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

I won't go into our speaker's background. I'll leave that for him. He comes to us well-recommended. He's the only one I know of that has quilted half the state of Texas. He's the only one I know of that puts three cups in bras. If he isn't careful when he puts on his glasses, he's mistaken for LBJ. And then he's in real trouble. And as the title of his talk tonight, he's the only man I know of that has ever hidden a complete train. I give you Joe Leap from Tyler, Texas. Mr. Chairman, Bill and Lois, the distinguished guests, you drunken doctors. My name is Joe, and I'm an ambulatory schizophrenic, a wino. I'm a goofball addict, and by the grace of a merciful God and the facility of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have been sober one day in 16 years. I had a birthday yesterday. When Don asked me to come up here and share this meeting, this erudite and learned group, I was somewhat reluctant. I had great apprehensions. I thought that you'd be a bunch of... ...high-bottomed snobs. And the longer I've been here, the more relaxed I have become. I discovered that one of you came a week early and demanded to have this convention. I ran into another one in the restroom who had lost his coloring crayons. Two red ones, a pink one, and a blue one, if you see them. You've got a drunken doctor. You've got a drunken dentist with a pocket knife handling the sound effects. And I have just been delivered to you by an OB. I'm not going to apologize for this program. If I ever had any dignity, I am now bereft of it. I called Don. He sent me a preliminary on the program. And I called him long distance and said, My God, take it off of there. And I don't know what he grunted. I told him I'd rather talk about anything else. Maybe the Synergism Syndrome. I don't know what he grunted. I told him I'd rather talk about anything else. Maybe the Synergism Syndrome. I told him I'd rather talk about anything else. Maybe the Synergism Syndrome. Mating habits of the mongoose. But I got a note yesterday in the mail, and it said, It stays, so I'm stuck with it. Not very dignified. Neither was I when I drank. Seriously, there was a wise old doctor who said one time that at every juncture in history, Seriously, there was a wise old doctor who said one time that at every juncture in history, there comes a need for a great man he has furnished. And in the description of his lecture, he ran the gamut from St. Paul to Winston Churchill with great elaboration. And I say to you tonight that we stand in the presence of a great man who has filled a need by finding a facility for the rehabilitation of the alcoholic and generously passing it on. I sometimes think that with our arrogance we're not as grateful as we should be from whence this great thing came. Now, you doctors, my God, when I drank, one doctor was too many. I've been going around here, drawn up, waiting for somebody to get me to stick my tongue out or take my clothes off. But you seem to be my kind of people if you're drunk. Now, Freud said, when he was treating his first case, this girl Anna, that he later diagnosed as a sex deviant, I believe, he said this, that if you revive the memory of the scene, the symptoms are aroused. And they are thus dispelled. So, let's arouse a few symptoms and see if they can be dispelled. Consequently, I think that that results in the beginning of a little story about me, very briefly. Maybe in it you can find a place that you fit. I don't know. I took my first drink of alcohol when I was 17. Purely and simply, to be accepted in a group of young fellows. I didn't want to be left out. But with that one drink that I took that night, I remember it vividly. To a person constituted as I was, it did something to me that it didn't do to the other young fellows. I remember it well. And I went back to it again and again. I suppose that there would be some psychiatric description for that. Maybe escapism or relief or a crutch. Nevertheless, I found myself closely in contact from then on with alcohol. I got drunk that night. It treated me badly. And it treated me badly for the next 18 years. And I can say with honesty that I've never seen a man who was compulsed to drink whose drinking ever improved. Mine always... improved worse. I found myself in Southern California, in Hollywood to be exact. It was an understudy to one of the more famous designers of ladies' lingerie. A young man who had every opportunity on earth was skilled in my profession and should have gone far. And I did. We have a step in AA about sanity, the second one there, where it slightly infers that you may have a go for it. But you're in your garden. And this was the bugger for me. In my profession, I cut the soft silk sleazy intimate things that the women wear. And... I'm firmly convinced that if you do cut a bunch of brassieres with three of those places in them, you're nuts. I told a psychiatrist about that later and he said it was just wishful thinking. Needless to say, I cut myself out of that profession. I worked for a Jewish fellow, a kind and compassionate man who had spent a lot of money on my education. He'd invested a lot in me, but he finally had to give up. He was a non-alcoholic who couldn't understand why we do like we do. And he said to me, Joe, you can't drink. And that infuriated me. As I said, he was a Jewish fellow, and he had a one-ass out there. He said, you're going to have to go, but I'm indeed proud of one thing. He said, the way you handle those scissors, that if you'd have been a rabbi, you'd have destroyed a whole race. I don't think my drinking was compulsive then. We hear a lot of high-sounding words in AA after we sober up about crossing from a thing called social to pathological drinking. I don't know where it is. I like to describe it as this phrase, where I quit living to drink and started drinking to live. This is my description of the compulsion to drink. Well, this was a crow blow to me. The war was going on at that time, and I went down to San Pedro, California, and literally bought a plumber's license out the back door of a union hall. And I went into the shop, and I said, this shipyard is a master plumber. This is a fellow that has never picked up anything any heavier than a pair of scissors. And you know I was a master fraud, of course. Those were the days, and this is a revolting thought, when you were frozen to your job. Well, I thought out. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And it's signed by the United States Department of War Labor, and it prohibits me from working within 25 miles of the city of Los Angeles. How lucky can you get? I used to say to my wife, this is my wife, and she said, no use in me looking for a job you go we're great executives we drunks well when I left there you know this is a funny thing when I came there they told me that I would learn to like myself and in the beginning of this process of drinking we never want to come face to face with ourselves but this was the beginning of the geography the moving and the moving and we say to ourselves honey let's go it's not so good here it'll be good somewhere else there's only one thing wrong with the theory of moving a drunk and that is that when you get there he's there too you see so I moved quite frequently for the next few years and I went up into Northern California and my selection of things to do were becoming less and less I couldn't do most a lot of things and I went to work of all things for the railroad and I would like to say here that there were a group of the most narrow-minded people I've ever met they had a rule about drinking they say that it reads like this that if you're seen coming out of an establishment that dispenses alcoholic beverages you can be dismissed well I never came back to work but I never came back to work I never came out very often, but when I did, it was under duress and coercion. But this set in a siege of the most hellish existence that one can imagine. And it is a small wonder that I'm alive. Those people, though, they started this rule, I feel, because they run more than one train on a track, you know. And it's a damn good thing you don't have to guide them. If you did, there would be more catastrophe than there actually is today. And I guess they're afraid that if a man is drinking or addled or not quite himself, that he might mix them up, you know. And that's just exactly what I did. They had issued a bulletin on a thing. Maybe you'll understand this vernacular, this parlance, some of you that are familiar with railroads. But they had a thing at the top of this mountain in the Sierras that was called an interlocking system. And the Sperry Company had installed it, and they put out a bulletin that it was physically impossible to make a mistake up there. And they shouldn't have made that boast. This is a challenge to a drunk. And they gave lectures to all the fellows that operated through it that it was physically impossible to get a train together up there. And by some quirk of circumstance, alcoholic circumstance, I got two engines going towards one another on the same track with four cars between them. Lettuce. Apples, carrots, and celery. And I made the biggest goddamn fruit salad that was ever been made. They wanted to fire me, these people. And I remember after the investigation, I had another alcoholic representing me, and he proved some of the most atrocious lies. He came out. He was a kind old gentleman, too. And he said, you ought to be arrested for even walking on our right-of-way. I can't fire you. I've already tried, but don't forget I'm after you. But this wasn't the thing that bothered them. The thing that bothered them so much was the flaw in their equipment. They had said that you couldn't make any mistake up there. And they flew two fellows out from the east, and these two poor guys, these engineers of sorts, followed me for two weeks, trying to elicit from me the manner in which I'd raised hell with a real load of hell. But, you know, I couldn't tell them. And I finally in disgust suggested to them that if they'd buy me a jug, I'd try it again. You see? This is a hellish existence, isn't it? No. And then we start along in the progressiveness of this disease, going through this years of making excuses, one for another. Every time I see a guy coming in the AA with his wife hanging on his arm, I'm so grateful because they come with us for, even, a more unselfish purpose than we come ourselves. They haven't got the problem. And I remember one of the neighbors had the audacity to ask my wife, why do you live with a man like that? And with her loving reflex, she said, you don't know him when he's sober. And this old woman said, well, when is he sober? You see? Making excuses with no answer. Making excuses with no answer. Making excuses with no answer. Making excuses with no answer. Making excuses with no answer. Making excuses with no answer for the problem. Well, things are getting pretty bad. I remember one day, I had been in the bar all day, next door to Floyd B.'s law office, incidentally, Bill. It was a nice bar, the only place in town I had any credit. And I'd been asleep all day in the bar. They had sleeping facilities, hell of a good place. And, you know, About four in the afternoon, I got up and staggered home. We were living with my sister-in-law at the time. This was a beautiful, pleasant relationship. And I went in and laid down on the bed, and my wife and her sister thought that I was asleep. And this is the conversation that went on in the next room. My wife, in hysteria, cried out and said, What would you do if you were living with a man like that? And her sister didn't hesitate a moment. She said, I would poison the son of a bitch. I was too poor to hire a food taster. Let me tell you, they ate first. Many of you have lived with this crawling, guilty, indefinable, thing within you like that. The thing that doesn't seem to be able to be explained. The human body will take so much. I had gotten on wine quite by accident. I had walked from my hotel to work many days and stumbled over winos and had seen them. And in those days, the word alcoholism wasn't talked. And I suppose that if I had any compassion for these fellows that were laying there, it would be for the fact that they didn't have the price of another drink. But I remember that I got so bad that I couldn't drink booze anymore. And what is this high-sounding word? Regurgitate. And I had befriended a little Irish bartender in the lobby of my hotel. One morning, he had the shakes. And I had a beautiful glow on this morning. Felt very benevolent. And I asked the little Irish bartender, I said, What's the trouble? And he told me very honestly, very forthrightly, He says, I've got the shakes. And I need a drink. And I reached in and gave him a five-dollar bill. And it was one of the best investments that I ever made in my life. I followed that poor little bartender for five years. And I drank over, I guess, five thousand dollars worth of booze. Off of that one five-dollar loan. Wow. How? Yes. Yes. I saw that one five-dollar loan. That's what I saw. He said, I've got the shakes. remember it I reminded him of it you remember me I helped you out see and he would spring he never gave up God rest him I hope he's found AA he needed it badly and I went into his place this morning and he was swamping out at six o'clock behind the bar and I said to him Curly I can't take my breakfast this morning and he knew what I meant and he looked over behind the bar I still think that all bartenders should be psychiatrist I don't know what I think psychiatry saw to be but I they're benevolent attitude sure they're medium of communication there's no love like a bartender has he can be so compassionate and I and he said to me over behind the bar you'll find some pork wine have a couple of drinks of that and you can go back to whiskey and I would say to him Curly I can't take my breakfast this morning I hope he'll have a good night and I'd like to say here to you my friends I have never been back to whiskey I like what that stuff does to you kind of like closed umbrella going down then it opens up all of a sudden there's nothing there was my first drink of it I was ashamed and I was aware that something terrific was happening that I couldn't explain and I and I was running the city of San Francisco an exclusive train in those days And when I would get to the other end of the line, I would go to the far end of the street where nobody was there that I knew to drink. There wasn't anybody seeing me drink wine. I was so ashamed of it. And you know the story. Look it down. I so appreciated Brother Hoffer's description of hearing the voices this afternoon. And I began to hear them and see them at the same time. This is not good. Wine, don't curse wine too much. It has some very fine medical facilities about it. It'll cure hay fever. Now, the doctor's been trying to find a cure for cold for years. I got it. Pour it wine. If you drink it like I did, you don't dare sneeze. Don't sneeze. I was born to the purple, I'll tell you. And I had a terrific siege this particular time. I don't know how they can be described, but they were hellish in a hotel room in Sacramento. How long it lasted, I don't know. It was rather nebulous. But I got up and staggered out. And finally... I was laid at home to Mary. And I think that she realized that something hellish had happened. Something different. And I came in and cried out to her this morning. And I said, I'm sick. I'm really sick. And she bought it. Hell, I've never been sick before in my life except this erpin sick that you get in the morning. And I thought everybody threw up every morning. I didn't know. I used to rent a hotel room with twin beds in it. And one to sleep in, one to throw up in. But this time, she bought it. And I'm down. We didn't have a family doctor. Never had had the use for one, really. And we were very reluctant to call a railroad physician. On account of this rule I mentioned a while ago. But we finally had to. And they sent this unsuspecting little chap down there. And... Here lays the corpse. The corpse with all the symptoms. Here comes our wives again. He said to her, does he drink? Well, he said he's a very sick man and he needs to be in a hospital. And he prescribed another delightful little dose that I later became quite fond of. Phenobarbital. He gave her the one grain load. Must have been a popcorn sack full. There were a lot of them. I know that. And they brought the ambulance to the door and very dramatically loaded me in there. And we go to San Francisco making 90 miles an hour with the red lights screaming and the siren on. And I'm up in the back eating those pills. I've always looked back on that trip with a feeling of irony. Here's a guy who's been drunk 18 years. And they're in a hell of a hurry to do something about him. And I got to the hospital after this hurried trip. It was a day and a half before I saw a doctor. I guess they were out testing cigarettes and breaking the laxative habits. Science made some great strides recently. They put me through one of the most stringent clinics in the West Coast. The largest hospital in history is out there. From the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. Don't ever go to the proctologist with a hangover. It's all over. And the result of this was that I had nothing organically wrong with me. A hospital's got to have an answer to all these problems. And they couldn't find anything organically wrong with me. And that was my introduction to psychiatry. And I would like to say here very humbly that the members of Alcoholics Anonymous who have had their alcoholism beaten out of them through their knees with a rubber mallet are very few. But they brought in this frustrated peon of a tuner. And he beat my knees and asked me questions. He asked me some very foolish questions. And I gave him some brilliant answers. If he's not a rummy now, it's not my fault. I must have set the practice of psychiatry back some 50 years. Now, I know none of you are ever going to drink again. But I'll give you a little lesson on how to get rid of a psychiatrist. You let two drunks lay up in bed one night and memorize the same dream to tell him the next morning. So make them quiver. We played with blocks and we started string. I became a adopted finger painting. And do you know that bastard enjoyed every minute of it. The whole story of where you go. How's the psychiatrist going to help you? You don't tell him the truth. So it was all to no avail. He prescribed another delightful little dose that I became quite fond of. This is known as sodium bromide elixir. He said that he was giving it to me to calm me down. I was getting about four or five little shot glasses a day of it. And with my reasoning, I thought that if four or five little shot glasses would calm me down, a jug would be a lot better. And I found an unsuspecting intern who would sell it to me for a buck a jug. Not much wrong with it. Make you frown with the mouth. Your eyes will cross. You talk about living the day at the time on AA. You just live a few minutes. You don't know what happened a while ago. I grew up much concerned with hints. And I think personally that it is more injurious to the brain, as I witness here. But this was my dose. Phenobarbital, sodium bromide elixir, and wine through the elevator shaft. So you see, much therapy was it. Stayed there three months, and one day he came into my nervous ward. Those were the days. Anatomy treatments for drugs. This thing wasn't accepted like it is now. We hadn't made the progress that we have now. We didn't have the friends that we have now. You were a drunk. But I wasn't even a drunk. The railroad was certainly not going to admit that they had a man in their hospital who was responsible for the lives of four or five hundred people every time he went out on the railroad that was a drunk. I was a nervous case. And treated as such. But he came to me one morning with more of a gleam in his eye than usual. And he ticked a couple of times. And he said, You can go home now. I was ambulatory by then. Well, you'd have thought that he had performed a delicate piece of brain surgery there, as happy as he was. And they gave me a quart jug of sodium bromide and a hundred and twenty-five phenobarbital tablets and headed me in the direction of Sacramento. And the trip that I had come down in so hurriedly took me four and a half days to get down. Some of you may remember this. At the foot of Market Street, the old ferries used to come across, and they came every thirty minutes. And it took me four days to get a ferry to come out even with a drink. But I finally made it. I returned home, and my wife set great store by this. She thought this was an answer to the problem. I had a disease. I'd gone the gamut all the way from nervous anxiety to schizophrenia while on my trip down there. And back again, I suppose. Did you ever walk up to an old drunk sitting on a stool by himself and punch him in the back and ask him a question right quick? You know what he'll say to you? I've been sick. Won't they? Well, they made good conversation in the bar. My wife was making a decent living in those days. Until I got double-crossed by a bartender. When you lose those bars, you've had it. This guy called my wife up one day and said to her, Mrs. Lee, you think that your husband is sick. But when you go to work in the morning, he gets up and comes down here. And at 11.30 he runs home and lays down and lets you come home and prepare his meal for him. And then he's back down here in the afternoon. And he further added, we don't want him. It was quite a blow to Mary. She became quite perturbed about it. And picked up the phone and called this psychiatrist in San Francisco. And I don't know what the conversation was. But that was when she left. And I say that without any rancor in my heart whatsoever. Because I think that you and me, as practicing alcoholics, will cling to every crutch at hand. And we're very reluctant to let go of any of them. And we have to, ultimately, some of us do, lose all of them before we can come face to face with ourselves. Well, the absence of my wife was only the absence of another crutch. Made a good story in the bar. I used to tell them, with tears in my eyes, my wife has left me and took everything. Hell, Sharon, didn't she should have took it? I go down again and some of my buddies on the railroad, loaded me. I didn't get the royal treatment this time. They loaded me in a baggage car and put me on a cot and sent me back to the hospital in San Francisco. They had to take me. I represented one of the largest union organizations at one time there as a legislative representative. They couldn't have turned me down. I'll say this, the hospital wasn't overjoyed to see my return. Here he is again. What'll we do with him? I'll tell you. And this may be a blow to some of you, but there are some psychiatrists who have a limit to their patients, and this cat wouldn't come to see me anymore. I was sort of a white elephant on their hands, I guess. They were trying to find out what made me tick. And they sent on to the University of Berkeley and they brought in a little Freudian fellow who was, well, hell, he looked like one. He had the Van Dyke, the double glasses there, and he ticked a little bit. He was just over from Vienna and he didn't speak English and I didn't speak what he spoke. And we had a great time. I remember one of the questions that he got through to me was, he wet the bed. You know, with the logical thinking of an alcoholic, this bothers me. I know that's a result of drinking and not a cause of it, you see. I've killed more potted plants than bad weather. Well, a few months of this fellow, we had these tri-weekly seances. One day we were walking down the hall, he'd take me in the little room, shine the light in my eyes, and I fell into him. And he stopped and ticked and rubbed his palms and he says, You are staggering. And I said, I bet that's a symptom of something. One of the resident physicians came to my nervous ward and beckoned me out with a whisper, in a whisper, actually, as though he were ashamed of it. And I knew something was wrong, really, this guilty conscience that we drunks stay with day and night. I'd been going around cheering up some of the patients and actually, as though he were really ashamed of it, he said in a literal whisper, he said, Listen, we have come to the conclusion that most of your trouble is from drinking. All of the science and money and the time, and he made this profound discovery. And Curly could have told him that in the bar if he'd have just gone back up to Sacramento without all the trouble. He was very benevolent soul, and he said to me, I had paraded this story, we've got to have self-pity, we've got to feel sorry for ourselves, and I told everybody in the hospital about how my wife had left me in the hospital, and took everything. And he said, Well, where will you go? You've got to get out of here. And I said, I don't know, really. And he said, Well, where are your folks? And I said, Well, they're down in Texas. And I think his eyes lit up. And he said, Go down there by all means. And he gave me an admonishment that no drunk should ever hear. He said, Take care of yourself and get plenty of rest. Rest from what? I've worked for months. And I got a supply of the goofiest pelletists and headed for Texas. When I got down there, I found a small town psychiatrist who was a lonely little fellow. And he loved to talk. I would listen to him. And he would give me goofballs but a popcorn sack full. But this is too good to last. I was awakened from a deep slumber. There were two deputy sheriffs looking down at me. And they said, Get up and come go with us. My mother had blown the whistle. I remember this vividly. I had a hard time focusing on my shoelaces. And I said to one of these fuzzies, Help me with my shoelaces, will you? And he said, No, I won't. We have plenty of time. And I found out that they did. This is the commodity that the judges and courts dispense with. It's time. That's all they're in business for. And they'll give you a big hunk of the clock at the slightest provocation. So I'm in the pokey. This is the smart guy. This is the resourceful guy who has returned to his hometown. And this is the treatment that they give me. The genius, no less. And here I am up in this pokey hating my own mother for having brought down this great humiliation upon me. Hell, it wasn't my first jail. Nor was it my last. But you know, I was there about three days and these pellets began to die out. I don't remember exactly. And there came a fellow whom I had never seen before to my boudoir with the vertical Venetian blind. And he called for me by name. And as I look back on it now, it was a rather cruel scene. When you're in jail, you're a captive audience. You know, in all of my lifetime when I didn't like what people were saying to me, I could spin on my heel and leave. But when you're in jail, you stay. And this guy came up to me and gave me what has been come to know as the A.A. pitch. Without himself, he wouldn't talk about me. If he'd talked about me, I could have carried on a good conversation with him. Here's the guy who is motivated by a force that I cannot describe, who has taken his time, closed up his office, and come down on Monday morning to see a guy that he doesn't know. And I sometimes am sickened as I sit around an A.A. club and listen to some guy say, if he wants it, let him come get it. You are looking at a man who would not be an alcoholic, not been motivated by some of the mechanics of God's handiwork. I turned him away, I hated his guts, but I subconsciously envied his serenity, I think. I remember asking him more than once, who sent you to see me? This is who I particularly wanted to hate. I went to see a drunk down in Texas not so long ago that reminded me of that. This poor devil was laying there with his sheet rolled up like a pencil, the bloodshot eyes, and he looked up at me and he said, who turned me in to that outlaw? You know, I know just how he felt. Who sent you to see me? Well, I guess he went back and reported to my mother. I'm sure he must have. I believe she asked him, what's the score? Is he all right now? And he said, no, I don't think your son's ready for AA. And being the wise woman that she was, she said, well, if we let him out, he'll get drunk. And he said, yes, his condition demands that he get drunk. Well, my people are pretty substantial citizens down in that area. None of them have ever been hung for horse stealing. And they arranged, no, that's not the word for it, they paid two deputy sheriffs to load me into a police car. They sent my bags down there and carry me 200 miles to Houston, Texas. And there they sat with me until the train went west. This was their treatment for the disease of alcoholism. No family likes to admit that they've got one of us. My family sure as hell had one. You know, in my experience in AA, I think that we stayed around and bat our gums too much about how we suffered. We talk about the physical suffering that we receive in AA. You know what I remember? The ideations and the indignities that I brought down upon myself. And I had no answer for why they were happening to me. Don't tell me this is not suffering. As I sat in this immense station in Houston that day with these two burly guards, I weighed 119 pounds, no teeth, had a pair of pants on that any one of you could have gotten in with me. And I knew that everybody that walked by on this station was looking at me. Don't tell me that I didn't suffer. I shall remember that till my dying day. Well, they escorted me out on the train that night. It's not a quick road to make friends on a train. I didn't go back to California all in one long hop. I got off in San Antonio and filled a bag up with the only thing I know to fill a bag up with. And they carried me off of the train in a wheelchair in Los Angeles. Some smart aleck said, you can't live in this car. We use it all the time. It goes back and forth. I had kind of set up shop in there. And they loaded me with three old bags on the foot of this wheelchair. Some of you are familiar with the scene there in Los Angeles. And took me out to the front foyer and dumped me very unceremoniously. And with all the jocular remarks that I might make, all the fun we have in looking back, I can honestly say to you that the next five months I went through a living hell. I ended up in a flop house in Sacramento. And those were the days that was not uncommon for four or five of us to walk from under the bridge for a $40 funeral. And every time I go into an AA club and see hanging on the wall the sign that reads but for the grace of God, I'm reminded of this particular flop house. I wonder what happened to the other 17 guys. Some of them could have possibly been as worthy as me. By a great stretch of the imagination some of them could have been as brilliant as I am. Some of them could have had somebody at home praying for them too. I wonder what happened to them. How come I was the lucky guy? And by brute force and awkwardness. And you know what that is to sober up. I crawled out of that place and headed for that guy that came to see me in that jail. I had to do it the hard way. A jail here and a bridge there but I finally made it. And I go back home and my people, they are great believers in this iron treatment. They think it will help our disease. They wanted to blow the whistle on us. They wanted to stop me and put me back in the pokey. And I had an old uncle who proves to us that we don't have a patent on everything good who said to my mother and her sister, he said, no, you can't put him out like that. No, you can't put him out like that. And then he said some words that might be applicable to the treatment of the alcoholic down through the centuries. Go into the back room and stay out of sight or you won't bother anymore. And that's been the treatment for us up until the advent of this society of ours. Go into the back room and stay out of sight or you won't bother anybody. Well, this is the beginning of the end, I suppose. I remember it. I can smell it even now. Somewhere during the course of that night, I had a little box of pills and three half pints of apple wine that I had brought home in a shoe box. I didn't have any blinding spiritual experience. No, I think I came to a realization that something was wrong with me that I couldn't control, that I had to cry out for help. And I think that it is the greatest sign of strength for any drunk to beg for help. And I called the guy that came to see me in the jail. And he came again and his story was no different. No different. It was me. And he took me to my first AA meeting. Well, I remember he loaded me up and I still got on the same pair of pants I've got on for three months already. And he took me up there that night. Dirty shabby place and the stairs were kind of cut on the bias. And I don't remember any of the brilliant things that were said up there that night by the old Ed, the elder statesman. Don't remember any pearls of wisdom. I remember experiencing a communication with people like and the sickening loneliness that plagues every drunk as long as he sits on a bar stool and drinks left to me that night. And it has never returned. And for that, I am deeply grateful. I got well in a hurry. I knew it all in two weeks. I went through all the fits and seizures of a new AA member. Ain't that great to watch? I quit cussing, quit talking too loud, just went all overboard and damn near got drunk. I just became so benevolent. I didn't know who was giving this away really. I thought I was. You might even say that I became God-like. We've got an old colored Baptist preacher down in our area. That makes the remark that there's something wrong with a peach that gets ripe too quick. It's got a worm in it. But I had quick, quick cures, real quick. I got a call one night to go see a drunk. I never will forget this. The fellow there did call me and said that he had taken this guy's jug away from him and would I come down and get him. And I took one of my buddies and a new automobile. And I remember how good I felt, how benevolent I felt. And I went down and the real smart guy and I retrieved this drunk from the fellow and I got his jug and I put him between me and the guy next to me and I start giving him the pitch. God, I felt good. And as I talked with eloquence, his eyes began to water and I knew I had him. And as we drove slowly on, he gently lowered his head over on my shoulder and I knew I had him. Did you ever hear of anybody throwing up silently? Every time I've ever gotten drivelagged with a drunk, he pukes on me. ...this stuff away. Well, I got a lot of blessings out of AA. He's supposed to work with a drunk, really is. Really, I don't. I worked with one down in Texas for four and a half years. This guy called one morning and my wife answered the phone. She said, Yes, Joe, come out. And I go out and this guy's real scurvy. He's like me. And he's bordering on DTs and, you know, Dr. Joe. And I borrowed a big tall goblet of whiskey and poured it down this trap. That's when he knocked him out, really. And when he kind of came unshuffled from this drink, he was in an AA club. See, any way you get him there is good to me. And the guy got sober. And he stayed sober for about three months and then he got drunk again. It didn't hurt him, but it was a hell of a blow to my ego. And I just knew that he had to sober up under my direction. So I work on him some more. Go get him. Start him over again. He gets sober. Gets drunk again in three months. And he had an affliction. None of you have ever had this, I know. He would go to faraway places and call me collects just to tell me that he was drunk. And I knew that ultimately he had to sober up. And I didn't. I kept on with him. And I thought, Oh, God, you've been watching Inspirers too much to let me listen and I'll tell you. He became sort of a side project with me. And about seven years ago he got on for him what I hope was his last drunk in one of our local motels. And he called another fellow from our club who is not half as smart as I am. And he went out and talked to that bastard for ten minutes and he's been sober ever since. And I hated his guts. I'd sit in the club and look at him and think, You ought to be mine. What do I know about the treasure that God has given us? I owe him more than he owes me. He kept me sober for four and a half years. I don't know how to explain the happiness that comes from an existence in this society. It's beyond my capacity. I know that a lot of good things have happened to me. I don't have to run anymore. I don't have to feel ashamed anymore like I used to. I don't have to apologize anymore like I used to. And I think maybe I'm not good enough to... explain about this. Let me tell you a little story that was written by a doctor about a guy making a call to a sick fellow. This is just like any other call on a sick fellow. Except it happened two thousand years ago. It was written by a doctor very coldly and abstractly. It's a story that we know of as the demoniac. This old boy, as Luke saw it, was real sick. They called him a demoniac for the lack of better verbiage in those days. If they'd have had him today he would have been a catatonic or schizophrenic or maybe a bed wetter or something. But in those days he was called a demoniac, a maniac full of demons. That's what it was. Best description they had in those days. And he went along literally and verbally said that no man could tame him. That the manifestations of his disease were such that it kept him in fetters and chains. Hell, that's like me. He got so bad that they ran him out of town. Kind of like me. And he ended up out on the riverbank eating with the pigs. Kind of like me. By a little stretch of my imagination I can see it. The beard, the dirty things, the things about him, babbling. There seemed to be at that time a little carpenter fellow who was wandering about the country who had a facility that you and I haven't quite acquired. He could see no ill in anyone. And he asked this fellow, Say, boy, are you having some trouble? And this guy was so filled with self-pity, I guess. He said, Trouble is my name. He said, Trouble is that they call me Legion, which means many. He's real sick. Well, the little carpenter fellow went through a process of healing that was very unnatural, even in those days. And the society of that day didn't understand it much as well as they understand our healing today in AA. The people didn't appreciate it very much, the manner in which he had been healed. And they came out in mass to see what had happened. And these are the words that I like. It said, When the people saw them, there he sat, fully clothed and in his right mind. We've got to step like that. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. There he sat, fully clothed and in his right mind. But the people prevailed upon him to leave, to get out. They didn't like the manner in which the guy had been healed. And I can see the sick guy that had just been well, timid in his newfound life. And he said to the little carpenter fellow, probably in fright, said, Let me go with you. And the little carpenter fellow gave the demoniac an admonishment that I would give to you as doctors of this profession. He said, No, you can't go with me. Stay here so that others may see what has happened to you. Thank you. No need for me to tell you how much that this was enjoyed. I'll ask Dr. Graham then to lead us in the Lord's Prayer and close the meeting. Shall we pray? Our Father who art in heaven, earth as it is in heaven, give us our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.