Page 241 - The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

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226 ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
anyone get out of it? Haven’t I been successful,
haven’t I accomplished extraordinary things in busi­
ness? What do I get out of it? Everything’s all wrong
and the hell with it. For the last two years of my
drinking, I prayed during every drunk that I wouldn’t
wake up again. Three months before I met Jackie, I
had made my second feeble try at suicide.
This was the background that made me willing to
listen on January 8. After being dry two weeks and
sticking close to Jackie, all of a sudden I found I had
become the sponsor of my sponsor, for he was sud­
denly taken drunk. I was startled to learn he had only
been off the booze a month or so himself when he
brought me the message! However, I made an SOS
call to the New York Group, whom I hadn’t met yet,
and they suggested we both come there. This we did
the next day, and what a trip! I really had a chance to
see myself from a nondrinking point of view. We
checked into the home of Hank, the man who had fired
me eleven years before in Mississippi, and there I met
Bill, our founder. Bill had then been dry three years
and Hank, two. At the time, I thought them just a
swell pair of screwballs, for they were not only going
to save all the drunks in the world but also all the so-
called normal people! All they talked of that first
weekend was God and how they were going to
straighten out Jackie’s and my life. In those days we
really took each other’s inventories firmly and often.
Despite all this, I did like these new friends because,
again, they were like me. They had also been peri­
odic big shots who had goofed out repeatedly at the
wrong time, and they also knew how to split one paper
match into three separate matches. (This is very use­