Page 293 - The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

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282 ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
course, the police would find me and bring me back to
my house and my worried parents.
About that time I started seeing therapists and spe-
cialists, each with a different theory and a different so-
lution. They conducted special tests and interviews
designed to get to the root of my troubles, and came
to the conclusion that I had a learning disability and
was depressed. The psychiatrist started me on some
medication, and the problems in school started to
clear up. Even some of the depression began to ease
up for a bit. However, something still seemed funda-
mentally wrong.
Whatever the problem, I soon found what appeared
to be the solution to everything. At age fifteen, I trav-
eled with my family to Israel. My brother was to be
bar mitzvahed atop Masada. There was no legal drink-
ing age, so I found it quite easy to walk into a bar and
order a drink. New Year’s Eve fell in the middle of the
trip, and since the Jewish calendar celebrates a differ-
ent New Year than the Gregorian calendar, the only
celebration was being held in the American sector of
a university. I got drunk for the first time that night. It
changed everything.
A stop at a local bar began the evening. I ordered a
beer from the waitress and as I took the first sip,
something was immediately different. I looked around
me, at the people drinking and dancing, smiling and
laughing, all of whom were much older than I.
Suddenly, I somehow felt I belonged. From there, I
made my way to the university, where I found hun-
dreds of other Americans celebrating New Year’s Eve.
Before the night was over, I had started a fight with a
number of college-aged drunken fellows and returned