Page 217 - The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

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202 ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
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 Sea-
brook’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 some­
thing about this, that I couldn’t go on...I remem­
bered 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 nor­
malcy. 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 con­
stant 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,