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Source: 1975 Denver International Convention – 1975 Denver Int Conv. ALKATHON Chair Van, 4 speakers, excellent AA talks Part 2 of 2.mp3 File: 1975-denver-international-convention-1975-denver-int-conv-alkathon-chair-van-4-speakers-excellent-aa-talks-part-2-of-2.mp3 Duration: 00:42:29
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It's a pleasure and privilege to sit up here in front and hear the music of your laughter. I fully well know that every person in this room at one time in their life had reached a point where they didn't have much to laugh about. That includes the alcoholics and the non-alcoholics. I think one of the things that I treasure is the little group that I attend, which is a very small roundtable discussion type of meeting, a fellowship hall of a church and right down the hallway not too far is our Al-Anon meeting on the same time.
And when I hear the laughter come floating up out of that Al-Anon room, it proves to me that the fellowship of AA can do great and wondrous things because those girls and guys that are near and dear to the alcoholic didn't have much to laugh about when we decided to come to AA and I think it is tremendous. Now we'll hop back and we're not going to go by plane after Pat told me that. We're going to go some other way, to the Middle West.
We'll go back to the dairy state of Wisconsin and I'll ask Clarence T. to bring a message to you. I'm Clarence T. Thank you, Pam. I'm Clarence T. I'm an alcoholic. Hi. Well, I've got some good news and some bad news to bring you tonight. First I'll have to give you the bad news. You heard the two speakers and now you're waiting to hear a third speaker and you're not going to hear that. I usually throw out a lot of confusion.
That's what put me in Alcoholics Anonymous. I'll try to do my best. But the good news is that it touches a few of the fishermen. There are people who love the fish. Back in Wisconsin, and I know the state of Washington and Oregon, and certainly the coast of California and most of the eastern seaboard, know what coho is. We imported them into Wisconsin, put them in the lake, so we'd have a better game fish to compete with you people out on the coast.
And we cross-breed them with the, we have the muskie and we have the walleye pike. And they got quite confused about arriving at a name for this new fish that they had produced by the cross-breeding. And they decided they would call it the kowalski. And I want to report that it's been very successful. And it'll soon be around, but we are having one little problem with it. We're trying to teach it how to swim now.
I could give you a drunkologue what it was like before AA found me. I didn't have the courage to find AA. AA came to me. I'm going to say something that I haven't ever said, being a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. But I feel such an honor of being asked to be on this panel. And in a way it's a celebration for me too. Because as of tomorrow, I'll be constantly dry, one day at a time, with this way of life for 21 years.
Thank you. I first approached Alcoholics Anonymous in 1949. So you can well see that I've been recapped, rethreaded and rebooted and re-hit and hospitalized. Not only for alcoholism, but for hypertension. And it was a very mysterious way that I found Alcoholics Anonymous. It was through a party that I didn't know, but somebody else had told somebody else, and somebody else had told finally my wife, and they asked me to make the call.
You can't get your fingers in those little holes. So I asked her if she would dial a number for me. This man happened to be dry many years before Alcoholics Anonymous came into existence.
[00:05:03]
And he told me where I should go. But if I wasn't capable of going, he would see that he would contact them and have some fellas call on me. And they did. How can you imagine securing yourself when I know you can't? And that fear of leaving the home knowing that you'll make today another yesterday of drunkenness. To have these people come and talk to you, and you look at them, and you immediately take the guy that says, I've only been sober a couple of days, and you immediately say, hell, I've stayed sober by myself that long.
And look down on them. That was my attitude. And that's why it took me that long to arrive at the doorway of Alcoholics Anonymous. But they were persistent. They never turned me down. They were always there with a helping hand. And I know you, too, have people in your area that you get disgusted with, that you feel like throwing up your hands in despair. But you don't. Because there's always that one fella that can come along, and he's the right one.
It might be a gentleman will call you a mister, and it might be another gentleman will call you what you really are. And I had that kind of a gentleman. He told me exactly what it was. He had happened to have two strokes. And he asked if he could take a crack at me. I was known as the town drunk. The town wasn't very big now. Then it's grown up from, I think, around 68,000 to around 87,000. And he came, and he told me exactly what I was.
I asked my wife to throw him out of the house. But he was persistent. He didn't leave. And he told me that if I wanted what they had, I would literally crawl on my belly to get it. That from now on, he would accept no excuses from me at all unless he read my name in the obituary column. And I looked at this nut, and I immediately assumed that this thing could stay sober. Maybe I could. But what a world of wisdom I found within this man and within the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And they all seem to repeat about the same thing. If you want what we have, be in attendance regularly without fail. Don't become a Missouri mule. And I hate to refer to the state of Missouri. We know. Don't have to have everything proven to you. Stick around. And you might begin to like what you feel. And this absolutely became true. I had graduated from the great Keeley cure at Dwight, Illinois, twice within 11 months.
I'd met a man down there, a doctor, that told me that the only salvation for me would be to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. And at that time, Alcoholics Anonymous hadn't entered into the Keeley cure division yet, but later on they got real active in the Keeley Institute down there. But I told my wife an entirely different story. I told her that the doctor had told me that he'd caught me in time, that he didn't think I was an alcoholic, that I should stay away from it for a couple of years,
[00:10:04]
and I felt at that time that I could go ten. And that's exactly the way I felt. I felt physically well when I walked out of there. In any way, it was none of her business. It was my problem, and she was the cause of it. Actually, today I still wonder if she wasn't, you know. Because she went to, those days they had an auxiliary. LNN hadn't been founded yet, but they had auxiliaries. And she began to change.
It was amazing. So I think if she'd got there first, I don't think I'd have been here today. But I always like to talk about the things that have happened to me after I found Alcoholics Anonymous. I made a lot of mistakes in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I continue to make them, but I recognize them. And the thing about the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous is that if you don't recognize them, they'll sure tell you.
But they tell you for your benefit and not theirs. And I think we've all had this experience. Sometimes we don't like what we hear, but then there's that old guy in AA who says, take a good look at yourself. Arrive at your own decision. And that's really the truth, isn't it? We arrive at our own decision. The fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous helps us arrive at that decision. So we must like it. And then they come up with that one that I think is the key to you and I being able to hold on to this program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the fellowship of AA, is that they state openly and freely that there is nobody here that can get you sober.
And there is nobody here that can get you drunk. This is your choice. All we say to you is to come along and try to work on this pathway of life and the 12 steps of recovery and to learn immediately to become dependent upon a power that is greater than you. And most of us in AA choose to call this power God because it's simpler than running around the bush or the trees or, oh, the sun. God, it's much simpler.
A God as I understand Him. And I heard it mentioned, I think, this evening right now that never again will you ever walk alone, that your sponsors and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous can be not at your side every second of the day. But if you work this program to the best of your ability, you will never again be alone. And they tell you that it's much easier to bend the knee than it is to bend the elbow.
So start bending your knees. And if you keep forgetting about asking this higher power of yours in the morning for help for that day, not always pertaining to drinking, but just to be a little bit better human being for the day, no formal prayer is necessary, just a little heart-to-heart talk between you and your God as you understand Him. And He's at your side. Now, to hear this, and we the alcoholic, God, how lonesome we were.
We could be in a room filled with people such as this, and we were still alone until we recognized that here was love. Here was a love that expected nothing back from you. Here was a love that extended its hands for you to take a hold and to walk down this new way of life. The Whole and the Walk Down This New Way of Life, And They Told You, That Being Sober
[00:15:05]
Was Not Enough, And It's Not, I Don't Believe I Came to AA and I Just Got Sober That I Would Be Here, But They Said If You Work at These Steps to the Best of Your Ability, Things Will Begin to Change, And Hold On, Ask Your God for Help Each Morning, And If You're Really Appreciative, You Won't Forget to Thank Him at Night, And I Can Say This, Honestly, I've Never Failed to Do Those Two Things for the Past 21 Years, What a Feeling That You're Not Alone, What a Feeling You Get When You Are Told That All of These Things Will Come, This Happiness That You Hear, That Is Guaranteed to You by The Program of Alcoholics Anonymous, And It's There, This Peace of Mind and Serenity That We Seek, That We Are Always Seeking, Has Kept Deluding Us, Just Out of Reach, It's Here, Now I'm Surely Not Going to Stand Here and Say That I Wallow Around in This Complete Peace of Mind and Contentment and Happiness Every Single Minute of the Day, It Was a Little Miserable Today, But I Found That I Begin to Have More Peace of Mind, With the Help of You People, On a Day-To-Day Basis, That I Like That Feeling, That Peace of Mind, I Feel That I Have More of It, And I Like That Feeling Too, And Then They Promise You One Other Thing, They Promise If You and I Do the Best Job We Can, That You Will Feel Well Up in You A Confidence That You Never Thought Humanly Possible for You or I Ever to Attain, It's Here, It's in the Twelve Steps to Recovery, That Is What The Program of Alcoholics Anonymous Means to Me and I Know to You. What Love We Find in the Fellowship, It's Like Pat Said, Our AA Up There is the Same as It Is Here, I Don't Believe It, We Are Individuals, You Will Hear That in AA, We All Work This Program Individually, It's A Lot of Hooey, We Might Come Different Ways, We All Work It The Same. You Hear There Is No Must in AA, Well, There Are No Musts, There Are A Bunch of You Who Had Betters.
And You Always Hear That Fellow That Says, These Are Only Suggested Steps, You Can't Tell Me. What Does The Book Say? Rarely Have We Seen A Person Fail That Follow These, Our Path, And Them Are The Twelve Steps. It Don't Say, Rarely Have We Seen That We Suggest That You Follow These Steps. We Have To Work The Steps. And I Know I, As An Individual, Needed All The Help I Could Get, And You Were There To Help Me. You Were There To Stamp On My Foot When I Started Moving Out, Like Pat Mentioned, You Start Swallowing Out Of Shape And Become A Hubcap, Or A Wheel, And A Wheel Just Goes Around In Circles. If You Can Miss The Dogs, They Won't Get Near You Then, Pat.
There's Something Else Here, Oh, I Don't Know Who Put This In Here, It Says, Down The Road His Funeral Goes, As Sobs And Wails Diminish, He Died From Drinking Clear Shellac, But He Had A Lovely Finish. I Don't Know How That Goes. I Found To My Amazement, I Happen To Be Roman Catholic, Born And Raised That, Not By Choice, I Was That When I Was Born.
[00:20:16]
And A Lot Of Them Ask You, You Know, You Come From A Religious Family? Yes, I Came From One. In Fact, My Family Was So Religious, They Would Never Use, Do Any Canning, Because They Wouldn't Use Any Mason Jars. But They're All Little Tricks In Alcoholics Anonymous, They Talk About In Meetings, And You Know, A Guy Will Come Up With This Little Gimmick, And That Little Gimmick, And They Say, You Shouldn't Use These Or That. But You'll Never Know If They'll Work, Unless You Try Them.
And The Biggest Gift We Have, Is That We Always Got Some Prodder In AA, In Our Own Group, They'll Say, Why Don't You Try It? And I Can Remember The Fellow That Called Out To Me, He Said, Listen, Don't Start Telling Them What They're Doing Wrong, Because I Think What You Should Do, He Says, Reminds Me Of When They Crossed A Tiger With A Parrot. And When That Parrot Talked, You Better Damn Well Listen. I Was Standing Down Here With The Young Folks, Had Their Dance Last Night, My Wife And I Came Out, And There Was A Captain Of The Navy, U.S. Navy Was Standing There, And This Drunk Come Out Of That Bar In The Corner, And He Says, Doorman, Get Me A Taxi.
This Captain Says, I Want You To Know, Sir, I'm A Captain In The United States Navy. He Says, Well, Then Jesus Get Me A Boat, I Got To Get Home. But All Of Us Know That Feeling Of Fear. And I've Been Blessed With Alcoholics Anonymous. My Wife And I Celebrated, I Think, 36 Years Together. And Very Blessed Years. Some Were A Little Sticky. I Heard A Guy From England Talk When St. Louis, And He Was Saying Things Were Getting A Little Tacky.
But We've Been Blessed And Fortunate That We Could Attend All These International Conferences Since 1955. And This One Has Been The Greatest. Not Just Because I Happen To Be On The Panel, I Think The Other Ones Would Have Made It If I Had Been There, Too. But What A Feeling We Go Home With From These. It Lasts Five Years. You'll Talk About It. And Sometimes I Think We Who Are In A Position Should Think Of Others And Maybe Bring A New Couple Along. Even Though Sometimes It Works A Little Hardship On Us.
We Should Forget That Move In The Way From Just Feeling I Have To Get There. And We Should Think Of Our Loved Ones That Are New In Alcoholics Anonymous. Because Something Like This Can Carry Them For A Lifetime. And In Conclusion, I Want To Say This. I Went To The Psychiatrist. And I Had A Fellow Tell Me About This Psychiatrist. He Was Having This Dream, This Constant Dream, About This Cloud That Floated Down Out Of The Sky.
He Stopped By His Bed. And He Looked Over And There Laid On The Cloud This Golden Screw Driver. He Looked Down At His Stomach And There Was A Golden Screw In His Navel. He Says, And I Wake Up. He Says, It's Gone. And The Psychiatrist Says, Well, How Often Does That Happen? Well, Doc, He Says, That Happens Every Night. He Says, Well, The Next Time That Happens Is You Take That Golden Screw Driver Off Of The Cloud And You Remove That Golden Screw Out Of Your Navel.
[00:25:19]
And You Lay It Back Up On That Cloud. So By Gosh, The Next Night He Went Home And Went To Bed. It Happened. And He Did Exactly What The Psychiatrist Told Him. Here Comes That Cloud. Look, Sure Enough, There Was That Golden Screw Driver. So He Reached Over And Took It Off Of There. And He Removed That Golden Screw Out Of His Navel. And He Put That On The Cloud And The Screw Driver Back On The Cloud. And The Way The Cloud Went. And He Slept Right On Until Morning.
So He Was So Excited When He Woke Up, He Got Up And His Ass Fell Off. Now, I Don't Think There's A Lot Of AA In That. But I Want To Say This Much. I Want To Thank You All For Listening. And I Want To Thank The Fellowship Of Alcoholics Anonymous For Helping Me Each Day Of My Life In AA. And May God Go With You And God Bless You All. Thank You. Well, Thanks A Lot Clarence. What Humor And What A Message. Now Comes The Dubious Honor Of Getting To Listen To Me. I Have Seniority Calendar Wise And Sobriety Wise. But I'm No Public Speaker. I Cannot Tell Stories. I Can't Remember Stories. And I Write Them Down And I Can't Even Read Them Right.
So I'll Dispense With Any Stories. I'm Under A Handicap. I Got To Keep My Talk Pretty Honest Because My Wife Is Out Here In The Second Row Double Checking Me. And I Want To Apologize To My Friends From The State Of Iowa Because They Are Going To Hear Something That They Have Heard Over And Over And Over. But It Reminds Me Of A Lady In Our Fellowship In Cedar Rapids. A Lot Of People Say AA Becomes Very Repetitious. They Don't Like To Go. It Gets Repetitious. And Old Peck Said Well, Breathing Is Damn Repetitious But If You Want To Live It Is Pretty Important.
So I Think I Read Some Place In The Big Book That When We Are Asked To Speak We Should Tell What It Used To Be Like And What We Did And What It Is Like Now. So I Want To Take You On A Little Journey Down Through Memory And I Hope I Can Get It Straight And Not Embellish It Too Much. And I Will Do My Best. I Came Out Of A Very Christian Family. I Am A Lonely Child. I Drank The First Time I Tasted Alcoholic Beverage I Was 15 Years Old. I Got Drunk And I Passed Out. And 30 Years Later I Got Drunk Roughly And I Passed Out And The Boys Had To Haul Me Home. So I Made Great Progress In My Control.
I Started Back In Prohibition Days. I Don't Know Anything About Fancy Social Drinking. I Can't Say That I Was Ever A Social Drinker. I Started On Pooch That I Stole Off Of A Bootlegger. I Also Drank Some Home Brew. We Didn't Get Around The Bottle Much Of It. We Just Drank It Out Of The Crock. Red Dog And Oh, Fancy Wines That Weren't Finished Working And All That. You See, I Was Not A Fancy Drinker And I Don't Know Anything About Fancy Drinking. I Like The Effect Of Alcohol. I Can't Say That My Drinking Got All Haywire In The Early Years Of My Life. I Was An Alcoholic From The Start. I Don't Know What I Was Or What I Wasn't. I Can Care Less. That's One Thing I Like About AA. They Don't Bother Us Trying To Figure Out Why We Are Alcoholics. They Just Want Us To Accept The Fact That We Are.
From There That I Can Pinpoint, I Drank About 18 Years Fairly Well On Control. I Had To Be A Pretty Good Salesman To Sell This Girl That Became My Bride. Because She Is A Titolan Methodist. And Incidentally, I Am A Mason. Methodist. And incidentally, I'm a Mason too, Clarence, so where else can we kid each other but in AA?
[00:30:05]
My drinking escapades weren't too bad, as I say, for about 18 years of my life, and then I seem to have crossed an invisible line where I went from impulse drinking to compulsion drinking. I don't know just exactly when that was, but I know I crossed it. My drinking got out of control, and living problems got out of control. Oh, I still was functioning fairly normal on the surface. But I have a unique story, and I think it's very fitting to tell this story at a General Service conference of this size. There's some parts of it that's so much rather unique.
My first knowledge of Alcoholics Anonymous was when I read the Saturday Evening Post article in, I believe, March of 1941. I grew up in a home where the Post was one of the standby magazines. Oh, living problems got out of control. Oh, I still was functioning fairly normal on the surface. But I have a unique story, and I think it's very fitting to tell this story at a General Service conference of this size. There's some parts of it that's so much rather unique. My first knowledge of Alcoholics Anonymous was when I read the Saturday Evening Post article in, I believe, March of 1941. I grew up in a home where the Post was one of the standby magazines, and I had read it avidly for many years.
I read this article about Jack Alexander's tremendous article, which has been one of our leading pamphlets, and with much interest. And believe it or not, that's when I think I admitted that there was something wrong with my drinking, and I'll tell you why. I saved the address of the General Service office in New York City, and what did I need with that address if there wasn't anything wrong with my drinking? I saved it and carefully hid it away. I don't think I even let my wife know I had that address. And in the summer of 1943, I wrote the New York office, and they come back with a beautiful letter thanking me and saying there wasn't a group in the state of Iowa, so I wanted to go to AA, and it wasn't available, so I continued to drink.
And I believe, I'm not too sure of this, but I believe that after the group got started in my hometown in the spring of 1944, that I got a second letter from the General Service office telling me that a group had started in my hometown. Unfortunately, this wife of mine got a hold of it, and I shouldn't use that word, this, but my wife got a hold of the letter, and I went to my first meeting. You know, they talk about there's motivators. I was motivated by having my right arm up behind my back. I could scratch my left ear with ease.
And I went to my first meeting in the Montrose Hotel in Cedar Rapids in the corn room. Well, I said, well, one of the competitors, he sold his hotel and quit. And, you know, these distinguished experts, March to June is not a very long period of time is it? They knew a lot about AA. They gave me a written examination to see whether I qualified for membership, and I haven't been able to find very many people that ever took a written examination to see whether they were qualified for membership in AA or not. I believe our tradition says our tradition says a desire to stop drinking. But anyway, I took this written test, and I can remember sitting at that little table in the corner of the corn room in this hotel, little beads of blood almost, sweat on my brow, trying to answer these questions. I'm a con artist.
You know what I'm talking about. I wanted to get a favorable readout when they corrected my, you know, my paper. So these three guys, I can still see these three. One of them, in fact, this gentleman turned out to be my sponsor, was my sponsor's sponsor. I think he was the one that graded the paper, and that was a one-legged guy who lives in California now. And another guy, they graded my examination paper, and they come over to me, and this one-legged fellow said, according to the way you answered these questions, we don't consider you an alcoholic. Now, can you imagine that happening today? So I went home to my wife, and I said, now, I've been to AA, and they're experts in their authorities. And they say I am not an alcoholic.
And I said, and I want you to listen carefully to this. I said, the job I have, there's a lot of pressures. My home life doesn't exactly run too smooth. There's quite a bit of nagging and
[00:35:00]
fault-finding and all of that. I have to drink for relief. Also, in my job of supervision, I must be a good fellow and drink with the boys. And I roared down the road of self-destruction. I tell the story a lot of times to new people. God, the room's empty since I got up here. Look at the empty chair. Everything was full, and I get up, and now they won't. Oh, they're hungry, I know. They're going to go out and get a bite to eat and listen to the good speakers after they hear me. I should have stuck around. They'd appreciate those guys tonight that follow me. So I decided I would return to controlled drinking or social drinking.
Now, I don't know how to return to social drinking. There was one. I don't know how to return to what you've never been. And I went on a self-help kick that lasted for years. And I tell it generally for the benefit of comparatively new people. And I think all of we alcoholics, after we crossed that invisible line, have worked so darn hard on trying to figure out some way to learn to control our drinking. That old denial thing that we're not abnormal.
I tried everything I could think. Well, anyway, I have to tell you that my wife is a very determined, strong-minded person, and she was going to make me quit drinking. I don't know that any other wife ever did that, tried it, but I think a few boys in the AA had been through the treatment that they had to quit drinking. It always hurts me when somebody says an alcoholic is weak-willed. I don't agree with that at all. I was strong-willed. I willed a drink and nobody could blast me out of it. Now, I had some experts work on me, as I'll tell you about. So I don't know whether the chronological order is right or not, but our town didn't have any mental health centers. So my wife, along with a lot of other ladies, I don't think all these were wives of Alki's, but anyway, they got together and they got a mental health center started in Cedar Rapids.
And my wife and I were the first married couple to go in through the mental health center. In fact, we went in with the folding chair furniture. And I got assigned to a psychiatrist, very eminent psychiatrist in Cedar Rapids, and I had many, many, many sessions with this man. And truly, he's a wonderful fellow. I'm not putting down any of these professions at all. The trouble is, I wouldn't cooperate with him. He was trying to get into my mind and find out what made me tick. And if anybody can throw off a defense around, I'll let the people next to them. It's an alcoholic, see? And of course, the thing he was doing was trying to determine why I was an alcoholic. And then the nice and A, we don't do that, as I said before. And I was amused when I think back now one time, I was a little kid on the farm. This will sound ridiculous, but we went into this. Was there anything abnormal in my childhood? And of course, I had to satisfy him with something. And I said, well, yes, something abnormal.
When I was about two or three years old, I had a habit of running off to go out the field where my dad was plowing or something. So my mother put me in red dresses. The little boy wore dresses then, and so she could see me a long way. She said, maybe that's it. Maybe that warped your self-esteem and so forth. I don't think it had anything to do with it at all. Well, after a long period of this, the good doctor got worn out because I wouldn't cooperate.
I went down for one of my sessions. And can't we play games? Can't we con? Can't we take the monkey off our back and put it on somebody else's back? He just bluntly told me, he said, you're taking up my time and I'm taking your money and we're not getting anywhere. And I said, well, what am I going to do? Well, he said, I'm not going to tell you what you're going to do or what you should do. I'm going to ask you a question. Have you ever heard of alcoholics and molluscs? And I said, yes. And he said, fine. And that was the end of that session.
So my wife still was not satisfied. She got me to go down to the University of Iowa hospital, to the psychopathic hospital, as an outpatient. I've been, I've been, I've dealt with the experts. This guy, as I went down there, the doctor assigned to him later became the head of the whole psychiatric department down there. So I wasn't fooling around with some amateur. In fact, my wife went with me and said, don't make it too rough on me tonight, honey.
And when I come out of that session, I'll show you the accountability of a practicing alcoholic. He took my wife to task because she was too narrow-minded and she was too puritanical. And what she should do was to have beer available in the icebox. So when I came home from work, I could sit down and enjoy a cold bottle of beer. I never took a drink in my own home,
[00:40:01]
never had no desire to. So I went home, I was scot-free on that. And then I think Clarence mentioned something about the clergyman. So I, I thought, well, maybe I can get help from the clergyman. So I went to this Methodist minister that's in our church, and he didn't know anything about drinking. He had no help for me at all. So I thought, well, of course, Methodists don't. At that time, they're supposed to be de-totalers. So I thought, well, maybe a Roman Catholic priest might be able to help me. And my wife, she didn't know about it, so I went to him, and he didn't know any more about what to do about it than the Methodist minister did. So I felt let down. And then I went on the self-help kick of buying books, counter-positive thinking, and know thyself, and the whole bit. I've got a shelf of books six feet long, beautiful books, beautiful books, wonderful books, nothing wrong with them.
Everything I'm talking about that I went to and resorted to is good. That was just one thing. That was just one key. I didn't have any desire to stop drinking, period. I went through this rigmarole. You know, they talk about motivators, motivates people to get their A. Well, family is one of them. And then there's the jobs, another one that motivates you, and the law. Now, the law, I had to get that straight out quick.
I never even had any trouble with the law. I never had an officer of the law talk to me. I don't know how I got through them. That's a beautiful, but I did. No trouble with the law. The doctor, my doctor, he thought I was drinking too much, and he kept insisting it'd be good if I'd cut down. And I said to my wife, you know, he's getting old, he's getting to be accountable, quack. I said, I think we'd better go on to another doctor.
And I don't know, I guess I'll talk about the job first. This is a ring around the rosy deal, this job thing. I had a good job. In fact, a real good job. I drank with my boss. He could drink me under the table, which was a pretty good feat. And I had a guy that worked for me, and I could drink him under the table. So I fired the guy that worked for me because he drank too much. And my boss got me in, and he got narrow-minded about absenteeism, and he fired me.