Alcohol Gave Me the Satisfaction of a Job Well Done Without Having to Do a Da*n Thing – Charlie C.
About This Speaker Tape
Charlie C. from Los Angeles tells his story at the Crested Butte AA Group in Colorado in August 2009. A writer by profession, Charlie has a gift for language that makes this tape crackle with energy and insight. He describes himself as a man who loathed the human race but demanded its approval and adoration at the same time — which, as he puts it, gives you real torque.
His first drink came at 18 at a party in Santa Ana, California in 1968. Five minutes in, surrounded by hippies he despised, he was handed a can of malt liquor. Halfway through it, he realized he had been way too hard on these people. For the first time in his life, he felt like he was right there — in the same moment with everybody else, no longer looking through a film that kept him separate. That feeling never left him, and he was never the same person again.
Charlie's metaphor for his alcoholic life is a bullet fired into water: he comes out of the barrel at 450 feet per second — blazing with potential and intensity in every relationship and assignment — then hits the surface of the water, keeps going a little, and drifts harmlessly to the bottom. His talk is a masterclass in how AA storytelling works: by hearing other people's stories, he began to understand his own. What he could not handle was not catastrophe but the small slights, the guilt of doing something wrong, and the knowledge that a couple ounces of bourbon would make it all disappear.
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