Contempt Prior to Investigation as the Operating System of the No-Person Alcoholic – Kay S.
About This Speaker Tape
Kay shares from a Zoom meeting during the early COVID lockdown, speaking to the Toluca Lake Speakers Group with a sobriety date of August 3, 1975 — nearly 45 years. She opens by describing her 99-year-old stepfather, a World War II Normandy veteran whose trip to Washington D.C. was canceled by the pandemic, and uses his perspective on surviving the Depression, the war, and a two-year tuberculosis sanitarium stay to frame the idea that AA people know how to live through uncertainty one day at a time.
Her drinking story is unusual: she didn't cross the invisible line gradually. A kindergarten teacher sent her home saying she wasn't emotionally ready, and she grew up in Westchester near LAX, adoring her playboy alcoholic father who drove her around Manchester Boulevard in a '54 convertible with bourbon in one hand. After her mother remarried the stepfather she resented, Kay retreated into fantasy — what she later learned to call the bondage of self. At 13 she transformed her appearance and fell in with the drug crowd, but didn't drink until age 18, when a boy at a party handed her a bottle of White Mountain sparkling wine. She downed six bottles that night and never drew a sober breath again until AA. By age 22 she was drinking a half-gallon of Gallo Rhinegarten daily, scraping frost off the freezer into her jug for breakfast, doing figure-eights in a vacant Palms parking lot in her Dodge Challenger on lunch breaks, and eating solo dinners at the Jack in the Box on Manchester Boulevard — proud that she'd mustered the courage to order from a plastic clown head.
One October 1974 night, listening to Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, she caught her reflection and said Higher Power help me. The next night at Santa Monica Junior College she randomly asked a stranger named June for directions — June happened to be there to give a lecture on alcoholism and became her sponsor. It still took a year of slips before her August 1975 sobriety date, which finally stuck after a sponsor named Jerry E. at a lesbian garage sale told her she was boring, had no redeeming features, and would do exactly what she was told. Jerry taught her to say hi first, suit up, show up, work at central office, and take contrary action.
Kay describes her 16-year-sobriety divorce as an end-of-the-world moment that cost her family, spouse, and money, and how June sent her to Al-Anon and Pat Roach in Orange County. She recounts calling her friend Riley in the middle of the night asking what to do in the dark hallway between one door closing and another opening — his answer was sweep the hallway. She also describes a botched ear surgery five years ago that destroyed her vestibular balance system, and how the physical therapy to retrain the left brain to compensate for the right mirrors how AA action retrains the selfish side of her. She closes celebrating the characters she's known — Shirley O'Hara who left her car running, Chuck C., Norm Albee — and insists AA takes no-people and turns them into yes-people.
Discussion
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