Overcoming Loneliness

Today’s passage comes from Bill W.’s essay on Step Five in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, where the essay starts to say what the Step gives. As Bill Sees It, the 1967 collection of his writing that the reading cites, took it from there. November 10 follows the paragraph on to belonging. On the way, the paragraph tells of a barrier alcoholics could never get past, of drink that let them improvise for a while, and of drink that turned on them: “even Bacchus boomeranged on us.” It speaks for alcoholics as a whole, as “we.” Bill had told much of it about himself, or would.

The loneliness came first. At AA’s International Convention in St. Louis in 1955, its twentieth anniversary, Bill told of going to live with his grandparents at ten: tall and gawky, pushed around by smaller kids, and depressed for a year or more, until he resolved to be “a Number One man.” In January 1962, writing about fear in the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, he went back to heavy shocks as a child, trouble at home and his own awkwardness among them. They left him afraid that he wasn’t like other children and never could be, and that fear, he wrote, sent him first into depression and then into “the isolation of retreat.”

Then came his first drink, a Bronx cocktail at a dinner in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he was a young Army officer in the First World War. “Down went that strange barrier that had always stood between me and people around me,” he told St. Louis. When he sailed for the war in 1918, his story in the Big Book says, he “was very lonely and again turned to alcohol.”

The boomerang came back. In the same talk, Bill told of a real one he had whittled as a boy, and said that, emotionally, he had begun at the same time to fashion “another sort of boomerang”: a need to be first in everything, which he said nearly killed him later on. By midsummer 1934 he was back in Towns Hospital in New York, and his doctor, Dr. William D. Silkworth, told his wife, Lois, that he would have to be locked up to stay sane, or even alive, and couldn’t go on this way another year. His story calls what came over him then “loneliness and despair.”

Ten months later, alone for a weekend in Akron, Ohio, he paced a hotel lobby with a bar at one end. The Big Book tells it without his name: without a few drinks, the man thought, he wouldn’t have the nerve to strike up a conversation, and would have “a lonely weekend.” He went to the church directory and the telephone instead, looking for another alcoholic to talk to, and the calls led him to Dr. Bob. In its chapter on carrying the message, the book counts among the rewards the chance “to watch loneliness vanish.”

More on Bill’s boyhood and the boomerang he whittled: The boomerang, in Number One Man. On his first drink and the war: The Bronx cocktail. On the lobby and the calls that led to Dr. Bob: The gate lodge, in I Just Work Here.