Drunks
Page 19
Never shall I forget the first courage and joy that surged in me as I opened the door to enter 182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn. I embraced Lois; our union was renewed. . . . Yes, life would begin again, and oh, how deeply we both believed it.
Bill and Lois disagreed about when his drinking started again. Bill said it was four months later. Lois said it was four weeks.9
Silkworth was almost as disappointed as Bill and Lois, but he wasn’t surprised. His hope had hung on his belief that Bill was strongly motivated. When Bill came back to Towns a few months after his first hospitalization, Silkworth could see his future clearly. Lois tried again to rescue her husband by taking him away to the country, but he got drunk anyway. They returned to Brooklyn. “Not long after we reached Clinton Street, my husband, who had been my daily companion in Vermont, became a drunken sot,” Lois said. Bill had not completely given up the fight, but the battles were growing shorter:
I’d work through hangover after hangover, only to last four or five days, or maybe one or two. In the night hours, I was filled with horror, for snaky things infested the dark. Sometimes by day, queer images danced on the wall.
Bill began to think of suicide. “I swayed dizzily before an open window, or the medicine cabinet where there was poison, cursing myself for a weakling,” he said. “Then came the night when the physical and mental torture was so hellish I feared I would burst through the window, sash and all.” His mattress was moved to a lower floor. The third time Bill was hospitalized, Lois confronted Silkworth and demanded the truth. The doctor told her that Bill was hopeless and would probably not last another year. Silkworth urged her to commit him to a mental hospital.10
Bill stayed sober for a couple of months after leaving Towns in September 1934. He knew his life depended on it, but he had no confidence in his ability to continue. In a bar on Staten Island, he began another spree, surrounded by other veterans of the Great War on Armistice Day, November 11. He had no intention of stopping again. But a few days later, he got a phone call from an old friend, Ebby Thacher, another big drinker. He and Ebby had once humiliated themselves by arriving drunk in a small plane at the airport in Manchester, Vermont. Because the airport was new, a small greeting party approached the plane as it rolled to a stop. When the door of the plane opened, Bill and Ebby fell to the ground, unable to rise.
Bill knew that he and Ebby were on the same road to hell, and he prepared for his friend’s arrival by making a pitcher of pineapple juice and gin. (Bill preferred to drink straight gin, but he was afraid Lois might come home.) He was thunderstruck when he opened the door for his old friend and found someone else entirely. He couldn’t put his finger on it immediately, but Ebby had stopped drinking. He refused the offer of the pineapple juice. Bill finally asked him what had happened. “I’ve got religion,” Ebby said.11
Bill was instantly on his guard. He was not an atheist. He believed that only God could have created a natural world that operated according to natural laws. “With ministers, and the world’s religions, I parted right there,” Bill said. “When they talked of a God personal to me, who was love, superhuman strength and direction I became irritated and my mind snapped shut against such a theory.”12
Probably sensing Bill’s resistance, Ebby didn’t dwell on religion. He brought him up to date on his recent arrest for drunkenly discharging a shotgun in a residential neighborhood. Facing a possible prison term, Ebby was rescued by the friend of a friend, Rowland Hazard, who promised the judge that he would take him in hand. Rowland was an alcoholic who had found sobriety through the Oxford Group, an organization of Protestants of different denominations who were dissatisfied with conventional religion. Rowland took Ebby to New York. He was currently living in a mission on East Twenty-Third Street that was run by the Calvary Episcopal Church, whose rector was a leader in the Oxford Group.
Ebby spoke briefly about the program of the Oxford Group, which was built around the practice of four “absolutes”—absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. The Oxford Group stressed the importance of taking a complete moral inventory of your life, making restitutions to those you had hurt, and then helping others. “Then, very dangerously, he touched upon the subject of prayer and God,” Bill said. Bill did not explode. Whatever Ebby was doing, it obviously was working. It was not just that he had been sober for four months or that he looked good. “I saw that my friend was much more than inwardly reorganized. He was on a different footing. His roots grasped a new soil,” Bill said. Ebby was not just sober. He was happy.13
One morning, Bill decided he wanted to see the Calvary mission for himself. By the time he had walked the three blocks from the subway to the mission, he was drunk and dragging a new friend, Alec, a homeless Finn who had once been a sailor. The two men made so much noise that they were ejected. Later, Ebby appeared and forced beans and coffee down their throats until they were sober enough to attend the daily service. Still drunk, Bill rose to his feet and swore that he would try to follow Ebby’s example. When Lois returned from work that evening, she found Bill sitting at the kitchen table, sober and deep in thought. He told her he was going to give the Oxford Group a try. “I remember how I hugged him and cried in his arms,” she said.14
For several days, he did try. The sudden withdrawal of alcohol caused Bill to shake so badly that Lois wanted to call the doctor, but he refused. When he did get drunk again, he and Lois had a fight that ended with Bill throwing her sewing machine against a wall. The next day, Bill checked himself into Towns Hospital. He had managed to buy four beers on credit and had consumed them on the way, so he was feeling better when he encountered Silkworth in the hall. Waving a bottle, he told the doctor that he had “found something.”15
As his detoxification progressed, however, Bill fell into a deep depression. His spirits rose briefly when Ebby visited, then sank again. He knew that death was near. “I again thought of the cancer of alcoholism which had now consumed me in mind and spirit, and soon in body,” he said. Ebby had promised that God would save him if he asked for help, but this flew in the face of everything he believed. It would be admitting defeat. At last, in agony, he cried out, “I’ll do anything, anything at all. If there be a God, let Him show Himself!”
Suddenly, my room blazed with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy—I was conscious of nothing else for a time. Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood on the summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought, “You are a free man.” . . . I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. “This,” I thought, “must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.”
Bill had experienced a spiritual awakening. He was convinced that no matter how wrong things seemed, “there could be no question of the ultimate rightness of God’s universe.” “For the first time, I felt that I really belonged. I knew that I was loved and could love in return,” he said.16
Silkworth recognized that something profound had happened and urged Bill not to question what it was. “You are already a different individual,” he said. “[W]hatever you’ve got now, you’d better hold on to. It’s so much better than what you had only a couple of hours ago,” he said. Lois was also convinced. “The minute I saw him at the hospital, I knew something overwhelming had happened,” she said. “His eyes were filled with light. His whole being expressed hope and joy. . . . I walked home on air.”17
Bill Wilson left Towns Hospital on December 18, 1934, and immediately embarked on a mission to change the world. “I was soon heard to say that I was going to fix up all the drunks in the world, even though the batting average on them had been virtually nil for 5,000 years,” he said. It was a crazy idea, but Wilson thought he had discovered the secret of success in the writings of
William James, a professor of philosophy and psychology at Harvard College. He had been given a copy of James’s best seller, Varieties of Religious Experience, and had read how spiritual experiences can transform people:
Some were sudden brilliant illuminations; others came on very gradually. Some flowed out of religious channels; others did not. But nearly all had the great common denominators of pain, suffering, calamity. Complete hopelessness and deflation at depth were almost always required to make the recipient ready. The significance of this burst upon me. Deflation at depth—yes, that was it. Exactly that had happened to me.
Later, Bill and the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous would describe “deflation at depth” as the experience of “hitting bottom.” Bill was not the first alcoholic to recognize the importance of hitting bottom. Handsome Lake, John H. W. Hawkins, and Jerry McAuley reported that they had been at their lowest point when they discovered a power greater than themselves that made it possible for them to stop drinking.18
But it wasn’t reading a book that had changed Bill’s life. Nor was it Silkworth’s wise counsel. It was Ebby’s visit to Clinton Street. “[W]hen Ebby came along and one alcoholic began to talk to another, that clinched it,” Bill said. Bill believed he had discovered something new:
My thoughts began to race as I envisioned a chain reaction among alcoholics, one carrying the message to the next. More than I could ever want anything else, I now knew that I wanted to work with alcoholics.
Bill was hardly the first recovering alcoholic to try to help other drunks. The search for sobriety was over a century old, and many of its leaders were alcoholics who had shown skill in organizing. But something new and important had been added to the quest. Bill would prove to be the greatest leader yet.19
Bill and Lois began regularly attending meetings of the Oxford Group at the Calvary Church. The Oxford Group believed strongly in the direct intervention of God in the life of every individual and spent time each day quietly listening for his guidance. For Bill, who had just experienced a spiritual epiphany, this made obvious sense. He was also strongly drawn by the Oxford Group’s evangelism. But Bill was only interested in saving alcoholics. There were several sober alcoholics in the group, and they began to meet after the regular meeting at a nearby cafeteria. With Silkworth’s support, he spent long hours talking to the alcoholics who could afford to stay at Towns. He also returned to the Calvary mission to try to save the down-and-out. He brought alcoholics back to Clinton Street for a home-cooked meal. Ebby moved in with Bill and Lois, and he joined Bill in trying to convince the dubious drunks that they could stop drinking if they wanted.20
After several months, however, Bill’s mission was on the verge of failure. No one was getting sober. Lois saw the problem. “He thought a good home-cooked meal plus plenty of inspirational talk about the Oxford Group’s principles of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love would get them sober,” she said. Ebby wasn’t helping. “[B]etween the two of them, it was obvious to me that all their preaching was only turning off our rather inebriated guests.” When Bill took his problem to Silkworth in April, the doctor told him to change his approach. Alcoholics were tough nuts. They had developed inflated egos that prevented them from seeing the damage that their drinking was doing to themselves and their families.21
Silkworth urged Bill to start by convincing them that they were suffering from an illness that was going to kill them. “Pour it right into them about the obsession that condemns them to drink and the physical sensitivity or allergy of the body that condemns them to go mad or die if they keep on drinking,” Silkworth said. “Coming from another alcoholic, one alcoholic talking to another, maybe that will crack those tough egos down.” It was the imminent prospect of his own death that had made Bill willing to ask for help, and there was no reason to think it would work differently for anyone else.22
Before Bill had a chance to try this new approach, he had to find a job. Lois had gone to work as a salesclerk in the furniture department at Macy’s after Bill was fired in Canada. They lived on Lois’s weekly salary of $22.50, facing foreclosure on their Clinton Street home. The only reason they were allowed to stay was that the mortgage company could not find a buyer and was willing to accept a small rent in the interim. Lois and Ebby opposed Bill’s decision to look for a job. He had been sober only a few months, and they feared that he would start drinking again if he went back to work too soon. Bill felt guilty about the fact that his wife had been supporting him for almost two years. “I want to get Lois out of that damned department store,” he said.23
Bill sought out old friends on Wall Street and was invited to lead a group of investors who were attempting to take over a small machine tool company in Akron. It would mean traveling to Ohio in an effort to line up support among the local shareholders. Bill was scared. Years of failure made him wonder whether he could recapture his early success. On the eve of his departure in May 1935, he was irritable and gruff.
As Lois packed his bag, Bill complained that he had only one good suit; that the collar of his dress shirt was frayed, and the heels of his black shoes were worn. His grievances began to mount: he told Lois that he hated his life, that he’d never amount to anything, and that the trip to Akron was a waste of time. Lois was impatient. She told him he should be grateful for his sobriety. “Sober! You call this sober?” Bill asked. “I’m still a drunk who hasn’t had a drink yet.” When Bill stormed out of the bedroom, Lois was afraid that he would be drunk before he reached Akron.24
Five days passed without a word from Bill. Things were not going well in Akron. Bill had joined a team of men from New York, but by the end of the week, there seemed little hope of taking over the company. The rest of the men returned to New York, leaving Bill alone to see if the deal could be salvaged.
On a Saturday afternoon, he found himself standing in the lobby of a hotel in a strange city not knowing what to do next. The new Mayflower Hotel was the best in the city. Prohibition had been repealed, and the lobby bar had become a gathering place for the town’s business and social elite. From the sound of voices, Bill could tell that the bar was coming to life in anticipation of another busy Saturday night. “Then I was seized by a thought: I am going to get drunk,” Bill said. “Then I panicked.”25
In New York, Bill had made a full-time job of helping drunks get sober. The focus had always been on them. He suddenly realized what they had been doing for him. “I thought, ‘You need another alcoholic to talk to. You need another alcoholic as much as he needs you.’” Bill decided to try to find someone from the Oxford Group in Akron. As Bill later told the story, he picked a name at random from a directory of churches in the lobby: Walter Tunks, an Episcopal minister. Tunks turned out to be a member of the Oxford Group, and he gave Bill a list of ten people he thought might point him in the right direction. The first nine were either unavailable or unable to help.26
The last person on the list was someone who knew Henrietta Seiberling, the daughter-in-law of one of Akron’s richest men. Bill recognized the name and hesitated to reveal his alcoholism, but he had no choice. “I’m from the Oxford Group, and I’m a rum hound from New York,” Bill said. Henrietta knew someone else who needed help badly. “You come right out here,” she said.27
The next day, May 12, Bill Wilson met Dr. Bob Smith at Henrietta’s large home on the Seiberling estate. Smith and his wife, Anne, had been invited for dinner. Bob Smith had no intention of staying. He felt terrible. The previous day, he had arrived home drunk, carrying a large plant as a Mother’s Day gift for his wife. After depositing the plant on the dining-room table, he had collapsed, and it had taken all the strength of his wife and two teenage children to get him upstairs to bed. He hadn’t wanted to come to Henrietta’s at all, but he had been desperately searching for a way to stay sober.
Bob and Anne had joined the Oxford Group in the hope that they might find the answer there, but he was still getting drunk every night two and a half years later. What he had found was a friend—�
��Henri.” When she learned that Bob had a drinking problem, she arranged a special meeting of Oxford Group members with the goal of getting him to acknowledge his alcoholism, which he did. Seiberling was still trying to help him, and she considered Bill Wilson’s telephone call a godsend. While Bob couldn’t say no when she summoned him, he didn’t have to like it. “On the way, I extracted a promise from Anne that 15 minutes of this stuff would be tops,” Bob recalled. “I didn’t want to talk to this mug or anybody else, and we’d make it real snappy.”28
“I just loved my grog,” Bob said. At first, it was the symbol of his rebellion from the strict morality of the small Vermont town of St. Johnsbury, where he was born in 1879. His parents were leading citizens of the town. His father was not only a lawyer, district attorney, and later a judge, but also the superintendent of schools and a director of two banks. His mother was deeply involved in the activities of the North Congregational Church. Later, Anne Smith would blame her mother-in-law for Bob’s alcoholism. She governed her only son with an iron hand, sending him to bed at five every night. What he hated most was church. “From childhood through high school, I was more or less forced to go to church, Sunday school and evening service, Monday-night Christian Endeavor, and sometimes to Wednesday evening prayer meeting,” Bob said.29
Bob engaged in small acts of protest from his youngest days. After being sent to bed, he often escaped to play outdoors. His failure to make good grades was a continual frustration to his parents. It wasn’t until he left for college that he found alcohol. By the time he reached Dartmouth College, the temperance movement had made major strides in drying up the rural sections of the country. Even where the sale of liquor was legal, as it was in Vermont, it was often discouraged. In St. Johnsbury, it had to be purchased from a merchant licensed by the state, who would sell a pint only if he was convinced it was really needed. Some men avoided prying questions by having their liquor shipped directly from Boston and New York. Everyone knew who they were. They “were looked upon with great distrust and disfavor by most of the good townspeople,” Smith said.30