Life wasn't worth living and he walked about like a zombie, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing but the raw spot in his heart. He just wanted to die because he couldn't think of any reason to live.
He wandered into a bar one day and never came out, he said, until two-and-a-half years later—and only then because his money and credit gave out. Never worked a stroke the whole time. He had turned bitter on life and claimed he was the most miserable man alive, hating everyone in particular and the world in general.
He'd spent his savings, sold his home and converted everything he owned that was salable into cash. Then he drank it up bottle by bottle. Six years later he was a withered wreck of a man, shaking out a bout with the DTs in the alcoholic ward of a city hospital.
There was a resident doctor there who had been working with AA and knew his drunks well. He had Tom on paraldehyde as he brought him through the DTs. Pretty soon Tom was crying for his medicine like a baby crying for its bottle. The doctor shut him off, but finally agreed to give him a little if he'd talk to a couple of guys from AA. Tom would do anything. Well, the guys came to visit two or three times a day but they couldn't get through to him because he was living in another world. As a last resort they gave Tom a kind of shock treatment—accused him of being a quitter and told him the facts of life in no uncertain terms. Tom came up out of bed and raved like a madman. The guys left. Sometime during the night something of what the men said got through to Tom. Next morning he lay quiet and attentive, listening to what his visitors said.
Tom had been sober five years when I met him at Men's Town, after hearing him talk to a bunch of drunks sent there by judges in the surrounding towns. What a man—alive to his fingertips, bursting with energy and a zest for living that would put to shame a teenager. When he listened to a man's problems he crooned and clucked in genuine understanding, his eyelids veiled with the heavy film of compassion.
Tom picked the toughest cookies of them all and the drunks he pulled back from the lip of hell would fill a city square. I'll bet his wife is beaming proudly somewhere up there to watch the likes of Tom as he lives each day to the fullest, giving everything he's got, piling up treasure in heaven that will take eternity to spend. You could tell by the look in his eye he had a new love, a love that would never fail.
It is assuring to know there are men like Tom in the world, lighting a candle here and there, cutting a swathe through the darkness. Someone's got to show the way, and it's guys like Tom who'll be doing it.
G.L.
Boise, Idaho
There Can Be Love and Laughter
February 1974
On June 8, 1961, while sitting in a boat fishing a picturesque little lake in Illinois, I reached a decision. I had returned to the scenes of my childhood to visit my mother, and for one week I had come daily to this tranquil spot to fish, to pray and meditate, and to reflect back over the years of my life as an active alcoholic.
There had been a brief interlude of dryness, when I was going to AA meetings for a period of three months. But then had come the old call of the wild, and I had bolted, rejoining the pack—the old cronies in their dens.
Now I was at the turning point. What was I to do about my life and the influence my life was having on those around me? The choice was mine to make. Was I to continue down the path of self-willed destruction, filled with hangovers, remorse, confusion, and chaos, or was I to stop, make an about-face, and follow the AA path with God and his people as my guides?
It was not a decision made lightly. I agonized over the emptiness of life without all my good drinking friends. Where would love and romance come from? Love and romance were important to me. Where would laughter and fun come from? Laughter and fun were important to me. God didn't like gaiety, I rationalized. God frowned on frivolity. The church of my parents had said so. Was I capable of living out my allotted time in solemn, somber sobriety?
My mind flooded with memories of the price I had always paid for the fleeting gaiety, the hollow laughter, the pseudo loves. I made the decision. “Okay, God. You win. It's AA all the way—starting tomorrow.”
That's the way it was. The decision, I mean.
I pulled anchor, steered my little boat landward, and never looked back at the tranquil spot, the tiny cove with its tree-filled shores, its quietness and majestic calmness.
Heading to the nearest bar to celebrate my decision, I drank the rest of the day, while driving back to my home in Northern Indiana.
The next morning, June 9, 1961, there was a note of finality to that hangover. I had drained the last dregs from the cup. I had had enough. It was finished.
That was thirteen years ago, and each morning since that day, when I have awakened, I have had the feeling “I have had enough.”
Let me tell you about my mornings now. Upon awakening, I take my cup of coffee to the patio of our small, pink house nestled under great oaks and hickory trees along the shoreline of a tranquil cove on a picturesque lake in Illinois. Soon, my husband joins me. My husband—the first boy I ever loved, the idol of my high-school days, returned to me through the divine grace of the Higher Power I came to know through a program of Steps to recovery. We have our morning prayers and meditation in harmony with the birds and God's little critters scampering about.
My gaze fixes on a spot out in the cove. I see a woman in a small boat. I feel again her loneliness, her fears and frustrations. I hurt for her; but there is a sweetness to the pain, the sweetness of gratitude, for she lives only in my memories. May she always abide there. I have gone full circle, returning now to the exact location where I made the weighty decision that changed my life.
I write now to that new woman—and to any woman new in our Fellowship today. That lonely, fearful woman, who cannot envision life without alcohol and all the familiar ramifications of a drinker's life. Thirteen years ago, forty years old, twice divorced, all I could see stretching ahead was an empty path for me to trudge alone.
Go to work; come home; meet the family's needs; go to AA meetings alone; come home alone; go to bed alone. Do the best I could about an inventory of self. Relate the sordid details of a seemingly wasted life to another human being. Make humble petitions for forgiveness to those I had harmed. Each morning, day after day after day, ask the God of my limited understanding for his guidance “today.” Some days, almost hourly, renew the plea for his way in my life.
But, ever so slowly, I could feel myself changing. Things that had seemed important were no longer important. There was inside me a warming, a softening, a stirring, as the petals of a rosebud stir almost imperceptibly into a blossom.
You, too, can live, new woman—really live. There will be love and laughter and a delicious sense of well-being down deep inside if you will abandon yourself to the business of recovery—not just recovery from the disease of active alcoholism, but deeper than that, recovery from a former self. Such thorough recovery can be realized, I believe, only through the fearless application of spiritual principles to our daily lives.
I hear the katydids, the buzz of the locusts, and I am reminded of a passage I read about a man named Joel. The locusts had devastated his lands year after year, but God said to Joel, “I will restore to you the years the locusts have taken.”
My heart swells and tears of gratitude fill my eyes, for I, too, have had restored to me the years of the locusts, through a blessed Fellowship called AA.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a Fellowship of men and women who share. Thank you, Grapevine, for letting me share.
N. G.
Neoga, Illinois
Close Shave
December 1998
In the fall of 1971, I was on my usual holiday drunk. It was the kind where I appreciated being able to go to a bar and not feel uncomfortable because I was shaking and looked like warmed-over death. A simple statement to the barkeep—“I