Audio
Transcript
Source: 1965 Toronto International Convention – 1965 International Toronto Heath C of Richmond.mp3 File: 1965-toronto-international-convention-1965-international-toronto-heath-c-of-richmond.mp3 Duration: 00:28:53
============================================================
Final speaker, Keith B. of Richmond, Virginia. He belongs to the River Road group down there, but he came to AA in Baltimore, Maryland. Keith has been secretary of the Virginia State Committee, and here he is, Keith B., Richmond, Virginia. Being a clean-up man at two o'clock in the morning is a little change in AA, and it is sometimes a little difficult for me to stay awake at this time in the morning, and so I am deeply appreciative of all of the people that we have here.
My name is Keith Bynum, and I'm an alcoholic, and for Charles's benefit and those of you from Ontario and the uninitiated, Richmond, Virginia is often referred to as the Riviera of the South, and if you would like to come down there, Charles, we will also treat you to some fatback and grits and maws and jowls and snouts. This is about the thing that we get along with. I want to address most of my remarks tonight to those of you who, if you aren't new to AA, may find yourself in the position that I do, and that is the fact that in many respects, and I've made this statement before and I find no reason to correct it, that in many respects, my greatest gain in Alcoholics Anonymous has been that I smell better.
I'm what has been described, I guess, in my own territory as a not-too-well-adjusted neurotic. I have difficulty living with myself, and I have a terrific difficulty living with other people. I have this difficulty despite the fact that AA has done tremendous things for me. I came to AA a number of years ago, and I had run out of gas. I was one of those who had to go all the way down to Skid Row, I went through the jails, I had the terrific advantage of having gone through sanity hearings to the degree where I had credentials that I was all right, and I came to Alcoholics Anonymous out of a hospital in sheer desperation.
I had started off as a drunk when I was quite young, about 15 or 16 years of age. I should have been wise since it took me six years to go through high school and there were any number of people where I lived that got out in four. I came on through school, got married after I had left college, and made my first error through which I felt was really not mine, and I guess I felt that I had some sympathy coming to me. I married a girl who was an addict.
And between her pills and her barbiturates and pick-me-ups and my booze, we lived, if not anything else, it was an interesting life. I had left school as an architect, later a mechanical engineer, which is my profession, and gone into newspaper work. For what reason, I don't know. I worked in the White House for two years, had an excellent position. My wife also worked there, and I had met her through the rather odd circumstances that I had been in an automobile accident and hospitalized for some time, and when I came back to work, she had my job. So I married her, and I got my job back.
The war came along about this time, and my drinking by this time had come to the crossroads that a lot of people do, and I guess this is really a pretty good barometer for the younger person is that I noticed that all my friends, as their responsibilities increased and their jobs became more responsible and they got married, that their drinking began to taper off and mine went the other direction. This I think maybe is the first danger sign for the congenital alcoholic, which I call myself.
[00:05:03]
And my drinking got to the point where it was no longer humorous. It had gotten me into serious difficulty. My wife was not in good shape, and the war came along, and I was called up by the service, my wife by this time was expecting, and I had gone to work for the city of Alexandria doing surveying, and through a number of drunken episodes in Alexandria, which included sleeping in the clock and setting all four hands the wrong direction and seeing what trouble we could get into this way, which I did, my drinking had gotten to the point where I was barely tolerated.
So when I was called up for service, my father being in the army, I went out to Walter Reed and went through a pre-induction physical, which was pretty good, and I was clean. We gave up our apartment and I sent my wife out to Montana, which was her home, sold all the furniture, shipped all my clothes to my family, and the day of my induction I went back to the office and went in to see the city manager, who was a drunk, was profane and was vulgar, as only a drunk can be when all the resentment begins to pour out, and went over to Fort Myer, escorted out of the city hall by two policemen, and I was rejected.
And I had no home, and I had no wife, and I had nothing but a pair of khaki slacks on and a sports shirt, and that was it. So I went back to city hall, and this is the gospel truth, and we sometimes criticize those who would help us, I went back to the city hall and went in to see the city manager, and I cried, which I always did, I'm a crier, and I got my job back. And I continued to work there for a few more months, the war progressed, I went into tooling, I was assistant chief tooling engineer, fortunately, of one of the aircraft corporations, but I drank constantly. My wife double-crossed me, she had twins instead of one child.
I was nearly six months getting them back because I could never get enough money aside with my drinking to get her back to where I was working at that time. And when I finally got her back, I had been drunk for nearly two weeks and they could not find me. We got back together again, and my drinking continued, and her pills continued. We had another child who died in infancy, which again gave me what I felt was an adequate excuse to get drunk, and about this time I started to hit the jails.
I began to travel when I'd get drunk, and on the day that the infant died, I had gone into a dive in Columbus, Ohio, and gotten drunk, and couldn't be found for two days to be told that the child was dead. But I don't think that at any time I ever had any remorse. I continued to drink. I held my job because of the fact that engineers were hard to find during the war. I was an excellent designer, if I do say so myself, being somewhat proud of my humility.
And as a consequence, I could work three days a week and keep a job. But our home life was deadly. My wife had become suicidal and made several attempts with a razor. She had attacked the children. She had attacked me. I had attacked her. The children had attacked both of us. And finally we got to the point where there was no alternative but to send her back out to Montana, which I did. And I lived in Columbus, Ohio, in a house which we rented like a pig.
I never washed anything. I never cleaned a dish. I never took anything to the laundry. I charged clothes as long as I could until all of my accounts were closed. And when it got to that point, I would pick clothes that would bend. If they'd bend, I'd wear them. This was my criteria of what I could put on. I did this for nearly four months. And at the end of four months, on one morning, I got up, left, started to Montana, and never went back to the house. I have never been back to it this day.
The furniture sits, I guess, and I guess the clothes went. And this was a three-bedroom house with everything that went with the children and my wife and myself. And I went out to Helena, Montana, and it's amazing what an alcoholic can do with a drink or just having enough to keep themselves straight. I convinced the state of Montana that I could design bridges, and I went to work for the state of Montana as a designer of bridges, and I did very well with it until I decided that I was also a drinker again.
[00:10:10]
And I went back to the booze and took a job ultimately as a night man in a gambling hall over in Butte, and from there, things went from bad to worse. I went home one night in a bad humor and did something which I, to this day, am ashamed of. I forgot my key, and my mother-in-law opened the door, and I punched her right in the nose. And I wasn't particularly drunk, but she said something about the key. That ended it. Two months later, I was divorced, and I began a road downhill.
Now, downhill for me led into Skid Row and Helena, Montana, and this is a pretty rough Skid Row. There were about 15 of us, a couple of Indians, two Chinese, and myself, and four or five other guys of varied nationalities and backgrounds, and I lived that way for three months. And through the help of my parents, for the first time they stepped in, I got back as far as Chicago, and I got off the train with nearly a month's growth of beard and an old blue wool pinstripe suit, which I had washed several times, a sheepskin jacket, and a pair of sneakers, and a sweatshirt.
And I got off the train in Chicago, and I can remember my father in all his dignity with his uniform. He was a colonel at that time, standing there looking at me, and my mother didn't believe it, and she started to cry, and I had just enough wine left that I cried, and we all cried. I was cleaned up and bathed and pressed and ironed and went to work down here in Urbana for a group of architects. I was only 25 at the time, and I could snap back, and I went to work down here in Urbana, and it went along for a while until I went back to the booze, and I began to end up on the county farm.
And then I was thrown out of the county farm because I was a detriment to the people that lived there because of being elderly, and I was brought into a sanity hearing and threatened with being put in can kiki, and to keep from that, I came up and started to live in Chicago on Madison Street. I just spent two weeks in Chicago before I came over here, and I shudder when I go to Chicago for this day because I lived in an alley behind Baldwin and Katz Theater, and I knew Madison Street, and I knew Halston Street, and I knew all of the dives, and I knew all of the joints, and I knew how to pour the Sterno through the sock, and I knew what to do with shellac, and I learned a lot that I hadn't learned in school.
And I worked my way down from there, which was difficult to do, until I ended up in Baltimore as an attendant in a mental hospital. Now, to me, this was a promotion because I was totally unemployed, I was run down, I could not write my name, and I couldn't think. But I took the job because I had nothing else to do, and I worked there for nearly a year, and I stayed sober that year, and as I look back, I think the reason that I stayed sober that year was because of the fact that there is no way that you can convince a man lying in a bed that you are an executive when you're standing there with a bedpan in your hand.
You can try, and I tried, but you cannot convince him that you're doing this as gray lady work. You are there because you are unemployable anywhere else. And I worked there for a year. After six months, I ran the farm, and I ran the farm with two lousy mules. There was no mechanization at this time. And eventually I left there, and with the arrogance that only an alcoholic has, I went back to the owner and director of this hospital, and it was a hospital nearly 50 years old, and I told him that since I now had a job and had been sober for six months, could I marry his daughter? And I remember the answer. I won't tell you what it was because it was a little profane, but I'm stubborn, and we're married today, and we have four children, and I have four psychiatrists in the family and three hospitals, and this kept me off the streets because from that time forward, I began to commute.
From that time forward, I began to commute.
[00:15:00]
I was in for two weeks, or a week, and then I'd be out for four months, and then I'd be in, and then I'd be out, and I got to the point to this day, I can't go in somebody's recreation room that's paneled, because I can see the wood, and I can see the bottle dripping, and I was one of those that had noisy blood. I could lay there and listen to the blood go through my veins, and wait for the blood to go up into the inner venous bottle.
And I went through this for over twenty hospitalizations, and eventually, one night, and I can't say what happened, it suddenly dawned on me that I had another wife, and I lived in another town, and I had another job, but the pattern was the same, and I had a big advantage over many people. I had been to jail, and I had been in the hospitals, and I had been on Skid Row. I look back on that, and that's only been about thirteen or fourteen years ago.
I'm Director of Engineering and Research for a corporation doing about four hundred million dollars worth of work a year, and those thirteen or fourteen years aren't very far back. And the reason I say I would like to address this a little bit to the newer member, or the person that might be as neurotic as I am, is that I have to attend AA meetings to establish my frame of reference. At the end of my first year of sobriety, I was horribly disappointed to find out that I was not Lily White.
I still had resentments, I was still impatient, I still had not been able to accept myself as I was, I was not able to accept other people. My impatience is a peculiar one, and I live with it to this day. Now you will know when I'm finished why I attend at least two meetings a week. You'll know. I'm the type of person that to this day can't buy more than a dollar's worth of gasoline. I pull in a gas station, and I tell them to put a dollar's worth of gas in a car that holds twenty-two gallons of gasoline.
And I shudder at the thought that he may want to give me green stamps because I'm in a hurry, and always he has to tear them off this way and then up two stamps and then over the one. I get hysterical. So I buy the dollar's worth of gas, and on a trip we stop a lot. I have this problem in purchasing things. I go into a store and a man says, well, Mr. Binding, we don't have this in stock, but he's killed himself at that point.
Because if I can't finger it, if I can't take my car and go get it, I don't want it. And I have in my garage a fifteen-cubic-foot deep freeze that I brought home from the store because I want it now. I want to carry it home. My wife will put the cuffs on the pants. To hell with it. Just give me the suit. I want to get it home and see what's wrong with it. And there's always something wrong with it.
We were planning about two weeks ago a trip. We're going down to see my parents, and in much better circumstances, and my oldest son who's seventeen, we were talking about the trip and he said, you know, one of my earliest memories of taking trips was having to go to the bathroom. And I didn't know what he meant until I remembered the trips after I first got sober that were always planned. We always had to leave on the hour or the half hour.
I had a very close schedule which we had to meet. We had to be in this town by this time and that town by that time, and my God, if anybody stopped and it was three minutes after ten, we had to wait another twelve minutes until it got to be a quarter after, because it wasn't neat to leave at three minutes after ten. And the stop was planned at Charlotte, North Carolina, and just sit there with your legs crossed in grimace.
This is my way today of the way that I think. Perfectionism with me is a disease. Now, it's a disease to me nearly as serious as alcoholism. I cannot buy the top newspaper off a pile of newspapers. I don't know what's wrong with the top newspaper, but I can't do it. I have to buy the second one or the third one or the fourth one. And if I'm looking at some magazines I may want to buy, and there's a whole lot of time magazines, I won't look at the front one to see if I want to buy it.
I'll reach in the back and get a new one to see if I want to buy it, and if I decide to
[00:20:03]
buy it, I will put the one back that I just leafed through and get another new one. I have no difficulty with accepting the second step, I might add, either. My wife won't take me to the market with her because of the fact that if she buys a frozen chicken that has a dent in it, she knows that ultimately I'm going to wait until she isn't watching the cart and I'm going to exchange it for a meat chicken, for a meat one.
If I buy milk, this is an ordeal because I have to decide whether the new milk is in the back or whether he has known that I was coming and he's going to put the new milk in the front. And I stand there for a long time. I had a little apartment in Chicago that had a kitchen, and I had to buy a coffee pot. And I went down to buy the coffee pot at Marshall Fields, and I looked at the coffee pot and it had fingerprints on it like they all do.
And she said, is this the one you want, and I said, yes, that's the one I want. It was obviously new, but I said, well, do you have another one? And she had another one, and I said, I want to ship it somewhere. Now this was a lie, but I wanted it in a box, virgin aluminum was what I wanted. I have these same problems in self-confidence. Now I should have enough self-confidence to be able to get by in life, but I thought of my lack of self-confidence, I go to work every day with the full expectation that I'm going to be fired.
Now this is the gospel truth, and I can't describe this to anybody unless you are one of those people who, like myself, when they're criticized, gets a knot in the pit of their stomach. I do this. I do this. When I was drinking and was always convinced I was going to be fired, and was usually right, I knew that the two people, I would see two people talking in the office and I would be immediately thinking they're talking about me.
Now today, I still think they're talking about me, but I don't give a damn. This is really about the only difference. But I go to work with this full expectation that I will be fired. If the boss calls me in, I wonder, what did I do wrong? He called me in about shortly after the first of the year and gave me a check for just under $3,000 as my bonus, totally unexpected. And this built up my confidence for nearly 48 hours, to the point where I could get over this lack of feeling of not having self-confidence.
It attaches itself to little things. I got a haircut in Chicago, and I'm getting a little bald on top, and I remarked to the hairdresser, and he happened to be in the Palmer house, and he's a hairdresser. And he said, well, we can do something with that. And with that, he put pomade on it, and hair set, and blew it, and teased my hair until it went way up in a wave. And the only thing I could think of was when I grew a mustache about five years ago, and I asked my neighbor how I looked, and he said, you look like an apprentice pimp, and I have always remembered that fact then.
But I sat in the barber chair, and he waved me, and I couldn't say no, and I let him finish, and I had to tip him. I went over to leave, and I had on a sports shirt, and the fellow brushed off my sports shirt, which was difficult to do, twice he brushed it off, and I had to tip him. This is lack of self-confidence. I have a thousand of these that I have had to learn to live with. I've had to learn to live with them.
With God's guidance, I've been able to live with them. By attending these meetings, I learned to live with them. And I think that if I make any prayer to my higher power, it is that he will give me the guidance and the tolerance to live with myself as I am, and the tolerance and the patience to live with other people as they are. For me, this is almost an impossibility. I am greatly concerned when I hear a new person told that their troubles are going to disappear.
I worry about this. I see a new person come in, and sits in the front row with me a couple of meetings, and then he moves to the next row about six months, and pretty soon he is sitting in the back
[00:25:03]
row, contented and serene, he's an old-timer, and I'm sitting up there in the front row sweating blood about how in the hell I'm going to get the car fixed or the hot water heater is blown up, the checkbook won't balance, tomorrow I'm going to get fired. I was once told by someone about my narrative that if I would accept the fourth step or practice the fifth step, if I would practice the fifth step and turn my life over to the care of God and really say and mean the serenity prayer, I wouldn't have these problems.
And my response is the only one that really I can say is meaningful to me, that if I could accept the fifth step and if I could turn my will over to God, as I understand him, without qualification, and if I could apply the serenity prayer without reservation, I probably would not need AA. It is my inability to do this that makes me need these meetings. It's my inability to accept my limitations. It's my inability to accept other people as they are.
AA promised me one thing, and it promised me one thing only, and that was sobriety. Sobriety and nothing more. Like the previous speaker, I am a purist. I believe in what the big book says, and the big book told me only that I was going to get sober. The rest of the things I have to learn to live with myself. Drunk, I could live with them. Sober, I can deal with them. This is what I came to AA for, this is what AA has given me, and despite my peculiarities, I am happy and comfortable this evening.
Thank you. That has been our first AA meeting of Saturday, July the 3rd. It has been a joy, a real joy, to participate. Our speakers, I think, have been intelligent, understanding, and happy. And with this happiness, they have brought to us all a picture, each in their own way, of their experience, their strength, and their hope. And as I go to sleep tonight, I will thank God for the privilege of having been here.
Now according to the program, you have six hours off, you can do whatever you like, but be around at 8 o'clock, it all starts again then. I invite you to rise and join with me in closing this meeting by praying the Lord's Prayer.