and in my confused state I knew that I had known him somewhere. And after the meeting, I discovered that I had soldiered with him some 20 years prior to this time and that the last time I had seen him, he was a blubbering idiot.
The army, they had him chained to a post. That was their treatment for alcoholism. And we would slip him whiskey just to watch him perform like a monkey on a chain. He was a real idiot, this character. And here he sits that night in an AA club, gently puffing on a cigar with a diamond ring and this AA, this serenity thing you get here. And I looked at him and I thought if it'll help him that much, it'll make a damn genius out of him.
It's hard to let go of this arrogance that is bred into us like that. And I learned it all in two weeks. I became pure, I became honest, I became a man of my word. I learned it all in two weeks. I became pure, I became honest, I became benevolent. Read the book, read the stats, you might even say that I became godlike. Have you ever met any AA members who are godlike? Oh, they're hell, I'll tell you.
I got a call one night, go out and see a drunk. He was in this restaurant and the proprietor had taken his booze away from him and all he wanted was for me to retrieve his booze. But I couldn't see that, I was too godlike. And I picked him up between me and another buddy and I start giving him this great pitch, this eloquent thing that I had. And I was going to sober him up and his eyes started watering and I felt so good.
[00:30:24]
Every time I've ever gotten God-like with a drunky puke on me, it don't seem to work quite like that, huh? Well, it's getting hotter in here. Let me tell you one and I'll sit down. There was a Twelve Step call about 2,000 years ago that I like and it was written by a guy called St. Luke. He didn't embellish it nor emboss it and if I take away from it or add to it, it'll be purely from my imagination.
But in the book 2,000 years ago it tells him, the drunk, they called him a maniac, I believe they called him a demoniac, if I'm not mistaken, which means that he was a maniac full of demons. So was I. And it goes on in the story to say that they kept him, that the manifestations of his disease kept that they had to keep him in fetters and chains. Well, they kept me in fetters and chains for my disease.
And then it goes further to say that he got so bad that they ran him out of town and he left. Well, they ran me out of town and he ended up on the river bank eating what was left from the pigs. I can see them, can't you? I can smell them with a little imagination. The long beard, the tattered pants, and he's eating what's left from the pigs, he's sick. As the story goes, there was a little carpenter fellow roving about the country in those days and he had a knack for healing that we haven't quite acquired.
The little carpenter fellow saw him for what he was and with his knack for healing he was instantly cured. But the spirits that were taken out of him, these things that were possibly in me, he was cast into some pigs and the pigs tossed themselves off into the river. And in those days I'm sure that the pig business was big business. And this stool pigeon who was tending the pigs ran in and told the fellows that owned him, said, something terrible's happened out here, said, your pigs are all gone, you're out of business.
And in mass they go back out to see the little carpenter fellow and the guy that got healed. I can see him in his timidity of being cleansed of this insidious thing that has ground us to heels for years. And they beseech them to leave. That's a good way of saying get out of town. And the little fellow that had been healed didn't quite know what to do and he saw the fellow that had done the work and he said, may I go with you?
And the little carpenter fellow in all kindness said to him what I'll say to you, no, you can't go with me. Stay here so that others may see what has happened to you. Thank you.