Three Doctors Gave Him Five Years to Live — Two of Those Doctors Are Now Dead – Jack B.
About This Speaker Tape
Jack B. speaks in Toronto in March 1973 with 26 years of sobriety. He opens by declaring every sober alcoholic in the room a miracle — people who should be dead. Three doctors gave him five years to live, predicted wet brain and homicidal mania. Two of those doctors are now dead; the third does not look good.
He traces alcoholism to age 12 when he and his brother found a gallon of wine under the bed. His brother had two sips and stopped. Jack drank until he blacked out in the bathtub. The difference was chemical — Jack was born with the body of an alcoholic. That first drink removed the terror he had lived with since birth, watching his father drink and destroy the family. He became an altar boy to access the sacristy wine before school; on mornings when an alcoholic priest got there first, he went back to being Denny the Dunce.
By 16 he was holding a gun to his father's head. His mother threw him out. He became a wheelman for the mob in New York, arrested over 125 times, put in straitjackets 12 times. The mob fired him because he blacked out at the wheel and might drive them to a police station. His wife visited every bar and grocery store in a ten-mile radius and told them she would burn their establishments down if they served him. She tricked him onto the subway for his first AA meeting by promising him a drink.
After two and a half years on the Bowery — bleeding, homeless, full of vermin — he crawled out of a filthy bathroom and asked someone to call AA. His sponsor Sam Cohen, a small Jewish man, arrived and said: come with me, you do not have to drink anymore. When Jack tried to thank Sam years later, Sam told him: thank the guy upstairs, He sent me for you. Jack made a deal with his Higher Power that night walking home: from here on, you tell me what to do, and I will do it. Twenty-six years later, Higher Power has never been wrong.
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