Paul M. from Chicago, IL speaking in Chicago, IL

We take the chance to be here this morning, because I think it might help me overcome my shyness. Alcoholism is a disease and AA is the answer. And as you noticed this morning, I've been sober 34 years as of last month. I'm glad they had the countdown because then I didn't have to announce it myself. You probably think that I sobered up when I was 3 or 4 years old.

However, I am a little older. I came into AA when I was 25 and I was 59 last May, which is quite a bit older than I had planned to be. I'm getting to be too old to take yes for an answer. AA is about change and change comes through working the 12 steps. The steps are the program.

There is no other program. Conferences are nice and banquets are nice and committee meetings are nice, but the steps to the program, without the program, there is no other answer. That's the message. And what I have seen as I as I have stayed sober is people who either didn't understand that or forgot it and got drunk and got lost along the way or never could get sober. AA is about change.

I heard about one man who changed a great deal. He got to be 80 years old and he'd work 90 hours a week all of his life, never had any fun, never enjoyed life. So he got his face lifted, got a new toupee, got some $900 suits and a new Mercedes. And the 1st day he put the whole thing together, he put on his toupee, a new $900 suit. He got in a Mercedes, and he drove 4 blocks, and he got killed in an automobile wreck.

And he went to heaven and he said, lord, why did you let it happen? I never had any fun all of my life. I'm finally going to enjoy life and I get killed. Why? The Lord said, to tell you the truth, Charlie, I didn't recognize you.

Alcoholics are known for big egos. I heard about 1 alcoholic who finally decided to try psychotherapy, and he went to a psychiatrist. And on his first visit, the psychiatrist said, well, I don't know anything about you. Said, I've never seen you before. Tell me about yourself.

Start at the beginning. And the alcoholic said, in the beginning, I created the heavens and the earth. Incidentally, I'd like to thank anybody who was involved in getting me invited to this Lenny. Incidentally, when Lenny was younger, he studied to be an artist, but he gave it up. He gave it up because he wanted to paint this beautiful model in the nude, and she wouldn't let him.

She made him put on his bathrobe. I think it's an indication of the higher powers view of the alcoholic's keen intelligence. When we look back on our beginnings and realize that of our cofounders, 2 of them, one was a medical doctor and he was a proctologist. Can you imagine the trouble we'd have been in if he'd have been a psychiatrist? As Pete mentioned, I've done a number of things since I sobered up.

I was sober 4 years. When I drank, everybody told me I was a smart young fellow. And if I sobered up, I'd go far, and I believed them. And when I was sober 4 years, I found myself working as a laborer on a rigging crew in Northern Greenland, about 850 miles from the North Pole, which was a lot farther than I had planned to go. But through a variety of events, I ended up riding for a living, which is what I do now.

I was in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador a couple of years ago. And the Galapagos Islands, of course, are where Darwin got the idea for his theory of evolution from the finches and the giant tortoises. The giant tortoises there get to be £506100. And I learned that during mating season, the giant tortoises become so excited they try to mate with large rocks. It's pretty much like your average 8 day picnic.

You know, if you drink, you've got 2 things to worry about. You're either an alcoholic or you're not an alcoholic. If you're not an alcoholic, you don't have anything to worry about. If you're an alcoholic, you've got 2 things to worry about. You'll either continue to drink or you'll stop.

If you stop drinking, you don't have anything to worry about. But if you continue to drink, you've got 2 things to worry about. You'll either die or you'll go insane. If you go insane, you don't have anything to worry about. If you die, you've got 2 things to worry about.

You'll either go to heaven or you'll go to hell. If you go to heaven, you don't have anything to worry about. If you go to hell, you've got one thing to worry about. Where in hell can you get another drink? Says in the big book that some of us tried to hang on to our old ideas and the results were nil until we let go completely.

Well, I came in to AA with a lot of lousy old ideas. I came in with what I look back on as 2 large handicaps. 1 was too much secular education. I got educated way beyond my intelligence, and it didn't take a lot of education to do that. And the other education the other problem was too much religious education.

I come from a long line of Lutheran ministers. And in spite of that fact, I believe in god today. The The time I came to AA, I was a fallen away atheist. I didn't believe in anything. The way I was taught, they said that if you don't believe this way, you're going gradually concluded And I gradually concluded that I could live better with less cosmic affection.

And I tried it on my own at the time when I came to AA and that didn't work too well either. I was very grateful after I sobered up to learn that nobody in AA argued about whose higher power was higher. I found that a very refreshing approach. But after I sobered up a while, I collected a whole new set of old ideas. I've had a continuing problem of trying to be smarter than I actually am.

I have continually been confused by the simplicity of the 8A program. When I was sober about well less than a year, I heard Paul Stanley talk in Chicago one Sunday morning in the spring of 1948. Stanley was the No. 5 AA. He was from Akron and he said in the course of his talk over and over, AA is of it self sufficient.

And he repeated this many times and I was not quite sure that this was correct. I believe that today, AA is of itself sufficient. You and I have within this fellowship, within these 12 steps, working these 12 steps because the program is not meetings, it's not conferences, it's not banquets. The program is working and reworking every one of these 12 steps. If we do that, we have everything we need to live not just soberly, but samely, joyously and usefully.

On Page 15 in the 12 and 12, it says, AA's 12 steps are a group of spiritual in their nature, which if practiced as a way of life, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole. And in my experience that is totally, completely and 100% correct. If you and I work the steps Well, when things get dull this morning, I'll just repeat that. But I collected all these new, old ideas because it startled me that anything as simple as this program could have everything that I needed. And I spent a number of years as a retarded mystic.

I read everything you could find on the subject of spiritual growth because I knew that some of us in AA were destined for greater spiritual growth than others, and I knew that I was one of those. My definition of humility has always been the art of looking ashamed while you say beautiful things about yourself. And so I read all these marvelous books that told you how to leap into the spiritual stratosphere, Bhagavad Gita and frequently bored, my friends, into terminal fatigue. And as time passed, I came to the realization that what happened was I developed a metaphysical hernia, and I had strained myself spiritually. And I went back and took some new looks at the big book.

Now, I read that big book many times. I made four contracts up in Thule, Greenland. I worked overseas construction from 1951 to 'fifty 8. I made 4 contracts up in Northern Greenland over in Iceland. I worked in Alaska on the Du Line and Point Barrel.

A lot of that time, there was no AA group. So my AA came out of the big book, and I've been through it again and again and again. I write for a living, as I say. That is the most incredible volume I have ever seen in my life. It's the only thing I have ever found in my life, the truth and the power in that big book that has held out for me throughout my life.

It's the only thing that has continued to work. Everything that you and I need is contained in that volume and in working and reworking all of these 12 steps. Again and again, I have read in there a paragraph that says I get everything I need in Alcoholics Anonymous. Everything I need, I get it. And, invariably, when I get what I need, it was just what I wanted all the time, and that's what I have found over and over and over.

Everything is connected to everything else which is something else I have trouble understanding. Very common, the ecologist says that there are 3 laws of ecology. 1, everything has to go somewhere. 2, everything is connected to everything else. And 3, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

And again and again, I have found that if I do something in the program here in a step, it straightens out something in my life over there that is apparently not connected. Or if I start to lie, steal and cheat over here, it corrupts something in my life over there. Over and over and over, I've had tremendous problem with my alcoholic ego. Somebody said that the ego was like a baby. It has a tremendous appetite on one end and no sense of responsibility on the other, and that's why I feel.

And the steps that again and again win the answer, work the steps and we get what we need. Everything is connected to everything else. Again and again, I have seen that in my life and the lives of many other alcoholics, the shortest distance from one place to another is through the 12 steps because they are all connected. There's no reason in the world that I can explain why if a person makes an important amend, suddenly someone who has been unemployable can get a job, and that that's happened to me and it's happened to other people. The steps are the answer in any any level of sobriety.

It's all here. The AA message is a message from 1 amateur to another amateur. AA didn't start as one of many, many ways to help alcoholics get straightened out. AA started was because there was nothing else that worked for alcoholics and it has continued because there is still nothing else that works for alcoholics. Going to meetings and not drinking do not treat my alcoholism.

Working the 12 steps treats my alcoholism. If all I do is go to meetings and not drink, I suffer from untreated alcoholism and that comes out as depression, anxiety, fear, hostility, empathy, boredom, sometimes drunkenness and sometimes suicide. One of the things that has impressed me as I have stayed sober is the fact that there are many, many musts in the AA program. Another thing that has impressed me is the deterioration I have seen in AA numbers with a lot of sobriety who failed to continue to work the 12 steps. None of us would expect that we could live on the food we ate 20 years ago, the water we drank 10 years ago, the air we breathed 5 years ago.

It makes no more sense to suppose that I could live on the work I did in these steps 5 or 10 or 20 years ago. I came in a way an area which said you worked the first 9 steps once and then you spent the rest of your life on 10, 11, and 12. And I suffered from that familiar and reworking every one of these 12 steps, 1 through 12, there were tremendous benefits which I could not understand because I had never tried it. It says in the big book, the only guarantee of everlasting ignorance is contempt prior to the investigation. And I thought the only way I can understand this is to try it.

And as I tried it, I found that this was absolutely correct. A friend of mine who sobered up a year after I did in 1948 In 1971, with 23 years of sobriety, never took a drink, never took a pill, shot himself in the head trying to commit suicide. He succeeded only in shooting out his right eye. He died a year or 2 later. A doctor from the Middle West, sober 17 years, killed himself last fall.

Another AA, sober 17 years, killed himself last summer. A woman I know, sober 13 years, tried to commit suicide last summer. So, those are the odds and that's what we're talking about, untreated alcoholism. How do I treat my alcoholism? I treat my alcoholism by working and reworking every one of the 12 steps on a continuing basis.

I belong to a step group and it's a group where we work the steps. We have a commitment not to talk about the steps, not to philosophize about them, we don't read about them. We go there and discuss our current experience with a commitment to continue to work and rework every one of the steps. And what that does is create a power and a vitality where you get a person who comes in. We had as an example a man who was sober 10 years in lousy condition, he had gone through a treatment center and taken the 4th and 5th step 10 years ago, never done much else, went to a lot of meetings, babysat at the treatment center, Lutheran General up near Chicago, and felt worse and worse and worse, depressed, anxious, afraid, hostile, about half out of his mind with untreated alcoholism and an awful lot of A.

Hayes who suffer from that at varying stages of sobriety. And he started coming to our meeting, and the way he started coming to our meeting was I had talked to the meeting last spring and I had talked about these things. And a couple of weeks later, he called me up and said, I've got three names in my pocket. He said, one is a priest who leads retreats where I go, and I thought maybe I could talk to him. He said the second is a prostitute.

I thought maybe I could go see her, and he said the third was yours, so I thought I'd call you. I said, well, that's much better company than I usually associate with. Now he started coming to our meeting about, 15 weeks ago. About 3 quarters out of his mind. He took a 4th step, he took a 5th step, took a number of 5th steps because one of the things we have found through the years is that the continuing opening up with other people frees us in ways that we could not be free otherwise.

I had an act that I had put together by the time I came to AA and an act that I have continued to try to keep glued together since I came to AA. The only way to find out who I really am is through this continuing work with the steps. So that as he continued to open up with other AAs and one of the things we believe and I certainly believe is that if somebody comes to me to take a 5th step with me, I have an obligation to be equally honest about myself and take a complete thorough 5th step with that person. And when we get done, we're even. I spent a lot of time in 8 and a looking for a guru and a lot more time trying to convince people that I have already become a guru.

And what that does is prevent that. I don't try to function as a therapist or counselor or spiritual guide, but simply as one beggar showing another beggar where there is bread. And so that the art group, we believe that men should take footsteps with men and women should take footsteps with women. We find that working on that basis we find that working on that basis there is less tendency to generate new material that requires additional So Jerry began to work the steps. 10 years sober, almost totally out of his mind, he began to work the steps, he lost his symptoms of untreated alcohol.

He's, and he lost his depression, his fear. He's made direct amends to the whole thing, and it does work. Very simple. That's the message. Somebody has said that if you wanna hide something from an alcoholic, the best place to put it is in the big book, and I suspect that might be true.

Willpower won't keep me sober. Willpower will help me work the steps. It's kinda like that Myron Cohen story about the lady who was chiding her husband for no willpower, and she said, you don't have any will power. She said, you're disgusting. She said, Goldberg has will power.

Goldberg smoked 3 packs of cigarettes a day for 25 years. 5 years ago he says I quit, Goldberg hasn't smoked since. That's willpower. She said Ginsberg has willpower. Ginsberg was drunk 25 years of his life.

6 years ago, Ginsberg says, I quit. He hasn't had a drink since. She said, that's willpower. You don't have any willpower. Her husband became incensed.

He said, I'll show you what willpower is. Said from now on, I'm gonna sleep in a guest bedroom forever. 6 months passed and he was awakened at 3:30 1 morning by his wife shaking the bed and he opened his eyes, looked at her, and he said, what do you want? She said, Goldberg is smoking. About a year ago, I was writing an article on the high profit alcoholism treatment industry and I was talking with Doctor.

Robert DeVito, who at that time was director of the Illinois Department of Mental Health and also in charge of alcoholism in the state of Illinois. And DeVito is a psychiatrist who's treated 1300 alcoholics in private practice and knows a lot about alcohol. And then I said, do you think it's possible to harm an alcoholic by too much treatment? And doctor DeVito says, no. I don't think so.

He said it implies that we know what we're doing when we treat him, and he said we don't know enough to harm him or help him. So I said, what do you think of confrontation for raising the bottom? That's just kind of a popular marketing concept these days. I said, do you think it works? He says, no.

I don't think so. He said, I've seen it tried many times, and I can never say that it has has worked. He says, I really don't understand what makes an alcoholic decide to quit drinking. Harry Tebow called hitting bottom. Hearing the sweet voice of reality.

And I really don't know how that happened to me. I just know that I reached a point in August of 1947 But I was no longer able to lie. I saw the truth in a way I never had seen before and perhaps have never seen since. But I don't know how it happened. That was the first gift I got.

I think the problem with psychotherapy is not that its practitioners don't know anything, but simply that they know so many things that are untrue. You and I have what we need here in Alcoholics Anonymous. An alcoholic cannot stay sober, or if he's sober from untreated alcoholism, he needs a sponsor, not a therapist. We hear a great deal about Bill Wilson's spiritual experience within the 1st week he was sober. Unfortunately, we hear much less about what Bill did that preceded that spiritual experience.

And what Bill Wilson did within the 1st week he was sober, with the help of Emmy Thatcher, was take the first 8 steps of this program. Step 4, step 5, 3, 6, 7, he listed the people he harmed and said he was willing to make amends to them. Then he had a spiritual experience. Earl Treat, who started AA in Chicago, and you can find his story in the big book, was sponsored by doctor Bob. It's called The Man Who Sold Himself Short.

And with doctor Bob's help in the late thirties, Earl Treat went through the first eight steps of this program within the 1st 3 weeks of sobriety. I've never seen anybody in AA harmed from working the steps too soon. I've seen an awful lot of people harmed from working them too late and some of them are dead. It's a very simple program. Got a guy who's been a friend of mine for years, doctor Holbert Maurer, who recently retired as research professor of psychology at the University of Illinois.

A few years ago, I was doing an alcoholism article for the Christian century. Hobert knows a great deal about AA. He's not a member, but he knows a great deal about AA and about the working of the twelve steps. The fact that anybody who does these things, who will be honest, who will clean up the past will start to be healthy. Depression, anxiety, fear come from guilt.

No other reason. And the answer is not to say I'm not gonna let somebody put me on a guilt trip. You know, that's idiocy. If I I came in that AA feeling very guilty and the reason I did was because I had lived in a way that would make anybody with a conscience feel guilty. And if I hadn't felt guilty, I would have been a sociopath, and I'd really been in trouble.

But I asked Sohberg what he thought about psychotherapy for the sober alcoholic in AA and doctor Mauer, who has impeccable professional credentials. He taught for 8 years at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He did seminal work on learning theory. Doctor. Mower said if the alcoholic will work the 12 steps and develop the friendship within AA, this will be far more effective than any psychotherapy I know anything about.

And, of course, what he points out is that a a enables drugs to stay sober, but also the 12 steps are designed to deal with what's wrong with you and me when we don't drink. And that's the answer. It's always useful for me to remember that AA is where the clergymen come to find god's help to stay sober, And AA is where the psychologists and psychiatrists come to find the kind of group therapy that will bring sobriety and order to their lives. The quality of my life is not what it should be. The best place for me to go for counseling or therapy is to the big book or to an AA member who has done enough continuing work with these 12 steps to understand that how it works means that this is how it works.

And I heard about one lady who went to a psychiatrist for 5 years. And finally, she said, doctor, tell me the truth. What's wrong with with me? He said, lady, you're nuts. You're crazy.

You're insane. She was somewhat taken aback, and she said, I think I want a second opinion. He said, alright. You're robbing me too. Most of what I have learned since I have been sober, this hair didn't fall out.

It was beaten out, and part of it was lost from reading all those books that are gonna tell you how to straighten your wife both before AA and since. I screwed up. Everybody screwed up. How to be your own worst enemy and all the rest of them. I read them drunk and I read them sober, and I think those books are tremendous.

I think they're really magnificent unless you really need help. And if you really need help and you're an AA, the answer is in alcoholics or nuns. Pretty much of what I've learned, I've learned like the marine who flattened the little old man in the saloon with a karate chop. He let out a shout and he said, I'm United States Marine and that's karate from Japan. The little old man got back on his stool and he started to drink again, and suddenly the marine whacked him again and flattened him and let out a shelf.

They said, I'm a United States marine, and that's karate from Japan. And the little old man wandered out. Pretty soon, the bartender looked up and the little old man was walking back in, but the bartender was busy mixing drunk drinks. He didn't pay attention and he heard this thud. And he turned around and the marine was unconscious on the floor.

And as a little man left the saloon, he stopped in front of the bartender. He said, when that so and so comes to, you tell him that was a hammer from Sears and Roma. And whatever I've learned, I've learned pretty much the same way. You sometimes hear it said that alcoholics are smarter than other people. I don't know where that came from.

I know it was never started by anybody in Illinois. But after I've been working out of the country, we have one guy up in, Point Barrow, Alaska, Nick Gray, whose father was on the program. His father was Jewish and his mother was Eskimo. And Nick said he always thought that he was probably a a his only juice skimo and I think that was correct. But after I came back around Chicago, I've been gone for a number of years.

And during the time I've been gone, they started having delegates in New York and they started having conferences and banquets and all of these things. And that was all new to me. And I looked around and I got back there in 59, and I saw that there was a click that ran this thing. And so I got my own click and entered my leadership phase and, gradually, I became a legend in my own mind and I started running everything I could find, banquets, conferences, and I became delegate to New York. And I started talking at conferences and running all over the country, and people would compliment me on my service, and I would mumble something about how this would release me.

I really hated all this, but I just needed to do it because AA had done so much for me. Frank, if you ever ask anybody who's doing this stuff why he doesn't, and he gives you any other reason than pride, ego, self importance, you wanna watch him because he'll lie to you about other things too. I ran into a strange phenomenon, however, because there were some people around AA who did not appreciate my insight and didn't like the way I ran things. And I ended up with a lot of really lousy relationships. And I found myself in 1968, silver 21 years, in really rotten condition.

A lot of resentments, and I couldn't work too well. One of the things I learned a long time ago and have forgotten from time to time is that if I don't deal with the past, it keeps affecting me in the present and it brings up vitality among other things. We can't change the past and I want to remain on realize that there are times when logic is not enough, that if there's a critical relationship in my life that's sick, then I'm sick, And I'm gonna stay sick until I do something about it through the steps. So after I sober up, I used to call him and suggest that we get together, and by then, he was sober on his own and he always said no. And after I made those amends to those 12 people around Chicago in the summer and fall of 19 68.

Suddenly, a trip to Miami opened up in October of 68 and I stopped to see my father unannounced on the way back. And I looked in the World Service Directory and there was a man in there as secretary of the AA group in that little town which had 4,000 people on my left. When I came back 27 years later, it had mushroomed 5,000. When I called him up and said what I wanted to do, he said, how can I help? I said, I don't know.

But I went over to see him. And I went to see my father unannounced in October of 68, so over 21 years, and I rang the doorbell. He came to the door, and not knowing how to proceed, I made them into him. And then I told him who I was, and I said I would like to come in and talk with you. He said, come in.

We talked for maybe 25 minutes. And I went home. And in March of 1969, I got the feeling I had to go back and visit again. I did. And I was having a quiet time a couple of days after that second visit, and I saw perhaps 10 names that went on my list of people I'd harmed from before I sobered up that somehow or other were connected to that event of my father.

2 weeks after that second visit he died and I went to his funeral. Time runs out easy. He does not always do it. If you got something like that in your life, all I can say is do it now. Because a week from now, the opportunity might be gone forever.

But everything was connected. As soon as I straightened things out around Chicago with those 12 people I pushed around in my leadership phase, I was able to get at a critical part of my life. And after I straightened that out, I saw another 10 names that went on that list of people I earned. I didn't start out in those years down in South Georgia to be an alcoholic. I started out to be an athlete in a clean living American youth and I got sidetracked somewhere.

Growing up was confusing for me. I don't know when I became an alcoholic. Paul, I believe, said he became an alcoholic at 12. There was some guy in Texas who said that he was a premature baby. And he was born at 6 months and the doctor told his mother to put a little whiskey in his milk, so he became an alcoholic 3 months before the rest of you people were born.

The alcohol glued me together in some very critical ways. When I was 8 or 9 and there was some beer or wine left in a glass around the house and I used to snap it up when nobody was looking and when I was 12, I used to pick the lock in my aunt's liquor closet. And when I was 14, I got drunk for the first time. And I knew that what happened when I got drunk, somewhere it registered that this is what I needed. I didn't need to get smart.

I didn't need to get educated. All I needed was the price in that bottle to survive because it patched up holes in me that I could never get at otherwise. I drank my way through high school and I started what was to be the first of several colleges near Atlanta. I lasted a year and a half a year and a half. I became increasingly interested in sports and that was a diet and a decreasingly good student.

I started a college near Chicago and lasted there a year and a half. I was boxing for a club on the West side of Chicago. I wanted to be a little weight champion of the world. And I wasn't accepted for a bad handicap. I couldn't quip anybody.

World War II had come along and I decided to be a pilot. I've always been afraid of airplanes, but that was part of the act. It was the athlete, the drinker, the laugher, the pilot, the general sophisticate. Sometimes I didn't realize which role I was in in the act and I had a great deal of trouble keeping it pasted together. I worked at it because if I didn't have that, I had nothing at all.

One of the many things I found from working the steps is that continued working the steps and attempting to practice rigorous honesty enables me to know who I am and who I am not. No longer does my identity exist in the eyes of the thoughts of somebody else, and that's the only way I ever found to experience it. I had non distinguished record in World War II. I destroyed 2 airplanes, both of which belonged to the United States Navy. A friend of mine pointed out that if I had gotten 3 more, I would have been a Japanese ace.

I got one decoration, it was a linoleum rug I went on a radio quiz show 1 night, When I finally got permission, which meant that I could get drunk every night of the week, which was pretty good. But I'd get drunk 9 nights and then I'd have to go to bed about 6 o'clock and sleep for 12 hours and then I start out again. I flew single engine seaplanes that were catapulted off cruisers and battleships. You went from 0 to 60 miles an hour in the space of about 40 feet. It wouldn't cure a hangover, but it really took your mind off of it for a little while.

A lot of strange things were happening and I found a lot of evil and lower companions. In the summer of 1945, when I was 23, I ended up in a Navy hospital with pneumonia which went into DTEs, and it didn't really make any impression on me. I got drunk about the last week and a half I was in the hospital, but I got out and started doing what I was doing again. And we had a man in there who was brought in at about 3 o'clock in the morning drunk. He was a pilot in the photo squadron and he'd gone swimming with the lady who came in with him that we thought was his wife.

And next day his wife showed up and it was somebody else. But he tried to spill open on a piece of submerged metal. But the rest of the time I was in the hospital, his wife and his girlfriend used to come visit them visit him when they never met. We figured that just goes to show that if you live right, the Lord will take care of you. When I had this over a while, I ran into a man who was celebrating 2 years of sobriety, and he said, when I came out of this program, I had a drinking problem and a marriage problem.

AA straightened out my drinking problem. My sponsor ran off with my wife, which straightened out my marriage problem. He said, this program will work if you let. So I got out and I continued to drink and a lot of weird things happened and the alcohol was starting not to work so well. I never drank in the morning because I had a regular routine.

I'd get up in the morning, take my gating exercises, go on to the flight line, wobble out over the gulf, and then wobble back, and then get drunk at night. If you go to bed at 3 o'clock drunk, you don't need to drink at 6 o'clock when you fly. You just need a seating night to us. And the water ground to a halt and I ended up at the Naval Air Station at Norfolk and I was out in Sacramento, and I leave for a couple of weeks. I reported to a base in Northern California with a terrible, terrible hangover.

My stomach was causing me to be bent over to about a 45 degree angle. One side of my face was a network of scratches that had been provided by a lady in Sacramento I had been sponsoring. So a lot of strange things kept happening and when I got to Norfolk, to Naval Air Station at Norfolk, my they asked me if I wanted to get out or stay in. This was in a fall after the war had ended. I said, well, I'd like to think it over.

And they said, well, come back in a couple of days. Then two and a half weeks later, the officer sent for me. I'd gotten lost with some friends and they decided I had to get out. But I read after I sobered up the 20 questions and then I heard talk about how sensitive you and I are and I began to realize that. And I remembered that when I had been at the air station in Norfolk, some friends had fixed me up with a blind date, and in her honor, I had gotten blind.

And as we were taking her home, we had to stop the car so I could get out and throw up. As I was walking her to the door, I had to go behind the bush and throw up. And then I was very hurt because she refused to kiss me goodbye. But I went over to Great Lakes and got separated in December of 1945 and I traveled for 3 days 3 nights and got home to Oak Park where I was living, about 50 miles away, and I thought it's probably time I did something about my drinking. And I went over for New Year's.

I started out through Cincinnati and ended up drunk in Milwaukee for 3 days. I drank myself sober on New Year's morning and I had a kind of terrifying experience. I wound up with what was perhaps the worst looking woman in the middle west. She'd write me into six weeks of sobriety. She looked like a $1,000,000 and the only reason I say that is because I've never seen a $1,000,000 and she looked like something I never saw before, which I guess proves that beauty is only skin deep, but I believe it was right So I decided to quit drinking and I was going to do a little boxing.

I can't say I was going to make a comeback because I'd never been anywhere. But I went up to Glenview to the air station to fly with a friend of mine in February of, 46. And the field closed in with a snowstorm, and we decided to have a few drinks. Well, we had a few, and he passed out. And he lived in Saint Charles, which was about 35 miles west of Chicago.

And I started driving him home, and I would ask directions in this snowstorm from various saloons. I buy a bottle of beer, ask directions, get back in the car, and drive west. And about the time the beer was gone, I would have forgotten the directions. And I went in one of these places to ask directions, and there was this large, friendly looking dog on the floor, and I said hello, and the dog bit me on the leg. And I really thought nothing of it, and I got my friend home.

And, eventually, I got home, and a couple of days later, I went to the doctor because some place I had gotten my nose broken that evening. And I casually mentioned that I'd been bitten by this dog. And he got very excited. He said, you find a dog. So I went back to these various saloons.

He eventually ended up in a treatment program at the state hospital. But I went back to these various saloons along North Avenue, and I said, you got a dog that bit me the other night? And they said, no. So I had to take rabies shots for 2 weeks. Just to be on the safe side, I made out a list of people to bite in case they didn't work.

And I began to make a variety of experiments and I drank only on weekends and only after 5 o'clock and only beer and you name it. I tried it. On occasions when I worked, if I took more than half an hour for lunch, they had to retrain me, and I would black out and my car would get lost and I would I started to read all these books. I read a book by a New York psychiatrist who said that we're alcoholic because we have too much pressure on the brain. And he said, if you make a spinal tap, it relieves the pressure, and you're no longer a compulsive drinker, and you have a wonderful personality.

And I thought, boy, that's for me. I knew I had a lot of pressure on my brain because something was shoving all the hair out of my scalp. So I wrote up and asked him if anybody around Chicago should tap my brain and he said no, so I bought another book and I got Rabbi Liebman's peace of mind. And I was very inspired by that and I thought this is going to transform my life. Then I found out that Liebman committed suicide, and I thought that's too much change.

So I bought Dorothy of Brandy's wake up and lift and she said act as if it's impossible to fail. You ever tried that with a dry knees? So I read link and paint, conceal and peel, and you name it, I read it. And I did the same thing sober, which tells you something about my level of stupidity. But all of them had one thing in common, none of them worked.

Everything I had tried before or since AA has that in common. None of them worked. Whatever problems I have in my life, I have found again and again will respond to working and reworking every one of these 12 steps, and that's the a a message which I have experienced. And if I'm smart enough to remember that this is a simple program, I can continue to experience it one day at a time. I always wanted to drink in sophisticated places, and one night a friend of mine and I were drinking in a sophisticated place on on Wilson Avenue in Chicago called the Backstage Bar.

You've been there. Entertainment at the backstage bar was provided by ladies who danced on top of the bar while they removed various articles of clothing and performed a variety of stimulating movements. And if you were worthy, they would drink with you. And a friend from But from that and some other experiences, I've come to the realization that if a lady who dances with no clothes on, sits at your table, drinks with you and says that she loves you, beware because she may not be sincere. The choreography was clumsy and the dance steps were not very skillful, but there is no question in my mind that many members of that audience experienced physical awakenings as a result of those steps.

We were having a party one night on about the twelfth floor of the old sheriff in Chicago, and we ran out of booze and they sent me out to some more because I was the silverest, which can tell you what kind of shape the rest of them were in. And I started out and I got lost in the sunken lobby downstairs and I was wandering around and I finally decided to go up to the mezzanine and reconnoiter. I went in the men's room and went out on the exit, and there was a fire escape one floor up. And I walked down this swinging ladder that swings down to the sidewalk. And I got to the bottom of the sidewalk, and I was still about 12 feet above the sidewalk.