You can´t tell a book by its cover.

Sitting across from me to be interviewed is Diane L. Polite, softspoken, demure, petite, a lady if ever there was one.

But yes, also a former car stripper, professional blackjack player, teenage hobo, and serious drinker from the age of 12 who, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, has segued into one of the toughest service jobs Seattle Intergroup has to offer. Diane is the A.A. Nightwatch chairperson, presiding over dozens of other volunteers who staff the A.A. phones from their homes 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It´s up to Diane to keep the phone slots filled: four-hour shifts of 10 p.m.-2 a.m., 2-6 a.m. and 6-10 a.m. If you, gentle reader, would like to participate, call Diane at 206-383-9123 or Intergroup at 587-2838.

The phones are covered from the office the other half of the day. Besides finding volunteers, the job includes putting together a complicated schedule each month which is distributed to everyone involved. It´s enough to test a body´s serenity.

It´s hard to imagine how Diane packed so much booze and delinquency into her life before reluctantly deciding to change it for the better. "Reluctantly," because she only came to A.A. as a result of a romance which subsequently went south. It was in 1986 in Las Vegas that Diane first came to this program, primarily to prove she was not an alcoholic. "They drew me in with talk," Diane recalled. Persuasive enough that "I decided I should try sobriety."

For the next seven months, she had a tortured white knuckle abstinence, treating her ruined health with orange juice and honey, but there was no conviction. She got into a new relationship and decided a little test drinking couldn´t hurt. Every other week, a bit of the old sauce. It wasn´t long before she was up to her regular fifth a day. When she quit that, it was vanilla extract and near beer.

"Everything in Chapter 3 (of the Big Book) I went out and tried," Diane said. {"We know that no real alcoholic ever recovers control." Page 31.} "I´d been going to meetings every day, Everyone thought I´d been sober for a year. They had a one-year birthday cake for me, but when they announced my name, I couldn´t go through with it. I started for the podium, and then I just walked out. I couldn´t lie anymore. I knew I had to start over."

She wasn´t quite through yet, though. Diane decided to have one more drunk before throwing in the towel. But a final fifth didn´t make her drunk, so she went to the meeting and "raised hell because they´d robbed me of my ability to get drunk." The meeting response was to give her a stark choice: sobriety or death.

She chose sobriety. That was on Aug. 8, 1997. Seven days down this new road, she decided she couldn´t make it if she stayed in Las Vegas, so she fled to her father´s home in Houston. It was in Houston that she learned what A.A. is really all about and built the foundation which has carried her through some tough times in the past decade.

"I only stayed with my dad for six months. I had no money and no skills. I think I went a little nuts. I was homeless until I got into a mission, and that´s where I finished working on my Fourth Step. Until then, I´d never realized the impact of my behavior on other people."

The Houston people told her that just going to meetings was not enough, so early on, she was into service work: alternate GSR, coffee maker for 30 days. That job led her into chairing meetings when the regular chairperson didn´t show up. "It was a wonderful time," Diane said. "For the first time, I didn´t feel stupid. I was treated normally, and came to realize that ´I can be a part of all of this.´"

The downside was her health, badly battered by a lifetime of heavy drinking. "Eighteen months into sobriety, I just collapsed. The hospital said my liver and kidneys had shut down, and diagnosed me with cirrhosis. I was on interferon for the next 18 months, sick as a dog. The drug killed my immune system, but it didn´t help me get well. Even today, I get sick too easily. I had liver surgery at the M.D. Anderson Center in Houston, and that didn´t help either. I was too sick to work, so A.A. became my job. But I started eating good food regularly and gradually began to get better.

"Somewhere along in there, I managed to make a friend for the first time in my life. She invited me to move with her to Seattle, so after four years of growth and pain in Houston, I moved here." She arrived on her fourth A.A. birthday.

It has been a long road, one that began in Oak Harbor, where she was born, daughter of a career enlisted officer. When she was two, the family moved to Japan, the first stop on a typical military family´s odyssey-Okinawa, Marseilles, and finally, Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville was not a good fit for the mouthy preteen who´d been all over the world and had a liberal view of life. Even though this was the early ´70s and American culture was undergoing rapid change, Diane did not find that when she entered the fifth grade. Her teacher discovered she was left-handed, a clear sign of possession by the devil, and went into conversion mode.

Whacked her across the knuckles with a ruler, that is, and broke Diane´s middle and ring fingers. Diane reluctantly learned to write with her right hand, but remains left-handed otherwise. The teacher got away with her crime by saying Diane fell down.

After a year of Jacksonville, Diane and her family moved across the Florida Panhandle to Panama City, and that´s where "I started drinking on a more regular basis." She was in the sixth grade. The kids would use the dregs of their parents´ drinks in the endless round of neighborhood parties. "Southern Comfort from the bottom of a blender isn´t too bad a drink," she said.

When she wasn´t partying, Diane learned how to hop a freight train. Nearby Alabama was a frequent destination, but one time she got all the way to New Orleans. The technique, she explained, is to wait at a curve where the train slows down, grab the skirting on the back side and pull yourself into the boxcar. New Orleans was too much for the child, though. "I scared the hell out of myself. Every alky in the world in the New Orleans switching yard said he wanted to ´help´ me. I was saved by a black guy who saw to it I was left alone, and helped me get back to Panama City."

Her parents never worried as long as she was home in time for dinner, so the New Orleans overnight took some explaining. Nothing that deterred her from her other activities, though-catching water moccasins for an Indian, hiding behind gravestones to terrify the new kid on the block. It was a busy two years, and then her father had his final transfer, to Las Vegas. Diane went to high school there, steadily increasing her drinking habit.

She wasn´t fussy. Her dad´s Scotch and her mother´s Bourbon were equally acceptable. By her senior year, she was drinking before lunch. Her mother worked for the military liquor store. Diane helped stock the shelves while helping herself to the stock.

At the end of her sophomore year, she got in a big fight with her mother and was kicked out of the house. From then on, she was pretty much on her own. She made some money playing blackjack, and with other teenagers, pooled their money to get a hotel room. When the rent ran out, they were back on the street until they could raise another money supply. Diane said. The kids also lived in an abandoned house for a year or two. No electricity, but a kindly neighbor gave them water. Another time, Diane lived in a junkyard stripping cars. Her pay was booze and a place to sleep.

Life went on, increasingly chaotically. At some point, a vague awareness developed that her life was out of control. "I decided that people were the problem, so I got a security job guarding a bombing range. I lived out there by myself, drunk as a skunk. I had plenty of guns. I was issued a .32, and I´d bought a bunch of guns over the years with my blackjack winnings. My prize was an 1841 cap and ball navy pistol." Luckily, she never shot anybody. "I was out there for seven months. I threw my empties out the window. One time, the bottle bounced off the stack back into the house. I was shocked o see how many there were out there, and that they all had the same label as the stuff I was drinking."

Her lonely job was eased by a liquor truck driver who brought her two cases of vodka (10 bottles in a case) and a case of moonshine every month. When she finally left the job, it was with the same driver. En route, they sold the truckload of booze and the truck to an Indian, then hitchhiked into Vegas. Diane headed for her favorite bar, and there she met someone who introduced her to A.A. That was only the beginning, however. She was back out and white knuckle sober for the next year, gradually acquiring the capacity to admit she was an alcoholic. It was not until she moved to Houston that she became a real part of the program.

It´s been 10 years sober now and time to reflect. "A.A. is my life, literally and figuratively," Diane said. "I could not have gone through all the physical stuff without this program. I still can´t work on a regular basis, but my life is full."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.