Chuck C. at the 4th International Convention – 1965

I've never heard his story. I'm looking forward to it, and I know you are. Chuck. My name is Chuck C., and I am an alcoholic. Hi. You know, when I got the communication from Hazel asking me to take this spot this morning I couldn't imagine why I think that now I know I believe there were three reasons two of them you've just heard and the third one why she couldn't get anybody else to take it. So I appear here now as the horrible example that these good reverends have been talking about I'm a simple guy and i don't have any illusions much about myself. I had 43 years to run my life, and I ended up a total failure in every department of life. A failure is a husband, a father, a businessman, a man and a drunk at forty-three. Now I take credit for that. I have been able to live now for something over 7,125 days without having to take a drink of liquor or a sedating or tranquilizing pill of any kind. And I do not take credit for that. that is God as I understand him. There are a lot of little things that have been very, very meaningful to me over the years and I'd like to share a couple of them with you you before I get lost. I reckon it was 18, 18 and a half years ago when a chap who is in the audience here tonight, this afternoon, showed up at a meeting in Englewood where I happened to be. He was from Michigan, and he was taking a tour of the country, and And he wasn't stopping any place where there wasn't an AA meeting, an AA group. And he had been down to Texas and he'd picked up a little plaque down there. And on this plaque it said, If you're not as close to God as you once were or as you would like to be, make no mistake, you're the one that moved. and Smitty went ahead to say all we have to do is to come back home and we find that God's always been there and then one evening early in my experience a chap came up to me after after the meeting was over and he said to me Chuck do you know why it's so hard to find God and I was tired and I didn't want to get into a long philosophical discussion and I would have liked to abduct him but he had me cornered and so I said no why is it so hard for us to find God? And the kid says, because he ain't lost. I've had that one with me a long time. and then one Sunday evening about 16, 17 years ago 18 maybe I had talked in the little town of Highland Park and after the meeting three of us were standing in the middle of the room with our hands on each other's shoulders us, and we were reveling in the fact that people such as us could be returned from the land of the living dead into the land of living. And we were saying one to another, how fortunate can a man be? and one of these lads wasn't talking much and finally looked at me and he says Chuck he says I am ignorant he says I ain't never read no books there's no sense in me reading books because I don't understand it he says I don' t know nothing about the Bible trouble. I don't know nothing about God, but you see, this no man can take away from me. When I practice these principles in all of my affairs one day at a time to the best of of my ability. And when I ask for and hope for a little guidance and direction from some power which I don't understand, he says I feel clean inside and good things happen in in my life and when I could talk I said son don't ever read no books no time I said this is what the book was written about this is the thing itself Isn't this what you and I have always wanted, that we might feel clean inside and have good things happen in our lives? I believe this is the best definition of what AA does through us and to us that I've ever heard in my lifetime and then this other little thing one night again many years ago I'd been talking at the Broadway group Los Angeles and a chap came up to me after the meeting and he was the very essence of well-being he was dressed dressed well, he looked good, and he had a good look. And he says to me, Chuck, when in the hell am I going to have this spiritual awakening? He says, people keep saying, keep coming back, keep come back, and sometime it'll happen. But he says, don't. And I said, well how long you been coming back? back. And he says, eight years. And I said to him, have you had to take a drink? And And I said to him, noting his evidence of well-being, I said, Well, what else has happened to you? And he started listing them. And he just kept on going. And everything good had happened to him except he hadn't won the Vermont primary or something. I don't know why. and by this time I'm laughing my head off and he got mad at me because this was very serious and I said to him man wake up you've had it for eight years but you don't recognize it now he said could you get sober on your own oh he says no No, but you came here and something happened and you haven't had a drink anymore. And he said, yes. I said, did all these good things happen to you before you got here? And he says, no. But you came there and something happened and good things happened in your life. And he say, yes." And I said," Well, all you need now is to recognize from whence it came and start thanking God and passing the ammunition and you're home free. And then there's one other little story that grows in meaning to me as the years go by. I don't know where it came from, But it's the story of the three little fish. It seems that these three little fish had had lunch and all they were doing was playing around in the water, having a good time when a big wise fish swam by and he said good afternoon children, isn't the the water fine this afternoon? And then he swam on off. And just as soon as he got out of here, these three little fish got together. And one of them says, the man spoke about water. He says, what's water? He says you. Did you ever hear of water? He says no. Says how about you? No, he says I never heard of it. And the third one and says it's easy to die. So they swam all over the Pacific Ocean looking for water in which they lived and moved and had their being. Now I wonder if that hasn't been pretty much the way with you and with me. for 30 of my 43 years of life I was looking for your God I looked in many philosophies and in many religions and I didn't find him And in January 1946, I ran out of time. Because long back there, 25 years before, I had found an elixir called alcohol. Now when I'd found this, it was not a problem. It was an answer. proving that the problem was already here. If I hadn't needed an answer, alcohol would not have supplied it. But I needed it, and there it was. And so alcohol to me was an answer for 15 years. years. But after fifteen years something happened and my entry turned into a problem. And in the next ten years it beat me to death. I never was one who learned easily. I recognized 10 years before I got here that I had a problem, that I wasn't drinking well. I had had a code for drinking just as I'd had a cold for everything else in life and I wasn''t drinking according to my code and I spotted this as a personal weakness, something that I had to overcome in order to get rid of it. And I spent that next 30 years working on my problem. And the harder I worked, the worse it got, and the worse I got, the harder it worked. And now I'm quite sure that I could, I would would be perfectly honest in telling you that in the last five years, 90% of my waking time was spent on that problem. And I was still saying to myself five years after everybody quit listening to me, I'll beat this thing if it's the last thing I ever do. And it came came that close to being the last thing I ever did. I'm mindful also that on my next-to-the-last-drunk, after I'd made a little 6,000 mile jaunt in a blackout. I'd driven my car from Beverly Hills to Louisville, Kentucky to North Michigan and back to the coast, and I don't remember five percent of it. And I'd gotten home and had taken the bed to finish my drunk. This is where I always finished them, was in bed drinking the clock around. And i never quit until i had so completely and totally depleted my body that I couldn't even roll over to look under the bed to see if I had another bottle. And this time finally came, and I had to quit. My family, for some reason were not very cooperative in those circumstances. And so I quit, and maybe it was twenty-four hours or thirty-six after my last drink that I was able to get up and go to the kitchen to get a glass of buttermilk. And Mrs. Sue and Dickie were sitting out in the living room, and they heard me let out out a bellow and heard me at the floor. And they came running out expecting to find me in an alcoholic convulsion, chewing my tongue full of holes and babbling like an idiot as was my wont. But they didn't find me that way. I was just stretched out on the kitchen floor, peaceful as anybody ever saw. I wasn't doing nothing. I left the great hill like a cadaver, I'd turn blue. And they tried to wake me up and they couldn't, and they got a little exercise about it. And nowadays this just tickles me pink, you know? You remember when you used to come home from the drunk and everybody in town was looking for you, 90% of whom all they wanted to tell you was that they never wanted to see you again? Why in the hell didn't they leave us alone? But no, they had to seek his out and tell us. And I'm sure my wife and my kids had been praying for me to die for at least five years. and they came out and find me dead and they got all exercised and they got the oxygen squad down there and after some little time they tell me they brought me around and there's a young doctor with them and I was talking to him a little afterwards and he told me to all intents and purposes that I was dead he told me that nobody would ever be able to bring me back again under like circumstances. And he told me that if he was me, he wouldn't do that anymore. He was a get it. Well, it might have been another 48 hours when I was able to get the old dirty bathrobe on and start walking. You know, when the late president brought out this dealie about walking fifty miles a day, I sure had to laugh. I've done that before nine o'clock in the living room on thousands of occasions. So I got the bathrobe on, and I started walking up and down the living room floor, sweating, freezing, shaking, dying, and walking. And Mrs. E was standing over by the fireplace. place. And as I walked away from her, she says, Chuck, don't you think you'd get a little help if you'd read the book Alcoholics Anonymous? She might as well have hit me with a ball bat. I turned around and I said, You, my very own wife, suggesting that I read a book written by a bunch of drunks. I who have read all the good books for the good office, and you you want me to read a book written by a bunch of drunks. Why? I said, you wound me deeply. How insane can you get? I'd just been dead 48 hours before. And she wounded me deeply and I polished her off completely by saying and besides, I can write a better book than that myself. So you see, I could not come to Alcoholics Anonymous until I'd run out of choice as long as I had choice my choice was never to come to AlcoholicsAnonymous by long before this time I had already decided that the human race was a great cosmic mistake. And I didn't even like the good people and the drunks I hated because I was a drunk and I hated me and I hate all of you. And the very idea of me coming to a bunch of drunks for help was absolutely obnoxious to me. And I could not come until I'd run out of everything including choice. I gave it a good fight. I threw in the family, my wife and our kids, our home, my job, my health, my sanity my money and that's all I had and I lost and I found you know it's a funny thing on the next drunk that came around it was a little different than all others because I got drunk immediately and I'd been a periodic in the last ten years on purpose. Because you see, I was going to beat this thing. And you can't fight a very good battle when you're down on your back. So I would die until I could live and then I'd build my body into a good machine again and then psycho myself myself or something. And I'd analyze my last drunk, and I'd see where I made my mistakes, and I decided not to do it that way anymore. And then I'd get going again because I had had to win. But I never got drunk in a hurry. I always sampled my way on back to bed. I'd start in with one, and it didn't do nothing, and then a few days later I'd take two, and they didn't doing nothing. And a week later I would go out and have a half-dozen, nothing. nothing. And a week later, I'd go out and have an evening's normal drinking, nothing, not even a headache. And then I'd come up with that bright idea that this time I had done it right, I was normal, and that I could drink normally. And so I'd go about my business. I was a normal guy. Well, in a few days, I would be drinking a pint a day. But anybody can handle a pint a day. That didn't bother me. And I'd drink a pint for a little while and then I'd step it up to two pints. And after a week or two, two pients, I'd quit eating. And you can't live on two pints if you don't eat. So I'd stab it up to three, and three pints for a little while, and then I'd get the flu. Mr. Seed called up and said, Chuck's got the flu again. I was the fluentest man you ever saw. I had the flu for five years, and I was getting worse all the time so I'd have a worse disease. So I got pleurisy and that's a good one. You can go around holding yourself together and you don't shake, you know. People say what's the matter with you? Oh, I had a bad effect of where was he last night that lasted me for three years and I was getting worse all the time so the last three years I had to have a worse one and it was the old kicker I had a heart attack last night and you know something after putting there 20 years people are still coming up and asking me if I ever have any more trouble with my heart My wife never missed a beat in his life. The trouble with mine was every time it beat, I jumped out at the back window. So I never got drunk in a hurry. I sampled my way back in every time. But this last time, I got drunk immediately. I had a little good fortune, and if there's anything worse for a drunk than bad fortune, it's good fortune. My boss had called me in and said to me, you've had a lot of trouble this year. Now, he didn't mention alcohol, but he knew that I knew what he meant when he said trouble. And he says, I think it's because of the pressure you're under, because, you see, he was not an alcoholic. And he says, I'm going to take a little pressure off of you. So instead of shooting me, he gave me $3,000 for a Christmas present. That really put me under pressure. I had won again. So I got drunk on the way home. And I missed everything between that night and the middle of January. And this is what I want to tell you. If my wife were talking, she's here, God love her. If she were telling this story, she would tell you that when I went to bed to drink, to drink I put away seven quarts of whiskey every three days. Now that isn't much whiskey if you just do it for three days, but if you stack enough of those three days on top of each other you've got a lot of liquor. And that's what I've been doing from the Friday before Christmas to the middle of January. But sometime around the middle of January I woke up, I had nothing in my body but liquor. I hadn't eaten, I I hadn't done anything but drink. But I woke up with a clear head, the clearest head I've ever had in my life, before or since. And for the first time in my adult life, I saw me without anything between me and me. All the excuses were gone. My God Almighty, the red light's on. I haven't started. I've got to hurry. This is the end of side one. Stop your cassette and turn your cassette over. You ain't going anyplace now anyway, are you? This is a last meeting. Thank you. you. And I knew that morning that I'd failed in the business of living. I didn't know why, but I accepted the fact that I had lost the battle of life. I knew why Mrs. C was divorcing me after 20 years. I knew why our kids wouldn't come home when I was around, and I knew why the boss had sent word to the house that if I ever stepped foot in a plant again, he was going to throw me through the window. And I totally and completely accepted the fact that morning that everything dear to me in life was gone and that I wasn't entitled to have it back. And it suddenly became very necessary for me to be sober till I died. And for one reason and one reason only, I did not want sobriety for myself because my life was over. I knew I was going to die and I didn't care. But I needed the time I had before I kicked off to try to rub out the record. I didn t want my wife and those kids to remember me as nothing but a tongue-chewing, babbling idiot, drunk. And the last thing that went through my mind before the curtain came down and I was again sick, insane, and drunk. I remembered that I'd read Jack Alexander's article in the Post in 1941. And I said to myself, if I ever live to get out of this bed, I will find AA. And then down came the curtain and I had a lot of dying to do but from that moment till this I have never had to take a drink of liquor or a sedating or tranquilizing pill of any kind. now that is God as I understand him too and to make it quick I didn't have any idea I'd used all this time up but to make the point to make a very very quick I have no illusions about me I cannot run my life I cannot running my business I cannot run my wife or kids I cannot run anything period what can I do I can practice these principles in all of my affairs one day at a time to the best of my ability and I can share me with anybody that wants me my experience, strength, and hope in love with anybody that wants me. And that's all I can do. And if it isn't good enough, I've got to die. That's all i can do and that's all i do do and it must be pretty good because i never had it so good i never had it so good not only have i been sober for put nearly 20 years years, but my family was put back together. I got a new body, my business life was put back together, my social life was back together and I have a family as big as this world whom I love and who love me. Now all of this would seem to be enough, wouldn't it? It's quite a lot to a guy that would have settled for the meanest old unhappy sobriety on the face of the earth. But I have something else. I have a God of my very own. That's like my shadow. He goes in and out with me. And wherever I am, he is. And every experience in my life, both the so-called good and the so- called bad, I share with him just like a little old knot-headed kid I talked to him all the time we talked with each other if you'd follow me out of Laguna up the canyon Tuesday morning coming up you might not see anything anybody in the car but me and I might be laughing I might cry and I I might be having quite a little talk with somebody, and you wouldn't see anybody. And it would be going something like this. Look, Father, I'm reporting for duty. I'm going to move it around. I'm gonna do the best I can with what I got today. And all I want out of you is a little guidance and direction and the power to carry it out. Sure, thank you. you. Or I might be saying, look, Dad, look what I did yesterday. Isn't this awful? Isn't it a hell of a thing for a guy like me to do? I know better. I know why I did it. I don't like it. And I'm going to do better. And with your help, I'll do a lot better. Sure, thank you. And throw it away. And when the good thing happens, we talk that that over, too. I say, look, Dad, isn't this terrific? This couldn't happen to a bum like me, but it did. And I know where it came from. I sure thank you. And we throw that away. Because, you see, this is my day. I have no past. I want no future. It is my business to walk in this way it is my business to practice these principles in all of my affairs it was my business is to share me with anybody that wants me and it is his business to take care of me and all I gotta do is thank God and pass the ammunition and that's all I have done and I've done it and I'm going to sit Sit down. God bless you all. Thank you very much. Have a wonderful morning. Gee, it's afternoon. And to put the finishing touches on this for us to make this memorable occasion just a little better, we give you Bill. As you and I know, every AA meeting of whatever kind and purpose It is really a communion. And a communion is a time when we gather together under God's grace. We close every communion with the prayer of our Lord but before we come to that I would like to recall to you that to us early people and countless ones since, we have heard over the centuries the voice of Francis, one of the greatest followers of the Master. He has voiced our aspirations as none of us could. It is altogether fitting that you share with me, the prayer of Francis. Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there's doubt, faith. faith, where there is despair, hope, where there is darkness, light, and where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is is in pardoning that we are pardoned. And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Now let us conclude. clue. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever forever and ever. Amen.