Thirty-Three Years from the Last Drink and Twelve Steps from the Next – Joe K.

About This Speaker Tape

Joe Klass, sober since December 23, 1962, delivers his 7th anniversary As Bill Sees It talk in Davis, California on March 17, 1996. He opens with his stack of anniversaries — OA, Al-Anon, NA, AA, and 76 years of financial insecurity — before walking the room back through World War II. He flew Spitfires with the Royal Air Force Eagle Squadrons, was shot down four times, and survived the Great Escape as the camp's theatrical makeup artist. In a burning cockpit on his fourth crash he had a spiritual experience he didn't recognize, calmly expecting to meet Higher Power in the next split second before the plane threw him clear. In prison camp the drunks distilled trombone prune brandy that nearly got fifty men executed, and on January 27, 1945 he survived a sixty-mile death march across Poland in forty below zero by following a mountain through the snow that didn't exist — years later he recognized it as Mount Rainier.

Home on the GI Bill he ate three T-bone steaks, apple pie à la mode and ketchup at Camp Shanks and began vomiting eighteen to twenty times a day for eleven years. Pellagra, esophagitis, and terminal cirrhosis eventually landed him in front of a doctor who told him to go set his affairs in order. His wife nagged him into calling AA and Pappy Boyington — Marine ace, Medal of Honor, Black Sheep squadron — walked up his Burbank sidewalk with a Big Book under his arm. Joe wanted to be an alcoholic the moment Boyington said he was one.

He turned down the first drink for five years and eight months on willpower alone, skipped the steps entirely, slipped once for three months, and vomited so violently at his return meeting that he ruptured his left eyeball and has been legally blind in it ever since. It took him nine years to get past the second half of Step One and another two years in Al-Anon — dragged in over his kids during the Fillmore era when Bill Graham was his radio client — to finally understand the deal. AAs think they have to give up alcohol and control. Al-Anons only have to give up control, and that was the whole program he'd been missing.

He closes on the price of serenity. Two months after his granddaughter was kidnapped at knifepoint and found dead, he says serenity isn't worth a damn unless there's a disaster to use it on. He is not one drink away from a drunk — he is thirty-three years away from the last one and twelve steps away from the next, and he walks the twelve steps backwards to show exactly how a man gets there.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Joe Klass opens — 34 years sober, 40 years in AA, 76 years of financial insecurity
• 4:30 Eagle Squadron's two rules: no marriage and get drunk tonight
• 8:00 Great Escape — makeup artist making doubles of the seventy-six who tunneled out
• 14:00 Fourth crash, burning cockpit — calm spiritual experience expecting to meet God
• 19:00 Trombone-still prune brandy and the guard who nearly got fifty prisoners shot
• 25:00 Death march lesson — the runners dropped first, then the men with big backpacks, then the rescuers
• 32:00 Three T-bones with ketchup on apple pie at Camp Shanks, then eleven years of vomiting
• 42:00 Pappy Boyington walks up the Burbank sidewalk with the Big Book under his arm
• 50:00 Ruptured left eyeball at his return meeting after a three-month slip — legally blind since
• 60:00 Walks the twelve steps backwards — the only way back to a drink