It was Monday, August 24, 1981. Instead of working in my office at the World Bank
in Washington, where I was supposed to be, I was driving north on I-95 from a cheap
motel in Richmond, headed home.
I was driving with one hand and drinking Budweiser from a six-pack of sixteen-
ounce “tall boys” with the other. I had escaped from my family on Saturday after a
disastrous drunken display while hosting a party Friday night, after I had promised my
wife and our children that I wouldn’t get drunk.
The party was to celebrate our second daughter’s graduation from Mount Vernon
High School. We’d invited some of her classmates and their parents, most of whom I
had never met, for drinks and a buffet supper at our home, before the girls would
leave for college. The day of the party, my daughter had come to me and begged me
with tears in her eyes, “Please, Dad, these are my best friends, and I really like their
parents. Please promise me you won’t drink tonight.” And I promised.
Before the evening was over, I was falling over the furniture, spilling food and
drinks on the guests and singing loudly. My own drinking was done on the sly while I
was out in the kitchen mixing drinks for the adult guests. I pretended to drink only
Fresca with ice, but I secretly laced each glass with hundred-proof vodka.
The next morning, I woke up with a terrible hangover and shuffled into the kitchen.
The whole family was sitting around the breakfast table, grim-faced, and our daughter
was weeping silently. They had to tell me what happened the night before because,
after a certain point, I couldn’t remember. They said the party had broken up early,
the other girls and their parents leaving hurriedly in embarrassment and pity.
My wife was the first to speak, “This is the last straw. Either you pack up and
leave or I will take the children and go myself.” She had said such things to me before
but not followed through. This time, something in her voice told me she meant it.
I turned to the children, panic-stricken, seeking their support. They usually sided
with me, but this time was different. One by one, with the exception of our eldest
daughter, they told me they agreed with their mother and asked me to leave.
Our eldest daughter, nineteen, was my drinking buddy. We two often allied with
each other when my wife complained about our alcohol and drug abuse. She was due
to check in at her college dorm at VCU that day, and I jumped at the chance to drive
her and all her “stuff” down to Richmond, anything to get away from the rest of the
family’s confrontation.
I knew, as I drove back home that Monday, that I was at the end of my rope. I
drove faster and faster, weaving in and out of slower traffic, until I suddenly had the
feeling that someone was in the car with me. It felt as if someone was tapping me on
the shoulder. I even looked in the rear-view mirror to check the back seat and saw –
or imagined – a shadowy form in one corner.
I glanced back at the needle on the speedometer. It was climbing steadily, past
80, past 90. Then I realized that I was going to die, if not then and there, a bit later
and somewhere else, but surely I was going to die, and soon. But I was only forty-six!
I was losing my family, my career, my health, everything that was important to me. I
knew I was powerless to stop drinking on my own. I needed help and decided then
and there to seek it as soon as I returned to DC. Having made the decision, I felt an
immediate wave of relief and, for the first time, hope. I slowed down to 60 and drove
home to my family.
That evening I arrived home to a cold, silent welcome. Unable to sleep without “a
little help,” I polished off the remains of a jug of wine and went to bed. The next
morning I struggled out of bed, sick, smelly, sweaty and shaky, and went to work. By
coincidence, I had an appointment with the doctor for my annual employment check-
up that very day.
For the past few years Doctor T, a tall, lean, healthy-eating daily jogger with a
great chair-side manner, always asked me the same questions about my drinking. I
always lied, minimizing the amounts I was actually consuming. The doctor wasn’t
fooled for a minute. He urged me to go to AA each time I visited him, and I knew he
would try again. I usually avoided eye-contact and mumbled something about maybe
giving it a try, but this time, concerned about my deteriorating health, he put both his
big hands firmly on my shoulders, looked me in the eye and said, “John, as your
doctor, I really want you to go to AA.You need to get some help.”
Looking him back in the eye, I replied, “I think I will, Doc.” And for the first time in
my life, I meant it.
I returned to my office that afternoon and, with hands that were still shaking,
looked up the phone number for AA to get information about nearby meetings. A kindly
male voice answered the phone and, when I gave him my location, said, “There’s a
meeting five days a week at lunchtime in the basement of the Western Presbyterian
Church, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from where you are right now.” He said the
name of the group was “High Noon” and they welcomed beginners at all their
meetings. By then it was already too late, so I resolved to go across to the meeting
at noon the following day.
In 1947, when I was twelve, I belonged to a Boy Scout troop that met one evening
a week in the basement of our church, St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Sewickley,
Pennsylvania . Leaving the troop meetings, I often noticed adults arriving in the lot
behind the church, parking their cars and entering the same building through a back
entrance. They were all middle-aged and seemed tired, almost furtive, I thought, as
they quietly went inside, glancing over their shoulders at our boisterous little group of
Scouts waiting in the street for our parents to come and pick us up.
One evening on the way home, I asked my parents who those mysterious people
were. My father made a wry face, sighed and said, “Those are the alcoholics,
Johnny.” I had heard of alcoholics, but I had only a vague idea of what they were. I
didn’t pursue it.
Years later, when my wife would berate me on Sunday mornings for getting drunk
at Saturday night neighborhood get-togethers, she would often ask, “Why do you
keep doing it?”
I finally learned a gambit that would usually get her off my hung-over back, at
least for a little while. I would stare at her, bleary-eyed but defiant, and say,
“Because I’m an alcoholic.” She would usually gasp, turn in disgust and leave the
room, slamming the door on her way out, without a further word.
I knew, or thought I knew, that I had to drink, that I couldn’t live without it, so
therefore I must be an alcoholic. Mostly, I could confine my heavy drinking to
weekends, family beach vacations and my frequent World Bank business trips
overseas, usually in the company of other hard-drinking colleagues. Over the years,
though, weekends began to spill over into the work week, and my buddies and I would
go for boozy Friday martini lunches in the Roger Smith Hotel at Eighteenth and
Pennsylvania and then meet up again for draft beer at the little bar across the park on
H Street before driving home late to our angry wives. Then, finally, I began keeping a
bottle of vodka in my bottom desk drawer and dosing my coffee mug with it as soon
as I arrived at the office. That started the year our second daughter graduated from
high school.
It never occurred to me that I might actually be able to stop drinking. I was an
alcoholic, and that meant that I had to go on drinking until… whatever. Right?
With my simplistic belief about alcoholism and my negative childhood memories of
the mysterious cabal of tired middle-aged people meeting secretly after dark in the
church basement, was it any wonder that I resisted Dr. T’s urging for so long? I used
to joke sometimes about drinking until I died. And then, that day on I-95, something
or some one finally got through to me, and my choices became real and immediate.
I arrived at the church at 11:45 on Wednesday morning. Should I go in and ask
someone where the meeting is? No, better walk around a little more until my nerves
stop jumping. I thought of just forgetting the whole thing and going back to my office.
I was afraid to go inside and afraid to stay out there on the sidewalk. Finally, I took a
deep breath, went in the office entrance and found the narrow stairway leading down
to the basement. As I started down the stairs I heard voices and laughter. Laughter?
I must be in the wrong part of the church. Better go down there anyway and ask. Can
you tell me where the AA meeting is?
As I rounded the corner at the foot of the steps, I found myself facing a doorway
leading to a narrow room with a long table surrounded by folding metal chairs. At one
end of the room a man in a business suit was making coffee and opening boxes of
Cheez-its and chocolate chip cookies, which he arranged on paper plates down the
middle of the table. At the other end, a grandmotherly woman with a tight, grey-
haired perm and bags under her kind-looking eyes was knitting what seemed to be a
sweater. She looked up at me over the top of her half-moon glasses and smiled. A
much younger, tough-looking man seated at the head of the table was arranging some
books and papers in front of him. He had a bushy moustache and a graying pony-tail
and wore a knitted woolen watch cap, in spite of the August heat in that stuffy,
smoky room.
Noticing my hesitation in the doorway, the old lady smiled again and said, “Hello.
My name’s Helen. Want a cookie?” She slid one of the paper plates across the table in
my direction. I felt a flood of relief, even joy, at this nurturing act. She reminded me
of my mother, dead from a self-administered overdose of pills and vodka twelve years
earlier.
“I’d love one, Helen, thanks. My name’s John.” Munching a chocolate chip cookie, I
began to relax. Apparently, I was in the right place.
One by one, the others introduced themselves as more people filed into the little
room and found places at the table or in the rows of chairs lining the walls. Soon the
room was full of mostly happy people exchanging greetings and news as they opened
brown paper bags containing their lunches and waited for the meeting to begin. A few
of the people looked haggard and sick, some even frightened like me. But, for the
most part, the “High Noon” group of Alcoholics Anonymous was a happy, healthy, well-
dressed mix of genders, ages, races and lifestyles that bore little resemblance to the
usual “wino” stereotype of an alcoholic, but resembled rather more a random sample of
ordinary downtown D.C. bureaucrats and office workers enjoying their lunch hour. How
wrong my preconceptions had been!
At exactly noon, the young man glanced at his watch and announced, “Hi,
everybody, let’s have an AA meeting… Welcome to the High Noon meeting of
Alcoholics Anonymous. My name’s Wally and I am a grateful, recovering alcoholic.” A
loud response came from the entire room, “Hi, Wally!”
He went on, “I’ll read the Preamble…” He read a short statement defining AA and its
purpose and method, inviting two others to read “How it Works” from “The Big Book”
and a daily meditation from “Twenty-four Hours.” He then launched into a brief
introduction, covering his own drinking history, what brought him into AA and what his
life was like since then. He said one thing which I shall never forget: “I was surprised
to discover that I still had a lot of problems after I got sober. But they were a better
class of problems than the ones I had before. And without the booze in my system, I
was able for the first time to work on solving them.”
The rest of the hour was devoted to comments from the others in the room, either
on the suggested topic of their “better class of problems” or on anything else they
chose to share with the group. A few of the newer folks preferred to “pass” or “just
listen” when their turns came to speak. I think I simply blurted, “H-hello. My name’s
John, I’m… an alcoholic, and this is my first meeting.” I was greeted by a loud chorus,
“Hi, John! Welcome!”
Somebody brought me a copy of “Where and When”, a monthly booklet which listed
all fifteen hundred AA meetings in the Washington area. At the end of the hour we
stood and held hands for the Lord’s Prayer, ending with “Keep coming back! It works if
you work it.” Then, before I could get out the door, I was surrounded by friendly
people offering me their telephone numbers and help if I needed it. Helen, the “High
Noon” matriarch and cookie-pusher, advised me sotto voce to find a sponsor from
within the group but to wait and listen carefully for a few meetings before choosing
whom to approach.
I did “keep coming back,” worked with a series of sponsors over the years and,
miraculously, was able to stop drinking to this day. Like Wally, I discovered that I still
had a lot of problems after I quit. After all, I came within a hair’s breadth of losing my
family, health and career, and I had to work long and hard on my Twelve Steps to
earn back people’s confidence and respect. I needed to re-invent myself completely.
If I was no longer John the Drunk, then who the hell was I? I had no idea!
Part of my twelve-step program of recovery was making amends to all the people I
injured during my drinking days. My wife and our kids came first, but also high on the
list was my father, seventy-eight, who lived in Boca Raton, Florida with Ruth, his
second wife of eleven years. They met two months after my mother’s suicide and
married only eight months later. Both my sisters, who blamed him for our mother’s
death, were furious that he did this, and I was rather estranged from the old man
also, although, unlike my sisters, I continued to visit him and Ruth occasionally. There
was always a lot of drinking during those visits.
Sometime in October I got enough courage to call my father to make my amends.
My AA sponsor told me not to worry if he didn’t accept them; they were for my own
good, not his. I was nonetheless sweating and nervous as I listened to the ring tone
at his end of the phone line.
“Hello?” He sounded perky.
“It’s me, Pop, how are you, and how is Ruth?”
“Oh, we’re fine, I guess. To what do I owe the rare pleasure of hearing from you,
Johnny? Do you need money?” he teased, always a little sarcastic.
“No, Pop, I just wanted to tell you some news. I joined AA.” There was silence at
the other end of the line. Then I heard my father laughing. “Are you laughing at me?” I
bristled.
“No, no! I’m not laughing at you. I’m delighted… because I joined AA too.” He said
he joined AA in April after a series of fender-benders and drunken episodes at his club,
one of which required two of the waiters to drive him home and put him to bed. Had I
really not spoken to him for more than six months? I suddenly felt ashamed for
neglecting him. We didn’t talk very long, but I told him I would fly down to visit him
and Ruth the following weekend.
“I want to make my eighth step amends to you, Pop.”
“Great, Johnny, I have some amends to make to you too.”
I spent the weekend in Boca Raton attending AA meetings and having long talks
with Pop. I talked about all the money I’d wasted, the cars I’d wrecked, the sleepless
nights I’d caused him and my mother. He talked about how he had made fun of me
when I was a child and buried himself in his books and writing on the weekends
instead of spending time with me. We talked about one awful day when he knocked
me down with his fist after I broke the window in his study with a rock. We both felt
terribly guilty for not doing more to help my mother before it was too late. One of my
greatest regrets about my drinking is that Mama didn’t live to see me in recovery.
When I told Mark, my AA sponsor, that I desperately needed to make amends to
my poor, dead mother, he understood. He too lost his mother while he was still
drinking. He suggested that I write a long letter to my mother telling her how much I
regretted adding to her suffering for so many years, how much I wished that she had
been able to find help to recover from her own addiction and how much happier I was
since I finally found sobriety after thirty years of avoiding it. Then, he said, I should
put the letter in the sink, light it and let it burn while I thought about my mother. I did
what he advised, but even today, sober for twenty-six years, I am still full of pain and
regret whenever I think of her, which I do several times each day.
The word “amends” literally means “changes”, not just telling someone “I’m sorry”. I
was forever telling people how sorry I was during my drinking days. I was about the
sorriest drunk you could imagine. But I never changed. I just kept going around in
circles, putting down the bottle hundreds of times, only to pick it up again a few days
later.
Change. That’s really what AA is all about. Taking stock of our lives with “a fearless
and searching moral inventory” and then asking God to remove our shortcomings.
Making amends (change, again) to people we harmed. Continuing to take personal
inventory and, when we are wrong, promptly admitting it. Changing ourselves,
changing our lives.
Whenever we told our stories at AA meetings, we were encouraged to say what we
used to be like, what happened and what we are like now. I have covered the first
two topics, but I need to say something about the third, what I am like now.
Like Wally, who led that very first meeting at High Noon, I too was surprised to find
that I still had a lot of problems after I finally stopped drinking. But, again like Wally, I
discovered that, for the first time, I was able to work on solving my “better class of
problems” without all the C2H5OH in my system. Rather than continually apologizing
for my behavior and then doing the same things over again, I was able to change my
behavior, gradually and painfully. I still have to struggle every day with my inflated
ego, my anxiety, my need to show off, to be right and to make you wrong. These
“character defects”, as we call them in AA-speak, are very stubborn and require my
constant vigilance to keep them from getting out of hand.
I love the idea of constant vigilance. There is an inscription on the
facade of the National Archives Building in Washington that reads, “The price of
freedom is constant vigilance.” I like to think that my freedom from addiction also
requires constant vigilance. Following the twelve steps of AA allows me a daily
reprieve from bondage to alcohol, nothing more. What I do with that daily reprieve is
up to me. I don’t squander it on the golf course like many retirees my age. I choose to
be active, to work on my relationships with family and friends, to volunteer in the
community, helping others to escape the bonds of addiction and other misfortunes, to
do research, to write…in short, to make a difference in the lives of a few others and
to be happy in my own life.
in Washington, where I was supposed to be, I was driving north on I-95 from a cheap
motel in Richmond, headed home.
I was driving with one hand and drinking Budweiser from a six-pack of sixteen-
ounce “tall boys” with the other. I had escaped from my family on Saturday after a
disastrous drunken display while hosting a party Friday night, after I had promised my
wife and our children that I wouldn’t get drunk.
The party was to celebrate our second daughter’s graduation from Mount Vernon
High School. We’d invited some of her classmates and their parents, most of whom I
had never met, for drinks and a buffet supper at our home, before the girls would
leave for college. The day of the party, my daughter had come to me and begged me
with tears in her eyes, “Please, Dad, these are my best friends, and I really like their
parents. Please promise me you won’t drink tonight.” And I promised.
Before the evening was over, I was falling over the furniture, spilling food and
drinks on the guests and singing loudly. My own drinking was done on the sly while I
was out in the kitchen mixing drinks for the adult guests. I pretended to drink only
Fresca with ice, but I secretly laced each glass with hundred-proof vodka.
The next morning, I woke up with a terrible hangover and shuffled into the kitchen.
The whole family was sitting around the breakfast table, grim-faced, and our daughter
was weeping silently. They had to tell me what happened the night before because,
after a certain point, I couldn’t remember. They said the party had broken up early,
the other girls and their parents leaving hurriedly in embarrassment and pity.
My wife was the first to speak, “This is the last straw. Either you pack up and
leave or I will take the children and go myself.” She had said such things to me before
but not followed through. This time, something in her voice told me she meant it.
I turned to the children, panic-stricken, seeking their support. They usually sided
with me, but this time was different. One by one, with the exception of our eldest
daughter, they told me they agreed with their mother and asked me to leave.
Our eldest daughter, nineteen, was my drinking buddy. We two often allied with
each other when my wife complained about our alcohol and drug abuse. She was due
to check in at her college dorm at VCU that day, and I jumped at the chance to drive
her and all her “stuff” down to Richmond, anything to get away from the rest of the
family’s confrontation.
I knew, as I drove back home that Monday, that I was at the end of my rope. I
drove faster and faster, weaving in and out of slower traffic, until I suddenly had the
feeling that someone was in the car with me. It felt as if someone was tapping me on
the shoulder. I even looked in the rear-view mirror to check the back seat and saw –
or imagined – a shadowy form in one corner.
I glanced back at the needle on the speedometer. It was climbing steadily, past
80, past 90. Then I realized that I was going to die, if not then and there, a bit later
and somewhere else, but surely I was going to die, and soon. But I was only forty-six!
I was losing my family, my career, my health, everything that was important to me. I
knew I was powerless to stop drinking on my own. I needed help and decided then
and there to seek it as soon as I returned to DC. Having made the decision, I felt an
immediate wave of relief and, for the first time, hope. I slowed down to 60 and drove
home to my family.
That evening I arrived home to a cold, silent welcome. Unable to sleep without “a
little help,” I polished off the remains of a jug of wine and went to bed. The next
morning I struggled out of bed, sick, smelly, sweaty and shaky, and went to work. By
coincidence, I had an appointment with the doctor for my annual employment check-
up that very day.
For the past few years Doctor T, a tall, lean, healthy-eating daily jogger with a
great chair-side manner, always asked me the same questions about my drinking. I
always lied, minimizing the amounts I was actually consuming. The doctor wasn’t
fooled for a minute. He urged me to go to AA each time I visited him, and I knew he
would try again. I usually avoided eye-contact and mumbled something about maybe
giving it a try, but this time, concerned about my deteriorating health, he put both his
big hands firmly on my shoulders, looked me in the eye and said, “John, as your
doctor, I really want you to go to AA.You need to get some help.”
Looking him back in the eye, I replied, “I think I will, Doc.” And for the first time in
my life, I meant it.
I returned to my office that afternoon and, with hands that were still shaking,
looked up the phone number for AA to get information about nearby meetings. A kindly
male voice answered the phone and, when I gave him my location, said, “There’s a
meeting five days a week at lunchtime in the basement of the Western Presbyterian
Church, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from where you are right now.” He said the
name of the group was “High Noon” and they welcomed beginners at all their
meetings. By then it was already too late, so I resolved to go across to the meeting
at noon the following day.
In 1947, when I was twelve, I belonged to a Boy Scout troop that met one evening
a week in the basement of our church, St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Sewickley,
Pennsylvania . Leaving the troop meetings, I often noticed adults arriving in the lot
behind the church, parking their cars and entering the same building through a back
entrance. They were all middle-aged and seemed tired, almost furtive, I thought, as
they quietly went inside, glancing over their shoulders at our boisterous little group of
Scouts waiting in the street for our parents to come and pick us up.
One evening on the way home, I asked my parents who those mysterious people
were. My father made a wry face, sighed and said, “Those are the alcoholics,
Johnny.” I had heard of alcoholics, but I had only a vague idea of what they were. I
didn’t pursue it.
Years later, when my wife would berate me on Sunday mornings for getting drunk
at Saturday night neighborhood get-togethers, she would often ask, “Why do you
keep doing it?”
I finally learned a gambit that would usually get her off my hung-over back, at
least for a little while. I would stare at her, bleary-eyed but defiant, and say,
“Because I’m an alcoholic.” She would usually gasp, turn in disgust and leave the
room, slamming the door on her way out, without a further word.
I knew, or thought I knew, that I had to drink, that I couldn’t live without it, so
therefore I must be an alcoholic. Mostly, I could confine my heavy drinking to
weekends, family beach vacations and my frequent World Bank business trips
overseas, usually in the company of other hard-drinking colleagues. Over the years,
though, weekends began to spill over into the work week, and my buddies and I would
go for boozy Friday martini lunches in the Roger Smith Hotel at Eighteenth and
Pennsylvania and then meet up again for draft beer at the little bar across the park on
H Street before driving home late to our angry wives. Then, finally, I began keeping a
bottle of vodka in my bottom desk drawer and dosing my coffee mug with it as soon
as I arrived at the office. That started the year our second daughter graduated from
high school.
It never occurred to me that I might actually be able to stop drinking. I was an
alcoholic, and that meant that I had to go on drinking until… whatever. Right?
With my simplistic belief about alcoholism and my negative childhood memories of
the mysterious cabal of tired middle-aged people meeting secretly after dark in the
church basement, was it any wonder that I resisted Dr. T’s urging for so long? I used
to joke sometimes about drinking until I died. And then, that day on I-95, something
or some one finally got through to me, and my choices became real and immediate.
I arrived at the church at 11:45 on Wednesday morning. Should I go in and ask
someone where the meeting is? No, better walk around a little more until my nerves
stop jumping. I thought of just forgetting the whole thing and going back to my office.
I was afraid to go inside and afraid to stay out there on the sidewalk. Finally, I took a
deep breath, went in the office entrance and found the narrow stairway leading down
to the basement. As I started down the stairs I heard voices and laughter. Laughter?
I must be in the wrong part of the church. Better go down there anyway and ask. Can
you tell me where the AA meeting is?
As I rounded the corner at the foot of the steps, I found myself facing a doorway
leading to a narrow room with a long table surrounded by folding metal chairs. At one
end of the room a man in a business suit was making coffee and opening boxes of
Cheez-its and chocolate chip cookies, which he arranged on paper plates down the
middle of the table. At the other end, a grandmotherly woman with a tight, grey-
haired perm and bags under her kind-looking eyes was knitting what seemed to be a
sweater. She looked up at me over the top of her half-moon glasses and smiled. A
much younger, tough-looking man seated at the head of the table was arranging some
books and papers in front of him. He had a bushy moustache and a graying pony-tail
and wore a knitted woolen watch cap, in spite of the August heat in that stuffy,
smoky room.
Noticing my hesitation in the doorway, the old lady smiled again and said, “Hello.
My name’s Helen. Want a cookie?” She slid one of the paper plates across the table in
my direction. I felt a flood of relief, even joy, at this nurturing act. She reminded me
of my mother, dead from a self-administered overdose of pills and vodka twelve years
earlier.
“I’d love one, Helen, thanks. My name’s John.” Munching a chocolate chip cookie, I
began to relax. Apparently, I was in the right place.
One by one, the others introduced themselves as more people filed into the little
room and found places at the table or in the rows of chairs lining the walls. Soon the
room was full of mostly happy people exchanging greetings and news as they opened
brown paper bags containing their lunches and waited for the meeting to begin. A few
of the people looked haggard and sick, some even frightened like me. But, for the
most part, the “High Noon” group of Alcoholics Anonymous was a happy, healthy, well-
dressed mix of genders, ages, races and lifestyles that bore little resemblance to the
usual “wino” stereotype of an alcoholic, but resembled rather more a random sample of
ordinary downtown D.C. bureaucrats and office workers enjoying their lunch hour. How
wrong my preconceptions had been!
At exactly noon, the young man glanced at his watch and announced, “Hi,
everybody, let’s have an AA meeting… Welcome to the High Noon meeting of
Alcoholics Anonymous. My name’s Wally and I am a grateful, recovering alcoholic.” A
loud response came from the entire room, “Hi, Wally!”
He went on, “I’ll read the Preamble…” He read a short statement defining AA and its
purpose and method, inviting two others to read “How it Works” from “The Big Book”
and a daily meditation from “Twenty-four Hours.” He then launched into a brief
introduction, covering his own drinking history, what brought him into AA and what his
life was like since then. He said one thing which I shall never forget: “I was surprised
to discover that I still had a lot of problems after I got sober. But they were a better
class of problems than the ones I had before. And without the booze in my system, I
was able for the first time to work on solving them.”
The rest of the hour was devoted to comments from the others in the room, either
on the suggested topic of their “better class of problems” or on anything else they
chose to share with the group. A few of the newer folks preferred to “pass” or “just
listen” when their turns came to speak. I think I simply blurted, “H-hello. My name’s
John, I’m… an alcoholic, and this is my first meeting.” I was greeted by a loud chorus,
“Hi, John! Welcome!”
Somebody brought me a copy of “Where and When”, a monthly booklet which listed
all fifteen hundred AA meetings in the Washington area. At the end of the hour we
stood and held hands for the Lord’s Prayer, ending with “Keep coming back! It works if
you work it.” Then, before I could get out the door, I was surrounded by friendly
people offering me their telephone numbers and help if I needed it. Helen, the “High
Noon” matriarch and cookie-pusher, advised me sotto voce to find a sponsor from
within the group but to wait and listen carefully for a few meetings before choosing
whom to approach.
I did “keep coming back,” worked with a series of sponsors over the years and,
miraculously, was able to stop drinking to this day. Like Wally, I discovered that I still
had a lot of problems after I quit. After all, I came within a hair’s breadth of losing my
family, health and career, and I had to work long and hard on my Twelve Steps to
earn back people’s confidence and respect. I needed to re-invent myself completely.
If I was no longer John the Drunk, then who the hell was I? I had no idea!
Part of my twelve-step program of recovery was making amends to all the people I
injured during my drinking days. My wife and our kids came first, but also high on the
list was my father, seventy-eight, who lived in Boca Raton, Florida with Ruth, his
second wife of eleven years. They met two months after my mother’s suicide and
married only eight months later. Both my sisters, who blamed him for our mother’s
death, were furious that he did this, and I was rather estranged from the old man
also, although, unlike my sisters, I continued to visit him and Ruth occasionally. There
was always a lot of drinking during those visits.
Sometime in October I got enough courage to call my father to make my amends.
My AA sponsor told me not to worry if he didn’t accept them; they were for my own
good, not his. I was nonetheless sweating and nervous as I listened to the ring tone
at his end of the phone line.
“Hello?” He sounded perky.
“It’s me, Pop, how are you, and how is Ruth?”
“Oh, we’re fine, I guess. To what do I owe the rare pleasure of hearing from you,
Johnny? Do you need money?” he teased, always a little sarcastic.
“No, Pop, I just wanted to tell you some news. I joined AA.” There was silence at
the other end of the line. Then I heard my father laughing. “Are you laughing at me?” I
bristled.
“No, no! I’m not laughing at you. I’m delighted… because I joined AA too.” He said
he joined AA in April after a series of fender-benders and drunken episodes at his club,
one of which required two of the waiters to drive him home and put him to bed. Had I
really not spoken to him for more than six months? I suddenly felt ashamed for
neglecting him. We didn’t talk very long, but I told him I would fly down to visit him
and Ruth the following weekend.
“I want to make my eighth step amends to you, Pop.”
“Great, Johnny, I have some amends to make to you too.”
I spent the weekend in Boca Raton attending AA meetings and having long talks
with Pop. I talked about all the money I’d wasted, the cars I’d wrecked, the sleepless
nights I’d caused him and my mother. He talked about how he had made fun of me
when I was a child and buried himself in his books and writing on the weekends
instead of spending time with me. We talked about one awful day when he knocked
me down with his fist after I broke the window in his study with a rock. We both felt
terribly guilty for not doing more to help my mother before it was too late. One of my
greatest regrets about my drinking is that Mama didn’t live to see me in recovery.
When I told Mark, my AA sponsor, that I desperately needed to make amends to
my poor, dead mother, he understood. He too lost his mother while he was still
drinking. He suggested that I write a long letter to my mother telling her how much I
regretted adding to her suffering for so many years, how much I wished that she had
been able to find help to recover from her own addiction and how much happier I was
since I finally found sobriety after thirty years of avoiding it. Then, he said, I should
put the letter in the sink, light it and let it burn while I thought about my mother. I did
what he advised, but even today, sober for twenty-six years, I am still full of pain and
regret whenever I think of her, which I do several times each day.
The word “amends” literally means “changes”, not just telling someone “I’m sorry”. I
was forever telling people how sorry I was during my drinking days. I was about the
sorriest drunk you could imagine. But I never changed. I just kept going around in
circles, putting down the bottle hundreds of times, only to pick it up again a few days
later.
Change. That’s really what AA is all about. Taking stock of our lives with “a fearless
and searching moral inventory” and then asking God to remove our shortcomings.
Making amends (change, again) to people we harmed. Continuing to take personal
inventory and, when we are wrong, promptly admitting it. Changing ourselves,
changing our lives.
Whenever we told our stories at AA meetings, we were encouraged to say what we
used to be like, what happened and what we are like now. I have covered the first
two topics, but I need to say something about the third, what I am like now.
Like Wally, who led that very first meeting at High Noon, I too was surprised to find
that I still had a lot of problems after I finally stopped drinking. But, again like Wally, I
discovered that, for the first time, I was able to work on solving my “better class of
problems” without all the C2H5OH in my system. Rather than continually apologizing
for my behavior and then doing the same things over again, I was able to change my
behavior, gradually and painfully. I still have to struggle every day with my inflated
ego, my anxiety, my need to show off, to be right and to make you wrong. These
“character defects”, as we call them in AA-speak, are very stubborn and require my
constant vigilance to keep them from getting out of hand.
I love the idea of constant vigilance. There is an inscription on the
facade of the National Archives Building in Washington that reads, “The price of
freedom is constant vigilance.” I like to think that my freedom from addiction also
requires constant vigilance. Following the twelve steps of AA allows me a daily
reprieve from bondage to alcohol, nothing more. What I do with that daily reprieve is
up to me. I don’t squander it on the golf course like many retirees my age. I choose to
be active, to work on my relationships with family and friends, to volunteer in the
community, helping others to escape the bonds of addiction and other misfortunes, to
do research, to write…in short, to make a difference in the lives of a few others and
to be happy in my own life.
| r.kv.r.y. quarterly summer 2008 shorts on substances hitting bottom by john m. |
