Alcohol as Reverse Insurance — You Pay Today for a Guarantee That Tomorrow Will Stink – Sandy B.
About This Speaker Tape
Sandy B. opens with his anonymity quip and recounts coming into AA on Pearl Harbor Day 1964, insisting that not drinking is the foundation everything else rests on. He traces a New England childhood weighed down by snobbery, Catholic school, and an 85,000-year Purgatory scorecard that seeded a primordial guilt he carried for decades. He describes his first drink at Yale as an hour of peace he would chase the rest of his drinking life, convinced the sickness was a small price for that hour.
He joined the Marines on a drunken Saturday dare, lost his wings after lying to a Pensacola psychiatrist, and ended up routing planes in bad weather while drinking around the clock in a Quonset hut in Japan. He tells the Saturday-afternoon package-store race with a fork in his shaking hand trying to undo his shoelace knots, the grand mal seizure in junior school at Quantico, and waking up in the Bethesda nut ward low man in the pecking order, with schizophrenics telling alcoholics to stop drinking.
A huge 12-step caller named Bill walked into his house, poured out the booze, and drove him to a meeting every night for six weeks. Sandy identified with a nucleus of sparkle-eyed AAs who credited the steps, raced through them in 45 minutes waiting for a spiritual awakening, then hit the wall at Step Three and his childhood Higher Power.
His sponsor told him to turn his life over to whatever would take it, promising the miracle that management would no longer be in the hands of an idiot. The closing image is the rock — his whole game plan for living, every conviction and prejudice — that he clung to like a drowning man until he finally dropped it and shot up like a water skier. His message to the newcomer: don't drink, turn it over, drop the rock.
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