Love With No Price Tag

Today’s passage closes the first paragraph of Bill W.’s essay on Step Twelve in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions (December 3 maps the whole essay). There the price tag is in Bill’s own voice, with no Ebby in it. Fifteen years earlier, in “Bill’s Story,” written in 1938 for the Big Book, the only price had been his to pay. Lying in the hospital at the end of his drinking, as he told it, his old school friend Ebby T., unnamed in the story, laid out a new way of living, and “a price had to be paid. It meant destruction of self-centeredness.”

At AA’s twentieth-anniversary convention in St. Louis in July 1955, Bill told his story again, as AA Comes of Age (1957) prints the talk, edited and enlarged. Now the price tag is Ebby’s. Sober, across the kitchen table in Brooklyn in November 1934, Ebby lists what the Oxford Group had taught him, and one item, in Bill’s telling, is a kind of giving with no price tag: “the giving of yourself to somebody.” When Ebby comes to Towns Hospital a few weeks later and hands out his formula again, the same item is giving without stint, with nothing asked in return.

Bill told it other ways, too. In memories that Pass It On (1984) and Mel B.’s Ebby (1998) quote without a date, Ebby speaks at the kitchen table of a giving that asked no return, and at the hospital of giving without a price tag. In a talk the Grapevine printed in January 1968, the rewards his giving didn’t ask for were approval, prestige and money. Lois W., in Lois Remembers (1979), set the idea down as one of the Oxford Group’s own precepts. No record from 1934 gives Ebby’s own words.

In Akron the giving cost something. By the late 1930s Dr. Bob S.’s practice was still poor, his house was mortgaged and he was in debt, Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers says. Elgie R., an Akron member’s wife, remembered him talking once about charging alcoholics for his services. She told him, “If you put money into it, it will never work.” The book’s writers asked every member they interviewed whether he ever did, and every one said no. Even the physical examination some hospitals required before they would take a drunk was done by another doctor.

In 1939 Bill wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation asking for a grant, not for himself but for Dr. Bob, who knew nothing of it. For more than four years, Bill wrote, Dr. Bob had carried on the work “without charge to sufferers,” and had been unable to build his surgical practice back up. Nothing came of the letter; the foundation supports the arts. Pass It On’s writers noted that, minor details aside, the plea described Bill himself.

More on Ebby’s kitchen and hospital visits and his formula: Ten cents, in My Sponsor, Ebby. On Dr. Bob’s unpaid hours and the debts a visitor from New York found: 855 Ardmore, in I Just Work Here. The night at the kitchen table is the film, The Kitchen Table.