what I was like at the end. I have no memory of it. A year of my life has been completely wiped out. I can only tell you what it did to me. When I came out of intensive care, I weighed only 130 pounds. I was in a wheelchair. It wasn’t a car accident that put me there; I had crawled into a bottle and almost killed myself. From what I’ve been able to find out, the doctors think I drank for about two months, day and night.
The alcohol level in my body was toxic enough to cause me to quit breathing four or five times. My internal organs (liver, etc.) had shut down. My body wasn’t functioning. That and the alcohol poisoning are what put me in the wheelchair. My vocal cords were paralyzed, my voice only a whisper. My memory was shot to hell.
After a year in the wheelchair, I was able to start using forearm crutches. I used them for four months before I could walk on my own. My voice is back and I’m able to shout with the best of them. The memory is still bad but I deal with it. I have used the stubbornness that kept me drinking to aid in my recovery. I have a lot of tangible things that I can look at and say, “Things are better.”
I’m not going to say that it is all better. Even with everything I’ve been through, it will cross my mind to drink again. I’m not sure that this desire will ever leave me. I call it a gut reaction. The old-timers that I’ve met at the meetings are split over whether it will ever go away. Right now I work on realizing that what I can control is my reaction to that thought. I also look at meetings as getting together with friends; that way it isn’t a chore. It is something that I want to do. I don’t know if I can risk a relapse; I came very close to death with my last drink. Now there are people around me who will help me, and maybe I’ve helped them.
Bad things will still happen; that is life. But I get to live it. That’s something I took for granted at one time and almost lost. In November I had my two-year anniversary. It doesn’t sound like much but at the beginning I didn’t think it was possible. I did it a day at a time as it was suggested. It has worked so far so I don’t plan on changing it.
RICK A.
EL PASO, TEXAS
Preamble to Recovery
May 1975
We put the AA Preamble in the Labor News, a once-a-week paper. Last week, a man who left AA twenty years ago happened to read it. Even though he was drunk, he got hold of another AA member and went to his first meeting again. And last night at a meeting, a friend told me he was still sober. I guess that makes it all worthwhile.
When I came around the first time at age sixteen, I just couldn’t identify with anyone. AA wasn’t out in the open as much. Then I came back at twenty-five, in January 1970, after living two years on Clark Street in Chicago. There still weren’t any real young people in AA. The youngest were in their thirties. But I made up my mind to stay anyway. I’ve only had one slip since then, at the end of two years, simply because I didn’t work the Steps. I was lucky it only lasted six days.
After my slip, I started working all Twelve Steps in order, and I lost my compulsion to drink, even when I went through a lot emotionally. My wife came down with Guillain-Barré syndrome. It’s a form of polio. She was completely paralyzed for eight months and out of work for a year. I had only been sober about four months when she became ill, and you know, I didn’t even think of a drink, even when she was in intensive care and they didn’t know whether she would live or not. If it hadn’t been for AA, I wouldn’t have made it.
Last September, my wife had our first child—a boy. So, you see, I’m really thankful for AA, because it gave me my wife and son. I met my wife, who is a nurse, while on a Twelfth Step call. We had taken a fellow to the hospital for help.
When I was young, I was a wino on the street for two years, in mental hospitals about forty times, and in jails about as often. It got so bad, the AAs didn’t want me, ‘cause I had used them so many times. I was even barred from the hospital at the end. I’m grateful that this past Christmas I didn’t have to sleep outside in a back alley where it was twenty below zero. In fact, I’m grateful to be around at all. On one of my drunks, while on skid row, I passed out on top of a railroad trestle and was run over by a freight train. When I came to, the only thing I thought of was whether my wine bottle was busted.
In January, I had my third anniversary. Now, we see a lot of younger people and other people who didn’t have to go down as far as I did, and I’m glad. I just wish that everyone knew about AA, but a lot of people still don’t. Putting the Preamble in the paper might help someone else someplace else. We put the AA central office phone number at the bottom, and they got some calls.
W.C.
ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS
Homeless Bound
November 2008
It was August 1977. I was homeless and facing life in prison. With thirty-five cents in my pocket and nowhere to live, my options were very obvious: jail, the streets, or death. I was also suffering from liver disease.
I had just spent the night at my sister’s home in Queens, New York. My mom had snuck me in; I had been thrown out of a close friend’s house the night before; I’d fallen asleep with a cigarette and nearly burned his house down. He threw me out and asked that I not return.
In my semi-blackout, I made it to my sister’s house. I woke up at about six in the morning. I looked up at a figure in front of me and realized it was my sister. Before I could even think, she told me I would have to leave. “I don’t trust you, Richard,” she said. I was not welcome there anymore.
This was devastating. Where was I going to go? I had burned every bridge I had. I’d hurt all the people and friends who’d tried to help me.
In just a few minutes, I was walking out the door to my obscurity. I had no destination at all. I had a bag full of soiled clothes as dirty as the ones I was wearing. I weighed 135 pounds soaking wet.
Then my bottom came. I didn’t hear the storm door close behind me. I knew my mom was watching, and my heart was breaking more and more with each step I took from her. I didn’t want to look into her eyes. I didn’t have any more room for pain. I was dead inside, scared of everything. I turned and saw her looking, and we both cried. We knew this was not going to be easy for me.
I walked about a mile, to a luncheonette where the owner knew my sister. He saw that I was strung out, and he made me a milkshake. He also gave me a pack of cigarettes. I sat pondering what I was going to do with my life. I had no strength to go back to the old neighborhood, I was too ashamed to ask anyone for money to get a drink, and I didn’t want to, anyway.
It was humid, hot, and just downright ugly. I wanted to lie down and cry. I was alone and scared to death. How could this happen to a twenty-three-year-old boy? That’s right, I was still a boy. Alcoholism had been killing me since my birth. My older brother had gone to this place called AA. Maybe they can help me, I thought.
In a few minutes, I’d dropped a dime into a pay phone; I wound up in a meeting that afternoon. The miracles—too many to mention—began with that call. I was a rarity when I came into the rooms. I had a heroin addiction, and I was the youngest man in the group. Back then, they didn’t accept that easily, but no one judged me. I respected the Traditions, and they healed me back to life.
Within five years, I was free of all criminal charges. I have been sober twenty-five years. I have achieved more than I ever thought possible in my life.
RICHARD
