The Iron Curtain Between Him and Reality – 1960 – Bob A.

Thank you, buddy. And good evening, friends. My name is Bob and I'm an alcoholic. And what a thrill this has been for this week. Betsy and I had heard a lot about Crested Butte sometimes because we ran into the people who had spoken here when they came over and spoke in Idaho, where we sometimes live. And they had just raved about what a wonderful time they'd had. And so we're just so grateful to Bob and to Jerry and Tom and the other people on the committee that are responsible for giving us the privilege of being here for this week. I just hadn't realized that you could combine so much AA with so much other wonderful things to express the fact that we are indeed happy, joyous, and free. I should tell you that my home group is the Wednesday night group in Greenwich, Connecticut, which is where Riverside is. Riverside has been a part of the town of Greenwich. It's in Greenish, Connecticut. and as a matter of fact we have a couple of non-alcoholic Greenwich friends who have migrated out here to Crested Butte ran into them on the street a couple days ago and they said they'd like to come to their meeting this is their first meeting but they didn't come up for any desired trip you'll notice that I'm tickled to death to see you here Randy and Mary I have another home group which is out it's the Monday night group in Haley, Idaho, which is, as I say, where we live part of the year. I guess that if there's any message that I hope comes through tonight, it is that AA is about the joy of living. and I've been so conscious of that as we've been out here this week a buddy has kidded poor Kendall to death and a lot of the rest of us have about that day on Tuesday but what they didn't tell you was that after this horrendous trip up the mountain which wrecked Don and Susan's or really Susan's car ruined the running boards and bent the bumper and so on, we did get up there and we had a picnic on top of Taylor Pass. And then we sat down and we all had an AA meeting at the top. And the theme of the meeting, the subject of the meet-up was spirituality because as we were sitting up there looking out over this magnificent, magnificent scene that could have come only from the hand of God, we were just overwhelmed with how blessed we are in AA to be able to live this kind of life and to put our lives on a spiritual basis so that we can enjoy doing this kindof thing. So that was a great experience. And then this morning, I got up at 5 o'clock and took my usual 45 minutes of exercises and then dressed and went out to run because I run every day. And while I'm on that run, I do my 11th step. It is an opportunity. There's usually nobody out and around much, and so you're pretty much alone with your higher power and with nature around you and, you know, it's a time when the birds are waking up and the squirrels are beginning to run around and this morning I ran into a black-and-white setter right out here the only other living thing that was up at that hour and he smelled around in my running suit and smelled the dog that I run with in Idaho and he looked up at me and he said you seem to be a pretty good guy I said I'm going to run with you this morning and I said wonderful I'd love to have your company so he joined me and we ran and just had a lovely time on the way back I ran into Betsy who was just going out for her morning walk and the dog kind of looked over at her and I thought I think he'd like to join you just whistle a little and so he excused himself went over and joined her and walked with her. But then we went with Watt and Maury, who were our host and hostess for the day, and we went rafting down on the Gunnison River. And, you know, peace and serenity and loveliness absolutely personified. I get back from an experience like this and I honest to God think that I have lived, lived more in these two or three hours than many people do in their entire lifetime. I've never said this before on a podium before, but I really mean that, I think. This morning as I was running, it just came back to me just a snatch of some poem I must have read 50 years ago and I guess I haven't thought about it since. But I remember this line, it said, we live in heartbeats, not in figures on a dial. And boy, that is so, so true. So, this is our life today. On my morning run and during my eleventh step, I really use it to go over a litany of the things that I have to be grateful for in this life. the blessings, the entirely undeserved blessings, but the multitudinous blessings that have come to us just in the last 29 years. Now this is our life today. These 29 years ago, just about this time, or let's say 29 and three months ago, about this time I was in a hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut I was hooked up to intravenous feeding in one arm and blood transfusions in the other arm I had been diagnosed they had said that I was dying this was only a few days before and I had survived that last massive esophageal hemorrhage that I had had and two or three, four days later why they declared me ambulatory and so it was of course in the summertime and so I pulled on my pants and my shirt and my shoes and I ambulated down to the liquor store which was about a block away and got a bottle of vodka smuggled it back into the hospital, and was sucking away on it when the doctor came in. So that was where I was in my denial. Poor Betsy was at wit's end wondering what was going to happen to her and the children. And my boss had given me a final warning after several warnings. You know, this time it was either shape up or ship out. they couldn't put up with me anymore my life was absolutely falling apart and yet I couldn't think of anything while I was in that hospital except my God I'll bet Bessie has hidden the liquor I'll get there and I won't be able to find it I won' t be able to get a drink and I'll just go right up the ceiling that's all I could think about self-centeredness is the root of our problem so the difference between those two scenarios and those two scenes is absolutely nothing but the program of alcoholics anonymous and you people so is it any wonder that I am just eternally and abundantly grateful to the program and to every single person in this room and in all the rooms like them all around the world to tell you a little bit about how I got into that situation 29 years ago Betsy and I are both from Kansas so we were particularly delighted to have Don and Susan assigned to us as our host and hostess and we feel real at home in Colorado it's such a neighboring state even though topographically it's a little bit different I came from a, I'm an only child the only significance to that at all is is that I lived a kind of a lonely alone kind of a life I was shy and introverted and felt really that I wasn't a part of it a great deal of the time and there was no alcoholism in my family but the times were hard and my dad had a hard time making a living and so we moved a lot and I moved 18 times in my first 13 years of life I bring that up because I think it did have an impact on my alcoholism because every time that we moved of course I went into a different school every single year that I was in school up until the time I got into high school. And I don't know about you fellows who have moved around, but you know when you go into a new school, why the kids that are there, they kind of test you. And basically that means really beating you up. And that kind of establishes the pecking order, you know. And I can remember when I was, oh, maybe in third grade, crossing the street when I saw fellows coming down the street toward me because I knew that it was going to be trouble and I just would rather not encounter them and so I would go along across the street to avoid them as a result of this kind of never really making enough friends wherever I went, by the time I would make a good buddy why my father would pick up stakes and we'd move on to another school and the same thing would be repeated. And so I kind of retreated into a world of my own, and I became a great reader, an avid reader, and I become probably the greatest movie fan that you have ever seen or heard of. I can remember, I can picture myself now in Lawrence, Kansas, in the Dickinson Theater on a summer afternoon. They used to change the programs, you know, every day or two in those days. And so I would almost always be there on the summer afternoon alone again. And I would be throwing myself into whatever was up there on that silver screen, just as I did with whatever I was reading about in a book. And if it was a war movie, in those times there were a lot of war movies, World War I. and you know I would be the hero leading my troops over the top and if it was a western I'd have both my guns out riding after the bad guys but the movies that I just loved were those Fred Astaire movies with the top hat and the white tie and the tails and twirling ginger Rogers round and around in her flowing gown across the Central Park. That was what I dreamed that I would be someday. And that was the image that I had of myself. And so as I grew on up and went to school out there, I had decided that I could become a writer. And I had had some early experience in high school and in college, in my last year of college, I sold an article to a national magazine, Scribner's Magazine. It's long gone now, but it was very prestigious in its day. And made, you know, they paid me what seemed to me to be an awful lot of money. And then it was picked up, that article was pickedup by Reader's Digest, and it was published, you known more all over the country, and itwas somewhat controversial. and the subject of it was picked up by Walter Winchell and all of the famous columnists of the day, William Allen White and so on. And so I was a temporary celebrity at 20 years old. And what this does for the alcoholic's ego, of course, is you know. Now, I had had my first drink rather late. I was probably 18 years old when I'd had my first drink. And in college, most of my drinking was this beer-bust kind of drinking. And then as soon as I got out of school, out to the University of Kansas, I beat it right back to New York to become this man about town, this suave, sophisticated character that I had pictured myself to be. I managed to get a job with a big company, which was a big oil company, and I was to work there actually for the next 33 years in writing jobs and editing jobs and finally as the manager or director of public relations of this oil company. And what happened then was that I was thrown in with people older than myself. Now, I was 21 years old when I joined the company and I was certainly thrown in with people. Most of them were at least, you know, 35 or 40. And so they kind of took pity on me as the green kid from Kansas. And so, they would invite me down for a martini or a Manhattan after work at the big bar down in the basement of the RCA building, you know, the glamorous, beautiful mahogany bar with the skaters performing outside. And this was my idea of really living. This idea of going down after work for an evening drink, that fit right in with the image that I had of myself. And so from that day on, I was a daily drinker. I was, except for World War II where I was in the Navy and got into my first disciplinary problems in the navy with drinking. But except for that period, I drank every day until I came to Alcoholics Anonymous many, many decades and many, many years later. Well, in the last year of the war, I had begun dating Betsy down here and we had actually met some years before, but she's five years younger than I am so we had to wait for her to get through school and mature and so forth before we started really romancing. But we were married in the final year of our lives in the very last year of the War. And to give you an idea of how my image of myself was progressing, why we had our honeymoon out at a beautiful resort over in the Poconos. Skytop it's called. And we only had a few days for our honeymoon because I had to go back on the ship. This was wartime. But we had an iced bottle of champagne by our bedside day and night for those five days. And that was the way that I pictured I was going to live for the rest of my life. Well, in the last year of the war, I'll tell you just to give you an idea of what was coming. In the last years of the War, I was transferred back ashore. We were temporarily down in Washington, D.C. And this is an Al-Anon story, by the way, but Betsy isn't going to give any Al-Alanon talk here at this conference, so I will take the liberty of telling you an Al Anon story. Because she and I were invited over to a big party over at the other side of Washington. We lived in an apartment on the northwest side and this party was way over across the river and a long ways away. And to get there we had to go through the very worst part of Washington and it was pretty bad even then. and so we borrowed my brother-in-law's car Betsy's brother's car which was our first mistake he was stationed down there too obviously and so we drove over to this party and it was a real drunken brawl everybody running after everybody else's wife and it was really drunk and about 2 o'clock in the morning we emerged from this and I started to get into the car to drive And Betsy said, she's a bride, mind you, see. And she says, darling, don't you think that I should drive? And of course I said, no, I can drive. So I got in behind this thing and we drove back through this worst part of Washington at this hour of the night. And somebody in front of me stopped and I didn't. And so I smashed into their rear end and the radiator broke and the water flowed all over the street. The guy ahead of me wasn't too dumb. He just drove on, but we were left there. And so I said, I'm going to go report this to the police. So I got out of the car and strode off into the night. Betsy, not knowing what to do, she locked the doors of the car, and she waited and she waited and she waited, and I didn't show up. And so finally she decided she had to do something. She had only about 15 cents in her pocket, incidentally. And so she unlocked the car, but she had seen a phone booth about a block down the street. And so he, with great fear and trepidation, made her way down to this phone booth and called the police and said, Have you seen a naval officer in a white uniform reporting a car accident? And they said, no, they hadn't. And she said, well, I'd like to report the accident. And they says, well was there anybody hurt? And she says, no. And they say, we're not interested. So then she didn't know what to do. And she really only knew one other number in Washington and that was her own home number. So in the hopes of raising somebody, why, she put her last nickel in the phone and dialed the home number and of course it rang and it rang and it finally I answered when I heard her voice I said where the hell are you you'll appreciate that the funniest part of this story in a way is that And some years ago, maybe 10 or 15 years ago I was speaking at something out in California and we were waiting for the thing to start and we Were sitting on a park bench looking over the Pacific Palisades there and Betsy said why don't you ever tell that story about wrecking Mark's car down in Washington and I said what story about wreaking what car down in Michigan that's a blessing of the alcoholic isn't it that you don't remember what those terrible things that you do so after we were um after we Were transferred back to New York and I went back to work for my company we had a couple of children we moved out to the suburbs we had an absolutely wonderful house out in Long Island. I had a great job, a pretty wife, just terrific children, a home that I was absolutely crazy about. And so what does the alcoholic do under these circumstances? He drinks himself silly, you know. So that's what I did. My disease began to progress very rapidly and very badly at that time. Within a few years, it had gotten to the point that my life was becoming upset and disturbed and a problem in many ways, but none of them did I associate with alcohol. For one thing, I got to the part where I said, well, I'm not going to the point that i i always did have a terrible problem with the shakes or the tremors you know what i mean and uh i i got you know so i couldn't sign a a check and and uh god forbid that that i would have to go to a business lunch and they would serve soup oh man this was terror i would pick up the the spoon you know and temporarily i would think that i had it under control you know so i'd reach down and i'd get that spoonful and i get it up to about here and it started like this and so it was all over everywhere so i took the alcoholic solution i quit eating soup but what happens is that this kind of a neurosis just spreads through everything else in your life And so I discovered somewhere along there that if I only had a belt of vodka before I had anything like this that I had to do with a steady hand, like sign a hotel register or sign checks, why, if I had that vodka, I would immediately calm down and I could do anything that anybody could do. You know, I'm reminded of an article I read a few years ago in the AA Grapevine by a fellow who lived, I think, down in New Zealand. And he was talking about this phenomenon of the alcoholic's need to have a drink to do things that other people do without drinks, you know. And he made that statement, that the alcoholic, that once an alcoholic has taken a drink in order to do something that everybody, all the normal people, can do without a drink, then he is forever hooked into having to have a drink to do that particular thing. And I identify with that so absolutely vividly. The writer went on to say that, you know, some of us have had to have a drink in order to take care of somebody who comes to the door. Or we have to have A drink in Order to answer the phone or to take Care of a phone call. But the writer of this article did observe, he said it is quite different between having to take a drink in order to answer the door. There's a big difference between that and taking a drink just in case somebody might come to the door I identify with that one too, right down the line I also had a great problem with lying that Buddy was talking about But I just sort of got in the habit of lying. I would tell my wife where I'd been and what I'd been doing or tell my boss why such and such a thing wasn't in on time, you know. And then after a while, well, you just make up lies to cover every situation. And it just spreads throughout your whole life. And I was getting this uncomfortable feeling that we get where there's a tremendous gap between our expectations of ourselves and our actual performance. As an alcoholic, as I have indicated to you, I had tremendous expectations of myself. I knew that I was going to be the great American novelist, the great African-American playwright, and that I Was going to cut a tremendous swath through the social circles of New York. And though I had this wonderful, wonderful life, I wasn't actually doing any of these things, you see. And so because that causes some kind of psychic pain, you find that to relieve that, you take a drink, right? The more that you drink, the more extravagant your fantasies become about your own expectations of yourself. And consequently, the more you drink in order to fill that gap. And, of course, the more your drink, the higher your expectations and the wilder your fantasies and you're caught in this snowball that you're just going downhill all the time in order stay even with the rest of the world. Well, it was about this time that we were transferred down to New Orleans for a year and I tell you that is an alcoholic's paradise. It's the only place that we've ever lived or where I've ever been where it's socially acceptable to drink in the morning. You go to Brennan's for breakfast, and the first thing on the menu is Sazerac or, you know, what are the other drinks? I said, damn long ago, I've forgotten. Gin fizz and all those things. That was right down my alley. Boy, I did love that. And the year that we were down there, I went down a hard drinker and an incipient alcoholic, and I came back a full-blown alcoholic in bad trouble, really. And so when we got back, we moved back to Greenwich, Connecticut, and I became a commuter, and the drinking became very, very bad indeed. So, finally the time came. I'll tell you one incident that took place right here at about this time, which again kind of illustrates my approach to life. Betsy's parents, wonderful people from Mount Salina, Kansas, they were having their 50th wedding anniversary and they chose to have it back in our part of the country, in Connecticut, because a couple of their children lived back there. And so it was to take place at our house. And as an only child and shy, basically shy, introverted kind of a person, I had married into this very large, loving family. They couldn't have been lovelier to me, and I loved them. But to go into any family gathering, I had to somewhat fortify myself all the time. So on this particular occasion, Betsy said to me in the morning before I went into work that day, she said, Darling, you know how important this occasion is tonight. And she said I hope that today you won't have too big a lunch. Now that's a code, you see. And I knew what she meant and she knew that I knew What She Meant. And so I went off and you know what happens to us alcoholics. We always drink most when we shouldn't drink. And so on this occasion, I was drinking most of the day and drinking on the train on the way home at night. So by the time I got home to Connecticut, I practically fell off the train with my coat buttoned up wrong and my hat sideways on my head and broke her heart, of course. and she was noticeably cool on the way home. At the time we got home, I immediately headed right into the pantry where we had the bar set up because, God, I sure did need a drink. The party was going on in the patio out back. And so I went out there with my drink and I went into a blackout. Now, I don't remember how long it was, maybe 45 minutes or somewhere in that area. I woke up out of the blackout, and I was huddled underneath the grand piano clutching this drink to my breast because I had a paranoid, alcoholic, paranoid fear that if they found me, I knew they would take the drink away from me. And, of course, they did find me, and that's exactly what they did. They took the drink way from me." fact, they sent me to my room for the night. I was at this time 44 years old. It was about this time that I was beginning to have some physical problems. For one thing, I'm getting ahead of myself here. The problem that I had at this time was that in my abdomen, in my belly and i had a big uh bloated belly at that time and jowls and and broken blood vessels in my cheeks and yellow eyeballs and i was great and uh i i had this this thing that seemed to be this growth that seemed to be growing here in my abdomen, a big hard lump. And it got bigger and it got bigger and just scared the bejesus out of me. And so finally I got up courage to go to the family doctor. And he stretched me out on the examining table and he felt me and he asked me the question which some of you may have been asked by doctors sometimes. He said, Bob how much do you drink? Well I really didn't lie to him at that time i sort of quickly figured up my head and i said oh seven or eight drinks a day and this is a guy it turned out later he was pretty abstemious himself and he was you know he recoiled with shock at this and he said you mean every day and i says for sure every day uh i didn't tell him that each drink the drink of my choice in those days and for many years was 100 proof vodka chased with Valentine's ale kind of a Russian boilermaker and boy that really did it to you he said well that may be a clue to what the problem is here he gave me a liver function test and of course it was real bad he said that I had a very badly enlarged badly malfunctioning liver right on the point of cirrhosis and that I would have to quit. He was very good about it. He said, some people can drink and some people cannot and you're one who cannot. And he then explained that every time I picked up a bottle instead of looking at seeing what I did on the label I should see a skull and crossbones because he said that's what it is to you. It's poison to you Well, I guess he scared me enough or something that I went home and for ten months I didn't ever take a drink. He did not suggest Alcoholics Anonymous. Nobody suggested Alcoholics Anonymous, and so I just slowly got recovered some of my strength and got better and better, recuperated to some extent, and then I had to continue to be, of course, take special diets and all that and then I had to continue to go back and be checked and after ten months when I went into his office after the examination he said you know your liver has really regenerated and repaired itself remarkably well he said it's probably as good as it's ever going to get and he said you don't need to come back well apparently there was some sort of a of a subconscious idea that I wasn't even aware of in my mind because I heard myself saying to him, well, John, does that mean that on a hot summer's day when I've been out cutting the yard, why I might have a cold beer? And he looked a little shocked, but he didn't say anything. And so I said, or a fine wine with dinner. Of course, that was a crock because, you know, I never did drink that way. And he said the fatal word to the alcoholic. He said, well, Bob, one won't hurt you. So you know what happened. I left his office and I drove back maybe 15 minutes home. I burst into the kitchen. Betsy was waiting there in the kitchen and what the doctor said to me in the office was translated into Betsy guess what I can drink again well she was overjoyed to hear that you know so I got on the train and I went into New York and down to the English Grill to that long mahogany bar and I said Sam set them up we're in business again and he set them Up and I had a drink 100 proof vodka with valentine's ale and of course it didn't hurt me just like the doctor said well you know the story I'm not going to prolong this but you know within I probably didn't have another drink for several days and then I had another drink and things kind of stretched on into the Christmas season and you know Christmas parties and I was rationalizing that You know, I had heard that we metabolize alcohol in about two ounces in about an hour and a half, something like that. Isn't that right? And so I figured that, you know, if I took a drink and waited and the body would metabolize it, and then if I take another drink, it would be like just one drink, wouldn't it? Because, you now, as far as your body is concerned, you're all recovered, right? So I started, you know, having a little bit more. And then I went away on a business trip, two or three weeks, and I had no intention of drinking on that business trip really. I came back just as desperately around-the-clock desperation drinker as I had been when I had gone to the doctor way, way back, you now, a year before. Well, the next two years were just declining health and terrible problems of all kinds. Of course, immediately my liver reversed itself again and began to fail. I got cirrhosis of the liver. what the liver does as some of you know is it manufactures this substance that prothrombin in it that makes your blood coagulate so when it stops manufacturing that you become a bleeder and I used to get terrible nosebleeds just epic and on two occasions they had to take me out of my office once in a wheelchair and once on a stretcher because of the terrible nosebleeds that I couldn't get it stopped. So they would take me down to the infirmary there in Rockefeller Center, and the doctors would cauterize as best they could up in the nose, you know, and they would stuff it full of gauze, and then they'd stuff that full of cotton to the point that it was really difficult to drink. But that never really bothered me because I never did associate those nosebleeds, you know, with the fact that I was drinking. And I got so doggone weak that there was a hot water faucet in our house that it was a little hard to turn. And by God, I got så weak I couldn't turn the hot water facet on. And I did a lot of traveling in those days by train and I got to the point that I couldnít pick up my own suitcase and get it up into the train. and I was just you know limping limping into the office Jesus I'd wake up in the morning and the first thing I would do would be go through the pockets of the suits that I wore the night before because I used to buy these little nips you know the two ounce jobs and I had them stowed away I must have had 30 of them in my pockets when I stopped drinking and I would find one in the closet that was still operative and I Would have a nip and then go into the bathroom and of course throw up I vomited every single morning for the last five years of my drinking but you know us alcoholics if that's what you got to do that is what you do that's all you have no choice you've got to continue drinking so if that is what it takes that is what it takes then I would go in get another one I'd get that down you know and I would go down and Betsy would have fixed a nice breakfast and of course with cirrhosis of the liver you can't face eating so I would mess around on the plate the scrambled eggs and bacon until she went out to the car to go around and pick me up in front and I'd quickly scrape it into the garbage can and have a little nip in the pantry as I went by and go out and go into New York and by this time of course I was carrying bottles in my business briefcase and so I couldn't very well drink on the train so I could huddle in a corner hoping that nobody would speak to me god i would you know people tend to be cheerful in the morning and i just couldn't stand that and so i would huddle in a corner until i got into 125th street i have been known to get off at 125th Street and go down to one of those bars and have a drink so i could get on back in going into new york but usually i'd make it on into grand central station and i would hurry through grand centralstation and in those days down into the the bowels of grand central Station to the men's room and hurry into one of the stalls and get this bottle out of my briefcase with it in its paper bag you know and and get the top off and get it up here you know get a little bit in my mouth and so I could get it down in my stomach and feel that peace that comes over you you know when you have that that drink that you that you need so bad then I could make it on in to Hurley's Daily's bar at 48th Street for another drink and then on up to the office to start my day's work. Well, that was the way that I was drinking in those days and that was the problem that I Was Up Against and My Poor Wife was at wit's end. I can remember waking up in the night we slept in a double bed, slept in double bed then, still do and I can Remember waking up In The Night and sitting up as we do at maybe two in the morning and I would see these things swimming around in front of me and I would close my eyes and they'd still be swimming around and I was desperate for a drink but I couldn't get a drink because she was awake and she was sobbing into the pillow and I knew that the reason she was sobbing was that I was making her desperately unhappy But if it was because of my drinking, well, that's just the way the ball bounces. I had no choice in my life, so I had to go on drinking regardless of what it did to her. So my doctor continued to warn me and tell me terrible stories about what happened to people who had cirrhosis of the liver and continued to drink. But I said to him, you know, he said, we're not talking about weeks or we're not talking years. He said, We're talking about a week's maybe to live. And I said, You know, the words of the alcoholic, the insanity that we get into. I said well, I'd rather just live a few more weeks and drink if I want to drink instead of quitting and you know so that's what i did and i was out at a on a business trip in chicago when the thing that happened that he said was going to happen happened and that is that i had a massive esophageal hemorrhage and that means the blood vessels in my in my The esophagus burst, and I was losing blood rectally and vomiting in every possible way. And I was going in and out of consciousness. I remember sitting in a little park across from the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, and it was a bleak October day, and it were bad anyway. And I remember just thinking there, well, maybe I should just go ahead and die. And then I thought, well Betsy's young and she's pretty and she'll get another husband and he'll be a better husband to her than I've been and a better father to our children. You know, just wallowing in this self-pity that the alcoholic just glories in, you know. And then I thought to myself, well, you know, my gosh, here you are 1,200 miles from home and you're in Chicago. And who wants to die in Chicago, you know. So I let the hotel call the house doctor, and he was a hard-bitten old boy. Boy, he'd seen this sort of thing before. So he knew exactly what was wrong and exactly what to do. So they rolled me off. I was back in my bed by this time, and they rolled me out of my bed onto this stretcher and took me out through the hotel lobby. That was the most humiliating part of it They took me out through the hotel lobby in my shorts and my socks and with a field kit, you know, of blood transfusions already going into me. And I woke up the next morning in a hospital, didn't even know what hospital I was in for a couple of days and, you Know, both arms tied down and these tubes going into them and I got a lot of blood transfusions, other people's blood and a lot Of this intravenous feeding And after about four or five days, I was beginning to feel pretty perky. And so they discharged me. And before they left, they said to me, If you ever take another drink, it may well be your last. And I said, After what's happened to me here, do you think that I haven't learned my lesson? No is right. No, I hadn't. because I went back home. They did not say anything about Alcoholics Anonymous. I did not have the advantage of what we all know, that it's the first drink that gets you drunk, that it is the first drinking that sets up that compulsion and that obsession that we have no control over which leads us to either insanity or death if we can't recover or arrest the disease. And so it was football season, and we were going up to a game up at Yale. And I had never heard in my life of anybody going to a football game without a drink. I mean, that's just an impossibility. And it was so ridiculous that I went ahead and I had a drink, and we went to that football game. Of course, it set up the obsession, and the first thing you know, I'm just as bad as ever. I went on another business trip and came back, And this time, I had an even worse esophageal hemorrhage. Got thrown into the hospital in the situation that I told you about at the beginning of this talk. My doctor, after I had turned up drinking in the hospital on this occasion, he turned up and he said he was angry. He was real mad. And he said, I am resigning you as a patient. He said, I will no longer be responsible for your life. And he said, you're going to have to go to a psychiatrist. Well, you know, I knew that I wasn't crazy, but I had no choice. You know,I really had no choicest. And so he sent me and I went to the psychiatrist who practiced in the same suite of offices as this doctor of mine did in Greenwich, Connecticut. And I think that's the only reason that he sent me to him is because he practiced in the same suite of offices. But here's where the hand of a higher power really came into this alcoholic's life for probably the first time, really. Because the name of the man that he sent me was Dr. Harry Thiebaud. The one professional who knew more about alcoholism than any other in the world at that time. And the man who put the big book in the hands of Marty Mann, the first woman who ever became sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. And at that point, at that moment he was serving as a non-alcoholic trustee on the General Service Board of AlcoholicsAnonymous, but he didn't let me know that. He saw me exactly twice. Then he called Betsy in. He had talked to Betsy the first time, and he said to Betsny, he said, I can't help your husband. He said, he has an iron curtain drawn down between himself and reality. And that's precisely where I was. You know, the doctor's opinion in the first part of the big book, Dr. Silkworth, It says that the alcoholic reaches the point where he can't distinguish between fantasy and reality. And therefore, he believes that alcoholic behavior is normal behavior. And that's exactly where I was at this time in my life. and so Dr. Thiebaud called me in then and he told me that we didn't have time to probe for why I drank and that what we had to do was treat the symptom and not the basic causes of the disease and that he couldn't help me just as Dr. Carl Jung had said to Roland Hazard many, many, years before He said, in essence, he said what the big book says, that my science cannot help your disease. But he said, I know somebody who's been in the same shape that you are and he's recovered and I think he can help you. And he said will you call him? And I said no. I said I don't want to bother him. and he gave me a lesson in Alcoholics Anonymous right then because he sat back and he kind of smiled and he said, you know, he said these are very peculiar people they don't consider that a bother at all and so he dialed the man who was to become my sponsor and put the phone in my hand and I had to talk to this member of AA who became my sponsor Well, he was great. I must tell you just a second about him. His name was Stuart Jones. He's dead now. But he was the town attorney, the general counsel for the town of Greenwich and a very prominent citizen in town, understand. And he was kind of a stocky fellow and he had a great big guardsman's mustache and he was, he would say, he was kinda bald and had this great big mustache He generally wore a beret, if you please, and he was a marvelous potter. He was very artistic and threw clay on the wheel, you know, and made these wonderful pots and ceramics. As a matter of fact, I have several of them at the house still and treasure them beyond words. And he also had a black belt in karate. and he came by to take me to my first AA meeting in a Porsche sports car and believe me I thought I deserved no less and so off we went to the first meeting and after the meeting on the way home he said well what did you think about it and I said well I said it was okay he said do you have any questions and I say yeah I said, I have one question, Stu. I said how in the name of God can you be so happy? Because he was always laughing, always laughing and kidding around, you know. I said How in the Name of God Can You Be So Happy And Be Laughing So When You Know That You're Never Going To Have Another Drink? And he said, Oh, I haven't quit drinking forever. Boy, that got my attention right away, you now. and he said I haven't had a drink today but he said I might have a drink tomorrow he said as a matter of fact considering my track record a lot of people in this town think it would be very likely that I might have a drank tomorrow but he says tomorrow is just today again and boy you know he was sucking me into the program you can tell I'd say and but but the thing that I want to emphasize is that this guy had such joy of living that it was attracting me right at that point and so but the problem is that I didn't quit drinking I got out of that hospital and went to a few meetings with uh with Stu and it really it really got worse it got a lot worse during that week and Betsy got more and more desperate And finally, on July 3rd of 1961, the town of Old Greenwich was having its annual fireworks display down in Benny Park. And we had been invited to go to a kind of a neighborhood party, a family party, you know, a kindof a picnic out in somebody's backyard, and then go down to this fireworks display. Well, our social life had long since disappeared. But on this occasion, it was being a family occasion on the 4th of July and all that, why we did go over to this party. And it was ideal from my standpoint because, of course, I was continuing to drink. And at this party, they kept their booze in the kitchen and the party was on the outside and the men's room was onthe inside. And I had to go back and forth frequently. And there was always the opportunity to, you know, have a nip as I went through. So I was getting worse, not better. as the evening went on, and it was dark, time to go to the fireworks. So we all piled in the car and went down, me in no good shape at all, down to this Benny Park. Well, everybody was already there. The parking lots were all taken, just like here at Crested Butte, you know. And so there was no place to park, so I let Betsy and the kids out down at the park, and I said, I'll go park the car. So I went and parked the car, and I came back down to this place where they were having the fireworks. Well, when I got there, there was just a sea of people, and I had no idea where Betsy and the kids would be. So I started stumbling over these people who were sitting there, you know, in their picnic blankets and their baskets and their perambulators and all this kind of thing, you Know? And hunting for Betsy. and the kids and it was dark and I couldn't see where I was going very well anyway and then off would go this tremendous explosion up in the sky you know and down around me would come these sparks and in that moment of course I could see and so I would look down as I'm looking down at you now and these people would be kind of looking up angrily at me you know but no Betsy and the Kids and so I kept stumbling around and boy off would go another one of these things and down would come the sparks and you know in my mind this was beginning to take on the aspects of dandy's inferno you know with and with the fire and the sparks and finally uh they went buoy blam blam bam buoy you know and down came all this these sparks and it's the grand finale and the fireman's band gets up and plays america the beautiful and And everybody gets up and folds their blankets and puts the kids in the perambulators and goes away. And there I am. And I racked my brain, you know, and I thought, well, obviously the family has not, you know I didn't show up so they've gone to wherever the car is parked. And I thought boy that is a stupid assumption because they don't know where the car's parked. And I though, I don't now where the cars parked. So I trailed off after the last of the people who were leaving this fireworks display. And I got up about halfway, a real steep hill that goes up from that park. And what you people had been telling me in the few AA meetings that I had been to just hit me right between the eyes. My life was unmanageable. So I went over. My reaction to this was to go over to the edge of the street, sit down on a rock and cry. And that's where my sister-in-law found me and put her arm around me and took me back to where, sure enough, they were back where the car was parked. They knew where it was. I don't know how, but they knew. They were there. We went on home. I must tell you that when we got there there was a classic man on the bed scene in my kitchen because there was a friend of mine who was a drinking buddy of mine that I'd done a lot of drinking with him and here he was sitting at the table with the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous spread out on the table before him and a stranger that I didn't even know who was also there with him And when they came in, you know, they wanted to talk to me. So what this was, you see, was the classic 12-step call. There was only one flaw that the man, my drinking buddy, he was drunker than I was. He had decided to come to AA a few weeks before. We hadn't crossed paths at any of the meetings, but he had been down in the park and he had seen in what shape his buddy, his old buddy Bob was. And so he had called somebody and he was making his first 12-step call by God, you know. The good part of that, the good ending to that story is that about seven years later while Don, his name's Don, Don came into the program and I was his sponsor. But at that time, I went on to bed. When I came down the next day, there was a meeting going on in our living room. Now, I must stress that this was 29 years ago. Interventions had not yet been invented, but Betsy had invented one. She had called my boss. She had told a lawyer. She had gotten commitment papers, legal commitment papers which you can do in Connecticut for chronic inebriates. And she had called this doctor who had resigned me, and he was there. And they were having a spirited discussion about where they were going to put me. And I had dressed in my very best polished shoes, silk ascot, slick hair. You wouldn't want anybody to think you weren't in great shape, you know. and came down and tried to get into the conversation. And they weren't interested in my input. They were really discussing whether to send me to the state home, a very fancy sanitarium, which is where they sent drunks in those days, which would have done absolutely zero good, of course, as we know now. Or where? Veterans hospital maybe? So I had heard something during these meetings that I had been going to that somebody had punched me in the chest, as we sometimes do with newcomers, and said, where you belong, young fella, is High Watch farm, naming the great granddaddy of all treatment centers or rehabilitation facilities that there are in the United States. This one happens to be up in the foothills of the Berkshires and it is a place that's described in AA Comes of Age because it has been from the very beginning nothing but an AA-oriented, 100% AA- oriented facility, a place where you get wonderful food, beautiful air, spiritual surroundings, and AA program 24 hours a day. And so I knew that their length of time at that time, their minimum length of Time, believe it or not, was five days. The customary length of time was two weeks. So I could see that this gave me a little escape hatch there, whereas if they sent me to one of these other institutions, I might never get out of the place. So I opted for High Watch Farm, and on that day, July 4th, 1961, they took me up to High Watch farm, kicking and screaming. When I got there, I was full of resentments and anger and hate, and I was just a cesspool of human emotions. But you know, an incredible thing happened. After going to a few of their spiritual meetings up there, a few other regular AA meetings, this iron curtain that existed between me and reality suddenly just sort of faded away. And I found myself up to my elbows in dishwater doing the dishes. Boy, I hadn't had my elbows and dishwater at home for a long, long time. But that's what I was doing up there. And so I began to slowly rejoin the human race. And after a couple of weeks, I came back and joined Alcoholics Anonymous and began to come to meetings, began to get involved, began to see for the first time in my life that sure enough it was possible to have a productive and a happy life without using alcohol. And that idea had never occurred to me in my entire life up until that time, of course. And so I became more and more active, and the days became weeks and the weeks became years, and of course it's a long time now. I would just like to share with you in closing that it's just impossible for me to really tell you the benefits that have come to us, and I say us because Betsy started going to Al-Anon while I was up at High Watch Farm, and so she has recovered in her program all through the years just as I have recovered. And it's been such a blessing in our marriage. We always had a close marriage, always. And she stuck with me when everybody else said that she should leave me. And, you know, sure enough, it worked out. But we have now a marriage that's on such a different basis that it's just a continual joy. And our children have benefited so enormously. They were pretty young when I came into AA, so they've kind of grown up in the AA and Alamon home. And it's amazing how it's rubbed off on them. None of them have ever yet had any problem with alcohol or drugs. But, boy, I hear them playing this back. Not too long ago, our daughter was talking to a friend of hers on the phone. The girl was having marital problems. And I heard my daughter, who has never been, as far as I know, to either an AA or an Al-Anon meeting, she was saying, well, you know, this, too, is going to pass. And what you've got to do is detach with love. You know, and things like that. And all of our children now love AA almost and Al-Anon as much as we do. They insist on accompanying us to the international conventions. They were at Montreal and Seattle and after Montreal, about a year after Montreal where they had been absolutely blown away by the whole experience. I said, well, you know, do you ever think back of the year ago when we were at Montreal? At that, tears came to their eyes. And they said, you Know, our lives will never be the same again. Our lives will Never Be the Same Again. And this is people that have nothing to do with alcohol, really. It's just the power of the program. and I don't hear too much about it anymore but when I came in there was a good deal of advice given about getting out of the driver's seat and I've had a great deal of trouble doing that over the years but I must say that I think it's getting a little bit better And, you know, they used to advise us that our needs, that our wants are never met. Because when we get one want answered, why, you always have another want to take its place. And they did say that on the other hand, our needs are always provided by a loving God. And that has certainly been my experience for the years that I've been in. We generally come here so loaded down with remorse and guilt and the bad emotions that, you know, we're told here that we have to put those negative feelings aside and fill our heads with positive thoughts instead. And to get rid of this remorse and this guilt and the wreckage of our past by doing the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and putting those into our life. As I told you, one of my basic problems always was that I lived in a fantasy world. My gosh, when I came into AA, my feet were planted firmly about three feet off the ground. I had no idea what reality was. I had no idea who I was. I was always playing roles. And so when I came into AA, it was my first really encounter with reality. And it's the reality that I had been trying to escape from for years and for decades, really from before I ever took my first drink. I was trying to escaped reality. and lo and behold when we come into AA and we meet up with reality we find that it's absolutely beautiful I mean and of course the only reality that we have is this very moment you and I right now that's absolutely all we have a minute ago not yesterday not last year but a minute before a minute or so is gone beyond ever retrieving it and we really don't know what in the world is going to happen to us in the next minute. Somebody in this room could die in the last minute, you know? And I certainly could. So all of the reality that we have is this heartbeat that I talked about earlier and this moment that we are living that we live within ourselves. And so to look out and see You and to feel Your love And to have had the fantastic fun that I've had with people that I never even knew until 48 hours ago is just such an expression of the kind of joy that we have. You know, an old-timer said to me once something that I hope that if you don't remember anything else, I hope you'll remember this because it's been with me all these years. He said, AA doesn't teach us how to handle our drinking. and you know that's right I mean, I could handle my drinking by quitting for those ten months heck, if you could solve all your problems in your life by simply stopping drinking why, you know, there wouldn't be any AA program it would be an entirely different world so AA really doesn't teach us how to handle our drinking said this old guy He said, AA teaches us how to handle sobriety. And that's what none of us could handle in the first place. And that is why we drink. Oh boy, when I first heard this it was like a light going on in my head. Because of course that is it. And people like my good friend Randy here or Mary will say to me, you know, you haven't had a drink for 29 years. Why are you still going to these meetings? And it's a terribly hard question to answer from a civilian, you know, because they don't really understand. But the reason is that, you Know, I haven't had a drinking problem for 29 years. And I'm not going to have a drinking program unless I drink. And the way that I don't drink, of course, is to practice the AA program day at a time and come to these meetings. But I have to cope with life every cotton-picking day of my life. And so does everybody else in the world. But we in AA have the advantage of having a program for coping with life so that we don't have to go back to drinking. I mean, stopping drinking is no big deal. But staying stopped is where the AA program comes in. So we find ourselves in a meeting like this, in a place like this on a night like this maybe at peace for the first time in our lives. We're at peace with ourselves and we're at piece with our fellow man and maybe at last we're peace with God. Thank you. Thank you very much, Don. Don? Don. I was thinking about Don. Your name is Bob. Okay. Bob Pearson. Right, see. Anyway, on behalf of the committee and the conference, I'd like for you to have this little gift. I accept with great pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much. And on behalf... Wait a minute. on behalf of those that suffered with you here is a map so you can tell where you've been and a bigger one so that you can really get involved in the thing telling your friends about it when you get back thank you very much I might say this meeting like all the rest that have happened and the one tomorrow night are being recorded and you would help George and me a great deal if you want an album you'd let us know tonight before you leave. It's our custom now for those that care to to stand and join hands and say the Lord's Prayer. Betsy, I wonder if you would like to start us. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day 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 and ever. Amen. Keep coming back. It works if you work it.