Stay Here So Others May See What Has Happened to You – Joe L.

About This Speaker Tape

Joe L. from Tyler, Texas addresses the International Doctors in AA convention in 1966, marking sixteen years sober the day before. He opens with irreverent humor about the medical crowd, then pivots to his story: a first drink at seventeen taken to fit in, eighteen years of drinking that only got worse, and a career as an understudy ladies' lingerie designer in Hollywood that ended when he kept cutting brassieres with three cups.

The middle of the talk is a railroad catastrophe and a medical odyssey. Drunk at the throttle on a Sierra mountain interlocking system that engineers swore was foolproof, he got two trains facing each other on the same track with four produce cars between them — lettuce, apples, carrots, and celery — and made what he calls the biggest fruit salad ever. After his wife Mary and sister-in-law's conversation about poisoning him, he detoxed in a San Francisco railroad hospital on sodium bromide elixir and phenobarbital by the popcorn-sackful, drank wine up the elevator shaft, and was handed off to Freudian and small-town psychiatrists who never named the problem.

His mother finally called the sheriff on him in his own hometown. In jail he met the AA man who would not talk about Joe, only about himself, and whose serenity Joe secretly envied. After one more cross-country collapse — a wheelchair dump in Los Angeles at 119 pounds and a Sacramento flophouse where five men at a time walked out for forty-dollar funerals — he called that visitor back and went to his first meeting, where the sickening loneliness of the bar stool lifted and never returned.

He closes with a sponsee he babysat for four and a half years who finally got sober in ten minutes with someone else, and with Luke's story of the demoniac — Legion, healed, sitting clothed and in his right mind, told by the carpenter not to follow but to stay so others could see what had happened to him.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Chairman introduces Joe L. from Tyler, Texas with jokes about quilting half of Texas and hiding a whole train
• 1:30 Joe opens — ambulatory schizophrenic, wino, goofball addict, sixteen years sober as of yesterday
• 6:00 First drink at seventeen, taken purely to be accepted; it did something to him that it didn't do to the other fellows
• 9:30 Hollywood ladies' lingerie designer fired for cutting three-cup brassieres; bought a plumber's license out the back door of a San Pedro union hall
• 15:00 Railroad interlocking system in the Sierras — two engines sent at each other with four produce cars between, the biggest fruit salad ever made
• 22:00 Sister-in-law tells Mary she would poison the son of a bitch; Joe too poor to hire a food taster
• 25:00 Curly the Irish bartender with the shakes and the five-dollar loan that bankrolled five years of drinking
• 32:00 San Francisco railroad hospital — phenobarbital, sodium bromide elixir, and wine up the elevator shaft
• 42:00 Jailed in his hometown after his mother calls the sheriff; an AA member comes Monday morning and will only talk about himself
• 50:00 First AA meeting — sickening loneliness of the bar stool lifts and never returns; closes with Luke's demoniac, fully clothed and in his right mind