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Source: DICOBE-00314 – Dick G – MISSOURI STATE CONV – 1978-07-23.mp3 File: dicobe-00314-dick-g-missouri-state-conv-1978-07-23.mp3 Duration: 01:19:00
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I read in, uh, Reader's Digest, you know, that's a pretty good book, that's about as high as my intelligence goes, and, uh, I read in that book that it said that, in order to introduce a speaker, you should be, uh, boy, I can't even remember what the first one was. There went my, there went my, there went my word, I didn't write that one down. Woo! It said you should be brief. Let me get it together.
Anyway, it said that you should be brief, you should be humorous, and then you should be seated. So, I guess what I'm gonna do is introduce Dick from Colorado, and be seated. Dick. Good morning, my name is Dick and I'm an alcoholic. Uh, and it is with the profound humility of a Sunday morning speaker, uh, after all the good speakers that you've heard this weekend that I stand up here, uh, that's been quite a, quite a weekend, and I appreciate the opportunity to share in it, and to have heard again some people who are very dear, and some people who say the things that I have felt, you know, and I think, like Tom said last night, this is a feeling disease, and when you can hear people talk like you have felt, then I think you kind of know that you're home.
Uh, you've had quite a crew this weekend, I think you have to compliment your, your, uh, convention committee, uh, so far. Have you ever noticed how a few gray hairs and a sudden accent can make a sexy senior citizen out of a dirty old man? Thank you. And if, if Beth is here, uh, I was in New York City last week, and… I did, it was really disappointing. Beth is here, I was in New York City, uh, last week, and don't tell me alcoholism isn't environmental.
And, you know, one of the great deep disappointments and the paradoxes of the program is that I started drinking when I was 15 years old, and 20 some years later I wound up moving back to Denver, and not only was the central office in Denver across the street from the high school where I started drinking, but I wound up working steps with the lady who was the dean of women at my high school. And now I find, of all things, that I'm in love with an English teacher.
And I know Tom's not here, and I think we all ought to say a prayer for him. I think he's going to be okay if we get him out of his shell. And isn't Ramona doing a lot more now on the sawdust trail rather than the roar pad? But it has been a true delight to be here. And I, I particularly enjoy the fact that I am able to speak on Sunday morning, because if I had to be typified as a member of the program, I'm one of the running, jumping, spiritual types.
I always try to put in a disclaimer. I was led astray when I first came to AA because I heard somebody say the spiritual part of the program. I almost went crazy for over a year trying to work the other part of the program. I don't believe there is a spiritual part of the program. I believe it's either spiritual or you ain't got it. So I particularly enjoy the opportunity to, I've got the mic in my mouth, no.
I didn't make any cracks about the price of your tapes. You know, that to me is one of the marvelous things about AA. Because of the words, the words you hear, you know, the words that you hear. I recently moved out in the country outside of Denver.
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I have about a 20-some odd mile commute into town.
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And the first thing I did was I had a cassette player put in the car because I can listen to AA tapes and my church tapes all of our lessons. And that to me is really quality time, you know, to be able to hear those tapes. And the thing that Frank and all these other fellows do and the legacy that's being passed around through those tapes, you know. And you hear great stories. If you have the opportunity to be on the rostrum speaking and then a year later you have somebody come up and they tell you, gee, we played your tape in a meeting and that kind of thing.
You know, when you think about the opportunity you have to share in recovery and the recoveries that are shared in through the use of those tapes. And I would hardly recommend to any of you to buy everybody else's tape except mine. Well, I got to Alcoholics Anonymous because I drank badly. I did not drink well. I did not drink well the first time I drank. The first time I ever drank alcohol, another fellow and I stole some from his father.
We went out into a little park thing in Denver. We burrowed in the back of some pine trees. We had some kind of disgustingly sweet peppermint schnapps or something like that. And I started drinking it down and it tasted terrible. But something wonderful happened. I had that sensation hit my stomach and go out through my body like I had never felt before. And I got drunk and I got sick and I passed out and I loved it.
And I was home. And that was the end of my successful drinking. I was a periodic alcoholic. And I think really we always ought to put a commercial in for periodic alcoholics. You know, you hear all these real horror stories of the maintenance drinkers. You know, I drank 41 quarts a day for 30 years and all that kind of stuff. They didn't go through nearly what we periodics did. You know that? If you're drunk all the time, you don't know how badly off you are.
But if you're a periodic, you keep getting well so often, you know. And it's that getting well that was tough. It wasn't the being drunk. It was the getting well that hurt. I believe that I was an alcoholic before I took my first drink. That's not important, you know. There are two schools of thought that say that you just start drinking and one day you're sitting on a bar stool and you come down alcoholic.
And there's the other school and I believe I belong to that. That I was alcoholic before I took my first drink because I was incapable of dealing with reality. I was an emotional disaster. I was a bundle of fears and resentments and anger, none of which I ever expressed when I was 15 years old. And I had been that way a long time. And when I took that first drink, that just did something for me that I needed to be done because there had to be something besides reality and I because reality and I just weren't going to get along.
We weren't going to make it. And so I needed alcohol or if it hadn't been alcohol it would have been something else. I was already fantasizing most of my waking life. I was reading books voraciously, not because I was delving into the mysteries of American literature. It was because I just simply didn't want to have to think about me. And it really was me that I didn't like. And that was a hard thing for me to come to realize because I grew up in a family with two alcoholic parents and I used to blame them for it all.
And I used to think that, boy, if I hadn't grown up in that environment and there hadn't been all that sickness and all that anger and violence and hostility, if there hadn't been all that hypocrisy, and I really keyed in on the hypocrisy for some reason. I guess maybe that's why the teenagers and the young people now, you know, key in on ours because it's that hypocrisy that I think in the final analysis is what irritates the most, you know.
My kind of life was that we lived in one of the nicest parts of town and we belonged to the country clubs and all that kind of nonsense. And my father was a super achiever with a big corporation. And everybody told me how wonderful it was and aren't you fortunate. And I just think to myself, yeah, I'm the guy that gets to go home to the week after week of the empty Chinese food cartons and the smell of Peralto hide and all the broken bottles and my parents staggered around the house half naked most of the time.
And that kind of hypocrisy and that kind of facade that I tried to hide behind in my later life too was the thing that I cursed and I damned and I said I will never be like they are. And then one Sunday morning I got up and I got out of bed and I walked downstairs and it occurred to me that I was the spitting image of my father in his sickness. And that was the moment when the one honest phrase came out of my mouth at age 30 and I said, oh God, I don't want to be like I am anymore.
[00:10:01]
And I didn't even know what I was saying. I'm not going to regale you with great tales of drinking. I was one of those that came in and the old hemorrhaging beacons would tell me that they spilled more on their thighs than I ever got down and I said that's probably true, you know, and that's just what I needed. I really needed to feel more inadequate than I did at the time. I really want to thank those bleeding beacons for helping me feel more inadequate than I did at the moment I walked in on it, you know.
And I got the old pitch about, you know, Sonny, if you've still got your wristwatch, you don't belong here, you know. And I kind of secretly agreed with him because I didn't come here to stop drinking. I came here because the psychic pain between my ears had gotten to the point that I couldn't take it any longer. I was a periodic alcoholic. My volume drinking occurred when I was in the Navy. They made it so cheap you couldn't afford not to drink.
I never will forget the high spot was when we flew in to the Philippine Islands to be stationed there and of course the first place I headed was the officer's club and I found out that Johnny Walker Scotch was $1.95. Home free. Boy, did I save a lot of money on that deployment. But toward the end, I was drinking about once every two or three weeks. I am a physical, or was at least, I was a physical and emotional coward all of my life.
Until God began to give me strength. I stayed out of trouble because I was afraid to be in trouble. But I thought that staying out of trouble meant that I was something special. I never went to jail, but I had a very close friend who spent three tours in San Quentin who pointed out to me that the only difference between he and I was that he got caught. But I'd done plenty of things. I'd done plenty of things that deserved to be in jail.
But somehow I thought that since I hadn't been caught and that because my background and my family and my education had given me a momentum in life, completely not of my own making, that I was something special. And so I walked in my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with the humility of a Prussian general and a little lady walked up to me and she was one of the skinniest little ladies I've ever seen in my life.
And she looked like about 50 miles of bad road. And she had the physical scars of alcoholism like one of the few people I've ever seen, you know. But she had something else that I couldn't shake and that was the look in her eyes. And she looked at me in all my phoniness, and of course I dressed right, you know, because if you're going and you want them to appreciate the fact you're there and that you're a little special and they're going to have to make some extra arrangements now because you're there.
That they're going to have to send out for intellectual help to deal with you. In the height of my masculinity at that point my wife had to take me to the meeting. In the height of my masculinity at that point my wife had to take me to the meeting. And that little lady took one look at me and she read me just like a book. And she said, this is your first meeting, isn't it? Doesn't everybody offer to buy a ticket to get in?
Doesn't everybody offer to buy a ticket to get in? She looked at me and she said, I'll get you a cup of coffee and you probably ought to go over there and sit down. Just remember a couple of things. You are welcome here. You are wanted here. And whatever you need is here. And of course I went over and sat down and thought, who the hell is she to take my inventory? I didn't use those words but I, you know, that was the concept.
I can tell you about times when, for example, I remember one when I was 18 years old and I was probably a problem drinker from the time, first time, and the way you know that is, I remember one incident, and funny, you sit up here, you sit through a conference and you hear the different drinking stories and that kind of stuff and it always seems to remind you of one that I've forgotten about for a while.
One was when I was a freshman in college, a bunch of my pals had been away to school and I was going to the University of Colorado. And they came and picked me up because they got out of school early and we were going to drive the 30 miles between Boulder and Denver. And do you know that in the 30 miles between Boulder and Denver, three of us managed to drive And you know that in the 30 miles between Boulder and Denver, three of us managed to knock off two-fifths of tequila straight.
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And it happened that my family was going on a vacation somewhere, and as they were packing the car, they found me passed out and throwing up on the steps. And they just walked over me and left me there. And I spent a two-week vacation in an alcoholic convulsion at the age of 18 all by myself. I went for over a week, but I couldn't get anything down to eat. I'd try to eat crackers or toast or water, and I'd throw it up.
And that's how I spent my 18th Christmas. So I guess my successful drinking was at least over by 18. I can tell you about all the conversations that I had. My alcoholism was a series of conversations with authority figures about how I was a little bit different than anyone else around. I particularly reached a peak with the commanding officer of my squadron in the Navy. We used to have a lot of these conversations.
I was the only officer who had ever been picked up while standing in the middle of the runway while flagging down a flight of bombers that were landing. I was the only officer he'd ever had who had been arrested for organizing and participating in the first and last annual naked hedge-hopping contest. I was the only officer in the squadron who at cocktail parties was given to have sub-pose contests.
The way you have a sub-pose contest is that you put on your full-dress uniform and you crawl around on your hands and knees biting women on the ankles. And you know, in the desperation of my illness, I tried to pretend that that was funny, and that I was doing that because I thought it was clever. And I wasn't. I was fighting to have a place in a world where I didn't belong. I was fighting for recognition and to try to feel comfortable in a world that I felt separated from and that I never felt I understood everything that everybody else did about living.
You can call it a pain in the glass between the rest of the world and I, or you can call it the sensation that everybody's read a chapter in the book of life that you missed. All those kind of vague, uneasy feelings that I had about just not quite fitting. Did you ever wonder how often other people talked about you behind your back? How long did you live your life wondering if maybe as a kid I used to lay downstairs in the basement of my room wondering how often my family would sit upstairs and say, isn't it a shame we had the last child?
That's what my alcoholism consisted of. And it also consisted of a terrible, terrible longing and yearning for something that I was never able to articulate. I used to be one of those terribly dramatic alcoholics. I must have seen some Susan Hayward movies at an early age because I was always getting to meditating and contemplating on building tops, mountaintops, lonely beaches, all sorts of dramatic places.
But I was seriously wondering what it was that I felt that tremendous sense of lack, tremendous sense of inadequacy and incompleteness and I couldn't understand what it was. And you know I was around Alcoholics Anonymous for a long time before I really recognized for what it was. I first came around here and I thought that that feeling had come from my alcoholism. I thought that I felt different and I thought I felt that terrible gut-wrenching need from my alcoholism.
And I was wrong because I tried to deal with my physiological aspects of my alcoholism and the feeling didn't go away. I didn't drink but the feeling didn't go away. I decided that I needed to straighten up my personal life. Now somewhere during my drinking career in the Navy I had decided that my act was running out of steam, that it wasn't as funny as it used to be and so maybe I ought to do something to straighten out my life.
And I came up with what I thought was a very clever, very sound solution to my problems. I got married. What that does is make Al-a-nons. You know by the way somebody was talking about those old Bleeding Deacons and how down they are on Al-a-nons and I figured out last night why the Bleeding Deacons don't like Al-a-nons. They're just secretly jealous that they can't work steps and drink too. I decided I'd straighten out my personal life and that would make things better.
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So I set about, oh Lord, I was going to straighten out my personal life. I was going to just make my wife happy and I was going to be a dutiful little husband and so we started talking about having children. And I was an eager little beaver at work and I was just a super little achiever at the corporation and boy I was just selling insurance. And my salesmen were just doing well and they were being sales managed to death and they were all going crazy and I just was going to be the best little guy society ever saw.
What that got me was one of the most profound, accelerated, dry drunks that I've ever heard of. Because all that effort, all that hard work, all that hard work, all that hard work, all that hard work, all that hard work, all that hard work, all that hard work, all that hard work, all that effort at straightening out my personal life resulted in the fact that I walked away from my job one day on a temper tantrum and went to a movie and decided that God was talking to me through a Jack Lemmon movie.
And the movie was about a guy who had a wife that didn't understand him and had a chicken boss and had a crummy life and he meets her at a cocktail party. The one who understands. And he runs away with her and the end of the movie is he's trying to run down a thing at an airport to make the airplane to catch that she's on and I'm standing up in the middle of the movie and I'm cheering for him. So I went home and I walked in and I without any warning told my wife I was leaving her.
This caused some agitated conversation for a period of time and then she fell back on the training that that subversive organization had been giving her and said you want the color TV. And I'm out on the street and wondering why I'm there. That didn't feel funny either. Then I decided that what I needed to do to end that terrible hunger and that terrible sense of being different and separate. The only way I've ever been able to describe my alcoholism was I darn near died from terminal weakness.
Decided that what I needed to do to get rid of that terrible hunger and that terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach was I needed to be in the fellowship. I needed fellowship with other alcoholics. So now I can go to all the meetings I want because I'm in this crummy little apartment that you wouldn't go home to with a cat. Almost slipped a Sunday morning meeting, right? Well I remember some of my other Sunday mornings.
Woke up in motel rooms and wondered what town it was. But I decided what I needed to do to fix my problem was I needed the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. So I was going to 10 and 15 meetings a week. And the more meetings I went to the worse I felt. I kept going to more meetings and more meetings and more meetings and I wasn't feeling any better. So I decided it was all those stupid people that went to meetings in Los Angeles.
They didn't understand me. I don't know why they couldn't understand me because I'd be standing there with that smile on my face at the meetings. And they'd walk up and they'd say, how are you? And I'd always say, fine, fine. And I'm contemplating suicide on the way home from the meeting. But it was always fine. I had that cutesy little smile on my face. Oh Lord, I was adorable. I wonder why they couldn't figure out how to help me.
And I went to more meetings and more meetings and all I got out of it was a profound resentment toward Alcoholics Anonymous and everybody in it. Because they weren't doing for me what I needed. And what was the matter with those selfish people that they couldn't help me? What a bunch of hypocrites. And that didn't work. And then I thought about leaving Alcoholics Anonymous. And probably the fact that now that I'd learned some basics about alcoholism and not drinking, then I probably needed to move on to something bigger and better.
Any of you ever wondered if you need to move on to something bigger and better now that you've been sober a while? Now you're looking at… You probably wondered where I've been all these years. You're looking at the guy they've been looking for who was probably the turning point in human intellectual development.
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I want you to know that that is not a burden that is easily carried when you're not noticed. I decided that this AA was probably just a little too simple for me. And I needed to move on to some new ism or ology. And I knew them all. I mean I had been a pseudo-intellectual all my life and I had been in and through every ism and every ology that is known to man. I was raised in a Mormon church. I'm sorry folks, I have to admit that, I really should.
I am your token non-Irish Catholic. You can get to be an alcoholic without being an Irish Catholic. It's just they seem to have a step up on us. I have heard alcoholism referred to as the Irish virus. Started out as a Mormon. At one point in my naval career I was attending mass. And I had two very good reasons for attending mass. Number one was that it was the only one where they'd let you kneel. And I was in so much trouble in pre-flight that I figured that it wouldn't hurt if I could go to a place and kneel but I wouldn't stand out in the crowd.
Because whatever you do as an alcoholic, don't stand out in a crowd. Unless you want to by biting women on the hose or something. The other thing was, and it was eminently logical, was that evidently since they had been at it longer than anyone else, they got out 15 minutes earlier than the Protestants. And the line was always long at lunch on Sunday, and it was a drag to stand in that long line, so I started going to mass.
I chopped every church. I have been, by dent of very shallow investigation, a deistic existentialist, a utilitarianism. I thought Ayn Rand had it all for a while. John Galt and I were soul brothers. And my last stop before AA was I was a nursery in the Unitarian Church. And I think that covers the spectrum. And there wasn't anything wrong with all those places. It's just that I was the one going there.
And that's why it wouldn't work. I'm sure God exists in lots of places. You know, we don't have a lock on God here. Sometimes we act like it, I think. But we don't have a lock on God, and that's very reassuring to me. Because the more I studied my 11th step, and the more my 11th step encouraged me to study all things spiritual, and how men have attempted to understand God in all their manifest ways throughout eternity, except mankind, I found out that, hey, AA didn't invent these spiritual principles.
It's just that 40-some years ago, God, in his infinite wisdom, felt the need to make a specific application of his eternal principles to a certain specific illness. And I don't know why he chose 1930, but I'm sure I'm glad he did. Because I don't know where I would have gone if he hadn't. I was 30 years old, and I had narrowed my options in life down to turning myself into the Camarillo State Mental Hospital, which I used to drive by regularly in the course of my business, for an honest suicide attempt.
Now, I'd had a lot of suicide attempts. I think one of them might have been honest. If you ever want to know what a deep sense of failure is, try to pull off a suicide attempt and blow it. That is a sense of inadequacy. But I stuck rags in all the windows one time. I was about 24 years old, and I was young and healthy. And on the outside, I was telling everybody how well things were going. And I went home one night, and I stuck rags in all the windows.
And I turned on the gas, and I laid down and hoped like crazy that it would work. And I woke up two or three hours later with a headache and a profound sense of failure. So I tried them all. I tried everything. And I made the decision about quitting anyway one night at a meeting in Beverly Hills.
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all the other meetings I went to because I felt so torn apart from it and wondered why I couldn't feel a part of it, and I walked out of the meeting before the meeting even started, and I walked out and I said that's it, AA isn't going to work for me, I need something bigger, it's too simple for me, it's too simple for an intellectual like me, and obviously there's a guy and he's trying to tell me something, and I better go find something else, and I got halfway across that park, and it was dark, and I had a sense of fear and of hopelessness come over me that I had never felt before, and I felt some beauty, and I just stopped in my tracks, and something said to me, if you can't make it here you're not going to make it, so I went back inside and sat down in the back of the meeting, and I began to pray for the first time in my life, and I, you know, very humble, very honest prayer, whoever the hell you are, I'm sick and tired of putting up with what I've been taken from you, and I think it's about time you did something for me, as though we hadn't all along, the format of the meeting was they would call people at random up and they would get maybe 15 or 20 guys up out of a crowd of 50 or 60, and wouldn't you know it, by coincidence they called on me that night, by coincidence, and I went up and I stood in front of the meeting and I started to cry, honestly, for the first time in my life, and all I could blubber out was, I think I'm flunking AA, isn't that interesting, I was still keeping my own score, still the ego and the pride, and afterwards a fellow walked up to me and he said, my name is Hal, and I think you better stick with me, and that's where sponsorship came alive for me, and I think if this conference gets one thing across to those of you who are new, you can intellectualize and explain away why you don't have a real sponsor, and by a real sponsor I mean one of those guys that tells you things you don't want to hear, who walks the program and doesn't talk it. I may owe an amend to somebody, I don't know his name, he lives in Missouri, but I had lunch yesterday with a fellow and he told me that his sponsor had never asked him to take the four step because the sponsor had never taken the four step, and I said, if you get away from that man he's going to kill you. Now I may owe that man an amend and if so I'll pray to God that he'll give me the opportunity to make amends to that man, I don't know his name or who he is, but those kind of sponsors scare me to death. You know why? Because I sobered up and I had a sponsor who talked a better program than he walked, and the program worked for me at that point, but it didn't work for him. I had a sponsor who was truly a spiritual man, who loved Alcoholics Anonymous, but there were a few things in his life that he couldn't give up. He was perfect for me, he didn't care about my sensitivities at all.
Our relationship was he talked and I listened, and I was still, I had still been living in the apartment from having run away from home at age 31. And that's all it is guys, I mean you can say you're moving away to protect your sanity, but let's face it fellas, you're running away from home. The only thing is now we don't have to carry the bag over our shoulder and our mommy will let us cross the street. The only difference between men and boys is the size and price of their toys. He didn't want to hear anything I had to say, he wasn't impressed at all. And I'd start to say something and he'd interrupt and he'd say, what you mean by that except you're lying is… So we spent every evening together and every weekend we got in the car and we drove and we talked and we talked and oh my sweet lord how we talked. And that's what I needed, I had to say all those things that I hadn't said all my life. I had a whole lifetime's worth of things stored up. And we talked and
[00:35:06]
we talked and we talked and we found out that we shared a great deal in common. He could predict what I was going to say generally before I got it half out and he was just right for me. Because combined with him and the fellows in that group I was taught the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first thing they got through to me was that the steps of the program are not something you agree with. I tried to stay sober by agreeing with the steps.
I listened to them and think that's nice. I'm not against that. I thought that was it. I'd like to finish that subject of my first sponsor because it's important to me and I think it's important as an example. God has talked to me through my sponsor's failures. My sponsor has now just had his first birthday. He resents me. He knows I love him and I know why he loves me. But he's still caught up in his recovery and still so caught up in keeping score that he won't write me right now. And this weekend one of the things I've done is I've been composing a letter in my head to him because I'm going to love him back into the program. If I ever need to know what love is, God has provided lots of ways I can read the big book or I can read that other big book, non-conference approved.
And it tells me what love is and it occurs to me that I haven't been patient and long suffering and I'm going to love him back whether he likes it or not. But he began to become critical. He became critical of personalities. He said well so and so is on an ego trip and such and such and this and that and he became critical and I finally became very uneasy with him. Fortunately at that point God saw fit to move me to Seattle, Washington and up there I ran into a sponsor who just walked the quiet dignity of the program. And my sponsor slipped and took pills and that's a slip, I believe that's a slip. I believe that anytime we get away from reality that's a slip. Because I think in my opinion and this is only my opinion, that how we measure what we do is how we're doing with reality. And the chemical scoreboard, the chemical content doesn't make any difference if we get away from reality.
But he started taking pills because he was a little nervous. The reason he was a little nervous was because he was so far from God. And one pill led to one drink and he slipped and drank for three years and didn't tell me. And I'm going to LA on business trips and we'd have dinner and he couldn't tell me. He couldn't tell me. Can you imagine the frustration and the anger he must have felt inside? He must have loved my trips coming to town. And finally he called me one day and he said I'm in the sanitarium and I've been drinking and I've been taking pills and I haven't told you or anybody else and he said I can't stand it any longer. And all I could say was thank you for telling me.
Thank you for telling me because I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me or with both of us because of what was happening between us. And now he's had his first birthday and I don't know what kind of a road he's on as far as his recovery and all I know is I'm going to love him back. When I heard about the program of Alcoholics Anonymous I thought they were talking about going to meetings, not drinking alcohol, thinking nice thoughts and hanging around with the people. And it's interesting that I, in thinking that that was the program of Alcoholics Anonymous that I worked at for a couple of years, I didn't get any better. I didn't drink. For some reason God has not seen fit for me to take a drink since before my first meeting. Oh, that's right, we're supposed to do it.
It has not seen fit since the night before my first meeting which was February 16th, 1969. And in spite of me the program of Alcoholics Anonymous has worked. I sometimes, you know, I guess it's a form of ego but every once in a while don't you wonder if you're not the acid test. Boy, I didn't throw it off with me, this thing is really dynamite. I
[00:40:16]
have found that going to meetings and thinking nice thoughts and hanging around with the people and not drinking is not the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. For me I have found out that I do those things comfortably if I work the program of Alcoholics Anonymous which despite all my frantic intellectualizing and all my specialness and uniqueness has boiled down to those same twelve steps that all the other people work and say are the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. And that in my opinion is the program. And it's those twelve steps that I can only share with you because that's all I know. If I'm here to say something that I've thought up or originated please forgive me because then we're all in trouble. I pray that I can only bring to you those things which I have learned from the twelve steps of the program and through the combined experience of those of us who are seeking and looking and stumbling and falling and getting up again and working the program and going on and somehow trudging down that road to happy destiny. I don't want to invent anything new to add on to the program because I finally figured out something. The reason that I'll never need anything more than the program is that I'm never going to run out of God. I'm going to spend the rest of my life and I figured it out once that if I have the average life expectancy of the American male I'll have 43 years on the program. That will get you a little squirrely once in a while. But I got the rest of these years trying to just get as much of God as I can and that is my point and that is my purpose. That is the focal point of my existence now. It is not my job, it is not my bank account, it is not my living style, it is not the number of people that I sponsor, it is not the number of conventions I speak at, it is not any of those things. The focal point of my existence is how much of God can I get today and that's what I pray for every morning when I get up and that's what I measure at night when I go to bed. Did I get as much of God as I could have today? And that makes it very easy for me to keep scoring and then that cuts through all that other paraphernalia and stuff. How much of God did I get today that was available to me? Now I'm here to testify it's a long way from 100% every day. But it's getting better, it's getting better. I could not admit that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageable because it would have caused me to become honest. And being honest was the one thing that I was incapable of out of desire. I was not congenitally dishonest, I was dishonest because it was necessary to be dishonest to live the life that I was living and pretend that it was alright. The toughest things in the program has been for me to admit that after I sobered up and had not had alcohol in my system for a number of years that my life was still unmanageable. And I had a hard time with that. And I resented people when they said that because my ego came back to the front and I kind of secretly thought that well after you've been sober a while, you know and I was one of those egos that came in and wanted to be an instant old timer. I thought well gee whiz after I've been sober a while now here I've probably been given the ability to do some pretty, you know, pretty important heavy things in life. And then I had a series of life experiences which caused me to realize that my life is unmanageable, irregardless of how much alcohol I've had or how long it's been. God has given me opportunities to know him in ways, and he always comes to me in the ways that get me right where I live. I have always been athletic all my life. For some reason I was born with a natural athletic ability and I participated in it and I enjoyed it. It's been important to me. It's been important to me in my sobriety because I found out that the better condition I'm in if I take care of my body and if I eat and I exercise regularly and I do all those things my nervous system is quieter and my nervous system is the barometer of my spiritual state. That's how I can tell whether or not I'm in tune is by my nervous system. If I get tired easily and come home at night and I'm too tired to go to a meeting and da da da and down the line, then I know I'm out of shape.
I'm out of shape. I can tell. I start eating badly and all those types of things. Well, I was always very grateful for that and I always, you know, put kind of a high emphasis on it.
[00:45:02]
So I got him on understanding and said, hmm, guess who wound up with a disc problem in his lower back to the point that he wouldn't go get it fixed, you know. But I was driving to work and it hurt so much I used to have to pound on the steering wheel and I'd cry all the way to work. But I wouldn't get it fixed. They weren't going to fool with my back. Until finally the pain hurt so much I got down on my hands and knees and I said, God, I surrender my back to you.
And the next day a fellow worked for me. I went walking by my claims manager in the insurance business. And for some reason I asked my claims manager, I said, hey, who do you use for expert witness, you know, for an orthopedic surgeon? And he gave me the guy's name. I went to see the guy and the guy said, you'll be in the hospital in a day. He went in and had the surgery. And I'm here to tell you that the two weeks that I spent involved in back surgery is possibly the two happiest weeks of my life.
The reason is that I had to hurt so much and I had to go through so much pain with that that he got my attention. And when I went into that hospital I knew who was in charge now of my back. And as a result I was reading and I was praying and I was meditating and I was on fire. My wife would come to the hospital and say, honey, are you sure they're not slipping stuff in your water? She said, you're on a high like I haven't seen and you just had back surgery.
And I said, yeah, isn't it great? And I had the nurses coming in. I had nurses coming in and telling me their whole life story. I had one nurse's aide that with the first five minutes I knew her we were into her sex life. And that's not Dick doing that. You know, to kind of my understanding he uses those things for his own purpose. He can use back surgery. He can use some schmuck like me so he can certainly use, you know, back surgery.
So he comes to me in those ways. He comes to me in ways like this. After I'd been sober seven or eight years, you know, I got that, this is kind of nice, you know, here I am sober for a while now. I'm nearing old timer-ism, you know. Not old like that. Not old like that. Spiritual maturity is what I'm talking about. Is he laughing? You know, I'm kind of a mover and shaker in the community and I'm on the board of this and I'm, you know, I'm doing these things and a nice house and family now.
Wife and I are back together because she went to Al-Anon and I went to AA and her sponsor and my sponsor got together and decided that we were just barely well enough that they could put the two squirrels back in the same cage. And I said, boy, isn't this neat? I'm kind of an example of spiritual achievements in my life and I'm up and coming in the corporation and everything else. And wouldn't you know it, for the first time in my life I had a terrible year in business.
Little whiz kid Dickie, boy wonder of the corporation, and I couldn't find a bathroom for a year around that office. I said, hey, I think I'm getting the point. I think I'm getting the point. You run this company too, don't you? I think I'm getting the point. As a result of that, I faced up to something. As a result of my God getting my attention that way, I faced up to something. I had been doing a job all those years that I didn't really like, but I held on to it because of what I thought it gave me and what it made me.
And it was awfully important to me that I was the corporate executive and the youngest this and the da-da-da and on and on. And I realized, hey, I don't even like this job. I don't even belong here. So this spring, I was praying and meditating one morning, and the concept of roots for my family and of belonging somewhere and of wanting to stay somewhere came on to me very strongly. And I said, God, I pray that you will show me where I am to live.
And a few things happened, and I became aware that I wanted to live right where I live. I want to live in Colorado. I don't want to go chasing off after the big numbers and the big titles somewhere else. I began to turn down job promotions. You can't do that too long, playing by their rules. So I said, God, show me what I'm supposed to do. I said, I know that you want me to act on faith first, and then you will follow up and take care of the details.
[00:50:06]
I believe that very strongly. I believe he wants us to step out in faith, and then he'll come along behind and build the bridge. My wife called me at work. She said, you know that ruler we've been talking to? He thinks he's got just the perfect house out in the country. It's just under construction. I can rearrange it the way I've always wanted to have a home, and we can afford it. And I said, oh, that's what you want me to do, huh? You want me to make a commitment.
Okay, so I went out and put more money down on the house than I needed to. I can remember that contractor looking at me like, boy, I got a wide one this time. You see, I don't trust me, you know. Just in a little bit, I might have backed out. But if it's a lot, I'm too cheap to back out. So now I got the money down on the new house. I haven't sold my old house. And I said, okay, you got it. What am I supposed to do for a living?
And within two weeks, I had three inquiries from jobs around the Denver area. And if you're sitting there and you're like I am in my early days in the program, and you're trying to pass that office coincidence, you ought to take a look at why. I had always known there was a God, and I did believe that I needed to be restored to sanity. It's just that somehow I got the idea that he was going to give me the ability to restore me to sanity.
And I had a lot of hard times. And then one night in the meeting, it occurred to me that, you know, what if God is just the simple love that these people say he is, and that he comes to us this simply, and you don't have to intellectualize to understand him? What if he is just that simple and that profound, and they're right and I'm wrong? I'm really missing out. I'm in a lot of trouble. And when I made the decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understood him, I did it except for my job.
Now, we all know that God doesn't have time to fool with jobs and sex life. It's beneath his dignity, right? So we can turn over our alcoholism, and we can sure turn over our alanines, but there are always a couple of things that deep down, don't we really suspect that maybe we've got to hang on to those? Because, you know, he hasn't got time to fool with that. So many areas of my life improved rapidly, except the ones I held out in.
Work didn't get any better. When I was taught to take a fourth step, I was allowed, in the wisdom of the people who understood me, for the sickie that I was, they let me just run around crazily and just do it on my own and do it my own way, and they waited patiently. My sponsor the night we got finally on the fourth step, and he said, I think it's time for you to write it, and I thought to myself, gee, you've got to have an inventory.
Now if you want to be an old timer, you want to be one of the movers and shakers around here, you've got to write an inventory. So for that noble principle, I wrote my first inventory. It was peer pressure. I wrote my first inventory out of sheer peer pressure. And I called my sponsor up in the middle of the night after I'd written it, and I'd worked on it for about an hour and a half. You know, when you're quick with it, you can cover it all in an hour and a half.
And he said, well, what I suggest you do is that you go to sleep now, and you get up in the morning and you read it and see how many times you lied. Thank God for sponsors like that. Thank God for sponsors like that. So I read it over and called him up in the morning and said, you're right now, what do I do? And he said, well, you're going to do it the AA way now. And so he did it to his ability, and I found out later he'd never taken one.
And that's why I had to go back. And gratefully, my first inventory, even though he helped me as much as he could, and we had a thorough fifth step, I still knew that I had not done a correct inventory. And so I became one of those pains in the fanny at four-step meetings who talks about taking inventories now. I don't want to hear about the inventory you took ten years ago any more than I want to hear about your last year's spiritual experience.
I want to know about the steps and the inventory you're working today, because that's the one I need to hear about, because it's today's step and it's today's inventory that I need to keep me sober.
[00:55:05]
I can't coast on momentum. I tried to live all my life on my potential, and I used my potential as a way of explaining the way that sick individual I was, and I tried to coast on the momentum that my family had given me through education and all the other kinds of things, and I finally ran out of momentum, and that's when it hurt. So I'm one of those that believe you have to take four steps regularly, and I believe you take it right after you've gone through your third step again, and I believe you do that right after you've gone through your second step again, and I do that right after you've gone through your first step again, and I believe they're in order for a reason.
I believe that when God saw fit to have those people, and have Bill articulate that big book, that he wasn't presenting a department store of spiritual living and you could wander from department to department as it struck you. I believe that he said, if you want to get from here to there, you start here and you go down this road to there, and I believe that that's what that book is. It's the combined experience of those first hundred people on how they got from here to there.
I get a little upset with newcomers, I get a little upset with newcomers who want to get there their way, and then call you up in the middle of the night, and they're all in psychic and emotional pain, and can't understand why their program is not working for them. And I try to explain to them, the reason is that you wouldn't recognize the program if it bit you. AA doesn't work except the AA way. My first Fifth Step, my sponsor in his wisdom, saw fit that we did it the night of the Academy Awards.
He's an actor, came over to my apartment and made me sit through the Academy Awards before he listened to my Fifth Step. That's the closest thing to justifiable homicide I have ever known. I really cared about the Academy Awards, right? It's funny how many things, though, in reading over my inventory, as I was sitting there waiting, how many things came to me and I had to jot down notes in the margin, and how many things I had left out or colored.
After I'd been sober three or four years, and I entered into my spiritual giant phase, spiritual giantism is much like emotional elephant-titus, and about as beneficial. I set about correcting my character defects. Now that makes sense, doesn't it? Well, it doesn't, because it doesn't say in the program anywhere that we set about correcting our character defects. What it says is that we become willing to have our character defects changed, and then that we pray that He will do it.
Oh, I went around and I was going to quit overeating, and I was going to be a nice guy, and I wasn't going to be a backbiter anymore, and I wasn't going to do malicious gossip, and I wasn't going to do all that stuff, I wasn't going to be a backbiter anymore, and I wasn't going to do malicious gossip, and I wasn't going to do all these things that I was doing that I knew was wrong, you know? I was going to quit pulling that emotional bully routine at home that I'd perfected over the years and still hadn't gotten rid of.
And it got worse. Five years of sobriety, I found myself down on the hands and knees in the middle of my bedroom one day, crying and pounding on the floor and cursing God. Because I was so frustrated at my lack of growth and my lack of ability to change. And I wanted to change, because I saw that change was available, and I couldn't do it, and I got mad, and I got bitter. For some reason, God has found it necessary to give me the kinds of spiritual experiences that are the sort of overt or cataclysmic or whatever you want to call them, type.
And they've come to me at strange times. I had one while on my hands and knees, pounding on the floor, crying. I had five years of sobriety. I had another walking through a park one day when I was at ill at ease about a lot of things. And I don't… And I don't know how else you can explain it, and the only reason I bring it up is that I guess God gave it to me for a reason, and I'm up here to share my message with you.
I want you to know that this doesn't make you any more spiritual than anyone else.
[01:00:01]
I don't need to infer that. But for those of you who may have had those times and wondered, you and I know that at those periods that you are simply given all knowledge, that you simply just know everything there is to know. And don't minimize those. If you have those profound senses of the times of enormous well-being and just knowing everything you need to know, hang on to them and share them with other people, because we all need to hear that, because we're going to sober up sharing our experience, strengths and hopes around here, not sharing our failures.
Our failures are merely the springboards. Making a list of the people I had harmed is very easy for me, because I had a four-step written. That's the way it's supposed to be. And I had to pray a long time for the willingness, because when you're still trying to be a mover and shaker in the community and you don't want people to think too badly of you, it's a little hard to go around and do some of those things.
And I was afraid of the reaction I'd get from some people, and so I held off a lot longer than I ever needed to. Finally I began to, because I realized that if I didn't, I'd get drunk, so I began making amends to people, and it was hard, and it cost some money, and a lot of other kinds of things. But I had those moments of real joy that comes from being about God's work and knowing that you are. And then I reached a point, and now I understand why the promises in the big book are where they are.
They're at the end of the ninth step. Franklin covered them so beautifully. And then my sponsor at that time told me something that I'd been wanting to hear all my life, and particularly all my sober life. He said, Do you know that if you work the first nine steps of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous to the best of your ability, as honestly as you can, with the understanding that you'll never be through, but that you really go through those formally and in depth and with guidance, that there will be a morning when you will wake up for the first time in your adult life, and you will be back to even with the world again, that the past will have no hold on you, that there will be nothing that you have to explain away, and there will be no ties to you at all from the past, that for the first time you will be even with the world again, and you won't start out the morning in debt or with guilt.
And I don't know about you all, but I've been waiting to hear that a long time. And it's true. And then he explained to me the maintenance concept. He said, That's why 10, 11, and 12 are referred to as the maintenance steps, because what you do is you maintain that which you had gotten to by honestly and thoroughly working the first nine steps as well as you can. And then all you do is, on a daily basis, you continue to work those three steps with regular trips back formally through the first nine, because more will be revealed to you.
More will be revealed to you. And I was taught that concept of the onion, too, that somebody mentioned. I thought that was a Southern California original, that the onion will be continually peeled back. And onions, when they're peeled back, they smell and they make you cry a lot, and it's not fun and all those other kinds of things. But more and more and more as you go back through those steps. But on a daily basis, if you want to maintain, then you maintain by steps 10, 11, and 12.
And for me, the way I understand that is that the steps 10, 11, and 12 are the way God and I make up for my humanity on a daily basis. Because I am human. I suffer from the human condition. I was born the way I am because I guess that's the way God wanted me to be, because he can be glorified through me by having faults a lot more than he could be if I were perfect. And so I learned to take inventory, and when I was wrong, promptly admitted it.
Didn't mean I did it, but I was taught that. Harder, it takes, promptly, with my friends in the program, means 30 seconds. Promptly with my wife can run 30, 40 weeks. That is a good degree, or a good indication to me of my continual emotional immaturity and of how hard it is to trust the person to whom I am the most vulnerable. That's what bugs us about wives. They got an inside shot at us.
[01:05:00]
And they know us better than anyone else. It's really hard, as a practicing alcoholic I recall, to pull off the manly image, the man on the white charger, the prince charming, the super achiever, father image to your wife right after you wet the bed. My wife has had a series of physical illnesses for about four years now. It's been a constant stream. Different, but continual. I talked to her on the phone last night and she said, I think we've tracked them all down except the doctor and I talked about the ones that I'm causing.
Thank God for Elanon. She said we've tracked down all the physical illnesses now except the ones I'm causing. I wanted to kiss every Elanon on the block. The night my wife came home and said, you know what we talked about tonight, that we had to be sick because we married you. She spoke at a big meeting recently in Denver and she heard one I hadn't heard before. She said, you know I was taught that the horns in the AA's heads perfectly fitted the holes in ours.
And what sickness in me was appealed to by your sickness? What sickness in the Elanon is appealed to by the sickness that they can see in the AA? And hey, you know, our problems weren't that well hidden when you met us. She told me that last night and I really thank God for that because you know what that reminded me of? It's been a while since I took an inventory of what I may be doing to cause her pain because I have not achieved perfection, I am still a human and I must still be making mistakes at home and it's been a while since I took an inventory of that and that's what I'm going to do on the airplane going home.
We're going to have a little inventory time and I thank God for that. I thank God for my mistakes and my problems because through those and through yours we are all alright this morning. My 11th step, again that was one of those steps that I thought you agreed with and then went on to 12 and then I began to read about it and I read Came to Believe and that's funny because it was in the Came to Believe that I became aware of how shallow my 11th step was.
And in the opening of that little thing there's a quote from Bill that says that if you can lay your spiritual prejudices aside long enough you may find something here for you. And I began to wonder little things like I wonder how many spiritual prejudices I really do have. And then my 11th step burst open for me one night in a meeting when I thought to myself I wonder what God has done for the non-alcoholic.
He isn't going to just do something for us, he must have been doing something for those other folks all this time. I wonder what it was. And that set me on a trip that I am on now that's one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to a human being. I am out looking to see how many ways there are to make conscious contact with the God of my understanding. Boy, you know there have been a lot of books hidden for a long time, I didn't notice all those books.
And I began to read some of the ones, the more prominent ones that I had been criticizing and making fun of all my life without having had benefit of reading them. You start fooling around with those things and that will really change your life. I set out to prove that that big book non-conference approved was really nothing more than a group of Aesop's fables that have somehow been a big seller for years.
You know something, it changed my life. It changed my life. It gave me an aspect of my 11th step and that's exactly what it is. I do not confuse it with moving on from AA. I pray to the God of my understanding every day that I'll never see fit to move on from AA because this is where I found him and this must be where he wants me. But boy, that 11th step is infinite in its size and you can go and search and look and read and learn and do everything you want.
And I've done it, I had a buddy in the program and we learned Zen meditation and I've been through it all and it's tremendous, it's terrific as long as I understand where I'm
[01:10:01]
coming from. My name is Dick, I'm an alcoholic and I need your help today, God, to stay sober one day at a time. And it's exciting and I would offer that opportunity to you all. The hardest part about the 12th step, and it must be why they saved it for us, is the last part of the 12th step. Now I can run around and do all those wonderful little things and 12 step calls, you know, it's beautiful. You get caught up in that works ethic, as some people refer to it, where you're just doing so many wonderful things for the program.
Have you ever been through that phase where, oh, heck, you're just doing so many wonderful things for the program? You can't understand why those people don't appreciate it more. Beautiful, beautiful. And he said, you'll never satisfy the ego. That's great, that made sense. I will forget a gal in the central office at LA because I was on one of my super saver times. And I came dashing in the central office and I said, boy, quick, I need two big books.
I got two live ones and I'm just, you know, I'm little Mr. A.A. and I'm tearing around. And I started out the door and she waited until my back was turned and all I heard was this quiet voice saying, it's a wonderful thing you're doing, Dick. Thank God for understanding. Thank God. Practicing these principles in all my affairs is the task that's going to be the toughest for me. It's going to be the hardest thing I'll ever do in my life.
It's much more difficult than stopping drinking. Stopping drinking is easy. I did it so many times. Staying stopped is the toughie. Practicing these principles in all my affairs, you know, I agreed with that step for a long time before I figured out, hey, I wonder what the principles are that I'm supposed to be practicing in all my affairs. So I decided I'd write them down. Have you ever tried to figure out for yourself what the principles are that we're supposed to be practicing in all of our affairs?
It's not thinking good thoughts and going to meetings and doing tail step work and all those other kinds of things. Because at that time I began to study the traditions and that's when the whole new thing opened up. And I found out that the traditions of the program are to teach me how to get along with people and the steps are to teach me how to get along with God. Twelve traditions are the combined experience of all the mistakes that they made as individuals bumping into one another in the early days on the program.
And so they put them down to say, hey, here, you want to learn how to get along with people our way? Here's how you do it. You let them be wrong. You give each group the right to be wrong. We don't have any leaders because we're all such egos that we'll get too many resentments if we have leaders. And you know why we only have one primary purpose? Because it's the only thing we know how to do. We're not marriage counselors or psychologists or vocational resource centers.
The only thing we know how to do is to carry the message of AA. I don't know about you, but at about five years I decided it was time for me to make major changes in my life and go into spiritual work. You want to do that one? Well, now, this meaningless thing that I'm doing over here has to go because now that I'm five years sober, it's time for me to be about the Lord's work. I had a sponsor at that time who had a crusty wife who was also on the program, and she said, do you know what five years of AA has qualified you to do?
She said, where does it say in the program that anything to do with your sobriety was going to do anything for you other than let you be sober? And she's right. So I am about the business of trying to practice these principles in all my affairs. I know that now I have great dreams, and I have great hopes, and I have visions, and I have my great moments. I have my moments that I cry, and I cry a lot these days, and I cry unashamedly, and I always try to cry once in a while around my children and my wife to let them know how much I love them, because if I don't cry and I don't show them that I love them, all the words and all the gifts and all the houses and that kind of stuff aren't going to mean much.
I know that houses and that kind of stuff aren't going to mean much. Unless I make myself available and vulnerable to them, I can't tell them. They can't really believe that I love them. And I have dreams, and I have visions now, and I have hopes of what I can be.
[01:15:01]
The program has taught me that none of those are to take the form of a worldly or a material guide. But I have visions because I know that God is. The question in AA is not whether or not God is. God is. The question is what are you and I going to do about it today. Are you willing to overcome your terminal uniqueness long enough to participate in the intelligence and love that is here? And Franklin said, you know, we're never going to even begin to understand the power that's available to us here.
Boy, I'm glad to hear that. Because that said something that I've been trying to articulate well, and he did it much better. How much God do you want today? Have you ever been around people whose sobriety consists of having crawled out of the pit of alcoholism and got up here just to the edge of the pit and they're saying, that's enough. I'm going to sit around this club or I'm going to, you know, do these things and that's all.
I'm going to grip my teeth and hang on, you know, and that's enough. I don't want to sober up with those people. I'll do anything I can to help them, but I don't want to sober up with them. What I want to sober up with are the people that are trying to see how far back from the edge of the pit they can get. And you know I found out that the only thing that stands between the edge of the pit and my going back here is my ego.
Because it can only be ego that would cause me to not want to change any more than I have to. I didn't bring anything in here that was particularly swell. My buddies in AA and Denver always remind me that my best thinking got me to Alcoholics Anonymous. I want to see how far back from the edge of the pit. Every once in a while I like to walk over and look over and I do that in 12-step work. I go back and I look over and I see what it's like and I thank God for the opportunity to go back and look and see what it's like in the pit.
Because if I don't remember what it was like in the pit, I might start thinking that I'm the guy that got me here. But I want to live a program and I want to work steps with people who want to see how far back from the edge of the pit they can be on a daily basis. And I thank God that there are a whole world full of those people and that sobriety is not the business of not drinking. That sobriety to me in my opinion and in my experience is the ability to know that God is and how much do I want today.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here. Thank you for sharing your program and your love with those of us who have come to visit. You really don't know what you look like until you stand up here and you look at your eyes and your smile. You take each and every one of us and you add us up and there's something more here than the sum total of our parts. And it is that something that's greater than the sum total of we as individuals that gives us the dignity and the self-respect that comes to us through the graciousness of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Thank you. Thank you.