Audio
Transcript
Source: DICOBE-00360 – James K – KENTUCKY STATE CONV – 1979-02-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00360-james-k-kentucky-state-conv-1979-02-15.mp3 Duration: 01:01:26
============================================================
We had a short time together on the way here, got to know a little bit about Jim. I've talked to other members who have heard his tapes and expressed their interest in hearing him again. Without further ado, I will introduce our speaker tonight because I think he has a story to tell us that we will enjoy. So if we'll just sit back and listen, Jim Kay. Thank you, Bob. My name is Jim and I am an alcoholic and a very grateful member of this fellowship. I like that, hi Jim, especially for two reasons because I came on the program in Los Angeles and I think Southern California was the first place that that custom started.
And the other reason is that I can't see you and that's reassuring. I know you're out there with these lights. I have never been in Kentucky before. I'm almost ashamed to admit that. And so my experience in Kentucky so far consists of arriving at the airport yesterday afternoon and being met by Bob and through today and I'll be leaving tomorrow. I haven't been out of this complex and won't get out of it before I leave.
So based on my experience when I get home I'm going to tell people back in Chicago that everybody in Kentucky is a member of AA or the husband or wife or relative of a member of AA. And you know, I don't want to get a big deal about world affairs and so on because that's not part of the AA meeting, but I can't help but think that in a way it's too bad that the whole world isn't operated on the basis of this kind of fellowship and the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
It would be a lot better world, a lot better world. You've been so nice and so cordial and so hospitable and I've enjoyed the conversation in the coffee room and running across a few old friends and this has been a good weekend for me. I don't think that I have ever heard my own story told so completely as I heard it last night when Ann talked and this morning when Brian talked. Between the two of them they really didn't leave very much for me to say and I don't mean about the particular details.
I mean I never married any Arabs or any gigolos for that matter and I, by the grace of God, was spared some of the experiences that Brian had in the latter part of his drinking. But the theme is the same and I guess that's why when we go to AA meetings so often we say to the speaker, boy you told my story because the theme is the same. The patterns are different sometimes and the details but it's like we were all on different roads headed for the same destination which for us who are lucky is this fellowship.
Now the idea is and I believe in this that you tell what you used to be like and what happened and what you're trying to be like now. I don't believe in drunkologues. I think that spending a lot of time describing in detail your drinking at an AA meeting is an utter waste of time. The one thing you don't need to tell alcoholics about is drinking. So I'm going to talk about some patterns and episodes and so on to qualify myself.
I was in my teenage years until maybe my middle twenties what I call a sort of a college type Saturday night drunk. I guess if I look back now and I were smart enough to analyze it I would say that I had alcoholic tendencies at least from the beginning because in those early years any time that I started drinking and I was in a situation where I didn't care what the people around thought of me
[00:05:06]
and I had nothing I particularly had to do the next day I generally got drunk. But in those early years if I were let's say with a relative or a wife or if I was with people I wanted to impress I could generally put the cork in the bottle after two or three drinks. The fact that I was never really comfortable unless I went on and got drunk tells me now that I was certainly at least prepping to become a full-fledged alcoholic.
But I got through college and I got through law school and in the early years of my first marriage lived in that relationship without any major crises. I identify the first thing that really rang the alcoholism bell for me is something that happened when I was 24 years old. I graduated from law school and I had gotten a job with the Department of Justice in Washington and I had gone down there for about three months and then they transferred me to the New York regional office and one of the things that I had to do was to pass a bar examination.
I had the job but it was contingent on getting admitted to the bar and I was to take the bar exams in New York State. I went on a wagon for two months getting ready to take those exams. Now that's you know as I think of it now that's kind of interesting. I don't believe that anybody goes on the wagon except for maybe some special medical reason who is a normal drinker. Who needs it? You know you stop and think about it and even a heavy social drinker if he thinks he's drinking too much you know he cuts down and he only has a couple of beers or whatever his taste is a couple of martinis.
But something in me at that early age you know got the brain working and said if you're going to do well in these examinations you better not drink at all. So I did my regular work all day and I studied at night and weekends and I worked very hard and when the time came to take that examination I'm sorry this was in Washington I was to take it the first time and I got ready to get on a train to go down there.
I was ready I was as ready as I could ever be for anything in my life. And those days you took trains everywhere and I got on the New York City to Washington train just feeling great. God I was in great shape. Prepared, ready, healthy and so on and I went in the club car. Need I tell you the rest of the story? I sat down and the fellow next to me ordered a bourbon and soda. The one thing that I loved the most was Old Fitzgerald and soda.
And I watched him drink it and I thought well God I maybe need to relax a little bit. You know I've been working so hard and so I ordered a bourbon and I never took the exams. When I got to Washington I was drunk and I checked into the hotel and I never came out of the hotel for three days. Now that I look back on it I am inclined to think this was alcoholic behavior. It took me a year to get around to doing the whole thing over and finally passing it which I eventually did.
But that was a turning point in a sense because while I was sure not ready to quit drinking it told me in no uncertain terms that I was going to have to find some way of controlling my drinking. And for the next 16 years, most of the next 16 years, I could sum up my existence by saying that the number one objective in my life beyond everything, beyond career, beyond a marriage, beyond anything else, was to find ways to drink without getting in trouble or to go on the wagon and stay on the wagon long enough to make up for the trouble I'd gotten into.
Since I came to LA and have read chapter three of the big book I've, I read that and I just found myself all through it.
[00:10:00]
You know the part where they talk about all the things we did to try and control our drinking? I tried them all. Only beer. Well, that's not very satisfactory. Things don't happen fast enough and you're running back and forth too often and you don't get those zing results. I tried only weekends. I tried just two martinis before dinner. I tried only sherry. And I would like to tell you that of all the things I tried, that was probably the most disastrous because it got me not only drunk but stupid and sick.
All these little devices. And what would happen is that ultimately these little tricks would last maybe for a few days and then the inevitable would happen and I would be drunk and I would get in trouble. Then I started the process of going on the wagon and I've run into so many people in AA who tried this. I had, once I went for 11 months without taking a drink, several times, four weeks, six weeks, a couple times, three months, four months.
And the pattern was generally the same. It would happen after something bad had occurred. Either by this time I was in private practice with a law firm, either I had loused up in some way and been called on a carpet by the senior partner or I had had some bad trouble at home or just some very humiliating thing or maybe I was just sick. And so I'd make all the resolutions and I would go on the wagon.
Then I would try to do something useful to get back into the good graces of everybody. I would work extra hard at the office. I would get into some kind of a civic thing or I would take up a new hobby. One summer, you know, I've got to admit I'm not handy and I hardly know how to pound a nail in with a hammer, but one summer when we were living in the country I built a 681-foot fence, three rails with 81 fence posts and put three coats of paint on it and I did it all myself.
And I was, you know, what in the world did I do that for? I did it because it was something new to do to keep from drinking. I changed lives once at the urgent suggestion of the first one, I might say, and getting out. But this was really, you know, the second wife is a fine woman and I know she'd understand my saying this or I hope so, but that was kind of like a new hobby. I changed law firms. I moved from one city to another.
I got active. I moved from New York to Chicago where I'd been born, lived out in the suburbs and got active in the local church and in two years I was the senior warden and if there ever was a drunken deacon, this was a prize example. I never read the Bible. When I went to church I sat in the back row so nobody would see me twitch or could smell me. But I got there because when I was not drinking and on the wagon, I would race around and raise money and it was a new church, changing from a mission to a church and they needed the money and so I kind of got promoted.
But that was a hobby. Any kind of variation from just being a good husband, a good father, and a good worker and a good citizen. To find another thing that would attempt to bring me that deep down gut satisfaction of going out of the world that booze gave me. Nothing ever gave me that kind of satisfaction. My idea of a perfect day was for instance to go into a good bar in Chicago at about two o'clock in the afternoon.
You don't go earlier because it's crowded and people are having lunch and you don't go later because it's crowded and they're starting to have cocktails, but at two it would be just me and the bartender and the mirror. And the mirror was the most important thing. And I would sit there and get drunk and look at myself in the mirror and dream. I look at myself in the mirror and dream, and in those dreams, the booze made me anything I wanted to be. I could be anything. In those dreams, I have been the Secretary of State of the United States of America. In those dreams, I have had the Congressional Medal of Honor.
[00:15:22]
The law firm that I was with, I had had dreams. They were, you know, I was there and doing all right when sober, but always it was a little edgy. And I would create the situation where the senior partner was in the hospital on his deathbed, and he would say to those around him, ask Jim to come. I want to talk to him. And I would go and stand by his bedside, and he would say, Jim, you are the man to take over this firm when I go. And I would sit there and tears would come down my cheeks. This was heaven, and I never found in the hobbies, in the marriages, in anything else that I could involve myself in in my life the kind of emotional satisfaction, that the booze and the fantasies and the dreams of a world that never was could give me.
In 19- well, dates aren't important, but I finally ran out my welcome in Chicago, and I made my last geographic move to Los Angeles with an opportunity out there offered to me by some people who didn't know what I was like. And I discovered a good financial fact at that time, that if you lived in one city and sold your house and then moved to another city and just rented a house, you had a lot of money left over that you could use for whatever purposes you wanted. And that's what I did.
And I moved my wife, my second wife, and then three children by that marriage out there. And in the two years out there, I lost the last bit of ability that I had had to either control the drinking or to moderate or to go on the wagon for any appreciable amount of time. I began to act in ways that made me unacceptable to anybody. I began to have my first encounters with the police, which is something that had never happened to me before.
I found myself in a position with the law firm that I was with where they were just waiting for an excuse to get rid of me. The second marriage was teetering, and I had sown all of the seeds of the same thing that had happened to the first marriage. And I began to engage in some of the kinds of conduct that I had been able to stay away from up to then, some of the kinds of stuff that make the fifth step of this program so darned important when we do come to AA.
And finally, on a Thanksgiving weekend, I disappeared for five days, and I showed up, I think it was Tuesday, and not knowing part of where I'd been or what I'd done. And when I got up the next morning, when I woke up, my wife was sitting on the bed and just looking at me. And a lot of you know that look. It's hard to describe it. It's the thing that happens to a wife which is a mixture of despair and love and contempt.
It's a look that I think only can come on the face of the spouse of an alcoholic when you've just about given up hope. And I said, don't say anything. Please don't say anything. And she said, well, I won't if you don't want me to. And I said, don't say anything. I'm going to call AA. And she said, well, okay, and got up and walked out of the room. Now I had a commitment. I didn't know anything about Alcoholics Anonymous. I had heard about it. I didn't know anybody that was in it, but I knew it was for people that had problems with drinking.
[00:20:05]
And I was on the line. I said I'd call them. So I went down to the office and I called the central office in Los Angeles and there was a gal named Sybil out there then who was running it. And she answered the phone and I was, you know, very nervous about all of this. And I said, I think I may have a drinking problem. Now that incidentally was the understatement of the century by that time. And I said, I would like to talk to somebody. And she said, well, fine, let me have your name and your phone number and I'll have somebody call you.
And I said, oh, no, I'm not going to give you my name and phone number. I thought this thing was anonymous. And she said, well, it's going to be a little difficult to have somebody call you if they don't know your name and your telephone number. I said, you give me somebody's name and telephone number and I'll call him. And she went up and she said, I guess that's all right. And I said, incidentally, I'm a lawyer. And I said, I would rather not just talk to anybody in AA. I'd like to have someone who is a lawyer and who will understand, you know, my thinking and my background and so forth and so on.
And you see, I was arrogant, you know, just as arrogant as I'd ever been in my life. I was going to have it my way. So she played it straight and she said, fine. And she gave me the name of a fellow named Fred. And so I called Fred on the phone. I called him right then because I knew if I didn't do it right then I wouldn't do it at all. And he said, fine. He gave me his address and said, come on over. Well, the first surprise I had was his address, which was a very first-class office building in downtown Los Angeles. And my impression of AA was that if you were a lawyer in AA, you were probably in some loft down at 5th and Main Street.
And it puzzled me that a member of Alcoholics Anonymous would be in a good office building. And I got over there and I was further astonished because I walked in and, you know, a beautiful office and the guy was dressed a hell of a lot better than I was. And particularly, he had a carpet about that thick. And that's one way you tell whether lawyers are prosperous is one of the two ways. And that's one of them, if the carpet's that thick.
And so I got a kind of a snout effect out of this. I thought, well, that's going to be my kind of a guy. So we talked for a couple hours and most of it was his telling me his story. And it was right down the line my story. The way we thought, the way the things that happened to us, the drinking patterns, it was just, he nailed me on the story. Until he got to the point which went farther than I had gone because he had spent two years on Skid Row in Los Angeles.
And with all of the things that go with that. But up to that point, we were like twins in our experience. And I said, Fred, you know, if you're an alcoholic, I think probably I am. What do I do? Well, he said, I belong to the Pasadena San Marino group, which meets Wednesday night at the women's club over in San Marino, and I'll take you to the meeting. And I said, now wait a minute. This meeting stuff. I said, I'm not a joiner type. I just don't join things.
And I said, this meeting business, I said, I, you know, a women's club. Somebody might see me over there. And I just, do I have to go to a meeting? Isn't there some other way to do this? And he said, well, he said, I would recommend it. He said, that's the way to get sober and stay sober. But he said, if you don't think you're ready to go to a meeting, there's a book. We call it the big book, Alcoholics Anonymous. And he said, get that and read it.
And I said, okay, where do I get it? He said, you can buy it in any bookstore. And right then I thought, ho, ho, ho. You know, I can see myself going into a bookstore and asking for something called Alcoholics Anonymous. And he began to lose me a little more. And then he began to talk about the 12 steps. And then he lost me completely. Because, you see, I was not ready, in spite of all of this, to talk about maybe I needed to be restored to sanity. I didn't need somebody to tell me about a power greater than myself. Hell, I'd been the senior warden of a church, and I certainly ought to show I knew enough about religion.
[00:25:17]
And this stuff about amends, you know, the problem was that other people had hurt me. And I had been the object of people who ought to make amends to me. So, you know, it went off my back like water off a duck's back. And I thanked Fred, and I walked out of there. And the last thing he said was, I'll see you again sometime, which was prophetic, although I didn't know it at the time. And the one thing I knew as a result of that visit with Fred was that I was an alcoholic. That he had sold.
And the next four weeks, I didn't take a drink, and I had never lived in such fear in my life. Because I knew then what was wrong, and I was not prepared to do anything about it. And I lived in total fear for a month, and then I started to drink. And then I spent the next four months apparently trying to do all of the things that I could do to get to the point where I thought I was qualified to join this fellowship. I did things that I'd never done before.
And I think to describe one episode as an illustration of that, I took off one afternoon about five o'clock in the car to drive from Los Angeles, from Pasadena down to Palm Springs. And I had a few drinks before I left. And then I stopped about halfway down at the home of some people I knew, and I had some more drinks, and then I stopped at a bar another half hour down the road. And I was drunk, and I was blacked out, and I don't remember getting into the city of Palm Springs at all.
I woke up the next morning in a hotel room in a bed with a fellow standing there who was the assistant manager of the hotel, whom I happened to know, who was an acquaintance of mine. And I said, what happened? And he said, well, you were parked in a no-parking place right in front of a fire plug in front of a bar on Palm Canyon Drive, and there was a squad car with two cops in it that were just sitting there waiting for you to come out and get in the car and turn the motor on. And he said, I came by and saw this and talked with them and told them I would take care of you, and I brought you over here.
Now, that story may not be too unusual for alcoholic conduct except one thing. I had my little two-year-old daughter in the car with me at the time. Now, I am not that kind of a person. I am not the kind of a person who willfully would endanger the life of his little two-year-old daughter, but that is what I had become. The compulsion to drink had reached the point where it was more important to me than anything else in my life.
And I had other incidents like that. And finally, I went on that most wonderful experience that comes to all of us in AA, the last drunk. The thing about changing jobs, I think alcoholics have a set of antennae that say to us, just before you are going to get fired is the time to make a move. I know I did, and in this case, knowing what was going to happen, I walked into the senior partner of this firm in Los Angeles and demanded a raise.
Perfect excuse, he says, no way. And I said I quit. So I kept my 100% record of never having been fired from a job. And I had opened a sort of a one-man operation and borrowed some money from this one to pay this one to pay this one to pay this one. I owed everybody by then. And I decided to take what I called a goodwill tour to Chicago and New York, where I had practiced before, to go see the people that I had been in business with in order to learn more.
I've been in business with, in order to line up referral business, and I made appointments, you know, one at nine, one at ten, everywhere, both cities, I didn't keep one of them, I got on a plane, and I got drunk, and I just never got over being drunk, I was drunk for ten days, and that was the longest drunk, I was a three-day-er, incidentally, it's my normal pattern, and for ten days, I had nothing but
[00:30:25]
vodka, and Old Fits, always Old Fits, and beer, and chocolate milkshakes, and by then, I was also experimenting with second-law and dexedrine, and I was something not to be believed. On the fifth or sixth day of the drunk, my sister and brother-in-law, who lived in McKinney, Texas, lost their five-year-old little boy in a swimming pool accident, he was killed instantly, and my sister went into shock, and she would not talk to anybody but me, and they couldn't find me, and they finally found me in two days, in a hotel in New York, and when my brother-in-law got through talking with me, I went over, and you know, you kind of laugh about these things, but at that point, there was nothing really I could say or do about myself, and I went over and I opened the window in the hotel room, and I got out, and I got sitting on the window sill with my feet hanging over, and I was ready to go, and I always thought that the reason I didn't do it was because it was too high. It was on a 22nd floor, and I wondered at times, I wondered if it had been the third or the fourth floor, whether I might have been able to shove off, but I climbed back in, and I finally got out to McKinney, and my brother-in-law, who was, he's died since, he was an Episcopal priest, and had to perish in McKinney, met me at the airport in Dallas, and I was, you can believe, like a zombie getting off that airplane.
I had stopped drinking for what, you know, six, eight hours, and you know what that's like after ten days, and I was shaking and sweating and sick, and this was the big brother who was coming to help his sister who had said that I was the only person that she would talk to, and we got to the rectory, and when we came in, she was upstairs, and I said to my brother-in-law, I'm sorry, but I've got to have a drink, so he went out in the kitchen, and he had a bottle of bourbon with about that much in it in the refrigerator.
I've always thought, God, you know, this shows that people are not really worth it to have whiskey in the refrigerator, but he got it out, and he poured it in a water glass, and I drank it, and that is the last drink that I have ever had. I went up and talked to my sister, and I was full of shame. You know, it's a funny thing, this business of what is the particular event that happens that brings someone to Alcoholics Anonymous after years and years of alcoholic drinking.
What is the particular thing that does it? And I guess it's a little different for everybody. Sometimes it's a drunk driving arrest, or it may be when your wife says you're going to have to get out, or your husband says you're going to have to get out, or it may be the third or fourth divorce, or it may be the threat of losing your job. With me, it was shame, just plain, ordinary, kind of sick shame when I spent that day and a half in that rectory in McKinney, Texas, and thought back over what I had been like and the things that I had not done that I should have done.
It was shame. When I got back to Los Angeles, I called Fred, and I got my first resentment in AA that day because he said, I figured it was about time I'd be hearing from you. So he took me to my first meeting, and I will never forget that. I had not been welcomed anyplace for a long time. Not in my own home, no friends. If I went to somebody's house, a relative or somebody else, it was like having a time bomb in the house. If they had to let you in and be polite, they would, but they never knew what was going to happen.
[00:35:05]
And boy, the minute I walked in that meeting place that Wednesday night, 30 seconds I knew I was welcomed. And I just really wanted to stand there and cry because I hadn't had this experience for so long. And the first person that my sponsor, Fred, introduced me to was a man who was in his 70s. I was just 40 years old then. And I looked at him and I thought, my God, he looks better than I do. And he did.
And his eyes were clear and he looked right at me and he just looked great. And the next person he introduced me to was a lady schoolteacher. And I thought, my God, you mean to tell me they have lady schoolteachers who get to be alcoholic and come to AA? And in about two minutes, I found myself swapping stories with her on how to hide bottles. And I want to tell you, her maneuvers for hiding bottles in school rooms just fascinated me. I had never told anybody that I ever hid a bottle.
And here I was in a couple of minutes talking just, you know, freely with this gal about hiding bottles. And it was just like a stone came off of me. And the two speakers that night, you know, they told part of my story and I walked out of that meeting and I was on that famous cloud nine and then some. And this persisted for a couple of months. And I want to talk a little bit about my first year in AA because with that wonderful start, I have yet to find any member of this fellowship that did as many dumb things in his first year in AA as I did without getting drunk.
First, I became Mr. Twelve Step. You know, on the second day. My program was, you know, when I'm powerless over alcohol, I'm going to carry this message. Anybody I could find that drank at all, I'm giving them the word. I would go, there was a sanitarium, a very expensive sanitarium in Pasadena near where we lived, and I had a station wagon. And I worked out a deal with them, I'd go over there every night and I'd pick up a load.
And some of them might have been alcoholics, but there were people there for pills and people there who were just nutty and senile. And I'd take the whole load and I'd take them to an AA meeting and I'd tell them about God all the way over to the meeting. And I'd take them all back and I could sign them in and sign them out. I was Mr. Twelve Step. After about a month or six weeks, I was still living with my wife, or I should put it the other way, she was still living with me. And one night I said to her, I want to have a talk with you, let's go in and study.
Now that was a switch, because it had usually been the other way around. So we went in to study and I shut the door. And you see the problem was that she and everybody else had been telling me, if all of you didn't drink, all these good things would happen. Well, I wasn't drinking and I want to tell you at home nothing good was happening. And I was getting a little impatient. So I said, now where is this book, Alcoholics Anonymous? And there is a chapter in here about the family and how the family ought to treat the alcoholic who gets sober.
And I said, now, while of course you are not an alcoholic, there are some very deep, fine Christian principles in this book and I think you ought to read it. Very stern. And she was very nice about it and she said, okay, I will. And she read it and in a week she left. And rightly so. You know, the old arrogance, the old arrogance was back. Then there was another thing. You know, I had had not too much success with clients in this new venture of mine and I had had some people say to me, you know, you would be a really fine lawyer if you didn't drink and so on. Well, I wasn't drinking and nothing was happening at the office.
[00:40:02]
You kind of tell how you are doing by the morning mail. You know, if there is a lot of airmail special stuff and all that and pleadings delivered by messenger and what not, the lawyer is doing well. If it is all fourth class mail advertising used law books, you are not doing very well. And the business wasn't coming in. And I began to get very resentful about that. What the hell is the matter? I'm sober. I'm going to meetings every night and I did and sometimes twice on Sunday. And my wife is gone and my business is gone to hell. You know, what's the matter?
Then I decided, well, I better start doing some parts of this program. And I let on the amends portion. I've been told that this was very important. So I took my list of all the people that I had heard in the last some years that I could remember. And then I divided the list in two parts. One was the people who were really close to me and who lived around there. And the other was the people who were out of town. And I thought, well, I'll start with the easy stuff first and write letters to the people who were out of town. And you wouldn't believe those letters. I will just give you one example.
This involved an event that occurred. I wrote this lady in New York City. I said, Dear Mrs. So-and-so, I just want you to know that I apologize and I'm very sorry for the fact that I went to your garden party last May when I was in New York and got drunk and passed out in the bushes and had to be taken out by the police. Paragraph. I know you will be glad to know that I joined Alcoholics Anonymous and I don't drink anymore. And I wrote about ten letters like this. And I didn't get any replies.
What's the matter with people? Here I am apologizing in good faith and nobody seems to appreciate it. I wasn't ready to get around to the people that I had really hurt. That was too difficult and I didn't want to do it. I began to use AA with a busted marriage for some of the kinds of social purposes for which it is not intended and which I, of course I'm older now and it wouldn't be as much of a problem, but which I really don't think is supportive of sobriety.
And there were other things. I stayed sober for ten months, unhappy, arrogant, dissatisfied, resentful, and confused. And then there came a day when I was having lunch with an uncle of mine and this was a man that people like us I guess can't understand. He had been a heavy drinker all his life and his pattern was that he would have three martinis before lunch and he would have four or five drinks before dinner and drink highballs in the evening and it never interfered with anything and he never did anything wrong.
And when he got in his car he'd drive just like the Rock of Gibraltar and he'd be up the next morning at seven eating ham and eggs. You know, people like that can be disgusting. I did a favor last night. I said, what was that? He said, well, your aunt and I were at a party and this woman came up to me and said, weren't you shocked to find out that Jim is an alcoholic? And I said, what did you tell her? Oh, he said, I told her, you're no alcoholic, you're just a damn flimble-belly that never learned to drink like a man.
And he puts his nose back in the martini. And the physiological effects of what goes on in our minds are really something. Within seconds I was covered with cold sweat all the way down to my feet and I couldn't talk. And I got up and pushed my chair away and I got in the car and I drove home and I had one thought in my mind, I'll show that S.O.B. says I'm not an alcoholic. You talk about insanity. Ten months, A.A. meetings almost every night.
Almost every night. And, you know, relationships with AA people. I'll show that SOB. And I got out of the car, and I went in the kitchen, and I got a bottle of whiskey out of the cupboard, and I took the top out of the bottle, and I put a glass on the counter, and I got down on my knees. And I don't know why I got down on my knees.
[00:45:18]
There wasn't anything in my head going on at that time that had any relationship to getting down on my knees. But I did. And I didn't, you know, none of these lightning things or anything like that. And I got up in about a minute or so, and I didn't have any desire to drink. And I went in, and I got on the phone, and I called Fred, my sponsor. And I said, Fred, let me tell you what just happened. And I told him. And I said, Fred, what am I going to do? I don't want to drink again.
He said, well, he said, there is a fellowship called Alcoholics Anonymous. And he said, in addition to meetings and other things, we have something called the Program of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it has 12 steps. Why don't you start practicing the 12 steps? And so, you know, I look back. This is 24 years ago. And I look back, and I say, well, there was the other turning point. By the grace of God, I didn't take the drink.
When people tell me they have had slips in AA, I say, I understand this, because I have had the slip in every way except the actual physical thing of putting my hand around the glass. And since that time, thanks to Fred, thanks to so many people in this fellowship, I've tried to practice the 12 steps. And I want to tell you that it's, you know, one day pretty good, the next day awful, the next day I'll do all right.
It's just, I think, I really believe that the answer is, I think we get credit for effort. I believe this. I know how imperfect a human being I am. And I guess there are not, as they say, any saints in AA. We're not expected to score 100%. And I don't think I ever have on any day in my life that I think you get credit for effort. And I have tried to make the effort since that time, as best I know how. I learned a lot of things in the next few months.
First I began to take the inventory. Now again, you know, everybody to his own choice. I had to write it out. And I did it month by month. And then I had to take the fifth stuff, because the garbage had accumulated to such an extent that I was convinced that some of the fears that I had in my gut that I couldn't explain were related to some of the rotten stuff in the past. There had been some relationships. Since then I've learned as a character to say, sure, you're right. But I didn't know that. But I got another guy in AA who had been sober about three years, about my own age, and who hadn't yet taken the fifth step. And we did this in a succession of evenings. And this was another turning point.
God, this was beautiful. To be able to sit with another character just like myself, and he was a character like I was, same kind of thinking and so on, and talk and let it all hang out and let it all go. And the big book says, the language in the big book is that when you have taken the fourth and fifth step, you pass through an archway to freedom. And I believe it, because I did. Then I got around to the amends thing and I learned another thing that probably shouldn't have surprised me, but this time I got to the people closest to me.
And there were about seven. There had been six when I came in AA that I hated. Resentment was never a strong enough word for me. It was hatred. And that added to seventh, which was a resentment I had gotten in AA, so there were seven. And I started on O's, and the first one was a bust. This was the senior partner of the last law firm that I had been with, and the response I got was contempt. But this time it didn't make me mad.
[00:50:02]
And I don't know how he felt, but I left his office feeling pretty good. And then there were two wires. And this took time and the right circumstances, but the result is that today the relationship is cordial and supportive as respects our children. And we get along all right. Both instances. There were some others. Two other relatives that I'm not going to define. And in one of those cases, again, it was a zero response.
But it's kind of like if you carry the mail and you deliver it, it isn't, I guess, your responsibility what the reader says when he opens it. The interesting thing I learned was that when I listed those resentments, it turned out that the people I hated the most were the people I had hurt the most. The same people. And it kind of reminded me of what they used to say about the Holocaust in Germany, that the more the Nazis persecuted the Jews, the more they hated Jews, the more they persecuted them, the more they hated them.
And this is what had happened to me. The more I hurt people, the more I resented them and hated them, and then the more I hurt them and so on. So that the process of making amends in itself was a way of lifting the burden of those resentments off of my shoulders. Ann talked last night about things coming full circle, and they do, in so many ways. And I'd like to just tell you about a few good things that have happened to me in these last 24 years.
And you may think I'm practically stealing from her talk, but I'll swear that these things happen to me. I have a son who is now 38 years old, and of all of my children, he and I have become the most estranged. I had been with him and his wife a couple of times after I got sober on what were rather sort of formal get-togethers, and he'd gotten drunk both times. And the second time that he got drunk, I began to feel pretty good about this. I thought, hey, maybe we have a candidate.
In 1968, he walked into an AA meeting in Manhattan Beach, California, and he now has 11 years of sobriety, and we're friends. And he's now living in the East, New Jersey, and he's the secretary of his group. And when I go to stay an occasional weekend with him, which I'm always welcome to do, it's kind of fun. We have a sort of a family therapy session, which has become more interesting recently because his wife became a member of AA about six months ago. So that's been a good thing.
As I said, I was married twice. For six years after the second one, I stayed alone, and I really decided even after I got sober that I'm so screwed up in so many ways and so selfish that even though I'm sober and trying to practice this program, I'm really not an eligible husband type that's going to make it. I'm not a comfortable husband for anybody. And then in 1959, I met a woman in Alcoholics Anonymous, and a year and a half later, we were married. And we have been married for 20 years, which is twice as long as the other two put together.
And she now has 21 years of sobriety, and it is a good AA marriage. One other thing to pick out of so many, and this is the first time that I've ever talked about this at an AA meeting. It's the first time I've been able to, really, because of an event that is about to come full circle in another few weeks.
[00:55:01]
I am the only son of a man who started a business over 65 years ago, and he was the kind of a guy that had a possessive necessity to bring every relative in sight into the business. By the time I got out of college, every relative in the North American continent was working for him, including his own father and his father-in-law and two brothers and cousins and everybody was there. And I, at that point, had, I think, a genuine feeling that I didn't want to go into the family business and get messed up with all his relatives, and that I wanted to do something independently on my own.
Later on, as the drinking got worse, and as the efforts continued to get me into the business, I think I had another motive, which was that I was afraid to. I was afraid to be in an atmosphere where I would be under the gun and under observation, and where the kinds of freedom that I had and the kind of work I was doing would not be present. So it was a combination of fear and, you know, father-son competitiveness and a lot of other mixed up things.
After I had been sober for five years and had gotten financially back on my feet and was doing all right, I went to him, and I really today can't describe what the motivation was. But I said, let's reopen this whole thing and talk about it. And then after some several talks, I said, I'll tell you what. You know, I like what I'm doing, and I like the law practice, and I'm making all the money that I feel I need to live the way I want to.
But if you'd like me to do it, I will come back, and I will go into business on this basis, that you pay me what I made out of the law practice last year, and you don't have any other commitments, nor do the directors. And I will stay for a couple of years, and then everybody get together and let me know whether you think it's worked or not. And if it doesn't work, I'm happy, I'll go back. But that was 19 years ago.
And again, I look back at the character that looked into the mirror and into the heart, and the character that grumped at the wrong times and that was filled with shame and unreliable and irresponsible and so forth. And I can't believe what AA has done in my life, because I spent nine years getting ready, and the last ten years I've been the boss. And it's a big company with a lot of people in it. And I've done a good job, and that's not great.
I've done an adequate job, and I'm going to be retiring in six weeks as boss. And to me, this is another stage and another turning point. If I were not a member of AA, I would look to retirement, because I've been so damn busy this last 19 years, with real concern. What in the world am I going to do? You know, what am I going to do? Play gin and rummy all day? Or golf? But just this scholarship and the things that spread out from it and the things that it gets you into and makes possible.
My wife and I have talked about this, and she has said, thank God we're both members of AA. Because we'll have years and years ahead of us, as long as we both live. While we can be happy and useful and active and involved in something that we love. You know, there's this old saying about my cup runneth over. And I'm aware of the fact that it's not smart for an alcoholic to get too high. Because we have to be emotional and the ups are followed by the downs.
There isn't anything in my life that I have today or have ever been able to do that is not total. So I'm very dependent upon this program and a not too good effort, but an effort to practice the 12 steps of AA. Practice the Twelve Steps of AA. There isn't anything. It isn't just that I'm alive and I'm healthy and I don't drink. That any project, any responsibility, anything that I have ever been given,
[01:00:03]
and I think God gives it to us when we're ready, gets screened through the program and the Twelve Steps, and they are what make possible anything that I can ever do. I hope I never forget that. I pray, I have a little set of morning prayers and another one when I go to bed at night, and prayers are private so I'm not going to tell you, but part of it relates to my hope that I will always, all my life, stay close to you people.
Because I have a hard time feeling the relationship with God that some people say they can feel. I guess maybe there are too many filters between me and God. But I can feel a relationship with you people. And as long as I have that, as long as I get the thing that I've gotten here this weekend, and that I feel tonight looking out at all of you, I'm going to be sober and I'm going to be all right. Thank you very much.