Page 253 - The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

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238 ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
last night.” Fear gripped me then, because I could
remember nothing about it. It was the first blackout
I had to recognize as a blackout. The next morning
I carried another prescription to this man’s house and
exchanged it for the bottle his wife had. Then I said
to my wife, “Something has to be done.” I took that
bottle of medicine and gave it to a very good friend
of mine who was a pharmacist and had it analyzed,
and the bottle was perfectly all right. But I knew at
that point that I couldn’t stop, and I knew that I was
a danger to myself and to others.
I had a long talk with a psychiatrist, but nothing
came of that, and I had also, just about that time,
talked with a minister for whom I had a great deal of
respect. He went into the religious side and told me
that I didn’t attend church as regularly as I should
and that he felt, more or less, that this was responsible
for my trouble. I rebelled against this, because just
about the time that I was getting ready to leave high
school, a revelation came to me about God, and it made
things very complicated for me. The thought came to
me that if God, as my mother said, was a vengeful
God, he couldn’t be a loving God. I wasn’t able to
comprehend it. I rebelled, and from that time on, I
don’t think I attended church more than a dozen times.
After this incident in 1940, I sought some other
means of livelihood. I had a very good friend who was
in the government service, and I went to him about a
job. He got me one. I worked for the government
about a year and still maintained my evening office
practice when the government agencies were decen­
tralized. Then I went south, because they told me
that the particular county I was going to in North