as somewhat of an example, if not a font, of AA wisdom. My AA talks pointed out not only how stupid I had been, but also—and mostly—how much smarter I was now. In discussion meetings I never asked questions; I just answered them. I overflowed with AA know-how, and insidiously it put me out of touch. Secretly, I did not mind at all when someone once referred to me as an oracle.
True, I was sharing my experience, and what I revealed was honest. But it was not the whole truth. I kept hidden from others the yet-unsolved problems, the shameful secrets of today, admitting them fully to no one.
I was furious at the old AA friend who punctured the vanity balloon, but she was right. I had been so busy giving fellowship that I had forgotten to accept any. And she finally goaded me into doing something about it. I began to spill it all out, at last sharing the other parts of my total experience, including the bad and the embarrassing. Believe me, it was a liberating experience, and the help was enormously strengthening.
I still marvel that our Loners and Internationalists, who hardly ever get to meetings, stay beautifully sober. But I also remember that originally the Grapevine began as a message from the AAs back home to the AAs overseas in World War II. And I recall a letter from a private, who wrote from Normandy, “Even thousands of miles away, I know I am not alone, since all of you are always with me in spirit.’’
Maybe those isolated members—perhaps because they have to dig so deep into our literature—sense better than some meeting-goers like me the meanings and values of fellowship. They are constantly reminded that the Twelve Steps say we admitted, we came to believe, we made a decision, and we tried to carry the message.
This beautiful we, this sticking together in our brotherhood of love—which can heal my individual sick soul, as well as cementing together our Fellowship—is set forth for all of us in the words “Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity.”
B.L., New York, N.Y.
Tradition Three
The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.
January 1970.
Who can measure what is in the heart of another? No one presumed to measure the sincerity or quality of my motivation to get well when I first approached AA. Our Third Tradition is based on group experience, and its wisdom has truly been proved to me in personal experience. It is a powerful tool for safeguarding my own recovery.
When I first offered myself to AA, some twenty-five years ago, I met almost no requirements for joining any decent gathering. The preceding months had been nothing but drunkenness, accompanied by a sickness at heart which few but alcoholics can fathom. I could have completed no questionnaire or application blank. I had no address, no telephone, no references. My last few employers would have warned anyone not to let me inside the door. My estranged family would have agreed. I had no religion, no job, no clothes except those I was wearing. I could not have paid for entertainment in a penny arcade. From my past behavior, I could not prove that I deserved any kindness or help. I was dirty, and I stank. I had only a highly undesirable sickness to offer AA, and that was all AA asked of me.
I was so chilled inside, so bleak and numb that, although I had no overcoat, I did not notice the bitter wintry weather on the January day when I first walked, zombie-like, up the steps into the old AA clubhouse on New York’s West 41st Street. What shakes I could not control, I pretended were deliberate, if weird, gestures. My mouth was cottony; I had not had a drink for about thirty-six hours. I knew from gloomy past experiences that I must just hold on for one more minute, make my legs take one more step, try to think of some great happy moment in the past (or invent one), steel my will just one more time, and sooner or later I could get a drink, after I had investigated this Alcoholics Anonymous business. Or, mercifully, I would suddenly die. I had no strength to ask for help. I was taking this dangerous risk—getting near strangers who, I was told, did not ask for names and had been pretty bad drinkers themselves—just to see whether I could observe while being unobserved.
Although I did not know what to expect, I was prepared—with lies, naturally. I had to be. If anyone asked me how much I drank, I always lied; the quantity was irrelevant to how drunk I got or what happened to me. If I was asked what I would do to get a drink, I would have to lie, because if I admitted the truth, I would surely be punished. If I was asked how I behaved when drunk, I would lie, partly to cover up the blackouts, partly to hide the bits of shameful truth that I did recall.
Since this was in 1945, before our Third Tradition was written, the AA woman who spoke to me first had no formal printed guidance for deciding whom to admit to AA for help. But she had compassion. She did not begin with a blunt “Are you an alcoholic?” If she had, I would have said, “Certainly not,” with my usual nasty aloofness. Nor did she ask, “Do you want to stop drinking?” In my state, the question would have seemed absurd, if not insane. The one thing in the world I needed and wanted that minute was a stiff drink. But I was afraid to take one. That fact glued my feet just inside the door of the old building, where I pretended to be reading a handy bulletin board.
But she spied me lurking about, and, in a kind but not over-gooey voice, she said, “Are you having trouble with your drinking?” I was thunderstruck. It was the one query I had not prepared a lie for. Before I knew what was happening, I told the truth. I nodded yes.
“Well, I’m a drunk myself,” she said. “Come on in and we’ll talk it over.’’
She spoke easily, with no emotionalism. I had thought I was beyond surprise, but I could only stare in disbelief. She seemed so serene, so content, so clean, so respectable. How could she say she was a drunk?
We sat down, and my education began. She asked no questions, so I did not have to be cautiously alert; I could just listen with full, intense attention. I heard about her disease, alcoholism, and her recovery in AA. It was more comforting, more nourishing, and more enduring than any drink had ever been. Probably my face remained frozen, but my heart thawed, and I had to keep blinking rapidly and blowing my nose. Finally, warm inside, I began to feel the cold I had come in out of.
Dreading the answer, I was afraid to ask what was in my heart: “Will you, please, let me join?” I knew I did not deserve it, so, with a disdain often practiced, I tried to sound casual while managing to murmur, as if only impersonally interested, “How does one join?”
She said that my simply coming there meant I wanted help, and if I just wanted to be a member of AA, then I already was.
I hope I never forget the floods of relief those words brought. I particularly need to remember them when I am disturbed or inconvenienced by “improper personages” who sometimes intrude on nice, clean, sober, orderly AA meetings these days. A group near my home has “banned” two alcoholics from its premises. Impossible types, I heard. Most uncooperative, very undesirable.
I was not in on these exclusions, but during my early AA days I sometimes led the pack in verbally stoning an alcoholic out of the one place where he could have found help at that time. We had many rules of membership then. They were a nuisance, because we had to keep changing them almost weekly to keep the “wrong” people out and let the “right” people in. Sometimes one week’s sergeant-at-arms was himself excluded the next week because he was drunk. Me.
Perhaps today’s would-be rule-makers for AA membership, or guardians of the premises, are those whose drinking lives had such virtue as to earn for them the “privilege” of AA assistance. But no member I know claims such deserts, and I know I do not. As you see, I am now as intolerant of rule-makers as they are of the sick alcoholics they find undesirable.
Honestly now, if in order to get into AA we had to meet any standards more rigid than the one given in the Third Tradition, who of us would be alive? Think of all the wonderful people, including the nonconformists, eccentrics, and kooks who make such valuable additions to our number, who would have been kept out of AA if we had any requirement for membership other than a desire to get well.
Although I know it is impossible to judge what is in anyone else’s heart, and