After 46 Years, the Prison Still Smelled Like Fear - AA Speaker - Johnnie H.

But I got to stay sober for all this period of time because of a number of reasons.

Uh, last night, I went into great deal-- great detail about what I was like and what had happened to me, what I'm trying to be like today.

But there's some very, very important things that have happened to me in my journey in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Uh, most of you know I, I took a drink of alcohol when I was nine years old, and I didn't realize then that it had a special effect on me.

It does something for me that it doesn't do for maybe nine out of the other ten people who drink.

And I pursued that illusion that they talk about in our book, Into the Gates of Insanity and Death and Beyond, because I went insane one day standing in front of a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles, California, on my second sentencing to a state penitentiary.

And what that judge said to me was that I was a blood-sucking parasite in society and that I had no right being around decent people.

He told a woman who was sitting in the courtroom, who was pregnant with my oldest child, that if she cared anything about that child at all, she would never let me lay eyes on it.

Now, he didn't say anything to me or anything to that courtroom that I hadn't said to myself time and time and time and time again.

But the first time I ever heard it in an open courtroom, it did what to an alcoholic what an alcoholic will do when he's overburdened with the truth about himself and the exposure of the truth to a room full of people.

My brain exploded.

And I spent the next eight or nine months of my life crawling around in a cell in solitary confinement in a maximum-security penitentiary.

That's what it finally left.

See, that's what being sober for a period of time and facing up with the truth did to me.

That's what sobriety was to me.

Sobriety was a nightmare.

Sobriety was the, the reoccurrent nightmares of the tragedies and the atrocities that I had committed on my selfish, self-centered journey through this thing called life, and I didn't know what we're doing.

And, and it had driven me right up into, maybe into a, a depth of hell that very few people will probably ever understand.

And if it had been in my depth moment standing in front of that judge, if he'd have said to me, "You need to go to Alcoholics Anonymous," I'd have thrown something at him.

Because there was no reason for me to go because I knew what my answer was.

My answer was that sooner or later, somebody's gonna blow my brains out in one of those street alleys that I lived in, or I was gonna spend the rest of my life locked up in some type of an institution somewhere.

Because that had been my prognosis, that had been my evaluation from the psychiatrists and the therapists and the penologists and the criminologists and the lawyers and the teachers and the preachers and the coaches for as far back as I could ever remember.

There was a psychiatrist in, in the San Quentin State Penitentiary in nineteen hundred and fifty-one who tried to talk me into a lobotomy.

Because he said, "Son, you're gonna die in a penitentiary.

People like you are gonna die in a penitentiary." Now, I don't know what kind of grace that was looking over me.