I Always Got a Room with Twin Beds One to Sleep in and One to Throw Up In – Bill G.
About This Speaker Tape
Bill G. is "Our Southern Friend" — his story appears in the second edition of the Big Book. This tape captures him in full raconteur mode at the 3rd Annual Tampa Bay Roundup in 1989 with over forty-two years of sobriety, and it is one of the funniest old-timer recordings in the archive.
Bill grew up with a pitcher of beer at every family dinner and graduated to selling furniture, where "most all-selling men are two-fisted drinkers." He opened a store with a partner, hid pints of hundred-proof rye in his desk drawer, and told his partner the booze was there in case a customer fainted. When his drinking drove him west, he always got rooms with twin beds — one to sleep in and one to throw up in. He sold his Stacy A. shoes for seventy-five cents, split two bottles of muscatel with a fellow bum in a Newark alley, and ended up at the Salvation Army bailing newsprint for ninety-five cents a week. He got the truck driver promotion by taking the current driver out and getting him drunk on a Monday.
His wife dragged him to his first AA meeting, where he heard a man talking about the grace of a Higher Power, tiptoed back downstairs, and went home to tell his wife a completely fabricated story about the meeting — including an invented liquor table "just there to test you." On January 4, 1947, hemorrhaging and desperate, he finally stayed. He spent his early sobriety dragging drunks from Mulberry Street into his basement apartment. Out of the first hundred men he worked with, he had one recovery — old Boxcar Jimmy, who got sober at seventy and stayed nine years.
The moment that changed Bill was seeing a sparrow take a bath on a stunted oak branch outside his window five years sober: "I had never seen a bird take a bath before. I spent twenty-five years in the bottom of a brown bottle." He calls AA "the romance of recovery" and means every word. Recorded at the 3rd Annual Tampa Bay Roundup, September 1989, a classic convention speaker tape.
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