Lying by Intimation as the Alcoholic’s Native Tongue — the Kind of Lie You Don’t Catch Yourself Telling – Alabama C.

About This Speaker Tape

Alabama C. (born Evelyn) speaks at the St. Andrews Speaker Meeting in Saratoga, California on November 20, 1982, a week shy of her 30th AA anniversary. A Southern woman raised in a good Methodist home, she started drinking at 16 to show off around older peers and spent the next 23 years building a career as a full-blown alcoholic. She married a mining engineer, played company hostess, and used his position, her brothers' money, and a talent for lying by intimation to protect her drinking while racking up fake diagnoses at hospitals across the country.

She describes getting to her first AA meeting in North Hollywood in a navy suit, pearls, and white gloves, stopping on the way for two bottles — one for the meeting, one for the hospital — because she arrived without the only requirement: a desire to stop. She didn't identify with the 502s or the Lincoln Heights jail stories and sat in judgment of a man who admitted to federal prison time. Years later she would marry exactly such a man, a sober alcoholic who wrote the same kind of bad checks she had written across the Waldorf, the Pierre, and the Roosevelt.

Her real bottom came after breast surgery when her brother Dan, coached by the Al-Anons, told her the family was releasing her with love — stay sober or die in the drunk tank with the winos. She drank a case of whiskey alone, was carried into a detox over an empty store in a snowstorm, and went insane for five days and nights while a man named Walt prayed aloud that Higher Power would restore her to sanity. In a dirty bathroom with the door ajar she heard Higher Power tell her she could be sober and sane a day at a time — and the miracle, she says, was that she believed it.

The tape closes with her learning self-respect at 76 cents an hour as a store clerk, a failed marriage made out of loneliness, a tarnished halo deflated by old-timer Dick D., and the lesson that the only difference between her and the prostitute upstairs was that Alabama didn't know she could tell and didn't need the money.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction — Evelyn C., known as Alabama, St. Andrews Speaker Meeting, Saratoga CA, November 20 1982
• 2:00 Close to 30 years sober; why she kept the name Alabama — Evelyn was the drunk she was ashamed of
• 8:00 Discovering alcohol can't talk, think, or act — she was the problem, not the bottle
• 14:00 Sponsor Walt teaches her she's a liar and a thief — using hospitals like hotels, stealing doctors' time
• 22:00 Seven doctors, John Hopkins thyroid appointment, tearing up the letter asking them to check for alcoholism
• 30:00 First AA meeting at North Hollywood — navy suit, pearls, veil, two bottles in her purse, no desire to stop
• 42:00 Waldorf Astoria bad checks, the Pierre, the Roosevelt, the bank chairman who covered her thousand-dollar check
• 55:00 Brother Dan weeping in the hospital — releasing her with love, the winos in the drunk tank
• 65:00 Five days and nights insane in a detox over an empty store; Walt praying aloud; hearing Higher Power in the dirty bathroom
• 80:00 76-cents-an-hour store clerk job and Dick D. deflating her halo over the 'poor sick girl' upstairs