I was in my sister’s house, living in the basement, next to the pool table, unemployed and for all practical purposes, unemployable. At the few interviews I did manage to get, I was vague and evasive. My creative genius–my mind–advised me there was something terribly wrong with my life.
My mind told me, “If you can take one problem area and get control of that, then another, and another, you will soon have your life back under control and everything will be all right.” I’d tried this solution many times before, but it had never worked. I would pick a problem habit and as soon as I started to work on it, everything that happened would challenge my success. After a very short time, I would throw up my hands, yell obscenities at God, and swear I had tried but that God had sabotaged me.
Nevertheless, my mind told me, “This time it will work.” So my mind and I had this little conversation about my worst problem. We decided it was smoking. So my mind and I agreed that starting first thing in the morning, we’d quit smoking. Then, once we got control over that (in a day or two), we’d go to work on something else.
So I got up the next morning and had no problem with the urge to smoke all day long. As I was sitting down to dinner, I was patting myself on the back and saying how easy this was. This time it was going to work! That day happened to be my forty-third birthday, and as a birthday present, my sister and her family had bought me a carton of cigarettes. There it was again–God interfering in my plans. Again, I threw my hands in the air and said, “I tried, but God messed it up!”
Later that evening, I caught myself pacing the floor. I sat down and discussed that with my mind. We decided that I was nuts. That meant I needed to commit myself to some mental institution for drug or electric shock therapy. That was just the thing: put me away for a couple of years and then I’ll be all right. Once my mind and I made that decision, I had a certain sense of peace and slept quite well that night.
The next morning I went to a mental health clinic in Bellevue, Washington, and I told them I was nuts and needed to be incarcerated. They gave me one of those sideways looks and began to ask me really stupid questions like: How much do you drink? How often do you drink? and other weird things like that. Needless to say, I gave them pat answers: “Oh, I have a couple of beers a couple of times a week.” They advised me that I didn’t need to be committed, but I could certainly use some counseling. There it was again–God kept messing it up.
Then, as I had also done numerous times in the past, I went into an almost immobilizing depression. A good portion of that day is a blur. Sometime late in the afternoon, I ended up at the Labor Temple in Seattle, where my cousin Jim was an alcoholism counselor. With him I was very vague and evasive. At some point, he asked me, “Do you have a problem with alcohol?” This was one of my favorite people in the whole world and I wanted to be truthful with him, so I said, “Not that I know of.”
Then he asked me how often I drank. I told him, “I have a couple of beers a couple of times a week.” He said, “If we took ‘couple’ out of the vocabulary, an alcoholic couldn’t answer a question! Now, tell me–have you ever wondered about whether or not you had a problem with booze?” That was in 1976 and the first time I had wondered was 1954, so I said, “Once or twice.”
He said, “People who don’t have a problem with booze never wonder about whether or not they have a problem with booze.” That made so much sense to me that I agreed to go to an AA meeting with him.
He picked me up after dinner and took me to a Friday night meeting at a church in Redmond, Washington. They had a beginners meeting on the stage and a general discussion meeting in the auditorium. Jim told me, “You had better go up on the stage.” Well, I liked that idea since I’d been an amateur performer for a number of years. But after I got up there they closed the curtains. I was a little bit miffed, but I wanted to please Jim so I stayed for the meeting.
Most of the people there were from treatment centers and many of them were in pretty bad shape. It proved a golden opportunity for me to take their inventories. “Boy, if I ever get that bad. . . Look at that one, he has to sit on his hands. . . Wow, I wonder what that guy is on. He looks like he came from a different planet.” But despite my inability to listen or to concentrate, that first meeting was a positive experience. I liked it. In fact, I felt so great that I went to a meeting at the old Hilltop Club the next night. It was an AA birthday meeting. I was welcomed, enjoyed the speakers and the cake and coffee, and told to keep coming back. In fact, after the meeting, people actually came and invited me for more coffee. I loved it.
After about a week of basking in this acceptance, I decided it was time to come clean. Since my brother-in-law and my cousin were both “in the business,” everyone knew who I was and I felt kind of important. Everyone was treating me so nice that I wanted to be honest and open with them. So after a meeting, I went to one of the “old-timers” (someone with over a year) and said, “I really like what’s going on here and how I feel coming here, but I have a problem.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“Well, you see, I’m not an alcoholic–I’m just nuts.”
“What do you mean?”
“I tried to commit myself, but they wouldn’t take me. Then I ended up here. I like what you guys say, and I really relate to a lot of it, but I’m a nut, not an alcoholic!”
And he said to me, “Sonny, why don’t you make ninety meetings in ninety days, don’t drink in between, and then we’ll see what we can do about your insanity.” That was a lot better deal than they’d offered me at the mental health clinic so I agreed.
A week or so after I started going to meetings, a small security company gave me a job I could handle. I went down to the Seattle waterfront and from midnight to eight A.M., I’d sit in a guard shack. Three or four times each night, I would have to get up, unlock a gate, let in a truck, write down its number, then close and lock the gate. At that stage of my life, that was about the limit of my capabilities. Anyway, a week or so after I got this job, I was getting ready to go to work, shaving, brushing my teeth, and swallowing the Listerine–when, in the mirror, I saw me do that. I had to think about it. By this time, AA had already taught me that thinking for myself was not a good idea, so the next day, I told my sponsor.
Tom said, “How long you been drinking that stuff?”
I said, “What do you mean, ‘drinking’ that stuff?”
He said, “That’s what you did, isn’t it?”
I said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
“So, how long has it been?” I had to confess that by then it had been almost four years.
Tom said, “Why do you suppose you are drinking Listerine? It sure as hell isn’t because of your overpowering fondness for oil of eucalyptus!”
I had to do a little inventory on Listerine. I found I’d kept a bottle in my desk at school; I’d kept a bottle under the seat of the car; I’d hidden a bottle behind the refrigerator at home. I’d been going through three to five bottles a week. Then I got an “attitude”: I decided, “What kind of trouble can I get into for having Listerine on mybreath?”
Tom said those magic words: “Do you suppose normal drinkers drink Listerine on a regular basis?” I had to admit it did not sound very normal. He then lovingly advised me that Listerine hadn’t been a drink of choice for me–it had been a drink of necessity. It was about 56 proof and I was using it to keep up my blood alcohol level.
My last objection was, “If I’m an alcoholic, how come it has been so easy for me to stop drinking?”
And he told me, “Because God knows what a sick, weak puppy you are. He has given you this grace period so you can embrace the program of Alcoholics Anonymous without any more objections, excuses, or holdouts. So–what are you going to do?”
I folded! The first half of the first Step made the journey from mind to heart.