Audio
Transcript
Source: Joe M – Joe M. – Bronx, NY – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: joe-m-joe-m-bronx-ny-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:27:03
============================================================
Our next speaker, there has been a change in the program, unfortunately Julian B., who was to have spoken here tonight, has taken ill, but there is a replacement, and what a replacement. Once again, the facts create the interest, and the interest quite simply are these, that our speaker recently celebrated his 25th year of sobriety. His story is in the Big Book, under the heading, Joe's Woes. There is a brief description of that story, and it reads simply like this, Joe's woes were only the beginning when he hit Bellevue Hospital for the 35th time.
He still had the state hospital ahead of him, and even after AA, a heartbreaking test of his new found faith. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you, from New York City, Joe M. Good morning everybody. I am Joe M., and I'm an alcoholic. Maybe I'm a little different than the ones from Alaskan, Ohio, and Florida, because you often hear mentioned up here, fellow speaker will get up and say, I never drank till I went to high school.
Next one will get up, proceed them, and say, I never took a drink till I went to college. Well, I never drank in high school or college, because I never went to high school or college. Our leader told you about 35 trips to Bellevue, that is so, and let me say this, that should qualify me as an alcoholic, because they don't take you in the alcoholic ward in Bellevue for sinus, and when we mention alcoholism as a disease, I think it's a very, very insidious disease and a very, very progressive disease.
I took a drink in my early, early teens, I got drunk in my early teens, and I stayed drunk for a period of 30 years, say. Now I made my first trip to Bellevue back in 1916, and at that time I was diagnosed as, in Bellevue Hospital, as a chronic alcoholic. Now what the hell did a chronic alcoholic mean to a 16-year-old boy? I thought a chronic alcoholic was a derelict, or a drunken bum, or a skid row bum, or a bowery bum, and I didn't do too much about it, but little did I know at that particular point that I was to make 35 more trips to that institution, and little did I know at that point that I too wound up as a derelict, I wound up as a drunken bum, a bowery bum, and a skid row bum.
I think we are affected with a very, very progressive disease. It's a disease that's, I don't think there's any cure for it. The medical profession claims they have no cure for it. That was brought out today in one of the meetings, and here in AA we don't have a cure for this so-called disease, but here in AA we do arrest this so-called sickness, and the proof of that is talking to you here tonight.
Now I'm going to skip along, and because being in AA, and I have a pretty rough story, and I don't have time to tell it here tonight, but you may read it in page 445 in the big book, and if you play numbers, don't play that number. That number owes me about $30,000 if it owes you a nickel.
[00:05:09]
Now I was in AA for, no, I was in Bellevue, and I come out, and I tried a lot of things. I tried a lot of it in my own way. I knew I was having trouble as a young kid, and I tried things. When I come out of Bellevue, I, well, I tried, no, I was going to stop drinking. I was going to keep this up until the day I got married. Now let's put it that way, and well, I'm going to skip 10 years. In 1926, I did get married, and that's the time I really tried to stop drinking, and it was no success with me, because I had no luck with it, and I went on and on.
It was one continuous smack-around I was on for 30 years. After being married a few months, it was suggested to me, maybe if I went back to church, and I was away from church, and I didn't want no part of God, and didn't like the word God. Family of four, and I'm the only alcoholic, and the only bum in the family, and I thought maybe it was God's fault. That's the way I figured out, and, but I did, I went back to church after the suggestion, and I went back to church, and I took many and many pledges.
The pledge never hurt me, even as much as one time, well, it was, I was married 11 months, and my family, my wife got in the family way, and I took my wife to the hospital. I got that far with her, and I left her there, and I went to visit my wife certain days, in fact every day. And those days, they used to keep a woman about 10 days in childbirth, and I made a date with the hospital staff that a certain day, at a certain hour, I was to come down and get my wife and bring my child home.
Well, that day come along, and needless to say, I don't know where I was, I wasn't there, but my dad took over, and he carried out this mission for his drunken son, and I come home three hours of the morning, and I get in the house, and my dad called me to this attention, and he went over, tried to give me a father-to-son talk, and he was talking to me. He tried to do good, of course, and then he went on to say, he says, you know, you gotta change your pattern of drinking, you gotta, you gotta change your company, he says, and here's the words he used, and I'm not going to use any other words.
He said, let these goddamn Irish bums you hang around with, he said, let them drink all the whiskey they want, he said, you buy yourself a bottle of wine, you take it home, drink it with your meals, he'll never hurt you. Well, I took his advice, I went out and bought two gallons of wine, I come home, and I drank the two gallons of wine, and I was out looking for my Irish friends. So drinking with my meals didn't help.
I even as much as went to the medical center, and my sister suggested one time, she was a nurse, and things were getting rough instead of better, and now it's going into tragedy, drink, tragedy, three children in the world, and instead of getting better, I'm getting worse. About 10 years after I married, my wife's got a resentment. She was going to leave me. At the time, my sister suggested to go to the hospital, the medical center, and I did.
I went to the medical center, and I checked in there, or my sister checked in. She paid about $40 for this visit. She stood all expenses, and she talked to the doctor at the medical center in New York City, and then we were assigned to a certain doctor. All we got is a number of this doctor's office, and the name of this doctor that was supposed to take my case over, and we knocked on the door. I knocked on the door, and an answer from the inside came in and said, come on in, the door is open.
I walked in. I walked up to this doctor's desk. He stood up the greatest, and he, when he stood up, he stood up to my shoulder, a little bit of a fella. Right away, I stared at him. I said, what the hell kind of a mess am I in now? I was bigger than he was. I thought I knew more than he did. Well, he asked me the silliest question that anybody could ask. He looked at the paper that my sister handed in the window, and he says to me, he says,
[00:10:03]
young man, he says, why do you drink so much? I says, holy gee, there goes $40 out the window. Well, I had a talk with him. You know, I start asking him a lot of questions, because I have interviewed psychiatrists in Bellevue by the hundreds. And you know, some of the questions I asked him, he couldn't answer me. And I was convinced I knew more than he did. And this went on. He got mad at me, and he threw me the hell out of the office.
Then he told my wife and sister to come in. He talked to them. And then he suggested that I would go to Bellevue. I did. I went to Bellevue the next morning with my wife and sister and sober. When I walked in there with two ladies, sober, the doctor got a look at me, a doctor that had seen me come in there in all shapes and forms, like on a wheelchair or on crutches or tied down to a hospital cot. And he also seen me coming with a cop under each arm.
And when I walked in, there were two ladies sober. He says, Moina, what are you doing in here in your condition? And I told him about the little squared up medical center. He said, do you want to go through with this? I said, yes. And he drew out a voluntary commitment to a state hospital, which I didn't know it was a state hospital. Had I known it was a voluntary commitment to a state hospital, maybe I wouldn't have signed it.
I don't know. But I signed it, and I was in. The girls went home, and I stood there. I stood there for about a week. Then they called me, took my clothes. They gave me my clothes. They said, you're going up the country. And they took me to Rockland State Hospital on a bus. Now, when I got to Rockland State Hospital, I thought I didn't belong in a place like that. And believe you and me, I really belong.
And I got mad when I got up there. Not angry, but mad. I got mad at the world. I got mad at my wife and sister, my whole family. And I got mad at everybody. And I was even mad at myself. I got so mad, I wouldn't talk to nobody in Rockland. Now, here's a little tip. If any of you folks in the audience here tonight ever hit a place like Rockland State Hospital or any other state hospital, do yourself a favor and at least talk to the doctor.
Now, this went on for quite a while. The bus come up from Bellevue the next week. And the procedure is everybody lift out the window to see who is coming back. Now, everything was all right. About 10 got off that bus. And the last two men that got off that bus, I happened to be in Bellevue with them maybe 30, maybe 40 times. And I knew one of those men had been in Rockland. And they come up there and they said, look, this ain't the worst place in the world.
Cooperate with us. And you know, we know the ropes in Bellevue. And Jimmy here knows the ropes in Rockland. So it didn't turn out to be the worst place in the world because 10 days later, we're three of us are drunk and held up in Rockland. So even a voluntary commitment to a state hospital didn't help. I got drunk in Rockland so often that they threw me the hell out of Rockland for being a bad example to the other alcoholics.
Now, I got out of Rockland. And what do I do? Same old. I'm on the same merry-go-round. I get in and had a little more trouble. Now I'm going to go and skip along. And I'm going to I don't ever want to forget this last trip to Rockland. And all I remember this last trip to Rockland is I know it was around 10 o'clock at night or maybe at midnight, because I remember the early night shifts going off and the late night shift.
Early Night Shifts Going Off and the Late Night Shift was coming on, and when a late
[00:15:01]
night shift came on, the doctor recognized the condition I was in, and he gave the male nurse a set of keys, and he says, go back there and get that bottle of paralyhide, and they give me, and while the nurse is back there getting the paralyhide, I recall the doctor hollering, bring back an empty water glass, so they give me a big water glass full of paralyhide, and I drank that, and it knocked me out, and they put a cot on the hospital floor, the Bellevue M1, and they laid me down there, and the next thing I remember is about maybe an hour and a half later, there's three men, and they knelt down alongside my cot, and they're trying to wake me up, I didn't know, they didn't know whether I was dead or alive, they tried to get me to breathe again, I suppose, and they did, now they got me up on the set, up on the cot, and my legs hanging down, and then they stood me up, and this male nurse was shaking me around, and well, when I come out of the fog a little bit, I recognize this male nurse right away, and when I come out of the fog seconds later, alongside of this male nurse stood a New York City policeman in uniform, now the third man was a first grade detective, he was also alongside of this policeman, there's two men from the New York City Police Department, they knew my record, I guess, and they says give this bum enough rope, he laying himself, which they did, they picked me up that night in the alcoholic ward, and they brought me upstairs, put me in the prison ward, and I was held, I was taken downtown, the DA's office, and I was held for a very, very serious charge, I was held, and I was supposed to do seven and a half to fifteen years in state prison for something I, for a felony I committed in the blackout, which was no excuse for the law at that time, and it's no excuse for the law to this very night, you just can't get away with it, and it was all set for me, but two weeks before they took me downtown for a sentence, something did happen, because a brother of mine that was around, he came down, he went back and forth downtown, pulling a few wires here, and a few strings there, and politics, and a few thousand dollars, and something did happen, because I was taken down, and I had the right date, and all, and when I was sentenced, I was, instead of state prison, I was sentenced to Rockland State Hospital for the rest of your natural life, which happened to be late 1937, and early 1938, I met a man in Rockland that I hadn't seen in a couple of years, and I'd been in jail with this fella, I'd been locked up so many times, more times than I'd been in Bellevue, and I had drank with this guy, got drunk together with him, but I hadn't seen him in maybe eighteen months, and when you meet a guy like that, you want to know about each other, and we did, we swapped stories, and I said, what happened, how come I didn't see you, or you didn't see me in the last couple of, or this last couple of years, let's put it that way, and he's the first guy that mentioned AA, he says, the reason you haven't seen me, he says, I met a handful of men out in the Brownstone house in Clinton Street, Brooklyn, at that time, our founder, Bill Wilson, did have a Brown, and Lois, they had a Brownstone house in Clinton Street, Brooklyn, and he was going to these meetings down there, they had a membership, maybe about eighteen to nineteen men, there was no ladies in the AA at that time, he told me all about these meetings, and he went on to say, you know, these fellas are even writing a book, right now some of the scripts are up in Akron, Ohio, and down the Jersey Coast, and so on and so forth, and when the book is published, they're going to name it, uh, Alcoholics Anonymous, and uh, that was it, that's all he could tell me about AA, and uh, what AA was doing for eighteen or twenty men at that time, and he told me all about it, and he told me, oh, I was in the same dormitory as this guy, and it was, believe me, oh, I got fed up with it, he says, AA for breakfast, we'd get up in the morning, he'd start, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, going to, in the mess hall, more AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, well this kept on, we'd go on to job together, it was nothing but AA, we wouldn't wake, we'd sit down and talk AA, he was talking AA, well I, I stood all I could of at him, and then I says, now wait a minute, let's put our cards
[00:20:00]
on the table, and I says, if you say AA is what you're building it up to be, now answer me a question, what the hell are you doing back here in Rockland, he says, oh, I'm one of the unfortunate ones, I had a slip, well I didn't know what the hell a slip meant either, well anyway, to make a long story shorter, we'll skip to April of 1939, uh, with the first print of the big book, and May of that same year, May of 1939, that book was brought up to Rockland State Hospital, it was introduced to the superintendent up there, and uh, with the message that they had, they had a message for the hundreds of chronic alcoholics that was in that hospital at that time, now, Bill come up with a book, but Bob Valentine, I remember when in the Montclair group, he was the instigator getting Bill in there with the book at that time, cause he had known this Dr. Blaisdell, and he talked to him, they must have sold him a bill of goods because they uh, they sold him a bill of goods because they asked him, let us prove to you what we are trying to do with this book, and uh, get one of the worst cases of alcoholism on the grounds, now, I don't know what's going on in the administration office, and uh, at this point, I'm in the day room of the reception building, and I'm playing pinochle with three other nuts, and this guy comes along, this male attendant, he says, Dr. Blaisdell wants to see you, drop your cards, he says he wants to see you up in the office, and that's the time I was introduced to Bill, now, Bill is my sponsor, I guess I'm lucky, like Clarence here, he had Dr. Bob for a sponsor, but Bill is my sponsor, Bill and Bob Valentine, I think I'm one of the lucky ones, well, they got to me, they talked to me, and before they left, they talked to me for a couple of hours, before they left, they left me the big book, and Bill says to me, he says, you read this book and see what you think about us, and we'll be up to see you again, well, they did, I read the book, and I kept it to myself, and about a month later, or three weeks later, Bill and a couple other guys from AA had come up, I'm in the day room, I got the book under my arm, and I'm talking to a group of men, made to look like I was talking AA to them, but I wasn't, see, Bill comes in and he says, hiya lad, how you doing, I said, I'm doing alright, how you fellas doing, he says, you letting anybody read the book, I said, shhh, what, this book, no, no, and he says, and then out of the clear sky, I don't know where the hell he got this bum's name from, he mentioned a name that I knew had been in Bellevue maybe 95 times, and he'd been in Rockland over 12 times, and he says to me, have you gotten the Frank Rogers yet, to read this book, I says, wait a minute, Bill, you mean that bum back in building 19, that's been in Bellevue 90 times, and he's been in Rockland, is that the Frank Rogers you mean, he says, yeah, you know how Bill is, he says, that's the Frank Rogers I mean, I says, now wait a minute, Bill, if we want to make a go of this, let's keep those bums the hell out of it, or we'll never make a go, well, anyway, he had an ace in the hole, and he says to me, he explained to me, he says, here's what we're trying to do, and you can do more in this hospital, and the whole membership can do on the outside, and the whole membership at that time, maybe 95, 75 people throughout the country, and Bill explained the program to me, and before he left, he says, you do this, and I'm sure, well I did, I done what he told me, then I took the book after Bill left, because Bill says to me, he says, why don't you cooperate with us, he says, who knows, maybe in four or five years, we'll be able to spring you, wow, now I can understand him, I got two minutes to go, I don't know where the hell I'm going, well, that's all I wanted to hear, when Bill left this time, I took that book, and I went from ward to ward, and I was going to sober
[00:25:01]
every son of a bitch in the place, and I did, believe you or me, I did, I sobered everybody, but I didn't sober me, well, that's it, I went out, I left the hospital, I got thrown from the hospital, I went out, and I took a glass of beer under a chalice of one of the men in Steinway Hall, it was Tom Burrell, he got up, and here's the words he used, and I'm going to use them too, he says, as long as one is an alcoholic, you'll never be able to take another drink, as long as you live, now this is before even Bill, I don't think, knew that we had a 24-hour program, so when he left, when he got through talking that night, this fellow in Steinway Hall, I says, gee, as long as you live, well, I couldn't take that man, after the meeting, I snuck out, and I had done something I'd never done before in an AA meeting, but thank God I'd never done it since, I went out, and I had a glass of beer, and one beer brought another, and I had about seven beers, then I was getting fed up with the beer, and I was too much of a beer drinker, and then I says to the bartender, make that a double calvets, he did, well, three months later, I was back in Rockland again, now, that's the time I cleaned myself out, and here I am, after 25 years, I can honestly stand here and say, I had my last drink of alcohol 25 years ago, and just one month, thanks to you good people in AA, last but not least, the grace of God. Thank you very much.