You Can Do Anything as a Member of Alcoholics Anonymous If You Prepare Properly – Keith L.

About This Speaker Tape

Keith L. shares at the Edisto Roundup, opening with warm thanks to the committee and fellow speakers before tracing his story from a big Irish Catholic family on the Ohio River. As the second of eleven children with a severe speech impediment, he grew up feeling isolated and terrified, unable to respond to the love around him. He tells of his first beer at age five with his father and brother Denny, his four years in the Marine Corps where alcoholism cost him an officer's commission after he led a combat patrol in a blackout, and the slow erosion of every principle he once lived by.

The heart of the tape is his second daughter Kimberly's premature birth. Passed out on the living room floor when his wife went into labor, Keith arrived drunk at the emergency room, demanded care from colleagues at his own teaching hospital, then sat alone in his office across from the neonatal nursery watching the two-pound baby fight for breath. He begged Higher Power in the chapel to let her live and promised to stop drinking — he was drunk within 24 hours. His wife asked him to leave, and he spent six months on Skid Row in Washington, D.C., ending with a Thanksgiving Day turkey sandwich eaten on a park curb with a six-pack.

On May 13, 1973, hearing voices and Beethoven's Fifth coming out of parking meters, he called a treatment center and was taken to his first AA meeting. A man at the door looked him in the eye and said, 'If you keep coming here, you never have to drink again.' Keith describes finding a hard-nosed sponsor named Dan, the lipstick-on-the-mirror assignment, forgetting where he worked at two months sober, and Dr. Jerome Lejeune's invitation to study at the University of Paris — which his sponsor insisted he accept because 'this isn't about you, it's about Alcoholics Anonymous.'

He closes with his Eighth and Ninth Step amends: to his brother Denny, to an old priest who wept and said 'I was just asking Higher Power where I missed it,' to his father who finally told him about the root beer at Louie's hot dog stand on his first day of work, to his dying mother who asked for his 23-year chip in her coffin, and to his brother Terry who died of alcoholism but got to be hugged one last time in a hospital bed. The tape ends with Keith visiting a black man in a teaching hospital — two strangers who turned out to have bought from the same Ontario Liquor Store in 1973 — and telling a young intern that the ability to speak to another alcoholic is the only talent that matters.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Keith L. thanks the Edisto Roundup committee and introduces his Al-Anon wife Julia
• 3:30 Growing up second of 11 in an Irish Catholic family on the Ohio River with a severe speech impediment
• 8:00 First drink at age five with his father and brother Dumb Denny — Denny the natural alcoholic
• 14:00 Sister Victoria, the librarian nun, and the mutant rosary beads with 11 decades
• 19:00 Joins the Marine Corps at 17 — 5'1", 113 pounds — and finds his first drink in a Pittsburgh bar
• 28:00 Daughter Kimberly born three months premature while Keith is passed out; negative respirator and the chapel prayer
• 36:00 Six months on Skid Row; Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches on a park curb with a six-pack
• 42:00 May 13, 1973 — hallucinating Beethoven's Fifth, calls treatment center, first AA meeting with the man at the door
• 52:00 Sponsor Dan, the lipstick-on-the-mirror assignment, and forgetting where he works
• 68:00 Ninth Step amends to his father about the root beer at Louie's hot dog stand, his dying mother, and his brother Terry