The First five
Chapters were from a series of seminars McGinnis gave in 1968. This is from a
talk he gave in 1971, one of the last times he shared. It has been transcribed
and Reprinted here. It is possible to learn from him how life can happen to us
Sober when we are challenged to put into practice what we have heard and
learned through the years. It isn’t Always Easy, but it is possible if the
Foundation is Solid. Shortly after this talk, and perhaps providing some.
Explanation of how our physical condition can Affect our Reaction to life
Situations, Allen was diagnosed with cancer. He died of that cancer in November
of 1972, Sober and still giving hope and Encouragement to those who were there.
by Allen Reid McGinnis.
Sharing.
GOOD EVENING,
ladies and gentlemen. My name is Allen Reid Francis Xavier McG. And, I am an
alcoholic.
Anything I say
here can be held against me, but not against AA. There are only two groups in
AA that I like to stress that to … newcomers, and old timers. And if we all
remember it, then nothing I say here, or any other speaker from any other AA
podium anytime and anywhere, need ever distress you, or bug you. As a matter of
fact, there’s always a great possibility that something that is said might help
you, as well as the one who says it. Please, God that will be the way it is
tonight.
I’m always a
little irritated and disenchanted with speakers from AA podiums who begin by
telling you how nervous they are. It always sounds like special pleading to me,
kind of saying … “look, I’m shy and I’m sensitive and I’m fragile … so,
cooperate!” Well, I’m nervous tonight. Damn nervous. But it isn’t at all
because I’m shy or sensitive or fragile. I wouldn’t be here if I was shy and
sensitive and fragile … I’m about as shy as a bull.
Why I am nervous
is a thought that keeps … it’s a question, really … that keeps recurring in my
mind over the years. I think it probably first hit my brain when I was about a
week old and on my way to St. Joseph’s Church in Crebs, Oklahoma, to be baptized,
and the question is, “I wonder what kind of an impression I’ll make?” And, that
is why I am nervous.
I have a problem in that I have now been sober longer than I drank. And, as the
years go by, and I’m asked to speak at AA meetings, I quickly review these 19
years in my mind, and I think … well, dear God, what will I talk about?
Obviously, when you have been sober for 19 years, more than 19 years, you can
pile up an awful lot of experience … that important thing that we’re supposed
to share. The magnificent thing about this experience that we pile up in AA is
that we remember it. And, because we remember it, we learn from it; and because
we have learned from it, there is the natural wish to want to pass it on to
those who are following us. As a matter of fact, that is really, in my opinion,
what the AA Fellowship is all about. And, since, of course, this has happened
to me, and I have lived this experience and learned from it, it is of intense
importance to me and I don’t see how I can leave out one tiny little word of
it. But, in case you think that you’re going to be subjected to 19 years … take
heart. I’m simply just not strong enough to stand up here that long.
I’ll try tonight
to telescope it…how it all finally came together and what brings me to this
moment here tonight. It’s not going to be easy to do, but I’ll try. It’s never
easy to be rigorously honest about yourself. It’s so pleasant to be rigorously
honest about everything else, but about you, it’s a little tough. Since I have
been sober now longer than I drank, thank God I can spare you from any
drunk-alog. As a matter of fact, my drinking was just exactly like your
drinking. The longer I’m in AA, the more distressed I am that nobody comes up
with any new thing, really. We all drank too much, too fast, too long. As a
matter of fact, my drinking can find a parallel in the old story about the
bobcat who mistakenly courted the skunk and was later heard to remark, “Well, I
enjoyed as much of it as I could stand.” And, in one sentence, that takes care
of my 19 years of drinking. I stayed in there as long as I could, and I didn’t
surrender easily.
I don’t think
anybody ever approached this fellowship with more of a closed mind than I did.
As a matter of fact, I got here while headed in exactly the opposite direction.
It was my intention to take what was left of my substance and go down to Skid
Row and there, among my people, end my days anonymously … a misunderstood
genius to the very last. I don’t dare get off on telling you how I got to AA
because it is a fascinating story. I regale people with it for hours. And, if I
dare start, we just won’t get there.
Due to an unholy
alliance that developed between my boss, my pastor, my physician, the one
friend I had left, and two Irish conspirators from AA, instead of finding
myself in the anonymity of Skid Row, I found myself in the somewhat belligerent
anonymity of Alcoholics Anonymous … an environment to which I took an instant
and violent dislike … among people I decided were definitely not my people. But
I was trapped, totally and completely trapped.
When anyone who
has anything at all to do with you, including one of God’s direct
representatives, has decided that for you a sojourn in a land called AA is
highly to be desired, then anyone who was feeling as weak and weary and guilty
as I was is not likely to give any visible signs of rebellion. So I went to AA
after this 12th Step call that was paid on me by these two Irish 12th Steppers.
It was a very spiritual 12th Step call. They came into the apartment, took one
look at me and said, “Do you have any money?” And I said, “Well, (chuckle)
wouldn’t you know, yes, I have money, why do you ask?” They said, “To our
practiced eye, you’re about five minutes away from the DT’s and we think you
should be placed in a sanitarium.” And I said, “Can I choose the sanitarium? At
some of them I have credit.” They said, “Yes, you can choose the sanitarium.”
So I asked to be taken to one that had come to be my favorite. I had found it
after much research. It was located on Fairfax Avenue in West
Hollywood, just two blocks away from my parish church. I figured
that if I worked everything all right and God was kind, I would be in Dr. M’s
sanitarium and he would come in with a shot of paraldehyde while Father O’Toole
came in with the last rites, and it would all come out even.
It was from this
spiritual background that I approached my first AA meeting. I have heard many
speakers on AA podiums since; say that it was all those happy people at their
first AA meeting that won them over. Well, this was a large meeting. It was on
a Saturday night on Hollywood
Boulevard, in the basement of the Garden Court
Apartments, just opposite the Cinegrill in the Hollywood
Roosevelt. That is a watering hole that you
Northerners would not know anything about, I think. But besides alcohol, you
found other divertissements there. As I walked down the stairs of this basement
entrance, I remember looking across Hollywood
Blvd. at the Cinegrill thinking … well, goodbye.
It’s all over. I’m going off to this place where everybody thinks I ought to
be, and it will be just my luck for it to work. I may become healthy, probably
a little sane, maybe even a little rich … but, I will be dead … because I am
going to be sober the rest of my natural life and I couldn’t contemplate it.
However, as I said, there wasn’t any way I could get out of it. I looked at
those happy people, I listened to them, and I wanted to go outside and vomit. I
said to myself, if they’re really this happy, they are morons. They simply
don’t know that I and the world are coming unglued. And they’re sitting in here
laughing and using little code words on each other. I knew they were code words
because they lifted their eyebrows when they talked to each other. One would
come up to the other one and say, “Hi, first things first.” And the other one
would say, “Yep, and easy does it.” Then they would part, having exchanged
worlds of information.
I also was sure
that they were all stockholders in foreign coffee plantations. I knew of no
other reason that could explain why they drank gallons of this beverage that
they called coffee. Now, over the years, I have looked at this habit that we
have. I’ve seen newcomers come in shaking, sweating, not knowing whether to run
to the toilet or sit down, and we say, “Have a cup of coffee.” Three weeks
later, the poor devil, (his eyes are like saucers) says, “When will I sleep?”
And we say, “Don’t worry. Nobody ever died of insomnia. Have a cup of coffee.”
I don’t think it will ever change. Talk about getting sober … in spite of.
But I was
trapped, and so I did what I always did in those days when I found myself with
my back up against the wall and in a situation that was not to my liking, I
adapted. And the way that I adapted was always the same … I sincerely
pretended. Looking around at my new surroundings, I knew that this technique
was going to payoff better here than it ever had anywhere else.
It is believed
that in Alcoholics Anonymous, in our humility and in our anonymity, that we
have reached a milestone in this highly-to be-desired virtue, humility. But I
was born and reared in a religion that is the ultimate in anonymity and in
humility. You can run up the aisle to the communion rail until you wear out the
carpet and no one pays the slightest bit of attention. You can run in and out
of the confessional like a whirling dervish and no one bothers to notice,
unless perhaps you stay a little longer than usual, and then there is some
conjecture as to what new sin you may have come up with. Your virtue is known
only to God and to you and this doesn’t get you very much publicity. But oh,
how different is the practice of the virtue of sobriety and humility in
Alcoholics Anonymous. No wonder it held such fascination for me.
From the moment
you hold up your reluctant hand as a newcomer, the moist and welcoming eyes of
your neighbors greet you. Utter strangers rush up to grab your hand and know
your name and, no matter how vacantly you may stare back, you are assured over
and over that you are in the right place. Your head fairly swims with the
knowledge that you are everybody’s life’s blood. Your every word and movement
is given loving attention. Even something as simple as sitting up straight in
your chair is taken as unmistakable evidence that you are growing. When it is discovered
that you can put two sentences together without having them collide, you are
asked to speak. And to a Catholic who has been living in the lifelong anonymity
of the church, this is akin to suddenly being asked to say mass.
I was so delighted with the attention I was getting, that pretty soon I
completely forgot how much I disliked the people who were giving it to me. I
began to think to myself…I wonder how they got along for so long before I came
along. And, of course, I thought they were totally, terribly brief and young.
After all, those of you who may not know this, we Catholics humbly believe we
are the one, the only and the true. And for someone who has been weaned on
2,000 years of St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John of the Cross,
and a few cats like that you know, something that happened 15 years ago in
Akron (when I came in), between a broken down stockbroker and a defunct doctor,
doesn’t hold out much promise.
But I went along.
It was all so simple. I read the book and I thought. .. Well, it’s not very
well written, but it’s sound. I developed a little AA smile. You’ve seen it. As
a matter of fact, I thought I detected it a couple of times tonight here. It’s
that little half-smile that says, “I’m all right; just don’t get too close.”
And I grew. I’d been sober about two weeks when, with that acute hearing that
alcoholics develop, I was at a meeting and there were two men about 50 feet
away carrying on a conversation. I heard one of them say, “Have you noticed
that new guy, McGinnis? You know he’s only been sober a couple of weeks, but
have you noticed how he’s growing?” After that, anytime anybody looked at me, I
grew … right in front of their eyes. Fortunately, I’m a very quick study. Just
about three months passed when it dawned on me that the fascination I had been
exuding upon people as a newcomer had begun to fade. The people I was bumping
into at meetings were not immediately healed of their disease. As a matter of
fact, they started to ask me not to bump into them.
Then I made an
even more shattering discovery and that was that you could sin much more
efficiently sober than you can drunk. To an Irish Catholic who has depended for
years upon booze to get him through sin, this can be completely and totally
demoralizing. Fifteen minutes after my first meeting, I knew I was back in the
be-a-better-person business and I had always failed in this business, but I
thought, well, we’ll try it again here. At the sanitarium where I had been and
where I started my career in AA, my pastor, my boss, my priest, my doctor, my
friend, and these two AA missionaries had kept coming, and every time I tried
to say anything, they’d say, “Don’t worry, don’t worry now, you’re going to AA
and they know the way you’ve acted is not your fault. They know that you’re
sick and it will all be different.”
Of course fifteen
minutes after I came into AA I thought, “My God, I came in here carrying the
Ten Commandments and the Six Precepts of the Church on my back and now they’ve
given me twelve more Steps, which I need like I need a hole in the head … but
if this is what I’ve got to do, I’ll do it. And I had made this shattering
discovery that here I was, and after three months of the pursuit of sanctity;
all these 12th Step calls, the meetings, the smile, the code words, the coffee,
the slobbering drunks, I was the same S.O.B. that I had always been … except I
was sober and I had been robbed of my alibi because for years I had been
looking up to God, priests, bosses, judges, policemen, bartenders, (I was nearly
always flat on my ass, so I was nearly always looking up) saying, “Well, you
know, I never would have done it if I hadn’t been drunk.” Now I was doing it
and doing it better because I was doing it sober. I couldn’t take this
knowledge; I couldn’t accept it because, once again, the pursuit of the virtue
of sobriety had failed me. So I uttered the fateful words … the most fateful
words and notice I say fateful, not fatal … they’re fatal depending upon how
you answer them … the most fateful words an alcoholic can ever say and they
are, “What is the point of sobriety if…?” What I said to myself was, “What is
the point of sobriety if I don’t become a better person?” And since I didn’t
say them out loud, no one answered me. So I resigned.
In the two and a half months that followed, I tried committing suicide in the
only way that seems to be acceptable to Catholics; I tried drinking myself to
death. And I made a very useful discovery about this disease. In case you would
like to know, I’ll pass it on to you. You don’t die fast. Instead of waking up
dead, you just keep waking up day after day, week after week, just wishing you
were dead. But somewhere in those two and a half months, I began to come to
grips with (and I wouldn’t be here tonight and there wouldn’t have been the 19
years that followed if I hadn’t come to grips with it) what was for me, (this
first thing first), and that is … am I really an alcoholic? And if the answer
to that is yes, then do I really believe that alcoholism is truly a progressive
and a fatal disease, or do I believe that it’s the moral weakness that I always
was taught it was and that even today in our culture, we are taught it is.
Before I got to AA and after I got to AA, sobriety was a means to an end. It
was something you did in order to get something else.
Before I got to
AA, in the culture that shaped and molded me, drunkenness was a mortal sin.
Therefore, it’s absence … sobriety … must necessarily be a shining virtue. As a
matter of fact, in the culture from which I came, it was just a notch below
chastity. So when you have assumed that you are practicing the virtue of
sobriety, it follows then that, since it’s a virtue, you will have to be
virtuous in order to achieve and maintain it. And, if through very great prayer
and effort you manage to achieve this shining virtue of sobriety, doesn’t it
also follow, as the night to day that you should, by God, get a reward for it?
You’re damn right you should get a reward for it.
That’s the way I
came into AA, and I think that’s the way everybody’s been coming in behind me
all these years. Until you get that straightened out in your mind, I don’t
think that any true recovery from alcoholism ever really begins. No matter how
long you’re staying sober, if you’re staying sober in order to get something,
or to get it back, the day will always come when what you have been staying
sober to get back, you either will have not gotten it back, or now that you
have gotten it, you will no longer want it. And then you will say the fateful
words … “What’s the point of sobriety if I don’t become a better person?” But
it might very well be because even in AA, you see, we seem to talk out of both
sides of our mouth at once. On the one hand we tell you that there is no moral
culpability in connection with this disease at all. But then it seems in the
same breath that we hasten to tell you that you’re going to have to have a
complete and total change of personality; you’re going to have to have a
spiritual awakening; you’re going to have to find a Power greater than yourself;
all these things in order to stay sober. AA reverberates with phrases like,
“Don’t do that, or…you will get drunk.” So, we add fear upon fear upon fear.
Remember I
started this out, ladies and gentlemen, by telling you that Anything I say can
be held against me. So, while you are Reacting to this, just Remember it. These
are my opinions, but it had to be this way with me or I wouldn’t be standing
here tonight
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