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April 1998

MY STORY BEGAN on January 27, 1938, a cold snowy day in Syracuse, New York. My first remembrance of alcohol was my father coming home at eight every morning after working all night in the steel mill to put food on our table and a roof over our heads. He’d reach up to the cupboard, take down his bottle of whiskey and pour himself a strong one. Then he’d look down at me and say, “This is Daddy’s medicine. This makes Daddy feel good.” Both he and my mother drank every day, and I got the notion at an early age that alcohol helped whatever ailed you.

During my high school years I never drank because I didn’t want to be like my parents. I had an inner feeling that if I added alcohol to the severe emotional mood swings I was already having, it would be disastrous.

This changed in October 1956 when I was a freshman at Syracuse University. On the very day that Don Larsen pitched his perfect game for the New York Yankees, I attended a fraternity rush party and had to chugalug a pitcher of beer. As that beer went down my throat I felt the wonderful warm glow my father had told me about years ago. With my first taste of alcohol, I had a blackout and passed out.

I didn’t draw a sober breath for the next four years. I finished classes (the ones I went to) about noon. Then my drinking began with a couple of Manhattans, flowing into eight or ten bottles of beer, and finishing around eleven o’clock with a couple of whiskey-and-gingers. Then I passed out. The next day I got up and started all over again. I did this five days a week with variations on the weekends.

At the end of my senior year, after four years of daily blackouts and one half-hearted attempt at suicide, I contacted a young priest at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. His name was Father Joseph. I was told that he’d graduated from a very prestigious prep school in New England and gone through a year at Yale before becoming a priest. I felt that this man had the intelligence to understand me. After listening for an hour to the story of my drinking, he took from his desk drawer a pamphlet from Johns Hopkins University called “The Twenty Questions.” He asked me each question. I answered yes to about ten of them. Then he said to me, “It says here that if you answered yes to three of these, you’re an alcoholic.”

I was stunned. I thought this man was intelligent. I was ready to leave immediately. Then Father Joseph had the nerve to tell me he wanted me to meet an alcoholic that very evening. Well, I thought, maybe it would be good to see what one looked like, so in case I ever met one at a bar, I could stay away from him.

He sent me to the Twenty-Four-Hour Club, which was above Gotch Carr’s Grill on Warren Street. I stood outside the bar for half an hour because I didn’t want anyone to see me going up those stairs to the club. Finally I opened the door and a waft of smoke hit me in the face. Through the haze of smoke I saw that there was a guy waiting at the top of the stairs to greet me. “I thought you weren’t coming up, kid. I’ve been waiting for you for over an hour!” His named, it turned out, was Emerson.

He told me that it isn’t how much you drink, or when or where you drink, that determines whether you’ve crossed the invisible line into alcoholism. The determining factor was very simple: what happens to a person’s personality after he takes alcohol into his system. In my case, it felt like I was alcoholic from my first sip. I never had a period of social drinking.

I thanked Emerson for his information. I knew that I was pretty crazy, but I wasn’t ready to admit that I was alcoholic. So I began seeing a psychiatrist. I also got a job teaching fifth grade in a school district near Syracuse. For the next two years I never drank while in class, but I did come in with a hangover every day. I’m not proud of this. I attended one or two AA meetings during the period I was seeing the psychiatrist once a week.

Finally, in April 1962, an event happened that changed my life. I awoke one morning feeling fluish, sweaty, and very sick. Then an awful conviction took hold, that I had stayed home from school the day before and hadn’t called a substitute teacher. My God, I thought, how am I going to talk my way out of this one? I went to school and waited outside the principal’s door like an errant little boy. When the door opened, I faced this man and asked him if I could speak to him for a moment. He asked me what the problem was. “Well,” I began, “I was very sick yesterday with a fever and the flu, which is why I made such an awful mistake.” “Refresh my memory,” the principal went on. “What happened yesterday?”

I winced. “I didn’t come to work, and I forgot to call a substitute teacher. I’m very sorry, and it will never happen again.”

Then he looked in my eyes very carefully and said, “Dick, you were here yesterday.”

“Oh,” I said, backing out of the office. “It must have been a bad dream.”

Before the first of June my principal called me into the office and said that he didn’t want me in his school next year, but that he wouldn’t blackball me if I could find another job teaching in the district.

By the time I was twenty-four, I was losing my career, an internist had told me I’d probably lose my stomach, and a psychiatrist had said I might kill myself from depression. I had nowhere to turn. So on June 22, 1962, after drinking all day with some teachers, I called a man named Tom whom I’d met at an AA meeting the previous New Year’s Eve. I’d noticed he was wearing a college ring and that impressed me. I asked if he’d pick me up from where I was drinking and take me to the Friday night Dewitt Group. Then I told everyone I was drinking with that an alcoholic was coming to take me to an AA meeting, and this produced a great amount of interest. My fellow teachers were eager to meet this alcoholic. So, when the doorbell rang at seven-thirty, Tom was faced with eight to ten teachers who were pretty well sloshed by then. (Needless to say he continues to remind me of this event today.)

On the way home after the meeting, I asked Tom if he thought I could make the program. “Absolutely, Richard,” he said. “Absolutely.” I asked him the same question a couple of more times. Each time he answered, “Absolutely, Richard, absolutely.”

The next morning I woke up, and from that day to this, I have not had a compulsion to drink.

The past thirty-five years have brought all of the joy, happiness, and sadness that happen to anyone over a span of time. I have a wonderful wife, two beautiful children, as well as a retirement plaque from teaching thirty-three years in various school districts in New York and California. I’m an active member of my home groups, the Sunday morning Spiritual Progress Group and the Roxas Mens’ Group. I attend at least three meetings a week. I’ve served on the county alcoholism advisory board. I do volunteer work every week in a second-grade classroom. My wife and I travel frequently. I’ve always loved poetry and now have time to write each day. Despite many health problems I’m able to walk on the beach, where I commune with my Higher Power.

The spirit of Alcoholics Anonymous has been with me for thirty-five years: for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. I know at the moment of death the same Higher Power who gave me my sobriety will be there to greet me and to take me to another level of being, another level of consciousness, and another level of sobriety.

Richard S.

Santa Cruz, California

“FROM MAKE-BELIEVE TO BELIEF”

June 1981

When I read in the Big Book (after asking God to bring some calmness to my life) that I could find happiness, power, peace, and a sense of direction, and that God did not make too hard demands on those that earnestly seek him, I began to be encouraged. Reading further in our Big Book, I was relieved to learn that I didn’t have to believe, only be willing to believe. This I could do. I couldn’t believe, but I made believe—and came to believe.

When I surrendered, the battle was over. I finally realized that I did not drink because I wanted to—I drank because I had to. This leads me to think that we alcoholics do not try to stop drinking until we discover that we can’t stop drinking. Then we must ask for help. I asked for help from a fellowship of lovely people who accepted me, not for what I had been, nor for what I might become, but for what I was: a suffering, dying alcoholic.

When I drank, I made numerous trips to mental institutions, jails, and just plain nowhere. Today, I am ten years happily sober in the Fellowship. I have found the God of my understanding and gotten everything I need and most of what I want. I’m glad I surrendered.

B. B.

Charleston, West Virginia