Father Bill W.

Good morning everybody. My name is Bill and I am an alcoholic.

And the first thing I want to see, and I'm seeing it really and truly from my heart, not routine. I really want to say thank you, Don, and thank you to the committee and whatever mysterious background personalities bring it about that I find myself right here, right now. I never understand how these things happen.

Total mystery to me. But anyway, here I am, and whoever is responsible for it, I want to say to you from my heart, thank you.

I can't imagine being anywhere

that makes me happier than being where I am right here, right now.

Conrad has just mentioned to you as he read the Promises,

God has a sense of humor. If you want to know whether he has or not, just look around you.

I believe that when I'm with this particular company, recovering Alcoholics, I'm in the presence of that mysterious presence.

I have

believed this about

the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous ever since I first went to Amazing. I can't understand it, but it's Sunday morning and I feel like just lying down in front of you, all

bowing down and adoring.

Because I believe that the wonder of wonders is right here.

A whole pile of zeros. Zeros. Powerless, powerless people.

And yet here is power.

Power that's amazing, that's kind, that's friendly, and that has a sense of humor.

Thank God for you, and I thank you for God

when I talked to you long enough already to make you realize that I was not born in the United States of America,

but I was born and raised with all the real Alcoholics come from.

And when I tell you my story, I'm telling you my story from the vantage point now of a number of years

experiencing recovery in this fellowship and program. And so I'm looking back

from the perspective of being in the process of becoming recovered.

The very first meeting of the AI ever went to. I remember seeing the steps up on the wall, 12 steps,

and the moment I saw doorsteps I had behind me. Then 25 years

for alcoholic drinking

and for some reason I'll never understand, when I saw those steps,

I realized that I was looking at something that was the absolute certain prescription

for putting rice. Everything that was wrong with me,

I remember saying to myself with my mouth open, God, I need to do every single thing that it says there to do.

Yesterday Vince talked about the trails. That's been perfectly familiar to him. This is just what he had been hearing all his life and the religious background he come from. And with the flame in my case, God, I need to do that everything there. And I remember hearing hearing it on the second step

being restored to sanity.

I'm Maria is not a bullish out of my head.

I had 25 years of alcoholic drinking behind me

and they had sent me, my bosses had sent me to shrink from psychologists and psychiatrists and holy people and gurus. I couldn't tell you what I was at all. No use.

And here I was looking at something that was telling everybody in that room that they needed to be restored to sanity, and I thought, my chart. I wonder if that's what's been wrong with me all the time.

Such a thought had never dawned on me and my whole life before. I remember saying to myself Yard

if that's true but I've been insane all the time.

That would explain a lot,

and for the first time in my life I allowed for that possibility.

And now, as I look back from the perspective of being with you for these years, I know that that what was wrong all the time. I know it now

and certain of it, and so it's an embarrassment for me now to share my my, my, my story with you because it's the story of a nut.

Well, there may be some here that won't see it that way.

If there are, you're in the right place.

So

there are all kinds of nuts, funeral, various kinds of nuts

and the kind of nuts that I know now that I was right from the start was I was a religious nut. Not doesn't mean necessarily there's anything wrong religions. It doesn't necessarily mean there's anything right with it, either,

but that's the kind of nuts that I see myself as having been.

I was born

in the little village in Ireland, the South of Ireland, not that place up in the north

where everybody was a Roman tragedy just because there was nothing else to be.

When I think of my native country, I go back there, you know, I go back there every so often. I go back to Polish up my brogue.

The last time I was back there, just three years ago, there was a story going around and I was thinking of it. When Vince was telling us about his Texan friend last night, there was a story going to land about a Texan

who was on vacation in Ireland

and regarding with this little Irish, with this Irish farmer, and he asked the farmer to show me little farm. The farmer did and the Texan looked at it

and he said, you know, he said back in, back in my file, I don't call the farm. It's a range. Range,

not in my range. Give you an idea to say that if I got up at sunrise and got into my car to go around my ranch, by the time the sun would have set, I wouldn't have gotten halfway around.

So the Irish farmer looked at him and he said it's perfect,

Connie said. I had a car like that one too.

You know, if you ever go on a vacation to Ireland, I'm one in here. Watch it. You won't win. You won't win.

There's another story about an American. I don't know where this one was from, but he was,

he was on a vacation. He was looking up all his forebears and getting to know the place and so on. And he came to the end of his vacation and he was in this little village and he went to the village hall where there was a dance

and he had his eye on one particular girl. And eventually he cornered her and he had this dance with her and he gave her a real sob story. It was his last night in Ireland and he'd never, never, never, ever see Ireland again. He knew that. And he had only one regret, that he had never gotten around to kissing the Blindstone. Now that's something you do when you go to land and you'll have luck for the rest of your life. You kiss the blind,

so he said. I never got, he said.

But I believe the next best thing to kissing the blind is to keep someone who has kissed it.

So he popped the $1,000,000, honey, he said, have you ever kissed the blank store? So she's dancing around and there and looking up at him. And she said no, but I sat on it. She said

watch it, you won't win,

not even I win when I'm around there. Last time I was there I got the use of the car. I'm not used to to driving in Ireland. I left Ireland when I was very young. I'll tell you that in a minute. If you Dublin in this car I was trying to find a certain St.

and Dublin is all one way streets since I was a boy. It's all different now and anytime I came close to the street I was trying to get to, the arrows were all pointing away

before I got frustrated and I pulled in to the curb and I put the window down and there was a, a native passing by and I said to him, hi, Patrick said how do I get to Thomas St. So he looked up the street and he looked down the street and he said, father, he said to get Thomas St., you wouldn't really start from here at all.

I knew I was home. I knew I was home

anyway. That's the kind of people I was born into,

and as I was growing up, I was sent to school in this little village. I went first of all to the school where I was taught by the nuns, and then I went to the school that I was taught by what's called the Religious Brothers.

And then I went to the classical school where I was taught by the priests of the diocese to our classics.

So as you can imagine, I heard him an awful lot about God, God, God all am I years growing up, God became more real to me than the people I could see with my two eyes. He haunted me. And this is the part about me that I always feel embarrassed when I have to share with you.

I was conscious of God all my waking hours.

It's only in my later years that I became aware that not everybody is like that.

I wasn't. I thought everybody was like that. I was as aware of God, aware of them, haunted by him all my waking hours, as if I could see him

as a freedom.

I was terribly conscious of God,

and it's from my earlier years.

I never remember making my mind up to become a priest. I never remember making my mind up to do that.

As far back as I can recall, that

decision was there when I made it. I don't know of Nora, 'cause no one ever suggested it to me. I always wanted that. And if you had asked me when I was very young, now why? Why do you want to be a priest?

I would have been very embarrassed if I if I would have told you for for real,

because there's something going on inside me that I know now was unusual.

I had heard. And don't forget now if you're nuts,

what what you're told and what you hear isn't all the same thing.

Must allow for that.

I had heard when I was growing up that if you want to do the biggest, biggest thing that a human being can do, what is this? What's the biggest thing a human being can do?

Well, I have heard the biggest thing a human being can do is to love God.

Love God perfectly,

The good book says that. What's the 1st and the greatest of all the values?

Thou shalt love the nor thy God with thy whole heart, the whole soul, thy whole mind. Do that

and the biggest thing human being can do? Bigger than getting to the moon and back. Bigger than getting the cure for Cancer. Being bigger than making a billion.

The biggest thing we can do?

Love God perfectly

to that you've done the uppermost maximum.

And that impressed me.

And I say to my little circle, that's what I'm going to do.

That's what I'm going to do. I don't see any of these for doing anything else.

And if you'd ask me, well now what is this business of loving God consistent? What do you have to do in order to do that?

And that's where it would have been a bit embarrassed to tell you. Don't forget now what you hear and what you're told isn't always the same thing if you're nuts.

And so if I were to tell you what you have to do in order to love God totally and perfectly, I would have told you, Well, the first thing you have to do is you have to make yourself as miserable as you can possibly make yourself.

You have to give up every single thing that in any way enjoyable.

Give it up.

And I said to my little self, well, if that's what you have to do, let's get on with it. Let's do that.

And then I had heard

that if you really want to go in for anonymous course in this business of loving God perfectly, then you have to leave home and leave all your possessions and prospects and family and all that and go way out foreign to convert to heathen.

I said OK,

I'm not talking myself when we're in all this world. Could you get more heathen

then England?

Now don't forget I was nuts.

And so, the ripe old age of 15,

I packed my little bag.

I told my mother and father what I was proposing to do

and my father brought me up to Dublin, to capital city, and put me on the little ship that went across to Liverpool in England, north of England. And from there I went to a place called the Yorkshire Moors, out in the Wilds of Yorkshire in the north of England. And I went to a prep school run by monks, and in due course,

when I graduated from that prep school, I entered the monastery and became a monk myself.

And not only a monk, but with our Dean's as we're a priest as well.

And I lived the life of a priest and a monk in a monastery for 30 years.

Now,

if you want to know what life is like in that kind of a setup,

you'd regard it, I know, as very, very weird. And for all I know, maybe you'd be right.

I don't know anymore the difference between normal and abnormal. I don't know,

but in that life that we lived in the monastery, we used to get up at 2:00 in the morning.

And when I say get up, I don't mean out of a lovely comfortable bed. We slept on bare boars with a straw mattress

and a straw pillow. We just rolled off of that for 2:00 in the morning and totaled along to the Abbey church where we sang the praises of God for over an hour.

If you want to know from me what in the name of God God wanted his praise of sunk for a 2:00 in the morning,

I don't know.

We've seen a good a good idea to me, yes,

we used to fast three days a week.

We used to what I say that you should do. And they lived a life of a very intense prayerfulness and study worked in the fields. And, and then as well as that, those particular kind of monks used to go out of the monastery at regular intervals to do a kind of work that you don't hear so much about. I think nowadays,

you know the kind of priests that look after parishes in the parish. They are called

diocesan priests. Well, those kind of priests would ask for some monks from the kind of modesty that I lived in, to come to their parish

for Week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks and preach to the people.

And the idea was that these holy, holy men wrapped up with God and prayer and meditation and tenants and all that.

Would come like Moses coming down from the mountain up being wrapped up with God, coming down to the people in the plains to speak God's mind and God's heart to them, to the same idea. These kind of monks would come to the parishes and

preach parish missions. They would also go to the convent of religious sisters, nuns and religious brothers

and

recharge their batteries and their commitment to the life they lived.

That was the kind of life that was lived by those monks that I belong to for 30 years. Well,

in 1950,

that was five years after was ordained a priest,

my superiors took it into their heads to send me to Rome to go to a Roman university to study all kinds of highfalutin stuff.

And I found myself

living in this head monastery of the order, religious orders. I belong to the head monastery in Rome,

and in this head monastery there were not only the resident Italian monks, but also all kinds of other young monks from of the same order from all over the world who are going to Roman universities like I was to do

now. I had never been drunk in my life up to this point,

and I found what I

was living in that monastery in Rome

that the two means each day that we went to at each of those two means, wine was served and served very, very liberally.

There's no limit to it.

We used to feature these long bare tables, and you always sat in the same place at your table

with whoever, whoever was on this side that he was always this side of you, whoever was that side he was, according to your seniority, like in the service and all. Down the middle of East tables were these enormous flagons of wine. They were positioned one between each of two monks. You weren't supposed to drink the whole tomb if that's the way they were set up.

And the guy who satisfied me here, he would only take that much in the bottom of the glass at each meal.

The guy that sat the other side of me who was supposed to share that enormous flagon with the fella, the far side of him. This fella here never took any at all.

He was weird

and the friend of the parasite of him. He only took that much

soul. Twice a day,

I saw myself within reach of two enormous flagons of wine.

Now, I had never been in a position like that my whole life before

and I have to tell you

I was always very, very. My stomach was always empty at meal time

and was always full by the end of the meal, but it was full of wine.

I think I'd bottomed those two flagons at each meal

and I experienced for the first time in my whole life, inebriation,

intoxication, getting smashed.

And I want you to know that it was the most fantastic experience of my entire life.

Nobody had ever told me what happened when you get smashed. Lord, I couldn't believe it.

It was out of this world.

Everything became funny, funny, funny.

We had to ease in silence,

and there was a kind of a podium halfway up the dining room,

and there was a reader reading all kinds of serious, spiritual, solemn stuff, you see, all during the meet.

Well, I took strong objection to some of the things that he received,

and to make a Long story short, needs became an awful problem.

Anyway, what I do clearly recall is that I had this fantastic

Arnac and call it is Breakthrough. It was like Alice in Wonderland. I just broke through to a whole new dimension of reality that I never knew existed. Being drunk was wonderful

and I was drunk twice a day

for openers because I have to tell you that in that monastery there were young priests like myself, young Monstrum, all over the world from English speaking parts of the world like America, Australia, Canada, God knows Ireland, England,

and we found the kind of a little community within the community. We weren't supposed to, but we did,

and we had money sent to us by our superiors back home to supply ourselves with books and all that was necessary for doing deep research to university. But we didn't need all the money for that.

And

so we found this little fellowship within the big community and they made my room, the meeting place for these parties. And they laid in the stuff.

And I laid in shelves, had shells put up in the wall there, and I had rolls and rolls of bottles of booze. Became a bar

discreetly discreetly covered by a blanket.

We Co opted one single Italian into our little circle.

His family owned a winery outside of Rome

and so I live to see the day when this huge barrel of wine was brought up the backstairs, the monastery, along the chaiser and into my room

and set up an addressing with a faster to it, which was wonderful.

So there I was, all set up for my honeymoon with booze.

Believable. Unbelievable.

I spent three years in that monastery. I was supposed to be studying all kinds of wonderful, wonderful stuff, but I don't remember very much about it. I really don't. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I was not sober or without a hangover for three solid years.

Those those are my first years with those. When I eventually got the degrees, they sent me out periodic I How the heck I I don't know how that ever happened either.

I wrote a dissertation, by the way, for the doctors, and I read that thing once in a while still. And where in the name of God it came from, I don't know,

the professor said. It was absolutely brilliant.

I don't understand the word of it.

So anyway, I came home from all that experience,

and

I came home meant to my monastery in the north of England,

and I was appointed to teach. And that was the fulfillment of a dream that I had hugged for secret for years. I wanted to be the most brilliant professor at the Roman Catholic Church ever produced. And I was going to put the Roman Catholic Church right about absolutely everything, and it needed putting right.

So by this time I discovered that I couldn't function without, you know what?

And so

I became a charter drinker in my monastery.

Now you may be Whoa,

isn't that nice

when I keep talking?

Ah,

you may wonder

how a monk living in a monastery, with all the restrictions involved in that,

can supply himself with booze limitlessly.

A monk, as some of you may know, is a pair of nutrites. Very serious vows for recalled vows to take, a vow of poverty to undertake, never to own any money, never to own any property, never to own anything whatever at all. To live like a poor man, like the foundry of Christianity did,

he undertakes to leave. He takes a vow of obedience in which he he left his whole life be run by another human being, in whom in whose arrangements he recognizes the will of God for him, so that all his comings and goings are under the vigilance of the superior. He's vowed to obey. He can't go very like and do do what he likes

and it takes about chastity in which he renounces all that has to do with marriage and romance and sex and all that side of life. By the way, the whole purpose of this

is to do what the third chapter of our big book talks about. The third chapter talks about ego has to be slashed.

Ego has to be smashed if we're ever to get close to God or God is able to get close to us. And that's the rationale behind all that stuff

that goes on in condoms and monasteries when you take these vows. Anyway, here was I

and I needed. I had switched to Scotch by this time and I needed it.

And I was never with houses.

I was always able to get it because, as I told you, these kind of guys used to go out from the monastery to parishes and to other and to convents and other places to give these parish missions, as they call them, and retreats and all that kind of thing. And when the pastor would see that this particular good holy monk needed to be filled with the Spirit to keep going,

he thought to her that I was filled with a spinach.

And when I'd be going back, he would supply me with plenty of booze during the job. And when I'll be going back to my monastery, please give me something to put in my bag. And he didn't even give me a apart from the honorarium to give to the monastery. He gives me a backhander for myself

who wasn't supposed to. I wasn't supposed to accept this, but in an emergency,

God understands,

so I was never without. And I hope you'll notice that by this stage, this business of loving God perfectly

had drawn in the back burner A-Team called pitiable an incomprehensible demodulization at setting, and it had set in with a vengeance. With a vengeance.

I don't know what way I need. I really don't,

but I can have political high ideals that when I let go of them, oh boy, oh boy, oh man,

there are no limits. There are no limits.

When I say to hell with it all, I mean what I'm saying.

So I became I became a phony

hypocrisy fraud.

I was drinking

constantly,

but I never decided myself as an alcoholic, for heaven's sakes.

Anyway, I had me I I hadn't been teaching very long when the superior sent from me, and I tutored along to his office, wondering which university in America I was going to be recommended to. And when I walked into his office,

the look on his face indicated that the barometer was very low.

So he just said to me, I want to cut this short. You think

I want you to know? He says that as of this moment,

your teaching assignment is terminated

and is terminated for good.

I will teach that you will never have another teaching assignment anywhere in the Roman Catholic Church on this planet,

he said. Your conduct has been atrocious. The worst day's work I ever did was to send you to Rome.

All it did for you was it made you an alcoholic.

That was the very, very first time in my life but that 50 filthy word was addressed to me.

God blesses a man with a triple doctorate an alcoholic.

You would appreciate that's not possible. Limbs

not possible.

That's a purely without of his mind. He didn't. He didn't recognize

a valuable man when he saw one.

Anyway, I staggered out of there

and now I come to a period of my life that I just want to skip over.

25 years

of alcoholic drinking. 25 years of a king size chip on my shoulder.

25 years of maudlin. Maudlin

drunkenness.

I was reduced in the ranks. I was required to do the kind of tasks that you needed. No brains whatever for doing.

I dragged myself through life going on those preaching jobs.

I'd get up in the pulpit and I talk wonderful God stuff. Wonderful. Most impressive. Oh boy.

And all the time I knew that every word that I was saying

was an indictment of myself. I knew it.

I was leading a life of brand,

unrestrained, maudlin, pathetic, pitiable, self indulgence, depraved.

I know what they're talking about when the 20 questions asks

did you seek out what is this nor company? I know what they mean, I did.

I hope to God my poor mother never hears

what kind of sleazy circumstances I got myself into and what kind of depths I descended to

after

I don't know how many years. Or

trying to live my life

saying to myself that somehow or other

this will all clear itself up

when my ship comes in. Somebody gave me one of those things you put on your desk. I was always thinking about the day of my ship would come in

and someone gave me a dream that says what you're kind of what you're kind of look, when your ship comes in, you'll be at the airport.

I decided that the religious order that I belonged to wasn't worthy of me. And so I did something that was rather exceptional in those days.

I applied to the supreme authority in the Church,

to the Pope,

to another. My vows is a monk

and let me go free, but I had to remain a priest. And so I had to apply to become a priest, a member of a diocese somewhere in the world. And I pulled wires and pulled strings and all this. And I got this, the president of the seminary back in Ireland

to recommend me to the Bishop of San Diego, a very promising young man here who would be in adornment to the diocese.

And the Bishop of San Diego swallowed at all, hook, line and sinker,

and he accepted me as a priest from diocese. He has regretted it since.

And so in 196821 years ago, I once again packed my bag and I ended up

in San Diego

brought my problem with me without ever realizing I had any problem. My problem was very simple. If only people would realize the talents I had, if only people would realize where I belonged in God's scheme of things, and put me there, everything would be perfectly all right.

The first assignment I got in the dice of San Diego was with an Irish pastor.

It was a bit older than myself and the very first words he spoke to me when I arrived was

like a drink.

Will you drink with me?

Kind of transpired to this fellow was a chronic alcoholic. How lucky can you be?

Now, if any of you have any have any idea of what it's like to have one Irish alcoholic around, watch out when you have two.

I really mean it. They don't call us the Fighting Irish for nothing.

Oh boy,

when we really got tanked up,

it was serious.

You needed to keep out of the line of fire.

Would you believe the neighbors called in the police one?

That's how bad it was.

I was reassigned

and I was reassigned many, many, many more times.

I wish I could really

make you appreciate what is going on inside in me during those years

it was there.

It's very hard to put into words. You know, the only the people that I identify with most

in the Federation of Alcoholics Anonymous,

our people who have had a big love in their lives, who have fallen in love,

have experienced great happiness. And then came the booze and the drugs

and the whole horrible, horrible mess up

and all they did. The last, the last, the loss of all that you treasure, and the loss of any claim. The feeling of having any claim anymore

and watch it treasure

that old, that old boy stream that I had of wanting to love God, wanting to

wanting to be close to him, wanting him to make use of me whatever way he wanted for his good purposes. That whole dream was still there. I knew I had loused off God. Did I ever I want to tell you

you can't meditate when you're drunk,

when you have a hangover? And so prayer, prayer was gone out of my life. Absolutely, totally and completely.

No relationship with God at all. There was only a terrible terror. I was terrified

that I might die and the ultimate disaster overtaken

terrifying constant. I always intended to fix all this up somehow sometime,

but not today. In the meantime, let's have another drink

then with my sort of,

you know,

guys in my job and and my core religionists, you know, Roman Catholics are very weird beliefs. And

one of our beliefs is

and dynamite won't get it out of our heads. One of our beliefs is that when the priest does what he does at the altar at mass, what he's holding in his hands has him face to face, eyeball to eyeball, which is maker. He's God, his savior, He's judge.

And as I was doing my pain as a priest,

I might be coming from the pig stay the night before with the sweats and the shakes

and is not a comfortable feeling

to be face to face with someone you have promised to love.

Someone that you have asked to love you in a special way

and that you've totally remained done.

It's not a comfortable feeling.

It's not a comfortable feeling

to go into the concession thing and have people come in as Vince George last night just to take a fifth step. That's all it is. To acknowledge their five bills, their faults, decent, humble, honest people. And I was supposed to speak the world

that would express God's merciful, kindly, loving heart to them. And there I'd be sitting there and inside in the parish house, I knew the whiskey bottle was out. There were precious drinking time was being wasted. And here they were coming in here hesitating and fumbling and forgetting. And I just blow up and say, well, you for God's sake, get on with this damn thing.

It was not a nice life. Why did I stay in this?

Well, I always intended to put it right somehow.

Our new friends with a family that oh boy, Once again I chose my friends very carefully. The wife, the mother in this family herself belonged to a large family which owned a winery,

Brookside Wineries. And this family befriended me and slide me with all I needed, plenty of booze every time I would go home. And they invited me to go on a vacation with him in a place called Ensenada down in Mexico. And I went for the Monday, which was a big family, typical Catholics, you know, loads of kids and all that such thing. And the children range from

a 20 odd year old who was in college a way, way down to a little nipper, a little pinning

now down in this big, big thing they had on the beach. What do you call them? Those

training? It was really two or three trailers broken into one, assembled into one. But mum developed tennis elbow and she had to be brought back up to San Diego to the doctor by the her husband brought her up there and that left Uncle Bill in charge.

And this particular night I had been drinking all day as usual while I just

feeling normal. Don't you understand? And it was coming towards midnight and there was a radio had been blaring in the in the trailer all day in the still on. I said, now guys and gals, let's switch off that radio. Let's all go to our beds and have some peace and quiet around here.

And so

I upended the bottle for the last of the whiskey into my Tumblr, through the bottom, away in the trash can. And here was my last trouble. I was going to go to bed with the one I was going to pass out with the most important drink of the day,

and I was veering over towards where night Bunk lies. And the eldest son, his name was Matt,

positioned himself in front of my bunk

with his thumbs in his belt, not looking very friendly.

And he said to me, where do you think you're going, buddy?

Question. I'm going to bed. Well, he said no, no, you're not,

not with that. And he points to the Tumblr in my head.

Who said I'm not? He said. Funny enough, I did. And I want to say a bit more that you need to hear

you come around my family on a regular basis, and just because you wear a corner back to front, you think you're some sort of God-given right to limitless moves from my family

now, he said. I want you to know something.

You are not welcome around here because all you are is an ignorant Irish savage alcoholic.

Did you hear that dirty word?

That is the second time in 25 years.

Does anyone ever address that ugly word to me?

And he said, I want you to know this,

that my father and mother

are too decent to tell you to their face what I'm telling you. And I'm telling you to you on their behalf. And I'm telling you on behalf of all my brothers and sisters here, Amanda, I And they all said yes,

computing little Timmy. And then he ran away like hell.

And he said the sooner you make yourself scarce and get the hell out of our lives, the better. We'll all be pleased.

Did I tell you people, by the way, there was a very brilliant man.

Did I tell you that

no one had ever talked to me in my life like that before? No one.

And I decided to try to walk past Nash with dignity

as we fitted at Simple Doctor

and he made a grab at the glass in my hand and he knocked it out of my hand. And that was the last whiskey in the house.

And when that happened, something happened inside me that I never know how to describe.

Something exploded in here

like an atomic explosion. I just

went their Cirque.

I have never imagined that anybody could experience such anger, such total savage rage. It just swept through me and I wanted to grab hold of that young punk.

I get his neck and squeeze till his eyeballs pulled out and he'd go all blue and fall down. And I made for him.

And I would have killed him. I would have if the rest of them didn't. Oh, they're screaming. And the roaring was unbelievable. And they dragged me off of that guy. And I half ripped that trailer that night and I stormed out of there and I went up the beach and I knew there was a bar open up there

and I bought my last bottle of booze. But I pray to God with my last bottle of booze. It was the 8th of September 19175. And I lay out on the beach and I drank myself into insensibility.

When I came to, the sun was up.

I had a clear recall of all that had happened.

I looked over at the trailer