I Was Slipping Fast

Today’s passage comes near the top of Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, in its second paragraph. The essay goes on to say what members often make of prayer at first: something for an emergency, or a skill for clergymen that might do them some good at secondhand, if they believe in it at all. In the next essay, on Step Twelve, Bill wrote about another way a sober member can drift, and set down AA’s slang for it.

When things are going well at home, at work and in AA, the Step Twelve essay says, a member can start to feel no need for all twelve Steps. A few seem to be enough, perhaps only two: the First, and the part of the Twelfth about carrying the message. In AA slang, it says, that is “two-stepping.” “And it can go on for years.” A member can get “quite far off the beam,” it warns, without necessarily taking a drink. In time the glow of early sobriety fades and AA can start to feel flat. Then, perhaps, comes a blow too big to take: a promotion that doesn’t come, a lost job, trouble at home. The essay’s answer is to switch from “two-stepping” to “twelve-stepping.”

Marty M., often called the first woman to stay sober in AA, called herself a slow learner. Between Christmas 1939 and Christmas 1940 she had three slips, the first a ten-day binge. Looking back, her biographers write, she saw that she had been leaning almost entirely on the fellowship and passing over the Steps, sure that her years of psychotherapy had put her above needing them, the inventory Steps most of all. In their words, at first she danced only “the one- and two-step”: Steps One and Twelve.

John S. got sober in Gary, Indiana, on September 15, 1960, in a group he called the mother group of just about every Black AA group in Gary. In August 1999, at seventy-six, he was interviewed for northern Indiana’s AA archives, and said he had “two-stepped for ten years”: Step One, and a great many Twelfth Step calls. Those years he traveled the state for AA, visiting prisons as an institutional representative, and served as an intergroup representative and as the intergroup’s chairman. He said he didn’t think he would still be sober “if it hadn’t been for institutional work.”

He gave a talk the same evening, and told it more fully. It had taken him three years in AA, he said, before he really understood the Steps. Every morning he worked the first three, and he had taken the Fourth and Fifth with Father Ralph Pfau, an Indianapolis priest and one of AA’s most widely read early writers, at whose retreats in Kentucky he had spent about fifteen weekends. Glenn C. printed both the interview and the talk in Heroes of Early Black AA.

More on how Bill wrote the Twelve and Twelve, and the two-stepping line beside the Big Book’s words on carrying the message: Wit’s End, in Suggestions Only. On Marty’s three slips: Women aren’t alcoholics, in People Like You. On how Black alcoholics were let into AA in South Bend and Chicago, and the groups they started: Don’t drink the coffee, in The Only Requirement.