Page 255 - The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

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240 ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
fights, and on one or two occasions I struck her
with my fist. She decided that she didn’t want any
more of that. So she went to court and talked it over
with the judge. They cooked up a plan whereby she
didn’t have to be molested by me if she didn’t want
to be.
I went back to my mother’s for a few days until
things cooled off, because the district attorney had
put out a summons for me to come to see him in his
office. A policeman came to the door and asked for
James S., but there wasn’t any James S. there. He
came back several times. Within ten days I got locked
up for being drunk, and this same policeman was in
the station house as I was being booked. I had to put
up a three-hundred-dollar bond because he was carry­
ing the same summons around in his pocket for me.
So I went down to talk to the district attorney, and
the arrangement was made that I would go home to
stay with my mother, and that meant that Vi and I
were separated. I continued to work and continued to
go to lunch with Vi, and none of our acquaintances on
the job knew that we had separated. Very often we
rode to and from work together, but being separated
really galled me deep down.
The November following, I took a few days off after
pay day to celebrate my birthday on the twenty-fifth of
the month. As usual I got drunk and lost the money.
Someone had taken it from me. That was the usual pat­
tern. I sometimes gave it to my mother, and then I’d go
back and hound her for it. I was just about broke. I
guess I had five or ten dollars in my pocket. Anyhow, on
the twenty-fourth, after drinking all day on the twenty-
third, I must have decided I wanted to see my wife