Good Orderly Direction as a Higher Power – Brian M.

About This Speaker Tape

Yorkville, New York, post-WWII. An eleven-year-old Brian M. sits on a stoop, watching a war hero make cigarette smoke vanish into thin air. He follows the lead, gulping free brewery kegs until the street waves and he is throwing up on the pavement. For Brian, the alcoholic life was a series of "human shrugs"—the casual, collective indifference of a neighborhood where a man could beat his wife or lose his car as long as he went to work.

He lived in the grip of the grape, a round-the-clock drinker who forged papers to go to sea and woke up in a Singapore jail with a mohawk of blood and stitches. He worked as a dynamiter in the New York tunnels, eventually suffering an alcoholic seizure that left him flopping on a flatcar while the bomb squad looked on. He mocked the "AA Quasimodos" until a Higher Power finally caught up with him on April Fool's Day, 1972, when he was carted off to detox wearing a vomity T-shirt and pee-stained pants.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Brian M. opens with memories of 11-year-old drinking on New York stoops.
• 11:45 Description of the 'alcoholic shrug' and the cultural normalization of drunkenness.
• 18:20 The 'human shrug' and a chaotic encounter with a magistrate in Singapore.
• 26:10 Laughter: Brian M. describes his first confusing phone call with 'Intergroup' and his fear of 'ninja group guys.'
• 34:15 The 'alcoholic seizure' vs. epilepsy diagnosis after a tunnel-digging accident.
• 42:30 Skepticism toward the '90 meetings in 90 days' suggestion and the 'AA Quasimodo' image.
• 51:10 The 'wolf man' moment: being carted into detox on April Fool's Day.
• 58:40 Identification: The nurse reveals she is an alcoholic, shifting Brian M.'s perspective.
• 1:08:15 Discussion of 'Good Orderly Direction' as a replacement for traditional concepts of a Higher Power.
• 1:18:30 The emotional weight of burying a friend's ashes at the international date line.
• 1:25:40 The triumph of overcoming a lifelong phobia to get a driver's license at age 50.