On one of the avenues a man darted from between parked cars right in my path. I swung the bus sharply over to keep from hitting him but couldn’t quite make it. He died in the hospital. Passenger and sidewalk witnesses absolved me completely. Even if I had been completely sober I couldn’t have cleared him. The company investigation immediately after the accident showed me blameless but my superiors knew I had been drinking. They fired me—not for the accident—but for drinking on the job.
Well, once more I felt I had enough of city life and found a job on an upstate farm. While there I met a young schoolteacher, fell in love with her and she with me. We were married. Farm work was not very remunerative for a young couple so we went successively to Pontiac, Michigan, and later to an industrial city in Ohio. For economy’s sake we had been living with my wife’s people, but somehow we never seemed to be able to get ahead. I was still drinking but not so much as formerly, or so it seemed to me.
The new location seemed ideal—no acquaintances, no entanglements, no boon companions to entice me. I made up my mind to leave liquor alone and get ahead. But I forgot one boon companion, one who was always at my elbow, one who followed me from city to farm and back to city. I had forgotten about John Barleycorn.
Even so, the good resolutions held for a time—new job, comfortable home and understanding helpmate, they all helped. We had a son and soon came another. We began to make friends and moved in a small social circle of my fellow-workers and their wives and families. Those were still bootleg days. Drinks were always available but nobody seemed to get very drunk. We just had a good time, welcome surcease after a week of toil. Here were none of the rowdy debauches that I had known. I had discovered “social drinking,” how to “drink like a gentleman and hold my liquor.” There is no point in reiterating the recurrence of experience already described. The “social drinking” didn’t hold up. I became the bootlegger’s first morning customer. How I ever managed to hold the job I had now I don’t know. I began to receive the usual warnings from my superiors. They had no effect. I had now come to an ever-deepening realization that I was a drunkard, that there was no help for me.
I told my wife that. She sought counsel of her friends and my friends. They came and talked with me. Reverend gentlemen, who knew nothing of my problem, pointed me to the age-old religious formula. I would have none of it. It left me cold. Now, with hope gone, I haunted the mean thoroughfares of speakeasy districts, with my mind on nothing but the next drink. I managed to work enough to maintain a slim hold on my job. Then I began to reason with myself.
“What good are you!” I would say. “Your wife and children would be better off if they never saw you again. Why don’t you get away and never come back? Let them forget about you. Get away—get away anywhere—that’s the thing to do.”
That night, coatless and hatless, I hopped a freight for Pittsburgh. The following day I walked the streets of the Smoky City. I offered to work at a roadside stand for a meal. I got the meal, walked on, sat down by the roadside to think.
“What a heel I’ve turned out to be!” I soliloquized. “My wife and two kids back there—no money—what can they do? I should have another try at it. Maybe I’ll never get well, but at least I can earn a dollar or two now and then—for them.”
I took another freight back home. Despite my absence, my job was still open. I went to work, but it was no go. I would throw a few dollars at my wife on payday and drink up what was left. I hated my surroundings, hated my job, my fellow-workers—the whole town. I tried Detroit again, landing there with a broken arm. How I got it I’ll never know, for I was far gone in drink when I left. My wife’s relatives returned me to my home in a few days. I became morose, mooning around the house by myself. Seeing me come home, my wife would leave me a little money on the table, grab the children and flee. I was increasingly ugly. Now, all hope was gone entirely. I made several attempts on my life. My wife had to hide any knives and hammers. She feared for her own safety. I feared for my mind—feared that I was breaking—that I would end up insane. Finally the fear got so terrible that I asked my wife to have me “put away” legally. There came a morning when, alone in my room, I began to wreck it, breaking the furniture, destroying everything in sight. Desperate, my wife had to employ the means I had suggested to her in the depths of alcoholic despair. Loath to have me committed to the state asylum, still trying to save something from the wreckage of my life and hers, she had me placed in a hospital, hoping against hope to save me.
I was placed under restraint. The treatment was strenuous—no alcohol—just bromides and sleeping potions. The nights were successions of physical and mental agony. It was weeks before I could sit still for any length of time. I didn’t want to talk to anyone and cared less to listen. That gradually wore off and one day I fell into casual conversation with another patient—another alcoholic. We began to compare notes. I told him frankly that I was in despair, that no thinking I had ever been able to do had shown me a way of escape, that all my attempts to try will power (well meaning persons had often said, “Why don’t you use your will power?—as if will power were a faculty one could turn on and off like a faucet!) had been of no avail.
“Being in here and getting fixed up temporarily,” I told him bitterly, “is no good. I know that only too well. I can see nothing but the same old story over again. I’m simply unable to quit. When I get out of here I’m going to blow town.”
My fellow-patient and newfound acquaintance looked at me a long time and finally spoke. From the most unexpected quarter in the world, from a man who was in the same position I was in, from a fellow-alcoholic, came the first ray of hope I had seen.
“Listen, fellow,” he said, looking at me with ten times the earnestness of the many good citizens and other well-intentioned persons who had tried their best to help me. “Listen to me. I know a way out. I know the only answer. And I know it works.”
I stared at him in amazement. There were several mild mental cases in the place and, little as I knew about their exhibitions of tendencies, I knew that even in a normal conversation, strange ideas might be expected. Was this fellow perhaps a little balmy—a wee bit off? Here was a man, an admitted alcoholic like myself, trying to tell me he knew the remedy for my situation. I wanted to hear what he had to suggest but made the reservation that he was probably a little “Nutty.” At the same time I was ready to listen, like any drowning man, to grasp at even a straw.
My friend smiled, he knew what I was thinking. “Yes,” he continued. “Forget that I’m here. Forget that I’m just another ‘rummy.’ But I had the answer once—the only answer.”
He seemed to be recalling his very recent past. Looking at me earnestly, his voice impressive in its sincerity, he went on. “For more than a year before coming here I was a sober man, thoroughly dry. I wasn’t just on the wagon. I was dry! And I would still be dry if I had stuck to the plan which kept me sober all that time.”
Let me say here that he later went back to the very plan he told me about and has been sober for more than a year for the second time.
He told me his story briefly and went on to tell me of a certain cure for alcoholism—the only certain cure. I had anticipated hearing of some new treatment, some newly discovered panacea that I had not heard of, something which no doubt combined drugs and mental healing. But it was neither one nor the other; it was certainly not a mixture of any kind.
He spoke of a group of some 30 men in my town who were ready to take me by the hand and call me by my first name. They would be friends without canting or ranting. He told me they met once a week to talk over their experiences, how they tried to help each other, how they spent their time in helping men like me.
“I know it sounds strange, incredible maybe,” he said. “I slipped, got drunk after being sober for a year, but I’m going back to try again. I know it works.”
Helpless, without faith in myself or anyone else, entirely doubtful that the fellow really had something, I began to ask questions. I had to be interested or go crazy.