A Sad-Looking Hillbilly with Eight Years and the Funniest Story in AA – Buttermilk S.

Thank you and thank you Barney for the introduction and before I get off into this long earth shaking message I'm going to deliver, I'd like to thank the committee for having us here. It's been a pleasure and in the meantime I'd like to introduce my traveling mate or my bodyguard or whatever you call him and don't do anything to upset him because he's only had 18 hours sleep since we got here. Ken would you stand please? Well, I'm Buttermilk Smith, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Buttermillk. And I'm awful glad to be here and see so many people. I had another disease. Of course, I got rid of it, but I used to have a little trouble telling lies, you know. I mean, I had trouble telling the truth. But this wasn't caused from alcohol. It was caused from something else. I don't know what. I can remember when I was about five or six years old. And I went in the house one day, and we had an old yellow cur dog, and he was laying out there in the yard sunning. I went into the house, and I said, Mama, there's a lion out there. And she went and looked out, and she come back, and She said, Now, buttermilk, you go in the bedroom and ask God to forgive you for telling me a lie because you know that's our old dog. Well, I went in there and mumbled around a while And come back out She said, did you talk to God about it? I said, yes, I did And God told me not to think too much about it That he thought that was a lie in his self When he first looked at it Thank you i met this gentleman here in the black suit a while ago and uh reminded me of a story i generally tell this girl got on the bus and she stuck a cigarette in her mouth and started to light it and she didn't have a match she turned into this fellow there in a black suit who happened to be a preacher she didn'T know it was a preacher and she said fella have you got a match he said said, No, indeed, I don't have a match, young lady, and I'll tell you something. I'd just as soon commit adultery as to smoke one of them filthy things. She said, Well, so would I, but I've just got 20 minutes off for lunch. Thank you again. This may go on forever. I generally start out by telling a story, and most people say they tell a story to relax the audience. You people look pretty well relaxed to me. I tell a storytelling story. I try to relax buttermilk. I don't know. I've told this story for years, but I kind of fell in love with it. And it seemed like this old 85-year-old man went for a walk one afternoon uptown, I'm gazing up at them high-rise buildings and walking around and directly seeing a sign that said sperm bank. Oh, boy, he said, just what I needed. And he went in and he said... Girlie, I'd like to contribute to this. Oh, she said, old-timer, I don't think you're capable and why would you want to anyway? Well, he says, I once had a boy and he went off to war and got all shot up and come back and later got to drinking, later died. said I think some of my blood ought to be left here it's a pretty good line you know well she said if you think you're capable and she handed him a little fruit jar and said go in that little room and bring me back the specimen and he went in there and she got busy more customers come in about 20 minutes later she thought oh my God that old man's still in there and she went and jerked the door open and he was just completely exhausted. Oh, he said, Girlie, I'm glad to see you. He said, I tried it with my right hand. I tried with my left hand. I've held it between my knees and tried it both hands. I've run hot water on it. I've ran cold water on him and I cannot get the lid off of this damn jar. Thank you. I needed that. Roger, good audience. Well, I... I got kicked out of the school in second grade for not shaving so you're not going to get no intellectual speech or any of that but don't know where to go from here I wasn't going to tell this but I had a couple of fellas ask me if I would so I'm going to to get it out of way and they asked me to tell about the time I went I went to the Fat Stock Show in Fort Worth. And all of my life, I'd wanted to go to Fort Worth to that Fat Stock show. And every time they'd have one, I was either too broke to go or too drunk to go. So I throwed a sober spell for a week or two, saved up a little money, and just got on the bus and went to Fortworth. Landed in Cowtown a day or two early. I always like to be early. so I went down on Skid Row and rented me a Skid row room went and got me a galleon of that sweet Lucille and started drinking it and it seemed like every one of them bronc stompers that I tried to talk to wanted to whoop me and some of them was getting the job done they had both my eyes black and my front teeth all knocked out and they just had me in a heck of a mess now staying up there to this old lady in that skid row room. She was a typical skid-row hotel runner. So ugly she'd have to slip up on the dipper to get a drink of water. But she was kind to me. I liked her. She was good. She was just a good old girl. And she told me one day, she said, I don't believe these people like you. Well, I said, they haven't gone out of their way to show it in any way if they do. She said, if I was you, I'd leave. Well, Well, I said, I'm going to leave when I get to work and see how. I said I'm not enjoying this. I'm not enjoying this like I thought I would. So she kept me around there and put poultices on my eyes and fed me soup and she'd give me a pipe and a pouch of tobacco that I imagine somebody left there and I smoked that pipe and sat around and drank that soup and I finally got to where I could see pretty good and I tucked my little suitcase and went down to the wine store and got me a couple of bottles of wine and put it in the suitcase. Went on down to Depot and bought a ticket to Amarillo. Thought I'd go out in West Texas and see if I could get along with them people any better. Well, the train come in and I got on and walked about halfway back through the car and there's an empty seat there. I put up my suitcase and sat down. well about the time the train come in went out of the station in come a woman with a pair of shoe heels on about that high there's higher than that there's that high I wore them out of picking a banjo Joe. And this woman with them high-heeled shoes on and had on a fur coat that was shedding and carrying a little old fuzzy dog she called Poo-Poo. And come over and sit down with me. We started chattering like a chipmunk, and Poo Poo growled at me. And I stood about all ladder cut and I just got up and took off back down through the train. And I found an old club car and it was empty. There wasn't anybody else in it. So I got me a place by the window, opened the window and took a drink of wine and lit my pipe. And i thought this is going to be a pretty good trip after all. And well i think it's over five minutes and the door flung open and in come that woman with poo-poo and she sat down right across the table from me and she said you're going to have to quit smoking that pipe it might make poo-poos sick I said now woman if God don't think any more of you and poo-foo than I do you're both lost and you ought to go on and your paper somewhere else I've got some serious drinking to do well she just kept sitting there her a jabbering, and I laid my pipe down in the ashtray directly. When I did, she grabbed it and threw it out the window. And when she did, I just grabbed poo-poo and throwed him out the room. If you ever seen a woman come unglued, she did. And she called a conductor and a porter, andI'm not sure but what the engineer come back. And I thought they were You're going to hang me. Finally, that old conductor got mad and he said, if you don't shut up and stop this noise, I'll put you both off of the train right here. And I said, well, that'd be good enough for me. I could get under one of them mesquite trees and have more fun than I'm having here. And he didn't put us off there. But when we got into the next station, four or five miles down the road, he did put us both off. and I reckon everybody had met the dock it was full of people I mean met the train the dock was full of people and she was running up and down there pointing at me saying that savage man throwed my little dog off the train my poo-poo's out there starving to death and here come one of them harnessed cops that I love so well and he said did you throw that woman's dog off the drain and I said indeed I did and if you open your mouth again I'm going to stick 200 pounds of fist in it this ain't none of your business he thought about it a minute and said come to think about it I don't guess it is and about that time this old gal started jumping up and down hollering poo poo poo and I looked up and here come that dog up the railroad track with my pipe in his mouth something happened to me in the last year or two every time I come up here to talk my nose starts running I think I'm afflicted most people's nose their feet smells and their nose oh hell forget it getting to work can't even talk had it fixed but it ain't working well Well, I don't know hardly where to start one of these things. I guess you're supposed to start back where I started. I never give my sobriety date, and I hardly ever do, but if I live till the 23rd of this month, I'll be 33 years in the program. Thank you. thank you I grew up down here in the edge of Arkansas back during that Hoover boom and if you think Lazarus was poor you should have come down through there back during the depression it wasn't easy some fellow one time was telling how poor it was and he said we never did live in a tent or nothing like that and he says we damn sure would if we'd had one and that's kind of the way with us us and it's back during that depression and the whole roll of preachers was thicker than the fiddlers and that's getting pretty thick and there's a preaching schoolhouse and brush arbors and anywhere they get to preach preaching the nra and the blue eagle and the end of time and what have you and they had me scared to death all the time i didn't know what to think or what to believe and I've often said I did leave Arkansas on the account of my belief I got to believe in if I didn't leave I was going to starve to death so that's how come me to get to Oklahoma but I had a brother that got into this preaching don't know how he got into it he just didn't have no education but he carried that Bible around with him for for a year or two and he got to preaching. Done a pretty good job of preaching. He said he was called to preach. You never did say who called him, just said he would be called. Said he got seen in this vision of the morning. Signed a little up in front of him and said GPC. And he seen that and thought it meant go preach Christ. After about six months he hadn't saved a soul. I told him one day I said Jim him, that might have meant go plow corn. But anyhow, I stayed around down there until I got about grown and it just wasn't doing any good at all. So I hitchhiked out of there and I wound up over here at Bartlesville, Oklahoma. And they had an old zinc smelter her there and i got a job in that smelter and the depression had begun to break up a little it was long in the late 30s i think 37 or age somewhere along there things began to loosen up a little and i remember that old humpback german boss looking at me and said if you can do this work it pays four dollars and 81 cents a day and i said well fellow you can consider it done I never had heard of anybody making that much money in a day so I went to work and I've always been the fellow that set goals never have met any of them but just set them and I said now if I can work here for three years making this kind of money I can go back to Arkansas and build a better town than Cincinnati and run it like it ought to be run but it seemed like things didn't work out just like they should I got to drinking a little more whiskey and a little better grade of it and a lot of things just happened about the first payday I got I bought me a suit of clothes never had had a suit then about the next payday I boughtme a pair of them bronc stompers boots then aboutthe next pay day I gotme one of them John B. Stetson hats and then I think about the next payday I discovered girls and I got engaged to three of them at the same time and you talk about a hillbilly kicking it in overdrive I was off and running but my money wasn't accumulating so I couldn't figure out what was wrong and I wrote to this brother that is preaching down in Arkansas and told him how well I was doing and he sold out and come out there no he didn't sell out he didn'y have nothing to sell he just come out and he too got a job at the smelter and he two got him a pair of boots and a hat and we saved up a little money and bought a model A Ford and we save up a little more money and he said we ought to go down in the hills and visit the folks see if we can help anybody out so we went down and visited around a while Well, I told them all if they needed anything just to write to us. And we were riding around. Now this preacher was a very versatile man. He had a pretty good drinking hand when he wasn't preaching. He could go either way. And we're riding around down the hills drinking that white lightning. We got to talking about we happened to pay 20 cents a pound for bacon out there at Bartlesville. And we never had paid for any bacon. and if we run out of meat, we just killed a hog. Didn't make any difference whose it was. They run outside anyway. So we went off in one of them ravines and there's a bunch of them old shoals bedded down in the road and we just jumped out and cornered this about 150-pound shoal up in the corner of a rail fence and throwed him in the back seat of that A model and headed for Bartlesville. And we'd gone along as I said Had a drink and feeling about like a couple of fellas ought to feel the year around. And we'd forgot we had the hog. And along over there between Pryor and Salina, it's long between sundown and dark, more dark than sundown. And I looked up and there's one of them Holstein cars back in there stopping everybody. And I look at Jim and I said, we may be in trouble. and I looked back at that hog and he had kind of got leaned up in the back seat like he was one of us so I just pulled off my hat and put on the hog we pulled up and stopped and that patrolman threw that flashlight on me and said what's your name I said, Buttermilk Smith. Throwed it over on my brother. Said, What's your name? He said, Jim Smith. Throwed him back on that hog with my hat on and said, What's you're name? And I punched the old hog with me thumbnail and he said, Oink. And he was going back over to the car where that other patrolman was kind of shaking his head. He said I'll tell you right now there ain't none of them Smiths very good looking but that aren't the ugliest damn man I ever seen in my life. Thank you. Well, I stayed in Bordersville. As I said, 80% of that story is true. I Anyhow, I had gone back to Arkansas and married one of them hillbilly girls. And we had a baby by this time. And I got to having asthma, which I'd had as a kid, but since I went out there and got to breathing that smelter smoke, I kind of got over it for a while. So the asthma come back, and the doctor told me I needed to change climates. The sheriff had already told me that a couple of times. So I left and went out to California, in Southern California. And I didn't fit in very good out there at that time. Now, later on in life, I would have fit all right, but I didn' t then. I never had been around any of them so-called winos. And I got up one morning early before daylight and started somewhere, and I met one of them winos coming just as hard as he could walk. I mean, he was getting low and level. And he just walked up and started talking to me. We talked a few minutes, and he said, well, I've got to go. And he wheeled around and took off and got about ten steps, and he says, hey. I said, yeah, what? He said, which way was I going when I met you? And I told him. He went on. As I said earlier, I hadn't got that bad yet. so i didn't stay in california long i come back around to topeka kansas and they were hiring people for the alcan highway so i hired out to go up on the alkan and i signed up on a nine-month contract and i stayed through two contracts and i managed to save a little money because it didn't do too much drinking while i was up there whiskey was scarce and it was hard to get so I didn't drink a whole lot and I managed to save a little money and I come back and got the wife and baby and we moved back to Alaska we landed in the little town of Cordova which is about halfway up the coast population of about 2,000 people and I hadn't been there very long probably a month there's three young dagos that are trying to get in the outlaw business and they were doing a pretty good job of it. And they throwed the police chief out in the street and he quit like any sensible man would. Well, I went in the bar that evening to get my usual double shot and I said to the bartender I said looks to me like a policeman would carry enough for deference to swap out at them fellas. He said how long have you been here? I said about a month. Well, he said you could probably get the job. So the mayor lived right across the hall from me. I went up and talked to the mayor, and he called a council meeting that night and hired me. And they gave me a club and a pistol and a book of the city ordinance, which I never got time to read. And I went to work. Well, about the second night I was on duty, they started in to throw me out of the same bar. and when the fight is over I had the handles of a .38 S&W in my hand and the rest of it I'd wore out over their heads and I told them I said now I brought a wife and baby and come up here and I don't have the money to leave and this town ain't big enough for all of us so they took me at my word and a few days they was gone and I stayed on there for about four years and I didn't have nothing to do but drink and I learned how to do it pretty good now as I said we had a population of less than 2,000 people year round in the summer time we had five canneries we got a lot of Filipinos in there for that but we had less than 2,00 people per population we had nine bars and six liquor stores and everybody made a living and I helped them all I could and this is when un-drinking become a problem with me. I just got to where I get up in the morning and start drinking, and then drink until I went to bed at night. And I don't know why. I just did. And it went on and on for... It kept getting worse and worse. Finally my wife heard the rumor that there's a fiction department and told me about it, so I quit to save my reputation, you know. And I went back into the construction business that's what I went up there to do in the first place and I was going to try to describe these two buddies that I had one of them's name was Slim Jensen and the other one was Mally Moot Slim and they had no way to describe him but I'm going to try to describe old Mally moot he was about a hammer handle taller than I am and about half as big around and he had one eye plumb out and he didn't wear no patch over it he just had a hole in his head and a lot of them told him Poles had better looking heads on them than he did and then there's Slim Jensen he looked a lot like him only he didn't have the hole in His head and then there was me and people often said the three of us made a wonderful pair but one time we was up at Seward to show you the kind of humor Mally Moat had I was up at Seward, and Mally Moody was a little drunker than he generally was. And he started uptown, and an old truck come down through there flopping its wings and run over him and skinned him up pretty bad. We went and got him and carried him down to this clinic. They had him in there on the board with two or three nurses and doctors working on him. And I looked up, and here comes the girl that carries the pad and pencil and wants to know where was you born and why was youborn and all them things, you know. and she just tipped over and looked over in there at Malamute and she said are you married he said hell no woman a truck run over me so that that kind of shows you the kind of humor Malamude had Well, we worked together Slept in the same building We were all together And we drank every day And I don't know why we did We just drank And we never thought nothing about it We just thought it was part of life I actually thought that everybody was drunk When I was still drunk And it just kept getting worse and worse and I want to tell you something before I forget it I've heard doctors say that the DTs are kidding you in ten days if you don't get them stopped but I guarantee you they won't because I had them and I'd had them for three years in fact I got the damn things when they first come out and if I run out of whiskey and couldn't get a drink when I needed it this old white horse would come up and if I was in the truck he'd get in the trunk with me if I wasn't walking he'd walk with me if I didn't beg he'd lay down with me and he'd talk to me and I'd talk to him we've had some wonderful conversations in that home and I knew what that was I knew what I had but what are you going to do about it if I went and tell some doctor that I've got a white horse and he looks and there ain't no horse he's going to stop me up somewhere and I'd already been in two or three jails and hadn't been contented in either one of them and I just lived with it didn't know nothing else to do and I got to where I'd go in them blackouts and say one time Ross McDonald was the superintendent and I don't know why he put up with us I've seen him fire people for sneezing at the wrong time but he did put up with us and he sent me one time from Fairbanks I went to Great Falls and from there back to Seattle and picked up a crew and took them back into Fairbank and i got up the next morning went down to the office ross was sitting in there and he cut that bad eye around on me and said well them men got in all right i said what man he said them you went after oh i said them men and i never have remembered that i don't remember ever leaving in town. So it was getting serious. And Ross finally come one morning, got in the truck with me and opened the bottle, opened the glove box and got the bottle out and took a drink, put the cork back in it and put it back in there. He didn't offer me a drink and it was my whiskey. And he looked up and said, now buttermilk, if I open that jockey your box again and find the bottle in it i'm gonna have to run you off and i thought about it for a minute and i said well ross if i'm in the truck it'll be in there because i can't operate without it he said you ain't doing very good job with it and i knew that i was still intelligent enough to know that and he said well i'll tell you what i'll do if you will turn in your resignation nation and quit I'll pay your way home he didn't have to because I was hired up there so we got my tools and clothes together and put me on an airplane and I should have been in Tulsa in 24 hours 60 days later I still wasn't in Tulsi and I could write if I could read I could could write a book about that trip home. And I remember the plane stopped in Great Falls. Excuse me. And, I got off. I don't know why, I just got off and there was a limousine there and I figured he'd come after me so I just cut in. We went back into Great Falls and and parked in front of a big hotel. And when I got out of the limousine, I could hear old Tommy Duncan sing, and get off, it's the end of the line. And I looked across the street, and there was a city hall or something over there, and Bob Wells was playing a dance. And I went over there. I remember that. And I had a drink or two with them. Next thing I knew, I come to again, and I was in a hotel. I just figured it was that hotel we parked in front of. I got my key out and looked at it, and it gave the name of the hotel and said White Sulphur Springs, Montana. Now, dear ones and friendly people, you can't get to White Sulpher Springs with an Indian guy. But I was there and don't have any idea how I got there. Well, I went downstairs and talked to the desk clerk and he called me Mr. Smith seemed very friendly and I said well I don't belong here I've got to get out of this place and I got about half way at the door and he said just a minute I said yeah why he said don't you want your money oh I said I'm always going off and leaving my money and he went to the safe and opened the safe up and brought me a roll of money that big around you couldn't reach around it and it like scared me to death i said where did i get the money he said you don't know i said hell if i did i wouldn't ask you where did they get the money well he saidyou've been here for a week playing poker with them sheep herders out there well that let me know where the money was and it pleased me to think i could outsmart a sheep sheepherder, especially in me drunk. So I took the money. I said, where's the airport? He said, there ain't none. And I said where's bus station? He says, there ain' t none. I say, how am I going to get out of here? He say, How did you get in here? I said I don't know. Well if you can't get get an airplane and you can't get a bus, there ain't one thing to do and that's to hitchhike. And you can' t hitchhik with a Bronx Stomper's boot on and a dirty sock, I'll tell you that. So I went over to the shoe store and bought me a pair of shoes to walk in, got them a little extra big, and throwed the boots away, but I kept the shoe box. And I went down to the liquor store and brought three-fifths of whiskey and tried to put them in that shoe box and they just won't go. So in that case, you've got to drink one and two will fit in there all right. So that's what I done. And I started hitchhiking. And them fellas would get up inside of me and they'd speed up. And i just walked till I was plumb exhausted. And l looked up and here come a fella in a buggy. One of them fellas in the buggy that wears the black hat and the long beard, you know? Well, we got some over here but prior, they're Mennonites. Up there, they call them Hodorites. I don't know what's the difference. I don' t know why I got into that but that's what... Anyhow, he was in a buggy and he pulled up and asked me if I wanted to ride. I said, indeed, I do. And I got in and we jogged along and jogged and talked and jogbed Finally, my white horse got to jogging along with his. And I stood about as long as I could and I said, Fella, do you mind if I take a drink? Well, he said, not if you'll give me one. So I gave him a drink and had one. We jogged a little way and had another one. I said you don't think it's a sin to drink? Oh no, no. He said it's the sin to buy the damn stuff. and who knows what he's right I may have to speed up anyhow 30 days later or 30 days from the time I left Alaska I come to one day standing and leaning up again in the Union National Bank in Bartersville and my sister-in-law had drove up there in parks and I got in the car with her and she took me out to the house and now I don't know how long I'd been drunk I don' t know I was in a hell of a shape I know that and I still never had heard of Alcoholics Anonymous this was 1951 I believe and I didn't know there was any such thing and I was staying with my mother and my brother and me a-drinking was upsetting them and them trying to keep me from it was upsetting me so I just got up one morning and left went out the edge of town there's an old gal out there had a beer joint in some old cabins she'd get me one of the cabins to sleep in her customers would buy me two or three fifths of whiskey a day and I'd just stay down there and drink and she claims I eat one meal in six weeks time and I don't doubt it But anyhow, I had this big brother, Tobe, that raised me. And Tobe liked me. He sent me to the store one time and then moved while I was gone. But he didn't give up on me. He kept looking for me. And I don't know, I'd be somewhere when he'd come by there. But anyhow this gal come down to the cabin one morning before daylight and woke me up and said, That big brother's up there and he's come to get you. I said well I'm going to whoop him that's what I'll do so I jumped up and puked right quick and took another drink and jumped into that uniform that was standing there and I come out all bowed up to whooped Big Toad now Toad stood 6 foot 5 and weighed 225 anyhow when I got up close enough that he could see me or smell me I don't know which he got first he started crying and I decided well you better not whoop a man him falling so I give up on that and he took me put me in his car and I think about this he had a brand new car and put me in it I don't believe I'd have done that but he did and I thought he'd take me to his place I could have conned him out of a drink but he didn't he took me to the preacher's place and the preacher had quit stealing hogs and started preaching again and whatever he done he was radical about it he never could hit a happy medium and we wound up by taking a gallon of ice water and a Bible and two straight chairs and went out in the front yard in the presence of God and all the neighbors and he'd read a little scripture and preach a while I'd take a drink of that ice water and puke a while and this just went on it seemed to me like forever and I told him I said Jim I'm going to die he said well that's alright I'm a preacher I can take care of everything but in the meantime up in front drove one of them sport model jeepsters they just made them that one year I think and this little fella jumped out of that jeep and he was everything that I'd always hated he was a little bitty short man with a burr haircut cut and a tweed suit on. And I thought, now that's one of them little old detectives and he's followed me from Fairbanks. Sure enough, he come up and called me by name, shook hands with the preacher and called him by name and I thought now they've snitched on me and he's come after me. And i kept on maneuvering around to where i could get in a Sunday punch on him. I thought if i can get in the good punch i'll salt him down and i can and get away but he never let me get him in that place and I'm glad he didn't because I found out later he was a prize fighter but anyhow he looked at me directly and said fellow you're sick I said now that didn't take no genius to figure that out no I said he talked around a while and directly pointed his finger at me and he said you're going to have to have a drink I said well tell that preacher that i already knew it he told the preacher said he's gonna have to have a drink well he said whatever you think so he went and got in the jeep and took off and wasn't going for 10 minutes and come back and just throwed me a fifth whiskey and i went into one of them riggers and threw it back out in the yard thank god there wasn't any rocks and he went got it he said you are in in a bad shape and twisted the head off of it and give it back to me and I'd get it up here and I couldn't make connections so I just well he sat me down on the chair and got the creature to hold me by the hair of the head and poured about a third of that booze down me I could swallow all right there wasn't nothing wrong with my swallowing well pretty soon the horse got up and left he wouldn't stay around the drunk and I began to come too got plum intelligent again you know and then when he approached me about this AA I didn't know nothing about it and he didn't know much about it I think the oldest member there had less than two years that was Tiny Klein do you remember him well anyhow Anyhow, he started telling me about some people that belonged to it. And I thought, holy cow, I knew some of them. And I said, now he's got them and he's trying to get me in this. There ain't no telling what it is. But I told him, he asked me, he said, would you consider joining Alcoholics Anonymous? I said hell, I'd consider joining the Ku Klux Klan if it would get people to leave me alone. on he said you've almost accomplished that by yourself and i had anyhow he told me a little about it and he said now if you want to go i'll come and get you tonight i said all right let's do it so about seven o'clock that night here he come with two other vids and they loaded me up we went to the meeting and a lot of people say they don't remember the first meeting i remember remember the first meeting better than I can remember some last week. And I remember the people that are there and the friendliness and the speaker they had that night. He just died a while back. For quite a while he and I was the only ones left of that group. Now I'm the only one left. And, uh, I remember Clancy's talk. I could put in here and tell I'll tell you everything he said. But anyhow, on the way home, these three fellas got to talking to me and they said, have you ever had the DTs? Oh, I said, no, nothing like that. I drank a little too much, but I ain't never got that bad. And I got to thinking, they're going to take me back to that preacher. So I told them about the horse. Well, they said that's what it is. Hell, I knew what it was anyway. and they started in telling me all the things they wouldn't do they wasn't going to loan me any money they wasn' t going to talk my wife into coming back they wasn''t going to do this they wasn ''t going do that and I got to wondering if there was anything they would do and finally they said we'll help you sober up and that's all and I said well let's do it so they put a window fan in each end of a porch that is on my brother's house, a glassed-in porch. And they put a cot out there, and that's where they started in to sober me up. And every time one of them would have to go to work, another one would come. They never left one man there by himself. There always was two. And I don't have any idea how long this went on. I've heard all the way from ten days to six weeks. I don' t know. But I remember one night the room got full of snakes, thousands of them. they wasn't poison snakes I wasn't afraid of them one of them had on glasses bug held on I wasn' t afraid of him I just didn' t like his looks and that's where they sobered me up and we started going to meetings and running around all over the country heavens we'd have drove to Kansas City just to get to lead the Lord's Prayer and eat. I hadn't eaten breakfast in years and I tell you it was a treat to get to eat breakfast. But getting back to these old timers that wasn't no old timERS then they all had less than two years there and the things that they told me they said you need to get this book and you need read it and you may take these steps and you know I felt so good by just being sober that I didn't think there's any way that I could ever drink again. So I didn't do any of these things they told me to do, and we'd just go into meetings and having a ball. And I even got to making talks. I delivered a message over there at Pawhuska one time that may outlive the Gettysburg Address, and then got drunk the next day. and this went on for 10 more years i'd get sober i'd go and i'd sit on the front row expecting that that speaker to tell me how to stay sober and i guess they told me a thousand times but i didn't understand it or i don't know why i couldn't understand but i just kept getting worse and i finally made my way back to bartersville I'd been in every jail and every place in South Texas I remember one time getting in jail down there at Rockport and if you always get in on Friday you can't get out for Monday and I'm sitting back there with whiskers about that long a jitterbug until I couldn't sit still and there's one of them little old detectives he'd come in there and look at me and then he'd go into the other room and I knew he was looking at them mug shots he'd directly come in here and he said I said, fella, I know that you're wanted somewhere. And I said well I wish to hell you'd find out where it is. I'd been run out of every town in South Texas. Well anyhow I'm running out of time. I finally made my way back to Bartersville and I went to see one of these fellas that sat up with me the first time and he wasn't very friendly he'd gone to bed and I woke him up and he called me everything but buttermilk and now I've talked for an hour and I haven't said anything that'll help or hurt anybody but if I've got any kind of a message it'll probably come in the next four or five minutes and if you're an alcoholic it wouldn't hurt to listen at it I don't think anyhow he finally got up Tom did Ted called me everything but buttermilk. And he said, now I'm going to go through this with you one more time. He said, you no doubt have read it in the book and you know what's in there. It says, no human power could relieve our alcoholism that God could and would if so. So now he said that don't leave you two or three ways to go. It only leaves you one. And I said, I'm a human being, so I can't relieve your alcoholism. You're a human being, so you can't do a damn thing about it. So the only thing you can do is to get God to remove the compulsion to drink alcohol. Well, I left mad at Tom, and I had about three miles to walk back out to my brother's. Same cot, same house where I sobered up ten years before. My brother didn't much want to let me in, but he did. and I went out on that cot pulled off my clothes and knelt down on that concrete floor now praying wasn't nothing new to me I'd prayed all of my life them preachers taught me to pray when I was a kid I fell off of a shrimp boat down in the Gulf of Mexico one time and when I come up and got that salt water blowed out of my nose I said God help me out of this frog pond I didn't send for the group I didn' t think they could get there in time so praying wasn't nothing new to me but I'd always just prayed to quit drinking this night I got on my knees by that concrete on that concrete floor by that cot and I prayed till daylight to God to take the compulsion to drink alcohol away from me because it was so bad that I could not keep from drinking in my dry days I could go 30-40 days one time I went 8 months just on sheer willpower, if there is such a thing. But the compulsion to drink was so bad that in my dry days I could be thumbing through a magazine and see the picture of a bottle of whiskey and I'd get to slobbering until I couldn't talk looking at that picture. So you can see I was hooked on this stuff. And I prayed all night to God to remove the compulsive to drink alcohol. I heard my brother get up and go to work. He walked by and stopped and looked over there. I guess he thought I'd really cracked up this time. But when I stood up in the floor that morning, I've never figured any way to describe this. There wasn't no women screamed or bells rang or nothing. But when i stood up on the floor the next morning, I didn't want a drink. And that's been almost 33 years ago and I haven't had to have a drink since then. Thank you. So, AA has been my life for the last 33 years. I can't go into this, so I'm getting ready to quit. Thank you, I love you. Thank you.