I Got the Monkey Off My Back But the Circus Is Still Going On – Liz B.

About This Speaker Tape

Liz B. opens with a flood of greetings — thanking her 30-year sponsee who flew in from New York, the committee, fellow circuit speakers, and women who took her to lunch — before settling into her story. She had her first drink at 12, rice wine her mother fermented in a crockery, and was already drinking to pass out. By 14 she was selling bathtub liquor in the neighborhood. At 17 she married Mr. Bailey on January 3, 1939, a man she says cried for 47 years until he went home with the Lord in 1986.

She describes the shape of her drinking: disappearing for a loaf of bread and coming back a week later, burning her legs frying a frozen chicken at a neighbor's house, planning elaborate birthday parties for her children and never making it home from Sutton's Bar and Grill, waking up on a Liberty Park bench three blocks from her own new bedroom set. Mr. Bailey once begged a neighbor to let her jump from a second-floor window. She had every material thing a woman could want — fur coats, a leopard coat she gave away because she was sure he'd made it to spot her with — and none of it touched the drinking. The turning point came when she overheard Mr. Bailey tell her mother she was a sick girl, not a bitch, and something broke open. She spent two days in the basement praying to die, then called AA.

Her sobriety date is July 11, 1952 — 53 and a half years at the time of this talk. She walks through the hard after: Mr. Bailey worked to get her drunk again and she had to leave him for 24 years, returning only to nurse him through his last illness and hear him say he loved her for the first time. Her son Dennis was shot and killed at two in the morning. Her father hanged himself. Her sister jumped thirty floors and laid on a canopy five days. Another sister drank herself to death. Of her mother's five alcoholic children, Liz is the only one sober. She survived cancer 38 years ago after a doctor gave her six months, and a stroke that left her shaking until she turned on a jazz station and danced it off.

She closes on the mechanics of staying alive: never say no to a call for AA, get another drunk in your life, find a Higher Power of your own choosing, and remember that the monkey is off her back but the circus is still going on. She reconciled with her oldest son at 65 after decades of his unforgiveness — one phone call on his birthday. She is flown all over the country as a circuit speaker, celebrates her anniversary on Jones Beach because the rooms can't hold the crowd, and tells the Marietta audience plainly: we can do together what I cannot do alone.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Liz calls her sponsee, committee, and circuit-speaker friends to their feet — the Marietta Roundup welcome
• 3:00 First drink at 12 — her mother's rice wine in a crockery, sipped through cheesecloth until she put on a real drunk
• 6:00 Selling bathtub King Kong booze at 14 at 40 cents a cream; meeting the sharp dude with the roll of ones
• 9:00 January 3, 1939 — crying through her wedding at 17 to Mr. Bailey, the sorriest day of his life
• 14:00 The frozen chicken at the neighbor's — burned both legs to raw meat that stayed that way until AA
• 18:00 Mr. Bailey yelling to Nana downstairs to let the bitch jump from the second-floor window
• 24:00 Waking up in her son's twin bed — Mr. Bailey telling her mother she's a sick girl, not a bitch; two days in the basement praying to die
• 30:00 July 11, 1952 — first AA meeting in a new two-piece blue suit; two women tell her she doesn't look like an alcoholic
• 42:00 Leaving Mr. Bailey after 24 years of sobriety, then returning to nurse him and hear him say I love you for the first time on his deathbed
• 55:00 The birthday phone call — her oldest son in California telling her it was the best birthday of his life; 53 years to hear it