Carrying the Message

Today’s passage comes from Bill W.’s essay on Step Twelve in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. It’s where the essay turns from the spiritual awakening to carrying the message (December 3 maps the whole essay). Fourteen years earlier the Big Book had given that work a chapter of its own, “Working with Others,” written for the member doing the carrying. Near its end, the chapter takes up a question every sober member met: whether to keep away from drinking, and from the people and places that go with it.

People had told alcoholics, the book said, that they mustn’t go where liquor was served, keep it in the house, see friends who drank, or watch films with drinking in them. Its own experience, it answered, showed that this was “not necessarily so.” Its rule was that a member needn’t stay away from drinking “if we have a legitimate reason for being there,” and it named bars, nightclubs and weddings, “even plain ordinary whoopee parties.” A member’s job now was to be wherever he could do the most good, and he wasn’t to shrink from “the most sordid spot on earth” if helping took him there.

The rule came with conditions. It assumed the member was spiritually fit. Each time, he was to ask himself whether he had a good reason to go, or was hoping “to steal a little vicarious pleasure” from the place. And if he was shaky, the book told him, “you had better work with another alcoholic instead!” The loan copy, sent out for comment early in 1939, had been blunter about the old advice: “Experience proves this is nonsense.” After asking whether he had a legitimate reason, its questions turned to helping: would he be of use to anyone there, or more useful somewhere else?

The founders had tried going before there was a book. Late in May 1935, about two weeks sober by Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers’ count, Dr. Bob S. talked of going to the American Medical Association’s convention in Atlantic City, as he had every year for twenty years. Anne S. was against it. As AA Comes of Age prints his talk of 1955, Bill remembered telling Dr. Bob to go: “After all, we must learn to live in a world that’s full of alcohol.” Dr. Bob started drinking on the train. Five days after he left, his office nurse got a call from him at about four in the morning and fetched him from the Akron station.

He was due to operate in three days. Bill and Anne sat up with him in shifts, tapering him off, and as they drove him to City Hospital the morning he was to operate, Bill handed him one beer (and, Pass It On adds, a sedative). It was his last drink. AA dates its beginning from June 10, 1935, the date Dr. Bob gave in his own story in 1939; the convention’s dates put that morning about a week later. Four years on, the Big Book’s chapter said many members kept liquor at home and often needed it “to carry green recruits through a severe hangover.” Those words are in the book still. Dr. Bob, remembering Atlantic City, leaned the other way, Good Oldtimers says: members should keep to dry places when they could. “You don’t ask the Lord not to lead you into temptation, then turn around and walk right into it,” he said.

More on Dr. Bob’s trip to Atlantic City and his last drink: The last drink, in I Just Work Here. On one drunk going to the next before AA had a word for it: Working with Others, in You Had to Be Sponsored. On the draft sent out for comment, and what came back: Loan copy, in By the Carload.