Head to Heart Is the Greatest Distance Known to Mankind – Ted H.

About This Speaker Tape

Ted H. speaks at the Grants Pass Roundup in 1981, opening as a grateful alcoholic who thanks Higher Power for his alcoholism because it led him to AA. He describes a 23-year drinking career that started at age seven with a sip of his father's beer and escalated through Mount Baldy Ski Patrol drinking, scuba diving on alcohol-laced compressor vapor, flying airplanes at 16, racing cars at 16 on a forged birth certificate, and becoming one of Southern California's youngest subdividers at 24, building 200 houses a year — all while unable to draw a sober breath for the last ten years.

The tape is a masterclass in alcoholic humor: the drinking man's ski pole sawed off and corked to hold a pint, the one-handed alcoholic watch stuck at ten-of, the blackout bar he searched for by its gold toilets until a bartender told him he was 'the drunk that peed in your tuba,' the bumper-jacked garage exits, the cop who stopped him three nights running in Beverly Hills, and the windshield-washer hose dispensing Cutty Sark. Underneath the comedy is a terminal drunk — cirrhosis, hemorrhagic pancreatitis, alcoholic gastritis, hemorrhaging ulcers, BP 60 over 40 — told by his doctor he would die.

After a suicide attempt where he fired a .45 between his eyes and blew a $90 mirror off the wall instead, a woman named Helen took him to his first real AA meeting in a Beverly Hills park. At Jeannie Johnson's house afterward he met Eric Bloor, a high school idol four months sober, and Eddie Jenkins, who later relapsed and died in the Veterans Hospital. Ted credits Jimmy Ryan (700 meetings the first year together), the UCLA counseling course, Alan McGinnis's pamphlet, and a basement surrender in Silver Lake where he finally took Step 3.

The closing teaching is about self-forgiveness as the heart of the amends — you cannot love, judge, or forgive another until you have done it for yourself — plus a pencil-and-paper ritual for making amends to the dead: write in the first person, read it aloud, burn it. He ends with his nine-years-sober daughter on the Mount Baldy number-two lift, telling her the same words the old-timers told him: put your hand in mine and come with me, I've been there, I know the way, hang on tight and don't let go.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Opens as a grateful alcoholic at the sixth Grants Pass Roundup, thanks Bert and the committee, describes the love he feels from the audience
• 4:30 Born an alcoholic — first drink at seven from his father's 20-ounce green bottle, the only lie his father ever told him: 'you won't like it, it's an acquired taste'
• 9:00 Mount Baldy Ski Patrol and the drinking-man's ski pole; fell out of a bus at Mammoth and placed in a downhill race two hours later; Beverly Hills cop with the jumping vein
• 18:00 Social drinkers versus alcoholics — the suppository pill joke, the secretary and her glass of wine, the brother who ran his truck into his own car on New Year's Eve and quit
• 28:00 The full bar-scenario monologue: alcoholic watch, first martini, lashing to the stool, cocktail hour, 20 drinks, bottle of Cutty Sark on the way home, Test Pattern and Ray Charles
• 40:00 The hospital: doctor in tears, cirrhosis, hemorrhagic pancreatitis, blood pressure 60/40, promises not to drink, out 10 days later with the 20-ounce mint julep survival cocktail
• 48:00 Silver Lake basement — dying of loneliness and pancreatitis pain; calls Helen, goes to his first real meeting in a Beverly Hills park; meets Eric Bloor four months sober at Jeannie Johnson's house
• 55:00 Suicide attempt with the .45 automatic; blows the mirror off the wall; tenant Art Cole next door later joins AA six years later
• 63:00 Step 3 surrender on his knees in the basement; sponsor tells him to read the sentence after Chapter 5; writing inventory; amends as an inside job — forgiving yourself first
• 75:00 Daughter on the Mount Baldy number-two lift — he passes on the old-timers' words: put your hand in mine and come with me, I've been there, I know the way; closes with Dennis Waitley's 'take time' list