Not-God (8 page)

To be not-God was to need others: to need them precisely in their weakness, from one’s own weakness; to need them as they were — alcoholic — precisely because one was himself alcoholic. So important was this sense that two decades later Bill Wilson recorded that on the “next day” (11 June), Dr. Bob suggested that they both start working with other alcoholics. In fact, however, it was not until 28 June that Bill and Dr. Bob actually confronted Bill D., the first “man on the bed.” Two days earlier, Bob had called a nurse-friend at Akron City Hospital and told her that he had “met a fellow from New York who had found a new cure for alcoholism.” The nurse’s first reaction was somewhat snide: “Is that so, Dr. Bob? You don’t mean to tell me you’ve tried it on yourself!” Smith winced at this further, developing awareness of just how “secret” his drinking had been, but he answered with brief honesty, “Yes, I sure have.” Relenting somewhat, the nurse told Dr. Bob that yes, she had on the floor “a real corker” who could not however be seen that day.
¹

Bill D., destined to become the third member of Alcoholics Anonymous, possessed the necessary credentials. A prominent attorney and former city councilman as well as former church deacon, he had just begun his eighth detoxification in six months by physically assaulting two nurses, leaving them with black eyes. Dr. Bob guessed that he and Bill Wilson would not have too difficult a time drawing this potential new recruit’s attention to “hopelessness” and “bottom” …
if
he wanted to stop drinking.
²

Bill D. did want to stop: he was ready for the message. He was also exquisitely ripe for the way in which the saving tidings would be delivered. On that Friday morning, he had been moved into a private room — unknown to him, at the initiative and expense of Dr. Bob. When, shortly, his wife appeared at the door, Bill D. became convinced that one of two things was about to happen: either he was going to die or she was going to leave him. Most crushing was the awareness that his wife’s obvious happiness was unhelpful in deciding between these alternatives.
³

“You are going to quit,” she told him, relating how she had been “talking to a couple of fellows about drinking.” Bill D. resented her talking to strangers about his drinking, and he told her so strongly. His wife waved aside his blustering protest about “loyalty” to him. She informed him that they, too, “were a couple of drunks.” Bill relaxed. “That wasn’t so bad, to tell it to another drunk,” he afterwards reported. Mrs. D. had apparently had quite a conversation with Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, for she went on to tell her glassy-eyed husband that part of the plan these two drunks had for staying sober themselves was to tell their plan to another drunk: that was how
they
were going to stay sober. Years later, Bill D. reflected on the jumbled thoughts in his mind as his wife left and he began to lapse back into withdrawal stupor: “All the other people that had talked to me wanted to help
me
, and my pride prevented me from listening to them, and caused only resentment on my part, but I felt as if I would be a real stinker if I did not listen to a couple of fellows for a short time, if that would cure
them.
”
⁴

When Bill D. opened his eyes again, Wilson and Smith were standing at his bedside. The three began to chat, and the patient found himself unable to lie back and passively await their message. “Before very long we began to relate some incidents of our drinking, and, naturally, pretty soon, I realized both of them knew what they were talking about because you can see things and smell things when you’re drunk, that you can’t other times, and, if I had thought they didn’t know what they were talking about, I wouldn’t have been willing to talk to them at all.”
⁵

A true alcoholic, Bill D. — who had at first offered what was to become the usual protest: “But I’m different” — soon went to the opposite extreme, and at length Wilson had to interrupt. “Well, now, you’ve been talking a good long time, let me talk a minute or two.” He and Bob probed again their new acquaintance’s sense of hopelessness. Did he think he could get up and leave the hospital and not drink again, on his own? With seven recent failures of just such a resolution in less than six months under his ample belt, Bill D. harbored no illusions on that score. Wilson and Smith then stressed that they
had to
give their “program” to someone else if they were to stay sober, so was Bill D. really certain that he wanted it? Because if he did not, he was doing worse than wasting their time, he was endangering their sobriety. So they had to know, because if he did not want it, they were not going to stay and nag at him. For their own sakes, they would have to “be going and looking for someone else.”
⁶

Lying there, entranced by the clear-eyed enthusiasm of these two men even as they spoke of their hopelessness, Bill D. decided and declared that he “wanted the program.” But when Wilson and Dr. Bob began to speak of “a spiritual approach” and a “Higher Power,” he shook his head. “No, it’s too late for me. I still believe in God all right, but I know mighty well that He doesn’t believe in me any more.” Bill Wilson and Dr. Smith appeared to their listener to hesitate. “Well,” one of them asked, “maybe you’d like to think about it. Can we come back and see you tomorrow?”
⁷

The co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous did return the next day, and for several more visits. Finally, one morning they entered the room to find their first “pigeon” speaking excitedly with his wife.
⁺
He looked up and pointed to them, saying, “These are the fellows I was telling you about. They are the ones that know. They understand what this thing is all about.” Bill D. went on to relate to all three how, during the previous night, “hope had dawned on him.” He had had his “spiritual experience” and had grasped at the thread of faith, hope, and a muted charity: “If Bob and Bill can do it, I can do it. Maybe we can all do together what we could not do separately.”
⁸

Bill Wilson exulted. The saving message had been shared successfully a second time — Dr. Bob Smith was no fluke. Nor, apparently, need a suffering alcoholic necessarily be already familiar with Oxford Group principles. This fact especially lodged in Bill’s mind. Grateful as he was to the Oxford Group and to their teaching, Bill’s first experience at the Calvary Church mission still rankled. He could not yet put his finger on exactly what the difference was between the alcoholic and the nonalcoholic Oxford Group members of his acquaintance, but a deep instinct told him that there was something.
⁹

Yet, uncomfortable as it might be at moments, especially to Bill, the Oxford Group was the only conceptual home Wilson and Smith had. More, although Bill did not realize it at the time, it was a womb which had still one further positive contribution to make to the yet undeveloped program that would become Alcoholics Anonymous. For the remainder of the summer of 1935, Bill Wilson stayed on in Akron, attending weekly Oxford Group meetings and living with Dr. Bob and Anne Smith in their Ardmore Avenue home. Wilson’s financial support during this time came from his persistent if intermittent pursuit of the proxy fight that had brought him to Akron. Feeling that with proper legal assistance he could demonstrate that their defeat had been by fraud, Bill had obtained from his partners a small amount of money with which to pursue that thread of hope.
¹⁰

Wilson and Smith directed their main efforts, however, at alcoholics. The quiet example of Anne Smith and almost daily visits from Henrietta Seiberling provided their spiritual nourishment and much religious education through the summer. Every morning, Anne, who for years had begun each day with the practice of a “quiet time” seeking “guidance,” shared this practice with her husband and their visitor. Her “guided” Bible readings favored two themes: Paul to the Corinthians on love and the apostle James on the crucial importance of “works” if faith were to have meaning. Henrietta’s visits led to further exploration of the same themes. Years later, Wilson looked fondly back on the summer of 1935 as the period in which Anne and Henrietta had provided him and Dr. Bob with their “infusion of spirituality.”
¹¹

Progress in their work with alcoholics was not smooth. The Smiths took into their home a few who expressed an interest in “getting well.” Once, when her husband and Bill had gone out to seek yet another potential client, Anne found herself chased around her kitchen by a crazed ex-drunk brandishing her own butcher knife in his demand for alcohol. On another occasion, with Bill and Bob at home, a prospect in search of booze shinnied down a gutter pipe and fled down the street with A.A.’s co-founders, after a delayed start, in hot pursuit — Bill on foot and Dr. Bob in his aged but beloved car. Anne Smith could understand and even accept such occurrences, but they proved somewhat less than welcome in the quiet, middle-class, residential neighborhood of Ardmore Avenue. The Smiths, able to retain their home only because of the depression-induced and Roosevelt-imposed mortgage moratorium, hardly relished such scenes. Gratefully then, they readily accepted the generous invitation of T. Henry and Clarace Williams to bring whatever alcoholics they could muster to the regular Wednesday evening Oxford Group meeting at the Williams home — a meeting which had had its origin largely in Henrietta Seiberling’s much earlier effort to “do something” for Dr. Bob.
¹²

At first, there were precious few alcoholics to bring. For all of Bill’s and Bob’s daily reinforcement with the Saint Jamesian idea of the importance of their “works,” the second aspect of that term (“It works!” — a phrase later to be glorified as the chief and indeed the only claim of their program) had difficulty in blossoming beyond their own and Bill D.’s example. “It works!” was, of course, witnessed to by their own sobriety; but some of the goings-on at Ardmore Avenue as well as the blank stares and rejections which they most usually met when trying to convince new prospects, gave ample evidence that, for most others, it did not work easily.
¹³

In 1944, Wilson blamed this early failure on the fact that “again came this tendency to preach, again this feeling that it had to be done in some particular way.” A few years before, pondering the apparent greater success of Dr. Bob in Akron in comparison with his own New York efforts, Bill had proclaimed that the time had come to “stop pussyfooting about the spiritual.” A happy and fruitful middle between the “tendency to preach” and “pussyfooting about the spiritual” was only laboriously worked out. In the summer of 1935, such a compromise was not even conceived, much less glimpsed. Then, imbued with the Oxford Group sense of imitating primitive Christianity, Wilson and Smith found hope in the gospel story that recounted how even after three years of preaching to the multitudes, Jesus of Nazareth had garnered but twelve close followers and that, later, even these had all but deserted him in his moment of crisis.
¹⁴

A respite from this possible concern came in mid-July. Lois Wilson journeyed West to visit her husband and to meet his new friends. The gentle wife to whom Bill had preferred another alcoholic on Mother’s Day was unable to be jealous of or to resent Bob and Anne Smith. Welcomed into their home, impressed with Dr. Bob’s Vermont-manly affection for her husband, warmed to the core of her being by Anne’s outgoing faith and love, delighted at her spouse’s childlike joy in his sobriety, Lois gave her blessing to his efforts and enthusiasm. Her brief visit proved long enough to renew in her heart the first-married love and deep faith in her husband’s abilities, the seeds of which had somehow survived the seventeen years of his destructive drinking. Certain more firmly than ever that her Bill was a great man, she returned to Brooklyn’s Clinton Street determined to cooperate in every way possible. Sharing him with Bob and Anne was surely preferable to losing him to bottles of gin, and she sensed in him — even as a result of this sharing — a love for her which she had almost forgotten. Back at her job at Loeser’s, Lois soon took up her new duties in her chosen field of interior decorating. So joyously at peace was she after years of mental turmoil worrying over Bill that her own creativity burst free. Lois wrote and found ready publication for an article on veneers as she serenely awaited her husband’s return.
¹⁵

She did not have long to wait. Early in September, Bill Wilson’s proxy battle met another apparent defeat. His sponsors soured on the project’s continuing costs, and Bill departed for New York. He left behind Dr. Bob and two other sober alcoholics. “Not very much to show for four months of intensive work,” Bill meditated as his train rolled eastward; and he smiled wryly at the realization that this evaluation applied to both the frustration of his attempted re-entry to Wall Street and his and Bob’s many failures with drinkers. But on the positive side, Wilson was now convinced of two things that he had held more as hopes than certainties when that train had carried him in the opposite direction four months earlier. He could stay sober —joyously sober — by working with other alcoholics; and whatever it was that he had, he could give — his sobriety could be shared.
¹⁶

Bill and Dr. Bob had talked about these realizations as well as their frustration over their less than five percent success rate during their final moments together on the Akron station platform, as Wilson reached to explore with the surgeon for one last time before departure how he might proceed back in New York. Now, Bob’s words echoed in his enthusiasm-turmoiled mind, restoring calm: “Bill, keep it simple.”
¹⁷

Back at 182 Clinton Street, Wilson shared his thoughts with Lois. The idea of attempting yet another return to Wall Street faded. Whether moved more by Bill’s contagious enthusiasm or by her own joy and hope at seeing him so gloriously sober, Lois agreed that above all her husband must explore his developing ideas by continuing the work he had begun. Basking in his wife’s continued devotion and still cherishing the warmth of the home Anne Smith had provided for Bob for so many years and into which she had welcomed him so readily, Bill conceived a new plan — one made possible by Lois’s decision to give up her job at Loeser’s. It was notorious that alcoholics felt unloved: an understandable fact, for few were so blatantly unlovable as the drinking alcoholic. If an alcoholic like them, not having the advantage of such loyal love as Lois and Anne had given him and Dr. Bob, were to “get the program,” perhaps such an environment and atmosphere of home-like caring would be needed.
¹⁸