Bill's Dinner with Ebby

Daily Gratitude List 11.11.22

I’m grateful for having the right people in my life. I’m grateful for Friday morning. I’m grateful for the view from my desk. I’m grateful for people who get excited about the same things. I’m grateful for chances to do things differently. I’m grateful to be sober today.

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Happy Friday! I’m just going to point out that today could be an auspicious day, given that the date works out to be an equation. I like days like that. I’m going to dive right in and today’s topic is Bill’s fateful dinner with Ebby Thacher.

Bill’s dinner with Ebby is both a pivotal event of the Big Book and also kind of exaggerated and maybe bits are not as true as we’d like. It is, inarguably, the central event of the Big Book and in the same way the resurrection story frames Christianity, Bill’s realizations after his dinner with Ebby frame the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

It’s November of 1934. Bill had emerged from a stint at Towns Hospital, maintained sobriety for a bit, then relapsed spectacularly on November 11—Armistice Day back then, Veteran’s Day today. Bill played golf on Staten Island, made a new friend, went to lunch, lectured his friend expansively about his new comprehensive theory of alcoholism and then drank to punctuate the presentation. That’s my kind of alcoholic. After that relapse:

Everyone became resigned to the certainty that I would have to be shut up somewhere, or would stumble along to a miserable end. How dark it is before the dawn.

Big Book, p. 8

I think I’ve said this nineteen times or so, Bill was a pretty smart guy, he was 100% aware that drinking was well on its way to actually killing him and that knowledge was not enough for Bill to stop drinking. This is the part that non-alcoholics simply don’t get: Why would you do something so incredibly self-destructive? That to me is the hallmark symptom of alcoholics and addicts—you know it’s killing you, destroying everything of value in your life and that knowledge is not enough to get you sober or keep you sober.

Near the end of that bleak November, I sat drinking in my kitchen. With a certain satisfaction I reflected there was enough gin concealed about the house to carry me through that night and the next day. My wife was at work. I wondered whether I dared hide a full bottle of gin near the head of our bed. I would need it before daylight.

Big Book, p. 8

As I approached the nadir of my drinking career, I had to manage withdrawal symptoms that set in about 4 hours after I stopped drinking. I was a maintenance drinker—meaning I was mostly drunk all day long, every day. I’d often head home around 10pm, put on “Law and Order,” and kind of collapse/pass out. When I awoke after 4 or 5 hours of not drinking, I was in complete withdrawal. The sheets and pillows and my pjs were literally drenched in sweat, my hands shook so badly it was hard to brush my teeth, I was dizzy and wobbled around the house, I couldn’t focus, withdrawal-fueled anxiety sent horrifying thoughts and feelings zipping through my head at lightspeed. It was complete chaos in there. I couldn’t listen to music, I couldn’t read, at that point, all I could really do was drink. That’s pretty much where Bill was, too. The comment about needing that bottle of gin before morning tells the whole story.

My musing was interrupted by the telephone. The cheery voice of an old school friend asked if he might come over. He was sober.

Big Book, pp. 8-9

I don’t know if Bill swore a lot or not, I feel a certain kinship with Bill and that last sentence, the bombshell that had just come over the telephone wire, I think it would hit me this way: He was sober? Fucking Ebby Thacher is sober? WTF? He was a way worse alcoholic and he’s sober? I think it’s funny that Bill put that in italics in the Big Book:

This thought did not linger too long with Bill. Being the terminal OG Alcoholic that he was, he saw the bright side of newly-sober Ebby’s visit:

Of course he would have dinner, and then I could drink openly with him. Unmindful of his welfare, I thought only of recapturing the spirit of other days. There was that time we had chartered an airplane to complete a jag! His coming was an oasis in this dreary desert of futility. The very thing—an oasis. Drinkers are like that.

Big Book, p. 9

Yes, indeed, drinkers are like that. Set against the backdrop of impending doom and futility, the only thing that mattered to Bill about this dinner was the opportunity to drink. Drinking does confer a certain single-mindedness if you work at it a little. According to Susan Cheever, Bill retrieved the bottle of gin hidden in the toilet tank at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn and awaited the knock on the door.¹

The door opened and he stood there, fresh-skinned and glowing. There was something about his eyes. He was inexplicably different. What had happened?

Big Book, p. 9

Anyone who has gotten sober for a little bit knows all about this. It doesn’t take too much before the color comes back to cheeks, sparkle comes back to eyes, life comes back. These little facts, the observations of a practiced alcoholic, are what convey the depths of Bill’s illness. Hearing the thoughts of a doomed man confronting someone claiming to be saved is pretty fascinating. Of course, the first thing a true alcoholic will do when confronted with someone doing better, particularly someone who has some success with the whole drinking thing, is to find a way to bring Mr. High-Faluting Sober Guy down to our level.

I pushed a drink across the table. He refused it. Disappointed but curious, I wondered what had gotten into the fellow. He wasn’t himself.

Big Book, p. 9

First, that is a total dick move. Bill poured Ebby a drink and pushed it across the table at him. That’s kind of an aggressive way to treat someone who asked if they could come over and tell you how they got sober. It’s a good reminder that we alcoholics do kind of run on rage and anger and resentment. Bill was pissed when Ebby arrived. Ebby, the completely incorrigible alcoholic, had somehow gotten sober and Bill, the suave, charming, super-smart guy who had been trying so hard and failing at every turn, was not. So Bill had tried to even the playing field, to ruin Ebby’s fragile sobriety.

He looked straight at me. Simply, but smilingly, he said, “I’ve got religion.” I was aghast. So that was it—last summer an alcoholic crackpot; now, I suspected, a little-cracked about religion. He had that starry-eyed look. Yes, the old boy was on fire all right. But bless his heart, let him rant! Besides, my gin would last longer than his preaching.

Big Book, p. 9

Again, Bill tries to find a way to dismiss what Ebby is saying but is finding it more and more difficult to dismiss what he is seeing.

But he did no ranting. In a matter of fact way he told how two men had appeared in court persuading the judge to suspend his commitment. They had told of a simple religious idea and a practical program of action. That was two months ago and the result was self-evident. It worked!

Big Book, p. 9

Bill continues on, noting that they talked for hours, and he begins to synthesize his feelings about religion, spirituality and his own addiction. He remembers attending revival meetings with his grandfather, he remembers rejecting religion, he remembers realizing he was an alcoholic that day at Winchester Cathedral during World War I. Bill muses:

I had always believed in a Power greater than myself. I had often pondered these things. I was not an atheist…Despite contrary indications, I had little doubt that a mighty purpose and rhythm underlay all. How could there be so much of precise and immutuable law, and no intelligence. I simply had to believe in a Spirit of the Universe, who had neither time nor limitation. But that was as far as I had gone.

Big Book, p. 10

This is the beginning of Bill’s conception of his Higher Power: A great spirit that animated the universe, not a Christian God or anything connected to any organized religion. Bill explicitly rejects organized religion on the next page and simultaneously realizes God had done for Ebby, what he could not do for himself.

His human will had failed. Doctors had pronounced him incurable. Society was about to lock him up. Like myself, he had admitted complete defeat.

Big Book, p. 11

And this fucking guy got sober:

Had this power originated in him? Obviously it had not. There had been no more power in him than there was in me at that minute; and this was none at all.

Big Book, p. 11

So, it can’t be that Ebby managed this on his own. There’s no question he’s sober, just look at him. He’s not hysterical or ranting, he’s describing a miracle in very quotidian fashion.

I saw that my friend was much more than inwardly reorganized. He was on a different footing. His roots grasped a new soil.

Big Book, p. 12

Bill continued drinking after his dinner with Ebby, but the seed was now firmly planted. Between Bill’s realizations about his addiction, his budding theory of alcoholism and the physical appearance of the formerly alcoholic apparition at his doorstep, well, Bill knew something was up. Lois, his wife, recognized that even though he was still drinking, something had changed in Bill.

A few days later, Bill went down to the mission where Ebby was staying on East 23rd Street (it’s now a Taco Bell). Even though he had been drinking earlier that evening, Bill announced to a gathering of Mission residents that he had found the answer to his alcoholism and was turning his will and life over to the care of his newly found and understood God. This is arguably when Bill did a Third Step for the first time, even though he was still drinking.

I have pet peeves. Probably too many. One of them is the kind-of-moronic saying: “Relapse is Not Part of Recovery.” What does this even mean? Who said it? What are people trying to accomplish when they say it? It’s not in the Big Book. When I hear it, the first thing I think, fairly or unfairly, this is someone who hasn’t read or understood the Big Book. In fact, I’m going to argue that the foundation of Bill’s sobriety was actually laid while he was still drinking. While he was in the middle of a relapse. If Bill’s prior attempts at stopping drinking had been successful, if he had been able to just decide one day “enough is enough” and stick to it, well, there probably wouldn’t be a Big Book and there certainly would have been no dinner with Ebby. Bill’s recovery story, the one that has helped save the lives of millions of alcoholics and addicts, wouldn’t have occurred without his relapse.

I used to think about my sobriety like one of those really dense rubber balls I had as a kid—-the kind that would bounce crazily forever.² Well, it turns out they don’t bounce forever, the amplitude of the bounces steadily decays and maybe the bounces come more frequently towards the end, but they are much, much smaller and eventually they stop. I think the seeds of recovery are often planted in relapses; you can feel the power of the thing that has been your life-force, your drinking, diminishing and that’s not all good, because for many of us, alcohol was what gave meaning to our lives. It’s why Bill refers to these moments as the “Jumping Off” time. The relapses and misery have convinced you that you can’t continue drinking and the only choice is to find a new basis for life, a new way to live, because the old life is drawing to an inevitable close.

I have a visceral objection anytime someone in recovery tells someone else they are outside the lines. I’m not sure what point the “Relapse is Not Part of Recovery” shouters are trying to impress upon relapsers? That they are hopeless, beyond repair, not capable of redemption? That they are outside the Program?³ Like, I said, this is not found in the Big Book and Bill certainly did not espouse that attitude. Bill began to understand there might be a way out, while he was still drinking. Bill realized that Ebby just might have the answer, while he was still drinking.

Those scattered mustard seeds don’t grab hold and grow crazily overnight. It takes time and usually requires that the seeds land somewhere that has already been slightly prepared, softened up by living the despair of the end stages of alcoholism. I think there are very few neat, tidy landings for most alcoholics. We come in hot and pretty messy and there are more than a few wave-offs and come-around-agains. That rubber ball keeps bouncing until it can’t.

That’s how I got sober. The growing realization that I just couldn’t continue to live the way I had been, literally, and finally the guy with the flashlight shows up, lighting the way out. My recovery was built upon the lessons I learned from my many relapses and the desperate sense that life could not continue on this basis—a feeling generated by my horrific relapses. Alcoholics like me, and I think like Bill, drink because we have to, not because we choose to or prefer to. Relapses are not indications of a lack of desire or motivation or evidence of some kind of character stain, but coming back from one is pretty significant evidence of the strength of our desire and shows us that there is still work to be done. Bill’s relapses, and the realizations they drove, were an essential part of Bill’s recovery. They were an essential part of mine and that’s why I still carry them with me. My relapses help light the path of my recovery.

Bill’s relapses prepared the soil in advance of Ebby’s visit and afterwards, he was convinced he wanted the same thing that had taken root in Ebby to find purchase in him. Bill went to Towns Hospital for the last time in December 1934. He was done, he had seen the light, the ball had stopped bouncing and now it was time to see if he could make the transition to a new way of life.

Spoiler Alert: He did. He found sobriety by sharing his story authentically with other alcoholics, trying to help them see what Ebby had helped him see. By being willing to believe that there just might be a power greater than himself that might possess the power to restore him to sanity. That’s all it took to make a new beginning. Bill’s recovery wasn’t marked by certitude or proclamations about never drinking again. It was borne of defeat, humiliation and shame, it was borne of constant failures and the consequent despair. It was borne of relapses. The fact is, relapse was part of my recovery and I think it was part of Bill’s, too.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. At this point, Bill was largely confined to the basement of his in-laws’ house in Brookly.

2. Were they called Super Balls?

3. People who say this should probably also read the Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous before they proclaim who is “in recovery.”