Acceptance as the Thing the Alcoholic Has Been Starving For Long Before He Ever Picks Up a Drink – Charlie L.

About This Speaker Tape

Charlie L. from Casselberry, Florida delivers a humor-soaked drunkalogue at the 1976 Mississippi State Convention. Raised dirt-poor in Garland County, Arkansas during the Depression, he opens with a string of country tall tales — Hard Luck Clyde, Uncle Ben rubbing the sow's belly, the Quaker and his mule, the Dunkard pastor on the bus — before pivoting into his own first drink at sixteen, chugged from a bootlegger's tin cup in the Fourche bottoms. Thirty minutes later he'd shot the man's mule, stolen a Dominicker rooster, and passed out in the Rhode Island Red chicken lot where his mother bathed him, dosed him with castor oil, and gave him an enema.

The drinking career that followed took him to Monroe, Louisiana and a Shamrock Bar bender, thirty days in jail coasting on goofballs, a freight train to Mississippi, and a Greenville County jail cell where he and a bridge-dwelling partner conned the jailer out of pints of rubbing alcohol by claiming a bad leg. He lost three or four wives, pawned the furniture piece by piece during 'higher negotiations,' went home to mother, wore long-handled underwear with the flap dropped for ventilation, and was finally sent to a psychiatrist by his cousin Alt who told him flatly, 'we think you a nut.' After the psychiatrist came the Arkansas State Hospital for Nervous Diseases, where he first heard of AA at the 210 1/2 Main Street club in Little Rock.

For five years he drifted in and out of the Fellowship. The turn came in Washington, D.C., eating stolen green onions with his two remaining teeth, pawning a stolen Thompson's restaurant leather jacket for a fifth he then dropped and shattered on the flophouse floor. An old skid-row drinking buddy named Bob found him there sober and took him to a meeting at 1401 Rhode Island Avenue, where a clean little man sitting next to the lousy, stinking Charlie wordlessly offered him a cigarette, lit it, then set a shared lighter down between them. That gesture — human compassion without a word of judgment — is what Charlie calls the moment love became real to him.

He closes with gratitude for the people who told him 'come back,' the words that beat in his chest through a sleepless flophouse night and pulled him back up the stairs the next morning. He contrasts AA's welcome with mission-house 'have you been saved' routines, and finishes with the lifeboat parable — Viva la France, There'll Always Be an England, Remember the Alamo — to say that if AA ever gets overloaded, nobody needs to come tell him, because he ain't going nowhere.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 J.D. introduces Charlie L. from Casselberry, reads the AA preamble, recalls Mike W. saying 'for so many years he had wept — it's time to laugh'
• 3:30 Charlie picks the green bell — 'as long as you're green you'll grow, when you get ripe you get rotten'
• 5:00 First drink at 16 in the Fourche bottoms — bootlegger's thump keg, tin cup, shoots the mule and steals the Dominicker rooster
• 8:00 Passes out in the Rhode Island Red chicken lot; mother's therapy of hot bath, castor oil, and enema — 'the cleanest drunk in Arkansas'
• 11:00 Arkansas tall tales — Hard Luck Clyde, Uncle Ben and the sow, the Dunkard pastor, Cousin Penny's twins named Denise and De-nephew
• 20:00 Monroe, Louisiana — Shamrock at Five Corners, Sweet Lucy, 30 days coasting on goofballs in the county jail
• 24:00 Freight train to Mississippi; bridge-dwelling partner teaches him to drink rubbing alcohol; Greenville County jail and the milk bottle scam on jailer Mr. Carroll
• 32:00 Higher negotiations — sells the furniture, loses his wife and her dog, goes home to mother, flap-flapping through the living room in long-handled underwear
• 38:00 Cousin Alt's family meeting sends him to a psychiatrist; the little black ball rolled from his nose; committed to the Arkansas State Hospital for Nervous Diseases
• 48:00 Washington D.C. — eating green onions by the fence, pawns Thompson's leather jacket, drops the fifth on the flophouse floor, the clean little man at 1401 Rhode Island Avenue shares a lighter — 'we'll both use this'