Chapter 3: Women Suffer Too
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Despite great opportunities, alcohol nearly ended her life. An early member,
she spread the word among women in our pioneering period.
WHAT WAS I saying ...from far away, as if in a delirium, I heard my own
voice---calling someone "Dorothy," talking of dress shops, of jobs ... the
words came clearer ... this sound of my own voice frightened me as it came
closer ... and suddenly, there I was, talking of I knew not what, to someone
I'd never seen before that very moment. Abruptly I stopped speaking. Where
was I?
I'd waked up in strange rooms before, fully dressed on a bed or a couch; I'd
waked up in my own room, in or on my own bed, not knowing what hour or day
it was, afraid to ask ... but this was different. This time I seemed to be
already awake, sitting upright in a big easy chair, in the middle of an
animated conversation with a perfectly strange young woman who didn't appear
to think it strange. She was chatting on, pleasantly and comfortably.
Terrified, I looked around. I was in a large, dark, rather poorly furnished
room---the living room of a basement flat. Cold chills started chasing up
and down my spine; my teeth were chattering; my hands were shaking, so I
tucked them under me to keep them from flying away. My fright was real
enough, but it didn't account for these violent reactions. I knew what they
were, all right---a drink would fix them. It must have been a long time
since I had my last drink---but I didn't dare ask this stranger for one. I
must get out of here. In any case I must get out of here before I let slip
my abysmal ignorance of how I came to be here and she realized that I was
stark, staring mad. I w as mad---I must be.
The shakes grew worse, and I looked at my watch---six o'clock. It had been
one o'clock when I last remembered looking. I'd been sitting comfortably in
a restaurant with Rita, drinking my sixth martini and hoping the waiter
would forget about the lunch order---at least long enough for me to have a
couple more. I'd only had two with her, but I'd managed four in the fifteen
minutes I'd waited for her, and of course I'd had the usual uncounted swigs
from the bottle as I painfully got up and did my slow spasmodic dressing. In
fact, I had been in very good shape at one o'clock---feeling no pain. What
could have happened? That had been in the center of New York, on noisy 42nd
Street ... this was obviously a quiet residential section. Why had "Dorothy"
brought me here? Who was she? How had I met her? I had no answers, and I
dared not ask. She gave no sign of recognizing anything wrong, but what had
I been doing for those lost five hours? My brain whirled. I might have done
terrible things, and I wouldn't even know it!
Somehow I got out of there and walked five blocks past brownstone houses.
There wasn't a bar in sight, but I found the subway station. The name on it
was unfamiliar, and I had to ask the way to Grand Central. It took
three-quarters of an hour and two changes to get there---back to my starting
point. I had been in the remote reaches of Brooklyn.
That night I got very drunk, which was usual, but I remembered everything,
which was very unusual. I remembered going through what my sister assured me
was my nightly procedure of trying to find Willie Seabrook's name in the
telephone book. I remembered my loud resolution to find him and ask him to
help me get into that "Asylum" he had written about. I remembered asserting
that I was going to do something about this, that I couldn't go on ... I
remembered looking longingly at the window as an easier solution and
shuddering at the memory of that other window, three years before, and the
six agonizing months in a London hospital ward. I remembered filling the
peroxide bottle in my medicine chest with gin, in case my sister found the
bottle I hid under the mattress. And I remembered the creeping horror of the
interminable night, in which I slept for short spells and woke dripping with
cold sweat and shaken with utter despair, to drink hastily from my bottle
and mercifully pass out again. "You're mad, you're mad, you're mad!" pounded
through my brain with each returning ray of consciousness, and I drowned the
refrain with drink.
That went on for two more months before I landed in a hospital and started
my slow fight back to normalcy. It had been going on like that for over a
year. I was thirty-two years old.
When I look back on that last horrible year of constant drinking, I wonder
how I survived it, either physically or mentally. For there were, of course,
periods of clear realization of what I had become, attended by memories of
what I had been, what I had expected to be. And the contrast was pretty
shattering. Sitting in a Second Avenue bar, accepting drinks from anyone who
offered, after my small stake was gone, or sitting at home alone, with the
inevitable glass in my hand, I would remember, and, remembering, I would
drink faster, seeking speedy oblivion. It was hard to reconcile this ghastly
present with the simple facts of the past.
My family had money---I had never known denial of any material desire. The
best boarding schools and a finishing school in Europe had fitted me for the
conventional role of débutante and young matron. The times in which I grew
up (the Prohibition era immortalized by Scott Fitzgerald and John Held Jr.)
had taught me to be gay with the gayest; my own inner urges led me to outdo
them all. The year after coming out, I married. So far, so good---all
according to plan, like thousands of others. But then the story became my
own. My husband was an alcoholic, and since I had only contempt for those
without my own amazing capacity, the outcome was inevitable. My divorce
coincided with my father's bankruptcy, and I went to work, casting off all
allegiances and responsibilities to anyone other than myself. For me, work
was only a different means to the same end, to be able to do exactly what I
wanted to do.
For the next ten years I did just that. For greater freedom and excitement I
went abroad to live. I had my own business, successful enough for me to
indulge most of my desires. I met all the people I wanted to meet; I saw all
the places I wanted to see; I did all the things I wanted to do---I was
increasingly miserable.
Headstrong and willful, I rushed from pleasure to pleasure and found the
returns diminishing to the vanishing point. Hangovers began to assume
monstrous proportions, and the morning drink became an urgent necessity.
"Blanks" were more frequent, and I seldom knew how I'd got home. When my
friends suggested that I was drinking too much, they were no longer my
friends. I moved from group to group---then from place to place---and went
on drinking. With a creeping insidiousness, drink had become more important
than anything else. It no longer gave me pleasure---it merely dulled the
pain---but I had to have it. I was bitterly unhappy. No doubt I had been an
exile too long---I should go home to America. I did. And to my surprise, my
drinking grew worse.
When I entered a sanitarium for prolonged and intensive psychiatric
treatment, I was convinced that I was having a serious mental breakdown. I
wanted help, and I tried to cooperate. As the treatment progressed, I began
to get a picture of myself, of the temperament that had caused me so much
trouble. I had been hypersensitive, shy, idealistic. My inability to accept
the harsh realities of life had resulted in a disillusioned cynic, clothed
in a protective armor against the world's misunderstanding. That armor had
turned into prison walls, locking me in loneliness---and fear. All I had
left was an iron determination to live my own life in spite of the alien
world---and here I was, an inwardly frightened, outwardly defiant woman, who
desperately needed a prop to keep going.
Alcohol was that prop, and I didn't see how I could live without it. When my
doctor told me I should never touch a drink again, I couldn't afford to
believe him. I had to persist in my attempts to get straightened out enough
to be able to use the drinks I needed, without their turning on me. Besides,
how could he understand? He wasn't a drinking man; he didn't know what it
was to need a drink, nor what a drink could do for one in a pinch. I wanted
to live, not in a desert, but in a normal world; and my idea of a normal
world was being among people who drank---teetotalers were not included. And
I was sure that I couldn't be with people who drank, without drinking. In
that I was correct: I couldn't be comfortable with any kind of people
without drinking. I never had been.
Naturally, in spite of my good intentions, in spite of my protected life
behind sanitarium walls, I several times got drunk and was astounded ... and
badly shaken.
That was the point at which my doctor gave me the book Alcoholics Anonymous
to read. The first chapters were a revelation to me. I wasn't the only
person in the world who felt and behaved like this! I wasn't mad or
vicious---I was a sick person. I was suffering from an actual disease that
had a name and symptoms like diabetes or cancer or TB---and a disease was
respectable, not a moral stigma! But then I hit a snag. I couldn't stomach
religion, and I didn't like the mention of God or any of the other capital
letters. If that was the way out, it wasn't for me. I was an intellectual
and I needed an intellectual answer, not an emotional one. I told my doctor
so in no uncertain terms. I wanted to learn to stand on my own feet, not to
change one prop for another, and an intangible and dubious one at that. And
so on and on, for several weeks, while I grudgingly plowed through some more
of the offending book and felt more and more hopeless about myself.
Then the miracle happened---to me! It isn't always so sudden with everyone,
but I ran into a personal crisis that filled me with a raging and righteous
anger. And as I fumed helplessly and planned to get good and drunk and show
them, my eye caught a sentence in the book lying open on my bed: "We cannot
live with anger." The walls crumpled---and the light streamed in. I wasn't
trapped. I wasn't helpless. I was free, and I didn't have to drink to "show
them." This wasn't "religion"---this was freedom! Freedom from anger and
fear, freedom to know happiness, and freedom to know love.
I went to a meeting to see for myself this group of freaks or bums who had
done this thing. To go into a gathering of people was the sort of thing that
all my life, from the time I left my private world of books and dreams to
meet the real world of people and parties and jobs, had left me feeling an
uncomfortable outsider, needing the warming stimulus of drinks to join in. I
went trembling into a house in Brooklyn filled with strangers ... and I
found I had come home at last, to my own kind. There is another meaning for
the Hebrew word that in the King James version of the Bible is translated
"salvation." It is: "to come home." I had found my salvation. I wasn't alone
any more.
That was the beginning of a new life, a fuller life, a happier life than I
had ever known or believed possible. I had found friends---understanding
friends who often knew what I was thinking and feeling better than I knew
myself---and who didn't allow me to retreat into my prison of loneliness and
fear over a fancied slight or hurt. Talking things over with them, great
floods of enlightenment showed me myself as I really was---and I was like
them. We all had hundreds of character traits, fears and phobias, likes and
dislikes, in common. Suddenly I could accept myself, faults and all, as I
was---for weren't we all like that? And, accepting, I felt a new inner
comfort and the willingness and strength to do something about the traits I
couldn't live with.
It didn't stop there. They knew what to do about those black abysses that
yawned, ready to swallow me, when I felt depressed or nervous. There was a
concrete program, designed to secure the greatest possible inner security
for us long-time escapists. The feeling of impending disaster that had
haunted me for years began to dissolve as I put into practice more and more
of the Twelve Steps. It worked!
An active member of A.A. since 1939, I feel myself a useful member of the
human race at last. I have something to contribute to humanity, since I am
peculiarly qualified, as a fellow-sufferer, to give aid and comfort to those
who have stumbled and fallen over this business of meeting life. I get my
greatest thrill of accomplishment from the knowledge that I have played a
part in the new happiness achieved by countless others like myself. The fact
that I can work again and earn my living is important but secondary. I
believe that my once overweening self-will has finally found its proper
place, for I can say many times daily, "Thy will be done, not mine" ... and
mean it.