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Source: DICOBE-00576 – Dick G – TOP O TEXAS – 1979-10-06.mp3 File: dicobe-00576-dick-g-top-o-texas-1979-10-06.mp3 Duration: 01:04:03
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Hi, my name is Dick G., and I'm an alcoholic, and it certainly is nice to be here. I was trying to figure out what you all were doing here this early on a Friday, and I guess this is the serious group, the really serious attendees, so we'll try to do something here that'll set a standard by which the rest of them shall be measured, shall we? You know, I got looking around up here, and they got all these nice banks of flowers, and it's carpeted, and there are all these upholstered things, and then they put a flower on me. I figured I was supposed to stretch out like the deceased. This is the nicest dais I've ever been on.
I guess all those stories about Texas are true. I understand that because you all don't trust one another. You give your sobriety date down here, and I'll even give you the one where it was the last drink I had. We have some fellas in Denver that have problem understanding that distinction. You can ask them how long they've been on the program, and they'll tell you the first time they went to a meeting, and there is often large lumps of time between that and their last drink, but my last drink, and coincidentally my first AA meeting was February 16th, 1969, and I'm just in awe of that. They sure snuck up on me at that meeting because I didn't come here to get cured of my drinking. I didn't come here to stop drinking. I came here thinking that you all had some way that I could drink about as much but get in less trouble. I did not come here to get cured of my agnosticism, and that happened, and I am truly, and I use the word advisedly, eternally grateful for the fact that I was cured of my agnosticism by going to a bunch of people upon whom I looked down before I even met you. You know, I'm always at a loss. I'm not a person who can remember stories, you know, and I love stories. I really do, and I always get a big bang out of them, and then you stand up here, and somehow my story machine always breaks down whenever I get up here, so you heard all the stories you're going to hear today.
I just really feel good today. This just is nice. You all don't, you know, I was not terribly welcome in many places, including my own home, and, you know, every time you get asked, somebody will pay your plane fare, and I certainly want to thank the committee for inviting me and paying for my plane fare and my room, and I guess if I do okay, then they'll go ahead and pay for it all. They said I'm working on a commission. If I get an A on this deal, they pay all the expenses. If I get a C, they pay 50-50, and if I get an F, I got to pay it all, so would you laugh even if you don't feel like it? Business is a little slow, but I do. I just feel great. You know, the opportunity to do anything and participate in anything in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have found now, never occurs by coincidence, and it always seems like I have the opportunity to get away, to have a weekend like this either with my wife. I wish she could attend with me this weekend, but she could not, or alone, and it's always the right thing at the right time and the right place with the right people, and I know it's always with the right people because I belong to you. Like me or not, I belong to you, and that was awfully hard for me to accept at first, too, but I just feel terrific today. I even worked this morning, so I only have to take half a day vacation. I can beat my employer out of half a day that way, and I had a nice opportunity to take care of some business this morning, and for some reason, I got here and the committee was looking for me.
I was the vanishing speaker, and they didn't know if I was going to show up or not, and they were awful kind about that afterwards and got me checked out on what to do, and anyway, we'll get going here. Despite countless attempts on my part to rewrite the big book and all the literature, I've still not been able to top the premise that we share what it was like and what happened and what it's like today, and I will do that. What it's like for me right now, again, I must say that coming to a convention is such a treat, and you know, one of the reasons is that every time I come to one of these, I get a chance to meet somebody new that I haven't met before in AA, and I always have seemed like the opportunity, and I hope I do this weekend, to really get to know a few people well and spend some time and have some meals together and all that kind of thing, and you know, that occurs to me that not only does that do an awful lot of good for me because I desperately needed to belong somewhere. I was the kind of kid that grew up who did not belong in his own family. I honestly thought that they used to talk about me
[00:04:59]
behind my back, and wasn't it a shame they had the last child. You know, that's the kind of
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feelings that I had about living, so to know that I come here and that I belong and I have the opportunity to make some new friends, I think not only does a lot for me, but I think it helps the program in total by all of us getting to know one another, and I was thinking about that this morning, and it occurred to me the next time I go to a convention in Colorado, I'm going to make a point to go and spend some time with someone from Colorado whom I don't know. You know, I have a tendency when I go to our own conventions is that I go and hang around my buddies, and we all have a good time and everything, but it occurs to me that it would probably do a lot for AA as a whole if each of us took the opportunity to meet somebody brand new in the program, and just think of the ties that we could begin to build that way, because it's such a true, true treat to go somewhere. I've never been in Amarillo, Texas before, but here I get here, and here's Marcy whom I've met before, and Jim, and my girlfriend Eloise over there, you know, and these are people whom I've met and shared meaningfully with, even though in a short burst, and that means an awful lot to me, and I think that's something that maybe we all can do this weekend, because I believe in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. I believe that it is a God-given thing that was put here because we had a problem that had no other answer, and if the doctors could have helped us, and the ministers could have helped us, and the lawyers, and the judges, if they could have helped us, we wouldn't have had to come together, but only by coming together were we able to get help, and so I believe in this fellowship, and I believe that it exists in opposition to everything else in the world.
We go counter to the grain of every organization. You imagine what the American Management Association would say if they ever studied us? What do you mean you don't have anybody in charge? You mean you were all like that, and you still don't have anybody in charge? No, we're all in charge, secretly. Did you all kind of have the feeling when you went to your first AA or Al-Nan meeting that, boy, you got there just in time to help them?
And what's taking them so long to realize it? That sense that I was suffering from terminal uniqueness when I got here from the drinking world. I was raised in an alcoholic family. That will give you every reason not to turn out the way I did. I don't believe that being raised by alcoholic parents makes you alcoholic. In fact, if anything, I had a leg up on not becoming what I did, but I figured out the secret to it is you drink, and if you drink enough, you get to be alcoholic. In my case, I believe I was alcoholic from the first because the first time I got drunk, first of all, I stole the liquor. That tells you something.
I did it contrary to the law. I was underage. So right away, my drinking has a pattern, you know, a pattern of one that was never changed. I passed out and threw up. Felt great. Sobered up, got on my bicycle, went home, crashed into the side of the house and began to have a long conversation with an authority figure. And that's the way it went downhill from there on. That was my good drinking. I drank from age 15 to age 30. I remember hearing that described once as sliding down the razor blade of life.
And that's what it felt like. I never did it right. I never did it well, and I never did it for any positive reasons. I never drank for a positive reason. I always drank for negative reasons. It was because I felt negative inside, and I attempted to use alcohol to overcome that negativity within me. And I guess that just proves a fundamental fact of physics that if you start something on a negative premise, it will remain negative. And that's exactly what my drinking was. My drinking and my living and my mentality and my spiritual condition and my emotional state were in rotten shape before I started taking my first drink, and it got worse from then on. I needed booze. Booze was able to do something for me that I was unable to do for myself for a short period of time. But I was in trouble with my drinking right from the start.
I won't bore you with my 15-year dull drink-a-log, because it really is dull. I was a small potatoes drinker. I was a periodic. I simply was unable to cope with the chemical very often over a long period of time because I have a body chemistry that used to just scream after getting drunk. I used to have those kind of hangovers where it felt like I could feel my nervous system and my body just start to shake. And I was in trouble with that. I was in trouble with my after getting drunk. I used to have those kind of hangovers where it felt like I could feel my nervous system vibrating inside. I felt like there was music pouring out of my ears during a hangover.
It was like a noise in my head that never got any better. I began to steal tranquilizers from my wife and replace them with baby aspirin, so neither one of us were getting any better.
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That reminds me, I was one of the fortunate ones. I managed to get here without being diagnosed as having a valium deficiency. So I never had to overcome that problem. That's one of my prejudices creeping in. During this delightful 15 years, my life was characterized by certain episodes. Um, ones that come to mind very hurriedly. Um, I once was driving a group of similarly intoxicated college fraternity brothers over a mountain pass and passed out the wheel and went off the pass and none of us were hurt. We were hanging off the edge of a cliff, the car high centered on a protuberance. Tried to kill my father once. He got drunk on me once too often and they had to pull me off of him trying to kill him. That was sort of our family relationship. Tried to kill both his first and second wives. I remember trying to explain to the commanding officer of my squadron why I was the only officer who had to have these conversations with him so regularly. Like standing in the middle of a runway while a flight of bombers was landing and I was waving my coat at him.
Why I had been the only one caught while participating and having organized the first naked hedge hopping contest in Coronado, California. Who that young lady with the baby in her arms was that showed up at the squadron one day. I was the guy that had to explain to his roommate who came home to a house full of gas because I'd had the gas on trying to kill myself and blown that. I remember lying once on a bed with a butcher knife stuck at the tip of it in my chest praying that I would have enough strength to push it in and I made all that by the time I was 22. I think that's a tribute to the chemical ethanol and its potential on a body chemistry and a set of emotions and mentality like I had.
That's what alcoholism was for me. I tried to cover it up by pretending that my activities were just that clever sort of college boy F. Scott Fitzgerald syndrome and underneath I was desperately going crazy and desperately wishing that I had a nice and efficient way to just get out of it all. There was nothing fun about drinking to me although I covered it up with a lot of hilarity. I used to pull stunts like in a full dress uniform. I remember once crawling around on a cocktail party at our squadron head and this is uh it's in our full dress uniforms with the swords and all and I'm down on my hands and knees biting women on the ankle and running a suppose check. I think it's a tribute to alcohol and alcoholism in our alcohol oriented society that that type of behavior is allowed and condoned and really almost admired.
I could never get anywhere doing something positive because I was too unsure of myself. So what I did was participate in negative activities as though I were thumbing my nose at the world and you know I didn't have the guts to thumb my nose at the world. I was a petty thief and a petty problem. I was never a big problem in any area because I didn't have the nerve to get into big trouble. I just stayed in petty trouble and I lived that way for the first 30 years of my life and for quite a bit time after coming to the program I might add. I have a theory about bottoms. It's a personal theory. It is certainly true in my case and I seem to exhibit seem to witness it in a lot of the people at least the kinds of people that that my higher power puts in my road to be able to help and that is that our real bottom comes quite a bit of time after we have our last drink. I believe that we reach a drinking bottom when as a you know I heard a great definition of a bottom the other day and that's when the unknown looks better than the known and the unknown of sobriety looked better than the known of drinking and I think that's a good definition for a drinking bottom but I believe that I reached a bottom the real bottom quite a bit of time after that several years after being on the program and that was the point at After being on the program, and that was the point at which the momentum of my emotional, mental, and spiritual illnesses reached its full potential.
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I believe I was deathly ill, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, a long time after I got to the program. Now, physical sobriety gave me some new freedoms, and I don't mean to minimize physical sobriety. And it gave me, you know, health back to some extent. You know, I could now drink a cup of coffee with one hand. Remember what a big day that was? And all those things that come from physical sobriety.
But I don't believe that physical sobriety was anything more than the grace period that I was given to find out how sick, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, I really was. And it was at that day, and I remember the day that I hit that bottom, and it was several years after being around the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, and not having had a drink. Having been dry for a period of several years.
And it came to me one day in the middle of a temper tantrum at my wife, because subversives of Anonymous that she'd been attending, or they call it Al-Anon here in Texas. Hadn't done enough to straighten her out yet, despite my constant offers of help. Most of it turned down, and I don't understand that. But I remember reaching that bottom one day after a couple years of sobriety when I was out of control internally.
Of course, after you've been sober a few years, you have to pretend like you're in control. You've got to remember that. And that's keep up appearances at all costs. Like I was the kind of newcomer that was dying on the inside, and you'd come up and say, how are you? And I'd say, fine. Fine. And then resent the group for not helping me when I was so sick. Amazing disease we suffer. Amazing disease.
We come here because we're out of options in life. We figure we're dead, or the equivalent of it. And the first thing we have to do is to prove we don't need you. Right? That's alcoholism. Or al-anon-ism. Right? And I think that's a disease, too. I really do. And I say that seriously. I don't mean that demeaningly at all. And I don't think… By the way, guys, I don't think they catch it from us. I think they had it, or they wouldn't have married us.
But we seem uniquely blessed at fanning it into full flame. Any event. She wasn't getting any better. And the world didn't understand, and I was not receiving my just dues in AA. My unique position in the universe was not being admired and acknowledged. And I was feeling dirty and crummy inside, and I got down on my hands and knees, and I was pounding on the floor, and I was crying, and I was screaming at God.
That's when I reached my bottom. And thank God for that day. And thank God for the opportunity to have that day. If I had come in here and had the kind of dull, quiet thing that Thoreau talked about, you know, the quiet desperation, the massive mentally… If I'd had that kind of sobriety, I wouldn't have hurt badly enough to get to that day when I'm down on my hands and knees, crying and screaming at God because I don't understand what's wrong.
And that was the day that I got down, and I laid flat down on my face on the floor, and I said, I don't care what I have to do. I don't want to feel like this anymore. And that's not a unique prayer. You know, I think most of us have said that in one set of words or another. And that's the day that a market change came into my life because that was the day I joined AA. Now, I had been attending AA for several years, but that was the day I joined AA.
And you know, my wife had a bottom like that one day, too. One day she had to hurt so much that she had to get down crying on her hands and knees all by herself where no one else would know and say similar words. And that's the day she joined Al-Anon, and that's the day that we understand the difference between attending meetings and being a part of this program. And that's what I'd like to try to share with you now.
I've described my alcoholism as well as I can. I never did it right. It got worse from the start, and it was bad from the start. It led me to contemplating my options in life at age 30, that either I was going to have an honest suicide attempt or I was going to turn myself into the mental institution of my choice. Now, that's a decision you've got to be careful about making. When you narrow your options down to that, and you've got to have a mental institution of your choice, you've got to be careful in picking that out, because this could be a long-time deal.
I scouted around.
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I want you to know that I used to evaluate mental institutions that I would run across in my daily travels. I had a beautiful one in Camarillo, California. It was near the ocean, nestled against the mountains, lovely palm trees all around, and verdant lawns everywhere. And I thought, that is the mental institution of my choice. But you know something that, one of the reasons why I didn't go up there and check in?
Because, you know, I was afraid they'd turn me down. Now, here I am, secretly harboring the idea that I am the turning point in human intellectual development, a misunderstood genius, cast loose in an unthinking, unfeeling world, an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, and I'm afraid to go up to that mental institution because I think they'll turn me down. Because what was I going to do if they turned me down?
Where do you go if the mental institution of your choice doesn't accept you? The other tribute to alcoholism is that all the time on the outside, everybody's saying, how well my life is going. Have you been through that frustration? Dick, you're doing great, you've just been promoted now, you're living in Santa Barbara, California, in a beautiful place, you know, and you've been promoted over a lot of men in the corporation, and your sales record is tremendous, and you've got a lovely wife who's a schoolteacher, and just, gosh, it's just great, Dick, to see things going so well.
And you think, oh, what the hell is the matter with these people? Don't they understand how much I hurt inside? How can they tell me, you know? Of course, I'm still coasting on my potential. Any potential coasters in the crowd? That's where, you know, the parents paid for it all and threw me out of the nest, and I'm still gliding on the potential of that, you know, and it's running out, it's running out.
I came into my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous after having reached my drinking bottom, which was that I had almost killed a friend of mine and his small son while driving back from Pismo Beach, California, after having stood in the Pacific Ocean trying to dig up clams that I didn't want, and drunk on cheap red wine, which is fitting because I was one of those phony drinkers. I had to drink Rob Roy's and martinis, don't you know, and all those kinds of things.
Because if you drink very expensive scotch in some upholstered sewer that overcharges you for the drinks, then you don't have a drinking problem. One of my last drunks was sitting by myself while my wife was attending a sensitivity group that she had joined. It didn't have anything to do with my drinking, of course, but she… was drinking port wine out of a silver chalice. Now, it's impossible to have a drinking problem if you drink port wine out of a silver chalice, even if you drink the whole bottle.
In the middle of that, I started crying. Something came over me and I started crying, and I said, God, I don't want to be like this anymore. And I looked around to see if anybody had heard me, because I mentioned His name, and I had neatly intellectualized Him away. I had explained away God. Even if He did exist, as long as He stayed in His place and I stood in mine, it was going to be okay. And suddenly I let His name slip out, in other than the usual manner in which I used it, which was the first half of a word.
But I reached that bottom that morning because I walked down to my living room and my self-disgust and my remorse and my sense of impending doom had reached the point that I simply couldn't go on anymore. Now, I had no conscious thought of doing anything about my life. I had no desire to stop drinking. I had no desire to become a better person. I had no desire to find a God of my understanding. I simply wanted to find a way that as an emotional cripple, which I realized I was, that I would somehow be able to function in this world with a little less problem.
And without any forethought at all, while standing in the middle of my living room blubbering like a baby, which was terrible for the image, by the way, when you are the intimidator-type alcoholic, you know, where as a brooding intellectual you are continually harping on the shortcomings of your spouse. It really blows your image to start crying in front of her. I don't recommend it.
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As they will, she saw the chink in the armor and drove the whole truck through. And she said, Dick, what can I do to help you? And without any conscious thought at all, I said, would you call Alcoholics Anonymous for me? And you know why I wanted her to call me? Because we lived in Santa Barbara for almost six months and they might recognize my voice. That's serious. That's the honest truth. Coincidentally, we were having lunch that day with my mother and my sister who were driving up from L.A.
and after we walked out of lunch and we were walking toward the car, my mother said, how are you? And it dawned on me, my mother had been sober in A.A. for eight years and I never once connected that with me. That was all right for dear old mother because heavens knows the old girl needed it. Never once made that connection. My sister said she could hardly keep mother on the seat all the way home because mother for all those years had been respecting my right to find my bottom on my time and in my way.
And she knew from her own experiences, because she had been eight years sober and 25 years around A.A., that that was the only way that this alcoholic, or probably any alcoholic, was going to find his bottom and that she was not going to protect me to death. Nor was she going to mar the dignity of this program by making it something so base and so cheap as to be merchandised or pushed upon somebody.
And that is my personal opinion. I went to that first meeting and I realized that I was in a lot of trouble because they were talking about things with which I was very uncomfortable, like honesty and not drinking and admitting when you're wrong. Because as an intimidator-type alcoholic, you don't admit when you're wrong. You may sometimes be in error, but never in doubt. Bloody but unbowed, I would go down with all flags flying rather than admit that I was wrong.
A man told the story of my life, except he changed the names and the dates, and I honestly, honestly thought, I'll just tell you about humility, I honestly thought that my wife had called him during the afternoon and given him the story of my life and it was a set-up. That tells you the humble attitude I had when I came there. Still the center of the universe, still the hub of all things, around which all things revolved, and secretly so afraid that it was true because I felt so terribly inadequate at anything.
I was the kind of alcoholic that used to worry if the guy passing me on the freeway who looked over and looked at me, liked me. I was always afraid of offending the waitress by asking her to come over too often. It's interesting, an alcoholic, guess what I was doing for a living? Selling. Cold call selling. That's alcoholism. That's alcoholism. I spent a few weeks hanging around the edge of the program.
I'm very good at dodging eyes, therefore they could never get me into any protracted conversation. I memorized the floor in several club houses in Santa Barbara. Spent all the breaks, they had terrible meetings there, they have an intermission in the middle of the meeting, and you can't run away, I mean you gotta stay because after all you're there to bless them with your presence, you know. So I'd hide in the men's room during the breaks.
So I'm fairly intimate with several lavatories in Santa Barbara. If you ever need a set of directions, I can direct you to most of the lavatories. Finally made a mistake of going to the kind of meeting, I hadn't been to this one before, where they went around the table and they all introduced themselves, you know, now what are you gonna say? So they got around to me and I somehow mumbled out that I was Dick and I was an alcoholic, and afterwards they came up to me and they said, I'm glad to hear you're here for that reason, we thought you were a college student doing a paper.
So you can tell the zeal with which I plunged into this program. Moved to Los Angeles right after that, and that's a good place not to be in the program. You know, meetings, two or three hundred folks, this is, you know, this is about an average meeting in L.A. So you hide around the edge of it, you come a little late, you leave a little early, and you go to the men's room during the rest breaks, or during the intermissions.
During the Rest Breaks or During the Intermissions, and Whenever Trapped and Asked How I Was I Would Smile and Say Fine.
[00:30:02]
After a year of this I had managed to work up a dry drunk that was sufficient enough that some funny things began to make sense to me. By the way, on the subject of dry drunks, I finally have found out there's one common element in a dry drunk by which you can recognize it if you're in it, and that is a profound and absolute sense of being the only person who knows what's going on. My dry drunk had led me to such activities as having a temper tantrum one Friday afternoon at work and playing with my head up in outraged dignity, going to a movie, sitting there and beginning to get the message of the movie and deciding maybe there is a God because I thought he was talking to me in the movie.
Now this movie happens to be a movie called April Fool's with Jack Lemmon, appropriate title I might add, and this guy is a heck of a fine fella, neat guy, got a miserable wife, bitchy all the time, boss doesn't appreciate him, trapped in a humdrum, meaningless existence, and he meets her at a cocktail party, and he is racing down this long jet port trying to get on the plane at the end of the movie to fly off into the great blue yonder and all the wonderfulness tiptoe through the tulips with her, and I'm standing up in the movie cheering for him, in full possession of a year of sobriety I might remind you.
Went home, informed my wife that God had talked to me and that I was leaving with no warning. Now this used to work and I used to get a lot of concessions out of tricks like this, the old threats about walking and everything. What I didn't realize was that she had been going to too many subversive anonymous meetings, and she looked up at me and said, do you want the color TV? And I thought, oh damn, now we're playing hardball.
They changed the rules and I'm in trouble. Next morning I find myself living in a temporary apartment in West Los Angeles with the color TV. So watch out guys if you're still trying to pull some of those old tricks and they've been going down to those meetings, particularly your newcomers, don't tell them about that group until you're really sure. Screw up a whole life's worth of intimidation. Thank God for Dry Drunk of that type because it was at that point that I realized that I was truly alone in my alcoholism, whether or not I was drinking, that somehow my life was completely out of control and completely unmanageable even though I had not had a drink for over a year.
And I got more frightened than I had ever been in my life. You know, when they talk about the possibility of having a slip, I'm very grateful that I have not had to experience that. I think that more than the sobering up scares me is that first year afterwards. I don't want to go through that year again. To wrench the biggest part of me out of the middle of my gut and not have anything to replace it with was the worst experience that I have ever had in my life.
I look back on it now. So I began to go, I found the answer to the problem, I thought. I thought if I feel this badly what will make me feel better is I'll go to a lot of meetings. And I went to a lot of meetings. I mean 10 to 12 a week. And I was feeling worse after that. And I didn't understand it. And I have a theory that I have developed out of having gone to a lot of meetings and felt worse. I finally figured out that you don't work the program of Alcoholics Anonymous in a meeting.
You have other people share how they work the program of Alcoholics Anonymous in a meeting and then you go back out there among them and practice it.
[00:35:00]
Remember them? The people you were trying so hard to please? Buying things you didn't want and couldn't afford? And you knew that if you ever met them you wouldn't like them? And those of them you had met? You always compared yourself to? I had a terrible time with comparing. And I learned something very interesting about comparing. And I learned it in AA because I had a particularly bad problem about comparing when I came into AA.
I would come into an AA meeting, I'd take a look at how you dress or how you drink your coffee or whether or not you smoke or whatever it was, any little thing I could pick up on and immediately I could use that as making a profound and basic comparison between you and I. Have you ever noticed when you compare yourself with other people that you never tie? I got frightened one night because I'd gotten up and walked out of a meeting before it even started.
And the reason I'd gotten up and walked out is that there was a very close group, I'd never been to it before, it was a stag group in Beverly Hills. I'd never been there before but they were obviously a very close group. And I sat in the back of the meeting with my eyes down so no one would talk to me. So I decided they were all hypocrites because they hadn't talked to me when they couldn't talk to me.
But they were hypocrites because they hadn't. And I got walked out. I found myself out in a park cutting the way over to my car. And I've never been that frightened in my entire life. Something came over me and I just simply knew at that moment that if I left at that time I was walking out of AA and if I walked out of AA I was going to die a lousy death. And I knew that as clearly as I knew my name or where I was.
And I turned around and I walked back into the meeting and I sat in the back and I prayed for the first time in my life to something which I had made fun of all my life. Sure enough they'd get up about 15 guys out of 50 or 60 who were there and wouldn't you know they'd pick on me. Called me up and I stood up in front of the meeting and I started crying and I said my name is Dick and I think I'm flunking AA.
Interesting that I'm still comparing myself, see? I'm still saying flunking AA as though it were something by which you excel and therefore are above others. That's how much I understood about it. And a man walked up to me afterwards and he said my name's Hal and you need me and I think you better stick with me and I said I think you're right. And that was my first sponsor. And that's when I began to understand the difference between working the program and going to meetings and not drinking.
My first sponsor was a man who had never worked steps but who understood me. In attempting to lead me through the first five steps which he did, he did the best he could and we got through it. He was gifted with the ability to perceive and understand what was motivating me and he could see through me and he was very firm and he was very strong. He got me through those first five steps and then went out and got drunk.
Didn't tell me for three years that he was drunk. That's alcoholism too. That's alcoholism where you can't admit to a man and he and I were as close as any two human beings can be. We had shared literally everything you can share about yourself that's crummy, dirty or positive. There was nothing he didn't know about. He knew about all the times as growing up as a young man that I had homosexual fears.
He knew about all the cowardly act that I had done. He knew all that stuff about me. And yet he couldn't share with me that because he had not worked the steps of the program that he went out and got drunk and he used the same formula that seems to work for everyone else is he stopped going to meetings and he got judgmental about the people. Then he finally called me from a mental institution. His arrogance and his pride were still so much that it got between our communicating.
And I tried to see him several times after that and he was so embarrassed and still hanging on to something from his past that he and I have never been able to be close again. And I'm really sorry for that because no matter what happens I will always love him as deeply as I can love any other human being. Because we shared the most important thing in life and we shared it on a long and a meaningful basis and that is that we were able to sit together and consciously be aware of the presence of the Almighty God with us at that moment.
And that is something that we share together here that sets us unique and apart and I believe it is that central fact for which I am most grateful to you all for giving me that. For the times in the past, for the times right now today, because those of us here, the sum
[00:40:01]
of us here today is greater than the total of our parts. There is something here because we're gathered together in the name of whatever we understand to be keeping us sober and he's here and I'm grateful to you for sharing that with me and that's why I'm grateful to come down here and to speak. It's not to exercise my ego. I think I understand the role that a speaker plays at an AA meeting and it is not guru and it is not pontificator and it is not the solver of domestic problems afterwards and all those kinds of things.
It's because for some reason the God of my understanding thinks that I need this to be here to do this. Because unless I am able to share honestly with you about me, whether it's here in this format, I don't believe I'm here to take a fist step, but I believe I'm here to share with you as honestly as I can because I need to, because I need you. I never saw you before in my life and a lot of you I'll never see again, but I love you and I need you because you share the same love for the same thing that I do and that is this thing called Alcoholics Anonymous.
This wonderful phenomenon, this mystery, this spectacular thing that exists against every force in the world that's acting against it. All the people who want to affiliate with us because it'll make them money or it'll get their body count up at their little sanitarium or it'll do all those kinds of things for whatever ends they have. We have all that tremendous pressure on us, but yet something that keeps us going, that brings us here together at 1.30 on a Friday afternoon of all the unlikely things, that those of us who are so different from such different backgrounds and everything else are here together.
That's the thing that I need and that's why I'm here and that's what I hope I can convey is that my appreciation and my love for the mystery and the wonder of this thing that I found and if you haven't found it and are sitting there as I did for several years thinking you phony and you hypocrite, you're nothing more than a delegate from a PTA type organization, I feel sorry for you that if you think that what I'm saying is hypocritical or untrue, we will respect your right to think that right to your death.
We will protect your right to die from alcoholism or to go crazy from Al-Anon-ism. We'll respect that. I love this thing I found. I have had a bubble of joy in my chest from being a part of AA most of the time since I finally understood the message. That was some time after I started going to meetings when I finally understood the message. Like all other rotten hypocritical AA speakers, for those of you who are sitting on the edge and doubting, I'm not going to tell you what the message is.
Because if I use specific words, you as a keen intellectual giant as we are when we come here, you will take those words and pervert them and will use them as a reason to explain it away. Because I did. Because I had some people that tried to tell me what the message was. They used to drive me nuts. Like they'd say, practice these principles in all of our affairs. I'd say, what the hell principles are they talking about?
Finally one of my sponsors said, hey brilliant, if you're so smart, why don't you figure them out? Go write them down. And I did. And it was a mind-boggling experience. Go write down the principles you're supposed to be practicing in all your affairs. Have you ever tried that? That's a great experience. First thing was, I sat down and said, well, where do I start? You know where I found them? I tried to make it complicated, but it's the same old thing.
I found them in the steps in the traditions again. Some of these days, I'm going to get something outside those steps and traditions. I seriously doubt it. Moved from town to town. For some reason, I've been doing my geographics since I sobered up. Left that sponsor, went up to Seattle, had a sponsor there named James Patrick O'Leary who was a graduate of Gonzaga, one of those carriers of the Irish virus.
Geez, I just remembered an old joke. You know what an Irish homosexual is? That's an Irishman who'd rather go out with girls than drink. That's an old joke. I haven't heard that one in a few years.
[00:45:02]
This was the man who taught me by example. Have you ever had a sponsor when every time you ask him a direct question, he never gives you a direct answer? I'd say, Jim, I'm really feeling torn up at work. I just feel like I'm in the wrong job, and it's eating me up down there, that rotten corporation I work for. It's meaningless, and all I'm doing is participating in a meaningless diversion of cash flow from one corporation to another, and it has no spiritual redeeming value. You know, I go through all those kinds of things.
And Jim would look up at the ceiling, and he'd say, you know, this guy that I grew up with in Spokane, he was a heck of a guy, and he'd start telling me the story of this guy's life, and I'd say, will you answer my question? After a while, I learned to listen, and he was, because he always taught by example. And about the time I was moving from Seattle and was deeply in love with this guy, I finally understood that the greatest example I had ever had in my life as a lesson was Jim, the example that he was living. This was a guy who, after a few years of sobriety, fell down some stairs and had a massive brain concussion, woke up from it after a month or so. His wife had left him, sold the house. His partner and his wife had gutted the business of all of its assets. They have given him residence in a floppy apartment near downtown Seattle, which is a rough part. You know where Skid Row was originated? That's Seattle. That's Skid Row. They used to skid the logs down, you know, the big chutes. They used to skid the logs down to the water. The drunks lived under the skids. He's living there. This is where he comes to, right? Never once complained.
The entire two years that I knew that man, and we were together constantly, never once complained. He used to go down to the detox center by himself. I didn't know this for a while. By himself on Sunday nights and go sit in a corner of the lounge with a big book in his hands and just sit there and wait for some drunk to come up and talk to him. They used to throw him out of there. He was a threat to the professional alcoholics and curers, and they used to run him out. I mean, physically run him out. Next Sunday night, Jim was back.
They just got tired of running him out. I met some guys who got sober in AA and found a way of life in AA because Jim went down there all by himself every Sunday night for three years and sat in the corner of the lounge. On the nights he wasn't thrown out, if some drunk wandered in, he had the big book and he'd walk over and say, who are you and what's that? Jim would say, gee, I'd love to tell you. You want to sit down? That's the kind of examples that I've had in working this program. I moved to Ohio. I spent a year there.
There I don't have a sponsor, and that is a great experience, too. For me, working a program of Alcoholics Anonymous without a sponsor is like a guy driving railroad spikes with a tack hammer. Get to Denver. Move into a house. Don't know anybody in Denver. Happens to be where I grew up. Scared to death, because this is where all the family alcoholism and all my early wonderful drinking occurred. Scared to death when I moved there. Flew in on the plane, rented a car, and drove to the central office. Guess where the central office of AA in Denver is? Across the street from the high school where I started drinking.
And all I could think of was, boy, what a long circle that was. The couple in the house behind us are on AA. His sponsor is the guy who spoke at the first AA meeting that I ever went to. Five years of sobriety, I have him over, and I point out two children. One child, age two, and one about to be born two weeks later. And I said, Lou, this is what I have to thank you for. This is what you gave me that night in Santa Barbara. And that's what it's been like. I'd like to share with you for a moment what AA is for me today, because I think that's what counts. I don't believe that last year's inventory any more than last year's spiritual experience is going to keep me sober today. I believe that it's a program that I'm working today. All 12 steps, all 12 traditions, and the concepts, and the legacies are the things that are keeping me sober. I was at a convention this summer in Atlanta, and Chuck C. and Wesley P., who have got to be two of the biggies, the big hitters in this outfit, in terms of being able to… I'm not saying they're special, ultra-human, or anything like that, but they've got a great God-given ability to communicate the program with alcoholics. And I'm down there, and I'm trying to make a business decision because I stopped in a town on the way down there, and this guy's offering me this job with a lot of money and all this kind of stuff, and I just knew it was wrong. And I'm looking for the answer to what I should do about my life, this job decision answer. And you know
[00:50:03]
those two guys, and I didn't tell them what was on my mind. I walk in, and I sit down, and I say, Hi Chuck, hi Wesley, how are you? And they start talking, and you know what they were talking about the whole time? Was that there are three parts to this program, and if you're only spending your time and energy on the part that has to do with your personal recovery, you got a one-legged stool. If you're working on all three parts, which are your recovery, service, and unity, then maybe you got a three-legged stool that'll stand up. And all I'm sitting there thinking, yeah, did I sober up to go make a lot of money, and in order to do that, to root my family up from where they're happy, from where their ties are now, after all the uncertainty my wife has been through. I don't know about you Al-Anons, but being married to this alcoholic did not breed a great deep sense of security in my wife's unconsciousness. She describes it as living with the time bomb, and nobody could see the dial when it was going off. And I realized, hey, I didn't get sober, I got sober just for my recovery, including my financial recovery. What I got sober was for recovery, service, and unity. And that's what I got out of those three guys. Thank God for the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't have to figure out anything anymore.
All I have to do is just pay attention. And the way I pay attention is I go to meetings, I read the big book, I work with newcomers, and I talk to my sponsor as often as I can. That's how I pay attention. It works for me. Various times on the program I have suffered from spiritual giantism. There's another big book, non-conference approved, that refers to those guys as Pharisees. In Colorado we call them hemorrhaging cardinals. One of those periods was when I began to attack my character defects. Have you ever attacked your character defects armed with the righteousness and the vastness of your spirituality now that you've been sober? That's one of the worst experiences I've ever had. My character defects were like mushrooms popping up at night after the rain storm. And blossoming, like a science fiction thing, you know, where the funny thing lands and it keeps growing and they can't stop it? Well, that doesn't make sense now that I'm armed with the vast spirituality that I have gained through, lo, these many months, can't even count them in years yet, many months of spiritual living. I was still cheating on my expense account and couldn't understand it. And most profoundly, I was dishonest at home. If there is a bellwether or a marker on my spiritual condition, it is how honest or dishonest I am at home. Because home is where they know all the stories. Tough to pull the con off at home, particularly after a regular daily injection of Revenge Anonymous into your family. If I start getting coy with the relationship between my wife and I by doing things like, it's time I called attention to this prolonged character defect of yours, out of love you understand. Or, I'm sorry son, dad's just a little tired tonight and doesn't feel like going out and tossing the football with you. Or, I really need a nap this afternoon. I've had eight hours of sleep, suddenly I need a nap this afternoon. I start hiding out. I start pulling back within again. I cannot honestly share myself with you and my family. I am going to get drunk sooner or later. As Paul M. says from Illinois, what I have if I am not drinking and doing nothing else is a case of untreated alcoholism that will sooner or later lead to drinking. And that is true with me. If I am not making amends where I'm supposed to. I had reached a period recently in my job where I was participating in the Ain't It Awful sessions around the office. I don't really know how that fits
[00:55:01]
with the spiritual program of living, but I was doing it. Ain't It Awful sessions in the office. And I knew it was wrong. I had also withheld some information from my superior which had not turned out to be important, but it was a potential large problem in a large account that we handle. Very sensitive. We handle other people's money a great deal of it. And I had not made him aware of a potential problem, but the problem had passed and now I'm sitting there with the realization that, hey, I still didn't tell him the truth.
And I've been participating in the Ain't It Awful sessions. So I'd like to share with you just in one little instance how the program A.A. works for me. I went into my boss, or first of all I went to my sponsor and I said, here's what I've done wrong. And I like to talk it through with you on how we're going to make amends. My sponsor, God bless him, he's not a guru. We go through the whole thing and he looks at me and he says, boy, you better pray because I haven't got an answer for you. But I would direct you to prayer, which is his role. Which is his role is to remind me when all else fails to do what the manufacturer's handbook says. So I did. I prayed about it. And I was driving into work one morning praying about it and thinking about it and an answer came. When I was first sober I used to have to wonder if that was an answer from God or merely a gas attack on some of the things that I would come up with. But now after some time in the period of program I am beginning to think I can possibly trust some of these intuitive thoughts that I have. I went to my boss, walked into his office and sat down. I said, I owe you an amend. And I explained to him what an amend was. We talk funny. You've got to remember that. We talk funny around here and you've got to translate it sometimes for the outside. And, of course, as most amends go I told him the situation, how it was over, but yet I felt I owed him an amend and I had done him wrong by not making him aware of this. And, of course, as most amends go it was no big deal to him. He couldn't wait to change the subject to get on to talk about whatever it was he wanted to talk about. And I walk out and I, you know, I said, thank you, God. And I walk down the corner and I turn around and go to the elevator and another fellow, Fellow A from the firm comes up and says, you and I need to talk to Fellow B.
And we go down to Fellow B's office and we transact our business and Fellow A leaves. And Fellow B and I happen to start talking about starting a Bible study in our office. Now, I don't bring up the Bible study to interject any religious notes in this. It just happens to be one of the ways that God, in my understanding, has revealed himself to me. We put together the deal on how we're going to get a seminary student and all this kind of stuff. And I'm walking out of the office and it hit me. That fast God had given me the answer to making the amends to the office whom I had harmed as a whole by participating in the Ain't It Awful session. That fast the answer came. And if you, like I am, are sitting on the edge of the program today and think that's coincidence, I would like to refer you to the book of Alcoholics Anonymous that makes a very big warning about the most dangerous concept from which you can deal about these spiritual things. And that is contempt before investigation. Please spare yourself what I suffered, which was contempt before investigation.
I almost blew this thing. I almost lost the dearest and sweetest thing in my life, which is the relationship with my higher power, because I was so filled with contempt before investigation, which derives, in my case, out of ego and arrogance and a terrible inferiority complex that needs to be covered up. I can't talk about AA without talking about my children. This is corny time, folks, but I can't talk about AA without talking about my children.
Because my children have been born since their mother and I went off separately to get well so that we could then cohabitate together. Now, we have not cohabitated in absolute bliss since that time. I know that comes as a surprise. Of course, it's mostly her fault. Because she found her program and I found my program and we began to set aside all the spiritual prejudices we had by investigation, by honest, open-minded investigation, those two children are alive today. They were conceived and born after she and I got into the programs.
I
[01:00:06]
say this because I don't know how else to share my God. I try to share Him in a way that's understandable. I can tell you all the little God stories that happen to me all the time, all the little supposed coincidences that occur constantly in my daily life, or that I hear other AAs and Al-Anons share in their lives. That's why I love to get tapes from the conferences and all those kinds of things, and what a joy it is.
I live in the countryside outside Denver, and I have a half-hour commute into town, and I put a tape thing in the car, and I have a ball, and I've tapped into a couple of good AAs around the country who feed me tapes in Bordeaux. I love that, because I hear these God stories. I hear it at work in other people's lives, so I don't have to depend upon my own experience. Part of my alcoholism was an absolute, utter fascination with self.
The world was how I felt. That fallacy went, when I had the revelation one day, sitting in an AA meeting, that God could still exist, even if I didn't agree with it. You want to get a lonely feeling, try that one on for size. If your premise is that God doesn't exist because you don't accept it, you may have a terrible problem, but we've got the answer. We've got the answer, and that's what matters.
I can't tell you what the message of Alcoholics Anonymous is, except that it works. It works perfectly for this incomplete alcoholic. I am incomplete. The manufacturer put me together, and then describes me in his handbook as an incomplete entity needing completion through a process. My process for me has been to say that I am Dick, I am an alcoholic. When I woke up this morning after ten years of sobriety, I was just as bereft of answers to daily living as I was ten years ago.
But that's okay, because the knowledge of that need and that lack in me, that incompleteness in me, is my strength upon which my sobriety and my life is built, because there is an answer, and it works. I thank the God of my understanding so much for giving me the opportunity to be here today. Remember what I was told and taught, that all the words don't mean a thing. All of us up here talking, the words aren't what's important.
The important fact is that we're all here, and there's not a chance in the world that we should be. Something outside this world is the answer that we're all here today. My fundamental message is that I am Dick, I am an alcoholic, and I love you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Dick. We've just had some car keys turned up to us, if you might look in here, it's got a little red guitar. If they belong to you, I'm going to lay them here on the table so you can get it after the meeting.
There'll be another meeting here at three o'clock, and there'll be a short intermission.