“Lets Finish The Bottle & Go To The City!” – AA Speaker – Chris S.
AA speaker Chris S. recalls getting drunk at 13 with friends and experiencing his first blackout—a turning point that revealed his different relationship with alcohol.
Chris S. was 13 years old when he and two friends decided to cut school and drink. In this AA speaker tape, he describes the moment that revealed something fundamentally different about how his brain responded to alcohol compared to his peers—a difference that would shape his entire life.
Chris S., an AA speaker, shares his first drinking experience at age 13, when he and classmates stole alcohol from his parents and got drunk. While his friends stopped after a few sips, Chris drank the entire bottle and blacked out. This early experience foreshadowed his alcoholic drinking pattern and his inability to drink like a normal person.
Episode Summary
Chris S. opens this AA speaker meeting with a story that cuts straight to the heart of what it means to be an alcoholic—the difference between drinking and alcoholic drinking. At 13 years old, he and a couple of friends decided to skip school and get drunk. They raided his parents’ liquor cabinet, grabbed a bottle of Four Roses whiskey and some Canadian whiskey, and poured three big glasses.
What happened next became the blueprint for Chris’s relationship with alcohol for years to come.
His friends each had maybe half a glass. Then they stopped. They’d had enough. That was it. But Chris couldn’t understand it. In his mind, why would you have two drinks and call it a day? “Let’s finish the bottle and go to the city,” he says—capturing perfectly the mindset of someone for whom drinking has only one logical endpoint: more drinking.
So that’s what he did. He finished his own glass, then he finished his friends’ glasses. Then he went to work on the rest of the bottle. And that’s where his first blackout happened. He doesn’t remember what happened after that point. It’s gone.
This is the kind of foundational AA speaker story that shows up over and over in the rooms because it reveals something crucial: not everyone drinks the same way. The disease of alcoholism isn’t just about drinking too much—it’s about an obsession with the drink itself, a complete inability to stop once you start, and a mysterious blackout that erases memory while the body keeps going. For non-alcoholics, drinking has a natural off switch. For Chris, and for countless people in recovery, there is no off switch. There’s only “more.”
He points out that plenty of hands go up when he asks if there are blackout drinkers in the meeting. There’s a recognition here—that moment when you realize you’re not alone in this, when you see that specific kind of broken mechanism in other people’s stories and think, “That’s me. That’s exactly me.”
What makes this story powerful isn’t the drama. It’s the clarity. This is what it looked like before Chris hit bottom, before the consequences piled up, before the real suffering began. This is the moment that, in hindsight, showed exactly who he was as a drinker. And for someone sitting in the meeting for the first time, wondering if they’re really alcoholic, wondering if they’re different from normal drinkers, this story answers the question in the first ten minutes.
Notable Quotes
Two. Let’s finish the bottle and go to the city. That’s how I drank.
They had maybe half their glass, pushed it back, and they’d had enough. But me? I finished my glass, I finished their glasses, and I put a big hurt on the rest of that bottle.
I went into my first blackout. Any blackout drinkers in here? A lot of hands. Let it be known that there’s a lot of hands.
Topics Covered in This Transcript
- Hitting Bottom
- Early Sobriety
- Denial
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▶ Full AA Speaker Transcript
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Now, here I am. I'm about I'm about 13 years old, and me and a couple of my buddies decide we're going to we're going to cut school and we're going to get drunk. And that's what we set about doing.
So, we we we cut school and we we went back to my house and I took I took down a bottle of um four roses whiskey and uh Canadian whiskey and poured three big water glasses and me and my two buddies uh got to the business of getting drunk. And what happened with them was I I would think it would be like a normal non-alcoholic reaction to drinking alcohol. They had maybe half of their glass, maybe a little bit more, pushed it back, and they'd had enough.
Does anybody in here ever drink with people that have enough on you? You know, isn't that annoying? Oh, no more for me.
I've had two. What? Are you crazy?
Two. Let's finish the bottle and go to the city. You know, cuz cuz that's how I drank, you know.
But they had they had, you know, half their glass. They pushed it back and they'd had enough. And and what happened with me was um I finished my glass.
I finished their glasses and I and I put a big hurt on the rest of that bottle. And and I went into my first blackout. Uh any uh any blackout drinkers in here?
A lot lot of hands. Let let it be known that there's a lot of hands.