Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot by John Callahan

Author:John Callahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

When I finished making amends, I had a sense of enormously increased emotional strength. It was as if the whole base of my life had broadened out on the earth. And, finally, I felt the psychic din in my life quieting, the voice of my intuition growing stronger.

Housecleaning as defined by the fellowship, like housecleaning in real life, never ends. The Tenth Step demands that if I wrong somebody, I go straight out and rectify the wrong. This enforces a rigorous, habitual honesty, and that’s necessary, because if a lie works, it leads to another. Soon, the liar is back to deceiving, not just others, but himself. As the pain levels increase, that person, if he is an alcoholic, will think about reaching for a bottle; in my own case, probably a fatal move.

The Eleventh and Twelfth Steps of the program ask for a lifetime of spiritual effort and service to other alcoholics. I finally understood that I must talk about my life in meetings, however it hurt. When an attractive young woman, a senior secretary at IBM, got up and admitted that she’d worked as a whore, her honesty and strength were a gift to me. These were desperate people, bent on saving their lives. So was I. And I owed them.

I learned to control my panic and, after two years, chaired meetings. I also served on the AA hotline several nights a week. The line was routed directly to my apartment, and I took calls from some very disturbed people. Sometimes I was able to find help for them and tasted the enormous satisfaction of being on the giving end for a change.

Every aspect of my life was changing. In 1979 I had a bout of the kidney infections to which quads are susceptible, that produced blood-pressure headaches, as painful as migraines. They felt like someone was sandpapering the backs of my eyes, but there was nothing the doctors at Good Samaritan, the hospital in my neighborhood, could do about them but give me painkillers. I knew that drugs, for a guy with as little sobriety as I had, could open the door to all my old behavior patterns. I decided to do without and to concentrate on the program instead. The pain became unbearable. Finally I rang for the nurse and told her to bring the needle. As she walked back to her station to get it, I made a last-ditch mental effort, reciting the Serenity Prayer with all the concentration I had. The nurse came back with the hypo on a tray, but in the five minutes she’d been gone, the pain had vanished.

No sooner had I made some gains in strength and independence than I found myself with a new attendant. Martin was a total mom. He became devoted to me to the point of driving me crazy. He loved to drive me to school, hand over my allowance for the day, pick me up on time, make sure I ate twenty-five vegetables at each meal, all while boring my friends into grease spots.

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