Audio
Transcript
Source: DICOBE-00315 – Dick G – SPRINGTIME IN THE OZARKS – 1978-04-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00315-dick-g-springtime-in-the-ozarks-1978-04-15.mp3 Duration: 01:16:32
============================================================
Thank you. My name is Dick G. and I am an alcoholic. And you should see you. You are quite a sight and this is quite a privilege. Valerie and I had a great time today and we had the opportunity to share this marvelous thing called AA. And if nothing else, AA has to be the most efficient way of meeting someone in the world. Because within the course of a luncheon, sitting together in the restaurant up there, we were able to share about as much a life as you can get to in as few words as possible. And that's the kind of thing that I am grateful for, that I have the opportunity to come here tonight and to share what I found with you all. I, too, would like to thank Keith and Jody and all the rest of the folks who have obviously worked very hard and very intelligently to put this thing on. This has to be one of the nicest facilities I've ever been in for a convention. And they are so marvelously organized. They've got some things up here for you. This is really good. In case you get stuck as a speaker, they've got the traditions and the steps up here. When in doubt, follow directions. You know, the therapy of the program is magnificent and you can see it at work everywhere. Obviously, somebody appreciated the opportunities that came with being the chairman of this thing and they've given Keith this opportunity to be the chairman.
I figure in a couple more years it's going to bring him out of his shell. Well, I'm here tonight to share something that I found that came as an absolute surprise to me, that continues to be an absolute surprise to me, and in which I stand in awe. And that is this AA thing that I have experienced. I guess I better do it like everyone else has. I have not, by the grace of God and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have not found a reason or excuse to take a drink of alcohol or any other mind or mood-altering drug since February 16, 1969. And this is a constant amazement to me. I really don't know how that's all worked, except that I know that it does work. And in those nine years, if I've learned one thing, I've learned to quit trying to figure it out and just to sit back and accept it.
I am one of the minorities. You know, I almost died from trying to be unique in life. We refer to it as terminal uniqueness in Denver. And I'm still casting around for a few, you know, and I'm one, I guess I am one of a small minority. I'm one of the few ex-Mormons that I've met in the program. I thought, you know, when you come in in Southern California, you'd think you have to be Irish Catholic or they won't let you talk. I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was raised in the Mormon religion, and that gave me a good background. Gave me an appreciation of people who stick to something that they believe in, in spite of pressure from the outside. I found it necessary as a teenager to leave that way of life and to go out and to try on all those things that they told me I didn't have to try on if I didn't want to. I was raised in a family of, with two alcoholic parents. That will not make you alcoholic, but if you're as screwy as I was when you're growing up, it gives you good ground to grow. My earliest memories are of a two-faced life. That dichotomy of living or that schizophrenic way of life that's the alcoholic. Because my father was a very successful corporate executive. He was a self-made man up from a farm boy in northern Utah. No college education and made it the hard way. We were members of the country clubs and all that kind of thing, and that all seemed terribly important in the lifestyle in which I was raised.
And on the outside, everyone was telling us how wonderful our lives must be and how blessed we really were, but I knew what it was like at home. And my earliest memories of home are when I would come home from school and I'd stop at the corner and peer around a bush to see if there were any police cars or ambulances in front of the house. And if I were gone for any length of time, the first thing I did was sneak in the back door and try to smell for peraldehyde. I don't know if any of you have ever been brought off a drunk on peraldehyde. It's something they used to use.
[00:05:02]
It's a derivative of formaldehyde. It has one of the most pungent orders that you'll ever experience, and I can still remember that. And so that's how I thought life was lived. I thought that there were some rules and some requirements of living that you were supposed to live up to that they, I never did find out who they were. I almost killed myself for 30 years trying to make them like me. And deep down, I knew if I met them, I wouldn't like them. But there was some set of rules or some kind of importance put on some things in life, and I had it drummed into me very deeply that those things mattered and were very important, and that's how you kept score.
And the fact that the weekends around our house were characterized by empty whiskey bottles and old Chinese food cartons, and that would go on for anywhere from two days to two weeks, that didn't, that wasn't supposed to matter. That was supposed to be the little price that was paid somewhere along the line, and it just was sort of the string of bad luck that dynamic people run into. There are two schools of alcoholism. One says that if you drink enough, at some point one day you're sitting on a barstool and come down alcoholic. There's another one to which I ascribe for me personally, and I believe they're both right, that I was alcoholic before I took my first drink. By the time I was 10 or 12, I was such an emotional and nervous disaster that I was just looking for something that would ease the pain of living. It happened that in my teenage years, alcohol was current and popular. If it had been marijuana or speed or drugs or overeating or sex or something, I would have glommed on to it because I needed help. I was absolutely incapable of accepting life on a daily basis just the way it came. That was something that made me entirely nervous. It's hard to describe those feelings. The only way I've ever been able to describe it are a couple of ways. Number one is, if you ever walk through life with the feeling that you and the rest of the world are separated by a pane of glass, you can see each other and kind of communicate, but you have that terrible feeling of being cut off, and there's not a way you're ever going to be in the main flow. And the other way was that I really wondered if there wasn't some manual on how to be clever in living, and I'd missed a chapter. Because everybody's outsides seemed so good, and I wasn't particularly happy with my outsides, and I was just sick about my insides. And I didn't like the way I felt, and I didn't like the way I was living, and I didn't like what I was becoming, and I didn't know what to do about it. When I was 15 years old, we had moved to Denver by that time, and one of my friends convinced me one evening that it would be very clever if we stole some liquor from his parents who were out of town and would sneak off somewhere and drink it. It happens that in Denver they have some streets with parkways down the middle, and my first drunk came on a parkway deep in some pine trees. I think it was something like peppermint snops or something like that, and I'll never forget that feeling. Because we got that thing open, and I gagged it down a little bit and pretended it didn't burn, and something happened.
And my first drunk, I got drunk, threw up, passed out, and loved it. And it never got any better after that. It was downhill from there, no matter what country I was in, no matter what mix I was trying at that current time. I had a very discouraging realization one time that if you buy Glenlivet scotch and throw it up, it looks just like Jim Beam. I think at that point I turned to wine. I tried every combination, every lifestyle, every kind of bar, every kind of phony thing that I could attach to the act of drinking, and none of it worked. I migrated in high school to a group of individuals who drank exactly like I did, so I thought that everybody else did. That was my definition of a social drinker, was somebody that drank the way I did, because everyone I knew drank like I did. There were a few oddballs around the school, of which I was aware, as little as
[00:10:02]
possible, who didn't seem to be acting and having the things happen to them that I did in high school. But I always dismissed them as being the somewhat emotionally unstable and intellectually underdeveloped. I chose to go to the University of Colorado for a very solid reason, and I remember discussing it with friends of mine who were going back east to school. And that was, why would you want to go somewhere where you have to be 21 to drink? Why not stay in Colorado when you can, where you can drink when you're 18? That's an interesting way to pick your college. But since my life by that time was characterized by not caring about what I did or where I went, it really didn't matter. I never took any aggressive stance about anything. I simply floated and drifted, and whatever the current in guy said or whatever the group was doing, I tagged along. And my life went that way right up to my last drunk. On my last drunk, I was standing in the ocean, in Pacific Ocean at Pismo Beach, California in February, stabbing for clams, which I did not want nor would care to eat. Drinking cheap homemade red wine and wondering why I was there. And I was 30 years old. And the 15 years between the peppermint schnapps and the homemade red wine really didn't matter for much, except that I was given a few things from the outside. I was given enough propulsion in life by my circumstances and my family and my education that I was able to glide on the momentum until I was 30. And at age 30, I ran out of gas. I didn't have anything going for me, and all the shove I'd gotten as a youth was gone, and I didn't know what to do. I went to college. I graduated from college because I didn't want to be criticized for not graduating from college. I joined a fraternity that I didn't like and didn't want to join because my friends told me that that's the thing you did. I was an absolute case of emotional disaster. Women, as Bob put it, made me mildly nervous. I don't believe I ever had a serious relationship with a woman all the way through those years in which alcohol did not prominently figure. I remember knowing quite a few nice young ladies who seemed to really have some substance, who would be attracted for some sick reason to my personality, and after having been burnt a little bit, would walk away saying, I don't understand. What's the matter with you? I remember one having one honest moment in college when a gal that I had been dating off and on for two or three years, she seemed to have a weirder need to fill than most, and kept coming back to see how bad it was getting. We were sitting in a hamburger joint one night in University of Colorado out under some trees in the parking lot, and she turned to me and she said, what is the matter with you? And I broke down and started crying, and I told her, I said, I don't have the faintest idea. And that was one of the few rare glimpses into reality that I ever had during those years. I was a periodic alcoholic. I was blessed with hangovers you could hear. I used to have the kind of hangover that you could stand very still with your mouth closed and your hand over your ears and be sure that the people could hear the noise leaking out.
I would have been a daily drinker, but I didn't have the guts. Although I really think that there's something to be said for we periodic alcoholics. Those daily drinkers just stayed drunk all the time. They didn't have to sober up so often. And it was always the sobering up that was the worst. I entered the Navy and began to have a series of discussions with people in the Navy, and they were always around the theme that, Dick, I don't have these discussions with any of my other officers.
Commanding officer after commanding officer of our squadron kept pointing out that I seemed to just be acting differently than anyone else. I was the only ensign who had ever been picked up for standing in the middle of a runway while a flight of bombers was landing, waving my coat and pretending that I was the LSO on the back end of a ship. I was the only full lieutenant who was ever arrested for organizing and participating in the first naked hedge-hopping contest in Coronado, California. I was the only officer than the squadron they'd ever had who had a young lady, her mother, and a baby in arms show up at the squadron one day.
mother and a baby in arms show up at the squadron one day. That'll do a lot for your fitness
[00:15:06]
report. It will at least make it longer than most. Probably the best memory I have of my years in the Navy was laying in a house that we had rented, a bunch of us on the beach in Coronado living the good life. Damn near died living the good life. And I had one of those moments of insight that I didn't like. And I took a good honest look at me. I walked over and I stuffed rags around the windows, closed the doors, opened up the door between my bedroom and the kitchen and turned all the gas on and laid down on my bed and said, this has got to be the only answer. I woke up about three hours later with a deep sense of failure and a splitting headache. And I really was disgusted to think that I couldn't even pull off an honest suicide attempt. And I remember lying there and I went in the kitchen and I got a butcher knife and I brought it in and I put it up against the point of it up against my chest and I started praying to something I didn't believe in that I'd have the guts to push it in and I didn't have the guts to do it. Thank God. I don't know why a house or two rooms that are completely sealed off with gas going for over three hours won't kill you. I didn't know then, but I know now. I don't know why I was put back to life except that I guess I have some purpose and it is that sense of purpose which keeps me going now and I think probably keeps us all going.
When I had a glimpse of the self-respect and dignity that was available in Alcoholics Anonymous, that's what I glommed on to. That's what I'd been looking for and that's what I've been praying for all my life. I was about to get out of the Navy and I was a little afraid of going out into the cold crew world and I figured out that I needed something to straighten out my act, so I got married. I figured that if you get married you quit doing the things that I did and you'd probably get straightened around somehow. Needless to say, with that strong spiritual foundation for our marriage, it's been a rocky road. God has not only been kind enough to keep me sober this whole time, but he's also managed to keep me with the same wife, Al-Anon, and I too thank God for the program about Al-Anon. I've heard a lot of things said about Al-Anons, like they're nice but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one. That'll grow on you. Also heard them described as the world's luckiest people, they get to work steps and drink too. I got out of the Navy and went into a job which I didn't care for, but that was alright because I didn't care for anything else in life. We got moved around and I found myself in Santa Barbara, California at age 30, driving up and down Highway 5, calling on clients up and down the central coast of California and driving by the Camarillo State Hospital, which is the mental hospital for Southern California, and considering that as probably the best alternative that I had going at that point. I had narrowed my options in life down to Camarillo or an honest suicide attempt. In another one of those moments, I had realized that I was emotionally crippled and I was certain that there was nothing I could do about it and the best I could hope for would be to find some way to cope with it. We were living on a beautiful estate in a guest cottage. My wife was teaching school. We had no children. We were living a very nice, selfish way of life. People were congratulating me on how well things were going in my life and I kept thinking to myself, how can they not understand? How can they not understand how I feel inside? I had been through suffering image of myself that you could possibly conjure over one lifetime. Mostly I played the
[00:20:05]
routine about the poor, misunderstood, suffering genius cast loose in an unfeeling, unthinking world and doomed to this destiny of trying to cope with the coldness and unfeeling part of this world. I got one guy down here and boy, he and I got to get together later. And that was the image I had of myself. And at age 30, I made a decision that there was no hope for me emotionally or mentally and I didn't really care. And as I said, my last drunk was standing in the Pacific Ocean in February, which is a little cold, didn't get any clams and almost killed a fellow and his five-year-old son driving him back down the road to Santa Barbara that night. And I woke up the next morning and I walked downstairs and stood in the middle of my living room. My wife was sitting on the couch and my emotions completely came apart. Now that was not necessarily new to me. I was the kind of alcoholic who was afraid to go to bed at night unless you were so tired or so sedated or so drunk that you didn't have to think. The worst times for me were the times when I was sober and I was left alone with my own mind with no outside distraction. I remember those nights of lying there and the reality and the thoughts would start whirling around in my mind until it was like a motor without a governor and start spinning faster and faster and I'd have to get up and go around and pound on walls and walk around outside because I just couldn't stand it. And wish I could get drunk but afraid to get drunk again because it was too soon after the last time. And I had to keep the act together. I had to keep the facade going. And I felt like somebody who had crumbled inside, all the supports were down and the shell was like plaster of Paris and the next thing that came along was going to crack it. And I completely came apart that Sunday morning. My body started shaking. I had to sit down in the middle of the living room and I started crying and I said, my God, I don't know what's wrong with me, but I don't want to be this way anymore. And I turned to my wife and I said, would you call Alcoholics Anonymous? And that was a completely new thought to me. I had never registered in my mind that my problems were the result of my drinking. I identified with drinking because when you are a misunderstood genius cast loose in this world that doesn't understand you, the least you can do is get drunk. Now, I've been living in Santa Barbara four or five months at this time. And to give you a barometer on my ego, I asked my wife to call AA because I was afraid they might recognize my voice. It happens that my AA birthday is my wife's natal birthday and we are having dinner that afternoon down in Ventura, meeting my mother and sister who were driving up from Los Angeles. Now, my mother had been sober and Alcoholics Anonymous for seven years continuously at that time and had been in and out of the program for over 20. I had never registered that, you know, heaven knows mother needed it. She has a plaque at Mount Airy Hospital in Denver. She was in and out of there so many times. And that was okay for mother because she needed it. And after all, mother really wasn't as bright as I was either. And nothing that could help her could probably reach me. But driving down there that day, my wife was wise enough that she didn't bring up the subject that we had called AA and that we had the date, the time and the place of the meeting that night. And we sat through dinner and like I was to do for the first year or so on the program, they said, how are things? And I gritted my cute little smile and said, just great. Plucky little devil. That was one of my images too. And we walked out to the parking lot and I walked them over to their car and my mother said, is everything all right? And I said, I think so. I'm going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting tonight. She waited five years to tell me how she felt driving home that night. If I ever need an example of the dignity of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I had it right there. When your own mother cannot mention it, when she can go without mentioning your problem to you and that AA is the answer, that is the finest example of the principle of attraction rather than promotion that I could ever understand. And God truly blessed me with that
[00:25:01]
because with my kind of ego and pseudo intellectual smart aleck attitude toward things, if she had mentioned it to me, I never would have gone. And I owe her that. And I will always owe her that. On the way to the meeting, I made about 14 phony directions up and tried to lose my wife. By the way, I was in firm grip of my masculinity and could not go alone. The only good definition of an alcoholic I ever heard is an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. The other one that comes close is the guy who can go off in two different directions at the same time and damn near make it.
And that's what I felt like inside. We got to the meeting. Some people whom I immediately judged as to not be my equal intellectually were kind enough to me and ignored my haughty grandeur. I walked in there with the humility of a Prussian general crying on the inside. I know what it's like to cry on the inside when you can't show. And my friend Bob described that beautifully last night. It hurts. It hurts till your forehead hurts. But you can't do it because you can't let down the act because it's all you've got left. You may be sick inside and you may be contemplating suicide, but don't ever let them know about it or they'll talk about you behind your back. About 20 minutes into the speaker, I became enraged. I was wise to the deal. My wife had called that afternoon, given them the details of my life, and it was a setup.
Funny they'd go to all that trouble and then not fall all over themselves afterwards. I developed my first good running resentment at AA at that meeting, and it ran along the lines of as long as I was willing to come here and uplift the level of this group, why don't they show more appreciation? I spent over a year on that one and damn near got drunk. I immediately decided that everything they told me I had to alter and do it my own way. I spent the first year on the program not having one telephone number, not getting to know one person. After several months of attending very infrequent meetings, I actually got trapped into the thing where I had to say my name is Dick and I'm an alcoholic. And after as they walked up and said, you know, we really thought you were a student from the university doing a paper. We have an important phone call for Doyle Blackman. Doyle Blackman, I believe it is. B-L-A-C-K-M-O-N. I obviously didn't have a sponsor. After about four years of sobriety, I moved down to Los Angeles and you can really not work the program with those meetings. When there are two or three hundred folks there and you come late and leave early, there's not a way they're going to get you. And you can stand there crying on the inside more because you don't have alcohol any longer to rely on or to sedate you. Praying that somebody would talk to you and when they tried to, putting them off with a phony smile and gee isn't everything great. And I spent a year that way. Without the benefit of alcohol and with reality beginning to crowd in on my consciousness, I went on one of, I believe, again I'm fighting for uniqueness, one of the better dry drunks I've ever heard described. A year of sobriety had brought me such tranquility and peace of mind that I ran away from the office one afternoon because I couldn't stand it any longer. And I went to a movie in South Pasadena, California in the middle of a Friday afternoon. A Friday afternoon happens to be when it was the Senior Citizens Club and there were an awful lot of nice elderly people there. It was a Jack Lemmon movie about a guy who had a chicken job, working for a lousy boss, a wife that didn't understand him, and a nowhere existence.
But one bright ray of hope comes into his life in the form of a But one bright ray of hope comes into his life in the form of a lovely blonde lady whom he meets at a cocktail party.
[00:30:00]
The end of the movie is his racing down a long concourse at an airport trying to make the plane. I found myself standing in the middle of the theater cheering for him. I got up and decided that God was talking to me and went home and told my wife with absolutely no warning that I was leaving her. It made sense at the time. Unfortunately, she'd been going to that subversive movement known as Al-Anon.
I really do feel that one of us this weekend owes those of you who are new around here, who are window shopping AA, we owe you a warning to not let your spouse find out about Al-Anon before you make up your mind. Because your marital relations will really go to the devil when you get released. After an obvious amount of agitation on her part, she fell back on her program and sat down on the couch and looked at me and said, Well, do you want the color TV?
Next morning I found myself living in a crummy little apartment in west LA and wondering why I was there. I then realized that I was in a whole lot of trouble because I had lost my last anchor. I had lost my last little piece except my job and I was obviously going to quit that because my intellectual development was being arrested seriously there. So that was a foregone conclusion and I had just lost my other anchor.
I had no more reason to keep up the act because I was living around some folks that didn't keep up any act at all. Just an afternoon at the pool was an experience. I got scared deep down in my being. So I set out to prove one other rule in AA. If you go to a lot of meetings to make you feel better, you will feel worse. I went on a saturation campaign of going to meetings and it was at least one and usually two a day.
The more meetings I went to, the more frantic I got and the more frightened I became. I really became more resentful toward the people in the program. I thought the AA program was going to meetings. I wouldn't have recognized a step if it bit me. I thought that the AA program was going to meetings and thinking good thoughts. So I went to a lot of meetings and tried to think a lot of good thoughts. I got more panicky and more panicky.
One night I attended a meeting for the first time, which was later to become my first home group. It was a stag meeting in Beverly Hills and it meets in a lawn bowling clubhouse in a park on Wednesday nights. I walked into that place and I sat down in the back as I was given to do. These guys are a particularly enthusiastic, loving group of guys. They always go out to dinner with each other beforehand, or most of them do.
Then they go out for coffee afterwards. That's the kind of group it was. They had come in from dinner and they were having a ball and they were still going through what they had talked about. I sat back there and I felt more pure hate for those people than I had ever felt in my life. Why can't they understand how I feel on the inside? What is the matter with these phonies? I felt a sense of rejection and a sense of hate.
When you grow up as a child thinking that when you went to bed at night your parents were talking about it, wasn't it too bad they had the last child? To feel that sense of rejection again was more than I could take. I got up and I walked out in the park. It was pitch black out in that park and I got about halfway to my car on the other side. Then one total dominant feeling came over me and that was absolute fear and certainty that if I walked away from it this time I was a dead cookie.
For that noble reason I turned around and walked back in. I sat down in the back of the meeting and I closed my eyes and I started praying that something would happen. I started praying to something that I had made fun of all my life, except in a few moments when it got a little tight. One of the most difficult things for me to learn to do
[00:35:03]
was to accept the concept of a higher power without sacrificing my intellectual integrity. If any of you out there are battling with that tonight, go ahead and fight it out, but be assured that you can because I got a secret for you. Without God you don't have any intellectual integrity, in my opinion. The format of the meeting was that they would call people at random up and they could stand up at a rostrum and talk for up to five minutes.
I'd never been to that meeting before and I didn't know anybody there. I sat back there and I prayed and sure enough they called on me. Out of 50 some people they'd get up 10 or 15 and they called on me. I got up in front and I remember the absolute panic I felt as I walked up to that rostrum. Also, when they knew you were kind of new around and everything, the old guys always kind of positioned themselves along the aisles on the way up.
They'd give you a pat on the back and they'd wink at you or touch your hand or something to let you know it was going to be all right. They have a brutal tradition in that group. If a guy's coming in off his drunk and this is his first meeting, they make him speak. I've seen them stand up there like this holding on to the rostrum with the microphone whipping back and forth. They do that out of love and understanding.
That's, by the way, the only time for the next year you can say anything. That's my kind of group when you've got an ego problem like mine. I got up there and I turned around and I looked at those faces and I said, My name is Dick and I'm an alcoholic and I think I'm flunking AA. And I started to cry for the first time. And I cried and I didn't know why I was crying except I was scared to death and I was praying so hard that somebody would come up and take me.
Just take me and do anything. I didn't care. I just didn't want to feel that way anymore. After the meeting in this very small room that's full of 50 guys or so, they have a thing where they pick up the chairs. And all the people on one side picked up the chairs and went that way and all the people on the other side of the room picked up chairs and went another way. And I was standing there in the back of the room and there was a guy standing all the way across the room.
His eye caught mine and he smiled and we just registered. And he walked over to me and he said, My name is Hal and I think you better stick with me. And I thought, My God, it finally happened. He could not have gotten rid of me. I couldn't wait to get it out. Hal was an unemployed actor who had nothing but time on his hands, coincidentally. And he took me like a kid. And he had to teach me how often to get my clothes cleaned.
I didn't even know how to do that well. I had missed out on so much of life in growing up that I read an awful lot of the simple fundamentals about life that I didn't even understand. And yet every morning I'd go down there and pretend to be Boyd Jr. executive with all kinds of people working for me. And I was the whiz kid of the corporation and all that sort of thing. And every night we'd go to a meeting or we'd just get together for dinner.
And every weekend we'd get in my car and we would drive all over Southern California and stop at a motel when it got to be time and go to a meeting in that town and we'd talk. And we talked and we talked and we talked. And he knew how to probe and then sit back and listen. And I didn't think I was ever going to be able to get it all out. And when I'd get down, I'd get a little bit tired or I'd start getting resentful toward him because he was always right and I was always wrong.
You ever feel that way about your sponsor? Oh, if I could just be right once. If you can't, you probably got the right sponsor. I think it's a testimonial to this program and to the force which works through it that this guy who led me so perfectly through me and who over a period of four to five months was able to get me to completely open up and finally have that feeling which is so beautifully described in one of our pamphlets called A Member's Eye View of AA as actually finally being able to stand completely naked in front of another human being and being glad for it.
That this guy who was able to do that for me had never taken a forced step and got drunk soon after and drank for four years before he admitted it to me.
[00:40:06]
That's alcoholism. When I think of how he must have been crying on the inside and so caught up in that specialness and uniqueness that he had to live that kind of a lie and he and I are closer than any other two human beings on earth. There's nothing we don't know about each other. But he got me to talk and talk and talk and you see he didn't have my answers but he sure knew where I could find them and he didn't try to give me any answers.
The only advice he ever gave me he said I'll only tell you one thing when you get in a bind apply this principle when in doubt don't. And that's the only advice I'll ever give you. But he had the patience and the love to sit through all those hours and lead me through the discovering of what I was like what happened and what it could be like now and he did that. He had those moments of insight that come to the kind of alcoholic I am.
When I had finally was going to write my fourth step and of course I wrote it in a couple hours one night and called him up and he said well I'll tell you what why don't you go to bed and read it in the morning and find out how much you lied in it and then we'll talk about doing a real one. And then when I was ready to take my fifth step and he came over to my apartment and it happened to be the night of the Academy Awards and he made me sit through those damn Academy Awards.
And it's funny the number of things that I wrote down on the end that hadn't been on there yet while I was watching those dumb Academy Awards. And then finally I laid it out and as Bob so beautifully puts it I even got down to the take it to the grave stuff. Of course I didn't look at him when I said it I stared at the ceiling when I was on that stuff. And he would interrupt every once in a while and say yeah I did that too and here's what I did about that in fact I even did this also and etc etc.
And then he told me some words that I'd been wanting to hear all my life because I had been blocked off. I had problems with people. The way I had problems with people is I didn't have anything to do with people. You know that's a terrible kind of failure. And I had a horrible time with people wondering what they thought about me so terribly and painfully self-aware all my life. And at the end of the fifth step he looked me in the eye and he said I want you to know something.
That after you've told me all these things which have been so horrible and so terrible to you that you've hidden inside all these years that have been festering your soul literally as well as your emotions and your mentality. He said you can walk in a room now and I can be standing across that room and you can look over there and you can think to yourself this is someone who knows every crummy dirty thing I ever did thought or said and he loves me.
And I've been waiting to hear those words a long time. After having run away from home at age 31 Hal and I decided I was patched up well enough to try it again. And coincidentally my wife had gotten hurt deeply enough by my leaving her that she decided that maybe she ought to do something about herself and she went and got an Al-Anon sponsor. She had an Al-Anon sponsor that she was as close to as I was with Hal and you know they didn't meet for four months.
They did it all over the phone. Well you tell me this program doesn't work. And we got back together again and I'd like to be able to tell you that it's been heart music and tiptoeing through the tulips ever since then. It has been real. And that's the best thing I can say. I found out that in the jargon of the young the ultimate trip is reality. The ultimate experience and joy and thrill is knowing this world that the God of my understanding has created it and knowing it just the way he made it.
With no frills and no help from me in spite of me. I had a hard time admitting I was powerless over alcohol because my pseudo-intellectualism was the only defense I had left. The fact that I was contemplating suicide did not equate with the fact that my life was unmanageable. I did not equate with the fact that my life was unmanageable. That was a separate deal.
[00:45:02]
I came to believe, and I am so grateful to be at a conference where that is the theme, because if you have to typify me in the program, I am one of the spiritual fanatics. I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity by having a great revelation one night in an AA meeting. All those people think there is a God. What if they are right and I am wrong? I am in a lot of trouble.
So I went home, and I got down on my hands and knees in the middle of a dark living room, and I started out something like this. I really feel foolish. I don't have any idea what is going on between you and me, but if I can have what they have got, would you help me out? I can't say that I had a flashing light, the furniture didn't move, but the next morning somebody questioned my future at work, and it didn't bother me.
Things began to happen that threatened the image that I had been carrying around of myself, and it didn't bother me. Then they talked about the rest of the program, and I said, I am kind of a clever guy, and I obviously have some talents because look how I am doing in work, and I am able to manipulate people on the outside socially, and given two or three, I will get up and do twenty minutes on anything.
So there must be a lot of me that I ought to keep, and maybe just little parts of me need some fixing up. I am very grateful that the kind of sponsors and the guys that I hung around with in those early days convinced me that that was not the way to approach the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. They taught me that that was the Band-Aid approach of AA, and that if I really wanted to find continuous and constant peace of mind, serenity and sobriety, that what I had to be willing to do was to go in the shop and be torn down into every smallest piece, and then say, whatever you will make of me, please do, and not try to manipulate the outcome.
That overhaul or metamorphosis type of AA is the thing that has saved my life. If I were still trying to be the me that I was when I came here with just a few little patches and a few little touch-ups, I wouldn't be here, because in the first few years of sobriety I began to experience depressions that were like walking into a black cloud, and the only thing that got me through the depressions were somehow I had a fundamental sense that it would be all right someday.
I didn't know where that sense of well-being came from until I had another one of those revelations. That if God was God, and all those people for all those centuries were right, that there was some kind of a creative, positive, loving force, that it must be Him that was curing me and it must be Him that was sustaining me in spite of all my mistakes and in spite of my insufferable intolerance and selfishness.
I did a fourth step because I wanted to be one of the guys. I didn't do it because I wanted to finally find out what it was that had been getting me drunk and keeping me so sick all those years. I started out on it to find out whether or not I could be one of the guys and say I'd done it, but I had the kind of sponsor who said, no, we're going to do it the AA way, not your way, and he told me a few simple directions.
Pray first, and the hardest thing you'll do after that is find a pencil and a piece of paper, and it worked. At the time I finished my fifth step, I got back together with my wife and I got all caught up again in that business of living. All the noise, all the activity and the humdrum began to come in again and to drown out some of this that I had found and learned. I got transferred to Seattle, and I moved up to Seattle, and I began another one of
[00:50:00]
my withdrawal programs from Alcoholics Anonymous because I had been sober now for a couple of years, and I had a new job, and I needed to get active on that, and I didn't have time for all the dumb meetings. About a month of that, I got scared to death and went back to AA, and I began to do battle with steps six and seven. I think probably I was finally challenged by that line in the 12 by 12 that says step six is the step that separates the men from the boys, and I was still having to prove my masculinity a lot at this time, and so I thought, well, I better do that.
I somehow got the impression that having been sober for a couple of years and being embarked on a spiritual program had then equipped me to do something about my character defects, and I spent a horrible next year because I kept trying to fix my character defects and they kept getting worse. And the busier I got, the behinder I got, and I would pray to have the power not to do that or say this or feel this or to be able to do this or say that, and I never could do it.
And finally, another sponsor taught me that nowhere does it say in the program that we are going to be given anything that we didn't have when we came in here that's going to have any lasting effect on our relationship with God, and he taught me the definition of grace. He said, if you ever notice, dummy, that in front of a lot of rosters at AA meetings there's a little saying, but for the grace of God.
And I kind of liked that. I thought that was a nice sounding little phrase that they ought to have up. You know, I agreed with a lot of it. In fact, I thought the steps were something you agreed with when I first came around here. I thought you just had to, well, I agree with that, and then go on and think good thoughts and do good things and hang around the guys, you know, go to a lot of meetings.
And he finally gave me a definition of grace that I understood, and that is that it is unmerited, undeserved favor. He said the flip side of that is mercy. He said grace is when you get what you don't deserve, and mercy is when you don't get what you do deserve. And he ventured the opinion that that's how I was living at that point, and should acknowledge it. I finally found time in the middle of my busy schedule to write down an eight-step list and procrastinated.
It happened I was working on that character defect at the time. I got a little clue for you, too, if you're new around here. Watch out what you pray for. I've never prayed for tolerance yet that he didn't give me circumstances where I had to exercise it. Another sponsor told me that if you want the spiritual way to develop patience is to wait for it. I began to make amends, and I called the guys that I'd roomed with in the Navy and tracked them down and sent them the money and all the funny things, and I wondered, boy, I bet they've got some funny conversations going, hey, you ought to hear the phone call I got last night, and all that kind of stuff.
And I mumbled a little bit about how I was sorry to my wife. It was about that time that I'd love to hear those guys' meetings that say, well, I never really did much harm to the family, and I'm living out my amends by staying sober. And then I became aware that there were some amends that maybe I wanted to do, but I was afraid to do them. I mentioned to you that at one incident in my Naval career was the arrival of a young lady, her mother, and a baby, and I'd been paying child support for about ten years.
And whenever the subject was brought up around the house, which was very rarely, I just said mail the check. I told you I had the obligation before we got married, and I don't want to discuss it. And I guess this was one of those take it to the grave amends, and I didn't know that.
[00:55:03]
And I got frightened one day because I got a phone call from my ex-wife, and again, after three or four years of sobriety, I was in such firm command of my mental and emotional state that when I heard the voice on the phone, I hung up. But by working steps, I became aware that I had to do something about that, and I began to pray for awareness of what to do. Now, the God of my understanding is rather an elaborate one, and he went to the trouble of moving me to Columbus, Ohio then so that I had to go to Los Angeles to meet my new boss, and guess who lives in Los Angeles?
So I called, and I asked permission to come and meet my ten-year-old son for the first time. And I went, and he was just a ten-year-old boy who was terribly confused. And I told him that I loved him, and it must be hard for him to understand that, and that I owed him an awful lot, and I didn't know how I was ever going to pay him back. But I wanted to, and if he ever felt like he needed something, to call me, and I hoped that we could get to know one another better.
And we have made some faltering attempts at that over the last five years. I got on the airplane and flying to Ohio, and I was crying, and I wasn't crying about anything specific. I was just crying, that kind of crying that I have come to appreciate and love in AA. I'm a big crier now. I drove away from my house yesterday morning, and the three of them, my wife and the two children who were born after we got together, who exist because of the program of AA, walked out and they went to all the trouble to stand out there and wave to me until my car went around the corner, and I started crying.
I don't know if that means anything to you, but that's what sobriety is all about to me. Because I'm that same sick, selfish, emotional cripple except for one thing, that for some reason the Almighty God who created heaven and earth had time to fool around with me and to set me in a new place as a new person. So I made all the amends, and then I tried to write down every other one that I could ever possibly have to make, and I've been praying to be able to make any other ones that I haven't been able to make yet.
It was at that point that I was told something that was a very dear promise to me. If you work the first nine steps of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous as honestly and thoroughly as you possibly can, you will wake up one morning for the first time in your adult life you will be even with the world again. That you can be totally and completely free of the past and the sickness and the ugliness and the feelings and the emotions can have no more control over you unless you want them to, and you can have it all back.
But if you don't want it back, it's gone. And you can walk on from that morning on even with the world again, and all you have to do is once a day get even again. And a day's worth isn't that big a deal anymore. One day's worth of mistakes and stupidity and selfishness and intolerance and impatience aren't that big a deal anymore. I still do them, and I still have them, because I suffer from the human condition, and I always will.
And I think he made me that way for some reason, for his own very good reason, because I had about that time somebody define spirituality to me. It is not a destination, it's a trip, and that made sense to me. I began to find peace with my human condition, and at the same time a great profound sense of well-being and protection and being sustained. The way I do the tenth step now is that I look for anything that I might have done that day that would go between the God of my understanding and myself.
For the first thirty years of my life, I build up a little bit at a time, and in such small units I didn't notice it, a big wall between that thing that I had been so hungry for all those years. I was a very dramatic alcoholic. I was given to meditating on mountaintops, building tops, and way down at the end.
[01:00:03]
I had a gut-wrenching hunger in those days that I couldn't describe, and I thought if anybody ever knew about it, they'd think I was crazy. Well, I know they were right. I had that hunger and I could never put a name to it, and now I can. I was lonely for God, and I don't have to be lonely anymore, and that's because of Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm not in Alcoholics Anonymous because I don't want to drink anymore.
I'm in AA because I want to be the me that I can be with God's help and yours, and that's why I'm here. And that's a message I hope we can carry to you who are newer or who are older and having some problems, that at this moment I can stand here free of my problems and my self-awareness and my little deals going on, and I can tell you that it's going to be all right, and that you don't have to feel that way and you don't have to be that way anymore.
And no matter what you're going through, one of us has gone through it. No matter what you're feeling, one of us has felt it. And no matter what you fear, one of us has feared it. And it doesn't matter anymore. All you have to do is to get off the elevator and walk out in the sunshine and know that it's going to be okay. As a result of that hunger and the identification of it, I became aware of what the 11th Step had to offer me.
And it became clear to me that I had probably contained many of those things that Bill refers to in the front of the book, Came to Believe. There's an opening page there. It says, We ask that you set aside your spiritual prejudices long enough to find out if there's something here for you. And I became aware that I had prejudices about everything spiritual and certainly everything religious. And I began to wonder things like, I wonder what God's done for the non-alcoholics.
Doesn't seem consistent with his nature that he would have only stepped in for us. And I wonder what he's done for all the rest of them out there. So I decided I'd go and find out. And as a result of that, I have embarked upon a program of discovery that's one of the most exciting things in my life. I'm never going to finish that program. I'm never going to get to the last book. I'm never going to get to the last discussion.
I'm never going to get to the last prayer or meditation in that discovery. Because it's infinite. And he's never going to run out. I began to realize that I had prejudices about things and books and had knocked them all my life and never read them. I could make fun of Buddha or the fact that Joshua couldn't make the sun stand still. And every other expression of man's hunger to understand the meaning of his existence that has ever been put down.
And I could make some smart-aleck comment about every one of them. Because I started out as a Mormon, went through deistic existentialism, every ism and ology in between, and wound up as an usher in the Unitarian Church. And that covers them all, including going to mass some mornings when we were going on long flights and I wasn't too sure about any of us. I found out why I had been prejudiced about things spiritual.
And it was because I didn't have the guts to take a stand on any of them. I didn't have the nerve or the backbone or the strength of my own convictions to stay in front of other people, this is what I believe. And stick to it. I didn't even want to be an AA at first for that reason. Because I didn't want to have to be a social outcast and have to say, this is something that I am and I am committed to doing something about it.
Now I am willing to take a stand for God in front of anybody. And the people I work with sometimes think I take that stand too often. And maybe I do. I seem to work him into most of our conversations. When my personnel director would come running into me and say, we got this problem and I would say, let go and let God.
[01:05:01]
I sometimes think that corporation kept me around as their token religious fanatic. And non-drinker. The biggest part of the twelfth step to me is not going out and calling on wet drunks and all that sort of thing because that's easy to do. And that you can get all caught up in the activity and it's terribly important and I don't mean to minimize that because it saves lives. But I found that I went into my evangelical period in doing that and I was hauling them off the skid row in Pasadena and boy that's about as bad a skid row as you'll ever see.
And I realized that what I was doing was I was creating activity and noise and bustle around me that was starting to drown out the real me again. That when I didn't want to have to cope and deal with me, what that in my case boils down to is go back and work the steps, when I didn't want to have to face that, then I'd go get terribly busy doing AA kinds of things. Few of them even sobered up. But I began to sense that where, as they say, the rubber hits the road is, am I practicing these principles in all my affairs?
And that made me very uneasy. I'm not confident in the slightest that I am today either. I want to practice these principles in all my affairs because I feel good inside and I feel closer to God. I don't know what kind of example that's going to set out there in the world and I don't have to worry about it. I guess he'll use it to whatever end he wants. But that to me is the sum essence of the twelfth step.
What did I do today to practice these principles in all my affairs? How are we doing on time? I would like to share my now with you. I have two questions that I like to bug newcomers with. One of them is, how are you in reality getting along today? And then how is your now? You get some funny looks, but every once in a while it registers with one of them and then you say, I got one. That's when you spot those newcomers that you couldn't keep them from the program with a stick.
I sometimes wonder why I spend so much time on all the others when there are those around. I often wonder what it does for the dignity of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous for me to try to carry it to somebody who doesn't want it. But they need it and I'm just the guy who can say it right. My today is made up of things like crying when I drive away from home because the three of them thought enough of me to come out and wave until I went around the corner.
It's a constant series of God's coincidences. For example, a week ago Friday I walked away from the job that I had had since before I was sober. I had wanted to for several years and prayed a lot about it and the answer didn't come. And then I began to realize, through the help of my sponsors, that that was the answer, that it wasn't time, that I had something left to do. And I began to realize that I did.
All the little shortcuts that I had taken and not done the job as well as I might have, the mistakes I had made by people-pleasing or by just not facing up to the problems that I had and those hundred-odd people that were running around out there for which I was responsible, that I hadn't done everything I could and I wasn't going to run away from something again in my life. I spent all my life running away.
I never went to something, I always left something. And I began to sense that I was going to have to stand there and do it until it was time that it didn't need to be done anymore. And about two months ago I reached the point where I knew, through a set of circumstances and things that happened, that I had to make a decision for my family. I had been transferred around all over the United States, I had lived in five cities since I sobered up as a result of this one job, and there were some more coming down the pike.
And I had a decision to make. What was most important in the set of priorities for the Grant family? And I prayed about it and I became aware and I simply knew, and that's the best description of spirituality I've ever had, is that when you have those moments, and I have had those cataclysmic type of spiritual experiences, the only thing you can say is at that moment
[01:10:03]
you just know. And I prayed about this and I knew that it was time to sink roots because coincidentally I had wound up back in the city where I had grown up and it was the closest thing to home that a wacko alcoholic like me could ever have. And so I said, God, I feel like I ought to stay here and I don't even want to keep the job I have because I've realized that it's been a security blanket for me, it's been too terribly important in my self-image that I am this bright, young, achiever, corporate executive type and that's become too important in my consciousness.
And I relied on that and wanted people to see that in me too much. So I would like you to please show me what I'm supposed to do. I will make a decision that here I am going to take a stand and I don't have any idea what I'm going to do for a job. But you've got it, you work it out. Within two weeks I had four job offers, all in Denver. And the way that happened was not that I made that decision, but I acted on it.
Because about that time the home that we had dreamed about all our lives suddenly became available out in the country, outside Denver. And I knew what was going on. It was number one saying, okay, you act and you go out on the limb and you take the risk and leave the rest up to me. And when you're ready to do that, I'll move. I did and he did. And he never fails to. I walked out of my job on a week ago Friday and there was nothing that I needed to do and I didn't owe any more amends.
I think I'd even paid back most of what I'd chiseled on my expense account. And coincidentally that weekend, about two hours later, my wife and I got in the car and we drove and we spent a weekend engaged in a new technique, learning how to be married better and being honest with each other. And I said, you never let up, do you Lord? Because here was the one last place that I had held out those secret little thoughts of uniqueness and distrust.
And I spent 44 hours involved in something that is the most effective technique for learning for Dick how to be honest with Jay, his wife, that could ever have been designed. And I became aware halfway through this process, and this is a spiritually based thing, and it's a part of my 11th step because I have come to understand God and I have come to make closer contact with him through my family and particularly through the wife to whom I have also made a commitment finally, that I am going to stand and be measured as the kind of husband that I am to that woman because that's the woman God gave me.
And I came to a realization halfway through that, that all this time I didn't know it but I'd always had this choice. I could choose to make loving her more important than proving I was right. And I always thought that I had to prove that I was right in our marital relation. And that's a pretty weak grip on my masculinity if I've got to be proving that all the time. I have a whole new marriage now.
God's given me a new marriage and it's the most exciting thing I've run across in a long time. That job really is way back in the background somewhere right now and I really have to start thinking about it because I've got to go to it Wednesday. That's another little coincidence and I'll tell you about that. I went in to meet the man who was the head of this organization and he's a very successful man in the world's terms.
He has all the accoutrements of worldly success. And he said, let's you and I sit down and talk because I'm talking about the possibility of hiring you into a part of this organization that's vital to our growth and to our staying alive over the next few years. And I said, well what you better know about me is that I believe in God and he's the most important thing in my life and I'm a… of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Those are the first words out of my mouth and I thought, well, there goes that one.
[01:15:01]
And he looked me in the eye and he said, I'm so glad that we could get down to that level and thank you for telling me that and that's the last we ever discussed AA. He didn't even care I was in Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's how today goes. If you could see you, you'd come to believe too. Because when you stand here and you look out and you think about all the misery and sickness that is represented in this room tonight and the fact that it doesn't have to exist anymore, it's all behind us, we are free, we are walking in the sunshine and it's going to be just fine.
If you could see you, you would understand, as I do, why I am grateful to be an alcoholic. If that's all it took to have found you and what's shining in your eyes and what I feel in my heart, that was a cheap price to pay and I am truly grateful to share that with you tonight.