Good evening. I’m Sam, an alcoholic. Hi, Sam. How about a seventh-inning stretch? Yeah. Do it. Come on, you guys. Settle down, or I’ll have her e- her Al-Anon group release you. Boy, wouldn’t you hate to be released by that bunch? Ooh. God. Be afraid to look in the mirror. There wouldn’t be any reflection. Um, I should tell you I’m the alcoholic child of an adult. I like all these titles. Boy, there’s an awful lot of titles out there now, isn’t there? They’re all over the place. I, I haven’t found any about hostility yet. That’s what I’m into. I, I know that you p- anybody here ever been hostile? Uh, I have problems with that. Yeah, I, I came out of the womb like this. If I’d had a light and something to read, I wouldn’t have come out at all. My Aunt Bessie said I came out ’cause I’d written on all the walls. As a child, I was dangerous with a crayon or anything else. I, I was a rotten, obnoxious child. I’d, uh..

By the time I was five years old, I, uh, chewed tobacco, I smoked big black cigars, I wrote on every wall I could that would look blank. And my Aunt Bessie would give me a quarter if I would say, “Fuck,” in the grocery store and embarrass my mother. So my mother sentenced me to eight years in a Catholic school- .. for the cure. And it took me two and a half years to learn to say, “Yes, ma’am,” and, “No, ma’am.” Up to and including that time, I stayed every night after school, but then I finally learned, and then I became an example to the other little guilt-ridden urchins that went there with me. I got straight As. I became an altar boy. I sang in the choir. I did my time there, my eight years. I got out. I went straight to a reform school. ‘Cause I’d been in the family business, which is stealing. And I went through puberty in about 20 minutes. Got out of reform school, and I was nothing but a horny little kid loose on the streets with nothing but a hard-on and a bad attitude.

Which was pretty much what it was when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous. Not much had changed over a period of time. I had a, had maybe a little stronger Al-Anon. I might not have drank at all. But I come from a family of alcoholics, and I promised myself I wouldn’t end up like them. However, by the time I was 21 years old, I started drinking. I’m a late starter, but I got started, and I really did it. I realized after starting what a fool I was for not doing it earlier. And I drank and used as long as I possibly could, and then about two years longer- .. because of my stubbornness. Uh, the first year I was drinking, I found, uh, out about drugs. I smoked a lot of non-habit-forming marijuana. I took a lot of amphetamines because I bullshitted myself that they enhanced my intelligence. And all they did was speed up my mouth. So I had an amphetamine mouth and a Demerol brain, and- .. got into a lot of trouble.