There was never a more blasted, ruined alcoholic than Doreen S. that night in the Pike Street flophouse.

"I´d been on a big drunk, the worst I´d ever experienced," Doreen recalled. "I woke up so sick I couldn´t raise my head. I had to roll out of bed and crawl over to the door. Lying there, I reached up to the doorknob and got the door open. But how was I gonna get down the stairs? I finally slid down on my back to the lobby, where the manager found me."

Not unreasonably, his first question was what was she doing on the floor. "I said there was nothing left of my life, nothing." The manager, a drunk with a heart of gold, picked her up and put her to bed in his apartment. She stayed there for two weeks, totally helpless, unable to eat, and sharing the bed with a swarm of people from Mars. Finally, on the 16th day, she was able to sleep for an hour.

"That man saved my life," Doreen said. But she had another five-day drunk in her system before she met Jack S. and turned her life around.

"We lived in the same apartment building," Jack said. "I saw her after that last drunk. I knocked on her door to make a Twelve Step call, and we´ve been together ever since." That was in 1970, and a year later, on July 9, 1971, they were married. Together, they´ve carved out whole new lives for themselves and for each other.

Doreen´s story begins on an Indian reservation on Vancouver Island, where she was born to an Eskimo mother and an Indian father. At school on the reservation, other Indian kids made her life miserable because of her Eskimo ancestry. "I was beaten all the time. Nobody liked me. Kids picked on me, and I didn´t know why ´cause I didn´t know my mother was an Eskimo. Kids can be mean. I know what prejudice feels like."

She quit school in the third grade and went to work with her mother in a giant salmon cannery at Steveson on B.C.´s Lower Mainland. She was nine years old. Her first job, at 15 cents on hour, was to bring cans to the packing line. By the time she was 13, she was supervising 100 women. That same year, she discovered the wonders of booze.

"Everybody drank at the cannery Somebody gave me a rum and coke. I drank the rum and chased it with the coke. Right away, I felt good. All of a sudden, I was popular. Everything blossomed for me. Oh, my God, it opened up a whole new world. I could dance better. I was the life of the party.

When she was 20, Doreen married a U.S. soldier she met in a bar in Vancouver and they moved to Tacoma/Fort Lewis. The next 20 years of her life, to the extent she can remember through the DTs and the blackouts, are a nearly continuous nightmare. "We were in WillIts, California, for awhile, but all I remember of that town is the bars." She had three children by the time her husband left her.

She spent some time in a Stockton, California jail before going to live with a friend in Blaine, Washington. Her children were there too, but she doesn´t remember how they got there. Her drinking escalated until she was sent to the then-tuberculosis sanitarium at Firlands in Shoreline. When she got out, she hit the mean streets of downtown Seattle until she met her second husband, a sailor, and they moved to Bremerton.

"I got my kids back and everything was great for awhile. I was a good wife. Nobody went hungry; I paid the bills. Then I started drinking again. I´d end up on Skid Road in Seattle with the other Indians at First and Yesler, a wild place. Over and over, my husband brought me back home and I promised him I´d quit. I really meant it, but I´d forget."

There was a 90-day stint at Western State Hospital too, where Doreen thought her psychiatrist was great. He told her all she needed to do was to learn to drink moderately. So when she was released, she got drunk on the way home to Bremerton.

"It was a mess. My kids went into foster homes. My husband finally said he couldn´t take anymore. ´I still love you, but you´re committing suicide the slow way,´ he said, and left me. What was he talking about? I was just having fun. One Sunday, I went to see my kids after a night of drinking. My daughter was 10 months old and I couldn´t wait to get out of there to get a drink. That´s the last time I saw her ´til she was married and living in Nevada. But I´m glad to say we´re good friends now. My granddaughter is coming to live with us this fall to go to college here."

Doreen stayed on in Bremerton after her husband left her. Finally, she was hospitalized with delirium tremens. The little men from Mars wearing gas masks lured her out of bed with their strange flashing light. "Screaming and hollering," she was forced back into bed, only to see a snake the size of a horse coming out of the wall. Heavily sedated, on her 10th day in the hospital, she stopped breathing. The doctors saved her life and released her back to Naval Avenue in Bremerton, where she was welcomed back to her favorite bars. The little Martians were there too, when her downward spiral took her back to Seattle.

Doreen didn´t think she had any friends in those terrible days, but two of them came from somewhere and drove her to a halfway house, where a dose of paraldehyde let her get a night´s sleep and a few days´ rest. This was about 1958, she thinks, and she was beginning to consider sobriety. There were dry periods punctured by binge drinking. She got a job cooking at the old Alano Club and was thinking about getting drunk again when something shifted inside her. "Another drunk and I´m not going to come back. I was scared."

She got to her first meeting on Oct. 18, 1970, the 20/40 Monday night meeting, "where everybody said the right things for a change. Not long after that, Jack knocked on my door, and oh, my God, we haven´t been separated since."

Doreen´s favorite memory is of her first AA birthday. "I couldn´t believe how time flew by that first year. Then there I was, everyone singing ´Happy Birthday´ and cutting a cake with one candle. I´ll never forget it."

Asked what finally gave her the strength to quit drinking, Doreen just said "I felt different that morning, and I was sick. My compulsion to drink went away." Jack gives the credit to God. "At times, God steps in to help really bad alcoholics," he said.

"People come to hear Doreen talk. When she was new in the program, she couldn´t read from the Big Book. She taught herself to read by watching ´Password´ on TV."

"I´m still learning," Doreen said. I work all kinds of word puzzles. I watch people, how they talk, how they do. I listen." At one time barely able to speak English, she now speaks fluently with only a trace of accent. She enrolled at Seattle Community College, and later worked for Nordstrom´s before retiring for health reasons. Jack and AA are her life now.

Jack´s AA story is shorter but just as intense. A naval architect for a prominent Seattle firm, his drinking got him fired and rehired eight times, a statistic he says is a record. When he was 32, his parents sent him to Kodiak, Alaska, to sober up. Not the right place, Jack recalls-"22 bars and 22 churches, and they needed all of them. The first problem there was alcohol and the second was mental illness. It was a dangerous place. I was sitting next to a woman in a bar one time when I said something philosophical to her--´All women are prostitutes.´ Her husband pulled me off the stool and broke my nose."

Jack worked as a laborer and then a carpenter in Kodiak for three years, drinking more heavily all the time. Finally, the Carpenters Union funded a trip to the University of Washington Hospital for him for treatment of delirium tremens and alcoholism. That resulted in three weeks of sobriety, when the need for a drink hit again.

"Two angels told me they were gonna kill me if I didn´t go to City Hall (counseling center). There, the doctors gave me a massive shot of librium and sent me to UW´s psych ward for two weeks. For five days, I got 500 milligrams daily."

That wasn´t his first experience with the angels. They´d been on his case in Kodiak, and in his first year of sobriety, "they´d come back at me, so I behaved myself pretty well. Those were awesome angels, huge. If you ever saw one, it would be you who needed the diaper, not the angels."

That last hospital stint worked for Jack. He went to his first AA meeting at Wedgewood on April 4, 1967. He was told later people there didn´t think he would live through the night. "I had that dead fish look, you know?" But instead of dying, his life began changing for the better. He got his old job back with the naval architectural firm. The hallucinations and the angels stayed with him for a year, along with severe anxiety attacks. But he stayed sober, and started back to college.

Soon, he formed a band called Alaska Jack and the Revenuers which became famous for its plays and skits at the Big Hall. Professionally, he went out on his own in 1979 as a naval architect and has segued into sound control on ships. Currently, he is a consultant to the Washington State ferry system.

Some people dismiss stories like Jack´s and Doreen´s as drunkalogues, but Jack says they´re important, especially to newcomers.

"You don´t know who´s there to listen and is going to say, ´That´s just like my story.´ In my own case, someone said that after a year, the voices would go away. It was very helpful to hear that, and yes, they did go away."

Let´s give Doreen the last word:

"People stood by me that first year. I left the Big Hall one night wanting a drink so bad I could taste it. Then I remembered that last drunk (God again?), called a friend, got something to eat, and the next thing you know, it was my first birthday."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.