MY FOUR WEEKS AT THE BETTY FORD CENTER : A Legendary Drinker Goes Cold Turkey at 39000 Bob Hope Drive

This article is adapted from “Time Is All We Have: Four Weeks at the Betty Ford Center,” just published by Arbor House Publishing Co.

In deference to AA’s practice of anonymity among alcoholics, some names and characters have been changed to protect the privacy of the patients and the personnel at the Betty Ford Center.

I WAS LOST. “WHERE’S THE CLINIC for drugs and alcohol?” I asked.

“The Center?” the policeman said.

That particular morning I wasn’t afraid to pull up alongside the Palm Springs policeman’s car; I’d had a few, but I wasn’t drunk, not according to their little Richter scale anyway. Just hung over and shaky from the day before--the days, weeks, months, the years before. “Hell, mister, you’re a ways from Betty Ford’s--that’s over in Mirage. See that road right there--it’ll take you directly to it.”

“Good name,” I said. “Mirage.”

He didn’t seem to hear me.

I turned my car around and got on the right road.

It had taken me a long time to find the right road. Fear, more than hope, had brought me here.

The Betty Ford Center for the rehabilitation of chemically dependent people was established in 1982 by the wife of the 38th President of the United States, and in its few years it has established itself as the best-known and perhaps the most successful institution of its kind in the world. It usually has a waiting list of about 300 people, and when I went there, it could handle only 60 patients at a time. Part of its renown owes to the number of celebrities who have “graduated,” such people as Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Tyler Moore and a top astronaut who requested anonymity. For anyone from any walk of life who had an alcohol or drug problem, the center’s reputation for success, its geographical location and its physical layout held an undeniable allure.

I felt terrible and about to throw up. In front of my bloodshot eyes in Rancho Mirage was a mirage: Floating there in the desert in a sea of grass, newly cut, was what appeared to be a country club. Only there was no golf course. There are about 65 golf courses in the Palm Springs area, but this wasn’t one of them. It looked like an elegant clubhouse in need of Robert Trent Jones. There were four other one-story buildings behind it, and off to the left was a large pond with three swans gliding gracefully on it.

How could any place with an address like 39000 Bob Hope Drive, Rancho Mirage, expect to be taken seriously?

A tall, white-haired man opened the glass door for me. “Hi, I’m Edward,” he said genially, shaking hands.

A week later he would joke, “My own hand shook for an hour after that contact with yours!” One of several “graduate” volunteers, he took my suitcase to the registration desk. I was in Firestone, the nucleus of the rehabilitation center. As I looked around, my first thought was how very unlike a clinic it appeared. There were no visible white-coated doctors in the spacious lobby, no nurses in uniform, no patients in gowns, no hospital smell. Just several normal-looking, informally dressed people of various shapes and colors, wandering around, going into the little gift and candy shop, the cafeteria, the office doors, sitting on the couches talking or looking at the handsome framed prints on the wall.

After I signed in, a slim man in a sport coat and bow tie introduced himself. He was Malcolm. He led me to an empty office, put my suitcase on a table, and began to go through it purposefully, saying, “Sorry about this--standard.”

He confiscated a bottle of after-shave lotion, aspirin, and some pills.

“I have to take those,” I said. “Blood pressure.”

“You can get them from the nurse every morning at 8 right here.”

He took away the Listerine, saying with a laugh, “We get some beauts in here who actually drink this stuff.”

I took heart that I appeared so normal that he and I could laugh about those others, those beauts.

I had six paperback books--two Elmore Leonards for fun, and four for self-improvement I’d been “dying to read” for a quarter of a century: “The Red and the Black,” “The Idiot,” “Lord Jim,” and “Swann’s Way.” Here, with four boring weeks staring me in the face, I would finally get through them.

“Gotta take those,” said Malcolm.

“No reading?” I exclaimed. “How about magazines and newspapers?”

“You can read the paper after 7 at night. No magazines. No books. No distractions.”

If I felt sick before, I felt sicker now.

Malcolm closed the suitcase. “Let’s go see the doctor.”

“I’d like to call my wife,” I said. “Tell her I got here OK.”

“We’ll call her for you,” he said. “No phone calls till after the fifth day. In or out. No visitors for a week either.”

As we started out of the office, I asked gloomily, “Any good restaurants around here?”

“A few,” he said, “but, of course, you can’t leave the premises. Not for a month.”

I was in a concentration camp!

A SHORT WOMAN WITH BOBBED GRAY hair came out of her office and walked up to me with a smile. “Hi, I’m Jerry, your counselor. Come on in. We’ll talk a bit before lunch.”

I liked her immediately but was intimidated by her. Afraid of her. And why not? She held the key, I knew, that would ultimately get me out of here.

She was dressed in a suede skirt, cashmere sweater and flat, no-nonsense shoes. Her direct manner was also no-nonsense. “Here’s the routine except for Sundays. Up at 6:15, make your bed, breakfast, walk, therapeutic chore: that is, whatever you’re assigned to do on the bulletin board, like vacuuming or setting the tables. Some columnist said we put Liz Taylor on the ‘toilet detail’; there’s no such thing. We’ve found that a little menial chore is therapeutic. Morning lecture’s at 9. At 10 you and five others meet here in my office for group. Then lunch, afternoon lecture, and your group meets in here again. Then exercise in the pool or aerobics, dinner at 5:15, evening lecture, reading and writing assignments, bed.” She gave me her good smile. “Think you can stand it?”

I wasn’t exactly sure, but I said, “Better than the options, I guess.”

She looked down at my file. “You were arrested almost 20 years ago for drunk driving.”

“Yes, but then I gave it up for at least. . . .”

“Are you an alcoholic, Barny?”

“Well, I can go--I have gone--long periods where. . . .”

“Are you an alcoholic?”

“Once, about three, four years ago, I went four months without. . . .”

“Are you an alcoholic?”

“I suppose so or I wouldn’t be here, right?”

She sighed. “Still some denial there. Well, go get some lunch, and after the lecture I’ll see you here for group. Now here’s your Alcoholics Anonymous book.” She handed me a large, blue book. “We’ll be using it a lot. Plus a notebook--you are to write your feelings in it every night and turn it in to me before 8 every morning. Plus your ‘Twenty-Four Hour Book.’ Plus the ‘Twelve Steps and Traditions’ book.”

Homework. I was a third-grader again. It was demeaning.

A voice called out over a loudspeaker, “Circle time.” In the lounge, people got up from the tables and couches and went outside the glass doors onto the lawn.

Twenty of us--about half men and half women, ranging in age from 64 to 22--stood in a circle holding hands. One man led off with Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer, and the others joined in: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

After dinner there was just time to go back to McCallum Hall and find out that my work assignment for that week was setting and cleaning tables, and then it was time for the evening lecture.

The speaker was indeed Betty Ford, and when she came into the room and went to the podium, everyone clapped and stood up.

“Hello,” she said. “My name is Betty Ford, and I’m an alcoholic and an addict.”

The AA-indoctrinated group chorused in unison. “Hi, Betty!”

“Welcome to newcomers and good luck and bon voyage to those of you preparing to go back to reality. I fervently hope that a new life is awaiting you all.”

Flushed and smiling shyly as though it were her first time to speak here, she went on: “Not one of us set out to be an alcoholic or addict, did we? We have a lot in common, you and I. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have the same disease as I, if you didn’t suffer from chemical dependency. It’s no stigma; but believe me, you couldn’t have convinced me of that back then. Let me tell you about it. Perhaps you’ll recognize yourself here and there.”

She entwined her fingers and leaned her forearms on the podium. In an informal, almost casual way, she gave her “drunkalogue.” There was little variety in the inflection, the tone was colorless, yet the sincerity and caring were undeniable. No one coughed or rustled for the next hour as she told her story, much as she had in her autobiography, “The Times of My Life.”

“No need to tell you people about the treatment I received. You’re going through roughly the same thing. The Betty Ford Clinic is an outgrowth of the Long Beach Navy Hospital’s program and Hazelden in Minnesota. But no two patients ever take the same treatment or react the same. It can be rough. Here’s an entry in the diary I kept at Long Beach.

“At first, I loathed the sessions. I was uncomfortable, unwilling to speak up. Then one day, another woman said she didn’t think the drinking was a problem, and I became very emotional. I got to my feet. ‘I’m Betty, and I’m an alcoholic, and I know my drinking has hurt my family,’ I said. I heard myself, and I couldn’t believe it. I was trembling. Another defense had cracked.”

She looked around the audience and smiled. “Sound familiar? At first, growth is slow; it takes patience. If you expect a party with balloons and confetti and music the minute you get off the pills, the booze, whatever your poison is, you’ll be disappointed. No lights flash, no siren screams. But the process of healing is interesting in itself, and peace is its reward. With peace comes new energy. I am filled with vitality I haven’t known since I was a young girl.”

WHEN I CAME INTO THE LOUNGE AT MCCALLUM, JERRY BECKoned me into her office and motioned for me to sit. She was chic in a suede outfit and a blue silk scarf around her neck.

“This is unacceptable,” she said, handing me back the notebook I’d written in the night before.

“What’s wrong with it?” I said defensively. I hadn’t had a literary rejection for a long time.

“No feelings,” she said. “You’ve been way out of touch with your feelings for years. Maybe decades. Your feelings, like those of most drunks, have been anesthetized.”

“I did what you told me,” I said sulkily. I hadn’t quite gotten used to being called a drunk.

“You described everything well enough. But I want to know how you felt emotionally, not what you thought intellectually.”

“Feelings?”

“Yes, you know, like anger, anxiety, happiness, loneliness, hate, love, resentment, apprehension and so forth. Do it over. Now, Barny, did you ever do anything while under the influence that you were ashamed of?”

“Plenty,” I said.

“Didn’t we all?” she said with a smile. “I want you to write in detail about one of those episodes. And--important--how you felt about it. For Monday.”

She handed me “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions,” published by Alcoholics Anonymous.

“As you probably know, we are totally AA-minded here at BFC. We believe the Twelve Steps program is often the only thing that works for the alcoholic and the addict. AA has the very best record of any program in history; on that everyone agrees.”

“Why didn’t I just stay home and go to AA?”

“You tried that once, didn’t you? I saw that on your record sheet. Few years ago, wasn’t it?”

“I tried going to meetings for a while.”

“And?”

“It didn’t take. I went because other people thought I should.”

“I’ll bet you’d go to a meeting, and then go to a bar afterward.”

“Sometimes before, too. How’d you know?”

“Don’t forget that everyone in this place has been where you’ve been, where you are now. We’ve all done things as bad and bizarre as you, and in my case, I know, a helluva lot worse. Why do you think AA didn’t work for you?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t take it seriously, I guess.”

“When you get out of here, you will. Now, we only have time in four weeks to cover the first five steps. You’ll start this weekend with the first. Know what it is?”

“Giving up booze.”

“Right. The First Step says, ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.’ Is that hard for you to admit?”

I hesitated. “ ‘Powerless’ seems a bit strong. Sounds as though I was lying drunk in a gutter someplace.”

“But, you must be powerless over it. Otherwise, why haven’t you been able to quit? Isn’t the urge and habit of drinking stronger than your resolutions to quit? You’ve proved it over and over.”

“All right. I’ll admit that much.”

She looked at her watch. “Time for the lecture. I want you to read about the first step in this book and also in the big blue book, and write your feelings about it for Monday. Plus, of course, your daily impressions, and a complete revision of your first entry.”

“That’s quite a bit.” I said.

“What’d you think you were signing up for--a country club?”

THE LECTURER WAS DR. JAMES WEST, MEDICAL DIRECTOR OF the clinic. He was tan, trim, 60, with bushy, dark eyebrows and iron-gray hair, and dressed in a natty gabardine suit. He started out with a fine description of alcoholism and the alcoholic in general in understandable terms. He spoke without notes in an impressive and decisive way, and we had to scribble our notes in our binders fast to keep up with him. He didn’t talk down to this audience, but his section on alcohol and the brain was a model of science made understandable to the layman. “The brain is the target organ for the pharmacological effect of the sedative-hypnotic chemical alcohol. Alcohol is closely related to the anesthetic ether.

“One of the brain functions most obviously affected by alcohol use is memory. It is thought by many authorities that short-term memory is primarily a transitory phenomenon that can be compared to an electrical charge, but that over a period of time, usually after about 15 minutes, certain changes begin to occur in the brain that make these short-term memories, or electrical charges, permanent and convert them to chemical or permanent memory engrams. The process by which this takes place is called encoding.

“After the circuitry of memory has been exposed to alcohol repeatedly and over a long period of time, and in relatively large amounts, the encoding process, as a physiological function of the brain, begins to fail. This failure results in the drinking person not being able to recall what occurred during his or her drinking episode. As time goes on, it requires less and less alcohol to bring about this so-called blackout. Eventually, the circuitry of the brain becomes so damaged that the patient is incapable of remembering anything beyond a very short time. This condition is referred to as Korsakoff’s syndrome. It is usually an irreversible state.”

A LOUDSPEAKER IN THE HALL CRACKLED AND SUMMONED US TO the lounge for the weekly Saturday afternoon hall meeting. We arranged our chairs in a circle, all 20 of us, plus three counselors, and the meeting was presided over by a counselor named Laverne. She had grayish blond hair and looked like a pretty, small-town librarian with her horn-rimmed glasses. Until she spoke, that is; she had a voice, as we used to say in Montana, that could worm a dog. “It has come to my attention that one of you has offered the housekeeper $50 a week to make his bed. This will not be tolerated. I know it’s a first for some of you, as it was with Elizabeth Taylor, but here we make our own beds. And we make them neatly.”

The meeting then focused on a woman, Reena, a beautiful dark-haired Latin of 30, who had always worn layers of pancake makeup, mascara and lipstick. She generally dressed, as someone said, in what looked like the flag of a Central American country. Today, her counselor had ordered her to go three days with no makeup at all to help her “get in touch with the real Reena.”

“Reena, how are you doing today?” Laverne made the mistake of asking.

Reena told her how she was doing. Reena told us all. And she phrased it in the language of a Marine drill sergeant.

To put it mildly, she didn’t like or trust us. She didn’t like or trust the counselors, and Betty Ford could take her center and perform an impossible physical act with it. Reena said she had delivered herself, body and soul, to this place, and what had happened? People talked badly about her behind her back, accused her of being a falling-down drunk and a doper, and the women hated her and were jealous of her and her wild life style. “Hypocrites!” she screamed at all of us, and burst into sobs.

When she finally quieted and cringed in her chair, weeping silently, Laverne said in a surprisingly soft voice: “I think you’re mistaken, Reena. No one hates you.” She looked around the circle. “Does anyone hate Reena here?”

“No!”

“I think, on the contrary, Reena, they love and understand you. I think this is part of your problem--your failure to trust people. I know you had a rotten childhood; I know you were raped by your uncle and so forth. But that’s over. This is now , and you must learn to trust people. You must start today. Let us begin by trusting your peers. Let’s try a little experiment. Everyone stand up.”

Then Laverne led Reena to the center of the room. She told the woman to close her eyes tightly. Laverne motioned for all of us to come closer and pointed at several people, waving them in behind Reena.

She took both of Reena’s hands, and she spoke quietly and soothingly, almost hypnotically: “Reena, you’ve never liked yourself, but you are basically a fine, fine person. Look how you’ve taken care of your old mother and your daughter, for example, through thick and thin. We recognize your fine qualities, and your bad points are no worse than ours, and we love you and want to help you. Everyone here wants to help you, don’t we?”

“Yes!” we chorused.

“We love you, Reena,” said someone, and others echoed it. “We love you.”

“Do you love them, Reena?”

The woman, tears flowing over her high cheekbones, whispered, “I don’t know.”

“Do you trust them?”

She caught a sob. “I--I don’t know!”

“Are you willing to try to trust them?”

Reena shook her head, her eyes still shut.

“If you should fall, do you think they would catch you?”

Reena hesitated.

“They love you, they want to help you. They would catch you, wouldn’t they?”

She murmured, “I don’t know.”

“Reena,” said Laverne, “when I count to three, I want you to fall straight backward. Do you hear me?”

The woman barely nodded.

“One,” Laverne started, “two. . . .” She let go of Reena’s hands.

Reena stood rigidly, her eyes shut, her hands clenched at her side, her mouth working silently.

“Three!” Laverne commanded.

Reena swayed, then like a tree sawed through in a forest, she fell slowly backward, her body straight. Twelve inches before she would have hit the floor a dozen hands caught her. Then, slowly, they lifted her up and put her on her feet.

And now she was laughing and crying and hugging the people crowding around her who were touching her and saying, “We love you,” and she was kissing Laverne and gasping to everyone, “Thank you, thank you. I do love you, I do, oh, I do!”

The others went back to McCallum to play charades or watch TV. I felt like neither. What I wanted was a book--a book that had nary a mention of ethanol in any form. No weighty thoughts, no message, just a good exciting story that I could lose myself in. No Robertson Davies, Herman Melville or Saul Bellow tonight. It was Saturday. I could kill for a Robert Ludlum or my favorite suspense writer, Elmore Leonard.

I went into the little book shop across from the cafeteria, knowing that I was licked, that every one of the dozens and dozens of books and booklets and pamphlets on the shelves is about alcohol, but I idled through them anyway. I saw a book titled “The Courage to Change” by Dennis Wholey. On the cover it said: “Personal conversations about alcoholism” with such famous people as Billy Carter, Sid Caesar, Jerry Falwell, Jason Robards, Rod Steiger, Wilbur Mills, and. . . .

Elmore Leonard!

My favorite writer a drunk?

“My first wife doesn’t have a problem that I know of, but we always drank,” Leonard said in his interview. “We always drank together. We always drank before dinner. We always had wine with dinner. Every single night we would get into arguments, with me drunk and her part of the way, with me saying vicious things, which I couldn’t believe the next day. I’d be filled with remorse.”

I rested the book on my chest for a moment. I shut my eyes and saw the scenes. Boy, that was me and Mary. Get about halfway through the dinner and the wine would start to take hold, and suddenly I was saying things I didn’t mean, words coming out of my mouth as though they had a life of their own, slashing and wounding and having no connection with the real me, or what I thought of as the real me when I was sober. And then maybe something Mary said would trigger a mean response in me, and I might dump my plate on the floor or tip over the whole table and lurch out of the house hurling epithets and climb into my car and slam off into the night to the nearest bar, which is probably what I had in mind all along anyway. And then, as Elmore Leonard said, the remorse the next day. Oh, Lord, the remorse.

I FINALLY WROTE MY STORY ABOUT MY “MOST HUMILIATING EXperience.” It was what I like to think of as a polished, professional account of my two-week jail term for drunk driving, years ago, in which I made friends with some pretty rough fellow inmates by sketching them. I read the story in group therapy, and rather expected it to be a big hit. But when I stopped and looked around me, smiling, there was silence instead of the applause I’d expected, counted on, yearned for.

Jerry sighed. “Well, group, what do you think?”

Terry, a nurse addicted to drugs, was first: “B.S.!”

“Why?” asked the counselor. “Why do you say that, Terry?”

“I don’t believe all that happened. And I think he wrote it not to tell us about the evils that alcohol can lead you to but to show how good he was at drawing!”

“I agree,” Essex, another patient, jumped in with a will. “Showin’ off!”

“And racist,” said Chico. “How come only the Mexican guy smelled bad? And that ‘weeth or weethout nuts’ crap--some of us speak English pretty well, you know.”

“Yeah?” I said hotly in injured retaliation. “Well, this guy didn’t happen to. He was. . . .”

“Shhh, Barny, be quiet and listen to your peers.” Jerry said. “Dave?”

Good old Dave--he wouldn’t let me down.

“Well,” Dave started reluctantly, “the article is lively enough, frivolously amusing, but what really has it got to do with addiction?”

“Exactly,” Jerry said. “It is not accepable the way it is, Barny. I didn’t ask you to write a screenplay or a magazine article. I didn’t ask you to amuse me. These exercises are for you , not for me. You’re the sick person. Forget about impressing me. Stop being a people pleaser for once in your life and concentrate on your recovery. I wanted you to dig down deep into yourself and scrounge up some feelings . For example, how did you feel when you heard the barred door slam? When you were fingerprinted? When you said goodby to your wife? Didn’t you feel humiliated, embarrassed, afraid, guilty, and so on?”

I nodded numbly. “All of those things.”

“And how did she feel, and how did you feel when you got out of jail?” Jerry made some notes in her binder. “I want you to do it over and this time concentrate on your emotions, those feelings of yours that are dead or buried, like every alcoholic’s.” She studied her assignment book. “I’m also missing your journal entries for the last two days and the rewrite on your first assignment. Where are they?”

Oh, Lord! I’d been so engrossed in the jail thing that I’d totally forgotten the other work. “I don’t have them. Forgot.”

“You didn’t forget,” she said. “You hoped I’d forget.”

I flushed under the scolding. I had not really forgotten; she was right. My intent, as it had been through much of my life, was like Paul Theroux’s advice to the expatriate in Singapore: “Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.”

She shook her head. “You are in deep trouble. I want all your assignments, back work and all, done by the day after tomorrow.”

I was fatigued with depression, as we filed out of Jerry’s office. Dave said, apologetically, “Barny, I hope I wasn’t too. . . .”

“I know, I know,” I said, angry, brushing him off. “Rigorous honesty at any cost.”

When I got to the lounge and saw the telephone, I brightened. I could call Mary. At least I had that. I went eagerly to the pay phone, which was on the wall across from the little glass office of Laverne, the acerbic counselor. There was no line yet. I had a quarter and was asking the operator to reverse the call when Laverne herself materialized beside me. She jabbed the telephone hook down.

“No calls for you,” she ordered.

“Why not?” I sputtered. “It’s the fifth day.”

“Rules say very clearly ‘ after five days.’ Barny, you’d better start getting the rules straight in your head or you’re going to be out of here on another part of your anatomy.”

She strode off. It isn’t fair, I thought, as I hung up the telephone.

AND THE DAYS WENT BY AT THE BFC, EACH THE SAME, EACH different.

San Francisco columnist Herb Caen once remarked that “vacations are long in the beginning, short at the end, and round in your middle.” That certainly applied to the BFC experience, though it never was a vacation. My first week at the center was surely not dull, but it seemed interminable. The second week went faster, and the final two zipped by. As for the “round in the middle,” exercise, fresh air, and an alcohol-free palate gave me a teen-ager’s appetite and a craving for desserts. Curiously, while I actually gained a little weight, everyone said how good I was beginning to look and how thin; it was merely the bloat disappearing. There were highs and lows in my moods and attitudes during the first fortnight. Some days I was euphoric, delighted to be here, reveling in sobriety and envisioning a new life for myself. On other days I would feel surges of great anger, resentment and impatience, and I’d become swamped with self-pity. And at times I was filled with craving for a drink--not a drink, but a whole bowlful of liquor.

And always we complained--about the food, or lack of mail, or the tight restrictions. “Why do we put up with this?” I remember saying to Dave after we’d been reprimanded severely for reading a newspaper before the proper time. “They treat us like a bunch of children.”

“I guess technically we are until the day they give us their precious medallion.”

But little by little the anger dissipated as my body and mind continued to get healthier and closer to normal. There was, indeed, something magical about this place, and that was proved in so many ways.

One magical happening was Reena’s graduation. Before her falling-over-backward experience, no one had ever expected Reena to make the grade, but here she was sitting in a circle with all 20 of us in McCallum Hall, without the cheap makeup and gaudy clothes, accepting the medallion with grateful, dignified words and vowing never to forget the friends she’d made in her 30 days here.

Something magical finally happened to me, too. For want of a better expression, I’ll call it the Experience. It occurred one afternoon after lunch when I went to my room to catch up on homework. It was my third week here, and time for work on the much discussed and important Step Three, referred to by us apprehensive patients as “turning it over.”

In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous it reads, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. “

It is regarded by AA and the BFC as a crucial step in an alcoholic’s recovery. I doubted my capability to accept it.

There was no heavy insistence on religion as such at the BFC, yet since the treatment and preparation for subsequent after-care was based on the Alcoholics Anonymous program, it perforce placed considerable emphasis on the spiritual side of the patient’s treatment and development during his time there.

It was reiterated that God, or the preferred term Higher Power, was as we perceived him as individuals, not the way some formal church tradition or TV preacher might have pictured him. He--or She or It--was simply a force, an energy or idea or concept that was outside of ourselves and bigger than ourselves and stronger than ourselves and more powerful than the alcohol and drugs we’d been taking, and somehow, if we prayed to this force and permitted it to, it could rid us of our consuming disease.

Many an atheist or agnostic has entered the BFC and come out still nonreligious in the traditional sense, yet imbued with a new feeling of wonder and spiritual awareness and a respect for the power of prayer.

I was one of those. I am not arrogant or wise enough to presume that there is or is not a God. But I know that I did go through some sort of spiritual awakening, and most of the other graduates of the BFC that I’ve talked with have told of similar happenings.

It was on my 18th day, and the anxieties and uncertainties of the first days were behind me. I knew what was expected of me now, and I had done my assignments as well as I could and even had drawn coveted praise for some of the work from Jerry and the rest of my group. I had completed my First and Second Steps and the reading and writing connected with it. That is, I had admitted to the powerlessness and unmanageability of my life in the face of alcohol, and admitted that I was unable to do anything about it on my own. I had admitted to the false pride, the grandiosity, as they termed it, that prevented me from seeing my own behavior as it actually had been, that caused me to think that unlike other mortals, I could swill down any amount of liquor I chose without being held accountable for the damage it was doing to my health, my brain, my family and my career.

There was no proselytizing at BFC, and it was never made a controversial issue. Steps Two and Three simply assumed that there is a God to understand and that we each have a God of our own understanding in us. Our understanding might be that he is weak or strong, conservative or liberal, out of date or even nonexistent. We were urged not to allow our understanding of God to become an issue at this stage of our sobriety, but simply to accept the fact that if we remained abstinent and pursued the treatment, significant spiritual changes would take place in us, that as we grew to understand ourselves and other people more, we might develop a better understanding of a Higher Power.

It was easy enough to listen to this counsel day after day, and mouth the words, but it was a different thing to feel and truly believe.

Yet this day, this Sunday, a beautiful, crisp desert day, I was in my room writing about the Third Step when something strange occurred. Suddenly I felt a tingling over my entire body. It was as though my limbs and face were glowing. And I saw as clear as the sunlight streaming in the open door that I no longer had any problems, that they had been relieved and shouldered by some unknown force. I realized with startling clarity for the first time the simplest of ideas, so simple but all-important:

I didn’t drink because I had problems. I had problems because I drank!

I said it out loud, and then again, jubilantly. I laughed out loud. The BFC had been hammering away at that concept for so many days, yet only now had it truly sunk in!

I had no problems in this world that couldn’t be surmounted or solved if alcohol were removed from the picture.

A great warmth of serenity came over me, an absence of anger, an onrush of love, an acceptance of myself and everyone around me, and a tremendous surge of gratitude as I took inventory of my many blessings.

I wanted to thank someone or something for all of it, for my realizing it finally, for my having found my way to this place, for the love I had rediscovered for people, for my wife and my children and friends.

I found myself on my knees, my hands clasped together, looking upward and mouthing fervently the words, “Thank you, thank you!”

And, as long as I was in an attitude of prayer, I felt I might as well pray for Mary, who had been skittish about the idea, to come here for Family Week.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, but when Peter, the “granny” appointed to look after me, knocked and came in to say I was wanted on the phone, I wasn’t embarrassed to be seen on my knees.

I went down the hall to the telephone, my legs a little shaky. I was wet with perspiration, and the skin over my entire body was sensitive and achy, as though I had the flu.

It was Mary, and her voice was full of optimistic resolve and support as she said that in a few days she would be driving down for my final week. I gasped. Then I finally found my voice and answered that that was great and that I could hardly wait to see her.

I had prayed for that, and already it had happened!

When I hung up, I walked over to see Craig, a BFC minister, in his office. I haltingly tried to tell him what had happened to me and how marvelous I was feeling--euphoric, serene. And the answered prayer! He listened to me quietly, then he stood up, extended his hand, and said, simply: “Welcome to the club.”

SINCE LEAVING THE BFC, I’VE HAD AN INCREDIBLY GOOD YEAR. When I went into the center, my GGTP (short for gamma glutamyl transpeptidase) count was a stratospheric 594; that is an indicative and important blood test for liver damage, and any count over 53 should be watched. Last week I repeated the test, and the GGTP was an astonishing 41, which amazed even my blase doctor. My blood pressure, even with medication, had been consistently around 170 / 110; now, with no medication, it is a consistent 130 / 70.

But above and beyond the sense of optimism and physical and mental well-being, my relationship with my family has never been better.

I confess to missing drinking on long flights in airplanes; it was a good way to kill time (what a dumb concept anyway; we don’t kill time--time kills us). And what sort of an idiot wants time to pass quickly when that is all we truly have? That is the precious commodity that Ray Bradbury speaks of in this poignant prose-poem; he sent it to me with Christmas greetings and congratulations on my sobriety, and I quote it here in part:

Imagine that you have been dead for a year, ten years, one hundred years, a thousand years. . . .

The grave and night have taken and kept you in that silence and dark which says nothing and so reveals absolutely zero. . . .

In the middle of all this darkness and being alone and bereft of sense, let us imagine that God comes to your still soul and lonely body and says:

“I will give you one minute of life. I will restore you to your body and senses for 60 seconds. Out of all the minutes in your life, choose one. I will put you in that minute, and you will be alive again, after a hundred, a thousand years of darkness. Which is it?”

What minute would I opt for, Ray?

I don’t know, but I would want it to be a sober one.