tomsteve, your story just reminded me of someone.
As I said, it's years and years ago I tried AA. There was this man there, quiet nice man, very sweet and soft spoken, always wore a suit and tie with a pocket hanky in his suit pocket.
Found out when he shared, he was only the "town drunk" when I was a kid...the stuff of legends. He slept rough under a bridge, he was one of the meths drinkers (methylated spirits, never see people drinking that now, thank God). He would cause traffic jams in the town centre by having punch ups with imaginary people in the middle of the roads. Looking at that man then, you would never have thought he would have survived. But he did, and what a nice man he turned out to be when I talked to him all those years later