ABSTRACT
As an out-patient Berryman joined Alcoholics Anonymous squad 2 at St Mary’s Hospital, whose chairman, Ken Stevens, played the game of ‘Wet or Dry’ when taking the roll call each Sunday. Berryman liked the game, and would always respond honestly if dramatically; often he would seem about to say ‘Wet’ but switched to ‘Dry’, and the group would clap frantically. During the summer Berryman and Kate took a short holiday in Mexico, and Stevens later questioned him about his sobriety during the trip. Berryman had considered two plans – Plan A: Drink; Plan B: Don’t Drink – but had decided, as he told the group with his deep, booming, resonant voice, ‘Fuck Plan A’. On one occasion, when he answered the roster with ‘Wet’, he explained, ‘You’d drink too if you had an abscessed tooth like mine!’ While Stevens, who always felt very protective towards him, tried to rationalise the error, the group as a whole criticised any excuses. When the time came for Berryman himself to lead the meeting one Sunday, he had clearly forgotten to prepare a talk, but after a stunned moment started inappropriately to recite his Fourth Step Inventory (a ‘searching and fearless moral inventory’, according to treatment handbooks), which would normally be reserved for personal and confidential discussion, not for group rendition. Undaunted, Berryman read his confessions from a paper that he had discovered in his coat pocket, with the result, Stevens recalls, that ‘there was snickering and laughing and most of the women in the group were about ready to climb out of the window.’
