Читать книгу Voices of Long-Term Sobriety - Группа авторов - Страница 11

February 2001

I WAS A low-bottom drunk, having hit as low a bottom as any drunk can hit and live to tell about it.

I was a patient in the state mental hospital, having been committed to that desolate place by my mother. She had been called by the police to come and get me. I had been fished out of Lake Erie by the Coast Guard after my latest suicide attempt, put in handcuffs because my behavior swung from sweet and docile one minute, waving and smiling at the crowds gathered for the regatta, to being violent and uncontrollable in an instant. On land, I was handcuffed to a metal table. I was completely crazed from alcohol. When my mother tried to get me to go with her, I started screaming obscenities at her, as I did at everyone who came near me. I did not recognize my own mother. She was led away sobbing by the police and I was put in a drunk tank. The next day, there was a court proceeding, which is still foggy in my mind because for the most part I was in a complete blackout. People seemed to float around the room like ghosts; someone in a black robe sat at the front of the room, and a woman sat there weeping. I remember a long ride in the back of a police car with two other shackled prisoners.

The road to this hell had been long and rocky. From a loving wife, mother, business woman, licensed airplane pilot, and avid golfer, active in church, as well as business and social affairs, I became a falling-down lush, traveling all over the country in search of fun, men, and adventure. I went from one job to another, from one man to another, from one drunk tank to another, descending in three years from respectable citizen to drunken bum, living on skid row, homeless, defenseless, and completely derelict.

The last job I had was shoveling manure onto a truck and hauling it from local farms to the winery on the island where I worked. My bed was in the basement with rats crawling freely around, my only food scraps the winery owner’s maid would bring down to me, which I shared with the rats. A bottle of wine put me to sleep.

One day I decided to die, for I had nothing to live for. My beloved children had been taken away from me by the court, and I could not and would not get sober because reality was too awful to face. I had tried suicide several times by trying to stop breathing, by swallowing a bottle of aspirin, by trying to drown myself twice—anything that wasn’t too painful or bloody. But I kept getting rescued. The last time I jumped off a ferry boat with a suitcase loaded with rocks. The suitcase sank, but I didn’t, as I had forgotten to attach it to me. The next day, I was committed to the state insane asylum. My first memory of that place was lying on a table surrounded by people dressed in white trying to put wires on me. I fought so hard to keep those wires from touching me that I had to be strapped tightly to the table. I had tried many times to commit suicide, but I didn’t want to be electrocuted. Unfortunately, I was only one obese female and unable to stop them from giving me shock treatments. After several months of shock, I began regressing into a catatonic world where nothing could touch me. In a last ditch effort to bring me back from the oblivion I sought, a psychiatrist made me go to an AA meeting. She took all my tranquilizers away, so I would know what was going on. Then, because without tranquilizers I was unpredictable, she put me in a straitjacket, and had an attendant wheel me into the meeting.

At my very first AA meeting there in the hospital, I heard words of love, understanding and compassion, and stories told by beautifully dressed women, parts of which I could identify with, although none of them had fallen off a manure truck and been thrown in Lake Erie to wash off manure and blood from a cut caused by a rusty nail. I believe the hand of God reached down at that meeting and healed me. For from that day thirty-eight years ago to this, I have not had a desire to drink or escape from reality again.

Today I live a busy, productive life, working a full-time night job in a large law firm. I use my computer talents to make a very good living, which allows me to travel all over the world and share my experience, strength, and hope with AA members in Athens, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, and Nassau. I love to tell my story and have an audience of alcoholics laugh with me, cry with me, and hopefully get hope from my story, seeing that if I can come back to sobriety and respectability after my life as a drunk, they can, too. I especially love to tell my story to prisoners and mental patients who identify with me because they too have lost their freedom to alcohol.

One of my fondest memories is the night I told my story in Raiford Prison in Florida and had over 200 men incarcerated for heinous crimes laughing so hard they cried and then coming up and hugging me afterward with tears in their eyes, telling me I had given them hope. And oh, the wondrous joy of Christmas reunions with my scattered family and the laughter and love that is there. Best of all is the peace I have found knowing that I made amends to my mother for all the sorrow I caused her. A few months before she died, I took her to Hawaii for her birthday. It was a gift for both of us.

Pauline B.

Royal Palm Beach, Florida

FROM “FIFTY YEARS OF GRATITUDE”

June 1994

I first learned about AA in Ohio in August 1938. I had several relapses until my first day of lasting sobriety—Armistice Day, November 11, 1944. I’m very grateful for all that I’ve achieved in AA: recovery, sobriety, contentment, and the opportunity to share all that I was so generously given. But I will always remember those helpless and hopeless drinking times and early treatment procedures: undergoing the aversion cure, being locked up with mental patients, enduring iced sheets and other shock treatments, withstanding physical beatings in a jail bullpen and an Army guardhouse. And I remember the anguish in the faces of loved ones when it seemed that their prayers for my recovery had failed.

Then there was that glorious first memory of freedom, the rapture of not needing the crutch of alcohol—the especial joys of self-forgiveness, the regeneration of hope, and the rebirth of faith. There was the bonus of self-respect, of forgiving and liking oneself as a whole person, in a whole family and a whole community.

George S.