Clancy I, from 1983
I am the last speaker of a very distinguished panel of authorities in the field of alcoholism. I don’t know if you’re familiar with carnival procedures; I once was, in one of my incarnations. There are three aspects to a carnival presentation. First, a guy comes out, someone called a barker or a talker. With pretty girls or music, he talks to the people in front of the stand, entertains them, and so on. Then, when they get a bunch of boobs standing there, they do what’s called “turning the tip”; that is where they do something to make them buy that ticket: “Get that ticket! Wonderful things inside!” When they get all done with that and the show is over, they want to get rid of those boobs so they can make room for the next crowd. They have some particularly turn-off guys do what is known as “the blowoff” before they get rid of them. My job in this series is as your blowoff man. Hopefully, when I’m done, you’ll have had enough.
Looking over the program for this series, I’ve known a number of those people. Some I do not know, but their bona fides certainly are impressive. I have known some of them with a great deal of admiration: Dr. Pers, for example, who I’ve always felt was one of the very few non-alcoholic professional people who really understood alcoholism at a visceral level and can talk about it knowledgeably. And when he can’t talk about it, he sends people where they can be talked to about it knowledgeably.
If information on the subject were sufficient, we would not have the vast problem of alcoholism. In the last number of years, a great deal of information has been made available and disseminated. If that amount of information were made available on cancer, cancer patients, or friends and relatives of cancer patients, would flock to get the data. If that amount of information were made available on diabetes, people with diabetics in their family would rush to find out about it. But the peculiar aspect of alcoholism is that it is one of those borderline or negative illnesses in which your mind may tell you it is a physiologically conditioned illness, but people don’t care. People think it’s just folks who don’t give a damn. This happens to the people who have it, so it certainly must happen to the people who surround them. That’s why the dismaying, lethal statistics in this field continue, diminishing somewhat over the years, but not that much.
Most of you, I’m sure, are familiar with some of the self-help groups. Perhaps some of you are familiar with AA or others. I know that it is the posture of the National Council on Alcoholism to say there are a number of self-help groups, and it’s true that the National Council is formally connected with none of them. Many years ago, I used to do a good degree of public information speaking for the Los Angeles Council on Alcoholism. Whenever we went out, it was necessary for the moderator to say, “Now, we have a representative here of one of the ways to stay sober, and there are many other ways to stay sober.” No matter what, they had to say that.
I went out about ten times like that, maybe more. Finally, like a guy in a comic strip, one day I was driving down the road and a cloud formed over my head with a light bulb lit in it that said, IDEA. The next time they asked me, I said, “I feel that I’m giving a one-sided picture of the recovery program. All these poor people ever hear from is one of the ways to stay sober. Next time, why don’t you bring representatives from all the other ways to stay sober, and we can all talk? When you get them together, let me know.” Somehow or other, I never got called back! Now, that’s not putting anything down. I know that is necessary because there are people who are sober in other disciplines or self-help groups besides AA. It’s just sometimes hard to locate them. I don’t mean that derogatorily, I’m just implying it!
What’s amazing, and has been said here, I’m sure, by every speaker, is that the great problem in alcoholism is the lack of knowledge of what it really is. With that lack of knowledge comes the denial of the alcoholic to accept his own involvement in it, the inability to treat people who don’t feel they need to be treated, and the puzzlement of families who have one in their midst where everybody knows they’re the one, except them. It really is a baffling thing. It’s kind of funny for a while, but it isn’t funny after a while.
I am in a position that probably hardly anybody in this room is in today. I have the experience almost every day of my life of seeing alcoholics die. Most of you don’t have that opportunity. Intermittently, I have the opportunity of seeing cases of alcoholic insanity. For years, I always thought alcoholic insanity was measured by people who act crazy, someone who’s gone too far. But that isn’t really alcoholic insanity; that might be borderline psychoneurotic behavior.
Alcoholic insanity is something different. They say alcoholism is the second greatest cause of insanity, and you just imagine someone running through halls acting silly. But that isn’t what it’s talking about at all. Alcoholic insanity is when sufficient alcohol has been in the bloodstream to desiccate enough brain cells so that you’re no longer able to function. Alcoholic insanity is just like advanced syphilis: when enough brain cells are gone, you don’t go around acting funny as a rule. You wind up on the porch where someone comes along, changes your diapers, feeds you three times a day, and takes you to bed and back. Once that happens, you never recover. Anything that affects brain cells is terminal because brain cells do not reconstitute themselves; there’s no regeneration in brain tissue. It’s really singularly unfair: the liver and the brain are two major organs that do not regenerate new cells, and that’s precisely what alcohol hits.
Watching people die from alcoholism is a dreadful thing. When you think of people dying from alcoholism, think of how it’s listed. Of course, if they’re dead and we find them in the alley behind our building in the morning, I suppose that’s considered a death from alcoholism, although sometimes they call it exposure. But I see many deaths from alcoholism that wouldn’t be listed as such: a man who’s no longer able to walk and topples forward in front of a bus that runs over his head. That wouldn’t be listed as a death from alcoholism, but it certainly is. Or, as we see more and more on Skid Row now, two broken people having a knife fight where one goes down with his stomach cut out. Is that really a death from alcohol? I say it is.
If you’re like me, you might think, “Well, sure, they’re dying on Skid Row.” But figures suggest those Skid Row deaths all over the country make up maybe 3% or less of the deaths from alcoholism. That leaves 97% or more in places like Santa Ana, Anaheim, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Atlanta, people who look almost indistinguishable from you and me, and who you would think would not want to die a miserable death. It isn’t even a quick death. That’s one of the great innocuous recruiting lines when people say, “Well, if you’re an alcoholic, for you to drink is to die.” I thought, “I hope so!” It would be much more realistic to say, “For you to drink is to ensure continued misery, pain, and anxiety,” not from the drinking itself, but from the emotions that go with it.
Over the years, medicine has made some rather significant advances, but for many years, medicine had no training in alcoholism. Up until maybe 25 years ago in medical school, you got the same amount of training in alcoholism that you got in dengue fever: one half of one day! And there hadn’t been a case of dengue fever in 50 years. So doctors were significantly ill-trained to deal with alcoholics. If anybody in the world looked like just another bunch of self-indulgent, neurotic pukes, it was alcoholics. Traditionally, for many years, the medical treatment of alcoholics was, “Here, take these as needed, and good luck.” The doctor traditionally wanted to get these goofballs out of his office so he could take care of people who were really sick. How do you deal with someone staggering in saying, “They looked at me funny on the bus this morning”? “Here, take that; I’ve got a lady in here with a ruptured spleen! Who cares about how they looked at you, you dummy!”
The first major study of alcoholics was in the late 1950s at the Yale Institute of Alcohol Studies. They studied alcoholics of all backgrounds and socioeconomic profiles, giving them psychological tests and measuring their reactions against control groups. They never really found anything that they all had in common except two things:
- Physical Overreaction: For reasons they could not identify or measure, alcoholics react differently to a given amount of alcohol than non-alcoholics. They just seem to have an overreaction, an alteration of personality. It’s not surprising that Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, suffered from alcoholism; much of that was autobiographical, watching that personality change.
- Perfectionism: They all ranked very high in perfectionism on psychological profiles. They were all perfectionists, although none of them would have identified themselves as one. (I never would have identified myself as a perfectionist; I just have a certain flair for “if it isn’t perfect, screw it!”)
And there is one other aspect they didn’t measure, but if they could have inserted the question: “Do you, deep in your heart, believe your case is different?” You bet! You bet.
After that study, alcoholism became a little more socially acceptable. I became sober in 1958. Our moderator made it sound as though I were very gracious for leaving a marketing job in Beverly Hills about ten years ago to go down and run the Midnight Mission. When you get introductions like that, it makes it sound as though I were a dedicated, wonderful man. It isn’t quite that way. One of the reasons I went back there is that in 1958, I was 86’d out of the Midnight Mission, and I swore I’d go back and get him someday! So I’m down there looking for that guy assiduously. He hasn’t showed up yet, but he’ll be along.
By the early 1960s, I was working again as a writer. In 1961 or ’62, I saw the first full-page ad in a medical journal about the treatment of alcoholics. It said, “Doctors, now you can treat alcoholics without side effects or negative effects! Reduce anxiety and conflict!” It had a name that indicated freedom: it was called Librium. I thought, “If only I could have had some Librium!” Sometime after that, I began to see the first Librium survivors: “I don’t drink as much anymore, but I don’t get up out of my chair much anymore either!” Then came Valium and so on.
In the late 1960s, a lot of press was given to a doctor in New Mexico who found a “breakthrough”: taking movies of alcoholics when they were drunk, and then running the reel for them when they felt like drinking so they’d say, “Oh man, I don’t want to be like that! Thank you, Doctor!” Except, unfortunately, it got to a point where people didn’t feel like going to a movie show before having a drink.
Near the end of that decade, a big hospital in Redlands installed a bar in one of their wards. The poor alcoholics walked in expecting a religious harangue, and instead, there was a bar! They’d have a drink, do fine for a few days, and then one morning, they’d shoot an electric shock through the wire attached to the glass! “Happy days no more!” Then they’d give him a drink without a shock, and after a while, he’s like a fawn in a forest fire. Finally, they’d ask, “Want a little drink?” and he’d say, “No, I don’t think so.” Another cure went on the books! Of course, in a follow-up, they discovered most of them hadn’t gotten past the first place that had glasses without wires.
In early 1972, a big hospital in Seattle claimed alcoholism was caused by an enzyme imbalance, and if you readjusted enzymes, you could drink socially. Their director gave public addresses, a staggering presentation, where he’d say, “Fanatic self-help groups tell you abstinence is required, but with our program, something different can be done.” At the end of his talk, he would pick up a cocktail and drink it! That was a very impressive presentation, until one day, the director’s enzymes kicked up, I guess, and he wound up in a padded cell. They begrudgingly moved to abstinence after that.
Then in the 1970s, the Rand Report came out saying alcoholics can drink again. They claimed to have hundreds of people drinking successfully. When a massive follow-up was made years later, they found nearly all of them were dead or dying. Do you know how Rand did their original follow-up? They called them up! In my worst day, I could pass that test: “Oh yeah, still doing fine!”
It all goes back to aversion treatments that were set aside fifty years ago. If someone had something that was destroying him and you got him away from it, you would be absolutely baffled if he voluntarily went back to it. A year ago, a lawyer I know very well had advanced emphysema and was dying from it. He’d go to the hospital, get oxygen stuck in his nose, come home, and fire up a cigarette. It was like watching a man commit suicide. I thought to myself, “That’s just the way it was for my family or people who loved me, watching me, after being laboriously withdrawn, hospitalized, strapped down, put into an anxious silence, go out one day and hit it again.” I couldn’t explain it to them because I didn’t know why. I knew why going in, but by the time they asked me, I didn’t know.
That is what makes this problem so baffling. How can anyone understand it when the person who has it won’t accept it? At the current stage of understanding, almost everyone in the medical or psychiatric profession agrees that abstinence is the only answer. There is no control left. As one self-help therapy says, “There seem to be brief recoveries, followed always by still worse relapses.” That is what makes alcoholism smack of moral degeneracy, weak-willed pathetic people who should know better, and why a real case can be made to call alcoholism a disease of perception.
The one aspect that makes alcoholism cunning, baffling, and powerful is that neither the treater nor the treat-ee usually understands what’s really wrong. They keep thinking it’s the alcohol: “If I can get the patient off alcohol, he’ll be all right.” All the research into metabolic differences, malfunctioning endocrine glands, hyperinsulinism, the one thing they are unable to measure is the perception of the alcoholic.
The number one mistake in the identification of alcoholism is thinking that we’re dealing with an alcohol problem. It is not an alcohol problem. If you have an alcohol problem, the treatment is relatively simple: have the person not drink. That’s all. You may charge them a lot for the data, but that’s what it is: don’t drink. But I don’t believe alcoholics have an alcohol problem. That sounds upside down, but I bet my life on it every day: If my problem is alcohol, I am not an alcoholic. Conversely, if I am an alcoholic, my problem is not alcohol.
If the problem is alcohol, the solution is not drinking, and that solution was found 5,000 years ago! If you’re allergic to orange juice and every time you drink it your nose falls off, you come to the conclusion: “I’m not going to drink orange juice.” You might give it one last shot just to be sure (“I’ve lost my nose; how do I smell? Pretty bad!”), but if that’s the problem, you stop.
People like me have tried swearing off again and again, with and without oaths. Once upon a time, many years ago, my little boy died while I was in jail for drunk and scuffling. The judge released me. I was an executive, and his little casket was about this big. I carried his casket and said, “I’ll carry him; I don’t want somebody else touching him.” I set it down, put my hand on it, and took a vow: “This will never happen again, ever, ever, Baby John. If it ever happens to me, I hope my arms wither and fall off.” I had tears of absolute sincerity; I would have given my life to keep that from happening. About 29 days later, in another city where I was working, the feelings of remorse and pain were so intense that I had to have a few drinks to relax me. Try to explain that to anyone! My family said, “How could you, after what happened to John?” There’s no answer. I knew why going in, but coming up, I didn’t remember.
Withdrawal from alcohol is how you beat an alcohol problem, whether in 30 days or cold turkey on a jail floor. But alcoholism has one significant difference that nobody seems to recognize: stopping drinking has no effect on alcoholism. In fact, it begins to make it worse! Stopping drinking moves you across the line from some degree of relief to unvarnished, gray, cold, old remorse-filled and anxiety-filled reality, and it gets worse as you go along. That is the greatest evidence that my problem is not alcohol; I have these other problems, real problems, problems that seem unique to me: “I’m more sensitive than other people. I feel things too intensely. I have anxieties. I feel different. I feel lonely.”
The trap every human being falls into when they feel bad is comparing themselves to others. When you feel insecure, you begin comparing to see why you are different. You look around in a job or social situation, and the answer you get is always wrong because you are comparing your insides against other people’s outsides. You are comparing your raw meat against defense mechanisms they’ve spent 30 years building to conceal their raw meat.
When you make comparisons while feeling bad, you will never see anyone who looks as sensitive as you feel, as anxious as you feel, or as lonely as you feel. Conversely, as they look at you, they feel the same. You can measure alcohol with a breathalyzer, but the highway patrol can’t take a drop of blood to measure how much anxiety you have today, or have you walk a white line to see if you’re feeling different. That’s why nearly everybody who has alcoholism dies from it, one way or another.
The curse of alcohol is not that you can’t get sober. If getting sober were the answer, detoxes would turn out winners. The classic American detox isn’t a hospital; it’s a toilet! There are few problem drinkers who haven’t knelt in front of the old porcelain altar in the morning, gazing into those shimmering waters waiting for an answer to surface, saying their morning prayers: “Oh, God…” It is physically impossible for a human body to stay intoxicated for 14 straight days and nights, even in laboratory conditions. So you always get sober. The curse of alcoholism is sobriety!
Alcoholic emotions can be described as childlike or childish emotions, terrible words, but so true. It’s almost impossible to evaluate them because they’re in a grown-up body with a grown-up brain, grown-up skills, and a grown-up ability to rationalize. When the sober alcoholic gets into a conflict, he attempts to control these growing, intense emotions with his intellect. But intense emotions and the intellect are in constant conflict, and the emotions will always win. The intellect gets tired and takes a walk. Willpower cannot superimpose itself forever; the strong, neurotic emotions will always overtake the intellect.
That brings us to the operational aspect of alcoholism: what alcohol does for the alcoholic. An alcoholic gets a special effect from alcohol that most people don’t get. He can literally alter his perception of reality with alcohol. I can instantly make myself bigger and more self-contained, and make my environment and the people in it smaller and less threatening. If you are an alcoholic, two martinis will make you feel better than six months of psychotherapy! A bottle of good wine, or bad, will be better than years of metaphysical insights!
When I was about a year sober, I had a job wrapping packages at an advertising firm in West Los Angeles, quite a comedown for an award-winning writer. One of our accounts was Camchatka Vodka. One day, the artists and copywriters were laying out a billboard. I stepped up and said, “Instead of that same slogan you’ve been using for ten years, why not use something like: ‘Camchatka Vodka, booze better than all rod-offs anywhere!’” They gave me a look of pure disdain: “If you don’t like how we do things, why don’t you wrap packages for some other agency?”
That night, I told my AA sponsor this hideous story about how they wouldn’t listen to me. He said, “Can’t you ever understand? In those kinds of situations, they’re not putting you down; they just don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! To them, Camchatka Vodka doesn’t go BOOM! To them, Camchatka Vodka goes glug-glug-glug. That’s why you’re in this meeting, and they’re not!”
A lot of times, alcoholics wish they were non-alcoholics, not because they want to be non-alcoholics, but because they want to avoid the bad effects. Only 3% to 7% of all drinkers will ever know what I took for granted my whole life: when the hounds of fate are ripping into your throat, alcohol makes it look different! Nothing actually changes, but it looks different. The tragedy is that the tools for dealing with conflict atrophy from disuse. Why work out a painful situation for two weeks when you can change your perception of it in two minutes?
By the time alcohol is doing that to you, sustained reality becomes untenable. That particular combination, alcohol changing from the answer to the problem, combined with an unbearable reality, is called alcoholism. That is why knowledge alone is not enough. All the knowledge of the intellect doesn’t help when emotions start to surge. I’ve watched department heads at Caltech and ditch diggers die from the exact same reason.
You cannot alter your emotions by thinking, just like you can’t decide not to be hungry or decide not to blink when a hand waves in front of your face. You cannot control your emotions, but you can control your actions. You can superimpose action over emotion.
The purpose of a sponsor or someone helping you is to superimpose objective perceptions over your subjective, discolored perceptions. When I was new, if my sponsor said to me, “Clancy, that wall is green,” I’d think, “You’re crazy! Look, that’s brown!” He’d say, “I don’t care if it looks brown to you, act like it’s green!” We discussed perception: “I don’t care how it looks to you, don’t quit that job. I don’t care how it looks to you, go over and apologize to her.” Those objective perceptions were vital because my own perceptions were discolored.
Therapy and recovery reduce the pressure on the emotions so the intellect can regain control. That’s why information, love, or even the love of God alone won’t keep an alcoholic sober unless there is a continuing therapeutic to deal with childish perception. They say alcoholics shouldn’t get too Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired (HALT), not because those are bad, but because they are perception disorders!
- When you’re hungry, you become impatient.
- When you’re angry, it’s obsessive.
- When you’re lonely, it presses every self-pity button.
- And when you’re tired, you think people are taking advantage of you.
I’ve noticed this on the Santa Monica Freeway in the morning after giving my all for others: I’m tired, and I see an old lady up ahead and think, “She sees the boy in the blue Toronado is tired, and she’s cutting me off on purpose!” It makes you crazy!
I must take remedial action no matter how I feel at the moment. I must not allow my life to be at the beck and call of childish emotions. All I have to do is surrender, the hardest single thing in the world. Humans can’t just throw in the towel and live happily ever after. As soon as the heat is off, I inch the towel back and spend the rest of my life tearing off small strips: an incremental surrender. Alcoholism is a disease of perception, and recovery must alter perception, or the alcoholic will surely drink. Thank you very much.
I’d be glad to answer a few questions. I’m very pleased that you gave me a halfway standing ovation, but if you really want to show your sincerity, go fill my car with gas! Are there any questions?
Yes, sir, about the Mission? The Midnight Mission is one of the few major charities left in the world that categorically declines any sort of governmental funding: federal, state, or city. We feed about 450,000 people a year and bed down about 50,000. It is not an alcoholic treatment center, although AA holds meetings three nights a week. All employees are men who came off the street at one time or another as hopeless. You work yourself back to self-worth; you do not think yourself back. We are not connected with any church; it may be the only major mission where you don’t have to listen to a religious service to get fed or bedded. In my experience, having a man hold food and say, “Sit down for an hour while I preach to you, and then I’ll give it to you,” doesn’t always increase spiritual growth! We have the California State Employment Office inside our building, getting hundreds of jobs a month: leaf raking, peddling handbills, ways to work back to reality. The whole thing is run exclusively by public contributions.
Any other questions? I could tell you a few words about the Texas State Asylum, they hurt me dreadfully there! One year, I was on the faculty of the University of Texas, directing the grand opera Mefistofele in the original Italian. Nothing is more fun than watching Texans sing Italian! Later that year, through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings, I was in the state asylum in Big Spring, Texas, not for drinking, but because erroneous perceptions made me think I’d be better off dead. They saw on my record that I’d directed an opera, so they had me direct the Christmas Pageant. The director’s main job, which I brought off beautifully, was keeping the three wise men off the Virgin Mary!
Let me tell you about the Phoenix drunk tank, that’s a bad place. One year, I was working at Tracy-Locke Advertising in Dallas. Through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings, I woke up one morning in the Phoenix drunk tank, a thousand miles away! That’s an altered perception with a vengeance. Some guy had just kicked out all my front teeth because he accused me of vomiting on his bunk. I was so sick I couldn’t move my head, but I was instantly able to observe his problem. I remember thinking, “This son of a bitch is overreacting!”
I went through the classic alcoholic syndrome: high-bottom drunk, medium-bottom drunk, low-bottom drunk. I got banned from the Midnight Mission, lost my family, home, and occupation. On the last day I drank, if someone had put a lie detector on me and asked, “Are you an alcoholic?” I would have said no, and the needle wouldn’t have moved. Almost everything I’ve told you today I learned long after I was sober. That’s one of the great helps in being desperate: you take the action before you understand why. Understanding why doesn’t help you get better; you have to take action. It’s like being on the deck of the Titanic after hitting an iceberg, everybody else rows away as fast as they can, while people like me say, “I’m not getting off until I understand why this happened!” Knowing why doesn’t help; you have to do something to get better. I appreciate being here, and I want to thank Muriel and the group for inviting me. Thank you very much!
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