The Inferiority Complex of the Successful Man – 1962 – John V.

Thank you, Dr. Lodge, Mr. Chairman, I'm going to be very formal tonight.\nMy name is John Van Dyke and I'm an alcoholic.\nI've said it now, I don't know how many thousands of times, but one more doesn't matter.\nAnd those of you who are new in AA are probably rather astonished that you see a fellow here\nwith a black shirt and a white collar addressing an AA meeting.\nWell, there is a hymn, an old Methodist hymn, I was not always good.\nI am here as a priest in the church through AA, and when any one of you are brand new,\nwhen you stop drinking and you stop coming to meetings and keep it up,\nyou'll never know what's going to happen, believe me.\nI didn't know either.\nThank you.\nIt's always very interesting to me, again,\nto recall my own story, and I haven't done this for years now.\nI've always been philosophizing on AA, but I think in a meeting like this,\nand I haven't been in Florida for quite some time, and very few people know me well here,\nI'm going to tell you little bits about my own story, which generally is parallel to most of yours.\nI believe when we are young, we want to be good.\nWe want to be happy people.\nWell, I asked my little boy, who is now, and he never saw me drink, by the way,\nwho is now about 16, then he wants to be happy, and he is just like his father.\nHe thinks that happiness sits in things.\nHe has a motorcycle.\nFor an Oklahoma, where I'm living now, they can drive a motorcycle.\nThey are 14 years old.\nAnd this motorcycle means a great deal, and he fusses with it all the time.\nAnd now he is 16 about, and now he wants a car.\nAnd when he has a car, then he will be all right.\nHis marks stink, but that's another story.\nThe next thing what he wants to do, and I can predict that already, is he wants a girlfriend.\nAnd then he's probably just as bad as his father.\nThat he wants a girlfriend who is built like a cathedral, you know.\nWell, there is an old proverb that a fruit does not fall far from the tree.\nAnd this was my story.\nI came and was born in a little village in a very small country, in Holland.\nYou still can hear it, I'm sure.\nI never will get any better, so forget about it.\nEither you understand me or you don't.\nSome people get accustomed to it, they tell me, in church.\nWell, anyway, I was born in this very small village, 875 population,\nand about 1,000 chickens and 200 or 300 pigs and what more.\nAnd my father was a schoolteacher.\nI hope there are no schoolteachers here.\nFor that's a hell of a job.\nTo make men out of monkeys.\nAnd you know, schoolteachers are a race by themselves.\nThey never have any money.\nMy father didn't either.\nBut they have great ideals.\nThey want their children to be on the mountaintop.\nMy father wanted that too, but he didn't have the money to do it.\nSo we went to school and we had to take from time to time some fetched up pants\nand some books which had been used by other people, and I resented that.\nThe character of a person is made from the time that he is about a year old, I believe.\nAnd I started, when I was five, six, and seven years old, to resent those fetched up pants.\nAnd I started to resent those books which were half torn, and we had to study in them and we had to go to school.\nWhen we had a bicycle, it was always secondhand, never new.\nYou know, in the country I came from, bicycles were known by their trade name.\nI knew names of bicycles the same way as you know the names of cars.\nAnd my bicycle didn't have a name.\nAnd you start to resent that.\nFor none of us wants to be that way.\nWe want to have things which we, as it were, can identify.\nAnd so when you have these things, you start to already develop a drive towards materialism.\nWe want to have things.\nAnd I remember when I was a small boy, I made up my mind that someday, somehow, I was going to have these things which I never had.\nAnd I remember the time that we were living at the railroad which passed some, I don't know,\nthe Hague to Paris.\nAnd you saw the people sit in these beautiful dining rooms in the railroad cars with these little red lights on and having all this beautiful silverware.\nAnd I was jealous.\nAnd I wanted to have these.\nAnd someday I was going to get them.\nWell, this is all very well, and it makes for a career.\nFor only people who want to have things.\nThose things will succeed in life.\nBut we can ask for the wrong things, too.\nThen there was something else to trouble, and I think we overlooked it.\nBut I have to start to realize this, the more I have to be living in the Southwest.\nMy parents were Bible people.\nYou know, the Bible is a very dangerous book.\nFor you can find all the answers.\nYou can find all the answers that you want in it.\nAnd my father and mother were Protestant.\nAnd in Holland, to be Protestant was approximately the same as Jewish.\nFor they had, all commandments were negative.\nThou shalt not do this.\nThou shalt not go ice skating on Sunday.\nThat was one of them.\nAnd thou shalt not play cards.\nAnd thou shalt not leave the home after nine o'clock.\nAnd thou shalt not read a book on Sunday.\nAnd thou shalt not read a newspaper either.\nFor if you go ice skating on Sunday, then the ice is so bad that you'll sink through it,\nand you'll be in hell forever.\nWell, this is a negative religion, you see.\nThis is no religion at all.\nOf course you can dig it out, simply.\nAnd therefore, when you grow up and you have this kind of negative approach to life,\nthat you may not do things,\nand that God has become a policeman instead of a father,\nthen you start to rebel.\nAnd I did.\nWell, now, where did that lead to?\nAlmighty God has given us, in my family,\nall very good brains.\nThe village I came from was about a thousand years old.\nAnd I was one of the first two to ever go to high school.\nTo go to high school, we had to go by bicycle an hour and a half,\nand an hour and a half back.\nThey were the good old days,\nthat you were willing to give something for your education.\nAnd I did that.\nAnd then we moved to\nclose to Rotterdam,\nand it was much closer by.\nAnd so we got a very good education,\nthanks to the government,\nfor in Europe,\nWestern Europe,\nwhen you have good brains,\nthe government takes care for everything.\nAnd if you don't have good brains,\nyou don't get any education, period,\neven if you pay for it.\nWell, I came out of high school,\nand my father said,\nare you going to study?\nI said, no.\nI'm going to make money.\nThere it began.\nYou see?\nI wanted to have things.\nI didn't want to have a quarter pocket money a week,\nand a quarter that is exactly six and a half cents in American money.\nAnd so I went in business.\nI'm a little older probably than you think I am.\nI'm quite over 50.\nAnd the time we went in business in Europe,\nit was that you had to start from the very bottom.\nAnd the moment you get a BA in business administration,\nyou start as vice president.\nBut, you know, we didn't do that those days.\nAnd so I had to become an office boy.\nBut you work hard,\nand you start to find out a few things about yourself.\nI don't think it is a bad idea for a lot of young men and women\nto go for a year and learn what they are,\ninstead of going to school,\nand not know what they want,\nfor that's the trouble today.\nSo I went in business,\nand I started to make 25 guilders a month,\nwhich is six dollars and a quarter.\nAnd my shoe repair bill did cost ten dollars a month.\nFor you know, Holland is very thrifty.\nWhen you would live, let's say, in Miami,\nthen the head of the office would say,\nat the very moment that there is any letter\nto go to any place in Miami,\nit is not going in the mail.\nYou're going to bring it.\nHe saved three cents.\nAnd this is how they got millionaires.\nAnd they did.\nAnd I don't blame them.\nBut after a year, I had enough.\nAnd then I knew I was a businessman,\nbut now I had to make more money.\nFor just to be a businessman,\nI had to go very slow.\nI had to be a junior clerk,\nand then a coming clerk,\nand then finally,\nwhen you are gray and old,\nyou are vice president.\nAnd that was going too slow for me.\nBut I wanted those nice dinners\nin these big trains and what more.\nWell, as I had become a newspaper reporter\nin my spare time,\nI have always had the capacity to work very hard.\nI think most alcoholics,\nthey don't have.\nAnd I had become a newspaper reporter,\nand now I enrolled in the university,\nwhich was the closest by,\nfor I couldn't afford anything else,\nto become a doctor of chemistry\nand chemical engineering.\nAnd you see,\nI haven't talked about alcohol yet, have I?\nI didn't drink.\nNever.\nIt wasn't necessary.\nI had something to work for.\nI worked very hard.\nAfter about four and a half, five years,\nI became associate professor\nin chemistry and engineering,\nand the future looked beautiful.\nAnd after I got my degrees,\nI met the man who was the head of the office\nwhere I had worked,\nwho happened to be\nthe largest grain importer of Holland.\nAnd he said,\nwhen do you have your degree?\nAnd I said,\nI will have my degree in about six weeks.\nAnd he said,\nI want to see you.\nAnd they made me president of the company.\nSimple.\nYou see,\nno drinking,\nworking hard,\ngetting someplace.\nAnd now I had arrived in Holland,\nfor I was now president of a company,\nand I started to make,\nfor the first time,\ngood money.\nAnd now the tendency comes out,\nyou see.\nFor the fox gets old and loses his hair,\nnever his tricks,\nand his tricks are all there.\nFor they could have diagnosed\nwhat I was going to become in a hurry.\nThe first money I made,\nI bought an ivory-colored open Buick.\nHolland has roads for bicycles.\nNow why did I do this?\nYou know why?\nThis is typical in alcoholic trade.\nI wanted to show people\nthat my God,\nhere was Johnny Van Dyke.\nYou see?\nSee this fellow\nwho comes from this small little village,\nhe's taken out of the clay\nby about eight horses,\nand you see where he is now?\nThere is where he goes.\nWhen you see anyone driving\none of those crazy sports cars\naround here,\nand he is young,\nyou can bet your boots\nhe's going to be an A.A.\nsome of these days.\nWell, I had arrived,\nand things went fine.\nNo drinking.\nWell, a few things had happened,\nand I think you should know those,\nbut it is not complete without it.\nWhen I was 18,\nI went to my father,\nand I said,\nFather,\nI never will go to church anymore.\nAnd he said,\nWhy?\nI don't believe in all that nonsense.\nAnd my father was the wisest man\nwho ever lived.\nBless his soul,\nhe is dead now.\nAnd my father said to me,\nSon, he said,\nyou are not 45 years old yet.\nThat's all he said.\nHe didn't say,\nyou must go,\nyou have to go.\nHe knew,\nyou are not 45 years old yet.\nAnd I never will forget it.\nAnd so I didn't go to church anymore.\nI was now completely out\nto make my own happiness.\nSo,\nand there is where it sits.\nI was self-centered.\nI once upon a time wrote on a card\nwhich was over my desk,\nas far as my future is concerned,\nI will not go out of my way\nfor anyone,\nnor anybody,\nnor anything.\nAnd this is how my career began.\nNo drinking.\nBut you know,\nwhen you are this kind of a go-getter,\nthen you take two jobs instead of one,\nisn't it?\nWhen you want money,\nthen you take two jobs.\nSo,\nduring the day,\nI was president of a company,\nand at night,\nI was chief engineer of another company.\nAnd I made so much money,\noh,\nI lived fine.\nAnd from time to time,\nI even had time to have a girlfriend.\nThat happens too.\nBut I shouldn't have,\nfor you see,\nin Holland,\nwe get engaged when we are seventeen,\nand you stay engaged for seven years,\nand then you finally marry the girl.\nBut I had been engaged for five,\nand I didn't marry the girl.\nWell,\nthis card was a great help to that,\nfor you know,\nthe girls like,\nin those days even,\nthey liked ivory-colored open Buicks.\nWell,\nthey said,\ndon't go into that further,\nfor otherwise they say,\nwell,\nwell,\nwhy is he in the church?\nBut anyway.\nFinally,\na year later,\nI made as much money as the prime minister of the Netherlands,\nand the country became too small.\nAnd so,\nI wanted to come to a country where you really could make money.\nAnd of course,\nthere's only one country in the world where you really can make money,\nand that's the United States of America.\nAnd they always had told us that in America,\nthe dollar bills are green,\nand they hang on the trees.\nAnd if you really work hard,\nand you're not too lazy to pick them off,\nyou can pick them off.\nAnd my idea was,\nI come to the United States,\nand I'm going to make as much money as I can,\nin the greatest of hurry I can,\nand then what I do,\nis I go back to my home country,\nand take a nice rocking chair,\nand rock.\nSo now the trouble began.\nFor I was sent out from the Netherlands,\nto come to America,\nright after repeal,\nand become the head of a liquor company.\nNow,\ntake care now,\nI was not drinking.\nI mean,\nI think any man should have the privilege of getting drunk,\nso once or twice a year,\nI don't see anything wrong in that.\nBut I was with the liquor company,\nI came to the United States,\nI left everything I had over there,\nand I started to work hard here.\nThe small company,\nwhich I was connected with,\nhowever,\nright after repeal,\nwas taken over by a larger company,\nand again by a larger company,\nand I grew with them,\nand finally,\nI wound up to be\nDirector of Research and Development\nof the largest liquor company in the world.\nHeadquarters in New York,\nI had offices in London, England,\nin France,\nin Spain,\nall over the planet.\nAnd I made the money I wanted to make.\nAnd according to any kind of calculations,\nI should have been now\nthe happiest man in the world.\nI had,\nnot only that I had a house,\nI had two estates\nin Morristown, New Jersey,\nand there are some friends of mine here\nwho know that,\nwho have seen those deals.\nI even had my own plane,\nand my own chauffeur,\nand my own butler,\nand my own farm.\nThings went fine.\nI had become the great successful man.\nAnd people who saw me drive in the streets,\nand in New York,\nfor I know New York better than I know any other place,\nthey probably put their finger and say,\nBoy, what a successful guy he is.\nWell, pay you something.\nYou have to pay for success.\nAnd from time to time,\nthe price we pay\nis too high.\nAnd I had become\na great man in the business world,\nbut the price I had to pay\nwas too high,\nand I had become an alcoholic.\nNow, this is very simple.\nBut I'll tell you why people become alcoholics,\nand I only can talk about myself.\nAnd I think\nyou may have had this question in your mind\nfor a long time.\nIn the first place, as I told you,\nI was completely a materialist.\nThat means I wanted to have things.\nThe world revolved about things.\nSecondly, I didn't have anything to fall back on.\nI didn't have any kind of a religion or philosophy,\nbut specifically not a religion.\nI didn't know God.\nAnd I thought God did not know me.\nAnd secondly, I think,\nI had a tremendous inferiority complex.\nAnd you may say, why?\nThat is very simple.\nYou see, an inferiority complex\nis not that we are\ngood at a lot of things\nand don't show it.\nNo, it is deeper than that.\nI traveled in circles\nwhich were far in education above mine.\nThere are people,\nspecifically when you come\nto the very high circles,\nwho are not only well educated,\nbut who know by infusion so many things.\nI speak and still do seven languages.\nBut there were people who spoke languages\nI did not speak.\nAnd there were people who had\nbeen able to learn so many things in their youth\nwhich I hadn't the chance to do.\nI had studied all my life.\nI had worked all my life.\nAnd they had, well,\nsome of the kind of qualities.\nI remember that how I was in Scotland\nand lived there for a while,\nthat they asked me to go grouse hunting.\nHave you ever been grouse hunting?\nWell, I didn't know a grouse from a canary.\nAnd you have to be on a horse on top of that.\nAnd I didn't know how many hands\na horse was supposed to have.\nBut when I took a bottle of scotch,\nand then I drink it in a hurry,\nthen I can talk about horses and grouses\nand all these things.\nWhen I was speaking in foreign countries\nand I didn't speak the language quite correct,\nthen when I did take a bottle of liquor\nand I did drink it before the meeting,\nI could speak Arabic and what more.\nYou see?\nInferiority complex.\nIt all depends on what kind of setting\nyou have there.\nI remember how I was skiing one day in Switzerland,\nand I just had learned to ski.\nAnd there was a very pretty girl there,\nand she asked me if I would go skiing with her.\nNow, of course, you do that.\nAnd we climbed up the mountain,\nand she happens to be a champion,\nand she ran down,\nand I was standing there.\nBut I always had, you know,\nmy tranquilizer with me.\nOr my pepper-upper,\nI don't know how you call it.\nBut anyway, I took a few good big slugs\nand I ran down, too.\nHow I ever did it, only God knows.\nBut you see, there we are.\nWe use this in order to overcome\nour inferiority complex.\nAnd the last place,\nI didn't have any humility whatsoever.\nJohnny Van Dyke was number one.\nAnd I didn't care what happened to anyone else\nas long as I got my way.\nAnd I think here are the traits of an escape artist.\nAnd we are escape artists.\nSome of us fall better away by alcohol,\nanother by sex,\nanother by dope,\nanother by pride.\nIt is all the same thing.\nIt happens to be that we become alcoholics,\nand that is really a disease which can be healed yet,\nor it can be cured,\nor it can be arrested,\nwhile other people,\nthey cannot arrest that disease\nas easy as we can.\nWell, anyway, I had become an alcoholic.\nAnd that wasn't too bad, I think.\nI didn't know it.\nI did drink too much.\nBut my job was drinking.\nSee, you couldn't expect anything else.\nYou know, in the liquor business,\nthere are two kinds of analysis.\nOne is chemical analysis,\nand the other one is organoleptic analysis.\nNow, you know what organoleptic analysis is?\nIt's to taste the stuff.\nAnd I was an expert in that.\nBut you know, it is very hard to taste just here, you know.\nThat's bad.\nGenerally, you have to taste here, too.\nSo I did drink the stuff.\nAll over the world.\nMy job was to buy new plants and new laboratories,\nand I changed the production.\nWell, in the beginning it wasn't too bad.\nI was drunk.\nBut I think I could have stopped.\nI believe that even if I had been a Christian at that time,\nI would have been able to stop during Lent.\nNo, no, no.\nBut now we laugh about this.\nBut these weren't the reasons\nthat people made that rule, you know.\nUh-huh.\nWhen you still can stop for six weeks, brother,\nyou have a chance.\nBut when you don't,\nthen you better be careful.\nWell, anyway, I never had any Lent.\nSo I didn't stop.\nThen comes the time that you start to need it.\nFirst you start to need it in the morning.\nWell, you can get it.\nI mean, the trouble with me was that I had too much of it.\nCan you figure out that if you could get drunk\nand don't have to pay for it,\nhow many of you would probably still be drinking?\nUh-huh.\nThe only thing that I have to do is to write a slip.\nAnd they would send me a case or ten cases to the house,\nand they would send me to the office and what more.\nIt didn't cost me a nickel.\nAnd the finest of stuff.\nI never used any good.\nOh, no, sir.\nThe finest of it.\nThe finest champagne and the finest wines\nand the finest whiskey.\nI made the stuff.\nAnd I knew what was the best.\nWell, things are not too bad yet.\nAnd then comes the time that your health goes.\nAnd your thinking goes.\nEspecially if you don't have to pay for it,\nthere is no limit to it.\nThen comes the time when you're completely alone.\nLonely.\nI don't think that anyone knows,\nbesides an alcoholic,\nwhat it is to be lonely.\nTo be in a room full of people.\nAnd nice people.\nAnd feel yourself completely alone.\nThat people come to you\nand they want to start a conversation.\nAnd they do.\nAnd they really seem to like you.\nAnd probably do.\nAnd you still feel completely alone.\nI think only an alcoholic\nknows that better than anyone else.\nThen comes the time that you think you get crazy.\nThat the little wheels in your head start to spin.\nAnd you have to call someone.\nFor you don't want to be alone.\nI've had many times that I had to call someone\nfrom one of the plants and say,\nwill you please come over.\nI think I get off my rocker.\nAnd then you are in a bad shape.\nBut still it is not the end.\nYou see, the time that I came into AA,\nthere was not much of AA around yet.\nThis is long ago.\nThen comes the time that you become a zombie.\nYou see those people from time to time.\nYou have been drinking for so and so many years.\nAnd then finally the alcohol content in your blood stream\nis so high that you really only need\none or two double martinis a day\nto stay on that same level.\nAnd you do things automatic.\nBut you don't know why you do them.\nAnd you can't recall how you did them.\nThis is what I call the last stage, zombie.\nDrink is just now a medicine.\nAnd you can't stop.\nFor when you are without a drink for a half a day,\nyou start to shake not only inside and outside.\nAnd then comes the time that you start to shake\nand to shake\nand to shake.\nAnd then you want to pray and you can't.\nYou start to shake and to pray at the same time.\nAnd you don't know what to say.\nAnd you say, God, please help me.\nAnd then that goes away too.\nThen it becomes a matter of not praying at all\nbut just hoping that it will be the end.\nAnd that is where you wind up.\nAnd that is where the choice sits.\nAnd that is not your choice\nand that is not my choice.\nThat never was.\nWell, when you get to that stage,\nthen you're not good in business anymore.\nAnd so you lose your job.\nAnd when you lose your job\nand you can't hold down your own job anymore,\nthen it is logical there\nthat you lose everything you have too, isn't it?\nI had, when I was 35,\nI had enough money to retire.\nI have made a very,\nI have become a very successful man.\nI had all the things.\nI was now an alcoholic.\nI couldn't stop.\nI lost my job.\nAnd I lost\nmy health.\nYou know, one day I was called in\nto the chairman of the board\nwith two others of my friends.\nOne was my boss\nand the other one was a friend of mine.\nAnd we were some of the highest paid people\nin the United States.\nAnd we were told that they had checked\nwith the insurance company\nand that our health did not allow them\nto keep us on the payroll\nfor they couldn't get any insurance\non us anymore\nand that the doctors had told\nthat we had half a year to live.\nIt's quite a verdict to hear that.\nThat your drinking has gotten you now so far\nthat you have half a year to live\nand no more.\nAnd of course you don't believe it, do you?\nBut then things start to happen.\nThree of us were called in\nand within two months my boss,\none of the greatest men ever lived,\ntremendous brain,\nthis country is greatly indebted\nto what he did for the war effort.\nHe called me up one night.\nHe said, John, how are you doing?\nI said, not good at all, boss.\nHe said, I am not either.\nDid you stop drinking?\nI said, no.\nDid you?\nNo.\nAnd the next morning I got another\ntelephone call that he had,\nduring the night, he had bled to death.\nAcute alcoholism.\nHemorrhaged.\nAnd that was the first one to go.\nAnd a month later,\nanother head of the department,\nwho also was one of the three,\nhe also died.\nAnd now I was alone.\nAnd the verdict had been\nall three of you have a year.\nAnd two of them have gone now.\nNow you would think that anyone\nwho has some brains in his head\nwould stop drinking then, would you?\nNot John even Dyke.\nMm-mm.\nAnd then I lost every dime I had.\nYou know, I think only alcoholics\ncan understand this.\nI had moved to a beautiful estate,\nand we had about eight,\nI had about 18 rooms.\nAnd there were eight bedrooms.\nAnd I slept in one bedroom one night\nand the other bedroom another night,\nyou know, to make it easy.\nAnd then I had to sell it.\nAnd there were beautiful furniture\nand beautiful rooms\nand so many grand pianos.\nAnd I had to sell it,\nand at the day when I sold it,\nI had to move.\nI was unable, physically and mentally,\nto take anything out of that house.\nHave you ever been that way?\nThat you couldn't even pick up a towel\nand put it in a barrel.\nI left everything as was.\nDidn't have the strength anymore.\nAnd so I lost everything I had,\nand I had to move back\nto an eight-dollar-a-week room.\nWell, now you save on that,\nwhen it is so far,\nnow you're certainly going to quit,\naren't you?\nNo.\nYou can't.\nYou can't.\nThen came the time,\nand I think most alcoholics\nthrough this special event\nthey get that far,\nthey just think about suicide.\nNot only think about it,\nbut that you really want it.\nBut what is the use?\nYou have had everything.\nWhat is this road back?\nIt's difficult.\nHardly possible.\nAnd you want to give it all up.\nYou really surrender then.\nYour back is against the wall,\nand you can't stop.\nYou can't live without drinking.\nYou don't have the money to buy it.\nYou can't think anymore,\nand then you want to give up.\nAnd the day came for me, too.\nAnd you know,\nthis is the most remarkable,\nthat when you come so far,\nthat you, as it were,\nare willing to blot out yourself,\nwhich it is,\nthen help is there.\nI believe life is something like a tree.\nA person is something like a tree.\nWe have to be pruned.\nAnd the more selfish we are,\nthe harder the pruning has to be.\nSome people are so little bit selfish\nthat, you know,\na little bit of the outside of the branches\nhas to come off.\nAnd some of us are so self-centered\nthat whole branches have to come off.\nAnd some of us are so damn self-centered\nthat the whole tree has to come down\nand only the roots left.\nAnd that was Johnny van Dyck.\nFor I gave up.\nAnd help was there.\nAnd now comes AA.\nI had bought a book of AA\nabout seven years before.\nI wanted to learn\nhow to drink like a gentleman.\nBut the trouble was\nthat I bought that book in the morning\nand I had a luncheon engagement.\nAnd I had a luncheon engagement\nwith the sales manager\nand he had trouble in his drinking, too.\nHe told me.\nAnd he was married\nand he had some children\nand I was not married.\nAnd so we had lunch\nand he bought from me the book\nfor two double martinis.\nBut I had seen it.\nI had carried it under my arm.\nAnd lo and behold,\none evening I come to my one-room apartment\nand there is a book laying on\nthat little nightstand\nand it is that yellow book.\nAlcoholic Phenomenons.\nAnd I didn't know how it got there.\nThe next day I found out\nthat an old lady had brought it.\nAnd she had come to the landlord\nand asked if he or this young fellow lived\nwho seemed to have so much trouble in drinking.\nAnd they said, yes.\nShe said, I have a present for him.\nWill you please put this next to his bed?\nAnd they did.\nShe didn't come in as my sponsor.\nShe didn't come over and say,\nwell, now I'm going to talk to you.\nI didn't like old ladies anyway.\nBut she just put the book there.\nThat's all she did.\nShe didn't hold my hand\nand didn't come babysitting.\nShe just did what she thought she should do\nand leave her book.\nAnd she left the book\nand the next morning, of course,\nI woke up and I started to read some of it.\nYou know, when you are in that way,\nyour story is the same as in the book.\nAnd so she also had left some information\nand that is where A.A. met.\nAnd A.A. met in an Episcopal church.\nAnd so I called the director of that church.\nBless his soul, too.\nI have met many saints in my days.\nWhen they are not saints yet,\nI'll make them that way.\nAnd I called him up and I said,\nMr. So-and-so,\nMr. Ettridge, by the way, is his name.\nHe was in Morristown, New Jersey.\nI said, I understand that there is a group of alcoholics\nmeeting in your church.\nNow, take care.\nNow, this was 9 o'clock in the morning.\nAnd he said, yes.\nI said, when do they meet?\nHe said, next Sunday.\nThis was Thursday morning.\nHe said, are you in trouble?\nI said, no.\nWell, he said, you know,\nyou may not be in trouble,\nbut I'd like to see you anyway.\nHow about coming over at 5 o'clock?\nNow, that's a long time,\nfrom 9 to 5 o'clock, by the way.\nAnd so this is how I got acquainted\nwith Mr. Ettridge and A.A.\nAt 5 o'clock, of course, I was drunk.\nI didn't understand.\nYeah, you can't be sober from 9 till 5.\nI mean, being an alcoholic, that's impossible.\nAnd he expected it fully.\nAnd there was one man who put his arm around me.\nHe didn't know me.\nAnd he talked me sober.\nHave you ever had that?\nHe loved people so much that he was able to put his arm\naround you and just talk.\nAnd my God, you got sober.\nThis is a trick.\nHe loved people.\nAnd I'll never forget him.\nNever in my life.\nAnd he told me when the meetings were.\nAnd the meetings were on Sunday night.\nAnd I promised him that I wouldn't take another drink.\nWell, you understand.\nI mean, that is, you know.\nWell, anyway, I promised this holy man.\nAnd I hadn't talked to a minister now for 18 or 19 years, you know.\nSo I promised this holy man that I wouldn't take a drink.\nBut, of course, the next morning I was drunk.\nWhat happened between Thursday and Sunday, I don't know.\nI had very bad blackouts.\nThe only thing that I remember is that I woke up in New York.\nIn a hotel room.\nWhat I did in New York and how I paid for it, I even don't know to this day.\nAnd I remembered on Sunday morning that I had made the date with this holy man\nto go to the meeting.\nAnd I drove from New York to New Jersey.\nAnd all day long I tried not to have a drink.\nBut you know you need a drink in between.\nYou know that.