I'll Cry Tomorrrow Page 22

  “All right Get that orange juice into you, then.”

  I sipped, I gagged, I staggered to the ladies’ room and threw up, and staggered back. After the third try I managed to swallow the remainder.

  “Now we’ll walk,” John said. And we walked. I stumbled along with him, half-falling, tripping, getting dizzy spells. My knees buckled, I clung desperately to him. Several times he put his arm around my waist and supported me. “It’s going to be all right, Lillian. It’s going to be all right,” he repeated. “Nothing can happen to you. I am with you. Just ask God to help you get through this hour.”

  “Get through this hour!” I cried. “I’ve been asking all my life for help. What do you mean this hour!”

  I started to cry. “You’re taking me on streets where people will recognize me.”

  “You’re just as good as anybody else,” he said. “You’re just sick. Stop worrying about what people will think of you. Don’t be so conceited. That’s one of the troubles with an alcoholic—a swollen ego.”

  I cried at that. He had hurt my feelings.

  He led me into an air-cooled movie on Broadway. I ran to the ladies’ room and drank what seemed gallons of ice water. I kept giving that back, too. Somehow he managed to keep me in the theatre two hours, while I turned and twisted.

  Then we walked some more. “Oh, God,” I moaned. “John, I’ve got to have a drink. I won’t be able to live through this day.”

  “In half an hour,” he said. He held my arm firmly, and we walked up one side street, down another. A half-hour passed—and no drink. “You’re torturing me,” I wept “It’s not a half hour, it’s an hour. For God’s sake, get me a drink.”

  “In another 20 minutes,” he said inexorably. But when the 20 minutes had elapsed, we were in the AA clubhouse, and I was seated at a table, and being fed hot coffee and talked to, talked to and being fed hot coffee.

  So the second day passed, a repetition of the first Julia sat with me through the night The third morning I was again in the company of my new friends.

  “We’re driving you to an AA meeting,” John said. I was put into an automobile.

  My eyes played tricks on me. The roads were weird white ribbons in tunnels of darkness: now I was on a merry-go-round, now on an elevator, rising, dropping down, rising again. “You are going to hear a talk by Bill, the founder of AA.” John’s voice was in my ear. Now I was helped up a staircase, and then I was in a large room among many people, with the hum of voices and cigarette smoke all about me.

  I was introduced to a man from the Hal Wallis studio. “I’m making a picture about alcoholics” he said. “Let’s talk.”

  “Why talk to me?” I demanded. “I don’t know anything about all this.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see a picture made that would help alcoholics?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want anybody to know who I am. I’ve been keeping my alcoholism a secret for years. Please don’t bother me.”

  A thin, tall gray-haired man began to speak and the hum of voices subsided. I tried to control my trembling hands. The speaker’s words were without meaning. Suddenly his voice broke through a haze: “There are three kinds of alcoholics in this room tonight. First, those who have already found the peace and happiness that comes with sobriety. Second, those who have been sober only a short time, and wonder if they’ll ever reach that goal. And finally, those who have the sweat breaking out all over as I talk, sitting on their hands so no one will know how they are shaking. Those are the ones I’m talking to now. You can look at the fellow on one side of you, and the woman on the other, and you, too, will eventually have their serenity, if you will keep on this program, one day at a time.”

  Like a shock of icy water thrown in my face, the words registered: That man standing there knows exactly what I am feeling. I don’t have to tell him what I am suffering. I’m not alone.

  But gain serenity? Have peace? That’s ridiculous. Even if I stop drinking, what have I to be happy about? The sixteen years of life 1 threw away? How could I get them back? I know I’ve got a voice, but how would I get my glamor back? Nobody would want to watch a hag on the stage, a has-been…What was he saying now? Try to follow the 12 steps. Turn your will over to a Higher Power. Do they mean God? Haven’t I turned my will over to God? What happened? I’m still suffering. What do they mean, a Higher Power would restore my sanity. Wasn’t I sane when I came out of the hospital? And yet I drank again…I heard Bill’s voice again: “Try to have a conscious contact with God.”

  The sentence remained in my mind, and after the meeting, as they drove me back, I turned to John. “That’s it, John. I’ve lost my contact with God.”

  “Easy does it, Lillian,” he said. “God or a Higher Power, whatever you feel or think, is what is meant. How you believe in what you need will gradually come to you —God as you understand Him. But—one step at a time. Take it cafeteria style. What you don’t like, let alone. Remember—we do it here one step at a time.”

  They left me off in front of my apartment building, and placed a pamphlet in my hands.

  “This explains the 12 steps,” John said. “Don’t try to do them in one day. It took you 16 years to destroy yourself. You can’t mend overnight.” He held my hand for a minute. “Put as much effort into this program as you put into your drinking, Lillian, and you’ll make it.”

  Again Julia stayed through the night with me. I struggled to read the pamphlet. It listed 12 steps to sobriety. In substance they were:

  One. Admit you are powerless over alcohol and that your life has become unmanageable.

  Two. Believe in a Power greater than yourself.

  Three. Turn your will and your life over to the care of God as you understand him.

  Four. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself.

  Five. Admit to God, to yourself and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs.

  Six. Be entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

  Seven. Humbly ask Him to remove your shortcomings.

  Eight. List all the people you have harmed and be willing to make amends to them all.

  Nine. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

  Ten. Continue to make personal inventory and when you are wrong, promptly admit it.

  Eleven. Seek through prayer and meditation to improve your conscious contact with God as you understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for you and the power to carry it out.

  Twelve. Having had a spiritual experience as a result of these steps, try to carry this message to other alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all your affairs.

  “Oh, Julia,” I said. “Now that I’ve read it, I’m not sure I understand. Especially the religious part.”

  “Honey, this isn’t a religious program. This is a spiritual program,” she said. “If you accept the first step, you’re on your way.”

  Yes. I was powerless over alcohol. My life had become unmanageable. But make a moral inventory of myself? Why, if I looked over my past, I’d only be driven to drink again. I wanted to forget what had happened. How would I handle all that?

  “Honey, one step at a time.”

  The fourth day I was with my new friends again. That night John said, as he and Julia escorted me to my apartment door:

  “Lillian, you’ve gone through 72 hours without alcohol. That means it’s out of your blood stream by this time. But you will still want to drink. Your thinking hasn’t changed this quickly. For some time now you’ll be physically sober but still mentally drunk. And it won’t be easy. If you want to continue this program, we want to continue to help you. But from now on, you’re on your own.”

  “I want to continue,” I said humbly. But would my shakes ever leave me?

  There was a remedy for that, John said. They would take me tomorrow to a clinic where I would be given vitamin and liver shots. They would help tremendously.

 
“But remember—it’s up to you now.”

  He and Julia left their telephone numbers, if an emergency rose, and departed.

  After they had gone, the realization came to me, beyond all doubt, that if this man, or whoever was helping me, man or God, gave me up, the last door was closed to me. I was in AA now. If I left it, nothing waited outside but insanity or death.

  I walked into the kitchen, took the bottle with two ounces of gin still in it, and poured the contents down the drain. I did not know it then, but I was never to take another drink.

  Now I lived and breathed AA. I neglected my mother, Minna, Edna, everyone I had known, for I dared not go without an AA member at my side, lest someone I meet, some situation arise, that would upset me and send me to the nearest bar. The true alcoholic takes the first drink for the person, or situation, or insult, that upsets him. He takes the rest of the drinks for himself.

  I began to understand the importance of moral inventory and the listing of persons I had hurt. So long as I continued to believe that others hurt me, I would feel anger, resentment, bitterness—all emotional states which called for liquor to assuage. If I accepted my shortcomings instead of fighting their existence, once more I was removing an emotional stimulus to alcoholism.

  First think I awoke, I hurried to the clubhouse and breakfasted there (thus avoiding the temptation of the morning drink). “We stay sober 24 hours at, a time,” John explained. “You don’t know what’s coming tomorrow, and neither do I. All you can hope for is the best today. We never forget one thing: we’re just one drink away from a drunk again.”

  Over and over he repeated: with us, alcoholism is a disease. It’s an allergy of the body coupled with an obsession of the mind. It is no more disgraceful than diabetes or tuberculosis. We will never be cured of it Though we never drink again, we are still alcoholics-dry alcoholics. Our alcoholism has been arrested, not cured.

  An important part of the program consisted in thinking less of I and more of you and they. Printed cards were distributed at meetings. One read, “Just for today, don’t say a harsh word to anyone.” Another: “Today try to do a good deed for someone which no one else will know about” A third: “Just for today, I will try to adjust myself to what is, and not try to adjust everything to my own desires.”

  It was like learning to live all over again. “You’ll have to let us do your thinking for you for a little while,” John had said. I acquiesced. It was reminiscent of Bloomingdale, for I was being helped to organize my thinking. I would wake each morning and ask myself, “What will I do today?”

  A glance at a card. “Today try to do a good deed for someone which no one else will know about.” I walked along the Bowery until I found a poor drunk asleep in a doorway. I looked in my purse. I had 75 cents. I took 40 cents and put the money in his pocket. That act made me glow more than anything I had done in my Charlanna League days.

  The next day: what shall I do today? Again, the card. “Today, think and act your best. Look your best” That was a difficult job—but that day I was a lady. I tried to look my best. When I mounted a bus, I said, “Thank you!” to the driver so warmly that he stared, then grinned back. “Don’t mention it, ma’am.” My courtesy to everyone bowled them over. But I was doing and acting my best.

  With Maggie, an AA who spent much of her time helping alcoholics, I visited the Bellevue alcoholic ward, the one place I feared most. I went among raving alcoholics in straightjackets, their eyes black, their noses bloody, their faces blue with bruises from their drunken falls, and I talked to them, tried to soothe them and make them feel they were not alone.

  I read a great deal of AA literature, and I learned the appalling statistics of alcoholism. I placed the little cards about my room and kept the literature at my bedstand so that I could read it when I woke in the dark hours of the night.

  At meetings various members rose and spoke on their personal experience with alcohol. Once I was asked to speak. I stood up. I had faced many audiences without qualms. This was the toughest appearance I had to make. I couldn’t act. I had to be. I was no longer a stunning actress with the camouflage of clothes, beauty and reputation. This was the real me on display for the first time in my life.

  Stammeringly I tried to tell about myself. These are all my blood brothers in the audience, I thought. We all suffer from the same illness, and these talks we give are our blood transfusions to one another. We all have an incurable disease—alcoholism.

  “I can’t get up here and tell you I’m a happy person,” I said. “But I am sober. I am trying to contact God as I understand Him. I don’t yet have the peace of mind I know many of you have, but I’m told that if I hold on, it will come.

  “The other day I read in the Bible Paul’s words to the Romans: Tor I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.’”

  I was convinced, I added, that no matter what happened, the fact that I was now with them meant that I must in some way be connected with God.

  I was limp when I sat down. “What a beautiful talk,” one woman said. A girl approached me. “This is my first meeting,” she confided. “You don’t know how you’ve encouraged me. I have such a terrible alcoholic problem. I looked at you and I thought, ‘If she can do it, after what she’s gone through, I can do it, too.’”

  Her words left me with a warm glow. Was this what they meant when they said I would be happy again? Because I had helped someone?

  I wrote a friend: “Do you know what it is like to be well? Why, I’ve only now begun to appreciate the beauty of the world. It’s been so long since I could look out with comfort into daylight, or face a bright sky.

  “I always had to have the blinds down in my room, and to wear sunglasses when I went out. I could not stand the light; it threw me into the shakes. Even the sound of birds drove me mad. Daylight was horror. All alcoholics must wait until sundown before they can begin to live.

  “It was like a pig going down in the mud of its pigsty,” I wrote her. “You need dimness; your room is always gloomy; you live in darkness and in your blindness.

  “Now, for the first time, I see the world as it is. I live again. I am a new human being.”

  Yet it was not easy. Sleeping became a problem, and I turned to sleeping pills. At the end of my first month in AA I was drinking coffee by day and taking sleeping pills by night. Soon I was visiting doctor after doctor, telling them I had just come out of the hospital and needed sedatives for my nerves. I became so accustomed to them that they lost much of their effect, and I slept only in fitful snatches through the night.

  One morning, when I woke about nine o’clock, I wanted liquor. For no ascertainable reason, every nerve in my body demanded it. My imagination tortured me. I tasted liquor, smelled it, inhaled it, desperately desired it.

  I knew if I rose and dressed and went out, I would succumb. I telephoned John’s number, “Come over right away, for God’s sake,” I begged him.

  I hung up. I began trembling as though I had a chill. If only someone were there to tie me to the bed—

  There was a knock on the door. It was Minna who, coming to town to shop, had dropped in on me. She saw at once that I was not myself.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, alarmed.

  “Make me coffee,” I said, “Please, hurry”.

  As she brewed it, John arrived. He understood. “Have your coffee, Lillian, and then we’ll take a long walk.”

  “Minna,” I said. “You ought to know. I was headed straight for a bar.”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  KATIE wouldn’t believe me.

  I had been in AA six weeks. Katie had attended a meeting with me, but the same fear remained in her eyes. “You sure you’re not drinking, Lilly?”

  “Mom, I’m not. I swear I’m not Honest to God, Mom, I haven’t touched a drop in six weeks.”

  “All
right, Lilly,” she said. “I believe you. I want to believe you. And if these people can keep you from liquor, God bless them.”

  She continued to live with Ann, and from time to time, when she could, she gave me a little money. Edna and Minna attended several AA meetings with me. They, too, wanted to believe, but they felt sometimes they were hoping against hope.

  One afternoon I sat quietly at my table in the clubroom. I glanced about the room idly, and my eyes caught those of a good-looking blond young man who was seated alone, too, drinking coffee. I thought, he’s entirely too young, too clean and fresh looking, to be here. He can’t be more than thirty. Was he a fellow sufferer? I glanced at him again, and when our eyes met a second time, I smiled. He rose and came across the room to my table, walking with a slight limp.

  “I’ve been watching you since you first came in,” he said pleasantly, “but you’ve always been surrounded by so many people I never got the opportunity to talk to you. How are you getting along?”

  He introduced himself. His name was Burt McGuire. I thought, I wish this fellow had seen me in my good days. I bet I look awful to him now.

  He was handsome—slender, blue-eyed, cultured in voice, quiet in manner.

  After a little while he asked, “Would you like to go to the movies tonight?” Suddenly I felt like a school girl. I said, almost in confusion, “I’d love to.”

  That afternoon we tuned in a dance band on the clubhouse radio, and some of us tried to dance. I attempted an old buck-and-wing, and in my clumsiness sprained my toe and threw out my sacroiliac. Combined with a bad cold I picked up, I was an unhappy figure by nightfall.

  “I’m not much to take out this evening,” I apologized, when Burt called for me. “Funny, too. When I was drunk, these things never happened to me.”

  He laughed. “They did, but you couldn’t feel them. Anyway, come on. A picture will do you good.”

  As we walked, he chatted easily. Had I noticed that hardly anyone in AA seemed to get to sleep? People there all hours of the night? “I’ve been in about a year now,” he said, “and it takes a long time before you sleep normally. We keep the same hours as when we were drinking, live the same life, only we do it without liquor.”