Mary Pearl T. from Little Rock, AR at the 23rd Annual Springtime In The Ozarks Convention, Eureka Springs, AR

Little Rock, AR.

Hello, Eureka Springs.

I am so glad to be here. When Mike called and said, you know, I said, well, I was just there a few years ago, he said, yeah, but I love you. Oh well, I've never been able to turn down the alcoholic who loves me.

They're my specialty.

It was exceptionally pretty driving up here Thursday. JD and I had a leisurely Dr. and just looked like snow all out through the hills, all the dogwoods of bloom. It's always a special time for me, and I appreciate very much the committee and Mike for allowing us to come and participate again this year. It's just always a thrill. I love to be. There's nothing I like better than being with a group of Alcoholics and Alnons. I'm telling you,

you know where the people know how to have fun now. When I came in Al Anon many years ago, I wasn't real happy there. I wanted to be an alcoholic.

Well, there was laughter in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and in the Alnon room was those little thin lipped cookie baking bitches. You know

I related to the alcoholic story better too, I just didn't have an allergy to alcohol. So with that, I'm going to tell you my name is Mary Pearl and I'm an Al Anon who is a big book black belt Al Anon from the Rose City family groups and I am happy, joyous and free.

Poor little chart, where is Charlie?

I scared him. I guess so. You know, we've had a big book study at our group, the Al Anon group, for over 10 years now. We might could teach him something. Anyway,

I love to play with Charlie,

with Barbara's permission.

No, you know it. It's been an amazing thing to me over the years, the amount of the things, how my life has changed. You know, the person you see here is not the person who came in in January 1977, not the same person at all. And I probably would have been the same person anyway. But this way it's much better. You know, first of all, I'm alive today, which I probably wouldn't have been the way I'm the way I did stuff. And I'm not in prison today, which I probably would have been the way I did stuff. Because every once in a while it gets a little iffy on.

And I had this uncontrollable temper I had. I had a lot of resentments. I had a lot of rage. I get tickled. I was watching Judge Judy yesterday afternoon. They were talking about road rage. And I thought, these are wimps,

three little boys fighting. They hadn't lived. You know, I remember one time a girl cut me off and then we got stuck in a line of traffic. I got out, went up and beat on her window and she locked her door. I said you needn't do that. If I won't in there, that won't stop me.

I had her begging forgiveness on the I-30.

And that's before I was carrying a gun.

JD told me. He said you pull that crap today, you'll get killed. I said I can give back. You know I can give back. No, it's not near as much fun as it used to be to do that madness stuff, but I found a lot of excitement. You see, my drug of choice is adrenaline.

I love excitement. If I don't have some, I create some. It's just that simple

and that was one of the things that was going to get me in a lot of trouble. That need for excitement in my life, that need for attention in my life. I'm the youngest of four children and I'm a change of life baby. And I was an Army brat and I was spoiled rotten by my daddy. Absolutely. I loved it. If I had still been spoiled rotten, you would have a different speaker today.

If I could have had my way, what I wanted, when I wanted it, there would be no need for me to ever change, do anything any differently.

And but that wasn't going to be the case. And I'm going to share. You know, daddy was a retired Army officer of 38 years and we went hunting and fishing all the time together and mother stayed at home. My mother was the kind of person that if you weren't working and doing something productive, you weren't worth anything. Praise God, I didn't get her at work ethic. But anyway

save from that my sister had that.

But anyway, I would go fishing with mom and with daddy, and this one day Mama decided to ruin it and she came with us

and what she did that day, I caught a little bitty fish and the first thing she did was she took a look at it, said it's not a keeper, ripped it off my hook and threw it back. Well, I went into a screaming coma right there in the boat

and my daddy said, honey come back to the back end of the boat with me. And as I got close to Daddy, he said, and we'll get her now.

I didn't know what it meant, but intuitively I knew I was going to like it.

And what it meant was that every fishy old helper caught that day,

hey, she would swing around, he would take it off, rebate her hooks, he'd swing back around, he'd hand me the fish and I'd throw it over every fish the old girl called. Now Daddy was playing a joke on Mama, but that's not what I heard. What I heard was anytime anybody does anything that hurts you, do it back to him as many times as you can. Now I can know today that's revenge. But when I was doing a four step, that was my most pleasant childhood memory.

My mother was the the disciplinarian in the home. She was the one who had all the rules and regulations and and it was she was a controller. That's what it amounts to. I know today. And you see, my mother had been damaged by the disease of alcoholism. Her mother, her father, two brothers and two sisters were alcoholic. My mother didn't drink.

I think she needed one,

she might have been a happier camper, but anyway, 'cause I hear y'all say you take a drink, you get relief, you feel better. She never felt good, never felt good. She was always mad. When I was 12 years old I watched my father die of a heart attack on the 30th of November and it just my world ended as I knew it because he was my protector, he was my best friend, he was my buddy. I felt loved, I felt and all I was taken away.

I no longer felt good. I no longer felt good. And not only that, I had been taken to church. And I believe that God loves you and that you'd sing the little songs. Jesus loves me. And then all of a sudden I know that's not true because if Jesus loved me, he would not have taken away my daddy. So I turned away from any kind of spiritual belief, a value system or anything at the age of 12. Now, I didn't know it at the time. This is all retrospect and this is my story. You know, this is what I have learned since I've come to you. I've learned a lot of

things about me that I never knew and I know why I do the things I do. It doesn't always stop me from doing because as we know, self knowledge along availed you. Not much you know and half measures avail you nothing. So there we are. But anyway, I went on and I declared war on my mother. I was really mad at God for letting her live and it was her fault and so I took it out on her. Now I know today if I had a kid like me, I'd killed it.

Very simple, very simple. There was a lot of physical abuse in our home. There was a lot of verbal abuse in our home because mother and I had declared war on one another and whoever died, the other one wins.

And that's the way it was growing up. And but the one place I found that I could achieve was in school. My school teachers love me. You know, I'm the the straight A student. I'm the one that does all this stuff. I follow the rules, I do the stuff. I know where to get my perks. And that's what I did. I got that through my schooling and I would have still been in school today, you know, if they hadn't, that's enough. Send her away, send her away. We've had all. You know, I was also the the only kid on the national. I had more days in detention hall than anyone in the history of the National Honor Society at our school.

I had this little discipline problem. You know, I mean, I was smart, but I didn't have a lick of common sense. And I thought I could do everything and get away with stuff, and the rules didn't apply to me. You know, that's like, you know, you can find out real easy if you're one of those kind of people. Do you follow the speed limit? See, none of you do. That's the reason we're here. You know, if it says 60, you got to go 62 for God's sake. You know, you have to just push it. You know, just push the edge a little. And that's the way I would do always. I would just push up to the edge and then step over.

You know,

it's exciting out there, over the edge.

And when I was 16, I went to jail the first time and the first time. Don't you like that? See, I'm a low bottom, Alan. That's the reason they love me, you know,

And it could have been, I could have had a ticket for speeding. But instead I got speeding, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer of law, hitting an officer of the law, actually kicking him,

and they took me to jail. So that was when I was 16. You know, I'm off to a good start.

Later on I would get there still into the violence, obviously. But anyway, the in the 50s they built the Little Rock Air Force Base and I was so thrilled because, you know, it's getting pretty dull at home and and nothing going on. I read in the paper where there was 10 men for every woman

in North Little Rock and I want my 10.

So I went out to the base of trolling

and I want your 10 and your 10 too. I mean, you know, I'm is there ever too much of a good thing? You know, I'm like the alcoholic walks in a bar. See the son, oh, you can drink for a dollar. Needs to give me two bucks worth. I mean, that's the way I am.

If it's worth doing, do it to you die on the spot.

So that's why I'm doing. I'm out there. And I met this little Yankee boy. Now, things were really bad at home. But back when I was growing up, you only left home if you want to wait to college or if you got married. That was the only two acceptable ways to leave home. You know, if if my mother said, I told her, I said I want out, I want an apartment. She said you can't

and I said well why not? She says because she's the only girl that won't out know an apartment or won't be doing stuff they ought not to be a doing. That may be true and I did, but I wanted to. I wanted to let me out there. And

well, you see, in our home, you couldn't do much. You know, Mama was real conservative about things, and she was firmly convinced that if you wore nail Polish, you'd be a whore. And let's see, if you paint your nails, it's just the first step before you smoke. And if you smoke, you're going to drink. And if you drink, you know you're going to be a horse. So there it is,

lay where I married this little old boy to get away from home. I know that today, but I was in love with the idea of being loved and came in heat about the same time. It all worked pretty good together

and he took me away from home. He took me further than I asked to go. He took me to Newfoundland.

Not on my list of places to vacation, much less live, I'm telling you. And we were there for about 5 years now. It's a Landis. You think it's cold out here? This is nothing We're talking because I know somebody sitting right over here who was there with me at the same time in Newfoundland, and we had an average snowfall of 290 inches and we had snow nine months of the year. You know, it was a real fun place. I can tell you one thing about Nothingland. Boring

and the excitement to be held

was in the clubs because that's where you heard the sound of the ice going in the glass and you heard the little stuff pouring in. And it was like music to my ears because people were laughing and they were having a good time. And see, that's what I always want to do is just be having a good time. And so I would go to those clubs. Now my husband played in the band in the club, so that left me to troll the room and

I found slot machines and other men. It was wonderful, just wonderful. I found enough excitement there. It ruined my marriage.

I got carried away. I'll excited that doing everything teaching die on the spot. And so I worked for the American Red Cross when I was there. I was assistant field director and I liked it. It was a position of power because if you are a military guy on an overseas base, the only way you can get off that base for emergency leave is with Red Cross verification. So it gave you a little bit of power there. And so I had me a little things going on, like I had a black market going on the flight line.

I got homesick for Arkansas food and and it was in the summertime. And so there was a big KC 97 going down to Maryland and the guy went on down and they picked us up a load of watermelons and brought them back. And I was selling watermelons up in Newfoundland for 10 bucks apiece. And this is in 1962.

Well, you know, supply and demand, let me tell you, you know, But when our son

came back and we were supposed to, after five years in Newfoundland, we're supposed to go to Minot, ND. And I said, I'm not going to Minot. And I said, I've been in this cold, snowy stuff all I want. I want to go back where it's going to be wonderful and it's going to be different. I'm going to go back to Little Rock Air Force Base. Isn't it funny how you get away and you think everything's going to be different? Well, see, the problem is wherever you go, there you are, you know, and I didn't know I was going to be taking me back. And the guy said, well, there's not an opening in your husband's career field. A little thing like that's never stopped me. And I said that, well, change it.

And he said, what do you mean? I said, put him in another career field, one there's an opening in. And he said, oh, hadn't thought about that. And I said, we'll do it. So all of a sudden, my husband, who was an aircraft mechanic, we go to Little Rock Air Force Base and he's a missile inspector. Never seen one

that ought to make you sleep good tonight.

And all it cost me was a case of Chevys. You know, alcohol is a daily part of my life. You know, alcohol on an overseas base was just dirt cheap. Just dirt cheap. Cigarettes were too. Back then you'd get them for $0.90 a carton.

Yes, Lord. Anyway,

so I came back home, we're in Little Rock now again and everything's going to be wonderful. Guess what? There we were. It wasn't wonderful and I knew what the problem was. It was him. If I could just get rid of him, then it would be OK. See, I mean everything. It's all about me being OK. And so I convinced him that what we need to be was separated because I wasn't ready to be self supporting through my own contributions.

I had done that overseas and I had that this. And I said I don't want to do that anymore. I want to, I want to paint. I'm an artist. I want to paint and I want to sculpt, and I want to do all this wonderful stuff,

and I don't want to live with you while I'm doing it. And

so he said, OK. And you see, I took advantage of that boy because, see, his mom and his daddy left his Mama when he was a baby, and his Mama died when he was 12, and he was left orphaned with a grandfather who didn't want him. And so it was very important for him to maintain that image of that family unit together so he would have put up with anything rather than to be divorced or not. And I took advantage of that.

So he went his way and

I was going to live there and I did what I wanted to do. And the only problem about that is all my life I did what my Mama told me not to do. And I had done what my husband didn't want me to do. And now I can do what I want to do. And you know something? I don't know what to do.

You know, that's a that's a strange thing. But if you've never had that freedom, you don't have a clue. And so I got into trouble and I began to work. I've always been a people watcher too. And I begin to watch what was going on in my neighborhood. There was a war across the street and I knew he was one of them. Now, by one of them I'm talking about he was a drunk because I knew all about drunks. My momma had a whole family of them. My father, my grandfather, died in the state hospital with wet brain from alcoholism. My grandmother died of cirrhosis of the liver from alcoholism.

My uncle AB was shot in bed with another man's wife. He was my favorite.

I had two aunts and an uncle that were still practicing at the time. And so I knew what about alcohol. I knew what they did and what they did. They went out, they got drunk, they came home and they fought one another and they hurt one another. And that's what was going on next door. This boy would go out and he'd get drunk, come back and beat up his little wife. And she was French Canadian and spoke very little English. Well, see, I've been living in Canada. I could speak. And so I went over there, and Joanne and I became very good friends. And she got pregnant. And the night she went into labor, he came home and beat her up.

And she came over to my house and her nose was bleeding and her mouth was cutting. And she said, will you take me to the hospital? And I said sure. And I went over with her. And you know how Alcoholics will pass out on the bed with that little smirk on their face like they've done something good. He was so pleased with himself. And I looked at him and I looked at her, and I thought, you know, somebody ought to whip his butt. And then I had my first spiritual awakening. I'm somebody.

So I rolled him up in his bed sheet, I took a slat out of the bed and I beat the fool out of him.

And the next morning he came over to my house and he said, do you know where Joanne is? I said yes, she's at the hospital, she had a baby last night. And he said, well, I was out with some friends and I got into a fight.

I didn't have a clue what a blackout was, but I was grateful today, you know.

So anyway, I went on like that and then I had this other neighbor that lived on the other side of me and he had a drinking problem and the doctors told him he was now calling, said Freeman, if you don't quit drinking, you're going to die. Well, he quit drinking, died anyway, but he was miserable, let me tell you. He did not find Alcoholics Anonymous. And all he did was he just didn't drink and he was. I know what irritable, restless and discontent meant. When I was looking at Freeman, I didn't realize I had it too. You know, that's the thing, You have it and you don't know you got it.

And what it amounted to was I was a night person. I'm still a night person. My clocks just in backwards. That's all I know. And so I would come home around 7:00 in the morning from having fun and

Freeman had a garden. He wanted to till his garden at 8:00 in the morning. How unreasonable can you be? And so I went out there and told him about it and he told me to shut my mouth and get my fat butt back in the house. He didn't know about mom and the fish.

So I got my daddy's frog gigging headlight and I mow growns at 11:30 at night.

Well, the sheriff came to see me.

Have you never noticed how law enforcement people are very narrow minded?

The sheriff talked to me about it and I tried to explain. He didn't understand, so I went into Plan B. Now, Freeman had beagles. He had six beagles. Now, if you've got one Beagle, you got a barking little dog. Well, he had a whole chorus out there. So I would wait until the wee hours of the morning. I'd run off my back porch, run across the yard, take a broom handle, run up down that dog yard fence.

Jump on my porch. Now they were going, this barking frenzy, and he'd come out and he'd cut them out, hold them down, go back in the house, and I'd wait an hour and we'd do it one more time.

Well, the sheriff came to see me

and after several more plans, it became obvious the sheriff and I are beginning to develop a relationship.

So I had to connect. That's when I noticed. OK, Director energy, somewhere else you got a neighborhood softball team. Well, I'm an athlete. I love sports. So I said that's it. So I got me some stretch boots and hot pants and I joined the team. I am here. And so it was our custom after the game to go back over to someone's house and we discussed the strategy of our game. But we should shouldn't have done.

And we would pop a few tops. Some of them would sniff some stuff and some others were smoking those little funny cigarettes. Just your normal neighborhood, you know. And it was their time to be over at my house. And this little boy was like 18, but he got drunk at my house. And I got to thinking, you know, that's the most dangerous thing you can ever hear from an al Anon. I got the thinking and

when I got to thinking I thought, you know, if he gets picked up going home and he they find out where he got booze, you'll be in big trouble because he's underage.

So to cover myself, I decided I'd drive this boy home. Now it was around Mother's Day and he had bought a ton of tea set for his mother for Mother's Day. So get the pictures 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I'm going into a strange house carrying a China tea set escorting a drunken 18 year old kid. OK, never been there before in my life. And he flipped the light on in the bedroom and when he did, there was a man laying on the bed in his underwear. And he looked up and said, well hot damn little brother. He brought us abroad home.

And I said, not tonight, fella,

but that's who I'm married to. JD,

perhaps you got yours on the front row of the choir. I didn't.

Later on that summer we started dating and it was, it was just wonderful. I mean, we could talk to one another about anything, everything. It was the most open, warm, wonderful relationship I'd ever had. However, there comes a point in time when there's a time to tell things. And if you go past that time, there doesn't seem to be a good time that that sort of tell it lends itself. And so we, we had a wonderful courtship last about four years and he ruined it. He asked me to marry him.

And that's when it occurred to me I had forgotten to give him some information.

And I said, JD, I can't marry you. And he said, why not? I said, because I'm already married. And he was shocked. Now, see, intuitively I knew if I told him I was married, he would not have dated me. And so that's one of those things, you know, you just, you know, you just don't say. And he said, well, you sure didn't act, Mary. Not so I forgot.

What's amazing to me about that is he still want to marry me? A woman who has, admittedly, that you can't remember she's married.

So he wasn't wrapped too tight either, you know.

Well, I got to

divorced, we got married and guess what? Alcoholism moved into my house. Now I didn't have a clue he had that. I mean, I knew he didn't know how to drink, right. I knew that you know, and it's like without a drink he was sort of boring. But if he had a couple of drinks, he was exciting. I just didn't have him very long because he never stopped it. 2 drinks, you know, it was sort of like having a harem. You know, you'd have the guy that picked you up, the guy that had two drinks and then there was the guy that had about four drinks and he began to feel sorry for him self. And then you had the guy who had about 8 drinks and then he got

on him like an old Chevy trunk lid wouldn't cut down. And then there came the guy that did you had to put out of your misery and

all in one night. You know, it's just so exciting, you know, and

it was real funny. You know, when we got married, I thought that his drinking would stop because, you know, it's like you get married and everything changes. You know, he would come home and and he would be then and he didn't those things. And he said, you sold me a bad bill of goods. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, for one thing, you never bitched about my drinking. You never had a headache. He said, now all this stuff

and I said, well, when you get that piece of paper, it makes things different, you know, But you don't tell them till after you get the paper.

But it's like, OK, it's time to shape up. It's tried to to to be a real family here. It's trying to do those things. And that wasn't going to happen in our house because the disease of alcoholism was there for him and the disease of alcoholism was there for me as well. Because the sick thinking and all the reacting and the things now that we were on that downhill thing and we didn't realize. I don't know about you, but have you had the relationship where it peaks out at the beginning and then goes downhill?

I mean, that was how that was how it was with us. You know,

it was so good. And then, yeah, here we go. And as the disease progressed, so did the insanity. So did the hard feeling. So there was violence. Like I say that violence that I had had toward that boy across the street now happened to the boy there in the house. And, you know, his daddy would. His daddy nearly got him killed because his daddy would give him pep talks about coming home and getting the pants off of me and on himself. He said, Jim, you letting that woman control you over there, That's what it is. He said you do better if you would just go home,

do what you need to do, get them pants off that woman, put them on. And then he'd go back hurt to his daddy.

And then we played hide and seek. He'd get he'd go get drunk and hide and I'd seek him. You know,

ain't a bird dog in the world compared to an Al Anon on the horn. I tell you what,

we were the best private investigators of the world. You can give us a clue, man. We can go

when we develop a whole network, you know, we can find you. Don't think you can't be found. We can find you. The problem is when we find you, we don't want to find you the way we find you. Because I would find him with her. He had these lower companions that he was just drawn to, you know, and he, they would be sitting at a table having a drink. Well, God, you can't let that happen. You walk in, you turn the table upside down, you slap her flat. You proceed to pulverize him and the bouncer throws you out

and you're only there trying to save your home, for God's sake.

Now, JD's never been thrown out, but I've been barred from three bars and two pawn shops.

And then if the, if the bouncer was a little ugly

with me, then I'd go hand to hand with him and I'd go to jail for assault. And that was, you know, that was how that would happen, you know, So finally I got to where I quit looking for him. You know, I just quit looking for him. And I just wait for the the police to call me and tell me when they had him and he'd beg them, don't call her. Don't call her.

She'll hurt me. Don't call her.

And I'd go get him and I'd bring him home and kill him.

And then we did that one day at a time.

Well, sooner or later, you know, we had to do something different. And I told him, I said, I can't live like this. You're going to have to do something. You have to get out. It's what's going to matter. And he said, I don't mean to do this. He said, I don't mean to go out and get drunk, drunk. He said, I just want to go out and get feeling good. That's all I want. But you see, his ability to to get there and feel good had long gone, long gone away. And I didn't know that

because it looks like to us that you are having that good time and you're doing that deal and you have a tendency to want to blame us. That's what I noticed. Because I'd say, why do you do this? He says, 'cause you didn't do this. And then the next time it was because you did do this. Now it's the same damn thing. So it's like, you know, your mind, you know, you begin to get a little weird. You get a little quick, you know, just get a little quick.

I'm beginning to have health problems, you know, I've got to have blood pressure, probably get a little kick, you know, every once in a while,

you know, But it's no, everything's fine at our house. And the doctor says, are you under any undue stress? He said, how about at work? I said no, everything is fine. He said, oh, fine, fine, fine. There's nothing wrong with my home, You know, it's okay, you know,

so we're trying to take care of you, but you know, we lie. We lie. We don't tell the truth what's going on because we're ashamed. We're ashamed to tell what's going on in our home. And it wasn't just that I was ashamed to say my husband's a drunk, but I was ashamed to say, hey,

I'm an abuser. I don't want to have to deal with that either. And there's something that happens to you on the inside when you hurt other people. It makes you very, very small. And you, there's a tremendous amount of self loving that comes with that tremendous amount. You can't hurt another one of God's kids without hurting yourself. It's just that simple. So anyway, I took him to the doctor and the doctor told him, he said you've got a drinking problem. JD said yeah, slight problem.

I slight problem. The Titanic had a little bad afternoon,

OK.

And he said, but he says, well, Unite could go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He said they seem to be able to help people. They have drinking problems. And JD said, but I'm not an alcoholic. And I looked at him and I said, that's right. He's not an alcoholic. You know, he wasn't like my mother's people. He did not drink like they did. He didn't do like they did. So therefore, you know, it's funny. All my life I put people in boxes. I had this little box, and this is where you went. And these people went in this box over here and you defined what they were and you judged them and you put them in the box. Well, you

take them out-of-the-box once you've got them boxed, because that means you made a mistake when you put them in the box.

And you can't afford to be wrong, for God's sake, because you feel so wrong that one more wrong is more than you can bear. So you can't move people. Once you get them boxed, they're boxed

and they were the Alcoholics over here and he was my husband over there and I couldn't put him in the alcoholic box

and I didn't want to either because that was hopeless and helpless. I knew where that was over there. I had watched my mother try to deal with an entire lifetime, so it couldn't be that way. But he asked for the doctor for a prescription and he said that he had some friends that were taking Ant abuse and if the doctor would give him some interviews, he knew he could be OK, just need a little help. So now the doctor hands us the prescription. I take the prescription because I can't trust him to do anything, and I become the keeper of the pills.

Now I've got high blood pressure. I've got an epileptic dog. Now JD's on the pills every morning in a hurry, going to work. I can't guarantee who got what, but I can guarantee one thing. Everybody got a pill.

And now you see, my, my dream has come true. You know, if you'll quit drinking, I'll be OK and see he's not drinking. I'm not OK. Now that's a real puzzler. And so I look at him again, and I said, it's just like the other one. It's not his drinking. It's him. It's him. It's him that's the problem. So I decide, you know, all right, now

what do we need to do about him?

Well, now, you see, this is the summer that the committee came in and the committee, we had a meeting one night. And we're sitting there and we're talking, and it's like, well, you know, you could divorce him like you did your first one. Well, yeah, but, you know, if you have to keep divorcing them, you seem to be the common denominator. We really don't want to look there too far. Well, that what? All right, then. Well, what if he were to die? What was that?

Well,

if he were to die then you could be a widow. Sounds much better than the divorcee. And you get the insurance. You're right. Because see I work for an insurance company and I had him insured up to $1,000,000 and I got I got to the point where the underwriters wouldn't write anymore insurance. They were afraid for him because every time I, every time he'd go out and get drunk, I'd get pissed off and get another policy

because I knew he was going to die. Well, anyway, so I'm sitting there thinking, oh, he's worth more dead than alive. And that's true. And they said, but you know, he's not, he's not really.

He's not dying. That's no big deal. We can take care of that. Well, what do you suggest? Well, personally, I like stab him in the neck with an ice picking, watch him drip.

Best thought I'd had in a long time. And what about that? Well, why don't we just get a tires and and and just roll over him with the back of the car and squish him up in the tread? That's right, make a note, buy new tires.

And that's the way my thinking was going. And let me tell you something about that kind of thinking. Now we all know we can do that kind of thinking, but you know, when here we're the lucky ones because you see,

we tell God ourselves and another person what we're thinking, you know, and I wasn't doing that. I wouldn't live anybody any kind of spiritual principles. And if I'd have told, if I had heard myself say it out loud, I might have said, God, that's crazy, but I didn't. Cause what you hear in your head makes sense to you. That's the scary part. It makes sense to you. But when you take it outside and look at it and let another person hear it, you, you know, you could, It makes a world of difference. It just makes a world of difference. But I didn't have that. So it made sense to me.

So I went on and there was a lady in the paper that had killed her husband, said he was an alcoholic, and they put her in prison. And I thought tacky, tacky, tacky. It might have been on that jury. That wouldn't have happened, I can guarantee you that. And so I went on. We had to have another committee meeting now, you know, And it's like, well, what do you think we ought to do now? And so we're not. We came up with the idea of an alcoholic were to pass out in the bathtub and drown. Who would know? Was a group conscience. We all liked it.

So all you have to do now once you make a decision, all you have to do is just wait for the right time to implement. You know, you get a certain amount of peace once you've made a decision. So the following

January, we had ice and snow in Little Rock, which is you all know is not normal for us. People don't know how to drive on it. And I came home from work that day and and it was pretty slick out. And later on that afternoon, I heard our truck at a high rate of pitch, you know, going and I'm thinking God

and I lookout just in time to see him come caddy corner across and he hit the cast iron hitching post horse at the end of the driveway. He went shooting across the side of the yard. He hit a tree and then he bounced into the side of the house. And I thought he really can't drive on this. He really can't.

And then he opened up that door, but he poured out of the truck and I had seen that too many times. And I looked out that picture window and I said I'll kill that SOB if it's the last thing I ever do. And so when he came in, I never seen anything. I just hit him as hard as I could

and when he fell, he hit our coffee table and it knocked him out. And I drug him across the living room, in the hall, into the bathroom, took his clothes off of him, ran the bathtub full of warm water. And I put him in and I held him under until the bubbles quit coming because he was the problem and I couldn't stand it any longer.

And he's laying there in the bottom of the tub, and there's a voice that comes. It's not a committee member. And the voice says, look what you're doing. You can't do this. And I picked him up by the hair of the head and I said, the hell I can't. And I put him back down again. And then the voice came back and it said, don't you realize you're committing murder? You're taking the life of someone you once loved. Now that's what he talks about in the book, about a moment of clarity. And what you see yourself is what you've become. And I had become an animal to find an illness and it scared me.

And I jerked him out of that bathtub. And thank God I had worked for the Red Cross. And I resuscitated him and I drug him into the bedroom and put him in bed and got the hair dryer down and dried his hair because I didn't want him catch cold.

And I had a problem with Step 2.

OK, it was different. You know how we always say this time it's going to be different, nothing's any different. Well, this time it was different. And I left him in that room and I shut the door and I went in and I rocked in my chair for the next 8 to 10 hours with a desperation I have never known since. And it was that desperation that I don't know how I know one thing. I can't live like this anymore. But I don't know how not to live like this anymore. There is no light at the end of the tunnel.

It's just absolutely miserable.

You need something

only you can perform this, this will. These are alcoholic trucks and being Oh my God, and there are tow trucks there. Oh, if you're parked in the fire line, it's almost too late that they're there. This is your final warning. The tow trucks are out there right now ready to do it. There's a red BMW, a red BMW, a red BMW