When I finally stopped drinking, I became a regular attendee at an AA meeting. I was amazed at and by some of the stories people who had stopped drinking cold. I was specifically interested in the circumstances that led them to AA. While some of these episodes go back to the early 1970s, I still remember them very clearly, as if they occurred yesterday.
I have met many wonderful people through my association with Alcoholics Anonymous. This Superman—and I’ll explain that moniker in a bit—had the ability to make people laugh. He was a natural comedian. All he had to do was greet you with a “hello,” and he would bring a smile to your face. He could probably have been a very successful entertainer, but he used his unique way of charming people in his insurance business career, and it paid off immensely. You could say that he did very well financially, but that would be an understatement.
There is a saying that kind of goes like this: “happy on the outside and crying on the inside.” Clowns are considered to be happy figures, even if they are wearing sad-sack or sad-face makeup. We see them as being always cheery—or at least they keep us cheery as they pantomime antics that demonstrate troubles.
Smokey Robinson & the Miracles recorded “The Tears of a Clown for Tamla Records (Motown Records) back in 1967. Smokey claimed that he based this song on the Italian opera Pagliacci, where a clown continued to make his audience laugh while he wept behind his makeup. His wife, the most important thing to him in his life had betrayed him. In the song, Smokey sang: “Just like Pagliacci did, I try to keep my surface hid.”
Likewise, Superman kept his surface hid—or at least he tried to—from his family, friends, and clients. His single flaw lay in his addiction to alcohol.
Here we have another example of a person who has become very successful. He made it to the top of his world. He had it all: success, money, a circle of friends, and a family who loved and supported him. As Superman shared his woeful tale of his life with us, he revealed the kryptonite that very nearly killed him.
He admitted to having a history of drinking that dated back to the 1960s. At first, like myself, it started with a drink for lunch. Then, two drinks. After that, a drink before dinner and then after dinner. Not long afterward, forget the lunch and dinner: drinking virtually non-stop became a habit. His life had become unmanageable. He started having blackouts and vision problems, the latter almost costing him his life.
There are two kinds of blackouts: “en bloc” and “fragmentary.” With fragmentary blackouts, the alcoholic typically cannot recall moments for small periods of time. These are not necessarily life threatening. A lot of drivers can identify with momentary blackouts, as “how did I get here again?”
But en bloc refers to larger periods of memory loss. People who experience fragmentary blackouts can typically recall forgotten events once they are reminded of them, but not so with en bloc blackouts where a region in the brain integral to memory formation is damaged. Sufferers with en bloc lose days; they don’t know what they did or what happened while they were under the influence even when people remind them or tell them what occurred. You could videotape a drunk under the influence, and it still would not register in the mind.
Vision can be altered because drinking heavily impairs brain function. Blurred vision or double vision can occur due to a weakened eye muscle coordination. Drivers can experience delayed reactions. Drinking alcohol can decrease the sensitivity of one’s peripheral vision, creating the effect or perception of tunnel vision. Finally, excess drinking can develop optic neuropathy, which is a painless loss of vision, peripheral vision, or reduced color vision. Under the influence of alcohol, the drunk isn’t aware of his impairment: it’s just “norm” from drinking and nothing to worry about.
“I’m off,” slurred Superman as he waved goodbye to his drinking buddies.
“No way, man,” one of his bar friends told him, weaving a bit himself as he tried counseling Superman to “sleep it off” at a flop house nearby. “You’re too drunk to drive home.”
Telling a drunk not to drive is a waste of time. I was similarly told many times not to drive while I was drunk because I was impaired. Eventually, I was warned, I was going to be involved in a serious accident. I nearly was, as I retold in my book Miracles, Luck, or What?, but that incident and others like that didn’t stop me from drinking.
“Oh, posh!” Superman waved the man off. “I’ve driven that route so often, I know it like the back of my hand. Why, I could drive it in my sleep, if I had to.” And he left the bar.
This is one reason why I named him Superman. In his inebriated state, which, unfortunately is shared by users of other drugs, he felt himself invincible. Up till now, nothing bad had happened to him. Nothing could happen to him, he was convinced. This was the one time that fate or the throw of the dice was against him.
He left New York via the George Washington Bridge. (This famous bridge is one of the connections between Manhattan Island and New Jersey, and since he lived in New Jersey, the bridge was the fastest way home.) There is no such thing as light traffic on that bridge: it is busy all hours of the night and day. But on this particular night, he found that he could drive a little faster than usual, and that pleased him because he could get home a little earlier, maybe have a nightcap before climbing into bed.
As he was dreaming, his car was fast approaching the toll booths on the New Jersey side. And then, his vision failed him. Normally, there would be lines of cars and trucks stopped at each lane as each waited its turn to pay. But as luck would have it, several of the lanes were empty or just now being emptied. The problem was, instead of seeing eight toll booths, he saw sixteen! No problem, our Superman said to himself. I’ll just navigate between them.
Superman was never certain if he ever touched the brake pedal and might have pressed the accelerator pedal instead, which propelled the car even faster. Attendants manning the two toll booths on either side of a concrete dividing barrier had little reaction time to do anything but show a face of horror.
It is a fact that when two objects are on a trajectory course to collide both are going to affect the other. They can both move or, in this case, one will be more severely impacted than the other. Based on the mass of each and that the barrier was pretty much anchored, not to mention that it was nearly twice the length of the car, the concrete barrier won the contest hands down.
The whole front end of the car crumpled and crushed inside the engine compartment. But the momentum of the car’s velocity sent the chassis up and over the barrier. It had now become an unguided missile, aimed inerrantly at one of the toll booth stations. The sound of the initial crash must have been equivalent to an explosion, but it was the gut-wrenching smash of the undercarriage landing on top of the barrier, followed by screeching metal as the car slid off the barrier to land nearly on its side in the right lane that got most of the on-lookers’ attention.
Superman wrenched the driver’s side door open and stumbled out. Fortunately, neither he nor any of the booth attendants were hurt. He looked at the mortally wounded front end, the pitched angle of the car, and began to whoop! “I am invincible!” he started shouting to no one in particular, although there were a great number of people who witnessed the accident. But like good New Yorkers and New Jerseyans, drivers and occupants gawked for a few seconds, probably spoke a few colorful epithets about our Superman, and moved on with their own business with a short story to tell friends, neighbors, and family members about later.
You can imagine the immediate chaos that followed. The attendants were screaming. Police were running madly towards our Superman, more out of concern that he might get himself killed. Superman began walking around the toll plaza, yelling: “I am superman! Look at my destroyed car! But I am unhurt!” When the police tackled him and drove him to the ground, his last words, I believe, were: “Now, I’m hurt!”
The police handcuffed him and hauled him off to the drunk tank where he was allowed to sober up. The following afternoon, it was a much more subdued and penitent man standing before a judge.
“License suspended for six months, and I’m ordering you to attend an AA meeting,” the judge sentenced him.
“But judge, I’m not a drunk!”
The judge pointed his gavel at him and warned him. “You attend an AA meeting, or I’ll take you off the streets for two years. It’s your choice!”
“I am very thankful,” admitted Superman to us in conclusion of his talk, “for both the accident and the judge. I could have killed someone that night. I could have killed myself, which would have been a lot worse for my family. I am also thankful for that judge. He could easily have sentenced me to a few days or even a few months behind bars. But that wouldn’t have changed me or my self-destructive behavior. I am not ashamed to stand before you and tell you that I am an alcoholic. I attribute my continued sobriety and participation at these AA meetings because of that accident, and, of course, that judge. Thank you.”
While I lived in northern New Jersey, I attended an AA meeting every Monday night. It was an open meeting whereby both alcoholics and non-alcoholics could attend. The format of the meeting was pretty simple. Three recovering alcoholics would narrate their history and problems due to alcohol consumption. One of the three would act as a meeting leader, while the other two would speak for approximately twenty minutes. The speakers would tell their personal stories about their drinking problems: “what it was like then,” what happened to them and others because of their drinking, “what it was like now,” and what life was like now that they had stopped drinking.
On one Monday night after the meeting was already in progress, a latecomer entered the room. He was obviously drunk. While the speaker, a woman, on the stage was trying to tell her alcoholic story, the drunken latecomer started to interrupt the meeting. Using vile language, he began denigrating the woman. Other members present tried to ask him to be quiet without success and ended up physically escorting him from the meeting. Outside the room, his vile language increased in a disgusting manner. Eventually, he ran out of curses and left, walking off into the dark night.
We thought that was the end of it, except the following Monday, he again came to the meeting. He stood at the entrance and was so disgustingly rude that he was escorted to the front door. The drunk was so angry that he tried to throw a haymaker at one of the men escorting him out. Well, the intended recipient ducked, and the drunk drove his fist through a glass door, ripping open his right hand and arm. Since he was bleeding excessively, the police were called as well as an ambulance. He was soon carted off to a local hospital, and that was the last time we saw this disruptive person.
One might think, as a non-alcoholic, that there was no help for this drunk. However, life is full of surprises.
A couple of years later, I was in San Francisco for a week’s vacation. Long before the Giants baseball franchise moved out of New York, I was an ardent fan. Now that they had built a new home, Candlestick Park, my loyalty to them was still strong.
I attended an AA meeting on a Tuesday night in downtown San Francisco. As I walked up the stairs to the meeting room, I stopped dead still. The very drunk we had thrown out of an AA meeting—twice—in New Jersey was standing before me. He recognized me as well. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. I was witnessing another miracle of a former drunk who had found a way to control his disease.
We talked for a while.
“I’ve been battling the alcohol demon for decades,” he admitted to me. “It ate me up inside. It brought out a demon in me that even I hated. I came out west to try and find a new life, but there is no running away from the addiction. I’m not going to bore you with a lot of details. I’m too embarrassed to talk about most of the things I have done. I wouldn’t wish some of them on my worst enemy. I’ve been in and out of the pokey so many times, they almost have a cell reserved for me.
“But eventually I decided to stop taking that first drink. I want you to know that I’m completely into AA. I’m so happy to see you here, because, in accordance with Step 9, I offer you my sincerest apology if I hurt you or offended you in any way.”
I shook my head. “You have nothing to apologize to me for. As a recovering alcoholic myself, I’m just glad to see you here.”
In 1971, a young man had a serious alcohol problem. His wife was on the edge of divorcing him, but as hard as he tried, he could not stop. She was a member of Al-Anon, which is a Twelve-Step program for wives, children, and friends of alcoholics. Because of her membership in the Al-Anon program, she felt qualified to claim that her husband had a serious drinking problem, and it was tearing their marriage apart. She kept threatening to divorce him unless he stopped drinking and became a sober member of AA.
Well, he resisted her threats until one Monday night, when they had a big blowout.
“If you don’t go to a meeting tonight, I’m calling my lawyer tomorrow!”
The husband sat in his favorite chair, unmoved. “Yeah, yeah! How many times have I heard that one before?” He started to take a swig of beer when his wife knocked the bottle out of his hand. It bounced, rolled, and finally clattered up against the wall. He looked up in shock. He had never seen his wife this angry before, and it rattled him.
“Tonight!” she screamed her fury at him.
“It’s snowing!” her husband responded, looking out the window. It was, in fact, snowing pretty heavily, and probably the roads were all blocked up. “I’d go,” he lied, trying to placate her, “but it’s snowing too much! Besides, no one is going to go to a meeting in this weather.”
I remember that same night very well, because I was snowed in and could not attend the meeting, and there was no traffic moving as well.
“There is always a meeting!” she shot back.
“It’s snowing!” he yelled.
“Fine! I’m calling my lawyer!” she responded, screeching with the same emotional temper.
The husband angrily grabbed his coat, gloves, hat, and galoshes and put them on. “Fine!” he shouted back. “I’m leaving! I’m gonna prove to you there ain’t no AA meeting tonight! And when I come back—if I come back and not freeze to death first—we’ll see who’s gonna eat crow!”
The distance between his house to the AA meeting place took about a half an hour to walk when the weather cooperated. Tonight, however, it was treacherous. Even penguins would have had the good sense of huddling down until the storm had passed. He was dead certain that there would be no meeting tonight. He was cold and getting wet for nothing, just to get his wife off his back. If he was right, the meeting place would be locked up tighter than a drum. And then he would return home all justified with hell to pay.
But lo and behold, the meeting place was open! The meeting room was unlocked. With a bit of resignation and disappointment, he entered the meeting room and saw no one. The lights were all on, and the room was totally set up for a meeting: the chairs were in place, the AA literature was all displayed out, and the coffee was perking. Then he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. An older gentleman was finishing up and patiently waiting for more recovering alcoholics to arrive.
To say that our husband was shocked would have been an understatement. He walked over to the elder who was now sitting in patient silence.
“Mind if I ask: how long have you been sober?”
The elder looked up at him and smiled: “Thirty-two years.”
The husband didn’t understand. “Thirty-two years,” he repeated. “But—why—what are you doing here on a night like this? There’s a snow storm raging outside.”
The old man gave the husband a reproaching look: “I’m waiting for you, you dobby bastard!”
Struck dumb, the husband sat down in front of the elder. That was the statement he needed to hear.
“But I’m not a drunk,” the husband insisted although weakly.
“Then why the hell are you here?” the old man challenged him.
From that day forward, he started staying sober one day at a time. Not only did he become a dedicated member of AA, he started many new meetings in the New Jersey area.
He kept in touch with me by phone for many years, always excited about starting a new AA meeting so he could help other dobby bastards like himself who needed the help of an AA meeting.
It was a cold night in northern New Jersey. A drunk was weaving his way through the town’s streets. He was kind of lost, and he didn’t know where he was heading. Many drunks sometimes just wander the streets, lost due to the debilitating effects of alcohol. Oh, how I know that feeling, because I have wandered, lost, the streets of New York many a time.
As he was wandering around, he saw some people entering a building, and he became curious as to why these people were going into the building. It was way too late to be doing business, and they sure as heck didn’t dress like they were going to a party. So, he decided to follow these folk to see what was going on.
He followed several men into a room where he saw an old fashioned radiator standing near the entrance. (I always liked those radiators of my youth, as they brought back lots of memories with their popping, banging, and gasping noises with hot water and air passing through the loops of the heating element.) Being that it was a cold night, and he was chilled to the bone, he drew up a chair beside the radiator and sat down just to get warm. By the way, it is a myth to believe that drinking alcohol will raise one’s body temperature. One alcoholic drink can make a person feel warmer, but it actually lowers the core body temperature. Our drunk was much colder than he felt or believed.
Around eight p.m., a gentleman stepped up on the stage and announced: “Welcome to the regular Tuesday night meeting of Alcoholic Anonymous.”
The drunk didn’t have a clue about AA much less any interest in the organization. He had come into the room just to get warm. But to his credit, he did pay attention to what the speaker’s message was: “If you stop drinking and start attending AA meetings, your life will get better.”
It was at this point he realized he was at his very first AA meeting, and things were already better. I mean, he was warm. No one was bothering him. And, there was some free pastries and a pot of coffee on a table in the back of the room.
Up till the day I stopped going to that Tuesday night gathering, when I arrived I would see this recovering alcoholic sitting by the radiator, whether there was rain or snow or perfect weather that day, or whether it was cold or warm outside. So, I got to know him and finally got the nerve to ask him why he liked to sit next to the radiator all the time.
“I believe a higher power brought me to this meeting that first time,” he explained with a twinkle in his eyes. “I wasn’t interested in AA, getting sober, or anything else in my life. But I saw this radiator, and I sat down next to this radiator to get warm. That’s all I cared about. But if I hadn’t been drunk that night; if I hadn’t been so blasted cold, I wouldn’t have come in. I wouldn’t have tried to snuggle up against this radiator. I wouldn’t have heard the words that, so far, have saved my life. So, I hope you now understand how much this radiator means to me.”
This gentleman had one penny to his name. Literally. He had heard about AA before, and he had a drinking problem. But he hadn’t reached his bottom yet. Eventually, his social and financial situation caused him to consider giving AA a chance. He had no job, no family, just the clothes on his back, and his wealth amounted to that one penny.
One Penny used to go to meetings because he had been told that the meetings were free to attend and that sometimes coffee and donuts were available free of charge. So, he decided to go to AA regularly. It wasn’t his intention to take care of his addiction, but he was out of options as to how to deal with his pitiful situation. As long as there was a meeting, he reasoned, he could live, too. It was easy to recognize him: he was the first one to treat himself to the snacks and coffee. He would have stayed in the meeting place forever, because he really had no other place to go.
Another reason he liked to hang around the meetings was because there were no dues or fees for attending or becoming a member. No one asked him for a financial statement either.
One meeting, One Penny listened to one of the sober speakers who shared how his life had improved since he joined AA. As long as he stayed sober—one day at a time—things kept improving, the speaker stated. One Penny wondered how his life could improve if he stopped drinking and started attending the meetings—other than for the free coffee and snacks, that is—with the goal of staying sober for the rest of his life.
After the meeting, One Penny started wandering the streets as usual. The germ of an idea of becoming a standard member of the chapter and becoming sober began to lose its luster. After all, he reasoned, life hadn’t become all that bad. Yet. He didn’t have to make a life-changing decision. Yet.
As he congratulated himself on his wise decision, he glanced down to the pavement and spied a penny shining back up at him.
Picking it up, he muttered to himself, “The speaker was right. Things are getting better. I now have two pennies!” Then he looked back at the building where he had just come out of the AA meeting. Was this a sign that a Higher Power was trying to convey to him?
HE HAD TO BE KNOCKED OUT TO FIND ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
One of my drinking buddies was a construction worker. He was married with three children and a wife. Although he made good money, he had a problem going directly home on paydays. With money in his pocket, he would join some of his fellow workers who retired to a bar after work. They would get to carousing, and both money and alcohol would flow freely. By the time he got home, there was little money for family financial obligations. His wife complained about his drinking and the lack of money, but in his mind, things were not that bad.
“You were out again,” his wife accused him acidly.
“So?” the husband weaved back and forth. “I work hard for a living, woman! I deserve a night out every now and then!”
“Where’s the money?” the wife demanded. And when the husband handed over what was left from the paycheck, she screamed at him. “What am I supposed to do with this? The kids need lunch money. They need things for their school project. They need new shoes. I need new shoes. Which bill do you want me not to pay this month?”
The husband merely waved her off. “That’s your problem. I make the money. You spend the money.”
“You drink the money, you mean.” She threw a cup at him, the closest inanimate object at hand, which missed his head by just a few inches.
Many addicted people follow this pattern, thinking that if things did go bad they would stop their destructive behavior. But this is the trap: they won’t stop because for them things were never that bad. I was one of those people who had become so far gone from reality that I didn’t know how bad things were.
My friend was also blind to how bad things were becoming in his personal life, due to drinking. His wife tried using threats to get him to stop blowing their money on drinking. Nothing worked. So then, she had a bright idea: she would confront him in the bar where he drank their life funds away on payday.
Picture this:
It was their favorite watering hole where construction workers from different on-site jobs gathered together to carouse, let off steam, and get as drunk as fast as they could. The husband was in his element: shouting, laughing, telling off-colored jokes, and getting high on ever-flowing beer. If he wasn’t offering up free drinks, he was adept at losing drinking games that rapidly ate up his paycheck.
The wife entered the bar. She drew a lot of looks and even a few catcalls. But no one seemed to read her mind nor her intention that night, least of all her husband. She walked with a singular purpose into the bar and saw him having such a great time with his buddies. She lost it. She walked up right behind him, tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned around, she punched him in the jaw as hard as she could! He fell off the stool and landed heavily on the floor, out for the count. To be fair to the wife, she was a big, strong woman, more than capable of knocking a man out with one punch.
You could hear a pin drop. That is, if you turned off the television and the loud music playing. Men like to pretend to themselves that they can handle any woman in any situation, but not when a woman displays the “hell has no fury like a woman scorned” attitude. They all tried to make themselves as small or insignificant as possible.
When her husband finally regained consciousness, he saw an ugly picture of his wife standing over him and screaming: “I will kill you, you drunk!”
That was a moment of clarity for him, a turning point in life. He realized in that moment just how unmanageable his life had become, and it was all because of his drinking addiction. Plus which, he was mortified and embarrassed in front of his friends. No man likes to be shown up by his wife, much less admit it, in front of male friends. It is emasculating.
The bottom line is that after he and his wife left the bar, he never drank again as long as I knew him. Yes, he had to put up with jokes and jibes about who wore the pants in his family, but down deep he was grateful for that knock-out punch. He didn’t just get his life back, he got a new life.
Normally, in these short vignettes, I end each with the “happy” ending that people found AA and the successful turn-around they experienced. However, there is more to this story.
Unfortunately, after the husband had been sober for some time, he was seriously injured on the job. The injury was so great that he was no longer capable of continuing as a construction worker. He was forced to retire and went on permanent disability. He became a “house dad,” staying home to take care of the children. His wife then went to work and became the “bread winner” of the family.
“I felt so useless,” he confessed to us during his turn on testifying how he found AA. “Getting punched out by a woman was bad enough, but let’s face it guys: we are supposed to be the bread winner, supporting the family, not the wife. That was even more emasculating.
“One day, I asked my wife to accompany me to the garage. The garage was filled with junk, you know, kind of like that junk so-called reality television show Storage Wars people bid on, hoping to find a single treasure or gem to make their investment worthwhile. I suggested that we get rid of it all.
“Well, one piece of junk was an old wooden chair that was pretty beaten up. Most of us probably would just have throw it into the garbage and forgotten about it.
“My wife, however, looked at it and suggested: ‘Why don’t you refinish it? You could probably make it look like new.’
“I appraised the chair. It would take some work, but I knew I could do it. So, I bought some necessary supplies and set to work. When I finished it, I was fairly pleased with it. A number of people even complimented me on my masterpiece,” he added, laughing, “and were impressed with my skills as a repairer and refinisher.
“‘I bet you could make some money refurbishing old furniture,’ my wife commented obliquely.”
And sure enough, he took up the challenge. On weekends, he and his wife would rummage through garage sales, hoping of find wooden things that could be refinished. They had become like that other television reality show, The Pickers.
To make a long story short, a new business was born. Initially, he did all the refinishing work himself and then held garage sales and sold his handiwork for a fair price. The business grew rather rapidly, and he hired other men to do the refinishing. I never asked him how much money he was making. I’m not sure he really cared. He no longer felt useless. Disabled, yes; an alcoholic, yes; but he dramatically illustrates the title of this book: Never Count a Drunk Out. In this case, he came back fighting after being knocked out.
Bob was new to the program when I met him. He was the kind of a guy that when he said “Hello” to you, he made you laugh, like Superman in the story above. He always had a jovial personality, in and out of the program. I always enjoyed his company.
Before he stopped drinking, he could not hold down a steady job. Luckily, his wife worked, and her salary helped meet their monthly bills. Bob eventually stopped looking for a regular job. Financially maintaining a family of five children that was just getting by was an understatement.
He started hanging out in different bars to feed his alcoholic addiction. Although he didn’t have a regular job, bar owners would let him clean out their bars, sharing a portion of their tips. They liked having around because he was basically the local clown. He made the customers laugh. After time, many of the customers would get to know Bob and his family problems, which make good stories to laugh at, and they thought the