Ninety-Five Percent of Alcoholics Die Drunk in an Era with More Resources Than Ever — Why? – Clancy I.

It's Clancy Emslund. I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Clancy. I'm very glad to be here for this happy occasion tonight. Happy to have been smuggled into town. So I could go to the restaurant and surprise Joe. A lot of work for that one reaction, I'll tell you. Well, I want to thank Matt and Heidi for picking up the airport, taking good care of me. Glad to be here again. Glad to be in Norman. I was telling some folks at dinner, I'm going to tell you a little fact about me that you didn't know. That probably I may be the only one in the room who ran for a touchdown in Owens Stadium many years ago. I'll tell you how that happened. I was down here to speak at a meeting in the 1970s, and they had me staying at the dormitory over at the university. School hadn't started yet, but football practice had started. And I am ambly over to see the football practice. They had just finished. They were all coming in. Went to the locker room. And the guys drive them home and this and that. But the gates were wide open. Swam into the middle of Owens Stadium. Now the soul was there. And I stood on the 50-yard line. I thought, I'm going to run for a touchdown. As I was saying at dinner, I haven't had a happy childhood, but it's been a long one. I've had a number of achievements in my life. This is another one of my achievements. I've had the opportunity to be in places. I've been around the world, in the White House, Supreme Court, and be in movies. But the one I like to think of most is I introduced Otto to Roz. I'm sure the creators of the first atomic bomb had the same feeling. But it was a very nice evening. I thought she was going out. I'm sure there are young people and new people in the room. What's all the big hoorah about here? So I think I've been sober forever, so what? And that's not an unnatural feeling. I should follow your format. Through the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I've not had a drink or a sedating medication since October 31, 1958. And for that, I'm really, truly grateful. But when you're around here a while, it gets to be rather an interesting thing. A lot of people say, you know, a lot of questions about alcoholics. I'm sure we have people. I'm sure we have people in the room who are not alcoholics, not quite sure what it's all about. What's this big deal, you know? Haven't had a drink? My grandmother died with 88 years of sobriety. You know, what's the big deal about that? One of the great puzzlements is that over the years, as we get known more about alcoholism, there seems to be kind of a strange phenomenon here. There are people who drink, who drink themselves or who are alcoholics by any way of measurement, when something dramatic happens, there may be a loss of a job, even a death in the family, something, a loss of a family, something dramatic happens, and they are so shocked, they quit. And they never drink again. And then there are people also, apparently alcoholics by any measurement standards, who not only are psychologically addicted, but become physically addicted. They are the people for whom treatment centers were originally created, and they are taken off medically, withdrawn, and each step of the withdrawal, they point out to them, look what you've done to your family, to your home, to your life. And these people get off that stuff, and they stay, they quit, and they never drink again. And then there's other type of alcoholics who drink, they're apparently alcoholics, and something dramatic happens, something, a death in the family, a loss of a family, loss of a job, something terribly dramatic happens, and they quit. But they always begin to drink again. And there are people who have taken off medically, and they really understand the nature of their problems. And they eventually always drink again, much to the chagrin of everyone around them. And these are the people that have been most troublesome to society since the invention of alcohol. In every generation of men, there's always been some mention made, there was some small majority of people who act badly as a result of drinking, unlike the majority of people who use it wisely. And they've been viewed simply. Sometimes it's possessed by the devil and put to death sometimes. And they've been scourged and whipped and put in jail and sent to Australia, to found Australia, all sorts of things. Most of the early settlers of Australia were penal colony prisoners, alcoholics. And these are the people that have always been an absolute bafflement to the people who are drunk. They've been charged with helping them, the clergy, the medical profession, the law, and so on. What in the hell is wrong? Why do you do this? And I suppose there are very many alcoholics in this room who haven't heard that, who you've made a promise and mean it, that I'm not going to do this anymore, I swear to God. And eventually you do it, and they want to know why. And I can't tell them because I don't know why. And I'm sure most of us have backed into a corner where you have to just finally lash out. Leave me alone, damn it, just leave me alone. And never know why, and then sorry about that later. But I don't know how to explain it. And Bill Wilson understood these types of alcoholics. He wrote this book about them, of course. But you'll notice again and again in the book he refers to alcoholics of our type. He doesn't ever mention what the other types are. But alcoholics of our type, our type of alcoholics, the people who will not, cannot, do not choose, who do not seem to have the ability to stay sober. And in the whole recorded history, there's never been any organization that's ever been able to help people do this. There was one group briefly in 1840, most of you know about that. Six old guys got together in a bar in Baltimore. And one day I just got down to jail again. He said, oh God, they understood how I felt, but they don't understand how I feel. And you guys, you guys don't understand. They said, yeah, we feel the same. Maybe we can help each other stay sober. And we'll take a vow and we'll write some, we're elect officers. No, six of us will have a club. And everybody, yeah, that's what we need, six more drunks going to hold a club to stay sober. And somehow they stayed sober. Every time a fellow drank and he talked to the other five guys, they stayed sober. And eventually a couple of guys got down from Philadelphia. And they went back there to try, that was up there. Interesting. They had a little group in Washington. And they finally had a little name for themselves. They called themselves the Washington Movement, the Washingtonians. And they, at the end of the year, they had several hundred people staying sober. You don't understand why. What the hell is going on here? And after two years, they're in most of the states, northern states. And in fact, but they're still looked upon as some sort of crazy people, you know, idiots. So they had selected Washington's birthday as their anniversary. They actually had a birthday. It actually started in March, but that was close enough. It made it germane to Washington movement. So just before Washington's birthday in 1842, they sent out a letter to all the people they knew where they could find an organization and said a lot of people think we're kind of goofy. Invite somebody from your community to come in and talk on our anniversary meeting. Not so we care so much what they say, but they will see that we are not so odd. So all over America, 1842, they invited, well, significantly persuasive people in the talk and Springfield, Illinois, for example, invited a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. You look through a book of Lincoln's talks. He has a long, you hear a long talk. You find a long talk to the Washingtonians, February 22nd, 1842. They give a really long talk, but it boiled down to this. I don't know why you drink the way you do, but I know many of you and you're sensitive, intelligent people. You know, the difference between you and me is I do not have the thirst. I don't know why I've been spared. There is, but you have it and you're able to do something about it. And then they got a couple of guys in the Washingtonians who were really spellbinders. They'd go around and lecture on how to stay sober. And by 1845, they had a membership. It was estimated the bottom number was 100,000 sober drunkards. Can you conceive that? That may not seem like much to you, but after five years, didn't even have a thousand. And then no phone. No phones, no radios, no nothing. Every connection had to be one-to-one, one-to-one. And then they did something in 1845. They got thinking. It seems kind of right because people say the same thing today, some people. Gosh, if we could help drunkards, we should be helping a lot of other people as well. We should be able to help people who are not drunkards, but who are narcotics addicts. Not narcotics like today, heroin and cocaine, but... Opium and things of that nature they had then. We should get involved in other movements. We should do that. A large group got involved in the temperance movement, which meant stamping out the sale of alcohol. Some got in politics. All over, people just working to better the country and stamp out addiction of all sorts. By 1848, the Washingtonians were extinct. In the very few examples, they all died drunk. They died. They were so extinct that nobody... When Bill Wilson, in the 1950s, was discouraged because AA was shrinking rapidly, and he couldn't understand the reason why, some guy in North Carolina sent him a letter and said, we're going to weigh the Washingtonians. And he wrote an article about the Washingtonians for the new paper called The Great Blind. Bill Wilson went to the library and found about the Washingtonians. You'd never heard of them. And he realized how similar their experience had been to AA in many ways. And he read about how the Washingtonians, they got in terrible conflict with the speakers. Who was getting the most write-ups in the paper? Who was getting the most attention? Who was best known? Where did the money go? On and on, all the little crappy thing, getting involved with outside movements. And in an effort to save AA, he sat down in the mid-1950s, mid-1940s, I should say, in the 1950s, and he wrote the Twelve Traditions. And they are based as much on the Washingtonian experience as they are on the AA experience. And they saved AA. Yet today, people still think, oh, that's out of date. They're not out of date because they deal with human emotions, which have destroyed alcoholics for eternity. But little by little, AA has grown. AA today is in 132 countries. It's almost impossible to find a city in the United States where there aren't a lot of alcoholics. It's almost impossible to find a city in the United States where there aren't a lot of alcoholics. It's about a hundred meetings. In our city alone there are over 2,000 weekly meetings. We have the largest group in the world there, 1,200 meeting people every Wednesday night. There are a lot of things. Everywhere you go, you can't go through Oklahoma, there's an AA meeting in Ada, there's an AA meeting in Enid, there's an AA meeting everywhere you go. And it's not necessary to die from alcoholism anymore. And so we are very fortunate. We live in a window where it's not necessary to die from alcoholism anymore. to die from alcoholism, because up until recently in history, with the exception of that little moment of the Washingtonians, there was no place to go. There were all kinds of treatments that never worked. And so we are living a life where it's possible to stay sober without much problem. There's only one kind of cloud in the sky, and that is today, where there's more sobriety in America than any place in the history of the world. You know, it's really, it's just nothing like this has ever existed. It's estimated in America that about 95% of alcoholics still die drunk as a direct result of drinking. And the question is, why, for God's sakes, why? And I used to wonder that myself. I found out I've been sober a while, and I've been working with alcoholics, so I'm staying sober. And I think, why? Why aren't these people sober? Why aren't these people staying sober? Then I had to stop and remember. Why did I slip year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year? I went from being a kind of a medium high-bottom drunk to being an average drunk to being thrown out of a skid row mission with my front teeth kicked out, standing on a street corner. And at that moment, I would have bet my life I was not really an alcoholic, because my problems were different. And if someone would have said, well, prove you're not an alcoholic, I probably wouldn't have been able to do that, because I wouldn't have had the objectivity to stand back and delineate the differences. So I probably would have had to do what frightened people like me do when we get cornered, and we take refuge behind bluster. We say things like, oh, get out of my face, you son of a bitch. Leave me alone. Get away from me. It sounds funny, but it isn't funny at all. It's your last defense you have against the cold and unfeeling. It's your last defense you have against the cold and unfeeling world, it seems like. Yet, why would I be sober today? What in the world had happened? And I've thought about that many times. I was on a street corner in Los Angeles. I just had my front teeth kicked out in the Phoenix jail. I'd lost all my clothes at the Phoenix. My wife and children had left me in Dallas. I had just been fired in Dallas from a big job at Tracy Lock. I went from being something. They repossessed my car. They evicted me from my house. My wife took the kids and left. I had no money. And I was in a car accident. And I had to get out of the state because I was going to be brought back to Big Spring, maybe for more electric shock treatments. And I just was on the dead run. And I stood in this damn old street corner in Los Angeles, the cold rain, and sick and desperate. And I would have bet my life that I could not be an alcoholic. And then I could understand. When I think about that, I understand why people don't come to AA and stay sober. I think of all the problems that afflict alcoholics or people of my type. I suppose the most lethal one is this. And I'm sure everyone in this room has had traces of it through their lives. I know they're trying to help me, but they don't understand. My case is different. The universal cry of every alcoholic that ever lived. Sometimes I've even had the feeling there are trains coming for me. Well, we're on the right track now. You know, we talk about that. My case is different. Now, I'm in a different situation than anybody in this room, I'm sure. Yesterday morning, I went to work. I went to work. Drove downtown, where I live, out by the ocean. And I parked my car, and I stepped over the bodies of men and women dying from alcoholism and drug addiction, lying on the sidewalk, to get to my office. And when I went home last night, I stepped over the bodies of men and women dying from alcoholism and drug addiction, and some of them were different, some of them were the same, dying men and women. And I got in my car and drove home. And you wonder, now, why are these people lying on the sidewalk? And I know that I was on that very same sidewalk. What is the difference? They say God loves us all. Some polygamous loves us all. Doesn't he love them? I remember when I was new thinking about that, they said, well, you know, I owe my sobriety to God's grace. Well, the people who are dying drunk, what do they owe it to? Not having God's grace, apparently. And that always bothered me, because if sobriety was based on God's grace, I didn't think I would be getting any, because I was not in good stead with God, because I was a sinner, I was a backslid guy for a strong religion or religion within church. And I knew I had to fight constantly against the belief I was going to go to hell, and the only way I could get around that was to try. I had to try not to believe in God. If God exists, I'm damned, so I've got to not believe in God. And I'd go to AA off and on in various places, and then they started to do this God stuff, and I just, enough. You don't understand. Now, why, if God loves everybody the same, why doesn't he love those people down there? It's kind of hard to explain that to yourself when you don't have much going for you. But I walked off that street one morning in the cold rain. I walked out to an AA club in the rain. My mouth was bleeding. I didn't want to get sober. I had no reason to get sober. Being sober for me is just because the one reason I always knew I wasn't really an alcoholic, and I knew it in Dallas, in San Francisco, New York, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Milwaukee, in Minneapolis, in El Paso, the place I went to AA, is this. Well, put it this way. I'm sure many of you people are in the Phoenix group. You come. You're on Saturday night for a speaker's meeting every week. Is there a speaker meeting here every week? If you come here every Saturday night for the next year, you will hear 52 speakers, and they will all say one thing the same. They may not say so many words. You may not have to listen for it, but it boils down to this. I used to drink alcohol, and my life was very painful. I came to AA and got sober, and now I'm feeling better. And that is the thrust of all AA talks. The short talks tonight were much talked about that same thing. And I could always go to AA and talk about drinking. I could talk drinking stories to anybody. I've been in jail a lot. Not big, long terms, but I've been in jail 32 times, which is pretty good for an advertising executive. Mostly just overnight because I have a terrible tendency to counsel police officers. Wow. I've been in hospitals, Veterans Hospital, State Hospital, Nuthouse, terrible places. And I was sent to the Texas Nuthouse not for drinking at all, but for being absolutely psychotic because I, in a moment of sobriety, committed suicide, and they had to bring me back to life to put me in the insane asylum. I can talk drinking stories to anybody. I can talk AA with anybody. I can tell you about the cultural differences between New York and San Francisco AA and how things look different in Minneapolis and what they think about it. They won't. They'll say the Lord's Prayer, and sometimes I'm going to be better than them. But the one thing I could never overcome is this. Unlike alcoholics, it is when I get sober and clean up my life, that's when my life gets painful. And the longer I stay sober, the worse it gets. And I hear all these people be talking about how wonderful it is, and I have no way to explain. I can stay sober a while sometimes, and I can do it. But sooner or later, somebody sneaks into my bedroom in the middle of the night, and puts an invisible string in my gut. And when they start to tighten that string the next day, comes the irritability and the resistance to people treating me like I was an idiot, like a child. I mean, my gardener can drink and I can't drink. That's ridiculous. Or like Joe told Mike, you don't try hard enough. God knows I did. And I went to AA, and I went, spent thousands of dollars in psychoanalysis to get to the root of my problems, discovered I really liked psychoanalysis. I didn't know why. It cost me a lot of money. I always got bad news, you know. Well, the depression hurts you, and your parents weren't nice to you. That's too bad. But I really liked it. Somebody hid the water. Oh, yes. And I'll tell you the reason I liked it. It's because I discovered something I discovered later. Enlisting to some of the commercial versions of adult children of alcoholics. I'll tell you why people like this, if they're like me. You know, the worst emotion I think you can have, the most painful one, is deep-seated guilt. Guilt over the things you've done, and also things over the things you should have done and didn't. The sins of omission, which just eat you away like piranha fish. The sins of commission eat you like sharks, and the sins of omission eat you like piranha fish. And how would you like to find the therapy that could make you get rid of, the guilt? Jesus, would that be great? And there is. That's what these therapies do, at least for people like me, for psychoanalysis and ACOA. I'll tell you how they do it. They convince me that I have been a victim. It's never been my fault at all. I was made this way by them. And it sounds kind of funny, but it really isn't. It's a great thing. I didn't consciously know my guilt was leaving me, but I didn't know it was leaving me. But I could feel better every time I went there. I could have a martini. I think, no wonder I feel this way, because I could have been something. I felt a great pain when I saw that movie On the Waterfront and saw that guy sit in the back seat with his brother and say, gee, Jimmy, I could have been a contender. I think, yeah, I could have been a contender. But these people screwed me around and hurt me. They meant well, but they ruined me. I never even... And it wasn't until later I looked back and realized that there's a terrible tab for that. You say, what's wrong with that, you know, inconveniences? There's a terrible... Nothing is free in the world. And there's three big payments you have to pay to get rid of guilt via victimization. You don't know at the time, but you can see it later, hopefully. One, whether you intend to or not, you must sustain and enhance resentment toward people who have failed you, who have not been kind to you, who have hurt you, who have done various things to you. I must... When you go to these meetings, there are no laughter in those meetings. It's a series of intense resentments. Secondly, you must accept the fact that you are irremediably different. I heard a guy, one of the gurus, talk about one time, we are like trees, he said. And when we were saplings, our insides have been changed and corrupted. And we continue to grow to full trees, but inside we'll never be the same. We'll never be healthy inside. We can never change. And the third little price tag you can pay, when you think about those two things, which is quite obvious for people like me, may grab you, intense and intermittent self-pity. Boy, I wish I could have had what they had. I wish I could have... And you think, well, maybe that isn't so bad. Maybe that isn't so bad to have that. That isn't so bad. I mean, they're inconvenient, but they're not as bad as suicidal guilt. Well, maybe... Maybe they're not for most people. But for people like me, I discovered later when I was sober, well, I read that old blue book. It specifically lists the three most lethal emotions for people like me. Resentment, self-pity, and feelings of difference. And why are they so lethal? Because they will justify every drink I take till I die from it, and it will never have been my fault, and you don't understand. It is really a lethal combination. Now, if my problem isn't alcohol, it's obvious I'm not an alcoholic. As I say, the one time I stayed sober was because my son died when I was in jail one night, and I felt so bad about that, I swore never to drink, and I went so long when eventually I got almost crazy, and my family, my wife took the children to church, and I just parked the car in the garage and took the hose and the exhaust pipe, went to sleep and died. A neighbor happened to be watching us through the window and heard the motor running, ambled over as he was happening, and he pulled me out dead, and I got my heart... He sent me to the Texas Insane Asylum where I got a lot of electric shock treatments. Now, that is not an alcohol problem. That's something else. That's something wrong inside of me somewhere, and I don't know what it is. But as long as I can remember, I remember thinking, people have always known there's something different about me. I don't know what it is, but they seem to see something missing in me that I can't identify what it is. But I never seem to get close to people. I don't really feel close. I have a difficulty sustaining one-to-one relationships. I feel less than much of the time. I feel like I don't fit in. There's something missing. I sometimes feel as though I'm missing a layer of insulation on the outside. Every emotion I get is a sore tooth. I can feel things so intensely. I have to coach myself not to show them when I'm hurt. My feelings are hurt all the time. It's a crap like that. When I was a boy, 15 years old, I ran away from home early in the Second World War, and I got in a ship in the Pacific, and some guys got me to drink whiskey. And the first time I ever held a drink of whiskey down, I got over that feeling. And I didn't think much about it. When you're in your teens, you learn things. I learned to smoke out there. I learned to curse. I learned to lust effectively. I learned techniques of lust effectiveness. They never worked for me, but they worked for the others. But even at that age, I had sex often. But I'd been apprehensive. I'd been apprehensive and afraid and alone. I learned how to... I suppose what alcohol did for me, although I didn't know it, would never be objectivity to know it, is the first thing and the only thing I've ever found that almost instantly makes me feel the way men look. And if you ask me why I drank when I stood in Skid Row dying, I could give you psychiatric reasons and psychological reasons and self-pitying reasons. I could put it if I'd have been accurate. It's the only thing I know that helps me feel the way men look. I can't even do that. And I... The hardest lessons I learned in my life came in those moments of pain, but those moments of pain were great for me because they enabled me to... I felt so bad. It was raining, and I was in an AA club, hanging around. I did some things in there that I wouldn't... I sunk to demeaning myself that I never would have done if I'd... had any pride left at all. I'm not talking about traditions or steps or anything. I'm talking about like this. In those days, there were no styrofoam cups. It hadn't been invented yet. So every group drank coffee out of a porcelain cup. And at the end of a meeting, somebody had to wash them. And the old-timers got sick and washed them. And I had to sit in these meetings all the time because I didn't want to be thrown out of the club because nothing kept me out of the rain. And I said, how about you, boy? About the teeth there. Want to wash our cups tonight? If I had any strength left, I would have said, no. I don't want to wash your cups tonight or tomorrow night or any other night. Why didn't you lick them off with that long, ugly tongue of yours? But instead, they had me weak, and I said, no, no, no. I said, hey, you want to stay late, kid? And I said, no, no, no. I said, no, no, no. I said, no, no, no. I said, no, no, no. Help mop? Uh-huh. And I was living in an abandoned car and their parking lot would be convenient for it to go to meetings. One day, I said, how about you, kid? You want to help set up the meeting tomorrow night? You live right here on the property. But that did nothing for me. I hated it. I despised myself for doing it, but I couldn't risk it. I had no place to go. And I felt what it did, it got me to stay sober a couple weeks just doing this. I remember thinking, maybe I'm in hell. Maybe I died and didn't remember it. And this is what hell is. I thought hell was hot and fire. Maybe it's just cold and rain every day and people talking to you about the steps. And that's why they were so crazy. They insisted you get a sponsor. I saw an actor come in and out of the door and I'd seen him in the movies. I was giving people money and gifts. And I heard he was not quite two years sober. I thought, that's my, and that's the simple thing. I'll get some money from this coup. I'll get some teeth. I'll get some clothes. I'll go back to New York. I look sober now. I have a clean cut. I'll get a recommendation from one of these idiots. I'll get a job in an agency. And I'll give it hell and I'll save some money. I'll come back here to Los Angeles one day. I'll buy this club and I'll burn it down. And I hope they're all in it. And it was, you know, until I saw the movie Carrie some years later, I didn't really understand what I was wishing for. But yeah, yeah, Carrie, burn that school down. And this guy turned out to be, when he was acting in the movies, he was really acting because he was not kindly or good. He was a mean, cruel, heartbreak, right-wing fascist apig. I want you to listen, I want you to, ha ha ha ha ha ha. . . . . Look, Bob, I'm ringing the bell. I'm Quasimodo. . And somehow I stayed sober. And I've thought many, many times, why would I take the crap from that guy? Because all my life, I never took much crap from anyone. Certainly in those years, I didn't take crap from anybody. When I was working on big jobs, I've walked off big jobs when I was still doing good because somebody gave me too much crap. Get yourself another boy, smile, because I'm gone. I don't know how many nights in bars where I have a tendency to talk a lot. Some big moose comes over and says, I've been hearing you moth off all night long. You don't seem like you're very much to me. You don't think so? Why don't you try me, you son of a bitch, and see how I am? . And I get knocked out of my can a lot. . But they know I'm half tough and half crazy, which is a good reputation to have in a bar. . And it wasn't until I was sober almost a year that I understood why I didn't take crap from people. I heard a guy talking about it, and I couldn't believe my ears. He was talking about why he never took crap from people. I thought, yeah, why? Because you're above them, you can't stand it. He said, no. And the reason was I couldn't believe. In my case, certainly true. All of those years, it became more and more clear to me that inside of me, I was a weakling. And I hate being a weakling. I despise weaklings. And I despise myself even worse for being one. And no one would ever find out I'm a weakling because I'm whining, fraying, inanimate. So I made sure I had to carry myself with a lot of elan and not take crap from anybody. Because if I took crap from anybody, they would find out. That's the other great way to stay bad in AA. Because you come here, I'll go to AA. I guess when I look back, that's one of the reasons I couldn't take advice in AA. So I took advice that would indicate I was weak. I'm not weak. I'm too smart for these boobs. And why would I take crap from this guy? This guy, I found out later, didn't really like me. Because I was the worst type of person that I know to this day in AA, a smart aleck failure. God, there are no teeth. Hey, baby, I'm doing fine. Screw you. Don't give me that shit. I have sponsored people like that. Just about kill them. Just, here, I have something for you. We call that the 15th step. But he would try to help me from time to time. He took me with him a couple of times to meetings where he'd talk. And somewhere in that period, I don't, I thought about this later. You know, I heard, a guy gave me a tape of mine from 1967. And I was talking about that. And I haven't done, I think I've talked about it in 25 years, until recently, because it drifted off somewhere. But really, it says, you know, grab it. It's a graphic part of my life. I've heard him talking somewhere, either to me personally, or in a meeting, or someplace, saying things like, I have never, alcohol has never really been my problem. But I have these feelings. I don't fit in quite well enough. And I don't get along with people. But alcohol makes me feel like I'm something. It's just great. And I remember thinking, what? I must have heard it in AA maybe 100 times before that, but never paid attention. I never listened to anything in AA. But this guy was talking, and he was talking about feeling good. And he was talking about the things I had. And he admitted his problem wasn't alcohol. And yet, he was doing good. And what happened? I was startled. And as a result of that, I developed a begrudging respect for this guy. He was not as dumb as I thought he was. And he had had some emotions that nobody else seemed to have, except him and me. And as a result of that, as a result of my begrudging respect, I began doing things he told me. They worked. And I thought AA was crappy. But I wanted him to like me. And I'll tell you one of the great facts about AA. AA's actions don't care why you take them. If you take them, you start to get better, little by little. And your perceptions change a little bit. And over a period of time, I stayed sober. And probably the greatest thing that happened to me in my early sobriety has been as good to this day. The problem I always had, and I've been talking a lot about this recently, but it's on my mind. If you're new tonight or just around, I got a name. His name is Clancy . And you may wonder, when did this old fool become an alcoholic? He was an alcoholic when he drank, when he got sober. When did he become an alcoholic? I was not an alcoholic after I was in AA. I'll tell you that. I knew I wasn't. I knew my case was different. My sponsor was, he made me do things. He wasn't as sympathetic as I thought. You know, he'd say. Um. I've been around here three weeks now. And you've been my sponsor a week. And I'm living in this abandoned car out there. I've got these old clothes on. And I've got no teeth. And guys give me this green corduroy jacket. And I'm cold. And people buy me food once in a while. But I'm an intelligent, sensitive person, Bob. I can't live like this. What can I do? Get a job. I get a job, for Christ's sake. Look how terrible I look. Get a terrible job. I follow that advice. But I finally got out of that car into somebody's sofa in their basement. I had to leave there because I put out some cigarettes in their rug accidentally. I was back in that abandoned car. And somebody else put me in their sofa. And their wife didn't like me putting me back. So about three months over, I was back in the abandoned car. But I had a deal, a place to go on Saturday at the end. And I had a job starting. Again, I'd been fired off another job. I had another job starting. And I was feeling pretty good. And I went to a noon meeting at the club. I had nothing else to do. I like noon meetings. That's where the philosophers of AA get together and really discuss truth. None of these blue-collar workers and all that crap. Just thinkers. And they were talking about the first step. And I felt so good. I told the truth once. I just told the truth. I just blurted out. I said, you know what? You people are very fortunate to be able to take the first step and admit you're an alcoholic. But I'm not an alcoholic. My problem is not alcohol. I don't explain that to anybody. But I envy you because I know those steps work. I've seen it happen time after time in a lot of cities. But when you're not really an alcoholic, maybe some of those steps will help me. I don't know which ones. I don't know what's effective and what isn't. But I tell you, I'm glad to be here. I wish I were an alcoholic. And I meant it. I really meant it. But can't say. We meet somebody called snitched me out to my sponsor. Here's what he said. Now, Bob, I'm here and for the next for the next few days or something. My sponsor and the guy named John Sullivan gave me a seminar that changed my life. I'm trying to condense that to two or three minutes so we get out of here and have... Have our coronation tonight. Well, the queen mother's dead. But Joe is here. Probably won't get invited back here again. Nobody. again. Hope. Kidding, folks, just kidding. Matt, get the car started. He said, I'm going to say this kind of quickly. He said, well, Ken, you say you're not an alcoholic, huh? I said, that's right, Bob. I told you that. I'm not trying to fool anybody. I've told you that all along. He said, that's why you can't take the first step? Can't admit you're an alcoholic? That's right, Bob. He said, why the first step is it say you're an alcoholic? It doesn't actually say so, Bob. But you know what they mean, and so do I. Don't kid me. I'm not an idiot. He says, Ken, why don't you try the black parts of the page? Let's try that for a while. He said, we admit we're powerless over alcohol. Do you think you're powerless over alcohol? Not really. He said, what do you think powerless is? I did hear these guys talk. They get drunk, and they rape nuns, and hold a band. They go to Bangkok. I'm just a good time guy that's been screwed around a lot, Bob. I'm a victim. He said, I don't think that's what it means. It doesn't mean that. It means that there are certain people among drinkers, there's always a small percentage of people who get an unnatural result from alcohol. They don't know it's an unnatural result. They don't have to compare it against, but it's an unnatural result. They just... What do you think an unnatural result is? I said, I don't know. You just get drunk and do crazy things a lot. He said, no, that's not at all. It's just the opposite. Alcohol and these people does something that no one seems to understand. It has to do something special for you that it doesn't do for most people. But you don't know it's unusual, and there are people around you who don't know it's different. What it must do is, after two or three or four drinks, it must change your perception of reality. I said, that's... Yeah, I've done that, but I don't get drunk and hold up banks and rob banks. It doesn't mean that, kid. It means that after two or three or four drinks, things look different. You may have two or three or four drinks and go home, go to bed. You may have two or three or four drinks and go to Mexico. You may have two or three or four drinks and fall in love with an 89-year-old woman on a walker. No. No. Just something different is going to happen. Yeah, I've had that, Bob, but I don't understand it. He said, look, kid, it isn't so much that anything big happens. It's that when you begin to drink, you cannot tell what's going to happen. When you drink, it's like playing Russian roulette for people like us. And you can win a lot of games, especially when you're young and strong. Boy, I thought until 3 o'clock this morning, just barely got home, got a shower, I get to work, click. I did all right. Oh, that broad. Last night, she had turned me every way but at least that day I'd never get out of there. Fortunately, I didn't give her the right name. Click. But eventually, sooner or later, you run across a loaded chamber. Got in that damn bar last night, got in a fight with those guys. We all got picked up. It was the damnedest thing. I explained to my boss. Boom, you know. You know, most of all, it happens. But as you get older, kid, some sinister force fills those shells more and more. And one day, they wind up like you, kid. Jesus. There's a click in here somewhere. So all you got to admit is that you can't really tell definitely what's going to happen when you start to drink. And that's right, Bob. By God, that's right. But that isn't the reason I feel bad. I mean, if that were the reason I felt bad, but I feel bad, that's why I drink. It isn't that I drink. Sure, I feel bad after I drink, but I really feel bad when I don't drink. How do I explain it to you? My problem is not alcohol. He said, kid, let's read what it says. He admitted we were powers over alcohol, dash. In the English language, kid, you don't have to be a good writer. That means end of thought, beginning of new thought. That our lives have become unmanageable. Do you think your life's unmanageable? Not really. He says, you're living in an abandoned car out here in the garden. And I said, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. He said, I'm just kidding, kid. That's what it means at all. It's not malleable. It's not malleable. It's not malleable. It's not malleable. It's not malleable. It's not malleable. A man in America sits in AA meetings three or four nights a week. And he can afford to buy chains of treatment centers and hospitals and psychologists and psychiatrists and counselors. Why do you think he sits in those meetings, kid? I don't know, Bob. He says it's because they are the only things that seem to work for people like him. Because he's an alcoholic. What you've got to remember is this, kid. Everybody's boring and we all grow up and we have problems and troubles and conflicts and woes and cares and ups and downs. Now, wouldn't it be nice? When you're really feeling bad a lot of the time, if you could find some way to get rid of that crap? Yeah. Because that's what drinkers do. They can drink and bury that crap for a while. And some of it floats back up. But a lot of it's got rid of. It happens again and again and again. The only problem is if alcohol does this for you and you come to depend on it without even being aware of it, sooner or later it causes you problems. Now you're going to quit. Okay, quit. Call of 15-year-old emotions. I never know why. He said, the problem is you stop drinking and eventually, if you're like people like us, it gets so bad you have to have a few drinks to get rid of it. But you can't keep drinking, so you've got to get sober. And you can't stay sober indefinitely, so you've got to drink. And you can make vows and swears and pledges of our type. We've got to drink. In fact, it gets to a point sometimes where they say that alcoholics of our type have to drink to preserve our sanity. I said, jeez, that's right, Bob. He said, the only smart thing you've said today is this. You've said your problem isn't alcohol. You're absolutely right. It isn't. It isn't. I said, it isn't? He said, no. Something like alcohol that people get mixed up and they die from it. It is something called alcoholism. I said, but that's the same thing, Bob. Alcohol is the same thing. He said, not the same thing. Anywhere near the same thing. And alcohol. problem is overcome by stopping drinking and cleaning up your act. A lot of people do that. But this thing called alcoholism, the 7 or 8 or 9 percent of drinkers who have that, but it looks exactly the same, discover that stopping drinking and cleaning up your act has no significant long-term effect on your life other than to gradually make it so painful you can't stand it. Eventually you have to drink. Jesus, Bob, that's me. He says, there's a name for people like you. I said, what is it, Bob? He said, you're an alcoholic. And I said, well, I'll be damned. Sounds funny, but I went through 10 years of the worst years of my life because I never fit any definition I knew of alcoholic. And it was that simple. And then that, I guess what I did that day, without being aware of it, I did something to talk about in Chapter 3. I conceded to my innermost self that I was an alcoholic, although I wouldn't have known it. And the result of that is this. That was in early 1959. I have not consciously desired a drink since then until tonight. Now, you might think, isn't that a wonderful life? You just become wonderful. Not at all. I had some terrible days after that. There were days I seriously contemplated suicide. And when my family returned to me after five years of writing, all of a sudden I thought I'd be in a situation where there's all kinds of kids and dogs and cats and a wife telling me what to do and do crap. And one day it got so bad, I jumped in my car and just drove away. I got as far as Arizona border. I can't do this. I called up my sponsor. He talked me back home. I went to work the next morning. I mean, it's tough. But the fact is this. The reason I didn't drink is not I wasn't afraid of losing my family or my job. Or anything else. I knew that if I drank, if I had one glass of beer, one sip of wine, one cocktail, tomorrow, next week, next month, five years from now, I'll be standing on a street corner again, cold, and there won't be anybody who cares. And that is as bad a feeling as I've ever had. So that's what AA is about, to come to establish that fact. And once I established that fact, I could little by little begrudgingly allow my sponsor, to guide me, to take on those traditions. The day I was going to commit suicide, he had me take the fourth sip, just on nip and tuck, which I do. But little by little, I did it. Now it's been 43 years. I became somewhat successful again. My family returned. I had another child. I live happily ever after. For the last 28 years, I've run the mission on Skid Row that threw me out in 1958. And I go there every morning. I don't know why sometimes. But why would, if God loves me and loves you and loves these people, why are they lying there dying? Why are people on the streets of Norman can't get sober? Why are people cannot do this? And that there's a million psychological reasons, but I'll put it in one sentence, the best of my ability to tell you. They are people who will not do things they don't agree with. That's it. That's why desperation is such a great help. To new people here. Because you surrender your judgment for a while. You surrender your judgment. And that's what you must do here. You've got to remember that you may know a better way, but it's not working. This way works for people like you and me. And Jeff for this four years, and Joe this 25 years, and everybody else in between here. We can all stand at this podium tonight and say, my name is whatever it is. Clancy Amazon. Through the grace. Of God. And the power of this simple program. It's not necessary for me to drink or take any mind sedating or tranquilizing medications. How could an alcoholic do that? They can't. Except they take those steps. Which do what? Make you drier and drier? No. They very slowly do what alcohol did fast. To gradually change my perception of reality. To make the world look different. And when that day comes, it's worth everything it took. Thank you.