Belonging Is the Cure for the Ache No Bottle Could Ever Reach – Joyce P.

About This Speaker Tape

Joyce P. shares her story at the Monday night Blue Chip Speaker meeting at the NAVA Club in North Atlanta. She grew up in East Point, the daughter of a Fort Mac motor-pool supervisor and Baptist minister, in what she describes as a happy middle-class home until age 13, when her mother turned violent. She began running away, landed in Fulton County juvenile at 15, and found God for the first time while sleeping in a cell. At 16 she was kicked out of Hedlund High for pills and transferred to College Park, where an older friend took her to the Sweet Gum Head bar — her first experience of belonging. She drank her way through being raped in that parking lot, being molested by her grandfather, being beaten by her mother, and being gay in a world that told her she was going to hell.

She walked into her first AA meeting at 18 after a juvenile probation officer told her she was an alcoholic, and spent the next six years coming in and out, still smoking pot, still wrecking cars, still waking up naked with strangers. On June 7, 1981, at 24, after a final blackout in which she came to in her car outside work with the whole passenger side caved in, she picked up what became her last white chip. She grew up at Biscayne and Easy Does It, a downtown group of older Black men who taught her she belonged. Mary Mack gave her a big book. Maggie Harrison refused to speak to her for over a decade and then loved her into the fellowship anyway.

The story moves through her long sobriety in hard layers: a brutal fourth step at ten years, a wedding day at fourteen, a successful painting business she'd originally wanted to call HP and Me, the loss of everything she owned when the economy collapsed six years before the tape, the death of her father, and most painfully the death of her best friend Chip Houston from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma — she had her hand on his chest when his heart stopped. She talks about depression on the back side of the couch, about being disowned by her family and learning she gets to do the disowning now, and about four years in Al-Anon teaching her a softer way to look at the disease.

The core message is that no matter how good life gets or how bad life gets, we never have to drink again. She closes by reading the last page of The Gifts of the Kingdom, replacing one word to make it hers, and by urging anyone teetering on the edge to pick up the phone. Thirty-four years in, she says she is grateful for a sense of belonging that nothing else ever reached.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Kat introduces Joyce; Joyce opens with the Prayer of St. Francis on her knees in the NAVA bathroom
• 5:30 Happy childhood in East Point — daddy at the Fort Mac motor pool, tomboy on Hot Wheels, holding up the mailman at gunpoint in a cowboy suit
• 12:00 Mother turns violent at 13; Joyce starts running away, ends up in Fulton County juvenile at 15, first conscious contact with God in a cell
• 20:00 Kicked out of Hedlund for pills; transfers to College Park, goes to the Sweet Gum Head bar, sees drag queens, feels at home for the first time
• 26:00 Raped in the parking lot — had nowhere to go home to; drank over the rape, the molestation, the beatings, being gay
• 32:00 Probation officer tells her she's an alcoholic at 18; first 28-day program; six years of coming in and out, never quite quitting
• 40:00 Last drunk at the neighbor's house — wine, amaretto, weed, Quaaludes; wakes up outside her job, picks up a white chip June 7, 1981
• 48:00 Easy Does It group of older Black men; Mary Mack and Maggie Harrison; lessons in humility from working the tables at the game room
• 58:00 Fourth step at ten years — 45 pages of guilt and shame; second one finds the big-shot defect hiding inside a successful painting business
• 68:00 Chip Houston's death from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma; reads the closing passage from The Gifts of the Kingdom with one word changed to make it hers