Staying Connected to the Fellowship Has to Be Number One Or the Drink Comes Back — ILA R.

About This Speaker Tape

Isla was born December 27, 1943, the seventh of eight children in an Alabama sharecropper's shack with no indoor plumbing, a periodically violent alcoholic father, and a mother who worked herself ragged in the fields. She tells her story chronologically because huge stretches of her childhood are gone — along with fourteen years of blackout drinking that started the night she learned to drink at an Atlanta loan-office job. The opening scene is a six-year-old Isla squatting in the outhouse as a live tapeworm comes out of her, her brother Seaburn rescuing her with two sticks, and the incident never spoken of again — a perfect miniature of a household where nothing important was ever said out loud.

At seventeen she got pregnant by a man named Carl who vanished; her brother Billy drove her to a third-floor walk-up on South Halstead in Chicago, where she signed adoption papers days after turning eighteen and returned home a stranger to herself. She had refused to drink before that — she'd watched her daddy, her brothers, her older sister — but after the adoption the shame was total, and within two years she had three jobs, was evicted from the YWCA and the Women's Christian Temperance Association, and had landed at Eastern Airlines in a Don Loper stewardess uniform that cost more than her entire childhood wardrobe. A three-year marriage collapsed after crew schedulers saw the black eyes she was hiding. Two DUIs came three months apart. In the Fulton County icebox — a phone-booth-sized cell with no toilet, no bowl, for people withdrawing under arrest — she finally understood she could neither get drunk nor get sober.

Three months of praying "please help me stop drinking" ended with a phone call from an old roommate, Pam Nellish, who'd been going to Al-Anon. Isla's first AA meeting was at NABA on April 3, 1975 — a women's Big Book meeting she thought was a Bible study, and she didn't care. She got hope at that first meeting and it turned her life from black and white to technicolor. She worked steps 3 through 7 formally on a spiritual retreat, leaned hard on Peggy, Linda, Barbara, Cheryl — her posse — and stayed happily sober almost fourteen years. Then came the Eastern Airlines strike, spare time she'd never had, disconnection from the fellowship, and a relapse that sent her back for a white chip. Her sobriety date is October 24, 1989.

The second life followed. On Valentine's Day 1997 she met her son and his four children. When her sister Audrey and Audrey's husband died a tragic alcoholic death, T.C. Henderson at NABA took the emergency airline call; a judge gave Isla custody of her eleven-year-old niece Jean. Next April she becomes a great-grandmother. The teaching she keeps returning to is plain: staying connected to the fellowship has to be the primary purpose, number one, or the drink comes back. "I can't do this by myself."

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Tim R. opens the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting on Navazoom and introduces Isla, who is wearing her Nava Club 50th anniversary T-shirt for the first time
• 2:30 Isla gives her sobriety date of October 24, 1989 and names April 3, 1975 — the day she first got to AA at NABA — as the date that actually changed her life
• 5:00 The outhouse tapeworm memory at age six: her brother Seaburn pulling it out with two sticks, and nothing ever spoken of it again — her miniature for a household where important things were scoffed at and left out
• 13:00 Brother Cecil comes home in his Army uniform, asks if those are her best shoes, learns they are her only shoes, and takes her into Scottsboro to buy new ones — the next time she sees him he is in a coffin from Korea
• 22:00 Pregnant at 17, abandoned by Carl, brother Billy drives her from Atlanta to South Halstead in Chicago where she sleeps on his couch and signs adoption papers just after turning 18
• 32:00 Learns to drink at the Chattanooga loan office and blacks out the first night; within a year is psychologically dependent, evicted from the YWCA and then the Women's Christian Temperance Association
• 48:00 Fulton County icebox after her second DUI — a phone-booth-sized cell with no toilet and no bowl for people withdrawing under arrest — and leaving jail the next morning with a stranger whose face she cannot remember
• 60:00 Three months of praying 'please help me stop drinking' ends with old roommate Pam Nellish calling; Isla asks drinking buddy Joan to take her to her first AA meeting at NABA on April 3, 1975
• 75:00 Relapse after nearly 14 years sober during the Eastern Airlines strike — spare time she had never had, disconnection from the fellowship, staying sober no longer her primary purpose — and returning for a white chip
• 85:00 Valentine's Day 1997: she meets her son and his four children; next April she becomes a great-grandmother