Every Alcoholic Is Two People and the Twelve-Year-Old Scared Kid Is the Real One – Jack B.

About This Speaker Tape

Jack B., an Irish Catholic from New York, shares one of the most harrowing and ultimately redemptive stories in AA speaker tape history. Born one of nine children to an alcoholic father in the pre-AA era, Jack describes himself as a child consumed by "ungrounded and unfounded fear" who could not function like his siblings. At age 12, his brother offered him wine, and the first drink relieved the unbearable fear he had carried his entire life. That single moment launched decades of alcoholic destruction including mob work on the west side of New York, over 125 arrests, 12 hospitalizations in straitjackets, violence, theft, and a wife and children he terrorized.

After doctors gave him five years to live and diagnosed him as a homicidal maniac, Jack's wife threw him out and he spent two and a half years living on the Bowery, homeless, covered in lice, bleeding, and full of hate. His bottom came in a filthy toilet where he hemorrhaged and watched himself "running down a toilet bowl." In that moment he finally put his finger on the bottle as the cause and remembered one line from an AA meeting his wife had dragged him to years earlier: "Don't take the first drink and you won't get drunk." He screamed for someone on the street to call AA.

His sponsor, Sam Cohen, a Jewish man, came to help him, an Irish Catholic who had hated everyone who was not Irish Catholic. Sam taught him about love, his higher power, and how to live. Over 25 years of sobriety, Jack rebuilt everything: his marriage, his family, his ability to speak and function. His wife helped him learn to talk again in front of a mirror. His daughter taught him to hold a fork. His son became an alcoholic too, repeating the cycle, but eventually came to AA. Just weeks before this talk, Jack's wife died suddenly, and he describes standing in a cold hospital yard at five in the morning, asking Higher Power why. The answer came that he had been given 25 years he was never supposed to have, years to prove he was a father and husband who loved them.

Jack closes with the conviction that AA is Higher Power-given and Higher Power-inspired, that if he can recover then anyone can, and leaves the audience with a traditional Irish blessing. His story is a testament to the depths alcoholism can reach and the completeness of the spiritual solution AA offers.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction and Irish joke about the devil and the drunk husband
• 4:30 Defines alcoholism as a physical, mental, and spiritual disease comparable to diabetes
• 8:00 Childhood fear, being the odd child among nine siblings, alcoholic father in pre-AA era
• 13:00 First drink at age 12 from brother's wine jug, instant relief from lifelong fear
• 18:00 Life of crime with the mob, mother threw him out at 16, over 125 arrests
• 24:00 Wife drags him to first AA meeting, he rejects it violently
• 28:00 Doctors give him five years to live, wife gets custody, banished from Brooklyn
• 32:00 Two and a half years on the Bowery, hemorrhages in a toilet, remembers AA
• 37:00 Sponsor Sam Cohen arrives, a Jewish man helps a bigoted Irish Catholic, begins recovery
• 45:00 Wife's recent death, standing in the hospital yard, gratitude for 25 years he was never supposed to have, Irish blessing closing