Blew a .33 on Sergeant Long’s Breathalyzer Then Drove to Two More Bars for Nightcaps 🥴 — Jack C.

About This Speaker Tape

Jack C. shares his story at Founders Day 2007 in Akron, a long narrative told with precise comic timing and hard spiritual edges. He traces a drinking life that began at 14 and rode alongside a career of improbable promotions: three summers as an Ocean City cop running a beer-confiscation racket with his lieutenant, deputy state's attorney, state senator, and youngest circuit court judge in Maryland. The badge case, the senator's license plate, and a .33 blow on Sergeant Long's breathalyzer at a bar association program each explain why he never got arrested while drinking the way he drank.

His last drink was a Tia Maria on April 7, 1982. Days later his abdomen filled with gangrene; he spent seven weeks fighting organ failure at Hagerstown Hospital and Johns Hopkins, turning 40 on what doctors expected to be his deathbed. Walking out sober but untreated, he describes the most insane period of his life — six marital separations (three drinking, three sober), all while two men, sponsors Bob and Ken, patiently brought the Big Book to his judge's chambers every Friday against his resistance. He calls this stretch "cake-mix recovery": reading the box and expecting a cake.

On December 22, 1989, he opened a Hickory Farms-style box containing four pipe bombs. Part of his right hand gone, bleeding out, eardrums blown, he prayed the Serenity Prayer — the only tool his late-arriving, early-leaving meeting attendance had given him — until a peace arrived that let him accept dying on the floor. He lived. Bob met him in recovery smiling: "It must be wonderful to know you can't be harmed." From that bed forward he worked the steps with a sponsor, later sponsored prisoners, and answered a newspaper ad that made him Attorney General of Palau, where he started a meeting in a black first-things-first t-shirt.

The teaching threaded through every scene: the alcoholic's problem is the thinking, not the drinking — "Simply How I Think" — and self-delusion does not stop when the bottle does. He closes with the Member's Eye View pamphlet and the Matthew passage about the poor in spirit hearing good news, reporting that in Alcoholics Anonymous he has heard and seen exactly that.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Jack opens at Founders Day, thanks the Serenity Singers, tells the room to blame Kent for anything offensive
• 6:00 Started drinking at 14-15 — felt like he fit in, father was alcoholic, the elixir of life
• 14:00 Ocean City police officer — spotting underage drinkers, the cooler racket, three summers of free beer and no arrests
• 32:00 State senator and circuit court judge stories — the badge case, the license plate, trooper courtesy, the governor's appointment
• 52:00 Bar association CLE breathalyzer demonstration — blowing .33 and continuing the night at the Broad Axe and cellar door
• 58:00 Last drink Tia Maria April 7, 1982; seven weeks in ICU with gangrene, organ failure, sent from Hagerstown to Hopkins to die, turns 40 there
• 1:12:00 Walking out sober but untreated — six separations, Bob and Ken bringing the Big Book to his judge's chambers every Friday, cake-mix recovery
• 1:35:00 December 22, 1989 pipe bomb explodes in a Hickory Farms box; prays the Serenity Prayer through to peace while bleeding out
• 1:48:00 Sponsor Bob at the foot of the hospital bed smiling — four pipe bombs, no rational explanation of survival, the steps ahead
• 2:08:00 Woody from Baltimore at Founders Day dining hall leads to prison meetings; Palau newspaper ad leads to Attorney General and a first-things-first group in Koror; closes with Matthew and the Member's Eye View pamphlet