I Found Higher Power’s Name Written Four Times Directly and Four Times Indirectly in the Twelve Steps – Charlie P.

About This Speaker Tape

Charlie P. opens at Sessions By The Sea with thanks to the chair and his wife Frances, then walks the room back through a drinking story that begins at age six with stolen homebrew and a state trooper who terrified him into wetting his pants. He tracks the arc through blackberry wine in his grandmother's pantry, dandelion wine ruining a St. Patrick's Day solo of "Johnny Doughboy," the infantry in the Pacific where the boys cut aqua-velva with orange juice and distilled poison leaves called mading, and a homecoming where the parade he expected never showed up.

Married on a steady diet of gin, he honeymoons at the John Marshall Hotel in Richmond, where a fire empties the lobby and he ends up sitting on a couch in his wife's Kelly green sweater and white shorts, drinking the bottle he ran back upstairs to save. He loses jobs, eats half a stick of butter to mask his breath before MCing an event, drinks paregoric for his "war nerves," and stages a celery-bag run past the church ladies to get a quart of Virginia Gentleman home, only to have his wife slip Antabuse in it and send him galloping around the house sick.

The hallucinations come hard: green and orange snakes in a flower bed, a brown bear in a rooming-house hallway, rubber monkeys in the jail stealing his cigarettes, an army of ants he tries to barricade with his shoes, a horse with two-story legs sticking its head through a second-floor window, a bird dog that tells him he is headed straight for hell. His mother chooses state institutions over tapering hospitals, reasoning that the one thing the boy doesn't need is one more drink. A 12-step call goes wrong when the man he is trying to help dies overnight and he gets pressed into being a pallbearer in a borrowed suit.

He finally surrenders on a street in Washington after flying up to see a major general, drinking through a hotel, and ending up in an alley with nothing but a yellow shirt and a belt. From that day he begins to heal, finds Higher Power's name written through the steps, marries his first wife a second time long enough to raise and marry off his daughters, and after years alone is given a second wife with no strings attached. He closes on 24 years sober, having puked once and been in jail zero times in that span, calling the people with the Cadillacs and minks "successful failures" and naming true success as seeking and doing the will of Higher Power.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Thanks Earl, Dr. Mills-Cook, Father McGann, and the Sessions By The Sea hosts; introduces wife Frances
• 2:00 At six years old, homebrew from a spring and watching the owner beat the man who stole it
• 4:30 State trooper in his grandmother's rental building, the warm feeling down the front of his trousers, "Mr. Hedrick, I only need one of those"
• 9:00 Pacific infantry: aqua-velva and orange juice, Kickapoo juice from coconut, distilling the poison leaf called mading
• 12:30 Blowing reveille at midnight on the bugle from the tent center pole and the naked first sergeant charging him
• 18:00 John Marshall Hotel fire on the honeymoon, the Kelly green sweater, the politician's wife in her brassiere and panties
• 26:00 Olive oil and butter tricks before MCing events; getting shoveled out the second time
• 32:00 Wife puts Antabuse in his Virginia Gentleman; he gallops around the house puking with his bowels letting go
• 40:00 Hallucinations: snakes in the flower bed, the brown bear in the rooming house, rubber monkeys in the jail stealing cigarettes, the horse with two-story legs
• 55:00 Surrender in a Washington alley with only a yellow shirt and a belt; "there are some people here staying sober, show me how they're doing it"