Marty M. on the First Women in AA and the 1930s

Thank you so much, Rosalie. Twenty-eight years ago this summer, I had a friend named Ed. Ed and I had only been in AA a couple of weeks, and one day Ed said to me, he said, how did you happen to get into AA? I told him and then I said what about you what brought you here well he said I'll tell you it's a real strange story he said I was about half in the bag one night and I got on a Lexington Avenue bus he said there were only about four people on it But he said, Brother, one of them, what a dish. She was the best-looking gal I had ever seen in my life. And he said despite the fact that there were many vacant seats, I went over and sat down in the seat next to this girl. and I tried to strike up a conversation with her but I didn't seem to be getting very far and I suggested that we get off the bus and stop in a bar and have a drink but she didn't respond to that and I asked her for her phone number and I thought I had punched the right key because she opened her bag up and got out a piece of paper and a pencil and she wrote it down, folded it up, handed it to me. Just then the bus stopped and she got off. He said I wasn't too worried. After all, she had given me her phone number or so I thought he said until I opened it up and he said, you know what it said? It said if you want to stop drinking stopped down at 324 1⁄2 West 24th Street. Well, he said, you know, I got thinking about that and I couldn't figure it out. But he said that was a mighty good-looking girl and I decided I'd do it. But he says, I was really afraid to go down there by myself so I got one of my buddies and he said we went down there and he said here's where we came right here to the club and he said I've been coming ever since but I haven't seen that girl about three nights later I ran into Ed and he said I saw her she's here and so she was and she was our next speaker the first gal to come into AA and stay sober Marty Mann Marty Thank you. Thank you, Bob. I haven't forgotten that episode. That guy thought he was being very funny on the bus, and the other people on the us were laughing. But I saw his eyes, and his eyes were crying. And that's how I knew that he was an alcoholic. I didn't know he'd told that story to Bob. I haven't thought of it in a long while. What I told him was, I'll meet you tomorrow night at 8.30, and here's the address. I figured that would get him. Anyway, obviously I've been around AA a long while, but I have felt recently as if I'd had a second rebirth in AA. I think one's first coming into AA is a rebirth. And I'll go back to that in a little, because that's what they asked me to do tonight. But for me, this past four months has been really a rebirth in AA thinking. Four months ago, I fell and fractured my hip. I have been a somewhat active person. Good many of you know that because you've seen me in your various towns and cities and states, both in and out of this country. And I've been on the go for a good many years, and you know I don't think I knew what it was to really stop. And on February 26th, I was stopped cold. There wasn't a thing I could do about and after the first few weeks of extreme pain and anxiety was over I then settled down to what they told me was going to be a very long period of recovery before I could walk again and walk hopefully quite normally again you know for somebody who has been on the go as much and as long as I have that requires an almost total readjustment of your thinking your feeling your living and where do you suppose I turned to find that I had it all I had the whole kit of tools right in my head right at my hand and I think beginning at the very beginning of this with the serenity prayer and I really believe that for several weeks I said that several hundred times a day and then going on to retest and retry and relive the 24-hour plan of one day at a time and I'm still trying to do just that. I just don't believe that I could have managed all that helpless though I was so that I couldn't just walk across the room and sneak a drink but you know and I know that alcoholics no matter how physically helpless they may be temporarily can always find a way around that if they really want to and I haven't a doubt in the world that it could have been done if that had been the way I had chosen to solve this particular problem. Even though it's a good many years, I'm a little surprised still that it didn't occur to me or that it did not become an urge of some sort or that I did not give even serious consideration to that particular way of solving my problem. I think there's a good reason why that's still surprising to me. I've heard other people during the day today talk about the fact that the minute they tasted alcohol, they knew that was for them. Well, that's the way I felt about it. The first time I ever had any, it was magic, because it did solve my problems, whatever they were at the moment. Sheer magic. And just as soon as I found that out, then I was dependent on that magic, not only to solve any problem I had, but pretty soon to just solve being alive. And even though I didn't get into any serious trouble the first ten years of my drinking, I drank enough to have got into trouble. I kind of think, I've felt this for a long while, that you have to be a little tougher and have a slightly better physique and a little more determination than anybody else to even become an alcoholic because you have to drink so much to do it. And the average person's body just won't take it. Of course, that's another reason I believe that our bodies are abnormal where alcohol is concerned and I think that they handle alcohol abnormally from the minute we begin to drink it. How many of us, and I know a really large majority of those I've asked, how many of us were able to out-drink everybody else at first? We carried our liquor better than anyone did. We could drink more than anybody did. And of course we did drink more than anybody else. And this is normal. The trouble is that too many of us grew up in a period where that was considered not only normal but a very fine and splendid thing to be able to do. and people patted you on the back and thought you were just great it's one of the tragic myths in my opinion about drinking that is going to have to be destroyed if we're going to get people to look at this a little bit differently and perhaps take a little greater care when they begin to drink but I didn't know anything like this I had never heard the word alcoholic or the word alcoholism. Oh, I knew there were drunks. Those poor unfortunates that lived down on West Madison Street in my town, which was Chicago, called it the Bowery in New York, Skid Row and other places, but those were the drunks, they were all men too. Didn't see any women down there and I didn't know very much about those people. Certainly they couldn't possibly have been anyone that I might have met or known or heard about and it didn't really bother me very much I didn't give it much thought but the trouble was that when I began to drink and discovered the magic in it and therefore developed the dependence on it that comes from finding the real solution to all your problems you'd be silly if you didn't become dependent on it it was all that wonderful I didn't know where I was going I didn' t know what was happening I didn''t know where that road was leading and when things began to change and began to go bad I didn ''t know why and I didn?'t know whatwas wrong and I spent five years trying to find out five years during which having turned the corner into the trouble I was shooting down like a shoot-the-shoot just as fast as I could go losing everything on the way the typical pattern and the typical story of so many of us but I wanted to know why I was curious, I'd always been a curious person always tried to find out why things happened and nobody could tell me and it may seem unbelievable to some of the younger people in A.A. today but in the 1930s all through the 1930's almost nobody knew the word alcoholic or the word alcoholism certainly no doctors knew it or used it and when I finally began to go to doctors they didn't call me any name they just said people like you they were always talking to me about people like you. But who those people were or what they were, I didn't know. And I had come to the conclusion, and I think with a good deal of reason, that I was insane. I was doing things I didn t intend to do and didn t want to do, saying things I didn d mean, getting into all kinds of jams and fixes that I didn ll want and didn ll like. I didn l like myself that way at all and here all my life i had been known as a willful person who who got what she set out to get and did what she said out to do and so i had up to now and here in this area i could make promises to myself over and over again not to anybody else just to me and i couldn't keep them and this to me meant that something had broken in my head So I did the obvious thing. I began to go to head doctors, shrinks we call them today, and not a one of them talked about my drinking at all. I talked about it to them because I explained that that was why I thought I was nuts. Oh no, they didn't think I was nutsy, but they didnít tell me what I was. This went on for a year or so in England where I was living and then finally I came back to this country because I thought if I'm going to be locked up for keeps and it's clearly coming let it be in my own country and so I came back here and for another year I knocked on the doors of the shrinks again they never would take me on I think they were all too honest they really didn't know a thing about this it could have been too that I was broke but I don't think that was entirely it because some of those men I've known since and they really didn't know when they told me that they'd never had any success with people like you and they were a little frightened of trying again as a matter of fact I think the whole situation was pretty hopeless for people like us until AA came along. In the years I'm talking about, when I was looking for help, AA had barely begun and nobody knew about it. Well, I was lucky in one way. I finally found a doctor who was willing to take me on and he put me in a hospital and there I was for seven months and I was determined that that wasn't enough that I needed treatment for this whatever it was that had broken in my head he was another one who told me you know spoke of people like you he did tell me that he thought I shouldn't drink but he couldn't give me any good reasons for it I wanted to learn how to drink again the way I used to naturally doesn't everybody I've rarely met anyone that didn't come here with that somewhere tucked away in the back of their mind as the real thing they were after. And for many people who come to AA, it's an appalling shock when they discover that that's not what they're going to get here. Nobody's going to teach them how to drink normally again. Nobody's gonna help them become a social drinker. And they're gonna have to swallow the very difficult fact that because they're alcoholics, they can never touch alcohol again. You know, I couldn't swallow that from the doctor. And even though my seven months in the hospital was followed by another 15 months in a private sanitarium and I was getting good treatment every day and I wasn't able to get any better, I was learning a great deal about myself, the things that made me tick, the thingsthat were difficult for me, the reasons I had some problems. and that doctor was sensible enough to know that people like me couldn't drink, and he told me this. That was two of them. But here again, he couldn't tell me why, and I could not accept it from him because he didn't have a good logical reason that could be proved to my skeptical mind. And so every now and then I'd try it out and you can imagine what happened I'd go into town because I was permitted to seven or eight times and I'd come back all right ninth or the tenth time I'd be drunk now I didn't set out to get drunk looking back it was easy to see what I was doing I was testing out my progress was I doing well enough was I learning enough about myself was I progressing in my treatment enough so now I could drink normally and of course I never could and as I said this was a hard pill to swallow it got to the point where that good doctor told me that if it happened again I would have to leave I think you must remember that that was my last hope that I had spent almost five years looking for help and this was the first time that I have been getting any kind of help at all. At least they felt they were helping, they were trying to and I too felt that this was the kind of health I needed and yet it was going to be all taken away all for naught if I got drunk again. well you don't think I never touched it do you I just took infinitely greater care I didn't get caught when I got back and this went on for another four or five months and then one day my doctor sent for me and he was at home sick and he wanted me to come and see him and I was very frightened because I thought this is it now I've had it he's going to throw me out and I went and he was propped up in bed and on the bedclothes he had a red cardboard cover manuscript it's the only way I can describe it and he said I've just been reading this it's written by some people like you I guess he choked over the word even then he couldn't say it he said they seem to have found an answer and he said maybe this will work for you I want you to take this book and read and I took it with my heart very light because I hadn't been thrown out and I went back to my room and the title of this book was Alcoholics Anonymous it was not in print in hard covers it was what they called a multi-lib copy with cardboard covers and wire circles, you know, holding it together. And I started to read it with great excitement. The only trouble was that after a few pages my excitement dropped. There were capital letters all over every page and those capital letters were all G and I wasn't ready for God. and I thought too bad it would have been so nice and I read on a little bit and I found a few things that I liked in it I found one thing I liked very much that made sense to me it talked about alcoholism being an allergy of the body coupled with an obsession of the mind and that this allergy of the body whatever it was and they didn't know what it was couldn't be changed once you developed it you had it it was irreversible and that this was why you could never put alcohol into that body again but you had an obsession of the mind that kept driving you to drink even when you didn't want to or didn't intend to well I knew that that had been happening to me for years and that's something to be done about well I like this but then I began to read some of the things that could be done about it and we were right back at this God bit and I sadly had to put it aside and think well I you know I wouldn't like these people what they are praying mantises or something mission stiffs that pray over you you know I had all kinds of notions so I began telling the doctor what was wrong with this book and I fought it and I picked it apart and I complained about it and this went on day after day and he'd let me talk and then he'd say well go on reading it so I dragged my feet and I read it just as slowly as I could and while this kind of thing was going on over a period of some weeks something happened to me that I had read in that book I didn't connect it then a crisis situation arose in my life for which I felt responsible if I had not been in that particular place if I hadn't been the way I was this would not have happened and yet there was nothing I could do about it and I felt so badly about it and so angry about it as a matter of fact I felt ready to kill I had never felt like that before I was in my room and I'd been reading this damn book and it was lying on the bed and I started thinking about what I wanted to do in this situation and I'd go right down to the town and I buy two bottles and I come back and I get drunk and I tear that place apart well I was showing that remarkable intelligence that all alcoholics have where when we get angry we pick up a sledgehammer and beat our own brains out this is true this is why we can't afford resentments it's why we can't harbor anger because we hurt ourselves when we do it we don't act like normal people we do it backwards and that's what happened to me then and I was lying there planning this and literally seeing red when my eye fell by mistake on this open book on the bed and there was a line in that book that seemed to me to stand out as if it were in block letters, raised. And it read, We cannot live with anger. And that was the battering ram that knocked my resistance right down. And the next thing I knew, I was on my knees beside that bed. There was a big wet spot. I don't know how long I'd been there. Apparently I'd ben crying. And I lifted my head into a sensation such as I'd never had before of utter, total, complete freedom. It was on the third floor. It had been an attic and my room was under the eaves and there was a little window and I looked out that window and the sky had never looked that blue and the grass had never looked that green and I knew I could walk out of that third floor window and keep right on walking. I knew this. I was free and in that freedom my totaled and complete belief in God I never used any other word had come back and the presence of God was in that room with me and had set me free I knew all this and yet the other side of my mind the skeptical side the intellectual side if you like was saying now you really have gone nuts now you better go tell the doctor so I went downstairs and I beat on his door and he came and took one look at me and he pushed the other patient out another door and said come in what happened and I told him what had happened and here again I was lucky if you want to call it luck I don't because many doctors would have said well you've had an hallucination or something has gone wrong with you or they would have reserved judgment on the whole thing and not committed themselves one way or the other to me. But this man said, after asking me many questions, I do not think you are insane. I believe you've had an authentic spiritual experience. Now, he said, go back upstairs and finish that book. and I went upstairs and I picked the book up and started to read again at the beginning and somebody switched books on me it was a totally different book it was the most wonderful book I'd ever read in my whole life I sopped it up like a sponge I read it through at a sitting and then I started all over again and I read this book and I started reading it again and I was on cloud nine believe me for quite a while. I walked around and everyone looked beautiful and everything looked beautiful. There was just one problem I had. My doctor wanted me to go and meet those people like me and I didn't want to meet them. This thing I had was too beautiful. I didn' t want them to mess it up and I still had some very peculiar notions about what kind of people they were going to be and what they might be going to do to me or say to me or pray over me or what have you. And I succeeded in putting this off for a good many weeks until finally one day the doctor picked up the phone when I was in his office and he said, You are going into New York tonight. You'll go to such and such an address and these people are taking you to a meeting. And that's what happened. You know, when I walked into that well in the first place we went on the subway and met a couple of other people on the subway that were going too over to Brooklyn and they told me afterwards I was the most wild eyed looking dame they'd ever seen well I was, I was scared witless I'd had a very nice dinner with three people I could manage that but I didn't know how many people were going to be where we were going or again what they were going to be like. And we got to this house in Brooklyn, and we went in, and it looked to me like there were dozens and dozens and thousands of people there. There weren't really that many. There weren't that many of us then. But I went upstairs to leave my coat, and I didn't come down. I don't know how long I thought I'd get away with it. But you know, a very nice woman came upstairs, and she put her arms around me, and said, we're all waiting for you downstairs we want you there my name is Lois and so I've always kind of felt ever since that Lois was as much my sponsor as Bill later that night after I had attended the meeting and after I had told the truth about my drinking without even thinking about it to all kinds of people I'd never seen before. It was perfectly extraordinary. I found it very easy to talk to these people, to tell them the truth. I wasn't afraid. And after the meeting was over, we all went upstairs to the upstairs sitting room and we sat and talked till about three in the morning. And I asked questions because by that time I almost knew the book by heart. Quite a few things happened that night that I think are the basis of AA. First, I knew what it was all about. I'd read it in the book. I had read the 12 steps over and over again. I knew them practically by heart. I had lots of questions about the techniques that were described in the book. Now, secondly, I had walked into a room full of strangers and discovered it was a room full of the closest friends I'd ever had here were people that knew what I was thinking before I hardly knew it myself they could finish my sentences I could finish their sentences I was completely at home and comfortable with them this was the fellowship of AA this warmth, this friendliness