Bob P. author of the story "AA taught me to handle sobriety" speaking in Kansas

Thank you, Larry. And good morning, friends. My name's Bob and I'm an alcoholic. And I too wanna thank Vivian and Dwight and the other members of the committee for making it possible for Betsy and myself to be here for this conference because, of course, for me, it's coming home. I was born and raised in Kansas City and Lawrence, And, I'm married to a gal from Salina.

So, what a privilege it is to to be here this weekend. And I just hope that all of you I just this is my earnest hope for all of you that you have had half as good a time as we have had so far in this convention. I've had such a thrill. I mean, I've seen so many old friends here, like, you know, Larry and Ken. I can't name them all.

And I have the thrill this morning of having right down here on the front row and the second row a whole bunch of nonalcoholics who are the members of our family who have come to hear hear me speak this morning. And I tell you, it's easy to talk to alcoholics, but I'm not so sure about it. It's like a family reunion down here. And then there then there are as a little pocket of my relatives from from Salina and Lawrence, some of them, I've not really known very well before until, by golly, on Friday night, they turn up here in AA. And I tell you, sharing with them has just been one of the most heartwarming things that's ever happened to me this weekend.

God bless you for for coming down. And the speakers, of course, I I I certainly thank Dwight and, Vivian and whoever put the program together for putting together a program of nothing but my friends. George, that spoke to you on on Friday night, he and I served together on the board of trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous way back in the sixties. And, you know, he just gives you such a solid old time AA program talk. Just great.

And, of course, having, Bob Smith here, I could just listen to him all day. The the idea that that somebody who was actually present on our cofounders, Bill Wilson and doctor Bob met for the first time, is sitting here with us having coffee and meals is just unbelievable. It just absolutely blows my mind. And, of course, Eve Marsh is, a dear old friend back from the general service office as she calls it the host of the heartbeat of AA. I think that's been that slogan's been preempted by somebody else here recently on TV.

But anyway, it was great hearing her. And of course, we just, Betsy, my wife, who doesn't normally, she has a very merry personality, but she doesn't laugh out loud very much. Last night, she was nearly rolling on the floor at Julian. And so it's just been a wonderful, wonderful weekend, and especially because all of you are here. I, I have, I have seldom experienced a more enthusiastic audience than this one.

You're absolutely wonderful. Because of, kind of the historic angle that we have been talking about some of the time this weekend because, Bob s is here and because this is Sunday morning and we're supposed to, have a spiritual meeting, really, it might be appropriate to take just a few minutes before I start telling about how it was and what happened and what it's like now, to trace the the spiritual underpinnings of our fellowship. How many of you, if I may ask, if I could see your hands, how many of you are were at the international convention, celebrating the 50th anniversary in Montreal? Oh, that's great. Yeah.

Good. Good. Good. Well, I apologize to all of you because what I'm gonna do, of course, is say just about what I said on Friday night as we as we opened that, convention at the Olympic Stadium in in Montreal. And that is that, although we arbitrarily trace the founding of AA from the meeting of Bill and doctor Bob, out in Akron, in 1935 when, when Bill himself was asked about the beginnings of AA, he liked to trace it back a few years earlier than that to the study of the great doctor Carl Jung, over in Zurich, Switzerland.

And on this particular occasion, doctor Young had called into his study one of his patients who had been there for about a year, a young man named Roland Hazard. And Roland was the scion of a of a well-to-do family here in the United States, but he was a terrible drunk and a disgrace to the family. And so they had had him off at the various cures of that particular time and, of course, without any success. And so having the the, means to do so, they had set him all the way across the ocean and by boat in those days, to be in the care of the greatest physician, in the world at that time. And that was doctor the great psychiatrist, doctor Carl Jung.

Well, doctor Jung was saying to Roland on this particular morning, he said we in effect, he said we've tried for the last year to bring about some deep seated psychological and emotional changes in you. And, we really haven't had any success. And so we're going to discharge you. And Roland, was, of course, I'm sure startled at this. And he said, in effect, well then, is there no hope?

And doctor Young replied, none. Except, he said, we do know that some people have been able to recover from alcoholism if they have been able to have a transforming experience of the spirit. And Roland said, well, yeah. But how do I bring that about? Where can I find that?

And doctor Young, of course, said, I don't know. And so Roland left, and he went back to drinking, and he came back to the United States. And somehow, and we don't know how, he got connected up with a religious movement of the time, which was called the Oxford Groups. And these people were, as Bob was saying the other day, and thank you for those personal insights into the early Oxford groups, Bob. They were, as he said, pursuing the values of early Christianity.

And they followed certain spiritual principles, which included, surrendering their wills to to God and praying a lot and and, asking for God's direction in their lives and and freely confessing their faults to one another and, making amends or restitution to people that they had harmed and trying to help their fellow man. And by following these principles, apparently, Roland was able to have a transforming spiritual experience take over in his life because he quit drinking. Now by another one of these incredible coincidences that we have in AA, he was on vacation up in, Vermont during this time. And it just happened by coincidence that it was on a weekend when a childhood buddy of his had gotten into a drunken driving accident, which consisted of driving a car across somebody's lawn through the front partition of the house and into the living room. Roland was able to go to the judge whom he knew and to tell him of his own recovery and ask if the judge would parole this Eby for that was his name.

This Eby into his care. And that's what happened. And so Roland and Eby went back to New York, and they went to the Oxford. Evie went to the Oxford groups and somehow he had a transforming experience of the spirit and he quit drinking. And in an attempt to follow the principles of the of the helping your fellow man, his mind went back to a drinking buddy of his, who was named Bill Wilson.

And Bill was, he had been a wonder boy of Wall Street, of course. And at that moment, he was sitting over in his kitchen in, Brooklyn Heights. He had drunk himself out of his career. He had drunk nearly drunk himself out of his marriage because his good wife was was, clerking in Macy's to keep body and soul together. He was stupefied and hopeless, and absolutely at the end of his rope.

And that's the way that Abby found him. And Abby tried to tell Bill what had happened to him. Very unlikely in the case of this drunken little guy. And Bill, being an unbeliever, he was not buying any of this god stuff. Stuff.

And so he was doomed to go out and have another horrendous binge which ended him up in a drying out hospital of the time. Not his first time there, I might add. And Eddie called on him there and he repeated his message that we could recover if we were able to have a transforming experience of the spirit. And after Abby left, Bill had absolute depths of despair. He called out to this God that he didn't believe in.

And he had an instantaneous spiritual experience, and he never drank again. Now, of course, after that, he tried to sober up all the drunks in New York without any success, dragging them off the bar stools and out of the gutters and out of the missions and the Bowery. And nobody was listening. And he, in an attempt to regain his life, he found himself out in Akron on a, on a proxy fight. And you heard from Bob the other day what what happened out there.

But when when Bill and doctor Bob met in the gatehouse of the cyberling estate, For one thing, Bill was not trying to preach to him. Bill was was going to him, to doctor Bob, for sharing with another alcoholic in the hopes that he himself could stay sober at that point. But he also carried the message that he had received from Ebby, who had received it from Roland, who had received it from doctor Young. And that message and this is what is amazing to me. That message survives in that the end of that how it works, which was read this morning and is read thousands and thousands of times every day.

You and I have heard it till we can recite it by heart. But listen, if you will, to see, to be, and see. That probably, this is doctor Young, you see, probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism. And c, God could and would if he were sought. Now in my job at the general service office, your general service office, and, you know, Megan talks a lot working with alcoholics over many, many years, I've talked a lot about carrying the message.

I mean, we all talk about it a lot about carrying the message. You know, it's in the draw step. And I'll be absolutely honest with you. Until about 2 years ago when all this sort of came together, I didn't really know what the message of Alcoholics Anonymous is. And I'll bet if you asked a 1,000 people, you get a 1,000 different answers.

I mean, the the the the message that I hear a lot recently is is don't drink and go to meetings. And, I I heard from my own sponsor the message, if you want a drink, eat something sweet. And, of course, I think we would all agree that the message that we carry to the alcoholic who still suffers is our own experience and strength and hope. But I'm sure that the message that was carried by doctor Bob, by by Bill to doctor Bob and really the message of of Alcoholics Anonymous is that God could and would if he were sought. Now, when I've been in in AA for about 6 months, I went to a meeting where I heard an old timer say something that changed my way of looking at Alcoholics Anonymous.

And, I'd like to share it with you because, it may be similarly useful to you. And what this old timer said was, AA doesn't teach us how to handle our drinking. Now at that point in my life, I must say that that got my attention because I sure thought that that's what I had been doing for about 6 months was learning how to handle my drinking. But he said, no. He said, we all know that the way to handle our drinking is to quit if we're alcoholics.

But if we don't know that, there's always a lot of people around us who are trying to tell us that. And, he said that, he said we've all quit drinking. I mean, alcoholics, you know, they quit when they're in jail or when they're in hospitals or when they go on a pledge or they quit for lent or they're they're quitting every once in a while. But the the trick is not to quit drinking. The trick, you see, is to stay stopped.

And that's what I could never do. And I immediately identified with this. At one time in my life, I had quit drinking for at the very worst part of my alcoholism. I had quit for 10 months, proving, of course, that I was not an alcoholic. And, I had to go back to drink.

And so what this man said, he said, AA doesn't teach us how to handle our drinking. AA teaches us how to handle sobriety, and that's what none of us could handle in the first place, and that's why we drink. I mean, it's so simple. It just was lit a lit a bulb in my head when he said that. And I found that so useful in talking to nonalcoholics ever since who will say to me, you know, you haven't had a drink in x number of years, and still you're going to those meetings.

You're not an alcoholic. Why do you have to go to those meetings? And, you know, it's a fair question coming from somebody in the outside world, and it's a little hard to answer unless you fall back on what I was just saying, because it is true. I don't have a drinking problem. I haven't had a drinking problem for nearly 26 years, and I'm not gonna have I'm not gonna I'm not gonna have a drinking problem as long as I don't drink.

And as I won't drink as long as I stay away from a drink one day at a time and keep going to meetings. What I do have is the problem of coping with life every day sober without the help of booze to help me along because I depended on it to do absolutely everything. But when that's cut off, you've still got to cope with life every cotton picking day. And of course, that's what we've all been sharing here this weekend. It is what we share at all of our AA meetings.

And that's what really makes AA so enduring and and so beautiful. Now, as I say, I, was born and raised right here and, there was nothing unusual about my youth except that this was back in the depression years and and before. And my my, father had a kind of a tough time making living in those days, and so we moved around an awful lot. We moved actually, 18 times in my first 13 years of life. And that meant that, I went to Gladstone School and I went to Macachek School and I went to some one room schoolhouse over on the way out on the Kansas side.

And, at each place that I would go, I don't know whether you men in the audience have had this experience, but, you know, you go into a new school and if you're the new kid, why the boys that are there, they they sort of test you, which basically means beating you up. And so about the time you know, I can I literally can remember over here going down one side of a street when the other boys were on the other side of the street because, you know, I knew they'd throw rocks at me or beat me up or something if I if I was over there with them? And so you'd feel kind of rejected and kind of kind of lonely and kind of out of it. I was an only child, and I was kind of skinny and shy and introverted anyhow. And, so about the time that I would come out of my shell enough to make some friends, you know, 2 or 3 real good friends, and poor dad would pull up stakes and we'd move on to some other place, and I would repeat it all over again.

Well, I tell you this only because what it did, I think, in retrospect, is that it made me kind of retreat into a fantasy world of my own. I was a daydreamer. I solved all my problems of those times by kind of living a different life in my imagination. Part of that was that I read an awful lot, and I identified with whatever I was reading about. And especially, I went to movies.

God, I saw every movie that was made in those days all by myself. I would be sitting in the matinee in the Dickinson Theatre up in Lawrence or the Plaza Theatre down here. And I would be watching whatever was on the screen. And, boy, I was living that life up there. You know, if it was a war movie, boy, I was leading them over the top, man.

You know? If it was a cowboy movie, I was galloping over the plains with 6 shooters going from both hips. But the the kind of movie that I really loved and that I really identified with was something like those old Fred Astaire movies with the top hat and the white tie and the tails as he would be dancing across Central Park with Ginger Rogers in his arms. And that was the way I was gonna live, my friends. And as I got into high school I went to Southwest High School over here.

And and as I got into high school, I decided I was gonna be a writer by trade, which I which I was. And, I went over to KU and and, it was at that time that I I guess I had my first drink. It was down on the plaza and and it was, it was a Tom and Jerry and then it was another Tom and Jerry and a whole bunch of Tom and Jerry's. And of course, I got terribly drunk and ended up, throwing up behind a sign out here in Waldo or somewhere and sleeping on the grass of my friend's house and got sick as a dog and swearing off the next morning. And, of course, by that night, I was ready to try a beer again, and then that's the way it went.

But it was just college type of of drinking. Then in the last year of of college, I sold my first article to a national magazine. I was 20 years old. My my family all along had given me lots of strokes for doing well in school. And the only reason I did well in school was because I read a lot, and the only reason I read a lot was because I was a lonely child.

But anyhow, I was a kind of an overachiever in school and so my parents had given me this expectation that I could do anything in the world that I wanted to. And I ask you, if you're 20 years old, you've sold an article to a national magazine, that proves it, doesn't it? And so, that article was picked up by the Reader's Digest, and, I became the subject of it was kind of a controversial thing and it became the subject of some, some columns by Ed Sullivan and William Allen White and people like this for writing about me. You me. So as soon as school let out, I beat it back to New York to live like Fred Astaire and to make my name in New York.

I was gonna write the great American novel or the great American play. Well, it turned out that the only job I could get writing and editing happened to be with a big company working on their company magazine. But don't knock it. You know, I had my I had an office in Rockefeller Center, and, I lived in a men's club in Manhattan and glamorous New York. And and, it was it was absolutely great.

And, I was thrown in with a bunch of of, people who were considerably older than myself. I was 21 at that time, and most of the people in the company, of course, were somewhat older than that. And it was their custom to go down after work, to go down to the mahogany bar of of, the English Grill and, have their, martinis and Manhattans. Manhattans were very big in those days. And, they invited me to go down with them.

And, of course, I was thrilled to death because this was right in line with the way that I pictured myself being the man about town, the in in New York City. So I became a daily drinker, when I was 21, and I remained a daily drinker all the rest of my life until I came into an Alcoholics Anonymous. Now there were danger signs at that time, but, you don't ever pay any attention to them. Then along came World War 2, and I went into the Navy. I was a, a gunnery officer on a destroyer escort.

And, we couldn't drink on shipboard, of course, but, boy, we sure did make up for it ashore. And I got into my first disciplinary problems, in in the Navy. I remember I was dating Bessie by this time. She'd gone through KU and come back to New York, and she was making her career as an artist. And so we had met and I would be dating her.

But on at least one occasion, why, I had disgraced myself, on a liberty over in the Azore Islands. And consequently, when I got to New York, I was in hack as we say in the Navy, which means that I was serving time, locked up in my state room with an armed marine guard outside instead of being able to get off and have fun with Betsy. But, with, with Betsy, it was in the last year of the war and while all of our, all of our courtship was done, you know, at the store club and the cafe society downtown and all these glamorous places in New York. She liked to drink and I liked to drink. So that's really what we did during our our courtship.

And in the last year of the war, we were married. And, I was still on the ship and just had a brief leave. So we went on our honeymoon over to the, resort over in the Pocono Mountains. And I just want to tell you that that for for those 5 days, we had an iced silver bucket of champagne by the bedside day and night. And that's the way we live.

Right? And, I had to go back to sea, and then the the, war was about to end. I got transferred back ashore. I wanna tell you an Al Anon story. This is really Betsy's story, but since she's not speaking this weekend, I'll spoil it, won't I, for next year?

But, oh, the hell with it. Betsy's gonna speak at this same conference next year. They tell me. Isn't that right? But anyway, we were, transferred to Washington DC where I was in the Navy Department down there.

And on this particular night, our, we had been invited to a party that was clear across Washington. And, Betsy's brother, Mark, was also down there in in Washington at that time. So we borrowed his car, which was mistake number 1. And we, we went clear across Washington to get to this place and we had to go through really the toughest, worst part of of Washington. And, it was a very wet party.

I mean, everybody got absolutely smashed. And by the wee hours of the morning, we had to come back home. And, of course, Betsy, who never really bugged me about my drinking ever, on this particular night, we'd only been married, you know, just a few months. And, she had the temerity to say to me, now, darling, don't you think that I should drive home? And, of course, I said, no.

I can drive. Oh, man. So I got in behind the I got in behind the wheel and we drove down. We got into this very worst part of Washington. Some gank in front of me, he stopped at his stop sign and I didn't stop.

And I smashed into the rear of his car and broke the radiator and all of the radiator fluid drained out. And, the guy ahead wasn't so dumb. He just drove on. But, there I was. And so I said to Bessie, I'm gonna go report this to the police.

And so I left her and I went off into the night. And, as she tells it, she says that she was, you know, scared. She locked the the doors of the car and she sat there and she sat there and she sat there and nothing was happening. So she finally decided she had to do something and she had about 15¢ in her pocket. And so she had noticed a, a phone booth down the street a little bit.

So she got out of the car and went down to the phone booth and she called the police. And she said, have you seen a naval officer in a white uniform in there to to report a an automobile accident? Well, no. They hadn't. And she said, well, I'd like to report the accident.

And they said, well, was there anybody hurt? She said no. And so they said, well, we're not really interested. So, she didn't know what to do. So she only knew one other number in Washington DC and that happened to be her home, our home.

So she rang in. And of course, it just rang and rang and rang and rang. And finally, I answered. When I when I heard their voice, I said, where the hell are you? And she says that at that moment, she had a little vision of what life was going to be like for the next 20 years.

And so we came back to New York after the war, and and, I went back to work at at Shell, and we eventually, we had a couple of kids and eventually had 3 kids. And we moved out to the suburbs. And, you know, we had absolutely the greatest house he ever saw, just a lovely place. And we treasure the memories of that place. Beautiful family, lovely wife and children, and I had a really a very good job, with Shell.

And, everything was going for me. And you know that no alcoholic can stand that. So I drink, and I drink more and more. The old progression took over. And, I began to have some troubles in my life.

None of which I associated in any way with booze. But, I was having trouble, for example, with, with lying, actually. I I suppose, I had been trained if you will to believe that a gentleman doesn't lie. A gentleman's word is his bond and all of this kind of thing. And yet I found myself lying about almost everything.

I just lied habitually, to Bessie about where I'd been and what I'd been doing and to my boss for why I was late, every everything. You know? And I think it, it kind of disturbed me. It kind of ate away at me. I didn't know what was happening.

I'd like to share with you, a comment on this. It was made by a nonalcoholic psychiatrist named doctor Abraham Twersky who practices in Pittsburgh. He's a wonder wonderful man. Great great guy. Great understanding of AA.

And he wrote an article which was intended to tell other alcohol other alcohol other doctors how to, specialize in the treatment of alcoholics, which is what doctor Torsky does. And, he was saying in this article, he was commenting that they should be aware that alcoholic patients lie a lot. And, he said, as a matter of fact, you may be surprised that they are maybe the only people in the country who will pay $100 an hour to go to a psychiatrist and lie about why they're there. That's true. But he he also said, and this is the part that really I I related to.

He said that in his article, he said that the best advice that he had ever gotten on this subject had come from a member of Alcoholics Anonymous very early in doctor Torske's practice when he had been complaining to this, AA about this. And, the AA member has said, why doc? He said, you can tell when an alcoholic is lying if you just know how to watch his lips. And doctor said, oh, is that right? How's that?

And the AA member said, if his lips are moving, he's lying. That comes from one of our non alcoholic friends. How about that? I was also having, a lot of trouble with the shakes and with tremors, you know. And with me, they were more like the leaps.

And I couldn't possibly have lifted up a glass, you know, and got it to my lips in those days. And God forbid that I would ever have to eat soup, for example, at a at a important business luncheon or something. You know, I I would sit there absolutely paralyzed with fear as I looked down at the soup before me. Finally, I would get the spoon alright, and I'd get it into the soup, and I'd get it up about this far, and it would go like this. You know.

So, you know, the alcoholic solution is to quit having soup. But, I I did, that that kind of fear really spread into a lot of different parts of my life. And then I discovered that if I had a a belt of vodka before I started that lunch, As soon as I got that vodka, all this inside I was shivering inside and outside, you know, and soon as I got that, boy, I could just feel this peace coming all through my body and out to the ends of my fingers and my toes. And then, boy, I could lift up glasses. I could drink soup.

I could sign my name. I could never do that before. I could answer phones. I could do all kinds of things like that. And so from that moment on, I was absolutely hooked on always being under the influence of alcohol.

I could not function unless I had some alcohol in my system. See people nodding down here. Did you have that experience? And that in turn reminds me of a, actually a grapevine article of about 3, 4 years ago, maybe more now, that it was by somebody writing from down in Australia or New Zealand. But I thought they really had an insight because they said that when an alcoholic takes a drink in order to do some act that the normal person, you know, does naturally, like answer the phone or answer the door or, you know, make love or any of those things.

When an when an alcoholic takes a drink to do that, he gives up forever and absolutely the possibility of doing that particular thing again without a drink. And that was exactly my experience. One morning on the way to work, I was falling apart. And so I had the recommended morning drink, my first one, I guess. And, I never went to work again after that without a morning drink.

Again, I'm indebted to the grapevine for a one liner when they said that when an alcoholic does something once, it's a habit. And I think that's really true. We are so obsessive and compulsive that it's just unbelievable. I was having an awful lot of trouble coping with other areas of my life. For example, I had a great deal of trouble dealing with any criticism.

I couldn't stand being balled out when I was in the navy and afterwards I didn't like to be criticized. I still have trouble led it this way actually, but not nearly what I did then because, for example, being a writer, I had an editor. And the job of an editor is to criticize the writer's writing. Now most writers accept this as a part of the job and they don't have any trouble with it, but I had a great deal of trouble handling this. It it really disturbed me that this really ignorant boob of an editor would have the nerve to fiddle around with my classic prose.

You can relate to this, can't you, Carrie? But I did find that if I was going in to see my editor about a piece of coffee, if I had a drink before I went in, I didn't much care what he did to it. And so that was that was the way you see that I was coping with life in every way. In fact, I want to particularly because of families here, I want to share with you, an example of how I was coping with life and that was when, Betsy, Marty's parents were having their 50th wedding anniversary. And they they chose to have it back in in our part of the country.

They came to our house, to a gathering of the family, maybe 20, 30 people, at that time. A lot of the people here were there. And that morning, as I went in commuting in from Connecticut where we lived into New York City to go to work, That's a human. I say you never did this, but on this particular morning, she said, now darling, she said, you know how important this occasion is tonight. And she says, I do hope that today you won't have too big a lunch.

And, yeah, you know, I knew what she meant and she she knew I knew, but you know what happened. I I I had a very big lunch indeed. No food, but a very big lunch otherwise. And I continued drinking in the afternoon and I continued drinking on the bar car on the New Haven Railroad on the way home. And I'm afraid that when I got there, I was in very sorry shape.

I stumbled down off of the train with my coat buttoned up crooked and my hat on the side of my head and in no shape. And poor Betsy, she was noticeably cool. We drove home and the party was already underway and everybody was on the patio out and back. And I went in the front door and, of course, made a beeline for the pantry where the bar was set up because I sure did need a drink and, had one and, I I I blacked out. I don't remember really what happened for maybe a half hour or more after that.

Maybe an hour after that. I sort of came to when they hold me out from under the grand piano where I had taken refuge, clutching my drink to my breast because I had the feeling that they were gonna take it away from me. And of course, when they found me, that's exactly what they did. And they sent me to my room for the rest of the evening. Now I was at this time 44 years old.

And actually, my wonderful brother-in-law, Clyde, he's not here today, but of all the members of the family, he came up to the room, and he tried to comfort me. And he tried to say maybe I needed a change of job or a change of location, and he was really trying to help me. He was a was a sweetest kind of thing. As Betsy said this morning, he was the only one that gave a damn. But, anyhow, that was the way that I was coping with life generally, I guess, in in those days.

And so the progression had gone on and and I had I was didn't look much like I didn't do now because I in those days, I was much, much heavier and I had a great big, beer belly, pot belly, and, distended abdomen. And and I had jowls and I had broken blood vessels all in my face and I had yellow eyeballs and and it was I was really a mess. And, and in this period, I became aware of a lump in my abdomen and, I I felt it grow and grow and I, you know, I knew that this was curtains and so I finally got up nerve to go to our family doctor and he stretched me out and he felt around a little bit. And then he asked me a question that some of you may have been asked at one time or another. He said, Bob, how much do you drink?

And in that moment, I actually didn't lie to him. I sort of totaled it up in my head and I said, oh, 8 or 9 drinks a day. And, you know, he looked startled. And what I didn't tell him actually was that my drink of choice in those days was 100 proof vodka chased with Valentine's Ale, which was, you know, a Russian boilermaker, you might say. And it was it really did it to you.

And it was about 8 or 9 of those that I had. And and he said, you mean you don't mean every day. And I said, sure every day. And he said, well, we may have a clue as to what your trouble is. And so he he he gave me a a liver, test, the liver function test.

And of course, it came out that my liver was badly badly damaged. And of course that was what this was, a great swollen lumpy liver. And he said he he set me down and he read me the riot act that a doctor should. He said some people can drink and some people can't. You're in the latter category.

And he said every time you look at a bottle you should see on the label because that's what it is to you. And he, you know, he really threw the spirit of God into me, and I left his office and went home. For 10 months, I didn't drink. Now he had not mentioned Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't think he knew anything about Alcoholics Anonymous.

So I was doing it, completely on my own, and it was a kind of a long recuperation. And I had to keep going back for tests all the time. And finally, at the end of 10 months after a lot of treatment and and things were going okay, I went back to his office one day for the usual stuff and he gave me a liver function test and he sat me down in his office afterwards and he said, you have made a remarkable recovery. He said, your your liver has regenerated itself and it's probably as well off as it's ever going to be. And he said you don't need to come back anymore.

So I guess subconsciously, I had been looking forward to this moment. So at any rate, I said to him very casually, you know, I said, well, John, does that mean then that, on a hot summer's day when I've been out hunting the lawn, maybe I could have a cold beer? And he looked a little troubled by that. And so I added, or a fine wine with dinner, which was a crock as you know. I did.

I never had a fine wine with dinner. But, he said to me the fatal words to the alcoholic. He said, well, Bob, one won't hurt you. So between the time that he said that to me and by the time I got home, which is maybe 10 minutes later, what he had said to me was translated into, guess what, Betsy? I can drink again.

And of course, she was overjoyed to hear that. And But nevertheless, I jumped on the train and I went into town and I went down to the great oaken bar at the at the English Grill. And I said, Sam, set them up. We're in business again. And so he set up the vodka and the ale and I had it.

And of course, it didn't hurt me. And, you know, you know the story. I can I don't need to even tell you? I it was maybe a week before I had another and maybe, you know, another week or 2 before I had another one or 2. And, then it was Christmas time, and I was going to Christmas parties.

And, you know, as rational people, you know you can't go to have a just wondering at a Christmas party. So, you know, I rationalized that you let the the drink metabolize for about 45 minutes and then to your body, the next drink is just like one drink and, you know, you know. So, I went on a business trip and at the end of that business trip, I had not intended to drink and yet at the end of that time, I was drinking just as desperately and alcoholically and crazily and insanely as I had been when I had first noticed the lump in my in my abdomen. And so there followed 2 years of really insane terrible drinking. My liver got much worse.

Of course, went into cirrhosis of the liver right away. And, I had all kinds of bad physical things happen to me. I got so weak that I couldn't even turn on and off a faucet in our house that worked kind of hard. I got so weak I couldn't lift up my suitcases to go on business trips that I still had to go on all the time. I, I got spontaneous bruising all over my body.

I I became a bleeder. I mean, I had nosebleeds that you wouldn't believe. They just would not stop. I had to be taken out of my office on 2 different occasions, once by stretcher and once in a wheelchair with a nosebleed. Can you imagine this?

Took me down to the infirmary. They cauterize your nose. They stuff a lot of gauze up there, and they stuff a lot of cotton up there to the point that it makes it difficult to drink. But but not that difficult, you know. And I just never associated that kind of thing with with drinking.

And I did have these these spontaneous bruises, great big green and the purple blue bruises all over my body. And, part partly, it was due to the fact that at that time, I was falling down a lot and I was running into furniture a lot. But, it was also just sort of spontaneous bruising that happens because your whatever it is that causes your blood to coagulate, your liver stops making it and you just become a a bleeder of this kind. I would wake up sometimes during this time, and Betsy was, of course, worried to death. My doctor was telling me I was gonna die.

I would wake up in the middle of the night and we share a double bed. And Betsy would be weeping into the pillow next to me and wondering what in the world was gonna happen to her and to the kids. And and I would sit up in bed and I would see these things in front of my eyes swimming around whether I closed my eyes or opened them. And I knew I had to have a drink, but I couldn't get out of bed and get a drink because she was awake. And I was sad because, I knew that she was so unhappy because of me.

But with all of this, I just said, well, that's the way the ball bounces. I just could not I had absolutely no choice about whether I drank or not. So, of course, I had to drink. Well, at the end of this period, I was on another business trip, and exactly what the doctor had been warning me about happened to me. And that is that out in in Chicago, I had I've been carousing a lot for several days, and I had a massive esophageal hemorrhage.

I lost about half the blood in my body in just a few hours, losing it rectally and vomiting it. And it was a terrible, terrible thing. And they took me out of the hotel. And, well, at that time, actually, I had gone out in the park first to sort of, you know, throw up behind the bushes out there and and was kind of, in a way, taking an inventory, I guess. And I it was a kind of a bleak October day in in Chicago.