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Source: DICOBE-00259 – Mike C – PALM DESERT RNDP – 1974-02-09.mp3 File: dicobe-00259-mike-c-palm-desert-rndp-1974-02-09.mp3 Duration: 00:55:56
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Hi, everybody. My name is Mike, and I'm an alcoholic. Happy birthday to Ralph and Mert. I was just standing there looking at them, and I said, that's pretty nice, isn't it? You know, five years and twenty years, you don't have your head in the toilet bowl, you haven't been kicked out of home, hopefully, and no jails and no mental institutions, and you know, you probably had your ups and downs over that period of time, but none of that old garbage, that old mess, and that's wonderful.
Francis, the fellow that read part of this up here, Frank took me to my first meeting, and my wife kicked me out of my home, and they're both here. So you have to be a little bit honest. Frank used to smoke pipe a lot, and he got me off cigarettes, and I still suck on a pipe quite a bit. And I happened to see a lady here, and I thought, oh, I know her from Orange, and then I got a better look at her.
I've been impressed now and then how drunks act alike when they're drunk, and sober drunks act a lot alike when they're sober. And one of the funny things that happens is we all seem to have a belly laugh. We can really just haul off and laugh at the most idiotic things. Well, I was doing something one night, and my wife used to get on me. She says, you suck on that pipe just like Frank. And she says, oh, you laugh just like Frank.
And Frank has quit smoking recently, and I'll die before I quit smoking. That's not true. If I had a choice, I'd quit smoking. But then one night on the way home, my wife was giving me another little rundown, and she says, you move your hands around just like Chamberlain. She says, you like to imitate those men. And I says, why didn't you tell me that when I had my head in the toilet bowl? I was just trying to figure out as we were driving over here how long it's been since my wife and I have had a good argument.
It's been a while. We were talking just last night, and I said, well, when I die, and I says, I would assume I'll die before you. I can't talk about that too loud. It sort of gets to me. I'll never want to die. But so she said, oh, things are so complicated. I'll never figure it out. And I says, OK, I'll make you a deal. You die first. And she didn't like that. And I said, well, I'll give you a telephone number before I leave.
And that's about the depth of our conversations most of the time. She still thinks I'm a little bit weird. But I forget when I was last over here. It must have been about a year ago. And what I used to be like. Well, that'll make you a drinkin', Joe. Used to sound like that on Sunday morning, though, didn't it? Just like. All right. Well, anyway, what I used to be like remains unchanged, I guess. And I, apparently we do this for reasons of identity, to help another guy identify a gal, find out if they're in the wrong place.
I personally don't believe that my life is a product of what people have done to me. I used to think it was. I think my life is a product of what I've done. If I drink a cup of coffee, something happens to me. If I drink a drink, something happens to me. Nobody made me drink it. If I lose my temper, if the person around me is sane enough to keep cool, I suffer. They don't. And I'm not saying I don't lose my temper, but I can take a better look at it more and more with the passage of time and these things.
And I really believe it's rather irrelevant what happened in the past. And there was a time when I used to feel bad, maybe that I hadn't gone to prison, so I didn't have as good a story as Johnny Harris or somebody.
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And I was pretty sick because I never, ever want to go to prison in my life. But perhaps that was a mild case of egoism. But just briefly in the past, I was born an Irish Catholic Democrat in Nebraska. And you're born that way and you die that way. And if you deviate one iota, you're a traitor. And now I live in the heart of the Republican Party. French is the most commonly spoken language in my home.
And I'm AWOL from the Catholic Church. So I'm not really where I should have been when they laid the master plan when things started out. But about age 14, I tuned in, turned on, and threw up back in North Platte, Nebraska. And fell against some picket fences on the way home from the Greyhound Bus Depot. I remember it a little bit, but I blacked out. And I didn't drink then for a couple years, which is no great big thing for a kid two years in high school.
But those were very nice years of my life. And later on, when things started getting so sour and so rotten, I used to say, my God, Mike, what are you missing now that you had then? And I thought it was a freedom from responsibilities. And I thought it was my youth. And I thought perhaps it was a little bit I was a center of attraction. I'm the youngest of four children, and really I was reared an only child.
I look back now, because we have five children. And the oldest is 10. Which brings to mind, now and then people ask me if I think about vitamin E or these things. And I say, my God, five kids in 10 years. If I take vitamins, I'll be back in that motel where I started six years ago. I don't dare take those and feel any better, you know. But the… I look back now, and days when I seem to be on the beam and feeling the best, the two common denominators that I have now, that I had then, is a boy of 17 and 18, that I love what I'm doing, and I'm not drinking.
And that's what I was doing when I was 17 and 18. And the world was just right then. The next time I got drunk, which is totally irrelevant, it was down at a state basketball meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, Patrick. And we got beat out. But unfortunately, they beat us out on a national holiday, which was the 17th of March. You see, the guy that brought me here was a Rourke, and my name's C.. And you're in bad trouble under those conditions on the 17th of March if a guy gives you a beer and you're an alcoholic.
And they carried me in, one guy on each limb. But then the next seven years, I had the opportunity to receive one of the best educations of four members in my family. And time spent there, the drinking was socially acceptable, and it was the thing to do. It was when you got accepted to med school. It was when you passed a test. It was when another guy got engaged. It was Thanksgiving or New Year or Christmas vacation.
And I would go out and perhaps imbibe a little bit more than I should have, but there was no remorse. There was no shame. There was no guilt. Really, the only bad part was a little bit of nausea. And I used to go in and tell these men certain sins that I had committed, and then I'd say I was guilty of the sin of gluttony. And they'd say, well, how's that? And I says, well, I drank and I became a bit ill.
And they said, well, that's just a venial sin. Don't worry about it, you know. And I used to say to myself, I'd be sitting out there in those wooden pews, and I'd say, how can you get so damn sick over such a small sin? You know, this is disproportionate. It doesn't make sense to a guy like me. And I used to drink with three black Irishmen from Bancroft, Iowa, and their name was Egan. And the Egans could drink beer all night and get up the next day and eat scrambled eggs, and I couldn't even be in the same room as scrambled eggs for 48 hours.
You know, it just, oh, God. And I used to talk to the Egans, and I'd take a little bit more of myzole oil, or I'd put more butter on my bread, or I'd eat a better steak. It always came out the same. So physically I never did drink too well. Mentally, I guess as time goes on and more is revealed to you, I wonder how well I ever did think my whole life. I know that I was not an obsessive-compulsive person as a young man because I could shake off things, and I didn't understand people that couldn't shake off an error in baseball
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or flunking an exam or losing a girlfriend. It was, those things weren't that important. I think if I ever had anything of any importance as a young man, it was to try to make my parents proud of me, and I appreciated all the time and money and the faith they invested in me. And I set out to do that. If I've ever been in competition, it's with my brothers, and I tried to exceed them in grades and in sports and ultimately in marriage.
And when I was about 26, I figured I'd graduated from med school and it was time to get off my father's payroll, and I met a girl that was very pretty, very rich, I'm told, well-educated, and I set about to do that as I'd done the other things, and I'd do my brother's, and I knew this wouldn't fail because I'd considered all the angles. Well, we had a beautiful wedding and no marriage, and within three months it was destroyed.
Now, they say we rebel against authorities, and I don't agree with that entirely. I've always tried to respect the people in charge. The people that bug me a little bit are those that come in unannounced from the rear and tap you on the shoulder and say, incidentally, I'm in charge here. And that happened in the form of a mother-in-law 48 hours after we were married. It never ended. The battle never ended.
I made amends to her in a cemetery in Nebraska five years after she was dead. As a matter of fact, when I heard she died, I got drunk because it was not at my hand. That's what you call a little resentment. But anyway, so I was living down in St. Louis then, and I knew what an alcoholic, so I realized they were dirty people, and they didn't shave, and their pants were filthy, and they had broken veins on their face, and you could feel their liver and their belly start bloating, and they shook a lot.
I knew what those people were, and I used to be down in my little Ben Casey uniform down in St. Louis and put a tube down their belly and stand aside so they wouldn't turn it red with their pizza and their steak and their mazol oil. I knew what those people were. But I became very ashamed that I'd failed in something that I'd set out to do, and I started to develop a shell around myself, and I never wanted anybody to ask me any personal questions.
And I would dazzle them with verbal footwork. I was just as loquacious as any Irishman could be in a bar, and I'd yackety-yackety-yack, and if they asked me any question that was personal, my heart would just skip a beat and drop way down. There's a wonderful young guy over in Orange County now. He called me up the other day, and he says, I'm still getting those lurches. And I says, what in the hell is a lurch?
And he happens to be in medicine, too. You'll all meet him someday. He's a wonderful young man. He says, that's when your colon takes a great leap towards your heart. And I used to get a lurch when people would ask me personal questions, and I didn't want him to know that something was the matter in my life. I was down in St. Louis then, and I moved up to Minnesota. My grades were good. My record was still good.
I had the opportunity to study up at Mayo's. And you know what they say, the three most overrated things in the world are home cooking, sex, and the Mayo Clinic. But I got up there, and I didn't want the young guys to know that I had failed. So I got an apartment, and I started living alone, and I wouldn't go out with the single guys because I didn't want to jeopardize this thing that I was going to put back together.
I couldn't go with married people because I felt like a fifth wheel. So I started sitting around, and you can only eat so many shredded wheats and cornflakes and pizzas, and you get sick of it. So I'd migrate down to the bar, down to a restaurant, go in and have a few beers. You see, up until that time, all my drinking had been done with three or four guys after an exam. And we'd go out and raise a little bit of hell and stay up late, go home and go to bed, sleep late the next day and watch TV, and by Sunday evening, we were in pretty good shape, and we'd sit down and study again.
And that was the extent of my drinking as such. Although I was never a guy to sit around and have a couple beers. It was an all-or-none deal. But then I got up there in Minnesota, and so I'd walk over to a restaurant, Michael's and Eddie Webster's, and I'd go in and have a few beers and sit there and have a steak, and walking out, they'd have a piano bar. I'd say, well, a couple beers never hurt anybody.
Bar. I'd say, well, a cup of beer has never hurt anybody. And I'm entitled to a little bit of fun.
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This isn't my fault. I used to sit down with priests and monsignors. I even got up to a bishop once. You know, I'd be half in the bag talking to them because I was afraid of those guys. They'd reassure me it wasn't my fault. I'd say, if it's my fault, if it's not my fault, how come I feel like I'm losing? They'd say, well, things like that happen. And I look back now, and I don't ever regret anything that ever happened in my whole life.
This winning and losing business, it's up here. And if you can shift it down here, it's no big deal. They're all the same. There's a lovely little poem I love. And there's one stanza that says, if you can meet with triumph and disaster, then you treat these two impostors just the very same. It's just an experience in one life. It's a passing event. And why they put on there won or lost, it's really irrelevant.
If a person's willing to look at whatever happened and make the most of it and take it out of there, it makes you a better person, a better man or a better woman. But I horsed around up there, and I'd go over to various cities and tell them I was going duck hunting. I'd get in an old wooden hotel, and I'd get down in my system. And I did this for a few years. And to avoid people embarrassment, I was divorced.
I didn't want to embarrass my parents or anybody else. And I did this in Minnesota. I don't know why I'm telling you this. It's rather irrelevant, you know. But I can tell you that I cried many nights over all of this. And I look back now, and I'm not opposed to any religion. I think all religions are good. I knew that when I was 14 years old, the first dance I ever went to. My mother said, where are you going? I said, well, I'm going up above the J.C. Penney store.
She said, well, that's Masonic Lodge. I said, so? And she said, well, those are the Mason's daughters, Job's daughters, I guess. She says, you can't go there. You lose your faith. So I said, Mother, I don't think it matters really what you are as long as you do it well. She says, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you've already lost it. And anyway, I left there, and I was called in the service. I got out to Fort Ord, and they paid me in cash. That's where I met Gar.
And not long after I was there, I was out one evening, and I met a girl. I asked her for a date. We went out a few days later. We were driving down the road, and I sneezed, and I said, excuse me, and she said, you're welcome. So I looked at her, and she wasn't bad looking. And I checked out her credentials. She didn't come here with a great deal of money to this country. Her father was dead, and above all, her mother was in Europe, and that was vital.
And I figured if I played my cards right, I could be on top of this situation night and day, and we fell in love and got married. That's not really love. That's a set of circumstances, and if she lived up to them good, and if she didn't, I was going to kick her out. And I set about to make this girl into what I thought the wife for a fine guy like me should be. And in all humility, I've taught my wife everything she knows, and when she learned enough, she got a lawyer and kicked me out of my own home.
And she sits here tonight, and there again, it's one of the best things that ever happened to me. I didn't like that when I got here. Frank used to drive me around. It was six months before he'd let me drive him, you know. And he'd say, well, these are the things you're supposed to be, and you've all heard that, you know. The guy goes to his first meeting, his wife kicks him out the next day, and they say, that's good. The next thing is, his kids won't speak to him, and he says, that's good. Then he declares bankruptcy, and he says, that's good. And Frank was giving me all this, that's good, that's good.
And I figured, well, you know what the hell, I guess it must be good because it's happening. I'm sure I became a little irate, you know, hair stood up on my back a little bit. I don't ever recall arguing that much with Frank, but anyway, things ultimately did work out. Now, in those years, my drinking was just as chaotic and depressing and disgraceful as anybody in this room. I came into Orange County, had a wonderful education, a wife, two kids, and her mother. But she came over to visit about 11 years ago and never went home.
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But we laugh a lot. I catch her in the driveway sometimes and push on the accelerator and make her move. I have a dog that's got arthritis of the hip. My wife and I had some fun with this the other night. I says, poor old Copan. Copan is French for friend. I says, poor old Copan's got bad arthritis. I says, I'm afraid we're gonna have to put him away one of these days. She says, my mother has that too. I says, tell her to watch the dog.
Then the other thing was, she says, my mother's shoulder bothers her when she's up like that. I says, well, tell her how I feel like this for 10 years. I says, I've been held up. But anyway, in those 10 years, some things happened. I didn't kill anybody. I didn't kill myself. I totaled out two cars and walked away from them. I guess I didn't walk away from one. I'm told I got extreme unction. But I woke up in a hotel and said to heaven the next day, and I've been asking a priest about that ever since. But I'd whip my kids unmercifully.
I wouldn't show up for work. I'd have to call in and cancel surgery and tell them I had a bad back. One time I told them I had a cousin that was a nun that was hooked on narcotics up in Sacramento. That's not too logical. I did everything in chapter three. I went through the Grand Canyon. Tried to get my health back. There was an old boy there that made the trip a few times, and he loaded up his bag with booze. And I loaded mine up with what they told me to, you know, toothpaste, sleeping bag and everything. And about the fourth night, I couldn't stand it anymore, and he had some disease that I knew nothing about. But I told him I'd be glad to explain it to him, and we stood there and drank. Then we sat down and drank, and we laid down and drank, and then we just quit talking. We just laid there and drank on the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
And I rode out of there next day on that mule, and that's a terrible ride out of there in a mule. It was better than walking, which my buddy did. I went through a year later, and the Grand Canyon is the most magnificent thing I've ever seen in the face of the earth. And just the difference between being sober and drunk, that alone. And I went through with the same people, you know, and I just had a ball. I've done many things over that I did before, and I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated many days how blue the sky is, how green the trees are.
So many things. It's amazing. The years in there, I guess my wife wasn't around the night I tried to shoot the neighbor's peacocks off the roof because they were keeping me awake. She wasn't there the night I totaled out a car. She was down in San Diego at the funeral of a 36-year-old man who had died of alcoholism. He was a fellow I met at Fort Ord. He was married to my wife's cousin. He was a hell of a nice guy. And I was an officer, and he was a non-com. And I, the doctors are the most worst people in all of the military corps, you'll find out, because they don't think they belong there, I guess. I don't know, but I never felt that much about rank or anything. And I liked Carly. He was a nice guy. It was a lot of fun to sit and drink beer with her when I was waiting for Monique to get dressed to go. And I liked him very much. And she was down at his funeral, and I totaled out a car that night. I called the guy up the garage the next day, and I said, you got to get my car up here. I got to go to work. And he says, you've got to be kidding, Doc. I said, no, I'm not kidding. He said, how do you feel? I said, oh, I ache a little bit.
He said, well, that thing's totaled out. You need a whole new car. That was a Volkswagen, and the previous car I'd totaled out was a Renault. So it would be logical to assume that foreign cars were not built well. And I never got another foreign car in my life, because I knew that they were problem cars. And I used that kind of logic for a great deal of time. Well, I started doing what people do. I started looking for Librium and Valium to calm my nerves down.
I'd take Sequinol occasionally to get some sleep. I might go on a trip. Not on a trip on business, but I might take a trip, actually, to another town. And I'd been so drunk in the city of San Francisco that I couldn't write my name on a credit card. And I was trying to peddle sleeping pill to buy a drink. And I had money in the bank. I had no money in my pocket.
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And I was so drunk I couldn't write my name on a credit card. Here I was with some pills I had in my pocket to go to sleep, and I was trying to peddle them to the hippies, and they wouldn't buy from me. And that's a little bit degrading. I was back in New Jersey at a medical meeting, and my brother tried to beat me into unconsciousness. Because when I rode up to his home, his wife says, let's have a drink and have dinner. And I looked her right in the eye and I says, Judy, I think I'll get drunk tonight. And that's the first time I can ever recall happening. It was a month before I got to the program, or about six weeks. And it's like those thunderheads that used to occur in the Midwest, and everybody in town knew it was going to rain.
That's about all you talked about. It looks like it's going to rain, doesn't it? And there's something in my head that just says, it looks like you're going to get drunk, doesn't it? And it was just coming down on me, and I couldn't move. And it was a very, it wasn't frightening, but it was a weird experience. Before the night was over, I was going up and down the street in a beautiful neighborhood, knocking on the door, saying, I'm Mike, I'm Pat's brother. I'd like to get to know you, because I might not be back for a while. And he reassured me it'd be a hell of a long time before I ever came back. And I was hanging on those light posts out in front of those homes, and I could go in and out of those doors. And he says, I never knew there were so many exits to this house in my life. You know, this was later on when we got back on better terms.
And I'd slip out, and I'd knock on the door and wake these people up. I'd hang on a post, and he just whipped the daylights out. I mean, I wouldn't go down. There was no pain. To this day, I don't ever recall being hurt one bit. Just sort of a little haze of hanging on a pole. But I remember, you see, back when I was a kid, the bums used to fall off the train. And they'd be drunk, and my dad, they'd be drunks. My dad was a doctor in a small town.
And there's a little bit of empathy in our family for drunks, because we're not immune to it, it's apparent. And we'd, my parents would bring them in, and they'd put them down in the basement near the furnace in those days, and throw an old mattress on the floor and let them sleep there, and sober up. And they'd work in the yard and clean out the garage and do these things, put an old suit on them, and shape them up a little bit.
Then pretty soon they'd start getting nervous and getting itchy feet, and they'd move on. And I knew what was the matter with those people, they were drunks. And here I was, a man of 35 with the best education in my family, and my brother had me on a mattress next to his furnace back in New Jersey. And I remember he took me out before dawn, it was hazy, and he says, I want to get you out of here before my wife and kids see what a mess you are. And put me on a bus in Newark and sent me to New York, and I wound up at another steam parlor. And those steam parlors I went to were on the effing up. They were none of this hanky-panky, I just wanted to get my health back.
And I'd steam and sauna and do these things, and it kept coming back slower and slower, but I seemed to get it back somehow. This was in the last month of my drinking. He took me down and tried to throw me in jail, and the police wouldn't even take me back in Chatham, New Jersey. I came back to the west coast, and I was reading in the paper one day where they had a retreat for divorced Catholic men, which is a minority and a subculture when you get that far down.
That's just this side of Hershey, Nebraska, Patrick, I'll tell you. But anyway, it was up in Azusa. I told my wife I thought I'd go, and unknowing to me, of course, she had already apparently made contacts with this attorney and just the right timing. I've had no tranquilizers, I've had no sleeping pills, had a shot of Demerol several months ago as a result of an auto accident, and that's it. And I don't need any of those things. I'm simply amazed because I thought you needed them to get by. I came back home and my wife had kicked me out. I went down, I found out that I could have killed her in a blackout drunk. And I went home, and I sat in a room, same bedroom I sleep in when I'm back there now, and I can really tell you very honestly, it was one of the finest days of my life, and I almost killed myself.
I don't know much about heaven or hell or any of these things, but I guess to me this was limbo, and I didn't know where I was or what I was or anything. And I retaliated, and I've come back in many ways with anger and lust and envy and greed, but that day there was none of that in me. And I sat at the foot of the bed, and I can't even recall trying to think. Now a man asked me one time, he says, where did you hear all those things? And I said it was either Christ, Kipling, or Chamberlain.
I said it was either Christ, Kipling, or Chamberlain, and I don't know which, but it's, I said it's
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totally unimportant. The first thought that came my way was to be or not to be. And I can tell you in all sincerity, there was no idea of make up your mind to do this, my friend, and go and do it. There's none of that. It was almost as though I flipped a coin and came up heads instead of tails. I had a 16-gauge shotgun sat there loaded. Now, we heard this expression as people, we've seen it written on the wall, you're here because you were nothing but a gleam in your daddy's eye. I think if you're an alcoholic and you're here alive whether you're sober or not, you're still a gleam in your daddy's eye, but it's a different daddy than the one they were writing about on the walls. Because you thought of suicide, you tried it, you should have been killed, and there's a hell of a lot of people that have thought of doing it to us. And but for the grace of God, we should be dead. And except for the fact that you're still a gleam in your daddy's eye, that's the only reason you're here. There's an old man, he used to wander the northern parts of Africa, and he says you can take no more credit for being twice born than you can for being once born.
You know, there's not a single person in this room that can say they're here because they wanted to be, you know. And we take a great deal of credit for all this wisdom, this knowledge that we seem to have, and it's a gift. Both eyes, both limbs, all of these things. We can take no credit for it, they were just given to us. But the second thought that came my way was it's got to be you, my friend, it's not the world. And now again, I get a little bit mad at the world about Republicans or Watergate or the taxes or the smog or the decreasing value of the dollar, but it doesn't tear me apart like that. More often than not, it's small talk, to tell you the truth. It's not that I'm not interested in these things, it's just that they don't play the role in my life they used to. I called up the guy that went through the Grand Canyon with me. He's a big red-faced Irishman, he's a wonderful man. And he came over and I put my head in my hands and I wept like a baby.
I said, Jack, there's something terribly the matter with me, but I don't know what. And at least I'd conceded to my innermost self that I was a sick man. And I thought that I had some type of brain damage. And O'Rourke will tell you I did. But I refused to look at the articles about alcoholism. I read about being a psychopath or about being schizoid or about being schizophrenic. And I'd worked as a young doctor and given a great deal of shock treatments. And now and then these people would relate to me how they felt lonely and a little bit resentful and nobody liked them. And I thought, hell, that ain't bad. That's about normal, isn't it? Because that's the way I was feeling. And I would dispense the pills and give a great deal of shock treatment to these people. But that doesn't happen to be what I went into. I went into a thing dealing with bones. A guy asked me one time, he says, how'd you get into that? And I says, if you'd been fractured as many times as I had, you'd take it up too. You know, just talking about that briefly, Joe and I were talking and our paths have crossed for the first time tonight, that we have a common friend. And this is a man I admired very much. And I knew him at Fort Ord. And he and I were sitting there having a cup of coffee the first time they flew one of these Sputniks around the earth. His name is Gar. And Gar was sitting there. He liked me, I think. I hope so. And he says, God, isn't this a fantastic world we live in? He says, there isn't a day in my life, and you know the guy, this way, there isn't a day in my life I haven't got up looking forward to something new and something different. And you know, I could have cried.
You know, I swear to God, at that moment, the guy could have just cut my left arm right off my body just to feel that way for one brief moment. Because I hadn't felt that way since I was a kid. And I thought it was impossible that I ever feel that way again. But anyway, my good friend, the doctor, he says, I'll do anything I can for you, but you must agree to see a psychiatrist. Well, I got kicked out of the house. My mother came out to babysit me with me, and I moved into a motel that had a swimming pool and a sauna bath. And I was about the most swimming in, about the most sweating Irishman you've ever seen for two weeks. I was out there at three in the morning, swimming. And I could see him pull the curtains back, you know, there he is out there. And I'd never been to a meeting. And I got off the pills, but I still had them in reserve. I didn't know what was happening, and I was just drying out, really, and coming down off this stuff. And I met Frank at a retreat. It was a retreat for divorced Catholic men, and you're supposed to be quiet at a
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retreat. Well, if you know Frank, you're not quiet anywhere. The last guy you want to meet in the world is an attorney that likes to find people that doctors have mutilated a little bit, and he likes to go to work on the doctors. Well, that's the kind of guy I met. The last guy in the world I ever thought I could even want to meet. And I'm standing there. Now, Frank knows the details better than I do, but anyway, I saw a man in constant motion. He was old before his time. His hair was uncombed. And he'd done everything in a suit of clothes that the human body could do. And he was in constant motion. And I stand there watching him, and I knew how he felt. And Frank came up, and he says, what do you do for that man, doctor? And I says, well, he needs a drink the worst way in the world.
This is what I recall, anyway, Francis. So Frank says, that's right. And he says, then what are you doing? And I says, well, I'd send him to AA. And Frank says, that's where I go. And I looked at Frank, and he looked like a milk-fed quarterback, and he didn't need to go to AA. I knew that. But I was just sort of beat. I was beyond arguing. I walked away, and I came back. I pulled out a fistful of pills in each hand. I said, he's more than welcome to either one of these. I says, I haven't been sleeping too well. And he can have some, a fistful of Librium and a fistful of Equinil. Frank says, how long since you slept well? And I said, 11 years. Sleep, sleep's a great gift. It's a great gift. You'll never know. You know, they talk about the money, the property, the prestige, the self-respect, the things that have been restored to us, our families, our homes, our cars, our jobs, our religions, no matter what they are. But to me, so often, it's a little thing. For me to get up in the morning, and I slept so sound that I don't even know where I am, and I got to shake my head a little bit to know what's happening. That's one of the greatest feelings in the world for a guy like me. It's just like having a precious meal, and just being able to taste it clear down to your toes. It's like driving along in the car and rolling up the windows and turning on the radio. And I have a friend who's a neurosurgeon.
Frank knows him. And I says, Hector, there are days when I hear that music and it goes right to my bones. You know, and I says, that's a great feeling. Hector says, you're crazy. You can't feel music in your bones. And I said, I can. Maybe it's the vibrations. I don't know what it is, but these are the things that are so valuable. That evening, Frank came by the room, and I was dictating a tape to the Pope to straighten out my life. I never called him, but I was going to send him the whole damn machine, tape and all. I don't know if Frank knows that, but I was giving him the details. I was trying to tell him what I used to be like, what they did to me, and what I'm like now. And it was a case of a unilateral disarmament, and it wasn't my fault. Well, it takes two to tango and just being there is my fault now as I look back. Frank came in with two cokes. He gave me one.
I says, tell me about A.A. Frank, and he did. That was Saturday. Sunday night I went to a meeting up in Anaheim, and I was two weeks off of everything, and I've never stopped going, and I've never regretted it. To those of you who are new, you'll have no regrets about this program. Just do these things. And I'd like to share with you perhaps some of the good, wonderful things that have happened. I wound down my practice. I did no surgery.
I quit seeing new patients. I went to a lot of meetings. I made amends. I made amends to two men that went to bat for me to help me get my board. Two men in my own specialty. I went to them and I said, I'm told if I apologize to you two and you represent my field to me in this area, that I can keep my head out of that toilet bowl, and I can look people in the eye, and if you call me on the phone, I'll have a very good excuse for not showing up on certain occasions. These two guys went to bat for me. In the backlog, they said this man is not supposed to enter our group. These two men went to bat independently, and they said we'll stake our reputation on him, because you're not talking about the same guy. And I didn't know this was happening. They told me personally. I went back and I made amends to a lady that was dead. I knelt on the edge of the cemetery and I said, honey, the war is over. Neither one of us won. We both lost. And it's no big deal. I visited a lady that was the mother of my first child, and I told her, I said, is there anything in the world
[00:40:03]
I can do for you? She says, you can take your name off that child and never ask to see her. And I said, where do I sign? And she had married an attorney, and he already had the papers drawn up. I went down, I signed, had a cup of coffee, and I thanked him for all the cost and expense he'd gone through over the years, because when I didn't have any money, I couldn't afford it. When I did start making a little bit better living, I wasn't going to give it to them. Because I had it in my mind that someday they were going to encounter a little bit of difficulty, and they were going to be down. And they were down, I was going to kick them. And if they ever needed help from me, they were going to have to get on their hands and knees right in front of me and beg me. And here I am turning around, you know, some eleven years later saying, is there anything I can do for you?
You know. And I used to sit in my bedroom or in a bar and get drunk over this little girl a lot of times. And I was afraid she'd come in someday and say, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, you never thought of me, you never wrote to me, you never sent me any presents. But her mother told me that was the rule a long time ago. And if she were to walk in this room now, I wouldn't be afraid to tell the child that I thought of you so much every day for so many years. You were constantly on my mind. And a day came when I almost blew the brains right out of the back of my head. And at that time I had another wife. I had five, four lovely children to take care of. And since then I haven't thought of you that much, but you've been in my heart every day. And I guess this may be what the Alamonds call release with love. I no longer have to see, smell, or touch the things I love so much.
They're still very much a part of me. There's a wonderful book by a lady, Taylor Caldwell, I guess, and she wrote about a man named Luke. And Luke was a very wise man. And he knew so much, and it was true, most of it, that a man with a great deal of wisdom one day sat him down and he says, Luke, Luke, Luke, my friend, you must learn to think with your heart. And I think maybe that's what loving is, is learning to think with your heart.
And realize that just because you don't seem to have something within the grasp of this small hand, that it can still be very, very much a part of you, as long as it's in here. I lived in that motel for about a year, and one day my wife asked me if I'd care to come back, and I said yes. I wanted very much to become a father and a husband and a member of the community. And through Alcoholics Anonymous this has come about. My wife went to Al-Anon She's tried her best. They told her not to expect, and she didn't, and we had another child.
So we have five now. Before, I couldn't find anybody to take my call, and I couldn't find anybody to associate with. I have a very nice young man in with me now, ten years my junior, and when he came in with me I told him, I said, I want you to go around town and check, and I want you to make damn sure that I'm not hurting you. And I'd been about five years on the program. The man came back, and he says, everybody around here has a great deal of respect for you. And he says, why did you tell me to go ask? And then I sat down and I told him why. He says, well, I've never seen you drunk. And he says, most of the people around here have never seen you drunk. And I says, did you ask the people that had seen me drunk? He says, yes, and he says, they said, you better not drink. And that's about the end of it. And we're doing fine. I see a great number of drunks in my practice. I used to proselytize and do things. Now I give them the twenty questions. I give them a little pitch. I don't tell them I'm an alcoholic as such, but their eyes start lighting up when you share some of these things with them. And you know, that's not in the book.
Things have changed a little bit, and I can't tell you so many wonderful things, but it's a great thrill to be driving down the road and ask your kids, say, kids, would you like a new old man? They says, no, we like the old old man, because they didn't want me around a long time ago. My one daughter, I asked her one day, I said, Colleen, you should make your bed. And she says, will you tip me? And I says, make your bed. And she did, and she came back. She says, will you tip me now? And I said, how do you feel?
She said, will you tip me now? And I said, how do you feel? And she said, good. And I'm a big spender, and I said, here's a nickel. And I said, how do you feel now? She says, good. You know, it's about two years ago.
[00:45:06]
And I said, you should do things just for the fun of doing it, Colleen. Just to do it, with not expecting anything in return. And good things will come to you. I said, why do you think Daddy gets up every day and goes to work? She says, to make money. She's too young to appreciate this, maybe. But I looked my own daughter right in the eye, and I says, Colleen, if Daddy only got up every day to go make money, he'd walk to the other end of the house and blow his brains out.
Because that's where I came from. I was not obsessed to become rich, to be rich. I wanted to become rich to hurt some people that had hurt me. And I wanted to have control of things. And I lost absolute control of everything. Somewhere in India, some guy wrote, and it seems to make sense. Until you've shown the ability to give something away, it still possesses you. Anything that you're reluctant to give up, it's got a hold of you.
And these things. And so in a way, I'm grateful for everything that's happened in my life, because one day there was nothing that mattered to me. Now, as I've gotten back on my feet, a little ego trip, things start creeping back in, and they gain significance when they have no business doing that. And I know that. There's a lovely little poem, and I'll tell you about it, and then I'll close. But it's written by a man named Kipling.
And it says, for me, what really the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is in this way of life. It says, if you can keep your head, and those about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you. There's a nice old man, he says it better. He says that the set of the sail, not the set of the gale. Can be carried away by people losing their tempers, or becoming upset with the economy the way it is. Or blaming you.
Just keep your head and do these things. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, and yet make allowances for their doubting too. We alcoholics have a very bad track record. There are people that'll always approach us with a bit of skepticism, and hold little things back from us and say, I don't know if you can do it. And they're entitled to that, each and every bit of it. But you have to learn to trust yourself.
Now with that grit, determination, by God I'll do it if it kills me. There, trust myself, and I can do anything for a day. I can get up and work hard for a day. I can go without a cigarette for a day. They don't ask all that of you here, just one thing. Don't drink just today. You know, that alone. But there's more things to do. But you can never do them well without getting off that sauce. If you can wait, not be tried by waiting.
Patience. Or being lied about. Don't deal in lies. You might cover it up and say, oh, it's just behind the scenes politics. And that's a lie. It's gossip. It's envy. It's hatred. And it's just that simple. We rationalize. We cover up a lousy motive with a good one. I do these things. If you can dream and not make dreams alone your goal, or think and not make thoughts your mere aim. If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and you treat these two impostors just the very same.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trapped fool. Or you watch the things you've given your whole life, too broken. And you stoop and you build them up again with worn out tools. As a boy my religion was very precious to me. As a young man it was. And it was a way of life. And I spent a great deal of time trying to figure it out. As I look back now the rules are not too much different.
These principles here are as old as mankind. And I'm back doing what I was told to do as a kid. I'm doing what I was told to do when I tried to get a bunch of Boy Scouts together. They're very similar. If you can lose all of your winnings on one turn of pitch and toss, which we alcoholics do with the booze, and I might put in parentheses the pill, because they're catastrophic. They're mind benders.
You can't think straight if you're mind bent. It's that simple. If you can risk all of your winnings on one turn of pitch and toss and you lose, and you never breathe a word about your loss, I'm not complaining about a little girl I've never seen. I'm not complaining about some of the things in my life.
[00:50:03]
I've not lost them. They might be misplaced, but inside they're just as precious as they ever were. And I've lost nothing. If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve their turn long, long after they are gone, when there is nothing within you except the will, the will of God, that says to them, hold on. There are people in this room who thought of killing themselves in the past 24 hours.
There are people in this room who will think of killing themselves within the next 24 hours. Well, you're a damn fool. If you were of no earthly good, you wouldn't be here. And when you're of no earthly good, the guy that sent you here is going to take you. And I used to worry a great deal about where I was going and what was going to happen. But only one guy has ever gone out and come back, and they're all good reports.
So I don't worry about all that anymore. I wasn't kidding my wife too much. I said, I might leave you phone numbers. Hell, I don't know. They might have phones out there. But I'm not worried about out there. It's right here, right now. If you can walk with kings, you know, it's a little bit of an ego trip to rub elbows with Chamberlain and do these things, you know. And it's a little bit of a down trip to pick some hippie off the floor that's all spaced out and smells like a drunk.
If you can walk with kings and keep your virtue or talk with kings, how does that go? If you can walk with, talk with kings, keep your virtue or walk with crowds, don't lose the common touch. If you can talk with kings, don't lose the common touch. If you can fill the unforgiving minutes with 60 seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and all that's in it. And what is more, you'll be a man, my son.
The gifts they promise you in here, freedom, growth, and happiness, freedom from human bonding, the envy, the lust, the greed, the hatred, the anger, the impatience, that's the freedom, you know. Not from your mother-in-law, not from all those kids you got to feed, not from the people that don't pay their bills, not from the taxes, not such things. The growth is not so much in terms of real estate or new cars or more payments on the home, it's the growth in the world in which I live.
And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger every day. The envy, the lust, the greed, the hatred, the anger, the impatience, that's the freedom, you know. Not from your mother-in-law, not from all those kids you got to feed, not from the people that don't pay their bills, not from the taxes, not such things. The growth is not so much in terms of real estate or new cars or more payments on the home, it's the growth in the world in which I live.
And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger every day. I cried one night outside of my own home before Christmas a few years ago when I told my wife we were having a party. And I realized that my house was not big enough to hold the friends I had. You know, that I had in here, the house was nowhere near big enough. When I got here six years ago, I was a very lonely man, and I didn't have that many friends, or people that I liked to call my friends.
And I don't know what happiness is, but to me it's the feeling that there's nowhere else on the face of the earth that I'd rather be than right here, right now. And I feel like that man said something six years ago that isn't a wonderful world we live in, you know. Every day is a brand new experience. As old Clancy says, whether you like him or not, you know, there's a vast difference between being uninhibited and uninhabited.
Uninhabited, perhaps, is that expression, it's not I but the Father within me who doeth the work. To me, uninhibited is foul language under circumstances like this. I know just as much foul language as old Joe here, probably a little bit more, but there's no need for it. But I got off on something, and to tell you the truth I forget what it was, but just to be alive, and just to live every day, is a great gift, and we can take no credit for it, and you can only do, I guess, what the man wanted you to do the most with it.
And you people have shown me,
[00:55:02]
in my work as a father, as a husband, as a member of AA, as just a member of this whole human society, it seems as though the epitome of a man's life is just to do something for somebody else for nothing. And it's very rewarding, very, very rewarding. It's approaching 10. I guess that's the witching hour, so thank you very much, and God bless each and every one of you. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. That was just great.
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